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

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Jon Ronson is a gonzo journalist, author, and filmmaker who famously infiltrated Bohemian Grove & the Bilderberg group. He is best known for works such as Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and The Psychopath Test. SPONSORS https://mengotomars.com - Get 50% off for life plus free shipping & 3 free gifts. https://butcherbox.com/danny - Get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year. https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com - Use code DANNY for 20% off + free shipping. https://mod.com - Use code DANNY for 10% off your first order PLUS free shipping. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Jon's new book - https://amzn.to/3V4g2Op https://jonronson.com *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - UK's police culture war 05:59 - The Castle & "101 Princesses" 14:04 - "Them" & learning from Islamic extremists 18:53 - The Shadow Cabal ruling the world 26:50 - Members of the Bilderberg Group 34:14 - Pizzagate was a distraction from Epstein 39:18 - Jon's visit to Uri Geller's house 41:36 - Military's Project Jedi 44:14 - Sense of being stared at & haunted houses 48:19 - UFO hunting in Nevada 49:48 - General Stubblebine & secret military tech 53:26 - Remote viewing & the Heaven's Gate connection 01:01:31 - Jon's experience with Scientologists 01:05:05 - Visiting the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital 01:08:41 - How to detect a psychopath 01:16:49 - Itzhak Bentov's theory of consciousness 01:21:05 - Eleanor Longden's schizophrenia 01:26:45 - Death of industry 01:28:27 - Attending UFC 250 at the White House 01:35:33 - Josh Hokit's comments at UFC 250 01:40:54 - Photographer behind Trump's Butler assassination attempt photo 01:46:30 - Feminization of the world vs. the Manosphere 01:52:43 - The unraveling of manhood 01:59:56 - Greg's story from blue collar worker to "Bad Baby" 02:11:07 - Free speech 02:15:31 - Infiltrating Bohemian Grove 02:26:09 - Satanic owl imagery in Bohemian Grove 02:30:00 - Dick Cheney was at Bohemian Grove 02:36:03 - The Epstein conspiracy could be "anything" 02:45:13 - The mystery of Epstein's prostate 02:50:44 - Randy Weaver & the Ruby Ridge standoff 02:59:12 - The Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy 03:03:22 - Jon's visit to Aryan Nations Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John Ronson. Thank you for coming, man. 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 like the decay of freedom of speech is happening over there. But in this 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 in the back of these vans. but it was how kind the policemen were.

They were like, walk up. Hello, chap. 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 a pack. 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, forcible 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 culture 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 friends that live over there? Oh, yeah. I'm sure you have lots of people that, family and stuff.

Yeah. Because you originally from there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I lived there right through to like 2012 and 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 with the immigration and everyone getting arrested.

people can't protest. And then I hear like Pierce Morgan saying, it's fine, everything's great, there's nothing wrong. Like I don't know what's the truth. I mean, look, I can only speak anecdotally. Of course, your experience. But I gotta say, okay, so the protest thing seems to be, from what I can tell,

kind of series, there's lots of footage of like old ladies getting arrested for saying, 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, and I was like doing 40 cities, 40 towns in Britain, from working class cities to posh cities to country towns,

the whole kind of range. And just before I set off, I saw, I think it was Bill Maher, was saying to Patton Oswald, you know, do you know what's happening in England? And he's like, no. and Bill Musk, oh my God, all these like delightful English villages and I'll be completely taken over by Muslim immigrants or whatever. And I was thinking...

What year was this? Oh, like a year ago. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I was thinking, oh, I wonder if I'm going to see any evidence of that. And in my experience of that, that's where I went to like 30 towns, nothing. Like no indication of any problem. Now, 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. Certainly 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? Palestine action, right. They were breaking into an Israeli arms factory and they were smashing all the drones and stuff like that. Apparently they had a bunch of equipment and like drones and surveillance stuff that was in this. 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. As far as I understand it, look, I much prefer to talk about things when I've done my own research and I've done my own, being down my own rabbit holes and have my own adventures. And this isn't one of those situations. So I'm talking in a much more, not knowing what the hell I'm talking about, manner here. But from what I understand, there was a kind of I'm Spartacus thing, but like all of these, you know, old ladies were getting arrested for saying I support

Palestine action, and then that clearly becomes absurd. And I'm sure the police. Right, right. Oh, this is them breaking down, breaking into the warehouse. Okay. Okay. Wild. So, as I say, what are they wearing?

Jump suits. Are they making sailor hats? Like El Ron Hubbard sailor hats? The camera's way too crazy. Right. Oh, they got the fun gas, the colorful smoke. Oh, no, they're wearing helmets and she's got a sledgehammer. Oh, that's insane.

Oh, well, they don't go for it. That's crazy. Yeah. But as I say, I've kind of, I've just sort of veered from the rule that I have, which is that I, you know, I spend my life going off on 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. So you're like, 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 transsex 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 wrote the psychopath test, which is about how it explores the theory that psychopaths rule the world, like you're much more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the tree than at the bottom. And then, I book Them, which is when I snuck into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones.

That one's fascinating. Yeah. So those are the kind of things I do. And I've just brought out 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 texting me while I was asleep. And so I read the last text first. first and the last text said, it's okay, we left. That was completely fucked, but we're safe now, or something along those 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, being held by a stranger that one of them had met on Tinder. So they turn up at this guy's house, three hours outside of New York City, and they turn 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? Oh, gargoyles. That sounds fun. A moat. Well, so they crossed the drawbridge. and enter the grand banqueting hall to discover that there's no party. They've been lured there under 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 invited to here 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 Princess. They said, what's the concept? He said, the concept is, I'm the Lord, I'm looking for my queen, I've got a hundred and one 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? Three, two women, and two... And him. And him and one male friend. And there was a couple of other... of other equally bewildered young people.

Did you want the boys to put dresses on too? No, they ended up going into having tuxedos. Okay. So they go down to the basement. There's a basement costume room with like racks of princess outfits and tiaras. And it's right next 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 filming 101 princesses. But it becomes pretty clear, pretty quickly, that this isn't a real reality show. Partly because the videographer had other 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 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 lure my son to your mysterious castle and false pretense.

Yeah, so I, I mean, to his credit, my son was like a plus one. So this guy met one of the girls on Tinder? Yeah. How old was this dude? Early 60s. And how old was the girl? Like mid-20s. Oh my God.

Are you sure it was Tinder and not like seeking arrangements or something like that? No, it must have. Although I know that he also uses 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 cat and 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 of Connecticut. Oh, in the forest in Connecticut.

I should say, by the way, it's like on a road where all the other houses are kind of normal houses. There's this vast castle with like, you know, way too many turrets 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 money. money 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, like 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. Oh, he actually came to invite you in his house. Well, I message to 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 and write 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, he said the way that princess, he called it princessing, bringing women to the castle. He said the way that princessing works is that you've got to get the girls to love other girls and that's how princessing works and 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 Hefner at pretty much the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Hefner. Unless you're the creme de la creme of manosphere influences, you can't really lord it over your princesses in your castle anymore.

Yeah, so that kind of made me laugh. That became like a theme of the book. There's all these things that men used to be able to do. we can't do anymore. So I kind of explore that. But my weird relationship with the castle owner just gets weirder and weirder the more I discover about what's going on inside the castle. Oh, wow. Any kind of weird connections to 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... Because at one point when he was sent to me 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 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 who would hang around the castle, yeah. But that was the only friend in high places. So what does he think about now that the book's out?

He's probably... Has he tried 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 I've been very diligent in my information gathering. Right. But it's pretty wild.

That's insane. I know. So anyway, I wanted to 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 mention. 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 Oma Bakri Muhammad, who said he wouldn't rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. So I contacted him and said, can I hang around with you while you overthrowed democracy into an Islamic state? And he said, fine. So I spent a year with Omar. This was the very first story that I did. So bloody, 35 years later, I'm still doing reckless things.

It might endanger me. What made you want to do that? What made you want to go risk your life? You know, I'm always kind of looking for some sort of absurd humor in the darkness. So with the car saw, 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 use our symbols of capitalism to destroy them. And that made me laugh. So for instance, he took me, the very first day I was with him, he took me to our office world to get his Islam, the Future for Britain, pamphlets photocopied, because office world has a special price promise. If you can find a photo, coughing service is cheaper. He'll give you a discount.

Buy one, get one today. Yeah, exactly. Then after a while, he said to me, John, I've let you into my life. I have given you much. I would like something in return. So I was like, what? And he said, can you drive me to Birmingham? There's like a secret meeting with Hamas and Hezbollah.

Oh, wow. So I became a chauffeur. So for a year I was over my chauffeur. Whatever happened to him? He's in prison and Lebanon now for inspiring acts of terrorism. In Lebanon. Yeah, he went off to Lebanon and got after 9-11. All of this was before 9-11.

This was pre-9-11. You know, some really sad things happened though. I met his young kid, Muhammad, really sweet kid. He was like 13 when I was doing my story about Omar. And Muhammad was saying how worried he was about his father, because his father was saying, you know, I was making headlines and how worried he was.

and 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, oh, I wonder what happened to Muhammad. Turns out Mohammed 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 to leave ISIS. It was heartbreaking because he was such a sweet 13 year old kid. When was this? That must be. This was pre-9-11.

No, the, this is, I knew them. I did Omar and, you know, met Mohammed and everything pre-9-11. But Mohammed joined ISIS and everything, I don't know, 10 years later or whatever. Hmm. Yeah. 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.

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ask them where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Omar said to me, he said, did you know that there's a shadowy cabal secretly ruling the world from inside a secret room called the Bilderberg Group? Omar said this? Yeah, or one of Omar's people actually said it. Yeah. And I sort of didn't pay much attention to it. But then 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 cross-burnings,

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 marque in his garden, all the Klansmen had to do these like multiple choice questionnaires about which strengths and weaknesses most applied to them. I always remember that one of them was mixes easily, which usually would be...

mixes easily. Yeah, now normally that would be a strength, right? But if you're in the clan, it's a weakness. Yeah. And they said the same thing to me. They said, did I know that there was a shadowy cabal, secretly ruling the world from inside a secret room? Wow.

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. They're conspiracy theorists. They believe that there's a shadowy cabal secretly ruling 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 Grove 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 golfing facilities, and that's where they rule the world from. world from. Let me just chew my little energy coming. Okay. Okay. Um, so.

Enjoy that energy coming. Mm-hmm. I will. Delicious. Delicious. Mm-hmm. I will. Delicious. Mm. So, yes. So I discovered that they always meet once a year in a five-star hotel with golfing facilities, and that's where they secretly rule the world from. So, um, uh, and I discovered that they were meeting that year at a hotel in Portugal, the Caesar Park Hotel and Golfing Resort 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 builder boat group. What was your view on this stuff before you went out there? Did you suspect it was all bullshit? Or did you, were you open mind into like, maybe this shit's real? I guess I was sort of veering on the side of bullshit that still had an open mind,

but I made a decision to do no research. I wanted to be a, twig in 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 Builderberg Group. I thought, I'll just, I'll just, you know, be a feather in the wind of the story, see where it takes me. So we turn up at this five-star hotel the day before the Builder Boat Group was supposed to arrive and we're like scouting around me and Big Jim Tucker. And they're still like holiday makers there. They're about to take over the whole hotel.

Holidaymakers? Yeah, at this hotel. But the Bilderberg group are coming in the next day. Okay. Vacationers. Oh, gotcha. Sorry. What the fuck's a holiday maker?

I know. I've never heard of that before. I forget I've been some strange fallen land here. Vacationers. Okay. Tourists. Yeah, tourists. Got it.

Or is Jim Tucker wrote in his notepad, unaware civilians. Unaware civilians. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. So then we scout around the hotel and then leave. and we're followed, a car chase in 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 chases in shoe between me and the Bilderberg Group security detail. How do you know it 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, banged on the window, you know, tapped and he refused to look at me. Oh, that's spooky. Yeah, really spooky. So then I filmed the British Embassy.

What he'd look like? Like a hench man of the shadowy cabal that secretly rolls the world. Wow. So I found... Just sat there in the car while you're knocking on the window and looking straight ahead. Yeah. And I've like got a press card.

I'm like waving it and he's not even looking. Yeah. Jim Tucker, by the way, is in the back of my car having the time of his life. Like he's loving this. He's blowing kisses at the chaser. I phoned up the Bilderberg. I phoned up the British Embassy. And I said I'm being followed.

I said, I'm a journalist from England and being followed by a dark green lancier belonging to the Bilderberg group. And she said, and then she said, go on. So I said, I just heard you take a sharp breath. And 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 would need Bilderberg's permission to be in Portugal. I mean, I think she was probably, you know, her words were probably a little bit mangled. What she was trying to say is, you know, are you 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 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. Don't see him coming. Yeah. So I thought, A, how does a woman from the British Embassy in Portugal know that?

She's a spook. Right. And B, that was kind of scant comfort because I was thinking about one of these ones are the dangerous ones and I just happen to be naturally good at spotting them. So then 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 someone who doesn't exist? And I said, he's behind the tree. He was looking at me from behind the tree by the swimming pool. Really? Yeah. The same guy that was in the car that wouldn't stare at you, that wouldn't look at you. That I don't know, actually.

There was another moment when I went to the beach, like I was ready to abandon the story. I went to the beach to carve it. down and 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 pamphlets 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 builder, because I still didn'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 I was like, I did later discover Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Peter Mandelson. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peter Mandelson. who's a huge figure of British politics.

He's just been brought down because he was in the Epstein files. Oh yeah, I saw that. Yeah, he was there. He's your typical Bilderberg guy. I ended up interviewing a couple of members of the Bilderberg group. I interviewed Dennis Healy, who used to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain. What's the American equivalent to that?

Like the head of the Federal Reserve, maybe. Oh, okay. Yeah. Or something akin, not exactly the same. Not exactly the same. And 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, 98, something like that. This is just before my Bohemian Grove adventure with Alex. He said, so he had a whole load of photographs and he'd taken inside Bilderberg meetings. So I asked him if I could look at the photographs. And he told me to fuck off. So, 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 Bilderberg meeting? No. No? No. Wow. I went to Ted as well.

Maybe Steve Bannon. No, he wasn't there. Who was there? David Rockefeller. A lot of like the head of Heinz, the head of Smith Clyde Beach. 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 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, big

corporate businesses that are international can be, I mean, essentially make more money so we can 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 than a Hitler than some sort of crazy ideologue. I think And this was like nine years after World War II ended. It was when they were formed. 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 for, I want to say, 30 years. He was put in jail by the CIA for exposing the, he blew the whistle on the torture program. Oh, Abu Ghabe?

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, Al-Qaeda people and waterboarding them

and doing all that stuff. And he blew the whistle on it. And he was saying, what was I just talking about? I just lost my whole turn and thought. The CIA guy, the enhanced interrogation, the torture. Yeah, what were you saying right before? I brought that up. Oh, about...

Oh, you're talking about Bilderberg. 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, it doesn't surprise me. There was always three, there was the three big groups, Bilderberg, 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, to, you know, people on the fringes, particularly because 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. opened up your fridge, stared blankly into the abyss for five minutes, and then suddenly came to the conclusion that you have nothing to eat. That's what happened to me before I started using Butcher Box. Butcher Box delivers 100% grass-fed beef, organic chicken, wild-caught seafood, and more, all sourced to the standards they can actually tell you about. They've already done the research and made the sourcing decisions, so all you have to do is decide what's for dinner.

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B-U-T-C-H-E-R-B-O-X.com slash Danny. And be sure to use our link below so they know. know we sent you. All of your different books are sort of like connected in one way or the other. Like the one about like lost at sea about what people believe and all that stuff and conspiracy theorists and how they can get, you know, subjected to cults or believe in quote unquote conspiracies and how it connects to all this stuff. It's so it's all intertwined. It's all interesting. But like from the time you published that to where we are now, like there's a big gap in like what we've learned from things like the Epstein files to where,

you know, you have evident, 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 leave a, when you purposely deceive, try to deceive the American public and hold back evidence, you leave 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, you know, the stuff that quite literally can lead any rational person to believe that Pizza Gate was real, you can't, 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 Gate and Q and on, you know, read the Epstein files. This is, this will probably be an unpopular comment among some of your viewers and listeners.

But like, I was obsessed with Epstein for like years. I was an early adopter of Epstein. I remember like as early as like 2017. I was walking with a Fenderwood for the New York Times past Epstein's house in the Upper East side. And I said, you'll never guess whose house this is, Jeffrey Epstein. And she said, who's Jeffrey Epstein? I've been there. It's crazy. Right, 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 the big park right across the street. Yeah. And then Howard Lettnik's house is right next door.

That's right down the street. Who? Woody Allen, I believe, is on the same 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 Q&ON, but doesn't the Epstein files show that Q&N 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 Q&N, all you had 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 Patterson, the airport novelist, wrote a whole book about Epstein. It really didn't sell many copies at all. Nobody was interested. It was only when Julie K. Brown

came along in Miami Hamilton, the whole thing blew 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 that. 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. Have you seen his fucking crazy dystopian fucking demonic art of child and all that stuff he has in his house? Have you seen his? So, so Podesta like Clintons, like he was around all these people.

And those are all the people that were implicit that were supposed to be linked to that Pizza gate place and all the cheese pizza stuff. Like they literally dumped the US government, jumped all these emails where there's, I think, uh, cheese pizza is mentioned in the Epstein file, something like 3,000 times. times like that's absolutely insane what are we what are we supposed to do with that right they 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 and on with like Steve Bannon and Epstein where they like created that right I think that was the implication is like they intentionally started QAnon 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 hostence, so I don't know. Have you ever Googled? Have you ever looked yourself up in the Epstein files? Yeah, I did.

I'm not in there, unfortunately. Not even a mention. No, not even mentioned. My friend Kurt Metzker is mentioned in there. Yeah, Kurt. He's in there. Yeah. Because I guess Epstein was going to go to one of Kurt Metzker's comedy shows on his

birthday. And that's why he was in there. They're like, oh, look at the lineup or whatever. That's funny. I'm in there like about twice, I think. At one point, he was given a copy of the Men Who Stay at Goats movie, it was based on my book. So there was like a little bit of tiny little back and forth about that. And then 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? And I got a mention in there too. One of the guys I talked to on, on, um, you know, on the show on our Patreon show is uh was mentioned in the Epstein files i learned it the day before I interviewed him i was like Googling him because I knew like a bunch 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 in 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 um 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 I don't want to butcher it. But anyways, he's an expert on all of this Stargate ESP type stuff with Uri Geller and Andrea Pujaharich and all that stuff. And anyways, long story short, is Epstein reached out to him and asked him.

He's a parapsychologist. He's a parapsychologist and senior scientist who studies human consciousness and anomalous mental phenomena, 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 a Zoom with Epstein. So yeah, he had a 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 spoonbending for 20 minutes. Wow. If Epstein had zooms with me, I could have given him a spoonbending story. Right. I'm sure you could. Yes. I went because I was hanging out with Uri Geller when I was dressing the minister at Goats.

You hung out with him? Well, I went to his house. No, in Israel? No, in Sonning on Thames near London. Oh, wow. Yeah, this sort of fancy sort of kind of Dallas-style mansion. Yeah. With pillars.

He gave me a tour. I do like Oewe, but I'm about to say something slightly takes the piss out of him. But I do. Well, yeah, it doesn't matter. Okay. But I do like him. So he turns, I turned up, he gives me the tour. Do you think he can really bend spoons?

I'm skeptical. Well, so he says to me, yeah. because John, this is my recovery covered limousine. This is my onyx toilet. He has a toilet made of onex. Yeah. And then he said, here is a Jewish prayer, shawl. He said, now, in my religion, what we believe is,

and I said, Uri, Uri, you don't need to tell me, I'm Jewish. And Uri went, I knew it! He said, Shippie, Shippey, didn't I say, the next person who walks through this door will be Jewish? Shippie is like, brother, and I'll go, yes, you did Uri. 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 said they were quite suspicious about some of the stuff that he was doing. Yeah. He 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. You know, I think it like maybe under certain states or maybe when you're young, it's there.

But I think probably when they get older, it might atrophy or they might slip away. But, you know, wow, I realize I can create a whole career and make a much of money marketing this. So like, if I can only do it 5% of the time, I'm going to have to fake it 95% of the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's a part of it. So I wrote a whole book, The Minister of Goats, which was like looking at all of this stuff and how it, you know, how the US Army was trying 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 one? He said, level one was observation. you walk into a room, how many chairs are 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, that's kind of a leap from level two. 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. 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? And he said that 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 a chance.

It's what's known in paranormal circles as sympathetic injury. So that was like the thing. That was like what I discovered. Then I went down a whole rabbit hole to try and meet the goat storer. And I did meet the goat storer in the end, a guy called Guy Savelli. He said he had a video of him staring. 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.

Oh. And I said, can I see it? And he said, yeah. So this was in Ohio, Curtland, Ohio. And he gets out the video. And there he is, like, staring at a hamster. A hamster's like on the wheel. And he's staring at it.

And suddenly the hamster, like, drops off the wheel and, like, lands on its back in the sawdust. And I'm like, Jesus Christ. And then the hamster gets up and starts eating again. So I said, well, can you show me the part of the video when the hamster dies? Yeah. And he said, no. he said 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. You know, I thought a lot, could there be any truth in any of this? And where I landed on was, have you heard of Rupert Shell Drake's?

Yeah. Yeah, the sense of being stared at. 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. the sense of being stared at. Yeah, you know that feeling we all have that, you know, you look around and somebody's behind you. Yeah, just that sort of weird, you know, maybe it goes back to

like when we were hunter-gatherers, whatever, and, you know, there was, 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? You want to, like, a weird, creepy, haunted house, like you've- Yeah, well, I did with the castle. That house was haunted? Well, certainly haunted by odd going on. Haunted by some fucking weirdo, that's for sure. Haunted, haunted vibrational, I would say.

Bad vibrational energy. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've never spent an out in a haunted house. Have you? No. Maybe. Not that I know of.

Right. I could have. I've had very creepy experiences in houses, specifically in New Orleans. Okay. But, yeah, I don't know. I never saw like any ghosts or anything like that. I nearly did one time.

I got a call, do you know the pop star Robbie Williams? Robbie Williams, that 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. There's Robbie.

Go to his Wikipedia. I want to see what... What kind of music does he do? It's sort of pop. Oh, pop? That's why I don't know about him. Angels was his big hit. Okay. Let me entertain you. He's great.

So I got a call from him in 2005, saying he'd read them, I book them, and liked it. I'd wanted to spend a night on a haunted house, and could I set one up for him? So, and this was when Rob was like, they're at the height of this fame, like, was selling up stadiums all over the world. So I phoned up all of these ladies of the manor,

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 any time Robbie wants to come, they were like throwing their ghosts at Robbie, like they

were their kind of debutante daughter. 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 Robbie, yeah, no wonder Robbie Williams and ghosts get on so well. They both only manifest themselves and suits them. So, but then me and Robbie went UFO hunting. in Nevada instead. No, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This guy's all in the supernatural shit.

Yeah, he's really into. What I like about Rob is that he's very much got a foot in both camps. Like he's got a foot in the believer camp and a foot in a skeptic camp. And he's always, he phoned me. He's the first person who told me about QAnon actually. He phoned me up.

Yeah, he phoned me up. I think at the beginning of the pandemic or something. I wasn't really paying attention to QAnon. And he phoned me up and he said like, have you been following QAnon? And I was going, no. He goes, well, he says, well, you know, they think that all of these, you know, celebrities are piles,

and they all have these, like, sex parties with profiles. They weren't far off. Yeah. So he said, he said, look, I'm, you know, they think I'm one of the profiles. 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 QAnon together. But that didn't happen.

Where did you go? No, we didn't do it. No, we didn't. But yeah, but we went UFO hunting in Nevada, which was really fun. Do you find any UFOs? No, he rented a, no, he kept on like, I remember one person said, oh God, if you'd been here like 10 minutes earlier, there were two aliens on the side of the road having a fight.

But then they dematerialized just before you arrived. I'm like, damn. My favorite moment for that day was he had a private plane for the day, Robbie, to go UFO hunting. And we turned up at the plane. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, very nice. 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.

We're all like in our 40s by then. And Robbie's friend, Brandon, said, well, can we stand up as the plane lands? So that's what we did. That's funny. Yeah. Have you been on a private plane? I've been on a few private planes, yeah. Yeah. 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, like these people report. But like one of the things that I'm super skeptical of is that

why would the government spend millions and millions of dollars of studying this stuff if it wasn't legit, you know? Yeah, well, I actually asked that, when I was right in the Minister at Goats, I asked that question about the whole thing about the goat staring. There was a general called General 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 mostly. Mostly, right, exactly. Stubblebine, that's the guy who Stephen Greer said offered him $2 billion to stop all of his UFO research. That Stubberborn said back to him.

Yeah, you know who Stephen Greer is? I know his name. 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 Stubbubbine 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. What? I noticed I get a little bit of a name check in that, because the better Oh look. Yeah, they talk about your book right there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Interesting. Famously depicted in the men who stare at goats. Yeah. So I would ask for that. Did you ever talk to Stubbine? Yeah, yeah. I met him. I met him in Tarrytown, 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. Is that 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.

Like, why do you put all of this time and effort into this sort of weird fringe stuff? And they said, if the US Army doesn't do it, who's going to do it? Like, this is part of our job to reach for the impossible. The evidence they would cite is, firstly, the high visibility jacket came from some U.S. Army research. What was it called? You know, the high visibility jacket. High-vis jacket.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a 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 an ambiguous whether that's good or bad. Yeah, these are all low-tech things. Yeah.

Also, I remember Jim Channon, who was like the main guy who created the thing called 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. like we have these wells of incredible strength. Untab human potential, yeah. And I think there's some true.

You said you've never experienced anything telepathic. I think I maybe have. Really? 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 and 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. And I remember both of those, like, very clearly. Yeah. And on both of those occasions, I've thought to myself, God, I wonder whether there is something in us, some sort of thing that protects us from dangers.

Yeah, I've always wondered the same thing. Yeah. I think, 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, 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. Oh no, I don't know this. Have you never heard of this? No. Yeah, so allegedly it was tied to this Montauk.

Okay, the Montauk project. Right, which was like the real version of Stranger Things. Stranger Things was based off this. Yes. And essentially, you know, 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 extra ESP abilities. But there's been lots of people who have come out and like explained how this has happened to them. And, you know, it's just kind of crazy that that was all happening around the same time

as this, 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 military unit where we're psychic spies. That sounds great. I met a few of them, and I think it was a really bad life for them.

Really? Yeah, they're in Fort Meade, Maryland, in this kind of condemned, because they're black ops. They couldn't like get the army to like fix their buildings, because they didn't exist. They didn't have a coffee machine yet to bring their own coffee into work because they were black ops, and they were in there for years trying to be psychic. Like the whole lives, they're like sitting there staring at a yellow pad like this one,

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 of times named David Morehouse. Oh yeah, I remember him. He was one of them, right? Yes, he's great. He was doing military exercises in somewhere on the border of Israel. I want to say Lebanon on the border there. And they were training. The U.S. Army was training a faction of their army to do

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 covered 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 all 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, whatever happened to him, initiated him into having these abilities. So he became a long time 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 get them like very vague

inputs or whatever and you ask him to describe certain things. And he explains it in a very scientific, pragmatic way that makes sense probabilistically. Right. 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, it's real. He's, his thing is like, that's not how it works at all. Yeah, I gotta 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 guy called Joe McMonagel. McMonnacle, yes.

Bless you. Gesundite. That's his daily sneezing ritual on the podcast. I got to get it out every year. What I thought, Joe McMan, you know, he said he seems like a completely sensible, nice guy, not a charlatan, have no reason to lie, very humble, and 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 real. Yeah, he remote viewed Mars a million, a billion years ago, and there was a little, and there was.

there was a civilization civilization there that was going to a nuclear war or something like this. Right. They had a nuclear war. Yeah, I remember one of the Eddames, remote viewed the Loch Ness Monster and decided it was the ghost of a dinosaur. Oh wow, really? Yeah. I'd really be great if that was true. Was Ed Dames a part of that? Yeah. Really? Yeah, Ed Dames and then Ed Dames 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. And said that, that he'd remote viewed a companion object in the tale of the Hail Bop comet.

And who was listening. Yes. That's how, or what's it called? Heaven's Gate started from that interview. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. They were listening.

And so there's a connection, there's that connection between the Heaven's Gate, Mass, suicide, and the remote viewing program. That's one of the craziest cult things. One of the craziest cult documentaries I've ever watched. It was the heavens gay one. Yeah, I'm surprised that not more people know about the remote viewing connection. I discovered that when I was doing the Minnesota 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. And where we are right now. Yeah, we've got to, 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 can do that. become clear in the 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 that's i had one 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

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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. 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.

Dot Brian Johnson.com. By using the code Danny at checkout. That's code D-A-N-N-N-N-T-B-L-U-E-R-I-N-J-O-H-N-S-O-N-N.com. After you purchase, 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. There was actually pretty positive. It was pretty good.

So it was when I started writing my book, The Psychopath Test. So I ended up to, 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 like why the Chris Cliff psychiatry. So I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists,

a guy called Brian, and I ended up coming right 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 pseudoscience? That psychiatry is an evil pseudoscience that can't be trusted. That evil prove what? That psychiatry is an evil pseudoscience. And that's what Scientologists believe.

Yeah, there's a team of Scientologists called the CC. HR who just hate, because Elron Hubbard hated psychiatry, presumably because they told him he was nuts, as my guess. So he 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're not anymore. So I said, I want to, you know, 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 Broadmoor. Now, Broadmoor used to be called the Broadmoor asylum for the criminally insane. It's where the criminally, and to this day, it's where they put the most notorious criminally insane people. Whoa, where's this at? It's in England. It's very close to Windsor Castle, where.

where the King Spence his summers. Oh, okay. They're close to Legoland as well. Oh, wow. It's between Legoland and Windsor Castle. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Perfect spot. Yeah.

So, and, you know, serial killers. Mm-hmm. It's where Jimmy Saville, you know about Jimmy Saville, right? Yeah. The BBC guy who would prey on. He's there? Well, he's dead now, but he was there, not as a patient, but as a visitor.

He would like go there as a visitor. And there were stories that he would some of the women there. Oh, my. Yeah, if it wasn't bad enough. So, Brian said this, this guy called Tony, who's in Broadmoor. He faked madness to escape a prison sentence. He'd beaten somebody up at the age of, like, you know, 17.

And he decided to fake madness to escape a prison sentence. But he faked it too well. And they sent him to Broadmoor. He thought he'd end up in some of that cushy hospital, where nurses would bring in pizzas, but instead they sent him to Broadmoor, which is like this airless, windowless place you could never get out of. And if he'd just done his...

And nobody will believe he's sane. 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 Broadmoor 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 sane. Right. That's hilarious. I know, right. So did you get a hold of this guy?

Oh yeah, yeah. I went to Broadmoor to meet Tony. I went there with Brian, the Scientologist. Oh, wow. Well, I'll 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 patients. Were a lot of these people violent criminals? Oh yeah, it's pretty much all violent criminals. Um, and they just, they just, they just, moved a guy there who killed a bunch of school kids in Southport and the Yorkshire Ripper was there and yeah um some really hardcore people so we're taken through into the wellness center which is like this kind of all the colors are like calming colors peaches and the only bold colors 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 their years. They'd like given up. Brian said to me, oh, you know, Tony's the only person from the entire DPSD unit to be given permission to meet people in the wellness center. So I said, what does DPSD stand for? DSPD. It's a dangerous and severe personality disorder.

He said, oh, here's Tony now. So this guy's like 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 pinstriped 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 sociopath Right, well So So well So, I said, so did you fake your way in here? He said, yeah, I beat someone up.

My cellmate said, you know, you need to have fake madness. Tell him you're mad, it'll all be fine. I said, so 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 it 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 12 years. I want to go back to prison. He said, it's a lot harder to convince somebody you're sane

than it is to convince him you're crazy. He said, he tries to sit in a sane way, like when he's with a, you know, talking to one of the nurses. But the more you try and sit in a sane way, the more you come over is like nuts, you're too self-conscious. Right.

He said that he tried 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 Scientist 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 Thinks Bees. He's consistent out of 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 that Tony 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 0-1 or 2.

So after I met Tony, I thought, because somebody said to me, you're much more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the trees and at the bottom. What does that mean? Like the top of society? Yeah, corporate leadership, political leadership, religious leadership. You're much more likely to find a psychopath up there. Right. I see. That makes sense.

Yeah. 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. Right. Bureaucracies reward psychopathic behavior, right? Yeah, bureaucracy, just, you know, money-making. People who want to make money, they reward. Of course, right. And also- 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 that the sort of distant scary boys like we were 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 um 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 the way that their brains work.

So when I heard that, I said, 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.

That's a double-edged sword. 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 what the 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 Sherlock Holmesy about it. It's all about reading between the lines. What are they saying? Their tone of their turn of phrase. It is a, you know, it's all about that. So it's fascinating. So if you can get them talking about empathy,

because callous lack of empathy is one of the items on the checklist. Because they see empathy as a weakness or they see empathy as something that doesn't exist. Yeah. So it's really interesting to talk them about that. But the items on the checklist are, grandiose self-worth, glib, superficial charm. I went to interview this corporate CEO called Chainsaw Al Dunlap, who lives in Florida. Chainsaw Al Dunlap?

Yeah, he was always famous for like going into a failing business, firing 30% of the workforce. Always with a joke. Like somebody said 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... have a job. So I emailed him. I didn't want to say, can I come and interview you to find out if you're a psychopath. So instead I said, I believe 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 inherited or do you

think that's developed like nature versus or nurture, something that can happen in an early childhood, like not having parents, being a victim of child motivation or... Okay, so the consensus is the baseline you're born that way. But... 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're, if you're a psychopath, you're born a psychopath. However, what you... The nurturer side of it is also very important. That can enhance it.

Totally. Like 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 Chancellor or Al Dunlap, whereas if you're born into a kind of family where there's abuse and so on, you may end up like... Charles Manson. Or Tony and Broadmoor.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He had a terrible childhood. Right. Yeah. So I think that's where the nature and nurture thing kind of fits together. But anyway, so I'm interviewing Al Dunlap at his 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.

And he goes, yeah, it's an amazing theory. It's like Star Trek. You're going, well, no man has got before. I said, well, some psychologists would say that this brain anomaly makes you a... He said, what? And I said, a psychopath. And can 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 that I'll Dunlap, like all of us loved 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 gotta believe in you. Right. So he went through the checklist redefining 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. Right. I said cunning, manipulative. He said, that's leadership. So, yeah. Here we go. Yeah, this is the list. It's the hair.

It was Hare himself who taught me as I went on a... Glibniss, superficial charm. Previous, so, okay. Interesting. Some of them surprised me. Number 12, promiscuous sexual relations. That one surprises me because... Wait, which one? Number 12.

Primiscuous sexual relations. Yeah, because. Because you know, my promiscuous days are behind me now, but I look back on them with some fondness. Yeah. Early behavior. I have a lot of these, juvenile delinquency, well, the reason why early behavior-

Drug or alcohol abuse. Right. Yeah, this is worded slightly differently to the one course, but it's basically the same thing. Early behavior problems is an important one because most mental disorders manifest when you're like between 10 and 12 years old. Like that late?

Yeah. Yeah, actually I medicate the other day with ADHD, who was eight. So it's so it is earlier. But I think a lot of times it kind of happens when you turn, whether it's an anxiety disorder like OCD, but also, you know, the opposite of anxiety is psychopathy. Literally, I think, the opposite. The opposite of anxiety?

Well, I believe so. And I put this to people when I was writing the psychopath test. Because if you're anxious like I am, you have an overactive amygdala. Your amygdala, bless you, 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 where anxiety comes from.

Whereas psychopaths, I have an overactive amygdala because I have an anxiety disorder. Psychopaths have an underactive amygdala. That thing 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 for Itzhak Bentov? He was one of the big guys in the remote viewing days. No, I think he was the one who introduced Uri Geller to

Tag and Putoff. Biharich. 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 Stocking the Wild Pendulum. Okay. 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 and 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 at the beginning, well, we should just listen to it. That's the best. Here, throw your headphones on and you can hear him explain it. Right. That is our visual system has evolved. Let me draw 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 the population we can use this diagram also describe evolution the bulk of the population today is this intelligent moralizing intelligent biped and with a vertical spine and who

pushes the buttons on TV and drives a car etc etc now there is some back throw that That is there are some people here in this area, very few people who are still guerrilla-like. That is your hairy. They beat their chest when they see their 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 the very highly evolved people. At this point we're here, what's going to happen maybe a million years from now, half a 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. What's 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 find these people here? I suspect you would find them in universities, you'd find the people who are very bright, people who are in the leading edge of professions.

It's an intellectual thing. Well, I suggest that you find them in mental hospitals in not houses. And the reason for that is that these people, they 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, like, like, Canada. These are the so-called genie.

Hmm. Fascinating, right? Fascinating. And actually reminds me of a woman that I know called Ellen Longton who, um, I used to go, I used to tour with her. Actually, I had to interview her on stage. Such an amazing story that really speaks to what he just said about mental hospitals. What is her story? Her story is she's a student, somewhere 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 is 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. Anyway, after about a month of this, she had no problem with it. It was just like companion. An auditory voice. Yeah, just a voice.

Just narrating whatever she was doing. the third person. And she almost saw it as being like a companion, like she was, she was a bit lonely and miserable, she just gone to college, and she almost saw it as like a kind of companion. Anyway, one day, yeah, there's Eleanor. So one day she said to her roommate, something funny is happening to me, I'm hearing this voice. And she said, her roommate like 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 in her head.

Like no longer is like calmly saying things in the third person. It's like sounding, you know, nastier. So then her roommate says you've got to 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, you know, depression and the doctor's like looking really bored. And then she goes, oh, and I'm hearing a voice in the head. the doctor like spins around just like thrilled, you know, drops it fence her and says, well, you know,

and sort of sends her to a mental hospital. And that's when she's told she's got schizophrenia or she's schizophrenic. 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 they're patholic, they've become sort of evil because, she was told by the medical establishment that it was bad. Oh, wow. So she ends up going into mental hospital.

She says, I want to leave. And they said, if you leave, we'll section you. Does that a word in America? It just means, you know, we'll, like, an involuntary hold. Like Baker 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 an electric drill, to drill a hole in her head to get the voices out. Jesus Christ. That's how bad it is. And then finally, after all of this, she meets somebody, a more sort of holistic, mental health type person who says the voices are a part of you, that 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 voice. And she still has some, like, she still hears the voices all the time. Yeah. 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 exam.

Yeah. And now she's a very successful psychologist, researcher. She still hears the voices all the time. Oh, that's true. Yeah, but that story reminded me of that. Yes, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And also, like, what way, in what direction are we evolving? Like, are we evolving to become more psychopathic?

Like, 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 of 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. Like society definitely reward psychopathic. And we are becoming more psychopathic.

We are. Social media is a very big part of it. What does social media do, but discourage empathy. People claim to 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, who see the world exactly the same way you do. Right. 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. You know, that's a rule, that's promoting psychopathic values of people to take a shoot. Well, certainly making us numb to that kind of stuff. Yeah. Well, numbness, that's shallow affect and inability to experience a range of emotions. Absolutely. And I think, and you know what, this is something I've read about in the castle, the book I've got coming out, well, now as we're talking. It's about, one thing I look at in the castle 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. 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 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 adenosine, which is a chemical that makes you tired. But medaphanil works throughout multiple pathways in the brain, dopamine, norapinephrine, histamine, and oryxin, all to achieve energy and steady alertness for 10 to 12 hours.

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castle. How did you get the invite to that? Well, okay, so when I finished writing the castle, my American publisher said, you've got to get to the cage fight 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 if I can get access to the South Lawn. I'd always be like sitting at the nearby J.W. Mario 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 yeah, I got there, so I was there for the whole thing. Oh, wow. But the reason why I mention 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 on to 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 100 journalists there. And somebody for the UFC, I was out, 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, this kind of little rag tag of redundant dinosaurs. So that's an example of the death of. And I tell you, I was funny, I looked over the content creator line. I've never seen a press pack with so many neck tattoos.

Really? Really? Really? Like, like, fist bumping. Yeah. What an incredible production that was. Oh, God. the UFC, 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 was all knockouts. Right. Yeah, every one was a knockout. It makes you skeptical of like, you know, is the UFC mix. There's no way it can fix, but it's like, it's crazy. Right. That that, of all the UFC fights to have all knockouts, like it was the one on the White House law, 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 Hokka, Obama's a man, Michelle Obama's a man. Yeah, he said if it wasn't for that moron,

then that would have been perfect. And I couldn't have agreeing. Like, I don't know what the mainstream media naysayers would have latched onto if Josh Hokit, I hadn't done that stupid thing. Yeah. But, yeah, but the production was incredible. At one point, the day before at the fan fest on the Elips Lord, this bold eagle flies, you know,

so low above our heads that, you know, its talents are practically touching us. And that was amazing. I've never experienced that before. And there were supposed to be crazy storms and stuff. But they like last minute, they were like, allegedly they were going to have to push the start of it back to 10, which mean they wouldn't, 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 trumpet, did drag on and on and on. Like I was still there at like 1.30. Yeah, they all do. Yeah, they all go super late. Yeah. But yeah, it was amazing. We were all sequestered on the, in the, we had to get there 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 fight to start. And there's only a tiny number of us. There's a couple of UFC sort of journal. who follow the UFC like everywhere they go, like a British guy who works for Connor 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 it.

I was, you know, there was a tiny number of... Anyway, something exciting happened while we were waiting and it was that usually, Trump was having a pre-fight birthday dinner and usually, Usually the luminaries would go in through a different door, like miles 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 in there, like the embedded journalists, like this never happens. So we all went outside to take photographs and try and interview, J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson, they're all walking by us, Dr. Oz, so on.

GQ has commissioned this legendary maverick street photographer called Bruce Gilden to take the photographs for my story. And Bruce is this kind of crazy 79-year-old guy, you know, very maverick. So I look over and Bruce and one of the luminaries are like hugging each other and right up in each other's faces. 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, I just did that. But I know people, see, I know people. So then, and it went very well with Sean Duffy. But then Stephen 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 Stephen Miller, grabs him by his shoulders, and starts, like, laughing delightedly in his face.

And Stephen Miller's, like, security detail. Don't know whether to, like, go for their guns. Like, everyone's, like, suddenly really shocked. Like, who is the, 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 heard someone go, I think he's with GQ. So I'm like, I just, like, stomp as far away from this. Oh, my God. Yeah, I'm thinking I've been here all week. Pudger S. Thompson is just fucking it all up for me. So that's what happened just before the first. So did you get a good photo, Stephen Miller?

You know, the photo of Stephen Miller wasn't quite as good. GQ were using it in the piece, because I tell that story. Yeah. The one of Sean Duffy was great. Yeah. And a great photograph of Josh Hokit. I've got a theory as to why Josh Hokka said Michelle Obama's the man. Oh yeah?

Yeah. So earlier that week, Josh Hokka does this press conference. It's media day and all the fighters are coming in one by one and doing a little, you know, back and forth with the journalists. But Josh Hokit 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 just, yeah, his characters. And at one point he says as a joke that he's going to take his cup, his groin-protecting cup off and throw it at Trump. Like, that's what he's going to do when he wins. And there's like a sort of audible gasp in the room, like, don't, you know. And then Josh Hokit, like, immediately realized he's made a mistake.

And he says, no, I'm not going to do that. That one didn't land. Yeah, that one did land. Guys, work with me here. Guys, help. Yeah. My theory is that that was festering in Josh Hokkert's mind all week. Like I said something to insult Trump.

You know, I've really fucked this up. And that's why he overcompensated. I think he says that, though, in every fight. He said, I think he always says, Michelle Obama's a man. I think that's his schick. I think he always said, he said that many times.

Really? During post-fight interviews that he's done. I couldn't be wrong. Well, from what I've heard is that he's actually a really intelligent, well-spoken guy, like behind the scenes. And he's playing this character, this dumb sort of like, America type guy. He used to be an NFL, he used to play for the NFL.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I saw an interview with him where he was being the actual human being. And it just made the whole thing all the more baffling. Unless I'm the one being Joub's. 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.

He's a great fighter. Yeah. So what is, you know, does it come? from insecurity? Like what? What's going on? Anyway, I said that to Dana 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 for all 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.

to some level, 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, 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 cheering, yeah, America and all this stuff. It just, it felt like this big propaganda piece for America, you know what I mean? And you know what it really reminded me of was, that hyper normalization movie by Adam Curtis. Yeah, Adam's a close friend of mine. We, we, uh, yeah, I always watch.

I said, 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, and the idea of hyper normalization is where everyone knows that everything's falling, coming apart of the seams. But like 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 of American greatness and superiority and, you know, 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.

it on some stupid podcast and was his next door neighbor and it's just like you can't i can't compute that this is actually happening yeah it has to be some evil cabal and they yeah exactly there and they're putting on the hunger games um no i i 100% agree with every word that you that you just said you know the day before um somebody the day before at the fan fest they had a video of great moments from presidential history that was put together by the u. 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 is there isn't a red America, blue America, there's only one America.

The montage skips Biden. 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, blood and strength. And then the next night, there's people, you know, beating the living shit out of them. Yeah. Out of each other on the White House law and blood and strength. You know, a lot of people think that thing was fake, too.

What, the, that final. The whole Butler's thing, yeah. Right. Oh, yeah. Well, actually, I, when I was at the White House press room, I met the photographer. Somebody said to me, you got to meet this. No way. Yeah.

Someone said to me, you got to meet this guy. The guy who was running around the bait, right, right there in front of it. Yeah, the guy who took the famous photograph. I think he's either AP or Royters, I can't remember. Yeah. Really nice guy, we're chatting away. And I said to him, I said, look, like, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but that one, you know, that one seems odd. I gotta 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... These aren't that they don't think that the bullet was fake. I mean, it's obviously a guy got his head blown off. And I think two people were killed, right?

Evan is that him? I'm pretty sure if you, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's him. Very buff. Find a photo of that guy. Buff. Yeah, I just remember saying to me, Evan, he's very buff. Oh.

He took this photo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. I met him while I was waiting in the... It's copy. Yeah, that's crazy, man. Yeah. Oh, this dude. Oh, that's the dude who took it.

That's him. He looks hardcore. Yeah. Well, 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, 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 the story. But as you say, there's like, there's different, you know, there's different levels of conspiracy. Didn't the wife of the guy who was killed say that she thought that somebody, that there was an inside job, that there was somebody, the inside work. Did she? I don't know. I think that's totally like just something I read on the

periphery. Right, right. Yeah, there's, oh look, this guy does jiu-jitsu. Wow. He took a bronze. Wow. I'm glad I didn't annoy him that much. So he's a jiu-suitzu guy. Yeah. But he was great. He was lovely. I really, really liked the embedded journalists at the White House press room. Yeah, well, the, I forget exactly everything about it, but like there was like this religious, somebody made this, this, this connection to um 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 like a ritual thing that uh 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

with the guy crooks meeting he was pinged somewhere right like at an FBI office like far away from there a couple weeks before that there no silverware in the parents house. And like there was all these video like first of all the 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. Allegedly the NSA was never able to find and never gave us any evidence of it. Wow. Or whatever. I've got to say, it's crossed my mind more than once and maybe that's a rabbit hole.

I should go down is Butler. Mm-hmm. But I don't know. I don't want to go down to Big Raba Hall and find nothing. Well, I think it was definitely a turning point for a lot of people 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 or 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 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 heard that it did 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 Thiel 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 was that whole story that came out where this was reported. There was a lot of whistleblowers in the American military that said that their lead their commanders told them that Trump was like appointed by Christ to like end Iran or whatever. Right. So like there's so.

different little threads that can have 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 is the person who's going to provide the answers right cue said clearly turned out to not be true so yeah absolutely um yeah i was just remember another thing about my the ufc fight which i found Yeah, yeah. So 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 for himself where he can have princesses

and so on. It's like he can't handle the outside world. He can't handle how society is changing. Our 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? Those these. The pointy things?

Yeah. Yeah, that is. Too many everything. It's just too much everything. That's fucking weird. I know, right? So that's the castle off my book, off the castle. Could you imagine that in 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. Right. He's always been, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So he's kind of creating or trying to create this world where he has all of these princesses, a kind of Playboy Mansion type thing in that world. This man's deeply disturbed.

Right. And yeah, and I had an incredible three-year sort of cat and mouse game with him. And that's what most of the book's about. People are taking photos in front of it, Steve, go down. Yeah, zoom out. They had a TikTok account for a while. They don't have it anymore. Oh, a TikTok account, huh?

Which was very popular. She had like 800,000 followers. Wow. Is that the dude? Yeah. Oh. That's him with his llamas. Camels.

Camels. Yeah. That one looks like a lot. Baby camel and a big camel. It was reported during his divorce hearing that... That's stone, bro. It was reported that one of his camels had starved to get to death due to neglect. Starved 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 of one of them. Yeah. After death. That thing had been expensive to build. That's an incredibly huge fucking castle. It really is. His mother came for his great-grandfather. I'm jealous. Yeah. That birdcage is for his circus performers. Uh-huh. Yeah. I know where's this guy from? Um, he, well, he's, uh, come in with, I think, I think the family comes from Illinois, but he's in Connecticut. Uh, and his great grandfather was a gilded age steel tycoon. Right. That's where the buddy came from. Uh, oh, well, that's it under construction. Interesting. Yeah. But I tell you what's kind of what, bringing it back to the UFC fight. Yeah. The thing I found interesting was, I was talking to Sean O'Malley, the fighter. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Sugar Sean O'Malley. Shug Shorno Mali, who always boasts about his open marriage, his one-sided non-monogamous marriage.

So he's allowed to have sex with other women, but his wife, Banya, isn't, not to have sex with other men. And the way he explains it is, as Andrew Tate puts it, I have status, I have status. So I said to him, thinking about my castle owner and the, you know, world he's trying to create for himself inside his castle. I said to him, you have an open marriage. Surely that doesn't work. And he said, well, it 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 the short of marriage is over. Like the marriage is still good. But she said to him no more, no more open marriage. Oh, that she wants to go bang other guys? No, no, no. She wants it to be monogamous. She wants it to be

be like a normal woman of marriage. Oh, so he agreed no more other women. Yeah, no other women. And he looked so baffled, as he was telling me this, baffled by this change in his fortune, so he's not allowed to do this anymore. He's young, right? He's super young. Yes. But it made me wonder whether this kind of,

one of the things I traced in the castle through my castle load of another men that I meet in the book, including this YouTuber who's got the wildest story I've ever done pretty much. I think he's got the strangest story that ever happened on YouTube. this guy. Really? Yeah, Greg Chisholm. But anyway, I thought there's all these people are like creating this, these fantasy world 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, I'm going to be completely

disinhibited, my way or the highway. But sure no, Malley discovers that real life sometimes snaps back and stops you from doing those things. And it made me wonder whether like the pendulum swim is sort of moving back a little bit now from people just you know that sort of manospherey 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 um during the obama biden years you know all like you know the whole the whole thing where you know all of this these trans protests and like doctors trying to get kids to transition and stuff like that and like um there was a lot of a lot of craziness that was happening for a while where that was like really being pushed right

and where it was like you know even gay people i would talk to would be like annoyed by it where it's 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 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. You know, in the castle, I look at something a

little different to that, which is about, there's almost nothing about the manosphere in the castle. But what I do look at is sort of more ordinary men. Why is there 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've just bowed out of 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 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 like sitting on a bench trying to come up with story ideas yeah I just think to myself I'm just a man sitting on a bench

yes all of my self-worth just sort of drains away yeah and that's what I wanted to like look at in the castle through the story of the castle owner and like various other men that I that I that I right about. And so I was thinking about those 6.7 million men who had just bowed out of society and wondering what that lack of purpose and lack of structure is doing to their inner lives. And one of the things I came to actually which I thought was interesting 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-Churches, channel and you've got all of these like people saying you know the way to re-ancher yourself to society

if you're a man is to be more vulnerable be be vulnerable yeah 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'm sure that's true in many circumstances if I express my vulnerabilities to my wife, for instance, she's, you know, understanding, patient. Yes. But I've tried it out on female friends once or twice, tried to be like vulnerable. Yeah. And they recoil in disgust.

And it makes me think. Interesting. And Brunei Brown, who's like the doyenne of vulnerability. She's at the woman who started the whole vulnerability craze. Uh-huh. She says, when men try and be vulnerable, they require. women recoil in disgust. It's like if we move, if men move too far away from their sort of primordial,

primordial role is like stuical 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. That makes sense. Yeah. Evolutionary, I guess it makes sense, right?

I thought that was very interesting. And then, so then you've got like, you know, conflicting, influences say, no, don't be vulnerable, be more serious. be more stoical, then you turn on the TV, TV ads. Men and TV ads are dofuses who can't do anything right and have to constantly be bailed out by their exasperated wives. Any, any, well, I would say any, I'd say almost every male character in a TV ad is a dofuss who can't do anything right. men driving off cliffs, leaving their babies on restaurant conveyor belts, missing the plane because they're so inept, they can't get through the airport.

Baby men who like 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 and this kind of sea of conflicting ideas as to what being. a bad means these days is part of the reason why we are. 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 blue collar stuff, just coders, right? Like people, it's, it's very, a lot harder to, 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 um uh 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 fills a void 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 the, like in my experience, in real life, the people that usually tried 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 jiu jitsu black belts or 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, overboard. Or in Nick Fuentes' case, when you have like his, 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, you listen to in Aquinas. 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. What you said earlier 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 know, in the psychopath test, I looked at psychopaths and- A great, sorry to interrupt you, but a great example of what I was 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, looking like he's, you know, like he's never touched a gun in his life. Yeah. 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 this story? There's this guy called Greg. So he came from Granite City, Illinois. crumbling town. He was destined to work at the factories, but then the factory closed down and he had no prospects there. At the age of 18, he has, his heart has a problem, but he has multiple open heart surgeries. So by the age of 18, he owes the health insurance companies $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, can 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 fruitarian cyclist influencer.

Cycles only eats fruit. What was that other word, frutarian? Fruitarian. I hadn't heard that phrase. He only eats fruit? Only eats fruit. Wow. Not even vegetables.

So, Deerun Rider says, you've got a story. Tell a story. Tell a story on YouTube. YouTube is the new institute. YouTube is the place, is that too? Yeah. This guy only eats fruit. Yeah.

And you can tell in the top one is he, he has, you know, those watermelons. He had watermelon. He had every one of those watermelons. Oh, those aren't watermelons. He ate everyone else. I know, yeah, they're not. The giant. Whoa.

It's like jack fruit. Yeah. So, so he inspired Greg. Like Greg watched his video and that was his Damascus moment. His Damascus moment. Yeah. This was meeting Saul on the, road to Damascus. Greg decides to become an influencer. So the first thing he does is he does

adult braces influencing. 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, he's the lawn care goat, Greg. Really? He's YouTube's first lawn care influencer. Wow. I love watching the lawn care videos. You did the ASMR. 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 these hour long. Yeah, he was getting like 100,000. I could watch those for hours. Yeah. Right. Well, you would have been Greg's perfect audience.

Yeah. I'll probably subscribe to him. Yeah. Freak to Geek lawn care. Freak to geek. Yeah. Shout out Greg. So just wait until you hear what happens next in Greg's story.

He also does these, Good Samaritan lawn care videos. Do you watch those? No, I don't think you know. Okay, he's driving along, sees a lawn in need, jumps out of his truck, and fixes it. It's like a good Samaritan and then vanishes again into the night like the Zorro of lawn care. Oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. So he's doing brilliantly like he's like Batman. Yeah, he's the Batman of Lorne 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 meet and greet for him at a pizza place and it was like mobbed. Oh no, not a pizza place. Yeah. Oh no, different kind of pizza place. Okay. So Greg is at this, you know, a 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 a thousand subscribers. If his daughters do something funny,

he'll film it and put it on his other channel. It's 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 the boxes on their heads. And he puts it up on YouTube, and it gets 10 million views. What year was this?

This was like 2013, 2014, something like. like that. It 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 like works with this kind of teacher from YouTube and they're saying, you know, you need to have like the WTF moment. He needs to like come up with new seasons. Anyway, he's so he does a whole bunch of new seasons. He does food fights in the truck. He's getting like 25 million views now. Wow. You know, the kids are like throwing cereal at each other. People love it.

Then he does this 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 it to each other's faces and the kids love it. It's if it, you know, 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 like messy food scenarios. But then he becomes the third bad baby and now he's getting like 600 million views. Oh my God. Yeah. And that's when his life crumbles.

Because if you come to his story at the end, where him and his two daughters are all dressed as babies with like binkies in their mouths and wearing one pieces, it looks fucking weird. That's super fucking weird. Yeah. So BuzzFeed, he ends up getting like banned from YouTube. For the videos they were encouraging him to make,

banned from YouTube. For the videos that YouTube was encouraging. Well, because Bad Baby was doing brilliantly. Yeah. Like until it wasn't popular. Is this still on YouTube? Not really. No, they took it all down.

Yeah, I've got them all. You can see little images from it and so on. So he was, was the audience, like, begging him, like, suggesting shit for him to do? Yeah. But from what I can tell, not in a trolley, let's get him into trouble way. Right. But you know, we love you, do more of this. You know, the kid with the skips of him.

The skits are funny, do more. So he just gave himself over to the algorithm, 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 be working in the factory, dressed as a baby crawling around the house

with a onesie on, because this is what he's being rewarded for by the algorithms. It'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 amateur sleuths on the internet think he's part of some sort of boring. So the FBI raided his house.

He's take the kids have to go to child protective services. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's caught up in this whole Elsagate thing, if you remember, Elsagate. Elsa gate? Yeah, all of these weird videos ended up on YouTube kids. And some of them were really properly weird. And but Greg got brought 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 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, 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. Especially when YouTube rewarded you for it. Absolutely. There was a moment when he's a lot of, because 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 about 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, 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? When he's back to... For a while, his life was terrible. He would take the kids out, 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 influencing. 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 his perspective, tells it with all the nuances, is about to come out in the castle. So, 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, my story, story's going to make his life a bit better now. I mean, he definitely did things I wouldn't do. Like he put his kids on YouTube. Saying that, I used to write a column in the garden.

So many people do that now. 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. And people would drop their kids off.

Like, before it all went wrong and all the bad press happened. And strangers would drop their kids off at Greg's house so their kids can pay with Greg's kids. He'd have to like lock the door to not let them in. Yeah. But there you go. So YouTube offers itself as this 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 kind of hierarchy manifested itself. Yeah, YouTube is a weird thing. It's a very weird thing. because like the 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 it very much promotes people uh like me and people who do what I do to self-sensor themselves because you kind of know you loosely know like what you can and can't talk about because you're going to get de-platformed or you're going to get shadow banned or I mean the shadow 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 going to get so much, you're going to 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 going to stop seeing them, but they're going to start throwing their hands up, you know, saying that they're shadow ban and people are going to think they're crazy. So it works perfectly. But you haven't self-centered at all in this

interview. So, so why hasn't it not happened to you? There's a few topics. I self-censor on. Not, not anymore, but I did during the pandemic. Because 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 a lot of trouble. And a lot of people got completely thrown off. Right. There's Greg and his daughters. Oh, my God. Yeah. 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, before it was weird, it wasn't weird.

Yeah. That's the thing about it. It became a little bit like the voices in Eleanor's head from earlier on in this conversation. Yeah. It was like it was only weird when it was deemed weird. Mm-hmm. I'd 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 was in like a, a new... Nickelodeon type studio, it wouldn't seem quite as creepy. But because he's filming it at home, there's no context. It's like you've just stumbled onto a ordinary Midwestern family. Yeah. Who are all babies. Like what the fact?

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 to, in my, from my perspective, because you have parents, fully grown adults who are using their toddlers as. to make millions of, if they become successful, they make millions and millions of dollars. And like their kids now become like, you know, YouTube stars and they don't even know what the hell that means anymore and then you're making all this money.

And now, now you're in this cycle, you gotta keep making more and more and more. So eventually it's like, all right, kids, we gotta wake up, we gotta work on, we gotta skit to do today, we're writing the script and blah, blah, blah, blah. You've made this little like, this little content factory where your children are the workers.

And I obviously put that to Greg. Yeah. But I put it to him from the kind of empathetic place, because 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 time. This was 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 don't do this. Yeah.

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. And 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, cause to upset him. But, yeah, you know, he said it was a more utopian time when people were trying 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 uh political ideologies clashing or at least on my algorithm you know videos of war videos of death and destruction and then people just fighting about yeah uh their political stance on things but i interrupted you about to oh no i wanted to ask you about um you're the the time that you and Alex infiltrated the Bohemian Grove. Right. I want to hear that story. It's such a story. So after I, I assume that everyone has been, everyone 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 Builderberg. Builderberg is kind of globalist, I'd say probably centre, centre 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 thought, I'm going to 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 a beaming Grove. and he said, that's where they transformed themselves back into giant reptiles. Don't go anyone near that forest. David Lacks, a person who came up with the whole lizard theory. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. So then I phoned up Alex 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 had a small audience. But I'd met him because he was rebuilding David Koresh'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 was he rebuilding it?

I don't know, it was like it was in Waco. Yeah, the government burnt it down. Right. One of Alex's very first things was Waco. Okay. That this was a government conspiracy. They murdered them, so I'm going to rebuild this church. Okay.

And he did rebuild it with listener donations. Wow. And I went there. I didn't know that. Yeah. And I went there with Randy Weaver, who was from Ruby Ridge, the father at Ruby Ridge. Ruby Ridge was a kind of early Waco, two years earlier, where a family of white separatists in Idaho get involved with the ATF.

That's a crazy story. Yeah. So I made a documentary called The Legend of Ruby Ridge, where I spent quite a lot of time with Randy Weaver's daughter and Randy. Randy. And Randy had said he'd never been to Waco. So I said, let's go on a road trip. So I went to Waco with Randy and there was Alex Jones. Randy. We was like, oh my God, it's Alex Jones. And I said, who's Alex Jones? He's incredible. He's this incredible broadcaster. So that's why I phoned Alex and said, do you want to sneak into Behemen Grove with me? And he said, okay. So we went to,

actually said, more than okay. He said, I'm going to smuggle in a camera and we'll get right up in their faces and will confront them about their satanic devil worshipping. I didn't know the whole thing was your idea. Right. It's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I said to Alex, I think stealth would be a better approach. And I sort of, 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 in Occidental. which is a nearby town. Alex is a day late because he gets lost. He's there with Mike, his producer, and Kelly, his girlfriend, then wife, their ex-wife.

And they get lost in the fog. And they're phoning me up. 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 Bohemian Grove? So Alex's plan... It's on a Saturday night.

Yeah, I think we were probably there for about three or four days beforehand. And it was on the Saturday night. It's like the centrepiece 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. get in that way. So it was kind of the all conceived plan. So then we meet this local lawyer called Rick, who had successfully infiltrated

Bohemian Grove himself. And he said, if you go in that way. Can you show us where this isn't a map? Yeah, it's Montereo in Northern California. Monte Rio? Yeah, M-O-N-T-E-R-I-O. It's like Napa Valley, about three hours. Isn't it like right in the middle of a neighborhood?

Like behind, there's like a neighborhood access. Like you're driving around houses and there's like a big gate. Yeah, yeah, which I think is in Montereo. Okay. Find that, just go to the map, Steve, so we can see, give us a wide view of the map. So is this it? I mean, it's, yes, it's, I can't say exactly where it is, but that's basically. So there's the Russian River.

Yeah. So there's the Russian River. Yeah, so there's the Russian River. Zoom out more so I can see like where this is in California. Okay. Yeah. So we were staying in Occidental.

Oh, wow. It's north of San Francisco. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It took us a long time. Okay. Punch back in honesty. That's fucking way out there. Yeah.

So, and yes, there's a, there's exactly how you described it. There's a gate. Yeah, Bohemian Highway. There you go. Bohemian Highway. Oh, wow. 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, you can't really see, you can't see it for the trees, I guess. Yeah. Because those are big redwood trees. There's a great photo of the entrance to Bohemian Grove somewhere on Google. Right. 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 you. You're going to get

killed because of the terrain. I always remember Alex wrote down, Alex was writing everything down on a pad and he wrote down going in that way, dash killed. So we said, well, how should we get into Bohemian Grove? Instead, it's easy. Not easy anymore, by the way. This is now not possible. This was the 90s. Is it 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, look like some sort of, you know,

Texan, comes out looking like the great Gatsby. And then has second thoughts. His power, paranoid brain suddenly starts thinking, what if I am part of the plot to lure him, like the wicker man, 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 in 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 gets in, successfully gets in. I walk up the drive with Rick, the lawyer, and we also successfully get in. Wow. 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 did they look like? What were they? saying to you? Like, were they, 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 in 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 that 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 gotta say, you know, there was some odd, there was some unexpected things. So it's like posh, it's a very posh campground with like stages and there's like little clusters of campsites all over the forests and some of them have a sort of devily milieu to them like they're called things like red eyes or something. But it's basically sort of revelry. It's you go, you, you, you,

We were just walking around from 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, but I didn't recognize any of them. They all looked like Mr. Burns and the Simpsons.

It's basically a camp. Funny enough, Harry Shearer, who plays the voice of Mr. Burns, went to Bohemian Grove. Oh, my God. That's hilarious. He's the only grove. who would give me an interview to tell me about it. That's hilarious.

And I said to him to join the interview, I said, we filmed it. I wanted him to like, do the voice, do the Mr. Burns voice. I said, I wonder what Mr. Burns would make of this. He didn't play ball. Didn't do the voice. But they all looked like Mr. Burns. And we saw Alex's big thing was that the owl represents Mollock. It's like satanic.

Molyck's a bull, right? I mean, it's either way, from my perspective, it's bullshit because there were all these little cabins at Bohemian Grove with like stuffed owls in them and, you know, little information things about owls. It's like a kind of owl place. It's the redwoods of Northern California. Like a sanctuary? I don't know if I'd go as fast as 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 sliders bit as suspicious. But there was a sort of weirdness to the place. There was an intensity to it. So at 9 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. And they went, keep walking. There's owls everywhere. Owls are everywhere. Alex said that. Either Alex or Mike. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's cameras in the trees. They're going to walk first. They both are paranoid as each other, Alex and Mike. And then it's like nine o'clock and a bell is rung 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 kind of sort of harmless pageant, the actual ceremony itself.

It's basically, it starts off with some guy. There's like the San Francisco Symphony is there playing. Like this isn't, well, 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 Lader Hosen covered in L. leaves and he's like singing an ode to nature, oh boughs, oh, track up them, oh, twigs, whatever. And then like these posh Klansman type people turn 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 this silver forest, we banish these. 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 summer vacation. And it's all done in this cod 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, ye shall not burn me. Like it's all like 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 thee 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 up, please? Because we're all like sitting on the 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, don't worry, it's no one near as weird as what Alex. I became like a sort of self-appointed defender of the Bush family's right to have. Who was there? Who was like the most prominent people that were there? Dick Cheney was there.

Yep. What year was this? It was either 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 like a 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. They're the ones that immediately spring to mind. And yeah, so that's the story. Alex brought out his video. I brought up my book then.

Did you guys get in any backlash for that video? Um, it's, it, 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 reasoned 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. Yeah. 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, where I will agree with Alex is, is that there was a weird intensity that night. Like people that were like really into it like yeah yes burn him like like that. But I remember sitting there thinking I'm the only sane person this entire redwood forest. You got Alex like with his eyes like sources and then you got all the grovers themselves who were kind of into the stupid you know 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 a lot of people believe Alex's version of events. Like I can tell you for sure that it's all bullshit. Like my, the story I just told you is what actually happened. 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 faggy. He famously called it the fagiest place I've ever been to. The fagiest place I've ever been. Find the photo of Nixon at Bohemian. and grow. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah, like a lot of private clubs, secret societies, wherever you want to call it. Yeah, there's Nixon. Just with the red circle. I'll go, yeah, blow that shit up. Oh, and Reagan. Nixon and Reagan. Yeah. Wow. 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 Oppenheimer, the 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, whereas, he'd been built a bit more centrist yeah no it seems like i don't know if you're if you're familiar with whitney webb at all she wrote this book called uh this two volume book called one nation

under blackmail oh no i don't know and it goes into the history of like all the weird situations like this that um high level people in the government and like the lead the head of the who was the head of the first head of the fbi the gay guy what was his name again jay go hoover jay anger hoover yeah he was in this where they would invite them to parties in like backrooms 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 really weird like creepy pedophilic stuff and um the idea was that they would all have blackmail on each other so that you know they could get away with shit and you know so that corruption wouldn't go there'd be no whistleblowers or they could get away with doing whatever they did and then she lays out like you know since

the since like the early days of like the mom and how the FBI and the CIA 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. Exactly. When you think about what hasn't been released yet from Epstein, if they have, if he had cameras in all of the rooms and that seems to be the case, if you had all of these videotapes, 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 cook 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, who, who he was doing it for. But that feels very plausible to me and not at all unlikely. Whether, will it ever come out, one would hope.

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 conspiracy theory that not only is, you know, true, but it could be anything. Like, it could be it. Which doesn't mean it is anything, but it could be anything. I would say what I just said is the, 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, especially the emails about Bill Gates where he's like running down all the,

we know when Bill Gates is trying to like not pay him or there was 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 vener. 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 yeah but like the 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 child pornography, 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 obviously, 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 don't know. But can I counter what you just said with something more skeptical? Yeah. And again, what I'm about to say, I don't know. Right. But this is what I feel I should now counter it that with. Which is, you know, the Epstein files obviously are huge. Like, you know, they were discussing getting the DVD of the men who stare at goes. Like, you know, the whole world is, you know, is in the Epstein files.

There's these, I can't remember the phrase, but, and you'll know this, but these FBI reports where they don't try and sift fact from fiction, they just like write everything down. Of course, 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 phoned up the FBI blaring out a whole load of paranoid stuff.

Yes. And that making it into the Epstein-Pherson. 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 cheap.

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, 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 comet ping pong in D.C. having any kind of involvement. None at all. Right. There's some very weird things about the Comet Pizza thing. But no basements, no. 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 the original people to talk about the whole Pizagate thing. And he got fired from his job for, for, 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 comet pizza um he was listed as like one of the most powerful

people in washington dc at one point um it was very much tied to there was emails the podesta emails where they're talking about it specifically um and i 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 stayed away from Pizza Gate and Q and on. Mostly because 20 years earlier, I'd snuck into Behemen Grove with Alex Jones. And I thought, well, that's my story on this. Like, I've done this.

And I'm not saying I was right to have stayed away from those things, but that is the reason why I did it. But I don't know. Like I haven't done any independent. 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.

And again, the problem is that our 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, withheld a huge amount of documents too, right? What's that? I mean, the Epstein files, 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 get an email from Gilae and Maxwell asking somebody if they want to be a part of the 9-11 shadow commission or something like that. My God. Wow. Yeah. You know, so like they just, they throw out all these crumbs. It's almost like it's designed to

to make people crazy and create more theories about this, right? Because if you don't give him the answer, you just give them all this crazy fucking evidence. That's exactly what people are going to do. They're kind of come up with theories. Yeah. And it's almost by design, I think. Well, I'm very glad that people are not forgetting about the Epstein files. 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 files? UFO files, forget it, Epstein files. 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 Julian Dory confirmed that it was real Stephen where the hell is your number there it is pull up this quote right here I just sent it to you I just acted it to alright okay so how many is to go

or 40% left to go they've released 60% I don't think that's true I think it's a little 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 wired with cameras.

Right. 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 and see what Grock said. Yes, the substance matches. In a December 2018 I message from the DOJ Epstein files, 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 less than a month after? After the Epstein files came out, they started the Iran War. Jesus. Yep. Yeah. As I say, with Epstein, you know, I'm skeptical about some things. With Epstein, I really think anything could be true.

Mm-hmm. And the whole Rothschild's thing, it's just like, you know, it's the conspiracy theorists have been living in, 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 Hocchio 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 childmothers there in the government. So Q&ON was like a very pro-Trump thing. Yes. I think it's very healthy that Q&N believers are now very happy to not see Trump as that kind of Messiah anymore when it comes to the Epstein Files. Mm-hmm. 100%.

Yeah. And the other craziest thing about the Epstein Files 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 the

that came out in the epstein files between geoffrey epstein and his physician where he's he's talking about how he needs specific medications because he had his prostate removed oh 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 right will they were this other will the other material ever be released another administration huh who knows will aOC release all the information which 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 uh what you were talking about the psychopaths that are in power 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 castle a little bit too, are prodding away at us, making us angry, keeping us angry. With the algorithms and the flock cameras. And the culture wars, the Bredom Circuses, you know, keep us, keep us fine. This is what David Hike said to me 30 years ago, and he was right to keep us sheep bustling each other down here

while they can get away with all of their stuff up there. And the Epstein Files is the probably, the biggest story of my the most um 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 it's both sides you can get equally mad about this because both sides have tried to cover it up yeah so it's not it's not a left versus right it's a vertical fight it's us versus of the the layer of society that's above us that seems to be doing this stuff and getting away with things

and profiting off different conflicts and wars and literally, like, literally. Like, there's emails about that where he's emailing Houd Barak 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, been aware of this, the way that this is, you know, 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 council culture. Because in this book was the story that became the sort of ground zero, or the kind of patient zero of public shaming, this woman, Justine Sacco, the AIDS tweet woman.

She's on a plane to Africa. Don't think of that's tweeting. Because of my skin. or something, I won't get AIDS because of my skin color. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS, just kidding, I'm white. Right, right. She's trying to do a sort of South Park,

making fun of her own privilege. Anyway, it backfires and 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, go to psychopath tests, shame to 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

trickle down and impact our inner lives in ways that we don't even realize. And one thing 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 come. 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're aware of it, but we don't seem to be able to take any act. We have no power to change it. I mean, our personal power would be to just opt out of these culture wars. I've noticed things are changing a little bit. I make a show for the BBC called Things Fell Apart, which has until now been 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, because that seems to be how society is changing. Yeah. Now, the Luigi Mangione type situations, individuals waging 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 wiser way of looking at the world,

which is looking at how power works, how power trickles down and menace. 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. Well, 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 Stryker. They just, they, Ricky 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 a mountain in Idaho, Ruby Ridge. And Randy started attending, the fatal flaw was that Randy started attending Aryan 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 Aryan Nations, but he enjoyed their picnics and... Enjoyed their company. Yeah, games and so on. But he would take his family to Aryan nations for their summer camps and so on. And to his credit, one of the undercover agents there, like 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 soar off a shotgun below the legal limit. So he said, sure. So sort of like entrap him?

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 Aryan nations. And Randy said no. So he took his family.

This is Randy's second big floor. Is that he, you know, the whole family became paranoid. Like he shut 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 were... How old were the kids?

Really young, like I can't remember exactly I think Sammy was like 11 or maybe 13 sort of early teens I think and there's footage 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 air Anyway, one day, 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 has shot and killed. They've got a family friend staying with him at the time, a guy called Kevin, he's shot. Sammy, the little boy, they shoot the dog, that's the first shooting, they shoot the dog, Sama, the little boy, says, you shot my dog, you son of a bitch, and opens fire on the agents.

The boy said this. Yeah, the little boy. Opens fire. Oh, my God. One of the agents is killed either by Sammy 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 Sammy 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 run into the cabin and lock the door, and a siege begins. The FBI, you know, hundreds and hundreds of, because an agent's been shot, hundreds of agents turned up surrounding the cabin. It's like a war zone. People say that the American militia starts right there, you know, because there's all of these like townspeople 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 Secret rulers of the world. Secret rulers of the world. Yeah, that episode's called The Legend of World. called The Legend of Ruby Ridge. And I put a lot of footage. And it's also in my book, Them.

So I put a lot of footage in there. So the next day, Vicky Weaver, I think they've put Sammy's body in an outhouse. And Vicky Weaver goes to look. And she's got her baby. There's a little baby as well. I forgot, called Alicia. But she's got her baby in her arms,

and she's in the doorway. and this sniper shoots Vicky in the head and kills it. 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, Vicki's body and all the kids.

And there's this huge siege begins that lasts days. I can't remember exactly how long is about 16 days. And eventually Randy comes out. Bo Greitz, 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 in damages. So the government, that completely admitted the blame. Even though the guy got shot and killed, the ATF guy? Yeah, yeah, they, they, I don't think there's anyone really in the government. Because they started it. Yeah. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the government or law enforcement who thinks they did the right thing at Ruby Ridge. I think everybody knows what a disaster it was.

Yeah, there you go. So, so that's down at the... And what happened to, what was his name, Randy? Randy, he recently died. There's Vicky. So see you've got him left. that's Vicky We've That's the woman who got shot

Yeah So that would be surveillance footage Taken by the ATF Before the siege began Yeah that's Vicky It's a very haunting story And yeah Is that that must

Is that same spot Right Is that 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 it. I've seen footage of the girls, the daughters.

Oh my God. So I told the story through Rachel Weaver, the daughter. The baby? No, the middle daughter. She was like 12 at the time, something like that. I met her when she was maybe 19, 20. 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've got him being honest, he would take responsibility for his mistakes. I should never have armed my kids. Right. You know, I escalated this too, but while still like hating law enforcement and so on.

Yeah, and between Waco and Ruby Ridge, you got Timothy McVeighy, who then blows up. the Moe Building in Oklahoma City. Timothy McVeigh showed up at Waco. Yeah, he's shown up at Wai. I forgot about that. Yeah, and he cared, 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, 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 Debutante about Carol Howe, who was this debutante who became a white supremacist who became a government informant.

And a lot of the conspiracy theories revolve around cowl how 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 that most probably isn't true.

There are some odd things about Oklahoma City that remain odd. There's a leg. is this, 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 the,

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-skinned guy, right? Yeah, a swarthy guy. I think some of them were 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 Carol Howe, 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 theories that I thought could point to evidence of a wider 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 something about the way the way that the damage was was like the bombs exploded outwards or something like that so many weird things and it's like yeah it's almost hard to ignore it when so many of those questions are lined up that make it makes the conspiracy makes more sense than the narrative yeah i was focusing on this particular conspiracy about this place called eleham city this is what i do

in the debut town so oh elohem city yeah that was a why that rings a bell yeah that was like a sort of a Yawai Christian white separatist compound in on the Oklahoma Arkansas border and the reason why that's of interest to people is McVeigh phoned Elahim City before the bombing, that's for sure and asked to speak to a guy called Andy Strassmeier who was a German national who was working in security as Elahim City. That definitely happened and also McVey got a parking ticket or a speeding ticket quite close to Elahim City. So a lot of people got really interested in Eleham City. Carol Howe, the debutante turned white supremacist, turned government informant, was informing on the, on Elahim City. So she was there at Elahim City. After the fact,

she said she thinks she saw Timothy McVeighay at Elahim City. But that, I don't believe. He definitely phoned Elahim City, and it looked like he was looking for a place to stay, after the bombing, a place to hide out, because Elehim City did let white supremacist murderers hide out there. But I don't believe Carol's story that she saw McVeigh 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. religious, the religious extremists.

Yeah. They, like, they know. Oh, massively. There's, like, the statistics. There's been certain, like, plots where people were encouraging other people to commit acts of violence. Yeah. And it was why it didn't happen because it turned out all of them were undercover agents.

Right. And they just didn't realize. And I had a little moment at Aryan Nations. So when I was making my Ruby Ridge documentary, I went to Aryan nations. And I thought, okay, I'll just turn up. I'll say I'm a friend of Randy Weavers, it'll all be fine. So I turned up. And I'm Jewish.

And they, all these skinheads surrounded me. And they knew I was Jewish, like they knew it. And they asked, they said, what's your genealogy? Those are the words they use. What's your genealogy? I'm like looking desperately for my cameraman. My cameraman, by the way, David Barker, because I want to get the fuck out of there. 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 imminent flat. You were put on 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, you know, like.

But he loved being at Airy Nation so much. He was off getting cutaway after cutaway. So I'm like marooned. with these... He's shooting B-roll somewhere down the... Yeah, exactly. He's shooting B-roll of all the swastikas on the roofs, having a wail of a time, getting great B-roll.

And I'm surrounded by these skinheads asking me by genealogy. What's your genealogy, boy. Yeah, that's what they said. So I said, I'm Church of England. And at that point, at that moment, this older guy who works in security at Area 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.

And 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 kicked out of him at Aryan Nations. or he was some kind of undercover agent who was doing me a good deed in that moment. And I've always wondered which of the two was true. That's wild. Yeah, because we know for sure that all of these groups are massively infiltrated by undercover agents.

That's such a weird thing, too. 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 control Hollywood and all that stuff. and like people look at uh as the jews as like this monolithic structure right when it couldn't be more separated oh my god jews i went not in the slightest bit monolithic some are zionists some anti-zionists some just don't want just don't want to think about it atheists like everything like jews are the least monolithic group you can think of and you know my jewish friends and that all the

Jews I've known from being Jewish all my life, a million different types of people. Yeah. So yeah, so that anti-semitism is wrong for exactly the reason that you just pointed out. Yeah, it's so, it's so, 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, Nessoniyahou does the same thing. He says, we are, we are, I am the Jewish people, you know, 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 linking 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 me as, I don't know, Nicaragua. Right. Yeah. So that's why it's like... That's like me being born in America being like attached at the hip with like the Bush-Cheney administration. Right. You know, for doing the Iran war.

Yeah, totally. Totally. It's maddening. It's maddening when it comes from the left. It's maddening when it comes from the right. And it's just bullshit. Mm-hmm. Well, John Ronson, thank you for doing this man. This has been fascinating. Yeah. You've been everywhere. This has been a real pleasure. Yeah, we've done the whole... You're like the forced gump of all the crazy conspiracies of the American history.

Yeah. I think that's kind of true. It's been a great ride. And it's also been a great day. Your new book, The Castle, is out now for folks to find it. They can 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 the 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, your website or something? Yeah, my website, John Ronson.com. There's no H-and-J-O-N-R-N-S-O-N-S-O-N. John Ronson, not Ron Johnson. Yeah, John Ronson, not Ron Johnson. I am not that senator. And yeah, everything's on the website. Perfect. We'll like it all below. Thanks again, man. It was a real pleasure.

Thank you. Good night, folks.