When I read yesterday that Harry, the Duke of Sussex, was already coming back to America for the Clinton Foundation shindig in New York later this month after just fleeing California with his wife, I took notice.
Prince Harry is heading back to the U.S. for another major appearance, just weeks after his family’s move back to Britain.
The Duke of Sussex, 41, is set to return to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City on Sept. 22 and 23, marking his second appearance at the event after previously taking part in 2024. Harry will join a lineup that also includes Chrissy Teigen, Bill Nye and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman at the gathering, which is being held during United Nations General Assembly week.
The reason I found this relevant is because of the connection between Soft Landing in Missoula and the Archewell Foundation, which I covered here. Then I wrote about the Namchak Foundation and the connections between the Pritzker family and Jeffrey Epstein, which are numerous (more on Namchak coming tomorrow).
For today’s post I’d like to start with something WIRED wrote 13 years ago about Silicon Valley’s interest in eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism. Here’s how WIRED framed this philosophical perspective in 2013:
More than a thousand Googlers have been through Search Inside Yourself training. Another 400 or so are on the waiting list and in the meantime take classes like Neural Self-Hacking and Managing Your Energy. Then there is the company’s bimonthly series of “mindful lunches”, conducted in complete silence except for the ringing of prayer bells, which began after the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited in 2011. The search giant even recently built a labyrinth for walking meditations.
It’s not just Google that’s embracing Eastern traditions. Across the Valley, classes in meditation and mindfulness — paying close, non-judgmental attention — have become staples at many of the region’s most prominent companies. The cofounders of Twitter and Facebook have made contemplative practices key features of their new enterprises, and some 1,700 people showed up at a Wisdom 2.0 conference held in San Francisco last winter, with top executives from LinkedIn, Cisco and Ford among the headliners.
These companies are doing more than just seizing on Buddhist practices. Entrepreneurs and engineers are taking millennia-old traditions and reshaping them to fit the Valley’s goal-oriented, data-driven, largely atheistic culture. Forget past lives; never mind nirvana. Northern California’s technology community wants return on its investment in meditation. “All the woo-woo mystical stuff, that’s really retrograde,” says Kenneth Folk, an influential meditation teacher in San Francisco. “This is training the brain and stirring up the chemical soup inside.”
When did Bill Clinton and Reid Hoffman find Jesus–I mean, Buddha?
For CIA Bill Clinton, it was around the time of Barack Obama’s second term that he found a need to bring Buddhism into his life:
Buddhism made a bleep in the news early this month when the Times of India, and other news outlets, citing an unnamed source, reported that Bill Clinton, has turned to Buddhism for mental and physical well-being. The former president went so far as hiring a Buddhist monk to teach him the arts of meditation.
This may come as a surprise to some but to many others it’s only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.
For Reid Hoffman, a self-professed student of philosophy, Buddhism has been in his life for much longer.
Reid Hoffman may be best known in Silicon Valley as a cofounder of LinkedIn, a partner at the venture firm Greylock, a member of the PayPal Mafia, and, until last month, a board member of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. But behind his various tech accolades is a philosophy student.
“It’s two concepts from Buddha that form a big part of my perspective,” he said. “‘The world is what you make it’ and ‘This too shall pass.'”
Yes, Reid, the world is what you make it, and YOU helped make the world a little safer for your pal, Jeffrey Epstein, as he used his influence and connections to make the world hospitable for child-fucking psychopaths.
Can someone remind me while these people are still using oxygen?
Reid Hoffman will be in New York next week rubbing elbows with Bill Clinton and Bill Nye, the science guy, because why not? It’s not like Trump has actually done anything to make it less safe for the Epstein class to continue operating, right?
Back during the Clinton era, when Epstein had free range to rape minors and snack on jerky, a scandal revolving around “Asian money” emerged after Bill Clinton got reelected in 1996.
Before we get to the Asian money scandal, let’s recall what kind of money we’re talking about when we discuss the “Clinton Foundation”, and how this money often goes to United Ways and homeless charities–always for “early childhood learning” or the more broad “education”, of course.
With this context in mind, let’s time-travel back to the late 90’s, starting with this article explaining the context behind the phrase “It was a temple, you idiot!”:
Just as the 1992 Clinton victory produced its definitive shorthand marching order — “It’s the economy, stupid!” — so has the 1996 Clinton victory now produced an explanation in the same ringing meter for its forced retreat from some questionable political fund raising:
“It was a temple, you idiot!” screams the fine print on page 637 of the Democratic National Committee’s newly released documents explaining some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations that had to be returned as suspicions of abuse surfaced.
Anonymous himself could not have penned the pain and chagrin any better under the box listing “reason” for giving back $5,000 10 days after the election to a donor whose name was offered simply as “Buddhist Temple” in the box where a person or corporate donor is supposed to be listed.
“It was a temple, you idiot!” is listed near the bottom of a page that otherwise tends to list such unsensationally gray reasons as “determined to be inappropriate” for rebuffing various generous supporters who, in retrospect, turned out to be noncitizens or, in two cases, a suspected drug trafficker ($20,000) and someone accused of being an income-tax deadbeat ($450,000).
Next, here’s another article on this Clinton problem with “Asian money”:
To bring Suma Ching Hai into focus, imagine Martha Stewart as the Dalai Lama. The Supreme Master, 46, is an elegant hostess–and clever merchandiser. At a vegetarian dinner with a TIME correspondent last week in Alhambra, California, she wore a bright yellow dress that she designed herself–embroidered with the Supreme Master monogram (SM) and available to followers by catalog. When she gestured with her hands, she flashed gold and diamond rings with the SM design, part of her Celestial Jewelry collection–available by catalog as well. (Also for sale: Celestial purses, hats, gold dinnerware, chopsticks, inspirational videos, floor lamps.) A petite woman with long, dark brown hair that cascades past her shoulders, the Supreme Master is passionate, earthy (she says she needs a husband) and more fun than the average saint. “Of course I’m divine,” she says, laughing. “But so are you.”
At the moment, Suma Ching Hai is more than divine: she is controversial. Late last year, officials of Bill Clinton’s legal-defense fund rather shamefacedly disclosed that they had returned a donation of more than $600,000 from the followers of the Taiwan-based mystic, adding to the President’s “Asian money” scandal. Nevertheless, the Supreme Master remains a fervent Clintonite. “The poor man,” she says, erupting in his defense. “You must respect his office. How can he solve America’s problems if he is distracted? He’s in debt. He’s a suspect. This is terrible.” She knows what it feels like to be investigated: the Taiwan government is looking into alleged “fund-raising improprieties” by her sect, including the transfer of $2 million out of the country.
Scandal-plagued politicians are not the only objects of Suma Ching Hai’s charity. Whenever there is a natural disaster, she is there–with money. She says she has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to victims of the 1993 Mississippi River floods and to survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing. “Before we enter the spiritual world, we are in the mundane world,” she says. “If the Buddha isn’t a helpful Buddha, he is a boring Buddha. He is a useless Buddha.”
(Oklahoma City bombing? That’s not sus at all)
Instead of a “helpful” Buddha, or a “boring” Buddha, America seems to have gotten a seriously corrupt and perverted Buddha, one who fat fucks, like Reid Hoffman, want to use to train AI.
I wish I was kidding.
What would happen if we put artificial intelligence on a path to enlightenment?
LinkedIn founder and Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman shared a number of thoughts on the future of artificial intelligence research during the annual State of Technology Luncheon Friday in Seattle, as part of a wide-ranging discussion hosted by the Tech Alliance.
Hoffman bypassed the more near-term concerns of how artificial intelligence and machine learning will be implemented in today’s technology to think about how this headlong plunge into AI research will affect society.
This article is from 2017–which seems like an eon ago–but it’s fascinating now, looking back, to see how a nerd with an obvious caloric-intake problem was talking about training AI for a wide array of societal applications, like BIOLOGY.
He went on to explain that one’s level of anxiety about artificial intelligence research probably depends on how soon you think it will arrive, Hoffman said. If you think we’re 10 years away from developing computers with human-level intelligence, “you’re absolutely totally frenetic about it, probably a little crazy.” If you don’t think this will arrive for another 50 years or longer, you’re probably a little more blase about the whole thing.
But in the grand scheme of things, “do you know how short 50 to 100 years is on the human timeframe?” he said. If there’s even a 20 percent chance human-level artificial intelligence arrives by that point, we need to start thinking now about the impact it will have on society and the ethics that govern that research.
After all, computers only do what they are trained to do. “If you could train an AI to be a Buddhist, it would probably be pretty good,” Hoffman said.
Or, you could go in a different direction. Hoffman said he is particularly interested in what happens as artificial intelligence research starts to intersect with biology.
To wrap up today’s post, here’s another Epstein communication highlighting how spiritual creeps, like Deepak Chopra, were “riding the Tiger” and chumming around with the Dalai Lama who, according to Deepak, doesn’t actually know much about Tibetan Buddhism.
Hmmm.
Is Deepak Chopra still using oxygen? Of course he is, and he’s also still hijacking spirituality, as reported in 2025 in this article:
Last month, more than 20,000 pages from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate were released by the House Oversight Committee. The name of Deepak Chopra, the wellness guru with multiple bestselling books, appeared repeatedly. Emails showed Chopra recalling an evening with Epstein as “a blast. Ended 1 AM.” Chopra later expresses relief when one of Epstein’s accusers dropped her lawsuit. Between 2016 and 2019, continuing well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, Chopra has at least a dozen documented meetings with him.
Last Friday (Nov. 28), Chopra launched something that says more about modern American spirituality than his Epstein connections: an AI companion to his entire body of work. Ninety-five books, thousands of videos, decades of talks have been fed into a proprietary model designed to answer your existential questions. For 50 cents per 30-minute session, or $10 a month, readers can now ask Digital Deepak about their purpose, their fears, their path forward.
Reading about all this technology entangling itself with spirituality has me better appreciating the work of this guy (if you know, you know):
If you appreciate MY work, which is only rhetorically explosive, then please consider donating to my new GoFundMe page so I can consider covering the cost of my own technological harassment.
Thanks for reading!
