#427 - "I Infilitrate Secret Societies" Epstein, Bohemian Grove & Bilderberg Group | Jon Ronson

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 00

  Beauty today.

• 0:53Danny Jones?

  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 decay of freedom of speech is happening over there. But in this documentary that I was watching this morning on the Channel Five 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 gonna have to take you in now. I don't want to break your mannequin, but please put your hand behind me and back." Like, it was insane how friendly they are.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  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 culture war reasons or for protest reasons. So, yeah, that may be part of the reason why.

• 1:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Do you have any, do you have any friends that live over there? I'm sure you have lots of people, family and stuff. Because you're originally from there?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:09Danny Jones?

  I wonder what, because I hear, I hear both sides. I hear like, everything is going to hell over there. It's a shit show with the immigration, everyone getting arrested, people can't protest. And then I hear like Piers Morgan saying, "It's fine. Everything's great. There's nothing wrong." Like, I don't know what's, what's the truth?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I mean, look, I can only speak anecdotally.

• 2:27Danny Jones?

  Of course, your experience.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  But I gotta say, okay, so the protest thing seems to be, from what I can tell, kind of serious. 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.

• 2:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  And I did a kind of anniversary tour recently. And just before, and I was like doing 40 cities, 40 towns in Britain, from, you know, 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 Oswalt, you know, "Do you know what's happening in England?" And he's like, "No." And Bill Maher's going, "Oh my God, all these like delightful English villages are now being completely taken over by Muslim immigrants or whatever." And I was thinking-

• 3:21Danny Jones?

  What year was this?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Oh, like, like a year ago.

• 3:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I was thinking, "Oh, I wonder if I'm gonna see any evidence of that." And in my experience of that tour, I went to like 30 towns, nothing, like no indication of any problem. No, that's not to say that there aren't people in Britain who are having, you know, some difficulties, but I certainly do. I think that's self-applause, certainly for my anecdotal.

• 3:47Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, from what, from what that documentary was portraying is a lot of those guys from that Palestine organization, what's it called again?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Palestine Action, I think.

• 3:57Danny Jones?

  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 big factory, this big warehouse that was owned by this arms company that was owned by Israel. And they were breaking into it and vandalizing it and destroying stuff. And then I guess that is when the UK government labeled Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  That's right. But then it became a sort of I'm Spartacus type thing, like all, as far as I understand it, like I much prefer to talk about things when I've done my own research and I've done my own, been down my own rabbit holes and had my own adventures. And this isn't one of those situations. So, I'm talking in a much more-

• 4:42Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  -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 where 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-

• 5:00Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Oh, this is them breaking down, breaking into the warehouse?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:05Danny Jones?

  Okay. Wild.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  So, but as I say-

• 5:13Danny Jones?

  What are they wearing?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Jumpsuits.

• 5:16Danny Jones?

  Are they wearing sailor hats? Like L. Ron Hubbard sailor hats? The camera, the camera's way too crazy.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:25Danny Jones?

  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.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. They're going for it.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 5:39Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, you're, 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.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. And a lot of stuff that I think transects the kind of stuff that you're interested in.

• 6:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  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 Them, my book Them, which is when I snuck into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones.

• 6:42Danny Jones?

  That one's fascinating.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  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-

• 6:52Danny Jones?

  Tell me about The Castle.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Let me tell you the first page of The Castle.

• 6:55Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  I wake up, and there's a series of texts from my son. He'd been texting me while I was asleep. And so I read the last text first, and the last text said, "It's okay, we left. That was completely fucked, but we're safe now," or something 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 strange, 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

• 7:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:52Danny Jones?

  Gargoyles and shit?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Oh, gargoyles.

• 7:54Danny Jones?

  That sounds fun.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  A moat. Wow. So they cross 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 you 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 Princesses." They said, "What's the concept?" He said, "The concept is I'm the lord, I'm looking for my queen, I've got 101 princesses to choose from. Go

• 8:39Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:51Danny Jones?

  How many people was your son with?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Like, three, two women and two-

• 8:55Danny Jones?

  And him.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  And him and one male friend. And there was a couple of other equally bewildered-

• 9:00Danny Jones?

  Did he want the boys to put dresses on too?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  No, they, they, they ended up going into, having tuxedos.

• 9:06Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  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 door to his pole dancing nightclub, which has got cages. That's right next door to his hot tub botanical gardens. He's got like an underground, purple-tinted botanical gardens filled with hot tubs. So they put on their princess outfits, go back upstairs, a videographer appears, and they start filming 101 princesses. But it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that this isn't a real reality

• 9:48Speaker 02

  show, partly because the videographer was, 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, 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 to force pretenses.

• 10:19Danny Jones?

  Dude's due diligence.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I, I mean, to his credit, my son was like a plus one.

• 10:26Danny Jones?

  So this guy met one of the girls on Tinder?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:29Danny Jones?

  How old was this dude?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Early 60s.

• 10:33Danny Jones?

  And how old was the girl?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Like mid-20s.

• 10:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:37Danny Jones?

  Are you sure it was Tinder and not like Seeking Arrangements or something like that?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  No, it must have been. 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.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Um, 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.

• 11:21Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  So that's the first couple of pages of the book and the whole thing unfolds from there.

• 11:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God. So his, this house is in where exactly?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Connecticut, in the forests of Connecticut.

• 11:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, in the forest in Connecticut?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:48Danny Jones?

  So did you find out exactly who this guy was?

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Turns out he's the great grandson of a Gilded Age steel tycoon. That's how he got the money to build the castle. And, and yeah, every other chapter of, of the castle was 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, 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.

• 12:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, he actually came to invite you in his house and?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Well, I invite, I, I, I messaged him and I said, I'm a nonfiction writer and my son has just emerged from the castle with extraordinary tales to tell. Can I come and write about the castle? So he said, come on over.

• 12:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  But then he started saying some quite unwise things to me when I visited the castle. Um, about how, uh, you, he said, the way the princess, he called it princessing, uh, 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. Uh, 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, uh, creme de la creme of manosphere influencers, you can't really lord it over your princesses in your castle anymore.

• 13:13Danny Jones?

  Uh, no.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that kind of made me laugh and I, I, that became like a, a, a theme of the book. There's all these things that men used to be able to do that we can't do anymore. So, and so I kind of explored that. But my, um, weird relationship with the castle owner just gets weirder and weirder the more I discover about what's going on inside the castle.

• 13:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  I know.

• 13:36Danny Jones?

  Any kind of weird connections to like, uh, like political stuff or anything like that? Or was this guy like, any connection to, was he a spy or?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  No, no spy connection, although actually there was somebody from the FBI who would go to the castle. I never got to the bottom of that thing, but there was a, because at one point when he was sending me all of these kind of ominous messages, he was saying, I've got a team of investigators who are looking into you. Uh, I've employed the largest legal firm in the world to, uh, um, you know, to look into you. My friend from the FBI would love to take you out for dinner. And it turns out he does have a friend from the FBI.

• 14:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Who would hang around the castle. Yeah. But that was the only friend in high places.

• 14:18Danny Jones?

  So what does he think about now that the book's out? What is he?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  He's probably.

• 14:22Danny Jones?

  Has he tried to sue you?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Well, I, I think he's a bit worried. Last I heard, he's in Southeast Asia.

• 14:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's a, I think he's a little bit worried, but, um, but I've been very diligent in my information gathering.

• 14:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  It's, but it's pretty wild.

• 14:39Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  I know. So anyway, I wanted to tell you about that because we're going to go do like a deep dive into all my previous work, but I just wanted to mention.

• 14:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, going back, how early was it when you published the, the book about, uh, that was titled Them?

• 14:55Speaker 02

  I was probably around 30, pretty much. I, I, that was like five years. The first thing I did was, um, there was a guy who lived about four miles away from me called Omar Bakri Mohammed, who said he wouldn't rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street. Uh, so I contacted him and said, can I hang around with you while you overthrow democracy and turn Britain 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, reckless things that might endanger me.

• 15:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What made you want to do that? Like, what made you want to go like risk your life and?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  I, I, you know, I'm always kind of looking for some sort of absurd humor in the darkness. Uh, and with, so with the castle, it was like, oh, you know, this guy is trying this kind of very outdated version of masculinity is not going to work out. And so that made me laugh. And with Omar, it was like, here's a guy who lives in London. So he's going to have to like use our symbols of capitalism to destroy them. And that, and that made me laugh. So for instance, he took me, the very first day I was with him, he took me to Office World to get his, um, Islam, the future for Britain, um, pamphlets photocopied, uh, because Office World has a special price promise that if you can find a photo, the

• 16:20Speaker 02

  copying service is cheaper, he'll give you a discount.

• 16:22Danny Jones?

  Buy one, get one today.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But 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, uh, he said, can you drive me, uh, to Birmingham? There's like a secret meeting with Hamas and Hezbollah and.

• 16:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  So I became his chauffeur. So for a year I was Omar's chauffeur.

• 16:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, whatever happened to him?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Uh, he's in prison in Lebanon now for inspiring acts of terrorism.

• 16:51Danny Jones?

  In Lebanon?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, he went off to Lebanon and got, uh, after nine 11. All of this was before nine 11. This was pre nine 11. Um, you know, some really sad things happened there. I met his young kid, Mohammed, really sweet kid. He was like 13 when I was doing my story about Omar. Um, and Mohammed was saying how worried he was about his father because his father was, you know, Omar was making headlines and how worried he was. And, you know, he saw Malcolm X and I was really worried that his father's going to get assassinated, you know, really sweet kid. And then a few years ago, I thought, oh, I wonder what happened to Mohammed? Turns out Mohammed joined ISIS, then decided ISIS wasn't for him. Uh, and tried to leave ISIS.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  And ISIS, being pretty fucking hardcore employers, killed him, uh, for, for, yeah, for trying to leave ISIS. It was heartbreaking because he was such a sweet 13 year old kid and.

• 17:49Danny Jones?

  How, when was this?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Uh, that must have been.

• 17:51Danny Jones?

  This is pre nine 11?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  No, the, I knew them. I did Omar and, uh, you know, met Mohammed and everything pre nine 11. But Mohammed joined ISIS and everything, I don't know, 10 years later or whatever.

• 18:03Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, very sad. So that was my first adventure.

• 18:07Danny Jones?

  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 twenties. Same workouts, same diet, generally the same routine, except now my motivation and energy seem to be lacking a little bit more. And workout recovery certainly takes longer. It basically feels like you're working twice as hard for the same result. The thing is, even though your body produces testosterone, there's a protein called SHBG, which stands for sex hormone binding globulin, that can bind to some of your testosterone, making it less available for the rest of your body to use. And that's why I started taking Mars Men. Mars Men is designed to support healthy testosterone levels and optimize energy, focus,

• 18:49Danny Jones?

  strength and stamina using eight natural clinically dosed ingredients, including Tongkat Oli, Shilajee, vitamin D, zinc and boron. For me, I wake up feeling more bright eyed and bushy tailed. I have more steady energy throughout the day and my workout recovery is much faster. It's nothing like caffeine. I can just take on more of a workload every single day and I got my motivation back. Mars Men is made in the USA, it's third party tested and it's available at GNC nationwide and it's backed by a 90 day money back guarantee. For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off plus free shipping and three free gifts at mengotomars.com with the promo code Danny. That's M E N G O T O M A R S dot com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check

• 19:34Danny Jones?

  out with the code Danny. After you purchase, they're going to ask him where you heard about him. Please support our show and tell them we sent you.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  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?

• 19:50Danny Jones?

  Omar said this?

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, or one of Omar's people actually said it.

• 19:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  And I, 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. Uh, and instead they had these kind of, he built a marquee in his garden, all the clansmen had to do these like multiple choice questionnaires like about which strengths and weaknesses most applied to them. I always remember that one of them was mixes easily, which usually would be.

• 20:39Danny Jones?

  Mixes easily?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, now normally that would be a strength, right? But if you're in the Klan, it's a weakness.

• 20:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Uh, and they said the same thing to me. They said, did, did I know that there was a shadowy cabal secretly ruling the world from inside a secret room?

• 20:52Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  So, uh, and this was like late nineties. 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, they're conspiracy theorists. They believe that there's a shadowy cabal secretly ruling the world. Uh, so I decided to try to sneak into the shadowy cabal. So that's what Them is about.

• 21:15Danny Jones?

  So let's take that thread and go back to how much before that did you go to Bohemian Grove with Alex?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  That was a little bit later on.

• 21:24Danny Jones?

  That was later?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I tried to get into the Bilderberg Group headquarters.

• 21:30Danny Jones?

  Which was where?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  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. Let me just chew my little energy cookie.

• 21:40Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 21:43Danny Jones?

  Enjoy that energy coming.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  Hmm. And you should enjoy your energy.

• 21:47Danny Jones?

  I will. Delicious.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  So.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 22:08Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  So, um, I went there. I went there with a conspiracy theorist called Big Jim Tucker, who had dedicated his life to trying to expose the Bilderberg Group.

• 22:20Danny Jones?

  What was your view on this stuff before you went out there? Did you, did you suspect it was all bullshit? Or did you, were you open minded to like, maybe this shit's real?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  I was, I was, I guess I was sort of veering on the side of bullshit, but still had an open mind. But I made a decision to do no research. I, 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. Didn't do any research on the Bilderberg Group. I thought I'll just, I'll just, you know, be a feather in the wind of this story, see where it takes me. Uh, so we turn up at this five star hotel the day before the Bilderberg Group was supposed to arrive. And we're like scouting around, me and Big Jim Tucker. Um, and they're still like holiday makers there. They were about to take over the whole hotel.

• 23:08Danny Jones?

  Holiday makers?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, at, at this hotel. But the Bilderberg Group are coming in the next day.

• 23:13Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Vacationers.

• 23:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 23:16Danny Jones?

  What the fuck's a holiday maker?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  I know.

• 23:17Danny Jones?

  I've never heard that before.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  I forget I'm in some strange foreign land here.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Vacationers.

• 23:24Danny Jones?

  Okay, tourists.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, tourists.

• 23:25Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Uh, or as Jim Tucker wrote in his notepad, unaware civilians.

• 23:31Danny Jones?

  Unaware civilians.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:32Danny Jones?

  I like that.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So then we scouted around the hotel and then leave and we're followed. A, a, a car chase ensues. Um, I, I say we're being followed. I'm saying a car chase. Um, 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 ensuing between me and the Bilderberg Group's security detail.

• 24:02Danny Jones?

  How do you know it was the Bilderberg security detail?

• 24:04Speaker 02

  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, I thought, I'll solve, I'll solve this. I, I went over to his car, banged on the window, you know, tapped, and he refused to look at me.

• 24:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's spooky.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, really spooky. So then I phoned the British Embassy.

• 24:29Danny Jones?

  What did he look like?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Uh, like a, like a henchman of, of the shadowy cabal that secretly rules the world.

• 24:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  So I phoned.

• 24:40Danny Jones?

  Just sat there in the car while you're knocking on the window.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:42Danny Jones?

  Looking straight ahead.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  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. Uh, I phoned up, um, the Bilderberg, I, I phoned up the British Embassy. And I said, I'm being followed. I said, I'm a journalist from England. I'm being followed by a dark green lansia belonging to the Bilderberg Group. And she said, huh, then she said, go on.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  So I said, I just heard you take a sharp breath. And she said, well, she said, what are you doing here? She said, do, do you have Bilderberg's permission to be in Portugal? Do they know you're here? She said, what are you doing here?

• 25:33Danny Jones?

  You wouldn't need Bilderberg's permission to be in Portugal?

• 25:35Speaker 02

  I, 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, are you in contact with the Bilderberg Group? Do they know what you're doing? So I said, uh, 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. Um, so she phoned me, she said to me, she said, you know, the good news is if you, if you know you're being followed, they're probably just trying to intimidate you. And the dangerous ones would be those that you don't know are following you.

• 26:12Danny Jones?

  Don't see him coming.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I thought, A, how does a woman from the British Embassy in Portugal know that?

• 26:19Danny Jones?

  She's a spook.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Right. And B, that was kind of skank comfort. Cause I was thinking about, what if 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 says she phoned, she calls back and says, I've, 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.

• 26:50Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:51Danny Jones?

  The same guy that was in the car that wouldn't stare at you? That wouldn't look at you?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  That I don't know, actually. There was another moment when I went to the beach, like I was, I was ready to abandon the story. Um, I went to the beach to calm down. And when I got back to my, 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 pamphlet, both picked up leaflets and started like reading them. So clearly they were surveilling me.

• 27:23Danny Jones?

  They were trying to intimidate you too?

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:24Danny Jones?

  They wanted you to know that they were there.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  I guess, unless they just weren't very good at being.

• 27:29Danny Jones?

  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?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Well, after that, uh, we went back the next day when the Bilderberg, uh, cause I still didn't know what was going on. I mean, clearly something was going on. So I went back the next day. Um, and all of these cars started going up the drive, these limousines started going up the drive. Uh, and there was like, I did later discovered Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Peter Mandelson.

• 28:02Danny Jones?

  What?

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peter Mandelson, who's a huge figure in British politics. He's just been brought down because he was in the Epstein files.

• 28:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. I remember, I saw that.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was there. He's your typical Bilderberg guy. Um, I ended up interviewing a couple of members of the Bilderberg Group. Uh, I interviewed, um, Dennis Healy, who was, used to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer in, in Britain. What's the American equivalent to that? Like, like the head of the Federal Reserve, maybe?

• 28:30Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, or something akin, not, not exactly the same. And, um, he's, I said, why are you so secret? And he said, we're not secret, we're private.

• 28:41Danny Jones?

  What year are we talking roughly?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  This was about 97, 98, something like that. This is just before my Bohemian Grove adventure.

• 28:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  With Alex. Um, he said, um, so, so he had a whole load of photographs and he'd taken aside Bilderberg meetings. So I asked him if I could look at the photographs. And he told me to fuck off. He said, no, fuck off. So, uh, 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 Bohemian Grove together.

• 29:11Danny Jones?

  You didn't see Jeffrey Epstein at the Bilderberg meeting?

• 29:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:14Danny Jones?

  No?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  No.

• 29:15Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I went to TED as well.

• 29:17Danny Jones?

  Maybe Steve Bannon?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  No, he wasn't there. Who was there? David Rockefeller. A lot of like the head of Heinz, the head of Smith, Klein, Beecham. Um, I think the publisher of the Washington Post at the time, Catherine Graham, she was there. Uh, the way it was described to me was they were set up in the aftermath of World War II. They didn't, they wanted to thwart future Hitlers. 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.

• 29:55Danny Jones?

  Money.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Money. So that was the Bilderberg's philosophy. The world will be safer if we give the power to globalists and businesses.

• 30:04Danny Jones?

  Wow. A way to transcend nation states. So big, big corporate businesses that are uh, international.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:11Danny Jones?

  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.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also, yeah, the head of Heinz, all they care about is making money. So they're a safer bet than, uh, than a Hitler, than some sort of crazy ideologue. I think, I, and this was like nine years after World War II ended was when they was, when they.

• 30:35Danny Jones?

  When they were formed.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  When they were formed.

• 30:37Danny Jones?

  Are they still active?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. They meet every year.

• 30:40Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:41Danny Jones?

  See, I have a friend who is a former CIA officer, who was CIA officer for, I want to say 30 years. Uh, he was put in jail by the CIA for exposing the, uh, he, he blew the whistle on the torture program.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Oh, Abu Ghraib?

• 30:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah. No, uh, it, it was. It was, it was the, um, the torture program. Yeah. After nine 11, the enhanced interrogation stuff.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:04Danny Jones?

  Um, yeah, I think Abu Ghraib was definitely a part of that. But there was also like black sites that were set up all throughout Europe where they were taking, you know, okay to people and waterboarding them and doing all that stuff. And he blew the whistle on it. And he was saying, what was I just talking about? I just lost my whole train of thought.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  The CIA guy, the, um, the enhanced interrogation, the torture.

• 31:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What were you saying right before I saw, I brought that up?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Oh, about.

• 31:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, you're talking about Bilderberg?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:33Danny Jones?

  So he knows somebody who was also a high level CIA person who went to a Trilateral Commission meeting.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:42Danny Jones?

  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.

• 31:54Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 31:55Danny Jones?

  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.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. The, the, 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, um, of, 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, they wanted a one world government. I mean, that was what they were aiming for.

• 32:29Danny Jones?

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• 33:11Danny Jones?

  to get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, New York strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year, with free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com/danny, B U T C H E R B O X dot com slash Danny. And be sure to use our link below so they know we sent you. All of your different books are sort of like connected in one way or the other. Like, uh, 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.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  It's all intertwined.

• 33:50Danny Jones?

  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, 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

• 34:34Danny Jones?

  the truth is here. You know what I mean?

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:36Danny Jones?

  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, uh, 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?

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Although the one thing I'd say about Pizza Gate and QAnon, you know, read the Epstein files. This is, this will probably be 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 friend who worked 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?

• 35:29Danny Jones?

  It's crazy.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Right, it is. Have you been inside?

• 35:32Danny Jones?

  No, I wish. I would love to have gone inside. I would, I would love to have taken a tour of that house, you know, after he died. It's just like, it's so monstrous.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:41Danny Jones?

  And you have the big park right across the street.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:44Danny Jones?

  And then Howard Lutnick's house is right next door.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  I saw Nick and Woody Allen right down the street.

• 35:48Danny Jones?

  Who?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Woody Allen, I believe, is on the same street. That's, that's what I've heard. So, um, but the thing is, like, you know, a few people said to me afterwards, well, you've always been a bit sniffy about QAnon, but doesn't the Epstein files show that QAnon is basically true? And my answer is always like, no, because the Epstein stuff was going on at exactly the same time that you were really focusing on QAnon. All you 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, um, 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

• 36:32Speaker 02

  in Miami Hamlet, that the whole thing blew open. But Epstein, 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, you should have just looked at that and...

• 36:50Danny Jones?

  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, child molestation 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 the, all the people that were, that were supposed to be linked to that Pizza Gate place, and all the cheese pizza stuff, like, they literally dumped, the US government dumped all these emails where there's, I think, uh, cheese pizza is mentioned in the Epstein files, something like 3,000 times? Like, like, that's absolutely insane. What are we, what are we supposed to do with that? Right? They don't, they don't give you any explanation for that. And I think

• 37:32Danny Jones?

  from what I remember, if I remember correctly, in the Epstein files, was that, uh, I'm not super clear on this, but from what I can recall is that there was emails about QAnon with like Steve Bannon, and Epstein, where they like created that. Right? I think that was the implication, is like, they intentionally started QAnon, uh, for one reason or, or the other.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:57Danny Jones?

  There's evidence that shows that in the emails. I don't know if it's provable, but it's, there's definitely evidence for that.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Right. I haven't gone down that rabbit hole, so I don't know. Have you ever Googled, have you ever looked yourself up in the Epstein files?

• 38:08Danny Jones?

  Uh, yeah, I did. I'm not in there, unfortunately.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Not even, not even a mention?

• 38:11Danny Jones?

  No, not even mentioned. I have, my friend Kurt Metzger is mentioned in there.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Oh, I know Kurt Metzger.

• 38:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Kurt, he's in there. Uh, they, because I guess Epstein was gonna go to one of Kurt Metzger's comedy shows on his birthday. And that's why he was in there. They're like, oh, look at the lineup, or whatever.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  That's funny. I'm in there like about twice, I think. At one point, um, he was given a copy of The Men Who Stay at Goats movie, that 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, um, critical of Malcolm Gladwell.

• 38:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  And I got a mention in there, too.

• 38:48Danny Jones?

  One of the guys I talked to on, on, uh, 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, or not Googled, but I went on the Gmail thing in the emails, and I searched his name, and he's fucking in there.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  In a bad way?

• 39:07Danny Jones?

  Well, no, it wasn't bad, but what happened was, um, he did a Skype call, 20-minute Skype call with Epstein.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Really?

• 39:13Danny Jones?

  So this guy's name's Dean Raden, and he's all a spoon bender type guy. He, he was a, he wrote a bunch of books. Find out what his actual description is, because I don't want to butcher it. But anyways, he's an expert on all of this Stargate, uh, ESP type stuff with Uri Geller, and Andrea Puharic, and all that stuff. And, um, anyways, long story short, is Epstein reached out to him and asked him...

• 39:40Speaker 02

  He's a parapsychologist.

• 39:41Danny Jones?

  He's a, okay, 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.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  So he had a Zoom with Epstein?

• 39:55Danny Jones?

  So, yeah, he had a Zoom with Epstein. And I asked him, like, what was it about? Like, what do you want? He goes, uh, he wanted me to tell him stories about spoon bending for 20 minutes.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Wow. If Epstein had Zooms with me, I could have given him a spoon bending story.

• 40:10Danny Jones?

  Right, I'm sure you could.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Yes. I, I went, because I, I was hanging out with Uri Geller when I was writing The Men Who Stay at Goats, and...

• 40:17Danny Jones?

  You hung out with him?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Well, I went to his house.

• 40:19Danny Jones?

  No, what, in Israel?

• 40:20Speaker 02

  No, in, uh, Sunning on Thames, near London.

• 40:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, this sort of fancy, sort of, um, kind of Dallas-style mansion.

• 40:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Uh, with pillars. He gave me a tour. I do like Uri, but I'm about to say something that slightly takes the piss out of him, but, but I do.

• 40:38Danny Jones?

  Well, yeah, it doesn't matter.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Okay. But I do like him. Um, he said, we go, so he turns, I turn up, he gives me the tour, goes, Uri.

• 40:44Danny Jones?

  You think he can really bend spoons? I'm skeptical.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Well, uh, so he says to me, yeah, because, John, this is my recovered limousine. Uh, this is my Onex toilet. He has a toilet made of Onex. Uh, yeah. He's, 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!

• 41:11Speaker 02

  He said, Shippy, Shippy, didn't I say the next person who walks through this door will be Jewish? And Shippy is like, brother, and I'll go, you should do it already.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  So that was a moment where I'm like, okay.

• 41:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. I've had people who met him and had gone to dinner with him or whatever. And they said they were quite suspicious about some of the stuff that he was doing.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:29Danny Jones?

  You know, like they would, like he would intentionally make them look at something before he did something or whatever. But my whole, 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 realized I can create a whole career and make a bunch 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.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. There's a part of it like, so I wrote a whole book, The Minister at 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. Do you go left? Do you go right? You go right.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  So I said, what was level three? He said, level three was invisibility. So I said, I said, that's kind of a leap from level two. I said, yeah, I said, what, 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? And he went, no. And I said, what was he saying? And level four was we had a master sergeant that could stop the heart of a goat. Uh, just by wanting it to stop. And I said, um, did he ever manage it? And he said, yeah, one time, uh, but his heart got damaged in the process.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  So I said, what, 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, so that was like the thing that was like, what I discovered. Then I went down the whole rabbit hole to try and meet the goat stayer. And I did meet the goat stayer 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. And, and I said, can I see it? And he said, yeah. So he, this was in Ohio, Kirtland, Ohio. And he gets out the video and there he is like staring at a hamster. A hamster's like on the wheel.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  And he's staring at it. And then suddenly the hamster like drops off the wheel and like lands on its back in the sawdust. And I'm like, Jesus Christ. Uh, then the hamster gets up and starts eating again. So I said, well, can you show me the part of the video where the hamster dies?

• 44:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  And he said, no, he said, because my wife said, one of these guys are animal rights activists. You can't show them where the hamster dies.

• 44:47Danny Jones?

  That's a good excuse.

• 44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that was inconclusive at best. But anyway, um, but I agree. I, you know, I thought a lot, well, is, could there be any truth in any of this? And where I landed on was, um, have you heard of Rupert Sheldrake?

• 45:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. The sense of being stared at this.

• 45:05Danny Jones?

  No, I haven't heard of that.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  That's one I think, I wouldn't be surprised if in years to come, some research proves this.

• 45:12Danny Jones?

  The sense of being stared at.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, that feeling we all have that, you know, you look around and.

• 45:17Danny Jones?

  Like somebody's behind you.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Just that sort of weird, you know, maybe it goes back to like when we were hunter gatherers or whatever. And, you know, there was, so I wonder whether there's a little bit of that, that that's true.

• 45:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. I think so.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  There's been a couple of times.

• 45:33Danny Jones?

  There's a lot of weird things like that, you know?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  You know, there's.

• 45:36Danny Jones?

  You want to like a weird creepy haunted house like you.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I did with the castle. That was.

• 45:42Danny Jones?

  Was that house, that house was haunted?

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Well, certainly haunted by odd.

• 45:46Danny Jones?

  By some old fucking weirdo.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Haunted, haunted vibrationally, I would say. Bad vibrational energy.

• 45:52Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. No, I've never spent a night in a haunted house. Um, have you?

• 45:58Danny Jones?

  No. And maybe, not that I'm, not that I know of.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:02Danny Jones?

  I, I, I could have. I've had very creepy experiences in houses. Specifically in New Orleans.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:11Danny Jones?

  But, uh, yeah, I don't know. I never saw like any ghosts or anything like that.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I nearly did one time. I got a call. Do you know the pop star Robbie Williams?

• 46:22Danny Jones?

  Robbie Williams, that rings a bell.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  So Robbie Williams.

• 46:25Danny Jones?

  Pull up Robbie Williams.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:36Danny Jones?

  Go, go to his, uh, go to his Wikipedia. I want to see what, uh, what kind of music does he do?

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Uh, it's sort of pop.

• 46:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, pop. That's why I don't know about him.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Angels was his big, was his big hit.

• 46:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Um, uh, let me entertain you. He's great.

• 46:53Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  So I got a call from him in 2005, saying he'd read them, I booked them and liked it. And wanted to spend a night in a haunted house and could I set one up for him? So, and this was when Rob was like there at the height of his fame, like it was selling out stadiums all over the world. So, um, 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 from any of them.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  100% of the people I messaged, emailed back to say, our house is definitely haunted. And anytime Robbie wants to come, they were like throwing their ghosts at Robbie, like they were their kind of debutant daughters. And then Robbie bloody changed his mind and said he didn't want to spend a night in a haunted house after all.

• 47:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. I got very grumpy. I thought, no wonder Robbie would, yeah, no wonder Robbie Williams and ghosts get on so well. They both only manifest themselves when it suits them. So, but then me and Robbie went UFO hunting in Nevada instead.

• 48:07Danny Jones?

  No, really?

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:08Danny Jones?

  This guy's all into supernatural shit.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's really into it. 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 the skeptic camp. And he's always, he phoned me, he's the first person to tell me about QAnon, actually. He phoned me up.

• 48:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 48:24Speaker 02

  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, um, have you, have you been following QAnon? And I was going, no. He goes, well, you know, they think that all of these, uh, you know, celebrities are piles and they all have these like sex parties with piles.

• 48:43Danny Jones?

  It weren't far off.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he said, um, he said, look, I'm, you know, they think I'm one of the piles 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.

• 48:59Danny Jones?

  Where'd you go?

• 49:00Speaker 02

  No, we didn't do it.

• 49:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, you didn't do it?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  No, we didn't. But, uh, yeah, but we went UFO hunting in Nevada, which was really fun.

• 49:09Danny Jones?

  Did you find any UFOs?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  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, 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, uh, to go UFO hunting. And we turned up at the plane.

• 49:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Very nice. My only ever private plane experience. And there's a woman standing there and she said, Mr. Williams, Mr. Williams' friends, this is your plane for the day. She said, what I want to tell you is that Snoop Dogg uses this plane a lot. What I'm saying is you can do anything.

• 49:53Danny Jones?

  Any drugs you want.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Just anything. So we all kind of looked at each other and we're all like in our 40s by then. And Robbie's friend Brandon said, um, well, can we stand up as the plane lands?

• 50:08Speaker 02

  So that's what we did.

• 50:09Danny Jones?

  That's funny.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Have you been on a private plane?

• 50:13Danny Jones?

  I've been on a few private planes. Yeah. Yeah. I, when I, I grew up around a bunch of rich people, so I had, I had the luxury of having rich friends when I was younger. So I had, I was able to, uh, jet set around.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:24Danny Jones?

  Um, 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 studying this stuff? If it wasn't legit, you know?

• 50:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I actually asked that when I was writing the minister at goats, I, 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, the atom is made up mostly of space and the human body and the wall are made up mostly of atoms. So what I would try and do is merge the spaces. But for me, the key word in that is, is mostly.

• 51:09Danny Jones?

  Mostly, right. Exactly. Stubblebine, that's the guy who Stephen Greer said offered him $2 billion to stop all of his UFO research.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  That Stubblebine said that to him.

• 51:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah. You know who Stephen Greer is?

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know his name.

• 51:21Danny Jones?

  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, cause he makes insane claims.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:31Danny Jones?

  Uh, Stephen Greer claims that General Stubblebine approached him in the nineties and offered him $2 billion to walk away from his USO UFO disclosure efforts and stop investigating classified projects. And Stephen Greer told him, no.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Wow. I have some skepticism about that claim.

• 51:49Danny Jones?

  What?

• 51:49Speaker 02

  I noticed I got a little bit of a name check in that, uh, cause the.

• 51:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, look, yeah, they talk about your book right there.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 51:57Danny Jones?

  Interesting. Famously depicted in the men who stare at goats.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I would ask for that. So anyway.

• 52:02Danny Jones?

  Did you ever talk to Stubblebine?

• 52:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I met him. I met him in Tarrytown, New York.

• 52:07Danny Jones?

  Is he still alive?

• 52:07Speaker 02

  No, he died, um, a few years ago now. Uh, yeah, he never managed to walk through his wall. He kept on bumping his nose.

• 52:15Danny Jones?

  Oh God. Is that how he died?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Um, but you know, I put that question to all of them and they 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 gonna do it? Like, this is part of our job to reach for the impossible. The, what the, the, um, evidence they would cite is firstly, the high visibility jacket came from some US Army research.

• 52:48Danny Jones?

  What was it called?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Uh, that, you know, the high visibility jacket, you know, the-

• 52:51Danny Jones?

  High vis jacket?

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:53Danny Jones?

  Like a reflective, bright colored stuff?

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Apparently that came from the military. I, I, I believe that's true. Anyway, that's what I was told. The taser, I know that's a bit more of a ambiguous whether that's good or bad.

• 53:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah, these are all low tech things.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, also, I remember Jim Channen, who was like the main guy who created this thing called the First Earth Battalion, which is what a lot of these experiments were based on.

• 53:16Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  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-

• 53:28Danny Jones?

  Untapped human potential, yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  And I, I think there's some, you said you've never experienced anything telepathic? I think I maybe have.

• 53:35Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 53:35Speaker 02

  There's been two occasions in my life when I, I'm with my son on both of the occasions. One time I'm nearly crossing the road and the other time I'm about to get out of my car. On both occasions, if I'd continued, I'd have been hit by a car, uh, or my son would have been. But on both occasions, for no reason, I, I stopped. And I, I remember both of those like very-

• 54:00Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 54:01Speaker 02

  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 this, from dangers.

• 54:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I've always wondered the same thing.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:12Danny Jones?

  I think, uh, I, have you, are you familiar with the, um, the Gate program? Where there's these kids who in the nineties who were taken out of school and put in these special allegedly psychic programs where they did experiments on them and tried to figure out if they had some sort of like higher level of consciousness. Uh, they famously would give them this pink liquid to drink.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 54:34Danny Jones?

  Um, yeah. Have you never heard of this?

• 54:36Speaker 02

  No.

• 54:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So allegedly it was tied to this Montauk.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Okay, the Montauk-

• 54:41Danny Jones?

  The Montauk Project, right? Which was like the real version of Stranger Things. Stranger Things was based off this.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:47Danny Jones?

  And essentially, you know, the best way to describe it is just Stranger Things, like Eleven. They were doing the experiments on her to see if she had some sort of psychic powers or like extra sense, extra ESP abilities. But, um, there's been lots of people who have come out and like, like explained how this has happened to them. And, um, 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.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. By the way, my, my feeling about remote viewing is that, um, it sounds so great, like, oh my God, I'm part of a secret black ops military unit where, 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.

• 55:30Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 55:31Speaker 02

  They, 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. They didn't exist. They didn't have a coffee machine. They had to bring their own coffee into work because they were black ops. And they were in there for years trying to be psychic, like their whole lives. They're like sitting there staring at a yellow pad like this, trying to be psychic. So I've got a feeling that's an example of something that seems better in theory than in reality.

• 55:56Danny Jones?

  Hmm, yeah. We had a guy on the podcast a couple of times named David Morehouse.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I remember him. He was one of them, right?

• 56:04Danny Jones?

  Yes, he's great. He was doing military exercises in somewhere on the border of Israel. I want to say Lebanon, on the Leb, on the border there. And, um, they were training, the US 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.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  It's like cover fire, suppressing fire.

• 56:41Danny Jones?

  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 insane concussion, all like a really bad TBI. Um, 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, uh, member of the Stargate program.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:17Danny Jones?

  And, you know, he was breaking it down for me, how it all happened, how it all works and how you have to have like multiple points of corroboration on these things. You put all these people in a circle, you give them like very vague inputs or whatever, and you ask them to describe certain things. And he, the, he explains it in a very scientific, pragmatic way that makes sense probabilistically.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 57:39Danny Jones?

  Right? And he's very skeptical of all the other stuff. He's very skeptical of all of the, uh, telepathy tape stuff. Have you seen that?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I'm skeptical of that.

• 57:49Danny Jones?

  And these people that can do this mind sight thing where they wear masks over their face. Like, he does, he does not believe, he's not a believer that anyone who is performing these things in the public or like this, he doesn't believe any of that is real. He's, his thing is like, that's not how it works at all.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I gotta say, like, I, 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 a guy called Joe Mc-

• 58:17Danny Jones?

  McMonigal?

• 58:18Speaker 02

  McMonigal, yes.

• 58:19Danny Jones?

  Bless you.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Goodnight.

• 58:21Danny Jones?

  That's his daily sneezing ritual on the podcast.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  I gotta get it out every day. Um, well, I thought Joe McMonigal, you know, he's had, 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.

• 58:45Danny Jones?

  Remote viewed Mars a million, billion years ago and there was a civilization, civilization there that was going to a nuclear war or something like this. They had a nuclear war.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember one of them, Ed Dames, um, remote viewed the Loch Ness monster and decided it was the ghost of a dinosaur.

• 58:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:00Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  That would be great if that was true.

• 59:02Danny Jones?

  Was Ed Dames a part of that program? Really?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ed Dames, 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?

• 59:16Danny Jones?

  Of course, yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And said that they're, that he'd remote viewed a companion object in, uh, the tale of the Halep Comet. And who was listening? Yes.

• 59:27Danny Jones?

  That's how, or what's it called? Heaven's Gate started?

• 59:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:31Danny Jones?

  From that interview?

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Yep. Oh, yeah.

• 59:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  They were listening. And, uh, so there's a connection, there's that connection between the Heaven's Gate mass suicide and the remote viewing program.

• 59:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's one of the craziest cult things. One of the craziest cult documentaries I've ever watched was the Heaven's Gate one.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm surprised that not more people know about the remote viewing connection. I, I discovered that when I was doing the Minister at Goats.

• 59:55Danny Jones?

  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.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Right. Okay, that's interesting. And where we are right now.

• 1:00:05Danny Jones?

  Even right here, right? We gotta, I have a, an audit, what's this thing called again?

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  E-meter.

• 1:00:09Danny Jones?

  E-meter. Yeah, it'll do a technological exorcism on you. It'll remove all your body things.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Okay, maybe we can do that in the, uh, in the fourth hour.

• 1:00:17Danny Jones?

  Yes, you can become clear, like me. So even how put off was a Scientologist.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  That's right. I remember that now.

• 1:00:24Danny Jones?

  Like, what the fuck? What's that all about?

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  That's, I had one-

• 1:00:27Danny Jones?

  Maybe the Scientologists are on to something. I'm starting to think that. Like, maybe they're like, we're all laughing at them and joking, you know, making fun of them. But maybe they're the ones that are right about all this shit. If you're trying to do the research on what supplements to take and for what, you know, it's a never ending rabbit hole that gets ridiculous. You keep getting different answers from different people. Everyone is 100% confident that their supplement works. And in the end, you end up with more questions than you have answers. But that problem doesn't exist with Blueprint's Longevity Mix. It's based on years of biomarkers, testing protocols, and published data. Instead of having a cabinet full of supplements, it's just one scoop in water. It has study level doses of ingredients

• 1:01:08Danny Jones?

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• 1:01:52Danny Jones?

  get 20% off plus free shipping at blueprint.bryanjohnson.com by using the code DANY at checkout. That's code D A N N Y at B L U E P R I N T dot B R Y A N J O H N S O N dot com. After you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about them and please support our show by telling them we sent you.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  I had one dealings with the Scientologists that was actually pretty positive. It was pretty good. So it was when I started writing my book, The Psychopath Test. So I, I, um- Um. Ended up, this was kind of the story that really inspired the whole book. So for some reason I ended up, oh yeah, I wanted to do something about psychology and psychiatry. And I wanted to meet a critic of psychiatry to get their point of view on like, why the critical of psychiatry. So I ended up having lunch with a Scientologist, a guy called Brian. And I ended up coming right here to Clearwater, actually. I met a bunch of Scientologists here too.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Anyway, I said, can you prove to me that Scientology is a evil pseudoscience, that psychiatry isn't evil pseudoscience, it can't be trusted?

• 1:03:04Danny Jones?

  That evil, prove what?

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  That psychiatry is a evil pseudoscience.

• 1:03:09Danny Jones?

  And that's what Scientologists believe?

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a team of Scientologists called the C C H R who who just hate, because L Ron Hubbard hated psychiatry. Presumably because they told him he was nuts, is my guess. And so he developed this intense hatred of psychiatry.

• 1:03:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I remember this now.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  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, it's where the criminally, and to this day, it's where they put the most notorious criminally insane people.

• 1:04:06Danny Jones?

  Whoa, where's this at?

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Uh, it's in England. It's very close to Windsor Castle, where where the king spends his summers.

• 1:04:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Very close to Legoland as well.

• 1:04:15Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  It's between Legoland and Windsor Castle.

• 1:04:18Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Danny Jones?

  Perfect spot.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, and, and, you know, serial killers. It's, it's where Jimmy Savile, you know about Jimmy Savile, right?

• 1:04:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  The BBC guy who would prey on.

• 1:04:31Danny Jones?

  He's there?

• 1:04:32Speaker 02

  Well, he was 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 arrest some of the women there. Yeah, if it wasn't bad enough. So, um. Brian said, there's 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, seventeen. Um, and he decided to fake madness to escape a prison sentence. And, but he faked it too well, and they sent him to Broadmoor. He thought he'd end up in some like cushy hospital where nurses would bring him pizzas, but instead they sent him to Broadmoor, which is like this airless, windowless

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  place you could never get out of.

• 1:05:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  And if he'd just done his, um, and, 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. Cause it's very, it turns out to be very easy to convince somebody you're crazy, but very hard to convince them that you're sane.

• 1:05:38Danny Jones?

  Right. That's hilarious.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  I know, right?

• 1:05:42Danny Jones?

  So did you get a hold of this guy?

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I went to Broadmoor to meet Tony. I went there with Brian, the Scientologist.

• 1:05:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Will I tell you what that was like? I mean, it was crazy.

• 1:05:50Danny Jones?

  Please do.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  We're taken through like high security, gate after gate after gate, like into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet.

• 1:06:01Danny Jones?

  Were a lot of these people violent criminals?

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's pretty much all violent criminals. Um, and they, they just moved a guy there who killed a bunch of schoolkids in Southport. And the Yorkshire Ripper was there and, uh, 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 there years. They'd like given up.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Brian said to me, uh, so, you know, Tony's the only, uh, person from the entire D P S D unit to be given permission to meet people in the wellness center. So I said, what does D P S D stand for? Uh, D S P D, it's a dangerous and severe personality disorder.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  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 pinstripe suit.

• 1:07:17Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  And he's walking towards me with his arm outstretched like someone from The Apprentice. And, um, he sits down. This is clearly the outfit of somebody who wants to convince me that he's very sane. So.

• 1:07:31Danny Jones?

  Sociopath.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  Right, well, so, psych, well, so, uh, I, I said, so did you fake your way in? He said, yeah, I beat someone up. Uh, my cellmate said, oh, you know, you need to 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. Uh, 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.

• 1:08:01Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  So he faked madness too well. They sent him to Broadmoor. The minute he got there, he said, there's been a terrible misunderstanding, uh, but they wouldn't let him out. And he was there for twelve years.

• 1:08:13Danny Jones?

  I want to go back to prison.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, he said, it's a lot harder to convince somebody you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.

• 1:08:20Danny Jones?

  Makes sense.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  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 as like nuts, you're too self-conscious.

• 1:08:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  He said, um, 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. Uh, 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 can sniff out explosives.

• 1:09:03Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  So he couldn't convince them he was, he was sane.

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  And yeah, I spoke to the clinician there and that's exactly what he said. He said, we, 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.

• 1:09:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Um, uh, yeah.

• 1:09:27Danny Jones?

  So high level, what is a psychopath and how do you detect one?

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Well, it's a twenty point checklist. You score zero, one or two. So after I met Tony, I thought, um, because somebody said to me, you know, you're much more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the trees than at the bottom.

• 1:09:45Danny Jones?

  What does that mean? Like the top of society?

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, corporate leadership, political leadership, religious leadership. You're much more likely to find a psychopath up there because society.

• 1:09:53Danny Jones?

  I see. That makes sense.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:08Danny Jones?

  Right. Bureaucracies reward psychopathic behavior, right?

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, bureaucracy, just, um, um, uh, uh, uh, you know, money making, people who want to make money, they, they reward psychopath. And also.

• 1:10:21Danny Jones?

  Willing to cut anyone's throat to get higher on the ladder.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes. Uh, so that's rewarded by society. Also, people are kind of beguiled by psychopaths. You know, who did the girls fancy at school? Like the, you know, the, the, the sort of distant scary boys. Like we, we're excited by, you know, these people who seem to have something missing, you know, the sort of charisma.

• 1:10:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the quiet kid, the quiet kid, looks kind of funny who may have a gun.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  Right. So, um, uh, but also if you take empathy out of the brain, psychopaths have no empathy. If you take empathy out of the brain, what's left is just the desire to win. So I think psychopaths are propelled up the ladder both externally by society, but also internally by, by the way that their brains work. Um, so when I heard that, I said, that's, that's an incredible thing to say. Like, are you saying that there's a, this was a Harvard psychologist who told me this. I said, are you saying that there's a particular mental disorder? And it's the worst mental disorder and that's the one that we have collectively decided to reward as a society. And she said, yeah.

• 1:11:34Danny Jones?

  That's a double edged sword.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:11:45Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  And that's, uh, that's what psychopath test is. So what I learned was this twenty point checklist.

• 1:11:52Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  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 tone of phrase. Um, it is, you know, it's, it's, it's all about that. So it's, it's fascinating. So, so if you can get them talking about empathy, because callous lack of empathy is one of the items on the checklist.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Because they see empathy as a weakness or they see empathy as something that doesn't exist.

• 1:12:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  So it's really interesting to talk to them about that. But the items on the checklist are.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Grandiose self-worth.

• 1:12:31Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Glib superficial charm. I went to interview this corporate CEO called Chainsaw Al Dunlap, who lives in Florida.

• 1:12:40Danny Jones?

  Chainsaw Al Dunlap?

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was always famous for like going into a failing business, firing thirty percent 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 job." So I, I, 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, you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you fearless and interested in the predatory spirit. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?"

• 1:13:17Danny Jones?

  Well, do you think that's something that's like inherited? Or do you think that's something that's developed, like nature versus, or nurture, something that can happen in an early childhood? Like not having parents, being a victim of child domination, or?

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so the consensus is the baseline, you're born that way. Um, but, and I, and I wonder why they've come, I think they've just done, you know, brain tests and so on. But the consensus is that you're, if you're a psychopath, you're born a psychopath. However, what you, the nurture side of it is also very important.

• 1:13:48Danny Jones?

  That can enhance it.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Totally. Like, if you, if you-

• 1:13:51Danny Jones?

  Could be dormant, and then something could unlock it.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Or if you grow up in a stable family, then you might end up a corporate CEO, like Chainsaw Al Dunlap. Whereas if you're born into a kind of family where there's abuse and so on, you may end up like-

• 1:14:04Danny Jones?

  Charles Manson.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Or, or Tony in Broadmoor.

• 1:14:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  He had a terrible childhood.

• 1:14:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, so I think that's where the nature and nurture thing kind of fits together. But anyway, uh, so I'm interviewing Al Dunlap at his Florida mansion. Uh, I said to him, um, I said, you know how I said in 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 gone before."

• 1:14:31Danny Jones?

  I can see the future.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. I said, "Well, some psychologists would say that this brain anomaly makes you a..." He said, "A what?" And I said, "A psychopath. And can I, I have a list of traits in my pocket. Can I go through the list with you?" And he said, "Okay." Um, I think what saved me was that Al Dunlap, like all of us, loved nothing more than a mental health checklist. So, um, so I said, "Grandiose sense of self-worth." And I looked up, um, he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself.

• 1:15:05Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  So he said, "Well, you gotta believe in you."

• 1:15:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  So I, so we 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.

• 1:15:20Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  And he says, "Well, who wants to be weighed down by nonsense emotions when you're in the marketplace?"

• 1:15:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  I said, "Cunning, manipulative." He said, "That's leadership." Uh, so-

• 1:15:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  Um, here we go. Yeah, this is the list. It's the hair. It was hair himself who, who taught me as I went on a-

• 1:15:39Danny Jones?

  Glibness, superficial charm.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:43Danny Jones?

  Previous, so, okay.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Some of them surprise me. Number twelve, promiscuous sexual relations. That one surprises me because-

• 1:15:49Danny Jones?

  Wait, which one?

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  Uh, number twelve.

• 1:15:51Danny Jones?

  Well, promiscuous sexual relations.

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, you know, I, my promiscuous days are behind me now, but I look back on them with some fondness.

• 1:15:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Uh, early behavior-

• 1:15:59Danny Jones?

  I have a lot of these. Juvenile delinquency, delinquency, um-

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Well, the reason why early behavior-

• 1:16:04Danny Jones?

  Drug or alcohol abuse.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  Right. Um, yeah, this is worded slightly differently to the one, of course, but it's basically the same thing. Early behavior problems is an important one because most mental disorders manifest when you're like between ten and twelve years old. Like-

• 1:16:21Danny Jones?

  That late?

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, I, I met a kid the other day with ADHD who was eight. So, so it does, it is earlier. But I think a lot of times it kind of happens when you're ten, whether it's an anxiety disorder like OCD.

• 1:16:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  But, but also, you know, the opposite of anxiety is psychopathy. Literally, I think the opposite.

• 1:16:38Danny Jones?

  It's the opposite of anxiety?

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Well, I believe so. And I, and I put this to people when I was writing the psychopath test, because if you're, if you're anxious, like I am, you have an overactive amygdala. Your amygdala, bless you, uh, shoots signals of fear and distress and remorse up and down to your central nervous system. And that's why people have, you know, that's, that's where anxiety comes from. Whereas psychopaths, I have an overactive amygdala, because I have an anxiety disorder. Psychopaths have an underactive amygdala. They, they, that thing doesn't, doesn't work.

• 1:17:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  There is no signals of fear and distress and remorse.

• 1:17:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Um, which makes me think that psychopathy must be pretty much the most pleasant feeling of all the mental disorders.

• 1:17:22Danny Jones?

  Maybe, yeah. Things they just don't feel anything.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and why would you wanna, why would you wanna fix that? They don't have anxiety. All the things that keep us good are painful feelings that psychopaths don't have.

• 1:17:35Danny Jones?

  That's interesting. Are you familiar with who, uh, for Itzhak Bentov? He was one of the big guys in the remote viewing days.

• 1:17:43Speaker 02

  No, I'm not.

• 1:17:43Danny Jones?

  He was, uh, I think he was the one who introduced Uri Geller to, um-

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  Targ and Putin.

• 1:17:51Danny Jones?

  Buharich.

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 1:17:53Danny Jones?

  He was one of the biggest remote parapsychology dudes from Israel. And he was working with the, either the Israeli army or the Mossad, as far as, as part of their whole parapsychology division. And he was working closely with a lot of guys that were over here. He wrote a book called Stalking the Wild Pendulum.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:18:13Danny Jones?

  Um, and he ended up dying in like a plane crash. But he did this crazy video, which we've talked about in this podcast so many times, which is fascinating. He shows, he's on this talk show 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 the beginning. Well, we should just listen to it. That's the best. Here, throw your headphones on, you can hear him explaining it.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  That is, our visual system has evolved. Let me draw what is called a bell curve, which looks somehow like this. Uh, this bell curve gives us a, a good picture of where most of the population is. That is what typifies a, a population. We can use this diagram also to describe evolution. The bulk of the population today is this intelligent, more or less intelligent bipedal, right? And, uh, with a vertical spine, and who pushes the buttons on TV and drives a car, et cetera, et cetera. Now, there is some back throw,

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  that is, there are some people here in this area, very few people who are still gorilla-like, that is, they're 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

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  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, uh-huh, 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 can, what kind of person that will be. He may not have a physical body at all. What's the habitat, so to speak, of this group here? Well, you just go out and you find them. They're, they're

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  all over the place. The habitat of this group here, where do you think, where do you think you find these people here, hey?

• 1:20:51Danny Jones?

  Um, I, I suggest, you would find them in universities, you'd find the, you know, the people who are very bright, people who are, uh, in the leading edge of professions. That is, that is an intellectual thing.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Well, I suggest that you find them in mental hospitals, in nut houses. And the reason for that is that these people, they live in a different reality, in a reality which, 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, their, their different view of reality with their daily lives. Now, if they can integrate it, then we have people like, like Newton, like Darwin, like, like, uh, like, uh, Cora Day. These are the so-called

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  geniuses.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:21:50Danny Jones?

  Fascinating, right?

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  Fascinating. And actually reminds me of a woman that I know, um, called Eleanor Longdon, who, um, I used to go, I used to tour with her. Actually, I'd interview her on stage. Such an amazing story that really speaks to what he just said about mental hospitals.

• 1:22:06Danny Jones?

  What is her story?

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Uh, her story is she's a student, somewhere in the north of England, eighteen years old. One day she gets out of bed and she hears a voice that says she is getting out of bed.

• 1:22:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  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, uh, she's walking down the street. Anyway, after about a month of this, she had no problem with it. It was just like companion.

• 1:22:43Danny Jones?

  A voice, an auditory voice?

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, just a voice. Just narrating whatever she was doing in the third person.

• 1:22:49Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  And she almost saw it as being like a companion. Like she was, she was a bit lonely and miserable. She'd just gone to college. And she almost saw it as like a kind of companion. Anyway, one day, yeah, that's Eleanor. So one day she said to her roommate, something funny is happening to me. I'm hearing this voice. And she said, our roommate like, just looked horrified and said, that's really bad. That's indicative 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

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  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 Eleanor 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 my head. And the doctor like spins around just like thrilled, you know, drops a fender 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

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  pathetic, they've become sort of evil because she was told by the medical establishment that it was bad.

• 1:24:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  So she ends up going into mental hospital. She says, I want to leave. And they said, if you leave, we'll section you. Is that a word in America? It just means, you know, we'll like an involuntary hold.

• 1:24:36Danny Jones?

  Like Baker Act, you.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll basically keep, yeah. So she ends up in and out of mental hospital. By now this voice is screaming at her. She has to get a, at one point, she buys a drill, like a, like a, you know, electric drill to drill a hole in her head to get the voices out. That's how bad it is. And then finally, after all of this, she meets somebody more sort of holistic, mental health type person, who says the voices are a part of you, that, you know, you're treating them like an enemy that needs to be expelled. And this is what you're told they are. But actually, they're a part of you. They're your friends. They're you. And so she learned to live with her voices. And

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  she still has some, like, she still hears the voices all the time. But now she sees the voices as her friends. And she said she went back to college and got the highest degree that the college had ever awarded anyone. She said that the voices were giving her the answers in the exam. Yeah. And now she's a very successful psychologist, researcher. She still hears the voices all the time. But yeah, but that story reminded me of that.

• 1:25:49Danny Jones?

  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 we, are those traits, are those traits more adaptable to where we're going or where we're headed?

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  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 rule 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 rewards psychopathic traits. 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, 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

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:26:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  You only have to go on X these days. You know, go on X and all it is is videos of people getting killed and beaten up and, and so on. You know, that's, that's promoting psychopathic values of people to take.

• 1:27:11Danny Jones?

  Well, certainly making us numb to that kind of stuff.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  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 wrote 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.

• 1:27:47Danny Jones?

  The death of industry.

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the death of institutions and so on.

• 1:27:51Danny Jones?

  You think the institutions are dying?

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I think so.

• 1:27:54Danny Jones?

  We're like, which ones?

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Well, you know, your podcast has more listeners and viewers than most legacy.

• 1:28:03Danny Jones?

  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 modafinil 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 modafinil works throughout multiple pathways in the brain. Dopamine, norepinephrine, histamine, and oracin, all to achieve energy and steady alertness for 10 to 12 hours. Modafinil has been used for decades by the highest performers where

• 1:28:46Danny Jones?

  concentration and alertness matter, including fighter pilots, soldiers, and astronauts. And it's now available at mod.com to qualifying patients. Visit mod.com, that's M O D dot com, for a free consultation and 10% off your first order plus free shipping with the promo code Danny. That's promo code Danny at M O D dot com. See their website for important safety information. And thanks to MOD for sponsoring the pod.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  I've got this incredible, I really want to tell you about, I went to the cage fight at the, at the White House.

• 1:29:20Danny Jones?

  You went to that?

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'll tell you all about it. Because something really, actually, I'm telling you this quickly now. I did it for my book for the.

• 1:29:28Danny Jones?

  How'd you get the invite to that?

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  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 don't want to be like sitting at the nearby JW Marriott watching it on TV with all the other shutouts. And they got me access to the South Lawn. I've done it for GQ. And, and yeah, I got there. So I was there for the whole thing. But, 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 Lawn that night. But a couple of days

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  earlier, everyone was invited to look at the claw, to go on to the South Lawn 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 from the UFC yelled out, okay, everybody, content creators and videographers, former 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 ragtag of redundant dinosaurs.

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  So that's an example of the death of, and I tell you what, it's funny, I looked over the content creator line. I've never seen a press pack with so many neck tattoos. And so many bros hugging and like fist bumping. Yeah.

• 1:31:07Danny Jones?

  What an, what an incredible production that was.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  Oh, God, the UFC now has put on a show.

• 1:31:12Danny Jones?

  I mean, and that was also like one of the most invigor, like, one of the most energetic and like spectacular UFC cards of all, there was all knockouts.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, everyone was a knockout.

• 1:31:23Danny Jones?

  It makes you skeptical of like, you know, is the UFC fixed? There's no way it can be fixed. But it's like, it's crazy. That that, of all the UFC fights to have all knockouts, like it was the one on the White House lawn, probably the first and the last that will ever happen like that.

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure that's the case. Yeah, it was really, as Dana White said to me, if it wasn't for Josh Hoke.

• 1:31:45Danny Jones?

  Obama's a man. Michelle Obama's a man.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, he said, if it wasn't for that moron, then that would have been perfect. And I couldn't have agreed. Like, I don't know what the mainstream media naysayers would have latched on to if Josh Hoke hadn't done that stupid thing. But yeah, but the production was incredible. At one point, there's, the day before at the Fan Fest on the Ellips Lord, this bald eagle flies, you know, so low above our heads, that, you know, its talons are practically touching us. And that was amazing. I've never experienced that before.

• 1:32:18Danny Jones?

  And there were supposed to be crazy storms and stuff, but they like last minute, they were like.

• 1:32:24Danny Jones?

  Allegedly, they were gonna have to push the start of it back to ten, which mean they wouldn't, the fights wouldn't end till like two or three in the morning.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:31Danny Jones?

  And like last minute, the storms diverted the other way and they had perfect weather.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  Saying that, though, like anything related to Trump, it did drag on and on and on. Like, I was still there at like one thirty.

• 1:32:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they all do. Yeah, they all go super late.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but yeah, it was, it was, 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, you know, for the fight to start. And it's only a tiny number of us. There's a couple of UFC sort of journalists who follow the UFC, like everywhere they go. Like a British guy who works for Conor McGregor, he was there. Then there was a few people like me. There was me doing it for GQ. There was someone from Hollywood Reporter. There was a photographer from Time. And I was basically, yeah, I was, you know, there was a tiny number of.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  Anyway, something exciting happened while we were waiting. And it was that usually Trump was having a pre-fight birthday dinner. And usually the luminaries would go in through a different door, like Mouse from the press room. But that door was shut, I think, for security reasons. So all the luminaries had to walk right past the press room. And the journalists in there, like the embedded journalists, were like, this never happens. So we all like went outside to take photographs and try and interview J D Vance and Mike Johnson. They were all walking by us. Dr. Oz, so on. Now, GQ has commissioned this legendary maverick street photographer

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  called Bruce Gilden to take the photographs for my story. And Bruce is this kind of crazy seventy-nine-year-old guy.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  You know, a 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.

• 1:34:33Danny Jones?

  Luminaries?

• 1:34:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the people who were going to Trump's birthday dinner.

• 1:34:37Danny Jones?

  Big shot.

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  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 grinning. So it turned out to be Sean Duffy, the Transportation Secretary. So, so I said to Bruce, do you know each other? He goes, no, no, no, you know, I just did that. He goes, 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.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  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, doesn't know whether to like go for their guns, like everyone's like suddenly really shocked, like who is this? And I hear all these White House staffers going, going, you know, who is that guy? What's he doing here? What's going on? Like, should he be here? Did he come over the wall? And I hear someone go, I think he's with GQ. So I'm like, I just like stomp as far away from this. Yeah, I'm thinking I've been here all week and Podras Thompson is just fucking it all up for me.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  So that's what happened just before the fight.

• 1:36:08Danny Jones?

  So did you get a good photo, Stephen Miller?

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  You know, the photo of Stephen Miller wasn't quite as good. GQ were using it in their piece, because I tell that story. The one of Sean Duffy was great.

• 1:36:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  And a great photograph of Josh Hawke. I've got a theory as to why Josh Hawke said Michelle Obama's the man.

• 1:36:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So earlier that week, Josh Hawke 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 Hawke decides to do it as a comedy routine.

• 1:36:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  So he comes in and he's like, and he's, he may be a very good fighter. He's a terrible comedian, like no comic timing whatsoever. And he does these characters. And at one point, he says as a joke that he's gonna take his cup, his groin protecting cup off and throw it at Trump. Like, that's what he's gonna do when he wins. And, and there's like a sort of audible gasp in the room, like, don't, you know. And then Josh Hawke like immediately realized he's made a mistake and he says, he said, no, I'm not gonna do that.

• 1:37:16Danny Jones?

  That one didn't land.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that one did land. Guys, work with me here. Guys, help.

• 1:37:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  My theory is that that was festering in Josh Hawke'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.

• 1:37:34Danny Jones?

  I think he says that, though, in every fight. He said, I think he always says.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Michelle Obama's a man.

• 1:37:39Danny Jones?

  I think that's his shtick. I think he always says, he said that many times.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:37:43Danny Jones?

  During post-fight interviews that he's done.

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  What an idiot.

• 1:37:48Danny Jones?

  I couldn't be wrong. Well, from what I've, 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 a NFL, he used to play for the NFL.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I saw an interview with him where he was being the, the actual human being. And it just made the whole thing all the more baffling, unless I'm the one being jokes. Like, my theory is that no one likes his characters. People just think he's an idiot. Dana White thinks he's an idiot who ruined that night. And he's a great fighter.

• 1:38:26Danny Jones?

  He's a great fighter.

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  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 employ you and you could be the therapist for all the knuckleheads I've got on my roster.

• 1:38:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  So I don't know.

• 1:38:45Danny Jones?

  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, 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 in their Navy uniforms going, yeah, yeah. Like, and you have, like, it cuts to the parking lot of, like, the, the Waffle House across the street, or, 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?

• 1:39:26Danny Jones?

  And you know what it really reminded me of was that hypernormalization movie by Adam Curtis.

• 1:39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, Adam's a close friend of mine. We, I always watch.

• 1:39:36Danny Jones?

  I so love his films so much. And I've watched hypernormalization. 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 hypernormalization is where everyone knows that everything's falling, coming apart at the seams, but like they're pretending that it's not, they're trying to get through the day and make, and, you know, not face the truth of their miserable, miserable existence.

• 1:40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Danny Jones?

  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 Lutnick sitting there at this damn thing when he was like the guy who was with Epstein and famously lied about it on some stupid podcast.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Danny Jones?

  And was his next door neighbor. And it's just like, you can't, I can't compute that this is actually happening. It has to be some evil cabal.

• 1:40:40Speaker 02

  And they're, yeah, exactly. They're, and they're putting on The Hunger Games. No, I, I one hundred percent agree with every word that you, that you just said. You know, the day before, somebody, the, the, the day before at the Fan Fest, they had a video of great moments from presidential history that was put together by the UFC. And it was, you know, asked not what you can do for your country, then we land on the moon because it's hard. And Obama's, there isn't a red America, blue America, there's only one America. The montage skips Biden.

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  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, it's the picture of him with the blood in 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 themselves, out of each other on the White House lawn, blood and strength.

• 1:41:40Danny Jones?

  You know, a lot of people think that thing was fake, too.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  What, the, that final?

• 1:41:44Danny Jones?

  The whole Butler thing, yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  Right. Oh, yeah. Well, actually, I, when I was at the White House press room, I met the photographer. Somebody said to me, you gotta meet-

• 1:41:53Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Somebody said to me, you gotta meet this guy.

• 1:41:56Danny Jones?

  The guy who was running around, the bait, right, right there in front of it?

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, the guy who took the famous photograph. I think he's either AP or Reuters. I can't remember.

• 1:42:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  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. And 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.

• 1:42:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  So he-

• 1:42:28Danny Jones?

  Well, the conspiracies aren't that, they don't think that the bullet was fake. I mean, it's obviously a guy got his head blown off. And I think two people were killed, right?

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  Evan Booty. I'm pretty sure he, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's him. Very buff.

• 1:42:41Danny Jones?

  Find a photo of that guy, see if that's him.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  I just remember saying to me, meet Evan, he's very buff.

• 1:42:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, he took this photo?

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:42:50Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  I met him while I was waiting in the-

• 1:42:53Speaker 04

  It's copied.

• 1:42:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's crazy, man.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, this dude. Oh, that's the dude who took it.

• 1:43:00Speaker 02

  That's him.

• 1:43:01Speaker 04

  He looks hardcore.

• 1:43:02Danny Jones?

  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.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  Definitely not. But, but I definitely got the sense that he's kind of sick of hearing, hearing that story. But 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, that she thought that somebody, that there was an inside job, that there was somebody on the inside working with-

• 1:43:29Danny Jones?

  Did she? I don't know.

• 1:43:30Speaker 02

  I think that's totally like, just something I'd read on the periphery.

• 1:43:34Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Yeah, there's, oh, look, this guy does jujitsu.

• 1:43:38Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:43:39Danny Jones?

  He took bronze, wow.

• 1:43:42Speaker 02

  I'm glad I didn't annoy him that much.

• 1:43:44Danny Jones?

  So he's a jujitsu guy.

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. But he was great. He was lovely. I really, really liked the embedded journalists at the White House press room.

• 1:43:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, the, the, I forget exactly everything about it, but like, there was like this religious, somebody made this, this connection to, uh, it was Heather Lynn, remember what she was saying? There was a, there was a biblical passage, Steve, where it talked about blood on the foot and something else, and a sacrifice or whatever.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:14Danny Jones?

  It was like a, some sort of like a ritual thing that allegedly was taking place there. And that's, you know, there's no way to prove that. But like, there were a lot of really weird things. Like with, with the, the guy, crooks meeting, he was pinged somewhere, right? Like at an FBI office, like far away from there, a couple of weeks before that. There are no silverware in the parents' house. And like, there was all these videos. 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.

• 1:44:58Danny Jones?

  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 give us any evidence of it.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:45:17Danny Jones?

  Or whatever.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  I gotta say, it's crossed my mind more than once, that maybe that's a rabbit hole I should go down, is Butler. But I, I don't know. I don't wanna go, I don't wanna go down a big rabbit hole and find nothing.

• 1:45:29Danny Jones?

  Well, it was, I think it was definitely a turning point for a lot of people with, with Trump. Because like, at least for me, like, right after that happened, I had this feeling that like, this is, this maybe changed him, you know? Because after that, when the whole big convention happened, where Hulk Hogan did the speech and Tucker did the speech, and he had the thing on his ear, whatever. It's like, oh my God, like, maybe he's changed now. You know, maybe this, you know, something happened that is going to like alter his trajectory. He's gonna, I'm not gonna be the same guy. He's gonna be more empathetic. He's gonna be more, whatever, whatever, you know, it's gonna help change him for the better.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:46:05Danny Jones?

  And, uh, you know, obviously, that didn't fucking happen. And just, you know-

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  But probably, you know, I've heard that it did change him.

• 1:46:14Danny Jones?

  And there was also this whole narrative of divine intervention.

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:46:17Danny Jones?

  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, uh, 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.

• 1:46:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:46:51Danny Jones?

  So like, there's so many different little threads that connect to this thing, and it's not adding up. We didn't get any answers about it. And that's the problem. That's, 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.

• 1:47:06Speaker 02

  And Trump coming in as the person who's going to provide the answers, like Q said, clearly turned out to not be true. So, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I was just remembering another thing about my, the UFC fight, which I found interesting. 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. And society's getting more kind of feminized, I guess. And, um, and so he's kind of creating this sort of weird fantasy bubble.

• 1:47:47Danny Jones?

  Is that really his house?

• 1:47:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's his house.

• 1:47:49Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  And-

• 1:47:51Danny Jones?

  It looks like a dystopian Disney castle.

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does. Yeah. Don't you think there's too many turrets?

• 1:47:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What are the turrets again?

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  Uh, those, these-

• 1:48:01Danny Jones?

  The pointy things?

• 1:48:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that is-

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Too many everything. It's just too much everything.

• 1:48:06Danny Jones?

  That's fucking weird, bro.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  All right. So that's the castle of my book, of the castle.

• 1:48:12Danny Jones?

  Could you imagine that, like a normal neighborhood? Like, that would have to be in the woods. You couldn't put that next to like a normal house.

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  Right. He was, he's always been, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But so he's kind of creating or trying to create this world where he has all of these princesses, a kind of Playboy mansion type thing in that world. Where-

• 1:48:30Danny Jones?

  This man's deeply disturbed.

• 1:48:32Speaker 02

  Right. And, yeah, and I had an incredible three year, uh, sort of cat and mouse game with him. And that's like what most of the book's about.

• 1:48:42Danny Jones?

  People are taking photos in front of it, Steve? Go down?

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had a TikTok account for a while. They don't have it anymore.

• 1:48:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, a TikTok account, huh?

• 1:48:50Speaker 02

  Which was very popular. She had like 800,000 followers.

• 1:48:54Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:48:55Speaker 04

  Is that the dude?

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:48:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's him with his llamas.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  Camels. Well, yeah.

• 1:49:02Danny Jones?

  That one looks like a llama. Baby camel and a big camel.

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  It was reported during his divorce hearing that, um-

• 1:49:10Danny Jones?

  That's stone, bro.

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  It was reported that one of his camels had starved to get to death due to neglect.

• 1:49:17Danny Jones?

  Starved to death?

• 1:49:18Speaker 02

  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 if one of them starved to death.

• 1:49:28Danny Jones?

  That thing had to have been expensive to build. That's an, that's an incredibly huge fucking castle.

• 1:49:33Speaker 02

  It really is. His money came from-

• 1:49:35Danny Jones?

  Cathedral.

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  His great grandfather.

• 1:49:36Danny Jones?

  I'm jealous.

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, that birdcage is for his circus performers.

• 1:49:41Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I know-

• 1:49:43Danny Jones?

  Where's this guy from?

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  Um, he, well, he's, I can't remember, I think, I think the family comes from Illinois, but, but he's in Connecticut. And his great grandfather was a Gilded Age steel tycoon. That's where the money came from. Uh, oh, well, that's it, under construction.

• 1:50:01Speaker 04

  Interesting. A wood frame.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  But I tell you what's kind of, bringing it back to the UFC fight.

• 1:50:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  The thing I found interesting was, I was talking to Sean O'Malley, the fighter.

• 1:50:12Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. Sugar Sean O'Malley?

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  Sugar Sean O'Malley, um, who always boasts about his open marriage, his one, his one-sided, non-monogamous marriage. So he's allowed to have sex with other women, but his wife, Danya, isn't allowed to have sex with other men. And the way he explains it is, uh, it's, as Adjeti puts it, I have status, I have status. So I said to him, thinking about my castle owner and the, uh, you know, the 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, worked until it didn't. And it turns out that Sean O'Malley,

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  I think I'm the first person to break this information, uh, turns out the Sean O'Malley's, uh, open marriage is over. Like, the marriage is still good. But she said to him, no more, no more open marriage.

• 1:51:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, that she wants to go- Bang other guys?

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  No, no, no. She wants it to be monogamous. She wants it to be like a normal monogamous marriage.

• 1:51:15Danny Jones?

  No more other women.

• 1:51:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, no other women. And he looked so baffled as he was telling me this, baffled by this change in his fortunes. He's not allowed to do this anymore.

• 1:51:23Danny Jones?

  He's young, right? He's super young.

• 1:51:25Speaker 02

  Yes. But it made me wonder whether, whether this kind of, one of the things I traced in the castle through my castle owner and other men that I meet in the book, including this YouTuber who's got like the wildest story I've ever done pretty much. I think I've, I think he's got the strangest story that ever happened on YouTube.

• 1:51:42Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, Greg Chisholm. But anyway, I thought there's, there's all these people like creating this, um, these fantasy walls to themselves where they can like, in a way, as a response to cancel culture, like, fuck you, I'm gonna do whatever I want. I'm gonna be completely disinhibited, my way or the highway. But Sean O'Malley discovers that real life sometimes snaps back and stops you from doing those things. And it made me wonder whether like the pendulum swing is sort of moving back a little bit now from people just, you know, that sort of manosphere behaving however we wanna behave, back to something a little bit more.

• 1:52:20Danny Jones?

  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, 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, like you're, you're, you're bringing us into this fucking circus that we don't wanna be a part of. We wanna be left alone. But then you have this group of people who call themselves like transgender

• 1:53:03Danny Jones?

  or they have a million different words. They identify as a fucking llama and, you know, they want all this attention. They wanna make noise and they wanna make a big deal out of all of this stuff where it's like you're creating, the argument is like you're creating more of a divide between like us normal people, us normal gay people. We're now getting lumped in because you're, you guys are acting so fucking crazy and unhinged. You're just driving more division.

• 1:53:30Speaker 02

  You know, in, in the castle, I look at something a little different to that, which is about, there's almost nothing about the manosphere in the, 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 like bowed out of society.

• 1:53:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:58Speaker 02

  And I was interested in them, like, what does that do? Like, I have an enormous sense of purpose in my life. Like, like I go, if, 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.

• 1:54:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  I just think to myself, I'm just a man sitting on a bench.

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  And all of my self-worth just sort of drains away.

• 1:54:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:25Speaker 02

  And that's what I wanted to like look, look at in the castle through the story of the castle owner and like various other men that I, that I write about. And so I was thinking about those 6.7 million men who had have just like bowed out of society and wondering what that, you, 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, was how a lot of men, I think since Me Too, a lot of men are feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies as to what being a man actually means. Like they go on the TED channel and you've got all of these like people saying,

• 1:55:07Speaker 02

  you know, the way to re-anchor yourself to society if you're a man is to be more vulnerable. Be, be vulnerable.

• 1:55:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  Like get rid of your manly mask and just allow the vulnerable you to shine. Women love it when you're vulnerable.

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  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, uh, patient.

• 1:55:38Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  But I've tried it out on female friends once or twice, tried to be like vulnerable.

• 1:55:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:45Speaker 02

  And they recoil in disgust. And it makes me think.

• 1:55:49Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:55:50Speaker 02

  And Brene Brown, who's like the doyen of vulnerability, she's like the woman who started the whole vulnerability craze. She says, yeah, men, when men try and be vulnerable, they recoil, women recoil in disgust. It's like if we move, if men move too far away from their sort of primordial, primordial role as like stoic protector, then women, even the, even feminist left-wing women who want men to be vulnerable, who beg men to be vulnerable.

• 1:56:19Danny Jones?

  They no longer find them attractive.

• 1:56:20Speaker 02

  They don't like it anymore.

• 1:56:21Danny Jones?

  It makes sense. Evolutionary, I guess it makes sense, right?

• 1:56:24Speaker 02

  I thought that was very interesting. And then, so then you've got like, you know, conflicting, influences saying, no, don't be vulnerable, be more stoical. Then you turn on the TV, TV ads. Men in TV ads are doofuses who can't do anything right and have to constantly be bailed out by their exasperated wives. Any T, any, well, I wouldn't say any, I'd say almost every male, uh, character in a TV ad is a doofus 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.

• 1:57:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:57:09Speaker 02

  Baby men who like sob because they, uh, 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 in this kind of sea of conflicting ideas as to what being a man means these days is part of the reason why we.

• 1:57:30Danny Jones?

  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. 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, it like fills a void for people, for those people, right?

• 1:58:13Danny Jones?

  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, uh, there's that, but you know, for the, like, in, 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 jujitsu black belts or people that know they could kill you are the most gentle and the, the ones that project the least, right?

• 1:58:55Danny Jones?

  It's the ones that are the most insecure who project, in my experience, who project that toughness or that masculinity like over, overboard. Or in Nick Fuentes's case, when you have like, he, 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, and, you know, they need to answer to the man and never talk back to the man. And you know, you listen to Nick Fuentes.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:19Danny Jones?

  It's usually people like them who are like closeted gay people, right? Who are trying to project something else and, and trying to cover up or, or put on a mask.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:59:28Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. What you said earlier also about blue collar workers, um, 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, you know, I think purpose, you know, in the psychopath test, I looked at psychopaths and.

• 1:59:47Danny Jones?

  A great, sorry to interrupt you, but a great example of what I was just explaining is Lindsey Graham.

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:59:52Danny Jones?

  You know, a guy who worships death, wants more wars, kill more of 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, posts 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. He's, he's just, it's just trying to

• 2:00:17Danny Jones?

  project some fake reality just to make people think something different.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  Right. Fake realities. That's exactly what the castle is about. People creating these fake realities for themselves. But yeah, I, I wanted to tell a story of a blue collar worker who was feeling a lack of purpose, uh, who was then tried to make something of their lives. And I found the craziest story. Can I tell you the story? There's this guy called Greg.

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• 2:01:45Speaker 02

  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, uh, his heart has a problem and he has multiple open heart surgeries. So by the age of 18, he owes the health insurance companies $200,000. He's, he's unemployed, unemployable. The factories have all shut down. He meets a woman, they get married. She leaves and leaves him a single father with two daughters under the age of two. So this is like the worst. Could you imagine? Like just no prospects at all.

• 2:02:27Speaker 02

  Uh. 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 some money mowing lawns. And then one day, this is about twenty ten, twenty eleven, one day he's watching YouTube and there's a guy called Durian Rider on YouTube, who's an Australian fruitarian cyclist influencer.

• 2:02:55Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 2:02:56Speaker 02

  Cycles only eats fruit.

• 2:02:58Danny Jones?

  What was that other word, fruitarian?

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  Fruitarian. I hadn't heard that phrase.

• 2:03:02Danny Jones?

  He only eats fruit?

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  Only eats fruit.

• 2:03:04Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:03:04Speaker 02

  Not even vegetables. So, um, Durian Rider says, you got a story. Tell a story. Tell a story on YouTube. YouTube is the new institute. YouTube is the place. Is that true?

• 2:03:16Danny Jones?

  This guy only eats fruit?

• 2:03:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Only, you can tell in the top one, he, he.

• 2:03:20Danny Jones?

  Look at all those watermelons. Is that watermelon?

• 2:03:22Speaker 02

  He ate every one of those watermelons.

• 2:03:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, those aren't watermelon. They're something else.

• 2:03:26Speaker 02

  I know they're not. They're giant.

• 2:03:28Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  Like actually, yeah. So, so he inspired Greg. Like Greg watched his video. That was his Damascus moment.

• 2:03:37Danny Jones?

  Hmm. His Damascus moment.

• 2:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. This was meeting Saul on the road to Damascus. Greg decides to become an influencer. So the first thing he does is he, he does adult braces influencing. He gets his teeth fixed. Um, and, uh, 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.

• 2:04:01Danny Jones?

  I love those videos.

• 2:04:02Speaker 02

  Oh, amazing. He's doing like, look, he's the lawn care goat, Greg. Like he's.

• 2:04:06Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  He's YouTube's first lawn care influencer.

• 2:04:09Danny Jones?

  I love watching the lawn care videos.

• 2:04:11Speaker 02

  Is it the ASMR?

• 2:04:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah. They make the lines perfectly look like a golf course green and they had those like specialized lawn mowers.

• 2:04:18Speaker 02

  Right. That's what Greg does. He does these hour long. Yeah. He was getting like a hundred thousand.

• 2:04:23Danny Jones?

  I could watch those for hours.

• 2:04:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right. Well, you would have been Greg's perfect audience.

• 2:04:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I'd probably subscribe to him.

• 2:04:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, uh, yeah. Freak to geek lawn care.

• 2:04:32Danny Jones?

  Freak to geek. Okay.

• 2:04:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:34Danny Jones?

  Shout out Greg.

• 2:04:35Speaker 02

  So, um, just wait till you hear what happens next in Greg's story. He also does these, um, uh, good Samaritan lawn care videos. Do you watch those?

• 2:04:45Danny Jones?

  I don't think I've seen those.

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:04:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's pretty cool.

• 2:05:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, so, um,

• 2:05:05Speaker 02

  he's doing brilliantly. Like he's.

• 2:05:07Danny Jones?

  He's like Batman.

• 2:05:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's the, yeah, yeah. The Batman of lawn care. Uh, and, um, he went to like a lawn care convention in Kentucky. And when people found out he was there, like he was just mobbed. Uh, they had a meet and greet for him at a pizza place and it was like mobbed and everyone's hugging Greg. Yeah. Oh, no, different kind of pizza place. So Greg is at this, you know, high point in his life, uh, making good money as well. Anyway, he has his other channel, which is just for family videos. It's got like a thousand, it's got less than a thousand subscribers. If his daughters do something funny, he'll, um, film it and put it on his other channel. It's just

• 2:05:48Speaker 02

  called Greg Chisholm. So one day, his daughters are like playing, they get a Barbie cruise ship for Christmas. They're playing in the boxes, running around with the boxes on their heads. And he puts it up on YouTube and it gets 10 million views. Just for some.

• 2:06:06Danny Jones?

  What year was this?

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  This is like twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, something like that. Um, just, 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. You need to like come up with new seasons. Anyway, he, so he does a whole bunch of new seasons. He does food fights in the truck. He's getting like 25 million views now. You know, the kids are like throwing cereal at each other. People love it. Uh, then he does

• 2:06:49Speaker 02

  this series called Bad Baby. So Bad Baby is, uh, 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 at each other's faces and the kids love it. Um, 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

• 2:07:29Speaker 02

  the third bad baby and now he's getting like 600 million views.

• 2:07:35Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 2:07:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's when his life crumbles. Cause 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.

• 2:07:53Danny Jones?

  That's super fucking weird.

• 2:07:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So BuzzFeed and, uh, he ends up getting like banned from YouTube for the videos they were encouraging him to make, uh, banned from YouTube.

• 2:08:04Danny Jones?

  For the videos that YouTube was encouraging him to make.

• 2:08:06Speaker 02

  Well, because Bad Baby was doing brilliantly.

• 2:08:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  Like, until it wasn't popular.

• 2:08:11Danny Jones?

  Is it still on YouTube?

• 2:08:12Speaker 02

  Uh, not really.

• 2:08:13Danny Jones?

  No, they took it all down.

• 2:08:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, I've, I've got them all. Um, you can see little, uh, images from it and so on, but.

• 2:08:20Danny Jones?

  So he was, was the audience like begging him, like suggesting shit for him to do?

• 2:08:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. But from what I can tell, not in a trolley, let's get him into trouble way.

• 2:08:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:32Speaker 02

  But you know, we love you. Do more of this. You know, the kid with, 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 have been working in the factory, dressed as a baby, crawling around the house with a, with a onesie on, because this is what he's being rewarded for by the algorithms.

• 2:09:02Danny Jones?

  Probably making millions of dollars.

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  Well, he, he definitely made good money, but he said to me, I would give it all up for it to have never happened. Cause you know, because he ends up getting banned from YouTube, all of these amateur sleuths on the internet think he's part of some sort of bing ring. So the FBI raid his house. He's take, the kids have to go to child protective services.

• 2:09:22Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:09:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's caught up in this whole Elsa Gate thing. If you remember Elsa Gate.

• 2:09:28Danny Jones?

  Elsa Gate?

• 2:09:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. All of these weird videos ended up on YouTube, kids. And some of them were like really properly weird. And, uh, but Greg got bought into all of that because he's dressed as a baby and he's running around dressed as a baby. So what, what's so amazing to me about that story, I cut a few things out just for time, but if, if you're with him from the beginning, every decision he makes, makes a kind of sense. But if you come to the story at the end, you're like, what the fuck?

• 2:09:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:09:56Danny Jones?

  Right, right. When you're, when you're in his shoes and, you know, you, one step after the other, it's kind of like when you're in the middle of the tornado, you don't really see the forest for the trees and what this really comes across as.

• 2:10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:08Danny Jones?

  Especially when YouTube like rewarded you for it.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah. There, there was a moment when he, he's a lot of, cause he's getting like 600 million views. Like his, by the end of it, I think he had 13 billion views across all of his different videos. Yeah. So we're talking like huge. And YouTube gave him his own advisor. And one time he did a video that wasn't Bad Baby themed. It was just like a regular vlog and it got less than a million views. And Greg phoned them up in a panic and said, I think I've ruined the channel. And they said, no, no, no, don't worry. But I would take that video down. Just stick with the Bad Baby stuff.

• 2:10:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

  So he ends up getting banned from YouTube for the videos that they encouraged him to make.

• 2:10:49Danny Jones?

  What's he doing now?

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  Um, well, he's back to, yeah, 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 for him now. He's back to lawn care influencing.

• 2:11:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, good.

• 2:11:12Speaker 02

  He's back to doing the lawn care stuff. And my story about him, which is the first story that tells it from, from his perspective, tells it with all the nuances, is about to come out in the castle. So.

• 2:11:24Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:11:24Speaker 02

  Uh, 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 is 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 have a collar in the garden.

• 2:11:42Danny Jones?

  So many people do that now. There's so many shows where people take their kids and they, they create these skits with them and other kids watch it and they get millions and millions of views.

• 2:11:53Speaker 02

  Right. 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. Strangers would drop their kids off at Greg's house so their kids could 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, or kind of promotes itself. I don't know if that's fair to say. YouTube definitely has a reputation as this kind of post-institution utopia where a man like you can thrive through, through grit and perseverance. Um, and clearly it works, it's working for you and it works for lots of other people,

• 2:12:34Speaker 02

  but it's also evidently a false promise. And I think Greg's story shows how that can go really badly wrong.

• 2:12:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, it's interesting that it promotes itself as a kind of hierarchy free utopia, YouTube. But as soon as things go wrong, uh, Greg was kicked off. So kind of hierarchy manifested itself.

• 2:12:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah. YouTube is, uh, YouTube is a weird thing. It's a very weird thing because like the, the, the way it works and the way with like the rules and the regulations of YouTube, like you gotta be very careful to where it's, it very much promotes people, uh, like me and people who do what I do to self censor themselves because you kind of know, you loosely know like what you can and can't talk about because you're gonna get deplatformed or you're gonna 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 gonna get so much, you're gonna get, uh, put in such a bad light for banning people for speech. But if you can just.

• 2:13:39Danny Jones?

  Turn the throttle down on them and start making them less visible to people. Not only are people gonna stop seeing them, but they're gonna start throwing their hands up, you know, saying that they're shadow banned and people are gonna think they're crazy. So it works perfectly.

• 2:13:53Speaker 02

  But you haven't, you haven't self-centered at all in this interview. So, so why hasn't it not happened to you?

• 2:13:58Danny Jones?

  There's a few topics I self censor on, uh, not, not anymore, but I did during the pandemic. Cause we got, we got in trouble during the pandemic for talking about the, um, the COVID and the vaccine, especially the vaccine thing. When we had scientists come on, talk about that stuff, we got in a lot of trouble and a lot of people got completely thrown off.

• 2:14:17Speaker 02

  Right. There's Greg and his daughters.

• 2:14:19Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 2:14:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's not a lot of info.

• 2:14:21Danny Jones?

  That's very weird.

• 2:14:22Speaker 04

  Obviously it's not on YouTube anymore.

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, very weird.

• 2:14:27Speaker 02

  But as I say, like before, before it was weird, it wasn't weird.

• 2:14:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:32Speaker 02

  That's the thing about it. Like it became a little bit like the voices in Eleanor's head from earlier on in this conversation. It was like, it was only weird when it was deemed weird.

• 2:14:45Speaker 02

  I tell you, I tell you something to Greg's detriment. He was filming these skits at home. So that automatically makes it seem creepier. Like if it was in a studio, if it was in like a 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.

• 2:15:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:06Speaker 02

  Who are all babies, like what the fuck?

• 2:15:08Danny Jones?

  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 props to make millions. And I mean, if they become successful, they make millions and millions of dollars. And, uh, 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. You've made this little like, this little content factory. And your children are the workers and.

• 2:15:53Speaker 02

  And I obviously put that to Greg.

• 2:15:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:56Speaker 02

  But I put it to him from a 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, you know, don't do this.

• 2:16:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:21Speaker 02

  I stopped. And, uh, so I was saying to Greg, like, I did this and I regret it. Like I wish I hadn't done it.

• 2:16:31Speaker 02

  And Greg looked really rattled and, and so I didn't go too hard on him on that because he's clearly been through like a lot of bad stuff and I didn't want to like call to upset him. But, but yeah, you know, he said, it was, he, it was a more utopian time when people were trying to be like radically open on the internet.

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  About like with their personal lives, like exposing their personal lives.

• 2:16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of everything. I remember Twitter was like that in the earliest days. People were, it was that radical openness.

• 2:17:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Now it's more of like, uh, political ideologies clashing, or at least on my algorithm, my algorithm. You know, videos of war, videos of death and destruction, and then people just fighting about, uh, their political stance on things.

• 2:17:13Speaker 02

  But I interrupted you about two.

• 2:17:14Danny Jones?

  Oh no, I wanted to ask you about, um, your, the, the time that you and Alex infiltrated Bohemian Grove.

• 2:17:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:17:22Danny Jones?

  I want to hear that story.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  It's such a story. So after I, I assume that everyone has been, everyone now watching will have watched the whole thing. So.

• 2:17:32Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:17:33Speaker 02

  Okay. So, uh, just after I failed to infiltrate the Bilderberg Group, I, I heard about this other secret society called Bohemian Grove, where it, different to Bilderberg. Bilderberg is kind of globalist. I'd say probably center, center left. Whereas Bohemian Grove is very republican and just 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. Uh, 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.

• 2:18:18Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna have to sneak into Bohemian Grove and try and film it. But then I thought, well, I don't want to do that alone, uh, 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 phoned up David Icke and I said, I'm thinking about sneaking into Bohemian Grove. And he said, that's where they transform themselves back into giant reptiles.

• 2:18:48Speaker 02

  Don't go anywhere near that forest. Uh, David Icke's the person who came up with the whole lizard theory.

• 2:18:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. So then I phoned up Alex Jones, who at the time was unknown. Like he, he was famous in, uh, militia conspiracy circles and Austin hipster circles. And that was it. Like, I think I had a small audience. Um, but I'd met him because he was rebuilding David Koresh's church at Waco.

• 2:19:18Danny Jones?

  He was rebuilding it?

• 2:19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, with listener donations.

• 2:19:21Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 2:19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. That was one of his first big, uh, I wouldn't say stunts. It was actually.

• 2:19:26Danny Jones?

  Why was he rebuilding it?

• 2:19:27Speaker 02

  I don't know. It was like it was in Waco. Yeah. The government burnt it down.

• 2:19:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:19:33Speaker 02

  Alex, one of Alex's very first things was Waco.

• 2:19:36Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:19:37Speaker 02

  That this was a government conspiracy. They murdered them. So I'm going to rebuild this church.

• 2:19:41Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:19:41Speaker 02

  And he did rebuild it with listener donations. And I went there.

• 2:19:44Danny Jones?

  I didn't know that.

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  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. It's two years earlier, where a family of white separatists in Idaho get involved with the ATF.

• 2:20:01Danny Jones?

  That's a crazy story.

• 2:20:02Speaker 02

  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. And Randy had said he'd never been to Waco. So I said, let's go on a road trip. So I, I went to Waco with Randy and there was Alex Jones. Randy Weaver was like, oh my God, it's Alex Jones. And I said, who's Alex Jones? He's incredible. He's this incredible broadcaster. So that's why I phoned Alex and said, do you want to sneak into Bohemian Grove with me? And he said, okay. So we went to, actually said more than okay. He said, I'm gonna smuggle in a camera and we'll get right up in their faces and we'll confront them about their satanic devil worshiping.

• 2:20:44Danny Jones?

  I didn't realize the whole thing was your idea.

• 2:20:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:20:47Danny Jones?

  Crazy.

• 2:20:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So I said to Alex, um, I think stealth would be a better approach. And I said, okay, stealth. So, uh, 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.

• 2:21:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we, we turn up at Occidental, uh, 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, then ex-wife. And they get lost in the, in the fog and they're phoning me up. God, there's people on the side of the road just standing there staring at us.

• 2:21:32Speaker 02

  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 gonna sneak into Bohemian Grove? So Alex's plan.

• 2:21:42Danny Jones?

  It's on a Saturday night?

• 2:21:43Speaker 02

  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 centerpiece of the two week vacation that these men of wealth and power have. So Alex's plan was to rent a boat, sail it along the Russian River, climb up the mountain and get in that way. So it was kind of the all conceived plan. So then we meet this, uh, local lawyer called Rick, who had successfully infiltrated Bohemian Grove himself. And he said, if you go in that way.

• 2:22:20Danny Jones?

  Can you show us where this is on a map?

• 2:22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh, Monterrio in Northern California.

• 2:22:26Danny Jones?

  Monte Rio?

• 2:22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. M O N T E R I O. It's like Napa Valley, about three hours.

• 2:22:33Danny Jones?

  Isn't it like right in the middle of a neighborhood?

• 2:22:37Danny Jones?

  Like behind, there's, there's like a neighborhood access. Like you're driving around houses and there's like a big gate.

• 2:22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Which I think is in Monterrio.

• 2:22:45Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:22:47Danny Jones?

  Find that, just go to the map, Steve, and so we can see, get, give us a wide view of the map. So is this it?

• 2:22:55Speaker 02

  I mean, it's, it's, yes, it's, it's, I can't say exactly where it is, but that's.

• 2:22:59Danny Jones?

  So there's the Russian River in, in on the Russian River.

• 2:23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's the Russian River.

• 2:23:04Danny Jones?

  Zoom out more so I can see like where this is in California. Okay.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we were staying in Occidental, which.

• 2:23:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. It's north of San Francisco.

• 2:23:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It took us a long time.

• 2:23:15Danny Jones?

  Okay. Punchback in honesty. That's fucking way out there.

• 2:23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, and yes, there's a, there's a, that's exactly how you described it. There's a gate. Yeah. Bohemian Highway. There you go. Bohemian Highway.

• 2:23:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. Bohemian Highway.

• 2:23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that leads to Bohemian Grove. So somewhere in there is Bohemian Grove.

• 2:23:35Danny Jones?

  That's funny. It's not marked.

• 2:23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's funny, you can't really see, you can't see it for the trees, I guess.

• 2:23:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:42Speaker 02

  Cause those are big redwood trees.

• 2:23:44Danny Jones?

  There's a great photo of the entrance to Bohemian Grove somewhere on Google.

• 2:23:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:23:49Danny Jones?

  There's this big crazy gate. It's like in, in a cul-de-sac of a neighborhood or something.

• 2:23:53Speaker 02

  Well, I have walked through that gate as my story is about to, uh, continue. So basically,

• 2:24:01Speaker 02

  Rick, the lawyer, said to Alex, if you go in that way, you're gonna get yourself 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, how should we get into Bohemian Grove? He said, it's easy. Not easy anymore, by the way. This is now not possible. This was the nineties.

• 2:24:26Danny Jones?

  They're still going on?

• 2:24:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Rick said, um,

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  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 wave. So, so we went to Eddie Bauer and Alex, you know, went into the dressing room looking like Alex, looking like some sort of, you know, Texan, comes out looking like the Great Gatsby.

• 2:25:01Speaker 02

  And then has second thoughts. He, his paranoid brain suddenly starts thinking, what if I am part of the plot to lure, 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.

• 2:25:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, God.

• 2:25:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:25:30Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:25:30Speaker 02

  So that's what happened. Alex dives into the undergrowth with Mike and gets in, successfully gets in. I, I walk up the drive with Rick, the lawyer, and we also successfully get in.

• 2:25:46Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:25:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:26:01Danny Jones?

  So who were 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?

• 2:26:09Speaker 02

  Well, because I was with this guy, Rick, the lawyer, who looked like a Grover. He was like probably in his 50s or 60s, preppy. He was a lawyer. I, I immediately did some risk assessment. And I thought, if I stick with Rick, he so much looks like he's part of this. I'm going to be safe. Because I was probably the youngest person out. I, I must have been like late twenties 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

• 2:26:50Speaker 02

  like little clusters of campsites all over the forest. And some of them have a sort of devil-y milieu to them. Like, they're called things like red eyes or something.

• 2:27:01Speaker 02

  But it's basically sort of revelry. It's, you go, we were just walking around from camp to camp. And there's guys, there's like bands playing and

• 2:27:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:27:10Speaker 02

  Guys playing the piano.

• 2:27:12Danny Jones?

  Like a little festival in the woods.

• 2:27:13Speaker 02

  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 in The Simpsons. It's basically a camp. Funny enough, Harry Shearer, who plays the voice of Mr. Burns, went to Bohemian Grove.

• 2:27:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:27:32Speaker 02

  And he's the only, he's the only Grover who would give me an interview to tell me about it.

• 2:27:36Danny Jones?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I said to him during the interview, I said, we filmed it. I wanted him to like do the voice, do Mr. Burns' voice. I said, I wonder what Mr. Burns would make of this. He didn't, didn't play ball.

• 2:27:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 2:27:51Speaker 02

  Didn't do the voice. But they all look like Mr. Burns. And we saw, Alex's big thing was that the owl represents Moloch. It's like satanic.

• 2:28:03Danny Jones?

  Moloch's a bull, right?

• 2:28:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's, either way, from my perspective, it's bullshit. Because there were all these like 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. Like, it's the redwoods of Northern California.

• 2:28:25Danny Jones?

  Like a, a sanctuary?

• 2:28:26Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'd go as far as to say a sanctuary, but maybe it's like the kind of place where you get lots of owls. I don't know. Either way, the owl didn't strike me in the slightest bit as suspicious. The, the, you know, but there was a sort of weirdness to the place. There was an intensity to it. So at nine o'clock, we're there for hours wandering around. I see Mike and Alex at one point. They're walking towards us. And I'm going, hey, guys. And they went, keep walking. There's owls everywhere. Owls are everywhere.

• 2:28:53Danny Jones?

  Alex said that?

• 2:28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, either Alex or Mike.

• 2:28:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:56Speaker 02

  There's cameras in the trees. They're going to walk past. They're both as 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.

• 2:29:18Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:29:19Speaker 02

  And this whole ceremony unfolds, which is, well, you can watch it for yourself on YouTube. Like Alex was a few rows behind me secretly filming the whole thing. So you can watch the whole thing. I very much took it as a kind of, sort of harmless pageant. The, 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, there's a shit ton of people there. There's like, you know, the San Francisco Symphony. There's somebody in the trees wearing like lederhosen covered in leaves. And he's

• 2:30:02Speaker 02

  like singing an ode to nature. Ode to cows, ode to, I can't remember, ode to twigs, whatever. And then like, these posh Klansmen type people turn up, these like black robes. You know, it's all like, exactly like you think it's going to be. And then I go, oh, you know, here in the Sylvan Forest, we banish thee. Basically, the, 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,

• 2:30:46Speaker 02

  is supposed to represent their cares and troubles in the world.

• 2:30:49Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:30:50Speaker 02

  And so they burn it. He says, ye shall not burn me. Like, it's all like voices echoing through the forest. Ye shall not burn me. For 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, could someone help me out, please? Because we're all like sitting on the, on the lawn. And that's basically it. Anyway, Alex reckons we've seen an actual human sacrifice. Or, or implies in the video he brings out that we may have seen an actual human sacrifice, which it definitely wasn't.

• 2:31:32Speaker 02

  So that put me in the, in the odd position of having to like, counter Alex's version of the story.

• 2:31:39Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:31:39Speaker 02

  With like, don't worry, it's nowhere near as weird as what Alex. I, I became like a sort of self-appointed defender of the Bush family's rights.

• 2:31:47Danny Jones?

  Who was there? Like, who was like the most prominent people that were there?

• 2:31:51Speaker 02

  Dick Cheney.

• 2:31:52Danny Jones?

  Dick Cheney was there?

• 2:31:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:31:53Danny Jones?

  Uh, what year was this?

• 2:31:56Speaker 02

  Two thou, it was either 1999 or 2000.

• 2:31:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:32:00Speaker 02

  I think it was 2000. Dick.

• 2:32:02Danny Jones?

  You got him on video?

• 2:32:03Speaker 02

  No, but we saw his name on a guest list. There was like a, there was a guest list behind, and, and his name was on the guest list. And later on, it was, in, in, it was reported that George Bush asked Dick Cheney to be his presidential running mate when they were together in Northern California. So, 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.

• 2:32:41Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:32:42Speaker 02

  Uh, and yeah, so that's the story. Alex brought out his video. I brought out my book then.

• 2:32:50Danny Jones?

  Did you guys get any backlash for that video?

• 2:32:53Speaker 02

  Um, it's, I got a letter from Bohemian Grove.

• 2:32:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Saying something like, despite Ronson's objectionable trespassing, we're, 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, that was basically the tenor of their letter.

• 2:33:19Danny Jones?

  And what was the most objectionable part of Alex's take on it? Just that it was a human that they burned?

• 2:33:24Speaker 02

  Well, the whole thing. Like, like I've often, like that certainly. But really, everything. Like, I've, I've.

• 2:33:33Speaker 02

  Like wasn't what we saw enough, like what we saw was so fucking weird.

• 2:33:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:38Speaker 02

  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, you know, yes, burn him, like, ah, like that. But I, I remember sitting there thinking, I'm the only sane person in this entire Redwood forest. You've got Alex, like, with his eyes like saucers. And then you've got all the Grovers themselves, who were kind of into this stupid, you know, thing.

• 2:34:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:14Speaker 02

  So I think the ceremony itself was completely harmless. And I think everything, the way that Alex, I mean, in fact, the people still talk about it now. A, a lot of people believe Alex's version of events. Like, I can tell you for sure that it's all bullshit. Like, the story I just told you is what actually happened.

• 2:34:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:30Speaker 02

  So, you know, so a lot of damage comes from just adding a layer of paranoid fiction to something.

• 2:34:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Danny Jones?

  So, isn't there a photo of Nixon there, too?

• 2:34:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, Nixon used to go, he called it the faggy, he famously called it the faggiest place I've ever been to.

• 2:34:47Danny Jones?

  The faggiest place I've ever been. Find the photo of Nixon at Bohemian Grove.

• 2:34:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:53Danny Jones?

  That's weird.

• 2:34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, like a lot of, um, private clubs, secret societies, whatever you want to call it. Uh, yeah, there's Nixon.

• 2:35:03Danny Jones?

  Just with the red circle, yeah. Blow that shit up.

• 2:35:07Speaker 02

  Oh, and there's Ronald Reagan.

• 2:35:08Danny Jones?

  Nixon and Reagan.

• 2:35:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:35:11Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:35:12Speaker 02

  Wow. You know, obviously, these things exist for a reason.

• 2:35:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:17Speaker 02

  And one of the most famous things reported to have come from Bohemian Grove was the Manhattan Project, uh, you know, which gave Oppenheimer the nuclear bomb and so on. Uh, it's said that a lot of the funding for the Manhattan Project came about through people, um, giving speeches at Bohemian Grove and soliciting donations or whatever.

• 2:35:40Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:35:41Speaker 02

  Uh, or, 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 Bohemian, whereas Bilderberg's a bit more centrist.

• 2:35:53Danny Jones?

  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.

• 2:36:01Speaker 02

  Oh, right, no, I don't know.

• 2:36:02Danny Jones?

  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 leader, the head of the, who was the head, the first head of the FBI, the, the gay guy? What was his name again?

• 2:36:18Speaker 02

  J. Edgar Hoover.

• 2:36:18Danny Jones?

  J. Edgar Hoover, yeah. He was involved in this, where they would invite them to parties in like, back rooms, or like, they'd, they'd rent out like, a huge motel room. And they would bring like, boy, like, little boys in there and like, do weird, really weird, like creepy 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, and 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 mafia, and how the FBI and the CIA would, would historically work with the mafia to do stuff, and things like that, how this has become like, a central feature of like, the ruling class, and how they, how they control.

• 2:37:03Speaker 02

  Yes. Well, I mean, that's what you think about when you think about Epstein, right? When you think about, when you think about what hasn't been released yet from Epstein.

• 2:37:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:12Speaker 02

  If they have, if you had cameras in all of the rooms, and that seems to be the case, if you had all of these 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.

• 2:37:25Danny Jones?

  Right. And you'd be labeled a crazy kook, you know, a year ago, for trying to suggest that he had any affiliation with any intelligence agency.

• 2:37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, who knows, like, you know, who, whether he was doing it for himself, or who, who, who he was doing it for, like, but I, I, that feels very plausible to me, and, and not at all unlikely.

• 2:37:45Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:37:45Speaker 02

  Um, whether, will it ever come out? One would hope.

• 2:37:49Danny Jones?

  What is your, what is your take on all of the Epstein stuff? Like, high level? Like, what do you think it was? Like, I know you might not have proof, but what's your opinion?

• 2:37:57Speaker 02

  Right from the beginning, I've thought that Epstein is the, is the conspiracy theory that not only is, you know, true, but it could be anything. Like, it could be, which doesn't mean it is anything, but it, but it could be anything. I, I would say what I just said is, is the, is in, 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.

• 2:38:26Danny Jones?

  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, writing down all the.

• 2:38:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:38:38Danny Jones?

  We know when Bill Gates is trying to like, not pay him, or there was some, some sort of financial dispute they got into, where he's like, writing an email to himself, saying like, I helped you with this, I helped you get that medication for that venereal disease you got from that Russian bitch, that you cheated on your wife with, and all that, you know, it's very, very clear.

• 2:38:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:56Danny Jones?

  But like, the, the, the one thing that is just so crazy is all of the women that not only disappeared, and came up missing, or that were killed, you know, there's like, all the stuff with the jerky stuff, with the human flesh, you know, the, the insinuates that they were actually being, like, eating people. And the CP, cheese pizza, being, uh, 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, it's obviously, I, I, I'm pretty, I'm ninety, I'm ninety-nine point nine percent confident that cheese pizza was a code word for something. Right?

• 2:39:40Speaker 02

  Okay, can I, like?

• 2:39:41Danny Jones?

  I don't think that's a conspiracy, that cheese pizza was a code word.

• 2:39:43Speaker 02

  Well, I, I, I don't know. But, but can I, can I counter what you just said with something more, more skeptical?

• 2:39:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:51Speaker 02

  And again, what I'm about to say, I don't know.

• 2:39:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:39:53Speaker 02

  But, but this is what I feel I should now counter it that way. Which is, you know, the Epstein files obviously are huge, like, like, you know, they're, they're, you know, they were discussing getting the DVD of the Menisteric Goats, 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 like, these FBI reports where they don't try and sift fact from fiction, they just like, write everything down, like, somebody.

• 2:40:24Danny Jones?

  Of course, yeah.

• 2:40:25Speaker 02

  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 phoning up the FBI, blaring out a whole load of paranoid stuff.

• 2:40:42Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:40:42Speaker 02

  And that making it into the Epstein files for that reason. But, but there's been no attempt to try and sift through whether it's true or not.

• 2:40:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that, 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.

• 2:41:01Speaker 02

  Okay, so you, you know more about this than I do.

• 2:41:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. He's going back and forth with hot, with very powerful, rich people that are coming to his island, and people from all over the world, who, and, and they're talking about cheese, cheese pizza. Like, hey, I really liked that, that cheese pizza, or that pizza that you brought to me. I'm running out of pizza on the island. I think I need some fresh pizza, or some more jerky. And then responses from these people, these bankers, or whatever they were, on another side of the world, saying, oh, yes, that, I forget, we, we've talked about so many examples of this shit.

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  But there's, but there's no evidence at all about Comet Ping Pong in DC having any kind of involvement, none at all, right?

• 2:41:43Danny Jones?

  There's some very weird things about the Comet Pizza thing.

• 2:41:46Speaker 02

  But no basements, no?

• 2:41:48Danny Jones?

  No, apparently there is a basement there.

• 2:41:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:41:52Danny Jones?

  I haven't seen the evidence, but I've talked to people who say they're, one guy we had on, Ben Swan, he was a, uh, a newscaster in, maybe Tennessee, Nashville, Tennessee, and he was one of the original people to talk about the whole pizza gate thing. And he got fired from his job for, for reporting on that. And then he made this whole documentary on it, and he's still doing investigations on it now. And, uh, 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,

• 2:42:33Danny Jones?

  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, that it's not there. But.

• 2:42:54Speaker 02

  I, I honestly, I, I don't know. Like, I've not done any.

• 2:42:57Danny Jones?

  Right, I haven't either.

• 2:42:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. As I said at the beginning of this, like, I, 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, I stayed away from pizza gate and QAnon, mostly because twenty years earlier, I'd snuck into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones. And I thought, well, I've done, you know, that's my story on this. Like, I've done this. And I, I'm not saying I was right to have stayed away from those things, but that is the reason why I did it. But, but, but I don't know, like, I, I, I haven't done any independent research, so I just don't know.

• 2:43:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And I think one of the, to me, one of the craziest things about the Epstein, I mean, a lot of very dark, evil things are in those emails, that, and, and again, the problem is, they, 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.

• 2:43:49Speaker 02

  And, and.

• 2:43:49Danny Jones?

  So like.

• 2:43:50Speaker 02

  withheld a huge amount of documents, too, right?

• 2:43:53Danny Jones?

  What's that?

• 2:43:53Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the Epstein files, there's still only a fraction of it has come out.

• 2:43:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, only a very small fraction of it. And, and also, oddly, they redacted, there's no emails between, uh, nineteen ninety-nine and two thousand and one.

• 2:44:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we get, we get an email from Ghislaine Maxwell asking uh somebody if they want to be a part of the nine eleven shadow commission or something like that.

• 2:44:17Speaker 02

  My god. Wow. Yeah.

• 2:44:20Danny Jones?

  You know, so like they just, they throw out all these crumbs. It's almost like it's designed to drop, to make people crazy and, and create more theories about this, right? Because if you don't give them the answer, you just give them all this crazy fucking evidence. That's exactly what people are gonna do. They're gonna come up with theories.

• 2:44:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:41Danny Jones?

  And it's almost by design, I think.

• 2:44:42Speaker 02

  Well, I'm, I'm very glad that people are not forgetting about the Epstein files. I, I, 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.

• 2:45:02Danny Jones?

  Steve, I'm gonna send you this quote. You gotta pull this up. This is, I just saw this for the first time uh the other day. And I couldn't fucking believe it was real, but my friend Julian Dory confirmed that it was real. Uh Stephen, where the hell is your number? There it is. Pull up this quote right here. I just sent it to you. I just texted it to you.

• 2:45:25Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:45:27Speaker 02

  Okay, so how many is to go? Oh, forty percent left to go.

• 2:45:30Danny Jones?

  They've released sixty percent. I don't think that's true. I think it's way less than sixty percent.

• 2:45:33Speaker 04

  There's a bunch of videos that they haven't released. Videos and images. I think this is, yeah, there's a lot.

• 2:45:38Danny Jones?

  Well, yeah, they've released zero videos or images. And we know that every single house and plane was wired with cameras.

• 2:45:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:45:45Danny Jones?

  Look at this. So this guy goes, hey, Grok, did Epstein really say this? If Trump feels like a cornered rat, he will bomb Iran just to create a diversion. Go down, see what Grok said. Yes, the substance matches. In a December two thousand eighteen iMessage 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? That less than a month after the Epstein files came out, they started the Iran war?

• 2:46:13Speaker 02

  Jesus. Yep. Yeah. I, I, yeah, as I say, with Epstein, you know, I'm skeptical about some things. With Epstein, I really think anything could be true.

• 2:46:23Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:46:23Speaker 02

  I, I.

• 2:46:24Danny Jones?

  And the whole Rothschilds thing is just like, you know, it's a, the conspiracy theorists have been living in, 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.

• 2:46:36Speaker 02

  Right. By the way, I'm glad, like, the whole QAnon thing was that Trump's gonna come in and save us all.

• 2:46:42Danny Jones?

  From child, so they're gonna take, he's gonna take out all the evil child in the government.

• 2:46:47Speaker 02

  So QAnon was like a very pro-Trump thing.

• 2:46:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:50Speaker 02

  I think it's very healthy that QAnon believers are now very happy to not see Trump as that kind of Messiah anymore when it comes to the Epstein files.

• 2:46:59Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. A hundred percent.

• 2:47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47:00Danny Jones?

  And the other craziest thing about the Epstein files is that in his official autopsy, after he died, the under, 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 Jeffrey Epstein and his physician, where he's, he's talking about how he needs specific medications because he, he had his prostate removed.

• 2:47:35Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:47:36Speaker 05

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• 2:48:07Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:48:07Danny Jones?

  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?

• 2:48:18Speaker 02

  Right. Will, will this other, will the other material ever be released? Another administration?

• 2:48:25Danny Jones?

  Huh?

• 2:48:25Speaker 02

  Who knows? Will AOC release all the information?

• 2:48:28Danny Jones?

  I don't think any, I don't think anyone in power will ever release any of that stuff.

• 2:48:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:48:32Danny Jones?

  I think we're on this runaway train right now with uh what you were talking about, the psychopaths that are in power uh are just gonna keep gaining more power.

• 2:48:40Speaker 02

  And also, the AI companies and the tech billionaires, this is what I've had about in the castle a little bit too, are, you know, prodding away at us, making us angry, keeping us angry.

• 2:48:49Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:48:51Danny Jones?

  With the algorithms and the flock cameras.

• 2:48:54Speaker 02

  And the culture wars, the Breton circuses, like, you know, keep us, keep us, this is what David Icke said to me thirty years ago, and he was right, to keep us sheep battling each other down here while they can

• 2:49:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:05Speaker 02

  get away with all of this.

• 2:49:06Danny Jones?

  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.

• 2:49:17Speaker 04

  Bipartisan.

• 2:49:18Danny Jones?

  Bipartisan. It's the most bipartisan story of my lifetime, where it's both sides can get equally mad about this because both sides have tried to cover it up.

• 2:49:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:27Danny Jones?

  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.

• 2:49:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:49:35Danny Jones?

  That seems to be doing this stuff and getting away with things and profiting off different conflicts and wars and like literally, like there's, there's emails about that where he's emailing Ahud 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.

• 2:49:56Speaker 02

  I'm really glad. I guess people have always been, been aware of this, the way that they, this is, you know,

• 2:50:01Danny Jones?

  But there's never been proof, though.

• 2:50:03Speaker 02

  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, from them to, so you've been publicly shamed. I wrote a whole book about public shaming, which is uh kind of the book that kind of started the whole debate about what became known as cancel culture. Cause in this book was the story that became the sort of ground zero of what kind of patience era of public shaming. This woman, Justine Sacco, the AIDS tweet woman, she's on a plane to Africa. Don't remember this. She's tweeting.

• 2:50:33Danny Jones?

  Cause of my skin or something, I won't get AIDS because of my skin color.

• 2:50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white.

• 2:50:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:50:39Speaker 02

  She's trying to do a sort of South Park, making fun of her own privilege. Anyway, it backfires and her 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, goat, psychopath test, 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

• 2:51:23Speaker 02

  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, uh so the billionaires can carry on doing their thing.

• 2:51:36Danny Jones?

  But it doesn't seem to help, though.

• 2:51:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:51:38Danny Jones?

  We're aware of it, but we don't seem to be able to take any, we have no power to change it.

• 2:51:42Speaker 02

  I mean, our personal power would be to just opt out of these culture wars. And yeah, uh, I, I've noticed things are changing a little bit. I make a show for the BBC called Things Fell Apart, which, which has until now been about the origin stories of different culture wars, kind of amazing stories. Uh, 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 a little bit now. The Luigi Mangioli type situations, individuals waging war against institutions and so on. So maybe, maybe there is a little bit of a move away from um culture wars to, to, to what I, what I personally think is a more

• 2:52:23Speaker 02

  uh a kind of wiser way of looking at the world, which is looking at how power works, how, how power trickles down and manipulates us.

• 2:52:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, also, I just remembered, when we were, when you were telling that Bohemian Grove story, you were explaining the, the Waco thing and the guy who was a part of the white supremacist society, uh, who got in, it was like the pre-Waco.

• 2:52:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, Randy Weaver.

• 2:52:51Danny Jones?

  Randy Weaver.

• 2:52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:52:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:53Speaker 02

  Well, I tell you that story.

• 2:52:54Danny Jones?

  Will you tell that? That's, that's a fucking crazy story.

• 2:52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an amazing story. Um, it was like Waco before Waco. Between Waco and Ruby Ridge, a lot of people got radicalized on the, on the right, particularly in America. Uh, so Randy Weaver, they were a family of white separatists, Randy, his wife, Vicki, three kids, uh, little kids, Sarah, Rachel, and Sammy, and the dog striker. They just, they, Vicki was a, you know, a pretty hardcore conspiracy theorist. I mean, back, this was before the internet, so she'd be just watching VHSs and stuff. Um.

• 2:53:33Speaker 02

  And they decided to live off grid. They went to the top of a mountain in Idaho, Ruby Ridge. And Randy started attending, the, the, 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, um, uh, less radical than the people at Aryan Nations. But he enjoyed their picnics and.

• 2:54:12Danny Jones?

  Enjoyed their company.

• 2:54:13Speaker 02

  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 Aryan Nations for us. And Randy said, no. So then they sent in an undercover agent or informant

• 2:54:52Speaker 02

  to get Randy to commit a crime. They asked him to soar off a shotgun that below the legal limit. So he said, sure.

• 2:55:00Danny Jones?

  So sort of like entrap him?

• 2:55:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, entrapment. I, I mean, it was. And so they said to him, now we've got you on a crime. We're gonna 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 flaw. Is that he, you know, the whole family became paranoid. Like he, 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 would be.

• 2:55:33Danny Jones?

  How old were the kids?

• 2:55:34Speaker 02

  Uh, really young. Like, I can't remember exactly. I think Sammy was like eleven or maybe thirteen, sort of early teens, I, I think.

• 2:55:44Speaker 02

  And there's footage, you know, they thought they were being watched from the bushes and they were. You know, you had the ATF in the bushes.

• 2:55:53Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, watching them. And there's lots of footage of the kids with, with shotguns patrolling the area. Anyway, one day, the, one of the ATF agents gets too close to the cabin. The dog starts barking, the family wakes up and there's a confrontation.

• 2:56:13Speaker 02

  One of the agents is shot and killed.

• 2:56:18Speaker 02

  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, Striker. Sammy, the little boy says, you shot my dog, you son of a bitch, and opens fire on the agents.

• 2:56:35Danny Jones?

  The boy said this?

• 2:56:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, the little boy, um, opens fire.

• 2:56:40Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 2:56:41Speaker 02

  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, uh, 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, um,

• 2:57:12Speaker 02

  run into the cabin and lock the door and a siege begins.

• 2:57:17Speaker 02

  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. Or, or, or, you know, be, because there's all of these like, um, townspeople who are just standing there watching as all of these like tanks are going up, like it's incredible amounts of.

• 2:57:44Danny Jones?

  Is there, is there a lot of footage of this?

• 2:57:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, I found the reason, my documentary is probably up there. It's called, uh, Secret Rulers of the World.

• 2:57:53Danny Jones?

  Secret Rulers of the World?

• 2:57:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that episode's called The Legend of Ruby Ridge. And I, 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, um, Vicky Weaver. I, I think they've put Sammy's body in, in an outhouse. And Vicky Weaver goes to look. And she's got a babe, there's a little baby as well, I forgot, called Elizabeth. She's got her baby in her arms and she's in the doorway. And this sniper shoots Vicky in the head and kills her.

• 2:58:27Danny Jones?

  My God.

• 2:58:28Speaker 02

  And then a sixteen day siege.

• 2:58:32Danny Jones?

  What happened to the baby?

• 2:58:33Speaker 02

  Uh, the baby's fine.

• 2:58:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:58:36Speaker 02

  But they're now in the cabin with the doors closed, Vicky's body and all the kids. And there's this huge siege begins that lasts days. I can't remember exactly how long, it's about sixteen days.

• 2:58:52Speaker 02

  And eventually Randy comes out. Bo Grites, the old conspiracy broadcaster, he becomes like a hostage negotiator. Convinces Randy to come out. So they all come out, they're arrested, but then they're all rewarded. I think all the daughters are awarded a million dollars each in damages. So the government like completely admitted.

• 2:59:18Danny Jones?

  Even though the guy got shot and killed, the ATF guy?

• 2:59:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, they, they, I don't think there's anyone really in the government.

• 2:59:24Danny Jones?

  Cause they started it.

• 2:59:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I, I, I think it'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the government or law enforcement. But two things, they did the right thing at Ruby Ridge. I think everybody knows what a disaster it was. Yeah, there you go.

• 2:59:40Speaker 02

  So, so that's down at the.

• 2:59:41Danny Jones?

  And what happened to, uh, what was his name? Randy?

• 2:59:44Speaker 02

  Uh, Randy, he, he recently died. He, he, there's Vicky. So see at bottom left, that's Vicky Weaver.

• 2:59:53Danny Jones?

  That's the woman who got shot with one baby?

• 2:59:55Speaker 02

  So that'd be surveillance footage taken by the ATF before the siege began.

• 3:00:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's Vicky. It's a very haunting story.

• 3:00:08Speaker 02

  And yeah, is that, that must.

• 3:00:10Danny Jones?

  It's the same spot.

• 3:00:11Speaker 02

  Right. Is that Sammy with the gun?

• 3:00:16Speaker 02

  No, that's Kevin Harris. That's the family friend who was there.

• 3:00:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay. Oh, there's footage of Sammy with the gun?

• 3:00:24Speaker 02

  I think there is. I've seen footage of the, of the girls, the daughters.

• 3:00:27Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 3:00:28Speaker 02

  So I told the story through Rachel Weaver, the, the daughter.

• 3:00:32Danny Jones?

  The baby?

• 3:00:32Speaker 02

  No, the middle daughter. She was like twelve at the time, something like that. And I met her when she was maybe nineteen, twenty. So, so I told, basically she was the main character in my documentary. But then I spent time with Randy too. So Randy would, felt very bad too. Like if you got him being honest, he would take responsibility for his mistakes. I should never have armed my kids.

• 3:00:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:00:58Speaker 02

  I, you know, I escalated this too. But whilst still like hating the law enforcement and so on.

• 3:01:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and between Waco and Ruby Ridge, you, you got, you, you got Timothy McVeigh, who then blows up the Moa building in Oklahoma City.

• 3:01:19Danny Jones?

  Timothy McVeigh showed up at Waco?

• 3:01:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he showed up at Waco.

• 3:01:22Danny Jones?

  I forgot about that.

• 3:01:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he cared, you know, he, he was, you know, cared a lot about Ruby Ridge as well.

• 3:01:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's one of the other crazier conspiracies was the whole, was the whole, uh, Oklahoma City bombing thing.

• 3:01:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, I did a lot of research into that. I, I did a whole podcast series for Audible called The Debutante about Carol Howe, who was this, um, debutante who became a white supremacist, who became a government informant. And a lot of the conspiracy theories revolve around Carol Howe, that 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's, that could be true to think that most probably isn't true. There is the, there are some odd things about, about Oklahoma City that remain odd.

• 3:02:15Speaker 02

  There's a leg, is this, do you know about this? There's like one leg that was never identified.

• 3:02:21Danny Jones?

  I didn't know that.

• 3:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like this, the, the case of the, and then John Doe too, McVeigh was seen with these other people. Was it, were they all misunderstandings?

• 3:02:31Danny Jones?

  Yes. Yeah, there was another guy, like a brown skin guy, right?

• 3:02:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, swarthy guy. I think some of them were probably mistakes. Like, 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 my, and I did a whole lot of stuff on Carol Howe.

• 3:02:53Speaker 02

  It's a long story. I think I've been a little out of energy to, to tell it now. But.

• 3:02:59Speaker 02

  I came away thinking

• 3:03:02Speaker 02

  that that many of the theories that I thought could point to evidence of why the conspiracy didn't hold water, but that doesn't mean they don't all hold water. Some some might still do.

• 3:03:13Danny Jones?

  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 they something about the way the damage was was like the bombs exploded outwards or something like that. And so many weird things. And it's like,

• 3:03:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:03:29Danny Jones?

  It's almost hard to ignore it when there's so many of those questions are lined up that make it makes the conspiracy makes more sense than the narrative.

• 3:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was focusing on this particular conspiracy about this place called Elohim City. This is what I do in the debutante. So Elohim City.

• 3:03:42Danny Jones?

  Elohim City.

• 3:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was a white.

• 3:03:44Danny Jones?

  That rings a bell.

• 3:03:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was like a sort of Yahweh Christian white separatist compound in on the Oklahoma Arkansas border. And the reason why that's of interest to people is McVeigh phoned Elohim City before the bombing, that's for sure. And asked to speak to a guy called Andy Strassmeyer, who was a German national who was working in security at Elohim City. That definitely happened. And also McVeigh got a parking ticket or a speeding ticket quite close to Elohim City. So a lot of people got really interested in Elohim City. Carol Howe, the debutante turned white supremacist turned government informant was informing

• 3:04:28Speaker 02

  on the on Elohim City. So she was there at Elohim City. After the fact, she said she thinks she saw Timothy McVeigh at Elohim City. But that I don't believe. He definitely phoned Elohim City, and it looked like he was looking for a place to stay after the bombing, a place to hide out, because Elohim 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.

• 3:04:59Danny Jones?

  Interesting. Yeah, I mean, one of the crazy like connecting themes through all this stuff is the the depth that the government is embedded in all these crazy groups.

• 3:05:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:05:11Danny Jones?

  You know, not just the cults, but like the white supremacist groups.

• 3:05:14Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 3:05:14Danny Jones?

  Religious fund, the religious extremists.

• 3:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:05:17Danny Jones?

  They like, they know.

• 3:05:18Speaker 02

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

• 3:05:33Danny Jones?

  Right, exactly.

• 3:05:34Speaker 02

  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 and they knew I was Jewish, like they knew it. And they asked, they said, what's your genealogy? Those are the words they used. What's your genealogy? I'm like looking desperately for my cameraman. My cameraman, by the way, David Barker, because I want to get the fuck out of there. Like, I wouldn't mind filming this, but I also want to get the fuck out of there. Like, like, I'm pretty fearless

• 3:06:19Speaker 02

  when it comes to these dangerous situations. I've been in many. But that one, I felt like I was under real.

• 3:06:24Danny Jones?

  You were put on the hot spot.

• 3:06:26Speaker 02

  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, that. But he loved being at Aryan Nations so much, he was off getting cutaway after cutaway. So I'm like marooned with these.

• 3:06:44Danny Jones?

  He's shooting B roll somewhere down the road.

• 3:06:46Speaker 02

  Exactly. He's shooting B roll of all the swastikas on the on the roofs, having a whale of a time, getting great B roll. And I'm surrounded by these skinheads asking me my genealogy.

• 3:06:57Danny Jones?

  What's your genealogy, boy?

• 3:06:58Speaker 02

  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 Aryan 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 some joke. And that joke was a signal for the skinheads to like back off. And they all backed off me.

• 3:07:24Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 3:07:25Speaker 02

  And in that, 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.

• 3:07:50Danny Jones?

  That's wild.

• 3:07:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we know for sure that all of these groups are massively infiltrated by undercover agents.

• 3:07:58Danny Jones?

  That's such a weird thing, too, the 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 as the Jews as like this monolithic structure, right? When it couldn't be more separate separated.

• 3:08:17Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, Jews, not in the slightest bit monolithic. Some are Zionist, some are anti Zionist.

• 3:08:23Danny Jones?

  Anti Zionist.

• 3:08:23Speaker 02

  Some are anti Zionist, some just don't want, just don't want to think about it.

• 3:08:27Danny Jones?

  Atheists.

• 3:08:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, everything. Like, Jews are the least monolithic group you can think of. And, you know, my Jewish friends and all the Jews I've known from being Jewish all my life, a million different types of people. And so, yeah, so that antisemitism is wrong for exactly the reason that you just pointed out.

• 3:08:49Danny Jones?

  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 at the hip with the Israeli government.

• 3:09:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:09:01Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 3:09:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which I've got to say, by the way, Netanyahu does the same thing. He says we are, we are, I am the Jewish people, you know, he does the same thing.

• 3:09:09Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 3:09:10Speaker 02

  But for someone like me.

• 3:09:11Danny Jones?

  And he's like Polish or something, right?

• 3:09:13Speaker 02

  But yeah, but 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.

• 3:09:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:09:36Speaker 02

  Like, yeah. So that's why it's like.

• 3:09:38Danny Jones?

  That's like me being born in America, being like attached at the hip with like the Bush Cheney administration, you know, for doing the Iran War.

• 3:09:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:09:54Danny Jones?

  Well, Jon Ronson, thank you for doing this, man. This has been fascinating.

• 3:09:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:09:57Danny Jones?

  You've been everywhere.

• 3:09:57Speaker 02

  This has been a real pleasure. Yeah, we've done the whole.

• 3:09:59Danny Jones?

  You're like the Forrest Gump of all the crazy conspiracies of the American history.

• 3:10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's kind of true. And it's been a great, it's been a great ride. And it's also been a great day.

• 3:10:11Danny Jones?

  Your new book, The Castle, is out now for folks to find it. They can find it everywhere books are sold, I'm assuming.

• 3:10:17Speaker 02

  I, 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.

• 3:10:27Danny Jones?

  Have you decided your next project yet, or what you want to look at?

• 3:10:30Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 3:10:32Danny Jones?

  No.

• 3:10:32Speaker 02

  No. I had such a blast with the UFC doing the cage fight. I would do more in that world if if there was a story, but I just don't know what the story would be.

• 3:10:41Danny Jones?

  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?

• 3:10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, my website, jonronson.com. There's no H in Jon, J O N R O N S O N. It's just.

• 3:10:53Danny Jones?

  Jon Ronson, not Ron Johnson.

• 3:10:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jon Ronson, not Ron Johnson. I am not that senator. And, and yeah, everything's on the website.

• 3:11:04Danny Jones?

  Perfect. We'll link it all below. Thanks again, man.

• 3:11:06Speaker 02

  It was a real pleasure. Thank you.

• 3:11:08Danny Jones?

  Good night, folks.

• 3:11:10Speaker 05

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