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Viewers, off-least and vendors, made Shopify, consisted of Asian, hip-dad and started on test-na-hoy-de-funer-in-oil-re-pumonat of Shopify.de/recorder. I have inside information on Jevri Epstein, and why the US government is reluctant to e-more transparent. And I know this because when I was working in government meetings, we're not how shall we tell the public, but what shall we tell the public. So often the best we can get in our skepticism is to know that we are not being told the truth.
I think people need to know the truth. So, what on your seatbelt, I'm going to tell you everything. And all senior people in the US government know everything that you and I have discussed here today.
See, you've been behind the scenes with some of the most successful, richest, most powerful people in the United States.
What does it you do, Gavin? So, I do protective coverage. You know, any of the ways that wealthy or prominent people might be targeted. For example, the Saudi Arabian government obtained a system which you can get into your phone, used it on Jeff Bezos.
“So, our work was to figure out how it happened. Why would a government want to hack the founder of Amazon's phone?”
So, I'll tell you a second, but we're all not as careful as we could be in terms of what we say, what we text. And there is absolutely no protection viable for the confidentiality of your phone. Do you have any skepticism about that? I just have a lot of ignorance to how this whole world works. Look at you, but all power centers in human history lie.
There are some examples of this where it will start telling the truth about something, but years later, things like cancer, causing esbestos, and baby powder, 100,000 people dying from a heart attack from opioids, and we'll see it with mass vaccination. So, what advice would you give about how to navigate in the world we're living in today? To avoid risk threat.
I've got some core truths, so first of all.
Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. 69% of you have listened to the show frequently, haven't yet hit the follow button. And that follow button is very smart, because it means you won't miss the best episodes. The algorithm, if you follow a show, deliver you the best episodes from that show, very prominently in your feed. So, when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you tonight.
And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button.
“But also, the fact that I think what 41% of you have chosen to follow this show, that listen to it regularly,”
is the reason why we've been able to improve everything. It's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so, so much. Gavin, we have a mutual friend, and that mutual friend actually sent me a voice note late last night.
Here is what the voice note says. Coming up this crazy hours, I found out that interviewing a dear friend of mine, Gavin DeBacher, I think, in two days. So, I think I'm a 13th. He is an extraordinary human being, extraordinary soul. He comes from a very tough background. But what he's done to move from that background to becoming probably the single greatest security expert in the world. He designed the systems that are used to protect this frame court.
Well, I've met him decades ago, and there was a threat happening to a former girlfriend of mine, and that I was getting threatening letters, and he deciphered the letters in microseconds, got the FBI involved, and put a stop to it all. It was extraordinary what he did. Well, that was Tony Robbins for anyone that didn't recognize the voice. Yeah, because of someone didn't.
But it got me incredibly incredibly curious, because he said lots of things that I found fascinating.
The first one I'm going to start with is he describes you helping him with a personal situation in his life.
“And I guess this begins the question, what is it you do for people like Tony Robbins?”
What is it you do for famous people for world leaders? What is it you do, Gavin? The main function of my company is anti-assination. So, we develop and deploy anti-assination strategies. Under that, under assassination, which you can consider the worst possible outcome,
our lesser outcomes like other kinds of crimes, destruction of reputation, threats that are designed to cause anxiety and fear. We have a division that does assessment of threats and management of threats. We have a division that does actual protective coverage. That's the biggest division, meaning actual physical protectors fit young, capable, not retired ex-copes who are overweight in another second career, but you know, people who are really trained for this specific field.
Armoured vehicles, modifications to homes, basically everything that fits into the category of preventing or disrupting efforts to do tissue damage.
So, we're in the business of preventing tissue damage.
And who was some of the names that you do this full and have done this full over the years?
“All of the names that I do it for are never spoken by me.”
So, I don't say who clients are, and I don't say who they aren't, because if I say to you, someone so isn't a client, that is information that might reveal that somebody else is or something you heard is true or not true. The way I can describe it to you though is to say that if you took the 20 people you would assume fit into this category or the 50, most of them are clients. I mean, according to the internet, had you sort of referenced certain things before because these people have spoken or, you know, you've been seen in photos.
That's right, if a client identifies me or it happens because I testify in a court case or something that's a different animal. It just doesn't come from, I view myself as sort of like a psychiatrist or a doctor, I wouldn't be the one revealing it. And some of those names that have been revealed by others are Jeff Bezos, Elizabeth Taylor, Share, Madonna, Barbara Streisand, and many, many, many more from government officials to royalty, et cetera, et cetera. What was Tony referring to when he said that you helped him with this situation with his girlfriend to threat, found out that it wasn't who people thought they were.
Right, surely he was referring to a case, I'll never reveal and I won't even acknowledge he's a client.
You don't even say he's a client. I won't say it if you, if you have it from some other source, Tony said it. I understand, your interrogation makes all the sense in the world, but I just don't say it. I don't talk about clients, it was a bunch of reasons, but most of all, just absolute confidentiality. I know it's weird apologies.
“But how did you talk about the Jeff Bezos situation?”
You heard me talk about cyber security and the vulnerability of phones. And the basal situation is a little bit different in that I was involved very publicly in it, but clearly with permission of my client and organized with my client. Same thing as when I testify in a court case, there's no secrecy about it. I'm doing it, but it doesn't mean that I'll then do it everywhere.
And so in that case, why you did have Jeff's permission? The background context was that there was a newspaper that was going to publish that he was having an affair with. I think his current wife, he wasn't his wife at the time, Loren Sanchez. And you were called upon in that scenario to figure out what was going on and you were able to solve that. Yes.
What are you able to talk about there?
“Well, I'll think back to what's already been, what's already been public, and it won't be from me.”
It won't be anything about the client, but it will be about the Saudi Arabian government, which at that time had just obtained a system called Pegasus III, which can get into your phone. Remotely, it doesn't require a click of any kind, meaning you don't have to acknowledge anything. If you can get in, it's called a no click exploit. And it could do everything in your phone from 7,000 miles away that you could do holding the phone in your hand.
Even if it was off, could turn on the camera, could turn on the microphone, it exists. It's a very real thing made by these railies. And the Saudi prince, MBS, had just gotten it, and he used it on a group of dissidents around the world. He also used it on Jeff Bezos, according to the United Nations, according to lots of things that have been public. Our work was to figure it out, figure out how it happened in those days.
I didn't know what Pegasus III was, I didn't know what this system was. But the instrumental, or perhaps useful thing for you and your audience to know, is that there is absolutely no protection viable for the confidentiality of your phone if a government wants you. And the reason I say there's no stopping it is that even when Apple puts out a new solution, which they do an update, that breaks some particular exploit, thousands of people around the world immediately start working on the next exploit.
So if I said to you, here's a phone, and we've modified it, and it's great. Mr. President, here you can use this phone for your confidential conversations in a month. It won't work anymore. And so I'm able to tell clients and friends, and now you and your audience, there are a lot of things being offered for sale, that supposedly protect the confidentiality of your phone calls, for example, or your text.
Nothing will work reliably. There is no solution to that problem that is reliable. Nothing.
Yeah. There is their devices sold, there's all variety of things, but the reality is that even if something worked,
even if I said to you, here's this cool new such and such phone that will protect you. It'll only protect you for a while, because there's a constant effort to improve the exploits. And also, after say, people are somewhat reluctant and maybe even lazy, but myself on the list, and I'll put you on the list without even knowing you, we're all not as careful as we could be, in terms of what we say, what we text, and I have a dear friend and client who every text and every email, but he sends,
Also goes to his executive assistant, and everybody knows it.
And what happens is it controls an influence his behavior. So when you send me that off-color joke that I wouldn't want to see on television, he responds differently. He doesn't say, "Oh, that's great," and add another topping line on top of it, because he knows that his assistant and the other room is seeing that. And so the best we can all do is be watchful what we say and have no pretense of privacy or confidentiality,
because it simply does not exist period. The US government got into the phones of all of our allies, the Prime Minister's Chancellor of West Germany, Prime Minister of England, President of France, this is a game that's going on all the time. And privacy is just not part of the new world.
“Why would a government want to hack the founder of Amazon's phone?”
Well, again, from what's been public, the founder of Amazon was also the owner of the Washington Post, and the Saudis had killed Khashoggi, who was a journalist for the Washington Post, and the Washington Post then started putting out an Arabic edition that didn't feel good for the Saudis, and then they really went after the, I'll call him ahead of state, he's the Prince, but his father was alive and was actually ahead of state, but they really went after MBS.
I think Bezos was a kind of adversary in that regard. Additionally, the Saudi sovereign fund developed an Amazon competitor, called something like "nume" or something like that. And so they were concerned about that, and they were also doing deals with Amazon, and so they could get economic advantage by seeing what the various executives
were texting to each other. So there was a lot of moving parts to that. So all these things I've just shared with you with high stakes matters going on, around the time that Khashoggi was killed in the western countries of the world, were objecting to this assassination team of his going around and killing people,
and getting out of their phones.
“In early 2019, Jeff Bezos publicly accused the US tabloid the National Enquire,”
of attempting to blackmail an extort him by threatening to publish intimate photos, or he described as a nude below the belt selfie of him and his then partner Lauren Sanchez. Bezos wrote a blog post saying, "A.M.I. emailed his lawyer and security adviser, Gavin Debecker's counsel threatening to publish personal photos and text unless he and his team publicly stated that the tabloid's coverage of him was not politically motivated."
Yeah, what they wanted me to do, the inquire, and they negotiated with me and my lawyer over this, that I was to go public and shape two things. I was to say it was not politically motivated and it was not influenced by outside actors, I eat the Saudis, and that there was no hacking involved. My question was, "Why the hell do you want me to say those two things specifically?"
And I already knew the answer, of course, because there was outside influence, and there was hacking. Their request for me was so strange that we didn't go along with it,
and it was basically basically a media post talking about it publicly and saying,
"Hey, if I can't stand up to this, then where is a regular person?" And ultimately this had pictures when I've published. Yeah, I won't even comment on whether those pictures exist, because they were doing a fascinating thing by the way. They were sort of like selling you land in Florida,
that's marshland and doesn't exist. They were doing an extortion on a thing they didn't even have. Right? So it's kind of a double crime, it's an extortion and fraud. It's interesting, you know, we start talking here about digital comms
and that type of security with everything that's going on at this exact moment in time with all these Epstein files. And there's a big conversation.
You know, because now we can see 3,000, 3 million documents,
and many of them are emails that people have sent at different times. Some of the most famous people in the world have sent emails to Epstein, and now those are all out there in the public to see. I wonder what your take was and all of this stuff.
“You must be watching this stuff from like, through the lens that you've built your career.”
And you must have an interesting opinion. Some of it, I don't talk about because I have a fair amount of inside information, and I'm just watchful about not getting near the line. Which I mean by inside information. I mean, information that I might have gotten from characterizing it,
carefully that I might have gotten from government agencies that are clients, or that I might have gotten because clients were implicated. Like I learned today, for example, this morning on the way over here, that I'm in the Epstein files. And here's the way I'm in there.
Is that someone sent Epstein an article that I wrote called "Fooling Ourselves into War." And so somebody sent that article, which is an article I really liked, by the way, published in Huffington Post at the time, and they sent that to Epstein. So that's an example of being in the Epstein files,
and yet obviously never having that Epstein.
But I have a few clients who and friends who the Epstein group made approaches on and failed, meaning they tried to get them and failed.
I'll give you one story without naming the person, of course.
He goes to meet with Epstein in New York to ask for money for a charity,
“and Epstein is perceived as this big billionaire,”
which he was not by the way I'll tell you in a second.
And Epstein is in a robe, and they're across the desk just like you and I are, and Epstein says, "Hey, they're finishing the meeting." He says, "Hey, I'm going to get a massage." Hence my robe, you want to get a massage, and through the hallway, my friend can see a massage table and a room and a very cute girl, who's the massage therapist, dressed like a massage therapist.
And so he happened to say no. In fact, interestingly, he happened as to not like massage, which is itself, you know, a lot of people would say yes, and I'd even think it would improve my relationship with this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, who I perceive as this rich guy that I'm trying to get money from my charity.
Had that happened? What a different world for that person, what a different life. Because in that room is cameras, and then eventually audio, didn't start off with audio, but audio was added later. And then you're getting a hand job, if I'm allowed to say hand job,
from somebody who you don't even think about their age, but turns out to be 17, and you are in the world of trouble for the rest of your life. And that's a big piece of what was going on with Epstein, with cameras in that apartment in New York,
and eventually audio, cameras, and eventually audio at the island. My take on it, and certainly my public take, is that there was a profound blackmail operation going on to the benefit of probably more than one government, but at least one government.
And when I said a moment ago, he wasn't a billionaire. He wasn't a billionaire. For one thing, his earning path is highly suspect. I first tell you what he was. What he was is a construct.
He's a created construct. Money, wealth, private jet, private island, fund, not married, young girls, lots of things. So he was a construct, the money.
$500 million of money came from less waxener.
Who's a wealthy guy who owns or owned,
“I don't know what he's doing now, Victoria's secret.”
Big donated to the state of Israel. And $500 million was transferred to Epstein, along with power of attorney to use it and invest it in the ways he saw fit. Quite an unusual, you know, I'm mildly wealthy,
but I'm not sending you $500 million. I'll tell you that. The idea that you're doing this is itself extraordinary, but it was probably the funding mechanism for this construct. While it's a real name, Jeffrey Epstein,
and he has a real birth certificate and grew up in a real way, the picture that is presented to the world is not authentic. It is not accurate to who he was. And the more you dig into this story, which, of course, people are doing so much now
because of these three million documents so far.
And videos, by the way, and photographs was a lot of material there. It's very interesting to people right now and more to be learned, but, you know, what was actually going on, why in the world would anybody say,
“"Well, there are national security implications”
to some of this content." That's why some things are redacted. But would that be? Why would the prosecutor who prosecuted him inflore it up?
And provided one of the most unusual plea bargain deals in world history and certainly unique in American history, which is imagine I've got you, I'm a U.S. attorney, I've got you on some crime. And you say, "Okay, I'm going to plead guilty,
I'm going to serve my time, but please let my accountant go and please don't prosecute my wife because all she did was deliver the stuff and she didn't wasn't involved in anything."
And so those are called unindicted co-conspirators. So I make a deal with you and I say, "Okay, you go to jail for the eight months and we will leave the unindicted co-conspirators unindicted." We won't prosecute your wife,
your son, your accountant, or whatever. That's a very normal process. It's a bargaining process, basically. However, in the Epstein case, the U.S. attorney gave him a deal that said that we would not prosecute unnamed co-conspirators.
Holy shit, who's that? Who's unnamed co-conspirators? Unnamed co-conspirators could be 50 people. It could be 75 people. The guy who gave that sweet heart deal became the Secretary of Labor.
He was at that time the U.S. attorney for Florida. He was asked, "Why did you give that sweet heart deal?" Because the deal's ridiculous, unnamed co-conspirators will be exempt from prosecution. And he said, "I was told he belonged to intelligence
and then he had to resign because of this." There was a lot going on with Epstein, the person who, I mean, there's so much of this, the person who sort of brought Epstein into the world of power and got him his job at, I think, Morgan Stanley.
I could have that wrong, but one of those big finance companies
was William Barr's father. William Barr was the attorney general, who was the U.S. attorney general when Epstein was killed or died in prison, depending on your choice of reality. So, there's so much there.
But I won't be the first guest, Steven, that you've had,
that says that it was an intelligence operation. Why the U.S. government is reluctant to be more transparent? Some of it is national security. Some of it is, let's imagine, an ally of ours
is involved in that operation. So, there's a reluctance, and there's a question, it's a little bit like UFOs, could the public handle it?
“Is the question that's always asked in these cases?”
Meaning, could the public handle it if, for example, the UK was running an intelligence operation inside the United States to control senators and congressmen and powerful executives and powerful figures and scientists, could we handle it?
Could the U.S. public handle it? May I take personally? Absolutely, yes. So, you believe that he was an intelligence asset, and it sounds like you believe he was an intelligence asset
potentially by a U.S. ally. Yes? So, who is that ally? Israel. Yes.
Yes, I do. And Glenn Maxwell, just for additional background, but everybody can find it. Her father was an Israeli intelligent asset who was so revered.
His funeral ceremony was held in Israel was attended by the Prime Minister, by, I think, the last four or five, by every living head of Mossad attended. And there were words used in Eulogy's,
like he did things for Israel
that the world will never know about.
There's a lot of good connection there, and a lot of good connective tissue, some of which I've shared with you, because it's public and some of which I'm not sharing, but that is indeed what I believe, yes.
And that's just me, by the way. You might already be there, and you've certainly had another guest sit here and former CIA guy, Kira Cow, had he say his last name?
Yeah. Am I close to the United States? The place of the United States? Okay. And he was point blank in saying Israel.
So there's no direct evidence, but what people are essentially doing is putting the pieces together to make a picture. There is direct evidence. There's just not direct evidence.
I'm sharing it at this moment. But there's plenty of evidence that has been public already, some of which I've shared. I mean, I could do it for 40 minutes,
but everybody can just go to chat GPT. And if you ask chat GPT, make the best case for. This is a good thing for everyone.
“This is a good thing for viewers to remember.”
Make the best case for. dot dot dot. Whatever it is. If you ask, the first answer you get, if you ask a straight question,
will always be the official narrative.
I've done exactly that. As you said, I asked chat GPT, make the best case for Epstein being in Israel's spy. Here is what it said.
The case that Jeffrey Epstein functioned as an Israeli intelligence asset, rests on a pattern alignment rather than direct proof. He ran a sexual compromise operation,
resembling no intelligence. Compromat trade craft. Compromat. Yeah, like it's a Russian word, that means we can't compromise you.
Had wealth and access far beyond his formal career, and operated with unusual legal protection for years, his close partnership with Glen Maxwell, whose father had documented intelligence times,
fuel suspicion, as does reporting by journalists, who say Epstein's activities
“would discuss an intelligence adjacent circles.”
The cameras and the microphones, hidden in his apartment on his home. How do we know that with that? And why? Well, how I know they were there
is a little bit different from how everybody knows they were there. And I don't know enough about the entire history of the FBI piece, but I'll tell you a funny part of the FBI piece
when they went to execute a search warrant at that apartment after his more recent arrest. They found and even photographed a bunch of CD-ROMs or disks of some kind that were labeled, but they didn't take them.
They said, "We'll get a warrant and we'll be back for those." And they came back after a mere six days, and it was all gone. So where it is,
I don't know, does the US government have it? Does somebody else have it? I just don't know the answer. But I know from very direct information regarding
the island and the apartment, I don't know about New Mexico. I just don't happen to know, another house that he owned, that there were cameras
and then eventually audio was added. Oh, also testimony by the way, pardon me, testimony from girls who said girls who worked there and visited there a lot,
who said that in a small room to the right of the front door was a whole thing of videos where the recording was done. And can you explain to me why
recording videos and audio of people getting those kinds of, doing those kinds of things, which be a useful asset for this foreign adversary to have?
Sure.
Blackmail is not always done by calling you up
and saying, hey, Steven, I'm going to hurt you in the following way if you don't do ABC. The other version is far better,
which is even alluded to in some of the now-release material, which is he calls and he says, Steven, I've got terrible news.
“You remember you had that massage from Cindy?”
You know, that girl? Oh, yeah, yeah. I remember, she recorded something. She had something in her bag.
She made a recording. And I got worst news, Steven, the girl's 16. And a half. And now, by the way,
you are stomach drops, diarrhea, you are in a world of stress right now, just hearing that. And he,
instead of being your blackmailer, becomes your rescuer. He says, I can handle it. I can handle it.
I can handle it. She's got the recordings. I don't know where they are, but I can handle it. I can handle it.
I can handle it. Don't worry. Don't worry. And he owns you now forever. If you were involved in a naked experience
with someone who's underage, and there's a video of it, and audio of it as well, you will do anything that you are asked to do that is within reason.
Very few people would have the character and the stamina to do what you describe Bezos doing, which is that he wrote a public letter saying a very unusual thing happened to me the other day.
I'm being blackmailed by the National Enquirer.
And here's what they said.
That's very, very rare. And so, you know, a Senator of Congressman, he owned a lot of people. Hmm. Do you have any skepticism about that?
I don't have skepticism. I just have a lot of ignorance to how this whole world works. And look at you. And I just have a lot of ignorance to like,
you know, because you hear about these things and almost like movies. And it appears that we're all kind of witnessing something. We might have regulated just to the movies happen before our eyes.
And even when, you know, I saw some of the emails coming up on my feed of things that Epstein had emailed people. He seemed to be continually inviting people to hang out with him.
In a way that is quite a typical. Now maybe I'm just an introvert. But I'm not, he was like aggressive in his coms to people saying, come and hang out with me. I'm doing this thing that is dinner party.
Come to my island, do you? In the area. And he was succeeding in getting a lot of people to come and visit his, his homes in his island. And yes.
By the way, Stephen, in the circumstance you are in today, you might well have heard from from Jeffrey Epstein. You might well have had somebody who knows you, who says, "Hey, there's this guy in New York.
"Loves your show. "Just to riff it." And all of a sudden, you're getting that invitation. And you're getting that invitation through someone you know and kind of like...
Like, Joe Rogan did. I don't know, but like, so many people. Well, he, Joe Rogan said it. Oh, if he's been public about it, I'm just not going to be the one to say it, but I got it.
Oh, okay. Joe Rogan publicly last week said that. And it's in the files that a former guest,
“I think it was Lawrence Krauss, of his show,”
invited him to come and meet Jeffrey Epstein. And the emails show that Jeffrey Epstein was trying to get Lawrence to bring Joe Rogan in. Joe Rogan said, like, "Absolutely." But this was Joe Rogan's way.
It said, "Absolutely. If I cannot." Right.
I was freaked out about it and never went and was never involved.
Well, the point I was just making is that in your present circumstance with the, you know, enormous audience and the reach of this show and all your work to small videos, et cetera. Of course, you're a terrific person,
because now I can call you up and say, "Hey, will you have this person on?" Or I can say, "Hey, will you be really skeptical about this topic?" And we'll use, say, "I don't believe it."
And we'll use, say, "I think it's wrong." Or we'll use, say, "I think it's antisemitism." Or we'll use, say, "Such and such." And brother, you will. The moment where I started to, you know,
really understand the blackmail angle and was when I started reading some of the particular emails that Epstein had sent to himself. One particular, where he sent himself an email regarding Bill Gates.
He's alleging that Bill Gates is slept with. He's sending himself an email. He's alleging that Bill Gates is slept with someone, some Russian person. And that he got an STD, an extramarital affair,
all of these allegations. And when I read that email, then I thought, "Oh, you know, he was a blackmailer." He was definitely a blackmailer. And he's collected all these rich and famous people,
and he has them in his pocket now. Just to close off then on this point of Epstein before we move on, you said they've released some of the files, and you said they hadn't released other files.
And you have implied that was because they basically can't release these other files.
“Well, I don't know what I think more is coming.”
I think more will be released. But there are certainly files including files even right now, even yesterday. Though there's a law, as you may know, Congress voted for a law to release everything unredacted.
There's still a lot of redacted stuff. So there's more to come, and will some be redacted sure. Is anybody going to sit here like I did today
Say hi, I'm the Secretary of blah, blah, blah, blah.
And let me just tell you what was really going on. You know, I'm the head of the CIA. Let me tell you what was really going on. Not likely. But Trump knows he knows who Jeffrey and Jeffrey Epstein really was.
I would say all senior people in the US government, and many, many people in general know everything that you and I have discussed here today. No secret. By the way, what do you think? Let's imagine somebody came forward and said,
this country described as our greatest ally. I would say our greatest ally is the UK, based on history. But it's yours an important ally in the Middle East, and it's a democracy and it's more of a Western government. I get it.
But what do you think? The country comes out and somebody officially says, "Okay, let me tell you what was going on." Do you think the American public can handle it?
“I think they either way now deserve to know the truth.”
Whether they can handle it or not, is probably secondary to whether they, I think people need to know the truth.
I think like the problem is people have been like poshly traumatized by all of this stuff.
And so now I think the remedy is full transparency. I agree. And by the way, this is close because we got a lot of information where five weeks ago or eight weeks ago, people were saying, "Well, there's nothing more.
That's it. That's all there is." I mean, this is a big step. And I think it's a big step, as big a step toward transparency, as probably as I've seen in my lifetime by a government. The exception would be, it's not a government.
What Elon did after buying Twitter, the release of the Twitter files. That was a very impressive thing of letting three journalists come in and just go through everything. I think it would be awesome if the US government ever, governments don't do this very often.
But if they ever said, "Okay, everybody put on your seatbelt. I'm going to tell you exactly what happened with the JFK assassination." Or exactly what happened with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, when he ran for president. There are some examples of this in US history where it feels like
after about 25 years, we'll start telling the truth about something. Fifty years ago, Johnson and Johnson went to the FDA. And they said, "Look, our baby powder. You know, that stuff that you put on the baby and you breathe and the mother breath. Well, it's got asbestos in it, and it causes cancer."
And the FDA said, "Well, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We'll begin to study how much asbestos is an allowable amount."
Now, they never considered zero, which is what I'd want on my baby,
or you'd want on your baby. And they began to study, and then they studied for a while, and they studied for a while, and low and behold, 40 years had gone by. And they hadn't come out with a ruling to say, "There shouldn't be any asbestos in Johnson and Johnson and baby powder."
“When did they come out with that ruling, by the way, last year?”
End of 2024, after 52 years. So, at the beginning, the government is saying, "Asbestos, no, what are you talking about?" Agent Orange, the same story. Agent Orange, a material used in Vietnam for defoliation, hurt people, killed people and caused birth defects in their kids, including American soldiers, lots of them.
The government knew it. They had tested it on 40 lab mice, and lab mice don't have a good life generally anyway. They don't have a good life expectancy. But in this case, 38 died within five days. What did the government do with that information?
Oh, put that in a top secret file and get rid of that. And then it sits for a long, long time, and the Institute of Medicine says, "Agen Orange, hurting people, what are you talking about? No."
And they lie, and they lie, and they lie, and then finally,
20, 25 years later, "Okay, yeah, sorry, we were wrong. It does cause birth defects." You see that same story with breast implants, silicaum breast implants. You see that same story with baby formula, with baby food,
“which has arsonic in it. I don't want any arsonic in baby food.”
But denied and I denied and I, and we'll see it with mass vaccination. Because after some years, there will be, "Okay, yes, there is a good chance that it causes myocarditis already been admitted by the way." Perry carditis cancering young people. It was a bad product. Sorry.
But they won't do it a year away from a thing. And they obviously, as we can see every day, they won't do it five years away. It's very easy to see and to locate when the US government or any power center.
I'm an American, I'm all for America, but all power centers in human history lie. Knowing that they are lying does not tell you the truth, however. Meaning knowing that Oswald did not act alone as a shooter from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository
if he was a shooter at all. Knowing that does not tell you who was the shooter. So often the best we can get in our skepticism is to know that we are not being told the truth. When I grew up, I felt, I feel like I was very naive
to the nature of how the world really operates.
The more I've done podcasts and frankly,
you get invited to interesting things and you meet like rich people and famous people and billionaires.
“And I went to Davos this year, which I think people think makes me”
some kind of like, I don't know. If they illuminare at Davos, they didn't invite me into that room.
But I got to see like really powerful people and world leaders
and all those kinds of things. And I've sat here and interviewed so many CIA spies and I've learned that there are things going on out of plain sight. So the version of reality that the average person has as they go through their life.
How has the work you've done over the last several decades of your career shifted your belief about the version of reality that actually exists? How they different? So I can answer it easily because I was just like you. I would say I was naive.
And in fact, by the way, I want to quickly acknowledge that I'm probably naive today, even with what you've heard because there may be a level above the level above the level above that I'm not seeing or I'm choosing not to see. I can tell you the exact evolution for me, not dissimilar to you.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s.
“I believe the courts will always come up with a fair decision.”
I believe that the IRS will only collect money and destroy people with good reason and they won't do it with bad reason. I believe everything. And a lot of it right up until COVID, by the way. Right up until seeing what went on with both mass vaccination
and the mass control through fear.
Here's what I want to tell you. I've learned.
It's not that unusual, I think. I think it's easy to embrace, which is that our human beings the same as they were a thousand years ago. Our human beings the same as they were in Caesar's time. What did Caesar do by the way?
A Caesar, pick a Roman emperor. Whatever the fuck they wanted to do. They had sex with who and what they wanted. Eight years old, ten years old, boy, girl, whatever it may be. Even in King Faroox time, in Egypt, one of the last kings of Egypt.
If you were a house guest, they'd say to you, "We're going to have dinner at six. We can send somebody to do room. Do you want a young boy or a young girl?" No shame to it, no problem whatsoever.
The rich and powerful people, like the ones you were describing at Davos, often go from, "I already have all the money. I've already had all the fame. I've already had all the influence. What do I want to do now?" And sometimes they want to do forbidden things.
There, keep a girl in an apartment. These are easy, right? Cheat on my wife. These are easy still. 14-year-old girl.
Not getting so easy anymore, but I've done all the other stuff.
“And that's what the Epstein piece appeals to, which is the forbidden.”
I want to be very concise in answering this question about what changed. In terms of my view, how I've gotten, you know, started where I started. First of all, I worked in government. In regulatory administration, I lied. I did things that were lies. That were deceitful several times in my career.
I can give you examples in a minute if you want. But, you know, to make a prosecution work, I reached a bit to get somebody some bad guy who was trying to kill a client. You know, prosecuted or in custody for a longer period of time. I was in many meetings where the questions were,
"This thing happened. "Not how shall we tell the public, but what shall we tell the public? "How shall we spend this thing?" This is the norm in every corporate boardroom in America. It's not, oh, there's a cancer causing asbestos in the baby pet,
or I guess we better let everybody know. That's not the meeting. The meeting is, let's notify the FDA and say it's under study. And so, if we get asked, we'll get through this thing. Who goes to jail by the way in these corporations for the shit they do?
Oh, opioids, et cetera. Oh, my God, 100,000 people dying from a heart attacks from a pain pill, for example. Viox, for God's sake. I mean, it's unbelievable, and nobody gets in trouble.
Right, companies are fined. Do you know what the fines mean to these companies in that new book? I gave you forbidden facts. I lay out what all the pharma companies have been fined criminally. What it costs them and what they made nonetheless.
Right, and of course, they made the right decision because, financially, they did very well. But I want to get to the concise part. Look at World History as a pie chart, right? The entire thing is tyranny as a government method, as a control method. Just a tiny sliver is representative democracy, a little bit starting in Greece, Western Europe, the United States.
Tiny sliver. So our norm Stephen is tyranny, that is the norm for human beings. And what happens to that tiny sliver that I'm describing?
That tiny sliver always moves toward totalitarianism.
What does that mean? It means that the representative democracy we have, let's say, in the UK, which is pretty stressed right now in terms of freedom of speech. Or in the United States, moves toward totalitarianism in that it says,
It starts with we pass a law, and if the US Constitution says, if there isn't...
And for government, it says, if there isn't a law allowing it, you cannot do it. That's the US Constitution. That's the US method. We'll look what it's become. A law gets passed, and then regulators, unelected officials, go fucking nuts, uninterpreting that law the way they want to and applying it the way they want to.
And so the moves toward totalitarianism, 40,000 new laws passed in the United States every year, how many resented almost none. So where are we now?
“Here in the United States, where we both are, or in the UK, where are we in the arc of history?”
Because it kind of does seem to move in sort of cycles. Now the way, if you're talking about where are we now, like Western society or the US, empire indecline?
And first of all, is it an empire?
Obviously, right? We have 760 military bases overseas, 760. We have a larger budget for what we call defense now called war, since Trump has changed the name to Department of War more accurately. We have a larger budget than every other country in the world combined for military spending. How many overseas bases does China have?
I think it's one. I'm not saying China's all lovely. I'm just saying they have a different method. They have a method closer to what we had in the 60s, which was to come in with beneficial help. We'll redo your roads, et cetera, et cetera.
So we're an empire and we're an empire and decline. And a moment ago when I said that tyranny is the normal state of affairs for how people are governed, how is it exercised through fear?
Always through fear. Fear is the method that causes division.
And division is the fuel of power, meaning you want the population to be divided. You want the left and the right. You want the Trumpers and the Democrats and the forever Trumpers and the never Trumpers. Division is the fuel that all world leaders relish. And give you the example in the cleanest terms, the king of the queen, look over the castle wall, and when they see their subjects fighting,
they high five each other. Because if they're fighting with each other, they're not coming over the wall, and there's always a wall. And if they're not fighting with each other, that's a big problem. Because then they're coming over the wall. Because everybody knows in their heart, wait a minute.
These fuckers are living in absolute luxury, while I can't afford to feed my kids. They're their motorcades today, and in those days they're, you know, beautiful, ornate wagons pulled by a bunch of horses go by and splatter mud on me in the street. What really is the difference? I mean, royalty is such a bullshit scam.
“So what happens to the Western world if we're in a declining empire?”
I give you the optimistic version because I have a dear friend happens to live in Cape Town, who helps me with this sometimes because, like anybody, when I look a lot at what happens, I can get discouraged, I can get cynical, it's not a good place to live. I think Tony, maybe even he said it on your show, Tony Robbins, which is, you know, that what you focus on will determine the quality of your life. So I can focus on the pharma companies and all the shit they're doing, or I can focus on the beauty of nature,
and spend more time in nature, and spend more time with my kids, etc. So my optimistic answer, which comes from a dear friend Nick Hudson in Cape Town, is that even if empires decay, and social decay is outside this studio, it's in London, it's in New York, it's in Los Angeles, it's in Seattle, it's in Portland, it's unavoidable. Take a drive in Los Angeles, you know it, every freeway on rep, not some.
Every single one of them has 10 Sundays that with people living there, that is not good news.
And so, but here's the good news part of it, the optimistic part of it, is that survival and thriving always prevails,
and it does not rely on these systems, meaning you are who you are, as a spiritual sense, or in the scientific sense, or whatever way you want to look at yourself as a collection of energy that doesn't need that body, by the way. The energy doesn't go anywhere when that body is done, meaning it's the energy is still there, it's not destructible, and so it's indestructible. So you are this being, this awareness, this consciousness, and if around us, when we go outside here today,
“all the buildings are gone and social decay has accelerated, are we going to be okay?”
And the answer is yes, what happens? Now we're living in the forest, and now I say, Steven, you're pretty good at carpentry, right?
Come join us, and you say, you're good at planning sweet potatoes, we need so...
Let's do that, and small populations of people begin again, commence again, even after nuclear war, after a variety of things,
and I know it's crazy to some people, but I take my hope and my optimism from that fact, which is that it doesn't rely upon the electricity working. It doesn't rely upon the plumbing working and the sewage system working, but eventually there's enough of the earth natural earth for us to do what has happened before, which is start again, give you a very fast aspect of this.
Thousand years ago, there's a thousand little governments. There's Shogans in Japan, there's villages, there's, the guy has 300 people, and he's the chief, then it becomes what it was in your life and my life, which is about 190 countries. But those 190 countries are really about five power centers, right? There's NATO, there's Brexit, there's the oil producing countries,
and eventually that five power centers will come to two power centers, the West, US, and China is my prediction, but it'll be somebody else's prediction can do it differently. And then those two fuckers are standing in a room together, and one has to kill the other.
“That's the course of history, that's how it goes, that's how it goes in every geographical area in history,”
which is we've got 30 villages, and if I can find your village, we'll take the women, we'll take the children, and we'll kill them in, and it's just a matter of math. How many of there are of you, and how many are there of our group? It's, I think it's somewhat inconceivable, especially for people of my generation, to think that the U.S. is at some point going to be at war with China.
Because we've never experienced a world war, but because the stakes and also high with nuclear weapons,
a war theoretically wouldn't be like previous wars, it would be catastrophic. So it's a mathematical, some people say now nuclear weapons have now stopped us from getting into world war three as easily, and if it won't happen. Yes, some people believe in that general concept of mutually assured destruction, which is that neither side will do it, but you said it's almost impossible for you to imagine, or words to that effect, I want to help you with that imagining.
And it goes like this, we are currently at war with Russia. We are not supporting the war in Ukraine, only we are at war with Russia, because we are providing satellite information, electronic warfare, strategies, drone strategies, providing targeting information, and that is war today. That is war. War is not just the guys on the battlefield with rifles, that's the low end element.
The high end element is supersonic missiles, which Russia has, and the high end element is intel and satellite technology, and the wide variety of things that are going on, some of which aren't even in the news, by the way. That go on in Russia, and they say oh shit, or that go on in Ukraine, and they say oh shit. The Russians have figured out that thing, but the US is so far beyond other countries in the world in terms of technology. And so that is war with Russia, and you could say that our war with North Vietnam was war with China.
But now there's just no question about it. Well, that was a long answer, Stephen, to say I want to get your imagination closer. We're already at war with Russia.
“There's a phase a lot of companies hear, where they're no longer doing the most important thing, which is selling,”
and they get really bogged down with admin, and it's often something that creeps up slowly, you don't really notice until it's happened. Slowly, momentum starts to leak out. This happened to us, and our response to pipe drive was a fix I came across 10 years ago. And ever since, my teams across my different companies have continued to use it.
Pip drive is a simple but powerful sales theorem. That gives you the visibility on any deals in your pipeline.
It also automates a lot of the tedious repetitive and time-consuming parts of the sales process, which in turn saves you so many hours every single month, which means you can get back to selling. Making that early decision to switch to pipe drive was a real game changer, and it's kept the right things front of mind. My favorite feature is pipe drive's ability to sync your CRM with multiple email inboxes, so your entire team can work together from one platform. And we aren't the only ones benefiting over 100,000 companies used pipe drive to grow their business.
So something I've said resonates, head over to pipedrive.com/ceo, where you can get a 30 day free trial, no credit card or payment required. This company that I've just invested in, it's grown like crazy.
“I want to be the one to tell you about it, because I think it's going to create such a huge productivity advantage for you.”
It was supposed to flow as an app that you can get on your computer and on your phone, on all your devices, and it allows you to speak to your technology. So instead of me writing at an email, I click one button on my phone, and I can just speak the email into existence, and it uses AI to clean up what I was saying.
Then what I'm done, I just hit this one button here, and the whole email is w...
Because Whisper learns how I write, so on WhatsApp it knows how I am, a little bit more casual, on email a little bit more professional. And also, there's this really interesting thing they've just done.
I can create little phrases to automatically do the work for me.
I can just say, "Jack's LinkedIn", and a copy's Jack's LinkedIn profile for me, because it knows who Jack is in my life. This is saving the huge amount of time, this company is growing like absolute crazy. And this is why I invested in the business, and why they know our sponsor of this show. And Whisper Flow is frankly becoming the worst kept secret in business productivity of entrepreneurship. Check it out now at Whisper Flow, spot W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O-W dot-A-I slash, Steven. It will be a game change if you.
Speaking of crazy weapons, I was really about a story where you did a tour with the CIA, and they showed you a mechanical dragonfly with a battery. What did they show you? Well, I've had a lot to do with the agency that's been public over the years, and I was giving a talk, and then afterwards, they took me on a tour to a CIA museum. They showed me a lot of things. Oh, here's the helmet that was worn by that pilot who was shot down over Russia, named Powers, all kinds of interesting memorabilia.
And one of them was a little dragonfly, the size of a dragonfly, and it was mechanical. And I looked at it real closely, and it's like, "Wow, that's really fantastic. It's very interesting." And he said, "You don't have any questions at all?" I said, "No, I get it." And he said, "Why don't you ask me when it was built?" And I said, "Okay, when was it built?" 1967. In 1967, before we had any miniaturized electronics or motorization, the CIA had built that little thing.
And it was a little camera that would fly around in here as a dragonfly, and then fly home, and I don't know how many pictures it held.
“But it's an interesting piece I want to share with you about AI, which is people wonder, you know, how sophisticated is AI, and where is it?”
My belief is that everything we have access to, like AI, we probably have something that the US intelligence had 10 years ago. We're probably dealing with something quite old already. I'm just looking at the picture of this dragonfight. I didn't even know it was public. This, that's the fogger. There it is. This little thing here. Yeah. And you know, this was made as you say, well, 50 years ago. So one can only imagine the type of technology they have now. Oh, of course. I mean, they probably even need to fly dragonfly in, because we have all these electronic devices.
Of course. They can turn on our devices probably your watch, if it's an Apple watch, but certainly your phone. And yeah, we are participating in, I wouldn't even call it an experiment, but a process that you read 1984. I'm sure, and most of your audience did, I was very heartened during the beginning of COVID. That 1984 became the 17th best-selling book in the world in the English language. Telling me, ah, people are paying attention.
“They see that what they're experiencing here has a degree of 1984 to it. I think all science fiction stories come true.”
I really do. I see it a time after time. What advice would you give to my listeners about how to navigate in the world we're living in today? You know, to avoid risk threat, you know, whether that's a soft tissue, as you said, or just with our privacy or life's generally like, why does the advice start? You said you raised 10 kids? Yeah. What advice are you giving to your 10 kids?
Well, they all know that their dad is a big proponent and my first book, which is still a very big book, a gift of fear.
That book is, I think, still the best-selling book in the world on violence after 25 years. And that book is all about intuition and personal responsibility. So, the very first thing I would say to your listeners to you, to remind myself as well, is that human beings did not get the biggest clause or the biggest teeth or the biggest muscles. We got the biggest brains relative to our size. And the nuclear defense system that all human beings have is intuition, much different from logic.
Intuition, the root of it, by the way, I learned when I was writing that book, is in terror, which means to guard and to protect.
“So intuition, when you think about it, oh, I just have a feeling I should go back to the apartment and double check such and such, did I leave the firearm on the pot?”
And you go back and you open the door and you didn't leave the fire on the pot.
But something else will always be going on that makes you glad you came back.
I believe that intuition is always right in at least two ways. One, it always has your best interest at heart. It's not fucking with you. It's giving you real information that's valuable. And number two, it's always based on something. And so our journey is to figure out when I have an intuitive feeling like, do this show with you, who knows why.
When I have that intuitive feeling, and by the way, I don't do most shows, I ...
I don't know what it'll be. I mean, I can make up one with logic, right? I like that guy, I learned a lot from his shows. I can create a case. I can make a case for anything. But if it's just based on what I feel and everything you've succeeded at and accomplished was based on what you felt.
“It was based on intuition. In America, in the West, we think we're doing it by logic, right?”
I do a big PowerPoint presentation, and I say to the board, here's the reason. Here's why, and here's the percentages, and they say, oh, good. The board at corporations in America would actually prefer that I use logic even if I'm wrong instead of using intuition even if I'm right. So when I say to you, no, I just think it's the right thing to do. I think it'd be smart. I think it'll really work out, like something like Amazon Prime, the people opposed.
And then it's like 175 million people just in America are using it. Big success.
Intuitive process, not a logic process. Logic is weak and plotting. Logic does ABCD. Intuition does A to Z instantly. And you don't know why. It's knowing without knowing why. I don't feel good about that person. I'm going to make this business deal. I'm backing out of it. I said I was going to show up to that thing I'm calling and canceling.
“And by the way, canceling, one of my favorite things. I recommend it to everybody.”
I recommend canceling and postponing to everybody I know. You are not obligated to keep your plans. You've made a plan three months ago, and you don't know who you'll even be. Or if you were them or anybody will even be alive three months from now. There's nothing wrong with canceling. Now, I don't do it rudely by the way. But just to finish on, you know, sort of what your viewers and listeners can do is to really fall in love with intuition.
And to learn the way you communicate with yourself. There's signals from intuition, curiosity. You just wonder something. Suspicion, worry can even be a signal of intuition. But the biggest one is true fear. When you feel true fear, I don't want to do this.
Or what does ask you a question about this? I met with Magnus Colson, who is the arguably the best chess player in the world. And I met with him after spending some time in Cape Town writing about God instinct and intuition and all these kinds of things. And one of the things that I learnt through my writing was that in many cases when someone has really well trained intuition, their first thought is the right thought. And actually, if you give them longer to think about the problem, they make a worse decision.
So when I met Magnus Colson as the number one chess pair in the world, at backstage, we were both on stage together. I said to him, I said, "Listen, I have a question to ask you. Do you basically now just run off intuition or do you think?"
And he said, "My first thought is nearly always right."
So actually, I spend the other time just confirming the first sort of intuition that I had. And actually, I was telling him about a dodgeball game where they got dodgeball players, professional dodgeball players, to look at a frozen image of a dodgeball game and said, "Where would you throw the ball?" And when they gave them little time to decide, they made a better decision. When they just went with their first gut instinct, they made a better decision, they unfrozen,
and it was the right throw. If they gave them longer, they made the worst decision. And the sort of caveat I guess the question for you is, it appeared to me that you almost have to train the intuition. Like areas in our life where we've got multiple reps and pattern recognition are intuition is valuable. But then in other areas of our life where we haven't trained the muscle yet,
we can make bad decisions. Once such example would just be like the first time you start hiring people.
You don't have a trained intuition yet, so you go, "Yeah, it seems nice." But then you get, probably been hiring thousands of people 15 years now, and I get, you know, I get intuition. So do you have to train your intuition?
“Well, I think it happens automatically as you live life that new distinctions are added.”
But I also believe that it is a natural resource. I could think of it in a spiritual sense. It's very hard to figure out why we feel a certain way. And we do what Magnus said, which is we get our answer, and then we backtrack and see if it fits, right? I think the training that's necessary, Steven, is not the training to improve your intuition. But rather the training to listen to it, and to not interrogate it, and to not prosecute it.
Because I'll give you an example. Woman is working late at night in an office building like this. She's on the 10th floor. She's leaving. She pushes the button for the elevator. The elevator door opens up. Inside the elevator is a man who causes her fear. She doesn't like it. For whatever reason, obviously she has no opportunity yet to assess all the issues, what she dressed like, what's he looked like,
what did I hear three weeks ago about a guy who wore a blue cap and T-shirt and she didn't have any time. But her first reaction was like that. What does she do, most women?
They get into a steel, soundproof chamber with someone they're afraid of.
And there's not another animal in nature that will do it.
And why does she do it? Because the thought comes, oh, I don't want him to think I'm a racist because he's Hispanic. Or I don't want to be that kind of person. Or I don't want this reality to be true. So I'm going to act like it's not true, right? And what I say is let the door close in his face. No problem. If you've got the signal, that's a low-cost decision, wait for the next elevator.
Right? That's a very low-cost issue. Now, there are so many examples of this in my work where I interviewed people who had been victimized. And time after time they would tell me, I knew when I walked into that underground parking lot that that was the same car that I'd seen earlier. I knew when I met that guy, such and such. In fact, there's a beautiful woman who wrote me the most beautiful thing. I think it's in in gift of fear or it's in one of the subsequent books. And she said that she would look at her lifelong diary. She kept a lifelong diary.
And she looked back at it. And it would say, met this guy. Feel a little queasy about him, not so sure, dated him, married him. And then what she wrote to me was she said, again and again, I could see there it was in my diary. Listen to this, the ending embedded in the beginning. And so what I encourage people to do going to your original answer is how people can be safer is listen to their intuition.
“Know that its function is to protect you. That's what it's doing.”
When I was reading about your work on intuition and your perspective on it, I got me thinking about people in my life that I have to get rid of tomorrow.
I don't know what the answer is, but I feel like something isn't right.
And that little alarm bell on my head, I'm like, so what do I do about that? And I think there was one particular example I was thinking of where I was getting this little vibe from someone that something was just off. And then three months later, we were at this event. And they started opening up about their childhood. And in the course of opening up about their childhood, I learned something about their mother and something their mother used to do to them.
And they were talking to someone else about this behavior that it's created in them. It suddenly will make sense. That thing that was giving me was making me feel like the vibe was off.
“I think now is because of something from their childhood that I didn't actually know, which meant they have this behavior, which will make you feel a little bit uncomfortable.”
And in that moment, and without, I was thinking about this example before you arrived, because I was like, in that case, my intuition told me something, but I didn't know what it was telling me. I imagine a lot of people have that. They have a vibe of someone, something's not quite right, and they're interpreting it to mean acts when it could be why.
Yes, sometimes there's a very nice, like in my life, and I suspect in yours too, there's often a very straight line between certain childhood experiences and what we ultimately do.
In my case, a very easy one is there was fear. I then come to have a deep understanding of fear, both sides of it, and some compassion for it, and some insight, and I then study it. There was violence in my childhood, and so I now come, now it's so long ago that I'm 71. So my childhood is so long ago now that it doesn't have a grip on my throat, like it did for a lot of my life. Where the narrative was very, very important to me, and the narrative of my childhood was important.
Go ahead, do you want to ask questions? I was going to say, probably give people the context on your childhood. Oh, you were me. Oh, okay, go ahead. Yeah, my childhood, damn it.
I'll tell you. So yeah, very, you know, very difficult time. My mother was a heroin addict. She was quite violent. She was very troubled. She committed suicide when she was a 39 years old, and I was 16, and that was a kind of failure for me.
Because I considered it my job to get us all through this drama alive. She shot my stepfather in front of me.
“There were a lot of, in that house that we lived in, I think there, I saw the house a few months ago, by the way.”
I think there are nine bullets in the walls and floor of that house that I can account for, probably still there. And so while I'm describing this to you dispassionately, it's because of two things. The distance in terms of time, but most of all because of healing. And the, I want to give you my definition of healing in this context. My definition of healing for all of us is when we stop using any of our energy to manage the past.
And this gives us all of our energy in the present moment. And so what do I mean using energy to manage the past? Well, if I'm keeping that story going, and I'm saying to my wife,
Well, because my woman did this, this is why I feel such and such,
which I went through times in my life when those things were much closer to me. Today, I feel like I'm not using any of my energy to manage the past that the narrative I told you. There's whole series of dramas happened. And anytime you hear about a parent or anybody in somebody's life committing suicide, we often think, oh, what a terrible experience that must have been.
But you really ought to think when you hear about somebody committing suicide is all what a series of terrible experiences there must have been leading up to that. And I want to tell you really quickly that I had a couple of dreams that my mother was in that were particularly powerful.
“And I offered this to the audience to know that dream experiences are sometimes all you're going to get, right?”
Because my mother died when I was 16, so I don't have an opportunity to sit across the table with her and say, what were you thinking when you're such and such and what was going on in your life when such and such? But in a dream, she came to me once and I asked her why were you so cruel to me? And she was totally perplexed and she said to me, cruel to you, I was preparing you for this extraordinary life. And I think that's true.
I think that's what happened. Is that for you, whatever your experience was, for Tony Robbins who we talked about earlier, what his experience was, it took those experiences to take away those experiences, and you don't have someone who grows up wanting nothing more than to write these books for free and sell them for free and get them published for free, like forbidden facts, the current book,
in order to help people deal with these issues of skepticism, of fear, et cetera. You don't get somebody doing what I do, where my ambition is long on. At my ambition for more, more anything, more money, more houses, well, houses I might still slip on. But now it's about service to other people.
It wasn't always, but it was service to other people.
“Because I believe that public life includes you.”
If all you do is give me a bad example, that's service. If you give me a good example, that's a prettier form of service. It's that maybe it's a nicer job you got, but ultimately all of it is service. Everything that we can observe in of people in public life and people in our private lives, it's all service. You know, I remember a friend of mine telling me he went back home for Thanksgiving, and he saw his whole family.
And he said, "He learned to only stay for one day." He said, "Because all the shit happened on the second day with his family if he stayed for two days." And he also learned to stay in a hotel.
I said, "Oh, you staying at home?" He said, "Oh, fun. No, never, never stay at home."
Because here was this group of people, but what he told me it was interesting is he said, "Ah, and Charlene, you taught me to speak more quietly because you talked so fucking loud." And he says, "Uncle Carlo, you taught me to be more gentle because men you're rough in everything you do." Throw the glasses around and the way you engage. Dad, you taught me to listen to people because you never fucking listen to a thing I said even today.
Isn't it a beautiful way of looking at it basically? These were the teachers in our lives. For my mother, hundred percent, I'm so far past forgiveness and so far into gratitude for the pieces that were wonderful. And by the way, this is a suffering person. This is a person that charities are for, and social welfare is for. A woman with three kids and no job and a heroin addict, for God's sake. That's not an easy job.
And other drugs, too, by the way, which helped me as I grew up to be skeptical of pharma. Because some of the bills she took, one of them called Dorodon, has now been taken off the market for causing what psychosis. Which explains a lot of her craziness. And so all of this teaching that it depends what you do with it, meaning we all, nobody gets out of here alive. Everybody's got a story to tell.
And I remember a case where I overvalued my own ability to predict human behavior, which I say, "I say in these books, you can predict human behavior." To drive here today in traffic, I had to predict the behavior of thousands of people, based on just a little movements of the big metal objects around them.
You know that guy who starts to move over into your lane and then he catches himself and goes, "You never trust that guy."
You always want to get away behind him or away in front of him. So we're predicting human behavior all the time. But I overvalued mine. I thought, "Oh, I'm Mr. Genius predicting human behavior." Because I developed these systems of artificial intuition that predicted human behavior. And I was out of meeting, and there were group of people at the meeting, and it was going to start in about five minutes.
And a few people were comforting one woman who was really sobbing at the end of the table. And I thought to myself, "Judge mentally, I'm why she even come to the meeting." When she can't do the meeting, like what she's doing here.
“And I knew it was a boyfriend issue, right? That's what she's crying about, and they're comforting her.”
The meeting begins. And that woman speaks first, and she says, "Through her tears, I'm sorry you guys. I'll do my best at the meeting."
As many of you know, my husband killed my 12-year-old son four days ago.
So my little journey into Judge Mental Prediction was about as wrong as you could be.
And it was a humbling experience for me.
“Because I would have discounted that person in a moment. That's the other side of prediction and intuition, right?”
You can discount people and quickly toss them away. And so, you know, when you get this intuitive signal, do we have a responsibility to understand it? Yeah. We have a responsibility to understand how many people have I met? Well, I thought, "What an asshole that guy is." I don't ever want to talk to that guy again. And I didn't. My loss.
Sometimes it would have been the greatest person in the world. Sometimes it would have been a great relationship. And now I apply the George Harrison rule, George Harrison and the Beatles, which writes this unbelievable lyric that's in "Well, My Guitar Gently Weeps," which is, "I look at you all and see the love there that's sleeping."
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We feel deeply connected to each other. At the end of every episode, the guest I'm interviewing leaves a question for the next guest, and we've turned them into these conversation cards. And I've added these twist cards to make your conversations even more interesting. And there are so many more twists along the way with the conversation cards.
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Through your work, you've been behind the scenes with some of the most interesting people on planet Earth. It's the most successful, richest, most powerful people on planet Earth. And you get to see, therefore, both sides of the fence.
And the way that most people would never see, you get to see how they are in the public life.
And then you get to see them in their private life. And oftentimes you'll get to see them during some of the hardest moments of their life. Most of the time. Yeah. What have you learned from that exposure?
Well, probably a lot, but I'll give up what answer comes to me intuitively.
“When I was a kid and I used to watch television, I believe when I was a kid that the television was more real than our lives.”
And I learned, obviously, through my experience, that the exact opposite was true. Right, the media world was unreal, and our lives were real. And this Stephen is incredibly important today, because with AI and social media and other things, we actually are challenged to know what is real and what is not real. Did Trump really make that speech or is it an AI film? Did that really happen?
Or is that real? What I'm looking at, the cat really did that, or is that an AI film? And we are challenged now to understand and choose, I would say, what's real and what's not real. But that challenge has beauty in it, because it's making, for me, it's making me question reality itself. In other words, I'm questioning what really matters to me and what will I call real?
And I'll give you some examples. I'll call touch real. Hug you. Shake your hand. I'll call that real. Nature, time in a park, time with animals, my time with cats and dogs, unbelievably important to me, because I trust those fuckers.
“Right, I believe that cat means business.”
This is what it's doing. If it wants to be on my chest purring, it wants to be on my chest purring. And if it doesn't, she's out of there. Right, see how you count. And so, and children are the same thing. I remember my son's meeting of famous client of mine who, let's say, is was the richest man in the world, et cetera, at that moment, and my son at three years old.
How much money do you have?
But he held no offense, because it's this little kid, all it can be is real. There's nothing but real in the little kid.
And so, where I think optimistically about AI, which definitely has some problems for the human race, for sure.
“But where I think optimistically about it is, I think it's good for people to question reality, because what ultimately is it? What is it?”
If this is a simulation, like Elon makes a good argument for, and I think he leans in that direction, by the way, and sometimes I do too with him. If it's a simulation, then we want to make it interesting. And we want to be a bit outside. In a simulation, we're not vulnerable. The spirit, the soul, the energy that animates us will continue. It's not going anywhere. And it lets us witness this experience, rather than feel victim to it.
We get to this a good movie. And we wouldn't go see a movie if we knew the outcome.
But this movie is really good. And so when I look at AI things and trust me, I don't know about you, you're younger, so you may have better instincts or intuitions for it. But I genuinely can't tell sometimes. I send something back to a friend of mine and say, I think that's bullshit. I don't think the dog actually jumped up on the top shelf and did that such and such. I don't buy it. And then you look at it a few more times, but this is good for us. Because what it brings us to is whatever we think is real, touch, taste, the feelings, tears, nature.
“Well, whatever we think it is, I believe that's where I want to be. That's where I want to spend my time.”
So there's this theoretical, the dead internet theory where they think that because of AI and I was being able to make.
I said, I actually sent a video to some of my team members earlier. It was a two and a half minute video.
And it's made with one of these AI tools. And it's the ending of a very famous movie, and someone's just changed it. And everyone, it's a kid and their bedroom is made new ending to the movie. A couple of prompts, they've got new ending to the movie. And I was playing this forward, playing this forward and forward. And eventually, you get to a point where bots will be just spraying content at the internet, and in such a world.
Unless we have these sort of retina scanners to confirm that I'm doing the post-live, you get to this dead internet theory where everything you see is either written by produced by AI, therefore, with our level of skepticism just raises to the point that we don't trust anything we're seeing. You're saying that that's actually a good thing for us because it makes us question what we're saying again and revert to real things that are irreplaceably human. Yes, I think it's good to, I think it's spiritually good for us to redefine reality.
“As opposed to, take me back 20 years in my life and possibly yours, what did I believe?”
Everything the government said, every official narrative, why wouldn't I believe it? Do you think there's any downside to our lost interest in institutions? Well, I have such a negative view of big centralized institutions. Why? Because I think what happens when you, a very good number of people to live together is about 300. And what I base that on is, Fiji, where I live a lot, villagers are about 300 people.
There's a chief who lives with them. He doesn't get special treatment. He's not carried around and a gold chariot. He's got to eat the same food they do, and he is generally benevolent. Because the beauty of the Fiji and village, and I encourage you to go and all your viewers to go, don't all go on the same day because you'll fuck up Fiji, but go anyway. The beauty of the Fiji and village is that people will be born and grow up. And get married and have children and die all in the same house and all with the same people.
That's fantastic. Because what they don't get that I get in my life and you get is the engagement with all these anonymous people that don't matter. Right? The waiter is just a snapshot to me, not a real person I'm sitting down with. I like to, by the way, really engage with people at the expense of the friends I'm with very often. I'm really curious about people, the Uber driver. I'm curious. But I know that this is a temporary relationship. In the Fiji and village, it's not a temporary relationship.
I'll give you an example on an airplane. You're on a commercial flight somewhere, and you've got a 10 hour flight to overseas to London or something, and there's a baby crying. And you're pissed at the babies crying. Some people are. I mean, I look at this when we used to travel my wife and I and I remember somebody saying when we boarded with my maybe 20 month old son. Is that baby going to cry? And I said to the woman, what do you think? It's a 20 month old baby. But the point is, hey folks, we're together for the next 10 hours. How do we want to spend this time?
We want to spend it hating each other. We want to get too drunk and bug the person next to you. How do we want to do this?
A phgean village is like that.
Fewer people for God's sake. Then what we get on an airplane every day. And so, I believe in small populations for governance.
“And I believe in subsidiary. A word you probably don't know. I only learned it about a year ago from a dear friend in Cape Town.”
subsidiary means government at the most local possible level. So if it's an issue regarding building permit, that ought to be city or county. Nothing to do with Washington DC. If it's an issue regarding interstate commerce, maybe we need a little Washington DC, we need a little state involved. But government at the most local possible level, so that I can come over to your house, Steven and say, why did you not approve my building permit? Or so, I can meet you in the restaurant where we see each other every morning where kids go to school together. I don't believe centralized government works.
And I think further that centralized government is our enemy. It is the enemy of citizens. I was thinking about the parallels there actually for business. I get too big. Yeah, they get too big. And a lot of great companies actually break break up divisions and departments and give them autonomy and subsidiary.
It wasn't easy for me. I know the first time we're talking about subsidiary subsidiary.
subsidiary. And how even in his company grows, maybe I should think we're about subsidiary. Well, I'll tell you, my company at its biggest was about 1,000 people and 26 offices around the country, around the world. And I didn't like 1,000 people as a number. I liked where we are now, which is about 600 people. We're hiring by the way, so look us up and come to work. We need young people who are physically fit and have good backgrounds, meaning they can pass screening. But my point is that I like to stay in that sweet spot of 1,000 people starts to get too far from the individuals.
And when it's small, and I don't know where you are now in this podcast organization, but you can walk down the hall and see an employee and say, "Hey, it seems like you're not doing so well. You don't like to joke anymore. You seem humorless. You seem such and such."
In a big organization, well, I developed a method for that, by the way. I'll tell you a second.
But in a big organization, you get farther and farther and farther from the human beings. I want to tell you the method we developed. We have a thing called care. It stands for continuous asking, responding, and evaluation. Every day, every employee in my company, when they log in to work, gets a question that they answer. And I get the statistical results of that every day. And the questions will be things like, "When do you think you're getting your next promotion?"
Or, "Have you experienced or witnessed sexual harassment? Have you experienced or witnessed discrimination? Why do I do that?"
“Because I want to know, right? That's why you ask. Have you in bigger companies that use our system?”
Like Amazon did develop a system like it. You might ask a question like, "Have you ever seen a firearm in the workplace and unauthorized firearm?" Oh, damn it. We want to know that information, right? Does your supervisor know your name? Huge question. Because the supervisor, knowing that question is asked, "No, is everybody's name?" Which is what you want. Your influencing middle management behavior. But that system we have care is no different than me walking down the hall and say, "Hey, Stephen, I noticed for the last couple of days you're keeping your office door closed and you shut down for some reason what's going on."
You lose that when it gets too big. And when it gets really too big, like think about government agencies like HHS, the biggest budget in world history. $1.7 trillion. Bigger than the Pentagon started out at 85,000 employees, luckily it's down now. You've got to be kidding. You're running a machine. It has nothing to do with humanity. And government agencies have nothing to do with humanity. They have to do with process. You'reocracy. We talked about advice. That's kind of what we started on this train of thought that you would give to your children.
And one of the, you know, trains we went down was about intuition. Is there anything else that you think was, you know, if this was your last day on earth and your children said to you, that? What do I need to know to live a fulfilling life? Based in the world as we see it today? What would you say if you could only say one thing?
“For me, and I think it's true for everybody, contribution to others is a key part of coming to believe that you belong here.”
Those of us who had a tough time, and I remember I said everybody has a tough time in some way through childhood, self love is often missing or is hard to come by.
And to believe that you belong here, contribution to others is a key thing. And the second one you asked for one, but you're getting to, so it's a special today, a bargain.
The second one was the hardest lesson for me to come to believe. And that was that what is right for you is always right for the other person.
Very hard for me to get my head around this one because I thought, well, wait...
Well, A, she gets to be with somebody who actually wants to be with her. She gets to begin her life now instead of I stay with her until she's 45 and she can't have kids anymore.
“So this idea that what's right for you is always right for the other person. The practical application is that all you need to do Stephen is know what's right for you, which is easier said than done.”
It is easier said than done, but because in my case, what I would do is say, well, what has this person going to do when I was younger, I believed everybody that I fired, for example, which was very few people in my career. I mean, employed as shit load of people, but I didn't fire very often. Everybody that I fired, I thought they went from working at this great company that I was the founder of being on the street homeless and couldn't feed their families. That's not what happened. They went to other great jobs. If they could work for GDBA, they had already jumped through so many loops.
They were presentable. They were intelligent. They were physically fit. They had a great background. They had integrity that we could see. They had all the variety of things that they presented incredibly well because we've got one hell of a screening process. We have a nine day nine day interview. Not a one hour interview. They live. They come and live at our camp for nine days of an interview process. They're sleeping in our environment. We're really getting to know them. By the way, it's 12 days now, but it started as nine days. So now I know if I fire somebody or if they leave, they're going to do fantastic.
Awakening for me, but this idea that what's right from me is always right for the other person. What does it do? It frees you to know that the only place I have to go to get the answer to this question is in here. You don't want me messing around in your brain trying to figure out what you want trying to figure out what you believe trying to figure out what's best for you. I've hurt more people in my life trying to figure out what's best for them. Then I've helped. It is remarkably true. I've just sort of sensed checking it against people where in one particular case where I'd fired someone and they were very upset about it.
Many, many, many years ago, previous business, very upset about it, protested, you know, said some things to me.
“And then years later, five, six, ten years later, when I reflect on where they are now. And if that was the best thing for them, as I kind of assumed it was to be honest, they would say it was the best thing for them.”
I would say it was the best thing for them. In part, because when held in a situation that's not right for them, they're going to suffer in other ways. Yeah. I understand what you're resentment. My resentment is standard. They can't meet goals. They can't meet the pressure from everybody, the stress when they come see job. And yeah, and let them go and they start their own thing. And last pressure, lower goals, less expectation. They seem to be much much happier. And you, oh, mama, mama, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. Look, guide only made you or the universe, whichever word you want to fit in there, only made you responsible for one person.
Truly responsible for one person. And that's you. And then that has, of course, all the ripple effects of what it does for the rest of the world.
Even our children, by the way, are we responsible for them? Certainly not for life, right? Because in my case, I'm an older father. My first birth kid, I had a bunch of adopted kids, a bunch.
I had eight, but my first birth kid, I was 52 years old. And so I'm an older father to my 17-year-old son. I don't expect to be around when he's 50. I'll take it if it happens to be that way, but I would be de-fucking-crep it by that point. And I'd rather probably exit before that. But my point is, the idea that even our children, we will not find the answer. Do I know what's best for my kids? Of course not. I have a lot of opinions, but do I really know what's best? No, but I know what's best for me.
And that's really where my responsibility has to end. And Stephen, you asked me to boil it down to one. I gave you a special today of two. And I want to give you the third one that you haven't asked for. And it's this. Everything you want is downstream. Meaning that time when we're swimming against the current and think, oh, if it's important, it's going to take all this work, et cetera, et cetera, there is no swimming upstream.
Well, downstream always wins. Reality always wins. You know, when you swim upstream, you put enough current there and you're staying in the same place.
“And so the times in my life when I thought it must be this way, it has to be this, this is the only way I was wrong.”
I was wrong, including hiring a dear friend of mine told me the story of hiring a CEO for his company, big company. And the guy said, I'll take the job and they negotiated everything and then the guy said, you know, I'm going to go to work for Pepsi Cola. And I'm sorry. And my friend got an airplane and flew to the hotel and waited in the lobby of the hotel where he knew the guy was caught him in the lobby and said, don't go to work for them.
Go to work for me.
So basically, when the whole universe says no, everything you want is downstream. Now, you probably have some, you tell me, do you have some resistance to that idea?
Um, I would say, I can think of examples where I fought for something and it was, I fought for a person or something and it turned out to be a good decision. Should I give you the context? Yeah, I'd love to hear the context, but by the way, that doesn't defeat my argument because fighting for something is not the same as swimming upstream. You know, swimming upstream is, you know, which way this river is going. Yeah, that makes sense then. Yeah. And so the, the, the, you asked what I would tell my kids is that everything you want is downstream.
It kind of, you know, I've been so blessed or lucky, whatever word you want to use or fortunate in my life, that my work, you've got all these books as examples, I loved doing it. It wasn't work. I love sometimes it's hard, but hard is not the same as like feeling like I'm just stamping something out in this factory, which would be a kind of hell for me, I guess.
“I loved, I, I was doing what I was on the planet to do. I think everybody isn't that lucky.”
The example I was going to give you actually sort of story yet.
Me and my, me and my then girlfriend were dating for a year, we had an issue. I've been very open about this and newspapers were out about it and stuff, but we had an issue with our intimate life. And we couldn't really see a way round it, broke up, she flew to Bali because we couldn't see a way to solve the problem. And then I carried on with my life and a year goes past and I'm thinking constantly and thinking, do you know why? I think actually that was the right person. I think I should have, maybe in my maturity, I like should have found a way to work through this problem.
So I fly across the world to Bali for 18 hours and I go there to apologise to her for not handling the situation better in a more mature way. I apologise, I think there was part of me that's when I get her back, actually while we're there, she does tell me that in the time we've been apart, she's been with someone else. And I take it all very, very well, I'm very mature and then while we're there, I know she's not trying, she's not trying to like sit next to me. So when we go for dinner with our friends, she's like sitting two seats down, she's like, there's no interest in me.
So I accept it and I tell her I'm going home in two days' time, thank you so much for spending time with us in a nice text message.
And then in the 40 hours before my flight, it's like we fell in on with each other again. So it supports your point because when I apologise, I came with no agenda and then I said I'm leaving in the 40 hours from the point where I said I'm off now. I said, I'm not her nice message, it's like we fell in love again, she's not my feeling saying. And that's the visualisation of your girl. I've been seven years or something but it actually goes to show what you said, now I thought it through, because I thought flying was me fighting for something, because the example you gave, but actually it was, I apologise and I'd give it up.
I like stopped fighting. That's the best when you let it go. I let it go. And suddenly it happens, yes, it does fit everything you want is downstream. In fact, that's not, you know, even getting on a plane is downstream.
You didn't get on a plane that flies backwards or has no engines.
“That's what I'm talking about is when you find yourself and I certainly have in my life, find myself doing something that is so difficult to do.”
And so unrewarding. And it feels like I'm trying to swim upstream, which I can tell you from experience and lots of rivers, some of them in VG, it doesn't work. You don't get a lot of mileage swimming upstream. I was just going to ask for, you know, this was such a smash hit by a selling book. Yeah, nationally.
And I was just going to ask you the question, why? What is it that resonated with people that made this book so successful, the gift of fear? Survival signals that protect us from violence? What is it? That's a very good question. I mean, a good question in that it's a new question.
I'll give you what I hope.
“I think if that book had been about Chinese pottery or about spices,”
or any subject, carbon tree, it also would have worked well. Because it had by a number of blessings, it had some core truths in it. Like you didn't, one of the things I'm saying to them is forget about experts. You don't need an expert to be telling you things that are in your own body. If this story is resonant to you, if this experience from all these people that I interviewed is resonant to you.
And if that works for you, then you'll find value here. And there are some practical reasons why it was a best seller like Oprah doing it. I mean, everybody did it. Time magazine, newsweek, everybody did big things on the book. Why at that moment did that work out?
I have a theory, which is that a lot of people in media knew me or knew of me,
I never had done anything public.
And it took a lot of courage to do.
And when I, for me, I talk about things that were very personal in that book. And in the other books as well, and it took a lot of courage. In fact, I went and met with two authors beforehand who had told really hard stories about their lives. And I didn't know them. I just asked for meetings. One of them was in DC.
And I got some encouragement.
I also remember, by the way, meeting with a group of law enforcement officials who were at my company for some reason.
And I told them a couple of stories from that book. Childhood stories. And they were kind of a guest. Everybody was like, "Oh, it didn't stimulate any conversation at the table." I knew I was in a kind of territory that most people run away from.
And that too helped me.
Because I thought denial, denial, denial, denial, all around the table because every cop.
And every FBI agent has a story about why they are doing what they're doing. Just like every doctor does, just like everybody does. There's a reason that they're doing what they're doing that usually will be discoverable in childhood.
“And when they discover it, like, "Who do you want, for example, for a heart surgeon?”
Do you want the heart surgeon whose grandfather died of a heart attack in his arms when he was 14 years old? Or do you want the one who said heart surgery? Oh, the earnings look really good on heart surgery. I'll take heart surgery as my major." You know, you want the one with a core, with a story, a personal story. We have a closing to this moment that I'll ask you to leave a question for the next.
And the question left for you, not letting you leave it full, is, "Why do you think the origin of your purpose and meaning comes from objectively?" Okay, give me 25 minutes of silence. This is, I guess it's somewhat of a spiritual answer, which is that I believe in, I tend to go with everything as predetermined.
“Meaning, down to the smallest tree, in the smallest town, in the smallest place, it's going to be, that's how it was going to be.”
Now, I have a scientific version of this, which is that if you're, I remember one day I was in Fiji, and I was swimming in front of my house, and the water's just four feet deep in front of my house because it's on a reef. So you can walk on it, and you get to the end of the reef, you get to the deep water. And I was standing in the, in the four foot deep water, and suddenly a massive rainstorm came, just like the pop, pop, pop, pop, hitting you in the head, and then it stopped immediately. And immediately after that, this massive school of fish, about this big, just started jumping out of the water in front of me, and it's noisy.
As they were going around, and they go in a whole circle around me, and then they're gone, and immediately after this, the tide, which was rising, it goes up and down, as you know twice a day, the tide really got strong where I was standing, and it was coming in as opposed to going out. And so I was really like standing there like this, and I was looking around, and I thought, this better be enough stimulation for you, brother. Like I'd just seen the giant rainstorm, and then the sun, the fish going nuts, and then this giant tide thing, and as soon as I thought that, a whale breached right off the reef.
And, and I thought, holy shit man, you are seeing one hell of a movie here, and then I thought, in fact, I dreamed that night, that I was, as if somebody had typed in, show me what it would be like. To be standing on a reef in Fiji, there was no AI then, but to be standing on a reef in Fiji, and have a massive school of fish go jumping up around you, have a huge storm begin. Have it quickly gets sunny, and then see a whale breached in front of you, as you're trying to hold on to the reef is so strong, you can barely stand up.
Show me what that's like, Google, and that I, Gavin, was like the eyes of God, universe, whatever it may be, that you could, like, what is it like to be a 42-year-old man who's had this diet this day, this trip out to the reef, this childhood, this experience, is it all predetermined?
“And I do believe it is, and so the answer to that question is, I believe it's out of my hands, I may get the choices, you know, as they're free will, something is presented to me, go left, go right.”
I might get the choice, but what is presented to me? What is presented to me is not up to me? You tell me that life is consciousness trying to understand itself. Someone said that to me once and it was quite compelling though. The idea was dropped into my skull, so quickly, like it was a journalistic report that said, here's the way the world works, something, or somebody, or everybody, or everything, types into Google, what it wants to see, and occasionally you are the body that it works through, because if the rest of the universe and by the way, kind of interesting,
This very moment we're in Steven, because that experience I had is now being ...
So now you do know a little bit about what it's like to stand in the water with the current, trying to pull you over and see a whole school of fish, go around here and see a whale breach right in front of you, and see this massive rainstorm come and go in a matter of minutes.
“Now, you get a little piece of that experience. Now, do I think, here's the punchline, do I think I created that experience? No fucking way. I don't. I think it's predetermined.”
And I think the, I said you the scientific version is, you're going to ask me this question and that's the answer you're doing yet. That's what I believe, based on what I ate today, based on what I ate 40 years ago, based on childhood, based on who you are and who I am, that's the answer you're going to get and who left the question. And who left it and how their day was and what they ate that day and everything else, I believe in predetermination. It is, it comes from a teacher of mine in India, my best teacher in life in the Sargadada wrote a book called I am that recommended to everybody and then his student who's now died.
And he said, "Romesh Balsikar, who I got to go see and spend time with in India, who was an important teacher for me, who basically said every day at 9 a.m. he had sought song in his house, basically people could come and ask questions. And he happened to be Indian, but it was sort of Buddhist and nature and somebody said to him, well, you're just saying we're all robots and he said, yes, exact the correct we're all robots and then the person said, well, why should I even get out of bed in the morning?
And he said, after a few days, you'll be up and about, you'll be doing something, you'll be motivated to do something.
So that is my answer to your question, which obviously I only heard the second and the answer only came this second.
Kevin, thank you. Thank you for opening my eyes in so many ways. You've written so many of these great books, all of them I'm going to link below. And here is called "Forbidden Facts" government deceit and suppression about brain damage from childhood vaccines. There's another book about children here protecting the gift, keeping children and teenagers safe and parents sane. The gift of fear survival signals that protect us from violence.
“And I think those are the only three you need to link. And my reason is, these are kind of specialty books.”
Okay, fine. So I'll link these below for everyone to see.
I highly recommend checking all of the governments work out.
And these are going to be in the comments section below if anyone wants to read more about some of the things we've touched. And you've touched on all these books today, but if you want to go deeper on any of these subjects, this is your opportunity to do so. And is there anywhere else people can go to find you if they're interested in you? I mean, our website is gdba.com and probably Gavindbecker.com works. The website is, I don't even solicit new clients.
We don't have any marketing or anything like that. The website is there for one purpose, which is attracting candidates for employment because we are hiring a lot of people all the time.
“So that's what the website does, but there may be other information there that's valuable for people I don't know.”
Well, if anyone's young and fit, strong, I want to work with Gavindbecker. Then I'll link the website below as well to see all of the jobs available. Gavin, thank you so much. It's certainly, I mean, there's so many things that have been in my mind.
But one of the most important things for me is actually just this lesson about intuition.
And that even in that to listen to it more and to be more upfront with people, when my intuition isn't telling me something, because you're right. I think we are all very good at tuning the volume of our intuition down. And society kind of teaches us to gaslight ourselves and double gas. Gavin, thank you.
Thank you, too, and thanks for what you're doing. You are one of my teachers as well, young men. I get to say it's 71. Thank you. YouTube have this new crazy algorithm where they know exactly what video you would like to watch next based on AI and all of your viewing behavior.
And the algorithm says that this video is the perfect video for you. It's different for everybody looking right now. Check this video out. I bet you you might love it.



