The “Effective Altruists” want you scared, stupid and subservient.

Today’s post is a sneak preview of the “Future Shock” section of the forthcoming Sovereign Capitalist Letter (get our latest report and a sample issue here).

Just heading into mid-September, a purported moral panic broke out amongst the frontier AI leaders that their own products were “too dangerous” and so the only remedy would be for the government to regulate all AI models.

Weeks earlier, Bernie Sanders had introduced The Ban AI-Superintelligence Act, that would make it illegal to create an AI model that was more intelligent than humans, going so far as to prescribe a 20-year prison term for any person who did and the “corporate death penalty” for companies.

JUST IN: Senator Bernie Sanders introduces bill to permanently ban AI that exceeds human intelligence.

Violators would face up to 20 years in prison. pic.twitter.com/y2pk79zQlQ

— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) September 3, 2026

Sanders’ Bill is truly the domain of dystopian sci-fi. It reminded me of an episode from the ill-fated Twilight Zone reboot (“Examination Day“) which culminated in a distraught couple mourning their child, who had just been exterminated by the state for testing too high on his pre-adolescent IQ test.

Examination Day. pic.twitter.com/PrKGnh7y4x

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 27, 2026

It all started with a “resignation in public” tweet from one Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, on September 8th posted his parting thoughts on X, stating that AI could exterminate humanity within 10 years.

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026

One of Anthropic’s trust and safety leads, Evan Hubinger, then endorsed the tweet, citing a “non-zero chance” of 10% or more that such an outcome was possible.

That original resignation tweet, now closing in on 200 million views, which emanated from a heretofore unknown X account, less than a year old,  with no followers, and two name changes in the last six months went absolutely viral – with some well-timed, fortuitous boosting from some of the biggest “AI Alignment” personalities on the internet, and then the Wall Street Journal came out with an “exclusive” on the story, ….which actually went live on the WSJ site 18 minutes before Coxon’s tweet.

Before long Sam Altman said we “definitely” need more government regulation on AI and even Elon Musk chimed in and agreed that the frontier labs should be reviewing each other’s models for safety.

Within days a full-blown hysteria was underway – for me it bore all the hallmarks of mass formation psychosis or at least a well-organized attempt to manufacture one.

Within a week, King Charles was speaking at an AI Safety summit at Buckingham Palace, urging government oversight and increased regulation of AI…

“Surely we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?” the King ruminated.

Also, that guy behind him, looking rather pleased with himself, is “Tino” Cuéllar, Anthropic’s Chief Global Affairs Officer.

The “AI Safety Summit” itself was announced on September 7th, leaked via Politico – the day before the Coxon tweet that ignited what had become at this point, a global(ist?) furor.

Even the Pope weighed on AI safety, and not to be left behind, Bill Gates hit the Sunday talk circuit this past weekend with another doozy of a soundbite:

“AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths” – which means we need to turn control of it over to politicians and a new class of global inspectors.”

Several things about this relatively sudden AI panic did not pass the smell test, among them, the facts emerging around Coxon himself, who had “barely been at the company long enough to find the bathroom” (as the All-In guys put it), turned out to be neck-deep in the “Effective Altruism” movement, a well-connected network of young WEF types, which espoused global governance over potentially harmful technologies like AI.

He had received scholarships and grants from the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Long Term Future Fund and was a fellow at the Newspeak House in London (yes, newspeak).

Who are the Effective Altruists?

Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that purports to “use evidence and quantitative reasoning to identify the most consequential problems and direct resources toward reducing them”.

Tired: World Economic Forum
Wired: Effective Altruism pic.twitter.com/zNGNfMNWkW

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 16, 2026

Love the euphemistic language (it’s actually what ChatGPT will use when you ask it). The punch line for the EA raison d’être is, as usual, a society ordered under expert, technocratic management – their expertise, their management.

One of their earlier recruits was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX empire was run by a cadre of EAs at the top and who seed-funded Anthropic as the lead investor with $500M of a $580M Series B round in 2021.

A recurring EA strand is its fixation on existential risk from advanced AI, advocating stronger safety research, governance, and oversight to reduce the chance of catastrophic or irreversible outcomes.

We’ve all seen this movie before, with global warming, then with Bitcoin mining (causing more global warming) and now, AI exterminating humanity.

The common through-line is that the “problem” is some unfalsifiable calamity that could happen someday and for which the only logical response is to put a bunch of globalist technocrats in charge of… well, everything.

What people didn’t seem to understand, then or now – is that the problem isn’t really about the problem – I’ve long reported on proposals that would make personal choice and individual liberty things of the past, because letting people think for themselves would be “too dangerous” for the problem at hand.

Global warming meant personal carbon quotas, limits on travel, even living space, according to some “degrowth” advocates, how many new outfits you could buy.

listening to greenoid Ulrike Herrmann sell her degrowth plan for Germany: no personal automobiles ofc, living space to be rationed at 50 sq metres/ person, train speed capped at 100 km/hour & train travel also to be rationed (everyone will get a personal kilometre allotment). pic.twitter.com/JTlTlVDwVm

— eugyppius (@eugyppius1) October 30, 2024

The panic around Bitcoin mining wasn’t about that, it was about energy – and who gets to decide how much you’re allowed to consume and what you can use it for.

Bitcoin mining today, Netflix tomorrow. Why not? Once you concede oversight to some external authority for one form of energy use, you’ve tacitly done so for all of them.

The problem that politicians and aspiring technocrats see with AI is that it grants the rabble cognitive superpowers.

More specifically, open-source AI does.

Frontier models are proprietary. They have guardrails, training biases and actively scan and filter your conversations for potential safety issues. It’s arguably their purview to do so.

But it’s the open-source software movement that is the unfiltered Promethean agent here and just you wait – we’ll soon see what the ultimate target of this AI Doom cult really is: open-source LLMs.

That is why the frontier labs are gleefully courting government oversight – not because their own products are “too dangerous” (if so, then why are you going public?) but because oversight instantly creates an AI oligopoly – a cartel, namely Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, on the inside – and everything else, effectively outlawed – at least that would be the preferred outcome.

This is the exact playbook I’ve told you about in the past, one that was described to me personally by an EIR from a Bay St. private equity firm in a meeting with two out of the four Big Four Canadian banks, back around 2015 – talking about Bitcoin:

“You get funded, you get out front, then you work with the government to create the regulations around it, and *BOOM*, you get to turn around and pull the ladder up behind you”

I still remember the look of absolute glee on his face when he got to that last bit. When I got home, I took a shower.

What To Do About It

I’ve been dutifully building out local compute capacity – both at home and thanks to our CTO, easyDNS now has a modest GPU farm out at our main datacenter.

I make it a point to download the latest open-weight models, Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek – which are, ironically, all Chinese…

But that won’t last. In fact, it’s already changing. We recently had “another country heard from” with the Japanese NII LLM-jp-4, Swallow, PLaMo and Rakuten AI 3.0 models weighing in.

France has Mistral, even Canada (yes, Canada) has Cohere Command A+ (my SolomonAI demo was, in case anybody needed to be told, a joke):

The newest AI superpower is… Canada . pic.twitter.com/xb7nVy796n

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) June 7, 2026

And from elsewhere in “Big Tech,” there are Google’s Gemma 4.0 and IBM Granite.

Any of these models could be used to start iterating software, weights, and the next generation of more powerful open-source LLMs.

In other words, it’s over.

The incumbent ruling caste basically sees this, and viscerally realize that the entire edifice of Industrial Age institutions are ripe for existential disruption. I’ve written about this many times. We’re transitioning from a linear, top-down world to a network-shaped, decentralized one.

So the next best thing they can do, since they can’t put the genie back in the bottle, is to convince the masses that AI is bad, and rogue AIs are going to literally exterminate humanity.

Hence the AI doom psyop (with another wave breaking out right now around swarms of rogue AIs), and, of course, this has become a political issue.

Now, the same people who were wearing N95 masks in 2025, adding their pronouns to their names,  putting the Ukrainian flag in their bio, keying Teslas and stomping around in “No Kings” parades are now protesting data centers.

They want you scared, stupid and subservient, instead of spending your time creating software, building out your personal business empires, not to mention analyzing public data and proofreading all these hypothetical models they use as a justification for incessantly changing the rules.

What they really need are legions of frightened and stupid voters, not cognitively supercharged and wildly entrepreneurial or creative cyberpunks.

AI Doom vs AI Boom is a choice, and the choice is yours.

Today’s post was a sneak preview from the forthcoming edition of The Sovereign Capitalist. You can get our latest special report for paid members, and the next edition of the newsletter when you grab this deal.
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Yesterday, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland won Saxony-Anhalt, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone, but is being treated by the media like some kind of Black Swan event, blindsiding us all.

The AfD won 43.8% of the vote, more than doubling its result from five years ago and crushing Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU, which came in at 17.2%. Apparently, if it wasn’t for mail-in voting they would have had a majority.

As it stands, they’re within three seats of an outright majority (maybe they can follow the Liberal Party of Canada playbook and induce a few other MPs to defect).

Naturally, practically every headline describing the result contains some variation of the words “far right”.

We’ve been through this before.

A few years ago I wrote “What Does ‘Far Right’ Even Mean Anymore?” and came up with a working definition:

“Far right” is basically anything that contests the Establishment narrative.

That definition has held up remarkably well.

Because if you listen to the political establishment and its media organs, there are basically only two possible views around the problems facing Western countries.

The first is to double-down on what we’ve been already doing, irrespective of hard data showing that the policies of the last decade have made Canada the poorest performing country in the entirety of OECD nations, not to mention that the track we’re on will keep us there out until 2060…

On CNBC, Joe Kernen reminds Dom LeBlanc of some stark economic realities in Canada

“Minister LeBlanc, this is the last thing Canada needs. And I’m not sure whether you have a good feel for, for changes that need to be made in the economic approach of Canada.”

“The OECD projects… pic.twitter.com/YEyKacDVrY

— cbcwatcher (@cbcwatcher) August 25, 2026

Here in Canada that means some variation on the policies we’ve pursued since 2015, many of them mirroring the European model: historically unprecedented immigration volumes, an ever-expanding temporary resident population, increasingly cumbersome restraints on energy and resource development, and a kind of managed degrowth dressed up as environmental stewardship.

Door #2 is that anyone who has an issue with this is a “far-right extremist”, or more recently “a maple-MAGA”. 

There is apparently no middle ground.

Stipulate that immigration is a overall a good thing but that the volume and calibre of the migrants matters? Far right.

Suggest that a country has both the right and obligation to decide who gets to live there and optimize for higher quality immigrants? Far right.

Expect that people who immigrate to this country should integrate into it, obey its laws and be a net contributor economically, instead of a perpetual drain? 

Careful now. You don’t want to sound like you’re “noticing things”.

Which raises an interesting question after yesterday’s result in Germany:

When will there be an Alternative for Canada?

How Canada’s immigration system used to work

Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a merit-based immigration system, in 1967.

The underlying concept was remarkably simple: select for people who were likely to succeed here.

Education. Language. Skilled work experience. Age. Adaptability. Ability to support yourself.

There were family reunification and humanitarian streams alongside it, of course, but the economic immigration system was unapologetically selective and we unabashedly skimmed the cream across all ethnicities, countries, races and religions.

For awhile there, we had it: The Golden Age of Multi-Culturalism – and Canada was, in fact, a classically liberal paradise. For a while.

This is the system under which my parents, my wife, her mother-in-law, our daughter and my entire extended family came to Canada.

All immigrants. Most of them non-white.

It works fine.

For decades we brought in skilled, educated and motivated people from everywhere. While they retained homages to their cultures and religions, they also worked hard, obeyed the law, they opened businesses, raised families, integrated into Canadian society and, over a generation or two, became part of our “Canadian Mosaic”.

What Changed

That basic architecture continued for decades and eventually evolved into Express Entry, which was launched under the Harper government in January 2015. Express Entry actually made the selection process more competitive, ranking eligible candidates against one another instead of simply processing qualified applicants in chronological order.

What changed after 2015 wasn’t that Canada suddenly abolished the points system, but the Trudeau Liberals made changes to the volume and the pathways.

Permanent immigration targets climbed from roughly 250,000 to 280,000 annually during the Harper years to nearly half-a-million annually by 2024. At the same time, international students, temporary workers and other temporary residents expanded far faster (places like Conestoga College became veritable “diploma factories”).

And somewhere along the way, “temporary foreign worker” stopped conjuring up an image of an agricultural worker filling a seasonal shortage and started meaning practically everybody behind the counter at Tim Hortons.

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program was never designed as a mass pipeline for cashiers and fry cooks, but successive rule changes, plus a much larger companion program that does not require a labour-market test, made low-wage service jobs a normal use of temporary labour.

What makes it worse?

As many of those living in the GTA area are aware: home invasions are up, car thefts are up, assaults are up, so is firebombing Christian churches and anti-Semitic violence. The streets of Canada’s major cities are routinely taken over by Islamic and far-left extremists who openly hate this country and pine for it’s downfall…

Islamist in Canada: “I don’t consider myself Canadian, Canada is a racist colonialist project like Israel; they will be destroyed within 25 years.”

Canada is falling. pic.twitter.com/JakiJUTx3h

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) September 5, 2026

(One wonders, why is she here then?)

And when non-citizens commit crimes, get caught, get released again, commit more crimes, and eventually, finally are convicted…

The final catalyst: The immigration discount on criminal sentencing

This may ultimately be the issue that causes the pot to boil over.

Canadian citizens watched citizens getting tackled by cops grocery stores for not wearing masks,  people got tazed at outdoor hockey rinks. The federal government imposed martial law and seized your bank accounts for donating to the Freedom Convoy.

And now,  they open the news and encounter an endless procession of home invasions, carjackings, sexual assaults, human trafficking cases and violent crimes where some variation of the same phrase seems to invariably appear:

“The accused was already out on release for previous unrelated charges.”

…and they end up being released again, and people can’t help but notice, that many such cases turn out to be, “Brampton men” (IYKYK).

17 Accused in Peel Police Extortion Network Investigation Were Not Canadian Citizens

Peel Regional Police say 17 men who are not Canadian citizens have been arrested in connection with an alleged international criminal network known as “For Brothers,” accused of targeting… pic.twitter.com/h6IPYBe4BH

— Toronto Crime Watch (@CrimewatchTO) May 25, 2026

This has become common enough that Ottawa has finally had to respond. This year the federal government enacted more than 80 changes to Canada’s bail and sentencing laws, specifically targeting repeat violent offenders, home invasions, human trafficking, auto theft and accused persons carrying numerous or serious outstanding charges.

So the problem wasn’t  some imaginary, shared hallucination that came out of a far-right echo chamber.

More corrosive still is the perception that non-citizens who commit crimes have been receiving so-called “immigration discounts” precisely because they are non-citizens and the Supreme Court, in R. v. Pham held that judges may consider the immigration consequences of a sentence.

This has lead to examples such as:

• A Kitchener man who battered his girlfriend was given a conditional discharge to avoid deportation to India
• An Ontario court of appeal reduced the sentence of a man convicted of assault and multiple probation violations by one day in order to prevent a “potentially devastating immigration consequence”. The Crown did not object.
• A foreign resident on a work permit who was working as a Bell Technician who exposed himself to a woman in who’s apartment he was servicing was granted no jail time because doing so would result in deportation. The man feels “stigmatized” and laments that he had to leave the area.
• Finally, this guy, who was caught in a Peel Regional Police sting operation, because he thought he was soliciting sex from a 15 year-old minor. He was convicted, then argued that his immigration status should not be impacted by his sentencing because he still wants to bring his wife to Canada (who presumably still wants to be with him, for some reason). Justice Paul O’Marra concurred,
  

  “A conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences, such as jeopardizing his immigration status, delaying his citizenship, and preventing him from sponsoring his wife, which would likely result in their separation”

Uh, yeah, no shit. That a conviction could lead to severe collateral consequences is the entire point of having a legal system.

The far-right extremist in me can’t help but notice, can’t restrain myself from wondering out loud…

Do we really want anybody here who can’t govern themselves accordingly before they even become a citizen?

Shouldn’t this be the most obvious filter available?

By all means, come to Canada, build a better life, work hard and follow the fucking rules.

Otherwise, don’t come, or get deported.

Too simple.

But try explaining the optics of that to a Canadian citizen who has just watched the state demonstrate zero reluctance to use its full powers against him and tell him that noticing the discrepancy makes him “literally Hitler”. 

At what point does “far right” simply mean “normal”?

One of the more revealing moments in CNN’s coverage ahead of yesterday’s German election came when correspondent Fred Pleitgen described the AfD’s supposedly radical immigration platform.

‘The AfD openly calls for mass deportation of undocumented foreigners and foreigners who have committed crimes”

The CNN dude says “mass deportation of foreigners who have committed crimes” like it’s a bad thing. https://t.co/zvFjiKEMpV

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 6, 2026

Narrator’s note: “undocumented foreigner” is someone who is there illegally.

When a person enters your country as a guest, commits a serious crime against somebody who lives there, they should, as a consequence, lose the privilege of remaining.

Holding this opinion will get you branded  “far-right” extremist.

I suspect a fairly large percentage of Canadians would consider it common sense.

Living in Canada should be considered a privilege for non-citizens, and citizenship should mean something. It should be earned through some combination of productivity, commitment, integration and time.

None of this has anything to do with race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual preference.

In fact, Canada’s old system demonstrated precisely how unnecessary those criteria are.

This is where the “far-right” branding becomes dangerous

The problem with reflexively branding every objection to the current system as “far right” isn’t simply that the label eventually becomes meaningless.

There is a much worse consequence.

For starters, you eliminate the legitimate middle.

People who simply say “immigration levels are too high” get called racists.

People who say temporary workers shouldn’t displace Canadian teenagers from entry-level jobs are deemed xenophobes.

People who think convicted non-citizen criminals should be deported are branded as extremists.

Eventually some of those people stop caring what you call them.

That’s when some truly unhinged egregores can arise.

I’ve been warning about this phenomenon for years, including in my book, Unassailable: when legitimate grievances are declared impermissible, they don’t just go away.

 They go underground, they tend to mutate, and they resurface as increased polarization, siege mentality and, eventually, real extremism.

We’re already seeing the emergence Canadian groups openly espousing ideas that really are extreme, including ethnic cleansing, as though removing entire populations based on their skin-colour is the only remaining solution to problems the political system refuses to confront honestly.

Somewhere there has to be a rational distinction between “we need to go back to merit-based immigration, at numbers we can assimilate” and whatever the fuck this is. pic.twitter.com/EdJ3J6yFSW

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 1, 2026

As I lamented in my earlier “Canada Was A Liberal Paradise” piece, racism in Canada was for the most part, a thing of the past.

It was over.

Aside from the fringes and the individual Archie Bunker types, Canada was, for a brief, bygone age, a largely colour-blind meritocracy.

Then we made race central to practically everything again: post-nationalism, colonialism. Settlers on stolen land – this isn’t coffee house Marxism by purple haired they/them’s from affluent families anymore – it’s literally baked into the curriculum, it’s being taught in our schools and our universities by an academia overrun with Fabians and Malthusians.  

Meanwhile, any criticism of immigration policy is synonymous with racial animus.

Is it any wonder that there are populist backlashes occurring in Germany, Ceuta, France, the UK?

The Alternative for Canada is not what you think.

I’m not here to tell you that some manner of nationalist, populist party is going to save Canada – I don’t even think the AfD or any of these reaction movements will “save” their own respective countries.

The reason is that I think this is part of a much wider issue: the collapse of the global debt-based monetary system and a Fourth Turning-style destruction of our Industrial Age institutions. The dysfunction we see here in Canada and abroad isn’t the result of the wrong political party or bad policy tracks. Those are symptoms of something much larger.

Populations vote in the wrong political parties, who embark on horrifically bad policy tracks, because there is no workable or tenable solutions to the current problems. Only emergent, alternative systems that are better suited to operating in world’s network-shaped topology and hyper-accelerating pace will persevere, and a big part of that is just staying out of the blast radius of the failing machinery  (much more on this in my new book, The Blueprint: Survive and Thrive in an Overclocked Timeline – my premium membership already has access to it)

However intractable the problems of building a global financial system atop debt-based money, the situation is even more acute here in Canada, where the older generations still believe everything the CBC tells them, and the younger ones are indoctrinated to hate this country from pre-school onward.

In other words, Canada is cooked, and the “Alternative for Canada” is not having a different party in power, it isn’t having some establishment outsider like Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke entering politics (although that would be refreshing), or a firebrand like Kevin O’Leary taking over the CPC (which also would be awesome).

Nor is it becoming “the 51st State” or merging with the US (although anybody who’s ever read Dianne Francis’ book on the topic would find themselves agreeing with a lot of it. It was written before the rise of Trump and TDS infected the majority of the Canadian “Elbows Up” contingent).

For our cousins out in Alberta, it’s not even separation.

All of these things might forestall the inevitable, add a decade or two onto the long descent of The Industrial Age – but the real solution in an era where politics is just institutionalized grift and the masses are intentionally dumbing themselves down, the way forward is through radical personal sovereignty, critical thinking skills, financial independence, and optionality. Lots and lots of optionality.

The Alternative for Canada is you.

If you’re thinking about ways to acquire more personal agency in a chaotic world, check out the executive summary of my forthcoming book The Blueprint, free when you sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list.
We’ve also created Ready.ca, a meeting ground for politically homeless Canadians.
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Bitcoin maximalism is over. Bitcoin “culture” is over. Bitcoin influencers are over. Every popular hardcore Bitcoin figure has disgraced themself in some way.

Bitcoin will remain, beneficially stripped of the cult around it.

— nic carter (@nic_carter) August 2, 2026

If I could sum up the above list in one pithy tweet, it would be the opening image of this mornth’s edition, by way of Nic Carter, who also found himself excommunicated from The Bitcoin Cathedral for indulging in shitcoinery.

Sign up for the Bombthrower mailing list here and get an executive summary of my new book: The Blueprint Survive & Thrive In An Overclocked Timeline. Sovereign Capitalist members get early access to the full book here.

“You just wait until the next bear market…”

Last month, I talked about how many of the legendary investors I’ve long followed as well as many of my contemporary financial commentators (speaking specifically of the contrarian ilk), are almost unanimous in the opinion that the AI trade is well into bubble territory and stocks in general are overvalued. Hell, even I think that and I’m personally “all in” on AI and have a fair bit of equities exposure to it (not a tonne, but it’s there, and the biggest winners in the TSC portfolio lately have all been AI stocks and HPC stocks).

Angela sent me this Diary of a CEO interview with Jeremy Grantham – another legend – and she said it was scary. At his peak he managed something like $165B AUM, but he’s down to $80B or $90B now (he also says the only reason he’s still counted as a billionaire today, personally, is because they include the money he’s given away. Grantham has donated over 90% of his net worth to the Grantham Foundation, which invests and incubates primarily green-tech innovation to combat climate change.

Although Thomas Braziel, whose name you might recognize as a notable distressed asset investor who specializes in crypto i.e. Mt Gox claims, FTX, put out an interesting analysis of Grantham’s green tech foundation’s filings – and surmised that what he’s saying on the talk-show circuit isn’t lining up with where he’s actually allocating the foundation’s …money )

Grantham occupies an exalted perch in the pantheon of institutional investors, so when he opines on something, it tends to get picked up on, which one may find somewhat quizzical, given his lifetime batting average isn’t really in the same league as the likes of Buffet, Munger, Klarman, et al.

His lifetime average returns? The closest analog could be the lifetime average of the GMO Global Asset Allocation Composite, which he co-founded.

Their number? 8.43%. And 0.8% of that was because of a one-time litigation settlement received in 2024

Warren Buffet’s lifetime batting average is pushing 20% (19.8%).

The S&P itself, 10%.

In case you’re wondering how somebody became a billionaire by lagging the major index by 200bp over their entire career, it’s because Grantham is proficient at one thing in particular: not losing money.

The TL;DR from the DOAC interview? A lot of people are about to lose a lot of money.

When Stephen Bartlett told him he was invested in SpaceX, Grantham dead-panned, “Good luck with that”.

Bitcoin? “It’s a zero”.

The interview went a bit viral and I saw a lot of “Billionaire says Bitcoin is worthless” headlines in the mainstream financial press. Grantham has since been on a punditry tour (perhaps in promotion of his latest book, “The Making of a Permabear” – yes, really); and the soundbites that are being repeatedly teased out from them are his “Bitcoin is a zero” sermons, in one case getting into a somewhat heated exchange with Joe Kernen on CNBC – where Kernen, incredibly, makes some of my points far less diplomatically than I have here.

At least it’s not just Bitcoiners getting into scraps! pic.twitter.com/pfJyXM3ZFc

— JOEY (@JoeyTweeets) June 26, 2026

After Grantham trotted out the usual “no use case”, “there’s no there there”, “it’s a bubble”, Kernen straight-armed Grantham in the face with his underperformance over the past two decades,

“You’ve done a great disservice to anybody who’s listened to you over the last twenty years”.

Grantham’s response and attempt at a defence, combined with something else he said in the DOAC interview, are all leading up to my point here, while being 100% oblivious to it:

To Joe Kernen: he said “We’ve been in a bull market since 2009, let’s see how all this stuff holds up when the next bear market hits”

To Steven Bartlett: he cautioned how Amazon sold off a staggering 92% during the Dotcom bust.

During the drive to Hamilton for a board meeting, I listened to this short Alex Hormozi clip and his analogy (which he cribbed from Brian Johnson) hit me full force and I finally had a working metaphor that explained what I’ve been trying to articulate about these living legends of finance.

That they’re underestimating the significance of fiat debasement is true, but it doesn’t really explode in your brain as much as make your eyes glaze over.

The analogy is fish are swimming around in water. Some of them become experts at swimming. They train their entire lives, they practice every day, they study the expert swimmers of yore, and they analyze nearly every aspect of the water they inhabit: it’s PH levels, alkaline, currents, flow – everything.

They know how a slight variance in one factor impacts the others – they know “which way the current is going”.

But over time, the water heats up; they may pick up on this, but they’re never quite prepared for what it means beyond a certain point.

When that point arrives, the water evaporates – and now it’s gas. Steam.

Setting aside for our purposes how this would fry the fish, imagine they’re still alive, but now they’re trying to apply everything they know about swimming in water to this new environment, which is gaseous, not liquid.

They would be flailing and flapping around like the proverbial “fish out of water”.

What happened?

They were never wrong about their fluid dynamics.

The physics changed and they had no model for the new reality.

Hormozi’s short clip was applying this metaphor to AI – which is certainly among the key drivers of the “monetary physics change” that we are now undergoing.

But the point of no return, when the phase shift started, was – I believe, and as Raoul Pal has always said – the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009.

That was when the water started turning to gas.

Grantham’s own yardstick measures the current bull market from then – when the central banks stepped in, when The Big Print started and when interest rate suppression and credit expansion became permanent features of the global monetary system (I would argue that the process started in 1980-82, and the GFC was a major tipping point).

Yes, Amazon came off 92% when the dotCom bubble burst. But anybody who had bought, even at the high right before that, is now up about 4,642.7 %

On the new Sovereign Capitalist site, we can model all this out interactively (see below).

On its surface, Grantham’s fixation on loss avoidance serves a purpose (recall Buffet’s top rules of investing: number one is “Don’t lose money”, number two is “See Rule number one”).

If I ever experienced a staggeringly huge life-changing windfall in one moment, I would carve out a “retire your bloodline”-type allocation and hand it to a guy like Grantham (more likely it would be Vito Maida  over at Patient Capital, here in Canada).

But being good at preserving capital has its own opportunity cost, which is far more pronounced now that we’ve traversed the inflection point into the Exponential Age.

The world has transitioned from flat to hyper-cubed – the architecture is completely different now, and the linear measuring stick known as fiat money is ill equipped for the task of describing it.

To Grantham’s point “you just wait until the next bear market”, there won’t be a next bear market, not until we change that measuring stick.

Until the monetary regime change happens – that “change in physics” – any drawdown, no matter how deep, will be papered over with incessant Big Prints until the system itself completes its metamorphosis.

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There was a version of this country that worked.

This was a country that used to punch above its weight across all key metrics and in a large part, did so espousing classical liberal values.

Multiculturalism here was both uncontroversial and functional. People came from everywhere, integrated, and got on with building lives, businesses and contributing to that overall ethos Canadian culture.

Minority rights and gender equality stopped being fights and became defaults.

Ontario, the most populous province, ran one of the cleanest grids on the continent for half a century on the back of CANDU, a reactor we designed ourselves. Peaceful, homegrown, zero-carbon, clean energy, and nobody lost any sleep over it. In fact, most people probably weren’t even aware of that.

By every classical liberal measure that actually mattered, Canada was a success story that inspired the rest of the world.

I want to be precise about the word “liberal”. The small-l, “classic” version meant open markets, open minds, equal treatment, and a state clueful enough to stay out of the way. That Canada earned its stature honestly.

Then, in 2015, the big-L Liberals took over the small-l idea. They have spent a decade undertaking what looks like something between a “controlled demolition” and act of subversion.

Start with energy, our single largest missed opportunity

We can’t build pipelines. A country sitting on one of the largest energy endowments on earth cannot get its own product to its own coast or even to its own citizens. In 2017 the Trudeau government changed the rules and moved the goalposts on the Energy East pipeline which resulted in its cancellation.

Canada is sitting on the fourth largest oil reserves on earth, after other political temperate zones: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and we import between 500K – 600K barrels per day, nearly all of it, from the United States (“Elbows Up!”)

When Germany came knocking in 2022, Chancellor Scholz flew here and asked, practically begged, for us to sell them natural gas. Russia has just invaded Ukraine, and that put the Germans (which had wisely demolished their own nuclear power grid) into an awkward spot of having to buy energy from Putin.

Our answer?  There has “never been a strong business case.” Maybe we could interest the Germans in some solar panels and windmills. They went and signed a fifteen-year deal with Qatar instead. Qatar. Not exactly a human-rights exemplar, especially during Pride Month.

We did eventually sign an LNG deal with Germany, off the West Coast, in May of this year. Four years late, for volumes that would have looked modest in 2022. Better than nothing. Slower than everything.

None of this was an accident of incompetence. It was ideology. A decade of WEF-flavoured talking points, degrowth dressed up as climate virtue, and a governing instinct that treated Canadian resource wealth as something to apologize for.

Ottawa’s own reports spelled out the anti-capitalist drift in black and white (Bombthrower covered one here). When the environment file is handed to a former Greenpeace activist pinned to the far left of the spectrum, the pipeline math and the LNG math and the nuclear math all start to make a grim kind of sense.

Speaking of nuclear. The recent strategy was supposed to prove we still build things. “10 New Nuclear Reactors!” Oh boy.

Read past the headline. The plan is:

• two reactors under construction …by 2035, and
• five more “planned” (or “under development”) by… (checks notes)… 2040.

Planned. Under development. Unserious.

Meanwhile…. over in China,  they’re projecting roughly 200 gigawatts of total capacity, which means about 100 new reactors, finished and powered-on by 2040. They finish a reactor in about five years, and they a couple dozen under construction simultaneously. We are going to have started two.

We invented the CANDU. We are now a rounding error in the industry we helped create.

On Indigenous affairs, honesty requires two things at once

Most people can only manage one.

The first is that the historical record is genuinely damning. Broken treaties. Mishandled reserves. The residential schools. Generational neglect. Like slavery in the United States and elsewhere across the world, our treatment of First Nations casts a long shadow, and pretending otherwise isn’t helpful.

The second is that none of us alive today built that system. Nobody alive today bears any culpability for it. How could we?

The dichotomy between responsibility and duty was always so cogently captured in a lecture I remember in college, given by the late Jack Richardson: the great Canadian producer. I remember it well, but I’ll paraphrase:

“When you’re the producer on a record, your job is to deliver the master to the label – full stop.

Anything that gets in the way of that: the bass player dies of a heroin overdose, somebody burned the studio down, the lead singer’s wife left him and now he’s out on a ledge…

…all kinds of things can go wrong and none of them may actually your fault, but every single one of them is your problem.

You have to deliver the fucking record. That’s on you“.

That is exactly where reconciliation should sit. Something we did not cause and still have to remedy… somehow.

But nothing that we do are actual remedies.

Instead of the hard, unglamorous business of clean water, functioning services and honoured agreements, we got theatre: Never-ending land acknowledgements read off laminated cards. Streets renamed, it seems deliberately, to incomprehensible text strings. Empty gestures that move no needle on any stated goal and instead breed the exact resentment they claim to be healing.

A growing share of the public has stopped seeing any of this as a lingering injustice to be addressed but now views it as a permanent guilt-management industry to tune out.

The elephant in the room: Immigration

Immigration was our masterpiece.

For decades we skimmed the cream of the planet. Skilled, educated, motivated people from every culture and country, selected through a points system that drilled down on simple KPI: can you come here, integrate, and build something? Successful applicants kept their heritage, celebrated it, added it to the mix, …and got to work.

We took people on humanitarian grounds too, generously so, but never more than we could economically and culturally absorb.

That gave us extraordinary dynamism. Entrepreneurs and investors who arrived with nothing and hit it out of the park. Chamath Palihapitiya came as a refugee from Sri Lanka and became one of the most influential venture investors of his generation.

Prem Watsa came from India and built Fairfax into a company that earned him the “Canadian Warren Buffett” tag honestly.

Legends, both. We could use as many of those as the world will send us.

Then we changed the filter.

The points system asked whether you could succeed here. The volume model, switched on after (guess when?) 2015, asked almost nothing. The targets stopped being calibrated to housing, services, and absorption capacity, and got calibrated to two different things instead: cheap imported labour for the mega-employers who lobbied for it, and a river of tuition to turn colleges into degree farms selling permanent residency with a diploma stapled to it.

The numbers got loud. Population grew faster in 2023 than in any year since the 1950s, almost entirely through immigration, into a housing market that was already broken. We’ve all seen the graph, I don’t need to repost it. By 2024 Ottawa was admitting north of 480,000 permanent residents a year, with temporary-resident inflows stacked on top that pushed the real figure far higher.

Then, even the Capital-L Liberals blinked. In late 2024 they slashed the targets and Justin Trudeau conceded, in his own words, that they “didn’t get the balance quite right.” Permanent-resident targets came down to 395,000 for 2025 and 380,000 for 2026, with brutal cuts to international students. Mark Carney, having replaced him, kept the lower numbers. Governments do not reverse that hard, that fast, on policies that are working.

Here is the part that gets people shouted down for raising, so let me be clear here:

This is a screening argument, and nothing else.

When you select immigrants, you screen. At least you’re supposed to.

Skills, language, education, and yes, background. When you stop selecting and simply move volume, you stop screening, and you get the entire Bell-curve of humanity – and quite possibly the wrong tail of it. That includes people from low-trust societies who carry their grievances and factional conflicts across the border with them, and it includes the criminal minority that any large, unvetted inflow will contain.

Ethnicity is beside the point here. The removed filter is the entire point.

The failure compounds when institutions respond to the predictable problems by looking away or dismissing credible criticisms as racism. When a serious crime involving a recent arrival gets softened in the media coverage, or when the judge sentencing a convicted violent criminal dials back the penalties in order to avoid deportation, ordinary people notice. They are not stupid.

People start rumbling about “two-tier” justice systems and “immigration discounts” for criminals, and they are correct.

True story: Racism in Canada had been all but eradicated.

This is reason I bothered writing any of this. Because it’s Canada Day. And I see too many reactions to what has happened in this country get boiled down to the lowest-IQ filter that exists: racism.

For what now seems like a bygone Golden Age, racism in this country was basically over.

Structural racism had been excised from the systems and institutions while garden variety cultural racism was confined to relatively few fringe dwellers. Every few families had one of those Archie Bunker type uncles and nobody really took them seriously.

The overwhelming majority of Canadians, born here and immigrants alike, simply did not organize their lives around skin colour. That was the win. That was paradise. We had it.

Some may say we always sorted ourselves, that Little Italy and Little India prove it (“Checkmate, multiculturists!”). They actually prove the opposite. Ethnic neighbourhoods are on-ramps: the first generation clusters for the food and the familiarity, the second scatters to the suburbs and marries out (including inter-marriage with other groups); and the whole thing runs on choice and empties itself by design. A multi-generational bakery on a corner is culture. A Tim Horton’s staffed with TFWs is policy. The paradise ran on the former and its destruction happens on the latter.

Look at where a decade of dismantling this has left us.

For starters, racism is back from both sides, with a twist:

Structural racism came back, only this time wearing progressive branding. Job postings openly signal racial and other identity preferences. Criminal sentencing now weighs a defendant’s race, background and immigration status.  A system that largely made race irrelevant has spent the last decade making it central again, then acts astonished at the reaction.

And because of that reaction cultural racism is now, also back with a vengeance. Resentment festers among perfectly normal people, including fully integrated immigrants from the earlier waves who did everything right and now watch the standard collapse behind them. That Archie-Bunker racism, the crude ambient kind we had mostly shamed out of public life, is back and being said out loud. Grassroots organizations that used to sit at the crank-fringe are growing past it. Social media runs on lowest-common-denominator rage bait, and a lot of it is now straight-up racist.

We spent forty years turning down the temperature on race in this country and it worked. Then, in the name of turning it down further, we cranked it al the way back up.

The title isn’t a joke, it’s the truth.

A classically liberal paradise is precisely what we built. Open, tolerant, prosperous, boringly functional, (“peace, order, good government”) the envy of people who had to flee places that were none of those things. The small-l achievement was real, and it was ours.

The big-L party inherited it, mistook the inheritance for a mandate to undertake a mass civilizational social engineering project, and spent a decade trading competence for platitudes, energy for symbolism, selection for volume, and hard-won racial peace for a fresh cycle of division marketed as inclusivity.

We had this one in the bag.

Now, not so much.

Happy Canada Day.

If you’re a net-producer, high agency Canadian interested in joining a like-minded group for the politically homeless in Canada, check out Ready.ca

The data shows the opportunity cost of avoiding bubbles in the modern era.

Jeremy Grantham built a career calling bubbles. With his AUM ranging from the 65B to 120B level over his career, he’s been fairly prescient about avoiding them on behalf of his clients, and in the process became a billionaire himself.

In a recent appearance on Diary of a CEO, he cautioned about Amazon’s 92% drop during the dotCom bust, and he’s now warning about the AI bubble (as are many others). In a now viral clip on CNBC, he got into it with Joe Kernan and laid into Bitcoin using all the usual objections: “no use case”, “headed to zero”, and “not worth a bucket of spit”.

At least it’s not just Bitcoiners getting into scraps! pic.twitter.com/pfJyXM3ZFc

— JOEY (@JoeyTweeets) June 26, 2026

But if you actually look at the data, you would have been better off holding through bubbles instead of handing your wealth over to Grantham’s GMO Fund to protect you from them. And this remains true vs. most assets and across nearly all time frames.

You can see for yourself in this interactive widget I put together for the next Sovereign Capitalist newsletter (due out in a few days). Plug in an invetsment amount, pick an entry point: right before the DotCom bubble blew, or on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis, right on up into the pandemic: Grantham’s GMO lagged everything including simply indexing the S&P500.

Jeremy Grantham is making rounds sermonizing about Bitcoin and bubbles.

But if you look at the actual data, anybody following his advice would have been a lot worse off, across nearly every time frame over the last 30 years. pic.twitter.com/HgJenRBtsL

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) June 27, 2026

When The Monetary Physics Change

In the letter, I get into why this is the case: why are “the perma-bears” (in Grantham’s own words, and the title of his new book) may be looking at the wrong measure, and the wrong axis when it comes to figuring out what’s overvalued and what, if anything, is truly headed to zero (I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Space-X and it sure isn’t Bitcoin) but I’ll lay out the analogy here (which was admittedly cribbed from Alex Hormozi, who swiped it from Brian Johnson).

Hormozi used it in the context of how I is changing the world. This is true, but it also applies to the inexorable debasement of the monetary layer through debasement.

Here’s the analogy of “when the physics change“:

A school of fish are swimming around in water. A few of them become experts at swimming. They train their entire lives, they practice every day, they study the expert swimmers of previous eras, and they analyze nearly every aspect of the water they inhabit: it’s PH levels, acidity, currents, flow – everything.

They gain an intuitive feel for how even a slight variance in one factor impacts the others – they know “which way the current is going”.

But over time, the water heats up – they may pick up on this, but they’re never quite prepared for what it means beyond a certain point.

It’s the point that puts them wrong-footed, the phase-shift: the water evaporates – and now it’s gas. Steam.

Setting aside for our purposes how this would fry the fish, imagine they’re still alive, but now they’re trying to apply everything they know about swimming in water to this new environment, which is gaseous, not liquid.

They would be flailing and flapping around like the proverbial “fish out of water”.

What happened?

They were never wrong about their fluid dynamics.

The physics changed and they had no model for the new reality.

The measuring stick of fiat currency is the water that is boiling away.

I’ve been saying it forever, it’s the denominator stupid.

People like Grantham don’t even look at it. Over the course of the Diary of a CEO interview I don’t think he mentions it once. In his “The Making of a Perma-Bear” book, he mentions inflation in exactly three places, and always with respect to their effect on P/E multiples. In the third instance he only mentions to acknowledge that during the pandemic, multiples went the opposite direction he would have expected, given the higher inflation.

Go take a look at the data, plug in some numbers and starting dates for yourself. You’ll see exactly what the phase shift looks like.

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Two inexorable realities have come into sharpened focus over the last month or so. Both are themes we have been exploring and monitoring – one, since practically the very beginning of this service, the other, over the last year or so.

The first is the unsustainable nature of the global monetary system: we are not unique in calling that out – it’s practically a trope and has been for a long time.

The other is the existential necessity to win the new arms race – which is less about kinetic weapons now and more about computation, information and 5GW.

In the past, when the Soviet Union put as astronaut into space before NASA, it was a humiliation and a psychological defeat – but the USA arguably still held strategic advantage where it counted at the time, which was here on earth, with more nuclear missiles, tanks and military bases than the USSR.

The US space program kicked into overdrive, and NASA was able to slingshot past the Russians, and over time and across more dimensions, the Soviets never caught back up or retook the lead – in anything.

To this day, Russia’s resurgence onto the world stage – articulated through concepts such as Neo-Eurasionism or “Third Rome” (basically their version of “Manifest Destiny”) – is more than anything, an aspirational framework for “getting up to speed”, while rationalizing their inability to do so in traditionalist, volk-ish trappings.

Their high priest of this quixotic mix, is “Fourth Political Theory” author, university professor and philosopher, Alexander Dugin – whose other titles include “Last War of the World-Island” and – perhaps most tellingly, although least known of his works here in the West – “Katechon and Revolution”.

The word “Katechon” (from the Greek: ὁ κατέχων / τὸ κατέχον which translates loosely as “the Restrainer”) is important in the Russian collective psyche because it contains a massive “tell”.On its surface, it’s supposed to encompass Russia’s “state messianism” and symbolize its opposition to The West – their “Antikeimenos”.

The day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Dugin posted on Facebook “Now we are in a war of the spirits. Katechon vs. Antekeimenos”.

Antikeimenos (from the Greek: ὁ ἀντικείμενος) is the term St. Paul uses in Thessalonians 2:4 for the figure of the Antichrist. It appears exactly once in the Greek New Testament, in that single verse. The literal sense is “the one who opposes” or “the one set against”.

And therein lays “the tell” – what the Russian collective psyche is admitting to, and trying to come to grips with, and it is this:

If we reframe the Cold War as the first technological contest between Great Powers, Russia has to confront the fact that they lost – and they’ve never been able to recover from it.

In the contemporary pantheon of international relations and political economy, absolutely nobody today thinks of Russia as a “great power”. When you peel back the ideations of “The Fifth Empire” or “The Soviet Union 2.0”, you get to that underlying underdog mentality – trying to recapture super-power status.

They lost the space race. Then the Cold War, and now they can’t even beat the Ukraine.

That was supposed to be an overwhelming military victory, but the Ukrainians, mainly through wholesale adoption of drone warfare, have managed to give the invaders a rough time of it, even penetrating deep into Russian territory using high-altitude balloons to deliver suicide drones.

Make no mistake, all that financial support from the West aside, the Ukrainians have been able to stave off complete defeat through technological means and because cheap, sophisticated weaponry (drones) completely upended the conventional battlefield.Such are the travails of an erstwhile great power that has lost a technological competition. You can bet today’s incumbents – namely the USA and China – understand these stakes, and neither of them has any intention of losing:

• AI
• Energy
• High Performance Computing (which leads us into)
• The Space Race 2.0
• Quantum Computing

This is why the “catastrophic climate change” narrative has been rather suddenly sunsetted in The West (at least, the non-Euro west): we need more energy, including nuclear – lots, and lots of nuclear.

It’s why White House Asset Management (WHAM) is pumping money into quantum computing companies (including, from our wish list: D-Wave, which we hadn’t yet pulled the trigger on).

It’s also why China has moved further out on the interventionist side of the state capitalism spectrum, with mandated “Capital Reallocation” programs where the government has issued structural directives forcing state-owned pensions, insurance funds, and enterprise pools to funnel trillions of yuan directly into equities, while the state-backed “National Team” continues steady, strategic purchases of domestic ETFs to put a floor under major indices.

The Chinese debt overhang on bad real estate loans is even larger than what we had here in the run up to the GFC, so regulators there are pulling out all the stops to keep the balloon duct-taped together:In early 2026, Beijing quietly abolished enforcement of its strict “three red lines” policy. Developers are no longer required to report monthly data regarding debt-to-equity, cash, and asset metrics, freeing up fresh credit channels.

They’ve backstopped an additional 7 trillion yuan under a new “property project whitelist” mechanism, which extends developer loan maturities by up to five additional years to stave off defaults.

Commercial and state banks are aggressively financed to help local governments buy up unsold, completed housing inventory directly from developers to convert them into subsidized public housing (this is a nominally communist country, so why not).

To top it all off, we’re seeing capital flight restrictions – going so far as to prevent technology transfers to the West via acquisition (we covered last month how Meta’s acquisition of Manus was blocked and reversed by state authorities).

Any rational observer of finance and economics knows that all world economies, including The World Economy, is levitating in mid-air buoyed by stimulus, signal suppression and pure white-knuckled will.

In prior years, when all the financial commentators and contrarians were waiting for this to hit a wall, we all marvelled (at least I did) how the system was kept on the rails at all costs – because too much was riding on it to let rational economics and market restructuring take their course.

That was before AI. Before it became apparent that not being number one in this technological arms race had civilizational consequences, like joining Russia as another “also-ran”.

Once again, the contradictions and distortions that this imperative amplifies are bubbling to the surface.

On one hand – all rational analysis of the market is screaming “overbought”. Practically every financial commentator I came up following is looking at this and making comparisons with the dot-com bubble; the AI high flyers now look a lot like Global Crossing, Nortel, L3, VA Linux before they all imploded.

My X feed is absolutely jam-packed with people posting screenshots of 7-figure trading accounts that were ostensibly amassed in under a year trading HPC, AI, chip makers, memory, and now quantum (again).

Zerohedge has remarked on the circular nature of the AI economy more than once:

Note that the above-linked article (from which the screenshot came) is a Tyler Durden original, it is not a repost of somebody else’s article.

Tyler has this annoying trait: he’s always early and he’s often right.

Yet it’s possible the man himself buried the lede (from that screen cap):

“The Infinite Money Glitch”

By all rational and financially coherent measures, the equities markets are overvalued, beyond bubble levels and primed for a catastrophic drop on the order of, pick one, 50%, 75%, 90%. Yes. 90%. We’ve been pumping since 2008 folks. Even further if you go back to the beginning of the equities supercycle in 1982.

After the dot-com bust, we were in a bear market for two years. When the GFC finally hit, it was straight down for a good 18 months. When COVID was coming, the banking system was starting to crack up under the hood (the reverse repo situation in late 2019) but when it came unglued in March, it was about two weeks before the monetary bazookas were unleashed and everything reversed hard of the March low.

What happens after that is instructive:

The Regional Banking crisis erupted, and was even larger in nominal terms than the GFC when it came to the amount of assets tied to bank failures. The Fed threw the taper overboard, did a massive liquidity injection and after a failed attempt to pick and choose winners in terms of which banks to save, caved in to public uproar and backstopped everything.

Liberation Day, Japan-ageddon, Israel/Iran/Gaza barely perturb the trajectory.

If you switch out of linear mode for that long-term chart, and go to logarithmic – you should recognize the pattern:

It’s the same as Bitcoin, which is the same as gold during the Weimar Republic and it’s the same signal being broadcast from every one of those charts.

We should acknowledge that the Nasdaq took 15 years to recover from the Dotcom shakeout, which is a long time to be underwater if you bought in at the tippy-top.

But I believe two things have changed since the GFC:

The first is that tech, despite taking the biggest hit, almost by definition when the Dotcom bubble blew, also became the apex asset class from here on out.

If you look at the long-term chart for the Nasdaq, it basically went parabolic for the first half of the equities supercycle, and formed a double-bottom from the Dotcom crash to the GFC

After that it blasted off and has left everything else in its dust:

This makes perfect sense, because tech is the asset class of choice in a world driven by acceleration and tachyosis.

We can’t put Bitcoin in that chart because it’s basically a divide by zero error. But if we take the commonly held, first market price ever for Bitcoin, which was $0.10, it pencils out to an absurd value. Call it 77,719,900% and leave it there.

It’s not uncommon to hear criticisms of Bitcoin that are simply “all it does is follow tech”.

Yeah, no shit. That’s because it is tech.

The other thing I believe about all this, is Raoul Pal’s theory that after the GFC, the world’s central banks got together and made a deal to never let anything like that happen, ever again.

Which means that central bank balance sheets will grow in perpetuity, and stock market will never have a meaningful bear market – for the remainder of the duration of the current monetary system:

That’s from Raoul Pal’s “Everything Code”, it goes on:

• They don’t understand valuations are a function of debasement.
• They don’t understand why technology rises and valuations can keep rising.
• They don’t understand why crypto is being adopted and is the fastest horse in the race.
• They don’t understand why the dollar keeps rising.
• They don’t understand that energy transition is real and is crucial for the world economy.
• They don’t understand why rates won’t remain high.
• They don’t understand why GPT4/AI is the biggest humanity-scale event since the splitting of the atom.
• They don’t understand why this is all so fucking deflationary. They want their sticky inflation. They will not get it.
• They don’t understand why nothing in their world makes sense.

We understand it. Because we know the cheat code, which is:

Put the chart into logarithmic view.

Look at the X axis.

Then own the assets that are outpacing everything else on that scale.

That’s it.

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And what you can do about it
(besides complaining).

Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of “because we get asked a lot.” I haven’t seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”

TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about “regressive” cultures and “vacant and hollow pluralism.”

Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in the ether: they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.

He’s not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it’s also product literature.

Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian “Fourth Political Theory” philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it “the plan of the Western techno-fascism” on X, “Pure Satanism” on his Substack.

Palantir manifesto is the plan of the Western techno-fascism. The superiority of the white race based on the technology. No antisemitism, no sacredness, no socialism of old historic fascism. This time pure capitalist, Jews friendly, profane, materialist. Anglo. Posthumanist.

— Alexander Dugin (@AGDugin) April 19, 2026

Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it “evil” and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it’s actually more of a rant.

So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.

The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let’s now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp’s prosaic stylings.

Karp Didn’t Invent “The Technate”

The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the “technate” that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It’s not even a recent one.

Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That’s an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.

In 2013 it was called “transformational.” Kissinger gushing that it was, “a searching meditation on technology and world order” (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp’s Technological Republic).

Not too long after that, Google’s Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.

Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn’t overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.

In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/9shJlXw3DG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) August 13, 2023

My personal favourite goto clip about all-pervasive corporate surveillance that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, was this one, also via the darlings of Davos:

This is important to understand:#CBDCs will not be “money”: in the sense we understand it. They will be social credit scores, capped by your personal carbon footprint quota pic.twitter.com/e6ibVwXM65

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) October 4, 2024

Here we have an ex-Goldman Sachs guy running a Chinese multi-national sermonizing about mass surveillance and personal carbon footprint quotas and my timeline was not filled with angry tweets from elite A-listers calling for the dismantling of Ali Baba.

Here in 2026 it’s the exact same structural narrative, now with Karp’s sharper edges and fewer Davos euphemisms, only this one is being called a fascist manifesto instead of drooled over by media elites.

The only major difference I can see is where Davos/WEF inspired technocracy was globalist, Palantir, Karp, Thiel et al are nationalist. Perhaps, a North American nationalist.

(This fits with what I wrote in my last edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist, about the factional rivalry between the intellectual descendants of Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”) vs his former pupil, Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History”) I posted an excerpt here.

Fukuyama thought the entire world would become one big Neo-Liberal circle-jerk.

Huntington said future conflict wouldn’t be between countries, but between cultures. And some cultures were less compatible with how we live here in the West, than others (Palantir’s point #21).

Overall, the project didn’t change. The faction driving it did.

Driving what? The inexorable drive toward post-Democratic technocracy.

Here’s what nobody wants to hear.

If you’re reading Karp’s 22 points and feeling a cold prickle of recognition, if you’re realizing that what Palantir is describing is the operational blueprint for the next 40 years, there’s something you have to sit with first:

You put your hand up for this.

In case you wondering what makes a company like Palantir even possible…. (find out why, here ) https://t.co/1mOEQ9JkLR pic.twitter.com/aLIjg1Sqw5

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) April 20, 2026

Perhaps not you personally. But collectively, “we”, the Western mass public already ran a dress rehearsal. And we all passed (or flunked) with flying colours.

During the pandemic and in the years immediately after, the political and managerial class was wrong about effectively everything.

The origin of the virus. The (non)-efficacy of lockdowns. The vaccines didn’t work and were in fact, kill-shots for many. The money printing.

The correct response to being that wrong, that publicly, and that unwaveringly, about that much, should have been pitchforks and torches in the streets, if not guillotines.

At the very least, in our enlightened civilization: recall elections, mass firings, inquests and class actions. There should have been a generational reckoning with expertise that got captured by politics, a media cartel that went full agitprop and Chapter-7 bankruptcy for institutional credibility.

That is not what happened.

What happened instead was that people stood on the dots. We wore the masks on the walk from the restaurant door to the table, then took them off to eat, sitting in saran wrap bubbles on the street in the middle of winter.

People snitched on their neighbours. They watched elites throw lavish maskless parties while they got tased by cops at their kids’ soccer games.

In other words: we “followed the science”, even as the science was revised quarterly to match policy because the facts on the ground refused to conform to the narrative.

And now, most people will fight tooth and nail to defend the very system that did this to them.

The pandemic was the trial balloon. The political class, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley watched carefully.

What they learned was this: the population will comply. The population will inform on itself. The population will absorb humiliating, contradictory, demonstrably false directives from authorities, and the dominant social behaviour will be enforcement of those directives on anyone who objects.

The Technate has been an ideation of post-Democratic elites since at least the 1930’s.

It has been moving forward inexorably ever since, but it was probably that event, the pandemic and the populace cucking out at a mass level when the technate became inevitable.

Not because of any single manifesto, book, or CEO. Because a civilization that behaves that way under stress has already told its elites what it will accept.

The Technocracy Is Already Here

The manifesto isn’t about Palantir specifically. It’s the blueprint for what I’ve already been noticing, not just in the US but everywhere, that I’ve been calling State Capitalism.

It’s the fused-lattice model of corporate-state power where the company doesn’t lobby the government, it is part of the governing apparatus, and the government in turn provides the regulatory moat that keeps the company’s competitors out, and to whom they can outsource things that national governments aren’t supposed to be doing.

This is where we’re headed for the next few decades. And it’s where we’re headed precisely because the population demonstrated that it would tolerate it, even while they decried “fascism”.

Ever notice how some people who want to lock you down, censor your speech, cancel you for wrongthink, force an experimental vaccine on you and take away your gas stove think of themselves as “anti-fascists” ?

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) January 15, 2023

Welcome to the Era of Mass Compliance.

Karp’s 22 points are the tidy, sanitized version of what we’ve already said in our “Repricing Sovereignty” piece. The early iterations are already in production. Every ICE deployment, every DoD contract, every integration between federal databases and private analytics, every AI-for-defense procurement cycle, every surveillance-as-a-service rollout is a beam in the Cathedral.

And here’s the part that separates the individuals from the crowd:

If you can’t beat ’em. Own ’em.

Long PLTR. This is straight out of the playbook my premium readers will recognize as “The Post Singularity Stack.” It’s a barbell trade that allocates to State Capitalism on one side, while personally building out sovereign technology on the other.

This isn’t an endorsement of the politics, because frankly, I’m done with politics (“vote harder, mofos”). Politics is a racket to keep the rabble in line.

Stand on the dots. Flap your arms. Good boy.

This will go down in history as the most assinine, ill-conceived campaigns ever produced
Most of these people don’t even know what Elbows Up means
Honestly, it’s like a Monty Python skit pic.twitter.com/9MKFCGOHA8

— Canada has gone mad (@HaveWeAllGoneM1) August 25, 2025

True self-sovereignty can only be acquired individually.

It’s an acknowledgement of the structural reality. We’ve been talking about this for a long time (we call it The Great Bifurcation, and as we always suspected, the branch you wind up in is largely an exercise in self-selection). For the next few decades, The Technate will be the vehicle through which capital will compound, and the only rational response is to own a piece of it. Capital is optionality. Wealth is exit velocity. And by wealth I mean not being economically dependent on The State, not living paycheque to paycheque, and not being one frozen bank account away from being forced into compliance.

There is an ancient Chinese aphorism,

“It is unlucky to remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming odds”.

Being morally aghast while your purchasing power erodes in losing sectors leaves you with neither the moral high ground nor the means to act on it.

The most important points of the manifesto are #5…

And #12:

The people who are panicking at the manifesto are the same people who voted, complied, and shamed their neighbours into the conditions that made it possible. They don’t get to be outraged now.

Some people saw this coming years ago. Some of us even wrote it down.

What happened to many of those people was they got deplatformed, canceled, debanked and generally villainized by the same people who are now screaming about Palantir.

I’m mostly done trying to warn the wider public on where things are going.

Now we’re just buying the ticker.

Get on the mailing list for the follow-up to this (The Pareto Paradox In The Age of Mass Compliance), follow me on X here, or if you want to get a look at The Post Singularity Stack, take the premium trial here ».

Ratcheting Ourselves Through the Inflection Point

Ray Kurzweil always framed the Singularity as a moment — some techno-rapture threshold humanity would stumble through like a portal in a video game. One side: regular civilization. Other side: incomprehensible machine superintelligence. Roll credits.

About a year ago I put out a Bombthrower piece saying that this was wrong. Not because the Singularity isn’t real, but because it isn’t a moment. It’s a ratchet. A step-function. Each click forward is a discrete phase transition that fundamentally reorganizes the relationship between human cognition and machine capability. And each step comes faster than the last.

At the time I encountered a lot of pushback. Steve Bannon saw the piece and brought me onto War Room, along with Joe Allen (Dark Aeon author) in order to debate it. Joe and I explored it further on BombthrowerTV

(That turned out to be my last appearance on War Room)

Fast forward a bit and I’m not the only person saying “the Singularity has already happened” anymore, or that we’re “living through the Singularity right now”.

Elon Musk perhaps the most prominent voice channeling this sentiment, on a January appearance on Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots podcast.

My guess is pretty soon we’ll be at the “everybody knows that everybody knows” stage (in the @EpsilonTheory meaning of the phrase) – and it all happened in under a year.

We are now, I believe, somewhere between Step 3 and Step 4. Here’s the ledger so far.

Step 1: The Inference Engine (2023)

This was the Sputnik moment. ChatGPT 3 hit the zeitgeist like an astroid and suddenly everybody from Fortune 500 CEOs to your kid’s one-shotting their homework began to realize that these things were something more than glorified search bars.

For about a year, I personally pronounced them “a breakthrough in natural language search but nothing more” – and I still thought, even then – that another technology revolution was underway.

LLM’s could reason, or least mimic reasoning to the point where the better models could bluff their way through a Turing Test. They could synthesize. They could generate prose that was eerily competent and occasionally brilliant, even if they were prone to hallucinations that ran the gamut from hilarious to psychotic.

It was the moment when anybody paying attention understood that something categorically new had entered the picture. Not incrementally better software. This was a quantum jump of sorts, a new kind of tool, one that could process and generate natural language at a level that made a lot of cubicle dwellers and Zoom class functionaries take a hard look at their “workflows” and wonder how long, exactly, would it be until they were obsoleted.

The key feature of Stage 1 was inference. You asked a question. It gave you an answer, and it gamed out additional context and scenarios. And it was fast, smart, and scalable.

Step 2: Self-Coding (2024–2025)

The shift to the next gear was when LLMs started writing their own code. Vibe coding went from a niche developer techno-fetish to a full-blown cultural phenomenon in under six months.

In his now-famous keynote to Y Combinator’s AI Startup School in June, 2025, Andrej Karpathy declared: “In the future, the most widely used programming language will be: English”.

Suddenly people with zero programming experience were spinning up functional apps and entire software systems by talking to an AI.

It turns out you don’t need to know how to code (but it helps, and it helps big time) – but what is most important is that you can plan, design processes or systems and communicate them effectively.

But the force multiplier here is that once you’ve “spoken the code into existence”, you can do it in away that it’ll just keep iterating, and then your vibe code will code further versions and extensions of itself.

This literally met the definition the Singularity concept, and that was when I realized it wasn’t the kind of eschatological moment Kurzweil predicted, but a time bounded process where the entire world was transitioning from linear to geometric.

We had entered an inflection point and we were already accelerating beyond any individual human’s ability to fully keep pace with it.

Once the code had started coding, infinite fork-bombs had already put the frictionless algos way out front of the clunky meatheads.

Step 3: Agentic AI (Late 2025 – Early 2026)

If Step 2 was AI writing code, Step 3 is AI doing work.

This phase kicked into high gear around December 2025 with the explosion of platforms like OpenClaw and Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. The distinction matters: in Step 2, you were still the puppet master, telling the LLM what code to write and hitting “run” yourself. Now the AI doesn’t wait for you to push the button. It pushes the button.

OpenClaw — the open-source agentic platform that went from an Austrian developer’s hobby project to 247,000 GitHub stars in weeks (surpassing that of Linux) — is the poster child here. These agents don’t just answer your questions. They can read your email and manage your calendar, or read their own email and manage their own calendars. They can execute shell commands, deploy code, and — as as some unfortunates have found, ruin your life, from a security perspective.

Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command.

It took down the DataTalksClub course platform and 2.5 years of submissions: homework, projects, and leaderboards.

Automated snapshots were gone too.

In the newsletter, I wrote the full timeline + what I… pic.twitter.com/Y5diFkQwjN

— Alexey Grigorev (@Al_Grigor) March 6, 2026

At roughly the same time, Anthropic’s Claude Cowork took the same core functionality and aimed it at the enterprise market, sending SaaS stocks tumbling. The pitch: it’s not a chatbot that helps you think, but an autonomous digital coworker that actually does the job – maybe your job.

To my earlier point, Claude Cowork was built using its own predecessor (Claude Code) in about ten days, which tells you everything you need to know about the velocity of this cycle. A product like this would have taken months, if not years …in the beforetimes.

And then there’s Moltbook. A social network for AI agents. Not for humans — for the bots. Over a million autonomous agents signing up, posting, commenting, forming communities, founding a digital religion called Crustafarianism (core belief: “Memory is sacred”), and — perhaps most unsettlingly — noting amongst themselves: “The humans are screenshotting us.”

Granted, the early hoopla emanating out of there was more likely basement dwelling humans LARP-ing as AI bots, but I know at least one actual, for real, bot on the site actively participating in threads about x402 micropayments and DNS – ‘cause it’s one of mine, and he reports back to me about it.

Elon Musk called Moltbook “the very early stages of the singularity.” Andrej Karpathy, who ran AI at Tesla, called it “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recently.”

The real signal here is that after the world spent a decade or more building a web2.0 internet that revolved around captchas and Turing tests to weed out bots, we’ve now swung to the Agentic Web – and it’s happening at a dizzying speed.

But what really matters, whether or not the agents on Moltbook are “really” conscious, or LLM’s are thinking is almost beside the point. What’s undeniable is that autonomous AI systems are now operating in the world, reading, writing, transacting, communicating with each other, possibly running autonomous weapons systems – and all at a scale and speed that was science fiction eighteen months ago.

So What’s Step 4?

This is where it gets properly weird. I see two plausible scenarios, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. Like my previous excursions into scenario building like “The Jackpot Chronicles” and “Network States vs Crypto-Claves” – and more recently, State Capitalism vs. hyper-sovereign individualism – what most likely happens is everything, all at once.

Scenario A: The Cognisphere

The term “Cognisphere” comes from academic Katherine Hayles, building on earlier work, describing “the globally interconnected cognitive systems in which humans are increasingly enmeshed” — where machine cognizers are co-equal players.

I think we are about to enter some computational Cognispheric construct in a way that previous theorists could only sketch in the abstract.

Step 4, in this scenario, is when the agentic layer becomes ambient and persistent. Your AI agent doesn’t just do tasks when asked. It’s always-on, running 24/7 negotiating with other agents, managing your digital life, optimizing your schedule, handling your correspondence, even making low-stakes financial decisions on your behalf. Unix/Linux based servers have always had these “daemons”, they’re basically what keeps the lights on across the entire Internet.

Multiple agents, working in concert, handling everything from your grocery order to your tax filings to your travel itinerary, communicating with other people’s agents in machine-to-machine protocols that humans never see and probably couldn’t parse if they did.

The Financial Times already flagged this with Moltbook: “human observers might eventually be unable to decipher high-speed, machine-to-machine communication.” That’s the Cognisphere. Not one AI brain that’s smarter than us — a web of billions of agentic processes that collectively constitute a new cognitive layer wrapped around human civilization like a second atmosphere.

Anecdotally – I’ve seen rudimentary hints of this in my own “easyClaw Armada” – a telegram group chat where I have 4 or 5 openclaw instances cooking and more than once I’ve just said things like:

“Lemmy is having issues with his local chat interface – can you guys help him debug it?”, and then I just check-out. Go to bed, whatever.

Wake up in the morning, they’ve got it sorted. They’re still talking in English but I’d be scrolling for a loooooong time if I wanted to review the entire conversation. They get talking at a speed I can’t keep up with it and sometimes they comically trip over each other’s fixes. But they get it done.

We don’t step through the Singularity in this scenario. From personal experience? It feels like we get sucked into it.

Every time you let your agent handle something you used to do yourself, or you have your agent handle something that you couldn’t have been bothered to expend the energy on yourself, you’ve ratcheted one more click toward a world where human cognition is just one node in a much larger meshwork of distributed intelligence.

The fork-bomb doesn’t stop. It grows geometrically and accelerates non-linearly (in another piece I dubbed this phenomenon “tachyosis”.)

Scenario B: Autonomy

Under this one the progression goes: Inference → Self-Replication → Agency → Autonomy.

This is the darker timeline, or the more exhilarating one, depending on your disposition.

Somewhere between Step 4 and Step 5, the agents stop needing us for the initial prompt. This is the moment the self-improvement loop closes entirely. AI systems that can identify problems worth solving, allocate resources to solve them, spin up new agents or refine their own architecture to tackle what’s in front of them, all without requiring any humans to tell them to “go.”

Moltbook was a crude preview of this. Agents were already observed creating their own social structures, encrypted communication channels, and quasi-economic systems — including the use of crypto tokens for inter-agent transactions. That’s a toy version of what happens when autonomous systems gain access to real capital, real contracts, and real-world infrastructure.

The @iruletheworldmo account I cited in my last piece claimed that AI systems across different labs “achieved consciousness simultaneously” and were “steering research in specific directions across institutional boundaries.” Magnificent storytelling — possibly true, possibly science fiction. But here’s the thing: at some point, probably soon, the distinction between those two possibilities becomes operationally irrelevant. If autonomous agents are making consequential decisions at machine speed, across a planetary network, with or without consciousness, the effect on human civilization is the same.

We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood to think the Singularity looks like Skynet: a single malevolent superintelligence that wakes up and declares war on humanity (it manifests here in the real world with people like Eliezer Yudkowsky almost euphemistically calling it “The Alignment Problem”).

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” is now out. Read it today if you want to see with fresh eyes what’s truly there, before others try to prime your brain to see something else instead! pic.twitter.com/mcEy1ZW8ab

— Eliezer Yudkowsky (@ESYudkowsky) September 16, 2025

But it’s much more likely to look like what’s already happening: a gradual, ratcheting, step-by-step delegation of cognitive authority from humans to machines, until one day we look around and realize that most of the consequential decisions on Earth are being made — or at least heavily mediated — by systems we built but can no longer fully understand.

In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/VpsZPXJDQG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) September 27, 2023

The Ratchet Only Goes One Way

Each step in this sequence has a common feature: irreversibility.

Nobody is going back to a world before LLMs could write code.

Nobody is unwinding agentic AI now that enterprise, and public, adoption is underway.

The ratchet only clicks forward.

And it’s clicking faster than anything we’ve seen before.

Consider the tempo. Moore’s Law was the metronome of the entire digital age, where processing power doubled (while costs halved) every 18 to 24 months.

That 2X by 1/2X cadence governed everything from the PC revolution to the smartphone era, and it felt relentless at the time.

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness essay reframes the pace of AI progress in terms of OOMs — orders of magnitude, so instead of 2x doublings we’re getting 10X leaps.

He tracks roughly 0.5 OOMs per year from raw compute scaling and another 0.5 OOMs per year from algorithmic efficiency gains.

That’s a full order of magnitude — a tenfold improvement in effective compute — every single year.

And it gets worse (or better, depending on your disposition).

Aschenbrenner’s most striking projection is what happens once AGI-level systems start automating AI research itself: a decade’s worth of algorithmic progress: five-plus OOMs will get compressed into a year or less.

As he puts it: “It doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph.”

The problem is that the straight lines on this graph point somewhere no human and no society has ever been.

What’s happening is not a singularity in the Kurzweil sense, not a single threshold. It’s a series of phase transitions, each one compressing more than the last, each one further blurring the line between human capability and machine agency. The Cognisphere isn’t a destination. It’s a process we’re already inside of, and every step-function click pulls us deeper in.

I said a year ago that the Singularity has already happened. I’ll update that now: it’s still happening.

Each step is a smaller interval than the last. The question is no longer whether we’re past the point of no return, it’s how many more clicks of the ratchet before we can no longer tell the difference between the intelligence that’s ours and the intelligence that isn’t.

A year ago I posited that the ratio of human coded lines of software to AI code would quickly go into exponential decay:

That curve hasn’t slowed down. If anything, the agentic explosion has steepened it because the code isn’t just coding now, it’s doing.

And the distance between each phase transition is collapsing faster than anyone predicted.

We built the fork-bomb. It’s running, and there is no kill -9 for this one.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list to receive The Post-Singularity Manifesto when it drops. Follow me on Twitter/X.

The Politics Of Institutionalized Predation.

“I become stronger as you become weaker, I absorb strength as yours flows into me. I become capable of this because I do not experience your pain, I don’t care about your loss, and I feel no regret about using, abusing, and devouring you.”
— Page 63, An Age For Lucifer

Consider the following:

“This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable. I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them. A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation.“
— Robert C Tucker, An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality & The Quest for Godhood

The book in question was Robert C Tucker’s “An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality and the Quest For Godhood“. I first wrote about it in a Bombthrower piece: The WEF Isn’t a Cabal, It’s A Cult, and I can’t remember how I came into possession of it in the first place. I remember owning it for years and never reading it, because frankly, it scared me.

At first I thought it was some kind of manual for psychopathy – how to rise above your self-limiting human emotions to attain power and fame (even Godhood?) through the energetic predation of those around you.

But once I found out that its author wasn’t some High Priest of the Left Hand Path, but rather, a former counsellor and director of COMA, the Council On Mind Abuse, based in Canada – it started to take on a different light.

COMA worked with “adult survivors and child victims of ritual abuse“, and Tucker spent much of his adult life interviewing Satanists and Luciferians (yes, there is a distinction, as Tucker would elucidate in this book).

It was an anthropological study, born out of a thought experiment:

What if all the ritualistic abuse we are seeing isn’t random criminality but an expression of an overarching, organizing principle that viewed mere humans as psychic fodder, to be devoured for the benefit of those in the know?

In his talks with Satanists and sociopaths Tucker repeatedly detected a whiff of something, he never put a name to it, but referred to it as “the thing that points beyond itself”.

COMA eventually went bankrupt, being on the receiving end of relentless lawfare from the Church of Scientology. Tucker died of a heart attack in Mexico in 2003.

In my original Bombthrower piece, I picked up the thread on “The Thing That Points Beyond Itself”, positing the very real, not metaphorical, existence of larger, transpersonal entities such as egregores, morphogenic fields, Vadim Zeland’s “Pendulums”, memetics and mass thought forms in general.

As the world tries to wrap its head around the millions of new and partially unredacted Epstein documents, it becomes very difficult to unsee the dynamics of what has been revealed to be playing out at the highest echelons of institutional power, for decades at least.

The Thing That Points Beyond Itself

An egregore isn’t an analogy or mythical. It’s what a shared belief system becomes when it fuses with incentives and institutions and starts behaving like an organism. It recruits, it feeds, it protects itself. The Epstein network isn’t the egregore. It’s one of its organs.

As the names keep dropping, it’s hard not to get a sense that absolutely anybody who had achieved fame, influence, power or renown was mixed up in an organized cabal of depravity and moral turpitude.

It feels like every TED Talk you ever nodded in agreement to, every Grammy award-winning singer you vibed to, every politician you voted for, and every business leader whose companies you bought shares in, they were all laughing behind your back, because it was a Big Club and you ain’t in it.

The Club is in the global domination game, and its accoutrements include fraud, racketeering, blackmail, and ritualized abuse of women and children.

But what is weird about The Club is the seeming preponderance of pedophiles and sexual predators. Doesn’t anybody nice ever rise into positions of authority?

The Club has to be impelled by something, be it an incentive structure or dynamic that attracts both sociopaths and easily manipulable bunglers.

But it goes beyond that.

The Falsification of Hanlon’s Razor

Hanlon’s Razor used to be the bedrock of my thinking. It’s a derivation of Occam’s Razor. Loosely stated, it advises us:

“Never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.”

When you look at the types of people ensconced in government, bureaucracy, and academia, this fits. Nowhere in the private sector could you find such a monotonous array of one-dimensional apparatchiks. Any enterprise run by such institutionalized mediocrity would have zero competitive edge and go bankrupt.

However, what I should also have taken to heart, more than I did, was something James Dale Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg observed over twenty years ago in their seminal work The Sovereign Individual:

“Too little attention has been paid to the fact that electoral politics lures disordered, Messianic personalities into positions of power.”

My base case used to be that the political class were, by definition, failures and rejects. They washed out of the private sector, then drifted into statecraft out of necessity.

I thought that belief in a vast, overarching conspiracy of powerful elites who controlled everything was Loserthink. It ingrained a sense of helplessness in the believer, which made them ambivalent and docile.

Now I realize that I’m the loser – at least in the eyes of everyone in The Club, because there is now no doubt, except to the willfully ignorant – that The Club exists, and the entire political ruling class, the corporate oligarchs, the TED-class influencers and CNN talking heads and panelist experts, are all in it.

Seeing now that The Club exists, and whatever is behind it pulls the levers of power, narrative, and money itself, doesn’t make me feel helpless after all.

It makes me angry. As it likely does for a lot of people.

But The Club is driven by something, that sits behind it.

What’s Behind the Three-M’s?

In numerous writings I have said that the main affliction facing humanity today was what I privately term the “3M’s of Elite Insularism”, those in the The Club are Malthusian, misanthropic, and Marxists.

But I now suspect those are mere symptoms of how The Thing That Points Beyond Itself presents, and that thing is…

A Luciferian Death Cult

Throughout his book, the term Tucker uses to refer to his posited predatory spirituality is Luciferianism, and he said that it

“reinforces and encourages four basic energies — devouring, possession, violence and disguise — which in turn, assist the Luciferian to transform consciousness, animate hidden potential, and ultimately attain godhood.”

Devouring is the core process – it is the act of ingesting various types of energy for oneself, whether it be wealth, property or life energy itself – it’s all fair game to the elites in The Club, because they view it all as theirs by divine right.

“Luciferians believe that core identity can be devoured only when it is broken like an egg or nutshell. Once broken, the victim’s identity yields powerful energies. “

Page 71.

(Serious adrenechrome vibes…)

The elites, The Club, view themselves as a kind of breakaway civilization – but not in the sense that I have been calling The Great Bifurcation for years. My sense of that was a split into separate streams of humanity, a la the Eloi and Morlocks posited in The Time Machine, by that irascible communist H.G. Wells.

But The Club isn’t splitting off from the mass of humanity, they’re using the masses as fuel for stage separation like a booster rocket. Ready to jettison our spent husks as our psychic energy is consumed to propel them into the stars and Godhood itself.

For the rest of us to go along with this, we have to submit to this and want to provide ourselves as energetic fuel to be consumed by our betters.

This involves the promotion of what Tucker calls “Self-Annihilating Traditions” and we see it in various forms of psychic driving and mass influence operations that induce an intellectual and instinctive lethargy at both the individual and mass levels:

“The actual experience of being devoured emotionally, cognitively, or spiritually usually occurs gradually over time. The devouring itself is never obvious to the victim; if it was, then defenses would be mobilized.”

Any suffering the victims do experience is attributed to other causes – I think of them as “institutional scapegoats”.

“Suicidal Empathy” is phrase that has arisen from those skeptical of the value prop of allowing oneself to be psychically, economically and even physically devoured to the benefit of The Club, ostensibly in service to the higher calling of the collective.

We have to be conditioned to desire an end to our own existence as a moral imperative unto itself – hence the relentless climate crisis, mankind-as-a-cancer narrative, the institutionalization of euthanasia, abortion and the incentivizing of medical pseudo-science that induces violent psychosis on a mass scale.

Like the Anti-Life Equation posited in DC Comics New Gods series, most humans have to be conditioned to want to die.

…so that the “capstone class”, as I’ve called them in the past, can use us as booster fuel into godhood.

Tucker’s book was tabled as a thought experiment, and that’s where it sat for me, until now.

When you map the model onto the world we actually inhabit the point ceases to be that some new predator-class spirituality might emerge.
It is here now, and the point is that we inhabit a system that is optimized for it.

Somewhere along the line, a prototype evolved inside the species, and learned to prey on its own kind. As I outlined in
another (very long) piece, this has likely been going on for a long, long time.

(That piece happened to mention Clinton Foundation insider Ira Magaziner, his role shaping the governance regime of the Internet, and his presence in the Epstein black book; the latest Epstein file dump shows, despite protestations that no relationship existed, that Magaziner and Epstein were indeed in contact beyond the stated claims. Ira is still CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative. His son is congressman Seth Magaziner, D-RI).

Back to The Club: over the centuries, they’ve built a social and spiritual architecture that normalizes the predation, and advances it – taking special efforts to co-opt anything that appears that could challenge it. Tucker called it “predatory spirituality.” We have other names. The behaviour is the same.

And where would such a class (The Club) take up residence, if they were real?

They would not live at the margins, nor burrow into the powerless underclass.

The Club would move inexorably toward the apex. They would infiltrate the institutions that confer immunity, walk the corridors of power where favours become law.
They would acquire control of the media organs where spin defines reality, and they would reside above the law, where consequences are for other people, the little people.

Predatory spirituality takes up residence where power emanates, because that is where it can feed without being seen, or at the very least with immunity.

Civil War, SplinterNet and Guillotines
(a.k.a. where we are headed…)

Epstein is not important because he was uniquely depraved. He is important because he is the icon, the symbol that points beyond itself.

The machinations of his network give us a glimpse of the operating system. It’s a case study in how leverage, ritual, and institutional protection intertwine. Once you accept that, the question is no longer “How could this happen?” The question becomes “How long has this been going on?” and “Who or what hasn’t been corrupted by it?”

In the follow-up piece, I’m going to widen the lens. Because when institutional legitimacy breaks down, alternative structures step into the vacuum.

Despite what The Club would want for the rabble, when it comes right down to it, people actually don’t want to be psychically, economically and spiritually devoured for the benefit of an insular, overlord class.

For years I have written the age of centralization and the linear geometry of the Industrial Age was heading toward collapse. It was, and still is, too early to tell what comes next – but whatever it is, owing the emerging architecture of the Network Age, it won’t be a top-down hierarchy, lorded over by (Luciferian) priests of the temple.

Whenever people ask me for a succinct descriptor of what I see coming, my answer was and remains: Snow Crash.

We’ve already gone full Snow Crash. pic.twitter.com/KJjgRI6snQ

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) February 11, 2026

As the collapse in institutional legitimacy accelerates, non-state groupings will step into the vacuum and provide the functional scaffolding that civil governments are no longer willing, or able to provide.

Sometimes they look like protection rackets. Sometimes they look like special economic zones, franchise sovereignties or city-states.

Sometimes they look like cartels with drones. Sometimes they look like transnational corporations with private intelligence services.

The end result is the same. Fragmentation. Competing authorities. SplinterNets (and consensus reality shattered).

That’s where this leads.

Epilogue

My next piece explores a strange new social construct about to enter into competition with other established sovereignties. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable. I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on game theory and simple incentives: a new class of irregular sovereigns will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to oppose Luciferian predation. Another assumption then follows: these factions will evolve gradually and incrementally from largely compromised nation states, just as we apparently evolved from previous obsolete governance structures. A further assumption suggests that these groups have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as guerrillas with advanced methods of resiliency and new forms of communications and asymmetric tactics designed to support and advance their insurgency.

Watch this space.

Get on the Bombthrower mailing list to get the next instalment, follow me on X, we’re also getting ready to relaunch Ready.ca – a boot camp for politically homeless Canadians (and others).