Robert Frederick is the host of The Hidden Life Is Best podcast. He tells the mind bending story of philosopher Sir Francis Bacon: the smartest and most influential person who ever lived. Known as the father of modern science, he was heavily involved with Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians, Alchemy, secret societies, the writing of Shakespeare and the very beginnings of the English Empire. He was also the Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England and many believe he was the son of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth the 1st.
thehiddenlifeisbest.com
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Welcome to The Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but before I introduce him, a word about a forthcoming, very exciting event.
I've got this event, which loads of you have been clamouring for, for quite some time, with, I think, one of the dream, one of the dream podcast live guests.
David Icke.
I mean, I've been putting off doing a show with him for a long, long time, but it's happening in the North, well, North-ish if you count Manchester, on the 15th of November.
Tickets are selling out fast, but I want a really good crowd and I think it's going to be really enjoyable.
I'm going to ask All the questions you wanted to ask David Icke were maybe afraid to ask, and I'm not going to let him get away with stuff.
I'm not going to let him be slippery.
I want to pin him down on various things that I'm slightly puzzled about, and get the best out of him.
Anyway, 15th of November, in Manchester, I will provide where you can buy tickets in the blurb below this podcast.
Right.
Now, on to my invisible, if you're watching this on video and hoping for video and wondering why it's not there, my invisible guest, Robert Frederick.
Robert, welcome to The Delling Pod.
I'm happy to be here, James.
Thank you.
Very happy.
I'm excited, Robert, but I'm also, I think it's kind of ironic, or maybe it's deliberate, that you are the author and creator of the Hidden Life Is Best podcast, are hiding your identity in a kind of Francis Bacon style.
Yes, the Hidden Life Is Best, for a while anyway.
I'll come out of hiding of the shadows when my book is published.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
There will be some people listening to this wondering who the hell Robert Frederick is.
I discovered you, what, about two or three weeks ago on the recommendation of some of my followers, and they said you've got to listen to this amazing podcast about Sir Francis Bacon.
And despite being an American, you seem to know an awful lot about Francis Bacon.
Indeed, you make claims on your fascinating series of podcasts.
I haven't listened to them all, by the way, but I've listened to two or three and I think they're amazing and I highly recommend them.
You make the claim that, what, he was just about the most influential man who ever lived?
Yes, I think he was the most influential man that ever lived.
I think that can be Figured out.
I also say he's the smartest man who ever lived, but you can't, you can't really say that.
That's, that's what would you call that rhetorical device, but the most influential man.
You can say it.
You can't prove it, but I think you could make a very strong case that he was the most influential man that ever lived.
And I say the line between ancient and modern runs right through Francis Bacon's life.
Before you give me the hard sell on why you think Bacon measures up to these extraordinary claims you've made for him.
By the way, we should stress he's no relation, or not to be confused with, the painter Francis Bacon, who came a bit later.
Are you familiar with the other guy?
We're talking about the...
Are you familiar with the other guy?
Of course.
I studied art in college.
Did you?
Yeah.
He was big.
He was big when I was in school.
I was going to ask you.
Yeah, well, I suppose that there are artists, aren't there, who are designated as the artists that you rate as the greatest of their age?
And whether they are or not is, I think, irrelevant to the debate.
It's the ones that the system imposes on you.
I agree.
Completely agree.
And interestingly enough, Francis Bacon's been forgotten.
Largely.
Yeah.
You mean bacon number one?
Oh yeah, sir.
I'll say sir.
Sir Francis Bacon has been largely forgotten.
Yeah.
Yeah, he has.
And you're going to tell me that's probably by design.
But before we learn more about Francis Bacon, I just wanted to... You're reluctant to reveal your fizzog.
Yes.
I'd like to know how an American has become to be so involved in a renaissance... well, a renaissance renaissance man.
In England.
A good one.
You know, it's something I've just always been very curious, and a big reader, and started in with the history, and also very curious about why the world is so messed up.
When as a traveler and someone who's done different occupations and I'm a people person, I meet a lot of people and I think the overwhelming number of people I meet are decent and reasonably intelligent and want a fair shake for the other guy and I just couldn't make sense of why there's so much trouble in the world.
And I started to hone in on the English Empire.
As part Irish heritage and an American, you know, that's probably not an unusual way to think, but I thought that the arc of history for the last few hundred years is undeniably the story of the English Empire.
And then I started thinking, well, how that's kind of hidden because now the Americans are the big baddies.
You know, since really the end of World War II, as I say on my podcast, the English kind of disappeared behind the mushroom cloud.
That the Americans created, and now it's the big bad Americans.
But I kept thinking, you know, everywhere you go, there's problems in the world.
Oh, the English were there.
Simple search, you find out the English invaded 180 countries with their army, army and navy, which just staggered me.
Yeah, sorry.
So fact after fact just kept coming my way.
I was like, yeah, I think.
I'm on to something, but it was all just kind of random reading, listening to stuff, and that was just one idea I had, a head full of ideas that are driving me insane.
To quote the poet, when one day I'm listening to a podcast called Susquehanna River Alchemy, And it was all about the Susquehanna River, which is a fairly major river on the east coast of the United States that empties into the Chesapeake Bay, which is where D.C.
is and Jamestown.
And so it was all about the Susquehanna River in this kind of occult way, but it started mentioning Jamestown.
And Jamestown is the first successful English settlement in the United States.
Called Jamestown for King James.
Started in 1607.
And in passing, he mentions that Francis Bacon sat on the board of the Jamestown Colony Corporation.
And I was like, I keep running across this name Francis Bacon.
I can't believe he was on the board of Jamestown Colony Corporation.
It really struck me.
And I started writing an email to a friend because we had gone to college on the Susquehanna River, and the Susquehanna River supposedly means all these other things.
But I was really struck, and he's a history guy, and anyway, I won't go into it.
It's still too complicated, but there was this tremendous synchronicity happened right then, which I explained in one of the episodes of the podcast, and it had to do with Francis Bacon.
I thought, I've got to look into Francis Bacon.
And lo and behold, you find out he's the primary suspect for being William Shakespeare.
Which is fascinating, which I was already... I think that's probably how I discovered Francis Bacon, because another podcast, Alan Green, talked about how Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, which absolutely fascinated me.
And that got me into, I think, Francis Bacon, then discovering he was on the Jamestown Colony Corporation.
So Shakespeare was into colonization.
He's also considered the father of science.
So the Shakespeare thing is tenuous and conspiracy theory, but father of modern science is not.
That's accepted.
And when you look at the Age of Enlightenment, it almost always says, oh, it began with Francis Bacon and his ideas on Inductive reasoning.
So Francis Bacon invented a new way of thinking.
There was deductive reasoning from the Greeks.
Francis Bacon made a strong case for inductive reasoning.
He said we need to use this for the new science.
And it was a huge influence.
These books he wrote, philosophical works he wrote about science.
So it's pretty much indisputed that he started the ball rolling with this whole idea of
Modern science because we've always had science, of course and That's all basically indisputable now on top of that he was Considered one of the greatest lawyers of all time Which there's not a lot of information on that I haven't had time to go into that but he did become eventually Attorney General of England so the guy who started modern science was also Attorney General of England and
He became Lord Chancellor of England and he was even at one point Regent which meant he was acting King of England when James and the Duke of Buckingham went back to Scotland for a wee visit.
So he actually made it to King and here's where it gets kind of crazy and I pride myself I'm not getting too crazy with the conspiracy theories.
But I am very much a believer that Francis Bacon was Queen Elizabeth's secret son.
Which, now I hope I haven't lost half of your listeners.
Sounds really crazy, but there's just a huge amount... Robert, you've got to go a lot crazier before you start alienating my listeners, I can tell you.
You're safe here, my friend.
That's wonderful.
So it's just a crazy, crazy story.
And the more I read, I was like, I don't believe this.
I just don't believe what I'm finding out.
He's associated with the beginning of modern Freemasonry, for God's sake.
And I thought, okay, if I start a podcast about all this stuff, That's completely blown my mind.
That's a good way for me to go forward while studying it and, you know, kind of having some fun and consolidating this overwhelming amount of information that's very difficult to keep track of because I'm studying the history of the English Empire, the history of modern science, the Tudors, Shakespeare!
Shakespeare alone is like nearly infinite.
It just gets crazy when you get into Shakespeare.
It's a whole other world.
And I kind of pride myself on coming into it with fresh eyes because we actually didn't study Shakespeare in school.
My kids have all gotten Shakespeare now, but I think briefly there was a moment where we didn't get any Shakespeare here on the East Coast.
Anyway, the state, every school, every school is different.
It's run by the states here.
Shakespeare's definitely still taught, but I didn't know much about Shakespeare, and I always wanted to.
I just wanted to know what people were talking about when they said Iago or Falstaff or these very common Shakespearean names and tropes.
So that was fun, getting to know Shakespeare, brushing up my Shakespeare.
And I couldn't believe, you know, what I was finding there.
So it's just this huge amount of information that I saw was Gnostic.
Gnosticism has kind of been resurgent as a field of study and I got turned on to that by one of these books.
that showed that the Gnostics really were the secret elite of the world, or at least gave me that idea.
So all this tremendous amount of information came together all at once for me.
So I'm really swimming in it, trying to keep my head above water, trying to make sense of it, trying to present it in an entertaining way.
And a book is the goal, which I'm well on my way to writing a book about it.
So, I'm imagining thinking you majored in, what, fine art?
Yes.
And American university courses are different from ours.
Physics was really big back then, the Tao of physics, the dancing woolly masters.
You know, pretty much everything.
I've always had a very wide range of interests and I'm, I'm a songwriter.
I once wrote a song called, I wanna know everything.
And I kind of felt that way.
And then the internet burst forth and suddenly I had, you know, libraries at my fingertips.
You know, it was a blessing and a curse.
Yeah.
And I feel like I was going to ask you about that.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Well, it's I mean, first of all, I was going to say, you clearly have the yourself, the Renaissance man skills to be able to examine this from all angles, you know, music, philosophy, et cetera, literature, et cetera.
But secondly, I was going to ask you how Because, as you know, the Tudors is just about the most well-covered area of English history there is.
There are people who have built entire careers on their expertise on the Tudors.
I mean, an historian called David Starkey, there are various kind of women who write sort of books about Elizabeth and about her Her dad Henry VIII and his wives and stuff.
And we think we know so much about the Elizabethan court but I suspect that none of this stuff is going to be, none of your theories are going to be countenanced in mainstream published books.
So where did you go for your information?
That's a good question.
People have been writing about Francis Bacon as the real Shakespeare for about 180 years.
And many of them are English, and many of them have a detailed knowledge of Elizabeth.
I guess Henry VIII, but it's more Elizabeth.
This all happened during Elizabeth.
And they write about it, and they give details, and they give clues, and there is a lot of stuff that is straightforward history that just doesn't make a lot of the history books.
There's a lot of clues that bacon with Shakespeare going back 400 years.
And people have started to put it together.
You can even take a course at University of London online by Coursera called the Shakespeare Authorship Issue, which is shocking because you couldn't even talk about it, especially in England, 20, 25 years ago.
You would just get mocked.
And here, even as well, it was career suicide for an academic to discuss this issue.
But that's really the entree to this story, is the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy.
And it's really heated up In the last 20 years, probably because of the Internet.
But it's been a major source of contention for easily 100 years.
Mark Twain wrote his last book about it called Is Shakespeare Dead?
Hundreds, literally thousands of books.
I spent three years reading English literature at a university at Oxford.
And we spent a year pretty much studying Shakespeare.
And never once on the course was Shakespearean authorship continued.
Countenance doesn't matter for debate.
I mean, it just wasn't there at all.
It wasn't considered a thing.
And to be fair, we were studying literature at the time.
We weren't studying history or authorship and it didn't really matter.
We were analyzing the texts as texts.
and even then I mean even more so now there's this this this this this approach in English literature now which almost Pretends that no work of literature had an author you're just you're just examining the text and and I'm not sure that's that's Very healthy, but even when I was there It was it was the case that you weren't really interested in whether or not it was bacon or Devere or or whoever yeah, I
I have to confess, Robert, that I have a dog in this fight because I have a very good friend called Alexander War.
Who has, who makes a very, I don't want to, I don't want to argue too much about it with you because I mean this is, this is your baby and I kind of want it to be your show to talk about what you want to talk about.
But I find Alexander War's case that it was De Vere, the Earl of Oxford who wrote Shakespeare, pretty, pretty convincing because it's not just about sort of Circumstantial evidence.
It's ultimately about... I commend his YouTube channel on this subject.
It's to do with clues provided by John Dee in the form of codes.
Right.
Gematria and numerology and geometry and stuff on things like the first edition of the of the sonnets and stuff, which I think that indicate that probably it was De Vere.
But look, I don't think that the excitingness of your case Depends, you know, stands or falls on purely on Bacon having written or not written Shakespeare.
I mean, he's the most extraordinary character and that really comes across in your podcast.
I'm so glad.
Tell me first of all, Why you think that he was the the secret son of the Virgin Queen?
Okay, sure.
I heard your last podcast with Alexander Waugh and I'm very familiar with his work because he's all over YouTube.
So I have so much to say about DeVere and Bacon.
And Oxfordians and Baconians and Stratfordians because that's really, it is kind of the meat of the matter here.
It's kind of the nexus of the story.
But the idea that Bacon was the secret son of Queen Elizabeth apparently was discussed, was out during that time.
But it was quickly quashed.
As you know, the Tudor era was a police state.
It was a very brutal regime.
And they had no qualms about cutting off tongues and cutting off ears.
I've even heard cutting off noses.
You just didn't spread rumors if they weren't meant to be spread.
And also, most people couldn't write.
So if there were any secrets, they weren't going to get written down and hidden away.
But I can't, I don't have that information at my fingertips, but there were, there was Scuttlebutt at the time.
There's a whole area of research into this, which I don't, actually I didn't prepare for that, but I can tell you this.
Francis Bacon was born right next door to Whitehall in a place called York House.
And part of Whitehall was called York Place.
And the first English biography of Francis Bacon was by his chaplain, Dr. William Raleigh.
And Raleigh begins his biography of Bacon saying, Francis was born either in York House or York Place.
And your place was where Nicholas Bacon lived and Anne Cook Bacon.
And she was a lady-in-waiting.
She was head, apparently, of lady-in-waitings for Queen Mary, Mary I.
And so it's very easy to imagine that Elizabeth gave birth and Nicholas and Anne raised the baby and there's all kinds of clues to that.
Francis Bacon was never given an inheritance.
Nicholas was one of the richest people in England.
He had five sons.
All the other four got an inheritance.
Francis was left high and dry.
The birth records show that there was kind of scribbled in later something about... they made a mark indicating that something was odd about the birth.
Anne Bacon has a letter saying, I don't intend to treat Francis as a ward.
I'm going to raise him as my own son.
You know, why would she say that?
And there's a lot of other very circumstantial evidence.
I don't have it at my fingertips.
It would be easy for me to get it, but I'm not ready.
That he was... Whoa, no, that's interesting.
Yeah, all of that is there, and there's a lot more.
Oh, there's the whole thing about his putative father, real father, Robert Dudley, was locked up in the Tower of London with Queen Elizabeth.
By, uh, Mary One.
Can I call her Bloody Mary?
Is that rude to say Bloody Mary?
Yeah, yeah, you can, yeah.
They were actually in the Tower of London!
Oh, by the way!
Uh-huh?
Just briefly.
Yeah.
Bloody Mary is, of course, her name is the product, her nickname is the product of Protestant myth, isn't it?
I mean, it's the myth of the victors.
We know, I think, that Elizabeth In the Elizabeth era, many people were burned at the stake for their religious beliefs.
You're right.
That's Tudor propaganda.
But Mary's been sold to us.
Yeah.
Can I quickly put in, have you seen The Lost King by Stephen Coogan?
No, tell me.
Oh, you have to see this movie because the subtext of the movie is Tudor propaganda using Shakespeare.
So the Tudors were masters of propaganda, and yeah, that's great.
Bloody Mary, we say Bloody Mary, but when we think of Elizabeth, we think of doodly-doo-doo-doo, you know, fine fabrics, nice music, and yeah, because they're masters of propaganda.
The Lost King, fantastic movie based on a true story of a woman who discovered the remains of Richard III, who was the last king before the Tudor dynasty.
And they made Richard III look evil, and that Shakespeare play makes Richard III look totally evil.
And it turns out none of that is true at all.
He was a decent chap.
Yeah.
Henry VII, you know, took the crown and they threw him in the ground and no one knew where he was buried.
Great movie.
The Lost King.
But anyway, we were on, oh, so Dudley, who became Earl of Leicester.
Essex.
Essex is another story.
Sorry, sorry, yes.
Dudley was Earl of Leicester.
Dudley.
Robert Dudley was the son of Northampton.
Northampton led a rebellion against Mary.
He was killed.
Dudley was thrown in the tower, and she threw Elizabeth in the tower.
on suspicion of wanting to take power, which is very common, as you know, in those days.
You're under suspicion of a rebellion.
You go in the tower.
And they knew each other from childhood.
This is all straight up history.
Acknowledged history of the Tudors.
You could find it anywhere.
Dudley and Elizabeth knew each other as children.
Then they're locked up in the tower.
Rumors are they started an affair.
They both thought they were going to die.
You know, let's live all we can while we can.
They had an affair.
And that, of course, is not standard history.
But standard history is that when Elizabeth became Queen, shortly thereafter, she immediately made Robert Dudley master of the horse, gave him an apartment right next door to her bedroom.
And standard Tudor history is he became her favorite.
And they had a huge affair, like undeniable affair.
And then, mysteriously, Amy Robesart, Dudley's wife, died.
I think in Ireland.
Did he have an estate in Ireland?
She fell down the stairs and broke her neck.
Just before, yeah, and then there is some indication they were secretly married at the Pembroke Mansion.
Pembroke is a huge name in all of this, in the Shakespeare thing and Tudor history.
They were secretly married and there's a lot of stuff, evidence for that, that they were secretly married and that she gave birth so that Bacon was born to a married couple.
He was born, you know, not conceived while they were married, but he was born married.
That was very important.
Given to Nicholas Bacon and Anne Cook Bacon, And raised that way, but some of that evidence I could dig up, I don't have it in my fingerprints right now.
Yeah, and didn't you say that when Bacon went abroad, Elizabeth turned out to see him off or something like that?
So going forward, there's tons of evidence that Elizabeth was unusually interested in young Francis.
And that's a whole, that's going to be a whole chapter in the book, I guess.
There's just so much about it.
But one of the main ones is she accompanied him to the docks and, and left, uh, he left with her hand.
He left by her hand, which just never happened, especially for 15 year olds.
Maybe it would happen if a major person was leaving, but no, Elizabeth didn't go down to the docks very often.
And he wrote about that twice, and so that was well known.
And there are other instances where, for instance, she had Nicholas build a house in St.
Albans.
It's called Gorhamberry, and she told him to build a house.
And it turns out that it was near one of her summer residences.
And it is known that she would go on progress to Gorham Berry and took an interest in Bacon.
And a lot of this is mainstream tutor scholarship.
It's not going to be in a standard history book of Elizabeth because there's so much to write about.
But when you want to dig into the Francis Bacon story, yeah, it's in all the books about Francis Bacon.
Well, I think I think all this background is really interesting and yeah given that his his prodigious intellect now we know that Nicola you mentioned that Nicholas Bacon was was super bright, but of course So was Elizabeth.
She was very very well very very bright educated not only that but and cooks bacon and cook bacon's father was known as the leading educator in all of England.
He had been Edward's tutor.
And it's also believed that Elizabeth had a special book written, that's separate, but also Anne Bacon spoke Latin and Greek.
She was very, very highly educated for a woman of that time.
So it was a very rich environment.
I can't imagine a richer environment To grow up in, for learning.
Yeah, no, I was just talking about that.
I mean, I agree the environmental input must have played a major difference.
But just genetically, so you've got... Genetically, too.
If Elizabeth was his mother, so you've got Elizabeth is very bright.
I don't know, was... I don't think Robert Dudley was known as an intellect, was he or was he?
Well, he certainly had a lot of energy.
And enthusiasm.
But no, I don't think he was known as an intellect.
So he probably got his mother's intelligence.
Because I mean, Bacon was prodigiously intelligent, wasn't he?
As well as being very well read.
Tell us about how clever he was.
Freakishly intelligent.
Well, I think, based on my reading and some of the biographies that he He was so smart that they decided to kind of keep it hidden.
He became like a secret weapon.
But it's, I've read this, that he knew Latin and Greek by the age of seven.
He spoke fluently Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, Spanish, probably German, and you know, German-Dutch was kind of important, and Hebrew.
It is rumored that he read every book in print.
I think it's quite possible he had an extraordinary intelligence that could consume books effortlessly.
It's said he read every book in print at the time.
He read all the ancient Greeks, all of it, all the Latins, all the Romans.
All of Aristotle.
All of Plato.
There weren't a lot of books then.
There were a lot of books, but nothing like today.
Could you imagine anyone saying, I read all of Aristotle, and all of Plato, and all of Horace, and all of Ovid, and all of Cicero?
Nobody does that anymore.
You just don't have the time.
But the knowledge inside those works is incredible.
And he absorbed it all, and they saw this in him.
They actually devised a method of learning from a man named, I think, Sir Asham, Roger Asham, Richard Asham, who was a known educator.
And Elizabeth, it's rumored she asked him to write a book on how to educate a young courtier.
And they just, Francis wanted information, and they gave it to him.
And he flowered such that he dropped out of college at the age of 15, dropped out of university, announcing he was bored.
And he actually, at the age of 15, took on Plato and Aristotle as not progressive enough.
And eventually wrote a book called The Refutation of All Philosophies.
Like, at the age of 15!
He declared that he was going to create a whole new thing.
And then the rumors get really crazy.
You can read various writers that ascribe big books to Bacon.
Books that were published anonymously.
Books that were one-off.
Someone just wrote one book.
Big books like Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.
There are people that will say Francis Bacon wrote that.
There are people that will say Francis Bacon was actually Edmund Spencer.
So this stuff gets kind of crazy.
But if you look at it, if you look at it with an open mind, you can be led to think that, I guess it's possible Mozart was writing symphonies at the age of seven.
Whole symphonies.
Doesn't seem possible, but I do think that Bacon was a Mozart of words, and that he could dash off a book, like Mozart could dash off a symphony, and he could consume things.
And it's rumored, it's spoken of, you can find these quotes, that he had an extraordinary memory.
And there you go.
And then it did.
I mean, what he accomplished just in his life alone is remarkable with his legal work and his philosophical work are just enormous accomplishments.
But he is so implicated in Shakespeare, which maybe you don't want to get into.
I know, but I was thinking this.
I was, as you told me, I hadn't realized that you'd listened to my Alexander War podcast and you were aware of this.
And it would be terribly unfair of me not to give you a crack of the whip.
So tell me, tell me why you think that Bacon, I mean, I think we've established pretty thoroughly that the man from Stratford did not write the works attributed to William Shakespeare.
I don't think we need to waste any time on that.
We don't, we really don't.
I mean, I'm sorry for those people who still imagine that this is a topic for discussion.
I'm afraid it has.
Yeah.
But tell us, give us, because I do want to move on to, I find the Gnostic stuff and the Freemason stuff even more interesting.
And your theory, which I think is very persuasive.
Well, there are two camps now.
which in turn influenced scientism.
That's really good.
But please tell me Bacon and Shakespeare, why you think he is the more likely candidate.
Well, there are two camps now.
It's kind of dissolved the Oxfordians and the Baconians, and there's some competition between the two.
And I am a groupist.
I think it was a group of people.
And where I get original, I think, is that I think Shakespeare was a project of British intelligence, and that Francis Bacon was more or less head of intelligence.
He was sent at the age of 15 off to France with Sir Amius Pollat, who was in intelligence his whole life.
He was close to Francis Walsingham.
He was close to Cecil.
Lord Burleigh, these were the heavyweight intelligencers, which was the word for spy in those days, an intelligencer.
And I think this was conscious, and I think De Vere was definitely involved in this project.
But what I don't get about people like Waugh and other Oxfordians is that they want De Vere to be the sole guy.
that wrote all the plays with his scriptorium, that he was the man and he was this misunderstood genius.
They really like this kind of mythology of the misunderstood outcast genius that pushed out all these plays.
And I think there are some uncanny associations with his life.
I refuse to get into this code stuff because Baconians have been doing that for a hundred years.
And to me it just starts to look silly.
You can make anything out of anything.
If you don't have the cipher, if you don't have what they were using to make the codes, you can never be entirely sure.
And Wah's really into 17 and people make Bacon out to be 17 and 33 and Numbers and Gamatria.
Here's the deal, which I don't understand, because there's smoking gun evidence for Bacon as Shakespeare on multiple levels.
The evidence is like a tsunami.
It just overwhelms De Vere.
And I'll start here.
I'll start with what I think is the big smoking gun, and that is the Promus notebook.
There happens to be a book found in 1880 by Constance Pott, who was the first British Baconian.
She was the first Britisher to challenge the Shakespeare, the Stratfordian theory.
The first ever was Delia Bacon.
Interesting.
One of those crazy coincidences you start to find.
An American woman.
I think Constance Pott got it from Delia Bacon.
Anyway, Constance Pott found a book in The British Library, I believe, called the Promus Notebook.
It's in Francis Bacon's hand.
Promus means storehouse in Latin, and it's a book with jottings down of ideas, things like proverbs, sayings, thoughts, ideas, translations, things a writer might keep to keep his ideas straight.
You might have such a notebook.
I understand you're a writer.
Yeah, I don't.
I'm not meticulous or methodical enough.
Otherwise, I would have such a thing, yes.
There's 2,000 entries.
Constance Pott thought there were 1,400 direct parallels in Shakespeare.
The best book ever written on this is The Bacon Shakespeare Question by N.B.
Coburn.
He whittled that down to 700.
Some of them are directly in Shakespeare.
They're in the Promise Notebook, and the exact saying is in Shakespeare.
Dozens and dozens of them.
Things like, to slay with a leaden sword, and love's labor's lost.
Wounds like a leaden sword, love's labor's lost.
Things done cannot be undone.
Macbeth, what's done cannot be undone.
Many men stumble at the threshold.
To stumble at the threshold, promised notebook.
A fool's bolt is soon shot, promised notebook.
Henry 5, Act 4, Scene 7.
A fool's bolt is soon shot.
So, dozens of exact comparisons and hundreds of close comparisons in one notebook, the promised notebook.
You know, Wah doesn't mention it.
This amazing book just came out by Elizabeth Winkler, which is one reason this is heating up, called Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies.
Yeah, it's great.
It's a great book, and she's going to be at the Shakespeare Authorship Trust meeting on October 15th somewhere in London.
I was hoping to go, but I won't be able to.
She doesn't mention the promise.
I wish you would.
It's so weird.
I mean, to me, it's a smoking gun, but, you know, I'm just getting started.
I, you know, I could read dozens of those.
It gets boring.
But there's this other thing called the Northumberland Manuscript found at the Northumberland Mansion.
Fairly recently, I forget the date, And in it is a folder containing other papers and on the front of that folder is written the name William Shakespeare in different types of spelling.
It also is written Francis Bacon in different types of spelling.
It's even written Francis William Shakespeare.
And it was thought to be just another folder of Francis Bacon's writings because he also had a scriptorium, what he called his good pens, of people just writing for him or translating things or probably neatly writing out his scribbles for the printer.
And let me see if I can find the So this was their way of organizing his writings, and in that folder, this Northumberland manuscript, were three Shakespeare plays, a Thomas Nash play, Lester's Commonwealth, and a few other things that were missing, but some other stuff that was still there.
But it's the first time William Shakespeare's name was ever seen in manuscript, and it's right next to Francis Bacon's name.
And it's just this amazing clue that They were connected as early.
They date this manuscript to 1594, which is some of the earliest plays were performed in 1594.
How about this one?
A Comedy of Errors was known to first have been performed in 1594 at Gray's Inn, where Francis Bacon was head of the rebels.
So he dropped out of He did eventually go to law school and he stayed connected with that law school his entire life, grays in.
Might have been the same one DeVere was at.
And they had Rebels every Christmas season and Francis Bacon was master of the Rebels that season and it's known that comedy of errors was put on right then and there and also Love's Labor's Lost was supposed to be put on then.
Now Love's Labor's Lost Concerns the court of Henry at Navarre where Bacon went when they sent him overseas at the age of 15 He stayed involved with the court.
He got intimately involved with the French court and the play is about four young scholars who tried not to Hang out with women for the next few years.
They're going to discipline themselves and study study study and it's a it's a comedy and In that In this comedy, there's four young scholars that have the names of four people that were in Anthony Bacon's passport.
Barrowin, Braun, let's see.
Anyway, there's this, oh, the names in Anthony Bacon's passport.
Domaine, Longaville, Barone, and Boyette.
They're the exact same names of the characters in Love's Labour's Lost.
Again, one of the very first ever Shakespeare plays.
They know when it was performed.
Overwhelming direct connection to Francis Bacon.
There's a lot more, but then just speaking generally, Francis Bacon was extraordinarily disciplined.
He was extraordinarily connected.
He was extraordinarily well-read.
He was known to be devious.
He was known to be hidden.
And he was capable of running this project like it didn't happen with two or three or five guys secretly writing plays and handing them off.
This had to be a big operation.
It had to have gone to the very top.
It had to involve major figures.
Nothing really got past the tutors.
They were, you know, we think we're being surveilled today.
They were being surveilled then.
Everyone was a spy.
Every tavern owner.
Every time you went abroad, you were a spy.
Everyone knew everything.
And so you're actually more protected the more you have involved in a project You're more protected because no one's going to betray the project because they'll be betraying so many people.
So in trying to work out how they pull this off, I think Bacon was the mastermind.
And his dates fit perfectly with Shakespeare.
When the plays were written, when they were performed, when they stopped being written.
And the famous first folio, which created the Shakespeare myth, It was printed in 1623, three years before Francis Bacon died.
It's known Ben Johnson was living with Francis Bacon at that exact time when the first folio came out.
De Vere had been dead for, what is it, almost 20 years.
And the De Vereans, just one, De Vereans, the Oxfordians, this is just one case, they have to twist themselves into pretzels to say, well, it was It was Oxford's friends that printed it, and they found the place, and they saved the place, and they printed the place, where with Bacon, it's like he was living with Ben Johnson.
He had a scriptorium.
They put the whole thing together and put it out, and Bacon, you know, left three years later.
Bacon died three years later.
So all the dates fit perfectly with Bacon, but DeVere was involved.
I'm sure they used DeVere.
I think DeVere wrote some of the sonnets because DeVere was like kind of crazy, right?
He was passionate.
He spent millions of dollars on clothes and women and horses and fineries.
Is that really a kind of guy that could write 36 plays with deep Psychological characterizations of so many different people, like, really, like, tough psychological, tough, you know, mental work to write those plays.
But I could see him writing sonnets that are full of, like, anger and passion and retribution, regret, longing.
He seems like that kind of guy.
So I think he did help with the writing.
And I know he wrote plays on his own, and I know he was brilliant, But to think that he organized this whole project... I just don't get how Oxfordians can say that.
Like, what?
I think they should just say, yeah, he was involved.
I'm very glad.
Robert that I gave you the chance to make your case because I and as I found listening to your podcast I find you you are very persuasive and yeah I mean yeah I'm open to your ideas I just if I were into threesomes I would I would get you and Alexander To do a podcast together and I'd be the moderator and get you to duke it out.
The problem is that I hate being a moderator.
Yeah, I don't want to argue.
They just don't work.
Yeah.
I do think at some stage you need to get on a stage with Alexander to do it.
I mean you ought to be doing that at a festival.
It's not fair for me really to kind of... I haven't got enough information at my disposal to be able to adjudicate and I think it would be much better just if you at least got on a platform and got your arguments out there.
He is starting to say Bacon was probably involved.
Alexander has gone from Oxford did it all with a couple friends to I think it was a group.
And yeah, yeah, Bacon.
Bacon was probably involved.
But the fact of the matter is Bacon was the big dog.
In London that whole time.
So anyway, yeah, let's move on, I can tell.
Oh, but chap, episode 10 of your podcast.
I'm not moving you on because I want to pour scorn on your Shakespeare books.
Right, no, I understand.
You want to get into the Gnostics.
Well, I want to get to the Gnostics because I think it's really really interesting and after all this was the reason why you got into this stuff.
You asked the question that a lot a lot of people listening to this podcast will have asked themselves, which is why is the world so completely effed up?
How did we get here?
How come how come we live in This world that I was taught to believe that was on my side.
I now realize is a godless place run by people who hate me who want to either kill me or enslave me or poison me or or treat me as their chattels as their as their cattle and you I think have a powerful theory.
To suggest that at least in its modern form, this goes back to the kind of the spy state and and the mystical control system.
Yeah.
Created by Francis Bacon.
Yeah.
Yeah, I definitely believe that and to make a case for it.
It's frankly, it's not that hard.
And then we've seen, you know, the English Empire take over the whole world.
How would I start?
Well, it's very interesting, isn't it?
How would I start?
I was just going to say to you that I think most people who are down the rabbit hole are painfully aware of the degree to which the intelligence services run the world in the interests of what I call the predator class, who might call the cabal or whatever.
Yeah.
And we've been talking a lot in this podcast thus far about the spy state.
Yes.
So I think it's not a leap to infer from that that these traditions continued from... this was created in Elizabethan times, the spy state, and we're still living in the spy state now.
Absolutely.
I mean, there's nothing like what the Elizabethans had in terms of spying.
It's just incredible.
And it's tied in deeply with the occult, which is what Gnosticism is.
Gnosticism is the occult, and all of modern occultism is Gnostic.
And so, there's John Dee, and there's the Rosicrucians, and there's the Freemasons.
And there's occult knowledge, which was really circulating in Europe.
The Occult in Elizabethan England by Francis Yates details it, but kind of in a positive way, in that these occult writings loosened up the Catholic Church and loosened people up and opened up people and allowed humanism to develop and the Renaissance to develop.
Which is followed by the Enlightenment.
Hey, Robert, just pause you there.
Isn't that really interesting?
You see, this strikes me as the propaganda in excelsis of that period.
What do we learn?
Why do we study the Renaissance?
Why do we study the Enlightenment?
Yeah.
We are taught that this was a period in which man overcame the superstition and entrenched power of the church and formed a new and much more beneficial understanding of the world.
Yeah.
And you'll get authors like that guy that you... what was his name about the occult?
Francis Yates.
Francis, I wonder if Yates is a Freemason?
No relation.
It's a woman actually, but she worked for one of the biggest banks.
Oh, well, anyway, yeah, she was writing for them.
Yeah, but don't you think that this line we are fed about humanism about about the very that very word enlightenment as though previously that the Abelard and Heloise and all the kind of medieval that the medieval scholars who brought us such wisdom.
That somehow they can be dispensed with because hey, there are some new guys in town and they've really got it and they've kind of, they're questioning God and they're examining the occult.
When you were talking about the occult, is the occult study and practices that people like Bacon were into, is that essentially the Babylonian mystery religions?
Pretty much, yes.
So Dee was the real occult wizard.
They were close, Dee and Bacon.
There's not a lot of evidence.
They spent a lot of time together, but Bacon was the book guy.
Dee was the book guy.
And the Rosicrucians were very much influenced by Dee, and Bacon did the Rosicrucians, but yes.
It goes back to the Babylonian mystery religions because the Gnostics, the original Gnostics, came up around the time of the birth of Christ, the birth and death of Jesus Christ.
It was when Gnosticism really began.
There's hints of it earlier, but there's always hints of everything earlier.
Nothing ever just starts.
So Gnosticism is very much associated with the era of Jesus, Roman Empire, And the Gnostics had a completely different idea of nature and creation than the Greeks, the Romans, the Jews.
And they thought that the God of creation was an evil God and that they were trapping our souls here on the planet.
And that was their one original idea.
Otherwise, they took every religious idea from everywhere.
And if you want to study Comparative religion, Gnosticism is a great place to start because they kind of pulled every belief system in and a lot of it was the mystery religions.
And I think at one point, and this is a very interesting way to look at things, the mystery religions were at one time probably positive and probably produced democracy and Greece and philosophy and All that great stuff of ancient Greece, which you say, like, yeah, let's just forget about Socrates, whose one thing was like, what is virtue?
What is a good life?
And I've heard that he was not initiated, but other friends of mine say he was.
It gets very hard to know exactly what was happening in the sacred mysteries because they were so good at keeping it a secret.
The final Event it so supposedly transformed you and made you a better person and gave you Wisdom and and a joy of living really we don't know what it was.
It definitely involved drugs I'm thinking involved fear Thinking of all the tremendous amount of fear and then a release from that fear It was sort of near-death experience.
I think it was trying to read.
Yeah a fear death experience like a near-death experience, which is I I Take my metaphysics now from near-death experiences, which were common.
Plato wrote the first near-death experience.
It ends the Republic.
It's called the Myth of Ur.
It's a fantastic story.
It's the first ever near-death experience.
And Plato eventually, you know, led to Christianity and Socrates.
Early Christianity took so much from Plato.
That the mysteries weren't necessarily bad.
I think they got corrupted by the Gnostics.
That they slowly got corrupted.
That's interesting.
Yeah, they slowly became about mind control.
You haven't mentioned the word, the demiurge.
I know that's what you're referring to.
Oh, that's the creator.
Yeah, the creator would be the demiurge, yeah.
So, because I'm just coming, just learning about Gnosticism, partly from your excellent podcast, that the God of the Old Testament and, you know,
Yahweh, Jehovah, Jawobble, whatever, as you refer to him, is in the eyes of the Gnostics, he's not the real God.
That's the Demiurge.
And behind the Demiurge, beyond the Demiurge, is a creator.
But the Demiurge is in charge of this world, and it's kind of a hell.
And in order to progress to the true God, the God of Light, which seems to be kind of Luciferianism in there somewhere.
Is that right?
Am I getting the details wrong here?
That's the broad strokes, yes.
The Gnostics have this extraordinarily complicated creation myth Like, just to get to that demiurge that made this world is really complicated and whack-a-doodle, I don't mind saying.
It involves the creation of Sophia, and Sophia gets jealous, and she wants to make her world, and then she makes this...
Yaldabaoth or an Akamoth and he then makes this world to trap sparks of light and Sophia and it's really complicated and crazy but yes he he made this world to trap souls in and that with gnosis or knowledge you can escape this world.
If you don't you're going to get reincarnated back here and on one hand the the generous way of Discussing Gnosticism is that they were trying to account for how could this world have evil in it?
How could there be a creator God?
That allows evil in the world and it's a major philosophical question I think it's called the problem of evil and then all-knowing all-loving God yet.
There's evil in the world How do we solve this problem?
And they think the Gnostics were we're doing that and Probably were responding to trauma, you know from the Romans and the Babylonians and all that these horrible Massacres like how could that be?
How could life have that and they make this convoluted system?
It eventually says like everything is evil and you've got to escape but the only way to escape is with knowledge and sometimes that knowledge is meant living a very ascetic life, and you removed yourself, and you wore rough clothes, and didn't have sex, and didn't eat meat, and that kind of thing.
Or it could mean that you invert reality in a fight against this demiurge, and so you try to destroy, in a sense, life.
And you certainly don't have children, and you certainly don't have sex with women, because then you're going to make babies, and then there's going to be more babies, and it's just going to make more stuff for the demiurge.
And each Gnostic sect had a twist on this basic outline.
And so it would progress and it would change and it never really died out when Constantine decided, you know, formalized Christianity in 325 and adopted Christianity as the state religion.
For the first time, Romans started persecuting other religions.
Up until that time, in kind of a Gnostic way, they actually embraced all religions, including Judaism.
Although Christianity was persecuted by the Romans, but that was kind of part of the Gnostic thing.
But then they couldn't stop it, and it spread, and there were all kinds of Christian sects, including Gnosticism.
And they formalized it, and at that point the Gnostics started getting wiped out.
But they also just petered out, because it's It's really kind of crazy compared to the message of Jesus and the church.
Except, Robert, I was going to ask you about this.
I can see it would appeal to gay intellectuals Because it's exclusive.
It's the opposite of Christianity.
Even the poor, in fact especially the poor, are welcome.
And the rich not so much.
So that wouldn't appeal to the gay intellectuals.
And there is an element of procreation and celebration.
So that again wouldn't appeal to the gay intellectuals.
But at the same time, if the cleverest people in the world, if the cleverest man who ever lived was into Gnosticism, how do we know he wasn't right?
How do we know that there isn't a demiurge and that we're not living in hell and stuff?
Have you got any thoughts on that?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Well, so many reasons.
So, one of Plato's neo-Platonists, a guy named Plotinus, who was a Platonist, And he didn't particularly like Christianity, but he wrote a whole treatise called Against the Gnostics, where he mocked the Gnostics.
It's like, how could, you know, your idea that the world is evil is crackpot.
And how could the world be evil with babies and flowers?
This is me now presenting Plotinus' argument, but he did use the beauty of the world.
is an argument against this idea that the world is 100% evil.
But I would again say from these near-death experiences that there is evidence that this is a benevolent environment that we're here to learn, that this is a school for our souls.
And again, the first near-death experience was the very end of The Republic, a 300-page book on what is justice, what is the ideal city, how can we make it happen, politics, art, even food and how do we grow our food in the most just way.
And of course they can't decide what it is and there's a lot of cockamamie ideas put forth and people think Plato was totalitarian, but they're really just exploring what justice is.
And suddenly the book ends with this near-death experience where souls are leaving earth and going up to heaven or going down, I guess, to Tartarus.
And souls are coming out of the above.
They don't say heaven.
They're coming out from the above or coming up from below and getting ready for their next life.
And it's a great, great story.
Look it up.
The story of Ur, the myth of Ur, people.
It's great.
And everyone, and they're suggesting, obviously, Plato, that there is no real justice in this world and that justice takes place after you die fully.
The full justice takes place because in this story, the people that had led a bad life were coming up from below and complaining about, uh, that was rough.
I just spent a thousand years, you know, Very difficult circumstances and the people that had led a just life were coming down from above going, wow, that was so beautiful.
And they're all hanging out together choosing their next life.
Which happens in a fairly complicated way how they get to choose their life.
But there's this whole idea that you chose, you partially responsible for choosing the life that you have here.
And that you agreed to come here for one reason or another.
I think to grow your soul and to learn like this is a very difficult plane of existence.
There's no question about it.
Do the Gnostics not think that as well?
I mean, that's what I wonder.
I just put a post on Patreon.
That's where my updates are now because the website's so hard and cumbersome, but how did the Gnostics miss that?
Yeah, no, they don't think that.
They think this world is wholly evil and you need to escape.
But they do believe in reincarnation.
But you see how close it is to Buddhism and Hinduism.
Like a pure Hindu will want to reject this world.
But they don't think it's evil.
You know, the Buddhist will... Ideal Buddhist is maybe in a cave meditating somewhere.
They've rejected the world.
But they don't say the world is evil.
They just know, like we all sense, there's something grander and more beautiful Just outside our reach.
Just outside our knowledge.
But we feel it.
We have intuition.
Maybe we see it in dreams.
That there's something more to life.
And every human group throughout history has felt there's something more to life.
I think the first atheists were the Epicureans of Greece.
Always been very, very few atheists.
But atheism is very close to Gnosticism in that it's a rejection of a benevolent creator.
But it all gets, of course, complicated because the Gnostics do believe in God, and that's why the Freemasons can say you have to believe in God to be a Freemason.
It's just the God beyond God.
But that God is so remote, we don't even bother praying to Him.
I'm very much feeling that this podcast could go in a gazillion directions and I feel that we're scratching the surface of what could be at least the 12-hour conversation and I wish we had time for that because it is just amazing talking to you about this stuff.
But I suppose we ought to talk specifically about Bacon and how his Gnosticism How he incorporated that into... Rosicrucianism, by the way, it's not such a thing now.
Is it worth mentioning briefly?
Why does Rosicrucianism matter?
They became the Freemasons.
It's very much incorporated into Freemasonry.
Oh, okay.
It was a grand hoax.
It was another hoax, like Shakespeare.
Okay, fine.
Fair enough.
Yeah, that's complicated.
So, Rosicrucianism was part of this kind of fake-hit tradition.
to buoy up this kind of new religion that he kind of invented in the form of Freemasonry.
By the way, I mean, I know lots of Freemasons, and you know, they're kind of people who want to do good in the world, aren't they?
They want to go to their Their meetings with their long stuff that they've got to learn and roll up their trouser legs and give funny handshakes and stuff.
I think most of these people are decent decent folk who just want to make the world a better place and get on get a leg up in their careers, but it globally, it's more it's more.
Sinister than that, isn't it?
Well, there's the upper echelon So the the average Freemasonic lodge is kind of a feeder system and they do say we're here to make make men better and Everyone is welcome and we do charity and Bacon talked a lot about charity So it's hidden Bill Gates does charity I've noticed by the way He has lots of charity.
Exactly.
Lots and lots.
So does Melinda.
But that's how they pull you in.
You know, all cults say they're going to do something for you.
You're going to get something.
You're going to get something great.
And so it's again, this is another big, complicated topic.
And to pull out the Gnosticism is not so obvious, but it comes in a lot of quotes and a lot of it has to do with light and Bacon constantly talking about light and saying things that are wrong.
He's a biblical scholar.
Rumors are he did the final edit on the Bible.
But he's constantly talking about the Father of Lights.
God is the Father of Lights.
Or confused matter.
He starts talking about how the earth is confused matter.
But the Father of Lights even says that God's first creation light.
But in the Bible, the first creation is not light.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
And the earth was void and without form.
Darkness was upon the face of the deep then God said let there be light so it's actually the third creation Light there was heaven and earth already But he constantly says the father of lights the first creation being light Well, it turns out that's the first creation in the Zoroastrian religion and which is Kabbalah became Kabbalah and this idea of light and
And the Zoroastrian religion was very dualistic with good and evil.
And this dualism eventually filtered down to there's no real difference between good and evil, and you need to combine them.
And that's why the Templar flag had the white and the black.
And you don't shy away from evil.
You don't even judge evil.
It's just another part of life.
And again, all of this gets into various levels of theology and philosophy that can't be quickly summarized.
There's this group called the Assassins that influenced the Templars, and it's well-known that the Templars were Gnostics who worshipped Baphomet and also had this non-procreative stance.
Anyway, the Templars are a whole other story, but they were Set upon by the church, as you know, and a lot of them were burned at the stake, and they had to go deeply underground.
And that's where we get all this intense secrecy of the Freemasonry and this kind of revenge on the church.
Because at the time, the Templars were fake Christians, but Gnostics always accepted Christianity As something, okay, that's for the common folk, not the Gnostics, we have special knowledge.
And those are, you know, good for the Christians, but we have special Gnostic knowledge, and we get it by doing magic, and we get it by having orgies, and doing all these weird things, and we're going to escape, and those nice Christians.
But once the church moved on the Templars and wiped them out, They went deeply underground, and I think this vengeance started, like, we are going to destroy Christianity, because look what Christianity did to us.
And it's by now another foregone conclusion that the Templars morphed into the Freemasons.
And that is a book called Born in Blood, and it's also rumored, it's been rumored for hundreds of years that the Templars became Freemasons.
It's pretty much been established that that is true.
And the Templars were Gnostics.
So there, the Gnostic is this hidden underground pool, and it's open to creative interpretation.
You know, John Dee interpreted it one way, and Bacon interpreted it the other way, and I think his science was a form of Gnosticism.
Like, scientism is a form of Gnosticism, in that you want to take over the planet.
It became less about escaping the planet, to taking over the planet in a kind of a war with God.
We're going to discover the secrets of nature so that we can control them.
We want the power of life and death.
And so it's a pool of Gnosticism via the Templars that gets creative in many different ways, but it ultimately gets down to either no God or war against God or maybe even strict atheism.
There's a lot of ways to look at it.
I get this Robert because I mean as a Christian I understand that what is going on in the world right now as really the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in that you've got the fallen angels and the forces of evil are in opposition to God our Creator and
And that they want to replace, they want to rebuild the Tower of Babel.
They want to show themselves to be gods on earth in mockery of the true creator and create a sort of simulacrum of God's creation.
So that's how I understand it.
But I can see that if you were of a Gnostic persuasion You would be going, yeah, but it's okay because what we don't understand is that the God that we're fighting is not the lovely God that, you know, who made us all.
It's this nasty God, the Demiurge.
So, you know, like we're doing the right thing.
Is that more or less what's happening?
Yes, exactly.
So they think they're the good guys, basically.
Exactly.
Right.
They have a rationale for Inverting everything.
Turning everything upside down.
A man is a woman.
I don't know.
Carbon dioxide is burning up the earth.
Carbon dioxide is the most beneficial molecule around, but it's destroying the planet.
It's an inversion.
They invert things.
Good and evil get inverted.
Yes, I get this a lot.
There is so much inversion right now.
Yes, it's inversion.
But the things that they do, which are, you know, by their fruits you shall know them.
I mean, I can't find a rationale which would explain to me, convincingly, Why it's a good thing to trade children for sex and adrenochrome and sort of breed them in underground chambers and sacrifice them.
You know, there's no way that you can persuade me, but it's okay.
You've got to trust us.
We're doing it to have a go at this Demiurge.
It just doesn't work, does it?
I can't admit.
No, it's not.
They're going to suffer greatly in the life review.
From what I gather from my extensive study of near-death experiences is that you go through a life review and whatever pain you cause someone else, you're going to feel that pain.
You're actually going to get a vision.
Somehow it's all recorded.
Talk about the ultimate surveillance.
You know, it's all recorded, and you're going to feel the pain you caused in others.
And some of these people are causing so much pain, they're going to be in hell.
Like, that's what hell is.
Because they know they're not supposed to do it.
You know, they're of their own free will causing this pain.
But there will be subtle gradations, I believe, because some people have been brainwashed into doing these things.
So as Chekhov said, it truly takes a god to judge success from failure and never make a mistake.
That's why we can't really judge everyone.
I think we can judge Bill Gates, no problem there.
He's obviously a goody because he's a philanthropist, Robert.
That means he loves, Phil loves, and he loves mankind.
It's on the label that he wears.
And he wears nice cosy sweaters, have you noticed?
Yes, he's got good... He's a good guy.
Good PR, yeah, absolutely.
So, I don't know, the thing with this project is it leads into so much complicated philosophy and speculation, and there's just so much stuff there.
But I'm getting at it, I'm chipping away at it, and I'm making a limit, like I can only talk about so much, like we're doing here on this podcast, like, gonna draw the lines.
I know, it's just crazy.
And finish the book, but it's fun, it's exciting.
Can I ask you briefly, what's your, you're not a Christian, or are you?
I was raised as a Christian, and I consider myself a Christian, but there's things about Christianity that bother me, I think they put some words in Jesus' mouth like, there's no way to the Father except by me.
I don't think Jesus would have said that.
And that's one of my main criticisms of Christianity, this absolute refusal to entertain other ways of being virtuous or getting to God.
What are some others?
Oh, I believe in reincarnation.
Yeah, just going back, no one comes to the Father except through me.
That's only in John, I think, isn't it?
Is that right?
I think so.
I'm not sure, but that becomes a sticking point with a lot of Christians.
But yeah, I think I'm Christian.
I like Taoism with this kind of sense of being a part of this grander design, a small part, but you know, attune yourself.
And with that, I love the Iroquois, which is the Native Americans from Eastern seaboard who had an extraordinarily advanced form of government, which was copied by Washington and Ben Franklin into these separate states.
It's like the republics within a republic idea was invented by the Iroquois Indians.
And they had a very exalted spirituality that was, of course, nature-based.
But it sure wasn't Gnostic.
You know, it was like, wow, look at this earth.
Look at the beauty.
Thank you.
They would do these Thanksgiving we get here in America from the Indians where they They would start every meeting with like 20 minutes of, thank you.
Thank you, creator for the birds.
Thank you for the four legs.
Thank you.
Thanks for the wind.
And I love that.
I love nature.
And I think Christianity can get a little separated from nature, but it doesn't exclude nature and certainly doesn't say nature's evil.
I feel that I've stayed you off topic only because... But I love Christianity.
Yeah, sorry.
That's the problem with this work.
What's not to like about martyrdom?
So, you mentioned Benjamin Franklin, who was of course a Satanist and a 33rd degree Freemason.
And you reckon that all this stuff, all this dark stuff, can be traced back, at least in its modern incarnation, to Francis Bacon.
I think it came through Bacon.
Yeah, I do.
I think he, certainly because he made the Freemasons, which consolidated this occultism and the science.
But of course, he's obviously not alone.
But again, with the Shakespeare, he created this intense patriotism amongst the English.
And so when you think about the English, you think of Shakespeare.
It's impossible not to think of Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Winkler even says that in her book, you cannot separate the British Empire from Shakespeare.
And I think he meant to do that, and I think it created this force for empire, which is what he wanted.
He wanted empire He wanted control and we get the Great Reset, which Bacon's entire project was called the Great Instauration.
So the Great Reset sounds really similar to the Great Instauration, which means the great new beginning.
We're going to wipe, we're going to change everything, how things are run around here.
And that's what he wanted to do.
And he, uh, I think it's happening with this Great Reset.
It's kind of like the last Movement of the Empire and a lot of people think the Great Reset began in England with Charles first announced it.
I think those words are first announced by King Charles.
And again, I'm not putting down the common English person.
Charles the Third.
Sorry, Charles the Third.
That's what I meant.
I'm getting confused as well.
Yeah, yeah.
Charles the Third mentioned Great Reset first.
Prince Philip was on the board of the World Economic Forum.
It's empire.
It's the final stages of empire and surveilling the whole planet at once from a central global government and it's happening now and that's this This kind of end time scenario like we are I think we're in danger of this project Reaching fruition.
I don't think they will win.
I think Because they're mad it will fall apart But it may get chaotic as it falls apart, but they're completely mad.
They can't have power of life We don't know where life came from.
We don't know where a single thought comes from you know, we have souls and they can't create life and they can't They're going to fail because they're mad.
But we have to be strong and we have to do things like you're doing.
Thank you so much for your work and we will manage to change things around and create a more equitable society than what they want.
I don't think we can create heaven on earth.
I think that's the problem and that all these movements, communism, fascism, scientism are are forms of Gnosticism as been identified by some scholars like Eric Vogelin.
They're all aspects of Gnosticism trying to create heaven on earth when really we'll just try to love your neighbor.
Give that a go.
See how well you do.
And if you can do that, you know, move on to the next step.
But that's, that's your task here.
And that's, that's, that's very hard to do.
I'm with you on that.
I'm with you on this.
By the way, can I ask you a question?
Sure.
Elizabeth I era, it was illegal not to go to church.
And you could be burned at the stake for having the wrong thoughts about Christianity.
So everyone was supposedly a Christian.
So how was it that leading courtiers like Bacon, And John Dee were able to do this stuff that really ought to have got them burned at the stake.
Are you suggesting that Elizabeth was in on this?
I mean, do you think that she too was a Gnostic or an occultist?
I do, because you could be a Gnostic and still be a Christian.
They had no problems with that.
It's not a linear logical system.
You can do both at the same time.
Not a problem.
You know, that's shocking to us, but they had no problems with that.
And they needed the mainstream Christianity to keep control of the people.
I mean, that's the number one thing, is keep control of the masses.
We have to keep our exalted position.
Which goes all the way back to Egypt, where the leaders were worshipped as gods.
Even in the Roman times, you know, When the emperor died, he was turned into a god.
And this whole idea that your god has to be kept in front of the people.
And one way is to, you know, say you worship a good god and pretend to be virtuous.
Because we are at heart virtuous.
We are at heart
want fair play and we do love much more you know the world is overwhelmingly good so they pretend to be good it's it's important to pretend to be good and that's something that you know goes back to the Templars and and it's been a theme recently like this the show an outward show of religious faith which is part of the Assassins Templars the Sabbatean Jews were pretended to be Jewish but they weren't you know
People pretend very well and they get some places in life because we're trusting, as we should be trusting, but we have to use discernment and critical thinking at the same time.
So yeah, they gain a lot by pretending.
There also was briefly an opening, like they allowed magicians like Cornelius Agrippa to thrive and Dee took some heat for what he was doing and eventually they say he was turned on by James But it all gets very complicated.
It's not real linear, logical thing that we're looking at.
It's kind of this pool with the ultimate goal is power and this war on the Creator to become the Creator.
It's the same old story, right?
It's Lucifer, the pride of Lucifer in the fall.
This is continually reenacting, being reenacted.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I'm sure that people listening to this podcast are going to be turning to your longer versions because, I mean, you've done, what, how many podcasts?
Eleven.
Eleven.
And they're each about an hour long, aren't they?
Some got too long.
I was putting too much in.
Some of the early ones, especially, I'm sorry, Number four on Macbeth, when I bring out the Gnosticism in Macbeth, because what I'm discovering is the Gnosticism in the Shakespeare plays.
I think it's really clear in Macbeth, so that's episode four and five, but I think they're both like two hours long, but stick with it.
I do these long introductions where I talk about Bacon and Tudor era, but then I get to the play and listen to the Gnosticism in Macbeth.
That's episode four and five, I think.
I think I make a very strong case, and I don't think it's been seen before in Shakespeare scholarship.
So I'm going to go way out on the crazy limb and say I think I've extended Shakespeare scholarship.
Which is a nutty thing to say, but I just said it.
I'm sure you have.
But just as an appetite wetter, so why I think you've described Freemasonry as the world's most successful secret society.
Yeah.
Why is that so and how did Bacon make it so?
Great, great question.
Bacon wrote about and deeply understood the power of theatre on the human mind and he said it's the bow to the fiddle of the human mind theatre.
And he created the third degree.
So the Templars had two degrees of initiation, which involved this secrecy.
Like, we're going to cut your throat and pull your bowels out and throw you on the beach if you disclose anything that happened here to a non-Mason.
They say it twice and they, you know, sort of acted out.
But the third degree is this participatory theater degree involving a mythic character named Hiram Abiff, who is mentioned in the Bible once, sort of.
King Hiram of Tyre sends Hiram, the craftsman, to help Solomon build the temple, Solomon's Temple.
And from there, Bacon created a ritual theatrical ritual where the the initiate becomes Hiram Abyss and he's ritually killed and resurrected.
So all the mystery religion, death and resurrection, which is central to Christianity, death and resurrection actually happens to you.
So it's kind of which is what happened as we mentioned at the Eleusinian Mysteries.
So it's a It's a lighter version of the Sacred Mysteries.
And this person dies as Hiram Abiff.
He's killed, he's ritually murdered, and then resurrected.
And that's why the Masons say, uh, I rose, what day they call it, I was risen or I rose.
It's to become a Mason, your third degree of initiation.
you you are uh what's the word shoot i'm forgetting risen up or you rose up to become a mason and it's apparently very powerful because the entire time you're you're blindfolded and then i think when you take your blindfold off like everyone's got a a sword at your throat or something but there's that whole process of fear fear and then relief from fear And then you're in.
Then you're in a fraternity.
You have Lodge Brothers that are sworn to do anything they can to help you.
At any time, at any moment's notice, unless their life is in danger, they are sworn to come help you.
And as you said, you know, it's really great for doing business.
It's really great for friendship.
It's really great for this idea of belonging.
You know, you're a part of something.
You have friends.
And that's really, really big psychologically.
And Bacon knew that.
Bacon was hundreds of years ahead of Freud and Jung and any kind of psychology.
Bacon knew it.
He knew it from reading the Greeks and the Romans and so much art.
He knew all this stuff.
And he was a master at hypnotism.
He knew hypnotism well, even though it hadn't been named, just like gravity hadn't been named yet, but people knew, knew how to work with it.
And this bond develops.
That's been very good.
Very few people have broken that bond.
There have been some, and basically all the secrets of Freemasonry are available.
And it's, it's dying out in popularity, but back in the day, You could go to Indonesia and find a free Masonic lodge and get a place to stay.
You could go to France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and you'd get a lodge and stay there.
And it was this huge boon to travel as well.
And it's still good for business.
So he brilliantly created a religion that people are very loyal to.
And of course, it really wants the best and the brightest, so it doesn't have this burden of The sick, and the poor, and the maimed, and the blind.
They can't get in.
They say it's for everyone, but they can't get in.
They're excluded.
It's kind of a win-win, but also this kind of decentralized power structure in Freemasonry.
There's really not a charismatic leader.
Somehow, it's self-created itself going forward, and there have been wars within Freemasonry.
There's no question.
I mean, eventually the Freemasons went to war with each other, but somehow they've been able to patch it all up.
Charles lost his head.
That wasn't the Freemasons.
But later on, the Stuarts and the William and Mary, right?
James Charles III that lost the crown to William and Mary.
Those were two Freemasonic branches that kind of went at war with each other.
So it's not this monolith, and that's what we have to remember about the elite, the predator class.
They are not a monolith.
They fight amongst themselves.
And I think that's going on now.
They are like sort of rival mafia gangs, aren't they?
They meet occasionally.
The families all meet and they sort of sort out their differences and they allocate territory and stuff like that.
But they're all in the business of crime.
I think that's what they have in common.
Power.
Yeah, power and control.
That's what they want.
And they're not going to get it.
Was this, by the way, what was your rabbit hole moment?
What was it that sort of made you question the nature of the world?
Wow, that's a good question.
I think I would, you know, questioning, wondering, thinking, and it would pop in my head, maybe there's a secret government.
And instantly the voice in my head would go, no.
That's ludicrous.
How could there be a secret government?
It can't be true.
But I met this guy, and we were both kind of standing on the edge of the hole, the giant rabbit hole.
edge of a cliff, and we kind of pushed each other off.
His thing was the moon landing.
This guy's not like me.
He'll just launch into these things, and he launched into the moon landing conspiracy when we first met, and I thought, wow, what a nutter.
What a nut.
And I think looking into that, there's this writer named Dave McGowan.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
When you look into JFK, it's like, come on, and they got away with it.
They killed him and got away with it.
Yeah.
There's obviously a secret government.
Although when you go down the rubber hole of, yeah, was it all theater?
Well, that's the problem, right?
That's the problem with what we're doing is that it gets, Crazy on top of crazy.
And people say, I think people say crazy things.
And then we're arguing, you know, like, I'm sorry.
I hope I'm not insulting anyone saying flat earth, but you know, it goes there.
Are you off?
I'm sorry.
No, I think this is why we need to keep an open mind.
I mean look, I think you make a powerful case for Bacon being Shakespeare.
I love Alexander and I find his case enormously persuasive.
I'm not going to kind of play God here and decide what the truth is.
I certainly wouldn't give Flat Earthers a hard time.
I mean, there's so much that we don't know, it seems to me.
I'm up for any possibility.
Well, I'm up for any possibility, but there's that great saying, you know, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
And I think we can make a case that, you know, Flat Earth isn't true, but, you know, we can't get into that here.
But I will say that I think DeVere and Bacon were working on it together.
They were related.
They lived a few blocks from each other.
They both had all the wealth and power in the world.
They both loved theater.
I think they had a grand old time writing these plays.
And that was part of why it was so successful.
That sounds worryingly Hegelian.
You found the synthesis.
Very good!
Please don't, Alasdair!
I'm glad, though, that we've had a happy ending.
Happy finish, as they say in massage parlors.
James, I really appreciate the chance to talk to you.
Oh, it's been great, Robert.
I've really enjoyed it.
Tell people the easiest way to find your stuff.
Well, the podcast apps are great.
I don't know, whatever you use.
Put in The Hidden Life is Best.
I'm Francis Bacon of the Gnostic English Empire.
My website is thehiddenlifeisbest.com.
And if you want to support the book project, I'm asking for patrons at patreon.com slash hiddenlifeisbest.
And that's where I do updates for patrons.
And the podcasts take an enormous amount of time.
I had number 12 ready to go, but I didn't think it was up to snuff.
So I'm redoing that.
I have stuff coming out on Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night and some of these books I've been reading because there's just so much to read.
At a certain point I'm going to draw the line.
The book is going well, but yeah, TheHiddenLifeIsBest.com, podcast The Hidden Life Is Best, and Patreon.com slash The Hidden Life Is Best.
Well, can I just add my personal recommendation?
I urge people to go and listen to Robert's podcast, to your podcast.
They're really, really good, and you're very entertaining.
I wanted to mention one tiny thing to you, and I hope you'll take this in the right way.
I'm sure.
I wanted to correct a couple of your pronunciations.
Oh, please do.
Because I know you like getting things right.
Please do.
Okay, so it's North Humberland, not North Umberland.
Oh, North Humber.
Northumberland, yeah.
Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.
And Stratford-on-Avon.
Americans find it very, very hard to pronounce words like Ascot and Avon.
Yes.
Try and say it.
It's Avon.
It's almost as if the O isn't there.
It's Avon.
Stratford-on-Avon.
Try it.
Avon.
Yeah, that's it.
Stratford-on-Avon.
And I sometimes think Avon.
It's embarrassing.
I said Ava.
I always wondered.
I'll tell you a story, Robert, to show that I'm not trying to kind of school you or anything.
This is one of my childhood memories.
I was a very precocious reader and I would often devour books without always understanding what the words were or whatever.
My father had a friend around and he wanted to show, he wanted to show, oh thank you, my son's just brought me a cup of tea, he wanted to show off his clever son.
And so I would read out this, I read out this bit from a book and then I got to this word ETC dot and I put, I didn't, I'd never, I didn't know what it was so I said etic and they both laughed at me affectionately in the way that grown-ups do when they listen to a sort of small child pronouncing etc, etic.
And it haunted me for not just days or months but years afterwards because it's always embarrassing when you've been pronouncing this word wrong and you get found out.
So I'm saying this in the nicest, friendliest way.
There's one other word because I wanted to talk to you about this actually.
I was thinking about this when I was walking the dog this morning.
I was thinking what am I going to talk to Robert about?
And I was thinking how I think this fits in with your thesis about the power structure of England, how England rules the world.
There are all sorts of words in English which have kind of specialist pronunciations which are not obvious from looking at the word, and it's particularly the case among upper class names like Cholmondely, which is pronounced Chumley, and Featherston Hall, which is often pronounced Fanshawe, except when it's not, except when the family's decided that they want it to be pronounced Featherston Hall.
And there's Maudlin, Oxford, and Maudlin, Cambridge, which is spelt Magdalen.
It goes on and on.
I used to live, or rather my mother used to live in a village called Topsham in Devon, which the locals pronounce Topsham.
But if you were kind of, you know, a sort of income or whatever, and you pronounce it Topsham, you look like a fool.
In the same way that somebody's been to New Orleans and discovered that it's pronounced New Orleans sounds.
No, I knew there were words.
I was proud of myself for getting things like Lester Wright.
That's tough for Americans.
That is very tough.
Well done on that.
Rothsley.
I really appreciate you telling me that.
Oh, Rothsley.
How do you pronounce that?
That's the Earl of Southampton, isn't it?
The dedicatee of one of the sonnets.
That word pretty much doesn't exist in English now.
Rothsley or Riothsley.
That's a tough one.
Oh, there's one other, there's one other trap I noticed.
Please.
The word, the surname Cook, C-O-K-E, looks like it's pronounced Coke, but is often pronounced Cook.
Okay.
Cook, yeah.
Are you wise to that one?
It's, it's, it's really, it's really tricky.
That's a new one.
It's really tricky.
Because I know, and bake, and cook bacon is two O's, so that's Cook.
I hope.
Oh, that's easy.
They've given you the clue there, yeah.
But for example, the Cooks of... what would they be?
Hocum in Norfolk.
Cooks are the earls of...
Norfolk's one.
Leicester maybe?
I don't know.
Leicester's, yeah, Norfolk's one.
That's the other complicated thing, that you're often an Earl when your family seat is in Norfolk, say.
Yeah.
You're not the Earl of Norfolk.
You're the Duke of Norfolk.
The Duke of Norfolk, I think, is in Arundel, which is in Sussex.
It gets really complicated.
I know.
I have no idea what's going on there.
I'm looking for a book on that, like how to figure all that out.
I've so enjoyed talking to you and there's loads of room for another podcast.
Let me remind people...
That this is my living.
I really do depend on your goodwill and your generosity to support.
I'm not making this up.
I've cast myself out of the mainstream.
I cannot earn a living out of mainstream journalism.
They wouldn't, even if I wanted to engage with these scumbags, they wouldn't have me and they wouldn't pay me.
So that's over.
So podcasts are what I do for a living.
So please, please, if you can, support me.
I mean, I make this stuff, my stuff available for free if you don't want it or you can't afford it.
But if you can, show your appreciation.
You can buy me a coffee, lots of people do that.
You can support me on Patreon, on Subscribestar, on Locals and on Substack and probably other ways.
Oh yeah, there's PayPal as well, I think I still do.
There's a way of finding me there.
Bitcoin, yeah, I keep forgetting to do my Bitcoin address but I do quite like cryptos.
Anyway, thank you for listening and thank you again, Robert Frederick, for showing me that the hidden life really is best if you're kind of evil and clever and all the things that Francis Bacon was.
Well, thanks a million, James.
I really enjoyed it.
No, it's great and I hope to meet you one day.
I don't think I'm ever going to go to America again, you know.
I think America is so So over.
Not that my country isn't over, but I don't feel that sense of wanting to go to New York, New York anymore.
You know what I mean?
I agree.
I totally agree.
Sad.
And it's all Francis Bacon's fault.
Yep.
I'm glad we figured it out.
Welcome to The Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but it's even better than that.
This is a promo for the event you've all been waiting for.
You wanted me to do a live event in the North.
I'm going to be doing a live event in the North.
In Manchester.
You've been angling for ages to get me to do a podcast with one particular person.
I've held off till now, but finally the moment has come.
Dellingpole meets Ike.
Yep.
I am going to do a live podcast event with the guy you could almost call the God, well, certainly the living Godfather of all the conspiracy theorists.
I mean, most of them have been bumped off, of course, but not David.
And I hope he stays around till this live event.
So implies to me, actually.
It's going to be in Manchester, as I said, and it's on November the 15th.
I'm really looking forward to seeing you all there.
You can get your tickets, book them while they're still available.
You can get them on Eventbrite.
You'll find the details below this little advertlet.
