warrior
In his last article 'Historical Cycles; are we doomed to repeat the past?', Stefan Verstappen made the case that our society is going into what is known as the Chaos Stage of history.No one can deny that the state of our civilization is deteriorating.In his latest article 'A Time for Warriors' he describes the horrific situation we are facing. (Not for the squeamish.)But there is hope.

According to the theory of historical cycles, the next stage is a new golden age, appropriately named 'The Warrior Age'. But what does it mean to be a 'warrior'? Who can be a warrior? Is a warrior non-violent? Why is becoming a warrior the first step to changing society?

To learn the answers to these questions and what we can all do to prepare for and create a better world, listen this episode of 'The Truth Perspective' on the SOTT Radio Network with hosts Laura Knight-Jadczyk, Joe Quinn, Niall Bradley and Harrison Koehli, and their special guest Stefan H. Verstappen.

Stefan has over thirty-five years' experience in the martial arts including five years spent in East Asia. In 1985 he traveled to throughout Asia and studied martial arts in Hong Kong, Taipei Thailand, Korea, and mainland China. Verstappen is the author of 8 books including The Thirty-Six Strategies of Ancient China, Blind Zen, and The Art of Urban Survival.Website: Chinastrategies.com, Video.

After our talk with Stefan, we continued the discussion of spiritual warfare, and discussed the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.

Running Time: 02:13:16

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Joe: Hi and welcome to The Truth Perspective on the SOTT Radio Network. I'm Joe Quinn and as usual this week with me is Niall Bradley.

Niall: Hi everyone.

Joe: And Harrison Koehli is here with us too.

Harrison: Hi.

Joe: We also have a very special guest not often on the show, but when she is we're very happy. Laura Knight-Jadczyk is here.

Laura: Hi.

Joe: And our extra-special guest is Stefan Verstappen who is the focus of our interview or our talk today. Welcome to the show Stefan.

Stefan: Thanks for having me on again Joe.

Joe: I'll just give a little word about you Stefan. We've interviewed Stefan a couple of times previously. He's done a lot of work on historical cycles for those who remember. Stefan has over 35 years experience in martial arts including five years spent in east Asia. In 1985 he traveled throughout Asia and studied martial arts in Hong Kong, Tai Pai, Thailand, Korea and mainland China. He is the author of eight books including The 36 Strategies of Ancient China, Blind Zen and The Art of Urban Survival. His website is Chinastrategies.com and he also has a YouTube channel where he posts all of his videos which I think is called China Strategies, right Stefan?

Stefan: The channel is just my name.

Joe: Oh, it's your name Stefan Verstappen. Okay, so people can check you out there. Stefan, like said, it's great to have you back on the show. We always enjoy talking to you. We talked to you previously about your work on historical cycles but you have recently embarked on a new focus and it's the way of the warrior, hence the title of our show. So perhaps since we're all new to this to some extent, you could start by telling us, when you talk about the way of the warrior, what do you mean by a warrior?

Stefan: Well a warrior is really a mindset. It's an attitude and it's a lifestyle as well. The mindset, the attitude and the lifestyle for what has traditionally been called a warrior is the opposite, the antithesis to the lifestyle and mindset of a slave. The problem with our society is that we have been, from an early age, brainwashed through the educational system, through the media, through movies, entertainment and more recently through music and the internet, we have been conditioned and encouraged at every step of the way to think like a slave. What I mean by that is a slave is dependent on his master and the state is our master. So the state wants us dependent on them so what the state doesn't want is any self-reliance. They don't want people to actually do anything for themselves. That's why we see all these ridiculous laws that you're not allowed to grow a garden or collect rainwater or god forbid you should build a workshop in your back yard without a permit. The city will tear the whole thing down.

All of this is designed to keep you dependent on the state. Now one facet of the way of the warrior is you do things for yourself, you don't rely on other people. You stand on your own two feet and you get things done. So one aspect of the way of the warrior is self-reliance.

Another aspect is bravery. A warrior is brave. Now bravery doesn't mean you lack fear because if you're not a psychopath you will on occasion feel fear. The only other people who suffer from something like that is called Urbach-Wiethe disease where they don't have the ability to feel fear. But that's an unnatural state. We're mammals. Fear is a survival instinct so if you didn't have fear you wouldn't have a good survival instinct. But what bravery is, is to overcome your fear. Now internally you may be feeling nervous and hesitant but your intellect and heart will say to you "I need to accomplish these activities or these tasks and I won't let fear stop me." So bravery is part of the art of the warrior.

Now what the state wants is for you to be afraid. Look at all the propaganda that's going on. There's not a news story or television news article that isn't designed to make you afraid. "Oh terrorists!" They have been running that ridiculous routine now for 16 years. "The terrorists are going to get you" and then it's going to be the crime. They're doing everything to intimidate you and for those of us that are awake, they're so blatant in their tyranny. You think they would do a better job of hiding how corrupt and evil they are and they're not doing that on purpose. I think the reason they're not doing that on purpose is because there are people like us that are awake that see that and we sit and look at what these bastards are doing now and getting away with it. And the very fact that we sit back and we have to watch our world go down in flames right before our very eyes by this psychopathic cabal that's running things, is frightening!

So bravery is needed for the average person, even the ones that don't know what's going on, but even more so for those of us that do know what's going on, because these are really trying times and I'm scared a lot of the time, but what am I going to do?

Laura: I'm scared.

Stefan: You're scared Laura?

Laura: Oh yeah! I'm scared all the time.

Stefan: But if you weren't scared you wouldn't be human. If you're a bunny and there's foxes crawling through the tunnel coming towards you, ferrets, you should be scared! Of course! It's a survival instinct! So I'm scared. Laura is scared. Joe you're probably scared a little bit right?

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: He's terrified.

Stefan: But the thing is we all keep doing what we do. We're fighting back.

Laura: Yes.

Stefan: We're standing our ground. We're not going into a fetal position in the corner of our room and refusing to speak to anybody. That's what happens when fear takes over and controls you. So we all feel fear. That's fine but we have to be warriors which means even though these are our feelings we have a character drive or something that's separate; it's our character, it's our soul that says "I'm not going to let it stop me. I might be afraid but I'm going to fight back. I'm going to stand my ground." Bravery is a part of it.

Joe: On the point of fear or bravery or courage, you mentioned just a minute ago these terrorist attacks that have been going on. We had this most recent one in Orlando and I suppose the goal or certainly the effect of those is to generate or engender fear in the population. I think a lot of peoples' response to that to assuage that fear is to look to government, to authority, to make them feel better, to give them security. So while everybody feels fear, I think it's more difficult for people who are attempting not to look to government for security, but must stand on their own.

Laura: Yeah, those who know that the government is creating and propagating the fear.

Joe: Well you're left without anybody to look to, right, except yourself or your own resources? It's probably more difficult for someone like that, like us, than someone who's just a member of the population who will just fly into the arms of authority to say "Protect me!"

Laura: "Save me! Save me!"

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: And that's the point I was making, that for those of us that see what's going on, it's even more terrifying. So you're right. From its first inception, any kind of organized government has always been a protection racket. It's just like the mafia. It's just like the triads. They come up to your place of business and they go "Something could happen to you. Something bad could happen, but if you pay us money, we'll make sure nothing bad happens to you." So it's a protection racket. That's what government has always been. Now for the average person on the street they see this Orlando incident and all the other staged or instigated or orchestrated - I don't believe a word of anything I see on media so I don't know anything about Orlando because personally I was not there and I can't trust anything I see through the TV. Did this guy kill these people? I don't know. Was it really a gay bar? I don't know. Was it a Hollywood movie set? Who knows? How can I judge based on what I see through TV? It's all concepts. It's all bullshit on TV.

But for the average person they see that and then, especially with the liberals and the social progressives, it's "Oh, the government has to protect me by taking everybody's guns." So they're scared because some people might have guns and shoot them so let's take everybody's guns. Of course they never say let's take the policemen's guns or the government's guns, but let's take everybody else's guns. So that fear-mongering works perfectly on the man on the street. Now for the folks listening in and for the folks on the air right now, we're not buying into that bullshit but on the other hand, we are scared at the realization that our government is so psychopathic and corrupt that they would stage these events, whether or not they actually killed 53 people, or they're dead, I wouldn't put it past them either way anyway. But the fact that they're doing this and they're ramping this up and we know it's because they want to fulfill some sort of agenda and that agenda of course is to enslave us all completely and have us licking everybody's boots. That's what they always want. That's what psychopaths want, absolute and total control and us groveling in the dirt. So that's the agenda.

Now for those of us that understand the agenda it's frightening too! Yeah, I'm scared about it. Every time they pull this nonsense off I think "Well what are they going to do next? Are they going to drop a couple of tonnes of arsenic in the water supply and blame that on terrorists and meanwhile half of Detroit dies?" Who knows what they're capable of!

Laura: I don't put anything past them.

Stefan: Me neither.

Joe: That's kind of the essence. We have a very direct example of a situation that requires that the qualities as you're describing them, of a warrior and we've touched on the idea of who can and can't be a warrior. Would you say technically everybody can be but not everybody's going to be?

Stefan: Well from an egalitarian point of view everybody can be a warrior but to be honest with you, between you and me and the audience, no not everybody can be a warrior. Let's go back to Gurdjieff for a second. You need to have a magnetic centre in order to attract the proper influences that can develop a soul. And it's the same thing with a warrior. If you never had any kind of curiosity or inquisitiveness or a thirst for knowledge or the idea that you need to work on yourself to make yourself a better human being and a more enlightened human being, if that's never occurred to you in life to do that, you will never become a warrior.

A warrior is for those people who have already had the calling. The old Christians used to call it, when you went into the priesthood, you had "the calling". The way I would interpret that whole idea of the calling as the magnetic centre, that part of your being that we don't know how it comes about or how it doesn't come about, but it drives you to seek knowledge and to improve yourself and not to be satisfied with your being at the state that it is now, to become stronger, to become more aware, to know more, to understand what our purpose on this planet is. So I have now been searching for 50 years almost for truth and answers. But that's because the magnetic centre drives me to do that.

So for people that are listening right now, I can guarantee everyone that's listening now has this magnetic centre otherwise you wouldn't be tuning in. You wouldn't be part of this whole program. So you all know that you have been called to a spiritual path. Now there are many spiritual paths you can choose and one of them is the way of the warrior and it's an equal path to many of the other paths that are out there. The slight difference is that with the way of the warrior you're just a little bit more rugged and you're the shock troops on the spiritual path. So if you have the spiritual path already, if you get my book, there are a lot of techniques. The book is an instruction manual so there's no philosophy. There's no "my thoughts on the world" or anything. It's really an instruction manual and if you want to incorporate some or any of those exercises and ideas from that book into your current spiritual path, into your current spiritual purposes, then they will integrate perfectly.

For example I have exercises for how to improve sensory perception, how to see better, how to hear better, improve your balance, your sense of proprioception, basically how to develop what Gurdjieff would call your instinctive centre. The instinctive centre is the source of a lot of really powerful insights. Laura will back me up on this. You understand women's intuition and you understand how you can work on instinct, right?

Laura: Yes.

Joe: She agrees.

Stefan: Can I get an amen?

Laura: Hallelujah!

Stefan: The instinctive centre is really a powerful centre so some of these exercises will help you to develop the instinctive centre. So for those people who are on a spiritual path that involves mostly meditation, meditation is good. It develops a lot of capabilities. But by adding some exercises to develop your instinct, really will broaden your path.

So that's some of the things you can do with The Way of the Warrior. We're spiritual warriors and we're on the front lines so we're just a little bit braver than most people. We've got to be a little bit more self-reliant. We have to use our critical thinking more. Again, one of the qualities or characteristics of being a warrior is critical thinking.

Now of course this again is opposite to what the state wants. They want you just to swallow the propaganda the way they feed it to you and say "Thank you sir. May I have another?" They don't want people to think for themselves so they manipulate us to get some guy in a white coat and a piece of paper to tell us radiation cures cancer.

Joe: Right.

Stefan: And then because he's got a white coat on and he's got a piece of paper in his hand we think "I guess he knows so I won't look into it any further and I will go get my radiation dose." Or you've got the white coat with a piece of paper saying "Vaccinations will prevent disease". They want you just to take it at face value but a warrior doesn't take anything at face value. A warrior will take that statement and go "I'll look into it further on my own. I will always read the counter-arguments to any kind an argument". I do. If somebody says the sky is blue I will read articles by people who say the sky is green. Then I will make my own judgment. I'll read articles by people that say the sky is red, orange, pink and yellow. Then I will make my own judgment based on the arguments and based on my rational understanding and logic.

So if somebody tells me something, I don't just swallow it and accept it, "Yes it must be true". No, never. I always say let me look at it and I'll decide on my own. So critical thinking is an important part of being a warrior and being on a spiritual path. You have to think critically. And by thinking critically you are the antithesis of what the government wants. They spend a lot of money sending you through 12 years of indoctrination programming so that you will not think critically. So the last thing they want you to do is pick this up now but following the way of the warrior means you don't trust anything. You don't trust information at face value. You trust your own judgment.

Laura: There's another aspect of this that I would like to bring up. As I was just telling you before we got started here, I just came out of a long period of studying near eastern history, ancient history, and the one thing I notice is the US/western power structure is very similar to the Assyrian empire, which was basically a protection racket. But what you also notice throughout history is the way these empires coming and going, rising and falling, decimate populations. They decimate them by exercising the protection racket function, as you said. "Something could happen to you" and basically it's like "Give us your stuff or something's going to happen to you" or "Pay us your money". So then of course when anybody rebels they destroy all of them and take their stuff anyway.

Then they use their own people as cannon fodder. Of course they didn't have cannons at the time. They had throwing rocks and arrows and spears and swords and so forth, but it still amounted to the same thing. They were using their own people as their soldiers so they would wipe them out and they'd take them of course away from the fields so they couldn't be producing food and then they would be killing off the people on the periphery so that they weren't producing food and then these empires again and again found themselves in positions where they had decimated populations. Nobody was producing anything. They'd killed off the people who were creative and had artistic or technological knowledge and the empires of course had so many people hating them that the empires collapsed.

But the thing I want to get to is this vast group of people, the average person. And the average person isn't going to be a warrior. Let's face it. Even if they're pulled out from behind their plough and put in a uniform and sent to march, they're not really a warrior. They're just a statistic or a cog in a war machine. But there are all these other people who just want to live their lives. They just want to plough their fields, so to speak. They just want to raise their children, have a little vacation time when the harvest comes in, a little party and a dance and so forth - and I'm putting this all in ancient terms but it still amounts to the same thing.

So it seems to me that when there are people - and of course back then the elites were the scribes. They were the temple officials, the family members of the royal families and so forth. They were the only people who were considered to be elite. Then of course there were the military elite. But we're talking here about something entirely different. We're talking about psychological and spiritual warriors arising from within the larger population of the masses of people. I would say only maybe one or two percent of that large mass of people have this capacity. So after you've eliminated the psychopaths from your counting and the other pathological types and so forth and you get down to just the masses of fairly normal people, you're still only going to have a percentage of them who are capable of warriorship.

This is something Castenada addressed when he described that there were two kinds of people. One kind, the ordinary person, had two of these spinning circles of light or something which you could see and then there were the other kind who could be warriors or seers and they had the three spinning rings of light or circles of light.

So we have a difference here and what I would like you to talk about, or address, is the responsibility of the warriors to help others. Because if others had responsible governments, if they had governments that set good examples - you can see the problem. Everybody's acting like idiots because the government sets the example of acting like an idiot. But if they had responsible people in positions of power or authority, they would begin to act responsibly themselves.

So what is necessary is for warrior types to set examples, to really live the absolute cleanest lives possible, to do what they teach, to not only talk the talk but to walk the walk, that sort of thing, and to help other people when they have their fears, to talk to them, to support them, to help them to talk to each other, that sort of thing. So how do you feel about the responsibility of the warrior towards other people, towards the larger group of humanity?

Stefan: Well you've described it perfectly. From my opinion, and take it for what it's worth, the world is divided up into five percent psychopaths, 10% born leaders and then we've got the rest of the 85% that just want to be left alone and raise their family. And there's nothing wrong with the other 85%. Here's the problem, what I see has happened with our society. We have allowed that five percent of psychopaths to control everything. Now when they control everything, they program the 85%.

Laura: Right.

Stefan: What they've done is program the 85% of the rest of humanity to be idiots and selfish and lunatics and sex obsessed and drug addicted. They've done everything they can to take that 85% and turn them into crap, absolutely useless for any practical purpose. The warriors in society can reverse that once those psychopaths are gone or once the influence of them is gone. And they're going to go because just like you've studied the Assyrian empire, they collapsed really fast. They were so hated and loathed by the rest of the world at that time. I forget - did they salt the fields? Did they destroy their cities? But they were never mentioned again. That's how despised the Assyrians are, which is what's going to happen to America and Britain too. They're going to be so despised by the rest of the world they're going to be destroyed and everybody's going to spit every time they hear the name America.

So once they're gone and they go because it's like Samson tearing the temple down around them. They'd rather kill everybody and as many people and tear it all down when they go as not. So the 10% can be real warriors. Let me just add one little hopeful benefit to this, and that is even though there's a certain percentage that are born leaders, it doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of people who can take some of these techniques or apply some of these principles to their lives and even though they might not become a great warrior and a great leader in their community, they can still do a lot more, have a better, healthier, more positive influence on society.

But let's say we take the true warriors. Their responsibility then is as pathfinder, as a way to lead the rest of the 85% and reprogram them because if I was in charge of all media and all movies and education, I'd design a program that by the time you're 12 years old you have a medical degree and you also have a degree in philosophy. There's no reason a 12 year old kid couldn't already have learned enough to earn two college degrees by the time they reach grade 6. Their minds are a sponge and we've seen in the past, in the history even in the last 150 years that the founding fathers, many of them, by the time they were 13 they already had responsible jobs and the equivalent of a college diploma. So I would design a system where by the time you're 12 you already speak six languages, you have two college degrees. That's all possible.

Also I would program the movies and the music and everything, that virtue would be honoured instead of now what we see is psychopathic behaviour is always rewarded. Take a look at those TV shows like Seinfeld and Two-and-a Half Men and things like that. I watched a couple of those shows just out of morbid curiosity and what I see is what I see in most entertainment and that is there's a bunch of psychopathic characters and they're so funny because they're psychopathic and they understand that the whole world is just rotten and corrupt and then there's one or two characters that want to think good of people and they're naïve because they have a conscience and they try to do good in the world and then they all laugh at them and abuse them in the end. They always walk the dog or something.

So this is what they've done. They've completely turned this world upside down where evil is good and good is evil, smart is stupid, stupid is smart. So if I was in control of what these psychopaths are in control of, it would be just as easy to program those 85% of the people to be noble, caring, loving, productive, positive people in the world. Unfortunately the psychopaths have taken it over so for the vast majority it's not their fault. What good are they? To who? To what in the greater scheme of things? Not a lot of good right now. But that's the programming.

So let's say somehow we are able to rid ourselves of this cancer and the media starts to break down. We're actually starting to see that now. Nobody really believes mainstream media anymore. They're dying quickly and the sooner they're gone the better. So that leaves people like us and your radio show and my YouTube videos to try to offer some counter-programming. So the way of the warrior, if you're on a spiritual path and you follow the way of the warrior then you are the example. And your example is to deprogram the rest of the population, at least the people who are in your sphere of influence, deprogram them and show them a more positive way through your own actions, through your own independent thought and through your own bravery.

Laura: Wouldn't you say that that's something that Vladimir Putin is doing right now? That he is setting an example, in spite of the fact that the western mainstream media never loses an opportunity to defame or smear him or misrepresent him in some way or other?

Stefan: Yeah, well certainly he embodies or presents a warrior aesthetic to the public and I want to like the guy. But the thing is, what do I know about him? I only get my information through some form of media. Do I trust the media? Absolutely not! When I see pictures of him doing judo or going swimming, the guy looks rugged, he looks tough. He projects a warrior image and I'll be honest with you, I really want to like the guy. I really want to think he's sincere and I like, from what I understand, the way he stands up against Obama, Miss Obama there.

I think he presents a really good image. Is it for real? I don't know because ultimately what do we know? If I spent a month living with him I could tell you whether or not the guy was genuine. But since that would be impossible for me to do and since all my information comes through some form of official media, I can't tell whether the guy is sincere or not, but he certainly projects the image.

Laura: But ultimately what we're saying is it almost doesn't matter. What matters is setting the example. So he's setting the example of how a presidential figure should behave.

Stefan: Right.

Laura: He's setting the example of how a peacemaker should be, what a real man is. He's setting that example personally and even if we can't know whether it's true or not, he's doing a darn good job of it. I think a lot of people are responding to that.

Joe: I think you can glean some information from the media as concerns Putin, in terms of not just what they say about him and also what they don't say about him, what they leave out. They have attacked him repeatedly and they've also left out a lot of information about things that he has done, or twisted it. So you can look to western media which we know, as you say, is really just a propaganda arm of the western governments and look to them and what they do and don't do in reference to Putin for example, and get some information about what Putin is really like. You can't know for sure but you can draw some conclusions.

Laura: He's like your warrior. He's exactly what you're talking about only he has managed to get into a position where he can set a wider example. So maybe other warriors could congregate or support this and spread it and say "Hey look. Putin is exactly what I'm talking about." I hope you have a section about him in your book because it's really a hot topic and I think it's a really valuable way to set an example because as you say, you can't know but then what we do know is the example he's setting. And what we also know is the way the western mainstream media never loses an opportunity to try to defame him, which almost tells you that he must be the real deal, right?

Stefan: Right. Like I said, I really admire the image that he projects. He is embodying the whole warrior image.

Laura: And the martial arts thing, everything. He's just like you! I mean, you know?!

Stefan: Me personally, I really want to like the guy. The trouble is I'm so skeptical of everything. But personally I support the image that he's projecting and I also think it's important to see that he is projecting that warrior image and a lot of people are really responding to it in a positive way. So that goes to show you that the need among people for warriors is really great. So whether or not he's really a warrior or playing some duplicitous role, it doesn't matter. What matters is that his image is that of a warrior and that people are responding to that. From what I see I like the guy and the more the western media attacks him, great.

My slight hesitation is that mainstream media is also attacking Trump. But then I'll see a videotape of Trump speaking at AIPAC pledging his undying loyalty to Israel. Now I'm sorry, if you pledge your undying loyalty to a criminal state, I have some doubts about you as a human being after that.

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: So I'm not sure. There's wheels within wheels. There's propaganda. Is the western media attacking Putin simply to build him up? Who knows.

Laura: Well on the other hand, the western mainstream media that goes after Trump to some extent, supports the hell out of Hillary Clinton and basically here we're just talking about one psychopath versus another. He was shown pledging undying loyalty to that unmentionable Middle Eastern state. However, she has been kissing backsides over there for a long, long time. She's got a history of it.

Stefan: Oh yeah.

Joe: One of the things that annoys me and it's a bit of a pessimistic view, but what pisses me off about the US leaders is that at the very least, people should be given a leader that at least pretends to embody or tries to fake it at least in a fairly good way, authoritarian or at least strong "I will protect you"...

Laura: Ethical.

Joe: Even if they're lying, conniving, corrupt bastards behind the scene, at least they put on a good show for the people.

Laura: And they're not even doing that anymore!

Joe: They don't even need to put on a good show. They're lying, conniving bastards and they're pusillanimous pricks in public you know, to everybody! They just leave people with nothing! But listen I didn't say that. Stefan, we have a call. I'm just going to go ahead and take it here. I've been keeping him on the line for a while.

Stefan: Sure, sure.

Joe: Hi caller. Who've we got on the line?

TC: Hi, it's TC.

Joe: Hi TC.

TC: Am I coming through okay?

Joe: Yeah. Maybe I can increase your volume a little bit or maybe you can.

TC: How's that.

Joe: Just speak up.

TC: Okay. I just wanted to go back to what you were saying about the personal responsibility of taking on the role of a warrior because when you first get introduced to the concepts of the Work it's quite a blow for your confidence, for your previous shaky self-confidence and you learn kind of like what Stefan has been talking about, being skeptical about the things in the outer world. You become skeptical about yourself and that kind of thing. And so you're taught that at the beginning you need to go through this period of self-observation so that you learn to separate out the good from the bad within you and be able to see yourself objectively.

But all the time in the back of your mind you're thinking "I am not what I think I am" and "I'm not capable of doing", for example. That's a good one. We're not capable of doing anything.

Joe: Those are the kind of feelings that would come up I think as someone explored the idea of being a warrior and facing the responsibilities, as you say, of being a warrior. Those are the kind of things that would come up. People would start to doubt themselves a little bit because of the fear because as we've described at the beginning of the show, it is quite a scary thing to do, to stand on your own, to be your own authority effectively, and that can bring up all sorts of fears and doubts, etc. but I suppose in that case it's a matter of staying the course.

TC: Oh yeah. You Joe, talk about the process and self-doubt being a process. There comes a point where you do realize "Hang on a minute." The humility is essential and that is one of the main goals, is humility. But it gets to a point where you have to think "Hang on. Maybe I've gone through the first stages of the process. What's been the point in doing all this stuff if it's not leading me on to the next stage? Or maybe I've gotten to a point where I am a bit more capable of doing things now." When you get to that point maybe you've just got to think "Okay, now it's time to take on this responsibility." Get your confidence back in a way, through doing.

And then going back to what you were saying about sitcoms, the ponerized culture and that sort of thing, there's no heroes. There's no examples of how a strong person with integrity conduct their lives.

Stefan: Yes.

TC: Putin is setting an example for everybody now. On whether or not you can put your faith in him, I just think you have to look at "by their fruits you will know them". The guy has borne a lot of fruit.

Joe: I think actually referencing Trump in the US, that's as good as it gets in terms of someone who just provides a semblance of a real leader or authoritarian and it's pretty poor. It's a pretty poor example but that's as good as it gets.

Laura: He's a friggin' clown! He needs a fuzzy wig, a big red nose and giant floppy shoes and baggy outfits! But remember...

Harrison: He's already got the hair.

Laura: Adolph Hitler was considered to be a clown too.

Joe: Right.

Stefan: TC brought up a lot of really good points there. And I confess, I will reveal, that my inspiration to become a martial artist was because I was in a Gurdjieff group and I was doing the Work and I realized that I needed to work on my moving instinctive centre and obviously there were no teachers of Sufi fencing here in Toronto in the 1970s so I thought I would recreate the philosophy of developing the moving instinctive centre by studying martial arts. So that's where I'm coming from with this. And what you said about there not being any warrior images, yeah, that's it! There are no warrior images, not contemporary. We have some historical movies once in a while. And then we have the comic books. That's our warrior image, Batman and Superman and all that nonsense, right?

But we don't see a real warrior image in the public sphere and Putin does present that and for that reason alone I do admire him. There is an example of a man. He's a martial artist. He's a swimmer. He's a helicopter pilot. This is what a warrior is - someone who is capable. But let's back to what TC said about doing and self observation. That's why I tell people there isn't a thing you can say to me that I haven't already said to myself. My last video is called A Time for Warriors. We are now at the stage in our civilization that we have to walk along the razor's edge which means on the one side we have this self-doubt and I do. I've observed myself enough. Have I cleansed my being of all the faults I have perceived through my self-observation and my mechanicalness?

Yes, we kind of balance that but we don't have any time anymore. We have to say "Listen, I'm going to balance all that. I'm going to put it in the back of my mind, all my flaws, all my insecurities, all my fears. They're there. I acknowledge them but I'm putting them in the back of my mind and to the best of my ability I'm going to be a warrior." You know what it means? It means the ability to do, just like Gurdjieff explained which is a really rare ability. Most people think they can do things but they actually don't do things. They're just a toaster going through the motions.

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: So a warrior is somebody who can do. Now we might not have the power to do and be all the time but when possible we make the effort to do and that is to present that image to ourselves and to the people around us.

TC: Well I think that the point of sometimes making the best of what you've got comes into the equation but it's kind of like the old myth about if you can get a god's name, then you've got power over that god. And that's like we feel we've got more power over something if we can put a name to it, if we can put a label to it. So even if we haven't ironed out all the things that are going on inside us that annoy us or that we haven't got control of, or something like that, if we've observed long enough, we've catalogued them, we've put a name to them, we're aware of them, that in itself gives us power over them.

Stefan: Yeah, absolutely. The same with myself. Am I a great hero? I tell people I'm not brave. I'm not a great hero. I'm not a big tough guy, but I'm a little bit tougher and a little bit braver and because I'm one percent braver than average, that puts me in the top 10 percentile rate because the vast majority of people are just absolute cowards.

When I started out with martial arts I came from a background of being an intellectual. All I did was read books and paint and then I was doing the Gurdjieff Work and I'll be honest with you, I was an avid outdoorsman so there was that rugged side to me. I've always been at home in the woods. But I thought "It's still not enough. I need to develop something else." That's when I entered martial arts. I made myself a promise that I won't be a panty-waist. I'm not going to be a big baby about it. I will fight. I will spare. I will do all the exercises. I will get hurt. I will suffer the pain and I'm not going to cry about it.

So I entered very hesitantly. I was worried about it but then I started training and I started fighting and the more I spared and went to contests and tournaments, the better I got. The more I spared, the better I got. And then it turned out that just a little bit of bravery puts you so far ahead of the crowd because most people are really scared! They're scared of everything. They're scared of the woods. They're scared of the dark. They're scared of a guy sitting on a park bench late at night because I sit often by the lake here and everybody that walks by, even groups of 10 young men will see me and they'll all just get nervous and make a big circle around me. "There's 10 of you guys! I'm one old man sitting on a park bench. I'm not a threat." But oh no, they're scared!

So despite all our flaws, especially when doing the Gurdjieff Work, you're aware of your flaws, you're aware of your shortcomings. But despite all that, having just a little bit of courage, a little bit of self-confidence makes a huge difference and puts you up into that warrior category.

Laura: Well in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Stefan: Exactly and that's what I'm saying. In the land of cowards and wimps having just a little bit of courage, having a little bit of ability to rely on yourself and confidence, puts you way up in the upper percentile.

Joe: Anything else you wanted to say TC?

TC: No, thank you for your time guys.

Joe: Alright. Thanks for calling in.

Stefan: Yeah, great comments.

TC: Cheers.

Joe: See you, bye. We've already talked quite a lot about this topic of the warrior and we more or less covered the idea of why becoming a warrior would be the first step to changing society. It seems to be pretty obvious how that would happen, although maybe it's not, unless everybody was a warrior. How many people need to be warriors before society changes Stefan?

Stefan: About 10%. That's all you need. Because remember the rest of the people will follow along. I can tell you that I can walk into a room of 50 people and take it over. All you need is a somewhat strong personality. I can stand up in a room and say "Okay, everybody listen to me now" and then go into some sort of spew and arouse people and get them to do things. It's not that difficult. That's why these psychopaths must have a field day because it's so easy to control and manipulate people. No wonder there's so many psychopaths. It's a banquet for them! Most people just don't have any kind of critical analysis or the ability to think for themselves. But if you could stand up and present a warrior image that will reflect on people around you.

Now Gurdjieff - or was it somebody else? - had this thought that you had to be within the presence of a master in order to absorb some of the information or the wisdom that they were able to give. Even though I approach everything in the book from a very scientific background - I find mainstream scientific medical research to support the exercises and principles I describe in the book - there is something else and in martial arts or karate classes it's rare that they're going to learn anything of value or that they're going to find a decent school. Yeah, I love martial arts, but the trouble is 90% of it is like 90% of everything else. It's just nonsense. You have a bunch of full-of-themselves lunatics teaching stuff they have no idea of, unfortunately.

But the truth is, there is something in there that is really powerful. And one of these things is the concept of chi. Chi is chi in Chinese and the Japanese call it ki and it's described as a sort of internal energy, a force, a power. I was always skeptical of it because I need a scientific explanation before I believe something, almost. But through my experience of 40 years of training and through the teachers that I've had, there is something to this chi.

Part of the way of the warrior is to develop this chi and when you have this chi, people that come within the range of your magnetic resonance, whatever this chi is - it might be a magnetic field. Think of it like you're a magnet and you have this field and when people come to you they're in touch with that energy. When you have that energy, people will tend to follow you. You will also be able to transfer information better to them. The chi can also do things like heal and it can also do things like repel.

For example - and I've tried this many times in sparring - there is a technique that I call the impenetrable defence. What I'll do is assume a natural stance, nothing too fancy, but then I will concentrate on my focus and awareness in expanding my chi. It stops people from doing things! They can't get inside. It's almost like a magnetic force field around you. They can't get into you.

So there is something to this chi business, this spiritual energy. It can heal. It can heal you. It can heal other people. It can transfer wisdom and positive energy to people just by being in your presence. It can also allow you to control and dissuade attacks simply because they can't get in on you. It's really difficult to describe and it's kind of funny. You can ask my students. They'll all tell you lots of stories about how I was able to use this and they'll just look at you and go "There's no way I can attack him. There's nothing I could do." And it's just the chi, so I don't even have to put up my dukes.

There are a lot that try to pretend they do this and they stage demonstrations and all that. That's bullshit. The real chi actually does kind of work like that. If you can develop that, and again it's part of the spirit path, and if you adopt some of the techniques and principles of the way of the warrior, you can also develop this chi. And that chi will allow you to much more easily deprogram the rest of the people, if that makes sense. I don't know.

Joe: Yeah. I think there is something to it. It's veiled in the idea of chi and energy and all that stuff is veiled largely in eastern martial arts techniques, etc., but I think there's a truth to it that is broader and greater and less specific than that. But exactly what it is and how anybody would go about developing it outside of some kind of intensive martial arts training, I don't know.

Laura: For that reason alone people should buy your book, is to get these exercises so they can develop this because this is a very important thing. And I'm willing to bet Vladimir Putin has a lot of chi! He read your book!

Stefan: Of course he has. Of course he does. You can see it. It embodies a lot of things too, so chi is usually developed through breathing exercises and visualization. When I use it to heal things like friends, you use the visualization and the breathing, I can't find a scientific explanation for it, but what I can say is that from all my own experience, there's something there that's working. So whether you believe it or not, whether my rational left brain can figure out some logical explanation or not, doesn't matter because it exists whether you believe it or not.

There are exercises in the book, breathing and visualization. Putin has it because that's what I mean when I say you can walk into a room and your presence fills the room and people automatically defer to you. They sense that you are a leader and I have a chapter on leadership in the book too because it's important for a warrior to become a leader, to know how to present himself and give instructions and orders and embody the leadership role because you need to be a leader. You can't just let the mob rule because the mob doesn't know anything. The mob has been conditioned and programmed to be a bunch of psychopathic self-centred jerks.

So as a warrior you can't let the mob rule a situation, so you need your chi and you need your leadership qualities and you need to have a few techniques and principles of warriorhood. Then when you enter a room, when there's a mob, once you enter the room there's a team. That's the difference. And that comes through your body language. It comes through your presence. So yeah, when I see Putin on TV I'm going "This guy's got that mastered, the way he walks, the way he moves, his posture, the way he looks". It all projects the warrior image of a leader, somebody who's confident in himself, somebody who's not afraid. That's projected. So that's part of it.

Laura: What else is in your book? Have we covered all the...

Stefan: The internal stuff?

Laura: Yeah.

Stefan: The book is divided into two basic components, the internal and the external and martial arts is also divided into two components, the internal and the external. Some styles are designated as internal styles and some styles are designated as external. Typically the internal styles are Xingyiquan, Baguazhang, Qigong. Those are all styles that develop the internal energy and the parts of the body that are involved with awareness and focus and concentration, meditation and centering enhancement. So half the book is all about the internal, the mind, the awareness, how awareness works, how focus works, how to improve vision, how to improve hearing, proprioception, balance, posture, breathing exercises, relaxation exercises.

These are all things that you need to do internally. Even the relaxation exercises. Most of our diseases are caused by chronic tension. So a warrior needs to overcome his constant tenseness in order to be healthier, but a tense person also can't fight and can't think. If you're sparing with somebody that's really tense, they can't do anything. You have to be relaxed. You have to be fluid and that way you can move and think clearly.

So all those exercises are part of the internal side of the art. Then the external is those things you can see, so here we talk about stance, strength, the actual combat techniques and strategies, fighting technique, grappling techniques, punch, kick, block, different weapons and how to use them, how to defend against them because that's all part of the way of the warrior. It's not purely an intellectual exercise. You've got to know how to pick up a stick and I recommend people get a gun and learn how to use it. It's part of the way of the warrior as well but it's the external part, the stuff that you can see and how to move and the forms and routines, the grace and the balance. That's all part of the external.
So those are the two main components of the book.

Laura: So all that's in there, telling people how to do all that kind of stuff.

Stefan: Yeah. But it's my usual writing style which is that I cut all the crap. There's no first person writing. It's all third person. It's all training manual. It's all glorified boy scout manual, but how to be a warrior boy scout manual. Like I said, I've digested thousands of books on eastern philosophy and I will digest it all down to one or two pages because the rest of the stuff you can toss out. I don't need all that superfluous information that doesn't really add that much to it. So it makes it easier to read but it also is jam-packed with stuff. Every page has four or five things you can use.

Laura: And how much is it going for?

Joe: Well the title of the book is A Master's Guide to the Way of the Warrior, right?

Stefan: Yes.

Joe: Is it out in print yet?

Stefan: No it's not out in print. I'm running a kickstarter campaign. There's another 10 days. You can order advance copies through kickstarter so basically you're ordering a copy but if you order it through kickstarter that means I get the money three months earlier than I would after launching it. I need that time to finish off the book.

Joe: On kickstarter it's...?

Stefan: The way of the warrior.

Joe: So kickstarter/thewayofthewarrior, okay. So people can check it out there. But they can also get a PDF I think right?

Stefan: They can order the PDF for $10 through kickstarter and the trade paperback for $25 through kickstarter. But once I'm going to print, I think I'm going to be charging $60 for it. I know it's more money than most people charge and all that but I'll be honest with you, I put in 40 years in learning this stuff. I've done all the work for everyone else. When you go through a spiritual path there's lots of blind alleys, lots of U-turns, lots of wrong directions you can go down and it's wrought with pitfalls. Every spiritual path has so many false leads and false information. You can spend years practicing something only to find out later that it's harmful for you, like Gurdjieff wrote about people that eat a food 100 times before swallowing. Like he says you're not doing any good because you're actually decreasing the ability of your stomach to digest food.

So you can spend a lot of time doing ridiculous things. I get in trouble all the time when I talk about Buddhism. The founder of Zen Buddhism is famous for sitting in a cave for 20 years and staring at a wall and legend has it that there are two holes in the wall where he stared at. This is always cited as some great example of his spiritual ability. Personally I think that's a complete waste of life. I don't think the Creator put us on this planet to sit in a goddamn cave, right?

Joe: Right.

Stefan: He produced nothing in his entire lifetime. He didn't write anything. He didn't grow anything. He didn't build anything. He didn't have kids. He didn't have a family. He didn't teach anybody. What was the point of incarnating then if you're just going to sit in a cave? To me that's the wrong idea and I get in trouble all the time with people from the eastern philosophy but really I don't think you should sit in a cave or stair at a wall. The way of the warrior is to get out in the world and be active and like the last caller said, to do, to do things in this world, to make a difference. There'll be plenty of time for staring at the wall when you're dead, right? While you're alive you need to - and I'm going back to the Greek hedonists as well in the classical sense and that is you need to experience life and live it and be a part of it and play a strong role. Be the leading character in your own life and this is what the way of the warrior is, being a leading character in your own life.

Laura: I think that's terrific. That's a great motto, a great philosophy.

Stefan: Summation?

Laura: ...and something we probably ought to wrap this up on.

Joe: Yeah.

Laura: Because I don't think you can say anymore after you said that.

Stefan: Okay. I was looking at the clock and I'm thinking "better wrap it up".

Joe: It's been a very useful, interesting topic to discuss, particularly at this time because it's very...

Laura: Everybody buy Stefan's book!

Joe: Yeah.

Stefan: Thank you.

Joe: People can check out Stefan's book. His website is chinastrategies.com and he mentioned the kickstarter page and his video channel is on YouTube, Stefan Verstappen on YouTube. So check it out and check Stefan's book out and y'all become warriors. Right now!

Laura: Exactly.

Joe: Okay.

Stefan: Thanks guys. I really appreciate it.

Joe: Alright Stefan. Thanks a million for coming on and chatting with us. It's great to talk to you as always.

Laura: Thanks Stefan.

Stefan: Thanks for having me on. It's always good to talk to you guys. I love talking to you guys.

Joe: I know!

Stefan: Somebody that understands me.

Laura: Well we all need to be understood. We'll talk to you again soon. Okay?

Stefan: Okay Laura. Thanks for coming on.

Laura: Okay. Bye-bye.

Niall: Thanks Stefan. See ya.

Harrison: Take care.

Joe: So that was Stefan Verstappen and the Way of the Warrior. I hope you all know how to be warriors now. Polish up your swords, the metaphorical ones and go out there and take over the world and put it to rights, okay? And just let us know how that goes.

Laura: Be the main star in your own life!

Joe: Yes. Or else, failing that, just do your best.

Laura: Exactly.

Joe: Keep doing what you can. Harrison has hardly said a word and yet he's the host on this show. Harrison we want some pearls of wisdom before we sign off because it wouldn't be right otherwise.

Harrison: Well I was just thinking throughout the show about the nature of warfare. I've been reading some books lately on ancient Rome and just the nature of warfare then and in certain examples you had a bunch of soldiers get together and kill a whole bunch of people, storm a town, rape and murder the women and children and just leave the town or village a waste. Then you look today at the nature of warfare, what we think about as warfare and you have pretty much the same thing only they use bombs and they will decimate entire cities. This has been the whole history of the 20th and 21st century warfare.

Look at World War II and the Nazis did a whole bunch of terrible stuff and then the Allies did a whole bunch of terrible stuff, bombing entire cities and killing millions of people. You've got the same thing happening today. So I think about this nature of warfare and how it has expanded so now we have not only this conventional warfare of using weapons, guns, knives, any kind of weapon possible, various ways of tearing other peoples' bodies to pieces, we also have economic warfare and information warfare. So I was thinking throughout the show what kind of warfare are we talking about? It was kind of a subtext throughout the whole show. It's a different kind of warfare. This is what we might call spiritual warfare and it's something that's going on not only within the individual warrior but also there's an enemy out there in the world that we're fighting against and that has to do with the psychopaths, which Stefan talked about a lot. There's people in the world and there are ideas and trends and forces in the world that need to be confronted and fought in certain ways.

Not having read Stefan's book, it sounds great but I think by using these techniques, not only can we learn to carry out this kind of internal warfare against the aspects of ourselves that need to be overcome so that we can be better heroes in our own lives to better project that warrior image to help other people and by doing so then we are fighting this wider warfare in the world and we're actually defeating something in this world.
So I'm thinking about the spiritual warfare and how does it relate to what we think of as real war? We brought up Putin and Putin projects this warrior image. He embodies this warrior image, but he's also a real warrior and his country Russia, is at war, in Syria for example. There have been several wars in the past. So I don't know if you want to discuss that or just leave it. Something to think about is just the total nature of warfare and how it all fits together and what place actual physical warfare plays in that.

Laura: Yes indeed.

Joe: Laura we can keep talking if you need to go and tend to some pressing business.

Laura: I'm going to say goodnight. I'm saying goodnight Gracie.

Joe: Laura's departing the studio. We can talk a little bit about that since we have a little bit of time left. Thank you for being on Laura for keeping us all straight.

Niall: The Orlando shooting, was that an act of warfare?

Joe: Political hot potato. Harrison catch.

Harrison: Well which kind of warfare are we talking about?

Joe: I don't know.

Harrison: On the very basic level I think you could call it fighting. It's violence. It's an aspect of war. There were people killed in a reprehensible way where they don't even have any means of defence.

Joe: Right.

Harrison: If you think about the ideal warrior, throughout history there's been this idea of what's the ideal warrior or the virtuous warrior and this notion of honour. Would a real warrior kill someone who isn't staring them in the face and able to defend themselves? No. But that's an ideal that has very rarely played out in practice. Really, war is dirty and innocent people get killed deliberately and often because the so-called warrior enjoys it. So on that level, yeah it was war. And there's probably other kinds of warfare going on. What did you have in mind Niall?

Joe: I don't know what Niall had in mind.

Niall: Speak my mind Joe.

Joe: But I'm going to speak his mind. The thing is, we're in the stage of advanced warfare. Okay, conventional warfare still happens. America goes around bombing countries and killing lots of people and then occupies it. That's pretty much as old as time, right? In one form or another, be it with missiles and smart bombs or trebuchets and crossbows and swords you can achieve the same thing and it has happened throughout history. But in the case of Orlando you had an attack on people that was not occurring in the context of a war scenario and it did not happen in the context of their being a clearly defined enemy who wanted to attack those people and kill them and take their stuff or something. This was just random, mindless, senseless killing of 50 people in a country that most people believe is not at war with anybody and there is no one really at war with them, certainly not in any traditional sense.

The other strange aspect to Orlando and maybe because of that, is the effect that it has and the ability for it to have an effect far beyond Orlando, far beyond the people who died and their families because of the information age and the ability for information to be spread around the world and certainly across the USA for example, as a target country, let's say, for that information and awareness and almost a vicarious participation in the event to be had by millions, potentially all Americans, whoever was watching.

That's very unusual, at least in history if you look back at the history of warfare. Most of it was taken up with relatively small armies attacking other relatively small armies or villages or whatever and people 100 miles away, let alone 1,000 miles away would not have known about it and would not have been affected by it and the people in history who were attacked can't have understood why they were attacked. "This is just a bunch of evil people from that country over there who regularly come over and raid our villages and kill, maim and take away slaves. They do that and we do that as well. That's life. It's shit but that's life." But they understand why it happens.

Orlando, why? Still we don't even know. It was some vague attempt to link it to ISIS or something, "We claim responsibility" but there's all this talk about maybe the guy was actually maybe gay but conflicted about his gayness so this was a hate crime in the sense of an ISIS anti-gay attack. I don't know. Who knows? None of it satisfies so you've got 49 people killed indiscriminately for no good reason, with no agenda, no obvious reason, no explanation, nothing people can latch onto and say "Oh, that's why". And the whole of America knows about it and participates in the trauma to one extent or another.

That's very different from traditional warfare. It's psychological warfare, beyond the 49 people who were killed, you have what is effectively an attack in the sense of creating similar conditions or having a similar effect on millions of other people, as if they were attacked or as if they were close to the attack, someone in California you know? Three thousand miles away. A gay person in California maybe felt visceral fear from the shooting in Orlando 3,000 miles away because it was a gay community and because it was just a random attack. "What if that happens here?"
That is an effect that if someone wants to influence people psychologically in a country, that's the way to do it apparently in this age of information where you can have that effect. So for me that seems to be the agenda to this, which is to have a suppressive or oppressive psychological effect on as many people in the US as possible and engender as much fear in ordinary people in America as possible by periodically going around and randomly killing people.

Harrison: And that's where becoming a spiritual warrior comes into play I think because there's that aspect, like you said, of psychological warfare. This is a war on your mind because the vast majority of people, minus 50 or 100 people, are totally disconnected from that event, aside from the families. But it affects everyone who reads the news. So there's in a sense, that even though you weren't physical there it is affecting you. This type of warfare is affecting you and by becoming a warrior yourself it applies on all levels. I think this idea of the warrior is so multi-faceted because doing the techniques that Stefan mentioned can apply to any situation. So if you're there in that nightclub, who knows? Maybe having that sort of training will give you enough situational awareness that you might be able to survive. You might be able to help other people.

Someone in the chat room said there was an ex-military bouncer at a club who actually used his training to help save a bunch of people. So in the very immediate situation these kinds of things can help your own physical body. On the other hand, being removed from it and just experiencing the news waves coming at you, attacking you that way, you create a kind of mental barrier to defend yourself from that psychological attack, where there is this fear-based affront against your person, you psyche where you can put that up and see what's really going on and understand there is a real aspect of fear that's involved and I think that's a normal thing. Really, if you see that this can happen anywhere and it does happen then it can happen anywhere and it does happen anywhere so really, it could happen anywhere, so be prepared for it.

But you can't let yourself be paralyzed by fear. You just have to realize that it's a possibility and prepare for it and that's just life. It's unpredictable and bad things happen. By becoming a warrior you're not paralyzed by the fear and you're not easily manipulated because of that fear because that's what it's all about. It's all about putting you in a state of fear in order to manipulate you. If you realize that you're afraid, there's nothing wrong with being afraid, but what are you going to do about it and how are you going to respond to that fear and are you going to respond to that fear in a way that does what "they" want you to do?

Joe: It reminds me of something TC said when he called in. He mentioned this myth or idea that if you could get the name of a god you would have power over that god, i.e., the point being that if you can define something or know or understand something, then it doesn't have as much control over power over you. That's very true. It's self-evident in a certain sense, for anybody who's ever had any kind of a problem, even the fear or anxiety or discomfort you feel if you've got some kind of an illness or something and you don't know what it is. Then when you find out what it is, that goes a long way to giving you some sense of calm or reducing your fear about that kind of situation. I suppose it gets to the heart of the idea of knowledge protecting as well, which is kind of a catch phrase of ours, that the more you know about a situation, the less fear you have, the less power and control that thing has over you in your life.

Maybe that's one of the things that motivates some people who research stuff and find out what's really going on, what's the nature of reality, what's going on, because realities a big place that can be quite scary. There's all sort of big things happening that are beyond your control and people maybe are fundamentally driven to find out what the meaning of reality is, or anything that happens in this world, anything on a particularly large scale, or something that's happened in the past, researching history like Laura does, but to delve into it and to try and understand what is going on here, is maybe motivated fundamentally by a fear or a sense of anxiety or discomfort that comes from not knowing.

So in terms of this Orlando shooting, Niall and I were just talking about this the other night, trying to find the motive, the agenda of the people who carried out this Orlando attack. Why did they do it? We just talked about them trying to instill fear in the population in the US, spread a sense of insecurity among everybody. They carry out these kind of attacks in different places around the world so they want a global insecurity. They want to impose global insecurity into the minds of as many people on the planet as possible and they do it in a very crass and crude way which is the equivalent of taking a stick and going and beating people on the head. That's what these shootings are like.

It's just a blunt instrument trauma to the body public, to the collective mind, the social mind. It's just like beating it with a stick and traumatizing it in that way, hoping to keep it down. Why do people do that? Because they want to control it. People beat other people because they want to control them. These people beat society in this way with these kind of terror attacks because they want to control society, just for its own sake. They enjoy having control and power and dominion over people. That's how they get their kicks. That's all it is. That's why they do this. It's not a very satisfactory answer but it seems to be the only reasonable answer as to why they keep doing this kind of thing. They just want to control and terrify as much of the population as possible as an end in itself.

"Keep them down. Keep them afraid. Stop them even having any sense of security or comfort or contentment in life. We want to keep them always on edge. Like Pavlov's dogs, keep shocking them. Don't let them get complacent and happy and start thinking about nice things. We want them to think about bad things all the time. Flood the headlines with horrible news everywhere. Create as much material to produce those headlines as possible. Have as many wars and mass shootings as possible. How can we generate that as much as possible so that the entire world is sitting there in shock and terror at what's going on in the world and feel so fundamentally insecure in their own beings that they really can't function anymore as normal human beings? They're just too scared, too insecure and they're looking over their shoulder everywhere, when they go to the mall, when they go to the train station, when they go to the cinema, when they go anywhere almost, in the back of their mind they'll have the idea of 'what if I get killed today?'."

That seems to be where they want to go. And why would someone want to do that to eight billion people just for kicks? They want to do it because that's what gets them off basically. Why does anybody do anything?

Niall: Yeah.

Joe: You get something out of it, you know?

Niall: That's what motivates them and whether they're aware of it or not, but we might be able to assume that they are, or let's not. Let's just say it's instinctive.

Joe: Yeah.

Niall: An instinctive reaction as shown by psychological studies is that this kind of thing has a profound chilling effect and specifically what it chills in the social body politic is any questioning of authority.

Joe: Right. Yeah, they don't want people to question anything that the government does. They want to keep people down, keep them afraid, keep them unquestioning and instill that idea of "better to just keep your head down" and even look away from it. They want people to look away from everything that happens. They do all of this horrible stuff, splash it across all of the news articles and TV news and everything so that people look away because it's too horrible. It creates a really dark nasty picture of the world in which they live so people say "I'm not going to look at it".

They'll also look to authority to protect them on the one hand but at the same time they just go "I'm not going to look at the news. I'm not going to read the headlines because every time I do I get depressed and I get afraid. It's horrible. So I'm going to look away." Depending on what floats your boat you'll watch some ultimate fighting championship, you'll watch Big Brother or you'll stick your face into a video game for a whole week straight or you'll do all sorts of other things that are not good for your psychological, emotional or physical health. Maybe you'll get drunk more often, all that kind of stuff that is destructive and negative for human beings in terms of them living as full a life as they can and that's the result.

And like you just said Niall, so they'll also not question authority. So as more stuff comes out about what authorities are actually doing, people are less and less inclined to actually a) look at it, and if they do look at it, b) question it because they don't want to question authority because authority is there to protect them from the terrorism that the authorities themselves are perpetrating on them.

Niall: Additionally, those that do look, apparently in vast numbers far outweighing those who accept that something terrible happened, ask what really happened, people are fleeing. It's an interesting psychological phenomenon as well in the last few years are saying "Okay, I'm looking at this upside down. I really want to know what happened. Ah! I've stumbled upon the answer. It didn't actually happen at all." I say this is an interesting phenomenon because...

Joe: You can't really talk to people about that because the people who promote that or get into that idea of actors and fakery and all that stuff, are having a real problem at a level that's unconscious to them, a deeper psychological level, accepting the fact that the government could kill randomly 50 people in their society. It's a pretty shocking thing to have to accept or to look at and people prefer, if there's an option, to say "Oh it didn't actually happen", but maintain their conspiratorial bent but not go as far as to actually face the fact that the government kills and shoots ordinary civilians for no reason.

They'll go with that and you have these people picking up on the idea of actors and it's kind of just stupid because there's no reason for them to have actors. I don't even see any point in talking about it because you're talking about two different realities there. The people who actually talk about those ideas and promote and subscribe to those ideas obviously can't think straight or aren't able to think in any logical, rational way anymore. So the idea of arguing with someone who isn't able to think rationally is a pointless endeavour. You shouldn't even try to do it.

There are some people maybe who get sucked into it and maybe they need to be told "Listen, catch a grip here! Take a look at this and think rationally about this." And it should be obvious to people who still have some of their faculties to see that it doesn't make sense. There's no reason to have actors or crisis actors or fake shootings. To me it's obvious but obviously it's not obvious to other people who apparently still can't think a little bit logically because some of them that I know seem to be promoting it thinking maybe this is true.

But it's like I've said in various different places about this idea of actors and terror attacks is that no one has ever given me a good answer to the question of why would any authorities, who have a proven track record of enjoying killing people for fun, who have that proclivity for killing people because it's fun, with two options in front of them, would decide on the option to go and actually kill some people to achieve some geopolitical or psychological end result, that they would choose to not kill those people for real to achieve their goal of terrorizing people, but they would instead hire in some Hollywood directors to organize and event like an Orlando, for example, that would undoubtedly have required months of planning, hundreds of actors, all of them with a script or roles to play that they all had to play very convincingly lest the whole ruse be exposed and the time, effort and management to put together what effectively would be a small Hollywood production, that they would go and do that? For what reason?
Why would they do that? Why would they pick that option compared to getting a couple of those guys who love killing gay people, who hate gays, who hate homosexuals, who are completely homophobic and like killing people because they've proven themselves on battlefields in Iraq or wherever they've pulled them from, that they love killing ordinary people? Get a couple of those guys to go down there into that nightclub and shoot 50 people. And they'd say "Nah, let's not do that. Let's have the Hollywood production and then we'll try and make sure that it comes off correctly and there's no holes in it and that way we'll convince everybody that we killed people when we really didn't although our goal is to produce the same effect as if we had killed 50 people. "So why would we not kill the 50 people" some guy at the back of the room asks. "Uh, because we're humanitarians. We don't like killing people?" "You just said you like killing people so why would you not do the killing part?" Why would you do the production part? Why would you go to that bother?

So the point is that conversation doesn't take place because it's so obviously stupid to suggest actors or fakery. No one would do it. You're not talking about people who are interested in putting on a Hollywood production of a mass shooting when they actually like carrying out mass shootings themselves personally. So there's $25,000 for anybody who can give me an answer that makes sense. Did I say $25,000? $25.00!

Niall: Too late.

Harrison: Well there's an even more insidious aspect to this I think, and that is when you watch these YouTube videos of all these actors theorists, I think the net effect of all this is that the so-called truth movement or the people who see all these false flags everywhere, have no empathy anymore. When there's an attack and there's a person crying...

Joe: Right.

Harrison: ...who's just lost a loved one it's like "Oh they're just an actor".

Joe: I know!

Harrison: They don't have to feel anything. They don't feel anything. So these people are just really reprehensible human beings that can't even empathize and stop themselves actively from empathizing with victims of tragedies in their lives that affect the world. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. When did it start?

Niall: Sandy Hook.

Harrison: Sandy Hook. I don't remember seeing anything prior to Sandy Hook of anyone claiming these crisis actor theories, that these events never happened. I know that today there are people who are saying that no one died on 9/11 but during and after 9/11 there was no one like that. The 7/7 bombing in Madrid, all those, nothing. All the school shootings, Columbine, nothing. No, everyone accepted that these were real events. This is something new which makes me think that it started out as a cointelpro operation or just some crazy guy that first came up with this idea and now they're running with it.

But it's something new and I think that that's part of either the purpose of it or at least the beneficial result of it is that it's all of these people all over the internet just don't have any empathy anymore.

Joe: Right.

Harrison: And really if you think about it, probably the main reason that people get into this so-called truth movement or alternative news or just seeing behind the lies is out of empathy. It's because people are dying because of this. People are getting tortured. And that whole inspiration for this idea of truth and exposing these things is totally subverted. It's gone now because people don't care. It's like how can you care about someone who died if you don't even think they died?! "No, these things are even happening. It's all a show so why should we care? Let's just expose the media fakery."

Niall: Right. Instead they're hurling abuse at the victims and their families.

Joe: Yeah. And the other thing is we can't have a serious discussion or attempt to promote the idea for example, that in the Orlando shooting and many others, those lone wolves shooters at all of those shootings did not clearly act alone, that they could not have killed all of those people on their own, clearly there were more people. Look at all the eyewitness testimonies. We can't really publically talk about that anymore without someone saying "Oh you're one of those actors people."

So I want to punch every actor advocate in the face for making it very difficult for us to actually tell the truth, to try and get to the actual truth and tell people. Look it's not some weird, super reverse double reverse psychology thing where they're really trying to mess with your mind by doing actor stuff. No! It's really happening. The conspiracy stops at the point where your government for centuries has been killing ordinary people around the world to serve an agenda. Can you not live with that? Can you not just leave it there? Because that's clearly what happens and has happened for centuries. Big government, powerful actors, the psychopaths in power, go around killing people for fun and also to serve a particular agenda. It happens.

Niall: Wait a minute. Did you say actors?

Joe: Oh jeez, did I say state actors? Hang on a second. There's someone on the line. Let me guess, is this Stephen?

Ryan: Oh g'day Joe. This is Ryan from Australia. I'm not Stephen.

Joe: Hi Ryan.

Ryan: I just wanted to bring up one small point about the media fakery thing. I was on Twitter tweeting a few things about the Orlando shootings and this guy had tweeted about a Guardian article that talked about the initial witnesses. They'd tried to summarize all the initial witness testimony and come up with that early narrative sort of thing. I had a read through it and I thought "It looks alright. They've quoted the eyewitnesses and they haven't padded it out with too much nonsense" so I retweeted that particular tweet to the Guardian article. Then about half an hour later I was reading a different article where they started to promote that whole idea of "this guy was a repressed homosexual and that's why he went and shot all these people" kind of thing. They quoted his ex-wife saying "Oh yeah, he had homosexual tendencies" or whatever. And in the Guardian article previously they'd specifically quoted the ex-wife saying "No, I never saw anything like that while I was with him".

I was like hang on a second! That's a direct contradiction. So I went back to the Guardian article to try and cut and paste that particular quote into a tweet and the entire article in the space of maybe 2½ to 3 hours at maximum, the whole article was almost completely rewritten. It had all of this extra stuff where they were quoting people saying how they'd seen him at the club, and he'd been asking guys out. Then the quote from the ex-wife saying that he'd apparently mentioned homosexual urges or something. It was completely contradictory to the quote that they'd had previously to what they had in this earlier version of the article.

Unfortunately I didn't take a screen shot of it but the whole article was completely different and it was in the space of about three hours. So there's clearly a massive sort of media rewriting effort going on regarding the whole motivation...

Joe: Right.

Ryan: ...around what this guy was doing.

Joe: Right at the beginning there, putting out the idea that he is ISIS. They were throwing the ISIS thing out there on day one. They can say ISIS because what they do is say "Yeah, ISIS claimed responsibility on a website. That Rita Katz, the Israeli operative scans the web for ISIS postings and she tells everybody "Yeah, ISIS said they did Orlando." And they released that on day one and the idea that that is now proof, slam dunk, there you go. We know it on day one. Yeah, it was ISIS.

So obviously that bogus. And then afterwards they come along and they start investigating other things and it gets a bit more complex. They come to a conclusion first and in the days and weeks afterwards start to develop a narrative that shifts and changes. It's just a farce of any kind of proper investigation around these things. So I'm not surprised that there's fodder there for people to go "this is all made up" because it is to a certain extent made up because there's an agenda.

Niall: The dynamic narrative.

Joe: Right. It all points to an agenda before the shooting even that the shooting is part of a plan that is playing out as they go along. Of course they have a lot of control over the media and what the media says and doesn't say about it. Whoever's behind it is releasing information them directing this way then this way. They have almost complete control via the media to tell the people anything they want about any particular event.

Niall: Assuming the wife was actually giving statements to the media, one plausible reason for the sudden change is that she, being concerned about her safety or whatever, was saying one thing and adapting it based on what direction the overall narrative was going. Assuming it was her, let's say, she did say one thing and then the other. She has since gone silent. Why? Because they put her under arrest. And any other family members. The father is a no-fly. So we'll never know what the real story is in terms of their relationship and so on. I heard her once say that he was very religious, he'd been to Mecca three times. And other statements were coming out saying "This guy religious?! Are you kidding?!"

Ryan: His father said that he'd never shown any signs of homosexual behaviour and he'd made homophobic comments.

Niall: Right.

Ryan: Sort of general homophobic comments.

Niall: I suspect that's his father trying to save his skin because who wouldn't in that situation because all the media focused on him.

Ryan: Well apparently his father has these US state department connections. There were photos of him at the US state department in one article. So possibly that ties into the whole possible mind programming aspect, like Lee Harvey Oswald, that kind of thing. This guy was possibly known to intelligence services or something really nefarious might have happened or at the very most benign he was being groomed in some way.

Joe: You talk about Lee Harvey Oswald, is JFK still alive? Was he an actor?

Ryan: I'm pretty sure he wasn't an actor.

Joe: Well I don't know. Does anybody believe that he killed JFK all by his lonesome? Or at all? There's been weighty tomes by the hundred written about this and all of the credible ones say "Yeah, obviously it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald." It was the CIA. It was some part of the establishment, Allen Dulles, the CIA, that kind of behind-the-scenes shadow government, whatever you want to call it, the people who decided that they're running the country, not the President, who killed JFK because JFK wanted to destroy them because he saw that they were running the country and he wasn't. He was like "I am the President. Everybody says I am the commander in chief. I get to make policy. But you guys are making policy behind my back. Well you know what I'm going to - in his own words - splinter you into a thousand pieces." And they said "No, you first. We're going to splinter you. We're going to kill you first." So the killed him. What a shocking idea! No it's not shocking. It's very normal for a bunch of psychos to do that.

Okay, Lee Harvey Oswald in that scenario was set up as a patsy. He didn't kill JFK. He wasn't shooting any guns. But apparently official history says he was and he was the one that killed him. And guess what? He did it because he was a commie sympathizer. So back then, in 1963, they were already very capable, apart from getting rid of JFK in the context of the political atmosphere of the time, it was to make the Soviets, the Russians, look bad.

Niall: And to make Americans afraid to question authority by suggesting that they were sympathizing with communists.

Joe: Right. So that was happening back then. They had no problem doing it back then, of killing a President in broad daylight in Dallas and use some guy as a patsy, blame him, have him go down for it and also blame him as a communist sympathizer, so effectively almost by implication, the Soviets were involved in it. And people seem to think that these same people over 50 years later have a problem with going into a nightclub and shooting 50 people? Fifty ordinary citizens, not the President obviously. And it's at night time in a dark nightclub? Shoot 50 as they say "useless eaters"? "No they wouldn't do that. They want to create an actor drama/ Hollywood scenario. Why? Just to mess with our heads? No. They've been killing people for decades in this way, and not just in America, around the world.

Every state, particularly the Americans and the British, have been doing this and have made an art form out of it over the past 60 to 80 years. They do it repeatedly and they're very, very good at it. They just don't think twice about it. They have templates. "What template will we use this time? Let's use that one. Remember we used that one back in the '70s? We'll use that one again. Two guys go in there, two guys go in there, blah, blah, blah and then we spin it."

They have it down! This is why you need to understand the truth of history. I'm not talking about conspiracy truth, I'm talking about events. There's an article on SOTT about the crimes of the British empire and these are events that are effectively false flag attacks carried out by the British around the world in different places, that have all since been revealed officially as being false flag attacks, i.e., where agents of the British state went around killing civilians en masse to blame someone else, to serve an agenda. This has gone on repeatedly.

Ryan: Which article was that?

Joe: What's it called?

Niall: Evil-Britannia-Great-Britains-record-of-bloodshed-imperialism-genocide-PHOTOS. It's a photo gallery with some background information on each photo.

Joe: In Kenya in the 1950s, before JFK, the British soldiers were going around Kenya painting their faces - in Kenya which was a British colony at the time - painting their faces in boot polish and dressing up in traditional local Kenyan garb. Painting their faces with frigging boot polish! Going out at night and shooting white British settlers in Kenya and blaming it on the Mau Mau which was the resistance to British occupation at the time. In 1953! If people today, because they're totally unaware of that one incident among many, totally unaware of it, they have a problem thinking that those same people, cut from the same genetic cloth effectively, would have a problem going into a nightclub in Orlando and shooting 50 people! Because they're totally unaware of what actually happens and it's very normal, very mundane for these people to go around killing civilians every now and again.

If people would only wake up and look at the hard facts, and I'm not talking about some conspiracy theory, some article on the internet. I'm talking about officially recognized facts where the British had to admit that they did this! The British government admitted that they went around painting their faces in boot polish and killing British people in Kenya to demonize their enemy.

But apparently that's not good enough proof that this happens and has happened for decades! Yet people still question the idea that they would do the same thing in Orlando, the people cut from the same genetic cloth, as they say, the same psychopathic types who have been in power since.

Ryan: Is it perhaps a generational thing? There's a mainstream population of people who don't really have a memory larger than one generation's worth and so it's only maybe people who question things a little bit more who actually start to look at that historical context that actually reveals these things.

Joe: Right. That's very normal. I don't know why people don't do it but these people who can't accept these ideas, what happened today, don't know anything about recent modern history, within the past 60 or 70 years. There are dozens and dozens of examples of Orlando, i.e., state sponsored terrorism against civilian populations, having happened repeatedly. There are dozens of examples of hard official evidence that this has happened repeatedly.

Ryan: The basic facts of the multiple persons seeing shooting at the crime scene, there's a couple of YouTube videos that SOTT published and they very clearly show mainstream media interviews that show that a certain number of eyewitnesses stated that there were two, possibly three or even more - probably three maximum - shooters in the club. That's hard evidence, eyewitness first person eyewitness accounts.

Joe: Right. Corroborated evidence by multiple eyewitnesses. But they ignore it.

Ryan: Yeah, it makes me think that if people are so conspiratorial, so to speak, as to think "well they're all actors" but then they ignore something as so-called conspiratorial as there being multiple shooters at the site and they don't even look at that first before going into a more complex type of conspiracy, then it sort of almost points to them being part of some kind of narrative that's aimed at specifically spreading those kinds of conspiracies.

Joe: Yeah, to run it off the rails, to make it so extreme that nobody will believe it.

Niall: It's probably some mix, some element of cointelpro mixed with a symptomatic schizophrenic reaction in society. This is a relatively new thing and we first noticed it after Sandy Hook which was a horrific event as well where you had 20 very vulnerable people, I mean 6 year old kids, just slaughtered in a classroom. And you can imagine the first time this happening to let's say the American population in living memory that they know of, the mind has got to deal with that. You can see why years of preceding efforts, like 9/11, a big traumatic starting point, and then a boom and a recession and people going homeless, in substance I think the reason why this thing has legs and gets the most traction for those who "question the official story" is because they actually want some narrative that will protect an already fragile mind. It's a schizophrenic reaction to reality smacking them in the face. It's a really harsh awakening and I think most people, as we've discussed already on the show, are not for this. They never wanted to wake up. They were happy with "Just leave me alone in peace". And this was never really meant for them. Do you know what I mean?

Joe: That's why I have a hard time even disputing any of the things they say because it's just so irrational and not based in any reason at all. We have done shows on this and I don't know whether they're in the archives, but last year I think we had Anne Cadwallader. She's a former BBC and Irish TV journalist. We talked to her about stuff in Northern Ireland during the '70s and '80s and there have been ongoing for the past 10 years or so, international in terms of bringing in different people to be part of these tribunals and investigate historical crimes is what they call them, in Northern Ireland. There's stuff that came out of that where it's officially recognized and that produced reports that are not contested by anybody, that show that the British soldiers were walking around the streets of Belfast in the 1970s and '80s in plain clothes, or driving around in cars, driving into a protestant area, of pro-British loyalists civilians, and shooting five or six people in the street at night walking home from a bar and then allowing the blame to fall on the IRA.

That's been paid for by the frigging British government! The British government is sanctioning that. They're saying "Yeah, we did that." Now how is that in any way tangibly different from our contention that that is the same thing that happened in Orlando? And why would somebody not just accept that as fact when it's historically accurate? It's a historical fact that that kind of thing has been going on at the level of state operations for decades?!

Ryan: Maybe it's just that a certain level of common sense is required or something.

Joe: It's superpower.

Ryan: To realize logically, 1+1=2, that hey, that's a fact so therefore this is what the most likely probability is.

Joe: And you know what? In terms of the people who would do this kind of thing? Just the day after Orlando, there's a closed Facebook group of marines out of somewhere in the US who all post stuff on their little closed Facebook group, and one of their members, a marine, posted a picture of himself or a friend, in his military uniform with his hand on an automatic rifle on the trigger and underneath the caption was "Coming to a gay bar near you".

So there you have a picture of a US marine basically endorsing Orlando and saying "I would do this again" or "I would do this in another bar".

Niall: Or he's flagging his recruitment. "Please, sign me up for the next one."

Joe: Yeah, "I would do it". So the idea there aren't people out there who could be recruited, particularly because of homophobia and stuff in America, to go and shoot a bunch of people in a gay bar is just ridiculous. It flies in the face of hard evidence on frigging Facebook, posted by the people themselves. They're coming out saying "Yeah, I'd shoot a bunch of gay people!" Oh no, but there's nobody that would do that! It has to be an actor. Get a grip! There are people out there that'd do that in a heartbeat! They're paid to do it! "I'll pay you any money you want but let me go into a bar and shoot a bunch of people because I love doing that!" And they're talking about it on the frigging internet. But people have a problem with it.

Harrison: You just made the point Joe that there are people willing to do this and I think at least from my perspective, when this first happened I always try to keep open as many possibilities as possible before I know the facts and form a theory based on those facts. So personally I don't have any problem accepting the possibility that perhaps everyone once in a while there is some crazy guy or some bigot or whatever, that would go out and kill a whole bunch of people, who will just snap and lose it without any kind of state sponsorship or being handled or whatever.

But in this specific case there are several points that make me think that that's not what happened. First of all if that's what would have happened then according to some things I read, because I don't have any kind of military experience or tactical experience, but according to what some people I've read said - and they seem pretty credible - it's just not feasible for one guy to go in, shoot that many rounds and kill that many people.

Joe: Don't get me wrong. Let me make it clear. When I'm talking about that guy, that marine on Facebook, I'm not talking about him as the shooter guy. I'm talking about the government being able to find somebody in the US who'd be willing to take part in a covert operation to go in and shoot a bunch of gay people and blame it on a patsy. No problem whatsoever.

Harrison: Yeah. For sure. So in this specific case, there's not only that but then there's the actual facts on the ground that suggest that this guy couldn't have done it alone. Then you add on top of that the witnesses saying there were more shooters. And then add into that something that Ryan said earlier about the historical perspective. I think most people just don't read. They're not curious enough to actually look into history. All they care about is the last week or two. But if you go back to one of the most famous shootings - we already talked about JFK, but look at RFK.
There's Sirhan-Sirhan and everyone agrees and even he will admit that yes, he shot at RFK. Of course he says he doesn't remember it which is credible and there are various people and experts who agree that he was in some kind of trance when it happened and he has no memory of actually doing it. But the thing about that is that there was at least a second shooter. And this is what's been ignored for the past 50 years, that there was another shooter and the ballistics and the autopsy of RFK show that the killing shot came from right behind his head, point blank. Someone else was there. But we don't hear about that.

So when we look at Orlando, really if there was more than one person involved and if it was just this random event that happened without any kind of covert operation going on, then there's no problem with admitting that there's more than one shooter. Look at Columbine. They could easily get away with that. But the fact that they're covering it up.

Ryan: Denying it.

Harrison: And they're totally denying it and the local Orlando police and the FBI are saying "Oh no, there's only one shooter. Everyone else is incorrect," that says they're covering something up and that makes me think of Sirhan-Sirhan and RFK that there's something else going on. Because really if there were other shooters they should have no problem saying it. But the fact that they can't say it and that they're denying it really says something. It says they don't want to catch these other people.

Joe: Because they can't catch them because they don't know where they are and they got well away and they don't want to admit to it because that line of investigation would lead them to somewhere where they just couldn't go, they wouldn't be allowed to go. I think the narrative was probably already established by the media or by the higher-ups that feed information or feed orders down to the police chief in the area, etc., etc. He's just told "Listen we're going with just one guy on this." And the guy's saying "Yeah, but we were all shot at by multiple people" or "there's clear evidence of multiple shooters and there's different calibre bullets in there for Christsakes! There's more than one rifle." You can imagine the amount of evidence that would point to there being more than one shooter.

You can't go into a nightclub with three guys and shoot the place up and kill 50 people and then only leave evidence of there being one person there. So obviously the evidence has to be covered up. The same thing happened in France here last year after the Charlie Hebdo thing last year. Obviously in both of those events there was clear evidence of more than one - again, the same as Orlando - eyewitnesses were saying more than one shooter, and in the case of Charlie Hebdo, more than two shooters and white-skinned guys, the people they put as the patsies. People were saying "Yeah well maybe, but the guy I saw was very stocky, white and short hair. Where's he?"

And then right after the Charlie Hebdo thing, a police chief who was working on the investigation suddenly decided to kill himself?

Ryan: I didn't know about that one.

Joe: Yeah. They covered that up as well to a certain extent. It just goes away. But the problem here is there's a lot of people involved. They're all authoritarian and take orders, but there's got to be a lot of people involved who are effectively innocent in the sense of just coming to it and think they're going to investigate it and they're undoubtedly coming across information that really doesn't fit the official story and they're finding out very quickly that yeah, best to go with the official story on this one. And people will do that.

Ryan: Well I kind of wonder about that, that people would just sort of go in and look at the story and then go "Well the evidence clearly says otherwise but it might affect my journalism career" or something like that "if I was to write a story that was potentially interpreted as being too conspiratorial" or something like that. I don't get that.

Joe: There are very few people...

Niall: Because they're not warriors. The system doesn't select for warriors.

Joe: Yeah, and also they have a lot of practice in it. You can go back to Iraq and all the bullshit about Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. These people working in the mainstream media...

Ryan: The British commandos caught in the...

Niall: Basra.

Ryan: ...false flag attacks, they'd drive a tank into the jail to rescue.

Joe: Right. That's the kind of thing that's been going on for a long time and people in the media have been covering it for a long time and they seem to have been able to accept the fact that they don't really report the facts. They just report what they're told to report. And of course in journalism in media organizations they have an editor and you can write a story but you have to give it to your editor and your editor's a fairly high-level person in the organization and he's taking his orders from the owner of the organization who's a best friend of someone in the government. Yeah. "I read your story and I'm going to make some edits."

Ryan: There was a troll story that SOTT ran last year that was quite a good example of that, where the most likely pathological elite owners of these corporation were exercising strong editorial control over what was being published.

Joe: Absolutely. That's the way it works and we best just accept it. It's not really that strange. It's the way events in history have proceeded for so long.

Ryan: We can I guess spread the truth as best we can in our own way as an alternative. Let them tell their lies I suppose. It's probably pretty unrealistic to think that we're going to be able to stop the mainstream media from pumping it out the proverbial s-h-i-t tonne of propaganda.

Joe: Yeah. The best thing to do is let them realize that they're their own worst enemy and they're going nowhere because as these events continue to increase and the lies of the media continues to increase as well and what they say continues to diverge more and more from what people can see with their own eyes, especially when you've got someone like Putin coming along and officially pointing it out. He's got some power in the sense of having an audience. He has reach and stuff and when he comes along and Russia is doing what it's doing, really antagonizing NATO in that way, by not just bowing down and taking it, they're pushing the warmongers to increasingly desperate and dangerous...

Niall: Riskier endeavours.

Joe: ...riskier endeavours, yeah, which at some point may, and already has really happened where it leads to a situation where their official story or their official claim about something that Russia's doing or what happened here or there, really does diverge massively from what people can actually see or what even makes sense to people. And we're seeing that happen since Russia's been on the scene and doing what it's doing, there have been a lot of people, particularly in Europe who really are starting to see the BS from the west and do not believe stuff anymore.

Ryan: RT.com has been a breath of fresh air for news over the last few years. The way they write the articles, it's a lot clearer and easier to read and much more where the facts are laid out clearly compared to some mainstream media sources where it tends to be wishy-washy.

Joe: Nonsense.

Niall: Yeah. And they're funnier too. Humour's important.

Joe: Well, let's see how it goes. We've just got to keep an eye on it and keep watching and we can throw our bits in here and there. But really, it's kind of like not my circus. What's the saying? Not my circus, not my monkey type of thing? To a certain extent you can have some detachment from it and just watch them collapse under the weight of their own...

Niall: Hubris.

Joe: ...monstrous BS. It's best to stand back. You know when a building's about to collapse? It's best to keep your distance in case you get caught up in the flying bricks and stuff. So psychologically you can do that and not feel that it's your responsibility to bring it down or to stop it all happening because it's going to go where it's going to go and it's not looking good where it's going.

Niall: Yeah. Even just the act of live chatting, the building collapsing is actually helping it to collapse. Just step away from the danger zone.

Joe: Psychologically step away and don't feel that responsibility that you have to do something about it because then you'll get depressed because like you said, we're not going to be able to defeat the mainstream media or defeat the powers that be. But the good news is that they're going to defeat themselves. We can just add in a little flick of a pebble here and there to increase the weight or to help them help themselves down the toilet bowl. If you see them caught on the rim of the toilet bowl you can just go over and help them, take that last finger off. Down you go. You're just helping nature.

Niall: Take its course.

Joe: Take its course, yeah.

Ryan: There was a good Mullah Nasr Eddin quote I saw on Twitter from Gurdjieff that said "Better to pluck ten hairs a day from your mother's head than not help nature."

Joe: Alright.

Ryan: I thought that was quite apropos.

Joe: Absolutely. Well Ryan we're going to push off here.

Ryan: No problems mate. No problems. Great chat. Really interesting interview. Thanks everybody. Thanks Laura for steering the course.

Joe: Yeah. This is the second time you've called in so long may it continue.

Niall: Yeah, it's fun!

Ryan: Oh cheers.

Joe: Hope you tune in next week. Okay Ryan.

Ryan: Yeah, I might call back in next week.

Niall: Okay, great.

Joe: Have a good day.

Niall: See ya.

Harrison: Thanks Ryan.

Joe: Alright. Any parting words Harrison?

Harrison: No.

Joe: Live long and prosper?

Harrison: Never give up. Never surrender.

Joe: Never give up and never surrender. We're going to call it quits. Thanks to Stefan for coming on and having a chat with us about his take on things and obviously to Laura as Ryan was just saying there. It's always good to have her take on things, some straight shooting from Laura Knight-Jadczyk and to our chatters and to our callers Ryan and TC and we will be back next week with another show to be announced. Stay tuned. Until then, have a good one.

Niall: Have a good week. See ya.

Harrison: Bye-bye.