The Secret Faith Of Power

Greg frames the return interview as a deeper descent into taboo history, then asks the decisive question: why should anyone care about Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank now? Source trail 1:252:433:184:19 it falls and right into the rise of another and the interesting thing about our time is that cycle watchers of all types from the astrological and economic to those who track the life cycles of nations and the patterns...were talking a little bit after we recorded that and you mentioned a desire to have gotten into the movie and i think that's a really good question and i think that's a really good question to zabatai zevi and the 1666... Jiang refuses to start with sect genealogy. He starts with modern mysteries. Communism should not have conquered so much of the world so easily. Freud should not have ruled psychology so thoroughly. Occult symbolism should not appear so persistently in rockets, money, and civic architecture if the official modern story were complete.

That is the first compression of the whole interview. Jiang is not asking the reader to become obsessed with dead names. He is saying those names explain why apparently unrelated modern phenomena keep sharing a hidden grammar. The line to keep is simple and strong: these figures matter because their ideas did not stay in their own century. They leaked forward and became part of modernity's operating code. Source trail 4:195:20 Neuroscience is very much based on Freud's understanding of how the brain works. So how is it that this man with his strange ideas, esoteric ideas, was able to conquer the field of psychology? Then another question, of...all of these ideas, communism, Freud, and his psychology, occult symbolism throughout the world, you really need to look at Sabatini and Frankis. Because in many ways, even though they may not be around, even though the...

Greg does not let the Zevi material stay vague. Source trail 6:427:308:199:1810:28 Did this ideology really go away? Or is it still around in secret? And that's a hard thing to find a smoking gun for sometimes. So I have this book here, Robert Zephyr's 1666, Redemption Through Sin, Global Conspiracy i...heard of Sabbatai Zevi, who declared himself the Messiah in 1666 by proclaiming redemption was available through acts of sin. He amassed a following of over 1 million passionate believers, about half of the world's Jewi... He reads the lurid capsule version: 1666, redemption through sin, ritual inversion, sexual transgression. Jiang answers by restoring the surrounding pressure. Jews in the Ottoman world are dealing with conversion, persecution, expulsion memory, and shattered hopes. In that atmosphere Zevi's claim to messiahship feels like a release valve for collective despair.

Then Jiang flips the whole scandal. Zevi's conversion to Islam is not treated by true believers as the proof that he failed. It becomes the proof that he succeeded. If the messiah converts, then even the converted can be redeemed. What should have looked like apostasy becomes the mechanism of absolution. That is the interview's first hard reversal, and almost everything later depends on it. Source trail 11:1912:16 So here's the deal, either the turban or your head, okay? You either convert to Islam, or I will take your head. And what shocked the entire Jewish world, the entire Jewish diaspora is that Zebedee Zevi did convert. And...the Messiah converting, what it does is that it absolves all Jews of the messiah, the Messiah converting, what it does is that it absolves all Jews of the messiah, of the sin, of the original sin of conversion, just lik...

By the time Jiang reaches the Dönmeh and the Ottoman-Turkish elite lineages, the larger point is already clear. Inversion is not a side effect. It is the doctrine. You prove faith by showing that social and legal norms cannot bind you. That is why this material remains politically live for Jiang: a sect that can turn sin into spiritual proof can also become useful to empires, secret societies, and later ruling classes who want moral immunity without surrendering sacred language. Source trail 13:0314:0115:0216:09 How do you know your true faith in God? Because you're not afraid to break the laws of net. Your faith in God is so strong that it can bypass social convention and legal norms, okay? So they practice things like, as you...And that's just Turkey. In 2003, when the American military overran Iraq and they went to Baghdad and seized all the files of Iraqi intelligence, okay, the spy service for the Iraqis, what they discovered is, these huge...

Greg brings in the Jacob Frank packet all at once: reincarnation claims, Catholic conversion, noble patrons, rumored Illuminati founding, later occult descendants. Source trail 17:1918:2219:1719:5521:02 That's important context. And so this is often called Sabbatean Frankism. So let's get to the Frankism part. 50 years after Zevi converts in 1666, 50 years later, another guy is born, Jacob Frank. He's born into a Sabba...Frank and his followers were notorious for their depravity, and they engaged in ritual incest again. Frank inspired cult leaders such as Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard. David Icke believes that the Sabbatean Franki... Jiang does not try to prove every rumor with documentary closure. Instead he argues from texture and influence. Frank moved among European nobility, overlapped the 1776 Illuminati moment, and most importantly left a recognizable spirit inside later elite writing.

Faust is where Jiang makes the leap legible. He reads Goethe's tale not just as a literary masterpiece but as a spiritual operating system: transgression becomes the road to knowledge, destruction becomes a form of liberation, and the restless appetite for accumulation and conquest becomes civilizational style. This is how Frankism stops being a sect and starts sounding like modern Europe itself. Source trail 21:0222:0423:13 So that's number one. He was very, very close with the European nobility. Number two is you can feel his influence. In the writings of very prominent European intellectuals. So I'll give you an example. Goethe, the Germ...And so Faust agrees. And they go on these terrible misadventures together. So the first thing they do together is basically rape a young woman. And impregnate her, kill her mother, and kill her brother. And then she kil...

From there Jiang relocates magic itself. Real black magic is not numerology or props. It is narrative. A powerful story sticks, repeats inside the listener, alters the way the listener sees reality, and then begins to act through them. When Greg connects this to predictive programming and Neville Goddard-style manifestation, the interview lands on one of its most reusable ideas: stories are not decoration around power. Stories are one of power's delivery systems. Source trail 24:1725:2225:5926:4927:38 I'm not sure if this makes sense. So please debate me or question me if it doesn't make any sense. When people think about black magic, they think about astrology or numerology, but I would argue that real magic is in s...And not only that, starts to sing the song to himself or herself. And this song becomes a virus almost. It seeps into your consciousness. And the song, the lyrics, then start to alter the way you see yourself and you se...

Greg's Gnostic comparison matters because it forces Jiang to sharpen the difference. Source trail 28:2929:1029:5930:50 It seems to be the same mechanism. So I do think there's something there. I'm rambling, but the only other thing I wanted to say is that if I had to put a label on my life, I would put a label on my own philosophy. I'd...You look at the Cathars, they were doing extreme morality to maintain the connection. We talked last time about your own connection. And you say, no, you know, fasting and keeping yourself clean and pure, no caffeine, n... Classical purification disciplines try to strengthen the connection by reducing appetite. Frank uses the same mystical architecture and then inverts its moral direction. The divine spark is real, love is real, imagination is real, but they are redirected toward worldly power instead of spiritual restraint.

The bear story is the cleanest image of the turn. Four brothers who love one another can scare off what vast numbers cannot. Jiang says Frank agrees with Jesus and Dante about the power of love, but only so he can push the next step: use that concentrated loyalty to conquer the world. Love is not denied. It is repurposed. Source trail 31:3332:19 So he tells this great story where there's a bear whose cub was kidnapped. And so the bear's very angry. And the bear knows it was his villagers who've kidnapped the cub. So the bear says to the villagers, either return...And the bear runs away. And this story, it's just a beautiful story, right? But it shows you the power of love. How four people fighting together who love each other and who are fighting for each other, they're more pow...

Once that inversion lands, the rest follows fast. Free will becomes loophole lawyering. Visualization becomes behavioral magic. Taboos become imaginary weights that one can learn to lift like feathers. By the time Jiang reaches the conversion strategy of entering Catholicism as Jesuits or Protestantism as Freemasons, the real transmission mechanism is no longer secret ritual alone. It is a seductive story that removes guilt from power and then spreads person to person like an infection. Source trail 33:1634:1034:5735:5236:3537:20 But there's no law that says you can't do that, right? That's why he's so powerful. Because he's taking all these conventions, all this understanding, mystical understanding, these spiritual teachings that we've had for...What he's doing is he's visualizing the world for you, right? He's telling you what the world could be. And what he teaches his followers is that if you want the world to be what you want it to be, just visualize it. It...

The widow story condenses Frank's cruel pedagogy. Source trail 37:3538:1539:06 you have written on your sub stack so there was a certain widow who had many children she came to a rabbi asking him for food so she and her children would not die of hunger and the rabbi says hey the whole kalal and I...fish bone stuck in his throat no doctor could help him he was advised to send for that widow she came and began to pray over him what he had taught her from the great laughter that this caused him the fish bone fell out... A desperate woman is told to act like a miracle doctor, say prayers, and let the world heal itself through its own credulity. Greg immediately sees the modern version: maybe elites do not need literal occult omnipotence if it is enough for everyone else to believe they possess it. Aura itself can become a weapon.

Jiang's clarification is colder than Greg's version. Frank is not mainly trying to look spooky. He thinks the world is stupid, evil, and built by a false god. Since ordinary people will not accept that sin can be good, the task shifts from persuasion to conquest. Manipulate them. Use their greed and stupidity against them before they use yours against you. The rhetoric sounds warped because it is warped, but the inner logic is frighteningly coherent once one accepts the first inversion. Source trail 39:4040:4441:40 makes them seem undefeatable let's clarify certain things about sticker friend okay first of all he's not a Jew what he's doing is he believes that he's he is a reincarnation of the Patriot Jacob who found the nation of...and so what we need to do is come together as a new nation and conquer these people and lead them for their own good that's our mission okay so once you understand this then you understand what drives Jacob Frank right...

That is why Greg's timeline question matters so much. Source trail 41:5842:4143:32 new world that is based on good it's warped but you can see the logic in it sometimes you know when I have us if we've worked retail jobs or service industry jobs and you're dealing with regular people all the time you'...years ago you know when you use a term like Illuminati for example it carries a lot of baggage and there's a lot of people who kind of recoil because they find it to be kind of almost anti -intellectual an oversimplific... The issue is no longer whether the Illuminati still exists under that exact brand. The issue is whether this elite operating style, contemptuous, guilt-free, transgressive, mutually assisting, and theatrically fearless, can still be recognized in modern institutions and personalities. From here the interview stops reconstructing the past and begins naming names in the present.

Jiang's present-day test is not a secret handshake. It is trajectory. Zuckerberg refuses money early and moves upward almost without friction. Sam Altman keeps being offered the next ladder. Elizabeth Holmes acquires board-level guardians far above her proven competence. Kushner, MBS, and the House of Saud line look less like isolated friendships and more like family-level continuity. The recurring sign is seamlessness: someone is always there to absorb the risk, open the door, or rescue the ascent. Source trail 43:3444:2645:3246:2047:0848:0349:1150:02 an elite today let's look at certain individuals in our timeline in our world and then figure out why they did what they did okay so the first person I want to look at is Mark Zuckerberg and he was a freshman at Harvard...not a viable business because it's social media right what's to stop me from starting another Facebook and then having people gravitate towards that social media like tick -tock right people are fickle how was it that F...

Then Jiang adds the metaphysical motive. Traditional eschatology imagines the end as spiritual ascent. Frankist eschatology, as Jiang tells it, asks the opposite question: why become spirit when flesh is what God made to enjoy the world? In that frame, transhumanism stops looking like neutral futurism. It starts looking like an immortality project for appetite itself, endless youth, endless pleasure, endless continuation without surrender. Source trail 50:0250:50 prove it okay but like you have to eat but there's a lot of things that you have to do to get to the top what are these mysteries about how people behave in our world why these people are allowed to succeed so seamlessl...this world so when the world ends then we should be free to enjoy the world as much as we want sexual orgies all the time let's get drunk man let's eat pork uh let's just drink and we will have immortality well if you j...

Greg's response sharpens the social reading. Source trail 51:3652:2853:16 otherwise otherwise what why are you doing this yeah it's so interesting the first collection of names you mentioned a lot of people would be like well they're Jewish and it's like no they're there's something else and...these people lose a billion dollars in a day and they don't actually become homeless they just go on to the next project there's something cool about that a little bit like I I think I wish I had a little more fearlessn... What makes the continuity case persuasive is not merely that some elites are Jewish, Muslim, Christian, or something else. It is that above a certain level those divisions seem to dissolve into a shared style: outrageous risk tolerance, indifference to ordinary shame, and the habit of simply going for it. Jiang's historical thesis survives because it becomes an anthropology of the ruling class.

The interview's final turn looks at first like a topic shift, but it is really a stress test for everything that came before. Greg asks when cataclysm becomes obvious. Jiang answers with mini ice ages, magnetic weakening, solar-flare vulnerability, official denial, and rich men building bunkers. The systems diagnosis is clear: modern civilization is optimized for efficiency, not resilience, and that makes it brittle at the exact moment brittle systems become lethal. Source trail 53:1653:5554:5955:5557:00 winter is coming that gets into pole reversals and magnetic pole excursions can you talk a little bit about that or just tell us how soon you expect that to become a problem that becomes obvious to everyone this article...history if you study the past 10 000 years you will see a series of mini Ice Age events they're called killer year events and they always Herald in social collapse and change okay so branch age collapse um or started by...

Greg briefly jokes about copying elite prep: skip the iPads and build the bunker. Jiang rejects the frame immediately. Bunkers are not the main answer. The answer is neighbors who care, local community, and the social fabric strong enough to keep people from freezing spiritually before they freeze materially. This is the second great reversal in the closing act: the elite logic the interview has been anatomizing is useless as an ethic of survival. Source trail 57:2357:3057:44 Again, going back to like, do what they do. Don't give your kids iPads and build your bunker.Well, I'm not sure. The bunkers will actually be helpful. What I think we need is to rebuild a sense of community where neighbors take an interest in each other's plight. That's what's gonna get us out of this mess.

Jiang's last memorable advice is deliberately offensive to prepper common sense: get rid of most of your money. Gold, Bitcoin, and hoarded wealth become traps if they leave the mind unable to adapt when the old order breaks. What matters is spirituality, community, and creativity, because human beings survive catastrophe by imagining a new world together. Only after saying that does Jiang return to ordinary life, announcing a coming game theory course and pointing listeners back to Predictive History. The interview closes not with a bunker manual but with a question of what kind of soul can live through collapse without becoming elite-style dead inside. Source trail 58:2159:1459:411:00:22 I just want to give out this piece of new life. Okay. Okay. This is gonna sound strange. Okay. But the best way to prepare for a major catastrophe is to, you know, get rid of most of your money. Okay. Let me explain the...What matters is creativity. Then you're much more likely to survive any catastrophe, no matter what it is, because we humans are first and foremost imaginative. We have that connection to the divine, right? So in any cr...