 We can't afford to have a toga party. You guys up for a toga party? TOGA! I think they like the idea, Hoof. Oh, Otter, please don't do this. We got news for you, pal. They're gonna nail us no matter what we do. So we might, as well, have a good time. TOGA, TOGA, TOGA, TOGA, TOGA! That's a classic clip from Animal House where John Belushi and his fraternity brothers realize that the only response to the totalitarian rule of the Dean is to throw a Roman toga party. I'm gonna be going back to the Romans time and time again. And to kick it off, here's a clip from my upcoming interview with Chris Knowles. And, you know, one thing that I keep saying, and I'm sure maybe a lot of your listeners will just think I'm insane, but really a lot of what this is all about is about restoring a state cult, much the same as what we saw in ancient Rome. So when you take the ritualism, which we see at every Super Bowl now and at every Oscars now, and you combine it with this cultic gaslighting, with this mass conditioning into, like, this invasion of the body snatchers reality, they go together because they're all moving towards the same goal. And the mask is the annihilation of individuality, which is, you know, it's a prime aspect of any cult throughout history. Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Sekaris, and today we welcome back one of my favorite scallywags of the alternative media and the author of a new book that we're going to talk about, The Endless American Midnight. Chris Knowles is here to join us. Chris, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining me. I want to pull up on the screen this fantastic new book because what I want to tell people is, you know, a lot of folks are very familiar with your kind of essential read blog, The Secret Sun. And we see on there that you've actually started a new institute, jumping on the bandwagon there, but some deep state stuff there. But what you've done here with this new book, The Endless American Midnight, which I didn't quite get why you would do it initially, but then I thought about it a little bit more. And, you know, it's like there's so much stuff packed in The Secret Sun. And those of us like me who just dive into this and sometimes can't even get out of it. It's so deep and it takes you in so many places that once in a while, it's good to be able to kind of curl up on the couch with a book and kind of go through this stuff in a different format. Was that partially what you had in mind? Well, people have been asking me for a very long time to do a book of The Secret Sun work. And I just could never really figure out how to approach it because I have thousands of posts going back 15 years now. And it's just it's very intimidating and overwhelming even for myself. You know, I'm familiar with materials. So I just had a real hard time trying to put it in context. Luckily sort of 2020 did that for me. Everybody's writing books. Yeah, the material I chose, because I was looking around in 2020, I was just looking at the whole scene. I was looking at politics and the media and society in general and trying to figure out like, how did we get here? And then I started thinking, it's like, well, you know, I've been writing these essays, you know, mixed in with all the synchromistic work for a very long time. And a lot of the things that I said, you know, this is going to happen. This is coming came true. And it's not because I'm a psychic or a prophet or anything. It's just that it's just in the inevitable cycles of history. Let's not be too quick to dismiss your psychic abilities. Because as you said, I mean, folks, I'm going to hold up on the screen and Chris can see it, but he doesn't have total visibility on this. Here is the table of contents from the book, The Endless American Midnight. So I want to talk about the flat earth and other strange new rebellions. And as we're doing it, I want to remind people that you wrote this in what 2015? Well, there's a guy named Eric Dubey who sort of kick started the modern flat earth movement. And I'd known this guy for a number of years because he used to do synchromistic work for, you know, he had a blog on blog spot and he was sort of part of this loose ring of people who are looking at these kind of materials and synchronicities and symbolism and all that kind of thing. And then he got onto the whole flat earth thing and he had sent me some information through the comments a while back, you know, obviously before I wrote that post. And I just, you know, like most people I was just like, I couldn't put in any context. I'm like, what am I reading here? Is this serious? Is this a joke? Is this a troll? And I couldn't really get a handle on where this was going. And he did a number of videos and then there was a guy who I read about in the book, this photo realistic artist named Matt Boylan who claims to have worked for NASA and been led in on the secret by people at NASA that, you know, the earth is flat and all the space stuff is a hoax and everything like that. And he's a real hard guy to take seriously. He's got a very obnoxious and unpleasant personality. I, to be honest with you, I don't know where he's been the past few years, but I, you know, I watch some of his videos and, you know, I'm always up for a good conspiracy theory. I'm always up for a good alternative take, you know. But after some years, I just came to the conclusion that, you know, it doesn't matter. It doesn't affect the conduct of my life in any way, shape or form. It doesn't affect my viewpoint on the world. So in one way it was kind of liberating. But yeah, this stuff was going on back 2014, 2015 before it became such a big deal in the mass media. Here's where I really wanted to take you because it's where you take us in the blog post. And that is that initial sense that you got when you read this. It's like, what is going on? Am I being trolled? Who would say such an outrageous thing? And then the connection you make is this. I love how you connected it to this. I fucking love science vibe. And the Phil Platt, Phil Platt, bad astronomer with his 660,000 followers on Twitter. And then how the strange bed fellow thing, how really these lovers of Nassau who are these kind of uber empiricist kind of science will answer everything are strangely linked to Werner von Braun, who was a brown shirt before those brown shirts were popular kind of thing. And where I think you really took us in that post five years ago was just a kind of total layer bear, the phony fake scientism agenda. And in particular this cult around I fucking love science. And I immediately understood exactly what you meant because I discovered it much more slowly in my work. I wrote a lot of those kind of things. That was like a real big theme for the blog for quite a while. It was just taking apart this whole scientific world view and really tracing the roots of it, where it came from. There's another chapter where I talk about Carl Sagan's demon haunted world and how that sort of resulted how that played out and that ended up really with Jeffrey Epstein financing a good chunk of the theoretical science being done today. He had his claws and MIT and Harvard and all this scientific organizations, all these big name people. So this is something that I was looking at for a long time because I really feel, you know, when we talk about where we are and how we got here, I really feel that that group of people, that movement, the scientist, the scientismists as I call them, atheists, skeptics, this whole constellation of people who have really been marginalized in the past couple of years. But at that point in time, they were extremely aggressive. They were extremely online as the term goes. And they were, you know, spreading their message very aggressively. And then it all kind of came to a halt for some bizarre coincidence that will probably never be, you know, solved is that it all came to a halt when Jeffrey Epstein was taken into court with Jane Doe versus Jeffrey Epstein. And I think it came to a halt before that. And I think it's more traceable to James Randy, because like a lot of these things, there's a kind of cult of personality thing that sometimes creates an unexplainable kind of wake in the water. And I think he did. And I think his demise. And then when his own group kind of turned against him initially as he was getting older, and then he kind of went through the dementia stuff, and then he came out. Strangely enough, I think he's coming out as a, as a gay man who had kind of rigged the system to get his boyfriend kind of through an immigration thing. I think the whole thing kind of underage boyfriends. Yeah, underage boyfriends. Yeah. Yeah, because back in the day, people forget that back in the day, there were these great Randy conferences where there were 40 foot banners with his image on it. You know, he had really kind of just slipped into these guys. Exactly what they claim to be so against is that kind of cultish kind of personality kind of thing. What do you think about that? Well, I think that that was deliberate. I think maybe it almost feels like a beta testing of some sort, you know, can we construct an alternative mass religion to replace traditional religion? And I think that, you know, the people who are bankrolling all this, and of course, Epstein was a large part of it, had very strange beliefs of their own and very strange agendas of their own. And what really happened, you know, we had those amazing meetings, which were getting just fawning press attention on critical press attention when that court case came up with the identity theft with that with his living lover there. The press went to great lengths to either ignore it or to smooth it over for him. You know, he was clearly a favored personality. He was protected. He was protected by the media. And the thing where it really, I think, hit the rocks, you know, or hit the iceberg, let's say. And the Titanic hit the iceberg was when the woke thing really started kicking up again in the wake of Occupy Wall Street. I think the iceberg incident was, and few people remember this, but Randy came out as a skeptic on global warming. Yeah, I don't think that really broke. That wasn't the straw that broke the horses back. I mean, he had a lot of things that he said in favor of eugenics, all kinds of stuff. I mean, this is all the things that these skeptics or what's left of the movement or really, you know, the woke skeptics really, they've written all these revisionist history and like, oh, I should have known about this or I didn't know about this because I was blind to it. Mayor Calpa, mayor Calpa, whatever the situation is, but I think that it was, it was definitely, because I was watching this pretty closely, it was definitely what was called atheism plus and atheism plus was atheism plus woke. And it was really the, you know, it was predominantly women, people like Rebecca Watson were really at the forefront of it. And they really went to war against, you know, all these creepy guys and all these creepy guys in the, in the, the Epstein orbit, like people like Lawrence Krauss, you know, I think, you know, as toxic as I think woke is, they really did the rest of us a favor because they helped stop this thing in its tracks because they were presenting a rejoinder to the dominance of the movement by people like Randy and Clayton, Dennett and Harris and, you know, on and on and on. They were providing rejoinder to their sort of their dominance and, you know, Harris got it on the terrorism and Middle Eastern stuff. A lot of them really kind of took it in the neck for different reasons. But I really believe, let me just let me just finish my thought. So it's like, I was looking at this stuff. I was writing about a lot. There's a lot of pieces that I mean, some of which I put into the, the appendix of the, the, the ebook version I put in about 100 pages of new material and into that version. And a lot of it was sort of these things that I'd cut, you know, in my first draft. But I was writing about this stuff a lot and I was watching it and I was paying very close attention to it because they were sort of coming after us, you know, people like Randy were sort of to dip in their toes into, you know, these real fringy things like synchromesticism stuff. So I mean, it was, you know, it was opposition research on my part because I knew that they were going to come after us. And I think that they would have had this atheism plus woke schism, not been so successful in really crippling the mainstream skeptical movement. Before I plow forward, I want to go back and make sure we fill in some of the leaps we're making, some of the inside baseball leaps so that people can follow along a little bit if they don't know it. So we all have the James Randy thing down, the amazing million, the million dollar challenge where he said, Hey, anything that is paranormal, I'll pay a million dollars for it. And it was brilliant, brilliant publicity stunt and that it became the focus. And he had kind of created a false, completely false phony quasi pseudo scientific experiment and test. But then it became this standard that everyone could kind of push against. Now, the other thing you're alluding to is all these guys and it was 90% guys were going to the amazing meeting and they were just fawning all over, you know, James Randy and all these other self made quasi celebrities. And in the meantime, guys doing what a lot of guys do at night in at the bar was not a pretty scene. So Schermer Michael Schermer kind of gets sucked into it and he's like, you know, maybe some of the things that he did that weren't so appropriate with young women who maybe had too much to drink or maybe had something else in their drink that wasn't supposed to be there. And then some other people had some and then, as you said, across from Arizona State University, later it comes out, but we know it was rumored about earlier is involved in even slimy or scumier kind of stuff. And then you have, as you said, which is always kind of an interesting phenomenon in these groups is that they kind of, there isn't element of realness to it that I think the co-opters and the social engineers can never really fully control. So you do have someone like Rebecca Watson or other people who are genuine and believe in the cause and they rise up and say, hey, this isn't what we're about guys. This is what we're supposed to be against and it gains traction because there is a certain amount of cultural ethos that's built into that stuff. So is there anything you want to add as just kind of a background or to all that stuff you just said previously? Well, like I said, I think that this was an attempt or beta testing or an experiment to construct an alternative religious paradigm. And I think that woke ultimately one out because the Randy phenomena, the atheist movement, all these things, like you said, were predominantly overwhelmingly sort of low status men, oftentimes single, middle-aged single men, often involved in low tier work in STEM. STEM projects and fields. So I think what happened is that it was probably successful in that they learned how to make people respond to things, articles of faith, really, like the million dollar challenge is an article of faith. It's a great marketing tool, right? And you saw a lot of these quasi-religious or quasi-socialist icons being used to make memes and so on and so forth. But I think that it was never going to be successful because it just wasn't appealing to a demographic that has influence over the rest of society. And I think the woke thing became so overwhelming in the wake of that second Epstein trial that the atheist skeptical movement was buried underneath the avalanche. And I don't know if it's exciting. But the interesting thing to me about that as well is that wokeness and all these kind of outgrowths of PC culture and intersectionalism, they're extremely anti-science. And I think a lot of the original battles between these two wings of the movement were over these anti-scientific claims that the wokeers were trying to instill into dogma. And you had a lot of people like Thunderfoot and Carl Benjamin and the amazing atheists. These are all YouTubers that had pretty substantial audiences really mixing it up with that whole Rebecca Watson corner of the movement. But the interesting thing about that is that not only do they have these very strange quasi-scientific beliefs, but they also are really into the occult and witchcraft and all sorts of strange permutations of the supernatural. So Randy is not only dead, but Randy is spinning in his grave for eternity because everything he tried to build fell apart. I mean, he was successful in undermining a lot of things. He was successful in helping undermine organized religion. He was successful in helping organize a lot of what people would call the patriarchal power structure, whatever. I mean, however they determine it, their terminology changes quite often. If you use old terms from a few months ago, you're suddenly ostracized from the movement. But Randy failed miserably. This is where I take it. I think this divide and rule thing is always going on in these kind of subcultures. And I think when you can break the scientism and the woke communities into two communities that you now control, and you kind of create another forced choice situation where like, okay, nerd, where are you going to go? You're going to go with the scientism people, or are you going to go with the woke people? But the other thing that I think he did that was absolutely fundamentally important, and we still see the ramifications of it today. It was a test run on how to kind of jury rig the emerging science media that was moving to the internet. And I know that because I was right in the middle of it when I was doing all these interviews or like on near-death experience. And this stuff was making it through the scientific literature, particularly the medical scientific literature, the Lancet and all these other really important medical journals. But then when it hit the kind of general public science media, it was being completely distorted and completely turned inside out. And sometimes in a kind of crazy in-your-face way that was just like, why would you even say something like that? You just make yourself look stupid. And I got about 50 interviews on that if anyone wants to bother and go look. But I think there was, in terms of laying the groundwork for that, absolutely, Randy's organization did that. They found the pressure points. They found the leverage points, where to push and also where to lever and all that. And now they've reached a point. And I think we're living that. And I think two things came out of that that I wanted to pull you into talking about. Because one, I like the way that you kind of had that kind of broader analysis that not all these things work as they're planned. And I think that's an important part of understanding how the social engineering game works. Because sometimes in our community, we kind of go overboard on the other side like, oh my God, they have such control that everything they do is so. Yeah. I take global warming. Global warming. What a frickin fail. What a stupid idea. And the reason is because it's the wrong game. If you want to play the global warming game with science. Yeah, you can rig the science for a little while and you can get the 97% fake thing out there. And anyone who wants to go and just dig into that for 15 minutes, you see that that's a fake consensus completely. Rigged. And then you, but then you run into climate. And then you go to the other side of the world. And then you have to be able to go into the other side of the world. And it's not just a dead gate. Y'all, you need as one guy to say, this is really what the data looks like. And here are the emails with the group that reveals that they're rigging the system. But the biggest thing they didn't plan on. Is you're freezing your ass off. In the East coast. And whether we're the entire center of the country too, I mean, look at Texas. So, so now. Well, you can't tell one year to the next. You got to look at the patterns. It's like, yeah, but both are true. When people experience that, they have a, it's a reality check on the science. And for them to try and do the New World Order, which is what all this shit is about, to try and piggyback it on global warming was a huge mistake. But even that was a test run the home run they hit with the pandemic, right? Because it was the same principles, get in there, rig the science, try and get the edicts, but they trumped that a million times over with the pandemic. And I think they had the benefit of one, the Randy, jury rigging the paranormal science and suppressing that and turning it inside out. And then that led to their first attempt with global warming, which was kind of a fail. But then that led to the huge success that they hit with the pandemic. Well, like I said, I mean, that's why I see the whole Randy thing that was like beta testing or A-B testing or an experiment, like a social experiment. That's exactly, what you just described is exactly why I see it in that context. Because like I said, it began to receive what we saw in its place. And this began, I'd say around 2017 or so, was this major gaslighting where science was now unquestionable dogma that this whole thing, trust the science, the science settled. I mean, there were no two more unscientific things you could possibly say in your life. Science is never supposed to be settled. You're not supposed to trust the science, you're supposed to test the science. I mean, that's the whole point of science. And when you see simultaneously with this gaslighting was this, the replication crisis where all of a sudden people were saying, I can't replicate this published peer so-called peer reviewed experiment. And that just grew and grew at one point there was 50% of the experiments couldn't be replicated. And then it became 70% of the published experiments could not be replicated by other scientists. So this whole gaslighting thing and what Randy sort of planted the seeds for was science is religion, scientist is a priesthood. As if scientists are not all completely beholden to their paymasters in government and corporations, like scientists are not individual thinkers, they're not independent in any way, shape or form. If there's any subsection of society that's more controlled and more dependent and more subject to punitive measures if they step out of line, it's the scientific community. A scientific community has been terrorized to silence and complete uniformity of belief. And that's why you have to take care of the people like Rupert Sheldrake or the Dean Raidens, people who use the scientific method in exploring paranormal ideas because that steps outside, that opens the door for her pericy basically like that. And even if these experiments were valid, they need to be discredited. Any invective or insinuation needs to be thrown at them until the persuadables, the weak, the meek, you're sort of like your daily grail crowd when they roll over and accept it. And it's just like, it's gaslighting, it's social control and it's gotten really bare knuckled. And I saw this starting in 2017. I saw how this began to grow. I saw how this began to emerge. I saw the techniques they were using and I would goof on them and post. A lot of those posts and put them back up, by the way, on the blog. So I just saw the methodologies that we're using, the kinds of intimidation. It's all extremely totalitarian, straight out of the mouse playbook. Let's back up on a couple of things before we... So I wanna talk about the experimenter effect. I wanna talk about the replication problem, both of which you brought up. They both relate back to Sheldrick. They both relate back to consciousness really, because it hints at this thing that we've known for a long time that consciousness is somehow fundamental and it's messing up our experiments and our need to kind of measure everything will it don't quite work that way. But the other thing I wanted to stitch in here is, then I'll kind of start with this and then we'll back up into those other ones. One of the reasons I think you see the connection with the Jeffrey Epstein thing is one, of course, these people can be manipulated the same way that any brown stoning operation can manipulate anybody. So why not? It's easy. But the other thing is, I think what all this revealed at some point was how incredibly cost effective the manipulation of science was. It really didn't take much money at all. These guys are starving. You throw 10. Well, that's what I said. Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Let me just put a point on it so we make sure we're saying the same thing. It's like, look, if you have money and you got to start spreading your money around, one of the things I say, one of the ways to explain why science was manipulated in this way is that it wasn't a grand plan anymore that it just started yielding. It got a high yield. It got a high rate of return. Wow, it put a little money over there. God, we got a lot. We put a ton of money over here with this movement, this progressive bullshit movement. We didn't get crap about it. We bought what, a few votes. This is really giving us the bang for our buck. What do you think about that? I think it's been like that for a very, very long time. I think probably in the wake of World War I at the very least, because science really became such an important part of the national security state apparatus. I think we're in the tail end of that. I keep telling people that I really believe that we're on the tail end of the age of discovery. We're on the tail end of the age of scientific breakthrough and technological breakthrough. And I also believe because of trends in society that we are going to see a loss of expertise in the coming years and we'll probably lose a lot of science that we had. So maybe that ties into the same phenomenon as consciousness and so on because maybe there were sciences of consciousness 2000, 3000 years ago and they were just lost. I remember seeing Graham Hancock talking about like, well, look at the pyramid of Giza. And then he went out to some other pyramid that looked like children had created it. And he's like, well, what happened? In a hundred years, you go from kufu to this little mound of pebbles and dirt. Well, I think what happened is that they lost expertise. They might have regained it in later times but I think this is very common among imperial cultures and imperial societies, which we are. I mean, we are living in the American Imperium. We're not living in the country that maybe you and I grew up in. It's no longer that. Somewhere along the line, it became just a full blown empire. It was just never acknowledged as such. So when you talk about things like science or whatever is going on, you can question it, you can offer rejoinders with excellent published tested, confirmed experiment and observation and it doesn't matter because the scientists aren't in control of this. The scientists are all on the payroll of the national security state and they know all too well the difference between what happens to somebody who goes along with the program and the difference between someone else who doesn't, who steps out of line. Because if you step out of line, I would say that your chances are much worse than say a monk in the 12th century committing some sort of heresy. The punishments are a much faster and more severe. Hold up, I mean you make that point and there's something to that. Let me offer a couple of counter points and see where we get about that. But first I have to go back and just fill in something to make sure people understand it. Here's an example of what Chris was talking about with the replication experiment and Sheldrick does a really good job of breaking this down. I'll try and simplify it. If you take mice and you run them through a maze and you get that experiment down to where those mice are now, boom, they're zipping right through the maze because mice learn, right? And then you take that and you publish that work and you publish it and some guy in Australia goes and replicates the experiment that you did in London. You will find that when he ran the experiment before you did a thousand trials with that mouse, his time wasn't so good and now that mouse's time is better because it's the hundredth monkey thing. It's Sheldrick's morphic field and it's just proven over and over again. It's proven, so they have direct experiments where they've proven this but they also have all these kind of what science is. This is kind of indirect evidence that wow, this thing used to work, it used to work and then slowly it's kind of losing its effect. So we have some kind of collective effect on the consciousness field that is creating all of this. That's the best hypothesis we have for that. So I just wanted to add to that to anyone who is kind of wondering what you said, you know, the problem with replicating experiments go to Sheldrick on that. At the experimenter effect, you can go to Sheldrick or Raiden. Raiden was really, Dean Raiden was one of the first ones to really document this. Hey, the experiment comes out one way when we have this guy running the experiment and another way when we have this guy running the experiment and then further what Dean Raiden does is he does the total final nail in the coffin on the double slit slash consciousness experiment and shows that human beings can affect, consciousness can affect your ability to measure anything, anything. So from that point on, science is obsolete because science's whole game is about measuring stuff and now the best science is telling us we can't measure things. And I would also stitch that back into one other thing you were saying about the woke thing. Because the way I think that trickles down into the quote unquote soft sciences is they were barely holding on. One, they have to follow science. They've totally lost their way in terms of just being independent philosophical thinkers. So all they do is pick up these little tidbits from science and try and work that into their philosophical musings or whatever it is, you know? But when there's that shift where science now is kind of skating on thin ice, like maybe none of this is real, I think that propelled the soft sciences into this kind of boom, total, post-modern abstract. That was already there, but I think it gave them this momentum because they saw there was really no place to land with all of this stuff at the end of the day from a hard science standpoint. Do you have any thoughts on that before we move on? Yeah, I do. I think that a lot of the things, you know, like you said that all, if you take a scientific experiment that addresses a paranormal claim, what you're really proving is that these kind of phenomena do not happen under controlled conditions, you know, that you can't control these things. And like a lot of what you're referring to, these more ethereal or ephemeral effects that probably do have them, you know, they do have a science to them, they do have a formula to them, but we're just so far from actually nailing that down that it's almost, I don't even know if it's worth arguing about, you know? It's worth doing the work, but these issues are never gonna solve themselves. They're never gonna solve themselves with people in establishment of science who have no inclination or no motivation to confirm or agree with your findings in any way, shape, or form. So, you know, I actually have a great deal of respect for science, for the scientific method and for people who do real science, you know, not just clock punches in corporate laboratories, you know? And one thing that I say, this is sort of different than, you know, things like consciousness or spirituality, but, you know, in my line of fields, which is, you know, the mystical field dealing with mysticism, I say, don't combine science and mysticism. Don't try to scientifically rationalize your mysticism because what you always end up with is bad science and bad mysticism, you know? And it's neither fish nor foul and it does nobody any good. So, you know, just accept, you know, in a lot of cases that you don't have a methodology, you don't have a predictive model for these things, you're not gonna be able to prove them to people who don't wanna accept them in the first place. So just go with it, you know, and just work from your own results because really in the end of the day, all you really have to work from are the results of the work that you're doing. And if people don't agree with it, you know, whatever, I mean, that's the way it's always been, you know, radical new discoveries never accepted, you know, in their first go-around, it has to go through the process because there's an ego involved and there's also a lot of money involved. If you come up with something that challenges somebody else's business model, they're gonna do everything they possibly can to shut you down. So there you go. I mean, I really start to believe that, you know, we've been all raised to have this almost reverential respect for scientists like they're a priesthood, but look at the old priesthood. Look how the old priesthood turned out, you know what I mean? A lot of these scientists aren't any different. And I think a lot of the science they're doing is just absolute make work to sort of keep them busy so they're not out there, you know, going Ted Kaczynski and the rest of us. Well, there's kind of two ways to take that. So first I wanna bring your attention to this little article that I sent you. This is just, oh man, this is just a dandy. The title of it is Controversy on COVID-19 Mask Study, Spotlights the Messiness of Science During a Pandemic. And this would kind of bring us back to my point earlier about how when we let them get away with climate change, which they kind of remastered from, rebooted from global warming, which was a complete fail. And then they tried to reboot it as climate change, which was equally a fail, maybe not as bad. And it seems like they've kind of abandoned that because they're so successful with the pandemic thing. But here's the quote that I loved about this that I shared with you, I'll be pulling up here. But here, this whole article is about how, gee, we really don't have any good science to support the idea that masks are effective in reducing the spread of this virus among the general population. And I just did a whole show on this. So folks, look, your mom was right when you went to kindergarten and she said, cover your while you cough. So in a laboratory, you can show that a mask stops that little stuff from flying out of your mouth. But that was never the issue, right? That's one of the tools of fake science is it's kind of a home ice thing, right? So let's drag the problem, quote unquote, let's drag the scientific question onto territory that we know we can win. So in this case, it's like, do masks stop stuff from flying out of your mouth? And then let's do all these elaborate laboratory sciencey looking experiments to prove what we already know, of course they did. But the real question anyone ever had on that from a public policy standpoint was, do masks reduce your chance of getting the COVID-19 illness, disease, flu, whatever you want to call it? And consistently, we've known for years that the answer is no and surprisingly no. We don't exactly understand why masks don't work. We don't understand why we never recommended them before and all the SARS and the COVID-1 and the swine flu and all the other, we never got to the point. Because if we did get to the point, the other thing we would have looked at is, well, what are the potential adverse effects of a mask? But we never got there because we never even dreamed, when we say we, remaining like official science to whatever it's that, they had looked at masks and I said, they're not, they just don't seem to yield the results we thought they would in careful studies. So anyways, in this one that I brought up, this to me puts a cherry on what you're talking about when you say this next level science by edict, you know? And here's what the guys say. Well, can I explain, here's the thing. So we have the epidemiology, we have science on this COVID phenomenon, but that's only part, the actual science being done is not really the issue for the people who are driving things like wearing masks, you know, the Fauci's and, you know, the present ruling structure in Washington. This is about creating a cult. This is about instilling cultic behavior in people as a means of control. And, you know, the gaslighting is part of it. So let's just put aside the actual science on the COVID and just put a pin in that and we won't get into the actual disease, you know, because I'm not a virologist. Let me finish my thought. I mean, I'm not a virologist, so I'm not gonna be able to speak to that within the authority, but I'm looking at the phenomenon of the masks and the shutdowns and all the rest of it. And what this is, is that it's all classic cult conditioning. And part of the, one of the hallmarks of cult conditioning is erasing the identity, erasing the person's previous identity. And that's why you see all these people. And I'm just like, what are you doing? Who wear masks in their like social media profiles? Because they wanna show that they're down with the program, that they're part of the cult. You know, they agree with this dominant gaslighting narrative. And, you know, they're part of the in-group. It's all about in-groups and out-groups. And what's really being done here, and I just see it so often, is that it's just constructing a cultic mindset, a cultic behavior set that really doesn't have anything to do with the actual science. You know, even the most generous interpretations of the science that people like the CDC and the World Health Organization are putting out, it has nothing to do with that. The issue here is controlling people's minds, just controlling the attitudes and turning them against each other. You know, so what we have now is that we have the classic cult indoctrination, you know, and we have the sort of the buzzwords that we hear going on, but we also have this uniform, the cultic uniform, which erases the identity. You know, you see this in say basic training in militaries, you know, you shave the head and you take on the uniform because they wanna reduce individuality as much as possible. And that's exactly what's happening here. I mean, it's exact same phenomenon. If you look at the way that this is being conducted, again, even if you agree or disagree with, say, what people like Fauci are saying, that's almost irrelevant at this point because really what it is, it's about cultic behavior and in groups and creating this giant cult in much the same way that Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. St. Chris, this is why I love these dialogues with you and I hope other people can follow along. And especially since you have this kind of Boston kind of, you know, put up your Dukes kind of thing. And I have to Chicago, you know, don't screw with me, don't tell me I'm from Chicago kind of thing. But it's super cool. Man, I'm totally with you, but I almost think, you know, it's a kind of where you wanna start. It's kind of a chicken or the egg thing. So just, I'm gonna swing back to this because again, I'm using the term stitch it together because I think it's kind of interesting to stitch what you're saying together with what I'm saying because I don't think despite how it might sound to people that they're at all in opposition to each other because what I'm trying to build on is that in order to do that level of really kind of perverse social conditioning that just is so far, it's such a moonshot for most people to think that they would be kind of implementing that kind of cultish plan. What I think people can grab onto easier is from a science perspective, the way that we all understand this is supposed to work is that science to inform policy-making decisions and that's supposed to be a transparent process. So when you hear things, and this is the quote that I really wanted to pull out because I think it's like the ultimate quote, when the guy says, yeah, this is really a shitty study, I'll acknowledge that, but I still think we should use it because it supports the idea of mask wearing and we want people to wear masks. And then he says, this is my favorite skeptical quote, instead of clamoring for scientific studies to back up mandates, wait for it, we will tell you if we get more evidence. In the meantime, just wear your mask. So- That's not science, that's not science. Hold on, see, this is the point that we're not in disagreement for here, but the point is, this is what science has become. Where it's okay to say, why are you clamoring for more evidence? Why are you clamoring for proof to support the edicts? And that passes through the system. That's what I think we were saying about the James Randi breakdown of the scientific media is now that passes through the system without even any check or second thought to it. And I think that's where we're at. And I think that's incredibly a first step enabling cornerstone for what you're talking about with the masks as a kind of symbolic social engineering effort. Well, it's cultism, you know, but this is something that I've been looking at for a very, very long time is that there's never been a culture without a cult. There's never been in the history of the world a culture that exists without at least one major cult or if not a predominant cult. It's just, it's never happened. So when people were people like Randi and Harris and Hitchens and Dana and Sagan and all these people were really probably tasked with was just breaking down the old belief systems. And then the new belief system could be sort of eased in. And, you know, one thing that I keep saying and I'm sure maybe a lot of your listeners will just think I'm insane, but really a lot of what this is all about is about restoring a state cults much the same as what we saw in ancient Rome. And that's why we keep seeing all these rituals, public rituals falling on these models taken from ancient Rome that I've been looking at. So when you take the ritualism, which we see at every Superbowl now and every Oscars now. And this is something that I've detailed for 15 years. And you combine it with this cultic gaslighting with this mass conditioning into like this invasion of the body snatchers reality. They go together because they're all moving towards the same goal. And that's why we'll see, you know, there's this whole hue and cry to pull down these old statues of Ulysses Grant or something, whatever. I mean, but look what they're putting up in place of it. You know, in front of the San Francisco City Hall now there's a statue of Asa Burnapal, the Babylonian King, a Syria Babylonian King. And people in the Syrian community looked out and said, that's not Asa Burnapal, that's Gilgamesh. You know, so why are they putting a Gilgamesh statue in front of the San Francisco City Hall? It's bizarre. And we just keep seeing this over and over again. Why do they put a statue of Medusa holding the head of Perseus in front of the courtroom or the courthouse where Harvey Weinstein underwent this extended virtual humiliation? And then that's exactly what it was. Why is this all happening? Because this is all moving towards the goal and the goals in large part were at least suggested if not inferred by SRI back in the early 70s with the changing images of man when they recommended that a post Christian society be constructed along cultic lines and offered up the example of the Freemasons as a model. And when you hear something like that, you go, oh, that's just like pure blue sky, Alex Jones, David I. Craziness. No, it was published. Go look it up yourself if you don't believe me, you can find it. Changing images of man released by the Stanford Research Institute. So this stuff is not new. It's been going on for a while. And I just, like I said, I don't think you can separate this whole cultic behavior where you're creating a demonology. Anybody who doesn't wear the mask is a demon. And the mask is the annihilation of individuality, which is, it's a prime aspect of any cult throughout history. So you can't separate all these things. And that kind of, you know, IFL science, whatever, any vestiges of Randyism, I would just predict they would just be erased from society altogether. You know, Rebecca Watson had written when Randy died, had written, you know, a very skating article, sort of decrying him for heresy and sacrilege against the New Oak faith. And I think that had some great effect. I mean, nobody is gonna talk about Randy anymore. He's over. I mean, all these people are over. They have this rump cult, but society has moved on. And I think that the social engineers have moved on. My point is one of the things that fell out of that was the knowledge in terms of how to manipulate the science media in a way that they didn't have before. They had a lot of- Yeah, but the communists did that. The Nazis did that. I mean, the manipulation of science is an old phenomenon. You're just kind of steam rolling over the point. I was on the front line of this. I'm telling you, for 10 years with the Sheldrick and the Raidens experiments and then all the NDE and the Pinvon Lommel. And I traced that stuff as it came out through the scientific literature and then into the popular science literature. And they became more refined and more exact in how to manipulate that. There was a real growth process there. So it's almost to me like the butterfly coming out of the caterpillar. They didn't need Randy anymore. To a certain extent, Randy became a burden. They had all the skills. They had the gang stalking on Wikipedia to control, I can't even believe you have a Wikipedia entry. I remember when Sheldrick went on to change his Wikipedia entry and he was kicked off it. They figured all that stuff out. You can't believe that I have a Wikipedia entry? Yes, yes. I was created like a long time ago. I don't know. Some guy who interviewed me for a podcast created that without my permission. So. Yeah, well, it's coming down after this show probably someone will get out there and take it down. But the point is, again, I lived through that. They didn't know how to do that stuff before and then after they did know how to do that stuff. So you can say the Nazis or whoever, Stalin knew how to do it. But the modern day kind of Randyite's kind of crazy skeptics that, by the way, when my show first aired, I had 300 negative reviews on Apple within two months. Now this is called- Yeah, it's called regaining. Yeah, so this is back in the day. Yeah, regaining. This is back in the day where, you know, you don't get, you'll have a hard time finding somebody with 300 negative, 300 way back in the day, like 10, 12 years ago. So I'm just saying they developed a skill set in terms of how to manipulate the science media that they didn't have before. And I guess I've said it five times over now, but that's kind of one place I want to go with that. It's accelerated because of social media. And I think it's, you know, there are a couple of factors playing in here. One is that instant outrage machine on Twitter and to a lesser extent, Facebook. And a lot of it is a generation of young people who are extremely alienated, who are very poorly educated and who've been very poorly prepared for the workplace and really don't have anything with time on their hands. And they become very angry and bitter about that. And I would say understandably, you know, I think that I remember reading in Starship Troopers and Robert Highline said, you know, that he had, well, he said to the guys of a teacher in the military academy said, you know, children are not delinquent, parents are delinquent and not raising their children properly. Words to that effect. And I think that that's, you know, a major part we see. And then of course, now today, you know, we have this whole lockdown thing that's been going on for over a year now. People have a lot of time on their hands and they're afraid and they're being gaslit and they have to lash out at someone. And, you know, they're great penalties for lashing out at, you know, X amount of groups who are protected. So you just find the people who aren't protected and unleash all your anger on them. Yeah, it's been going on for, I don't know, three or four years now. And, you know, the Trump administration, you know, the whole de-election and all that kind of stuff and all this Russian gate kind of business. I think that just poured gasoline on the fire. It just, it accelerated this whole cult, this mass cult brainwashing, you know, to a degree that we have, like I said, we haven't seen since the Cultural Revolution in China in the 60s. Okay, so folks, I wanna remind you that this fantastic kind of back and forth dialogue we're having is loosely based on this book, The Endless American Midnight. And I wanna remind you this, we have basically talked about one or two of the short chapters in this book. We could, I could, and I will try and get Chris back on as often as I can to talk about more and more and more of these because they're all just this deep. It's like I told you at the beginning, when you dive into the secret sun, you better clear the afternoon or the evening off because you might be there for a while. It's incredibly deep. So I thought what we would try and do, I would love to hammer you on the technology thing because I just don't think you got the chops there. I mean, I was in the PhD program in artificial intelligence many moons ago. I walked the halls of Texas Instruments. I just interviewed a gold badger from Texas Instruments who was a senior member of the technical staff and as a PhD in quantum computing from the University of Texas. I interviewed Riz Verk from the MIT Game Lab. I can tell the bullshitters and the non-bullshitters. Two of those guys are, those two guys are definitely not bullshitters. And this idea that we've kind of hit the wall, no, what we have to worry about is the opposite of that because as much as we don't like the crazy over the top singularity idea, there is an ultimate truth to the advancement of technology, the advancement of computer technology and kind of augmented consciousness that is undeniable. But unless you had a quick comment on that. Yeah, I do have a quick comment on it. And really, I use a true believer in all that stuff up until not that long ago. And I would have agreed with anything anybody said about AI or quantum computing or technological progress. But a couple of things just happened. First of all, what happened is that I've been reading this popular science material for most of my life. And I just keep seeing these promises made over and over and over again. And they, nothing ever comes to them. These amazing breakthroughs. Yeah, but that's what you just, you never see. But no, let me just finish what I'm saying. So, and then they recycle these things. The other thing that I kind of base that on is just my journeys around the internet, just various kind of strange corners, maybe some different Reddit forums or whatnot. And there's always a lot of people involved in these tech firms that are just like, I have to say AI stuff, it's just... Chris, it's not what they say it is. Let me give you two touch points that you can go research if you want on your own. One is a movie that anyone can watch. And I talked about it a lot. I think it's super interesting. It's the movie's called Alpha Go. Have you ever seen it? It's a Netflix movie. And it's about Google's Alpha Go project to create a machine learning, game playing, Go winner. And Go is this kind of next level chess that's been around in Asia forever. And if you go to China, Korea, particularly Japan, any of the Asian countries, Go was like, wow. And the best Go player in the world is considered an untouchable genius in the way that we think about chess, right? And everyone has acknowledged for the longest time that Go from a machine learning standpoint is more difficult than chess. Chess was cracked a few years ago with big blue, deep blue, yeah, deep blue by IBM in kind of a dorky way. But go watch that documentary on Netflix or wherever it's at now. And you'll see the whole thing's laid out there. And it becomes a very public event. And the guy who is this Korean guy who's the world champ goes through the same process we're all gonna go through when we realize we really can't compete with machine intelligence. And Easter egg in the whole thing is that the way the machine beats him is actually a completely novel and new way of thinking about that problem that was never considered before because the way that humans think is different than the way that computers think. So check out that number one, but then check out number two to just really scare you is if you know anything about quantum physics, you know that one of the principles of quantum physics is this idea of entanglement is that you can have things and that they become entangled and entanglement suggests that time and space doesn't really exist because these bits as they're flipped flip across the world at the same time. Well, the technology, the engineering that comes out of that to this point has reached the point where our friends and our future overlords in China have now developed a satellite modem that uses quantum entanglement to send information. This is unprecedented. It's never been even, we're way behind on that at least in terms of what they tell us the implications for it in terms of encrypted communication and in terms of just instant communication are mind blowing. So when you start combining these things like machine intelligence, machine learning, AI, strong AI where we can demonstrate it and then our ability to harvest the quantum world and turn it into technology, there's plenty of room for more advancement. Well, I know what you're saying but there's the issue of things being able to be done on paper and then the issue of things being practical in a real world setting. And I think there's a lot of interesting theoretical science pertaining to AI and things like that. But I would just like to see more evidence. You can train a machine to play go but can you train that same machine to cook a hard boiled egg? Can you train that same machine to- We never thought we could train a machine to play go. They thought it was impossible. But is it really? I mean, it all works along, you know, certain systems and algorithms. No, it doesn't. See, it doesn't. Like the way they, if you got to have a little bit of a deeper understanding of that stuff and then you got to go watch the film because the way they did it with AlphaGo was quite unique. One, they used something called neural networks that completely lend themselves to quantum computing which is the next huge leap. Quantum computing at this point isn't good for a lot of problems. But it's good for neural network problems. So they combined that with machine learning and then along with just kind of this deep database diving kind of deep blue stuff. And again, you shouldn't know about any of this stuff. I was a fricking computer programmer. I was in the AI program at the University of Arizona. You know, you study this stuff. It'd be like me talking about music. I don't know crap about music. But I know something about this. And I know it's not just we could program it to do anything. It's like we didn't know how to do it. Some really smart guys got some new technology and suddenly it became possible for them to do stuff. Well, you know, listen, I'm persuadable. It's funny. I'm very skeptical about a lot of things, pretty much everything, because I like to test things and I like to have them proven to me. And I've read a lot of these articles on these things and I've seen some of these videos and so on. And listen, if they prove me wrong, that's fine. I mean, I'm wrong all the time. I have no problem with being wrong. I don't want to be right. I want to know the truth. There's a big difference between the two. But like I said, I just keep seeing this stuff cycle over and over again. And it just makes me very jaded. Everything has been right around the corner since I was in my teens. Moon bases were right around the corner and autonomous robots were right around the corner. And you name it, I get to be very skeptical about it and a little bit jaded and cynical. But like I said, I'm persuadable. We'll see what happens. But I just think that there's an immense amount of mythology that kind of arises out of these things, that there are giant, five mile deep underground bases in the Archelaida Mesa where flying saucers are being reverse engineered and all these kinds of things. I mean, you hear these stories over and over again and it's never amongst anything. So like the Zoom technology, very useful, very impressive. How is it different than what people like Jacques Fillet were working on in the early 70s? I mean, all of the technology that we have now was being theorized and modeled and experimented with 50 years or so ago. So I am skeptical, but I'm also persuadable. Like I said, I don't wanna be right. I wanna know the truth. You with me? Yeah. I love that point about persuadable and I wanna touch on it for just a second because like I told you in the email, you got a batting average that's way above Hall of Fame. You know what I mean? Like nobody gets up there and swings and knocks everything out of the park. And if you're not willing to kind of go in all these different areas, like I am, I talk about so much stuff that I have no business talking about because I really don't know. But sometimes you have to try and make those connections and stick your neck out because otherwise you're not gonna have a chance to really invite the dialogue. And if you are open like you are, then it's all good in the end anyway because you learn something. And that doesn't mean that I'm right because I might be wrong on the AI stuff and you might be right. And I'm totally down with that. So I just so respect that and I wanna emphasize that because you know one of the sure signs of a phony of a fake and I've found it so many times on this show is when they won't come out. They're all talk and then it's like, great. I provide a fair dialogue. I provide an open dialogue but they don't want to engage really. They wanna do this kind of hide and seek kind of thing. Hey, do you have time to talk a little bit about the Romans? You wanna try and do it in 15 minutes? Sure. So Chris, you have been super duper generous with your time and I do wanna try. We'll do a quick hit on this last topic. Another folks, another chapter from this amazing book The Endless American Midnight which not only can you buy and curl up on yourself and read but it's also a great one to give to somebody else who maybe isn't as familiar with Chris's work as you are and they can kind of get it without having to do the deep dive. So here's another one. Why I am not a mythicist. A mythicist being kind of someone who believes that Jesus was a myth in history and I am gonna do so many shows on this because I think there's a really important tracing back of social engineering that goes on with this whole thing but in terms of the groundwork for it why don't we start with where you were going with this and some of the observations you have about the mythicist thing? Well, I was friendly with Acharya asks Dorothy Murdoch she passed away a few years ago and I had a number of conversations with her and I've been following this stuff for a long time. People know Acharya asks Zeitgeist is where she really got a big boost in popularity. But here's the problem. I mean, Acharya was a very good scholar but she, I mean, she was a good researcher but I think she was very credulous because she accepted a lot of very questionable sources from late 19th century Victorian England and a lot of the discoveries, I mean, just the actual available evidence is very poor and there's a lot of conjecture there and there's a lot of free Masonic wishful thinking embedded into a lot of that stuff. So, somebody who's read a lot of these myths that she said were just like Jesus that they're not they just aren't. I mean, if you actually read these stories they're just not like the story of Jesus. You can stretch comparisons in some cases and they're always gonna be overlaps because a lot of this stuff a lot of these myths and these rituals and so on are based in the stars, it's based on star magic. So there is gonna be certain amount of overlap but I think even the guy who made Zeitgeist is pretty much disowned that first section there which the scholarship is just very poor. There are a lot of things that are said to be just like Jesus, they're just not. And I think that a lot of the mythicist arguments are based on a couple of faulty assumptions. First of all, that these comparisons are valid which they're not. Second of all, that real people who do real things can't be mythologized, which is just you know people are mythologized all the time. I mean, look at how Donald Trump has been mythologized. So myth, mythicizing people, you know there's no great leap there. I mean, the examples that I pointed out was that these movies are like Billy the Kid versus Dracula or you know, Jesse James versus Frankenstein's daughter. I mean, Jesse James and Billy the Kid were both real people. As far as I know, they never did battle with Dracula or with Frankenstein's daughter. You're talking about Bible stories that are dismissed as mythology and you say we have to be more open to how history was written during that period. And then you're also saying that the primary impetus for the initial thrust of the mythicist movement is wow, this Jesus is just a reboot of a movie we've seen before in all these other religions just so people understand where you're coming from. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what it boils down to. But you know, a lot of the comparisons they make are either just flat out wrong. You know, based on, you know, mythologizing of mythology in the late 19th century in Victorian England and which was really a hot house for this stuff. You know, a great case of point is somebody like Gerald Massey. I mean, nobody, I mean, people in even an esoteric Egyptology don't take Gerald Massey very seriously because he just made things up. And a lot of these guys made things up because they had these other agendas and you know, you couldn't fact check a lot of this stuff back then. So, you know, like I said, I mean, I think Dorothy, I mean, Dorothy was brilliant. She could read Latin, she could read Greek, she could read Hebrew, you know, I mean, all these things. But just because you're brilliant doesn't mean you're not credulous or a little bit too impressionable. And you know, this is the same thing with anybody in any establishment scientists, science. You know, maybe they are brilliant people that have degrees up the wazoo. I mean, look at somebody like Kurtzwell. Everybody knows that Kurtzwell is a brilliant man. He's a genius, but he's all into this whole transhumanism kick that nobody takes seriously. I mean, some people will be reluctant to admit they don't take it seriously, but nobody takes this stuff seriously. It's just like Kurtzwell is so afraid of death that he has to build his own religion, you know, this whole singularity religion that just doesn't pass muster. And I think the same was true with Dorothy. So, I mean, I've read the other material, you know, but I just don't find it persuadable. And there are a number of reasons, you know, if you wanna get into them, why I would argue that Jesus was not mythological figure, but somebody whose life, whose real life became mythologized because there is not one single figure from the ancient world whose life was not mythologized in one way or another. See, I'm coming at it from a different angle than you, Chris, big surprise. The folks who stuck her out here for a couple of hours and listen to this. The pivotal figure in this story to me is Flavius Josephus. And enough people have heard me talk about this, but you know, just as a backgrounder, Josephus is this Jewish general in Galilee when the Romans come to kind of put down the rebellion in Judea for the untimed time, he is the general of the First Army they meet. And what a lot of people will acknowledge and as part of just our history is that Josephus's account becomes the historical record for that campaign. And he's quite an author. He cranks out the books one after another. And as the story goes, see, Josephus defends the best he can against the Romans and then goes into a cave and admits that he better decides that it's best to commit suicide, even though it's against Jewish law, than to go out and be captured by the Romans. So they do this elaborate thing where they all kind of kill each other till there's just two left. And then Josephus comes out of the cave and has a revelatory experience. He actually has two revelatory experiences. The first one that you'll hear just parroted over and over again on every history channel, BBC, and as well as biblical scholar and religious scholar is that he has a prophecy that the Spasian who is just this general and doesn't, isn't in the bloodline of Caesar. So wouldn't it seem to be a likely candidate for becoming the next Caesar? But he says, you know what? You're gonna be the guy in a couple of years. He says really to think that. So the story goes, he kind of keeps him around and then when he's made emperor, when he's made Caesar, he says, wow, this guy's really valuable. We should keep him around as the historian. But the other thing that he says that is the total game changer that everyone overlooks that completely reveals the whole game in terms of social engineering 2000 years ago and the beginning of how the Romans were almost as smart as we are cause no one's as smart as we are at running these games is that Josephus comes out of the cave and he says, you know what? I'm first of all, he says, I'm a super Jew. And by that, when I was 14 years old, I knew the Torah and I knew the law so well that I went to Jerusalem and I kicked butt intellectually on all the other old men that were there and they all bowed down to me and said, wow, you're like a dream kid. You're the smartest kid in the world. And then he has all these other claims that he makes about how just he was a member of the scenes in the Pharisee. He was all of them at the same time. All these just impossible to believe and impossible for a true Jew at the time to be. But anyways, he comes out of the cave and here's what he says, Chris. He says, you know what? I love my Jewish people but you guys miss the point. Our entire prophecy, our entire religion points towards the Spasian being the Messiah, the Spasian being the one that would fulfill our prophecies. So you talk in that article about Joe Atwell. I love Joe Atwell, but I fear that Joe Atwell has kind of combined two conspiracies together in a way that kind of obfuscates what's really going on. Because this first conspiracy is really the most important and that's that Josephus emerging from that cave and saying, I'm the super Jew and I'm telling you folks, here's what it's about. The Spasian is the Messiah. We should all, all good Jewish people should convert over. And the reason why this isn't kind of emphasized and understood is because this is global warming. It's a failed conspiracy. It doesn't work. Everybody at Judea doesn't go, oh, okay. The Spasian is really, we're gonna rewrite our entire religion, all our family beliefs. The Spasian, it's a failed Psiop but it's a Psiop nonetheless. So we don't have time to go into all this but I do want to kind of kick this off and see if maybe we generate an ongoing dialogue about this because I think it's right up your alley and I think it's- I'm confused though. I mean, I don't understand how this impacts on, my argument that Jesus was a real person who was mythologized. I'm not really getting the connection here. Well, it's kind of a Chris Knowles kind of connection that would require about five more leaps. But the point is, all bets are off now. Because- I don't know, I mean, a lot of people were, there were a lot of people who came up and said, I'm the Messiah, particularly during those wars. So I mean, the Messiah just meant you were the king. You were the ruler of Israel. It was really Paul who comes along and says, well, he's the ruler of Israel, but he's also this mystery God that were very popular around the Mediterranean basin at that time. You know, these mystery figures, Addis, Adonis, Mithras, I mean, all these people, there were a lot of these cults that were competing for members. And Paul sort of got the notion that this Jesus wasn't just the Messiah of Israel, the king of Israel. He was more than that. He was the Messiah of the kingdom of heaven. That his kingdom was not just in this one little patch of ground on the Eastern Mediterranean, his kingdom was the heavenly kingdom. And that so much of his language, I mean, I've always said that I have a tremendous admiration for Paul because I think he was a great, I don't want to say a great salesman because that sort of diminishes what he did, but he was a great persuader. He was a great orator and a great persuader. So, and then people say that Paul's, you know, the Paul was fictional too. And, you know, one of the examples that just drives me crazy when they say that Jesus was a mythological figure is this whole Apollonius of Tyanna thing. Now, nobody, you know, I guess he was known, but nobody announced him as this messianic figure until the middle of the third century. And most of that was coming from the wife of Caesar. So I think that a lot of the groundwork again, like you can look at a book and say, well, there's this figure, Apollonius of Tyanna and he's similar to Jesus. And therefore Jesus must be a copy of him when it's actually the other way around. And it was very much a sigh off because there were a lot of problems going on with Christians and Jews throughout the empire at the time. So like I said, I mean, when you really break down the details of this stuff and you get past the sort of sensationalistic claims and I understand what you're saying about your Apollon. And I think you're right to a certain extent. But my argument is that- What do you think I'm saying? What do you think I'm saying about your- I mean, let me finish. Let me just finish. I mean, people are mythologized. People have mythologies from other people grafted onto them. This has happened throughout history. What I did when I went back and looked at the Gospels, I looked at the source material is that there were just some very unusual things that kept popping up that gave it sort of the sense of authenticity. It doesn't mean all the stories or all the miracles or the resurrection. It doesn't necessarily mean that all those things are correct or those other things actually happened. But just this basic figure, this son of a carpenter, which is really Texan, which is really basically a freemason, stone worker, builder, so on and so forth. You know, traveled. Roman occupied Judea and Israel at the time, preaching his message. He was a follower of John the Baptist and so on and so forth. Now, the thing that really struck me curious about this is that if you look in the book of Luke, it all starts off with the Baptist. And what I became convinced of because of the amount of detail that you read about things that the Baptist was said to have said is I think that there was Baptist literature. I think that there was a Baptist corpus circulating at the time. So I think there were a lot of people who knew about John, who knew about the things that John said and the things that John teach and then saw these people, these strange guys from Jerusalem running around talking about this Jesus character. Like, who is this Jesus? Oh, wait, was any of that follower of John who was crucified for a sedition? Why should we follow him? And then it just grows from there. But I think the fact that there's so much, they talk about like the criterion of embarrassment. There's so many stories that you just would not put in a hagiography in the first century. It just wouldn't happen because what these things really were was like, how great this person is. Everything they did was great. Everything they touched turned to gold. Yeah, you didn't have to explain all these things that I believe were, you know, rumors going around and so on and so forth because let me tell you this, there's a myth that just drives me crazy about this technological age is that, you know, there weren't mass communications that people didn't talk constantly talking to each other constantly gossiping that you had, you know, newsreaders running around the cities all day and night, you had preachers and there were people communicating on an incessant basis, particularly when you talk about like Jerusalem or Alexandria, you know, places where this stuff really emerged from. People, you know, these people were not ignorant, you know, it just like, it drives me crazy like before we had the internet, we didn't know what was going on. Like we didn't have a million magazines and newspapers on every street corner and in every major city, you know, everybody knew what was going on. I mean, I think people were a lot better educated back then, you know, go look at any time magazine or a music magazine from the seventies and look at them today. And it's just like, unbelievable, you know, the dumbing down has been so apparent. So Jesus to me was a real figure. I believe that he was part of this tradition of magicians dating back to Mesopotamia. I think it was a fall of John the Baptist who might have fallen out with John. And that, when you go under those, just those basic, I don't even want to say assumptions just for those basic CCs. And you read the Gospels themselves, you know, never mind, Joseph, never mind any of this other stuff. Just look what these people were saying about themselves and about their leader. You just start to realize that there's a lot of bending over backwards to explain things. Well, okay, you might have heard that Jesus did this, but really what it was was this, you know what I mean? Like you might have heard that he was crucified, but really what happened is that, you know, he rose into the third day and these angels took him up to heaven after this big Pentecost and so on and so forth. So if you're familiar with the ancient literature and you're familiar with how these figures were all inevitably mythologized because anybody who was a king or, you know, or a Cesar or high priest or whatever, had all these ass-kissing, you know, courtesans around them, you know, just telling them how great they were all that they were. And that's what went into the record. So I think we're maybe talking about like two different things. Like I'm just saying that, you know, I'm not saying that Jesus was an Messiah or Jesus was the Son of God. I'm saying that he was a real person who did real things and his life became mythologized because, you know, a very brilliant orator named Saul of Tarsus came around and thought that, you know, Jesus would be because of maybe this material that Jesus had appropriated from John or whatever. I mean, whatever the situation would be would be an excellent mystery cult figure. Like there were just dozens and dozens all over the place at the time. So we probably won't have time to get into this and we might, in the future, I might continue to filter stuff your way. We're talking about two different things, but then again, we're not talking about two different things. Here's where I'm at kind of bottom line. One, the Bible is pro-Roman in a way that's unexplainable in light of the history between Rome and Judea. No, it's not unexplainable because it was all edited by the Romans. It was edited by the church, you know, who are all Romans. You know, the church, the Roman church won out. The Roman church got the year of Caesar. They won all the battles. They declared everyone else who didn't go along with their line heretics. Here's my point, Chris. The Bible is pro-Roman because Josephus is pro-Roman. And Josephus is explicitly pro-Roman in a way that can only be understood as propaganda. And when you look at religious scholars, which is really not a fair name because 99% of them are not scholars, they're acknowledging the fact that they're heavily dependent on Josephus, even though they see all the problems with Josephus. They see that Josephus is completely propagandizing. He's completely conflating. He's just not telling the truth over and over again. He says he knows the Jewish law so well and then he contradicts Jewish law over and over again in his writings. This is a classic case of, I'm looking for my keys over into the lamppost, even though I lost them out in the parking lot that's dark, but the light is better over here. So I got volumes and volumes of Josephus. I'm gonna go with that because I like that. It makes me feel good that I can read some stuff and analyze it. But here's the real point where we owe a huge debt to Atwell. And that is that the Gospels are clearly undeniably dependent on Josephus. You can read the two side by side and it's the same story told the different way. One is told as a quote unquote, Roman slash Jewish historian, that is Josephus. And the other is reinterpreted by the Gospel writers as prophecy. Atwell proves this conclusively over and over again in detail where he takes that eventually in terms of mythicism, I agree with you. I don't think you can take it that far, but that point that he makes that the Gospels are dependent on Josephus to me is undeniably proven. It's also proven by our history because for the longest time for hundreds of years Josephus's word of the Jews was required reading along with the Bible. In the home, there was the Bible and there was Josephus and it was seen that Josephus was supporting the whole story because it was telling the whole story. The other thing that I'd add to that is that I think when we really step back and we look at why that history still comes down to us today. I mean, why don't we have that kind of history of all the other groups that oppose the Romans that were even bigger and stronger than the little Judea over there? It's because we didn't see the way the thing was gonna turn out, but the way that thing turned out when they co-opted the religion and kind of made it into a proto-Roman tool that they could use, well then it became necessary to drag along all the Christian stuff and along with it all the Jewish stuff that was all part of their thing that would have just been stomped out of history like everything else that was stomped out in Roman history that they didn't wanna hear. So I think the biggest mistake that I see that's being made in this work is that one, we're working backwards to try and understand this Jesus character rather than working bottom up from the data that we have. But the other two biggest things that I see is one, we just don't factor, we seem to easily fall into exactly what we're talking about before, which is the flip side of the scientism thing, which is the atheism, wokeness kind of view of this. So this history is written in a way that suggests that none of these people had a real spiritual experience, none of them. So Josephus didn't have a rich spiritual life. Vespasian, who was up stabbing his sword through the throat of a druid, wasn't tossing and turning at night like we all do about what the spiritual, what that did to his soul. All these people had a rich spiritual life, but we write the history as if we're all, you know, Hitchens style atheists that none of that stuff could possibly be true. And so I don't know, I've kind of thrown a ton on the table. We won't have time to process it all, but I wanna give you a chance to kind of maybe lead us out for this round of our talk about the mythosis. Well, one thing that I will say, I mean, because we're getting a little apples and oranges here because we're talking about Jesus, the New Testament, then we're talking about the Bible and then we're talking about the post biblical period. I mean, there are a lot of things to sort of separate and unpack here. But one of the things that I would say is that Judaism and Christianity were really not substantially different than the other religions. That's the myth that comes down. You know, the Judaism, you know, the Yahweh cult, which is the same figure as Zeus and Jupiter and Baal and so on, that this cult was substantially different than any of the other cults. And it's just not true. It's just, you know, somebody like Julian the Apostate said that, you know, when he was reaching out to the Jews after the exhalation, he said, you know, we're a lot alike, you know? We are, you know, our Jupiter ceremonies and rituals and so on and so forth are a lot like yours, you know? I mean, you can look this up and this is known. And the other thing that you gotta do is just realize that any religious text is gonna be just glazed over with symbolism and ritual and, you know, particularly star symbolism. The thing that I keep going through is I just can't believe how much stars, when you just look at a simple map, like what I have here and line it up against the Bible stories, it's just astonishing because the stars, you know, we're heaven. That was what they saw as heaven. That's what they saw as the heaven evolved, you know, the stars above them. So I think that, you know, there are a lot of different issues here, but really, like I said, what it really boils down to is like, I'm not making any supernatural claims as to Jesus in that very, you know, rather maybe over large chapter that you're referring to. What I'm saying is that I believe and I still believe and I don't see any reason to disbelieve that he was a real person who lived and died and his followers came along because he inspired them in a particular way. And then there was a second, you know, there's a second Jesus really, which is Paul who builds the whole thing up through the dint of his own efforts. And it's just, these are real people that just became part of a mythology machine, just the same way that, you know, Minister T has a TV show where he's like wrestling with dinosaurs or cartoon show on Saturday morning where he's wrestling with dinosaurs or whatever. I mean, real people get mythologized. It happens all the time. It's not unusual and it's not unique to the Bible in any way, shape or form. So Chris, again, thanks so much. All this time is just awesome talking with you. It's just so cool, so fun. The endless America at midnight is great. He will live up in the sky. Awesome. We talked about it last time Chris was here and you can find a bunch of other of his books on Amazon. Be sure to check out The Secret Sun. What's coming up for you either new books or I know you're coming up with another edition of kind of collections from The Secret Sun blog, but what's got your interest right now? What can we expect to see from you? I'm working on so many different things right now. My own mind is boggled. My main project for the new year has been to just go through my archives and try and organize it into more easily digestible portions and so on. One of the things that happened is that a blog are changed over their interface. So most of my posts before say like 2012 or so, all the text alignments all messed up and everything is just a big jumble and I have to sit there and go through and manually reform out everything. But I have a lot of stuff going on just to check the blog and then of course there's the paper on The Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism that I just opened it and I've got a lot of material up there, mostly podcasts, you know, podcast recordings that you can listen to and explore a number of different topics. So there's a lot coming up. I'm really just at the beginning of this process. It's exciting for all of us and we'll be sure to be checking back in with you soon. So thanks again so much for coming on today. Thank you. Thanks again to Chris Knowles for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I tee up because it's just classic, Chris is what do you make of his idea about masks and cult signaling? You know, it sounds like such a stretch but like I said in the interview, Chris, batting average, hall of fame, man. Don't bet against the hall of famer. Let me know your thoughts anywhere you can find me. More coming. Until next time, take care, bye for now.