Top CIA Security Advisor: Jeffrey Epstein Epstein Was A Made Up Person & They Can See Your Messages!

I have inside information on Jeffrey Epstein and why the US government is reluctant to be more transparent.

And I know this because when I was working in government meetings were 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 put 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.

So you've been behind the scenes with some of the most successful, richest, most powerful people on planet earth,

but what does it you do, Gavin?

So I do protective coverage.

You know, any of the ways that wealthy or prominent people might be targeting.

For example, the Saudi Arabian government obtained a system which 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.

Lucky 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 asbestos and baby powder,

100,000 people dying from heart attacks 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 that listen to this 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, will 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 to know.

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 the 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 this show better.

I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this

one right now and hit that follow button.

Thank you 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.

I'm calling at this crazy hour as I found out that you're interviewing a dear friend of mine,

Gavin DeBacker, I think, in two days, I think on the 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 the Supreme 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

at 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.

I recognize the voice, yeah, for crazy if someone didn't.

But it got me incredibly, incredibly curious because he said lots of things there that I found

fascinating. The first one I'm going to start with is he described you helping him with a personal

situation in his life and I guess this begets the question, what is it you do for people like

Tony Robbins? What is it you do for famous people for world leaders? What does it you do, Gavin?

The main function of my company is anti-assassination. So we develop and deploy anti-assassination

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 people not retired

ex-cops who are overweight and on their second career. But people who are really trained for

this specific field, armored 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 are some of the names that you do this for and have done this

for 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 it's 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 reference 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,

Cher 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 the

situation with his girlfriend, a 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 won't even say he's a client. I won't say it if you if you have it from some

other source. Tony said. I understand. Your interrogation makes all the sense in the world,

but I just don't say it. I don't talk about clients. There's a bunch of reasons, but most of all

just absolute confidentiality. I know it's weird apologies. But I heard you talk about the Jeff Bezos

situation. You heard me talk about cybersecurity and the vulnerability of phones. And the Bezos

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.

In that case where you did have Jeff's permission, the background context was 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, Lauren 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 that?

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 3, which can get into your phone

remotely. It doesn't require a click of any kind. I mean, you don't have to acknowledge anything

it 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 the Israelis. 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 3 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, 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, I have to say, people are somewhat reluctant and

maybe even lazy. I'll put 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 that he sends also goes to his executive

assistant. And everybody knows it. And what happens is it controls and influences 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 in the other room is seeing that. And so the best we can all do

is be watchful what we say and have no pretence of privacy or confidentiality,

because it simply does not exist period. The U.S. government got into the phones of all of our

allies, the Prime Ministers, 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 them ahead of state,

he's the prince, but his father was alive and was actually the head 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

NUM 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

are 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 and

that the Western countries of the world were objecting to this assassination team of his going

around and killing people and getting into their phones. In early 2019, Jeff Bezos publicly

accused the US tabloid, the national inquiry, of attempting to blackmail and extort him by

threatening to publish intimate photos, including what he described as a nude below the belt

selfie of him and his then partner Lauren Sanchez. Bezos wrote a blog post saying,

AMI emailed his lawyer and security adviser Gavin DeBeckas 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 inquirer and they

negotiated with me and my lawyer over this that I was to go public and say two things. I was to say

it was not politically motivated and it was not influenced by outside actors, IE the Saudis,

and that there was no hacking involved. My question was, why the hell do you want me to say that

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. Bezos ultimately wrote a medium post talking about it publicly and saying, hey, if I can't stand

up to this, then where is a regular person? And ultimately, there's pictures whenever published.

I won't even comment on whether those pictures exist because they were doing a fascinating thing,

by the way. It's 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. So it's kind of a double crime,

it's an extortion and fraud. It's interesting, 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 because now we can see 3,000,000 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 with all of this stuff. You must be watching this stuff from like

through the lens that you've not 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. But I mean, inside information, I mean information that

I might have gotten from, I'm 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 like 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 happens to not like massage, which is

itself, you know, a lot of people would say yes, and might 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 might 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, fun, not married,

young girls, lots of things. So he was a construct, the money, 500 million dollars of money came from

less Wexner, who's a wealthy guy who owns or owned, I don't know what he's doing now, a victorious

secret big donated to the state of Israel. And 500 million dollars 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 dollars. I'll tell you that.

The idea that you're 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, there's 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. What would that be? Why would the prosecutor who prosecuted

him in Florida 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 US 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 what have you. That's a very normal process. It's a bargaining process

basically. However, in the Epstein case, the US 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 sweetheart

deal became the secretary of labor. He was at that time, the US attorney for Florida.

He was asked, why did you give that sweetheart 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, but 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 US 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 US 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 US public handle it?

Might 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 US ally.

Yes. So who is that ally? Israel. You believe that Epstein was an Israel intelligence asset?

Yes, I do. And, and Elaine Maxwell, just for additional background, but everybody can find it.

Her father was an Israeli intelligence 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 eulogies 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, that is indeed what I believe. Yes. And not just me, by the way, you might

already be there, and you certainly had another guest sit here and, and former CIA guy,

Kirakau, had he say his last name? Yeah. Am I close to that? You're close to the nod again.

And he was point blank in saying Israel. So there's no, there's no direct evidence, but what people

live essentially doing is putting the pieces together to make a picture. There is direct evidence.

It's just not direct evidence I'm sharing at this moment, but there's there's plenty of evidence

that it has been public already, some of which I've shared. I mean, I could, I could do it for 40

minutes, but everybody can just go to chat GPT and, you know, if you ask chat GPT, make the best case

for. It's 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 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 sexual compromise operation resembling known intelligence. Compromat trade craft.

Compromat, yeah, like it's a Russian word that means we compromise you.

Had wealth and access far beyond his formal career and operated with an usual legal protection

for years. His close partnership with Glenn Maxwell whose father had documented intelligence ties

fuel suspicion as does reporting by journalists who say Epstein's activities were discussed in

intelligence adjacent circles. The cameras and the microphones hidden in his apartment and his

home. How do we know they were there 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 discs 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 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 would 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 a B or C. The other version is far better, which is even alluded

to in some of the now released 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 said, oh yeah, yeah,

remember she recorded something. She had something in her bag. She made a recording and I got

worse 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. 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 inquirer. And here's what they said. That's a very, very rare. And so, you know, a senator,

a congressman, he owned a lot of people. 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. Lucky you. And I just

have a lot of ignorance to like, you know, because you hear about these things in almost like movies.

And it appears that we're all kind of witnessing something we might have regulated just to the

movies happened 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. Sure. 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 comms to people saying, come and hang out with me.

I'm doing this thing. This dinner party come to my island, you in the area. And he was succeeding in

getting a lot of people to come and visit his, his homes and his island. And yeah, it's, uh,

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, uh, just terrific. And 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, and Joe Rogan said it.

Oh, if he's been public about it, I'm just not going to be able to say it, but I got it.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Joe Rogan publicly last week said that, and it's in the files that a former

guest, I think it was Lawrence Krause 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, absolutely, but this was Joe Rogan's where it said,

absolutely, if I cannot. Right. I was creeped 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, uh,

hey, will you have this person on or I can say, hey, will you be really skeptical about this topic?

And will you say, I don't believe it. And will you say, I think it's wrong? Or will you say,

I think it's anti-Semitism or will you, will you say such and such? And brother, you will.

The moment where I started to, you know, really understand the black male angle,

um, was when I started reading some of the particular emails that Epstein had sent to himself,

one in particular where he sent himself an email regarding Bill Gates. He's alleging that Bill

Gates has slept with. He's sending himself an email, alleging that Bill Gates has slept with

someone, some, some Russian prostitute and that he got an STD and extramarital affair, all of these

allegations. And when I read that email, um, then I thought, oh, you know, he was about, he was a black

male. He was definitely a black male 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, 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 gonna sit here like I did today and say, hi, I'm the secretary of blah, blah, blah.

And let me just tell you what was really going on. Uh, 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,

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, on history. But, uh,

Israel's an important ally in the Middle East and it's a, it's a democracy and it's more of a

Western government. I get it. Um, 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. We've, I think

like the problem is people have been like partially traumatized by all of this stuff. And so now,

I think the remedy is full transparency. I agree. And by the way, uh, this is close because we,

we got a lot of information, whereas, you know, five weeks ago or eight weeks ago, people were

saying, oh, 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, uh, 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 seat belt,

I'm going to tell you exactly what happened with the JFK assassination or exactly what happened with

the assassination of Robert F Kennedy Center to 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. 50 years ago, Johnson and Johnson went to, uh,

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 breathes, 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 them. Then they studied for a while, they studied for a while

and low and behold, 40 years have gone by and they hadn't come out with a ruling to say there

shouldn't be any asbestos in Johnson and Johnson 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 cause 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 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 Agent 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. It does cause birth defects. You see that same story with

breast implants, silicon breast implants. You see that same story with baby formula

with baby food, which has arsenic in it. I don't want any arsenic in baby food. But deny, deny,

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.

Pericarditis, cancer in young people, it was a bad product. Sorry. But they won't do it a year away

from a thing. And 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. This is,

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.

And the more I've done podcasts, and frankly, you know, you get invited to interesting things,

and you meet 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, I wasn't. If the

Illuminati at Davos, they didn't invite me into that room. But I got to see 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 are they different?

So I can answer it usually 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 grow 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 believed everything. 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? Aces, or 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 Farouk's 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 your room. Do you want a

young boy or a young girl? No shame to it. No problem whatsoever. 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. Have an affair. Keep a girl in an apartment. These

are easy, right? Cheat on my wife. These are easy still. Fourteen-year-old girl. Uh-oh. 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 started where I started. First of all, I worked in government,

worked in the Reagan 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 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, there's a cancer causing asbestos in the baby

pattern. 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, opioids, etc. Oh my god,

a hundred thousand people dying from heart attacks from, 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 cost 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 a 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, you know, the US Constitution says, if there isn't a law

prohibiting it, you can do it. 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. Well, look what it's become.

A law gets passed and then regulators, unelected officials go fucking nuts on interpreting that law

the way they want to and applying it the way they want to. And so the, it moves toward totalitarianism,

40,000 new laws passed in the United States every year. How many rescinded, 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 we, if you're talking about where

are we now like Western society or the US, empire in decline. 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, with beneficial help. We'll redo your roads, etc., etc. So we're an

empire and we're an empire in decline. And a moment ago when I said that 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 the trumpers and the

and the democrats and the forever trumpers and the never trumpers. Division is the fuel that all

world leaders relish. I give you the example in the cleanest terms. The king and 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, their motorcades

and today and in those days they're 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 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 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 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 what?

Every freeway on ramp, not some. Every single one of them has tents underneath it 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 in the spiritual sense or in the scientific sense, whatever way you want to

look at yourself as a as a collection of energy that doesn't need that body by the way, right?

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 going to planning sweet potatoes. We need some of that. 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 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 shoguns in

Japan. There's villages. There's a 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. 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. If I can find your village, we'll take the women, we'll take the children

and we'll kill the men. And it's just a matter of math. How many of there are of you and how many

are there of our group? I think it's somewhat inconceivable, especially for people of my generation,

to think that the US is at some point going to be a war with China. Because we've never experienced

a world war, but because the stakes are now so high with nuclear weapons, a war theoretically

wouldn't be like previous wars. It would be catastrophic. So it's an imaginable. Some people say,

now nuclear weapons have now stopped us from getting into world war three as easily.

And if it won't happen. Yeah, 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. So that was a long answer, Steven, to say I want to get

you your imagination closer. We're already at war with Russia.

There's a phase a lot of companies here 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 and you don't really notice until it's happened. Slowly momentum starts to leak out.

This happened to us and our sponsor, PikeDrive, was a fix I came across 10 years ago.

And ever since, my teams across my different companies have continued to use it.

PikeDrive is a simple but powerful sales CRM 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 PikeDrive was a real game-changer,

and it's kept the right things front of mind. My favorite feature is PikeDrive'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 use PikeDrive to grow their business.

So something I've said resonates, head over to pipedrive.com slash CEO, where you can get a 30-day

free trial, no credit card or payment required. This company that I've just invested in is growing

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. This flow is 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. And then when I'm done, I just hit this one button

here, and the whole email is written for me, and it's saving me so much time in a day, 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 it copies

Jack's LinkedIn profile for me because it knows who Jack is in my life. This is saving me a huge amount

of time. This company is growing like absolute crazy, and this is why I invested in the business,

and why they're now a sponsor of this show. And Whisper Flow is, frankly, becoming the worst

kept secret in business productivity and entrepreneurship. Check it out now at Whisper Flow,

spot W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O-W dot AI slash Stephen. It will be a game change, if you.

Speaking of crazy weapons, I was reading 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 thought, wow, that's really fantastic.

It's very interesting. And he said, you don't have any questions at all? I said, no, I mean,

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, 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 dragonfly. I didn't even know it was public.

That's the fucker. There it is. This little thing here.

Yeah. This was made, as you say, 50 years ago. So one can only imagine the type of technology

they have now. Of course. They don't even need to fly a 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. We are participating in, I won't even call it an

experiment, but a process that you read 1984. I'm sure 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 at a time after time. What advice would you give to my listeners about

how to navigate in the world we're living in today to avoid risk, threat, whether that's of

our soft tissue, as you said, or just with our privacy or life's generally? Where 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. 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. That book is all about intuition and personal responsibility. 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 fire on 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. But when I have that intuitive feeling, and by the way, I don't do most shows,

I don't know what the reason is. 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 be. It'll really work out like something

like Amazon Prime that 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 A, B, C, D. 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 said I was 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 cancelling.

And by the way, cancelling, one of my favorite things. I recommend it to everybody. I recommend

cancelling and postponing to everybody I know. You are not obligated to keep your plans. You made

a plan three months ago. And you don't know who you'll even be. Or if you or them or anybody will

even be alive three months from now, there's nothing wrong with cancelling. Now, I don't do it

rudely, by the way, but just to finish on, you know, sort of what your listeners, your viewers and

listeners can do is that 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. I wanted to ask you a question about this. I met with

Magnus Carlson, 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 gut 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

Carlson as the number one chess player in the world, backstage, we were both on stage together.

I said to him, I said, listen, I got 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 unfroze it. 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 few 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. Our intuition is valuable. But

then in other areas of our life where we haven't trained the muscle yet, we can make bad decisions.

One 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, she seems nice. But then you get probably been hiring

thousands of people 15 years now. And I get, you know, I get an 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, Stephen, 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's he 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?

She didn't have any time. 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. Now 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, a woman who wrote me the most beautiful thing. I think it's 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,

it got me thinking about people in my life that I have to get rid of tomorrow. Actually,

that I have, you know that little lambbell in your head when you have a little lambbell in tuition?

Like, I don't know what the answer is but I feel like something isn't right. And that little

lambbell in 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 all made 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 X when it could be Y.

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, you can ask. I was going to say, probably give people the context on your childhood.

Oh, you were me. 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 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. 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 a going and I'm saying to my wife, well, because my moment did this,

this is why I feel such and such, which I went through times in my life when, when those things

were much closer to me. Today, I feel like I'm not using any of my energy to manage the past,

the narrative I told you, this 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. What you really ought to think when you hear about somebody committing

suicide is, oh, what a series of terrible experiences there must have been leading up to that.

And I want to tell you real 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? And 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,

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, etc. You don't get

somebody doing what I do where my ambition is long gone, 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. 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 saw a fun. No, never,

never stay at home because here was this group of people. But what he told me that was interesting

is he said, ah, Aunt Charlene, you taught me to speak more quietly because you talk so fucking

loud. And he says, Uncle Carlo, you taught me to be more gentle because man 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, 100%,

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, right? This is a person that, you know, the charities are for

and social welfare is for, you know, 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 pills she took, one of them called Doridan,

has now been taken off the market for causing what? Psychosis.

Which explains a lot of her craziness. And so all of this, this, you know, teaching that it depends

what you do with it, meaning we all, we all, nobody gets out of here alive, right? 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, you know, I'd say in these books, you can predict human behavior, right? To drive here

today in traffic. I had to predict the behavior of thousands of people based on just the 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, but you never trust that guy. You always want to

get way behind him or way 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 predict human behavior. And I was at a 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 judgmentally, I'm like, she even come to the meeting. I mean, she can't do the

meeting like what she 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. But as many of you know,

my husband killed my 12 year old son four days ago. So my little journey into judgmental 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 was, would have been the greatest person

in the world. Sometimes it would have been a great relationship. And now I apply the the George

Harrison rule, George Harrison, the Beatles, which writes this, he writes this unbelievable lyric

that's in while my guitar gently weeps, which is I look at you all and see the love there that's

sleeping. We have a brain budget. The way to think about it is we have a limited amount of energy

that we can spend every single day. I'm saying find ways to simplify your life. And one way I've

conserved my body budget is via our sponsor factor who are a meal delivery service. They are

especially great because they make fresh meals and they cater to so many different diets.

Hyprotein, keto, vegan, vegetarian, low card, gluten-free, paleo diets, you name it. Every meal

is designed by a dietitian made by chefs and delivered right to me. Fresh and never frozen.

So if you're ready to streamline your food intake, visit factameals.com slash diary 50 off. And use

my code diary 50 off to get 50% off your first factor box plus free breakfast for one year. And

this offers only valid for new factor customers with code and qualifying auto review subscription

purchase. If there's anything we need, it is connection, especially in the world we're living in

today. And that is exactly why we created these conversation cards because on this show when I sit

here with my guest and have those deep intimate conversations, this remarkable thing happens time

and time again. 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 we'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. This is the brand new

addition. And for the first time ever, I've added to the pack this gold card, which is an exclusive

question from me. But I'm only putting the gold cards in the first run of conversation cards.

So get yours now before the limited edition gold cards are all gone. Head to the link in the

description below. 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. In a 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 often times 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 a, what answer comes to me intuitively. When I was a kid and

I used to watch television, I believed 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 Steven is incredibly

important today because with AI and social media and other things, we actually are challenged

to know what Israel 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. 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. And so, and children are the same thing. I remember my son's

meeting a famous client of mine who, let's say, is was the richest man of 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 a little kid.

And so where I think optimistically about AI, which definitely has some problems for

for 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, right? 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, right? We get to this a good movie. And we wouldn't

go see a movie if we knew the outcome, right? But we, 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 mean, 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. Whenever 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 us being able to make, 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 it's a kid in their bedroom has 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, wait, 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 seeing again and revert to real things that are irreplaceably human.

Yes, I think it's good to, I think it's, 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 downsides 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, villages are about 300 people.

There's a chief who lives with them. He doesn't get special treatment. He's not carried around in

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,

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 give you a good 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 baby's 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 Fiji and Village is like that. In fact, a Fiji and Village

is fewer bathrooms than a 747 and fewer seats than a 747. Fewer people, for God's sake,

than what we get on an airplane every day. And so I believe in small populations for governance.

And I believe in subsidiarity. A word you probably don't know. I only learned it about a year ago

from a dear friend in Cape Town. Subsidiarity 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, okay, 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 of citizens. I was thinking about

the parallels there actually for business. Yeah, they get too big and a lot of great companies

actually break up divisions and departments and give them autonomy and subsidiary. It's

claiming the same city area. It wasn't easy for me. I nailed it first time we were talking about

subsidiarity. Subsidiarity. And how even in as our company grows, maybe I should think we're about

subsidiarity. 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. And we're hiring, by the way, so look us up

and come to work. We need 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

humorous. 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 a witnessed

sexual harassment? Have you experienced or witnessed a 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, developed a system like it, that, you know, 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, knows 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, Steven, I noticed for the last couple of days,

you're keeping your office door closed and you kind of 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, bureaucracy. We talked about advice. That's kind of where 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. Yes. Is there anything else that you think would,

you know, if this got to be the 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 two. 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, oh, wait a minute,

I want to break up with this girl who wants to get married and have kids with me. How can my

breaking up be right for the other person? 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 till 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 how's 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

a shitload 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 to 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 variety of things and 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. Now I know if I fire

somebody or if they leave, they're going to do fantastic. That was a big awakening for me.

But this idea that what's right for 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 heard more

people in my life trying to figure out what's best for them than I've helped. It is remarkably true.

I was just sort of since checking it against people in one particular case where I had

fired someone and they were very upset about it many, many, many years ago in a previous business,

very upset about it, protested, 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 hindsight. 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 your

resentment. My resentment, a standard they can't meet, goals they can't meet, the pressure from

everybody, the stress when they can't seem to matter. Yeah, of course, and I let them go and they

started their own thing and less pressure, lower goals, less expectation, they seem to be much,

much happier. And you, I want more, much happier. And you, yeah, that's the, 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. 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.

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,

bid company. And the guy said, I'll take the job. And they negotiated everything. And 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. I'll change the

offer in the following way. I'll add this equity. And he succeeded. And he got the CEO he wanted.

And three weeks later, had to fire the fucker. 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? 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? 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. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That makes sense then.

Yeah. And so 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

fortune it 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 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. The story, yes. Go ahead.

Me and my, me and my then girlfriend were dating for a year. We had an issue. I've been very

upset 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 what? I think actually that was the right person. I think I

found out. 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 is part

of me that's trying to 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, she's not trying to 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 anymore.

So I accept it and I tell her I'm going home in two days time. Thank you so much for spending time.

I send her this nice text message and then in those in the 48 hours before my flight,

it's like we fell in love 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 48 hours from the point where I said,

I'm off now, sent her a nice message, it's like we fell in love again. She's not my fiance.

And that's been, congratulations to your boss. I don't know, it's 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 of the example you gave. But actually, it was, I apologise

and I'd given up. I like stopped fighting. That's the best when you let it go suddenly 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

and Fiji, it doesn't work. You don't get a lot of mileage swimming upstream. I was just going to ask,

you know, this was such a smash hit by selling book 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 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, carpentry, it also would have worked well because it had by a number of

blessings, it had some core truth 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 the best seller, like Hope were 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,

but 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 aghast. 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, 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 with a core with a with a story, a personal story.

We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. And the question

left for you, not knowing who they were leaving it for, is where 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 is 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 is just four feet deep in front of my house because it's on a reef. So you can walk

on it and then 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 rain storm came just like the 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,

it's like, as they were going around and they go in a whole circle around me and then there

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

rain storm 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 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 and Fiji. There was

no AI then, but to be standing on a reef and Fiji and have a massive school of fish go jumping

up around you, have a huge storm begin, have it quickly get 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 their 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 thought. 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 of kind of interesting this very moment

we're in Stephen because that experience I had is now being relayed to a few million people,

courtesy of you and your question and that question in this podcast. 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 you and see a whale breach right in front of you and see

this massive rain storm come and go in a matter of minutes. Now you get a little piece of that

experience. Now do I think here's the punch line? Do I think I created that experience? No

fucking way. I don't. I think it's predetermined. And I think I said to you the scientific version is

you're going to ask me this question and that's the answer you're going to get. 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,

Nasar Gadada wrote a book called I Am That recommended to everybody and then his student who's

now died, Ramesh Bhasikar, 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 satsang in his house. Basically

people could come and ask questions. And he sort of he happened to be Indian, but it was sort of

Buddhist in nature. And somebody said to him, well, are you just saying we're all robots? And he

said, yes, exactly 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, try it. Try and stay in bed. 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 this 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. The newest one 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 saying 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. Additions. Okay. So I'll link these below for everyone to see. I highly recommend checking

all of government's 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 on, you've touched on all

of 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 Gavin de Becker.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 Gavin. 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 I

blow 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 I my intuition isn't is telling me something. Because you're right. I think we're all very

good at tuning the volume of our intuition down. And society kind of teaches us to gasslet ourselves

and double guess. 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.