A Warning on Conspiracy Theories: My Message to Iman Gadzhi and Others

Note: This post is a written version of a Youtube video I made that can be found here if you'd prefer a video version.

As the U.S. becomes more polarized, more and more conspiracy theories are popping up.

Many of these theories promote the idea that there is a secret organization of powerful individuals, "a global elite" behind the scenes, that are controlling the world.

I'm seeing more people get behind this idea, including a semi-hero of mine: Iman Gadzhi.

Iman Gadzhi, London's youngest multi-millionaire and business mentor to thousands.

Iman is London's youngest multi-millionaire. His courses and videos have helped me and many others transform our lives by teaching how to start a business that provides financial and locational freedom.

However, he recently posted a video titled, "i will get canceled for this", in which he argues that there is a "top secret war that is going on behind the scenes".

He claims there is a group of power-hungry "puppet masters" that are on the verge of implementing their "mass control plan", and that if we don't "step up and stop this from happening", we will face "centuries" of misery.

He ends it by hinting towards "one last chance" to protect yourself from this impending doom. Undoubtedly, this will be a product that he is releasing to help people build a digital business as he did for me.

You could argue that this is just an effective sales video, but I believe he is doing more harm than good by emphasizing this conspiratorial narrative.

To explain why, let me take you back in time to 2015.

My Story

I’m 16 years old. My parents are recently divorced and I’m living in Hawai`i with my mom and brother as my dad wanders around Australia.

I'm on the phone with him as he tells me that he doesn't understand why I'm "risking my life" by staying in Hawai`i. He urges me to drop out of high school, break up with my girlfriend and move out to Australia with him to live on the farm.

I don't know what to do.

This is nothing new. My entire life, our family has jumped from place to place to prepare for the impending "doomsday".

I learned to live out of a backpack and a suitcase, never living in one place for more than 3 years, and many times as short as a few days.

At this point, my dad is finally in the place he has desired our family to live in all these years: Australia.

He drives across the country in search of a farm and community which he (and eventually our family) can live on to protect us from the impending economic, food, and civil crises that "The Elite", a group of out-of-sight yet immensely powerful people, are orchestrating in order to eliminate the world's "undesiresables".

At 16, I believe in my dad. I trust that he is, in fact, onto "the truth" and that we must prioritize our safety by whatever means necessary.

He is, after all, my dad. And he has some very strong arguments which he has made to me from a young age.

So, by the time he starts pushing me, as opposed to my mom, to join him in Australia, I struggle to decide.

I end up buying an Australian Visa that will allow me to travel there at a moment's notice if needed, but stay in Hawai`i until leaving for college a few years later.

My internal struggle, however, does not end. At college, I am constantly planning what to do if my dad is right.

"Will the dining hall keep feeding me if there is a food crisis? Is this area safe if civil war breaks out?"

I live in constant fear of my dad's predictions coming true, brainstorming what to do in certain instances if war breaks out or the food supply breaks down. 

Above: A journal entry from 2016 on what I'd do if war breaks out between Russia and the US.

You might imagine my fear, then, when the pandemic breaks out. "This is it", I think. He was right.

I return to Hawai`i and do everything I can to ensure I am safe and have access to food. I find security in my friends and family, but my relationship with my dad is a different story.

Prior to the virus, he and I began to disagree on more and more. As the virus becomes more and more politicized, this division between us intensifies and we struggle to spend time together without arguing.

I ask for a relationship with him exempt of his beliefs, hoping for a father with whom I can just have heart-to-heart conversations without the fear of the future, but this cannot be.

He feels that the threats facing us are too strong to ignore, and that by not sharing his concerns he would not be true to himself.

As I remember him placing it to me over the phone, "You're looking for a relationship. I'm looking to survive."

This takes us to the present day. I'm 23, a senior in college and I don't have a relationship with my dad anymore.

Lessons Learned

But here's what I've realized: Conspiracy theories are very seductive to people like me who, consciously or unconsciously, believe that if we are not better than other people, we are not worthy of love.

And Iman, I think you and I are the same in this, brother. We're both ambitious young men. We both value being extraordinary and being better than others.

To think that we understand something others don't, i.e. the "puppet masters", feels really good because it is another way that we can be special.

But doing this can have very negative consequences, not just for our own relationships, but for everybody who we get on board.

By this point, your message has probably incited thousands of people to believe that they now have something figured out that others don't. It makes them feel special.

It does a great job for your sales, but it is destructive. These people are now going to walk around with inflated egos, further separating them from others, perhaps to the extent that I've experienced where they can't even speak with family members anymore because of the difference in opinion.

My message, therefore, is this: Be honest with yourself about why you're getting hooked on these conspiracy theories, and go deeper than you think is necessary.

There are a lot of seemingly valid reasons to believe in and promote conspiracy theories: A value of "truth", wanting to help others "free themselves", or a demand for "justice".

These might all be true, but it is also true that we are VERY bad at explaining our behavior. The reasons we give for our actions and beliefs are often times completely unrelated to the true cause.

I therefore encourage you to dive deeper into your own psyche and to be honest with yourself about whether there are grains of truth to my realizations in your experience.

Do you also feel a need for superiority towards others? Do you need to outperform to deserve love? How might this be influencing your beliefs? Are you after truth, or being right?

Maturity is realizing that the seductive belief that we have it "all figured out" is deceptive and dangerous, to ourselves and others.

As Aristotle said, "The more you know, the more you realize you don't know."

We can (and, eventually, we must) hold opinions and stand for something. I strongly believe in standing up for our rights and ensuring our liberties are not taken from us by those will ill intent.

However, we can do this while holding the opinions loosely, prioritizing truth and understanding over being right, and remaining humble. 

This is hard to do when we believe we deserve love from being right, though, which means there is also quite a bit of work for us to do internally.

Yet I can tell you from my experience of doing this work the past couple of years that it is absolutely worth it.

I now live with more inner peace, happiness, and love for myself than I ever have before, and I do not believe that it has compromised my ability to perform or protect myself from any potential dangers.

In fact, I believe I am even more capable as I am coming more from a place of love, rather than fear. And love always wins.

So, to summarize: Do the work, be humble, and be very careful to claim you have discovered "the truth".

I'm still learning these lessons myself, but I can tell you this: It's a nice feeling to not have to perform to deserve love. I highly recommend it.

For more writing like this, subscribe to my newsletter, "Ryan's Practical Ponderings", and my Youtube channel. I will be increasingly making content related to these topics of self-love, self-awareness, and becoming a mature and integrated man.

I will also link to a video I made on the lessons I learned from therapy, which is relevant to the topics discussed in this video.

Mahalo for reading, take care, and I'll see you next time.