 start the sequence we've got activity on the hotline they've had their chance no no somebody's talking to the Kremlin that's a clip from i don't know wait a minute does it even matter i mean i think that's the sum of all fears but doesn't even matter it's just some other phony baloney orchestrated intelligence community propaganda sci-op major motion picture bullshit and i guess if you're uncomfortable with that idea if you're uncomfortable with the idea that you're being constantly played manipulated by some parapolitical sci-op machine that we can't even begin to ramp our head around then you might have a hard time with today's interview with recluse here's a clip i want people to understand the techniques especially in terms of psychological operations that are being used i mean not just so you can recognize them but so you can learn how to use them yourself because i mean effectively if we are going to have a third position or we are simply going to try to sway one of the two dominant positions anymore just say humanitarian direction what they're currently geared towards we have to understand their techniques and their methods welcome to skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers thinkers and their critics i'm your host alex secaris and today we welcome steven snider aka recluse to skeptico recluse is the author of a new book i have up on the screen if you're watching a special relationship trump epstein and the secret and the secret history of the anglo-american establishment i also wanted to mention another great book that steven did along with his co-host co-creator of the excellent the farm podcast and that is a book titled strange tales of the parapolitical post war nazis mercenaries and other secret history you can find that book on amazon but the other place and the real place to go to find that and the new book that's coming out is the visip blog that recluse does and you can go right there to the store and it's better for him i mean he gets a little bit more out of it which we definitely want when you're doing your own books like that so if you're unfamiliar with his work uh oh you're in for a real treat i mean recluse is very much of a deep dive kind of guy tons of research backed up with tons of really solid references and a lot of if only things were that simple kind of insights which i love because that's kind of this level three kind of stuff it's never simple it's never one way so it's going to be great fun for me i've been really looking forward to this one recluse man welcome to skeptico thanks so much for joining me yeah well thanks for having me on alex so you know what i thought we do is just uh jump in why don't you give folks a quick scan overview of those two books because what i'm really hoping to do is kind of stitch stomach stitch some of this stuff together particularly as it's relating to the craziness that is unfolding on a daily basis and i love how you're pulling the lens back to this parapolitical perspective that is a little bit removed from the normal kind of conspiracy theory perspective but it's absolutely essential to understanding any of this so with that kind of lens that i've already applied to the thing tell us about uh these two books that people might be interested in well the first one strange tales was kind of an anthology it was a collection of essays that i myself and frank zero had written frank did like the introduction and i think the uh was at the r of i each of one uh and then i did three myself one of them was on the uh you know famous or infamous one point of view melan family of pittsburgh uh they've certainly been involved in a lot of intrigues uh very wealthy family force thomas melan was the witness of secretary treasury during uh the 1920s leading up to three can i just interject i just want to make sure you hit the high levels because you know for folks who are coming at this cold parapolitical is really really interesting in terms of where you're taking that i mean maybe break it down at that basic of a level of what does parapolitical mean to you and why would kind of most people that run across would go oh he's just a conspiracy conspiracy theory guy and well yeah yeah well that's actually what we're trying to like get away from essentially i mean parapolitical was essentially an attempt to do a more of a scholarly approach to deep politics i mean it would be a field that was uh really pioneered i think uh going into the 70s by researchers like peter dale scott or albert mccoy and uh you know you can sort of see the lineage going on people like Douglas valentine with the great jeffrey bale those types of people but essentially i mean it was where you were actually doing your research you know i mean one of the things that i've learned doing this about ten you know for ten years or so now that i mean the really the great stories and the really true stories are not the ones that you're going to find necessarily online and youtube videos or even in books frankly i mean they're going to be in private papers that are stashed away at all these different universities across the country they're going to be in personal interviews with some of these characters but i mean that's where you find the stuff that nobody's ever really heard of before and that's really to me the essence of true research i mean it's not just you know looking at some of the you know time warren throats conspiracy culture like the old peril horse and using that as a citation over and over again is doing a legitimate and original research to try to bring new perspectives into a lot of these topics and that to me is what differentiates our politics from spirit theory you know i absolutely agree with you but i'd add something else because i think there's so much more to what uh you're doing here in the i don't maybe so much more as maybe a little bit too much but just to me there's a lens focus kind of shift in that we live i think we've we've now adapted to the parapolitical culture that we live in you know i'm older guy than you are so i remember back you know the jfk assassination we ground on that you know all the books and the doubts and all that stuff for years and years and years jfk is parapolitical it always was parapolitical but we never had that lens so i think then we lived through that and we got into this conspiracy you know famous bush up there kind of laying out the word you know don't believe these conspiracy kind of things and we shifted and i think what you're doing is bringing that shift back and saying you know really this is the only way to look at any of this stuff is through this parapolitical and you're living in a parapolitical world that's what i see you saying so to me it's not even so much that we have to throw things away because they're too conspiratorial or they're citing the same references over and over again to me what you're really doing is a lens change and saying wait all this stuff that you think is real is really parapolitical it's social engineering it's mind games it's all this psi-op kind of stuff what do you think about that lens shift kind of thing well i mean certainly i think in my case really that's what i've been trying to do a lot i mean especially relatively recently and trying to actually look more at um conspiracy culture itself because i mean it's very much a part of all of this i mean as much as anything and i mean it's really been instrumental i think in fragmenting the worldview of civilization as a whole you know which we're definitely living in right now very much uh it's you know it's frankly been terrible consequences in that sense and that's one of the reasons why i've been trying to put such an emphasis on that because i want people to understand how all these psychological warfare operations you know function and how they affect us and how they affect the different narratives that shape our reality essentially that's a great point and with that maybe i'd bring you back to this this book the strange tears tales of the parapolitical because one of the things you do in there and it's kind of an interesting contrast to the epstein book because the new epstein book which you know we're recording this october 23rd and that is supposed to drop and people can find it on your website like when in a week or two kind of thing yes yes hopefully within the next week or two but so we'll definitely shoot it out before the election that would be that would be a must but the interesting thing i find between these two books is if there are these lingering doubts among people the advantage of the strange tales of the parapolitical is that it isn't rolling out in real time like the epstein book you know even though you're going back and tracing the history of it back to the 60s and even before that it's it's rolling in real time i mean maxwell's still in prison you know but that thing hasn't been resolved this one because you look at like post war nazis down in south america and all the shenanigans they played clearly with the cia we have a little bit of a of a historical distance from it and when you start laying out the evidence which is undeniable i think it's it's kind of harder for people to reject that the premise of it that this is what's in play and this is how you have to look at this stuff compared to like i say the new book epstein we have lived through it but i think we're still kind of in shock about yeah well that was you know one of the reasons too why i did try to focus essentially so much on that whole period between the 1930s and 1960s where you know sort of the genesis of epstein's network came from in the first book because i mean that is something that we do have a certain advantage of time that's passed and there has been a lot of different works now that have been published especially in regards to perfumo because that's it's such an enigmatic scandal it's really very much like the uk's gfk assassination it's never really been satisfactory explained and now we do have those so many different testimonies regarding it so you do have a certain advantage in reconstructing events now tell people the basics on that and then i think they'll see the links but then the links to how it goes all the way forward to what we're living in now well perfumo was a scandal that broke out in 1963 it had its origins though about two years earlier in 61 and it basically involved a love triangle involving a woman named christine keeler who was having an affair with um john perfumo who was a member of a herald macmillan the prime minister's cabinet and um yuri ivanov who was a soviet naval attache there and also a grv agent on the side which is uh russia's um still actually their principal military intelligence division and um obviously this created some issues you now essentially had a prominent british official who was a fair with the woman who's also sleeping with a you know so spy effectively but um you know kind of further muddy in the waters as christine was essentially one of the girls for this guy called steven warded so called society osteopath who was well connected throughout the british establishment and a lot of the americans were over there as well and that just goes into an incredible world of these just strange joins with these you know vip sex rings i mean you see just all these incredible things i mean some of this weird you know occult stuff frankly uh i mean the indications that the reminders involved in some of this but i mean it just brings up so many different levels and effectively this you know was instrumental in bringing down herald macmillan's government in 1963 in the uk when the scandal started to break and then also i think it played a pretty crucial role in the kennedy assassination over here as well and that's also kind of another angle too that i mean americans who have looked at the kennedy assassination haven't really paid as much attention to as they probably should have and that was the bowl of foreign governments in it as well um certainly i do think if you look at elements pay being involved probably he was railies as well and so forth but i mean that's kind of like the same thing you're getting at with like uh you know the essay i did in colonial dignitaries for instance in strange tales it's like colonial dignitaries it's just it's so weird it almost doesn't seem like a place like that could even exist in the real world again recluse back up and talk about that for people who who are coming at it cold there's also a great netflix doesn't have a ton of great stuff i know it still has that great documentary doesn't it that or not a documentary it's actually a movie uh called colonnade yes yes colony yes yes that was actually a pretty good one too recounting of it but um yeah it was essentially set up around 1959 1960 there about uh colonial dignidad um by what was his name paul schaefer who uh had been some member of the nazi party at some point uh he ended up at setting up essentially this compound in chile uh it was a massive place i think around 300 or 400 acres in its heyday essentially you had a whole german community that was living there um they almost had all immigrated over which schaefer in the early 60s uh they had you know they were segregated by the sexes and different compounds they were 14 hour days they had these confessional periods that were kind of like quiet time with the moral the arm of movement and what's not that type of thing it was a cult which is like key but the the other thing about it is it kind of provides again this lens on what the nazis were really all about and that we sometimes forget it was about total societal uh control and and and engineering you know at that cult level at that deep psychological level probably at uh an occult level and then certainly in terms of traumatizing people with sex and violence and everything else i mean it had all the all the buttons and then you know of course the tieback that you do in per political is we had absolutely we as in the united states government had absolutely no problem partnering with these people learning from these people going oh wow that's a good one how can we uh how can we learn for at your footstep oh and how can we bring you in to do our projects here or do our projects abroad and that raises all sorts of questions not just from a per political standpoint but also you know as we'll get into later from a more deep you know spiritual kind of what should we be doing that is good and where should we draw the line between what's good and bad and moral so i think you know all these points that you're raising and that's why i said this is so deep to get into are all jumping off points for some really really big questions any thoughts on on that linkage i mean really you know getting into this the whole uh the cold war era i mean really and this is something again that i mean a lot of people don't realize but there really was just this fascination with using these different kinds of cults and cult ideologies to advance us policy objectives abroad and um i mean you know you would reach into the nazi regime for this type of thing but i mean it was much more universal honestly than that i mean one of the more notorious ones that we've looked at on the farm recently was uh the unification church and i mean you know again this is another outfit that had all the tech the hallmarks of the cold control i mean when you really study these things it's just amazing i mean how many of these techniques you see over and over again i mean the 14 hour work days segregationist sexist confessional public shaming and humiliations and whatnot and it's all rolled out going into the cold war with different groups some of them have been around like moral rearmament you had people like moonies you had places like colonial digniton possibly Scientology there's been a lot of rumors about that for years i don't know how true it is at this point or not but you know there are some interesting speculations on that but i mean this really was the kind of thing that we embraced you know nominally to defeat communism whether or not this purpose is debatable but that's what we gave as the reason for it and yeah i mean it did have a profound effect on our society because you really were empowering a lot of these just terrible and fringe ideologies and a lot of this stuff is corrupt into society at a more broader level at this point um you know that was something uh you know with the moonies i hadn't even really thought of but i mean my friend Keith had pointed out on our podcast i mean everything like taekwondo to sushi i mean you know where i wanted to tie this back because it ties directly back to the presentation you recently did on uh what was the the title of the conspironormal kind of uh conference that you guys did the virtual conference and you gave a presentation on mk ultra and uh cybernetics which i thought was fantastic and again tied these pieces together in terms of how the mind control agenda that we were keen on doing just kind of ran wild and it was that's what i think you're alluding to here it's like hey unification church moonies great what are they doing how can we do how can we profit from what they're learning oh it's abusive to people it's destroying people's lives ah don't worry about that maybe we can sprinkle it over here weaponize it over here and do a little bit but i don't want to shift gears too much and bounce all over the place but maybe tell us because we talked about mk ultra quite a bit on this show how that also has the same pathway into this because that's when i think you you were alluding to that right in your yeah yeah yeah i mean the presentation i was doing was called among the cybermen uh essentially the secret history of conspiratayment but yeah i mean a lot of this stuff sort of went back to um the initial macy's conference that was done in 1942 i believe which was sponsored by the macy foundation which incidentally also later became a major funding conduit of mk ultra later you brought together a lot of these prominent scientists psychologists this type of thing and this is uh really would produce the whole discipline of cybernetics which you know as i essentially argued in the presentation the cybernetics is a very esoteric i mean almost occultic ideology i feel like it was essentially a way much like union psychology that was devised to rationalize really a lot of what were effectively occult doctrines and kind of apply some kind of scientific jargon to it so that you could get funding for this kind of stuff on the level that was really unprecedented in human history up to that as you point out recluse it's it's not even like a leap there i mean you got you got references where they were doing occult practices they were doing and when we say occult practices i mean they were trying to summon entities in order to see if they could affect these different things it isn't like obscure i mean it it is you know let's nail nail that down for us again because i'm kind of vague on the details but i'm probably stunned when with the stuff that you had there well i mean really a lot of i mean really a crucial thing i think to all this is synchronicity of course that was a big concept in union psychology but i also think cybernetics was essentially trying to come up with a way of uh explaining this as well through the different orders of cybernetics and so forth but in cybernetics okay essentially all of the universe and different subsets and subsections of it are constructed by feedback and these different loops and so forth so there's positive feedback there's negative feedback negative feedback being system sustaining positive feedback being chaotic law of attraction right yes well that's yeah it really is very much an explanation of the law of attractions essentially the secret any of that kind of stuff but yes every thought every action creates different feedback loops and they all bounce off of one another and so forth and that's what creates these systems and then of course you go through the different orders of cybernetics until you get to the mysterious third order of cybernetics and this is when you notice the system and the system notices you're noticing the system and in theory in some of these more arcane interpretations of it this is what would produce a lot of effects of high strangeness this is when you would start having the poltergeist activities and the ufo's and all that other crazy stuff and the mechanical elves whatever you want to say but i mean that's when things start getting really weird and you know it's my belief that essentially uh this was really what mk ultra was devised to explain essentially these different kinds of cybernetic principles also doing psychology and so forth and how effectively all these things affect reality itself more or less but just to be clear where i was going to correct me if i'm wrong here but so that's your setup if you will that's your uh your orientation intellectually academically what you're saying in your reports to your superiors as you're doing this but then when a guy walks in and says hey i'm a chaos magician i'm a wizard i'm a whatever i call myself i'm wick uh whatever and i can make that happen i can manifest this or that inside of the framework that you've established well you can see where someone would be well god i've kind of already opened opened myself up to wanting to look at that so let's see if you can play my game and if you can then you know i'm in i mean this is a men who stare at goats kind of thing you know where oh yeah i mean absolutely but i mean also though there is that sort of connection as well that magic has essentially two public relations which was dealt with in moments of euros and magic and Renaissance and um psychological warfare for that matter too which is another reason why it would have been so fascinating to people involved with this i mean you know just look at um the roch accrucian manifestos okay basically they were a lark you know i mean they came out in what 1610 1614 or something like that talking about this great paternal brotherhood this secret society kind of it existed none of it but then suddenly you have this holy cult you know Renaissance now i mean you've got masons and all these secret orders everywhere and that in essence is a magical working because you manifested something that did not exist previously and you did it through these you know these documents which were basically larps well here here's the here's the rub and again i hope anyone can follow this conversation because we're going to bounce all over the place but one of the the central questions for me there is is there this co-creator of our reality thing so you know you kind of played it really straight there in saying they it was a larp and then they created it by these documents i might open it up and say did they create it by the documents or did they create it by the collective consciousness of believing it's so and is this kind of a topa you know if you're familiar with the buddhist Tibetan buddhist concept of you know this thought creation kind of thing which to me just seems obvious we see it over and over again especially in this extended realm where people are contacting spirit entities and they're manifesting spirit enemies that don't even exist and yet these spirit enemies are coming back and now they do exist you know we we did i did a bunch of interviews on this evil thing and you look at satan that is satan because you look all the way back you know and the the Jews and the oldest writings they don't have satan and then zoriaster comes along and and he you know kind of has this good bad you know kind of thing saying next thing you know the same stories that were in the old Torah you know now they're showing up again and now a character a new character has been written into it but would anyone at this so it's it's obviously literature to some degree but would anyone at this point deny that there is some satan something that i i shouldn't say anyone because a lot of people would deny it but it also seems definitely a possibility that we have now through our collective consciousness created exactly what we've talked about for the last 2000 years and people have put all this energy into and films have been created about and all that stuff so are we co-creators of this reality and how do we pull that out of this whole thing well i mean yeah that's definitely something you have to consider i mean i don't know that everyone who signed on to this believe that but i mean i do certainly think that there were some people in very senior levels of the government and the intelligence community that did come to believe very much that we could create our own realities by manifesting these beliefs on a popular enough level and the public at large i mean it is a fascinating concept but i mean you know too though it also begs the question is it just any individual or is it specific individuals as well i mean i don't know i'm sure you probably read american cosmos right um that's sort of a book where they get into some of these notions about possibly there being genetic um you know some kind of genetic code or something like that for people who experience high strangeness and that type of thing i mean i'll tell you something really weird that sort of relates to this okay so i'm working on this podcast right now penny royal which is affiliated with the hell your show that's on amazon and whatnot paranormal type thing and whatnot so i had a lot of strange meetings with the guys who do those the penny royal guys there were a series of synchronicities and whatnot but um and talking to them i figured out that all three of us have been tested as gifted children and that's interesting to me because gifted testing essentially looks for students that have unusual high abilities for pattern recognition seeing different things that aren't usually evident to people in different disciplines and so forth so you get people like us involved in something like this and it does kind of beg the question well is this kind of making the whole experience that we're having looking into these things even stranger because we have had a lot of that you know different leads and researches i mean i know just talking to the penny royal guys they start looking at this area they pick up on one cult possibly being active here and then after studying it for almost two years there's like half a dozen cults that they found so at some point we have sort of stepped back and have wondered were all these cults really here before we started looking at it or who knows you know but i mean it is a strange thing and i do you know i try to send an offense as much as this as i possibly can but on the flip side of the coin i've had so many strange experiences that i have to wonder in some level how much belief really does manifest the reality that we live in and specifically is it also particular individuals who are manipulated in the beliefs who have a higher capacity to influence this type of thing as artists or you know any other type of medium oh but it is very strange see that's a super interesting question isn't it and that's kind of a next level question um which is unless a next level to me what that means is once you get past the idea that we're co-creators of this reality right which you can sit there and wrestle someone back and forth but screw that just take that as a given and now start asking the questions that you're asking which is just an awesome opening question are some people more effective at manifesting a consensus reality that we can all experience than other people wow what an interesting question and then you you tied it into another question there is that you know so you had certain traits when you were born and they called them gifted is there possibly a genetic tie to that correlation to that um and do multiple people share that genetic makeup if we were able to look at it which again to me you know we can't avoid the uh the et ufo thing and it always surprises me when that doesn't come into these conversations because it's so front and center I don't know how we're leaving it out so one of the things I pinged you with beforehand uh because we're going to talk about this and I don't know where you're at on this so I thought it'd be interesting but I interviewed UFO researcher Grant Cameron I've interviewed him several times I kind of pissed him off the last time so I don't know full do it again but he's done some fantastic work over the years but one of the things that he did that always stuck with me is he along with the late great um Stanton Friedman who recently passed away did a freedom of information act in Canada and it's kind of like I'm sure you've done a lot of FOIA requests I have not but you know every once in a while you get a little gem that just pops up and these guys got a gem when the Wilbert Smith memo was released and Wilbert Smith was kind of running the strange desk in Canada if you will at the time in the 50s so this is where all the supposedly just radio waves and stuff were there but he was also getting all the UFO reports so I mean those were the guys specifically tasked I think really was trying to understand a lot of this phenomenon the first place I mean that in itself is very significant absolutely and and so I'm just going to retell this story for the benefit of the audience even though a lot of people listen to this show I've heard it 50 times before but Wilbert Smith is there and so he starts collecting all the reports are landing on his desk and eventually he goes to his boss and he goes we got a fair you know something's going on here how about you know we go talk to the Yanks and see what they know and so he goes yeah let's do it so he starts sharing stuff and that's probably the only reason they let him in the tent down here in the United States is he's just shared some shit and they were like whoa come on down you got some good stuff that we want to so he goes down he meets all the right people band of our bush and you know he names names in this secret memo that is later released but the other thing he releases in this memo which ties back to I guess the cybernetics MK ultra you know what these guys were really up to thing he said he to not bury the lead his memo is that UFO thing is real ET is real it is the highest most important most secret secret that the US has higher than the hydrogen bomb so imagine the 50s this is like say higher than hydrogen bomb you're up there but then in the last sentence what these guys picked up on is that that has something to do with a mental phenomenon now that catapults us into a different kind of space what it says is that they had made contact with ET and made contact at this telepathic level although we're not even sure that that's the right word for it but in this extended realm they had connected with ET and that they believed that it was necessary to better understand that extended realm because this was both a threat and an opportunity like these guys always look at everything and uh so Grant's view is and and really my I've kind of pushed this is that that has to be factored into the equation with MK ultra that that had to be maybe one of the agendas in terms of we got to figure this out because we're already talking to ET and we ain't talking through them through no radio oh yeah absolutely well I mean again you know my kind of working theory on the the obsession with the UFO phenomenon sort of ties into what we've been discussing about belief potentially manifesting reality see there were two really excellent folks that were written by um James Carrion I believe his name is one is the Rosetta deception and the other one is the Roswell deception and he does a really great job of laying out how some of these early UFO encounters were effectively deception operations that the US and the UK were running and specifically with the ghost rocket flap that you had in the Scandinavian countries in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War basically to convince the Soviets that there were these you know super weapons in this extra-terrestrial race and what have you around so that they would you know invest tons of money looking into this and I know that sounds outlandish but this is the type of thing that we really did throughout the Cold War I mean the Strategic Defense Initiative for instance we never really thought work it was just a way to get the Soviets to waste Monday okay so we're doing all these deception operations and at the highest levels of government you know we know these things aren't pretty upright but then I think something happened that really shook everybody they actually started to appear nobody had any idea why they were showing up because they weren't supposed to exist we knew that they weren't supposed to exist and this was roughly right around the time when you start seeing all these projects initiating Shatter, Bluebird, the early ones initially with the Navy and then going into the M.K. Ultra stuff and so forth and it's also when a lot of these weird deaths started to show up too which were never designed to just look at the UFO stuff but all kinds of unusual and unexplainable phenomena essentially kind of ex files divisions for each you know major branch of the US intelligence services so you realize essentially that something exists now that's not supposed to exist and probably one of the most logical explanations would have been this the belief that factored into it I mean this was already something that you're starting to see currents pop up in psychology and so forth so I mean the next step from there probably would have been logically to see if you could actually contact I mean why not right and if you're already doing it through all these kind of cookie means you know going into stuff about belief manifesting thing well who would be the people who would best understand how to rationalize this and contact something like that well magicians you know they had already been talking a lot about how belief could be used to manifest reality for a long time now so that's when I think you start seeing all these weird characters get brought in I mean you have guys like Adrien if you are a guy who had channeled the nine the so-called seance that changed the world was put onto that path by a cyberneticist so I think that's sort of where we got into some of this stuff but we also contact these you know so-called non-human intelligence or what have you see the problem I have with that is I think that the evidence for the ancient alien theory for lack of a better term and a lot of people hate that because they hate the show I don't hate on the show I think the show really kind of did a lot of good but and does a lot of good but I think the evidence for that really stacks up to the point of being overwhelming particularly when you go to cross culture cross time you know and you go and you look at these tribes in Africa that have no contact with the outside world and don't ever written language and say yeah you know they're wearing the headgear in the spacesuits and they're pointing to the Pleiades insanity yeah yeah and I don't necessarily think that it does discount prior contact with the same entity either before you know the Cold War era but see something else I'll point out with that as well when you get into these early deception operations they grew out of a lot of the British efforts and what have you that organized around the political warfare executive and so forth and you know a lot of guys involved in that were people like uh his name Ronald doll Ian Fleming people that were in contact with a lot of proliites or people that knew a lot of prominent cultists who were initially tapped with doing these deception operations it kind of begs the question where were they always magical workings in the first place and their superiors had no idea that they were I mean certainly this is also concurrent around the same time the jack Parsons is out there going to Babylon working and so forth so I mean I don't I personally don't think the belief alone is what manifested the things I think that they definitely existed prior to that because it's like I fast forward to um have you read Diana Walsh Posulka's book American Cosmic oh yeah so did you do a show have you ever talked to her no no I would like to at some point I've been tongue to agent about that for a little bit now yeah you know she was doing she did an interview with me back when she was doing more interviews and then I think she got you know kind of interview weary a little bit which we understand and you know maybe she'll come back around and and that kind of stuff but that book to me is phenomenal in so many ways and you know one of the things that this is like a total side to me but it's like so critical she's Catholic you know and she was still Catholic that kind of a not a strict Catholic in kind of very open-minded and really a tenured professor in religious studies so she's not like you know strictly religious person but the fact that she's out in the desert finding crashed alien space junk that is being reverse engineered directly into multi-million dollar patents that her Gucci wearing buddy is flying around on private jets kind of drives a stake in the ground in terms of the reality of this stuff because money does that you know when someone's cashing in that much just from the junk and it also drives a stake in the ground in terms of I don't know something akin to a breakaway civilization at least a breakaway academia where there are some people are in the know on this and then there's just a bunch of other people who are just completely ignorant of it and most importantly those are the people that we normally would go to to say is this stuff real and you know it in a way it ties back to the very first question that I guess I was driving at with you were close is that to me the kind of research you're doing the per political research is the new standard for how to know because if you do have this breakaway academia you're never going you there they that's a fight club kind of situation right first rule of fight clubs don't so the first rule of breakaway academia is don't tell anyone and then so the rest of the academia is completely useful idiot kind of bill where they don't know anything so where do we turn we it all comes to you buddy I mean we all come back to you and say okay so tell us what's really going on the best you can yeah well I mean I think that's you know it's in essence what I've been trying to do and especially looking into a lot of this you know these strange currents so to speak because I mean it really is crucial I mean this is where the real cutting-edge science is happening and again I always want to emphasize you know I'm not saying that I necessarily believe that a lot of this stuff is possible but there are certainly some very powerful and very well connected individuals who do think that it's possible and have invested a lot of time and resources into it and it's just instrumental to try to reconstruct this as much as we possibly can to try to understand the true history of what's really been happening especially for the last 50 or 60 years because it's so instrumental to what is now unfolding to of course right now in our modern society so let's talk let's talk a little bit about right now modern society as it relates to your new book that's a cue for me to put it up there on the screen a special relationship Trump Epstein and the secret history of the Anglo-American establishment go over one more time as I show kind of the table of contents here where you're trying to take us with this book and then and I know you're big on tracing the history but come up bring us up to speed I'm right now how you think this plays out with what we're experiencing real time like just the debates last night you know the third debate I mean this stuff is right we're right in the middle of it yeah absolutely well I mean really I think that the network I'm chronicling here was at the heart of you know Brexit in the UK and the rise of Trump explain that okay well I mean essentially okay you have the second world war that ends and you end up with a lot of these spooks who were temporarily unemployed and this sort of created this vast network of private intelligence networks among the US and the UK that have really subsisted to this very day now of course the UK was always a lot more reliant on this network because they weren't great power essentially in the Cold War era they had to do things with much more plausible deniability than we did in the US here but that's changing as well as America's overall power starts to decline but I mean this is where like the private military sector comes from especially which is one of the things that I chronicled in the first book the rise of the modern day PNCs and this is the sort of legacy that if you fast forward to 2020 where what I kind of think of as the Cambridge Analytica network comes from you know what I'm saying you guys did a great show on fourth generation warfare and that's what I think you're alluding to here and it's such a great point but a lot of people probably aren't tuned into it until that you tell them you know but you just kind of think it through you know you're out there battling with sticks and swords and it's like whoever has the most sticks and the best swords wins and then you get guns and you're like well whoever has the best guns and planes wins and then you get nuclear bombs and you're like oh shit we can't really do that anymore all along you were doing the information game the information war at every stage you were doing that but now it kind of shifts right and now that becomes well really the the the tool that is gaining more power is the information aspect and it also becomes the most viable one to kind of bring to the to the battlefield so that shift that you're talking about is so freaking central to all this and I just want to make sure that it's your point I just want to make sure that we yeah yeah yeah well I mean it's the shift with that but I mean it's also I think the shift of a lot of this stuff going from the public to the private as well too which is also instrumental in how things are currently playing out right now and I mean it was kind of like the same thing with the outsourcing of the private military industry as well because I mean it was so central around special operations forces so now it's a situation where you know you only need a handful of soldiers to do what you used to need you know a couple of battalions to do you know a couple of decades ago and now I mean going into the 21st century it's the same thing with psychological warfare operations you know you need to need used to need to hold staff to do this now I mean you need a couple of guys keyboards effectively so now I mean a relatively small network of private actors can you know effectively do tremendous damage to sovereign states I mean we're seeing it right here in the United States you know they're seeing it in the UK with Brexit and I think if you really pull back to curtain there probably aren't a lot of people who are you know uh who are players in this who are parts of this independent to whether or not it reflects the quote-unquote will of the people right I mean they're doing this totally for private agendas essentially right right but sometimes sometimes it reflects the will of the people so it's still being engineered it's still being gamed but it's being gamed I guess we could argue or have to hash out whether it is a virtuous game because it really is the people and it's countering a force that was trying to subvert the will of the people it's kind of like I just did the show on you know the glorious signum thing and how she was a CIA op from the beginning and not just she wasn't all interested in the women's movement you know other than she was just a CIA girl that was out doing things that the for student protests and stuff like that and they recruited her for this job and it's like the problem with that is that we needed that nudge of you know it was pretty unfair in terms of how our laws were in our society wasn't coming along in terms of equal rights for women so it'd be easy to embrace that and say well by any means necessary but on the other hand do we really want this CIA behind that running the running that program and I'd say the same thing here you know so if Brexit really does reflect the will of the people some people could say well then that's a good thing because they were holding us down in terms of controlling all the information so that that couldn't be expressed but then you're still in this dilemma because you're still in a manipulation situation do you get what I mean what do you think about yeah yeah yeah yeah well I mean because again you know it's just we don't really have any legitimate or grass roots anymore I mean it's all like astroturfing and so forth and that is really especially what is so dangerous about something like Cambridge I mean that's really what they do I mean they create false movements they try to encourage people to not vote I mean just all this other kind of shady stuff that does manipulate the public will so much and you know we're still I think really unaware of how all this affects us and again that's why I mean you see this small group of private actors who are able to subvert the government to the most powerful nation on earth allegedly yes exactly and you know I tell you but let me there's again there's just so many things and hopefully we'll have an ongoing discussion about this and I know I'm I'm gonna come on the farm and I would love for that appearance just to be kind of round two of this because this is the stuff I really think is it's just so great and so next level which you're able to do because you have this immense database now connected in your head of all these different facts that a lot of people don't have a handle on but I wanted to talk about new world order for a minute and I kind of have to throw you a little bit of a curveball here and I kind of wish I would have sent you this in advance but I did an interview I don't know a couple years ago with this guy and he's a political Psy professor at Ohio State University and really well respected his name is Dr. Alexander Went you ever heard of him? I believe so you might as the story goes on you might have heard him because you wrote these couple of papers that really got a lot of traction inside of the alternative conspiratorial community and both of them are super interesting and these things just just about cost him his job and certainly cost him a lot of respectability among his peers but you know he's German guy and kind of had this kind of certain thing where he was kind of a Teflon like what are you talking about I'm just writing another poly side paper what do you all work up about but here is the point not the barrier the first paper was well one world government yeah if you really think about it of course yeah how can it be otherwise we're headed towards a one world government look at the long lens of history you know you start with all these little tribes and all these little states and then they consolidate you know as you were kind of saying is power gets gets more consolidated than the states get more consolidated and sure that's where we're heading and is kind of somewhat obvious as that is it is a bit of a game changer when you really step back and go so what is the game that's really be playing because if this guy can figure it out then there's a lot of other smart people can figure that out and say so we're all really heading towards new world order one worlds one world kind of thing we really don't like the way it's being pushed by the Orwellian left wing crowd but as you kind of have delved into in the last couple shows you've done on the farm is there's another force and it's not so clear that in the there and there isn't no world order one world state either because they see around the curve and they see that that's probably happening and yeah let's just let's just throw that out well I mean yeah I mean everybody sort of knows this sort of globalist internationalist version of a new world order so to speak but I mean you had this sort of counter vision which in the American experience really went back to the administration of William and Lee which is really instrumental which is why no one talks about it but um you had an individual in that administration who went by the name of Theodore Roosevelt who was effectively America's first neocon now Roosevelt was of course a major internationalist he was a big believer in manifest destiny and radical racist all kinds of wonderful things anyway he also wanted America to embrace internationalism but more than anything he wanted a great glorious america empire that would dominate the world and effectively would model the world after our values and that was really in the cucks of always uh this sort of dispute between the different elite factions you're sort of conservative internationalists in one hand and your globalists on the other hand basically were we going to try to go towards a world of governments that would have at least nominally attempted to be more inclusive and in fairness to the old guard you know eastern establishment elites as vile as they were in many ways I mean I do think that an immediate aftermath of the second world war there was something of an effort to try and do something that would be more inclusive for the rest of the peoples of the world unlike your qualifications there I think those qualifications are key but um on the other hand I mean there was just always a group that always effectively wanted this america first vision I mean later it sort of came to also incorporate the uk in it and essentially this sort of great anglo-american empire that would dominate the entire world and effectively I mean they are both internationalist visions of it but I mean I think uh the more utopian one quote unquote if you will at least manage through the un and what have you was attempting to do so more so in a long time period of war of adoration you know kind of wearing everybody down and gradually bring them into this sector whereas the rooseveltian version was definitely a much more militant one it was more than willing to try to bring about this great glorious empire by the sword if that's what it took and I think you really see that especially very much in this day and age with a you know a lot of the rise of the neocons the america first or is in the america right and so forth and it's really unsettling because I mean again you know going back to the old you know kind of anglo-american eastern establishment in the u.s the prophet fellers and all these people I mean they had seen the second world war firsthand they knew the kinds of weapons that were being developed and they understood that there were at least certain lines that we should never cross because otherwise there wouldn't be a human species left essentially yeah as you explored in a recent episode on the farm and and did so just really in this kind of deep nuanced way you get to end of that discussion and you're like well if i am going to be dragged into the gutter in in a fight then i do have to fight so it's not like and that's the the problem with all this stuff is it just degrades you know into whosoever the nastiest wins out so it's not like one side if we are engaged in this culture war battle that is the manifestation of this deeper battle ideological battle of what the new world order is going to look like because that's what we're saying here i guess we're saying that there's two visions for the eventuality of that one world state the inevitability of that one world state that my buddy alexander wint is pointing to and the one vision is what we're seeing manifested by kind of let's call it the left um then the the counter to that especially the way they're playing the game is what you're talking about on the right but it really can't be any other way it's kind of like the the the christian thing which we can maybe get into religion and stuff like that and i think we're actually being dragged into a false duality with this though i mean i i mean essentially i would say we need a third option you know because neither one of these are really very good ones i mean i think that you know the globalist one might be somewhat a little better in some levels i mean probably less people would die but it's not pretty either a lot of levels either let's just say that so i mean i think that we need you know to start looking at different possibilities because yes the world is going to become interconnected i mean even more so than it is now i mean that's inevitable with the way technology is going and so forth but that also gives us you know the ability to not need i think as many of these Byzantine structures over as be they you know a kind of all-seeing world government or multinational corporations that effectively have the power of multiple but do you think the center can really hold this is the point that you guys raised in your in this show and i forget which episode it was because you've had so many fantastic ones that they've all kind of merged ahead in my merge together i think society is going to survive essentially well but no because i think in where is the farm here um oh because i want to show people some of the episodes that you've had here i you know there there's always you know oh wills of societies arrive and all the rest is it's like you know what i'm saying is kind of a more this is again this is i think the point that you guys were talking about is like if you want to say i don't want to take sides or has to be another way you know kind of what's popularized by the alternative the alt-alt media that we're a part of i just look at that and i just have to kind of laugh a little bit it seems so naive a little bit i mean the amount of money and power that these other two forces have is just going to it makes it look ridiculous so yeah you know everyone wants a everyone wants to pick on Soros and his billions that he's putting into that one side of the agenda and as you guys so rightly point out was like well there's billions coming in on the other side and they're trying to co-op things and manage things on the other side but the idea that and again i hate to be the debbie downer here but the the idea that there's going to be this organic middle that will kind of rise up it's like no to whatever extent we are successful it will be in making a small dent in shifting one of those two polarities it's not a third leg on the stool just ain't gonna happen we don't have enough power we don't have enough money well i mean yes and no i mean i do think though with the rise of the change in communications though that does offer different possibilities that we really haven't had in human history up to this point in time i mean obviously that could all change if there is an attempt to massively crack down on the internet or something to that effect but i mean break down buddy i mean this is again so so again i'm not i'm not like trying to to pick on you you're fine you're fine because because what i'm doing what i'm doing is really pushing back with your own points you know that you've made because and if you weren't exploring both sides of this then i wouldn't i wouldn't have the respect that i do for you because you're we all are flip-flopping on all this stuff so uh cambridge analytica is to your point is a few guys that are running this game that is impossible for us to right it took us forever to figure out that that's what was going on well they've already moved on to the next level next level next level so for us to get all excited because we have uh they have the internet and we can podcast and we talk to each other hey i'm not putting that down i'm still doing it i mean it doesn't mean that that that you stop doing it but it does mean that you have to kind of check yourself in terms of how this fits into kind of the big picture i mean i just talked to you know the the cancel culture the the people that are just kind of disappeared you know completely from the conversation this is something we never would have even if you and i were having this conversation five years ago and one of us said that the other one be your nuts they're never they could never do that they could never completely just across all these platforms that shows us collusion this conference talk about conspiracy shows us compromise conspiratorial collusion that we could never imagine we would have never anticipated that they could have done that now we live it so again i i just i think you're i think you're equally on board with that at different times as i am but then you also want to kind of look at the right side of things that yeah yeah well i mean also i always i hate to tell people to try to support the lesser of two people so any real faction i mean i don't know i feel like that's a lot of what has led us to this sad juncture i mean we've just we've continuously lowered our standards generation after generation after generation it's well you can see just look at the presidential debate we were uh forced to witness last night and that's what it's gotten us now well i think well i don't want to get off on another tangent i think politics when you look at i'm a really interesting because and you have a little bit of that lens i mean when you go back to mckinley or whatever i mean there were some really nasty shit going on in our history that makes modern politics look mild compared to what those guys did and all so it's always been why wouldn't you you know if you can't it's a great it's like the whole and not to nick boston which is a fantastic philosopher from uh oxford and it's kind of better known for yeah so you know if they can they will it is one of the quotes i like from him and it's like no matter how horrific you think you know whatever it is whether it's transhumanism or you know genetic engineering or you know cloning whatever it technologically if we can we will it's just always been and the you can't get away from it by being a ludite and sticking your head in the ground and go well you know we just got uh we just got in our house the new uh virtual reality thing from facebook you know because it's like you as soon as you do that you're like well of course everyone's going to be doing this everyone's going to be fighting over deciding how much of their life is virtual versus how much life is non virtual it's it's a given if you think that isn't going to happen it's going to happen for the largest percentage of the population it's just like uh you know the neural link stuff and and all that you know i mean of course i i have a family member very close to me who has a epilepsy they're not going to sign up for the neural link if it stops their seizures of course they will well now you're in the game right because hey you know what else we can do with this neural link we can do this and this and this and this do you want any of this we want to shut that down you know i mean it's like of course we're headed in there yeah i mean it's definitely you know i mean it's a strange position to be in certainly and i mean but i mean that's really essentially a big part of why i do what i do because i mean how they're applied and i mean effectively how they can be used against the different factions as well and i mean i think you know if you really look at some of these more arcane groups i mean what was it the DKMU was a feminist chaos marauder underground or some of these other kind of outfits they're already trying to do something like that you know i mean i think that's really at this point in time the best bet that we really have you know i think that we really have and i always say this and people think i'm joking or something is you know the the old navy commercials you know a force for good they show this big aircraft carrier no it's global force for good oh that's you're so right buddy that's so right right right we're close it's like they've changed it now right but the old one which is just generic right i mean whether it's global or whether it's you know let's leave that out of the debate but let's be a force for good let's you know tie into the american ideals that we were never they're ideals we never lived them really but we at least had those ideals that's all i think we have to do is just try and be a force for good in our life in our community and the people that we come in contact with oh absolutely that's the strong yeah and that's the gravitational force that's what pulls these two polarized insanities you know need to be attracted to us rather than us try and glom on to them what do you think about that as we try and well absolutely and i mean i think specifically you know to put these techniques to a positive end and so forth because i mean to a certain extent you know you do need these psychological constructs to formulate a society i mean you need a certain mythos to base a society around i mean they really don't last if they don't have that i mean i think it's really up to us i mean especially artists political scholars that type of thing to create a mythos that is a positive one something that's more inclusive something that's going to be the betterment of humanity in the long run awesome you know what i think that's a good way to kind of round it on home what else do we need to share with people in terms of how they need to connect with what you're doing and and keep keep up to speed on how to make that good stuff happen well i mean i just think you know you need to step back sometimes i mean even though i am kind of a political junkie i mean i usually make a point you know at least a couple of hours a day really to just get outside or something just get away from all the technology and i mean insanity and just try to focus on what's really important to me my life i mean that's kind of another thing you know you need something to aspire towards goals and just ultimately realize that there is stuff that you can do i mean it just seems like talking to because i'm a cook professionally i don't really do anything for stages or anything i'm around normal people pretty regularly it just seems like people get so daunted by thinking that i i'm just a little person i can't really do anything structure i'm like which is nonsense you know you really just have to believe in yourself you know the other thing that you said there that i think is kind of interesting and people don't talk about a lot and it almost sounds it can sound a little bit patronizing when you say i'm around normal people a lot but i know exactly what you mean and i find that too i mean people have to also i think step out of their social structures too because it just seems like so often people only want to you know especially nowadays we only want to associate with other liberals are we only want to associate with other conservatives are we only want to associate with other vegans or that type of thing i mean at least for me i've always tried to have friends from very different backgrounds over the course of my life and i mean i think that's very useful you know it exposes you to different social structures and a big part i think of being you know trying to do positive things in the world is understanding other people's perspectives i mean even if you find them appalling you really can't help them get beyond their perspectives you don't understand where they're coming from you know it just seems like in general there's a lack of mutual understanding nowadays in our society and attempt to even try to get where the other person is coming from you know you need to emphasize ultimately with other people to help them awesome well again folks we've been talking to steven schneider aka recluse fantastic stuff i hope you got a taste of it without getting too overwhelmed check out his podcast it's just terrific long form but deep deep dives into stuff strange tales of the parapolitical but we're going to want you to go to his website to catch that where did i do at the website he's got a new book a special relationship that you can get from the website as well as his other book on the parapolitical so it's been absolutely terrific having you on recluse and uh look forward to doing it again yep thanks a lot alex well thanks again to steven schneider aka recluse for joining me today on skeptical the one question i guess it up from this interview is the one that we kind of reached at the end of this and that is is there a third option in this globalist global warming communist one side and crazy right wing mooney uh neocon or die alternative on the other is there a third way a middle way and how do we find it i guess that's the question i t up can't get any bigger than that one really so if you like this interview if you enjoyed it i thought it was a great conversation i have another one coming up with recluse on his show that'll be out pretty soon check that out but doing a number of interviews on other shows and i continue to have some pretty good ones coming up on skeptical as well so stay with me for all of that until next time take care and bye for now