Steven Snider AKA Recluse | The Secret History of Psywar, Weaponizing Conspiracy Culture, & The ASC Network

02:40 And in this modern age of confusion, it's harder than ever to know what is actually true and it's impossible to not notice the ever increasing number of people losing their minds because of it. They're told by the TV talking heads about another dramatic and highly charged tragedy as well as how their respective political team is expected to respond. They see the Twitter trends and a flood of graphic images and videos taking it all at face value, they change their profile pictures, they rant into the digital abyss, and before they can even bring their emotional state back to baseline...they're hit again with something else!

03:16 but we've been cultivating discernment and skepticism for a long time. And if you take a step back, it's easier to see that the same old playbook is often used—events are engineered, mass shooters are manipulated, so-called pandemics are gamed out in advance—and everything is presented in the most panic inducing sky-is falling way that if you aren't constantly reminding yourself of that, it's easy to get swept away." And this is all the end result of think tanks, alphabet agencies and military intelligence engaging in an endless string of studies and field tests for getting exactly the response they want from psychological operations and mind manipulation programs like MKUltra and Artichoke to covert coups and drumming up support for whatever the next move is on the global chessboard.

04:01 Somehow, through all the muddy waters, empty gestures, broken promises, disingenuous coverage, psychic driving and nauseating repetition... ...the system has still maintained its credibility in the minds of the masses. And as for how exactly we got here? The great Stephen Snyder aka Recluse has chronicled the path as well as anybody in his new book THE ART! THE SECRET HISTORY OF PSI WAR CONSPIRATATION AND THE SHATTERING OF REALITY BOOK ONE The first of a planned trilogy that shows that not only have the mainstream masses been heavily manipulated through narrative control, but the alternative lanes and various conspiracy subcultures aren't immune either. Steven has been here four times before with episode titles like Nazi Occultism Deep State Magic and The Nine from 2017, the Epstein Conspiracy NXIVM and Blackmail Blueprint in 2019

04:56 Strange Tales of the Parapolitical in 2020, which took a deep dive into his previous book with the same title. And Honey Potts Cicada 3301 and High Strangeness in 2021 You can follow his always ongoing investigations on his blog Vice Up View and his podcast The Farm. I am pleased to be here doing The Dance with him again! The Muddy Waters Walker, Mind Control Chronicler and Tangled Web Detangler Steven the Spider Snyder aka Recluse. How are you my man? I'm doing well sir coming to you from West Picot Virginia here on this glorious November day i love it i love it and

05:36 I'm always a fan of your work. You just keep doing more and more impressive stuff as time goes on." Reading back some of those previous episode titles really reminded me of just how awesome those interviews were, and after reading this latest book, I expect nothing less today but as these interviews tend to go give us the overview here to set the stage because this is pretty far-reaching work Yeah, it was a project that I've been working on now for over three years. It grew out of what was supposed to be a short work on QAnon and then it just sort of gradually morphed into something more and more elaborate. I had planned on being one book until gosh! I think only about a year or so ago and then about the time I got 250 thousand words and still only about halfway through as like meh...that's not gonna work So from there it was kind of process trying to figure out how

06:30 organize the different books, what should be in which sections and all that kind of stuff. But yeah it ended up becoming quite an encompassing work The first book essentially chronicles the history of psychological warfare from the end of the Second World War to roughly the early 90s late 80's thereabouts so it was quite an undertaking and it ended up leading me on a lot of on-the-ground research going to archives and a lot of other crazy stuff like that Kind of felt like in the process I always became a real investigator somehow. Yeah, and i've heard you talk about this book and a couple of other interviews And i'm really interested In this idea of the gamification Of events ever since covid which is just a great example of it We're told this thing is happening Here's how you participate and show you're a good person etc etc

07:24 It certainly had a LARP-like quality to it. And you start the book off talking about two other big LARPs, 400 years apart that both started as a game that people started to think was real curiously connected to grand conjunctions astrologically. You mentioned QAnon and that is one bookend of it but talk to us about the other and how related they seem to be? Well, when I was sort of looking for a place to start and trying to trace the origins of the Q thing. There were any number of compelling candidates but it seemed to me that most logical would be the Rosh Hakrutions because as far as I can tell there really was not an actual Rosh Hakrutian order at the time when the manifestos appeared during the early 17th century

08:16 It was essentially meant as a kind of LARP, you know proto-LARP in this whole era getting into the Westphalian piece. And since it ended up serving as a kind of magical act because there were not a lot of these secret orders in Europe at the time. In fact probably the leading one was the Jesuits I mean there were Masons at this point in time but speculative Masonry was really in its infancy but Once the manifestos came out, I mean it really lit a fire in the minds of men and now you had the rise of esoteric Freemasonry and all these other secret societies that came out of it. So it essentially created something out of nothing that had not existed before And that was a notion that was especially fascinating to me In the context specifically how art could be used to do this

09:08 As I looked at it closer, there were the eerie parallels to what had happened with Q where it had effectively began as kind of a game probably growing out of Cicada 3301 and then it just gradually expanded into upon the life of its own until it almost developed into a cult. So I was also struck by all this with the absolute power that gamification could have, and it started to become more evident to me why gamification has been something that has been pushed more and more in society going forward of course. The RAND Corporation was really the sort of ideological architects behind the whole process of game theory and a lot of this kind of thing. So it makes sense, but it's essentially a way to generate participation from people which I think is like really the power of gamemanship

10:00 I mean it's one thing to like read a pamphlet or something like that, right? But when you're actually going out into the physical world and acting out this kind of stuff it's a totally different scenario. And that has a much greater psychological control to it. This is why people who get drawn into really well done alternate reality games end up having a lot of times difficulty separating truth from fact You know this isn't something you necessarily get say when you're just reading like a comic book or something like that but we are in immersive game experience like this it can. I think somebody very profoundly psychologically and then when you sort of get into the i don't know mystical aspects of this is who i mean it was just so,

10:42 strange when you look at the similarities between the eras when the Rosh Hakushans emerged and when the Q phenomena started to come out, because you had the great conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn. This is unfolding against a backdrop of not just major political upheaval but really I think a transition into a new kind of social order. The Westphalian piece came out of this whole era with the Rasha Khrushchev Manifestos, this is all unfolding during the time frame of the 30 Years War and also the Industrial Revolution Essentially, Europe is moving from an agrarian society into an industrial society and that necessitated new forms of living, new forms of government. All this kind of stuff really the nation state as we currently understand it grew out of this whole era

11:33 And we're currently going through, in my opinion the same cycle right now. The kind of industrial revolution is breaking down the consumer economy is breaking down or now to what are they calling it? Now the information economy or their information revolution or something but Regardless, it's already dramatically changing how societies are organized. How we interact and relate to other people and it's probably going to be a while until all the turmoil does sort itself out and we found a new model like the Westphalian piece brought forth. Yeah great points! Great introduction to the general concepts here

12:12 Why this connection to grand conjunctions is there an energetic effect making these things gain momentum that way i was trying to work this out in my head it's like almost a chicken or an egg kind of thing cuz i do think astrological configurations have a cosmic energetic influence but then i could also see how with that knowledge if you wanted to Put something out there you would look for the right windows of opportunity where it might generate the most steam so i'm just curious what you think about that you talk about the law of 17 and 23 in relation to the great conjunction of 1623 but why are. So many points on the human timeline connected to these great conjunctions

13:05 Well, I mean it really is very much a chicken and the egg thing. Is it a situation where the conjunctions make the earth somehow more fertile to a lot of this high weirdness and so forth? And then you almost inevitably see a lot of these just bizarre synchronicities surrounding them which is why I tend to think that there is more of a random factor to this because I just don't know that you could plot out Somebody's saying like new roger links are things of that nature to come out of these events. But conversely, I mean if you are aware as you're kind of suggesting when these major astrological events are unfolding. You can try to piggyback onto the energies and I would imagine that people do attempt to do that for various reasons but i don't know that you would be able to kinda plot like a... Like we were planning on this specific thing to happen 20 years ago and we were just waiting for the conjunction to play out

14:01 been a little nervous to embrace something like that but i mean i do think that there are certain circles that will try to piggyback onto this kind of stuff for operations and that kind of thing yeah i'm right there with you and as i read this book i was more confused than ever Has to like who are the good guys and you were the bad guys what information can be trusted and what information was designed to capture my imagination and i've carried it through for so many years. We beat up on the mainstream in their narratives a lot around here but i just love that this book sort of takes aim at the alternative world showing that,

14:41 They really do control both sides of the coin to some extent, the mainstream and the alternative. And you can't just take the alternative view on everything and consider it the pure unadulterated truth either because it's not so simple. When it comes to this gamification and weaponizing conspiracy we could say, even spirituality sometimes You start a lot of this at the time of the Cold War. Give us some examples of these tactics during that time Well, I mean there was a lot going on there and what tends to get most of the focus were the use that the CIA was having with Hollywood which was something that i wanted to try to avoid a little bit because it has been fairly well documented so i wanted to get into more of the alternative subcultures. And the whole thing with that is

15:33 From my kind of perspective, I think that you have essentially two rough factions within the United States that occasionally collaborate. There's a lot of overlap but they do have differencing opinions on certain things. And on the one hand, you would have the kind of neoliberal order that we all know and love the Council on Foreign Relations, the trilats I mean most of those groups are basically over the hill now. The new generations like the Atlantic Council, the New America Project all this other stuff You got these clowns and a lot of the storied families behind them like the rockefellers and so forth. And then on the other hand you have the conservative faction which was historically really driven by the national association of manufacturers in some other kind of shadowy groups like that aren't talked about a lot

16:21 And from the beginning, this sort of neoliberal group always had a lot of sway in Hollywood. So this is how they were able to go through and message their opinions on a lot of things. This left the other faction with an odds so they tried to overcome this in a lot of different factors especially through the use of radio and pamphlets in the years after the First World War leading up to the Second World War. But again, it just only had so much traction. So beginning in the 50s when the military started to become involved in this and were looking for a way to wage essentially an indoctrination program on both elites and the American public at large and anti-communism

17:07 They really made cause with a lot of the conservative establishment in this process. And this led to a glorious series of meetings known as the National Military Industrial Conferences, and this brought together all these major defense contractors, Hopewell Boeing Lockheed, you name it. On the one hand on the other hand you had a lot of big people from the Department of Defense and National Security Council and also from a lot of leading universities like Hoover, The University of Pennsylvania etc., etc.. And also representatives from MKUltra who were attending these most notably Colonel James Monroe who oversaw the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, the major funding conduit for MKUltra

17:52 So, in doing all of this they created an agency known as the Institute for American Strategy which was essentially viewed as a psychological warfare bureau for the security services. And from the beginning, it really seems to have latched on to a lot of these conspiratorial groups as a means to get their messaging out. It's kind of interesting too because the IS was founded in 1958 this is the same year that the Liberty Lobby shows up it's the first year that they attempt to set up the World Anti-Communist League I think like one or two years later The John Birch Society gets off the ground

18:31 And all of these groups are intimately connected to this milieu around the Institute for American Strategy. And specifically with conspiracy theories, it's fascinating because it seems that This was really very much what Naomi Klein's concept of the shock doctrine, how it was being applied in day-to-day life going back to this era. And so she has this whole notion that the techniques of MKUltra could be applied to the public at large and induce a sort of fugue state in them so that they could be reprogrammed And I get a sense that this was really what they were trying to do with some of this Bircher stuff, or later also a lot of UFO literature. Because again you're trying to drop what would essentially be a huge shock to a lot of figures in the American public i.e.,

19:20 Eisenhower's unconscious agent of the Soviet Union and that there are 3,000 Soviet agents in the US government right now and all this other kind of stuff. But the thing is I mean the early JBS stuff it's just professional enough to be believable so this could totally warp somebody's worldview from what they had been experiencing you know at this particular time when there was a great degree of trust in the government And, you know this also went into even more of the woo-woo kind of stuff. UFOs, the whole notion that the government's been taken over by an alien species or all this other kinda good stuff So it was a very novel way to try and use these techniques in the public at large while also kinda doing a limited hangout so to speak. There was a lot of very subtle layers to this that were going on

20:13 Right and for people who don't know the John Birch Society could largely be considered a precursor to InfoWars or major inspiration For Alex Jones and InfoWars, and here's a good quote about the John Birch Society from the book you write quality propaganda is often rooted in a factual basis. The spin comes in the intentions and interpretations of those facts. By and large, the John Birch Society adhered to these methods. A common technique was to cherry-pick quotes attributed to globalists and apply ample spin to the point that the entire American establishment was implicated in a Byzantine communist conspiracy but there was at least some factual basis even if the context was totally lost as such Berthers and Carto's

21:05 Liberty Lobby, were far more effective in this capacity than the UFOnauts and their legacy lives on through the process of redpilling. As recent years have demonstrated this is an incredible shock but the conspiracy racket changed after 1968 it was then that full-blown fantasies were grafted onto conspiracy theories of an already dubious nature, creating a kind of comedic performance art. Sadly few then or now got the joke." I like that a lot and i've certainly talked to some guests about some wild claims sometimes with the subtle intention of giving them enough rope to hang themselves as they say other times, i'm just entertained by the idea of a thing and it's a mental exercise like could this be possible if it isn't possible

21:59 What is this guy's role in all of this? What is this guy doing, which of course comes up a lot. I hope that I'm not part of the problem. I would want you to maybe elaborate on this change you speak about after 1968. Well, really it goes and this is something I'm going to get into a lot in the second book. But I mean it really gets into the rise of discordianism because now essentially you have people like Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea and Carrie Thornley using conspiracy theories essentially as an art form for their own kind of quasi take on a lot of these different subjects

22:38 And that was my mind a game changer but it also had been kind of unfolding against the backdrop of some interesting developments with john bird society because, The period in 63-64 is really fascinating, this context. So the Birchers were able to generate a major concept that Oswald might well have been a communist agent and this was very concerning to a lot of people in the establishment. This is actually part of the reason why we had the Warren Commission because there was a very real fear that the United States could be dragged into a nuclear war with the Soviets if they were not able to counter some of these allegations that the Bircher's are putting out

23:18 And then later on, they would continue to push some of these narratives for the possibility of nuking China as we got into the Vietnam conflict. In the flip side of the coin you also had sort of a counter narrative being put out at that time as well. I think it's really interesting in this context that this is the same timeframe when Stanley Kubrick drops Doctor Strange Love. Obviously if you've seen it, you can tell that this was just an absolute deconstruction of bircherism. I mean, the whole thing with General Ripper obsessed over his bodily fluids because of the fluoridation in the water...I mean this is straight out of Bircher literature from that era! So you've got essentially this sort of low-grade psychological warfare that's being played out by these different groups. You have Kubrick involved people like John Frankenheimer Kirk Douglas for the neolibs then you've got all this weird stuff with the birchers and military

24:12 So, nonetheless this still continues to be an issue and around 1966 when the Birchers are at the peak of their influence as far as I can tell Robert Welch decided to take a dive. This marks the glorious point when he starts to blame everything on the Bavarian Illuminati And I think that this was highly amusing to a lot of the people in Discordian circles, and they saw it means to unleash this as an enormous degree of social criticism and a kind of living art form

24:48 that came out of really the Surrealist tradition. Surrealism again also uses a lot of different techniques, games essentially to get into the state create their art you've got things like the exquisite corpse, cut up technique but one actually was just inducing a state of total paranoia in yourself to get into your art projects this is actually something that Salvador Dali was really noted for doing So, I think that also by pushing this and this sort of state of paranoia that came with it that the Discordians were trying to do a lot of this tied into you know really these older surrealist techniques of bypassing the conscious mind and affecting people subconsciously with the forms of art that you're trying to produce.

25:38 Yeah it's a thorny thing because when it comes to like conventional films I love the films that seed the conspiratorial ideas that, I think do have some form of truth in them, of course. Obviously the Matrix and Gnostic tale it's a way to represent things that we can't actually get the facts for because a lot of this stuff that We might talk about on our podcast I mean especially me It's outside the realm of being able to get verifiable Concrete evidence for because it's just too protected. It's just at too

26:17 at too high of a level on some of these things, like false flags or this and that. And so we look at certain films as examples of how the world is run like Network for example in that famous speech and when it comes to mixing reality and art I guess i don't mind it too much but There's also a lot of manipulation in there as well, and that takes people off the deep end. And so yeah you gotta I guess cultivate discernment in both regards. You can't trust the mainstream news but you got to be careful to absorb everything that quote unquote whistleblowers and conspiracy researchers might be putting out there it gets quite tangled and requires a lot of nuance I suppose

27:05 I wanted to bring this up because in our very first interview, we talked about Andrea Puharik and the infamous seance where they apparently channeled these Egyptian deities known as The Nine. We've talked about the people who were there and how influential they were in major events in pop culture. It's one of my favorite bizarre stories But you did a little more work on Puharik and his background in this book. Talk to us about that, how this more fleshed out background information might have changed the way you look at the Seance story? Well, a lot of it had to do with the role that Puharik was playing with US Army at the time

27:49 The thing is, is that he did these seances. I believe the first one was on New Year's Eve 1952 and then the other one was in June of 1953 so like roughly six months apart and right at the solstices of course right? In between this time frame, Puharic had gone back into the army and specifically he had been detailed to the psychological warfare components in the DoD. And this would have effectively been like an early version of the Special Operations Command. A lot of people don't realize this but special operations forces you know your Green Berets or Delta Force

28:25 These guys all work in conjunction with psychological warfare officers in the military because all of this is considered an operation to the army, not an intelligence gathering operation or something to that effect. So this is also coming against a backdrop where Puharic would be doing work with Project Arditchoke and had suggested, I should say Puharik had suggested that he have been involved in this kind of research for the Navy going all the way back to 1947 with something they called Penguin. There's never been a Project Penguin found but there was a project Pelican which was extremely brutal it was basically a full-blown Clockwork Orange type procedure. I believe that took place in San Diego and yes they did they were taking prisoners and doing the whole

29:13 holding their eyes open and forcing them to watch really graphic material, to an extent. Which in of itself is like interesting because in theory they're doing this to make these men more predisposed to violence yet they recruited them for military prisons which you know again for those of us outside the United States military prisons are even worse than most public prisons here, so keep that in mind. So you're bringing in all these characters who had already displayed a high capability of violence which is what got them incarcerated at the first point so did they really need to make these men more violent than they already were? Which is an interesting question and begs another question well if they didn't need to continue dishing them like this then why were doing these procedures in the first place

30:04 Which again brings up a lot of the questions as to whether or not this was all just a joke, or if they actually were communicating with something. But I mean, what could be said? In this regard was information that I found and that I had uncovered while working on this book. And I had gotten into in another section but essentially this went back to a declassified FBI document that I acquired that discusses one of the early Artichoke committee meetings. For those who are unaware Artichoke grew out of Project Bluebird. Bluebird, as many people know was the first CIA behavioral modification program but it was also a joint military program as well and it grew out of a lot of earlier army and navy programs And again just to emphasize this but Artitchoke never rolled into MKUltra It continued concurrently with it and it was under different leadership

30:57 And specifically for Artichoke and Blueberg, it was these committees that got together. And they have been meeting since I think at least 48 or something like that. As I looked at this FBI document, I was able to put together some interesting things in regards the players here. So this would have been a subcommittee of I think it was the Joint Scientific Intelligence Research Board or something. It's like a slew of these different alphabet agencies here, God! I can't remember what they were calling them but this was one of the successors to the Defense Research Council for World War II and the guy who oversaw all this stuff and is still overseeing it in the early days at Bluebird was Vannevar Bush

31:39 The guy everybody wants to point to at the Smith document is overseeing the US government's UFO program. Even before all this stuff had gone on, he was effectively the de facto overseer for this Bluebird Committee thing and it gets really interesting when you look at the CIA representative on there This guy was a dude called Cleve Baxter Now most people are familiar with Cleve Baxter because he later claimed to be able to communicate with houseplants with polygraphs But well before he got into this racket, he was a specialist in narco-hypnosis. This was really his big bag and he would later become a huge figure in a lot of New Age and UFO circles. He would also join a very sketchy chivalric order that I've been obsessed with for years called the Sovereign Order of Saint John, when he was in this group he was going around the country meeting with all these UFO abductees people like Travis Walton, the individual who's chronicled in Fire In The Sky

32:39 recounting their stories, sending reports back a lot of other strange stuff like that and he was not alone in these figures with this kind of background who show up in all of this. So it's a strange thing when you look at this perception of whether or not we were communicating with non-human intelligences be it through alien abductions through seances things like that they were conducted by QHORIC to channel the Nine Because on the one hand you do have this component of psychological warfare being in this and it had been from a very early point, but then the flip side of the coin You do have a lot of this weird woo-woo stuff with LSD with all this other insanity that's being carried out over and over again for a matter years. And It's something that even now I can't really say for certain if the people doing this genuinely believed

33:33 And what they were doing or if it was just a game to them i mean. Just to give you sort of example what a mind fuck this is, going through like Edward Lansdale's documents at Hoover. He was major guru in psychological warfare he really weaponized spirituality and occultism in that sense and you kind of think Lansdale well you know this was probably just a gag to him he was putting these people on when he tells his underlings to go out and kill an insurgent draining the blood put puncture wounds in the neck so it looks like a vampire killed him Which he did during the Philippines. Oh, Philippines Yeah It started with the Philippines insurgency But the thing is Lansdale I have all these papers that he was sending to his boy in the Philippines Charles Bohannon Bohannon's another really interesting guy He was a Harvard trained anthropologist who worked for the Smithsonian and really helped Lansdale figure out how to weaponize native indigenous beliefs against them but anyway

34:32 These letters, right? They've got all of this like you know masonic all-seeing eye like doodles and stuff like that on it. All of these other sort of weird occult symbols And these are just private letters these guys are sending back to each other and there's no comment or anything as To like why they're putting this stuff on there So it's kind of like... Are they just trying to fuck with people going through this stuff at the archives later on Or was this some kind of hidden code between them Yeah, it is weird and that's kind of where I get frustrated because i want to know what they think. And I wanna know what's genuine and what's a manipulation? It's kinda impossible to know we're so far removed from at this point we can kinda circle around what we think and you're great at that but...it is difficult to know coming back to Puharich and this seance I started thinking about well

35:27 Is this story genuine looking at his background being involved in psychological operations I start to wonder. I do think they have some occult belief systems behind the curtain but, i don't know if those stories always get out and then it's like well where did this story come from my understanding is the first person to really write about it as robert anton wilson he's a figure that i'm not quite so sure about and then peter lavender wrote about And sinister forces is an amazing trilogy but here live and i have some weird stuff about like kinda going we've been in and out of behind the curtain and some strange. Background does it make me all that confident either side on use the word traction earlier and i start to think are they just trying to get a story,

36:18 some traction and they're just trying, well it didn't work enough here let's put it out again. Let's put it out again until it starts to gain traction and then you have the influence of the Council of The Nine being talked about as something that influenced Star Trek." And it's like well was that just another trying to get traction for this whole thing or was that a genuine influence for some multi-dimensional entity? This is an interesting paragraph but you write about this guy Jack Sarfati, who had some ties to Puharich. And you say by the time Sarfati encountered Puharich during the 1970s the parapsychologist was working closely with a controversial Israeli stage magician Yuri Geller. Puharich was writing a biography of Geller aptly named Yuri in which he alleges that the magician was in contact with Spectra

37:09 an extraterrestrial computer orbiting the Earth. Periodically, the intelligence contacted humanity via the telephone assuring the recipients of a great destiny in a mechanical voice." It wasn't just Geller that Spectre contacted either. Safadi and his mother became convinced the physicist had received such a phone call during the early 1950s as well. Man I never read eerie cover to cover or knew that other people received apparent spectrum messages but an ET spaceship orbiting earth and sending messages down is not far from the story of the nine actually. And it almost sounds like a repackaging of this narrative, that it seems like he was just really wanting to get out there in one form or another

38:01 Now I'm wondering if that seance ever happened. Talk to us a little bit about all this stuff I just threw out there at you, and Spectra as maybe a repackaging of the story? And do you think the seance happened?" Well yeah, I definitely think that it happened. There's been enough people to come out and acknowledge they were there I mean, it's hard to say obviously. But I do tend to go with Puharic himself being a true believer It's not to say the people above him were not using him and taking advantage of his frankly fanaticism in a lot of this but i do get the sense that he was a true believer And you know your correct obviously The Spectre thing was basically repackaging of The Original Nine

38:44 But the whole thing is that the notion of the Nine was not really revealed to the public at large until 1974. So you're talking a good 20-something years between seances and when Puharic really brings this stuff to the public, And up to that point, it seems that awareness of the Nine mainly existed in fairly exclusive elite circles and had become a sort of quasi-cult maybe in Hollywood. So again this sorta begs the question was this something they were trying to seed a narrative or was it maybe something designed potentially as a control mechanism for certain elites?

39:25 Again, you could maybe draw some parallels to the Church of Scientology in this regard where it's proven to be phenomenally capable of bringing actors and a lot of entertainers and celebrities people that have a lot of cultural currency at their disposal into the church itself. So, I could see in some ways that Puharic may have been trying to set up some kind of quasi Scientology thing with the Nine amongst certain individuals in Hollywood. But then later it does start to filter into the public through various films and television shows. Of course The Original Star Trek, Chris Knowles has argued that this might've gone back as far as The Original Outer Limits was Leslie Stevens and

40:09 I'm actually convinced as well that Stanley Kubrick was aware of this and incorporated some of the nine mythos into 2001 because an old high school buddy of his. But it's just an interesting thing with this where on the one hand, were they trying to seed concepts of a cargo cult or something like that would eventually be revealed to public? And did that blow up in their face when the URI stuff came out Again, this is a specific possibility that should definitely be considered with the Nine. But it doesn't really explain why there seems to have been so little effort made to try and bring broader awareness of this cult in the first several decades of its existence. Of course you had The Changing Story as well but again I mean this tends to happen when you're getting into channeled communications.

40:57 But it is very interesting as well that people like Robert Anton Wilson and Peter Lavenda do show up as continuing to push this narrative because certainly these are guys who have done a lot of trying to generate false stories and narratives for various reasons. I mean, Lavenda's a guy there has been speculation for years that he played a role in the Simon Agronomicon but was potentially Simon himself So, it's fascinating that it's also a certain type of researcher that seems to pick up this narrative and want to run with it so much. Yes, absolutely! Well said. And we talked about the John Birch Society, the conspiracy side of The Coin. I wanted to talk a little bit more about the ufology side of The Coin.

41:41 We know that the CIA has worked a lot in the arts and it seems like the American Security Council is an agency that was heavily involved in this company, Regnery Publishing which published most of the esoteric conspiracy classics. J. Allen Hynek's UFO books, Jacques Vallée work, The Legendary Morning Of The Magicians that popularized Nazi occultism and the Vril And you say it had been described as presenting the first fully fledged modern ancient astronauts theory and was a major influence of Eric Von Danigans when he wrote Chariots of the Gods. So, a lot of my favorite material comes out of this nexus what am I supposed to think?

42:32 Yeah, that was like one of the weirdest things that I had encountered with Regnery because the Regnery family had supported a lot of far-right causes going all the way back to the original America First Committee. The one prior to the Second World War. I think it was William Regnery who have been one of the major patrons of that and then his either his son or his nephew had taken over the publishing house so this is a publisher whose probably most well known work is Was it Mangard and Yale by William Buckley? This is the type of books that they normally published. So, the fact that they were pushing UFO books in the 1960's is peculiar in and of itself but then there also embracing this really esoteric ultra-terrestrial type of interpretation on the phenomenon people like Jacques Vallée and J. Allen Heinegger, I think it was Jacques Berger from The Morning of Magicians were starting to put out at this particular point in time

43:34 Later, they would also play a role in seeding the whole satanic panic as well. I think they were the ones who had published Michelle Remembers but I'm not entirely sure about that right now. But yeah it's very interesting that this would be the publisher doing this but again in Regnery's case he was involved with this group The Institute for American Strategy, the one that was just talking about before there was a psychological warfare bureau effectively So, in this context you have to consider that the publisher was definitely being used for the purposes of political warfare. And that gets into some really curious questions as to why not just there would be ufology that they would embrace but this very mystical version of it?

44:23 Which I think is the more nuanced, more accurate framing of it than aliens from a distant planet in a mechanical ship. So...I don't know what to think now but let's talk about Jacques Berger a little bit He was co-author on Mourning of Magicians like you said he was a chemical engineer A French spy, a journalist and writer Here is a paragraph from the book for more context Berger's Extraterrestrial Visitations from Prehistoric Times to Present, published in 1973 heavily promoted the ancient astronaut hypothesis.

45:04 Regnery's involvement with him, whose Secret Doors of the Earth they also published is most intriguing. Berger and Vallée had known one another since 1961 and would carry on a correspondence throughout the rest of the former's life. This is most interesting in light of Berger's pedigree. In 1959 he authored a curious article in The French Magazine Constellation entitled thought-transfer weapon of war. The piece proclaimed that ESP tests were performed on the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear powered submarine the year before." The purpose of the experiment," Berger wrote, was to determine if telepathic communications were possible over long distances. So

45:53 Jacques Berger is a lesser known name to me, but what are your thoughts on his work? And if he was being genuine with it apparently he got a lot of his ideas from Lovecraft you could say that the old ones and the notion of ET origin of humanity it's somewhat similar But I just don't know what to think now, and especially with his relationship with Jacques Vallée. Jacques Vallée is not a spy and he seems pretty genuine but i don't think he shares everything he knows What are your thoughts about this relationship? Berger in general And how all this material has spiraled out decades later To still be quite popular We just don't know How genuine or authentic it is Well, I mean Berger was definitely a character

46:45 Another thing that's really significant about The Mourning of the Magicians as well is it really popularized the whole concept of Nazi occultism. A lot of people kind of looked at the Spear of Destiny and what have you, but The Morning of Magicians predated all this so in a sense some of this work I think did provide a certain romanticism to Nazism where it was like no there was actually this mystical brotherhood within the Third Reich or something to that effect So, Berger did some pretty sketchy stuff like that. And then when you get into this article that he wrote about telepathic studies potentially being done with the Navy and submarines, this was potentially one of the things that spurred the Soviet Union to start looking into their own ESP research again after a lull of many decades

47:36 So, there clearly seems to have been a strong component of psychological warfare for this. But again in terms of why these notions I think that were being used by the security services and using things that were being put out by the way and Berger goes into who the target ultimately was and that was the Soviet Union. And the reason why they're doing this is connected into the whole concept of cosmism which was so thoroughly ingrained in the Soviet scientific community that there was no way that they could ever totally suppress it. And for those of you unfamiliar with cosmism, it was really almost a kind of proto-transhumanist ideology that grew out of certain Russian intellectual circles towards the end of the late 19th century many of them connected to the Orthodox Church

48:33 But they essentially believed that humanity had a divine mission to perfect both our physical forms as well as the planet and the entire universe. So we had to strive for immortality, we had to strive for space travel so that we could go out and live forever and make the universe into fully God's image it was always meant to be. very much a spiritual approach to a lot of scientific builds and it always has had a lot of currency in Russian intellectual circles. And from this, it's where we get a lot of concepts like the noosphere which subsequently became really popular in a lot of Western New Age circles but the point being with this especially after

49:23 The Russians went through the Soviet revolution, the Bolsheviks come to power. Obviously now religion is the opiates of masses you can't openly practice your faith and I think that specifically for people who were more inclined to mysticism this whole concept of cosmism that was ingrained into the scientific community provided a compelling middle ground to this because now you theoretically have a scientific explanation for supernatural phenomenon because it is a species that's coming from outer space to their mind but they're also perceiving this as not necessarily a physical alien in the nuts and bolts spacecraft, but something that is capable of replicating all of the supernatural phenomenon that humanity had historically attributed to the divine.

50:16 So, in that context I don't think that the standard UFO narrative was so popular in US. You know again this is the immediate aftermath of Cold War or the immediate aftermath of the Second World War you know science is so popular now we had just seen all the great things they did to help us win war too come up with vaccines for polio, even though I know that's not the best example. But people's living standards had gone up we'd improved methods of farming so that it weren't mass starvation. The point being this is a whole era where you know we're looking at technology and seeing that it could lead to a great evolution as it theoretically had done up to the 1950s for us. I mean the Soviets had kind of that mindset with this too but there was still

51:03 hunger for a certain mysticism and there was no way for official religion in the Soviet Union to really fill that or to have something like the New Age movement really effectively there. So it ended up going into their scientific field, and you know if we were going to wage an effective psychological warfare operation against these circles then we had two embrace something that would be immensely appealing to them. And I think that they certainly found that in this sort of ultra-terrestrial interdimensional hypothesis. It's interesting that you say, you think the target for that material was the Soviet Union. Obviously, I know there is a back and forth tug of war going on with the two superpowers at the time and

51:54 That's true, but it's just strange that these books Passport to Magonia like J. Allen Hynek UFO books It seems like the alternative community was targeted and the narrative was trying to be steered a certain way I don't it just seems weird that the Soviet Union would be the ultimate target for that and Sometimes I also think maybe they were seeding aspects of their own secret religion to a degree, like the American Security Council or some of these agents that are involved are kind of commissioning authors to write from a perspective that seeds

52:35 their own belief system that's very bizarre and different from any mainstream belief system into the culture. I think about Chris Knowles and his watcher worship stuff, the seeding of watcher worship. And we're talking about chariots to the gods and the ancient astronaut theory being involved here like Were they trying to covertly put out some of those ideas? I heard you in a previous interview talking about the elite secret belief system and the context of Satanism, saying like, well, Satanism is way too simplistic of a term to describe what might be a very esoteric worldview that circles around in the top of the pyramid to some degree. But you say that

53:27 When you look at the motifs that you see most often, Diana, Apollo, Greco-Roman mythology. It seems like that would be a better place to put the spotlight on what their secret beliefs might be but does that relate it all to some of this mystical views of UFOs and ultra terrestrials? Do you think there's anything to the idea that they didn't have a proper vehicle to seed some of their own faith if they wanted it to gain traction so to speak and so they did it through this way.

54:04 Well, yeah. I think that is very much a distinct possibility and this wasn't necessarily something that I had ever really wanted to believe in but having toured quite a bit of the United States over the last two years, I would have to say there's a lot merit to Chris' concept of a watchers cult and to my mind if there was some sort long-standing cult within elite circles, this would be the most logical way that it would manifest. Because ultimately when you really get down to it this sort of mystical interpretation of Ufology or UFOs whatever you want to say it as... It's not new or original

54:46 Really, most ancient religions were steeped in what we call astrognosis effectively. But there is a reoccurring motif in various civilizations but especially when you look at Babylon or Egypt of the concept that the human soul originates in outer space. In a lot of traditions, it's in the Milky Way. It travels down through the celestial spheres for incarnation and then upon death the soul travels back up into the celestial sphere and returns to wherever it originated from so it's always been kind of baked-in there and this wasn't even necessarily the religions in the Near East that European culture would have been exposed to in antiquity

55:31 It's fascinating to me in North America when you look at the alignments of a lot of the Adena and Hopewell mounds, they're very specific in relation to a lot of planetary or stellar phenomena. A lot of solar phenomenon, they note the equinoxes, solstices all this other stuff so you had a lot of these massive mountains constructed some of the really famous ones like Serpent Mound can only really be viewed from the air So, it seems that even in indigenous cultures there was this notion that it was possible for the human consciousness to ascend and descend into outer space. And this is something that I think when you had a lot of European elites come over here they were really fascinated by this notion when they saw that

56:18 within some of the indigenous tribes. One of the groups that I've written a lot about was The Society of Cincinnati, which was actually the first group to really try to preserve the mounds and this is really where a lot of the... It's a hereditary order that has a lot of blue blood American dynasties in it families from Alexander Hamilton, George Washington all these other characters so when you take all this into the context where they're obsessed with these Native American mounds, they're coming from this tradition from the Greco-Roman classics that they grew up with, this knowledge of these various ancient traditions. It very much seems to me that they were trying to recreate this to a certain extent in contemporary America and this is really obvious when you go

57:04 places like the Biltmore, some of these really elaborate parks and what have you. Because it's just so obvious that this is a kind of pagan shrine if you will I mean i was just at the Parthian in Nashville yesterday or actually no it was two days ago I'm literally standing at the feet of a massive, 60-70 foot tall statue of Pallas Athenia with her freaking Medusa head on her chest and all this other weird stuff like that. There was so much time and effort that was put into constructing all this stuff across the country. In the case of some of these manors like the Biltmore where

57:46 It seems clearly that there was a kind of ritualistic purpose to this, but it's like... You know the thing cost small fortune to build. It's in Asheville North Carolina There was nothing there they had to build an entire freaking village around the thing To even service it and then on top of that The Vanderbilts don't even use it most of the time! It's like you spend a small fortune building this thing That your only going to go to for two months out of the fricking year Granted, yes people with lots of money do weird stuff but I mean this just seems especially absurd when you consider the amount of detail that they put into these places. So i do have to believe that there was some kind of tradition with that and when you get into things like the cold war...I should probably point out too- I mean the ultra terrestrial hypothesis was definitely distinctly in the minority until really relatively recently

58:42 For most of ufology's existence, it has always been the nuts and bolts perspective that has prevailed quite heavily. Which is why it makes it really interesting in recent years that you are seeing the kind of ultra-terrestrial thing gain traction but nonetheless when it comes to Russia Yeah, I think that the possibility that you're trying to create a cult out of all this and establish it among the Russian elites is also A very distinct possibility to this There was an interesting book written by Miles Copeland called The Game Player. Copeland's big CIA Poo-va-hoo Buncha coups and stuff. It's also the father of Stuart Copeland, the drummer for police Gotta think about that in their title but anyway Miles liked to talk about

59:26 occultism in high and low places. And he had strongly indicated that groups like the Church of Scientology were created for the purpose of targeting not average Joes, but influential members of society so that they could be controlled through these cults. And I mean this seems to really very much have been in play by the security services and as example of that we do have a fairly good amount of documentation for would be the Moonies, for instance. The Moonies are the unification church for those of you who aren't familiar with it. The Moonies have been huge in Japan for decades and specifically among the elite. In fact that whole assassination they had of Abe I think was about a year and half ago two years or something like that was all tied in with the Moonies so this is just sort of one instance where much of the Japanese ruling party was closely linked

1:00:23 to this specific church that had decades of ties to the CIA and would have effectively provided them with a very influential sect, to influence Japanese society through. And I think it would be foolish to think that this is the only case where they would have done something like that. So yeah, if you really want to gain control of the Russian elite and get them to do it to your will, what better way than take over their spiritual practices essentially. Yeah I suppose i just never really thought too much about that side of things. I kind of focus on the ideas and

1:01:03 if they are true or not, you know? If they have any merit. And I should say this doesn't necessarily invalidate this stuff or make it evil or something. I mean i'm not trying to suggest that at all. Personally, I think the ultra-terrestrial thing is the most logical hypothesis for UFO phenomenon as well It's a great theory You know, I think Valet is really cutting edge of lot of these stuff along with people like John Keel and so forth I mean, to be honest this is really the only kinds of explanations that can take into account of all the high strangeness. But again kind of going back to something we had talked about earlier a lot of the best propaganda is based in truth right? So... Right and it's okay to say I guess that maybe they had an ulterior motive they aren't just putting out information for information sake

1:01:51 And there was another agenda there that doesn't invalidate necessarily everything that was said. Like I've said in the beginning, this makes it all a lot more confusing and we're dealing with muddier waters and we're dealing with the gray is not a lot of black and white were clearly in the gray territory but as we're wrapping this up, I just thought this would be a fun question because you mentioned what the creation of the book you did a lot of first-hand research. It took you three years, you did a lot of traveling, you went to some archives firsthand trying to find evidence of this or that something you heard that you wanted to really make sure was true what do you think? You're most proud of when it comes to that what do you think is in the book a very dense and detailed book chock full of information What do you think is one of the things

1:02:46 is in there that you think is your contribution to this work that you found first hand you held the document like this i can verify and im so glad i came here instead of just. Speculating are wondering if it was their has a couple things maybe that stand out to us like i'm glad i got this document i verified this Yeah, I mean there were definitely a couple of them. I think one though that I was really stoked about finding was in Edward Lansdale's papers at Hoover but effectively it was for this company that was connected to... Was it Boltz? Bernanke and

1:03:28 It was BBS, it was essentially the company that was hired to build what became the ARPANET by Arba around 1968. That's the company that JRC Licklider was deeply involved with But anyway, I have been searching for more evidence of Lansdale's involvement with ARPA because I had found out that Lansdale was essentially running ARPA's counterinsurgency program Project Agile through his flunky William Goodell in ARPA during the early 1960s. And this was really disturbing because this is at a timeframe where they were trying to use data mining and an early version of the internet essentially

1:04:12 and create predictive models for insurgencies and personality profiles for individuals using this kind of data mining. So I have wondered if Lansdale was more directly tied into this, and it turns out that he was a consultant for this subsidiary that was part of BBS You know, and they had also gotten this contract or been bought out I should say by BBS shortly before they were awarded the ARPA contract which is interesting because the head of the company was a veteran of the CIA who had recently retired. He was also a graduate of Yale and apparently he had wonderful singing voice as well. He was in the choir at Yale for many years before you went into the CIA. So anyway Lansdale is involved with this and their whole proposal was basically

1:04:59 for projecting insurgencies. So it did seem that Lansdale, even in the private sector had continued to push this whole notion that you could use data mining as a distinct possibility for effectively pre-crime. You could predict where an insurgency would be or what individuals would be more prone towards insurgency So this was just a really disturbing aspect of this to me, especially from what we've seen with Google with Cambridge Analytica in the 21st century. But this stuff is already being envisioned as far back as the 1960's and it was always connected

1:05:37 these counterinsurgency programs that Lansdale developed initially in the Philippines, and then later in Vietnam with Phoenix program and kind of related projects like Condor. So again I think we're once again seeing the fruits of this war effectively being brought back to the United States We had probably been using this technology to try and predict insurgencies, and potential insurgents overseas for some time. And now it's in every aspect of our lives—our elections, our economic situation, marketing... anything you can think of." Yeah! Well that makes a lot of sense. Great find! Good on ya for locating that document

1:06:19 Man this has been really interesting and informative. Congratulations on just a very impressive work i look forward to the other two volumes coming out let the people know what you intend to cover with them when they might be coming out anything else you're up to that they should know about Well, probably I'm hoping that the next volume will be out late next year. It's actually the one i have to do more research with. The third volume is actually a good chunk of it already finished but the second one is going to really go deep into the history of Rosh Hakrushinism into Satanism and satanic panics and then going into the 20th century with all topics like surrealism, the Fordian society and then of course the discordians and a lot

1:07:07 fellow travelers. So that one's going to be definitely a fun one to write and I definitely suspect i'll be doing some more research on that in the field too, especially in California And then the third one which is going to be the real shattering or reality one is gonna try to bring everything together and going into how all this is unfolding in modern times In the interim, I'm actually probably going to try to release a kind of travel log based on these different dispatches. I've done, you know, John if by going into all these like weird sites that I'd been too, You know a lot of interesting places and just sort of random things I mean I was gonna put in like description at the time Keith And I almost died in the desert of Arizona while we're on mushrooms trying to find coffin rocks I think or something like that

1:07:54 Also, some of my favorite cooking recipes. Tips on how to cook a leg or ambrose while you're on LSD that kind of thing. Nice! I like it well I look forward to that and now that we're both on the East Coast, if you ever come down this way let me know. I'd like to get involved in something as we talked about it. I need to get out of the house more these kids drive me crazy! I actually think i will be in Florida around February if I'm not mistaken so we'll see Look at that it's all coming together well It's a pleasure to talk to you to reconnect again making it lucky number five it's always been fun your work is super impressive I don't know how you keep all this stuff straight in your head but

1:08:35 Keep doing it and take care man. Thank you. Thank you, Steven the spider Snyder how about it guys? I always know he's going to bring some deep level research and connect a few new dots in fact when he tells me that he has a new book out. I know it's gonna be a great week at work because I like his writing any actually remembers it for interviews so I don't have to do a whole lot And I think those are the weeks of work we all like best. But really this is the sort of background context that can be really helpful in discerning truth today and in the future, both in mainstream and alternative lanes This sort of Cywar stuff is only going to get more advanced and more pervasive

1:09:27 And the best broad approach that I've found is really just to keep everything at arm's length and really don't get too vested in any one story or perspective on that story or event. Because the commonality between people who don't seem to be thinking clearly, no matter the subject is that they are overly obsessed with it and that can be anything Trump trans kids The Daily Goings On In The Middle East Of course, if you know people living in those areas or at risk because of some major event then yes. It makes sense to follow every news story as best you can when it's presented as a well-edited soap opera but I don't know that it's ever good to just let anything consume your every thought how does that help anything?

1:10:17 If you pay attention to some of these ops, I guess we'll just call them. You will see a lot of serial observers that think that because they follow things really hard there somehow involved or they've contributed in some way it's odd if you spent the same time watching Seinfeld reruns wouldn't the world be exactly the same? A lot of the time yeah and you would have just laughed a lot less But I find interviews like this useful for those sorts of reasons. It's a certain kind of research that requires someone who has great recall and can process all those names and network connections, it's not my kinda mind, I know that so...I appreciate it alot We fit in pretty much everything I took notes on and considered my favorite parts of his book except this one thing let me read you a paragraph here

1:11:14 In the epilogue he says, basically everything we have considered special operators counterinsurgency stay behinds the ARPANET predictive modeling and psychotronics all would have factored into US nuclear policy. And as this is the apex of security in the national security state it stands to reason that all aspects of it would have been shrouded in psychological warfare to confuse the opponents And imagine if the Soviets could be made to overlook nuclear policy in favor of the new sphere or whether we had reverse engineered UFO technology in the process. Are you starting to get the picture? Who better to line up this hall of mirrors than the nation's premier psychological warfare expert, General Edward Lansdale

1:12:04 And who better to take up the mantle than his acolytes and fellow travelers? Should we be surprised then that with microwave and psychotronic weapons again making the headlines thanks to Havana Syndrome, a figure like Christopher Mellon would be at the center of renewed disclosure efforts. The year 2023 feels a lot like 1983 in this regard only with a shooting war in Europe rather than Central Asia this time around That's well said and of course we can add the Middle East to that now too, but it's an interesting perspective to think about. Especially when trying to circle around the why of disclosure And there are a lot of folks out there thinking nukes themselves are a super weapon hoax! I've been through a lot of that material and its wild when you do the whole thought exercise of Well if thats true then what about this? And this? And that etc etc

1:13:04 But if you think about what he's saying in that paragraph, it doesn't really matter if nukes are real or not. There would still be massive secrecy around it and there would still be a nuclear policy but great stuff I wish recluse much success because he deserves it and I look forward to the next two pieces of this puzzle! I also enjoy his podcast and I think you would too As for the second hour of this interview we talked about bill cooper's life and his credibility. The CIA drug trafficking story as a limited hangout, we got deeper into lansdale who i just mentioned the importance of building community and gamification in the digital world and unraveling of reality where is all this going how chaotic can it get

1:13:53 If you liked what you heard in the first hour, join PLUS. You get five two-hour shows a month instead of just the free first hour it's easy click the link at the top your show notes and you can get access to the PLUS Show feed which you can use to listen on any other same old podcasting apps all the same stuff is true for the Patreon link but you can also listen to PLUS on Spotify because they are partners so if you want to listen to PLUS on Spotify sign up through the Patreon link And as for the last episode with Hugh Newman about the new stuff from Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tempe, it seems well liked. 4.3 on the site rating system for the most part I think people just liked the unexpected they didn't hear the words COVID or Ukraine or really anything political just good old-fashioned mysterious ruins of the ancient past

1:14:47 I do like to try to be, in the words of Everclear, everything-to-everyone. But certainly there are threads that we follow and return to that aren't some people's favorite and that is nature of life but for most part it seems like you guys approved! That's great. And let's call out the next few events on the calendar at highersidemeetups.com as we wrap up this year December 7th the monthly meetup at Flame International Restaurant in LA. December 8 we got one in Oakland California at Two Pitchers Brewing. December 16, we got one at the Camden Beer Hall in London Christmas drinks with other THC fans gotta love it! December 22nd is still the Bulgaria event

1:15:33 which I appreciate and also December 22nd is now a Sinspiracy 5 event at Element Eatery in Cincinnati, Ohio. I imagine people are busy for the holidays but if you aren't there are some things you could do go check out highersidemeetups.com for more event details RSVP for the host if you plan to attend and or make your own events If you don't see one near you And you think it might be a cool way To meet new local people But that's it for me. Again, Steven is the man! Hope you had a good time and you learned something too I've done my part Your move seance sitters, psi-war wagers and paranormal publishing participators your fucking move You know the plan has always been to hack your brain MKUltra's trying to drive you insane They'll explode your heart if they think that's what it takes

1:16:33 You think I'm answering the phone, well I ain't. You gotta keep the curtains drawn cause you don't want anyone thinking your at home Well your not! You should tape the mail slot And baby if i seem withdrawn let me say it's cause I just dont wanna go and get whacked Maybe you should know that The trauma affects you like it does everyone It's just a game plan, it's what the world's become They want a pat down and a swap Don't you see what's going on? Well now you know You're better keeping on your own Cause' you can see The masters lie too much Oh baby, you can only trust yourself

1:17:25 And if you think the system's out of touch It is and you can only trust yourself I hope you know the elite aren't your friends They'll suck out everything from you in the end If for some reason, you think I might be wrong I wonder where you got that opinion from You gotta keep the curtains drawn Cause you don't want anyone thinking you're at home Well, you're not. You should tape the mail slot And baby if I seem withdrawn Let me say it's cause I just Don't wanna go and get whacked Maybe you should know that The trauma affects you like it does everyone It's just a game plan, it's what the world's become

1:18:23 They want a pat down and a swap Don't you see what's going on? Well now you know You're better keeping on your own Cause' you can see Masters lie too much Oh baby, you can only trust yourself And if you think the system is out of touch It isn't. You can only trust yourself Da da da da You might think that these problems are small Maybe they aren't registering at all Now they know you're naive and vulnerable

1:19:26 You won't believe all of the stunts that they'll pull. Cause you can see, the masters lie too much Oh baby you can only trust yourself And if you think The system's out of touch It isn't and you can only trust yourself Cause you can see the masters lie too much Oh baby, you can only trust yourself And if you think the system's out of touch It is and you can only trust yourself