Jason Jorjani, From Redefining Parapsychology to Image Cheapening |584|

Dr. Jason Reza Jorjani… philosopher…  redefined parapsychology…  alt-right image cheapening… Thomas Jefferson of Iran?

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[00:00:00] Alex Tsakiris: on this episode of Skeptiko, A show about being naive

[00:00:08] Clip: my father’s no different than any other powerful man. Any man who’s responsible for other people like a senator or president. Do you know how naive you sound? Why senators and presidents don’t have men killed?

[00:00:23] Clip: who’s being naive? Kay.

[00:00:25] Alex Tsakiris: and how to train yourself not to be.

[00:00:28] Jason Reza Jorjani: I have a very demanding meta philosophy, so ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and then politics. And it’s not enough for the concepts that you develop to cut across all of these domains.

[00:00:42] Jason Reza Jorjani: They have to also be somehow, Consistent with one another. I mean, your ethics and politics has to follow from your ontology and epistemology. , otherwise, you will have certain naive commitments that go unquestioned.

[00:00:58] Alex Tsakiris: That first clip was of course, from the Godfather. , and the second was from today’s guest, . , Dr. Jason Gianni. This was a real paradigm shattering interview for me as it kind of made me wonder what it would really be like to play the five D chess of geopolitics on the big board. I hope you enjoy it.

[00:01:20] Alex Tsakiris: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and today we’re joined by somebody I’m really, really excited to have on the show.

[00:01:36] Alex Tsakiris: , Dr. Jason Reza Gianni is somebody I’ve known about for a long time. And it’s really just an oversight cuz I’ve wanted to speak to him for the longest time. And then Chester from Skeptiko said, Hey, you really gotta talk to this guy. And I’m like, darn it.

[00:01:52] Alex Tsakiris: You’re right. I so want to, so this is going to be fantastic. I’m so looking forward to this. Jason is just a brilliant intellectual, a brilliant philosopher, lauded by. You know, all the most respected people in our little corner of the world here in Skeptiko, , the likes of thinking aloud. Jeffrey Mishk, who’s been on the show, who’s kind of canceled, cultured me because of Pizza Gate, but that’s okay.

[00:02:25] Alex Tsakiris: We might even talk about how he cancel cultured Jason, , lauded by, Jeffrey Kreel been on the show many times and has become kind of this, , shining star inside of this, again, corner of the world, of the intersection of UFOs and parapsychology and alternative spirituality.

[00:02:45] Alex Tsakiris: But he’s Rice University. He’s very, very mainstream in that respect, but out there pushing the edge. So Jason was held in just the highest regard by these folks in many other intellectuals. You know, you’d have to read in, in his latest book, , Promethean Pirate, which is a fantastic read. You can find it on Amazon along with so many of his other, , amazing books.

[00:03:10] Alex Tsakiris: I’ll share the screen now for a second, Jason, just so we can go through and look at some of those books so again, we probably won’t have a chance to talk about a lot of these, but they’re amazing , . So in the email exchange that I had with Jason though, I came to the conclusion that, you know, we can’t really get to any of that stuff.

[00:03:31] Alex Tsakiris: We can’t really get to the meat of this philosopher and his thinking, and his radical, but well conceived ideas about UFOs, about , what it means to be a philosopher, what it means to be politically and spiritually engaged in our culture. All these terrific things. We can’t get to any of that stuff without talking about

[00:03:55] Jason Reza Jorjani: well, somebody, somebody in the CIA let me know that that’s what they call it.

[00:03:59] Jason Reza Jorjani: It’s, uh, an image cheapening operat.

[00:04:02] Alex Tsakiris: Yes, an image cheapening operation. And that’s where we have to begin, because otherwise, any interview with Jason really, unless you’re just going to jump kind of right into it, um, you know, like my friend at Aon Bite MCGI does. I, if you’re not gonna do that, if you’re really gonna try and reach somewhat of a mainstream audience, the first thing on their mind is going to be, yeah, but isn’t that the guy who, and then they’re gonna fill in the blank.

[00:04:33] Alex Tsakiris: And in this case, the blank is alt right. Is he some kind of neo-Nazi? Is he anti-Semitic? Is he all these things? Is he a war monger? All these things. So right out front, I think we have to tackle that , in a very direct way. So you gotta tell the story, man. You’re the only one who can, who can tell the story.

[00:04:55] Alex Tsakiris: You’ve done it beautifully in Pirate, but it, it’s,

[00:04:59] Jason Reza Jorjani: it’s yours to tell. All right, Alex, but at least gimme some angle of approach here. Okay. Uh, and I will try to be as concise as possible, and then you can draw me out on specific points, uh, where we could get into more detail, because obviously this is a, um, it’s a long assorted saga.

[00:05:17] Jason Reza Jorjani: So, uh, and the devil is often in the details. Um, but give me some angle of approach and, uh, and then I’ll give you, you know, the most concise summary that I can, and we’ll take it from there. You

[00:05:32] Alex Tsakiris: know, the, the phrase that, that captivated me, and again, I don’t know, I think it’s gonna take a while to get there, is this idea that you are an Iranian American.

[00:05:44] Alex Tsakiris: You are looking at. What’s happened in Iran and the, the complexity of it as is that a false flag operation by the c i A to kind of counter block, , Russia? I mean, that is way out there, but that has to be kind of considered, what does it really mean to install a fundamentalist Muslim regime?

[00:06:05] Alex Tsakiris: What are you trying to do when you do that? What are you doing if you allow that? What are you doing now if you’re resistant? , what is, , Israel? Think about that. But here’s the phrase that caught my attention, the Thomas Jefferson of the next Iran. So you are this leading bright star intellectual. You see as many Iranian Americans do, the potential, the necessity, the ultimate reality that this thing has to change in Iran.

[00:06:32] Alex Tsakiris: It’s just so fake, so phony, so such , a betrayal of the. Persian people that it just can’t last and you’re going, it’s gonna change. And I’m somebody who can help in that process, be one of the change agents. I think that’s the angle, because that’s the only way I understand how you got drawn into some of the crap that you got drawn into that you should have sidestepped anyone’s looking at this and going, Jason, you should have seen this.

[00:07:04] Alex Tsakiris: You should have side stepped

[00:07:05] Jason Reza Jorjani: this. Yeah. Good angle of approach. Okay, so look, here was the situation. , I had published Prometheus and Atlas and I believe February of 2016. , as you suggested in your introduction, it was widely hailed. The most significant work in parapsychology, perhaps in decades. , uh, it’s of course a work of philosophy.

[00:07:28] Jason Reza Jorjani: I was coming from outta philosophy, but as a philosopher, I was looking at the whole history of data in parapsychology and advancing some rather revolutionary thesis, uh, that had a bearing on the potential of parapsychology to revolutionize the sciences in general, and to restructure what we even conceive of as the practice of science to point towards a kind of post paradigmatic, uh, vision for doing science, where theories are understood as models rather than as mirrors of some objective reality.

[00:08:00] Jason Reza Jorjani: And this was very well received, , at won the 2016 Book Award of the Parapsychological Association. , at that time I was basically a, you know, meteorically, frankly rising star in the field was introduced to everybody and, , , you know, there’s a review of that book on the inside Dust jacket from, from Jeffrey Kriel, who by the way, sat on my dissertation committee, , to approve the dissertation version of the book that eventually became Prometheus and Atlas.

[00:08:30] Jason Reza Jorjani: And then there was a review from Jeffrey Uff as well. In any case, I was doing these interviews. I was in the parapsychology circuit and Prometheus and Atlas also, toward the end, addressed the U f O subject, which then later I went on to write this tone about, you know, closer encounters. This really like, basically encyclopedic treatment of all of the various these, , in, in the domain of, uh, closer encounters research, of close encounters research, and in close encounters, I kind of come up with a, a meta hypothesis that synthesizes various.

[00:09:04] Jason Reza Jorjani: , apparently divergent theories, but I had already hinted at that toward the end of Prometheus and Atlas. And so here I am, you know, connected in the, let’s say, alternative science scene And,

[00:09:15] Alex Tsakiris: , but quite a, an important scene. I mean, we can’t diminish it too much cuz it’s not just like this narrow niche of parapsychology.

[00:09:23] Alex Tsakiris: I mean, Jeffrey Kriel is, a major, a major figure in this alternative shaping kind of thing. And you know, what’s happening with the whole U f O thing or is about to happen with the whole U f O thing and the disclosure and the rollout and the New York Times. I mean, a lot of this stuff is said in place where these guys who you are talking to are no longer.

[00:09:44] Alex Tsakiris: Off in the corner doing their thing, they’re being pushed onto the main stage as you are being pushed onto the main stage. Would you, am I, am I going too far with that or is that the feeling you had at the time?

[00:09:57] Jason Reza Jorjani: I don’t think you’re even going far enough to be quite honest with you. I think that it’s the most important scene in the world and that what was, and then now, you know, it’ll, it’ll require laying all of this out for people to appreciate, you know what I’m about to say right now, it’s gonna seem a little bit outta left field, but in essence, I think what was done is that certain people in intelligence, And with corporate connections saw that I was about to be the figure at the nexus of consciousness studies and ufology, and they intervened to make sure that that wouldn’t happen, , so that the conversation could be contained within certain parameters.

[00:10:39] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so anyway, to take us back to the timeline here, February, 2016, this book came out between February and say May of 2016. I became this rising star in this, in this, uh, uh, area of, uh, parapsychology and ufology and the convergences between them. And then I believe it was when I went to London at the end of the spring of 2016 to actually give a talk about Prometheus and Atlas at the Society for Psychical Research.

[00:11:07] Jason Reza Jorjani: I was invited for a kind of book launch at the Society for Psychical Research in London in, uh, late spring 2016. And I met a guy there who. Belong to an organization called Iranian Renaissance. Now I have to back up here and say that during the 2009 to 2010 uprising in Iran known as the Green Movement, I was a human rights activist.

[00:11:31] Jason Reza Jorjani: I was the New York chapter director of an organization called Iran Crime Watch. And my task in New York was to lobby the security council members of the United Nations to impose sanctions on, uh, regime officials that were responsible for the brutal crackdown on the uprising of the Iranian people. So I had had this background in human rights activism and the promotion of, , let’s say, , you.

[00:12:01] Jason Reza Jorjani: The cause of liberty in Iran. Okay? And I met this guy in London who was a member of this, uh, 5 0 1 cultural organization, informally known as Iranian Renaissance, formally called the Persian Renaissance Foundation. And long story short, he brought me into this organization. Okay? Now it, very quickly I moved to the highest level and to the inner, inner circle of this organization, Iranian Renaissance, to the point where, I mean, to be honest, I, you know, I, I, I hate to, to have been put in a position where I have to reveal these things, but the fact of the matter is that, I was part of a secret triumvirate in that organization.

[00:12:42] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay. Publicly, it was a cultural organization, 5 0 1 privately, it was probably the most significant political organization in opposition to the Islamic Republic because as a cultural organization, it did not have its own party politics. It was trying to bring together a fairly wide ranging coalition of, let’s say, uh, more nationalist oriented political groups who are opposed to the Islamic Republic.

[00:13:10] Alex Tsakiris: Jason, I don’t wanna get too off target and d too much, but you do, I think, have to give people , the Normies, because I’m a normy until I dug into this, an understanding of what that means, what a Iranian Persian resistance movement means in this context of, you know, when the whole thing just happened recently with Iran.

[00:13:36] Alex Tsakiris: The latest thing where they killed that woman cuz she wasn’t wearing the burka. And don’t tell me it’s not a burka. I know it’s not a burka wasn’t wearing it tight enough. And they’re doing this unbelievable crackdown that if we step back and look at it from an ordinary kind of what we consider to be rights and values that are fundamental to Western society, we just wouldn’t live with for a day.

[00:13:58] Alex Tsakiris: And yet we all seem to kind of turn and look the other way. But for people who, of our Iranian descent, and particularly people who are connected as you are to the tradition of, uh, of the Persian, uh, culture. This has been, I mean, you can’t even begin to say it’s like an affront because it’s just been, and it does tie back to this potential thing that the whole thing was kind of an orchestrated political play from the beginning.

[00:14:26] Alex Tsakiris: So you, you, you have to somehow help us understand to what extent that might be real. And how that’s playing into you year after year as you see this kind of show go on in Iran.

[00:14:42] Jason Reza Jorjani: Yeah. So look, , in the West we measure dates from the time of Christ for a better or for worse, right? 2000 years, right? , it’s 2023.

[00:14:52] Jason Reza Jorjani: Iran has just 2000 years of history. Before Islam, before the advent of Islam and the Arab conquest of Iran. Iran already had 2000 years of history. And by the way, the Iranians never called. Iran, Persia. That was the name that the Greeks gave to Iran because the capital district was called Parsa or Persis in Greek.

[00:15:15] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so like the way we refer to Russia as Moscow in news reports, Moscow said such and such that’s stuck in the West, but I, Iranians always called Iran. Iran, it’s a middle Persian contraction of the old Persian word, Ariana. So land of the Arians, Ariana or Iran. Anyway, uh, the country has 2000 years of history just before Islam.

[00:15:39] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so this Iranian Renaissance organization or Persian Renaissance Foundation, their task was to try to bring about a kind of Medici style renaissance in Iran that would draw from the ancient Persian culture, right, as part of not just the political revolution, but a cultural revolution from out of repressive Islamic theocracy.

[00:16:01] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so with that kind of, you know, cultural outlook with that kind of more long-term, deeper vision of change in Iran, that group was aiming to bring together a whole coalition of political parties, which, by the way, we succeeded in doing, uh, by the summer of 2017, we brought together groups that are monarchists, that want a return of the monarchy, albeit a constitutional monarchy and groups that are for a secular republic.

[00:16:31] Jason Reza Jorjani: Now, to put this in context for your listeners or viewers, uh, if they know anything about Mohamed Mossad. Mohamed Mossad was a democratically elected prime minister of Iran in 1951, who from 1951 to 1953 drove the Shaw out of Iran and basically took steps towards creating a secular republic in the country.

[00:16:55] Jason Reza Jorjani: So there has been for decades, a, as you know, vehemently as everyone. In the opposition opposes the Islamic Republic. There has been a deep divide between the supporters of Mohammed Mossad, those who want a secular republic in Iran, and people who want a restoration of constitutional monarchy. This is a big divide, and it’s one of the reasons why, uh, the opposition could never get together to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

[00:17:18] Jason Reza Jorjani: We were the first people who by the summer of 2017, brought together the Mosad camp, the secular Republicans, and the constitutional monarchists.

[00:17:28] Alex Tsakiris: At the same time, Jason, you’ve gotta be looking over your shoulder, no doubt, because the Shawah was our guy. Our guy being, he was a CIA guy.

[00:17:36] Alex Tsakiris: He was gonna run his thing. And then there is this thing floating out there that the Shah is kind of deposed by the Muslim republic. Kind of , is that possibly a false flag on our part to kind of make a block move for the Russians? Because this is 3D chess and unless we’re willing to kind of.

[00:17:55] Alex Tsakiris: engage at that level, speculate whether we agree with it or not. We we’re not really gonna get there. So you are there, you’re doing this cultural thing, but you’re totally looking over your shoulder, looking at how to play the 3D chess political game. Cuz that’s what’s gonna happen here and now in the 21st century,

[00:18:12] Jason Reza Jorjani: right?

[00:18:12] Jason Reza Jorjani: Yeah. More like five D. So, you know, I’m gonna try to keep it simple at the outset, then we can get into some of the more convoluted dimensions of this. But point being, , I wound up in the innermost circle of this organization that’s trying to create this broad coalition, right? And, and we were developing a plan for regime change in Iran.

[00:18:31] Jason Reza Jorjani: And it was a, it was a very, how can I put this ruthlessly pragmatic. Okay. Because there’s things about Iran, people who just shout, oh, democracy, you know, freedom. They don’t understand the complexity of the situation here. Okay? This is a country that has, yes, a Persian majority, but it has all kinds of ethnic minorities, which have now been agitated for decades by agencies like the cia, the Mossad, British intelligence, to try to balkanize Iran and rape and loop the country for its resources.

[00:19:03] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so you ju you can’t have a chaotic, free for all revolution in that country and expect that Iran is going to emerge as a cohesive entity on the other side of that. Okay? So what we wanted to try to do was to bring about a military coup inside of Iran, which would be first an officer’s coup that gets rid of all the people in the I R G C, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are loyal to the atos and then would under conditions of security and.

[00:19:33] Jason Reza Jorjani: Public Safety Shepherd, a transition out of the Islamic Republic toward a more, uh, you know, authentically Iranian government. Okay. So we had this plan, and I was approached in the summer of 2016 at the beginning of this process. And at the time when I wound up in the inner circle of this organization, I was approached by this Bri British gentleman, who, frankly, his initial messages to me sounded insane, and there was very bad grammar and whatever.

[00:20:08] Jason Reza Jorjani: I mean, so I, I dismissed him together with, I don’t know, a hundred other nut cases who were writing to me at the time. Uh, once I was doing these interviews on parapsychology and Euphology and so forth, until one day I got a message from him saying we, and his initial, initial messages all had to do with UFOs and kind of paranormal subjects, right?

[00:20:28] Jason Reza Jorjani: But then I get this message from him that says, We have a, an intelligence agency called jellyfish, and, uh, we’re able to broadcast the message of the Iranian Renaissance into the Islamic Republic. And so I googled this jellyfish, what is this business J? And it turns out it was the salvaged intelligence of Blackwater.

[00:20:52] Jason Reza Jorjani: Now, most of your listeners probably know what Blackwater was right after Blackwater, the mercenary force, the US basically used to govern large parts of Iraq after the disaster they had in Fallujah and Eric Prince. Basically, the head of Blackwater was effectively exiled from the United States when Blackwater dissolved.

[00:21:10] Jason Reza Jorjani: This guy, Michael Bagley salvage the intelligence directorate. And this character, Jonathan in London told me that Michael worked with him. I got the impression, frankly, over time, it, it became clear to me that Michael actually worked for him and. They had this intelligence agency, which supposedly had a broadcast facility in Croatia that threw some kind of satellite uplink or whatever, was able to break the filters of the Islamic Republic.

[00:21:37] Jason Reza Jorjani: And they were offering to take our Iranian Renaissance content and Bombardi run with it. Okay? And so I, I looked up jellyfish and it looked legit wired and Mother Jones and all these people had done stories on it. So I said, fine with one phone call, I’m gonna find out whether this guy, this British guy is a nutcase or really he has these connections.

[00:21:57] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so I called Michael Bagley and he picked up the phone and we had a very nice conversation. He was expecting my call. And long story short, we set up lunch meetings and so forth. And so I got involved with this guy, and more importantly, I got my Iranian Renaissance colleagues involved with these characters because they were offering to facilitate our attempts at regime change in Iran and.

[00:22:21] Jason Reza Jorjani: , so anyway, uh, long story short, I got involved with these people and a plan emerged that had to do with the publisher of Prometheus and Atlas because you see, and by the way, I was told before October of 2016 that Donald Trump was going to win the election before he won the election. I was told that he was going to win the election.

[00:22:47] Jason Reza Jorjani: And with Trump coming in with Steve Bannon at that time in such a prominent position of influence next to him, it was decided that I should make an approach to Steve Bannon because Steve Bannon was an avid reader of books published by my publisher. My publisher, Atos was also the publisher is is to this day also the publisher of Alexander Duggan’s books in English translation and of a variety of other books that.

[00:23:16] Jason Reza Jorjani: Steve Bannon is interested in from sort of new right traditionalist authors. And anyway, uh, the idea was that through my connection with ARC dos, I would reach Steve Bannon and then influence Bannon on Iran policy. That was the idea. Uh, and in order to facilitate this, uh, it was proposed that I take Aose and fuse it with two other, um, right wing institutions.

[00:23:53] Jason Reza Jorjani: Something called Red Ice Radio on television, which by the way used to be a paranormal broadcaster that had nothing to do with right wing politics

[00:24:00] Alex Tsakiris: Time out, time out. Cuz here’s where the thing starts sliding off the rails. Uh, so Heinrich from Red Ice, right? Hmm. , I mean I know who he is.

[00:24:08] Alex Tsakiris: I’ve listened to him for

[00:24:09] Jason Reza Jorjani: a long time and he used to be like Art Bell back in the day. He

[00:24:12] Alex Tsakiris: used to be like Art Bell. Yeah. And he would occasionally kind of slip into this, you know, kind of holo, hoaxer kind of nonsense. But you could kind of forgive it cuz it was a very small part of the content and hey, shouldn’t we be open to research?

[00:24:30] Alex Tsakiris: Even if it’s wacky research And Yeah. And all sorts of wacky stuff turns out to be real and stuff like that. But I mean, at this point now, I mean, he is full, full. Hold on, the Nazi holo hoaxer kind of thing. So are,

[00:24:45] Jason Reza Jorjani: are you some I haven’t spoke, I haven’t spoken to him for four years, so I have no idea. You know, I have no idea.

[00:24:49] Alex Tsakiris: Well, you can just go to his website. I mean, it’s, . The great one is how he refers to, uh, Hitler. He regularly has on people who are just, uh, you know, the whole holo hoaxer thing. Really. I guess it really tweaks me a little bit because it’s anti, , intellectual, anti history, , it seems like an op to me because it, it’s

[00:25:09] Jason Reza Jorjani: just trying, well, I guess I can tell you it’s not an op.

[00:25:11] Jason Reza Jorjani: Um, I knew him quite well and, and they, more important point is that when I knew him back then, he wasn’t like that. Okay. We gotta remember this is 2016, and if you go back and you look at what Red Ice was putting out in 2016, he had only just barely started to turn in a kind of right wing political direction.

[00:25:29] Jason Reza Jorjani: Most of his shows up to that point had been basically, , you know, COEX extensive with coast to coast content.

[00:25:34] Alex Tsakiris: , it was about nine 11. It was about, , federal Reserve. It was about very edgy stuff, but kind of in that

[00:25:41] Jason Reza Jorjani: contained a lot of UFO shows, a lot of paranormal shows and so Right. Any, anyway, the other important thing that, because before people think like, what the hell were you thinking, Gianni?

[00:25:51] Jason Reza Jorjani: Uh, the other, the other important thing they need to keep in mind is that, As I got involved with these intelligence people and as also the Iranian renaissance began to make its own assessments of the strategic situation. One thing that became perfectly clear to us in the run up to the 2016 election in November is that Hillary Clinton had as part of her agenda, not just regime change in Iran through foreign intervention, but the balkanization of Iran, Hillary Clinton was connected to the house of Sao through some people, very close to her, particularly, there was this one woman who was a, a very rather direct intermediary between her and the House of SA and her agenda coming in.

[00:26:31] Jason Reza Jorjani: Listen, she talk about warmongers. Okay, this woman voted for the intervention in. Based on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. She’s one of the most hawkish politicians in the United States. And we had good intelligence that Hillary’s agenda was going to be to have a foreign military intervention in Iran with the aim of balkanizing the country and looting its resources.

[00:26:55] Jason Reza Jorjani: , and in Europe there was a Islamist terrorist Maoist organization called Organization, M K O, or sometimes it’s abbreviated, m E k, that. Are opposed to the Islamic Republic, but they’re a, basically, they’re a cult. Okay? And they, they sided with Saddam Hussein during the Iran Iraq war. And then when we went into Iraq, they wound up being pushed into Europe.

[00:27:24] Jason Reza Jorjani: And they have a huge lobby in Europe. And all the left wing politicians in Europe are in their pocket. And by the way, they also had, , a number of prominent American congressmen in their pocket. Okay? So, so we’re looking at the scene in Europe, and we see the left wing in Europe. These socialist groups, communist, they’re all in with this Islamist Maoist.

[00:27:44] Jason Reza Jorjani: Terrorist organization. That’s their vision of regime change in Iran. Then we’re looking at Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in the US and okay, they wanna balkanize Iran. And so we sh you know, the only choice is Trump and the people around Trump, and at least they understand the idea of a nation and, you know, on account of their populism.

[00:28:02] Jason Reza Jorjani: They might be sympathetic to keeping Iran as a cohesive nation. So the, the idea was I have to get to Steve Bannon and influence Iran on influence Trump on Iran policy.

[00:28:13] Alex Tsakiris: So this is kind of the strange bedfellows kind of thing that very much it is a reality. That is just a reality. And I love the way that you, you play it out cuz it helps, cuz Steve Bannon, you know, turns out to be the.

[00:28:27] Alex Tsakiris: Meth porn house guy in Florida and all that stuff, which I, I, I don’t know what to do with it, but it’s real, you know, Trump turns out to be our covid president, which is, is real. That’s who he was. I don’t know if he was selected for that, but he certainly raised his hand when the, when the, the plan was laid out.

[00:28:47] Alex Tsakiris: And then you got, and then you got Hillary, who is the, the pizza gate? Hillary. I mean, there is an, there is an evil kind of, , another level, other Jason conversation about what does it mean to want to connect with other forces and have those forces aid you and kind of stuff. And again, we can’t, the, that’s the, the layer and the complexity of this that really gets interesting.

[00:29:09] Alex Tsakiris: But we can’t get there because I really appreciate how you’re breaking this down in terms of you walking through this history, what it’s like for you that, that what your goal is here is. These freaking Iranian people who are there, like you can hear ’em screaming, help us, help us, help us. And that’s what you’re trying to do.

[00:29:33] Alex Tsakiris: And Trump seems like a reasonable way to go about that.

[00:29:39] Jason Reza Jorjani: Initially he did. Yes. Later I actually turned against him very, uh, severely. But initially that’s what we were thinking. And so I brought together this organization. Now there’s another motivation that I had, which I have to confess here, which is, without which this story doesn’t make a great deal of sense.

[00:29:58] Jason Reza Jorjani: And that’s, that I have for many years, uh, many years before this, before even 2016. Uh, and, and those who are closest to me, the people who are my closest friends know this. I, I discussed this with them going way back to, I don’t know, 2010 or even earlier than that, that I’ve had for years, a vision. , uh, a nightmarish vision of a return of fascism to the Western world in particular.

[00:30:27] Jason Reza Jorjani: And, you know, I mean, that’s a whole complicated discussion we could have. What’s relevant for the moment is simply that I had this precognitive, it, it wasn’t just a projective analysis, it was also quite vivid precognitive vision that there is going to be this resurgence of fascism and people like Mussolini and Hitler are gonna be reevaluated as historical figures and things are gonna be so dark in the West that, you know, uh, hi.

[00:30:54] Jason Reza Jorjani: Our notion of history will have been revised. Okay. And so I, I had this vision and part of what I was trying to do in the way I wrote Prometheus and Atlas, and I wrote it very subtly, was it, it’s quite an esoteric book. It has esoteric dimensions to it. And part of what I was trying to do was to hack that narrative and recode it.

[00:31:16] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay. , to offer up an archetype around which the west could be restructured, that would be much more progressive and that would promote liberty and the freedom of the individual as opposed to the direction that I thought things were going to go in.

[00:31:33] Alex Tsakiris: I, as opposed to the direction things are going, so sadly, you, you gotta give a thumbnail sketch of that and it can get really deep really quickly.

[00:31:43] Alex Tsakiris: But I, I think you have to again, give people the technology, Prometheus Atlas, who they are, but more importantly, it, it is so, , immediate. It’s so present with everything we see. You know, we’ve been talking about the great reset in the World Economic Forum and you know, one. Tip of my questions to you is, is that another, uh, c i a Kissinger Make America great.

[00:32:11] Alex Tsakiris: Uh, let’s defend the, the US currency thing, or is it this next level Promethean totalitarian, technocratic dystopia kind of thing? And we don’t know, maybe it’s all those, but what you so brilliantly kind of, , sketched out and, and, and in a, like you said, in a very, , subtle way, but not so subtle way in Prometheus and Atlas.

[00:32:37] Alex Tsakiris: Give folks a little bit more of how that connects to what has happened

[00:32:42] Jason Reza Jorjani: since that time. Okay. I mean, that’s, we, we can, I know. I don’t, I know. I know.

[00:32:48] Alex Tsakiris: , in a nutshell, and Jason, in the context of this story that I, you’re doing awesome job of kind of, Helping us understand Yeah.

[00:32:58] Alex Tsakiris: How you wound up where you wound up.

[00:33:00] Jason Reza Jorjani: My vision of what was going to happen, which I wanted to avert, is that the west was gonna be pushed in the direction of a neo futile, agrarian, traditionalist society. And by traditionalist, I mean xenophobic, , Luddite, , opposed to women’s rights, uh, and so on and so forth.

[00:33:22] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay. So winding the clock back by not just decades. Centuries in terms of values. Right.

[00:33:30] Alex Tsakiris: And, okay. So again, uh, pardon me for interrupting, but I wanna break it down cuz I listen to your stuff and it’s so dense. I think we need to break that fu. You alone, nothing and you will be happy. That is about as futile as you can get universal basic income.

[00:33:48] Alex Tsakiris: That’s about as futile as you can get. The traditionalist part, , the Islamic Republic obviously is traditionalist, but how else do we get in our current state of affairs? Do we get to the traditionalist part of that?

[00:34:04] Jason Reza Jorjani: Through the promotion of the unity of all of the regressive religious and cultural forces in the world.

[00:34:11] Jason Reza Jorjani: There is this discourse of perennial philosophy, Sophia Peris, uh, that basically stipulates that there’s a unity of all the great world religions, and they always argue that, that unity is on the basis of the most orthodox. Elements of those traditions. So that, uh, what I saw taking place and which, which I think has begun to take place, uh, is a kind of coordination between, let’s say, conservative Catholics in Europe, the Catholics who reject the, the last Vatican Council, um, Islamic fundamentalists, particularly the Shiites, uh, Hindu nationalists in India.

[00:34:55] Jason Reza Jorjani: So a kind of alliance of regressive forces, uh, for the sake of promoting a kind of anti-technology view of the world that strips us of individual liberties and winds. The clock back in terms of kind of social progress that’s taken place in the West over the past two centuries. This is what I saw was going to happen without some kind of intervention.

[00:35:21] Alex Tsakiris: And could we throw in the pot this kind of secular atheistic, , wokeness without really any kind of mindfulness to what that means? Because it, again, it has that universality that, that kind of appeals in some vague

[00:35:37] Jason Reza Jorjani: way. It’s a dialectic Alex at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, this has been set up.

[00:35:43] Jason Reza Jorjani: They are using the soulless materialist, mechanistic transhumanist worldview in order to catalyze a reactionary traditionalist. Neo futile response, and it’s the dialectic between these two forces that’s going to produce the totalitarian political system of the future. That’s what I saw happening. And so what I was attempting to do in Prometheus and Atlas was because, see, what they’ve done is they’ve created a false binary.

[00:36:11] Jason Reza Jorjani: It’s a false alternative. That’s how PSYOPs work. And so what I was trying to do was to articulate a different vision of the human relationship to technological science. One that is not mechanistic and and reductionist, and one that actually identifies the essence of technological science as an archetypal or spiritual force, namely the archetype of Prometheus.

[00:36:35] Jason Reza Jorjani: And at the same time, that archetype of Prometheus offers us a spirituality that’s about as diametrically opposite to regressive traditionalism, as you can imagine. I mean, Prometheus is the, the, I don’t wanna say God, cuz of course he was a titan, but he’s the deity of the counter tradition. I mean, he is, Prometheus is the ultimate symbol of rebellion against tyrannical overlords and, uh, a, a sort of divine inspiration for human self-determination and for us, claiming our own destiny and our own highest potential.

[00:37:10] Jason Reza Jorjani: So I was trying to articulate this vision of our relationship to technological science and a vision for a new spirituality that went back to the roots of the West in order to propose a different basis for a cohesive reorganization of western civilization. A a basis that would be, you know, very different from the direction they’re pushing things in.

[00:37:34] Jason Reza Jorjani: Uh, and that could act as an alternative, right? Well enough in advance of the impending catastrophe that I saw on the horizon. And so people need to keep this in mind as well, like, I’ve got this Iranian renaissance thing going on, but also in the back of my mind is, The collapse of the West is coming and this is being engineered, and we need a new model for Western civilization.

[00:37:54] Jason Reza Jorjani: So when I agreed to be this figure to bring together these disparate organizations into a, uh, into a single quote unquote alt-right group, it was with the idea that I was infiltrating trading an organization that eventually would coalesce anyhow, and that I was going to use that influence that I had at the nexus of this organization to push things in a completely different direction than the track that they were already headed down.

[00:38:24] Alex Tsakiris: Okay, but Jason, here, here’s h here’s kind of a hard part, right? This is from a direct quote from the book. Well, it, it’s slightly paraphrased, but I think you’ll find it, you correct it if you need to. My aim as c e o of the alt-right movement was to make it cohesive and organize enough to redirect its trajectory away from.

[00:38:44] Alex Tsakiris: White nationalism, European ethnocentrism. That’s right. Now that’s, I’m on hand. . I mean, not a good idea, right? I mean, not, I mean the, the goal I’m getting all the things you’re saying, but as a pragmatic, you know how the game is played. Five d chess, really? You’re

[00:39:09] Jason Reza Jorjani: gonna allow, I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why.

[00:39:11] Jason Reza Jorjani: Really? I’ll tell you why. Really? Um, Marini, uh, uhso Marini Ft. Marini was a very close collaborator, Benito Mussolini, back in the 19 teens, uh, when Mussolini was still making a transition from being an anarchist. He was an anarchist, who by the way, was convinced by his Jewish mists. To become a fascist.

[00:39:37] Jason Reza Jorjani: Anyway, before Mussolini wound up there, he was close collaborators with Marini. And you know, there are a lot of ideas in Marini that I agree with. I mean, I don’t agree with going into the freaking UFI museum and Sledgehammering all the great, you know, classical and Renaissance sculptures because he thought that they were holding Italy back from futurist development.

[00:39:55] Jason Reza Jorjani: I don’t agree with that, but there’s a lot in the spirit of Marini that I identify with. And so there was a moment in time when we could have had a different Benito Mussolini, a Mussolini that wouldn’t have fallen under the influence of Hitler, and we would’ve had a very different kind of Italy emerge from out of that.

[00:40:11] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay. Uh, one has to look at these moments of opportunity in history, and now when people look at somebody like a Richard Spencer, whatever, uh, they see him as this cardboard cutout caricature of a white national. When I knew him back in, uh, the fall of 2016, he wasn’t there at all yet ideologically he had tremendous ideological plasticity and frankly, also he was very open to going in various directions depending on how much funding was available.

[00:40:43] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay. Uh, and you know, Richard Spencer later wound up endorsing Joe Biden and rejecting white nationalism. So we saw how firm his ideology was, and I saw that there was an opportunity to bring together a group of people and redirect their trajectory contingent on funding that had been promised to me directly to become the c e o and chairman of this organization.

[00:41:08] Jason Reza Jorjani: And to have operational control over it. Where things went sideways is when the funding never came through. And so they had us set, they had me set up this organization with these business partners, and then left me in the lurch without this funding and. So I, over time, throughout the course of 2017, through the spring, basically of 2017, lost control of this organization and my partners started to make, you know, increasingly rash decisions.

[00:41:40] Jason Reza Jorjani: Uh, and, uh, basically a articulate, a really craft populist agenda, um, that ultimately, you know, I, I wasn’t able to endorse and I resigned in protests from the organization. But one of the reasons why it took so long for me to do that is that frankly, I was repeatedly played by these people who promised this funding.

[00:42:04] Jason Reza Jorjani: They did things like put a nearly 1 billion oil contract in front of me for, believe it or not, the reconstruction of the Venezuelan national oil industry. This was in spring of 20. 17 months before any of the protests against Maduro,

[00:42:22] Alex Tsakiris: and they came. So then as you see that unfold, then you’re like, this is legitimate.

[00:42:26] Jason Reza Jorjani: Listen, they came to me and they said, we’re gonna overthrow the government of Venezuela. And by the way, I had no problem with it. I had no problem in my conscience with participating in that because that government of Venezuela in 2009, 2010, when I was a human rights activist, that government of Venezuela said that the whole thing was a CIA color revolution.

[00:42:43] Jason Reza Jorjani: The Iranian people deserved to be beaten down by the Islamic Republic. So frankly, I had an ax to grind against the government of Venezuela. And I said, oh, great, you wanna throw overthrow the government of Venezuela? Fine. Uh, and I took this contract they gave me to an petroleum engineer who worked at one of the largest oil companies in the world.

[00:42:58] Jason Reza Jorjani: And the idea was that if they accepted to do this project, the commission that we would get for closing this contract would be more than enough to cover for the funding that had been promised for the alt-right corporation, but wasn’t delivered on. Okay. And so these little things along the way and, and,

[00:43:14] Alex Tsakiris: and putting kind of, you’re not a wealthy guy.

[00:43:16] Alex Tsakiris: I mean, you’re, you’re a professor. I was a professor at a New Jersey Institute of Technology and you, you’re, you’re playing in this, in this game as well as you can, but they have an unbelievable Blackwater I love in the book where you kind of explain what Blackwater, you know, what that means in terms of oil in the water kind of thing.

[00:43:38] Alex Tsakiris: And that that anyone who knows history knows that these corporate intelligence agencies were really the precursor to all the intelligence agencies and that they still go on, there’s still a huge part of this network of things going on. So the fact that your assertion or your, , speculation that you were played in a very organized, systematic way in a playbook that’s well worn

[00:44:04] Alex Tsakiris: Cause they know how to do it. It makes a lot of sense to me.

[00:44:08] Jason Reza Jorjani: Now, let, let me add Alex , they didn’t just play on my concern for Iran. They played also on my deep interest in the U F O phenomenon and, , basically, , alternative science research. At one point, this character in London introduced me to a former NASA JPL engineer.

[00:44:33] Jason Reza Jorjani: Who had schematics for a retrofitting of supposedly deca, the Nazi bell from the 1940s, which is a mercury thorium generator. Uh, it, it, it basically, , counter rotates mercury and thorium to produce zero point energy in a local gravitational field. And, you know, in the 1940s everything was larger. You know, the, the power generation devices were larger, uh, you know, electronic circuits were larger and so forth.

[00:45:09] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so basically the idea was that now this type of device could be dramatically scaled down to where you could fit it inside of a car or inside of a boat. And by the way, they were really underlining sea-based applications of this. And so this guy had these schematics and the, the gentleman in London.

[00:45:30] Jason Reza Jorjani: Jonathan had noticed that I had befriended Jacque Vallee at that. By that time, I had already had dinner with Vallee at his home, , in San Francisco. And so he said to me, take this engineer Randall, this nasa, former NASA JPL engineer to Jacque Val.

[00:45:50] Alex Tsakiris: And just so people know, most people know this, but Jacque Vallee is not only kind of this brilliant computer scientist, this Ufologists, who’s kind of well known, and his books are just seminal books, but he’s also a venture capitalist.

[00:46:05] Alex Tsakiris: , he’s done a lot of VC deals in Silicon Valley, so this is not like out in left field here.

[00:46:12] Jason Reza Jorjani: You took the words out of my mouth. That’s, that’s exactly what I was gonna say was that look, not just in his capacity as a U F O researcher, as a venture capitalist, they wanted him to look at this project and to see whether he could raise capital in Silicon Valley for it.

[00:46:28] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so I took Randall to to to to Jacque and there was this meeting at the Fairmont Hotel, and I, I had email exchanges with Jacque before this where I said to him, listen, these people have been telling me all kinds of stories for months that I think they’re dicking me around and I really don’t trust these people.

[00:46:44] Jason Reza Jorjani: And I, you know, I had read Messengers of Deception, Jacques Val’s book, messengers of Deception, which is all about like quasi corporate crime syndicate organizations and cults manipulating the U F O phenomenon for various shady purposes. And I specifically said to Jacque Vallee, I would like you to give me your private opinion of these people, because if you think that it’s one of those types of con jobs that you covered in messengers of deception, I’m gonna cut these people off altogether.

[00:47:13] Jason Reza Jorjani: I’ve really had enough, uh, of them.

[00:47:16] Alex Tsakiris: And we should add, we should just throw on the table, Jason. Is that kind of the flip side of that is true as well as far as we know. And that’s that. There’s some incredibly brilliant breakthrough technology that is derailed, sidetracked, and you know, run through the ringer, the playbook as well.

[00:47:34] Alex Tsakiris: So you, in this situation, you have reason to be unsure of which way to turn. Right. I mean, it’s crazy stuff does happen

[00:47:43] Jason Reza Jorjani: in this field. Yeah. Oh. Listen, being con artists and criminals is not mutually exclusive of coming up with breakthrough technology. Okay? And, and to be perfectly honest with you, what I was thinking, which I didn’t tell any of these people, is that if this turns out to be the bell or whatever, some, you know, mercury, thorium, uh, you know, uh, anti-gravity device, I’m gonna steal this thing and give it to Iran to the future government of Iran.

[00:48:07] Jason Reza Jorjani: To, to be quite honest with you, I was thinking that in the back of my mind is that it’s worth it alone to find out if this thing works. Because if it does, I’m gonna take these blueprints and I’m going to give them to the future governments of Iran anyway. ,

[00:48:19] Alex Tsakiris: and I just can’t help but energy.

[00:48:20] Alex Tsakiris: One more thing, another way of thinking about this from your grander understanding of, , the Promethean Atlas kind of thing is that free energy is probably, the best chance we have of really destabilizing the power structure we have. Right. So absolutely. That’s would be in the back of my mind is like, I don’t care who gets it first.

[00:48:41] Alex Tsakiris: The fact that the genie is let out of the bottle gives us a chance for, , a different kind of reset in terms of redefining some of those power structures at a fundamental way that kind of, you can’t think of anything else that.

[00:48:56] Jason Reza Jorjani: That’s right. And you know, when I say Iran, it wasn’t out of, you know, some just, uh, sentimental personal, my, my personal heritage or whatever.

[00:49:03] Jason Reza Jorjani: It’s because, and this is a whole other conversation, we can have another time. I wrote a to about Iran’s history, I Iranian Leviathan. If you look at the scope of I Iranian history, you could see how if there were a total reorganization of sociopolitical power in that country, that country could act as a kind of David versus the Goliath of tyranny in the world.

[00:49:22] Jason Reza Jorjani: And I was thinking if a reset like that is gonna take place in Iran, it could be an optimal place to introduce free energy technology. Anyway. Uh, so I’m thinking these things and I take this engineer to meet with Jacque Vallee at the Fairmont Ho Hotel, uh, on in San Francisco. Anyway, we had a whole conversation about that thing in the course of which, uh, you know, valet said among other things, do you have a patent on this?

[00:49:46] Jason Reza Jorjani: Because as a venture capitalist, I’m not comfortable looking at this unless you have a patent on it. You know, I mean, I could be having breakfast here like next week with somebody else, and it could like, just slip out of my tongue that this and that element of your design. And, you know, and they, the guy said to him, the engineer said, no way.

[00:50:01] Jason Reza Jorjani: Don’t have a patent on it, because we didn’t come up with this. We’re basically just redesigning an existing system. Anyway, we had this conversation and then I was supposed to meet with, uh, valet again privately for him to give me his impressions of, you know, the engineer and Jacques had some kind of ear surgery, some pro, some medical issue.

[00:50:19] Jason Reza Jorjani: And so that meeting was sadly canceled. Now I’m in San Francisco to meet with Jacques Vallee and I’m contacted by a Persian billionaire who used to be a nanotech innovator. And he says, and I, and okay, this is a very dramatic series of events. So two weeks earlier, I was in Los Angeles , in August of 2017, and I was the keynote speaker introducing that coalition I had mentioned earlier of Iranian political parties.

[00:50:55] Jason Reza Jorjani: I was the person who was chosen to introduce it in the English language to the international media. And that speech exists. I can send it to you if you wanna, I don’t know, intercut a clip or two from it. And so here I am with, with these Iranian political parties around me that had been bickering for 40 years.

[00:51:13] Jason Reza Jorjani: And we finally unified them in the coalition. And I’m helping to introduce this thing. The day that that happened, my partners were making the mess in Charlottesville. Okay? Which I wasn’t present. Why? Because I was the speaker at this Iranian coalition thing. And so immediately after that happened, I resigned from the alt-right corporation.

[00:51:31] Jason Reza Jorjani: I didn’t even call my partners. I just publicly resigned in protest. And then I go to Jacque Valle to introduce this engineer to Jacque Val. And while I’m there, I get a call from this Persian nanotech guy back in Los Angeles who wants me to fly back to Los Angeles to come meet with him to discuss some things, which he didn’t tell me what he wanted to discuss.

[00:51:56] Jason Reza Jorjani: And I thought maybe he wants me to teach him thing. You know, he, he had hired me at one point to basically, uh, teach him about the goas of Zarathustra ancient Persian philosophy. And I’d had also taught him, , , I’d given him, let’s say some, , how do you wanna put it? , tutored him on the subject of the history of philosophy in science.

[00:52:15] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay. And so I thought this was gonna be the nature of the conversation. And I come back to LA to meet with this guy. For a day or two at his office, he bullshits me about the history of philosophy and whatever, and then he says, okay, no, let’s come down to business. The truth is, the reason why I brought you here is because I have information that there are people planning a regime change in Iran, like, , by means of foreign military intervention.

[00:52:41] Jason Reza Jorjani: And it’s important to note in this regard that at, at a certain juncture, John Bolton was brought into the Trump administration, and I had always been vociferously opposed to John Bolton. He was lobbied by those Islamist Maoist terrorist creeps that I told you had influence in Europe. And he was in with the wrong elements in Israel and always, you know, , was in favor of bombing Iran into democracy.

[00:53:06] Jason Reza Jorjani: Right. Which I, which I have always been vehemently opposed to. And so, so now the, the Trump administration was shifting in this wrong direction because we were not able to influence their policy the way we, you know, we had wanted to. And he, this guy tells me this nanotech. You know, billionaire Persian guy tells me I haven’t, you know, he’s obviously very well connected, okay.

[00:53:27] Jason Reza Jorjani: In the US political arena. And he said, I have information that there’s gonna be this attempt at a regime change in Iran, and we shouldn’t allow what happened in Iraq to happen in Iran, where a bunch of foreigners come and write a constitution for us. Somebody should write a constitution in advance for Iran.

[00:53:44] Jason Reza Jorjani: And the idea was that it should enshrine, I don’t wanna even say Zoroastrian principles, but principles true to the teaching of Zarathustra without using any religious language. In other words, just the way that the founders of the United States framed the Constitution in a manner that reflected deist thinking, but without using any specifically ideological language.

[00:54:06] Jason Reza Jorjani: Such a constitution should be framed for Iran that in a functional way, incorporates these principles that are true to Iran’s philosophical heritage. And he chose me as a person. To write this. And he was going to back it financially, not just, you know, the time and the energy to, to come up with this constitution and the research that would be required.

[00:54:25] Jason Reza Jorjani: I was gonna put to put, you know, 10 different constitutions of different countries in front of me. And anyway, uh, and, but he was going to also make the introductions that would be needed in order to field this as a viable proposal for future Iranian constitution. So meeting with Jacques Vallee, literally a week later, this meeting with this Persian nanotech innovator.

[00:54:46] Jason Reza Jorjani: I’m about to start working on the future constitution of Iran one month later. I’m defamed in the New York Times. One month after this. Exactly. So, I mean, do the math. Well, there’s

[00:54:59] Alex Tsakiris: a couple ways to do the math really, because the other way to do the math is, They had set the trap pretty well, you know? Yeah.

[00:55:09] Alex Tsakiris: So when they chose to spring, it really doesn’t matter. At that point, they have, you kind of boxed in, in a number of different ways there. So I guess the question would be, , how do you feel about, that? The, the timing of that, the way that was done, how it was done, the recording, the whole

[00:55:29] Alex Tsakiris: thing.

[00:55:31] Jason Reza Jorjani: I think that they had, okay, so I have to back up here now. You know, listen, I, I don’t need any more, uh, legal issues, you know. , so let me, let me couch this in these terms. I was told by the fellow in London who turned out to be, and I didn’t know this one, I got involved with him, but later it turned out he was a British intelligence operative, m i six, .

[00:55:56] Alex Tsakiris: , and, and you gotta tell the story cuz it’s an interesting, , spycraft . It’s not even spycraft, it’s just incredible. But he invites you to do this major presentation and then he very conveniently doesn’t show up. He does kind of a classic rug pull , and, and the person he introduces you to at the time is an

[00:56:18] Alex Tsakiris: antifa guy that, , you don’t know that at the time. I mean, there’s so many things that are kind of a, a key part of your story of, I wanna say, I was gonna about to say verifiable. I can’t verify them, but you’ve verified them. That kind of does help people understand, again, this spycraft spy versus spy kind of

[00:56:39] Alex Tsakiris: aspect to this.

[00:56:41] Jason Reza Jorjani: Yeah, this is all in my book, Promethean Pirate. And also in the second chapter of my book, Uber Man. Uber Man is, is kind of science fiction. But the second chapter of Uber Man is, uh, basically a, a, an embroidered a account of this series of events. And then again, it’s, it’s, you know, it is reiterated in Promethean Pirate.

[00:57:01] Jason Reza Jorjani: But my point was this, this fellow in m i six who, who was running jellyfish, Michael Bagley, was the front man working the jellyfish office in Washington. But really jellyfish was being run by someone who was a British intelligence operator. And this points back to what Carol Quigley called the Anglo-American establishment, that there is a secret stranglehold of a certain British elite over the United States that persists to this day.

[00:57:28] Jason Reza Jorjani: Uh, in any case, this fellow told me that the organization that sent the Antifa youth to secretly record me in a pub. In the shadow of the Empire State Building and then make word salad out of the recording, take a two hour recording and splice and dice sentences and half sentences of it to defame me in this video that he then gave to the New York Times.

[00:57:51] Jason Reza Jorjani: The fellow in London told me that the organization that that Antifa youth was working for is a front for British intelligence for MI five, initially domestic British intelligence, but then potentially it’s moved over to MI six because that group, hope Not Hate, now I believe has an office in the United States as well, which would then change the jurisdiction from I five to I six.

[00:58:12] Jason Reza Jorjani: In any case, he told me after I was defamed and I grabbed this collar and basically was like, listen, a, you know, irresponsible for this situation that, you know, I was put in. He said, well, yeah, I mean the guy, you know, that organization is a front for British intelligence and whatever, so, so they made this recording in, I think, I think it was the early summer of 2017.

[00:58:34] Jason Reza Jorjani: Maybe it was June, something like that. And I believe that they would’ve held onto that recording for a long time had I not resigned from the alt-right corporation. And had I not been put in a position where I was about to write the Constitution of me wrong, they used it only because I was no longer a valuable asset to them, and they couldn’t allow me to redefine myself on the other side of the trap that they tried to lay for me.

[00:59:03] Alex Tsakiris: Yeah,

[00:59:04] Alex Tsakiris: that, that makes a lot of sense. Because, , they had compromised you in a very kind of ordinary, old fashioned way. You know, not any kind of lurid sexual kind of stuff, any illegal misconduct they had just kind of compromised you with your position, if you will. , but they usually, that currency.

[00:59:28] Alex Tsakiris: Is spent very, very carefully. So I, I think your, your speculation there would seem to have, have, have some weight to it, right? Because otherwise why, play that card? They, would’ve loved for you to run that out, , the, the, the fish to take the bait and run it out to sea before they really reel it

[00:59:45] Jason Reza Jorjani: in.

[00:59:46] Jason Reza Jorjani: Absolutely. They wanted me to continue being a, a business partner of Spencer and, you know, these alt-right characters and whatever. And, uh, but I mean, I don’t know what they were thinking as if I would sit there and watch the shit show at Charlottesville and continue to be associated with these people.

[01:00:01] Jason Reza Jorjani: You know? I, but I do think that the, the issue with the writing, the Constitution of Iran, that was very significant, uh, in terms of their decision of when to try to burn me. And it’s, it’s significant because what wound up happening after I resigned from the alt-right corporation and even after I was defamed in the New York Times and Newsweek and, you know, N B C and the Intercept in all these publications.

[01:00:25] Jason Reza Jorjani: What happened even after that was that my role in the Iranian renaissance became even more prominent because, look, I was removed from my teaching responsibilities as a result of this, and so I had a lot more time on my hands. So my work with the Iranian Renaissance kind of became full-time work. And by the winter of 20 17, 20 18, we had a plan for regime change in Iran.

[01:00:47] Jason Reza Jorjani: And frankly, there was some level of involvement from the Iranian Renaissance in Flamenting, that massive uprising that took place in the winter of 2017, December, 2017, into January of 2018. It was an attempt at a kind of, uh, a coup against the Islamic Republic. And there’s a number of reasons why that failed, uh, which I don’t know whether they’re relevant or not to get into.

[01:01:13] Jason Reza Jorjani: But my point is this, With the kind of foresight that these people have in their projective analyses, these people in intelligence, they could have seen that coming. They could have seen that, okay, there’s gonna be this moment in Iran and if we let this guy write this constitution, there will be a situation in which it could be fielded as a amplifies his power.

[01:01:35] Jason Reza Jorjani: Yeah. And that’s why they burned me when they did.

[01:01:38] Alex Tsakiris: So, , the last thing that I think, the piece of this story that I really wanna make sure we get in there is, uh, Jeffrey Milo and, , Jeff Kreel because, , know ’em both, , through this show multiple times and , and both of them, the relationships kind of started out one way and kind of turned into something else.

[01:01:58] Alex Tsakiris: But what you put your finger on in the book from Methe and Pirate is really important, I think, for people to understand.

[01:02:06] Alex Tsakiris: And that is to understand the intellectual head space that these guys have worked themselves into. And each one of them is different, but each one of them , are somewhat the same. And I don’t know how this fits into your, , overall understanding of this cultural battle that we’re in.

[01:02:24] Alex Tsakiris: And I wanna understand that, and I would love to have you back on to kind of have that next level discussion. But the whole, uh, wokeness thing, and it’s beyond wokeness. It’s the willful ignorance thing. It’s the naivete, , you can’t even say, uh, it naivete doesn’t even begin to, to describe it now.

[01:02:41] Alex Tsakiris: Cripple not so much. Cripple kind of is savvy enough to know that, you know, where he can step and where he can’t step. But underneath that is very, very much a, a value system that is, Completely in line with what I’m saying. , mis love on the other hand is just, he just doesn’t seem that bright to me. . I mean, he’s just, you know, I mean, but the damage that they do and the people that they represent do has to be kind of put into perspective, which you do beautifully in the book.

[01:03:14] Alex Tsakiris: So maybe sketch that out. We gotta, we gotta talk about it.

[01:03:19] Jason Reza Jorjani: Listen, I don’t want to sit here and trash. Jeffrey Misla and, and Jeffrey Kreel. , look, after all Jeffrey Kreel was on my dissertation committee. Um, you know, he was a quite a helpful person in my early years of involvement with the Parapsychological and, , you know, ufology community and Jeffrey Milo.

[01:03:39] Jason Reza Jorjani: I did 37 interviews with Jeffrey Milo. , he was a close friend of

[01:03:43] Alex Tsakiris: mine. He scrubbed them all. He scr you were the most popular cast on the new thinking. Louder, literally

[01:03:48] Jason Reza Jorjani: scrub. He went and he unlisted. He, he unlisted 37 interviews that I did with him over the course of five years where I flew first to Las Vegas and then to Albuquerque, and spent countless hours, by the way, preparing him for these interviews.

[01:04:08] Jason Reza Jorjani: I used to sit there with him and prepare him for these interviews for an hour or so before each one. And that’s a lot of time and energy. And he basically scrubbed all of that. Okay. Now why did he do that? Um, and why did Jeff Kriel basically, uh, cut me off? You could say? Um, because after what happened to me, where my academic career was destroyed and where ultimately, and this is a long story, okay, that, again, I don’t think we can get into all the details of it here, but as my work with the Iranian Renaissance progressed, Because we didn’t have the kind of funding that I had been promised to pursue a more independent path.

[01:04:58] Jason Reza Jorjani: My associates got too close to alphabet agencies for my taste, and I started to see a situation where I was working with people who were consulting for the C I A I’m talking about in the Iranian opposition. Okay. And, um, and so I left the running opposition as well for that reason. See? And so I was in a situation where I’m no longer, I’m no longer working with anybody.

[01:05:23] Jason Reza Jorjani: Moreover, opportunities have been closed off to me. So what did I do? I took an independent path. I framed my philosophical project as something called prometheum, and I attempted to start building an institution based on it where I wouldn’t have to compromise my integrity and my values. Okay, it would be my project.

[01:05:42] Jason Reza Jorjani: And beginning in July of 2020, I came out and declared this, uh, movement with a manifesto. And the first line of the manifesto is this is a declaration of war. And I go on to make it clear that what I mean by that is that it’s a declaration of the kind of revolutionary war that let’s say the founders of the United States fought against the British Empire.

[01:06:05] Jason Reza Jorjani: My vision of the struggle of Prometheum is the vision of a David at war with Goliath. Okay? So I’m not a pacifist. I think that change often has to come by means of violent struggle, and that that’s how we’ve gained a lot of the most progressive advancements throughout the course of human history. So this is the spirit in which I launched Prometheum.

[01:06:28] Jason Reza Jorjani: And what wound up happening is that first, , , Jeffrey, , I, I don’t know what order really it happened in, but both of them wound up basically, , turning on me because they were, how can I put it, , scandalized by this militant discourse. See

[01:06:45] Alex Tsakiris: Jason, I see it slightly differently in that I’m so glad you covered this in the book because what you re, the mish love’s counter, you know, his explanation for why I am Excommunicating from Jason is so revealing.

[01:07:03] Alex Tsakiris: So revealing. You could have watched

[01:07:04] Jason Reza Jorjani: hundreds and hundreds he defend, listen, he defends the federal. He says that they’re good people, they’re conscientious, they’re looking out for us. He says the United States government is not hiding anything from the people. There are no conspiracies. They’ve been totally transparent on UFOs and, and other subjects.

[01:07:20] Jason Reza Jorjani: They’re telling

[01:07:21] Alex Tsakiris: us the truth about UFOs as they

[01:07:23] Jason Reza Jorjani: learn them, and he elapsed into the camera, as he says. He used to be anti-establishment back in the days of the Vietnam War, but these days he tends to trust the establishment. Well, excuse me, Jeffrey, but you know, did you not realize that the same people who dropped Napalm on Vietnamese children, the same people who ran the Rand Corporation and Dow Chemical, are the people responsible for what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last few years?

[01:07:47] Jason Reza Jorjani: It’s the same military, industrial, corporate complex. Uh, so, so basically this guy, Wound up revealing that he’s very much for the establishment and part of the establishment, and I’m sorry to say the same is true of Jeffrey Kreel and I lay this out in Promethean Pirate, that Kreel now effectively is running Eslan.

[01:08:06] Jason Reza Jorjani: And Eslan is part and parcel of this savvy Silicon Valley corporate intelligence complex. I mean, like Burning Man, for example, is the most, uh, infiltrated surveilled event by intelligence agencies that, that there is in the country. Okay? F B I, COINTEL Pro people are crawling all over Burning Man. The largest encampment at Burning Man is the ply agon fielded by the Pentagon.

[01:08:34] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay? And so there, and, and all these billionaires of Google and other corporations that show up there are totally involved in shaping the discourse of the so-called human potential movement that Eslan is at the center of. And so what, what wound up happening and, and. If you look at kri, Paul’s latest book on the super humanities, you see that he has swallowed lock, stock and barrel, the cultural relativist, identity politics discourse.

[01:08:59] Jason Reza Jorjani: How,

[01:08:59] Alex Tsakiris: how could he not, how could he not? Once you swim in those waters, once you make that intellectual compromise, , then you can’t. You, you know, what we’ve been talking about for a while here is this idea and, and it’s, it’s stunning to me because, you know, I started out, uh, kind of on the, the spiritual path through science on this show, and that’s, you follow the data wherever it leads.

[01:09:22] Alex Tsakiris: Why are these phony scientists. Disguised as Atheist and the Sam Harris’s and the Dawkins, why are they ignoring science? And they’re, why are they not being straight up? Isn’t that how we’re supposed to do it? But that led me to conspiracy and that led me to, and what I don’t understand about Milo Kripal and the like, is they seemed to be completely blind to, , and this is incredible naivete, you know, about deception and

[01:09:51] Jason Reza Jorjani: these ordinary, it’s willful blindness.

[01:09:53] Jason Reza Jorjani: It’s willful blindness.

[01:09:54] Alex Tsakiris: It, it, it is willful blindness. But I can’t quite wrap my head around it because there’s a certain mind control aspect of it. You know, when, , like Ms. Love’s thing, I always point this out, it’s so baby step kind of thing. But like, , Mitch love’s talking about the JFK assassination.

[01:10:09] Alex Tsakiris: I don’t believe in conspiracy theories like the JFK and es. I know that’s really old, but I always wanna say, you know, 1970. They had a Senate select committee on assassinations, and the finding of that committee was conspiracy. So, you know, I know you’ve been kind of mind controlled into thinking that, you know, the conspiracy theory, which is a c i a invented term, doesn’t kind of exist, but I I, I don’t know how you’re really functioning in this larger intellectual pool or SAS pool, whatever it is that we’re swimming in, if you don’t have some kind of grip on this stuff, and that’s, that’s what I think you reveal.

[01:10:46] Alex Tsakiris: But I, I, I guess I’d, spin it a little bit differently that if they can’t understand jellyfish, you know, it, and, and it’s not, it’s, it’s one thing to say, oh, you’re full of shit, Jason. It didn’t happen that way. Fine. Okay. That’s

[01:11:02] Jason Reza Jorjani: one thing. No ni neither of them doubted a word I said about how things happened.

[01:11:06] Jason Reza Jorjani: That wasn’t the issue at all.

[01:11:08] Alex Tsakiris: so , how do you make that, that intellectual, temporary blindness to say, therefore, I will, I will look away. , that’s a , lame ass question. Here’s the real question. How do you understand that this is gonna tee up , a follow on interview we’re gonna do, but how do you understand that within the , larger, larger intellectual framework that you were, you were laying out there, which I, by the way, don’t totally agree with and have some interesting data points that I wanna discuss with you, but you

[01:11:38] Alex Tsakiris: get my question, right?

[01:11:40] Jason Reza Jorjani: Yeah. I mean, I don’t, I, I don’t entirely agree with myself a lot of the time, so I mean, that’s the nature of being a thinker. Uh, but, , no, I get your question. I think the answer is really dark. Um, and it has to do with money. The worst thing that Ms. Love said in his, uh, explanations of why he canceled me is that he said that.

[01:12:06] Jason Reza Jorjani: Doesn’t really consider the power of finance and that maybe we commerce time where commerce trump’s ethos, or maybe commerce is an ethos while you see, this is the problem here. Okay? Because what I am most opposed to is the view that everyone can be bought and everything can be traded, and that’s the jellyfish worldview.

[01:12:35] Jason Reza Jorjani: So in a perverse irony, this guy is ultimately siding with the people who defamed me and destroyed my career by believing that all ideological conflicts, all sources of spiritual struggle, can ultimately be liquidated through the lubricant of commerce. And interestingly enough, shortly after he canceled me, Jeffrey Cry, Jeffrey Kriel chaired a committee that awarded Jeffrey mlo with half a million dollars of prize money from Bob Bigelow, which Jeffrey Mlo, by the way, had the courtesy to email me, telling me how I screwed myself out of a lot of that money that he would’ve shared with me, which I thought was particularly lacking in grace, considering my situation, right?

[01:13:29] Jason Reza Jorjani: Uh, in any case, how, how ironic that after commerce as an ethos, and I don’t understand that, that everything can ultimately be resolved. My money. And then cripple winds up being the judge on a committee that awards mlo, who by the way, already is a multimillionaire with half a million dollars of Bob Bigelow’s prize money.

[01:13:51] Alex Tsakiris: , take it back just to a little bit of a historical context because, you know, This is, he’s talking about China right now and he’s talk cuz this is roll the clock back, , so this is back when, , these people are jumping outta the factory and they have nets down below.

[01:14:07] Alex Tsakiris: You know, cuz as long as they keep putting those iPhones together, that’s okay. And maybe we can sleep at night with the thought that, well it’s better than, , they’re at least a little bit capitalist. Maybe they have a little bit more freedom than they did before. So maybe the great dollar is kind of , working its magic through the whole thing.

[01:14:25] Alex Tsakiris: So that’s the context that he’s saying it in. And it’s interesting, I, I think now because the tables have shifted a little bit, just like, you know, Putin was World Economic Forum global leader and now not so much. That’s scrap from the internet. China was our friend now, no, you can’t buy the AI chips cuz those might be strategically important.

[01:14:45] Alex Tsakiris: You know, maybe there’ll be a South China war. again, if you are, if you are in that mindset, then these things can kind of slip past you in a way that you just can’t think deeply about. And that’s what strikes me with that commerce. As the, the, the lubricant for morality really. Cuz that’s, cuz that’s what we’re talking about.

[01:15:06] Alex Tsakiris: You’re talking about , a morality, a spiritually based foundation for understanding the world. That has to be out the window if you say commerce trumps it. I mean the, the random thought. But would you like to expound on that a little bit

[01:15:20] Jason Reza Jorjani: up? No, that’s exactly it. Look, you know, I have been vehemently opposed to, For years because, not because I have anything against Chinese people as a race or ethnicity.

[01:15:31] Jason Reza Jorjani: Uh, you know, the doo ching was my favorite book when I was in my, you know, um, early twenties, late, late teens, early twenties. I’ve been opposed to ch by the way, the Daoists had been persecuted in China going back thousands of years. , and the Chan, Chinese, Buddhist as well. , so look, my problem with China has to do with the fact that they are the model for the totalitarian technocratic economic system of the future.

[01:15:59] Jason Reza Jorjani: And they’re the vehicle by means of which this system is going to be imposed in the world. The, the test site. Yeah, they’re the test site. I’ve been ringing the alarm bell on that for years. And fish love,

[01:16:12] Jason Reza Jorjani: there are a lot of things about this that could be said, , which I don’t know. I mean, I even in Promethean Pirate, I didn’t mention some of them. I mean, look, his adopted son was raised in China. There are other factors here, okay? Where this man is not thinking clearly, on top of which he’s a, he claims to be a pacifist.

[01:16:32] Jason Reza Jorjani: See, these are the things that really rubbed me the wrong way. If you are like a practitioner of Patanjali’s system of yoga and you know you’re a Samaya, , Hindu, and on the basis of this deep metaphysical worldview, you are a consistent pacifist, fine, I’ll have a philosophical disagreement with you. Or, or let’s say you’re a theta Buddhist and on that basis you’re a consistent pacifist.

[01:16:55] Jason Reza Jorjani: No problem. We can have a philosophical argument about that. But when you claim you’re a pacifist and you have giant campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton, right, , who is an actual war mon. Responsible for attempted regime change in Libya that, you know, uh, catalyzed a civil war in which, you know, who knows how many thousands of Libyans have been killed at this point, responsible for, you know, the, what was it, 15 year, I don’t know, over a decade occupation of Iraq and the starvation of all these Iraqi children.

[01:17:26] Jason Reza Jorjani: When you give huge campaign contributions to candidates that are fielded by the military industrial complex of the United States, and then you wanna say you are a pacifist and I’m a war monger. Well, frankly, that makes you a hypocrite, is what it makes you, So look, that that’s what happened with Milo.

[01:17:43] Jason Reza Jorjani: I think that I was canceled ultimately by his hypocrisy. Not on the basis of any principle, pacifism other, you’re

[01:17:52] Alex Tsakiris: canceled by his naivete. I mean, I think unless you’re able. And that’s what I guess we’re, we’re, we’re saying, and I’m putting forth, you know, that’s why I think what you laid out here is so important because unless someone can process what you’re saying, not agree with what you’re saying, but process what you’re saying as the kind of next level of how this game is being played and the next level in a way that is gonna surprise people if they think it through, because they go, well, well wait a minute, this guy isn’t like some political figurehead.

[01:18:26] Alex Tsakiris: This guy isn’t some labor leader. Or some, you know, he’s an intellectual, he’s a philosopher. That’s what he does. Why is he being manipulated, played in, in so, so hard? I mean, he, he is played hard in this thing and I think that’s really, really important. And if these other guys we’re talking about, I’m not putting them down, , Jeff Cripple seems like a terrific guy, uh, to me.

[01:18:53] Alex Tsakiris: And every time I’ve talked to him, But if they’re not getting this, then they’re just not in the conversation. The, the conversation is just gonna go on and they’re just gonna be at a different level with it, which is where they’re at.

[01:19:05] Alex Tsakiris: , there’s a new responsibility that comes with being an intellectual, oh,

[01:19:09] Jason Reza Jorjani: If you read my work beginning with Prometheus and Atlas going forward, My views are actually, I, if, if they’re to be categorized at all on the extent political spectrum, they’re very far to the left.

[01:19:24] Jason Reza Jorjani: I mean, I like to think of myself as an up wing rather than the leftwinger. A rightwinger, this was a term coined by this Iranian futurist FM s Fani in the 1970s. He wrote this book called Up Wingers. And so my views obviously, you know, for my views of how society should ideally be reorganized, sociopolitically don’t fit the binary of the left right paradigm at all.

[01:19:49] Jason Reza Jorjani: But if you were to force them into that, they certainly wouldn’t be right wing. I mean, I, I have like no right wing political views at all when it comes to, you know, how society should be organized. So it’s a real travesty what’s been done. Uh, the, the only thing that people could identify in my thinking that.

[01:20:11] Jason Reza Jorjani: Maybe someone might argue aligns with the right is that I have advanced a very, uh, rigorous critique of democracy. I’m not for democracy, okay? Uh, in the way that Plato wasn’t for democracy in the way that the founders of the United States considered democracy, a tyranny of the majority. As much as I’m an advocate for individual liberty, I’m opposed to democracy, which I consider mob.

[01:20:37] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay? But I don’t even see that as particularly right wing, because look, I mean, Stalin wasn’t for democracy either. There have been just as many authoritarian left wing movements that have taken power in the world as authoritarian, right wing movements. And so the fact that I’ve somehow been caricature as some right wing thinker is ludicrous.

[01:20:56] Alex Tsakiris: You know what, maybe that , brings us to a way to, to wrap this up by kind of going back to the beginning of Promethean Pirate, your latest book,

[01:21:06] Alex Tsakiris: and that’s the, you talk about the philosopher and you talk about how the true philosopher is a rare breed. And I love how you broaden what we need to understand the role of the philosopher to the spiritual, to the political, to the activist, to all these different aspects, which are just the exact opposite of where they’ve taken philosophy, which is such a dorky kind of, you know, mathematical logical system.

[01:21:39] Alex Tsakiris: , talk to us. As a philosopher about what it means to you to be a

[01:21:44] Jason Reza Jorjani: philosopher. So there’s something called meta philosophy. Meta philosophy is your understanding or definition of what counts for philosophy in the first place, right? What makes a philosopher, and I have a very demanding meta philosophy, which I lay out in Promethean Pirate.

[01:22:03] Jason Reza Jorjani: I think that the criterion, the criterion for being a philosopher is very high. Um, and let me explain why that criterion I set in Promethean pirate is not arbitrary. So, so what I say is that to be a philosopher, you have to either discover or develop concepts in all the domains. Philosophical thought, which extend from metaphysics or probably better called ontology.

[01:22:37] Jason Reza Jorjani: In other words, an understanding of the nature of reality, epistemology or the theory of knowledge. And then ethics, which is related to aesthetics. Because aesthetics as a branch of philosophy that has to do with perception and uh, judgment of things that aren’t purely mathematical or scientific, uh, is very bound up with eth with ethics.

[01:23:01] Jason Reza Jorjani: And I would even argue that if you go back and you look at, like, say, Aristotle’s Nakian ethics, Aristotle’s criterion for the good is ultimately aesthetic. Uh, and then you see this again very much in Nietzsche. So ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and then politics. And it’s not enough for the concepts that you develop to cut across all of these domains.

[01:23:24] Jason Reza Jorjani: They have to also be somehow, Consistent with one another. I mean, your ethics and politics has to follow from your ontology and epistemology. So it’s not enough that, let’s say Nom Shamsky who did serious work in epistemology, uh, or Berman Russell, who was a serious meta physician, and epistemologist also happened.

[01:23:47] Jason Reza Jorjani: The two of them also happened to be political activists, right? Russell Big, uh, let’s say peace movement, protest leader. And then, you know, Shamsky, of course with his kind of anarchist opposition to, uh, the corporate, military industrial complex, they don’t have a political philosophy that follows from their ontology and epistemology.

[01:24:10] Jason Reza Jorjani: They happen to also be political activists. So by my criterion, they’re not philosophers. Whereas let’s say somebody like I Rand. Whatever you might think of her, okay? Whether you agree or disagree with her, and I have big problems with various aspects of her thinking, but she developed an internally consistent and cohesive metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

[01:24:36] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay? And that’s the work of a philosopher. Now, why is it important? Why is it important to have that kind of, , uh, sort of coherent, , and integral thinking? It’s important because otherwise, and this goes back to our discussion about mish love and cripple, otherwise, you will have certain naive commitments that go unquestioned.

[01:24:58] Jason Reza Jorjani: You will have a politics that you naively subscribe to that you haven’t dared to question. You may be very politically savvy, but you may be a materialist, ontologically, or epistemologically, right, until, and unless you’re willing to question all assumptions in all areas of human endeavor. And then, and then after you’ve questioned them, develop some new concepts, having to do with them, you’re not working as a philosopher.

[01:25:23] Jason Reza Jorjani: A philosopher has to challenge all presuppositions preconceptions and cannot have any naive commitments to anything, which is why philosophers have been persecuted and martyred throughout the course of history because they’re dangerous. They’re questioning everything within themselves, and then in a way that destabilizes society by extension of that is dangerous.

[01:25:45] Jason Reza Jorjani: Okay. From Pythagoras. And how do schools burn down onto the martyrdom of Socrates and Giordano, Bruno? You know, becoming a human torch in a public square and Rome, it’s, it’s all having to do with the duty of the philosopher to question in every domain of human existence and enterprise, uh, and to break new ground, right?

[01:26:07] Jason Reza Jorjani: In developing concepts that have to deal with these areas of human life.

[01:26:11] Alex Tsakiris: that was beautifully said. . And I think anyone who hears that can understand how relevant it is today in a world that has taken the mind control game that’s been going on throughout history, , and just upscaled it with the technology and what the te technology is hinting towards is a dramatic increase in that.

[01:26:33] Alex Tsakiris: So I think would, would you go that far as to say that this is also maybe the first line of defense against that kind of mind control, mind manipulation?

[01:26:46] Jason Reza Jorjani: Of course. Absolutely. And I, again, that’s why philosophers have been so badly persecuted because they’re the ones who call bullshit on systems of mind control and, and social engineer.

[01:26:57] Alex Tsakiris: Jason, it’s been terrific, , having you on again, folks, , Jason Jian, you can find all his books on Amazon and on his website, , jason reza giani.com. We’ll have a link to it. Love to have you back a lot to still, all the other good stuff lies beyond this, and , I would love to have you back to talk about it.

[01:27:19] Jason Reza Jorjani: It would be my absolute pleasure, Alex. It’s been great. , and let’s please keep in touch. Will do.

[01:27:28] Alex Tsakiris: Thanks again to Dr. Jian for joining me today on Skeptiko.

[01:27:32] Alex Tsakiris: The one question I tee up from this interview, and it’s the one that I really wrestle with, is, what would you do in his situation? What would you do if you felt like your people, a whole country had been kind of overrun with a really crazy totalitarian regime, , and you felt you had an obligation to change it.

[01:27:52] Alex Tsakiris: What would you do? What would you not do? I don’t know. It’s a tough one. So lemme know your thoughts. Until next time, take care and bye for now.

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