The Jordan Harbinger Show - 596: Andrew Gold | Exorcisms On the Edge

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Andrew Gold (@andrewgold_ok) is an award-winning BBC and HBO journalist who interviews the world's most controversial and inspiring figures in his On the Edge with Andrew Gold podcast. What We Discuss with Andrew Gold: What Andrew discovered while making a documentary about someone claiming to be a modern-day exorcist. Is professional wrestling "real?" What you can buy in an exorcist's gift shop to keep the "demons" at bay. The multitude of benefits Andrew enjoys when making documentaries about people who natively speak a language different from his own. How Andrew handles the blowback from making documentaries addressing taboo subjects like pedophilia and abortion. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. I'm having to walk over like bodies and bodies on the floor in these little corridors, squeezing over and around people. They're all like foaming at the mouth and they're looking at me like, you know, and the priest had said something to them all about something like about the Falklands as well. He's going to look, they're British. They took the Falklands. So people are looking at us a bit like we didn't know what was going to happen. And then David says to me, oh, you know what?

I had the cap on the camera the whole time that we were walking out. And he's going, no, no, no, no, we can't leave here without showing. you leaving. So what are we going to show for the end of the film? You've got nothing. So I was like, I'm not going back in there and he's like, you are. So we had to go back in. So we go back up the street, climb over about a thousand bodies and all that stuff, and then turn around and David starts filming me from the back. I had to walk out again. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game,

astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional organized crime figure, legendary Hollywood director or Russian spy, each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to this show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest the starter packs.

These are collections of your favorite episodes or top episodes organized by popular topics. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash starts to get started or to help somebody else get started, and I always appreciate it when you share this show. Today, my friend Andrew Gold, this is an interesting guy, right? He's performed exorcisms, which are, of course, fake. He's been locked in a cupboard by an exorcist, chased UFOs with fervent believers,

filmed, and hear me out here, filmed a porn scene with retired people as actors. It was for a documentary, all right? It was for French TV, of course, where else? Played soccer with blind players. In my opinion, he is an up-and-coming documentary. commentarian in the spirit of Louis Theroux, if you're familiar with him. I really like his work. I enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will as well. In it, we discuss the nature of belief and rationalization, as well as getting into some hoaxes and cons that he's helped expose as well.

And if you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every week, it is because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. It works for beginners or advance, so I don't want to hear about how you already know this stuff. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Andrew Gold. You do these deep dives on some pretty wild stories, frankly. You've got exorcists, some kind of crazy activists, even pedophiles, which, by the way, balzy, gutsy move to cover that. I was listening to your podcast episode with this pedophile,

and I thought, you even said, oh, there's going to be people upset at me. And I thought, yeah, this is one where you've got to be very careful, like goes without saying that you're not glorifying it, but you have to circle, highlight, underline the fact that you are not condoning or kind of allowing that to go unchecked. And the documentaries you make are really fascinating because they expose a lot of stuff about belief in human psychology, which is right in the wheelhouse of the show in the sphere of interest for our listeners. So by way of just sort of cracking open this menagerie of weird stuff that you've covered,

tell me about this exorcist because this was the first thing you sent me, and I'll admit when you sent me this few line email being like, I covered an exorcism. I was like, this is garbage. I'm going to delete it. No, no, let me watch this video. And sure enough, I see this guy who is performing what looks to be exorcisms. And of course, it's never what it seems, is it? No, no.

Well, it's a really difficult one, I guess, as a journalist, because you go into these documentaries and you're thinking the whole time, I need to be neutral, right? That's what a journalist does. You need to, you can't go into the conceptions about what. Yeah. Well, it's impossible, isn't it? You can't. And this was one where I thought, well, what is neutral?

Because neutral would suggest that I'm giving credence to the possibility that this man is extracting demons from people's bodies. And there are a surprising amount of people who believe that, no doubt many who are listening to this right now. And I don't. I simply don't. So it's very hard for me to be totally neutral. And that's an accusation that was labelled at me after making it. I went in and tried to just be open-minded to the fact that he wasn't knowingly betraying people's trust that he might really believe in. his own powers. And so he is an exorcist out in the suburbs of Argentina. It's really quite an

impoverished area with relatively little education and that kind of thing. So there's not much access to mental health facilities or knowledge about it. So he's got a huge, huge following, a huge media outlet. You go to his church and there are posters of the film The Exorcist and other supernatural films with his face superimposed onto the main characters. That's a little cringe, right? That's like, I'm a serious exorcist. I don't believe in this movie stuff. It discredits the whole profession. That's what you'd be thinking if you believed your own nonsense, you would think. It's like bounty hunters don't like dog the bounty hunter because they think he's a bit of a clown. You know who I'm talking about? I don't know if they have that over there. Yeah, I do. Yeah, so they're like,

this isn't a real bounty hunter. He's just a TV guy. It's a bit of a reality show gig. Like, it's not a thing that makes us all look good as an industry. This guy's like leaning into it the other way. And he's like, oh yeah, I've seen kids. Their head didn't turn around once. It turned around Seven times. That's the kind of demons I'm up for. Let me post my face on this movie poster, not tongue in cheek at all somehow. That's it. We were shocked when we saw that. And then we go in and he's playing the music, tubular bells from the Exorcist film during his mass. So he really, I think he just thought, you know what? I'm going to go full in on this. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to really go for it and get sensationalist and get people to come in who are excited

by the movies. And the thing is, exorcism only really works in the way they wanted to. If the person being exercised has seen either those movies or has seen, you know, adverts or little clips. Oh, interesting. They know how to react. Right, because otherwise, they're like, when do I stop and let the demon go or do I just keep going and like, do I ride around or do I just scream? Do I bite scratch or do I just lay there? You're right. You really have to know how to play. It's like wrestling, right? Professional wrestling. You have to know that when the guy stomps his foot and hits his fist towards you that you're going to supposed to pretend that you got hit in the face, you can't just be like, that's weird. He didn't, you didn't make contact. You want

Try that again? Oh, I'm supposed to jump up when you lift me up in the air. And I'm supposed to pretend like I'm really hurt. Okay, I got it now. Right? Like, it's like that. You have to be in on the joke. Yeah.

And we all know wrestlers or fans of wrestling who take it so seriously that they get to the point where they sort of on some level believe that it's real. And you'll know that if you ever ask a wrestler whether it's real or not because they go completely berserk at you for even suggesting it might not be. Right. So you do have to get to a state of believing it's real. these people who are often young, and in this exorcist case, young women, very vulnerable, and they've got things like OCD, anorexia, bulimia, schizophrenia is a common one.

So all these sort of mental conditions that resemble in some way how you might expect a demon to take hold of you. Your body is doing things and your mind is doing things that you don't want it to do. That's a very scary thought. And when you're surrounded by people who are saying to you, like, you've got two children, You either go to a psychiatrist who's going to talk to you for like 10 years and maybe you might get slightly better because that's where we're at really. I mean, it's hard to treat mental illnesses. It's a lot of work. Or you've got someone going like, oh, but haven't you heard about this exorcist fella?

He'll just take you for one hour and do a thing on you, get a demon out. And your mind is going to go towards that, the confirmation bias. You'll only listen to that one. And you're going to go, well, it's obviously a demon. He's basically taking, he goes around taking women out of a psychiatric ward who are. suffering with things like schizophrenia. Literally taking them out of a hospital. Yeah, there's a particular one that I went to go and see.

His assistant, we find out during the film, who's called Lauda, she had schizophrenia and was basically in a mental institution, in psychiatric ward for her entire adolescence. And as soon as she came to the end of the adolescence, she got to an age where she's allowed to check herself out. And the exorcists got her from there and did an exorcism on her. It's called El Exorcismo de Laura, the Exorcism of Laura, on YouTube. We'll link it in the show notes. I'm giving him like marketing and stuff now, aren't I?

Yeah, go ahead and give this guy a bunch of Google AdWords money. No, I mean, look, it is interesting to watch. You can just also just watch your documentary, which I assume he doesn't get paid for. No, we'll link to that in the show notes. Don't give this Yutz con man guy any Google AdSense money. And by the way, one note on the wrestling. Wrestling is incredibly athletic. The athleticism is very real.

The performance aspects are very real. those guys are really, really badass, strong, fit performers. I don't want people to be like, oh, Jordan thinks that wrestling's a joke. It's like Cirque de Soleil. It's very, very, very impressive. It's just they're not really smashing each other's spines over their knee, at least not on purpose. That part is acting, right?

So before we get a thousand emails about how wrestling is a real thing, and I should step in the ring with Stone Cold Steve Austin and tell them that it's not real. I get that it's, that element is real. The pain part is also somewhat real, but they're also not trying to kill each other like it looks. It's a sad indictment of the world and how we all are that you have to say that because you didn't say that they were not impressive people.

But I agree, you do have to now state it in case people, because people want to misinterpret, don't they? Yeah, or they're just really, really into wrestling. And they're like, I can't believe that you don't think this is real. And they're going to, mostly, it's not that they're going to be mad. Someone's going to take a lot of time to explain to me how it's real. And I don't want them to waste their time. I have friends who are semi-pro and actual pro wrestlers.

I know these guys are, beasts, right? That's like, it's like the equivalent of saying, oh, you're only a division one college level football player. You're not a real football player. It's like, no, you're a real football player just because, you know, just because you're not an M&A fighter, but you're a wrestler doesn't mean that you're not like tough and impressive and great. I just, I always try and note these things because it's not just people get offended. It's, my audience is great. Someone's going to spend like 30 minutes writing an email that I don't really need to read because I already know. And it's mostly that. Yeah, I get that. You'll get a lot of letters from

people who believe in exorcisms. I've been getting them for years. I don't know how many people in, look, write me if you think exorcism is real. I'm not even sure how many. Although in 250,000 plus whatever people who listen to this, there's going to be a few. But I don't think it's probably that many. You let me know. Maybe I'll be surprised by the amount of people that believe that demons possessing people are real. I hope not. That seems obviously fake, right? Yeah. I think it'll be more on your YouTube page than people listening to the audio. It's the YouTube ones. For sure. The YouTube comments are sewage, and I never really read them. I have an intern that does that. But yeah, poor intern is like psychologically dead. Speaking of sight, maybe they need an

exorcism after handling some of the comments that I've seen on YouTube. So this guy goes and grabs, and I say that sort of met, you know, tongue and cheek, he grabs people from the psych ward. And he's doing this. To be fair, some of that is placebo effect, right? Like he does an exorcism and they're like, I am cured because some of them believe that at least for a while? Or am I giving him too much credit. No, no, no, it's absolutely the case. And that was where, you know, you want to make a documentary interesting, right? You don't want to go in and say like, okay, this guy's obviously a fraud. Oh, he was a fraud. And by the way, he is a fraud. Yeah. But the interesting part is, well, people did get better. And of course, placebo, suggestion, hypnosis, these things do work. It's just that they don't

deal with the core issue. Now, the thing is, some people do have just temporary lapses of mental health, right? There's particularly adolescence. It's such a difficult age. there are people who just sort of do need that sort of kick and they can get out of it. Relatively few. I mean, most people, they've got real mental health issues. But some people need that sort of kick and they get up and then they sort of get to an age their 20, 21 by the time. You know, other people, they'll be better for like a year, two years, three years.

And then it all starts to fall apart again. So it's a sort of, it's a temporary fix. But these people, as soon as the exorcisms were done, they were like, wow, I feel amazing. Like everything's better. Like my OCD is gone. my bulimia is gone. I'm going to start eating now. I'm going to start everything. And it's like, oh, I slow down, slow down. And, you know, every time a few months later, or a year later,

they're back to square one, unfortunately. But it does, it does sort of work. So you've followed up with some of the people and you're like, hey, are you still cured? And they're like, no, I'm back in the hospital. Yeah. That's it. So, and it took a lot longer than we thought. So I was going back and checking a few months later and then a few months after that. And I was like, oh, my God, they're not going to fit in with the narrative that I'm trying to do here. Oh, no, they're still better. I might be wrong. Oh, wait. Nope, they're not better anymore. Like, just had to, just the timeline wasn't stretched out enough. Yeah, it took about a year and a bit. I went back to Argentina, went to see how they all were. And yeah, it was to three women and they were all

back to square one. A year, though, was a long time. But I'm guessing if they went in for like another exorcism, it might not then last a year. It might last like six months. And then the next one's three months. And then pretty soon they needed every week or it stops working entirely. Because I'm thinking, if I just needed an exorcism one afternoon a year to not have an eating disorder or serious depression or OCD, I mean, that's kind of a fair trade, even if it's total bullshit, right? Yeah. Well, like I was saying, particularly for adolescents who are probably going to get better in a couple of years anyway, and that sort of gets them through that stage. So exorcism isn't all bad. It's sort of, but if in the way that it's right, it's right, it's right for the wrong reasons or

it's wrong for the right reasons. It's, it's backwards, isn't it? Yeah. But, I mean, so one person did say, oh, God, he's a fraud. blah, blah, blah. And then another woman I spoke to said, yeah, he's awful. I hate him because she kept going back, you know, over the months. And it's exactly, as you said, she wanted to go back more and more. And then he got, the exorcist got frustrated with her and started saying, like, look, you're not doing, there's something you're not doing right. You're obviously wrong and all this stuff. I mean, you always blame the victim when your bullshit doesn't work. That's how cons work, right? It's like, if you, you didn't believe hard enough. Well, okay, now it's,

it's never like, oh, there's no such thing as an exorcism. Psych, right? You can't do that. He wouldn't say that, no. But she, this particular woman was like, so I was like, oh, great, now she's going to turn to like therapy and stuff like that, how fantastic. And then she said, so what I'm doing is I'm seeing a new priest who's going to be doing multiple exorcisms on me every week. And I was like, oh, congratulations. For just three times the price, you know, for my, yeah, I just have to not go to school

anymore and I can pay for it. This is a stretch, but it's a little bit like multi-level marketing. You get people who do these MLMs and like some people go, wow, that was not good. It was a scam. I can't believe I've felt for that lesson learned. But a huge number of them go, yeah, you know what? It turns out that this was kind of a scam. And I go, oh, thank God.

And then they go, you know, I'm doing this other thing now. And I'm like, no, it's a multi-level. This is another MLM. And they're like, yeah, the other one didn't work because da-da-da-da. But this one works better. It's a different product and it's a better structure. And I'm like, you're out of the frying pan and into the fire. You're the same belief problem here.

It's the same issue. You're just on to the next. It's almost like an abusive relationship. That guy was really bad for me. He used to hit me and treat me poorly. Doesn't the new guy do the same thing? Yeah, but it's a little bit different. Well, okay, how? And it's there's no, but it's not different. Yeah, no, it's exactly the same kind of thing. People will fall for things over and over again. And it doesn't even necessarily mean they're not intelligent.

No, no, of course. It's just like a flaw in their reasoning. It's a flaw in the reasoning. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about a little bit here. The documentary was interesting, right? Because in the beginning, you're not really sure if he believes in what he's doing. You know, there's no such thing as an exorcism. So we kind of start on the whole page of like, well, this is wrong, but like, is everyone delusional or just, you know, Is he like kind of in on the, and then after a while, you realize he is a two-bit con man pulling a ruse and taking his victims for the ride. But he's also, surprise, surprise, kind of a terrible person. Like, didn't he threaten you? There's a time where he brings you into a closet. What happened in the closet? Well, so, yeah, he started to get a bit tired with my line of questioning because I started to ask more about the young women that he was around. This one particular one who was his assistant, who he had exercised. I was asking, you know, where were her parents? She was early 20s at this point.

sort of mid-50s, and she'd been there for quite a few years at that point. I said, where are the parents? And it's like they've moved abroad or something like that, which is unusual for Argentinians, but they've gone off somewhere. And this girl, woman, Laura, and I was asking a few little questions here and there. And at one point, I was talking to another journalist who goes to speak to the exorcist all the time. And he's like the link between the exorcist there and all the newspapers in Argentina, this particular journalist. And he didn't like me being on his turf. So he basically told the exorcist that I had asked about Laura and him and said, why do they kiss each other? Which I hadn't seen. Oh, that's interesting. Did he make that up or did he go,

I know this is going to be a trigger point for him and it's true? Yeah, I think that's what happened. That's what it was, huh? I think so, yeah. Oh, weird. So I went to this mass where it was a big mass. There were loads of people fainting everywhere outside. Like, and I'm talking about thousands of people in the suburbs of Argentina, they're out in the church, the church is packed, this is pre-Corona time, they're out onto the street, the streets are like shut down. There are so many thousands of people like going berserk. This is his church. Yeah, yeah. This is why I turned up there one, like one night, just expecting to just sort of talk to some of the people who are being exercised and all this stuff, you know, and help perform an exorcism. I got to do them, you know,

not believing in it, but just like, okay, this is how it works. And he's not there. And the crowd are going like crazy. They're going like, where is, it's getting towards midnight now. And then this Lauda comes out, louder, and she says, Andrew, can you just come backstage? And I'm like, oh, what's this about? Okay, I don't know what's going on. So I go backstage, and he ushers me into this little store room, like between a closet and a storeroom. And he wouldn't let my cameraman, David, go in. And this was quite scary because we're out in the middle of nowhere at this point.

We're really far from, like, the centre of Buenos Aires. We've got, like, nothing. Nobody knows we're there. I sold this later to the BBC, but I made it just off my own back, just me and my friend David. So we had no protection, we had no security, nothing. Just the two of us there and another friend of us who came as like an assistant. So they sort of locked me in this room.

There was like five or six of them. And they started becoming very abusive and getting right in my face. And the exorcist comes right up to me and he goes like, why have you been asking so many people about my relationship with Laura? And I was like, oh, and I was nervous. My legs are turning to jelly at this point because I'm thinking like they could kill me here. I'll just be another statistic out in the middle of this, like, like area, you know. And I was like, oh, you know, it's just interesting that you've,

you've found her and you've helped her, haven't you? And you've made everything better and all this stuff, you know, and he goes, but why did you say that we kiss on the lips? And I was like, oh, I didn't say that. And then the other guy comes forward with the journalist, he goes, yes, you did. And then other people came forward going, yeah, you asked me that as well. I had never asked that. I didn't even, it didn't even come into my mind. That's interesting. They ganged up on you for this. So weird. They really laid into me. My cameraman trying to get in the room and he's like banging on the door. They're keeping him out. I didn't even think about it at this time, but at the time, sorry, but I had a microphone still on on my lapel. So it was recording everything.

And to be honest, he ends up screaming and screaming and he's making me call him like, I'm like saying yes, like, see, and he's going like, yes, father. And I'm like, see Padre and he's like, I'm a bishop, you taught me like a bit. I'm like, yes, see your baseball. Yeah, yeah. Yes, Bishop. All this mad stuff. And it went on for like hours of in the film itself we've got like five six minutes of that like it's all kicking off eventually he sort of just lets us go and he goes off to his mass with his thousands and thousands of people and me and david we are just like shaking you know thinking god we're going to die we've got to get out of here i mean there's thousands of people and if he's like these are demons you're they're going to tear you to shreds you know they're going to tear you to absolute shreds literally

yeah he was saying things like that he was saying the devil is that in the house tonight that's while I'm late, that kind of thing. David and I, he starts filming, because you've got to keep filming me. He's filming me then. He didn't get the video footage of me inside, of course, when I was being shouted at, but we got it all on audio. And he starts sort of filming me walk out. And I'm having to walk over, like, bodies and bodies on the floor in these little corridors, squeezing over and round people. They're all like foaming at the mouth and they're looking at me, like, you know, and the priest had said something to them all about something like about the Falklands as well. He's going, look, they're British. They took the Falklands. So people

are looking at us a bit like we didn't know what was going to happen. We get outside eventually it took so long to squeeze past all these bodies, squeezing past everyone on the street again, and eventually we sort of go towards like a dirt road hoping that like a taxi will come. And then David says to me, oh, you know what? I had the cap on the camera the whole time that we were walking out. And I was like, what do you mean? You need, okay, can we just go? And he was like, he's like a proper director. And he's going, no, no, no, we can't leave here without showing you leaving. We already didn't have you inside the closet, right? So what are we going to show for the to the film, you've got nothing. So I was like, I'm not going back in there. And he's like, you are.

So we had to go back in. So we start, we go back up the street, climb over about a thousand bodies and all that stuff, and then turn around and David starts filming me from the back. I had to walk out again. You're so lucky he didn't see you coming back and be like, okay, that's the last straw man. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we knew that. You're so lucky. Yeah. Good God. We worked on that film for like months of our life, you know, and it had to be right. And the thing is, him going mental like that at the end, we had an okay film, you know? And I wasn't a known entity. No, that really did make it. It made it because he was so bad shit crazy at the end. You were just like, okay, not only are you a fraud, but you're an aggressive sort of sociopath

as well from the sound of it. Yeah. And it really did. He really did sort of like do the exact opposite of what he probably intended on doing. Like he was like, I'm going to scare them. They're never going to show this. Meanwhile, it's like, look at this crazy fool we got on camera. You're never going to believe this. BBC was like, I wasn't really going to buy it, but now I got my checkbook out because of that mental breakdown that this dude has in the last five minutes of the documentary. It's psycho. A hundred percent. And we didn't realize that until we were sort of the next day, you know, David and I were talking. We thought, wait, did we record that bit when I was in the room? You know, it was all like that. Have we got that? And we listened back to it.

And you can't, you know, now we're no longer scared at this point. We're just listening to the edit and we were just like giggling and laughing. And no, so that he made us, he made the film, you And he was livid when it went out in the end. You know, he sent us some very angry emails. But, you know, what can you do? You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Andrew Gold. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting this show.

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That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, back to Andrew Gold. This is a guy who probably doesn't really want to attract that much. Like, he wants to be famous in his little province. But the last thing he wants,

I mean, Argentina's, It's a developed country, right? There's a district attorney or whatever equivalent somewhere in Buenos Aires who's probably like, I could make my career getting this guy off the map and putting him in prison for defrauding all of these people. Like, he wants attention insofar as that attention is marketing. But he doesn't want negative attention insofar as it's obvious that he is raking poor and indigenous and rural people over the coals in the name of what, the Catholic Church,

which is probably also not super thrilled about him? Lutheran. Lutheran, okay. By the way, did you end up calling anyone who's like a real bishop? Because obviously, I'm guessing he's a fake bitch. Like the whole thing's fake, right? He's not licensed or trained or anything. Well, it's very complicated because in my mind, I'm an atheist and I respect to everybody else's. So I think all of it's sort of fake. So it just feels like different levels of fakery just to me personally. And so we did, yeah, I emailed like the Argentine Lutheran, whatever, and they said they didn't know who he was. And then I emailed like an American one. And then they said they did know who. who he was and that he had like turned up for an exam and I don't, it was something confusing like that. It was something or other, but I, you know, how, I don't know how hard it is to take that exam and become a Lutheran exorcist anyway. Okay, of course, look, I understand that you don't believe in the church, the doctrine of the church, and that's fine, but aside from all of that, there's still kind of like, like, like, I don't know about freemasonry or anything like that,

but I can't just walk around being like, yeah, I'm a freemason, are you? Are you on our email list, you know, whatever, no. You know, and if you say that you're a rabbi, someone can go, oh, in what shuler than what sort of, like, belief aside, there's still a hierarchical organization that has to say, you're allowed to do whatever it is you're doing in the name of our church. I assume, right? Otherwise, what's the Pope doing? Like, there's a whole structure for this whole thing. Yeah, maybe we don't go there. But there's a whole structure for this whole thing where it seems like somebody would have a vested interest in being like, oh, this is a scammer who's literally using the name of our church to con people out of money.

Because the dude's making bank. That has to be the key. Anybody who has thousands of followers who are there on the floor writhing around and paying him, even if they're paying him five bucks for an exorcism, and it's probably way more than that. How much was it? Did you get a price quote?

Is there a price list in the front? He's very slippery about it. He always insists whenever anyone asks that they're totally, totally free. He's like, it's the Lord's work, it's all free. But he has a shop. and the shop sells stuff like sunflower oil or whatever in tiny, tiny little vials of sunflower oil, which would cost like, you know, 10 cents or less, and he'll sell them for like 10 pounds each. So 10 British pounds? So what is that? Like 15 bucks or something like that?

Yeah, 13, 14 bucks or whatever. And so, yeah, everybody sort of, you come for the exorcism, everybody's coming to watch, and then you stay for the shop and you stay for all the, it's a clever setup they've got, it's smart. It's horrible, but it's smart. Yeah, like I can't help it if people buy 13 magical t-shirts at our museum gift shop. The museum's free. What are you complaining about, right? Yeah.

But you need this, I assume you need the sunflower oil and the holy water and all this other stuff to keep the demons away from you for the period after your exorcism, right? So you're really spending, like, even if you're only spending 13 bucks, you're probably spending way more at this shop. These are people that maybe make that kind of whatever they're spending in a few weeks or even a month, depending on how rural this area really is. Yeah. So he's making a lot of money. He's a very vested interest in keeping the scam going. And at the end of the documentary, it's pretty clear that him and this like 20 year old girl are romantically involved. He's probably minimum, what, three, he's kind of like three times her age or something or almost. Yeah. Yeah. We found pictures after like going through, snooping through Facebooks and everything. We found these pictures that had been put up of him with Laura on holiday, several different holidays in like Madrid and places like that. And again, for someone from this part of the world to be holidaying in,

in Madrid, in Europe and stuff, that's like, it's almost unheard of for people from that sort of area, that part of Buenos Aires. So he's making good money. And yeah, what's, I don't know why he's taking home on these holidays and, you know, it's all a bit, you know, it's fishy. Yeah, it's self-explanatory that it's sketchy and that he's a fraud. So the rest of, you kind of then have this presumption that he's up to no good kind of all around, a 360, like plot twist. He was the demon the whole time. Yeah. He thinks I'm the demon, you know, and we sort of juxtapose a bit of him saying that about me. being the devil in his house and that kind of thing.

And also, I can't say he's a fraud because the BBC lawyers advised me against Depp at actually saying he is a fraud. So it's possible he believes in what he does. And I don't really know, but there you go. Not that he's, I mean, he doesn't speak English, so it doesn't matter. Right, I'll say it. He's a fraud. And that's just my opinion, man.

You've lived in a lot of different places. You speak a lot of different languages. I mean, I rarely meet people that speak, what is it, five languages? Yeah. Wait, is it five? French, Spanish, German, Portuguese. Am I missing anything besides? English? Well, here's the thing. Yeah, I think it's a bit sneaky because I phrase it as, I learned to speak

five languages and one of those is English. Right. So you're like letting people assume that you're at the same level potentially with all of these, but really. Well, also that there's a sixth one. It's like, I've learned to speak five. Well, well, you've already got English. What are the other five? Right, right. Okay. Yeah, clever. As if five languages is something to sneeze at and you're like, need to be tricky to layer one in. Why does speaking the foreign language help other people underestimate You kind of talked about that with me pre-show. And Louis Theroux, love that guy, right? People who don't know who he is, is a journalist as well, who he's kind of like this nerdy

English guy that just stumbling around, doesn't know what he's doing, you know, ends up in a Scientology camp or a cult. Is it the accent or is it the fact that he's like a six foot five weighs, you know, 110 pounds soaking wet, nerdy-looking dude who just kind of is good at bumbling into things or making it look like he's doing that? Or is it the language? I've watched him a lot closely because I grew up wanting to do what he does and that's part of why I do what I do. And he says he's just being himself, but he's half American.

His dad is Paul Theroux, who is a famous American, who is a famous American, who is a American travel writer. His cousin is Justin Theroux, who's married to, was married to Jennifer Aniston. So he knows very, you know, the American culture very, very well. He started by, he learned through Michael Moore. He worked with Michael Moore on TV Nation. So that's how he got his start. So he's very aware of the subtle communication between sort of Americans and Brits. When he walks into this room with, you know, a Nazi, the neo-Nazi would probably be used to maybe an aggressive interviewer or something.

And Louie comes in and he doesn't judge, although he probably is in his head, you know, and just says, oh, hello. And it's like, oh, that's not what the Nazi guy expected. And he gets them to sort of be themselves. And you do see their humanity through that. But then they also let their bad side slip out as well. That's what Louis does, which is brilliant. He doesn't do too many documentaries in non-English-speaking countries. That's one of the reasons I wanted to learn a few of these languages, you know, Spanish

so I could do South American documentaries. That's where there's loads of interesting things, you know, South America. German, because I was looking into pedophiles over there and French, I just love the language, and Portuguese, Brazil, you know, it's crazy Brazil. When you go over there, just like Louis, with his English accent seeming a bit twey and quaint to American ears, I know that when I'm talking about, you know that when I'm talking about, talking to The Exorcist at the very beginning of the film, for example, the Exorcist, I'm making fun of him. And I'm saying to him, like, so how many vampires do you know? And just ridiculous

things. And I wouldn't be able to get away with that in England, probably not even in America, because they would know I'm making fun of them. But because I'm sort of speaking almost broken Spanish, they can hear I'm sort of a foreigner, they're treating me as this sort of naive, innocent guy who couldn't possibly have an ulterior motive. So it does give me that advantage, you know, similar to British-American thing, but even more, I think. It's interesting because you'd think it might almost be the opposite. Like, dang, this dude's Portuguese is pretty good. Maybe he's not a total dumbass that I can fool with my corny fake exorcism routine, right?

So my Portuguese or my Spanish is not as good as the local Spanish or Portuguese. So I'm always going to sound a bit stupider. Yeah, that's good. I think now I'm like, ah, this is white people like it when I speak to them in a foreign language, because I seem even dumber than I actually am. That is endearing. Yes, that is endearing. There's something to that. I like that. Okay, interesting. I don't want to get too good at these

languages I'm studying. You know what I mean? I don't want to lose that advantage. Tell me about the crazy baby lady. This one was, you spent a long time learning from people about belief and this woman, I don't want to dive too deep into her story. Essentially, she's like this anti-abortion activist, but she's complex in many ways, more complex than you might think. I'm assuming you came to the same conclusion. I got a bit, maybe frustrated with the Exorcist film in that I wasn't able to be this objective journalist, you know. So it went into the abortion one, trying to be as objective as possible. I'm a man, so, you know, some people would say that's not my debate to have, my fight to have, whatever. I, you know, I should say, put my cards down the table. I do lean

towards the pro-choice side myself, but I totally understand and respect both sides. And it was just really interesting meeting this woman who just, as soon as I saw her, she's in Argentina, you know, people calling her the crazy baby lady. I was like, right, she's got to be. the next documentary. Documentaries about things like abortion are usually a little bit more serious and worthy and not the kind of things I make. I like to make quite sensationalist, entertaining stuff. I just really enjoy that. A little whimsical. Is that the right word for it? Maybe not? Well, as well, yeah. They are throwbacks to, you know, you don't meet many people like The Exorcist nowadays, at least in Europe and fewer and fewer in the US, maybe.

And the crazy baby lady, she's a little bit like a Westbro-Baptist church kind of character, just so eccentric, so, you know, and I've got to get into her head. So it took months and months to get her on board because she's not very trusting because a lot of pro-choice people, you know, send her photos of their aborted fetuses and stuff like that to annoy her and stuff like that. But eventually she said yes and she took me on the school run with her kids to pick up her kids and she made us dinner and stuff like that. And she was just lovely. She was so nice to us. But then the next day I would see her in the news again outside an abortion, clinic or a clinic where they're, you know, screaming at young women who are very vulnerable

and in a position where they don't know what to do with their lives. And she's like screaming at them, throwing like plastic fetuses at them. And I'm like, how do I put that woman together with the woman that I was with yesterday who's making me lunch and whatever? And I saw her a little bit like, you know, we all have an aunt or a grandmother or a father or a brother who just has different opinions to us. It made me really think about belief. And I thought, you know, Does she really, really in her heart of hearts think that a one-day-old fetus, as in the conception was the day before, does she really think that that is killing a life? Or is it something deeper? Is she concerned maybe about losing her conservative way of life against, you know, a current of progressives who she sees as holding different ideals to her?

So it gets so complicated. And I think it always, and always with these sort of culture war debates, it goes far beyond the actual issue at hand. it's not necessarily about choice and like, you know, it's about two, you know, one conservative elite bourgeoisie who doesn't want to lose that status and another sort of progressive, younger normally demographic who wants to have more control and equality. And it's so complicated, but it just made me think like she, she doesn't think that she's doing evil. She doesn't go to these abortion clinics thinking, I'm going to be horrible today by screaming at people. You know, and then you think about anything in life, you know, apart from psychopaths, does any

do things knowing that it's bad and horrible, it's really complicated. So that was a huge learning curve for me, and I've tried to sort of be as objective as possible in journalism, because that's a dying art, objectivity in journalism. It's all about activism nowadays, you know? Yeah, you're not wrong. I think she was especially complex because as you uncovered later, or you disclosed later in the documentary, you're going to have to correct the record here. Her father was some sort of accomplice right-hand man to a fascist leader. who had actually murdered thousands of leftists, or people who were his political enemies that he said are leftists,

which whether that's true or not. And then he stole their children and sold them to people that were a part of his sort of inner circle or agreed with his political beliefs. So this guy's like Hitler adjacent, and then his right-hand man, his pseudo-Gobles or whatever, or Himmler, is her dad. And now she's just this fervent conservative,

but you can't be too, You can't really be a fascist in today's Argentina, at least not so openly, so she just like takes this one little element of that regime maybe and then turns it up to 11 and just becomes the crazy baby lady. Yeah, it's hard to know what's going on in her mind. Yeah, you're right. Her father was the lawyer to Vigella, who was a dictator, I think it was the 80s, who, as you say, yeah, murdered people and disappeared their babies.

So in Argentina, even now, every now and then, they will reunite a baby with like their original grandmother or their mother or something like that. And it will be caused for national celebration. You should see this stuff. I'm sure you can find it on YouTube, like the moments that they're reunited. And it's, it's like bittersweet and, you know, devastatingly emotional. But the whole country celebrates these moments. And her family is very well known over there and sort of very connected. And she was part of that, I suppose. I mean, at the same time, it's not her fault she was born into that. She was a child, right? I remember a teenager at most. So it's hard to blame her. But her father was obviously a,

capital POS, right? Like, her father was a horrible person who knowingly destroyed tens of thousands of lives, or was an accomplished there too? Yeah, it appears to be the case. And I, but I don't know, you know, him personally. I'm very careful now. You see I'm being careful. I don't have to be that careful. Even a person who helped disappear. You know, knew me and we'll get the evidence out on the record. You know, I'll happily do discovery and see if your father was a fascist POS who murdered people. Go ahead. Send me all your documents. What's hard is I spent so much time with her. And because I had to ask those exact questions. I had to say, is it not hypocritical for you to be the face of the pro-life campaign, given you come from the family, almost directly responsible for, you know,

disappearing so many children, you know. Yeah, and adults, for that matter. Like, you were, you know, murder, you think fetus murder is bad. Try murdering 30,000 fully grown adults and then stealing their children, which is what your dad was helping Vidal do. Yeah, but maybe that's why she does what she does. Maybe. Maybe in some twisted way. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. She's an interesting figure, what does it say about belief and the mind, right? You mentioned that you learn a lot about the human mind and belief and people talk about the need for better critical thinking, which I do all the time. I talk to a lot of people about critical thinking. I love it. It's a core element of the show, but the real core skill here really is skepticism so that we don't end up having our brains

take us on an emotional ride in the first place. It's just that I don't put the word skepticism in the intro to the show because people confuse that with cynicism and for other reasons as well. We want to mitigate the emotional response and the cognitive bias. But what did you learn or what do you feel people should learn from this particular story or these stories that you present? Well, she's pretty smart, right? In critical thinking, so I think back to someone I had on my podcast called David Robson, who wrote The Intelligence Trap, a book that came out, I suppose, last year.

And it's all about how the smartest people we know often made the biggest mistakes. And he looks into people like Einstein, for example, who did, you know, whatever, in his later years made a lot of mistakes. But then the big one for me was the writer of Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle was the writer of Sherlock Holmes. He believed in fairies. At a time, by the way, where nobody did believe in fairies. He wrote Sherlock Holmes, you know, the master of deduction, which you could say isn't just a synonym for critical thinking. He's the master of critical thinking of being able to think in a logical, rational way. He invented that character. He must be a genius himself, Arthur Conan Doyle. and yet he believed in fairies because he saw a child that did a prank.

There was a couple of 15-year-old girls in like, I don't know when it was the 30s or something, in the UK who put up like a picture of like fairies. And he was like, well, it's clearly true. And where they had put a pin through their belly to just put the picture up, he thought that was a belly button. And he was like, oh, it's proof that fairies can have children. And this is how Arthur Conan Doyle fell out with Houdini, who was his best friend at the time, who was more of a logical thinker, I suppose.

if the master of critical thinking can lead us to fairies and fairies having children and procreating, that sort of put me in a place where I thought, okay, critical thinking is not enough. I mean, the crazy baby lady is super smart. She's really, really smart. And she's come to a totally different conclusion to what I've come to and what many of us have come to with regards to pro-choice and pro-life, right? How often do you see on Twitter people are saying, you know, oh, we need to make critical thinking, you know, more of that? And they're saying something bonkers. Yeah, all the time.

Yeah. Who's critical thinking are we doing? So things are very subjective. Things are very complicated, I think. And I think this is just me, and I might be totally wrong in this, but what I've learned from interviewing with these people is just to try not to judge too much and to try not to go too far one way or the other and to stay reasonably grounded. I think that's all you can do and accept that you're probably wrong about a lot of stuff. That's all we can do.

Here's the phrase I never thought I would utter on this show. Let's talk about pedophiles. Sure. You know, not many people are covering this, at least not in depth, and certainly not in the way that you're doing it, because it is so the taboo is super strong. It's a repulsive topic. There's a father.

I have a gut reaction, and I don't think I could have done this myself and remained objective in any way. Tell me about this, because it really is, I don't want to say fascinating and interesting, but I guess it really is. I mean, it truly is. It's also really disgusting, just so people are clear on this.

Yeah, it's another one. It's like, you know, because I deal with controversy, subjects. I'm sort of drawn to them. I'm drawn to the darkness. I'm fascinated by things that we're told don't talk about that. And I'm like, since I was a kid, I was, why? Why don't talk about it? What's the problem with talking? Some people would argue, you know, by talking about it, you're enabling it, whatever. Your right to put out that sort of disclaimer, and I would echo it by saying, like, yeah, of course. Like, it's a really tricky subject. It's really taboo. And, you know, you and I would never ever defend any adult touching. You have to go into this subject by saying that.

I'm not about to defend them. I'm actually just interviewing them. I moved to Berlin and I was thinking, what can I do next? You know, I've done exorcism, I've done abortion. And it so happens that Berlin has the world's only clinic for pedophiles that doesn't ever report them to authorities. The clinic basically lets these people who they know could offend children, you know, lets them back onto the street without telling the police. The flip side of that is a lot more people actually voluntarily go to the clinic because they know they're not going to be reported. it's a really complicated one and people want to sort of shut their ears to it and people don't want to talk about it but the fact is that in the US right now I think it was one in nine girls are sexually

abused that's not even including you know other kinds of abuse neglect and physical whatever that is tens of millions of women and men it's it's slightly less but it's still a lot of people you're talking about tens and tens of millions of people in the US horrible that's horrifying yeah and what do we do we just sort of sit there and go like well let's not talk about pedophilia because that makes us feel bad. And it's like, come on, if you want to stop criminals, you know, if you want to stop the murderers and stuff, you look at the murderers, you try to understand them. I went to this clinic and I started talking to the doctors and over the months after that, they gradually started introducing me to some of the patients, took ages to get access to

them and to earn their trust to actually meet them. So yeah, I ended up meeting loads and loads of different, you know, they're pedophiles. That's what they are. Even now, I skirt around the word because the word has so much power now. It's creepy. It's a creepy word too. I mean, there's everything about it. It's disgusting. Really? Yeah. You can't think of a creepier one really, which I guess, again, it drew me to the subject, but it was difficult. You know, the first guy I met called Max, it's not his real name. They don't give me their real names. And he said to me, yeah, I can meet you today, come down to this address. So I go down to the address and it turns out it's a public swimming pool. And I'm like, that is weird. Because by that I should add,

All the people I met are supposedly non-offenders who have graduated from this program in Berlin. So these are supposed to be very, very well-behaved guys. And I turn up to interview him in the pool or whatever outside the swimming pool. And he's there, and he hadn't told me this, he's there with three young girls, 11, 12 years old. Yeah. So I was petrified. You know, firstly, at the whole situation that's going on, but also on a selfish level, like, what the hell am I doing here? Am I an accessory to something?

Yeah, like, what happens if something happens then is like, well, I was there with Andrew Gold and you're like, no, I was interviewing him. Well, you must know something about it. Didn't strike you as strange that a grown man was there with three young girls? Yeah, I did. That was the point of the interview. Yeah, that's so weird. I don't even know if I could handle that, seriously.

Man, I had to be very careful. And, you know, it was a weird thing, actually. I didn't expect this to happen because I'm very emotionally, like sort of stable. I mean stable in the sense that I don't get overwhelmed too easily. But after I spoke to him, he told me he was babysitting. the girls and that the mother was aware of his condition. No, I don't freaking believe that. Not for a minute.

What mother? I mean, she's, that's, no. Wow. I know, but you know what? I met her and it's true. And she is somebody who's an extreme leftist, you know, and she believes that these people are given a hard time. She believes him.

She trusts him. She's known him for a few years and she said, you can take my kids for me. And the thing is, I get that idea of wanting to trust people, Just because you are, you know, you're attracted to maybe women of your own age, right? Doesn't mean you go and attack them. So I get that concept. But women my own age can consent also.

No, exactly. So this is... Children cannot. This is the thing. So, and he's obviously getting some sort of pleasure from taking them swimming as well. So it's just so inappropriate. It's so out of order. And I went across to the other side of the street.

I left quite quickly. I straight away emailed the clinic just to sort of say like, hey, I've seen this happen. This doesn't seem right. What, you know, what's going on. Surely you've told him he's not supposed to be doing this. And I sat down, after doing that, I sat down in this park. And I just sort of wept.

It was such a strange emotion. I didn't expect. It just took hold of me. It's never happened in my life, apart from that one moment. I just sort of broke down in a part, sort of shaking. Someone came over. You know, are you okay? And I was like, oh, I'm fine.

You obviously can't tell them what I've just witnessed. You know, and I went and spoke to the clinic. And they said, look, there's nothing we can do. We don't have his actual real details. and for all we know he's not offended. You know, anyway. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Andrew Gold.

We'll be right back. Now, back to Andrew Gold. I'm hearing it secondhand, it's trauma. It's minor, you know, there's a minor trauma in me hearing about it because I'm sitting there thinking, like, yeah, you're right. Okay, there's women around me I don't, I'm attracted to, I don't go and attack them.

The difference is, if I'm around a woman, she's like, oh, maybe Jordan's attracted to me. Okay, she's familiar with that situation. She's an attractive woman. I'm 40s. She's probably in her 30s or 40s or 50s, whatever. She's from this is a familiar situation with which she knows how to handle. An 11 year old child has no idea what is going on in this other person's head. They've never experienced that before and it just reminds me the fact that this guy in this mud this dumb ass mother thinks that that's okay. It's just like saying you're a heroin addict and I'm like, oh, you know what?

I have all this heroin. Can you hold on to it? Don't do any of it though. That would be bad for you and this is my heroin, you need to hang on to it. It's very important. I got to get it to a medical patient and you go, no problem. I am a heroin addict, but I'm not going to do your heroin. Okay, great, I'll be back in three weeks. The idea that I would come back and expect you to have those, that drug sitting there on your dresser, that you've looked at it every day, and for that to be completely untouched is ludicrous and irresponsible, and I would never expect anyone to do that. And with your own children, I just can't even get close to wrapping my head around this. Talk about being blinded by your politics.

How freaking stupid are you? You're spot on. And that's a really good point about the blinded thing. Look, I met a lot of different patients and a lot of them were really, really well-meaning people who were, as far as I know, of course, I can only believe what they tell me, you know, were well-behaved. The clinicians I spoke to do, they believe the vast majority of pedophiles, they make up 1% of the male population, which is a lot when you think about it.

A lot of people. That's a huge-ass number of people, yes. Larger than the army. Yeah, look, if you're at a crowded gym, one of the people in there is a pedophile. That's right. Statistically speaking. Well, your listeners, my listeners, there will be people among them. And I don't say this is a dig to anyone.

There will be people who are listening now who will recognize this in themselves. Now, the vast majority never offend. And that's a relief. Because you wouldn't. You know, it's wrong. So there are three types of pedophiles. You know, there are the types who are basically psychopathic. they're going to do what they do anyway. We can't really stop them. We can try. You've got the type that

would never offend. That's most of them. These are normal guys who unfortunately have this condition. They're never going to offend. Don't worry about them. So those are two types. Don't worry about them. The problem is the middle. The ones in the middle who are tempted and you talk about believe your own politics. The problem with all of us not talking about it. For anyone still listening going like, oh, I don't want to talk about this. The problem is that the only people who do talk about it is them. And these people get together in communities and they tell each other, oh, it's not a problem if you babysit a bunch of kids. They need to be disavowed of that notion. And the only way that's going to happen is if we start to talk a little bit more openly.

And that doesn't mean accepting what they do. It means criticizing what they do. But at least we're talking. At least we're saying, okay, what should somebody, somebody who might be listening now? What should they do? Well, if they're in Germany, they can go and get help from a therapist who will disavow them of these cognitive biases. If they're in the States and they go to a therapist and say this, they'll be reported to the police. If they're in Australia, same thing.

UK, same thing. So by doing this reporting, we've basically ensured that people who want to go, dude, I got this weird-ass problem. They literally have nowhere else to go except for online where people are like, yeah, here's how you get away with this or worse, right? Yeah, yeah. I did a podcast recently, an episode with a geneticist, totally different subject, but it's Catherine Page Harden, she had a big argument of Sam Harris.

as well about genetics and stuff. But she's just written a book about eugenics. And the reason I mention it is because it's similarly controversial. And she made the same point. She said, if we can't talk about eugenics, and she doesn't mean she believes in eugenics, which is the concept that, you know, certain races are better than others. But she says, because it's so taboo, nobody talks about it. So the only people who know about eugenics are white supremacists in forums, all discussing it and using their cognitive bias to twist it to their own, you know, reasoning. That happens with any taboo group of people. If you make something taboo, you force them underground. So what the clinicians say, you know, there are three risk factors that they teach these pedophiles who come in. And you've got

to remember, like, these are people who are willingly coming in. They're bad people who don't come in. The ones who are willingly coming in, they want help. They know that there's something wrong with them, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. In terms of them being an anomaly and possibly dangerous. Yeah. Exactly. Good. The sociopath's not going to go, they're going to go, I'm not going to a therapist. I like being a horrible person who victimizes other people, right? That's them. And then there's people who are unaware of it. But as soon as it creeps up to consciousness, we want them to have somewhere to go.

I can reluctantly get behind that, right? Exactly. And you know what? It is hard because a lot of people listening to this, they haven't even thought about this stuff before, right? So it's very hard. And I have to want to, I need to constantly remind myself that I've been dealing with it for two years now as I've been investigating. So I have become a little, not exactly desensitized, but yeah, compared to the beginning when I was

weeping in a park, you know. So what they've said these clinicians are three risk factors for these people who might offend. One of them is being around children, right? That sounds pretty obvious. But you'd be amazed because that episode of my podcast with a paedify was it was episode six, a guy called C-Las. Yeah, I listened to it last night. Yeah. So he, as you recall, he was saying to me like, he needs to be around children and it will help him. And I said, what are you talking about? Yeah. If you're further away from them, you can't touch them and he wouldn't, that's how strong the cognitive biases with him. He thought that being nearer to them makes him less dangerous somehow. So that's one of the things. The second thing was getting drunk or taking drugs that of course

makes them more likely to offend. And the third thing is something that they can't control, but we can't, that's stigmatization. That doesn't mean that you can't criticize. It's so complicated, but basically the clinic where they go to in Berlin keeps getting graffitied with hang the pedos, hang the pedophiles and stuff like that. You know, we know with criminals, we know of any kind of criminal in prisons and stuff, if you make them feel more part of society, then they're less likely to offend. So it just comes down to this. Like, do we want to react emotionally and angry and show everybody how anti-pedophile we are, which should just be obvious, right? It should just be obvious that we're all anti-pedophore, but okay, do we want to just show that or do we actually want to

stop children being abused? Yeah. No, you're right. Yeah, it's just about talking about it a little bit more openly and not accepting even a morsel of like adult child touching or anything. Never. The statistics on that and how it ruins a child's life are just like, you know, absolute. It ruins any child's life if anything like that happens to them. And these people need to learn that. Yeah. I mean, this guy, CELUS from the podcast, this pito, he did say, oh, I would never do that because I know it harms the child so much. And he's like, but I love children, which is a creepy sort of thing to hear. Yeah. Because even though you know that that's coming. But what was really weird for me, man, was he's like, oh, I love making friends with children and playing

with children and children love when I play with them because it's really, and I'm thinking, what kind of adult man? Like, I have a two-year-old child. I play with my son, obviously. We play in the sandbox and we, like, wrestle and stuff like that, and I throw a ball back and forth with him. I would not for at least not for longer than a few minutes really be that interested in playing with somebody else's kid. It's my kid, so it's fun. If it's my kid and other kids, it's fun. I have no interest in like going and playing soccer or going swimming with a bunch of 10 year olds that doesn't even remotely.

It would be a chore. It would be an actual chore. I'd be babysitting and it wouldn't be interest. The relationship that I have with these people and I put that in air quotes would be so, there'd be nothing stimulating and interesting in any way at all. It would be rather irritating to have to deal with that.

Even if my kid was there, I'd be like, all right, I'm spending time with my kid watching him swim. The rest of it, It's literally just, how much am I getting paid per hour to watch these kids freaking swim for the next three hours? I don't want to deal with this. You know, this guy was like, oh, we have these great fulfilling relationships. And I just don't understand.

You had to be thinking, why are you stuck at age nine mentally? You have to have some sort of traumatic damage to your brain or something in order to find a relationship with a child fulfilling when you're an adult. Yeah. A friendship. Like, you're not on equal footing. You're an adult. They're children.

It just doesn't make any sense to me. Yeah. You're insightful there with the word stuck. There's no exact consensus at the moment, you know, in the world with doctors and stuff about what makes someone a pedophile. It's all really complicated. But there is a theory of sort of getting stuck, you know, that an eight-year-old might like an eight-year-old girl and a nine-year-old and a nine-year-old and ten and ten. And it sort of changes as you get older. It even happens as you get into your 30s and 40s. I remember being 20 and looking at a 32-year-old woman is like, oh, God, that's like my mom or something, you know, and then you get to 32. And you get to 30s and you get to 30s and you get to 30s and. I remember. I remember being 20s. I remember being 20 and looking at a 32-old woman. I remember. I remember, I remember, I remember, and I remember, and And suddenly they look different to how they did. That's most people. You're 40 and someone who's 32 looks like a child. And you're like not an actual child. It should be clear here. They look like they're in college.

And they're like, I'm not in college. I'm 35. And then you just look in the mirror and you go, damn, I got these crows feet creeping. I'm old now. Well, you look fantastic, Jordan. Yeah, it's the lighting. But thank you. Yeah.

But this reminds me of kind of like the Michael Jackson thing where he's literally having 10-year-olds or 11-year-olds and he's going to Disneyland with them. And you, it's like he's really enjoying that at this really weird level that makes everyone else completely uncomfortable. Yeah, yeah. That's it. They get sort of, you know, and Michael Jackson, again, you don't want to diagnose from afar, but he's the one I would go to as well. And, you know, he was clearly abused. He didn't have a childhood.

And he seemed to get stuck at that age. And it's a funny thing with these guys, because it's not just the sexual stuff. It's like, it seems to be something more. They want, as you were saying about this guy in my podcast, CELAS, he wants to hang around with them. He wants to have friendships with them. stuff that for us would be a chore, they seem to be stuck in childhood. So like I say, they need to go to therapy. They need to be disavowed of the notion that that's okay and that it's, this guy in particular

Celas, he was 18 and the head boy or class president of his high school, you know, a position of power. It's very scary. And we have to be very, you know, careful around him and he needs help. So at the moment, I've written a book on the subject about all these experiences. And it's just tough to find at the moment a publisher. that will take it on because it's such a true subject, which sort of is the point I'm trying to make, you know, because at the moment we're not, we're doing very little to curb child abuse.

Fortunately, I'm making a radio documentary about it as well, and it's just won some award called the Wickers Award or whatever, so it's going to start to get made in the coming months. Because that is the aim. It's like, what is anyone doing to prove? When it's your child, you care, you know, and people, it could be anyone's child. So, yeah, I feel quite passionately about it as we've gone on, you know, as I've continued investigating. Obviously, I got triggered up in this. I mean, as a father, I just can't.

I would absolutely tear this guy to shreds. And I know that that, look, if you haven't offended, you haven't done anything wrong. But the idea that somebody would even be a danger to society like that makes me think that risking prison would be worth it, which is not how we solve this problem. Because if I say, murder all the pedophiles, no one's going to come out and say, hey, I think I have this weird mental condition. No, I'm going to get murdered by Jordan Harbinger or a bunch of other people who think the same way.

And that's not going to stop kids from getting abused. really I'm making the problem worse when I express those kind of feelings, which is, you know, sucks. By the way, when you say disavow them, did they use that word that way in the UK? Disavow means, hey, I have nothing to do with this, but we would say disabuse them of that notion, which means like don't let them keep thinking that. Like, either that's a British thing, or I've never heard that, that use that way, or you're misusing that word. What do you think it is?

I've always said disavowal. No one stopped me. I've just never heard it used that way. Because I would say we need to disabuse them of that notion. I've never heard anybody say disavow them of that notion. I'm not totally... What does disavow mean then? It means like...

So in Mission Impossible, the OG's TV series from like the 80s or 90s or whatever it was, they would say if you get caught, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence, which means they just say, hey, we don't know this guy. Right. We don't know anything about it. Someone will email in. I don't know if you can disavow someone else and to cause them to do something. Yeah, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. If I am wrong, I'm pleased I used it about four times. Minimum, minimum, yeah, like a bunch of times to the point where we can't fix it, which is why we're leaving the grammar lesson into in the show here. Anyways, yes, many people will email in. You bet you're bippy on that one. Yeah. Now, look, I don't want to go on too long.

I really have enjoyed this conversation with you. I enjoyed your podcast and the documentaries. I will say that I did also listen to the podcast about the guys who crashed the airplane in the Andes Mountains and then had to eat each other. Is that the exact same group that was in the movie alive or is a different plane crash. Yeah, that's them. That's them.

Same group. Yes. I mean, it's just a case of, you know, a lot of our podcasts are fairly similar. You know, there's a crossover, isn't there? We want interesting people. It's as simple as that. Yeah. And I couldn't think, you know, literally on the edge is the name of the podcast.

I couldn't think of anything more on the edge. They were literally on the edge of a mountain for 72 days. Yeah. And it was great because that was a way I could use my languages. There aren't many times in a podcast you're able to do that. And I knew that, look, these guys are getting older. If anyone knows about this was the Andes. plane crash that happened now, I think it was 40 years ago or more.

They landed on a mountain. Most of them died in the crash, but they were like 30 of them still alive. There was that movie alive about them. And they had to eat the dead. It's the most horrific thing I've ever heard. But, you know, it's a theme of mine, I guess, to go towards the darkness. And I wasn't going to shy away from that one. I mean, cannibalism, which they don't like that word,

because cannibalism implies it's sort of a habit or a custom. This was sort of forced. They were forced to eat. each other to survive. So it's called what again, when it's not part of it? Like when it's not ritualistic cannibalism, what is it called when you're like having to eat dead humans? Could it be necrophagy? Yeah, or necrophagy? Necrophagy. That's the word he used. Okay, because that means dead and eat in Latin or whatever it is. I can't find it on Google, but that's what that would mean. By the way, your podcast network automatically injects advertising into the beginning and the end of the

show. I'm sure you knew that. So I just wanted to let you know that during the ad, during the show for people who had crashed into the Andes Mountains and been forced to eat one another. At the end of the show, there was an ad for a meat company. Oh no. And they were like, hmm, I really love such and such brand, you know, ham. Oh, yeah, it's the tasty. And I was just thinking, this is the weirdest. And I know it's an accident because I know how dynamic ad insertion works. Really, really gross. I don't remember the brand, and it's lucky for them because I would never want to associate my meat brand. And it makes me think, like, do they transcribe the show? And there's like somebody's talking about eating meat.

And they're like, oh, yeah, put a meat ad in there. They're already thinking about eating meat. Maybe. You know, when I was living in Germany, so they all came up in German. So, you know, which was strange. It's my English podcast. And then suddenly like, what do you then? We are from Germany.

Yeah, it's geo-targeting. So it depends on the IP address that you're for. but the meat thing was a little bit on the nose, especially because I'm like, how often are there meat companies advertising on podcasts? I mean, it's not exactly, it's not a mattress, right? It's pretty rare. I just thought it was really funny that there was a frickin' meat ad on your podcast about people having to eat one another afternoon, playing crash, which did remind me to ask you, and I'm surprised that you didn't ask this, or maybe you did, and the answer was kind of gross. Did you ask what human flesh tasted like?

No. It's dark. It was too much. He's like, he's a separate. 72 year old man. He was like in his little room and stuff. And I just read his whole book. And the book is quite religious and a lot of stuff about God. And they sort of use a lot of the imagery of like eating the body of Christ as sort of, I suppose you have to in that, in that instance, sort of as a way of living with yourself, I guess, although they had no choice. There was nothing to eat there. I mean, they were in freezing cold temperatures as well, like minus a million or whatever for like three months. And they only had like socks. They had like, they had, like, socks. They had. like no shoes on and stuff. They'd never been in the snow because they were from warm climates and they were going over to Chile to play rugby. So they'd never ever been in a snow. They were totally unprepared for that. They had to like put snow in a in a bottle and a wine bottle and like put it in the sun for like hours and hours to get drops out of it for water because the snow like burned their mouths. It was just horrific. But yeah, it was such an emotional ride reading this guy's book. And then to get him in front of me, this sort of slightly frail older man who's so lovely and

smiley. He said to me after a little bit like, you know what, I'm a bit tired. Can we speak in Spanish? Because we were speaking in English at first. So we went to English, uh, went to Spanish, sorry. And, uh, I had to use a translator over him. I think it still works. And it's, it's very emotional that episode. It's the only one I've edited and I was crying while editing it the bit where he gets saved. Just the most amazing story. From the beginning, I knew I'm, I'm not going to ask this guy, uh, what it tasted like. I, I, of course it went through my mind, though. Yeah, I wondered about that because it seems like, Like my dark curiosity wants to know. Obviously, I'm never going to do this.

You know, hopefully I'm never going to have any situation where this is something that I need to do. And I totally understand why he has to say like, oh, it's the body of Christ. Although the body of Christ tastes like wafers from my experience. And the blood tastes like wine. It's weird how that works. But the idea that he had to survive off of that, I mean, it might even be worse if you're religious because you feel like this is really wrong. and we're not supposed to do this, whereas me as somebody who's not a person of faith at all, I'm kind of like, look, this dead person would totally under, if I died and people ate me,

I'd be like, oh, good. At least I had some use after I kicked a bucket, right? I don't think, I don't really have any strong feelings around that I feel more bad that you're almost lucky if you died in the beginning of that ordeal until, of course, they got saved, which none of them necessarily knew it was going to happen. Andrew Gold, thank you so much, man. Always a great conversation. I really do enjoy your work.

Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me on. It was an absolute pleasure to be. As usual, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, I wanted to give you a preview of one of my favorite stories from an earlier episode of the show. My friend Steve Elkins found a lost city in the jungle that most people never even knew existed. I'm not even kidding. It sounds insane. This has to be one of the most incredible stories I've ever recorded on the show. I know you're going to love this one.

The legend of Cedad Blanca, or White City in English, goes back probably 500 years to the best of my knowledge. People have believed that there is this civilization out there. And the local indigenous people have their own legends. It has about five different names of which I can't pronounce about this culture, this civilization that lived out in the jungle at one time. One of the other monikers for the city in current times is Lost City of the Monkey God. Maybe there's some truth to this legend. I kind of felt there was something to it.

The Mesquedia jungle where it's located in the eastern third of the mountain, in the eastern third of Honduras is one of the toughest jungles in the world, and by accidents of geography and history, it's remained pretty much unexplored until recently. I have a map made by the British in the 1850s, and on that map, it says Portal del Inferno, over that part of the jungle, and it was called the gates of hell because the terrain was so tough. A lot of people have gone looking for it.

Some went in, and some never came back. A director friend of mine introduced me to a guy named Captain Steve, Morgan. And he was a lifelong adventurer, explorer, treasure hunter, raconteur. Nice guy, really pretty smart. And I said, let's go. In the 1994, we headed out to Honduras for an unknown adventure looking for the lost city. For more with Steve Elkins, including the details on how they discovered the city and made one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the century, check out episode 299 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Really interesting guy that Andrew Gold. I'm looking forward to more from him. By the way, he's got a podcast called On the Edge with Andrew Gold. We'll link it in the show notes. He's a pretty good interviewer. You'll like it if you like my show. Links to all of Andrew's stuff will be on the website in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Please use our website links if you buy books or anything from any of our guests. It does help support the show. Worksheets for episodes are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. And there's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at

Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, and that course is free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm showing you how to dig the well before you get thirsty and build those relationships before you need them. Most of the guests on the show subscribe to the course, so come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find

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