Richard Stanley | The Suppressed History of The Cathars, Mystic Montségur, & The Nazi Grail Quest

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05:36 The planet's puppet masters almost surely have a plan There clearly may be something there beyond the realm of man Until we've thoroughly tested every last closed chested view You'll find the more you think, you know unless you really do We without THC We know they're lying to us just don't know what degree It's the end of the world as we know it, but I feel fine. From The Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood and while some people claim all the worlds mystery is long gone in the modern age and lament that there is no uncharted territory left to explore

06:37 With a subtle shift in mindset, these people might see that mapping out and labeling all of the matter in the physical world is much different than having a full grasp on all of its territory or even inhabitants. Because our understanding of consciousness, non-physical realms, spiritual dimensions and all that comes with a deeper study of nature and how these things interconnect has certainly been better understood by previous cultures, usually ones who were erased by the big machine or lucky enough to be too remote to bother. As well as secret societies that don't exactly present their findings unprompted But megalithic sites mounds stone circles and sacred geometrical alignments of the ancient world are the clues that point to a much different and mystical reality beneath today's dead distracting digital overlay

07:23 And in some of these places, exotic energies and even doorways still remain. Well today's guest Richard Stanley is well aware of these things as they've been the subject of much of his life's work. If you don't know, Richard is a South African filmmaker screenwriter and trained anthropologist who has made horror films like Hardware and Dust Devil that are considered cult classics. And he's received a massive amount of praise for his 2019 adaptation of Lovecraft's The Color Out Of Space starring Nicolas Cage But he's also made some incredible documentaries that are likely to be of particular interest to THC listeners. The White Darkness, which provides an up-close and personal look at the voodoo practices in Haiti against the backdrop of US military occupation

08:08 The Otherworld, which looks at the mystical energies of an apparent network of portal places in southern France. The insights of locals who experience high strangeness in the area... ...the hidden esoteric science of the Cathars and Richard's own personal experiences there! And then we have The Secret Glory that takes a deep dive into SS Officer Otto Rahn's search for the Holy Grail. Richard also has an upcoming book titled The Last Crusade which includes his own field notes from the expedition and research tracking Otto Rahn, as well as 30 years worth of interviews he's done on the journey and it should be out in the US sometime in 2024

08:46 He's also written a few blogs about France's own Skinwalker ranch-like high strangeness hotbed, as well as several pieces for the UK's Fortean Times. A fascinating guy I'm lucky to spend some time with today—the Grail Quest chronicler, Portal Place film producer and the maker of 16mm magic coming in hot from the French Pyrenees Richard Stanley welcome to The Higher Side! It's a pleasure to be with you sir coming live from the French Pyrenees this very moment Yes, I love it. And by the end people will definitely understand why that adds a little extra element to all the things we're going to talk about but I am really psyched for this one and it came about in kind of a strange way but a podcasting colleague of mine Justin Young from monsters madness and magic told me about your film and upcoming book on auto Ron's grail quest

09:37 And that seemed pretty up my alley. So we arranged this interview and then I really started to digest the wider scope of your work and found so much more meat on the Richard Stanley bone, the white darkness is great but The Otherworld really blew my mind and it does connect to the Otto Rahn story and why you're living in the French Pyrenees I figured we could start with this quote of yours from your interview with Justin, where you say in the south of France, the French Pyrenees a chunk of history has been covered up for 700 years through incredibly fierce persecution by the Holy Roman Church. The first crusade, the inquisition and then witch hunters

10:20 This succession of effectively burning and destroying anyone who knew anything about it, and trying to control it in very much the same way as a virus. By separating out anyone who has had any contact with anyone else who knew anything, and religiously burning anyone who has been touched by anyone else who had been touched by whatever it was." And it wasn't until the rise of the Nazis and Otto Rahn that if anyone told the story of what happened here outside of France, it was a big issue. And I just love the way you set that up, very provocative. But if it's something that authorities want to suppress that badly, it's something we wanna know about! So to get us going here...can you tell us about what you're referring to there and the Cathars' story? Because it is good context and groundwork for a lot of things we might get into today. ALICE Wow, that's a big question.

11:15 So I'm going to try and answer it as concisely as possible. Just stop me if you feel that it's running too far. All right, we got time! Basically where I am currently residing in the French Pyrenees there used to be another country 700 years ago. It was a place called Occitania And the people here had a different language and were genetically different from the Northerners. They were really a very distinct nation unto themselves, who basically existed until the early 12th century when they were pretty much genocidally exterminated by the last crusade by a bunch of

11:59 largely French dogs of war who were given special dispensation by Pope Innocent III to kill, loot and destroy in the sure knowledge that all their sins would be forgiven and they would make it into heaven faster if they carried out the holy dictate to exterminate the Cathars. The Cathars were... I don't think they called themselves that for starters. I think the name Cathar is an invention of later historians I don't think they knew there were heretics, they just thought they were enlightened people or good Christians. Good men and good women are sometimes called the old good beards

12:39 There's two theories. Either they were an earlier extant form of Christianity, a form of proto-Christianity that had died out elsewhere—a lot of folk believe that they're related to the Essenes, to the proto-Christianity or John the Baptist, basically the pre-Christian Christians because before Christ came along there were people who are essentially practicing the same faith but we can't exactly call them Christians yet. It's quite possible that the Cathar adepts were right and that their tradition does extend further back than the Holy Roman Church by a thousand years or more, but the Holy Roman Church has taken it as if they were a Manichean mutation that had been basically brought in from the Bogomils from the heretics of the East Bloc

13:29 and they sought to purge them from Europe in any way they could. There's a lot of disagreement over that dogma because we destroyed all of their books, not only their books but also the entire language. The actual language Occitan was itself criminalized for centuries. They actually made it illegal to procreate with anyone unless they spoke French and deliberately bred them out So there's a lot of disagreement over the exact dogma. There were also an initiatory faith, so there were inner degrees of initiation that we will never know and it's quite possible that they might have been inner truths that are now fully lost to us

14:12 A lot of folk think they were essentially a Western tranche of Buddhism, because although they're Christians they admit to a lot of essentially Buddhist ideas such as reincarnation. The idea that souls are flung back into the abyss of material incarnation over and over again until they can progress towards Nirvana or Dharmakaya some kind of global state of enlightenment on top of that there's also the sense Animals have souls. Animals also have consciousness, reincarnate as humans. Humans reincarnate as animals which is also a big no-no to the Holy Roman Church along with I guess a primitive conception of karma or ideas that are more Eastern than Western

15:03 I suspect the heresy itself, the fact that these folk were adopting a radically different version of Christianity which was also extremely popular because in Gnostic Christianity there are no intermediaries between yourself and God. It's every person's right to seek direct spiritual communion with higher forces and with some state of grace or higher consciousness. You don't need the whole hierarchy of priests, prelates, bishops, cardinals and the machinery of the Catholic Church. And you don't need to go into a church to worship —you can go into the forest, you can go into a rock and kneel beside the river and have that direct communion with one's own spirituality—which was something that

15:47 ran counter to the whole money-making pyramid structure of organized religion, which I suspect was the most dangerous thing for the papacy. Also important to mention that they were extraordinarily egalitarian for their time. So it was a very high Jewish population here in the South up until the last crusade, and also men took their mother's surnames. A woman could officiate as priests, inherit land, Kabbalah derbies had at least equal rights with men which was again something that

16:25 doesn't square with the patriarchal Roman church. Women had a lot more power out here until the early 12th century when they were very ruthlessly crushed. There was a system they called The Courts of Love, which was something akin to the Benny Gesserit and Frank Herbert's Dune essentially all the noble ladies got together in secret to administer the hidden laws, the laws of chivalry on which their society depended. And this was a practice started by Eleanor of Aquitaine that continued until the early 12th century when the leader of the Crusaders Simon de Montfort ordered the last chatelaine at the Courts of Love, a lady named Gerarda de Laurac to be turned over to the dogs-of-war to be gang raped before they threw her down a well in Laval

17:17 which was formerly the end of the reign of the Courts of Love. They made Gerarda's followers sit around The Well and listen, because she didn't die immediately and then continued to drop rocks in her before killing the rest of her followers. But they very squarely put that down and stopped it So, yeah there was a far more enlightened culture. I mean up to the late 12th century we had a Jewish school of medicine in Toulouse and a school of magic in Salamanca. We saw the first flowering of Gothic art and architecture, the first flying buttresses... A lot of pretty sophisticated

17:57 material. And we cannot know just how sophisticated because of the tabula rasa of more than seven centuries of persecution, which is enough time to really wipe out a lot of data. I mean how far they were advanced in terms of algebra and math? Did anyone have electric power There's Baghdad batteries and things which are still turning up off the coast of Portugal. There's bits of glass, it's difficult to know just how sophisticated that had become but I think it was that overlapping of Western Christianity with the Jewish population with the Moors and Islam that led to a cross-pollination of science, mathematics architecture

18:42 We saw the first great books of the Kabbalah, the Zohar, the Sefir Yetzirah all written in what's now southern France and northern Spain in the late 12th century. So, yeah very sophisticated I guess proto-democracy because there was also something akin to an elected Senate. They had elected magistrates they called capitals who were democratically elected who sat in session and acted as a check between the peasants and the aristocrats and again an unprecedented degree of mobility between classes That's definitely a great summary. And it's just a sad fact of history that certain people can't just let the best ideas stand on their own, they can't be confident in their own way of life and just coexist next to another way of life and this story clearly has particular resonance with you this film The Other World it states that

19:46 You know, as you say seven centuries ago Crusaders perpetuated a genocide against the Occiana people and the Cathar faith. In 1244 they besieged Mont Ségur where 210 martyrs condemned by the Church of Rome died at the stake but their faith and occult science didn't fully die with them. And as you say a lot of data is lost we can only know so much but It's this idea of portal places that is so fascinating to me. The idea of a portal place naturally, is interesting enough but the thought of an intentionally designed reliable repeatable

20:31 technological portal place is also fascinating. I know that you talked to a guy in the film who identifies as a sorcerer and he does do some square encompass showing of belay lines and how things were mapped out in that area, I looked at some other research that suggests there's a giant pentagram there and each point is a different site one is Renle Chateau and of course there's a couple others That sort of makes sense to me because if this is a window area, a giant pentagram of cathedral structures could be something that might facilitate that. But I guess talk to us a little more about what you have learned about the occult science there or why it might be a place of extreme high strangeness? Do you think this ties into their belief system and things they might've actually built into the landscape

21:25 Well, a lot of the geo features are not only very precisely arranged but they're also just too damn big for humans to be responsible. So if one's going to go down that route believe in the giant terrestrial pentagram and the notion that we're actually living in the middle of this extraordinary web of cosmo-telluric currents we'd have to assume that the place was somehow terraformed or by some force that's vastly more powerful than human beings. This is quite possible because we are right at this kind of fault line between where two tectonic plates run into each other and forced up the Pyrenees, Mount Bucharash which is the local UFO window area.

22:19 got a long history in its own right, is actually upside down. The lower parts of the mountain at some point in its history has been uprooted and literally turned on it's head so that the oldest parts are now at the top and the younger parts, the more recent geological levels are at the bottom. So there clearly was some massive upheaval a long time ago In Lovecraftian terms, if it was going back to the time of the Old Ones or whatever ultradimensional inhuman forces created the Earth or created us to begin with. Maybe there was a portal at the bottom of the ocean because this was all underwater a long time ago and there's a huge number

23:02 marine fossils everywhere around here, and layers of shells. And then it dried out to leave the bizarre terrestrial labyrinths that we have now. But beyond that, the rugged terrain and the depth of the valleys and the heights of the mountain kept people out, have served to keep it safe from a lot of the worst in history And yeah, as a result it's possible that some things survived longer here. And certainly there has been human habitation since very ancient times. A lot of the earliest known cave art comes from this area from the Ariège and Ardèche. We see figures like

23:47 the sorcerer of Troyfraere, the guy with the antlers and big eyes in very early depictions of shamanism and goddess figures painted on walls from thousands and thousands of years ago. In fact, the oldest stone circle in one of the caves is embedded so deeply into limestone that we have to assume it was made by Neanderthals because it predates Cro-Magnon Man, it predates the emergence the Hobnads were supposed to be descended from. So it implies that even before we got here, Neanderthals were already worshipping in stone circles and using this place in some kind of ritualistic or ceremonial manner. And I think certainly the standing stones of the Celts, the Druids and the Gauls, their Golwar,

24:40 The stone structures, the castles left behind from the period of the Cathars in the 12th century are often channeling whatever energy this place originally had and concentrating it. It feels like a lot of these places have the ability to somehow store this spiritual energy or store something. It's beyond me what that energy is—dark energy I was probably a skeptic until I came here. I've always had suspicions about the true nature of the world, but the number of outright geophysical anomalies and UAPs—Unidentified Atmospheric Phenomena—Earth lights... It's very easy to see Earth lights things like your Marfa Lights in United States

25:36 There's several of the mountains, Mont Ségur and Bucharest that just seem to let off bursts and beams of energy that you can simply sit and observe for hours and hours sometimes in the summertime. And it goes on flashing without any trace of cloud thunder or lightning I've seen sheet things like sheet lightning going overhead all lightening There's a very high iron content in the mountains, which may have something to do with that. As well as all of the running water I'm quite convinced the electromagnetic fields in this place are pretty off-the-scale and we get apocalyptic electrical storms

26:20 Yeah that's fascinating any listener of the show would enjoy watching now you talk to so many people who have their own little stories one guy talks about a plateau behind redness bains where. It's said that if you walk around, time just completely stops or changes. You'll have missing time situations where someone thinks they were just walking around for a few minutes and their colleagues somewhere else say, Hey, that's a couple hours. Well, That's a box at so many UFO stories can check

26:56 And then there's another guy who has just so many pictures of orbs. And he was like, yeah it is just completely common and easy to capture here is no problem. This is the kind of stuff that a lot of seekers have high strangeness like how many more times do we need to hear about Roswell? You know here's an area where so many people probably haven't heard much about and It's just really fascinating there are couple stories about voices in the mountains or legends of beings living in the mountains and that's another major box is

27:33 There seems to be some connection between super high strangeness and mountain regions. It does bring me back to the idea that maybe this stuff is way more closely associated with nature than it is space aliens, because why are these geological features always so prominent? You mentioned the iron content. Yeah. Same with certain rivers that have certain qualities to them or a high crystal content people start seeing fairy sprites and that sort of stuff. What is your overall picture of how high strangeness really works? I would imagine that you are also in that camp, that thinks that UFOs are something closer to home, something that maybe has been with humanity for a long time rather than just some

28:25 distant traveler from Zeta Reticuli and a metal craft. How do you put all these things together? What is your kind of high strangeness, Fortean paranormal worldview of how this stuff works?" Well I mean as a devout Fortean i definitely abide by the maxim that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. I keep it open-minded but also striving constantly towards Yeah, quantifiable proof and demonstrable proofs. But another maxim I think which I could adhere to is John Keel's theory that what we're seeing are not quote shy strangers from another planet but that we are observing complex forces that have always been in the major part of our physical environment or a check and kind of subscribe to it. I also find it highly suspicious that whenever you have

29:20 aliens, a UFO window area like we have here with Bucharest where there's been a history of encounters with craft with alien beings and full-scale mass hysteria outbreak back in 2012 when the French military called in. And the whole thing got fully out of hand But there's nearly always a fairy tradition in the same place. There's a slide area between little green men and little people, and they kind of behave in a similar way that for some reason they always have underground bases or they're always inside the Hollow Hill. They have a tendency to mess with humans, to abduct us, and to leave us utterly confused about what happened — to somehow edit time

30:08 or to blank our memories, what we think of as being away with the fairies. But most of the fairy encounters ticked the same boxes as alien abduction stories so I suspect they're the same forces all these same events being viewed through different explanatory manifestations It would tend to imply that these things are not coming from another world, but are indeed much closer home. I suspect much of it has to do with our own state of awareness or state of consciousness

30:46 HP Lovecraft is certainly aware that there's a heck of a lot that's outside of our visual and auditory spectrum, stuff that's going on right here which we simply don't have the sensory apparatus to be able to perceive. I think that a lot of this stuff is always here and it's possibly always going on and it simply depends on the consciousness of the observer. Heidi, the lady who used to work in the Aubergine Hotel months ago said that you never see anything on the mountain in the summer times because whenever there's too many tourists up in the castle, the place is quantum locked. It just becomes a regular ruined castle full of tourists but when there's no one around it can do anything it likes

31:39 Yes. And that relates to your own story with the lady, we don't have to go super deep on it because you do explain it quite well in the film but the first time you were there was at night on a full moon lined up with an eclipse and cosmic timing comes up several times in all this that the machine that seems to be built or the technology and the landscape, seems to have a gear in the sky so to speak that really locks everything or makes it open up. And I guess i would ask because I've had psychedelic experiences that are quite out there and strange and a lot of people have

32:22 And there are things in them, little elements of it. Little details that to a person who's never had that experience you can read about it but it really takes first-hand knowledge to really feel it because the language isn't quite there to really describe it accurately I guess I would ask you a similar thing about your experience You talk about feeling like you might get stuck. It sounds somewhat like the fairy stories I've heard that you seemed to be in a bit of a stupor You seemed to be kind of locked in place and then you were jarred out of it. But what would you say about that experience? Because we hear about these window areas and portal places, and you're always wondering well how could a person get stuck? What does the opening look like? These sorts of things...you might have been closer to getting stuck in Fairyland than anyone I've talked to! So I am curious if there's any details that stuck out to you

33:22 Being so close to that experience that didn't come up in the many, many things you might have read about similar things until you were there firsthand. Wow again a big question one of the thoughts I've often had is it's as if it can use your body or your nervous system or your sensory apparatus as wetware to replay itself because it's almost as if your consciousness is taken over by the power of the place in some funny way. Like, my own individuality was subsumed...was completely crushed and dominated by the power of the castle and the supernatural presence within it. And the further I go away from the mountain, the less power it holds over me. But yeah living close to Montsagor

34:14 One of the things you notice is that every year, I think about 100,000 to 150,000 pilgrims come here. Different folk drawn from all across the world. A very high number of those folk these days tend to think that they are reincarnated Cathars or have a past life memory of having been there, having been present at the last battle, the siege of Montsagor which went on for 10 months. Or having died on the Camp de Cremat, the field stake where the martyrs were burned after the fall of the castle. So yeah, the numbers of people coming every year and the sheer number of people who believe

34:56 are in the thousands. But history does record that approximately 250, maybe 260 people burned on the Field of the Stakes so the thousands of people who are remembering burning on the Field of the Stake can't all be direct reincarnations of those same dead Cathars. Every year there's two or three lords of the castle, Raymond de Parés who show up in Montségur Many of the Cathar elite, the different adepts like Gleobetic Astres or Brother Matthias who allegedly carried out the treasure. You usually get about two or three of those every year too and yeah Esclamand de Foix are the greatest to the Cathar high priestesses is also extremely popular and even for atheists diehard cynics and people who don't believe in the supernatural out here

35:52 It's amazing how quickly they become interested in medieval armaments, medieval battles. And within a few weeks start thinking I wonder how it'd look in chainmail? Yeah, start developing a desire to practice the bow or to learn how to use the sword So there's some kind of, I think it's a signal or almost like a morphogenetic field which is so powerful that it not only draws people here like a beacon but has this habit of overwhelming your consciousness. Your own identity starts to crumble to the point where you start to identify with the former inhabitants of the castle so completely that a lot of people start to imagine they really are those people and that they are the living incarnations of those folk who were here

36:39 seven centuries ago. But it's almost as if that period, and it's weird how it's also just that goddamn period. It's like you don't get people turning up in their droves who are remembering being Huguenots from the War of Religions or dying in the Napoleonic army It seems to consistently focus in on the early 12th century and a period of around 40 years, around the siege of Monsegur which has left some kind of mark in time. It continues to reverberate and act itself out over and over again. And there is an element where it feels like

37:20 Another time is almost overlaid onto this one. In the village of Montsagur at the base of the castle, you can't really go to the local shop and come back with a baguette without getting into conversation or passing at least one person who is debating what happened with the Inquisition in 1244. The events of that period are still so strong that There are folk discussing it in the street as of its current use. It lingers in the air, and certainly in the moments when I've been the furthest into it, it's been almost impossible to remember one's own name or to remember who one really is once somehow pulled straight into a paradigm or the other reality of the place

38:10 Man i love it and reincarnated cathars was definitely something on my list to ask you about i think that would really. Be a provocative thing to put into the title of this one but, You talk to a woman who just, you know she saw a picture of the castle on a book and she's like I gotta go there. And then she goes there and then the memories come back and she's like i was this person? I was a daughter of this lord? And I guess as you say a lot of people have those experiences my thought was that it was some kind of cathar magic that they somehow preserved their consciousness into the next

38:46 reincarnation and then tried to bring themselves back. But oddly, there is a prophecy about the Cathars and 777 years and they talk about kind of a resurgence and maybe some of these conscious memories bubbling up in certain people are part of that prophecy. The Laying down of the laurels, they say and then bringing back some of this stuff It seems to relate like why in this time period would people start having these strange memories of the old time it fits 777 years is a window of time that they seem to have marked and that is now. Yeah creepily enough. It's difficult to argue us

39:35 So yeah, how that folds together is the Cathars had a form of initiation called the Consolamentum which was the sort of supreme initiation. You could only receive the Consolamentum by being touched by someone else who had already received it. It was through direct transmission through the laying on of hands which is why it was so easy to wipe out because they killed everyone who'd been touched But this consolamentum, once you had received it was supposed to liberate you from the cycles of time and the material world. So you didn't need to be reincarnated again. And also you were able to remember everything that happened before you were born and after your dead You had nonlinear access to time so that might feed into what you're describing as Cathar magic because if

40:30 Some of those people did succeed in stepping outside of time, then presumably they still have nonlinear access to the program and can still reach out to us even now because time is no longer relevant. Time doesn't exist." So there's that! Oh man... Well this is certainly a fun time So let's jump to Otto Ron. He became an SS officer who had this obsession with finding the Holy Grail, of course the sorcerer that you interviewed in The Other World thinks that the castle itself is the grail but I think Otto Ron had different thoughts about it but

41:11 Why was he so interested in this particular artifact? And why did you find his story so intriguing, there's all kinds of Nazi lore about seeking out powerful talismans and esoteric places. But this one seemed to resonate with you for me it was a series of accidents I first came out here because I was sent here. I was hired by Channel 4 television in the United Kingdom back in the early 90's to research a documentary program on the real life backstory behind the Indiana Jones movies,

41:50 And they sent me to Europe to basically see if the Nazis really had been looking for the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the Spear of Longinus and to see if there was anyone left from the SS's archaeological department who was still alive and who is prepared to be interviewed for British television. This was back in the very beginning of the 90s. There were still people alive at that time. I mean all of them have gone now. but there was just this tiny window of opportunity back then still to find direct witnesses. I learned pretty fast that there wasn't anything really to the Ark of the Covenant story, but there was a Holy Grail story and Otto Wilhelm Rahn was for his sons

42:43 looking for the Holy Grail, and in the latter part of his career he was doing this on behalf of Heinrich Himmler's Black Order. So yeah, Otto was looking for the grail on behalf of the Nazis. Yeah, this truly unfolded. I don't know if it ever came down to a physical treasure but there are certainly constant rumors thereof Otto was clearly obsessed with the Grail from the very beginning because he came out of the Black Forest and grew up not very far from the place where Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote Parsifal, which is the castle of Bildenburg.

43:26 And I imagine he must have heard the stories as a child, walked around the castle with his father. So the mystery of The Grail and the saga of Parsifal was probably very deeply imbued in him. I think he was inspired to try and find out whether the epic poem really reflected a real history and whether there was a real Braille Castle And Otto wasn't an archaeologist. He studied literary history, he was a literary historian and he studied medieval languages. And he bored into the 12th century rail romance in Tepasipal and found connections between

44:14 the quest narrative and what had happened here in what's now the south of France. In fact, he connects Parsifal to the figure of Roger Troncavel, the young prince of Carcassonne based on the fact that both surnames basically translate as pierced heart or broken heart or pierced through this notion of The Grail and The Grail Castle Otto tracked back two months ago Once ago, as the last of the Cathar castles to fall kind of the last redoubted faith. There's a document from the early 12th century where the final head of the Cathar church writes to the lord of the castle and says please can we come and take refuge in your castle? And bring with us the treasures of your faith

45:08 to be stored infracastrum is the word the letter uses where it says historians don't know what infracastrum means whether it's under the castle or under the protection of the castle, yeah quite hard to interpret that but we do know that the treasures of their faith were brought two months ago and when the castle fell the treasures were nowhere to be found which means they were either smuggled out or remained within the mountain. Yes I love it You open that film talking about the Grail narrative, I believe it might be Otto Rahn's writing or Percival but the idea that the Grail is a chalice fashioned out of Lucifer's crown is really interesting and I just wonder if that is really like literally something Otto Rahn

46:03 or members of this esoteric wing of the Nazi party thought was possible. Like just this idea that as we spoke of window areas, that occasionally some physical object could be brought over from this other dimension. We have people in ufology talking about metamaterials and Crafts that are left behind I've heard people say that it seems as if they were trying to gift them some kind of thing but the Social interaction is so bizarre That it's hard to really know except that the thing has left there Do you think that the Nazi Party this wing of it? That was going around looking for talismans of power. I don't know if they literally believed everything about through religion like the spear of destiny or the Holy Grail the things that

46:54 are kind of attached to these objects, but do they believe in apported objects of power from another dimension or the other side? The spiritual realm. Some of them no doubt but really what Heinrich Himmler was doing with the SS was pretty aberrant even by Nazi standards like I don't think any of the rest of Hitler's hierarchy really had an interest in this. Hitler was himself highly skeptical of Himmler's efforts, I think he said at one point, I don't know why Himmler is so interested in history everyone knows Germany doesn't have any. He gave him very short shrift but Himmler seems to have fallen under the spell of a rune mage

47:43 This Rasputin-like figure, whose real name was here Karl Maria Villigut who went by the pseudonym of Weisthor, The Wise Warrior. He was this aging sort of Nazi-Crowley figure, a crazy rune mage who believed that as a result of his shell shock in World War I he had total recall of all of his ancestral memory. That they could remember 8000 years of German history and read runes etc. Himmler was highly impressed by this weird old guy who looks like Uncle Fester by the way. It was Willigert who designed the Totemkopf ring who told

48:22 Himmler to buy the Schloss Wawelsberg, the SS order castle and who came up with the idea of putting the Sieg runes on there. All of the occult stuff was kind of Willigut's fault in his position as head of the race and settlement office. Carl Maria Willigut hired on a lot of talent and it was his office that hired on Otto Rahn and subsidized his Braille quest so it was kind a cell within the cell of the Nazis. I don't think it represents what the hierarchy itself believed, but I think a Luciferian element briefly founded an enclave and source of funding and briefly became powerful. And I think Willigot dreamed of overthrowing Christianity as well as Judaism basically bringing back the pagan faith of his ancestors

49:19 I don't think that was an idea that was widespread amongst the Nazis, but it certainly existed within the SS for a time. And I think it scared some of the other Nazis because most of the Arlenerbe SS were purged in 1939 Villigut was brought down by Karl Wolf, Heinrich Himmler's personal adjutant who spent months accumulating data to bring him down and took advantage of the Anschluss, the Union of Germany and Austria to pull all of his medical records, his asylum records because he'd actually been committed to an insane asylum just after World War II where had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.

50:03 Dumped all this on Himmler's desk in 1939 and said, this is completely untenable. You have to get rid of this guy." Most of their occult efforts were closed down before the war so I think Christian SS men or at least folk who were not friendly to those points of view took them down eventually and the pagan Luciferian element did not survive Most of the occultists ended up in the camps or simply disappearing in the course of the war. folk remark on when the Nazis found out about the Allies' alleged remote viewing program towards the end of the war, they tried to put together a remote viewing program with their own. Only to find that they'd already sent all of the clairvoyants and all of the folks with extrasensory talents to the camps and then purged them at that stage. So yeah it's a tricky thing. And Ron was Jewish as well through his mother. His

51:03 His mother had Jewish roots, so he couldn't prove... He couldn't fill out his armed pass. And beyond that from what we understand from the surviving records he was also gay. So it was a very unlikely figure who is kind of destined not to survive under those circumstances. Ram died in 1939. Right? He was young I believe he wasn't even 35 years in his early 30's and it seems like he took you know, so to speak cyanide capsule that a lot of these ranking people were given. And yeah it was really tough regime I hear stories about it being pretty tough but what I think is interesting is that you kind of followed Otto's trail and

51:51 You found this cave in Iceland and you wrote this post, Gateway to the Hollow Earth which definitely stuck out to me. And you write, mysterious pictoglyph surround a warm water lake beneath the volcano on this Icelantic Northern Cape seemingly a portal to another world. I found it on an expedition I undertook over a decade ago following the trail of grail hunter Otto Rahn to the Arctic Circle." This sounds incredible. There's a lot of mystique around the Arctic Circle, I love talking about the Arctic Circle but you included a picture of this place it looked very just pristine and quiet and naturally beautiful but talk to us about this place this gateway to the hollow earth as you poetically put it well um shortly after being inducted into the Arnab SS after his whole grail mission two months ago

52:46 Otto and a bunch of the SS guys went to Iceland, and then proceeded to go up to the North Icelandic Cape into the Arctic Circle. We don't know why, we don't know what happened there which is something that kept me scratching my head for years and years. Otto also published two books and claims at the end of his second book that these are the first two parts of his trilogy and that the manuscript of the third book is already complete. He describes it lying on the tabletop in front of him, and he says that he started writing this third book on the North Icelandic Cape. And I'd have to hope somewhere is missing a third book of Rán which no page survives over obviously was never published would reveal what really happened there at the North Icelandic Cape or why they went there? It took me a few years

53:45 to get myself up there. I followed Otto as far as I could, and you had gone to Reicholt. I knew he'd sat in Snorri Sturluson's hot tub at this lava construction where Snorri wrote The Eddas. Otto had been there on Midsummer Day in 1936 So I was able to follow him part of the way, and then the place that you're talking about is a warm water lake underneath the slopes. I believe it's Mount Cuffla on the North Icelandic Cape. And certainly going down there and I was seeing carvings in the rocks—a lot of what looked like pictoglyphs or lines down with strokes through them

54:31 Now, I'm not an archaeologist and I have no idea of the age of those things. There could be hoaxes from 20 years ago or there could be hoaxes from the 19th century – I don't know who carved those things but the overall feel was like it had an elfin quality it feels like it's somewhere, I guess close to Elfland. Which is something that turns up throughout the story in Iceland they really believe in elves and invisible people who live on a slightly different frequency and that was definitely the vibe I was getting down there and maybe some local Icelandic people had carved those faces into stone but it certainly added to the eerie sensation

55:22 of being at the very edge of, I don't know what. The stories about the Nazis and the Hollow Earths prevail and prevail on that particular expedition I was reading Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Yeah! I love the Hollow Earth lore I like a lot of the same fiction that you've talked about, that Edgar Allan Poe has some writings about it. Lovecraft obviously thought something could live inside the Earth—just the general idea I'm a big fan of. I don't know how much truth there is to it but just the idea of hidden lands that we don't necessarily know about things that used to be on old maps that seem to not be there anymore islands like that

56:06 And the mystic north, the idea that there is either some kind of crazy mountain at the North Pole. That's way out there in a remote area and there might be something beneath it. There's that old map that seems to show four rivers flowing out of the Iron Mountain at the North Pole What do you think of some of that stuff? Do you think that one might actually find something they wouldn't expect if they actually did get to the North or South Pole?" I think it's almost inevitable we're going to find something we don't expect. So yeah, I think we're much too presumptuous about what we know about the past

56:49 Certainly, and we know only very little about what's really been going on for the last few billion years. The number of bits of erroneous technology and bizarre bits and pieces left behind from before recorded history continue to stack up with the world seemingly heating up at the moment, the ice caps melting I wonder what else is going to come to the surface. Generally throughout my life, I've found it's always valuable to go and look for oneself taking a hands-on approach literally going and taking your look works wonders for one skepticism because you constantly see shit which just shouldn't exist but it does. That's what I think is so amazing about you! It takes a certain personality

57:44 to do that. Like I'm definitely a reader and a wonderer and an imaginer because i just think we get so many things attached to us, and we get bogged down in the life we have where we are, and we don't have this quality that allows us to just go and see but I think that's really amazing! And I'm curious obviously that's why you live where you live now it's why he took the journey into this cave but are there Are there any other noteworthy mystical places that you think you've experienced that are a little more off the radar, that people don't talk about maybe on the trail of Auroron? Maybe not. Plenty but there's a lot of places out there I wouldn't recommend anyone else try to get to just because it's too edgy. A lot of these places

58:35 Places where we really don't know what's going on are pretty hard to get to these days. So they're gonna be at like the bottom of the ocean, The only time I've been in a blank spot on the map which literally read relief data incomplete or even the best aerial navigation charts that I was able to get was in the middle of the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram mountains and that entailed having to sneak into Afghanistan and nearly getting killed a bunch of times But on the back of that, I was trying to get towards a Bactrian sun temple called Shamsi Balkh. The high light or the elevated candle that I was quite convinced at the time was the real Shambhala. But don't try it! Another one that was super powerful but again, don't try it... It's a place which only has the German name for

59:35 They called it Spitzkop. It's in the middle of the Namib desert, about 300 kilometres from the Taal Road when you come out on the road to Svakopmund in Namibia and it's basically in a completely flat place with these huge Volcanic extrusions, massive big rock spire things that have come out of the earth. And they were obviously hugely important to nomadic people thousands of years ago because they're absolutely crawling with rock art and painted with just unknown rock art everywhere and artifacts lying left right in center but it's super far from anywhere. Everyone who went out there had huge trouble. People went crazy

1:00:18 The electromagnetic fields gave them headaches, made people mad. When I was out there we were randomly attacked by a bunch of folk who seemed to be out of Hills Have Eyes who I think were just waiting down there to trap tourists so not advised trying to get to Spitzkopp but that place was super powerful they didn't like the fact that we were there yeah amazing amazing i mean this is the stuff that i just think is so interesting Now, if you were able to investigate some other mystery and money was no object for this investigation and you could guarantee your safety. And you could be pretty sure it wouldn't be a dead end where do you think you would take an expedition too? Where might be the next mystery you would want to investigate that kind of sticks in your mind as a nagging thing you want to find an answer to

1:01:14 Well, we've got quite a few active ones going on at the moment. I mean these last few years since the Cathar prophecy fell due in 2020 was one of the ones regarding—and i'm not going to give any geospecifics—what happened was a treasure hunter found what seems to be an underwater city thus far unknown to conventional archaeology, dredged up some bits and pieces of it. Then spent a lot of time towing a sonar bar over the top to produce sonar scans of what appeared to be streets and geometric structures on the sea floor

1:01:57 Then he got caught by local authorities, got into trouble, got scared and gave up. The sonar scans and the stuff dredged up from the site which include two things that look like Baghdad batteries, basically ancient electrical components eventually came before my eyes. As a result of that we were then able to pull satellite photos of the same section of ocean matched the geometric features that were visible in the satellite photographs to the treasure hunters' sonar scans, it's pretty conclusive there is something down there. That would be the answer if I had the money to go poke something being a Lovecraftian frame of mind because if we're to assume

1:02:52 Lovecraft's onto anything at all and the old ones are coming back then it makes sense that The city of Cthulhu or something would actually manifest. It does, it does make sense let me ask you more about your just general thoughts on the timeline of human history because You talked about the Baghdad battery, this idea of ancient electricity. There's a lot of different researchers now in different conspiratorial sub-communities dedicated to this idea that we did have a high society in the ancient past that was wiped out and the order of the day works very hard to suppress that by carefully controlling the information through a series

1:03:41 academic accreditations to write official history and this sort of thing. Some people think that even ancient cathedrals, the spires atop of them had a way of drawing down energy. That there was something more technological about it initially that obviously is broken now." Well what do you think about some of that stuff? Are you a believer in a high-technological society? Did the Egyptians have electricity and these sorts of things? And certainly possible. I mean, Arthur C. Clarke says that any sufficiently advanced technology if it's not properly understood would be perceived as magic in the sense that there was a magical technology or that sorcerous and alchemical powers truly existed have simply been edited out of the data by 1,000 years of persecution that forced

1:04:39 all that material to become esoteric, to become occult and obscured and go underground. It's highly possible whether that connects to our modern notions of dark energy or the idea that there is far more energy present in the world than our current science is capable of measuring or detecting yet at the same time those forces do seem to exist it's highly likely And on that theme of the potential for the city of Cthulhu to reemerge and this blending of fiction and reality, this idea that if something has enough energetic potency in our imagination that it can manifest in reality.

1:05:26 How do you work that out, your framework for the inner world and the outer world? The imaginal and fiction and the idea that these things can bleed over in some instances through some strange mechanism. Yeah, that's extremely eerie. But yeah there seems to be almost no division between fact and fiction. It's weird how things that are real turn out to be fiction, things that were fiction suddenly become real. It's very confounding the older I get. To some extent if reality is maintained by consensus it means that if more than 50% of people believe something is true then it becomes true

1:06:13 to what extent reality is maintained by consensus and what we believe impacts on a fictional idea once it's believed to be true. By most people, presumably would become real whether that would mean that Cthulhu would rise or a unicorn would finally walk across the road and ring the bell? I don't know but It's certainly eerie. Lovecraft material in particular shows a penchant for bleeding across into reality, I don't quite know how that happened but he received those things in dreams and then they've spread like some kind of psychoactive virus all across the world so

1:06:57 Things like the Necronomicon and Casullio are kind of common currency everywhere from Africa through Russia to Japan. It's spread in the same way that the evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins would call a religious meme. Yeah, man just so interesting There's a lot of people who say that when someone has an abduction experience or a sighting or something of high strangeness, that the presentation is something that comes from their imagination. Or from the collective unconscious if there is a being made of plasma out there some strange foreign intelligent life that has access to

1:07:50 our collective imagination. It could draw all kinds of things out of it, even things that the individual doesn't know which is like something that I've seen several times that a person has an encounter with glowing greys and they're shown some religious symbol or they're given some name in a foreign language, they have no idea what it means. Some informational download and then they go and they research that later And they're like yeah this name They told me is actually some obscure Hindu God I don't know why they told me that name but uh...I guess here in my simple life in Kansas It means something

1:08:30 I don't know what they're trying to communicate there, but just the idea that imaginal things can become real or imaginal things can show up in abduction experiences and high strangeness downloads if they have enough potency. Real or not? That seems to be evidence of such a thing. Yeah, I guess out for dimensional interference in our world. I don't know why it's certainly jarring A fully blown event of what you'd call high weirdness, high strangeness be it a UFO encounter or in my case an apparition in the ruined castle has the effect of jarring one's reality so hard that for most folk their lives never recover. I mean relationships break down when one plunges into the hell of insanity and bankruptcy

1:09:26 It can be a very jarring and disorientating experience. Yeah, I wrote down when you say in the film more than anything else now all i want is to be able to return to that place and it's suddenly difficult being locked in the 21st century carrying within the memory of a twice-lived piece of time and wondering whether or not i'll ever be able to find my way through that door again I mean, that's powerful man. It definitely seems to have a lasting effect. Yeah well Monsegor is a very particular thing as a result of seeing that apparition in the courtyard and being jogged sideways and that was only because...I came there because i was chasing Otto Rahn and Otto wrote about Monsegor so I went there because of his research

1:10:15 And at that point I was still completely detached. I was certainly not believing in all of this, the apparition kind of jogged me over into the world of faith and for a while the castle drew me in so strong and identified with that world so strongly there. I did kind of want to remain there I wanted to go back to 1240 around there. I was convinced that I'd be fully happy if i could port back into the period and I plodded for ages thinking, could it be possible to go back in time and change the events? What would you give to an immortal warrior high priestess who already has everything. Initially, I was thinking the same that I would try to give through the Afghans – morphine, automatic firearms…

1:11:09 There was a crazy time, I thought could it be possible to go back and tilt history and change the events of The Fall of Monsagor? I was fully obsessed. It took me 10 years to really shake it off. I was living there in the shadow of the castle for a whole decade. Well this is kind of experience that I think a lot people should...I don't know if you seek out but like should not be all that upset if it happens to them because I feel like these more extreme experiences do give us insights into the substructures of reality, how energy works. If there are multiple dimensions, the things we might spend a decade wondering about in a few instances and a few moments you got confirmation of and then yeah, a decade long obsession but at least you know more than those who just wonder

1:12:01 And I also read you helped produce a documentary about the Fatima events. Apparently, a man named Luciano Gaspar made a documentary that was not brought to market but he showed you some film of it that left an impression on you? Is that right?" Yeah this is also another very unfortunate series of events in there's something about the miracle of Fatima what i've observed is Whatever's happening, certainly the apparition I saw in Montsagaud conforms to all of the same characteristics as Marian apparitions anywhere. The sweet smell of sanctity, the smell of roses or lilies, the glowing outline of the feminine form and the shape of the apparition is iconic. It's something which has been going on a super long time in these mountains since long before the coming of Christianity

1:13:03 The film on the miracle of Fatima, the Vatican cover up and the fustication around it has also been attacked and suppressed. It was something that should have been released way back in 2021. Man wild! That is just another one of those things yes it's usually taken into its own category of marion apparition but that category should probably be widened to include all sorts of strange events and experiences people have.

1:13:40 I wanted to touch on, before i cut you loose the white darkness. It's described as a journey into the voodoo practices of modern Haiti with current practitioners as guides director Richard Stanley allows believers to explain their religious practices and sacred rites on their own terms creating a sincere portrait of an oft misrepresented way of life and it is pretty wild I don't see stuff like that all the time for sure. And they talk about these ritual ceremonies to invite the Loa to overtake or possess their bodies, and you see this happening a lot in the film. They don't think of it as a bad thing! At one point a guy says it feels like an orgasm but it can be for five full minutes or even five hours. It's like being on some kind of drug

1:14:33 Well, sign me up. But can you tell me a little bit more about their relationship with these spirits? I guess well yeah i was super lucky to have had a chance to go through the voodoo initiations that i went through in Haiti and this was extraordinary luck but i guess it's kind of at its base it's very similar to what you're getting in African magic and it also i guess relates to what people know about true yoga you've got a form of energy which can come up through your feet or which is coiled in the base of your spine and your lower chakra, which you can literally dance up through your spine chakra by chakra until it hits the base of your skull. And boom! You get possessed. In Haiti, you can get ridden by the loa, which are kind of a pantheon of spiritual entities

1:15:35 a sort of formalized series of alternative identities. And yeah, certainly it's like a drug but it's a drug that you can't isolate and you can't sell if… It was something we couldn't take away from the Haitians and mass markets so the Haitians were able to keep it unto themselves, and they're very rich in voodoo. I'm certainly envious of their ability to have this complete one-on-one transmission or union with the lower, the spirits that are something less than gods perhaps but maybe intermediary beings. Yeah well

1:16:16 It seems like that's obviously in the realm of that forbidden knowledge, and in our culture anything involving spirits or demons or angels is always in such a negative connotation. You should never mess with that stuff! Going back to what we talked about earlier and the church... I think there are just two ways to get rid of something or two components to getting rid of it entirely. You kill anyone who knows anything about it, and then you demonize the idea so much that everyone's scared to engage! And so yeah... That residue? Who knows how true it is but they don't seem to think this as a bad thing and doesn't seem to have negative effects on their life. It's quite orgasmic. Did you experience this yourself when you were there?!

1:17:03 I never got possessed, sadly. Yeah...I'm just too white. Maybe now at this point in my life it might work for me but try as i might it just never happened to me. But I saw a lot of that time and a lot of wild stuff. Possessed people knew things they couldn't possibly know and people predicted things you know crazy off-scale coincidences so I am a believer even if it didn't happen for me. Fair enough! Just to follow on that point and tidy it up in reference to the Cathars, the genocidal campaign of 13th century, the 777 affair and possession in general... It seems that sometimes these forces find ways of embodying themselves down through the ages. It's a crazy thing when it happens. And it still feels to me

1:18:04 Every so often, there's a force out there. Certainly there was a force out there these last few years which felt like it disembodied hatred or psychotic rage which seemed to manifest itself like little dust devil It's crazy how that shit happens Like the Embrace group is a thing that's eating the mountain They're trying to eat the mountain at the peak descent by telling me its doing largely for cosmetics It's powered by the forces of vanity and greed brought together into a force strong enough to vaporize the Holy Mountain. It's quite exquisite. Oh man! It's like a golem, these things find ways of re-manifesting themselves with different faces be it Crusaders or Nazis but yeah it's weird how in Mont Segur and Ufa these things just get replayed over and over down through the ages

1:19:02 Yeah i would say so man this is just been so amazing a wealth of information on so many obscure topics and a real explorer do or. I appreciate that about you mean hey this was so much fun had me smoking in the house i don't even smoke in the house anymore but i had to share one digitally with you it was only right and, I guess before I let you go, should we leave people with any information about future projects? The book that's coming out. That sort of stuff. We do the dance for promotional purposes! Let's do it!" Okay, the book exists. The Last Crusade, the quest for SS-Obersturmfuhrer Otto Wilhelm Rahn now exists. This is one of just a few presentation copies. The thing has been published by a major American publisher.

1:19:56 It will be reaching you next year, and I can't say who or how but bear with me it's coming. All kinds of occult and twisted forces have conspired to try to stop this from happening In the early days of the attacks here in Occitania, it became clear from the pattern of the attacks that there was all coming against folk who had something to do with Ottoman, something to do with Montsagor and something to do with the Pyrenean Grail. So a bunch of us got our heads together and we decided to hoover together everything, all data and all stuff that I had lying around put in between

1:20:40 two covers, try and get it out before anything shut it down. So I'm very happy that the material is finally going out there and they've been fact-checking it and fact checking it and sweeping over it again and again And yeah The beast should land in a New Age or occult bookstore near you online hopefully by the end of next summer I love it. Yeah, i'm happy to be on the side of those trying to elevate a lost chapter of history that the big empire would love To stay gone so i'm with you in that spirit and of course The official richard stanley is your website where people can read those blog posts see all the films you have worked on and probably rent or purchase them but

1:21:33 Thanks again for your time, man. I look forward to reading that book! This has been a real blast keep doing what you do and best of luck out there. This has been sweet sir. Cheers Third show of the year and the third one i am really happy with You know I had a good time with this one? I think that was obvious And what a wealth of interesting knowledge Mr. Stanley is, huh? It definitely felt arbitrary to ask him what it was like working with Nicolas Cage after all the other things we got into this might actually be one of the few two hour interviews with Richard Stanley that doesn't get into The Island Of Dr Moreau drama or Colorado Space or any of the commercial films he's made outside of the documentaries, of course but I loved this

1:22:23 He just seems like a well-researched adventurer and I thought even the open ended parts led to some really unexpected stuff. And clearly we have a lot of similar interests, but he just goes that extra step to do the exploring and have the experiences there's definitely some wisdom in that for those of us that just let ourselves get shackled down with life and all it's required maintenance. And we don't listen to those nagging curiosities We don't go and explore and see for ourselves. Maybe more of us should take a page out of Richard's book when it comes to that, I really love that idea of the castle being the grail itself. I dunno if we emphasize that as much as its emphasized in the film but the idea of a pentagram like arrangement of places creating this sort of portal nexus across this whole area and esoteric hotbed If you will

1:23:23 Just a lot of good new stuff. And the Plus Show adds several other stories, one about France's own Skinwalker ranch-like equivalent We spent a good amount of time on the 777 attack which was an attempt by a group of witches to cancel him with false accusations that were hashed out in court and he was victorious motivated by at least in part trying to keep the cathars story suppressed. And it might've even been enough to kill what was slated to be his Lovecraft trilogy of films, which we might only get the first one color out of space but hopefully Elijah would and the rest of specter vision see the light. We also talked about Otto Ron's lupus exilis stones ultra terrestrial musings

1:24:15 several other things just a great time as you guys know I just use the video for clips but check out a couple of those clips it added to the vibe more than usual and as i said in the plus show all these smoking that he was doing got me to just say fuck it and smoke in solidarity which i have not done in this house since we moved to Florida so like since May I always go outside but on this day, I broke the seal just to say i had a smoke with Richard Stanley because it was going so well. And I hope we do it again! Big thanks to Justin of Monsters Madness and Magic for the suggestion as for the last Hireside Chats episode with Michael Wan The rating is looking like a 4.2 not bad A bit more mixed than I would have thought but the number is the number

1:25:08 The plus people have spoken. I know, I enjoyed it. I know there were several people who are frustrated with Michael's use of Manhattan and Queens interchangeably that is not something that I would've caught because New York and really the new England area is the last part of this country that I have not explored And I understand for a show that is about the details and the synchronicities of things you really got to get that right but Corona Park is in Queens which is really the relevant aspect of that thread anyway. But also, in Plus News very good update for plus people who are a little annoyed or frustrated with the Plus feed recently being limited to the last year of episodes

1:25:57 I had mentioned that the feed was way too big of a file and was getting hit with so many requests. It was taking up the vast majority of server resources, and they bumped me up to a much more expensive hosting plan And because of this, we limited the feed to the last year of episodes until we found a fix. Well, we found one! We are back baby! 725 plus shows all there right in the feed A feat that a lot of other shows cannot accomplish I said it and there are tons of episodes just like today's which is kind of timeless

1:26:37 It's not about elections or current events. So you could listen to this anytime and be into it, I would say so that feature is very convenient and I'm glad it was only gone for maybe less than 30 days before we found a fix join plus its 725 glorious two hour deep dives into everything under the sun the higher side chats.com or look at the top links in your show notes And I will say signups have been coming in like crazy and I very much appreciate the 2024 bump. Maybe my sigil a day thing is working out or maybe it's the plus pitch i put together, It's hard to say but it's definitely been putting me in a good mood! I will say that and before we go you know what it is... The next meet-ups on the THC calendar are

1:27:30 January 16th, Washington DC. January 19th Oakland California. January 20th there's a meetup at the rabbit hole coffee house and brew in mountain home Arkansas. January 21st the electric skateboard gang initiation in Addison Texas. January 23rd two for one drinks at Monday night brewing and Nashville Tennessee and February 3rd Carbondale, Illinois at the Carbondale underground brewery and February 10th. The golden rooster in Saco main I like it go to higher side meetups.com for more details on any of those events and RSVP if you plan on going to one don't leave our event creators hanging they put themselves out there it's a beautiful thing

1:28:21 Come find new local friends and resources for building the better society on the other side of the soon-to-be collapsed one, apparently. Thanks again to Richard Stanley. Please reach out to him and tell him you had a good time, watch some of the films we talked about The Otherworld in particular is so damn good but that is it for me I'm getting out of here your move K-Thar Culture Suppressors Grail Questers and Mystic Knowledge Keepers Your fucking move Sweet dreams do thee alight Out on THC Uncovering secrets and conspiracies Everybody's looking for something Some of them want to use you Some of them want to get used by you Some of them want to abuse you Some of them want to be abused

1:29:26 Sweet themes on DHC Who the hell could disagree? We know the rabbit hole goes deep Everybody's digging for something Some of them want to use you Some of them want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you. Some of them want to be a-