#427 - "I Snuck Into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones" (Here's What Really Happened) | Jon Ronson

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We were just talking off camera before we started about all the crazy protests, the Palestinian action organization that's getting arrested all over the place in the UK and the police lockdowns and the decay of freedom of speech is happening over there. But then it's documentary that I was watching this morning on the Channel 5 channel. The thing that shocked me the most was not like how many people were getting rallied up and arrested and thrown the back of these vans, but it was how kind the police men were. They were like, "Walk up! Hello, chop! We're going to have to take you in now. I don't want to break your mannequin, but please put your hand behind me back." Like it was insane how friendly they are. Right, yeah, I think that's true. Maybe they're a little embarrassed about how they're not loving these, you know, forceful restrictions on people's freedom of speech. I'm sure they're not having a good time. They don't want to be, you know, the police don't want to be part of a cultural war. They don't want to be arresting people for cultural reasons or for protest reasons. So yeah, that may be part of the reason why. Yeah, do you have any, do you have any fries that live over there? Oh, sure, you have lots of people though, fairly and stuff. Yeah, because you're originally from there? Yeah, yeah, yeah, and if they're right through to like 2012, then I still go back four or five times a year. Yes, and it is a bit of a shock. I wonder what, because I hear both sides. I hear like everything is going to hell over there. It's a shit show, the immigration, everyone getting arrested. People can't protest. And then I hear like Pierce Morgan saying, "It's fine. It's everything's great. There's nothing wrong." Like I don't know what's what's what's the truth. I mean, look, I can only speak anecdotally because of course your experience. But I've got to say, okay, so the protest thing seems to be for what I can tell kind of serious, there's lots of footage of like old ladies getting arrested for a sag free Palestine. Which, yeah, feels absurd to me. The immigration thing, actually, I just did a great big tour. I wrote this book years ago called The Psychopath Test. And I did a kind of anniversary tour recently. And just before, I was like doing 40 cities, 40 towns in Britain from, from, you know, working class cities to post cities, to country towns, the whole kind of range. And just before I set off, I saw I think it was Bill Maar was saying to pass it as well, you know, Jena was happening in England. And he's like, "No, Bill Maar's got all about God." Oh, he's like, "Delightful English villages, and I'll be completely taken over by Muslim immigrants or whatever." And I was thinking- -What, you resist? -Oh, like a year ago. -Oh, okay. -Yeah. And I was thinking, "Oh, you know, I wonder if I'm going to see any evidence of that." And in my experience of that tour, I went to like 30 towns, nothing. Like no indication of any problem. No, that's not to say that there aren't people in Britain who are having, you know, some difficulties. But I certainly do. I think that's overplayed for my anecdotal. -Right. Yeah, from what that documentary was portraying is a lot of those guys from that Palestine organization. -What's it called again? -Helistode action. -Helistode action. Right. They were breaking into an Israeli arms factory. And they were smashing all the drones and stuff like that. But apparently they had a bunch of equipment and like drones and surveillance stuff that was in this big factory, this big warehouse that was owned by this arms company that was owned by Israel. And they were breaking into it, vandalizing it and destroying stuff. And then I guess that is when the UK government labeled Palestine action as a terrorist organization. -That's right. But then it became a sort of, I'm Spartacus-type thing, like all of that. As far as I understand it, like I much prefer to talk about things when I've done my own research, and I've done my own rapid holes and I have my own adventures. And this isn't one of those situations. So I'm talking to get a bunch more, not know what the hell I'm talking about, mania here. But for what I understand, there was a kind of arms part of this thing, but like all of these old ladies were getting arrested for saying I support Palestine action. And then that clearly becomes the absurd. And I'm sure the police. -Right, right. Oh, this is them breaking down, breaking into the warehouse. -Okay. -Okay. Wild. -So, but as I say. -What are they wearing? -Jumpsuits. -They all color coordinated. -Sailer hats? Like Elron Hubbard sailer hats? The camera's way too crazy. -Right. -Oh, they got the fun gas, the colorful smoke. Oh, no, they're wearing helmets, and then she's got a sledgehammer. Oh, that's insane. -Oh, wow. They got to wear it. -Oh, dear. -That's crazy. -Yeah. But I say, I've kind of, I've just sort of veiled from the role that I have, which is that I, you know, I spend my life going off of amazing adventures and doing incredibly deep dives into weird subjects. And that's what I love to do. I always feel a bit uncomfortable talking out of my ass. -Yeah. Well, you're like a, you're what we call an immersionist. You like to immerse yourself in these crazy environments with wacky characters and extremist groups and white supremacists and jihadi extremists. -Yeah, and a lot of stuff that I think transects, the kind of stuff that you're interested in. -Oh, yeah. -I wrote the men who stare at goats, which is about how the US Army tried to kill goats just by staring at them, and I went to the psychopath tester, which is about how it explores the theory that psychopaths rule the world. It's like, you're much more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the tree than at the bottom. And then my book Them, which is where I snuck into Bohemian growth with Alex Jones. -That was fascinating. -Yeah. So those are the kind of things I don't, and I've just brought up this new one, The Castle, which is equally insane. Will I tell you how the first. -Tell me about The Castle. -Let me tell you the first page of The Castle. -Okay. -I wake up and there's a series of texts for my son. He'd been text to me while I was asleep, and so I read the last text first, and the last text said, "It's okay. We left." That was completely fucked, but we're safe now, or something, long nose lines. We're okay now. So I frantically read all the other texts, and it turned out that while I'd been asleep, him and three friends had been invited to a party being held by a stranger, big held by a stranger, that one of them had met on Tinder. So they turned up at this guy's house, three hours outside of New York City, and they turned up, and it is a massive, this guy's private house, is a massive, newly built Gothic castle, which is ostentatious, even by Gothic castle standards, like way too many turrets. -Gargoyles and shit. -Gargoyles. -That sounds fun. -A moat. Wow. So they crossed the drawbridge, and then to the grand banquet in Gaul, to discover that there's no party. They've been lowered down to different, for different reasons. So then the castle owner comes out and they say, "Sorry, where's the party?" And he said, "Oh, no, no. I've got to do it for another reason. I would like you all to take part in my reality show." So they said, "What's the name of your reality show?" And he said, "It's called 101 Princesses." They said, "What's the concept?" He said, "The concept is I'm the Lord. I'm looking for my queen. I've got 101 princesses to choose from. Go downstairs to my basement costume room, put on some princess outfits." He said this to the girls and come back upstairs. So they went downstairs to the basement costume room. -How many people were your son with? -3, two women and two and him, one male friend. And there was a couple of other equally bewildered. -Did you want the boy to put dresses on too? -No, they ended up going into big, having tuxedos. So they go down to the basement. There's a basement costume room with like racks of princess outfits and tiaras. It's right next door to his pole dancing nightclub, which has got cages. That's right next door to his hot tub botanical gardens. He's got like an underground purple tinted botanical gardens filled with hot tubs. So they put on their princess outfits. Go back upstairs. A videographer appears and they start failing 101 princesses, but it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that this isn't a real reality show, partly because the videographer was, I don't know the duties, he was cutting up meat for the castle owner. He's filming, then he's stopping cutting up meat for the castle owner doing some more filming. So they, they get kicked out because they're refusing to participate in 101 princesses. And that's the end of their story. But it's not a good idea to buy some, to your mysterious castle, and to find the future of those due diligence. Yeah. So I, I mean, to his credit, buy some was like a plus one. So this guy met one of the girls on Tinder. Yeah. How old was this dude? Early six days. Then how old was the girl? Like mid 20s. Oh my god. Yeah. Are you sure it was Tinder and not like seeking arrangements or something? No, it was to do. Although I know that he also used the seeking arrangements to get other princesses to his castle. So I go to the castle. I thought what the fuck is going on? So I went to the castle and a strange castle mouse game unfolds between me and the castle owner. He starts sending me these very menacing texts. He says he has two murderers on his staff called Carlos and Brandon. And if I ever write negatively about the castle, Carlos and Brandon will be very angry and they're on their way to find me now. And I don't want to see them angry. They've just got out of prison for killing someone. So that's the first couple of pages of the book. And the whole thing unfolds from there. Oh my god. So his, this house is in where exactly? Connecticut, in the forest. In Connecticut. Oh, in the forest in Connecticut. I should say, by the way, it's like on a road. Well, all the other houses are kind of normal houses. This is vast castle with like, you know, way too many turnets in a road of otherwise pretty normal suburban houses. So did you find out exactly who this guy was? Oh, yeah. Turns out he's the great grandson of a gilded age steel tycoon. That's how he got the body to build the castle. And yeah, every other chapter of the castle is me trying to find out what the hell is going on inside of the castle. What's going on? Because at one point, he wanted me to sign an NDA and I refused to sign it. And I noticed he had like a whole pile of NDAs in his kitchen. So he actually came to invite you in his house. Well, I invite, I, I, I, I messaged him and I said, I'm a nonfiction writer. And my son has just emerged from the castle with extraordinary tales to tell, can I come in right about the castle? So he said, come on over. Oh, wow. But then he started saying some quite unwise things to me when I visited the castle about how you said the way the princess, he called it princessing, bringing women to the castle. He said, the way the princess works is that you've got to get the girls to love other girls. And that's how princess work. So I'll just benefit from it. It made me think that at the beginning, what I thought was, okay, this guy is trying to be Hugh Heffner are pretty much the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Heffner. Unless you're the crem to our crem of manosphere influencers, you can't really laud it over your princesses in your castle anymore. So yeah, so that kind of made me laugh. And I, that became like a theme of the book. There's all these things that men used to be able to do that we can't do anymore. So I kind of explore that. But by weird relationship with the castle, that just gets weird and weird at the more I discover about what's going on inside the castle. Oh, wow. I know. Any kind of weird connections to like like political stuff or anything like that? Or was this guy like any connection to was he a spy or? No, no spy connection. Although actually there was somebody from the FBI who would go to the castle. I never got to the bottom of that thing, but there was a, because at one point when he was said to be all of these kind of ominous messages, he was saying, I've got a team of investigators who were looking into you. I've employed the largest legal firm in the world, you know, to look into you. My friend from the FBI would love to take you out for dinner. And it turns out he does have a friend from the FBI. Oh, really? Who would hang around the castle? Yeah. But that was the only friend in high places. So what is he thinking about now that the walk's out? What is he? He's probably trying to sue you. Well, I think he's a bit worried. Last I heard he said Southeast Asia. Oh, wow. Yeah, I think he's a little bit worried. But but I've been very diligent in my information gathering. Right. But it's pretty wild. I know. So anyway, I want to just tell you about that, because we're going to go do like a deep dive in all my previous work, but I just wanted to make sure. Yeah. Yeah. So going back, how early was it when you published the book about that was titled them? I was probably around 30. Pretty much. I was like five years. The first thing I did was, there was a guy who lived about four miles away from me called Oberbach Kreme Hammer, he said he wouldn't rest until he saw the flag of his lab flag over Downing Street. So I contacted him and said, can I hang around with you while you over third democracy entered into an Islamic state? And he said, fine. So I spent a year with Oberbach. This was the very first story that I did. So bloody 35 years later, I'm still doing reckless and reckless things that might endanger me. What made you want to do that? Like what made you want to go like risk your life? You know, I'm always kind of looking for some sort of absurd humor and a darkness. So with the cast, or it was like, you know, this guy is trying this kind of very outdated version of masculinity. It's not going to work out. And so that made me laugh. And with Omar, it was like, here's a guy who lives in London. So he's going to have to like use our symbols of capitalism to destroy them. And that made me laugh. So for instance, he taught me the very first day I was with him. He taught me to office world to get his Islam, the future for Britain, pamphlets, photon copied. Because office world has a special price promise. If you can find a photo in the coffee services cheaper, he'll give you a discount by one get one today. Yeah, exactly. And after Wali said to me, John, I've let you into my life. I've given you much. I would like something in return. So I was like, what? And he said, he said, can you drive me to Birmingham? There's like a secret meeting with Hamas and his bull. So I became his chauffer. So for a year, I was so much chauffer. Oh, whatever happened to him. He said prison and Lebanon now for inspiring acts of terrorism in Lebanon. Yeah, he went off to Lebanon. I got off to down 11. All of this was before down 11. This was pre 9 11. You know, some really sad things happened. I bet his young kid, Muhammad, really sweet kid. He was like 13 when I was doing my story about Obama. And Muhammad was saying how worried he was about his father because his father was, you know, I was making headlines and how worried he was. And you know, he saw Malcolm X and I was really worried that his father's going to get assassinated, you know, really sweet kid. And then a few years ago, I thought, well, what happened to Muhammad? Turns out Muhammad joined ISIS. Then decided ISIS wasn't for him and tried to leave ISIS. And ISIS being pretty fucking hardcore employers killed him for, yeah, for trying to leave ISIS. It was heartbreaking because he was such a sweet 13-year-old kid and how, when was this? It was pre 9 11. No, I knew that I did Obama and you know, that Muhammad, everything pre 9 11. But Muhammad joined ISIS and everything, I don't know, 10 years later or whatever. I know very sad. So that was my first adventure. As I get older, I start to realize that things just aren't as easy for me as they used to be when I was in my early 20s. Same workouts, same diet, generally the same routine, except now my motivation and energy seem to be lacking a little bit more. And workout recovery certainly takes longer. It basically feels like you're working twice as hard for the same result. The thing is, even though your body produces testosterone, there's a protein called SHBG, which stands for sex hormone binding globulin, that can bind to some of your testosterone, making it less available for the rest of your body to use. And that's why I started taking Marsmen. 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Omar sent to me, he said, "Did you know that there's a shadowy cabal secretly rolling the world from inside a secret room?" called the Bilderberg Group and yeah or one of our people actually said it and I sort of didn't pay much attention to it but that about a year later I was in Arkansas doing a story about a politically correct faction of the Ku Klux Klan who had banned the robes and the hoods and the crossburnings banned all the things that were presumably the most fun about being in the Ku Klux Klan and instead they had these kind of he built a marquee and discarded all the cladspin had to do this like multiple choice questionnaires like about which strengths and weaknesses most applied to them. I always remember that one of them was mix is easily which usually would mix is easily yeah now normally that would be a strength right but if you're in the clad weakness yeah and they said the same thing to me they said did I know that there was a shadowy cabal secretly rolling the world from inside a secret room so and this was like late 90s so I thought that's interesting these two extremist groups that you would think would have nothing in common both have this one weird thing in common that conspiracy theorists I believe that there's a shadowy cabal secretly rolling the world so I decided to try to sneak into the shadowy cabal so that's what them is about so let's take that thread and go back to how much before that did you go to Bohemian girl with Alex that was a little bit later on that was later yeah so I tried to get into the Bilderberg group headquarters which was where well what I discovered is that they always meet once a year in a five star hotel with golf facilities and that's where they roll the world from let me just chew my little energy okay okay sorry energy coming and you should enjoy your energy I will delicious so yes so I discovered that there was me once a year in a five star hotel with golf facilities and that's where they secretly roll the world from so and I discovered that they were meeting that year at a hotel in Portugal the Cesar Park Hotel and golfing resorts in Central Portugal okay so I went there I went there with a conspiracy theorist called Big Jim Tucker who had dedicated his life to try to expose the Bilderberg group what was your view on this stuff before you went out there did you did you suspect it was all bullshit or did you were you open-minded to like maybe this shit's real I will I guess I was sort of varying on the side of bullshit but still had an open mind but I made a decision to do no research I wanted to be a twig at the river of the story I wanted to be surprised so I didn't do any research on Jim Tucker I didn't do any research on the Bilderberg group I thought I'll just I'll just you know be a feather in the wind of the stories he won't take me so we turn up this five star hotel the day before the Bilderberg groups are supposed to arrive and we're like scouting around me and Big Jim Tucker and they're still like holiday makers there they were about to take over the whole hotel holiday makers yeah at this hotel about the Bilderberg group are coming in the next day okay vacationers oh gotcha sorry fuck the holiday maker I don't think I heard that before I forget I've had some strange followed here vacationers okay tourists yeah tourists got it oh it's Jim Tucker wrote to this notepad unaware civilians unaware civilians yeah I like that yeah so then we scouted around the hotel and then leave I'm with followed a car chase and shoes I say we're being followed I'm saying a car chase I was going 30 miles an hour and so so was he but if I'd gone faster he would have gone faster so a very slow car chase is in tune between me and the Bilderberg group security detail how do you know was the Bilderberg security detail well actually that's a good question I didn't know at first I thought maybe it's hotel security who knows I just know I'm being followed so I stop my car and he stops behind me and I thought I'll solve this I went over to his car banned on the window you know tapped and he refused to look at me oh that spooky yeah really spooky so then I found the British Embassy what it looked like like a like a hedge man of the shadow we compiled it secretly was the world yeah so I found just sat there in the car while you're knocking on the window yeah looking straight ahead yeah and I've got a press card I'm like waving it and he's not even looking yeah Jim talk about the way it's in the back of my car having the time of his life like he's loving this he's blowing kisses at the chase sir I found out the Bilderberg I found out per the British Embassy and I said I'm being followed I said I'm a journalist from England I'm being followed by a dark green ladsia belonging to the Bilderberg group and she said huh then she said go on so I said I just heard you take a sharp breath and she said well she said what are you doing here she said do you have Bilderberg's permission to be in Portugal do they know you're here she said what are you doing here you wouldn't need Bilderberg's permission to be in Portugal I mean I think she was probably you know have words were probably a little bit mad gourd what she was trying to say is you know you and you're in contact with the Bilderberg group do they know what you're doing so I said she said what are you doing here I said I am essentially a humorous journalist out of my depth maybe you can phone the Bilderberg group and explain that to them so she phoned me she said to me she said you know the good news is if you if you know you're being followed they're probably just trying to intimidate you and the dangerous ones would be those that you don't know are following you I'll see him coming yeah so I thought a how does a woman for the British Embassy in Portugal know that I'm a spook right I'd be that was kind of scant comfort because I was thinking well one of these ones are the dangerous ones and I just have to be naturally good at spotting them so that I get back to the hotel she said she phoned she calls back and says I've spoken to the Bilderberg office and they said that nobody's following you and how can they call off somebody who doesn't exist and I said he's behind the tree he was looking at me from the hide the tree by the swimming pool really yeah the same guy that was in the car that would stare you that would look like that I don't know actually there was another moment when I went to the beach like I was I was ready to abandon the story I went to the beach to calm down when I got back to my hotel there was two guys in dark glasses sitting in the lobby of the hotel and the minute they saw me they both picked up pamphled both picked up leaflets and started like reading them so clearly they were surveilling me they were trying to intimidate you too yeah they wanted you to know that they were there I guess unless they just weren't very good at being did you ever try to interact with any of them like again after the car incident or did you never find out officially who they were or what happened after that well after that we went back the next day when the building because I still don't know what's going on I mean clearly something was going on so I went back the next day and all of these cars started going up the drive these limousines started going up the drive and there was like I did later discovered Henry Kissinger David Rockefeller Peter Mandelson yeah yeah yeah Peter Mandelson who's our huge figure of British politics he's just been brought down because he was in the abstain fire yeah I saw that yeah he was there he's your typical build-up guy I ended up interviewing a couple of members of the build-up group I interviewed Dennis Haley who was used to be the charge lived the extracur in Britain or see American equivalent to that like that the head of the Federal Reserve maybe yeah or something a kid not exactly the same and he's I said why are you so secret and he said we're not secret we're private what year are we talking roughly this was about 97 and T8 something okay this is just before my behemian Grove adventure okay Alex he said so he had a whole lot of photographs and he'd taken a side build a book meeting so I asked him if I could look at the photographs and he told me to fuck off he said no fuck off so but then I'd kind of got the taste for it so that's why I suggested to Alex Jones that maybe we should sneak into behemian Grove together you didn't see Jeffrey Epstein at the build-up book meeting no no no wow I went to Ted as well maybe Steve Mannon no he wasn't there who was there David Rockefeller a lot of like the head of Hines the head of Smith-Clyde Beacham I think the publisher of the Washington Post at the time Catherine Graham she was there the way it was described to me was they were set up in the aftermath of World War II they didn't they wanted to thwart future Hitler's so the idea was politicians would get together with business leaders and create between them, create sensible policies, because business leaders don't believe in ideology, they only believe in money. So that was the Bilderberg's philosophy. The world will be safer if we give the power to globalists and businesses. - Wow, a way to transcend nation states. So big corporate businesses that are international can, I mean, essentially make more money. So we can use politicians to help dictate policy that aligns more with our objectives. - Yeah, and also, yeah, the head of Heinz all they care about is making money. So they're a safer bet than a Hitler, than some sort of crazy ideologue. I think, and this was like nine years after World War II ended, it was one day, one day. - When they were formed. - Are they still active? - Yeah, yeah, they meet every year. - Really. - Yeah. - See, I have a friend who is a former CIA officer, who was CIA officer, I wanna say 30 years. He was put in jail by the CIA for exposing the, he blew the whistle on the torture program. - Oh, Abu Ghraib. - Yeah, no, it was the torture program, yeah, after 9/11, the enhanced interrogation stuff. - Yeah. - Yeah, I think Abu Ghraib was definitely a part of that, but there was also like black sites that were set up all throughout Europe, where they were taking, you know, okay, to people and waterboarding them and doing all that stuff, and he blew the whistle on it. (clears throat) And he was saying, what was I just talking about? I just lost my whole trip off. - The CIA guy, the, the enhanced interrogation. - Yeah, well, what were you saying right before? So I brought that up. - Oh, oh, you're talking about Bill DeBurg. - Yeah. - So he knows somebody who was also a high level CIA person, who went to a trilateral commission meeting. - Right. - And he was asking her, like, what is all this stuff about, like what's really going on? Is this like some crazy cabal, like what's, and what she said was it was all arms trafficking. It was all about arms dealing. - Wow. - Like illegally moving weapons across borders and like funding wars and supplying arms to different like different civil wars and different conflicts and all that kind of stuff. - Yeah, I didn't surprise me. There was always three, there was the three big groups, Bill DeBurg, trilateral commission and the Council on Foreign Relations and back then those were like the ones that were the most of the most interest, I think, you know, people on the fridges, particularly 'cause they were kind of globalists, they were all about business, so they were against nation states. They wanted a one-world government. I mean, that was what they were aiming for. - Have you ever opened up your fridge, steered blankly into the abyss for five minutes and then suddenly came to the conclusion that you have nothing to eat? 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And be sure to use our link below so they know we sent you. All of your different books are sort of connected in one way or the other. The one about lost at sea about what people believe and all that stuff in conspiracy theorists and how they can get subjected to cults or believe in quote-unquote conspiracies and how it connects to all this stuff. It's all intertwined. - It's all intertwined. - But from the time you published that to where we are now, like there's a big gap in what we've learned from things like the Epstein files to where you have evidence. Like there's a huge problem when our government specifically holds back information or tells us false information that enables conspiracy theories, right? Because when you purposely deceive, try to deceive the American public and hold back evidence, you lead people no other option than to speculate to what the truth is here. You know what I mean? - Yeah. - And then when you have all this stuff that's been coming out in these Epstein files and the stuff that quite literally can lead any rational person to believe that pizza gate was real, you can't blame people for coming up with these crazy conspiracies. Because I mean, you've just given us evidence for it and you've provided no evidence contrary to the fact that pizza gate was real, you know? - Although the one thing I'd say about pizza and QAnon, you know, read the Epstein files, this will probably be an unpopular comment among some of your viewers and listeners. But like I was obsessed with Epstein for years, I was an early adopter of Epstein. I remember like as early as like 2017, I was walking with a fender whip for the New York Times, past Epstein's house and the Upper East Side, and I said you'll never guess whose house this is, Jeffrey Epstein. - And she said whose Jeffrey Epstein? - It's crazy. - But it is. You've been inside. - No, I wish. I would love to have gone inside. I would love to have taken a tour of that house, you know, after he died. - Yeah, it's just like, it's so monstrous. - Yeah. - And you have to park right across the street. - Yeah. - And then Howard Lettnik's house is right next door. - So I'm using Woody Allen right down the street. Woody Allen, I believe, is on this street. - Oh really? - That's what I've heard. So, but the thing is, like, you know, a few people said to me afterwards, well, you've always been a bit sniffy about QAnon, but doesn't the Epstein files show that QAnon is basically true? And my answer is always like, no, because the Epstein stuff was going on at exactly the same time that you were really focusing on QAnon. All you have to do is just slightly move your head to the left and you'd have seen the Epstein stuff there. Epstein was hiding in plain sight for years. Even, what's his name? James Passe said the airport novelist wrote a whole book about Epstein that really didn't sell many copies at all. Nobody was interested. It was only where Julie K. Brown came along in Miami, Hamilton, with the whole thing blue open. But Epstein was there in plain sight for years before that. So I would counter by saying, like, you were dazzled by things like Pizza Gate. Epstein was right there. You should have just looked at it. - Well, people, I think people did make that connection. With the Pizza Gate and the Epstein stuff. Because, you know, he was in the orbit of all these people. The Podesta, we've seen his fucking crazy dystopian, fucking demonic art, a child, and all that stuff. He has in his house. Have you seen his, so Podesta like Clintons, like he was around all these people. And those are all the people that were supposed to be linked to that Pizza Gate place. And all the cheese pizza stuff. Like, they literally dumped, the US government dumped all these emails where there's, I think cheese pizza is mentioned in the Epstein file. Something like 3,000 times. Like, that's absolutely insane. What are we supposed to do with that? They don't give you any explanation for that. And I think from what I remember, if I remember correctly in the Epstein files, was that I'm not super clear on this, but from what I can recall is that there was emails about Q&A with Steve Bannon and Epstein where they created that, right? I think that was the implication is like, they intentionally started Q&A for one reason or the other. - Right. - There's evidence that shows that in the emails. I don't know if it's provable, but there's definitely evidence for that. - Right. I haven't gone down that rabbit hole center, so I don't know. Have you ever looked yourself up in the Epstein files? - Yeah, I did. I'm not in there, unfortunately. - No, not even a mention. My friend Kurt Metzger is much in there. - Oh, I know Kurt Metzger. - Yeah, Kurt, he's in there. - Yeah. - 'Cause I guess Epstein was gonna go to one of Kurt Metzger's comedy shows on his birthday, that's why he was in there. But go look at the lineup or whatever. - That's funny. I mean, I like about twice, I think. At one point, he was giving a copy of the Ben Hustow Goats movie that was based on my book. So there was like a little bit of tiny, little back and forth about that. - Yeah. - I let I think I was mentioned in it. It's something to do with Malcolm Gladwell. I did a show where I was a little critical of Malcolm Gladwell. - Oh really? - Had I got a mention in there to, yeah. - One of the guys I talked to on the show, on our Patreon show, was mentioned in the Epstein files. I learned it the day before I interviewed him. I was like Googling him 'cause I knew like so much of his colleagues were in there. So I just Googled his name in the Epstein for not Googled. But I went on the J-Mail thing and the emails and I searched his name and he's fucking in there. - In a bad way. - Well no, it wasn't bad, but what happened was, he did a Skype call, 20 minute Skype call with Epstein. - Really? - So this guy's name's Dean Raiden and he's all a Spoonbender type guy. He was a, he wrote a bunch of books, find out what his actual description is. I don't wanna butcher it, but anyways, he's an expert on all of this Stargate ESP type stuff with Erie Geller and Andrea Pujaric and all that stuff. And anyways, long story short, his Epstein reached out to him and asked him. - He's a parapsychologist. - Okay, he's a parapsychologist and senior scientist who studies human consciousness and anomalous mental phenomena. and not such as telepathy and mind matter interactions. So he's an expert on all this stuff. He knows a lot of those guys. - So he had to zoom with Epstein. - So yeah, he had to zoom with Epstein and I asked him, like, what was it about? Like, what do you want? He goes, he wanted me to tell him stories about spoon bending for 20 minutes. - Well, if Epstein had zooms with me, I could have given him a spoon bending story. - Right, I'm sure you could. - Yes, I went, 'cause I was hanging out with Ouykella when I was asking the men to stay at courts. - You hung out with him? - Well, I went to his house. - No, what in Israel? - No, in Sonning on Thames near London. - Oh, wow. - This sort of fancy sort of kind of Dallas style mansion with pillars, he gave me a tour. I do like Ouykella, but I'm about to say something. Slatney takes the piss out of him, but I do-- - Oh, well, yeah, it doesn't matter. - Okay, but I do like him. He said we go, so he turns, I turned up. He gets with the tour, 'cause I don't know what to do. - You didn't even really bend spoons. - I'm skeptical. - Well, so he says to me, yeah, 'cause, oh, John, this is my company covered limousine. This is my onyx toilet. He has a toilet made of onyx. Yeah, and then he said, "Here is a Jewish prayer shawl." He said, "Now, in my religion, what we believe is," and I said, "Ouy, ouy, you don't need to tell me I'm Jewish." And Ouyke went, "I knew it." (laughs) He said, "Shippy, shippy, didn't I say the next person walks through the store will be Jewish?" And I told him, "Shippy is like brother and I'll go. You should do a re-- (laughs) So that was a moment, okay. - Yeah, yeah, I've had people who met him and had gone to dinner with him or whatever, and they said they were quite suspicious about some of the stuff that he was doing. - Yeah, he said they would intentionally make them look at something before he did something or whatever. But my whole take on it, though, like high level, is I think that stuff is real. I think some people probably have some crazy abilities to be telepathic or manipulate matter somehow. I think there's probably a very small sliver of society that has this ability, probably. But I don't think they can recall it 24/7. I think it maybe under certain states or maybe when you're young, it's there. But I think probably when they get older in my atrophy or they might slip away. But, wow, I realized I can create a whole career and make a bunch of money marketing this. So if I can only do it 5% of the time, I'm gonna have to fake it 95% of the time. - Yeah, there's a part of it. So I've got a whole book, The Minister of Goats, which was like looking at all of this stuff and how the US Army was tried to. Well, I met this guy in Hawaii. This is how it really began. I met this guy in Hawaii called Glenn Wheaton who was in a secret military unit called Project Jedi. It was based at Fort Bragg. And I said, what was Project Jedi? And he said it was a series of levels. So I said, what was level world? He said, level one was observation. You walk into a room, how many chairs were in the room, the super soldier would just know. So I said, what was level two? He said, level two was intuition. You're a fork in the road. You go left, you go right, you go right. So I said, what was level three? He said, level three was invisibility. So I said, I said, that's kind of a leap from level two. I said, yeah. I said, well, actual invisibility. And he said at first, but after a while, we adapted it to try to find ways of not being seen. So I said, like camouflage, he went, no. I said, what was he saying? And level four was we had a master sergeant that could stop the heart of a goat. Just by wanting it to stop. And I said, did he ever manage it? He said at one time, but his heart got damaged in the process. So I said, what was the goat psychically fighting back? And he said, no, the goat didn't stand the chance. It's what's known in palinormal circles as sympathetic injury. So that was like the thing. That was like, well, I discovered it then. I went down the whole rabbit hole to try and meet the goat stare. And I did meet the goat stare in the end. I called Guy Sivelli. He said he had a video of him staying. He said he didn't have any videos of him staring goats to death. But he did have a video of him staring a hamster to death. And I said, can I see it? And he said, yeah. So he, this was in Ohio, Curtain and Ohio. And he gets out the video. And there he is like staring at a hamster. A hamster is like on the wheel. And he's staring at it. And it's suddenly the hamster drops off the wheel and lands on its back in the sawdust. And I'm like, Jesus Christ. Then the hamster gets up and starts eating again. So I said, well, can you show me the part of the video where the hamster dies? And he said, no, because my wife said one of these guys of animal rights activists, you can't show them where the hamster dies. Oh, that's a good excuse. Yeah, so that was inconclusive at best. But anyway, but I agree, I thought a lot. Well, could there be any truth in any of this? And where I landed on was, have you heard of Rupert Shell Drake, the sense of being stared at this sort of-- No, I haven't heard of that. That's one I think I wouldn't be surprised if in years to come, some research proves this. The sense of being stared at? Yeah, you know that feeling we all have that, you know, you look around and-- Like somebody's behind you? Yeah, just that sort of weird, you know, maybe it goes back to like when we were hunter-gatherers or whatever. And, you know, so I wonder whether there's a little bit of that, that's true? Yeah. I think so. There's been a couple of times-- There's a lot of weird things like that, you know? Like, you want a weird, creepy haunted house, like you-- Yeah, well I did with the car, so that house was haunted. Wow, certainly haunted by art, because I was haunted by some old fucking weird house. Yeah, haunted, haunted vibration lay. I would say a bad vibration allowed to do. Right, right. Yeah, no, I'm never spent tonight in a haunted house. Have you? No. And maybe, not that I know of, I could have. I've had very creepy experiences in houses, specifically in New Orleans. OK. But, yeah, I don't know, I never saw like any ghosts or anything like that. And nearly to one time, I got a call-- do you know the pop star, Robbie Williams? Robbie Williams, it rings a bell. So Robbie Williams? Pull up Robbie Williams. Yeah, outside of the United States for a time, at least Robbie was like the biggest star of the world. He was like Madonna, level fame. That's Robbie. Go to his-- well, go to his Wikipedia. I want to see what it is. What kind of music does he do? It's sort of pop. Pop, that's why I don't know about him. Angels was his big hit. Let me entertain you. He's great. So I got a call from him in 2005. So I'd read them, I booked them, and liked it. I wanted to spend a night in a haunted house, and could I set one up for him. So-- and this was when Rob was at the height of this fame. Like, it was Celica, Stadia was all over the world. So I found out all of these ladies of the manner. Like, dear lady, blah. I've read on the internet that if a portrait in your drawing room is disturbed, a ghost appears, I have been contacted by the pop star, Robbie Williams, who would like to spend a night in a haunted house. And I thought, I wonder if I'm going to hear for many of them. 100% of the people I messaged emailed back to say, our house is definitely haunted. And Eddie time, Robbie wants to come. They were like throwing their ghosts at Robbie. Like, they were their kind of deputant daughters. And then Robbie bloody changed his mind and said, he didn't want to spend a night in a haunted house after all. Oh, really? Yeah, I got very grumpy. I thought no one to, yeah, they want to Robbie Williams and ghosts get on so well. They both had a manifest themselves in suits them. So, but then me and Robbie went UFO hunting in Nevada instead. No, really? Yeah, yeah. These guys all in the supernatural show. Yeah, he's really into it. What I like about Rob is that he's very much got afforded both camps. Like, he's got a foot in the believer camp and a foot in the skeptic camp. And he's always, he's the first person to tell me about cueing that, actually. He found me out. Oh, really? I think at the beginning of the pandemic, of course, I think I wasn't really paying attention to cueing on. And he phoned me up and he said, like, have you been following cueing on? And I was going, no, he goes, wow, you know, they think that all of these, you know, celebrities, aisles, they all have these like sex parties with aisles. It worked for off. Yeah, so he said, he said, look, I'm, you know, they think I'm one of the aisles. And I know that's not true about me. But who knows, maybe it's true about the other people. So me and Rob were going to go off and investigate cueing on together. But I don't know where did you go. No, we didn't do it. Oh, you didn't do it? No, we didn't. But yeah, we went, you were full hunting in Nevada, which was really fun. You find any of your first? No, you rented a, no, we kept on like, I remember one person saying, oh god, if you'd been here like 10 minutes earlier, there were two aliens on the side of the road having a fight. Then they debaterialized just before you arrived, like damn. My favorite moment for that day was he had a private plane for the day, Robby, to go UFO hunting. And we turned up at the plane. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, Vena, and my only ever private plane experience. And there's a woman standing there. And she said, Mr. Williams, Mr. Williams is friends. This is your plane for the day. She said, what I want to tell you is that Snoop, dog uses this plane a lot. What I'm saying is you can do anything, any drugs you want. Just anything. So we all kind of looked at each other and we're all like in our 40s by then. And Robbie's friend Braddon said, "What can we stand up as the plane lands?" So that's what we do. That's funny. Have you been on a private plane? I've been on a few private planes. I grew up around a bunch of rich people. So I had the luxury of having rich friends when I was younger. So I was able to jet set around. But I never saw any UFOs. I've never seen a UFO. I've never seen a ghost. I've never seen never had any kind of telepathic spooky experience. These people were poor. But one of the things that I'm super skeptical of is that I would the government spend millions and millions of dollars studying this stuff if it wasn't legit. When I was writing the minister at goats, I asked that question about the whole thing, about the goat staring. There was a general congenital stubblebine who was trying to walk through his wall. He figured that the atom, this is what he said to me, the atom is made up mostly of space and the human body and the wall are made up mostly of atoms. So what I would try and do is merge the spaces. But for me, the key word in that is is mostly, right? Exactly. Stubblebine, that's the guy who Stephen Greer said offered him $2 billion to stop all of his UFO research. That stubblebine said that to him. Yeah, you know who Stephen Greer is? Yeah, I know it's me. He's like one of the most prolific long time UFO researchers and documentarians that's out there. Very, very divisive guy. But he made, because he makes insane claims. Right. Stephen Greer claims that general stubblebine approached him in the 90s and offered him $2 billion to walk away from his UFO disclosure efforts and stop investigating classified projects. And Stephen Greer told him, no. Wow. I have some skepticism about that claim. Wow. I got a little bit of a name check in that because the bed is pretty good. Yeah, they talk about your book right there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Interesting. Famously depicted in the men who stare at ghosts. Yeah, so I would ask for that. So anyway, do you want to talk to Stubblebine? Yeah, yeah, I met him. I met him in Tyree Town, New York. Is he still alive? No, he died a few years ago now. Yeah, he never managed to walk through his wall. He kept on bumping his nose. Oh, God. So how he died? But, you know, I put that question to all of them and it gave me a very, I thought a good answer. Why do you put all of this time and effort into this weird finished stuff? They said, if the US Army doesn't do it, who's going to do it? This is part of our job to reach for the impossible. What the evidence they would cite is firstly, the high visibility jacket came from some US Army research. What was it called? The high visibility jacket. High visibility jacket. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that reflective bright-colored stuff. Apparently that came from the military. I believe that's true. Anyway, that's what I was told. The taser. I know that's a bit more of a big US weather. That's good old house. Yeah, these are all low-tech things. Yeah. Also, I remember Jim Chaden, who was like the main guy who created the Synchal of the First Earth, Battalion, which is what a lot of these experiments were based on. He said, well, pregnant women are known to lift up an automobile if their child is trapped underneath it. We have these wells of incredible strength and ability to use. On a tabular human potential. I think there's some truth. You said you've never experienced anything telepathic. I think I maybe have. There's been two occasions in my life when I'm with my son on both of the occasions. One time, I'm nearly crossing the road and the other time, I'm about to get out of my car. On both occasions, if I'd continued, I'd have been hit by a car or my son would have been. But on both occasions, for no reason, I stopped. I remember both of those very clearly. On both of those occasions, I've thought to myself, I've got to wonder whether there is something in a sort of thing that protects us from dangers. Yeah, I've always wondered the same thing. Are you familiar with the gate program where there's these kids who in the 90s who were taken out of school and put in these special allegedly psychic programs that they did experiments on them and tried to figure out if they had some sort of like higher level of consciousness, they famously would give them this pink liquid to drink. You know, have you never heard of this? Yeah, so allegedly, it was tied to this Montauk project, right, which was like the real version of Stranger Things. Stranger Things was based off this. Yes. Essentially, the best way to describe it is just Stranger Things, like 11. They were doing the experiments on her to see if she had some sort of psychic powers or like extra ESP abilities. But there's been lots of people who have come out and explained how this has happened to them. And it's just kind of crazy that that was all happening around the same time as all this telepathy and stargate and remote viewing stuff was coming out. Yeah. By the way, my feeling about remote viewing is that it sounds so great, like, oh my god, I'm part of a secret black ops military unit where with psychic spies, that sounds great. I met a few of them and I think it was a really bad life for them. Yeah. They were in Fort Mead, Maryland in this kind of condemned because they're black ops. They couldn't like get the army to like fix their buildings. They didn't exist. They didn't have a coffee machine. It's been their own coffee and to work because they were black ops. And they were in there for years trying to be psychic, like the whole lives are like sitting there staring at a yellow pad like this, trying to be psychic. So I've got a feeling that's an example of something that seems better in theory than in reality. Yeah. We had a guy on the podcast a couple times named David Moorehouse. Oh yeah. He was one of them. Yes. He's great. He was doing military exercises in somewhere on the border of Israel. I want to say Lebanon on the lab on the border there. And they were training the U.S. army was training a faction of their army to do it. They were doing military practices. Anyways, there was a guy in one of the operations from that country that was doing this thing where he was like spraying his assault rifle across the ground. There's like a term for it. I forget what it's called. It's like cover fire. Suppressing fire. He got hit in the helmet. He was wearing a helmet and one of the bullets hit him in the head and in the helmet and like knocked him back off his feet. He had an insane concussion. Like a really bad TBI. But he lived and they took him back and they put him on disability. But then he started meeting with the psychologist and they wanted to put him in this remote viewing program because they thought that whatever his TBI would ever happen to him initiated him into having these abilities. So he became a longtime member of the Stargate program. And he was breaking it down for me. How it all happened. How it all works and how you have to have like multiple points of corroboration on these things. You put all these people in a circle. You give them like very vague inputs or whatever and you ask them to describe certain things. And he explains it in a very scientific pragmatic way that makes sense probabilistically. And he's very skeptical of all the other stuff. He's very skeptical of all of the telepathy tape stuff. Have you seen that? Oh yeah. I'm and these people that can do this mind sight thing where they wear masks over their face. Like he does he does not believe he's not a believer that anyone who is performing these things in the public or like this. He doesn't believe any of that is real. He's his thing is like that's not how it works at all. Yeah. I got to say like I have no evidence here at all. But I did come away from the minister at goats thinking there was one or two of the guys I met in the remote viewing program, especially I could jump with monogal monogal. That's his daily sneezing ritual on the podcast. Well, I thought Joe you know he said he seems like a completely sensible nice guy, not a charlatan. Have no reason to lie. Very humble. I'd people say he really could do this stuff. So, you know, I don't know. Like I never saw anything where I could say okay, I know for certain that remote viewing is right here. So your remote viewed Mars a million, a billion years ago and there was a civilization there that was going to a nuclear war or something like that. So you had a nuclear war. Yeah, I met one of the beddames remote viewed the Loch Ness Monster and decided it was the ghost of a dinosaur. Oh wow. Yeah. Really? I really regret if that was true. And James is part of that. Yeah, really? Yeah, at times then at times taught a guy called Courtney Brown and Courtney Brown went on the art bell show coast to coast. Do you remember the art bell show? Of course. Yeah. I'd said that they're that he'd remote viewed a companion object and the tale of they help comment and who was listening. Yes, that's how or what's it called if it's started. Yeah, from that interview. Yeah. Oh my god. They were listening. And so there's a connection. There's that connection between the heavens gate, my suicide and remote viewing program. That's one of the craziest cult things that one of the one of the craziest cult documents. I've ever watched, I'm a heavens gay one. - Yeah, I'm surprised that not more people know about the remote viewing connection. I discovered that when I was doing a manuscript goats. - Yeah, I had no idea. One of the things that baffles me about the whole remote viewing thing is that most of the most prolific remote viewers were Scientologists. - Right. - Okay, that's interesting. - You know, I'm where we are right now. - Even right here, right. We gotta, I have an audit. What's this thing called again? - E-meter. - E-meter. - Yeah, it'll do a technological exorcism on you. It'll remove all your body things. - Okay, maybe we could do that a bit later. - A fourth hour. - Yes, you can become clear like me. So even how put off was a Scientologist. - That's right, I remember that. - Yeah, like what the fuck, what's that all about? - I had, why? - Maybe the Scientologists are onto something. I'm starting to think that like maybe they're like, we're all laughing at them and joking, you know, making fun of them, but maybe they're the ones that are right about all this shit. - If you're trying to do the research on what supplements to take and for what, you know it's a never ending rabbit hole that gets ridiculous. You keep getting different answers from different people and everyone has 100% confident that their supplement works. And in the end, you end up with more questions than you have answers. But that problem doesn't exist with blueprints, longevity mix. It's based on years of biomarkers, testing protocols and published data. Instead of having a cabinet full of supplements, it's just one scoop in water. It has study-level doses of ingredients like magnesium, touring, glycine, and creatine designed to support things like energy, cognitive performance, focus, sleep, cellular resistance, and healthy aging. Just think about it this way. You don't have to waste 10 minutes every morning, shuffling through the cabinet in your kitchen or your bathroom trying to juggle all these pill bottles and swallow a handful of vitamins before you go to work every day. This way, it's just pour the scoop into the water, mix it up, and you're good to go. One scoop, mix it, drink it, done. Blueprint also has third-party testing for purity and heavy metals, and it publishes all the results. Science-backed precision-dosed no BS. For limited time, only new customers get 20% off, plus free shipping at blueprint.brionjonson.com. By using the code, Danny at checkout. That's code D-A-N-N-Y at BLUE-PR-I-N-T dot, BRY-A-N-J-O-H-N-S-O-N dot com. After you purchased, they're going to ask where you heard about them and please support our show by telling them we sent you. I had one dealings with the Scientologists. That was actually pretty positive, it was pretty good. So it was when I started writing my book, The Psychopath Test. So I ended up, this was kind of the story that really inspired the whole book. So for some reason, I ended up. Oh, yeah, I wanted to do something about psychology and psychiatry, and I wanted to meet a critic of psychiatry to get their point of view on why the Chris Cliff's psychiatry. So I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists, the guy called Brian. And I ended up coming here to Clearwater, actually, I met a bunch of Scientologists here too. Anyway, I said, can you prove to me that Scientology is an evil pseudo-science. Is that psychiatry? Is an evil pseudo-science that can't be trusted? And Brian. The evil. That psychiatry is an evil pseudo-science. And that's what Scientologists believe. Yeah, there's a team of Scientologists called the CCHR who just hate, 'cause Elron Hubbard hated psychiatry, presumably 'cause they told him he was nuts as I guess. Right. Sorry, I developed this intense hatred of psychiatry. Yeah, I remember this now. Yeah, and so they try and destroy psychiatrists wherever they can. Or this is how they used to be. I don't know, maybe they don't anymore. So I said, I want to prove it to me. Prove it to me that psychiatry is bad. And Brian said, okay, I can prove it to you by introducing you to Tony. So I said, who's Tony? And he said, Tony's in Broadmo. Now, Broadmo used to be called the Broadmo, asylum for the criminally insane. It's where the criminally. It's on it to this day. It's where they put the most notorious criminally insane people. Well, where's the sign? It's in England. It's very close to Windsor Castle, where the King spends his summers. Oh, okay. Very close to Legoland, as well. Oh, wow. It's between Legoland and Windsor Castle. That's nice. Yeah. Perfect spot. Yeah. So. And, you know, serial killers. It's where Jimmy Savo, you know, about Jimmy Savo, right? Yeah. The BBC guy who would pray on. He's there? Well, he was dead now. But he was there, not as a patient, but as a visitor. He would go there. A visitor. And there were stories that he would. Some of the women there. Oh. Yeah. There wasn't bad enough. So Brian said this, his guy called Tony, who's in Broadmo, he faked madness to escape a prison sentence. He beaten somebody up at the age of, like, you know, 17. And he decided to fake madness to escape a prison sentence. And. But he faked it too well. And they sent him to Broadmo. He thought he'd end up in some, like, cushy hospital when nurses would bring in pizzas. But instead they sent him to Broadmo, which is like this airless windowless place you could never get out of. Why? And if he'd just done his. And nobody would believe he's saying. And if he'd just done his time for beating the guy up, he'd have got five to seven years. And by then, he'd been at Broadmo for 12 years. Because it turns out to be very easy to convince somebody you're crazy, but very hard to convince them that you're saying. Right. That's hilarious. I know, right? So did you get a hold of this guy? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I went to Broadmo to meet Tony. I went there with Brian, the Scientologist. Oh. Wow. Well, I tell you what that was like. I mean, it was crazy. Please do. We're taken through, like, high security gate after gate after gate, like, into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the police. A lot of these people violent criminals. Oh, yeah. It's pretty much all violent criminals. And they just moved a guy there who killed a bunch of school kids in Southport, and the Yorkshire Ripper was there and, yeah, some really hardcore people. So we're taken through into the wellness center, which is like the skull, all the colours are like calming colours, peaches, and the only bold colours were the reds of the panic buttons. And these patients started drifting in, and they were all, like, overweight and wearing sweatpants, you know, heavily medicated, they'd been there years, they'd, like, given up. Brian said to me, you know, Tony's the only person from the entire DPSD unit to be given permission to meet people in the wellness centre. So I said, what does DPSD stand for? D.S.P.D. He said, dangerous and severe personality disorder. He said, oh, here's Tony now, so this guy's out walking towards me, and he's not looking like the other patients. He's in very good physical condition, and he's wearing a suit, like a pinstripe suit, and he's walking towards me with his arm outstretched, like someone from the apprentice. And he sits down. This is clearly the outfit of somebody who wants to convince me that he's very sane. So… So's your path. Right. Well. So… Well. So, I said to him, did you fake your way in? He said, yeah, I beat someone up. My cellmate said, you know, you need to fake madness. Tell him you mad. It'll all be fine. I said to how did you do it? He said, well, I asked to see the prison psychiatrist, and I told him that I wanted to watch women as they died, because he would make me feel more normal. So, I said, where'd you get that from? He said, oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy, that they had in the prison library. So, he faked madness too well, they sent him to Broadmoor. The minute he got there, he said there's been a terrible misunderstanding, but they wouldn't let him out. And he was there for you. I want to go back to prison. Yeah. He said, it's a lot harder to convince somebody you're saying than it is to convince him you're crazy. That makes sense. It's just to sit in a sane way, like what he's with, you know, talking to one of the nurses. But the more you try and sit in a sane way, the more you come over, it's like, that's you're too self-conscious. He said, he said that for a while, he tried to talk to them just about normal things like football and some of the things he'd read in the newspaper. He said, so one time I was reading new scientists, and they had an article about how the US Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, did you know that the US Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives? And he said, when he saw his medical notes, they'd written, "Think's bees can sniff out explosives." Wow. So he couldn't convince him he was saying, and yeah, I spoke to the clinician there, and that's exactly what he said. He said, we accept the totally faked mental illness to escape a prison sentence, but we've determined that what he is is a psychopath, and only a psychopath would fake madness to escape a prison sentence. Right. Yeah. So, high level, what is a psychopath, and how do you detect one? Well, it's a 20-point checklist, you score zero, one or two. So after I met Tony, I thought, because somebody said to me, you know, you're much more likely to have a psychopath at the top of the tree than at the bottom. What does that mean? Like the top of society? Yeah. political leadership, political leadership, religious leadership, you're much more like at least from psychopath up there. Because society, that makes sense. Because society rewards psychopathic traits, capitalism rewards, psychopathic traits, lack of empathy. You know, if you could be a CEO who has fun, firing people, your stock price is going to go up. Bureaucracy's rewards, psychopathic behavior, right? Yeah, Bureaucracy, just money-making, people who want to make money, they will watch it. Of course, right. We're willing to cut anyone's throat to get higher on the ladder. Yeah, yes. So that's rewarded by society. Also, people are kind of beguiled by psychopaths. You know, who did the girls fancy at school? Like they, you know, the sort of distant, scary boys, like we, we're excited by, you know, these people who seem to have something missing, you know, sort of charisma. Yeah, the quiet kid, the quiet kid, it looks kind of funny, who may have a gun. Right. So, but also if you take empathy out of the brain, psychopaths have no empathy. If you take empathy out of the brain, what's left is just the desire to win. So I think psychopaths are propelled up the ladder both externally by society, but also internally by by the way that their brains work. So when I heard that, I said, that's, that's an incredible thing to say. Like are you saying that there's a, this was a Harvard psychologist who told me this. I said, are you saying that there's a particular mental disorder and it's the worst mental disorder and that's the one that we have collectively decided to reward as a society? And she said, yeah. So I said, no, that's sort. Right. So I thought, okay, well, I'll learn how I'll go on a course. I'll learn how to spot psychopaths. And then I'll journey into the corridors of power to spot psychopaths. And that's, that's what psychopath test is. So what I learned was this 20 point checklist. Okay. And it's very beguiling, actually, because there's something kind of sure that comes about it. It's all about reading between the lines. What are they saying? A tone of their tone of phrase. It is, you know, it's, it's, it's all about that. So it's, it's fascinating. So, so if you can get them talking about empathy, because callous lack of empathy is one of the atoms on the checklist, because they see empathy as a weakness or they see empathy as something that doesn't exist. So it's really interesting to talk about that, but the atoms on the checklist are grandiose, self-worth, glib superficial charm. I went to interview this corporate CEO called Chainsaw, our Dunlap, who lives in Florence. Chainsaw, our Dunlap. Yeah. He was always famous for like going into a failing business, firing 30% of the workforce, always with a joke, like somebody sent to him one time, I've just bought myself a new car. And he said, well, I tell you what, you don't have a job. So I, I, I've emailed him. I didn't want to say, can I come and interview you to find out for your psychopath. So instead, I said, I believe you may, you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you fearless and interested in the predatory spirit. Can I come and interview about your special brain anomaly? Well, do you think that's something that's like inherited or do you think that's something that's developed like nature versus or nurture something that can happen in early childhood, like not having parents, being a victim of child malnutrition or okay. So the consensus is the baseline, you're born that way. But I, and I wonder why they've come, I think they've just done, you know, brain tests and so on. But the consensus is that you, if you were psychopath, you're born a psychopath. However, what you, the nurture side of it is also very important. That's an enhancer. Totally. Like if you, if you could be dormant and then something could unlock it. Yeah. Or if you grow up in a stable family, then you might end up a corporate CEO like Shane, so I'll done lap. Whereas if you're born into a kind of family where there's abuse and so on, you may enter black or Tony and broadmore. Oh, yeah. He had a terrible childhood. Right. So I think that's where the nurture, the kind of fits together. But anyway, so I'm interviewing our dumb lap is Florida mansion. I said to him, I said, you know how I said to my email that you may have a very special brain anomaly because yeah, it's an amazing theory. It's like Star Trek. You're going, well, I said, well, some psychologists would say that this brain anomaly makes you a, he said, what? I said, a psychopath. And can I, I have a list of traits in my pocket? Can I go through the list with you? And he said, okay, I think what saved me was our, our done lap. Like all of us love nothing more than mental health checklist. So I said grandiose sense of self worth. And I looked up, he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself. He said, well, you've got to believe in you. Right. So we went through the checklist, redefine all the items as business positives. So shallow affect is one. That's an inability to experience a range of emotions. And he says, well, who wants to be weighed down by nonsense emotions when you're in the marketplace? I said, cutting manipulative. He said, that's leadership. So yeah, here we go. Yeah, this is the list. It's the hair. It was hair himself who taught me as I went on a. Glidness, superficial charm. Previous. So okay, some of them surprised me. Number 12, promiscuous sexual relations. That one surprises me. Wait, which one? A number 12. Well, promiscuous sexual relations. Yeah, because you know, I, my promiscuous days are behind me now, but I look back on them with some fondness. Yeah. I have a lot of these juvenile delinquency delinquency. Well, the reason why I called abuse. Right. Yeah. This is worded slightly differently to the one, of course, but it's basically the same thing. Early behavior problems is an important one because the most mental disorders manifest when you're like between 10 and 12 years old. Like that. Yeah. Actually, I met a kid the other day with ADHD. He was eight. So it does, it is earlier. But I think a lot of times it kind of happens when you're 10, whether it's an anxiety disorder like OCD. Yeah. But also, you know, the opposite of anxiety is psychopathy. Literally, I think the opposite of anxiety. Well, I believe so. And I put this to people and I was writing the psychopath test because if you're, if you're anxious, like I am, you have an overactive amictola. You're a mictola. That's true. Shoot signals of fear and distress and remorse up and down to your central nervous system. And that's why people have, you know, that's, that's where anxiety comes from. Where are psychopaths? I have an overactive amictola because I have an anxiety disorder. Psychopaths have an underactive amictola. They, they, that thing doesn't, doesn't work. Yeah. There is no signals of fear and distress and remorse. Right. Which makes me think that psychopathy must be pretty much the most pleasant feeling of all the mental disorders. Maybe, yeah. They just don't feel anything. Yeah. And why would you want to, why would you want to fix that? They don't have anxiety. All the things that keep us good are painful feelings that psychopaths don't have. That's interesting. Are you familiar with who, uh, for each, each dog bent off? He was one of the big guys in the remote viewing days. No, he was, uh, I think he was the one who introduced Erie Geller to, um, target computer. The horridge. Oh, okay. Yeah. He was one of the biggest remote parapsychology dudes from Israel. And he was working with either the Israeli army or the Mossad as far as part of their whole parapsychology division. And he was working closely with a lot of guys that were over here. He wrote a book called Stalking the Wild Pendulum. Okay. Um, and he ended up dying in like a plane crash. But he did this crazy video, which we've talked about in this podcast so many times, which is fascinating. He shows, he's on this talk show, he's showing this bell curve of consciousness. And he's like, at the very beginning of the bell curve, when it's very low, here it is, right here. So he shows the beginning, we should just listen to it. Okay. That's the best here. Throw your headphones on, you can hear him explain it. Right. That is our visual system has evolved. Let me draw a, what is called a bell curve, which looks somehow like this. This bell curve gives us a good picture of where most of the population is. That is what typifies a population. We can use this diagram also to describe evolution. The bulk of the population today is this intelligent moral, I think intelligent bipedal, right? And with a vertical spine and who pushes the buttons on TV and drives the car, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there is some backstroke that is, there are some people here in this area, very few people who are still gorilla-like. That is very hairy. They beat their chest when they see the neighbors and a few other things. And then we have other people who are here in this corner, very few of them who are very highly developed because we say that evolution is now pushing mankind in this direction. away from the gorilla types towards a very highly evolved people. At this point, we're here. What's going to happen, maybe a million years from now? Half million years from now. This curve is going to shift, it's going to shift like this. That is, the bulk of the population will be very, very highly evolved. We've gone away altogether from the gorilla types, no more gorillas. And what we have here now is the average man is now the retarded person. In evolutionary terms, the bulk of the population is extremely very, very highly evolved. And the cutting edge of evolution here, these are very, very highly evolved people. We can't even imagine what kind of person that will be. He may not have a physical body at all. Was the habitat, so to speak, of this group here? Well, you just go out and you find them, they're all over the place. The habitat of this group here, what do you think? What do you think you'll find these people here? I suspect you would find them in universities, you'd find the people who are very bright, people who are leading edge of professions. And it's an intellectual thing. Well, I suggest that you find them in mental hospitals, in that house. And the reason for that is that these people live in a different reality, in a reality which is very changed, and few of them are adapted to live in this reality. So naturally, they can't function very well. So the only safe place, only good place for them, would be the mental hospital. Unless they can integrate their different view of reality with their daily lives. Now, if they can integrate it, then we have people like Newton, like Darwin, like Grader Day, these are the so called genius. Fascinating, right? Fascinating. And actually, it reminds me of a woman that I know, called Eleanor Longton, who I used to go I used to talk with her, actually, I didn't view her on stage. Such an amazing, sorry, that really speaks to what he just said about mental hospitals. What is her story? Her story is she's a student, someone in the north of England, 18 years old. One day she gets out of bed, and she hears a voice that says she is getting out of bed. So then she kind of looks around, there's no one there, walks out the door. She hears a voice saying she's walking out the door. So this goes on for like a month. She describes it as like the most boring podcast you can think of. She's going to college, she's walking down the street, and we're off to about a month of this. She had no problem with it, it was just like companion voice, an auditory voice. Yeah, just a voice, just narrating whatever she was doing in the third person. And she almost saw it as being like companion, like she was a bit lonely and miserable. She's just gone to college and she almost saw it as like a companion. Anyway, one day, yeah, there's Elena. So one day she said to her roommate, something funny is happening to me. I'm hearing this voice, and she said her roommate just looked horrified and said that's really bad. That's addictive of a very serious mental illness. So then suddenly the voice changes tone and I had no longer like calmly saying things in the third person, it's like sounding, you know, nastier. So then her roommate says you gotta go to the college doctor. So she goes to the doctor and the doctor says, you know, what's wrong? And Ellen says, well, I've been feeling some anxiety, I've been feeling some depression, and the doctor's like looking really bored. And she goes, oh, and I'm hearing a voice on the head. And the doctor like spins around just like the real, you know, drops a pencil. And says, well, you know, I've sort of sent her to a mental hospital. And basically, and that's when she's told she's got schizophrenia or she's got syphrenic. And as soon as she's told there's something wrong, it becomes wrong. Now it's not just one voice, it's like 12 voices and they're yelling at each other inside her head. Like their pathologist, they've become sort of evil because she was told by the medical establishments that it was bad. Oh, wow. So she ends up going into mental hospital. She says, I want to leave and they say, if you leave, or section, you know, is that a word in America? It just means we, you know, well, like an involuntary hold. Like a bigger act to you. Yeah, we'll basically keep, yeah. So she ends up in and out of mental hospital. By now there's voices screaming at her. She has to get a, at one point, she buys a drill like a, like a, you know, electric drill. Drill a hole in her head to get the voices out. That's how bad it is. And then finally, after all of this, she meets somebody more sort of holistic mental health type person who says the voices are a part of you that, you know, you're treating them like an enemy that needs to be expelled. And this is what you're told they are, but actually they're a part of you, they're your friends, they're you. And so she learned to live with her voices. And she still has some life. She still hears the voices all the time. But now she sees the voices as her friends. And she said she went back to college and got the highest degree that the college had ever awarded anyone. She said that the voices were giving her the answers in the, in the exam. Yeah. Now she's a very successful psychologist researcher. But yeah, but that story reminded me of that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And also like what way, what direction are we involved evolving? Like, are we evolving to become more psychopathic? Like, are we, are those traits, are those traits more adaptable to where we're going or where we're headed? Yeah. I think so. You know, when I wrote the psychopath test, I kind of hedged my bets a bit about, is it really true that psychopaths are all the world? Like, I'm showing one side of it, but then I'm looking well, you know, so, but now looking back on it, it's definitely true. Society definitely rewards psychopathic justice. Yeah. And we are becoming more psychopathic. We are, social media is a very big part of it. What does social media do? But, you know, discourage empathy. People claim to be, be very empathetic on social media, but it's always a very selective empathy. They're just empathetic for the people in their own little bubble. But then they have zero empathy for their ideological opponents. And that's another form of lack of empathy. If you're only empathetic towards the people who believe, you see the word exactly the same way you do. You only have to go on X these days. Yeah, I go on X and all it is is videos of people getting killed and beaten up and so on. Right. You know, that's a, that's promoting psychopathic values of people to take it. Well, certainly making us numb to that kind of stuff. Yeah. Well, numbness, that shallow affect and inability to experience a range of emotions. Absolutely. And I think, and you know what, this is something I've had about in in the car, so the book I've got coming out, well, now as we're talking, it's about one thing I look at in the car, so is how both YouTube algorithms and also the death of industry, the death of institutions are turning people haywire. They're kind of turning us crazy. So this idea about the death of industry. Yeah, the death of institutions and so on. Do you think the institutions are dying? Oh, yeah, I think so. We're like, which ones? Well, you know, your podcast has more listeners and viewers than most legacy. Right. It's just changing. There's definitely still, you know, like Google, I think, is an insanely powerful institution that it pretty much runs the world. Today's episode is brought to you by Mod. Mod prescribes, get this a daily medaphanil drink that will keep you wide awake and energized throughout the day. Basic caffeine energy drinks temporarily block a denocene, which is a chemical that makes you tired. But medaphanil works throughout multiple pathways in the brain, dopamine, norepinephrine, histamine, and aurexin, all to achieve energy and steady alertness for 10 to 12 hours. Medaphanil has been used for decades by the highest performers where concentration and alertness matter, including fighter pilots, soldiers, and astronauts. And it's now available at mod.com to qualifying patients. Visit mod.com. That's m-o-d.com for a free consultation and 10% off your first order plus free shipping with the promo code Danny. That's promo code Danny at m-o-d.com. See their website for important safety information and thanks to mod for sponsoring the pod. I got this incredible. I really want to tell you about, I went to the cage fighter at the White House. You went to that? Yeah, I was out there with South Florida. I'll tell you all about it because something really, actually, this quickly now, I did it for my book for the cast. How do you get the invite to that? Well, okay. So when I finished writing the cast, so my American publisher said, you've got to get to the cage fighter at the White House and write about it. And I said, I'm only going to go, like I'm exhausted. I've just finished this book. I only want to go and get access to the South Lawn. I don't want to be like sitting at the nearby JWB. Marriott watching it on TV with all the other shutouts, and they got me access to the South Lord. I've done it for GQ. And I mean, yeah, I got this, so I was there for the whole thing. But the reason why I mentioned it is that thing about the death of institutions and so on. There was this moment. So only a tiny handful of us got to watch the fight on the South Lord that night, but a couple of days earlier, everyone was invited to look at the claw to go onto the South Lord and look at it. So I went along to that anyway, even though I could go to the fight itself. And there was like a hundred journalists there. I just remember for the UFC, I was like, "Okay, everybody, content creators and videographers form a line to the left, print journalists to the right." And there was a vast exodus to the left. Like 98% of the people there were videographers and content creators. The print line was like me, the Toronto star, but this kind of little ragtag of redundant dinosaurs. So that's an example of the death of. And I tell you what, I looked over the content creator line. I've never seen a press pack with so many neck tattoos. I think it really. It really grows. How good, right? Oh, wow. Yeah. What an incredible production that was. Oh God, the UFC does part of the show. I mean, and that was also like one of the most invigor, like one of the most energetic and like spectacular UFC cards involved. There were all knockouts. Right. Yeah, if you want me to knock out. It makes you speak skeptical of like, you know, it's no way it could be fixed, but it's like, it's crazy. Right. That of all the UFC fights to have all knockouts. Like it was the one on the White House lawn. Probably the first and the last that will ever happen like that. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case. Yeah, it was really. As Dana White said to me, if it wasn't for Josh Hoke, Obama's a man. Yeah, he said if it wasn't for that moron, that would have been perfect. I couldn't have a green light. Like, I don't know what the mainstream media naysayers would have latched on to if Josh Hoke hadn't done that stupid thing. Yeah, but yeah, but the production was incredible. At one point of the day before at the fan fest on the limousine, this bold eagle flies, you know, so low above our heads. You know, it's telling to practically touching us. And that was amazing. I've never experienced that before. And they were supposed to be crazy storms and stuff. Yeah, in the last minute, they were like alleged they were going to have to push the start of it back to 10, which I mean, the fights wouldn't end until like two or three in the morning. Yeah. And like, last minute, the storms diverted the other way and they had perfect weather. Saying that, though, like anything related to Trump, it did drag on and on and on. Like, I was still there at like 130. Yeah, they all do. Yeah, they all go super late. Yeah. But, yeah, it was, it was, it was amazing. We were all sequestered on the, we had to get them at quarter to three in the afternoon to get through like secret service security checks and everything. So we had to sit in the White House press room for about five hours while we wait for the, you know, for the fight to start. And there's only a tiny number of us. There's a couple of UFC sort of journalists who follow the UFC, like everywhere they go, like a British guy who works for Conor McGregor. He was there. Then there was a few people like me. There was me doing it for GQ. There was something from Hollywood reporter. There was a photographer from time. And I was basically yeah, I was, you know, I was a tiny number. Anyway, something exciting happened while we were waiting. And it was there usually, Trump was having a pre-fight, birthday dinner. And usually the luminaries would go in through a different door like mouse from the press room. But that door was shut, I think, for security reasons. So all the luminaries had to walk right past the press room. And the journalists know like the embedded journalists, right, this never happens. So we all went outside to take photographs and try to interview JD Vance and Mike Johnson, the all-walking pyres, Dr Oz, so on. Now GQ has commissioned this legendary maverick street photographer called Bruce Gildon to take the photographs for my story. Bruce is this kind of crazy 17-hour-year-old guy, you know, a very maverick. So I look over him, Bruce and one of the luminaries are like hugging each other and right up in each other's faces. And luminaries. Yeah, one of the people who were going to Trump's birthday dinner. Big shot. Yeah, big shot. Bruce and this guy are like hugging each other and laughing, delightedly in each other's faces. And then Bruce takes a photograph. And I see the photograph. And it's a great photograph. He's like, you know, this guy's like gritting. So it turned out to be Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary. So I said to Bruce, do you know each other? He goes, no, no, no, you know, I just did that. But I know people, see, I know people. So then I mean, it wasn't very well with Sean Duffy. But then Steven Miller's walking towards us with his wife and security detail. And Bruce, like clearly feeling emboldened by how well it had gone with Sean Duffy, does the same thing. He lunges at Steven Miller, grabs him by his shoulders and starts like laughing delightedly in his face. And Steven Miller's like security detail done a weather to like go for the guns, like everyone's suddenly really shocked. Like who is this? And I hear all these white house staffers going, going, you know, who is that guy? What's he doing here? What's going on? Like, should he be here? Did he come over the wall? And I hear someone go, I think he's with GQ. So I'm like, I just like stomp as far away from this. Yeah, I'm thinking I've been here all week and punch rust tops and there's just fucking it all up for me. So that's what happened just before the fight. So did you get a good photo, Steven Miller? You know, the photo, Steven Miller wasn't quite as good. GQ were using it in the piece because I tell that story. The one to Steve, the one to Sean Duffy was great. Yeah. And a great photo of Josh Hockett. I've got a theory as to why Josh Hockett said Michelle Obama's the man. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So earlier that week, Josh Hockett does this press conference. It's media day. All the fighters are coming in one by one, doing a little, you know, back and forth with the journalists. But Josh Hockett decides to do it as a comedy routine. Right. So he comes in and he's like, and he's, he may be a very good fighter. He's a terrible comedian, like no comic timing whatsoever. And he does, he's characters. And at one point, he says as a joke that he's going to take his cup, his growing, protecting cup off and throw it at Trump. That's what he's going to do when he wins. And there's like a sort of audible gas in the room. Like, don't, you know, and then Josh Hockett, like immediately realized he's made a mistake. And he says, he's so, no, I'm not going to do that. That wouldn't land. Yeah. That would do a lot of joke. Guys, work with me here. Guys help. Yeah. My theory is that that was festering. And Josh Hockett's mind all week. Like I said, something to insult Trump. You know, I've really fucked this up. I see. And that's why he overcompensated. I think he says that though an every fight. He said, I think he always says, we said about this amount. I think that's his stick. I think he always said he said that many times really during a post fight interviews that he's done. I couldn't be wrong. Well, well, from what I've heard is that he's actually a really intelligent, well-spoken guy behind the scenes. And he's playing this character, this dumb sort of like, yeah. America type guy. He used to be an NFL, he used to live in the NFL, well, I didn't know that. Yeah. I saw an interview with him where he was being the actual human being. And he just made the whole thing all the more baffling. Unless I'm the one being jokes, like my theory is that no one likes his characters. People just think he's an idiot. Dana White thinks he's an idiot who ruined that night. And he's a great fighter. It's a great fighter. Yeah. So what does it come from insecurity? Like, what's going on? Anyway, I said that today to White. And he says, he says, if you can get to the bottom of that, then I'll implore you and you could be the therapist rule. The knuckleheads I've got on my roster. Yeah. So I don't know. It was such a great show. And I couldn't, but I couldn't help get the vibe when I was watching it. Like, just the production of it was so good. It felt almost like, I mean, obviously, yes, it's manufactured in some way, but it felt so manufactured to where, like, they were cut cutting to the shot of all the Navy guys and their Navy uniforms going, yeah, yeah, yeah, like, and you have like, it cuts to the parking lot of like the waffle house across the street or whatever it was where all the people were stacked up, like huge crowd of people's cheering, yeah, America, all this stuff. It just, it felt like the propaganda piece from America, you know what I mean? And you know what it really reminded me of was that hyper-normalization movie, but I hadn't heard it. Yeah. Atoms had the close end of my week. Yeah. I always watched. I love his films so much. And I've watched hyper-normalization. I watched it for the second time recently. And that's what I just got that feeling from it to where it's then the idea hypernormalization is where everyone knows that everything's coming apart of the seams, but they're pretending that it's not. They're trying to get through the day and make, you know, not face the truth of their miserable existence. - Yeah. - And like, you know, at some level, it's kind of like this crazy spectacle of American greatness and superiority and toughness and strength and, you know, at the same time, like the country is unraveling with, you know, these foreign wars. The Epstein files coming out. You got Howard Lutnik sitting there at this damn thing when he was like the guy who was with Epstein and famously lied about it on some stupid podcast. - Yeah. - And was his next door neighbor and it's just like, you can't, I can't compute that this is actually happening. - Yeah. - And it has to be some evil cabal. And yeah, exactly there, and they're putting on the Hunger Games. No, I 100% agree with every word that you just said. You know, the day before, the day before at the fan fest, they had a video of great moments from presidential history that was put together by the UFC and it was, you know, asked not what you can do for your country and then we land on the moon because it's hard. And Obama's, there isn't a red America, a blue America, there's only one America. The montage skips Biden. (laughing) And all the time I'm watching, I'm thinking, I wonder what they're choosing for Trump's moment. And I'll tell you, it's the picture of him with the blood and his ear and his fist going, fight, fight, fight, fight, blood and strength. And then the next night, there's people, you know, beating the living shit out of them. Yeah. Which other on the White House law and blood and strength. You know, a lot of people think that thing was fake too. Well, that's the whole Butler thing, yeah. Right, well, actually, when I was at the White House press room, I met the photographer, somebody said to me, you got to meet this guy. No way. Yeah, so he said to me, you got to meet this guy. The guy who was running around, the bait right there in front of it. Yeah, the guy who took the famous photograph, I think he's either AP or Roaches, I can't remember. Yeah. The first guy, we're dressing away. And I said to him, I said, look, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but that one, you know, that one seems odd. I got to say he got annoyed with me. He was like, visibly annoyed. He was like, I was right there. Somebody got killed. This was not, this is not fake. Yeah. So he said, well, the conspiracies aren't that they don't think that the bullet was fake. I mean, it's obviously a guy got his head blown off. I think two people were killed, right? Evan Brutian. Is that him? I'm pretty sure of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's him. Very buff. Find a photo of that guy. Buff. See if that's him. Yeah. I just remember saying to me, be Evan, he's very buff. He took this photo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. I've met him while I was waiting in there. It's copy. Yeah, that's crazy, man. Yeah. Oh, this dude. Oh, that's him. That's him. He looks hardcore. He wouldn't be, I mean, if that was something that was set up and planned, he would not, they wouldn't fucking, they wouldn't keep, you know, bring him in on it. They wouldn't brief him on it. Definitely not. But I definitely got the sense that he's kind of sick of hearing, hearing that story. But he said, there's like, there's different, like, you know, there's different levels of conspiracy. Didn't the wife of the guy who was killed say that that she thought that somebody, that there was an inside job that there was somebody on the inside working with? Did she? I don't know. He'd like, just like the guy who did it right on the periphery. Right. Right. Yeah. Oh, look, this guy does a jujitsu. He took bronze, wow. I'm glad I didn't annoy him that much. So these are jujitsu guys. Yeah. But he was great. He was lovely. I really, really liked the embedded journalist at the White House Press Room. Yeah. Well, I forget exactly everything about it, but like there was like this religious, somebody made this, this connection to, uh, uh, it was Heather Lynn. Remember what she was saying? There was a, there was a biblical passage, Steve, where it talked about blood on the foot and something else and a sacrifice or whatever. Yeah. It was like a, some sort of a, like a ritual thing that allegedly was taking place there. And that's, you know, there's no way to prove that. But like, there were a lot of really weird things. Like with the, the guy crooks meeting, he was pinged somewhere right at an FBI office, like far away from there a couple of weeks before that. There was no silverware in the parent's house. And like, there was all these video, like first of all, the FBI and the law enforcement agencies came out and said, we knew nothing about this guy. We had no evidence that this guy was extreme or nothing like that. Well, we know the NSA spends endless amounts of dollars looking for this stuff. I mean, that was like the Patriot Act and all that stuff that came afterwards. So and then Tucker somehow unearthed all this stuff, footage of this guy, messages from this guy asking questions about like shooting and guns and all this stuff. Like he was, there was a lot of shit out there with this guy that he was able to find. And allegedly, the NSA was never able to find it, never give us any evidence of it or whatever. Just cross my mind. More than one said, maybe that said, wrap it whole I should go down, it's, it's but look. But I don't know. I don't want to go down to big wrap a whole and find nothing but I think it was definitely a turning point for a lot of people with, with Trump because like, at least for me, like right after that happened, I had this feeling that like, this is, this maybe changed him. You know, because after that when the whole big convention happened where Hulk Hogan did the speech and Tucker did the speech and he had the thing on his ear, whatever. It's like, oh my God, like maybe he's changed now. You know, maybe this, you know, something happened that is going to like alter his trajectory. He's going to not going to be the same guy. He's going to be more empathetic. He's going to be more whatever, whatever, you know, it's going to help him change him for the better. Right. And, you know, obviously that didn't fucking happen. And just, you know, but it probably, you know, I've had to change him. And there was also this whole narrative of divine intervention, right, this religious narrative. And you know, there's also this crazy religious push happening with these tech people that are behind him, like Peter Teel and all this stuff. They're now all embracing Christianity and all this, all this shit. And there was this whole narrative of this like divine intervention where all the, all the Christians and the Catholics were saying that like he's preordained to be. And then you now we have the Iran war and there's that whole story that came out where this was reported. A lot of whistleblowers in the American military that said that their elite, their commanders told them that Trump was like appointed by Christ to like end Iran or whatever, right. So like there's so many different little threads that come to this thing and it's not adding up. We didn't get any answers about it. And that's the problem. That's why people come up with these theories again to go back to what we started off with is like, we don't get answers. That's a big black box. And Trump coming in as the person is going to provide the answers, like you said, clearly turned out to not be true. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'll just remember another thing about Mike, the UFC fighter, which I found interesting. One of the things I look at in the castle is that is this idea about these men like my castle owner creating this sort of weird bubble from Southwake and our princesses and so on. Part handle the outside world, he can't handle how society is changing and society is getting more kind of feminized, I guess. And so he's kind of creating this sort of weird fantasy bubble. Is that really his house? Yeah. That's his house. Whoa. And it looks like a dystopian Disney castle. Yeah, it does. Yeah. Do you think there's too many turrets? Yeah. What are the turrets again? Yeah. The pointy things. Yeah. Yeah. That is. Too many everything. It's just too much everything. That's fucking weird. All right. So that's the castle of my book of the castle. Did you imagine that like a normal neighborhood, like that would have to be in the woods. You couldn't put that next to like a normal house. Right. He's always been. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But so he's kind of creating or trying to create this world where he has all of these princesses. It's a kind of playboy mansion type thing in that world where this man's deeply disturbed. Right. Yeah. And I had an incredible three sort of cat and mouse game with him. And that's what most of the books about people are taking photos in front of it. See? Go down. Yeah. Zoom out. Zoom out. They don't have a TikTok account for a while. They don't have it anymore. Oh, a TikTok account. What? Which was very popular. She had like 800,000 followers. Wow. That's the dude. Yeah. That's him with his llamas. Camels. Yeah. That one looks like a llama. Baby camel and a big camel. It was reported during his divorce hearing that Stone, bro. It was reported that one of his camels had staffed to get to death due to neglect. Start to death. Yeah. Now, I don't know much about camels, but the one thing I thought I knew is that they can last months without food, so that sounds like a lot of neglect to one of them staffed to death. That thing had been expensive to build. That's an incredibly huge fucking castle. It really is. It's a cathedral. It's a cathedral. And jealous. Yeah. That bird cage is for his circus performance. Uh-huh. Yeah. I know where is this guy from. Well, he's. I think the family comes from Illinois, but he's in Connecticut, and his great-grandfather was a Gilded Age steel tycoon, that's what the buddy came from, oh well, that's it, under construction. Interesting. Yeah, a wood frame. But I tell you what's kind of, what, bringing it back to the UFC fight, the thing I found interesting was, I was talking to Sean O'Malley, the father sugar Sean O'Malley. Sean O'Malley, who always boasts about his open marriage, his one, his one-sided non-monogamous marriage. So he's allowed to have sex with other women, but his wife, Bania, isn't allowed to have sex with other men. And the way he explains it is, it's, and you take puts it, I have status, I have status. So I said to him, thinking about my castle owner, and the, you know, the world he's trying to create for himself, it's at his castle, I said to him, you have an open marriage, surely that doesn't work. And he said, well, worked until it didn't, and it turns out that Sean O'Malley, I think I'm the first person to break this information, turns out that Sean O'Malley's open marriage is over. The marriage is still good, but she said to him, no more, no more, open marriage. Oh, she wants to go bang other guys? No, no, no, she wants it to be monogamous, she wants it to be like a non-monogamous marriage. Oh, I was mad at him. No more other women, no more. Yeah, no, no. And he looked so baffled as he was telling me this baffled by this change and his fortunes. He's not allowed to do this anymore. He's young, right? He's super young. Yes. But it made me wonder whether, whether this kind of, one of the things I traced in the car, so through my car slowly another man that I made in the book, including this YouTuber, who's got like, wow, the story I've ever done pretty much. I think I've, I think he's got the strangest story that ever happened on YouTube. Really? Yeah, Greg Chisholm. But anyway, I thought, there's, there's all these people like creating this, these fantasy ball to themselves where they can like, in a way as a response to cancel culture, like, fuck you, I'm going to do whatever I want, so I'm going to be completely disinhibited. My way or the highway, but Sean O'Malley discovers that real life sometimes snaps back and stops you from doing those things, and it made me wonder whether, like, the pendulum swimming is sort of moving back a little bit now from people just, you know, that sort of manus theory behaving, however we want to behave back to something a little bit more. Well, I think that that stuff was a reaction to all of the other, you know, crazy, trans stuff that was happening during the Obama, Biden years, you know, all like, you know, the whole, the whole thing with, you know, all of this, these trans protests and like doctors trying to get kids to transition and stuff like that, and like, there was a lot of, a lot of craziness that was happening for a while, or that was like really being pushed, right? And where I was like, you know, even gay people I would talk to would be like annoyed by it. Like you're, you're, you're bringing us into this fucking circus that we don't want to be a part of. We want to be left alone. But then you have this group of people who call themselves like transgender or they have a million different words. They identify as a fucking llama and, you know, they want all this attention. They want to make noise and they want to make a big deal out of all of this stuff where it's like you're creating, the argument is like you're creating more of a divide between like us normal people, us normal gay people, we're now getting lumped in because you're, you guys are acting so fucking crazy and unhinged, you're just driving more division. I, you know, in the car so I look at something a little different to that, which is about, there's almost nothing about the man as fair in the car so, but what I do look at is sort of more ordinary men, why is that this sort of sense of unraveling, like, you know, the statistic that there's 6.7 million men in America who aren't only unemployed, they aren't even looking for jobs. They just bowed out to society and I was interested in them like, what does that do? Like, I have an enormous sense of purpose in my life, like, I go off, if I, if I'm not, I don't know about you, like if a couple of days go by when I can't think of a story to work on and I'm not sitting on a bench trying to come up with story ideas, I just think of myself, I'm just a man sitting on a bench and all of myself worth just sort of drains away. And that's what I wanted to like look at in the car so through the story of the car slowly in that face of the bend that I, that I wrote about. And so I was thinking about those 6.7 million men who have just like bowed out of society and wondering what that lack of purpose and lack of structure was doing to their, in their lives. And one of the things I came to actually which I thought was interesting was, was how a lot of men, I think since me too, a lot of men are feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies as to what being a man actually means, like they go on the TED channel and they got all of these like people saying, you know, the way to reanke yourself to society if you're a man, is to be more vulnerable, be vulnerable, like get rid of your manly mask and just allow the vulnerable you to show women, love it when you're vulnerable. I'd be curious what you think about this, like I think I'm sure that's true in many circumstances. If I express my vulnerabilities to my wife, for instance, she's, you know, understanding her patient. Yes. But I've tried it out on female friends once or twice, tried to be like vulnerable. And they recoil and disgust and it makes me think, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm Renee Brown who's like the doyen of vulnerability. She's that woman who started the whole vulnerability craze. She says, yeah, man, when men try and be vulnerable, they recoil, women recoil and disgust. It's like if we move, if men move too far away from their sort of primordial, primordial role is like stone protector, then women, even the, even feminist left-wing women who want men to be vulnerable, who beg men to be vulnerable, they no longer find them attractive. They don't like it anymore. It makes sense. Yeah. Evolutionary, I guess it makes sense, right? I thought that was very interesting. And so then you've got like, you know, conflicting influences, they know, don't be vulnerable, be more stoical, then you turn on the TV, TV ads, men and TV ads are doofuses who can't do anything right, and have to constantly be bailed out by their exasperated wives. Well, I would say Eddie, I'd say almost every male character in a TV ad is a doofus who can't do anything right. Man driving off cliffs, leaving their babies on restaurant conveyer belts, missing the plane because they're so inept, they can't get through the airport. Baby man who likes sob because their wives aren't allowing them to eat Doritos. So I think that whole thing, that sort of men feeling like a ball in a pinball machine being tossed around to this kind of sea of conflicting ideas as to what being a man means these days is part of the reason why we enter the hospital. Yeah, they're sure. I mean, there's definitely a huge lack of purpose that people have now, you know, like especially like people who are traditional blue collar workers having their jobs being taken by AI or not even college stuff, just coders, right, like people, it's very a lot harder to find purpose nowadays. And that's definitely a huge part of it. And then another thing that adds to it is you have more access to like independent media and independent thinkers now, like people like Nick Fuentes, who's the other guy who just got arrested, Andrew Tate, who like they project this version of what they think being masculine or being manly is and it like feels avoid for people, for those people, right? They think like, oh, this is something I like. This makes sense to me, I can latch on to this. Maybe I need to be more like this. And there's that, but you know, for them, like in my experience, in real life, the people that usually try to act the toughest or the most indestructible or like the most resilient are the ones that are not that, right? It's typically like, it's typically, you know, the high level, high level martial artists or jujitsu black belts are people that know they could kill you are the most gentle and the ones that project the least, right? It's the ones that are the most insecure who project, in my experience, who project that toughness or that masculinity, like over, overboard or in Nick Fuentes's case, when you have like hit, you know, kind of like the way he talks about women and like how women need to be, you know, in the kitchen and not all, and, you know, they need to answer to the man and never talk back to the man and, you know, listen to Nick Fuentes. It's usually people like them who are like closeted gay people, right, who are trying to project something else and trying to cover up or put on a mask, right? Right. Yeah. There are also about blue collar workers not having purpose anymore, the old industries are collapsing and so on. I found, I really wanted to do a story on that in the castle, because I think purpose, you You know, in the psychopath test, I looked at it's psychopaths, isn't it? A great, sorry, interrupt you, but a great example of what I was just explaining is Lindsey Graham. Okay. You know, a guy who worships death wants more wars, kill more the terrorists, kill all the jihadis, kill them all, who is, you know, probably a gay man who goes to Disney World. But you know, when he gets made fun of for going to Disney World and eating a giant thing of ice cream, post a photo of himself shooting a gun, you know, like he's, you know, like he's never touched on his life. He's just, it's just trying to project some fake reality just to make people think something different. Right. Fake realities. That's exactly what the castle is about. People creating these fake realities for themselves. But yeah, I wanted to tell a story of a blue collar worker who was feeling a lack of purpose, who was then tried to make something of their lives. And I found the craziest story. Can I tell you that story? Yeah, that's the sky-cool crack. Verustin Pyarelluva, teita, valmistavan, ornotin, vuona, kaksituhatta, kolmetoista. Mielestäni parasta, Shopify saan se, että voimme harioittaa liiketoimintaa, irman teknista osaamista. Voimme hallinoida yrityksen taustajärjestelmiä ja front-endija sekä myyden verkossa, vaivatta. Jos Shopify olisi pyarelluvaruste, sollisi mielestäni itse polku pyare. Sillä asiat hoidetaan ja meida liiketoiminta mehoituu Shopify sa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu. Shopify piste.com sivustolla. Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsintehtija artessaanituotteita myyven jaui-lahiakaupan perustaja. Valitsin Shopify, koska alustoja testa testa, ni totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helpokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulo oli tärkeä pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu, ovat kätevästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu Shopify piste.com sivustolla. So he came from Granite City Illinois, crumbling town. He was destined to work at the factories, but then the factory closed out and he had no prospects there. At the age of 18 he has his heart, has a problem and he has multiple open heart surgeries. So by the age of 18 he owes the health insurance company's $200,000, he's unemployed, unemployable, the factories have all shut down. He meets a woman, they get married, she leaves and leaves him a single father with two daughters under the age of two. So this is like the worst, could you imagine? Like just no prospects at all. So one good thing happens to him, he starts a woman from the local church is offering free babysitting for people like him in difficulty. So she's babysitting the kids, he makes the money mowing lawns. And then one day this is about 2010, 2011. One day he's watching YouTube and there's a guy called Durian Ryder on YouTube who's an Australian fruterian cyclist influencer, cycles only eats fruit. What was that? Other word fruterian fruterian, I hadn't heard that phrase. He only eats fruit. Only eats fruit. Wow. Not even vegetables. So Durian Ryder says, you got a story, tell a story on YouTube. YouTube is the new institute. YouTube is the place. Is that true? There's a guy eating fruit. Yeah, you can tell at the top what is he. He ate one of those watermelon. Oh, those aren't watermelon. Never in a month. I know, they're not. They're giant. Whoa. Like giant free. Yeah. So, so he inspired Greg, like Greg watched his video and that was his Damascus moment. His Damascus moment. Yeah. This was me to Saul on the road to Damascus. Greg decides to become an influencer. So the first thing he does is he does adult braces influencer. He gets his teeth fixed. And people are like following along his adult braces journey. Then he becomes a lawn care influencer because he's doing lawn care on the side. I love those videos. Oh, amazing. He's doing like, look, he's the lawn care goat, Greg, right? He's really. He's YouTube's first lawn care influencer. Wow. I love watching the lawn care videos. Is it the AS&R? Yeah. Yeah. They make the lines perfectly look like a golf course green and they had those like specialized lawn mowers. Right. That's what Greg does. He does his hour long. Yeah. He's got like a hundred thousand. I should watch those for hours. Yeah. Right. Well, you would have been Greg's perfect audience. Yeah. I'm probably subscribed to him. Yeah. Yeah. Freak to geek lawn care. Freak to geek. Shout out Greg. So just wait until you hear what happens next in Greg's story. He also does these good Smarraton lawn care videos. Do you watch those? No, I'll just see those. Okay. It's driving along. Seize a lawn in need, jumps out of his chuck and fixes it. It's like a good Smarraton and then vanishes again into the night like the Zorro of lawn care. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So he's doing brilliantly. He's like Batman. Yeah. He's the Batman of lawn care. And he went to like a lawn care convention in Kentucky. And when people found out he was there like he was just mobbed. They had a beaten greet from a pizza place and it was like mobbed. Oh, no. Oh, no different kind of pizza place. So Greg is this high point in his life, making good money as well. Anyway, he has his other channel, which is just for family videos. It's got less than 1,000 subscribers. If his daughters do something funny, he'll fail me to put it on his other channel. It was just called Greg Chisholm. So one day his daughters are like playing. They get a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. They're playing in the boxes, running around with the boxes on their heads. And he puts it up on YouTube and it gets 10 million views. Wow, here was this. This is like 2013, 2014, something like that. Just lit up like the kids were really adorable running around with the boxes on their heads. 10 million views. Then he gets a call from YouTube saying you've got a video with 10 million views. Do you want to go to like YouTube school to learn how to make more? So he works with this kind of teacher from YouTube. And they say you need to have like the WTF moment. He needs to come up with new seasons. Anyway, so he does a whole bunch of new seasons. He does food fights in the truck. He's going to like 25 million views now. You know, the kids are like throwing cereal at each other. People love it. Then he does a series called Bad Baby. So Bad Baby is. He dresses one of his daughters up as a baby. And they have like baby adventures. And it's getting like 50 million views. Bad Baby is. Then he gets his second daughter to dress up as a baby. And they're like eating food and spitting at each other's faces. And the kids love it. I think if it was on Nickelodeon, if it was one of those like Nickelodeon shows, nobody would think twice about it. It's just that messy food scenarios. But then he becomes the third bad baby. And now he's getting like 600 million views. Oh my god. And that's when his life crumbles. Because if you come to his story at the end, where him and his two daughters about all dressed as babies were like binky's in their mouths and wearing one piece, it looks fucking weird. That's super fucking weird. Yeah. So Buzzfeed. And he ends up getting like banned from YouTube. For the videos they were encouraging him to make. For the videos that YouTube was encouraging him to make. Well, because bad Baby was doing brilliantly. Like until it wasn't popular. Is it still on YouTube? Not really. They take it all down. Yeah, I've got them all. You can see little images and so on. So he was the audience like begging him, like suggesting shit for him to do? Yeah. But for what I can tell, not in a trolley, let's get him into trouble away. But we love you. Do more of this. The skits are funny. Do more. So he just gave himself over to the algorithm. He gave himself over to what? To the incentive structure of YouTube. What the audience telling him he wanted. And it ends up with him. This blue collar guy who should have been working in the factory, dressed as a baby crawling around the house with a wooden z-on, because this is what he's being rewarded for by the algorithm. He's probably making millions of dollars. Well, he definitely made good money, but he said to me, I would give it all up for it to have never happened. Because he ends up getting banned from YouTube. All of these amateurs fleece on the internet. I think he's part of some sort of a ring. So the FBI raid his house. He's taking the kids off to go to child protective services. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's caught up with this whole Elsegate thing. If you remember Elsegate. Elsegate? Yeah. All of these weird videos ended up on YouTube kids. And some of them are really properly weird. And Greg got bought into all of that, because he's dressed as a baby and he's running around just as a baby. So what's so amazing to me about that story? I cut a few things out just for time. But If you're with him from the beginning, every decision he makes makes a kind of sense. But if you come to the story at the end, you're like, what the fuck? - Yeah, right, right. When you're in his shoes and you know, you one step after the other, it's kind of like when you're in the middle of the tornado, you don't really see the forest for the trees and what this really comes across as. - Yeah. - Especially when YouTube like rewarded you for it. - Absolutely, there was a moment when he's a lost, 'cause he's getting like 600 million views, by the end of it, I think he had 13 billion views across all of his different videos. Yeah, so we're talking like huge. And YouTube gave him his own advisor. And one time he did a video that wasn't bad baby themed, it was just like a regular vlog. And it got less than a million views. And Greg phoned them up in a panic and said, I think I've ruined the channel. And they said, no, no, no, don't worry. But I would take that video down, just stick with the bad baby stuff. - Oh, wow. So he ends up getting banned from YouTube for the videos that they encouraged him to make. - What's he doing now? - Well, he's back to, for a while, his life was terrible. He would take the kids to school, come home, fall asleep, sleep all day, wake up, bring the kids back from school. I mean, that's how depressed and isolated from society was. Things are definitely getting better from him now. He's back to lawn care and fluency. - Oh, good. - He's back to doing the lawn care stuff. And my story about him, which is the first story that tells it from, from his perspective, tells it with all the nuances, is about to come out in the castle. - Okay. - And the New York Times magazine is doing an extract from the book and it's that story. So I think and hope that my story's gonna make his life a bit better now. I mean, he definitely did things I wouldn't do. He puts kids on YouTube, saying that, I used to have a collarbone with people do that. There's so many shows where people take their kids and they create these skits with them and other kids watch it and they get millions and millions of views. - Well, that's what was happening with Greg. He was kind of one of the original ones doing that. People would drop their kids off like before it all went wrong and all the bad press happened. Strangers would drop their kids off at Greg's house so their kids could pay with Greg's code. So you'd have to lock the door to not let them in. Yeah, but there you go. So YouTube offers itself as sort of all kind of promotes itself. I don't know if that's fair to say. YouTube definitely has the reputation as this kind of post-institution utopia where a man like you can thrive through grit and perseverance and clearly it works. It's working for you and it works for lots of other people but it's also evidently a false promise and I think Greg's story shows how that can go really badly wrong. - Yeah. - Also it's interesting that it promotes itself as a kind of hierarchy free utopia YouTube but as soon as things go wrong, Greg was kicked off so a kind of hierarchy manifested itself. - Yeah, YouTube is a weird thing. It's a very weird thing because like the way it works and the way with like the rules and the regulations of YouTube like you got to be very careful to where it's very much promotes people like me and people who do what I do to self-sense with themselves because you kind of know, you loosely know like what you can and can't talk about because you're gonna get de-platformed or you're gonna get shadow banned, or I mean from YouTube's perspective shadow banning is the most genius thing ever. Like if I'm like that makes so much sense because you're gonna get so much, you're gonna get put in such a bad light for banning people for speech but if you can just turn the throttle down on them and start making them less visible to people, not only are people gonna stop seeing them but they're gonna start throwing their hands up, saying that they're shadow banned and people are gonna think they're crazy. So it works perfectly. - But you haven't self-sense at all in a sense of you so why hasn't that happened to you? - There's a few topics I self-sense are on. Not any more, but I did during the pandemic 'cause we got in trouble during the pandemic for talking about the COVID and the vaccine, especially the vaccine thing. When we had scientists come on and talk about that stuff, we got in a lot of trouble and a lot of people got completely thrown off. - Right, that's Greg and his daughter. - Oh my God. There's not a lot of info. That's very weird. - Obviously it's not on YouTube anymore. - Yeah. - Yeah, very weird. - But as I say like before it was weird, it wasn't weird. - Yeah. - It was weird about it. It became a little bit like the voices that Ellen has heard from earlier on in this conversation. It was like it was only weird when it was deemed weird. I tell you, I tell you something to Greg's detriment. He was filming these skits at home. So that automatically makes it seem creepier. Like if it was in a studio, if it wasn't like a Nickelodeon type studio, it wouldn't seem quite as creepy. But because he's filming it at home, there's no context. Like you've just stumbled onto an ordinary Midwestern family who are all babies. Lie what the fuck? - It's so weird when you use your, especially when you use your own kids to do that stuff. Because now like, it's just a weird dynamic in my perspective because you have parents, fully grown adults who are using their toddlers as props to make millions and they become successful. They make millions and millions of dollars. And like their kids now become like YouTube stars and they don't even know what the hell that means anymore and then you're making all this money. And now you're in this cycle. You got to keep making more and more and more. So eventually it's like, all right kids, we got to wake up. We got to work on, we got to skip to do today. We're right in the script and blah, blah, blah. You made this little like this little content factory where your children are the workers. - And I obviously put that to Greg. But I put it to him from the kind of empathetic place 'cause for a couple of years, I wrote a column in the Guardian in England about my domestic life. And it was a kind of more utopian term. It's just like 2005, maybe 2006. I was doing that where there was a little bit more, it was a bit more utopian. But I definitely regret doing it. And the minute my son said, oh, you know, don't do this, I stopped. And so I was saying to Greg like, I did this and I regret it. Like I wish I hadn't done it. I Greg looked really rattled. And so I didn't go too hard on him on that because he's clearly been through like a lot of bad stuff. And I didn't want to like, call set him. But yeah, you know, he said, it was a more utopian time when people would try to be like, radically open on the internet. - About like with their personal lives, like exposing their personal lives. - Yeah, kind of everything. - I remember Twitter was like that in the earliest days. People were, it was that radical openness. - Yeah, now it's more of like political ideologies clashing, or at least on my algorithm, videos of war, videos of death and destruction. And then people just fighting about their political stance on things. - But I interrupted you about too. - Oh no, I wanted to ask you about your, the time that you and Alex infiltrated the Bohemian Grove. - Right. - I want to hear that story. - It's such a story. (laughs) So after I, I assume that everyone has been, everyone is now watching, will have watched the whole thing. - Yes. - Okay, so just after I failed to infiltrate the Bilderberg group, I heard about this other secret society called Bohemian Grove, where different to Bilderberg. Bilderberg is kind of globalist. I'd say probably center, center left, whereas Bohemian Grove is very Republican. And men only. And what I heard was they have a ritual. It's like in the Redwood forests of Northern California, two weeks every summer. And on the Saturday night, they have a ritual which culminates in a human effigy being thrown into a bonfire in front of a giant stone owl. So I thought, well, that can't be true. So I could have to sneak into Bohemian Grove and try and film it. But then I thought, well, I don't want to do that alone. Partly out of fear, but also partly out of, if I don't get in, I've got no story. It's just me not getting in. Whereas if I don't get in with someone else, maybe we could bounce off each other and there's a story. So I found up David Ike and I said, I'm thinking about sneaking into Bohemian Grove. And he said, that's where they transformed themselves back into giant reptiles. And I don't go anywhere near that forest. And David Ike's a person who came up with a whole lizard theory. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. So then I found a Balak's Jones, who at the time was unknown. Like he was famous in militia, conspiracy circles and Austin hipster circles. And that was it. Like, I think I have a small audience. But I'd met him because he was rebuilding David Krush's church at Waco. He was rebuilding it. Yeah, with listener donations. No way. Yeah, that was one of his first big, I wouldn't say stunts. It was actually, why wasn't he rebuilding it? I don't know, it was like it was in Waco. Yeah, the government burnt it down. Right. Alex, one of Alex's very first things was Waco. Okay. This was a government conspiracy, they murdered them. So I'm going to rebuild this church. And he did rebuild it with listener donations. And I went there with Randy Witt. Weaver, who was from Ruby Ridge, the father at Ruby Ridge. Ruby Ridge was a kind of early wake-o. It's two years earlier where a family of white separatists and I, to hoe, get involved in the idea. - Oh, yeah, that's a crazy story. - Yeah. So I made a documentary called Legend of Ruby Ridge. I spent quite a lot of time with my de Weaver's daughter, and Randy. And Randy had said he'd never been to wake-o. So I said, "Let's go on a road trip." So I went to wake-o with Randy, and there was Alex Jones. Randy Weaver was like, "Oh, my God, it's Alex Jones." And I said, "Who's Alex Jones?" He's like, "Oh, he's incredible." He said, "It's an incredible broadcaster." So that's why I phoned Alex and said, "Do you want to sneak in to be human growth with me?" And he said, "Okay." So we went to, as he said, more than okay. He said, "I'm going to smuggle in a camera, and we'll get right up in their faces, and we'll confront them about their satanic devil worshipping." And how the whole thing was your idea? That's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I said to Alex, I think stealth would be a better approach. And I said, "Okay, stealth." So we go to, I know I've been kind of written out of this history a little bit. I think most people only know Alex's. Yeah. Yeah. So we turn up at Occidental, which is the nearby town. Alex is a day late because he gets lost. He's there with Mike, his producer, and Kelly, his girlfriend, then wife, then ex-wife. And they get lost in the fog, and they're phoning me up. And there's people on the side of the road just standing there staring at us. I don't know what that was about. Anyway, they didn't turn up at the hotel, but they turned up the next day. And we thought, well, how are we going to sneak into be human growth? So Alex's plan-- Oh, sorry, Nate. Yeah, I think we were probably there for that three or four days before, and it was on the Saturday night. It's like the centerpiece of the two-week vacation that these men of wealth and power have. So Alex's plan was to rent a boat, sail it along the Russian river, climb up the mountain, and get in that way. So it was kind of the all-conceived plan. So then we made this local lawyer called Rick, who had successfully infiltrated the human growth himself. And he said, if you go in that way, can you show us where this was on a map? Yeah, it's Montereo in Northern California. Montereo? Yeah, M-O-N-T-E-R-I-O. It's like Napa Valley. That's three hours. Isn't it right in the middle of a neighborhood? Behind, there's a neighborhood access. You're driving around houses and there's a big gate. Yeah, which I think is in Montereo. OK. Find that, just go to the map, Steve, and so we can see, give us a wide view of the map. So is this it? I mean, it's-- yes, it's a contact exactly where it is, but that's-- So there's the Russian river, and in on the Russian river. Yeah, so there's the Russian river. So zoom out, more so I can see where this is in California. OK. Yeah, so we were staying in Occidental, which-- Oh, wow, it's north of San Francisco. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it took us a long time. OK, punch back in, honesty. That's a fucking way out there. Yeah, so, and yes, there's exactly how you described it. There's a gate-- yeah, Bohemian Highway. There you go, Bohemian Highway leads to Bohemian Highway. Yeah, that leads to Bohemian Grove. So somewhere in there is Bohemian Grove. That's funny, it's not marked. Yeah, and it's funny, can't really see. I can't see it for the trees, I guess. Yeah. Because there's a big redwood trees. There's a great photo of the entrance to Bohemian Grove, somewhere on Google. There's this big, crazy gate. It's like in a cul-de-sac of a neighborhood or something. Well, I have walked through that gate, as my story is about to continue. So basically, Rick the lawyer said to Alex, if you go in that way, you're going to get yourself killed because of the terrain. I always remember Alex was writing everything down on a pad, and he wrote down going in that way, dashed killed. So we said, well, how should we get into Bohemian Grove? It said, it's easy, not easy anymore, by the way. This is now not possible. This was the '90s. Is there still going on? Yeah. Yeah. Rick said, what you need to do is dress preppy. Go to the local Eddie Bauer preppy clothes store, buy yourself some chinos, and just walk up the driveway, giving the security guard a kind of I rule the world's wave. So we went to Eddie Bauer, and Alex went into the dressing room looking like Alex, looking like some sort of Texan, and he comes out looking like the great Gatsby. And then, has second thoughts. His paranoid brain suddenly starts thinking, what if I am part of the plot, to lure, like the wicker band, to lure him into the forest, and he's going to be the one sacrificed in front of the giant owl? Oh, God. So he decides, for safety, him and Mike, his producer, are going to go and via the undergrowth, whereas me and Rick the lawyer were sticking to our original plan of just walking up the drive. So that's what happened. Alex dives into the undergrowth with Mike. And Gatson successfully gets in. I walk up the drive with Rick the lawyer, and we also successfully get in. So we're now in Bohemian Grove. I mean, I'm a young guy. This is not something I would do now, like this is very adventurous. So then again, I did, you know, anyway. So who are the people that were there? Like, what do they look like? What were they saying to you? Like, did they seem skeptical or suspicious? Or was it all just like very welcoming? Well, because I was with this guy, Rick, the lawyer, who looked like a Grover. He was probably at his 50s or 60s preppy. He was a lawyer. I immediately did some risk assessment. And I thought, if I stick with Rick, he so much looks like he's part of this, I'm going to be safe. Because I was probably the youngest person now. I must have been like late 20s then. It's a long time ago. So I just stuck with Rick. And I've got to say, you know, there was some unexpected things. So it's like posh, it's like very posh campground with like stages. There's like little clusters of campsites all over the forest. And some of them are sort of devily milieu to them. Like they're called things like red eyes or something. But it's basically sort of revelry. We were just walking around for camp to camp. And there's guys, there's like bands playing. And guys playing the piano. Like a little festival in the woods. Yeah, little campsites, posh campsites with people drinking a lot, or yeah, that. And then we saw burden recognized any of them. They all looked like Mr. Burns and the sepsons. It's basically a camp. Funny enough, Harry Shere, who plays the voice of Mr. Burns went to Behemian Grove, and he's the only Grover who would give me an interview to tell me about that. Yeah. And I sent him to the interview. I said, we filmed it. I wanted him to do the voice, do Mr. Burns voice. I said, I wonder what Mr. Burns would make of this. He didn't play ball. Didn't do the voice. For they all looked like Mr. Burns. And we saw Alex's big thing was that the owl represents Marlach. It's like satanic. Marlach's a ball, right? I mean, it's either way, from my perspective, it's bullshit, because there were all these little cabins that Behemian Grove would like stuffed owls in them, and little information, things about owls. It's like a kind of owl place. It's the red words of Northern California. Like a sanctuary? I don't know if that goes fast to say a sanctuary, but maybe it's like the kind of place where you get lots of owls. I don't know. Either way, the owl didn't strike me in the slightest bit as suspicious. But there was a sort of weirdness to the place. So it wasn't intensity to it. So at nine o'clock, we're there for hours wandering around. I see Mike and Alex at one point. They're walking towards us. And I'm going, hey, guys, I think we're keep walking. There's owls everywhere. Owls everywhere. - Alex said that. - Yeah, either Alex or Mike. - Yeah, yeah. - There's cameras in the trees. - They're going to walk past them both as powered or just each other, Alex and Mike. And then it's like nine o'clock and a bell is wrong. And everybody drifts down to the lake. And it's like a big lawn. And then there's the lake. And then there's the big owl sculpture. And this whole ceremony unfolds, which is, well, you can watch it for yourself on YouTube. Like Alex was a few rows behind me, secretly filming the whole thing. So you can watch the whole thing. I very much took it as a kind of sort of harmless pageant. Did the actual ceremony itself? It's basically, it starts off with some guys. There's like the San Francisco symphony is there playing. Like, this isn't what I mean, it's secret, but it's a shit ton of people there. There's like, you know, the San Francisco symphony. There's somebody in the trees wearing like laid a hose and covered in leaves and he's like singing an ode to nature. Oh, bows, oh, track out the bow twigs, whatever. And then like, these posh clansmen type people turned up, these like black robes. It's all like exactly like you think it's going to be. And then like, oh, you know, here in the Sylvan forest, we banish the, basically the theme of the ceremony is we all have responsibilities in our lives. We're all men of wealth and power. For these two weeks, we're going to burn our cares so we can enjoy our suburbification. And it's all done at this card Shakespearean language. And the thing that they burn, the effigy, is supposed to represent their cares and troubles in the world. And so they burn it. He says, you shall not burn me. Like, it's all like the voices echoing through the forest. You shall not burn me for a year after year. You burn me in this grove, but am I not waiting for you back in the marketplace? And then they go, no, we shall burn the once again this night. It's all like that. And then they chuck it in the bonfire. And it goes, ah! And then the band play, when the Saints go marching in, and then all you can hear is like a thousand old men going, can someone help me out, please? Because we're all like seeing on the continent lawn. And that's basically it. Anyway, Alex reckons we've seen an actual human sacrifice or implies in the video he brings out that we may have seen an actual human sacrifice, which it definitely wasn't. So that put me in the odd position of having to, like, counter Alex's version of the story with, like, "Dowais, no idea, it was weird, it's what Alex." I became like a sort of self-appointed defender of the Bush families, right? So I think who was there? Like, who was the most prominent people that were there? Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney was there? Yeah. What year was this? You see, the 1999 or 2000? Oh, my God. I think it was 2000. You got him on video? No, but we saw his name on a guest list. There was a guest list behind, and his name was on the guest list. And later on, it was reported that George Bush asked Dick Cheney to be his presidential running mate when they were together in Northern California. So that may well have happened at Bohemian Grove. So George Bush was there, John Major, who was the British Prime Minister for a short amount of time, was there the other ones that immediately spring to mind. And yeah, so that's the story. Alex bought out his video. I brought up my book then. Did you guys get any backlash for that video? I got a letter from Bohemian Grove. Oh, really? Yeah, saying something like, despite Ronson's objectionable trespassing, we're grateful that he's telling a much more truthful and reason story to counter the bullshit that Alex Jones is telling. That was basically the tenor of their letter. And what was the most objectionable part of Alex's take on it, just that it was a human that they burned? Well, the whole thing, like I've often, like that, certainly. But really everything, like I've, like wasn't what we saw enough. Like what we saw was so fucking weird. Like why, why add an extra layer of fiction to it? And that's what Alex always does. He just adds a layer of fiction to something that's already interesting. Because there was a sort of a, where I will agree with Alex is that there was a weird intensity that night. Like people that were like really into it. Like, yes, burn him, like that. But I don't remember sitting there thinking, I'm the only sane person that's entire Redwood forest. You've got Alex with his eyes like sources. And then you've got all the groves themselves. So we're kind of into the stupid thing. So I think the ceremony itself was completely harmless. And I think everything, the way that Alex, I mean, if other people still talk about it now, I'm, a lot of people believe Alex's version of events. Like I can tell you for sure that it's all bullshit. Like, the story I just told you is what actually happens. Right. So, you know, so a lot of damage comes from just adding a layer of paranoid fiction to something. Yeah. Yeah. So, isn't there a photo of Nixon there too? Yeah, Nixon used to go, he called it the fakie. He famously called it the fakiest place I've ever been to. The fakiest place I've ever been. Find the photo of Nixon at Bohemian Grove. Yeah. That's weird. Like, like a lot of private clubs, secret societies, wherever you want to call it. Yeah, that's Nixon. This is where the red circle, yeah. Well, that shit up. Oh, no, it's Ronald Reagan. Nixon and Reagan. Yeah. Wow. You know, obviously these things exist for a reason. Yeah. And one of the most famous things reported to have come from Bohemian Grove was the Manhattan Project. You know, which gave up on hybrid and nuclear bomb and so on. It said that a lot of the funding for the Manhattan Project came about through people giving speeches at Bohemian Grove and soliciting donations or whatever, or asking people to fund it. So, you know, like Bilderberg, you know, they have agendas. This seems to be a kind of Republican agenda, where's Bohemian Grove? Where's Bilderberg's a bit more centrist? Yeah. No, it seems like, I don't know if you're familiar with Whitney Webb at all. She wrote this book called, this two volume book called "One Nation Under Black Male." Oh, no, I don't know. And it goes into the history of like all the weird situations like this that high level people in the government and like the head of the, who was the head of the first head of the FBI, the gay guy. What was his name? Jacob Huffer. Jacob Huffer. Yeah. He called in this where they would invite them to parties in like back rooms or like they'd rent out like a huge motel room, and they would bring like boy, like little boys in there and like do weird, really weird, like creepy pedophilia stuff. And the idea was that they would all have black male on each other. So that, you know, they could get away with shit and, you know, so the corruption wouldn't go. There'd be no whistleblowers. Yeah. So they could get away with doing whatever they did. Like, you know, sense the sense like the early days of like the mafia and how the FBI in the CIA would would historically work with the mafia to do stuff and things like that. How this has become like a central feature of like the ruling class and how they, how they control. Yes. Well, I mean, that's what you think about when you think about Epstein, right? What do you think about? Yeah. What do you think about what hasn't been released yet from Epstein? Right. If they have, if you had cameras in all of the rooms and that seems to be the case, if you had all of these video tapes, it seems pretty obvious to me that somewhere and for some reason, there's these videos and that's what's not coming out. Right. And you'd be labeled a crazy coup, you know, a year ago for trying to suggest that he had any affiliation with any intelligence agency. Yeah. I mean, who knows like, you know, whether he was doing it for himself or who, who he was doing it for like, but that feels very plausible to me and not at all unlikely. Um, whether will it ever come out? What is your, what is your take on all of the Epstein stuff, like high level? Like, what do you think it was? Like, I know you might not have proof, but what's your opinion? Right from the beginning, I've thought that Epstein is the, is the conspiracy theory that not only is, you know, true, but it could be anything like it could be a, which doesn't mean there is anything, but it could be anything. And I would say what I just said is, is the, isn't in my mind just being very interested in it for a long time, is the thing that I can't say for sure is true, but if it is true that it makes sense, is this idea that it's a giant blackmail thing? Well, I mean, that's not, I don't think that's the craziest thing to say. I mean, it's pretty obvious that just reading the emails is pretty obvious, like, with especially the emails about Bill Gates, where he's like, running down all the rights. We know when Bill Gates is trying to, like, not pay him or some sort of financial dispute they got into where he's like, running an email to himself saying, like, I helped you with this. I helped you get that medication for the venereal disease you got from that Russian bitch that you cheated on your wife with and all that, you know, it's a very, very clear. But like, the, the, the one thing that is just so crazy is all of the women that not only disappeared and came up missing or that were killed, you know, there's like all the stuff with the jerky stuff or the human flesh, you know, the insinuates that they were actually being, like, eating people and the CP cheese pizza being synonymous with the child or fee linking back to the pizza gate stuff like that. And you know, it's almost impossible to look at that stuff and read the emails where they're talking about cheese pizza, like what it's, it's obviously, I'm pretty, like, I'm 90, I'm 99.9% confident that cheese pizza was a code word for something, right? Okay. Can I, like, I don't think that's a conspiracy that cheese pizza was a code word. Well, I, I don't know, but can I, can I count? to what you just said was something more skeptical. And again, what I'm about to say, I don't know. But this is what I feel I should now counter it that way. Which is, you know, the Epstein files are obviously huge, like, you know, they're, they're, they're, you know, they were discussing getting the DVD if the minister goes, like, you know, the whole world is, you know, it's in the Epstein files. There's these, I can't remember the phrase, but you'll know this, but like these FBI reports where they don't try and sift, in fact, from fiction, they just like write everything down like somebody for us. Yeah. And it is possible. And again, I don't know, this is just what I'm postulating as a more skeptical person. It's possible that some of these more crazy things could have just been somebody photographing up the FBI, blaming out a whole load of paranoid stuff and that making it into the Epstein files for that reason. But there's been no attempt to try and sift through whether it's true or not. Yeah, that's true. There is lots of testimony that the FBI had to document, right? But that's not talking about the emails that he actually sent to people. Okay. So you know more about this. Yeah. Yeah. He's going back and forth with very powerful rich people that are coming to his island and people from all over the world who and they're talking about cheese, cheese pizza. Like, hey, I really liked that cheese pizza or that pizza that you brought to me. I'm running out of pizza on the island. I think I need some fresh pizza or some more jerky and then responses from these people, these bankers or whatever they were. On another side of the world saying, oh, yes, I forget. We've talked about so many examples of this shit, but there's no evidence at all about comment ping pong and DC having any kind of involvement. None at all, right? There's some very weird things about the comment pizza thing, but no basements. No, apparently there is a basement there. Right. I haven't seen the evidence, but I've talked to people who say there one guy we had on Ben Swan, he was a newscaster in maybe Tennessee, Nashville, Tennessee. And he was one of their original people to talk about the whole pizza gate thing. And he got fired from his job for reporting on that. And then he made this whole documentary on it. And he's still doing investigations on it now. And he's been talking to a lot of people that are involved with it. And there's a lot of very weird things with the guy who owned that comment pizza. He was listed as like one of the most powerful people in Washington DC at one point. It was very much tied to there was emails, the Podesta emails where they're talking about it specifically. And I don't know, but I know there's, I've heard compelling accounts of people who claim that there is evidence for it. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that it's not there. But I honestly, I don't know, like I've not done any. Right. I haven't either. Yeah. As I said at the beginning of this, like I love talking about stuff where I've gone down a great big rabbit hole and I've done a lot of investigating. But when it's something when I haven't done that, like pizza gates, like I stay away from pizza gate and queuing on mostly because 20 years earlier, I'd snuck in to be even grow with Alex Jones. And I thought, well, I've done, you know, that's my story on this. Like I've done this. And I'm not saying I was right to stay away from those things, but I need to be some why I did it. But I don't know, like I haven't done any interviews. I've never been. So I just don't know. Yeah. And I think one of the, to me, one of the craziest things about the Epstein, I mean, a lot of very dark evil things are in those emails that, and again, the problem is they are government gave us no explanation for it. They just dumped it on us and let us run wild with it on the internet. And so like, with how to huge amounts of documents too, right? What's that? I mean, the Epstein Fowler says there's still only a fraction of it has come out. Oh, yeah. Only a very small fraction of it. And also oddly, they redacted. There's no emails between 1999 and 2001. Yeah, we give, we get an email from Guillain Maxwell asking somebody if they want to be a part of the 9/11 shadow commission or something like that. My God. Wow. Yeah. So like they just, they throw out all these crumbs. It's almost like it's designed to make people crazy and create more theories about this, right? Because if you don't give them the answer, you just give them all this crazy fucking evidence, that's exactly what people are going to do. They're going to come up with theories. Yeah. It's almost by design, I think. Well, I'm very glad that people are not forgetting about the Epstein Fowls. I think it's very healthy to see comments on social media where it's like, you know, I'm not interested in this. What about the Epstein Fowls? You have faux files. Forget it. Epstein Fowls. I think that's very healthy. Steve, I'm going to send you this quote. You got to pull this up. This is, I just saw this for the first time. The other day, and I couldn't fucking believe it was real, but my friend Julien Dory confirmed that it was real. Steven, where the hell is your number? There it is. Pull up this quote right here. I just sent it to you. I just texted it to you. All right. Okay. How many used to go? How 40% left to go? They release 60%. I don't think that's true. I think it's low less than 60%. There's a bunch of videos that they haven't released. Videos and images. I think this is, yeah, there's a lot. Well, yeah, they've released zero videos or images. And we know that every single house and plane was wire with cameras. Look at this. So this guy goes, hey, Grock, did Epstein really say this? If Trump feels like a cornered rat, he will bomb Iran just to create a diversion. Go down, see what Grock said. Yes, the substance matches in a December 2018 eye message from the DOJ Epstein Fowls. Epstein privately speculated that if Trump felt cornered like a rat under political pressure, he would bomb Iran to create a diversion. How crazy is that? But less than a month after the Epstein Fowls came out, they started the Iran War. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. As I said, with Epstein, I'm skeptical about some things. With Epstein, I really think anything could be true. And the whole Rothschilds thing is just like, you know, it's the conspiracy theorist I've been living in and you know, they've been living like pigs and shit for the last few months because all the craziest shit seems to be coming true. Right. By the way, I'm glad like the coq and on thing was that Trump's going to come in and save us all from child. So he's going to take out all the evil child in the government. So Q and on was like a very pro Trump thing. Yeah. I think it's very healthy that Q and on believers are now very happy to not see Trump as that kind of Messiah anymore when it comes to the Epstein Fowls. 100%. Yeah. And the other craziest thing about the Epstein Fowls is that in his official autopsy, after he died, you can read the full detailed report from the medical examiner. And they reviewed his prostate and said his prostate was in like good working order. Right. Like they evaluate all the internal organs and the prostate was one of those things that was in that detailed report on his autopsy. Well, there's multiple emails in that came out in the Epstein Fowls between Jeffrey Epstein and his physician, where he's he's talking about how he needs specific medications because he had his prostate removed. Oh. Shopee-fayl had been in the air for a while, so he was in the air for a while. He was in the air for a while, and we're going to talk about Shopee-fayl. In the future, Shopee-fayl has been in the air for a long time. Olen Schellen-Maldonado has been in the air for a while. He has been in the air for a while, and he has been in the air for a long time. He was in the air for a while, and he was in the air for a long time. He was in the air for a long time, and he was in the air for a long time, and he was in the air for a long time, and he was in the air for a long time. Wow. So Epstein didn't have a prostate, according to his emails with his doctor, yet on the official medical examiner report, he had a prostate. What do we do with that? Well, this other world, we have the material that would be released, another administration. Huh? Who knows? AOC released some of the official machines. I don't think anyone in power will ever release any of that stuff. Right. I think we're on this runaway train right now with what you were talking about. Psychopaths that are in power are just going to keep gaining more power. And also the AI companies and the tech billionaires, this is what I've had about in the past a little bit too. You know, prodigal weight us, making us angry, keeping us angry. With the algorithms and the flat cameras. And the culture was the bread and circuses like, you know, keep us, keep us fat. This is what David Ike said to be 30 years ago. He was right to keep us sheep bustling each other down here while they could get away with all of that. And the FD files is probably the biggest story of the most, what is the word I'm looking for? It's the most it goes across both aisles. - Bipartisan. - Bipartisan. It's the most bipartisan story of my lifetime where both sides can get equally mad about this because both sides have tried to cover it up. So it's not a left versus right. It's a vertical fight. It's us versus the layer of society that's above us. That seems to be doing this stuff and getting away with these things and profiting off different conflicts and wars and like literally, like there's emails about that where he's emailing "Who'd Baroque" to go about, like, look at this civil war in the Congo. We could sell arms to both sides and we can make this much money, this many millions of dollars. And it's just fucking insane that that shit's real. - I'm really glad, I guess people have always been aware of this the way that they, you know, - But there's never been proof though. - Yeah, but just in general, the way that society is structured, something I've always tried to write about in all of my books from them to, so you've been publicly shamed. I wrote a whole book about public shaming, which is kind of the book that kind of started the whole debate about what became known as cancel culture 'cause in this book was the story that became the sort of ground zero or what kind of patient zero of public shaming this woman just in sacco, the AIDS tweet woman. She's on a plane to Africa. Don't think about this, she's tweeting. - 'Cause of my skin or something I will get AIDS 'cause of my skin color. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS, just kidding. I'm white. She's trying to do a sort of south park making fun of her own privilege anyway. Black fires and shared life is utterly destroyed and she's the first worldwide publicly shamed person. So anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that in all of my books from them through to, all of them, Minister of Goat Psychopath Test, shamed the castle, it's all about how the decisions being made by people up there, the kind of mind games and manipulations of the people up there trickled out and impact our inner lives in ways that we don't even realize. And one thing that I think that's been really healthy coming from the Epstein Files is that people are much more aware now of how the people up there operate and how the decisions they make. You know, when people are much more aware of how social media is designed to keep us all blind with rage, so the billionaires can carry on doing their thing. - But it doesn't seem to help though. - No. - We don't aware of it, but we don't seem to be able to take any out. We have no power to change it. - I mean, our personal power would be to just opt out of these culture wars. And I've noticed things are changing a little bit. I make a show for the BBC called Things Fell Apart, which is until now being about the origin stories of different culture wars, kind of amazing stories. But for the third season, which we've just finished, I've moved away from culture wars to class war 'cause that seems to be how societies change a little bit now, the Luigi Mangeo, the type situation, individuals waiting war against institutions and so on. So maybe there is a little bit of a move away from culture wars to what I personally think is a more kind of wise a way of looking at the world, which is looking at how power works, how power trickles down and manipulates us. - Yeah, 100%. Also, I just remembered, when you were telling that Bohemian Grove story, you were explaining the Waco thing and the guy who was a part of the White Supremacist Society who got in, it was like the pre-Waco Waco. - Yeah, Randy Weaver. - Randy Weaver. - Yeah. - But I tell you that story. - Will you tell that? That's a fucking crazy story. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an amazing story. It was like Waco before Waco. Between Waco and Ruby Ridge, a lot of people got radicalized on the right, particularly in America. So Randy Weaver, they were family of white separatists. Randy, his wife, Vicki, three kids, little kids, Sarah, Rachel, and Sammy, and the dog striker. They just, they, Vicki was a, you know, pretty hardcore conspiracy theorist. I mean, back this was before the internet. So she'd be just watching VHSs and stuff. And they decided to live off grid. They went to the top of the mountain in Idaho, Ruby Ridge. And Randy started attending, the, the, the, the fatal floor was that Randy started attending area nations, which is a very hardcore white supremacy skinhead compound close by. And Randy always said that he didn't, he wasn't a white supremacist. He was a white separatist. He was more less radical than the people at area nations. But he enjoyed their picnics and enjoy their company. Yeah, okay. And so on, but he would take his family to area nations for their summer camps and so on. And to his credit, one of the undercover agents there, those places are heavily infiltrated by undercover agents. And one of the undercover agents saw Randy that way too, as a less crazy person who was friends with these far crazier people. Because he approached Randy and said, I want you to become a government informant. I want you to spy on area nations for us. And Randy said, no. So then they sent in an undercover agent or informant to get Randy to commit a crime. They asked him to saw off a shotgun below the legal limit. So he said, sure. So it's sort of like entrapment? Yeah, entrapment, I mean, it was. And so they said to him, now we've got you on a crime. We're going to prosecute you unless you become an informant and spy on area nations. And Randy said, no. So he took his family. And this is Randy's second big floor is that he, you know, the whole family became paranoid. Like he, he shot his family in the cabin. He had the kids patrolling the grounds with shotguns. They were getting like more and more paranoid in there. Getting convinced they would be really kids. Really young like, I can't remember exactly. I think Sabi was like 11 or maybe 13 sort of early teens, I think. And there's footage, you know, they thought they were being watched for the bushes. And they were, you know, you had the ATF in the bushes. Jesus Christ. Yeah, watching them. And there's lots of footage of the kids with shotguns patrolling the area. Anyway, one day, the one of the ATF agents gets too close to the cabin. The dog starts barking. The family wakes up and there's a confrontation. One of the agents is shot and killed. They've got a family friend staying with him at the time. Like I called Kevin, he's shot. Sabi, the little boy, they shoot the dog. That's the first shooting. They shoot the dog, striker. Sabi, the little boy says, you shot my dog, you son of a bitch. That opens fire on the agents. The boy said this. Yeah, the little boy opens fire. Oh my God. And one of the agents is killed either by Sabi or by the family friend, Kevin Harris. I don't think I'm not sure if that's ever been proven one way or the other. And then they shoot Sabi in the arm. And he shouts, dad, I'm coming home, dad turns around, runs up the cabin, and then they shoot him in the back and kill him. So they've shot the little boy, they've shot the dog. The family running to the cabin and locked the door on a siege begins. The FBI, you know, hundreds and hundreds of it, because an agent's been shot, hundreds of agents turn up surrounding the cabin. It's like a war zone. People say that the American militia starts right there. Or, you know, because there's all of these like, towns people who are just standing there watching as all of these like tanks are going up. Like it's incredible amount of. Is there a lot of footage of this? Yeah, I found the reason. My documentary is probably up there. It's called "Seeker rulers of the world." "Seeker rulers of the world." Yeah, that episode's called "The Legend of Ruby Ridge." And I put a lot of footage, and it's also in my book, then. So I put a lot of footage in there. So the next day, Vicky Weaver, I think they've put Sabi's body in an outhouse. And Vicky Weaver goes to look and she's got a baby. There's a little baby as well, I forgot. She's got her baby in her arms, and she's in the doorway. And this sniper shoots Vicky in the head. Oh, my God. And then a 16-day siege. What happened to the baby? The baby's fine. Okay. But they're now in the cabin with the doors closed. Vicky's body and all the kids, and there's this huge siege begins at last days. I can't remember exactly how long it's about 16 days. And eventually, Randy comes out, Bo Grites, the old conspiracy broadcaster. He becomes like a hostage negotiator, convinces Randy to come out. So they all come out, they're arrested, but then they're all awarded, I think all the daughters are awarded a million dollars each and damages. So the government, that completely admitted. - Even though the guy got shot and killed, the ATF guy. - Yeah, yeah, they, I don't think there's anyone really in the government. - 'Cause they started it. - Yeah, I think it'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the government or law enforcement to think they did the right thing at Ruby Redge. I think everybody knows what a disaster it was. Yeah, there you go. So that's down at the, - And what happened to, what was his name, Randy? He, he recently died, he, he, there's Vicky. So see at bottom left, that's Vicky Weaver. - That's the woman who got shot with a baby. - So that'd be surveillance footage taken by the ATF before the siege began. Yeah, that's Vicky. The very haunting story. And yeah, is that, that must, is that the same spot? - Right. - That's Sammy with the gun. No, that's Kevin Harris, that's the family friend who was there. - Oh, okay. Oh, there's footage of Sammy with the gun. - I think there is. I've seen footage of the, of the girls, the daughters. - Oh my God. - So I told the story through Rachel Weaver, the, the daughter. - The baby? - No, the middle daughter. She was like 12 at the time, something like that. And I met her when she was maybe 1920. So, so I told, basically she was the main character in my documentary, but then I spent time with Randy too. So Randy would felt very bad too. Like if you got him being honest, he would take responsibility for his mistakes. I should never have armed my kids. - Right. - I, you know, I escalated this too, but while still like hating the law enforcement and so on. - Yeah, and between Waco and Ruby Ridge, you, you got, you got Timothy McVeigh, who then blows up the murder building. - Timothy McVeigh should have put Waco. - Yeah, he's turned up at Waco. - I forgot about that. - Yeah, and he, you know, he was, you know, cared a lot about Ruby Ridge as well. - Yeah, that's one of the other crazier conspiracies was the whole Oklahoma City bombing thing. - Yeah, you know, I did a lot of research into that. I did a whole podcast series for audible, called The Deputant About Carol Howe, who was this deputant who became a white supremacist, who became a government informant. And a lot of the conspiracy theories revolve around how the, if they'd only listened to her, she was giving information about a wider conspiracy. And if they'd only ever listened to her, then the bombing would never have happened. And I did a lot of research. And I came from thinking that could be true to think it out most probably isn't true. There are some odd things about Oklahoma City that remain hard. There's a black, do you know about this? There's like one leg that was never identified. - I didn't know that. - Yeah, and like this, the case of them. And then John Doe too, McVeigh was seen with these other people. Was it, were they all misunderstandings? - Yes. - Yeah, there was another guy, like a brown skin guy, right? Yeah, swore the guy. I think some of them would probably, mistakes, like McVeigh just happened to be in the same gas station as somebody at the same time or whatever. But I wouldn't say, and I did a whole lot of stuff on co-how. It's a long story. I think I've been a little out of energy to tell it now. But I came away thinking that many of the people that I thought could point to evidence of why the conspiracy didn't hold water. But that doesn't mean they don't all hold water. Some might still do. - Yeah, yeah. There's so many things about that that just don't make sense. Like anecdotal things about like the bombs, the way they exploded. Something about the way that the way that the damage was, was like the bombs exploded outwards or something like that. And so many weird things. And it's like, it's almost hard to ignore when so many of those questions are lined up that make. The conspiracy makes more sense than the narrative. - Yeah, I was focusing on this particular conspiracy about this place called Elohim City. This is what I do in the Debbie town. So Elohim City. - Oh, Elohim City. - Yeah, that was a why. - That rings about. - Yeah, that was like a sort of Yahweh Christian, white Separatist compound on the Oklahoma Arkansas border. And the reason why that's of interest to people is they phoned Elohim City before the bombing. That's for sure. And asked to speak to a guy called Andy Strassmeyer, who was a German national, who was working in security as Elohim City. That definitely happened. And also McFae got a parking ticket, or a speeding ticket, quite close to Elohim City. So a lot of people got really interested in Elohim City. Carl Howe, the Debbie Todd turned white supremacist, turned government informant, was informing on Elohim City. So she was there as Elohim City. After the fact, she said she thinks she saw Timothy McFae at Elohim City. But that I don't believe. He definitely phoned Elohim City, and it looked like he was looking for a place to stay after the bombing, a place to hide out. 'Cause Elohim City did let white supremacist murderers hide out there, but I don't believe Carl's story that she saw McFae there. That's where the evidence dries up for me. - Interesting. - Yeah, I mean, one of the crazy, like, connecting themes through all this stuff is the depth that the government is embedded in all these crazy groups. - Yes. - You know, not just the cults, but like the white supremacist groups. - Oh my god. - The religious extremists, they like they know. - Oh, massively. There's like the statistics. There's been certain lie plots where people were encoded together, people took a bit acts of violence. - Yeah, yeah. - The reason I did that was 'cause they took out all of the word to cover religious extremists. - Exactly. - And I had a little moment to air your nation. So when I was making my Ruby Rich documentary, I went to air your nations, and I thought, okay, I'll just turn up. I'll say I'm a friend of Randy Weevers. It'll all be fine. So I turned up, and I'm Jewish. And they, all these skinheads surrounded me. (laughs) And they knew I was Jewish, like they knew it. And they asked, they said, what's your genealogy? Those are the words they used. What's your genealogy? I'm not looking desperately for my cameraman. My cameraman, by the way, David Barker, 'cause I want to get the fuck out of there. I'd like, I wouldn't mind filming this, but I also wanted to get the fuck out of there. Like, I'm pretty fearless when it comes to these dangerous situations. I've been in many, but that one, I felt like I was under real. - You were in the hot spot. - Yeah, so I'm looking for David Barker, my cameraman. David was always, he's a great cameraman, but he was always a bit shit at getting cutaways. But he loved bigger airy nations so much. He was off getting cutaway after cutaway. So I'm like marooned with these. - He's shooting B-roll somewhere down the road. - Yeah, exactly. He's shooting B-roll of all the swastikers of the roofs, having a whale of a time, getting great B-roll. And I'm surrounded by these skinheads, asking me about genealogy. - What's your genealogy, Ma? - Yeah, that's what they said. So I said, I'm Church of England. At that point, at that moment, this older guy who works in security at airy nations made a joke. He said, "Oh, Church of England, they're the ones who force you to give them all your money or some joke." And that joke was a signal for the skinheads to back off. Are they all backed off me? - Interesting. And I've often wondered whether that guy. He had one of two reasons to do what he did. Either he just didn't want the hassle of some journalist getting the shit kicks out of him at airy nations. Or he was some kind of undercover agent who was doing me a good deed at that moment. And I've always wondered which of the two was true. - That's wild. - 'Cause we know for sure that all of these groups are massively infiltrated by undercover agents. - That's such a weird thing to the whole Jewish thing. It's like the, especially right now more than ever, like people think of, you know, the Jews now, they run everything, they can call Hollywood and all that stuff. And like, people look at as the Jews as like this monolithic structure. - Right, when they couldn't be more separated. - Oh my God, Jews, I went on the slightest bit monolithic - Right. - Some Zionists, some anti-Zionists. - Anti-Zionists, some just don't wanna think about it. - Like theists, like Jews are the least monolithic group you can think of. And you know, my Jewish friends and all the Jews have known from being Jewish all my life, a million different types of people. - Yeah. - And so yeah, so that anti-Zionism is wrong for exactly the reason that you just put it out. - Yeah, it's so silly, you know, they like to associate every single, you know, based on your genes, you know, you're now attached to the hip with the Israeli government. - Right, you know. - Yeah, which I've got to say, by the way, Ness Niyahu does the same thing. He says, we are, I am the Jewish people. He does the same thing. - Right, right. - But for someone like me. - And he's like Polish or something, right? - Right, but yeah, but yeah, everybody's like, doing that link here. Israel to Jews on the left on the right like fucking everybody and that's incredibly frustrating for someone like me who just has nothing to do with Israel like I've been once in my life for like two days to do a story. Israel means as much to be as I don't know, Nicaragua. So that's why it's like that's like me being born America being like attached at the hip with like the Bush Cheney administration. You know, for doing the Iran war. Yeah, totally, totally. It's it's maddening. It's maddening when it comes on the left. It's maddening when it comes on the right. It's it's just bullshit. Well, John Ronson, thank you for doing this man. This has been fascinating. Yeah, this has been a real pleasure. Yeah, we've done the whole you're like the forest gump of all the crazy conspiracies of the American history. Yeah, I think that's kind of true. It's been a great, it's been a great ride. So it's also been a great day. Your new book, The Castle is out now for folks to find it. Yeah, find it everywhere. Books are sold. I'm assuming. Yeah, very much. So I deliberately didn't say where the story goes because I really want people to read it. But I could tell you for sure, the story goes as wild as all the other stories that we've talked about. Have you decided your next project yet or what you want to look at? No, no, no, no. I had such a blast with the UFC doing the cage fight. I would do more in that world if there was a story, but I just don't know what story would be. Well, cool man, thanks for doing this. I really enjoyed it and we'll link that below. Anything else that we should link for people to find you find your info. Yeah, my website john ronson.com. There's no h and john j o n r o n s the word. It's just John ronson not Ron Johnson. Yeah, John ronson, not Ron Johnson. I am not that senator. And yeah, everything's on the website. Perfect. Well, thank you again, man. It was a real pleasure. Thank you. Good night, folks. that we will be able to find. All of the members of the board have been invited to the DASH Board. The members of the board have been invited to the DASH Board to the DASH Board. The members of the board have been invited to the DASH Board.