 Switching gears a little bit. When we were preparing for this chat, we were out on your beautiful balcony here. You spoke at length about being a mason and your cult. Tell us about your beliefs in that. Tell us what that means to you. My spiritual beliefs? Well, that whole circle of information there, because our previous discussion was simply fascinating. So, I was born an Episcopalian and I was a kid. I went to my Sunday school and followed all of that. When my mom died, I remember that the priest told me things like, God takes the best first and didn't make sense to me. Your mom, it's going to be like a blink of an eye to her. She's not going to miss you at all, which I misinterpreted totally. So, I'm already questioning things. And my dad now, several years later, is marrying a Roman Catholic. And I'm a teenager who's already thinking in terms of my imprint on the world. And they put me through cataclysm collapses. It was just a priest and I sitting along and they did just some weird things. One thing is they re-baptized me. I don't know if you know it, but Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics all have the exact same creed. So, if you go into the service for either of any of those three churches, it's really the same service. It just seems like the Catholics have a lot of statues and fancy robes and things. The Episcopalians quadruple that. They have tons and tons of ritual. The Lutherans have no ritual. But the service is about the same. The creed is about the same. So, I asked them in our creed, don't we say we believe in one baptism? And this priest tells me, well, we're going to re-baptize you in case the first one didn't take. And I'm thinking the first one didn't take, is it like photography or these people that think they've got a good baptism? But it didn't take and they really aren't baptized. So, just things didn't make sense to me. And then in college, we were praying for victory in Vietnam at a time when I thought we should be praying for peace. And I didn't understand why God would love Americans better or more than he was loving these Vietnamese people. So, I fell away from the church. I lost faith. And it wasn't until years later when David Groves, who was a member of the Renzweil family, sat with me night after night. We would sit in the family library four or five in the morning. And he basically showed me all of the world's religions. And as we looked at them and discovered what they believed, I started seeing this pattern and this belief system. And eventually, David introduced me to what he had been introduced by Chuck, which was the ability to do your own services. So, when you look at what the Catholic Church is doing, they believe that you can watch this and you can participate with us. But basically, our priests have this power and you don't. You have to come to us with your intentions and we will do these rituals and these ceremonies. And in much of the occult, at least Western occult, so proudly forward, the belief is that you can do it yourself. You can create your own rituals or use rituals that have been handed down and you can do what they do at church. If you're exposed to Eastern philosophy, so Asia, they also, they don't go into their temples. They watch from the outside, but they have integrated the spirituality and they might stop ten times a day a little shine and do a prayer. And when you go to somebody's house, you start by going to their shrine at their house and praying and saying hello to the dead ancestors and the not yet born ancestors. So, if you look at all of that that I had been exposed to from David Prunes and you look at the occult services that he and Chuck were doing, I naturally kind of fell into that and started doing it myself. And for those of you who hear that and say, oh, that's black magic and that's some type of paganistic religion and it's not black magic. I know, I mean, we owned an occult bookstore. Occult just means hidden. It just means you aren't usually shown this. So, it's the things that the priest does on the altar. You don't know how to do those things that it's been hidden from. So, there is no praying to the devil. There is no trying to get your enemies. Not that I suppose somebody couldn't do that, but they could do that in the Catholic church. I could go in there and wish for somebody to be killed or pray for bad intentions. But of all the people that I met, I never saw anyone that was practicing anything dark like that. People were asking for the same intentions that you do when you go to church. People were asking for health or success in something or love, peace. So, through my exposure within the Renzel family, I was exposed to this. I came to adopt it for my own. Not that we didn't go to churches also. I mentioned my children earlier with two children. They were both baptized in the Episcopal church. One later was rebaptized by their own Catholics. Got a lot of the Catholics. I consider myself an Episcopalian. I was raised there. I was confirmed in the Catholic church, so I consider myself a Catholic. I don't know that they consider me a member of the faith, because I don't, especially since Chuck's past, used to go to Easter and Christmas services. But the bare minimum requirements I don't do. And I'm sure that they would not approve of my occult beliefs. But I consider myself a Christian among other things. And it's all good. I'll take it where you haven't taken me yet, but I know that we're leading up to that. And you may have mentioned it, and that's my Masonic affiliations. So, along the way, I've rediscovered God. They have a very strong belief again in God. Again, I'm performing services, or I'm participating with other people in services. I saw myself as a spiritual tourist. So, when I traveled to Japan, Thailand, Ireland, South America, the things that I wanted to do was explore their religious and spiritual places. So, I've done that all over the world. I've done that here. I've gone to every type of church service and, you know, temple and mosque that you could go to. So, none of them were mine. I was a tourist in them. And we discovered Masonic. We can trace its history most definitely to the 1700s. But by mentions of us in other documents, poems and things, we can trace it to about 900 in England. And we know from that poem, which is something called the Regis poem, they were talking about it coming to England a lot earlier. Some people believe that it can be traced all the way back to the ancient sun worshippers in Egypt. But it is a spiritual fraternity. It is not a religion. And what they practice rather than a mass is a Western magic ritual. And the ritual that they do in their temples and in their lodges is identical to the rituals that we were doing at home in our cult services. And it's just that the intention that they have behind it, the work that they were doing or are doing is to make a man into a Mason. So they are initiating him over a series of three rituals and giving him this information. So Masonry is based on the allegories from the Stonemasons Guild. So the tools that they give you are these ancient Stonemasons squares and compasses and setting mallets and plumb lines. And then they teach you how to use those in a spiritual way to finish what we believe is an unfinished temple that exists inside of all people. It's where you go to meet God. It's where God resides in you. It is that one point of view that is God. It's kind of a sideline. I believe that if you have God here, it is this all encompassing everything. As you move down towards man at six o'clock, we start seeing ourselves as less part of this. We start thinking of ourselves as individual fingers. But if we go back up that circle, we find out that, oh, we're a hand. And if you step back even further, we say, oh, we're a whole body. So you eventually get back to where you are, that one thing that encompasses the entire universe. And not to bring it back to the dawning of the age of Aquarius, but with knowledge and with the awakening and re-understanding of where we've come from, you start the path back. For masons, we believe that we met God in the East. And we are now traveling back to the West to see what has been lost. Discovering masonry for myself and for every member of the Renzo family that eventually became active in masonry was a acknowledgement of our personal beliefs and our personal journeys. It was a landed credibility. It gave us a structure whereby we could go in and acknowledge with other people who were on their own journeys. And so, you know, if you went into my lodge tonight, which is very a lodge, number 411 in Chicago, Illinois, a lodge of the Grand Lodge of Illinois, you would find four holy books on our altar representing the four major religions of the people who are members of my particular lodge. And all of those people, some who are very devout Christians and some who are Muslims. We have a Buddhist. At one point we had a Native American. We were going to put a bundle of sage on the altar to represent a holy book for them since they didn't have one. But regardless of the journey that each of those members is on, when we get together and perform this one ritual to make another man a mason, it unites us. You know, we don't talk religion in lodge. We don't talk politics in lodge. We don't talk about anything that brings people apart. We tend to concentrate on the things that bring people together. So I've continued. I served in our lodge as the secretary for, I think, 17 years. I am now in my 10th year on the board of directors for our statewide charity. So one of the things masons do, you have this old stone masons guild from the mid-centuries, and they have this knowledge. And the knowledge basically was geometry. It was how do I build a structure that's not going to fall down into stiff men? That's incredible knowledge. It gives you a reason to go to other countries at a time when people didn't do that. You know, you were born on the land of some nobleman, lived your whole life out here. You weren't free to travel, but free masons were. That's why we say free. They were allowed to travel because each of the different leaders, token types, teams, they wanted the masons to come in and build their structures, so they allowed their masons to travel, and they just kind of trusted the masons to be able to move about. Which, by the way, put us in association with a lot of different belief systems around the world, which gave us our ability to incorporate and find some truth in all men's religions. Surprisingly at a time when we were building structures for individual religious beliefs. So we could be working for the Roman Catholic Church to build a cathedral. At the same time, some of the people that are working on that were Muslims. So it just put us in a very unique place. Now, the knowledge had to be protected. If everyone has that knowledge, then everyone can earn these huge wages and travel about the country. So we took an oath to protect the knowledge and to dish it out slowly. That survives today in these three initiations. We also took, it was dangerous work, so we took an oath to protect each other's widows and orphans. That exists today, and that is the charity that I share. We have about $114 million endowment to take care of our members and their widows and orphans, their families. So we have case workers. I have maybe 80 clients who have given months that are on our months to month program. Now they're 80 who are looking for individual one-time help. We're on disaster relief if a hurricane hits in Texas. We're on the ground. We actually are there before because a hurricane gives us warning. Something that we're not expecting. Maybe we get there the week after. We're doing a lot of good work. I can't help but ask this geometric knowledge of the mathematical equations from where do they derive? How do the basins come to have that? That's the mystery, isn't it? Yeah. Again, you can trace us to about 900 or at least know that we existed. You can prove that we existed in the year 900. But where we were before then, it depends on what your belief is and the faith that you have. Again, many people, myself included, believe that we came from the builders of the temples and the pyramids. They had knowledge to build those. We know they did. The structures still exist. Why don't we know how they built it? Well, because it was secret. It wasn't something that they shared with everybody. And how do we know that they had this secret knowledge? Well, because we still don't know how those things got built and they're still there. You can go around the globe and you will find evidence of Mason. Our symbols are there. Our symbols are on the cathedrals. Our symbols are all over the city of Washington. You know, here's an interesting fact that Washington, D.C., was selected because it was low-lying swamp that none of the states really were using. So it was an easy place to say, well, we're going to carve this out and take it for the federal government because none of the states really wanted it. There were two high hills in that whole area that weren't swampy. One became Capitol Hill and it's where our government resized. Guess what's on the second one? The National Masonic Line. Why is that one? Because Mason's built Washington, D.C., Mason's built this country. Every one of the principles that the United States has built upon was a Masonic principle before that. So freedom of speech, freedom of education, freedom of association, all of those things for 100 years, hundreds of years were Masonic. If you listen to the oath of office that Marshall, the vice president, but if you listen to the oath of office and you listen to one of our installation rituals, they're identical. Or at least a lot of the wording is identical. When Washington was being sworn in, he made up his own inauguration because we've never inaugurated a president before. He pulled from his Masonic experience how was I how was I installed as the wordful master of my lodge. He wrote a ceremony very similar to that and on the way to his inauguration he stopped off at the lodge and grabbed their Bible so he could be sworn in. And we swear you're in on a Bible, you got sworn in on a Bible, that Bible still exists at the lodge in Washington if you have the privilege of visiting it and I wasn't allowed to put my hand on it. You know, all of the the our money is filled with Masonic symbols, you'd be surprised. So the conspiracy theorists now say, oh well you've got this new world order, you're trying to take over. First of all, it's a very old world order, it's not very new. And secondly, we aren't trying to impose it on anybody, but we are trying to express it and express it in a way that it will affect the world. So all of the leaders of the world's western revolutions were Masons. The Masons didn't do those things, but the same type of person that would be attracted to Masonry is the type of person that we get involved in the formation of their country. The closest that we did that you can say, oh that was a Masonic lodge with the Boston Tea Party, you can read in their lodge minutes how they adjourned their reading to take care of some business and went down to the harbor and did that. They came back and started the lodge again and recorded it all. I will say this, that history is right with stories from the wars that the Civil War probably most vividly, where battles were stopped so the Masons on one side could exchange bodies with the Masons on the other side because both sides trusted the Masons. You're going to get the bodies back and bring ours back and you're not going to tell them anything and you're not going to... I can't say with you, but I've always been told that at the time that we broke off communications with Cuba in the 60s, John Kennedy had to have some way of communicating with the Cubans even though we had no formal diplomatic ties. The way that it has been done, I'm told ever since, was the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts communicates with the Grand Lodge of Havana communicates with Casperers and Vicerversa. So we've always had even if you look at the Knights Templar the Knights Templar have this whole history that people are aware from the time of their persecution in the King of France who was also trying to become taking control of the Catholic Church turned his forces against the Templars and the Templars came to the Masons and basically hid with the Masons What you wonder though why did he do that? Why was he so concerned with getting them? Well because they were a huge power they were a huge army that had no allegiance to any country and they were the bankers of the world. And why were they the bankers? Because everyone could trust that if they were going to move this money from this country to that country they were going to get it there they were going to be able to do it and they were going to do it safely and everyone trusted them on that side in this site. So Harry Truman once gave a very famous fireside chat where he said, you know what guys if you're in the trenches and you're feeling really down and like there's no hope find yourself a Freemason and take it to hell and that's the truth.