[CLIP] Exposing the ‘Controligarchs’ With Seamus Bruner | American Thought Leaders

I applaud Elon Musk and all he's done with Twitter and just being one of the lone dissenting billionaires out there who's using his wealth to help the people share information on ex-formerly Twitter. He certainly is a climate change true believer. I mean, he's built his fortune on Tesla, which is an electric vehicle company, and this is one of those kind of ironic things about, you know, there's tons and tons of research and studies that show that electric vehicles are, at the end of the day, just as polluting as gas-powered vehicles, from the pit mining of the lithium to the entire production of the batteries. That requires a ton of energy. So I don't put Elon fully in the Kontrolgark camp. He's mentioned in the book some of the initiatives he funds. I sort of trace back his—he's got a technocrat streak, a technocratic streak, which his grandfather was really the godfather of technocracy in Canada. And technocracy holds that the elites, the engineers, the scientists are much better at making decisions than the people. It's an inherently undemocratic system, technocracy is. And you see that Elon has this technocratic streak, where, you know, with the Neuralink is one of the things that we get into in the book, and its ambitions seem slightly dystopian with, you know, psychic text messaging or whatever they're trying to work on. Well, I mean, dystopian, but people with all disabilities, you can imagine, like, you know, incredible breakthroughs. I mean, realistically, right, with exactly this technology, you have people learning how to speak, you know, just using their thoughts through these interfaces, or being able to speak again. You know, there's many, many, let's say, benevolent, benevolent examples of the use of these technologies. Yeah, those are the thin edge of the wedge, the thin side, where, yeah, who could be against, you know, a paraplegic person receiving the ability to walk. But that is not the end goal of technologies like Neuralink. And there's a company, BlackRock Neurotech, which is putting microchips in brains. I mean, Elon Musk, when he describes Neuralink, the things that he appears most excited about are the uploading, you know, he's claimed to upload his brain to the cloud. But ultimately, these tech guys, they have this ambition to live forever. They all speak about it, that mRNA technology is something that can really extend life. I don't know if you've come across any of this World Economic Forum visionary, Yuval Noah Harari's writings or teachings. Harari says that it's going to be a new caste system, not everybody's going to be able to get the bio upgrades and the live forever microchip type thing. It's going to create a class that can have that and a class that cannot have that. And maybe a class that doesn't want to have it. I might add, right? Yes, of course, a class that doesn't want to have it too. So as long as it's an option, then that's no problem. With AI, we don't really seem to have a voice in how fast this technology is speeding up. It doesn't seem like there's even time to have a conversation about it. And study after study shows that the AI revolution, while amazing, you know, you could find a cure to a disease, but what if the result is 40% of the U.S. workforce cannot find a job and is just, you know, relegated to welfare and poverty? And OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which is making these technologies, I don't think it's a coincidence that they are funding study after study on universal basic income. And a universal basic income, I mean, do people think that they're going to get a UBI of a million dollars a year and get to live the lifestyle of the very wealthy? No, it's going to be approximately $20,000 to $30,000 a year. And there won't be a way to climb up like what America is so loved and cherished for is the ability to climb the ranks and build a life for yourself. It will be this more impoverished class. This is being sold as just inevitable. So you know, you have to come up with a solution, right? I mean, that's how I understand it. Inevitable and nobody gets a vote. And that's one of the things the book really gets into is, you know, I've tracked the politicians for over a decade. But the thing about politicians is they are elected, and therefore they're accountable to their voters. None of the people in this book were elected. Klaus Schwab wasn't elected. Bill Gates hasn't been elected as the leader of public health. He kind of just assumed that role because of the amount of wealth he's accumulated. So if they're not elected, then they're not accountable. And you can't really have a society that the leaders of which are not held accountable. So you've mentioned the World Economic Forum a number of times, and Klaus Schwab, of course. I've heard a wide range of ideas about what this is and how much influence it truly has. And so what did you find? Well, yeah. So likewise, I've heard, you know, everybody by now has heard of the World Economic Forum or Davos. And like you, I, you know, heard a range of things that sounded like conspiracy theories. And so again, followed the money. I decided to add up the market capitalization of the World Economic Forum members and found that just the top 25 members, and this would be companies like Amazon and Alphabet and Facebook, 25 members are worth $10 trillion. Now that doesn't include BlackRock, which is the largest asset manager in the world and central to a lot of the World Economic Forum initiatives. BlackRock has approximately $10 trillion under management. You add in State Street and Vanguard, the other largest asset managers. It puts the value of the companies that are sponsors of Davos, that fund Davos, where their leaders, people like Larry Fink, the CEO and chairman of BlackRock, are on the board of Davos, of WEF. Over $20 trillion now. The WEF members control more than the entire GDP of the United States, more than the GDP of China. Those are the top, obviously, GDPs in the world. So they're more powerful economically speaking than pretty much any country in the world. And so I thought, I mean, Davos only popped up on the radar a few years ago. Well, it actually has been around since the 1970s or just after Klaus Schwab left Harvard. He was a pupil of Henry Kissinger when Kissinger was at Harvard. He goes and sets up this European Management Symposium. That becomes the World Economic Forum. But then I found these connections, these abiding connections to an organization called the Club of Rome. There's a book that they, a famous book that the Club of Rome sponsored called The Limits to Growth. And The Limits to Growth really precedes global warming, global cooling, certainly before climate change. And The Limits to Growth says that there's a finite number of resources, everybody's heard this, there's a finite number of resources on planet Earth. And if we continue growing at the rate we're growing, the Earth is going, you know, we're all going to run out of resources and we're all going to die. And it was really the, it's a Malthusian point of view, which is we're running out of resources and therefore people need to sacrifice. Well, it's also very advantageous to the people who subscribe to its view and it's been adapted over time. I mean, just if you were to, like I did for this, for this book, if you go read every Club of Rome report dating back to Limits to Growth, they always amend it. And so you can actually see this progression from overpopulation to global cooling to global warming to the holes in the ozone layer. And finally we arrived at climate change, which is perfect because whether the temperatures go up or down, whether there's more storms one year or less, whether there's droughts, it's always attributed to climate change. And that gets back to the thing I said about it being unfalsifiable is no matter what the climate does, it's human caused. And so there's one particular Club of Rome report that it states that, I mean, I'll sum it up in just a short quote, the enemy of humanity is humanity itself. We went looking for a common enemy that could unite all nations and we found that overpopulation at the time would unite all nations and the enemy of humanity is humanity itself. That organization was the beginning of the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum and the Club of Rome co-sponsored events. The leaders of each other's organizations would go be the keynote speaker. And so there's this deep relationship between an organization that's founded on overpopulation and the organization that's now leading the climate change debates. And of course the United Nations is a frequent partner of the World Economic Forum, is a frequent partner of Bill and Melinda Gates.