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Sept. 5, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:18:47
Edition 267 - Guest Catchups

Seth Shostak from SETI, Beatle George Harrison's big sister Louise and former hacker GregHoush...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Really sorry this show is a few days later than I would have liked it.
Life has been a little crazy at the moment.
That doesn't mean that I'm doing so many radio shifts that I'm rolling in money.
Sadly, that's not the case.
It's just been a really busy time and I'm keeping life ticking over, but better late than never, as they say.
No shout-outs on this edition, but please stay in touch.
Keep sending me your emails and your suggestions to the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link there and you can send me an idea for the show, guest suggestion, that kind of stuff.
And I will follow it up and I do see all the emails.
So go to the website theunexplained.tv, the website designed, created and honed by the great Adam Cornwell from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
And send me your communications there.
When you get in touch, tell me who you are, where you are, and you know how you use this show.
Now, on this edition of the show, something slightly different.
I'm going to bring you some of the guests that we've had over the last couple of months on the radio show, because otherwise they wouldn't have gone international via my podcast.
You wouldn't have heard them or known about them.
So on this edition, what I thought I would do is bring you Seth Szostak from SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, who I spoke to here on Friday, about that burst of radiation from space.
It was reported by the media as being possibly a signal from ET.
It was discovered by an observatory in Russia, and it made a lot of news agencies and newspapers here in the UK, like the Daily Mail, reported it.
It was a big deal.
So we'll get an update on that from Seth Szostak first.
Then we'll talk with Greg Hausch, hacktivist, a member, former member of the anonymous organization, talking about hacktivism and why people do that kind of thing, which is, after all, illegal, but they have their justifications for doing it, some of which you may have read in the press.
So Greg Hausch, fascinating guest on this edition of The Unexplained from the radio show, courtesy of talk radio.
Also, I'm going to bring you something slightly different.
One of my favorite guests from The Unexplained, the sister of the Beatle George Harrison.
Louise Harrison lives in Missouri, USA now.
She manages and runs a Beatles tribute band, and they're very good.
And also has written a book about her brother and his life and times.
And I wanted to get her on The Unexplained, which I did, thanks to my friend Roger Sanders in California, who found her for me, to talk about George's great spirituality.
You know that George was the one who was most tied into Indian spirituality.
He was a great friend of Ravi Shankar, the sitar player, and learned a lot from him.
The Beatles also had their time with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi back in the 60s, where they got into a lot of that.
George stayed true to it, though, right until the very end when he died of cancer.
So Louise Harrison, great guest talking about George Harrison and his spirituality from the radio show here on this edition of The Unexplained.
So thank you very much for being part of this as ever.
Please stay in touch.
More great guests coming up on The Unexplained and I couldn't do any of it without you and your support.
Please tell your friends about this show.
All right, first off, let's start with Seth Szostak from SETI in California, talking with me a couple of days ago here about the signal from space that was discovered by an observatory in Russia.
And the media got very excited.
Let's hear that conversation.
So I'm not going to ask you first off how excited you are, because that assumes you are.
But I'll ask you first, Seth, are you excited by this alleged discovery?
Well, we heard about this discovery, as you call it, or tentatively call it.
We heard about it last weekend.
So it's been almost a week since I first got an email about this.
And I have to say that there was something kind of suspicious about it right from the beginning, because this signal was apparently found more than a year ago using this big radio telescope in the Caucasus or at the foothill of the Caucasus in Russia.
And if it was found that long ago and was credible, why didn't the Russian astronomers tell the world?
And that part alone was suspicious.
Right, because one of the things that you told me when we spoke about informing the world about any discovery like this is that as far as you were concerned, the protocols around the world are that you put the information out there, you don't sit on it, and these people appear to have sat on it, and I don't understand, and it sounds like you don't understand, why they would choose to keep this under wraps for more than 12 months.
Yes.
Well, that indeed is a puzzle.
But it suggests, certainly doesn't prove, but it does suggest to me that the reason they were doing that is they themselves didn't think that it was truly an extraterrestrial signal.
I mean, they're not going to win the Nobel Prize by sitting around on important data, and they know that.
They're not stupid people.
They're very competent, actually.
The Russian astronomers are quite competent.
So I just figured that that in itself, and the fact that they weren't telling us about it, it was coming via a third party, a physicist in Italy, that meant that it probably wasn't for real.
But, you know, you develop kind of skeptical attitudes in this biz, and you got to beware of that, because if you become too cynical, then maybe you throw out the baby with the bathwater and you ignore something that might lead you to a real discovery.
Right.
And the way that it's portrayed by the media, and we know that the media is looking through a glass darkly in many ways, you know, there are many tricks of language and tricks that journalists use that make things less clear, not as clear as they might be.
But having said that, what I read about this in the newspapers suggests that it is a very, very strong signal indeed, and something that were it to be something not naturally explainable, you ought to be getting really excited about.
Well, indeed, I mean, you can work it backwards.
The star from which this signal was purportedly coming, HD 164595, a truly lovely name, is 95 light years away, almost 100 light years away.
So you can work the numbers backwards and say, well, how powerful does their transmitter have to be for us to pick up a signal From that distance, of the strength measured by the Russians.
That's an easy calculation.
And it turns out, well, of course, it depends on whether they're broadcasting everywhere in the galaxy or they're deliberately targeting you because they figure, you know, there's a good audience for their advertisers here.
Who knows?
If they're broadcasting everywhere, that would require 100 billion billion watt transmitter.
That's a lot, even for the aliens, I figure, but who knows?
If they're aiming it in our direction, of course, that number can come down by factors of a million or more, but it's still a lot.
So, yeah, they would be a fairly sophisticated society, at least technologically, and that would be exciting.
But on the other hand, anything we hear from is likely to be from a society more advanced than we are.
Right.
So you've got to be like any good detective, like Colombo.
You've got to look at the possibility that this may be what it purports to be or what the papers think it might be.
And I guess you have to go through the steps of checking it out.
So the question is, what will you be doing?
What are you doing now?
Well, we were still observing this source yesterday.
So I don't think we're going to continue to observe it, actually, because the Russians themselves now have made it kind of an official statement that, well, no, don't get too excited.
This was just interference from a military satellite.
And they may know that that's true, and they may not.
They seem to be a bit tentative, and I don't know whether that's because they are tentative or because of the translation from Russian into English.
It became tentative.
But in any case, we did not find the signal in several nights of observing.
The SETI group over at the University of California in Berkeley, I believe, also observed it.
They sent us some data, and they didn't find it either.
Now, what does that mean?
The Russians claim they found it more than a year ago.
Nobody has found it since.
And by the way, that includes the Russians, apparently, because they looked many times.
So you could say, well, it's just the satellite, just as they're saying.
I would put my money on that.
The other possibility, of course, is that it really was aliens, and they went on summer vacation or did something and just turned off their transmitter.
But, you know, you have no proof of that.
So are you going to forget about this now?
I don't know that we'll forget about it, but we're not going to spend a lot of telescope time on it.
I don't think we will.
We may come back to it every couple of months and give it another shot, but I suspect that the Russians are doing that, and I think that the burden should be on them to show that it's a real signal at this point.
You know, I think the public expects that, doggone it, if you want to check these things out, it's just a matter of pushing a couple of buttons and, you know, looking at it again.
That's somewhat true.
But there's an opportunity cost there because you're not looking at something else, which might be a better target.
Telescope time is very precious and you don't give it away gratuitously.
Right.
Well, exactly.
So the question remains, doesn't it, that this thing appeared or was observed, if it was observed in the way that it was observed more than a year ago and was sat upon and then somehow released.
The interesting part of this is the chain, isn't it?
How this material got released and how it got itself into the media.
Yes, I think so.
This is not the way it is supposed to be done.
Not that there's any force of law behind these suggestions or protocols or anything like that.
I mean, they can be readily ignored and, you know, nothing's going to happen to you by ignoring them.
They're just sort of code of good practice, if you will.
But, you know, everybody knows about them and it's just good science.
If you find something that you think is significant and important, you don't keep it, you know, bottled up.
I mean, because you're never going to prove whether it's right or wrong by keeping it bottled up.
I mean, if I think that I found a cure for cancer in my basement, I'm not going to sit on that forever.
I'm going to tell somebody somewhere else and say, look, you try this and see if it works.
And if it does and I'm right about it, well, I'll go to Stockholm and collect my prize, right?
So they know that.
And I'm sure that in the future, you don't have to worry about these kind of false alarms being some sort of cover-up because there's too much incentive to tell the world.
Okay.
Now, there is a problem behind and belying all of this, isn't there?
And the problem is that even if this information was released in good faith, and let's leave aside the fact that there was a gap of more than a year between the so-called discovery and us getting to hear about it, even if it was all released in good faith, what this means is that the next time something like that happens, assuming there is one fairly soon, people are going to say, oh, well, last time it was just radiation from some satellite and it turned out to be a storm in a teacup and who cares anyway?
And then there is the possibility that something big might get ignored.
Well, that is something to think about.
I actually don't believe that it's terribly probable that that will happen.
I mean, there are false alarms.
This is like exploration.
It's like sending Captain Jim Cook into the South Pacific in 1770 and say, you know, find all the islands we don't know about.
And, you know, he's going to see clouds on the horizon and think, oh, Mamie, there's a new island over there.
There'll be mirages, whatever.
He's going to have false alarms.
That's part of the deal in exploration, any kind of exploration.
And we do get false alarms.
This is not the first one by any means, but they don't happen very frequently.
I mean, maybe every five or 10 years, maybe you get a signal that causes a kind of a, you know, a blip in the media.
And this has certainly been a blip in the media, right?
But it doesn't happen every month.
I think that if it happened every, you know, five times a year, yeah, the public would say, hey, you guys are crying wolf an awful lot.
I don't think there are any wolves out there.
But, you know, if it happens once every 10 years, especially as in this case, right after the announcement of a planet around our nearest star, the funny business going on with what's called Tabby Star, I think the public is attuned at the moment to the idea that there may be life in space.
So I think that this story got more play than it would have normally.
Those two things that you've just mentioned, are you doing anything about those?
We are, and we, yes, we are and we have, I guess I should say.
In the case of Tabby Star, this is a star that is seen to get dimmer by an enormous amount occasionally.
I mean, there's something going on there.
And one suggestion is that this is a star where there are some inhabitants nearby and they've built some giant alien megastructure, which is occasionally blocking the light from their star.
We did spend more than a week looking at that with the Allen Telescope Array.
We didn't find any signal.
Mind you, that particular star system is quite far away.
It's, you know, like 16 or 17 times farther away than this HD 164595 star that's causing the commotion this week.
So it's very hard, you know, to rule out anything there because the signals would be, of course, considerably weaker.
But we did spend telescope time on that.
And as far as the new planet found around Proxima Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, it's in the deep south.
We can't see it from the northern hemisphere.
I think this is just proof of the old adage that God put all the interesting astronomy in the southern hemisphere and all the astronomers in the northern hemisphere.
Now, interesting, going back to this week's great hoo-ha about this Russian discovery a year or more ago, the difficulty is, isn't it, that the original story got massive coverage in the newspapers.
You want to see the coverage it got here in the UK, and I'm sure in America it was exactly the same.
But the problem is what you're saying to me about it turning out to be a storm and a teacup by the looks of it, that will not get anything like the same prominence, will it?
Well, you know, I don't know.
It's hard to tell.
I've asked myself, because clearly I've dealt with some of these false alarms in the past, you know, what is it that sets off the public interest?
And I honestly don't have an answer to that.
It's obviously some confluence of events.
And it may be nothing more than the popularity of a new television show like The X-Files.
That did increase the public's interest in this sort of thing.
But look, you know, we're interested in aliens.
I don't think that that's something that the media have done or any other particular institution.
I think that's hardwired into us for the same reason that we're hardwired to be interested in dinosaurs.
They have big teeth.
There is some survival value in being interested in the habits of predators.
So we're interested in dinosaurs.
Kids are interested in dinosaurs.
They're also interested in aliens.
Not so much that they're predators, but they may be competitors or if you're optimistic, possibly even mates.
So I think we have a hardwired interest in this, and that won't go away.
Now, Seth Shostak, I first spoke to you on radio about 12 years ago or thereabouts.
And I've always, in all the encounters we've had on radio and online, been impressed by the fact that you're incredibly sober about all of this.
You have a very scientific, which you have to have, step-by-step approach to it all.
And you've taken your fair share of knocks.
You've had your fair share of false dawns, of which this may be one.
So answer me honestly.
Are you in any way remotely disappointed that this is not what it first of all appeared to be?
No, I'm not.
But I have to say from the get-go, and the get-go was, as I say, almost a week ago, I was a little bit skeptical that this was for real, because on the face of it, if it was really an interesting signal, the people that found it would have let somebody know, and I would have heard about it by a more direct route than reading about it on somebody's blog, which is in fact what happened.
So it's back to the office then, another day.
Yes, yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
Fortunately, we have some fourth-rate coffee available there, so maybe not too bad.
Well, stay in touch and look if anything else breaks, or if this turns out to be more than perhaps we now think it is, please let me know first, won't you?
Howard, I will do that, along with the 27 other people who asked to be first, but I'll definitely keep you in mind.
The amazing Seth Szostak from SETI in Mountain View, California.
And by the sounds of it, if we're looking for a signal from E.T., we're going to have to keep on looking.
But we'll talk to Seth again here.
And maybe next time we speak, we will have discovered a real signal from E.T. or something very close to E.T. Now, from the radio show, let's hear from Greg Hausch.
I struggled with a term to describe Greg Hausch, but I think reformed hacktivist hacker is probably the closest thing we're going to get to a description of what he has done in his life.
His life story is fascinating, and we have to say before we hear from him, of course, hacking is an illegal activity.
It is something that people must not do because there are strong legal consequences that might include time in jail, heavy fines, extradition to another country.
So it's not something that anybody is recommending.
But this is Greg Hausch and his amazing life story from a recent edition of my radio show.
Former hacker, current activist, however you want to put it.
Now, Anonymous, I've heard you talk about the group Anonymous in various places, and you've been asked the question, which I will put to you too.
Are you, it almost sounds like something from the McCarthy era, doesn't it?
But are you now or have you ever been a member of Anonymous?
Am I now?
No.
Have I ever been?
You know, it's really hard to say you're a member of a group that just kind of sort of comes together out of thin air when it's needed.
But if you want to word it that way, then I was.
So Anonymous is more of an idea than a thing.
Yeah, I mean, it really is.
It's an idea that absolutely anyone can use at any time they want, and there is no recourse against them using it.
So show up, use the name, it's yours.
Now, you know, my hearing is not as good as it used to be.
It's all that rock music that I listened to when I was younger.
But I heard an interview with you, one of many that I've been listening to today, where I think you described yourself as, quotes, a dumb kid good with computers who got himself into prison.
Is that so?
That's a pretty good breakdown of it, yeah.
Okay.
Would you care to elucidate on this?
Sure.
You know, I grew up in a family where the law wasn't necessarily a thing that we were told we had to agree with.
My dad was a bank robber and all kinds of other fun things.
You're kidding.
Your dad robbed banks.
Yes.
I mean, that's just my reality.
That's just, you know, how it was.
And so I never really was taught about right and wrong in terms of illegal and legal.
Right and wrong was more a moral choice, not a thing where prison was a consequence, because he never got caught.
And he's passed away now, so I don't really mind talking about it.
But with that, computers came very naturally to me.
They were just amazingly simple.
Everything else is really hard, it seems, but computers, easy.
And so in the early 90s, I was online in late 92, early 93, when there were only a few thousand people online at that point and growing.
Of course, it exploded in 93.
But at that point, the internet Had no security, not even the joke security it has now.
It literally had none.
I mean, people forget what that era was like.
I got my first computer.
Well, if I used my first computer at work in 1995 and started to understand what the internet and computers could do, it was a big revelation.
It was like the opening of a door to sunlight for me.
But to be involved in the very early days, it was all very primitive, wasn't it?
You couldn't just go to a search engine and you're there.
It wasn't that easy.
Yeah, you had to know someone who knew where things were in order to find them.
So presumably then, Greg, when you learn it from the ground up like that, and that's pure coding, if you learn that stuff from the ground up, you become very good at it.
Yeah, you know, I mean, I've always said if you're looking for a really good programmer or security guy, find the guy who at 12 was already writing programs.
Don't find the guy who didn't take programming until he got to college.
One of them is really good.
One of them is possibly okay.
Now, your father was, and I hope you won't mind me saying this, obviously not the best role model when it comes to legality.
So how did you find yourself getting involved in the illegal use of the computers with which you were becoming so adept?
You know, in the early 90s, Linux became a thing, you know, the free open source operating system.
And I had met a kid who knew it and could help me get it set up, who was also doing a lot of illegal stuff on the internet.
And so just by having him help me do the Linux thing and start getting a little deeper into the computer world and into the internet world, I also became really good friends with a bunch of people who were breaking the law.
Now, of course, that's not to associate Linux with breaking the law.
It just so happened that the guy I knew who knew Linux was also breaking the law.
So when I went to him to help me figure out Linux at that time, I also got a real lesson in how you make money on the internet.
Okay.
Now, this almost sounds to me like those people who commit crimes and say, well, don't worry about it because I've stolen this item from you, but your insurance will cover it.
It almost gets a kind of morality around itself, doesn't it?
People who justify their illegal deeds by saying, it's almost like a victimless crime.
Did those things, and we'll talk about the things that you got into at that young age, did they feel like that to you?
They did, and they did for the reason that, you know, I think my poorest enemy at the point was Microsoft, the poorest person I took money from.
Now, that's not excusing it at this point.
I totally understand why that argument is a complete logical fallacy.
But at the time, all I knew was I was taking from the super rich.
What did I care if I hurt the super rich?
Inevitably, though, that sort of thing is going to catch up with you.
Just before we work out how it caught up with you, you know, were you hacking their finances somehow?
No, we were taking software, games, movies, you know, whatever we could before they hit store shelves, before they hit theaters.
And a lot of people were just putting them online to our kind of core small group of people.
You know, this was before BitTorrent and all the other easy ways to pirate things.
And we were getting into these companies.
We were building people inside of them that were our contacts that would leak us things.
We were lots of social engineering.
For me, I was then repackaging that stuff and, you know, selling it overseas on black markets.
Did you never think at any point, remind me how old you were?
I started doing that when I was 13.
Gee whiz.
Boy.
So presumably as a 13-year-old, you were oblivious to the fact that somebody might come knocking on your door one day?
I mean, at 13, I definitely wasn't looking at it that way.
I knew there were possibilities.
I just, you know, wasn't caring.
By about 16, I really knew exactly what was going on and, you know, really how deep I was.
And I kind of wanted out, but, you know, it took a few years of me fighting back and forth before I decided to get out.
And it's the typical story you've seen in every movie.
I was only a few months away from being completely done and out and having my hands off when they showed up.
Which, you know, is a story that you hear an awful lot.
Talk to me about what happened when they did show up.
It's a relatively typical one.
You know, the feds were there to take all my computers, arrest me.
And of course, because the feds are this way, they sent the local cops in first instead of themselves.
Guns were out, all that fun stuff.
And I'm just sitting there wondering why on earth they even have guns on them.
Like, I'm a little computer hacker.
I didn't even own a pocket knife.
You know, there was no violence coming from me.
But you toyed with the man, and the man kicks you back in the end.
Yeah, yeah.
They didn't seem happy at all when they walked in the door and started looking around.
I mean, by the time they got there, I had wiped all my hard drives.
Everything was, I mean, on a push-button trigger to destroy it all.
So they barely got anything off of my stuff.
But you ended up in the can.
I did.
I did.
I ended up going through seven years of court and trials before they finally found a way to put me away.
And what was the crime that you were put away for?
The final charges were conspiracy to commit copyright fraud.
And I got six months in federal max, which is funny for something so short, but that's where they threw me.
And I did my first 27 days in solitary.
What was that like?
Weird.
You know, I've studied a lot afterward about the effects that it has on you and kind of been able to put a lot of that together.
But a couple weeks into solitary where I didn't even have a pillow.
I mean, let alone like a blanket or anything else.
I was just on a metal slab and didn't have a window, anything.
So it was really disorienting.
Within about a two-week period, I was hallucinating.
I was talking to myself.
And you really can't help it.
I mean, at that point in the darkness with random food times, so I couldn't judge if I had slept that day or not.
It was just, it was harsh.
Now, prison can have, as we've seen this side of the Atlantic, two effects on people.
It can be, as it seems to have been in your case, complete aversion therapy.
And you say, I ain't going to do that anymore.
I've learned my lesson.
I've done the time for the crime and that's it.
Or they learn from other inmates and it becomes an academy of crime.
Were you walking that line at any point, or did the shock of being inside and stuck in solitary for part of that time, did it hit you like a freight train and did you realize I've done bad and I ain't doing that again?
You know, it's weird because I don't think I did as bad as they think I did.
However, I do agree that I got prison time that I deserved.
I'm not going to be the guy that said I didn't.
But the one thing you are absolutely right about is the entire time I did spend in time, people were just learning from each other.
Well, people like you.
I had a lot of people ask me questions about, you know, computers and, you know, what they could do online and if they could get into banks and things like that.
And they wanted me to teach them, but I just wasn't going to be a part of that game.
But you could sit there and just listen in on conversations as people, you know, you'd be a circle of like 10 people who had gotten caught for the same crime, and they'd all be exchanging how they got caught so they would all know better not to do those things.
And then they'd be making sure they could contact each other when they got out so they could go right back into it.
And it was just, it was freaky to watch.
So although you didn't pass on the secrets of your trade, which led you into the slammer and led you to decide never again, there were other people who were exchanging their secrets.
Do you think, just as an interesting thing to float out there, that some of these people are still in the cyber community and still doing dirty deeds?
Probably.
I mean, you know, getting caught for a lot of the people that go as deep as kind of I was is a lot of times not a mistake made by you in terms of your computer security or anything else.
For me, it was a snitch.
Someone actually knew who I was in real life and was a friend in that community and got caught himself and then wanted to meet up, hang out.
So I met up and hung out because I'd known the guy for years.
I trusted him.
And at that meetup, he had feds there waiting to take pictures of me, record the conversations we had.
And then a couple weeks later, they show up at my house.
Boy.
And just quickly as we close out this segment of our conversation, Greg, what an amazing story.
The day that you came out of the slammer, of jail, what did you think to yourself?
What did you resolve to do?
Bury my head in work because I knew I couldn't go back to any of my old friends, any of my old ways.
I couldn't hang out anywhere I had online before.
I literally just decided the only thing I have right now is a job.
And I was lucky.
The job that I had had basically, you know, said I was on vacation and brought me right back.
And so.
So you were saved?
Really?
My boss at that company, without him, I think things would have gone a lot worse for me.
So I was very lucky to have an understanding person there waiting for me when I got out.
Boy, you had a rebirth.
Greg Hausch is the man we have online now to The Unexplained at Talk Radio.
What an amazing story.
Guy who found himself learning the ways of computers very young.
Learning how computers can be misused, which people are still doing, and paying the ultimate price for it, ending up in jail and then coming out and determining not to do that again.
But that is not where the story ends.
There's more to come.
I guess the phrase, but I may be wrong, is reformed hacker.
Greg Hausch is online now.
But that doesn't really tell the whole story, does it, Greg?
It does not.
Not by even a mile, I don't think.
So there you are.
You're a kid who is at the very cutting edge of technology at a time when most of us, including me, didn't know what hacking or a hacker was or is.
It was something for governments and banks and big institutions and didn't really impact on our lives.
So you did your time.
You came out determined not to do that again, but to use your technical skills.
You were really lucky and very fortunate.
Got yourself a good job with an employer who effectively erased the bad thing that happened to you.
And there you were, fine, upstanding citizen, ready at whatever age it was to get on with the rest of your life.
Is that so?
Pretty much.
And what did the job entail?
Presumably you were using your computer skills.
Yeah, I had had a really good lawyer who had fought for the fact that if they didn't let me keep using computers after I got out, I would starve to death because I can't do anything else.
And so we had pulled that off.
So yeah, I'd gone to a company that did computer repair and small business networking.
And I was managing all of the texts they had out in the field.
So every time they had a guy go to a small business or your house or, you know, your grandma's house to install antivirus, I was the one that those techs would call whenever they got stuck.
They'd be out in the field.
They'd not know how to fix a problem.
They'd call me.
If ever I wanted somebody to come and look at my computer and find out where the vulnerabilities were, I want you on board, I think.
So it was an okay job.
I could do it, and it was a good way to pass the time.
And they had been really good to me.
So I was pulling, you know, 10-hour days for them, sometimes 12, you know, just to pay it back.
And what about the hackers who you'd known in their little hacking communities?
No contact with them at all after that?
Pretty much none.
There were a couple that were just personal, real-life friends that reached out to kind of, you know, try and at least keep up the friendship a little.
But a lot of them also were still in to the bad things.
And so they wanted their distance.
And I didn't want to get near them for fear that, you know, I was being watched and I might, you know, draw people too much attention.
So I just stayed away and I ended up really bored.
I'm a big fan of the movie.
This is just going off completely at a tangent here.
Catch me if you can.
You know the Leo DiCaprio movie?
One of my favorite movies.
I love that.
I've seen that.
I virtually know all the dialogue.
Frank Abignale was the guy.
He was what they called a paper hanger, a forger.
And he was so good at it when he was very, very young.
Very similar story, I thought, when I was reading about you.
Very similar story to yours, but you were doing it in a cyber way in the modern era.
He did that, ended up being able to get himself on planes as a purported pilot, which he wasn't, became a doctor, which he wasn't, running a hospital department and all that sort of stuff.
Very similar kind of story.
But the twist in it was that he ended up working for the feds in the end because he was so good at what he did that the government, law enforcement, realized we need this guy on board because if we're going to catch the bad guys, we need somebody who knows the very deepest techniques of the bad guys.
What I'm getting around to is, did anybody at that stage ever approach you and ask you if you might be able, Greg, to use your skills on behalf of the White Hats?
Well, not on behalf of the White Hats, but very specifically the FBI multiple times during my prosecution.
I mean, they were the reason I was getting prosecuted, attempted to turn me.
And, you know, the thing with Frank Abignale there, when they got him to work for them, he specifically was working in the check fraud and bank fraud, you know, sector with the FBI.
And that's because that's the crimes he had committed.
When I was caught and, you know, going through trial after trial and, you know, working my way towards prison, basically, the offers they kept giving me were to work against basically my old friends, my old scene, my old people, you know.
And I just, that's not a thing I'm ever going to do.
I'm not going to.
We've got a phrase over here.
And, you know, not that I'm calling you a common thief kind of thing, but there is honor among thieves.
Yeah, and in this instance, there was.
What was really funny was one of my skill sets online, you know, just to kind of say it like this, is getting into small online communities who don't want to be infiltrated.
It's just a skill set I've owned over, you know, 20 plus years online, right?
So during my prosecution, I did go to the FBI and said, there are small online communities that are molesting children and pedophiles, trading information.
If you want, because I want, I'll go get all of their home addresses for you.
Send me against them because I hate those people.
I hope they rot in jail, right?
And the response I got was, well, we didn't catch you for that, and we're not trying you for that, so we can't use you for that.
Meaning, because I wasn't a pedophile, I couldn't help them find pedophiles.
That sounds like a ridiculous lost opportunity for law enforcement.
That's how I saw it, and that's how my lawyers saw it, too.
I mean, we were trying to find a way where I could do something to get, you know, not in jail and that wouldn't make me a turncoat against my old friends and would also allow me to do something that I would feel good about.
And they just, they wouldn't go for it.
And how did that make you feel about the good guys?
It made me feel like the good guys weren't there to be the good guys, but they were just there for their specific thing.
You know, the ones that I was dealing with were specifically the ones working with the computer hacker divisions and the cybersecurity divisions.
And they didn't care about the pedophiles.
There was a group of people in the FBI whose job it was to go after them.
Right.
So since I wasn't dealing with that group, they didn't care about those victims.
Okay, so we're talking about the screw-up, the mess-up theory of history here, really.
It wasn't that there was any sinister reason for them not wanting you to help them investigate those things.
It just wasn't their department, and they didn't want to bother putting you in touch with the other department.
Seemed to be the case.
God, that's a terrible story.
If you ever did, you should tell your congressman about that one, I think, and name a few names, but not on this radio station right now.
Okay, I want to get into talking about the group Anonymous.
Anonymous has been something that I've been reading about in news for the last several years.
And you have been, let's say, connected with.
Who are they?
What are they?
I mean, if I ask you, who are they?
Silly question because they're anonymous, but you know, what are they?
Right.
It's a group, if you want to use that word, but it's not any specific individuals.
It's, you know, you could be anonymous tomorrow if you went online, adopted the patterns of speech, wrote a press release saying you were anonymous, used our logos.
I mean, all of that.
That would just be, boom, now you are anonymous.
And that's really who anonymous is.
Whoever wants to use the name at this given time.
Early on, it was, you know, groups of people like me who were, you know, kind of building out what the idea is, but now it's anyone.
You said used our logos, so you still feel an affinity by the sounds of it.
I do.
I mean, I still have rough drafts of half of the logos that are in heavy use right now sitting on my computer because me and friends, you know, made them.
Now, you can go online and read what Anonymous has done.
Perhaps the biggest example that most of us will know from watching the news is the periodic appearance of a guy wearing a Guy Fawkes mask doing some of the work that maybe security agencies we hoped would be doing, and that is to take down the communications networks of 4-1 jihadis.
That's possibly the biggest connection that most of us have.
We know most about that.
Talk to me about that, how that evolved.
That one is a really sad and interesting story at the same time for me and for a lot of the Anans because there's this kid, his name was Juniid Hussein, and he was a hacker with a group.
They called themselves Team Poison, but they were kind of an offshoot of Anonymous.
And they would randomly be Anonymous, randomly be poisoned, but they were around everything, you know?
And they learned a lot of their tactics, and especially this kid from the stuff that we as Anonymous at that point when I was really heavily involved, what we were doing, he really grew up inside of Anonymous.
And when ISIS came about, he fled from England.
He's from the London area there.
And he went to ISIS and joined up.
And they gave him a house, eight wives, a bunch of cars, and just said, here you go, you're our new best friend.
Because what he brought them was the ability to build out a big Twitter presence, a big Facebook presence, a big website presence, and try and recruit online for foreign nationals to do things in their country, but also to come to ISIS Where they were.
And using all the skills that he learned around Anonymous, he did a really good job.
As we know, about two and a half, three years ago, Isis out of nowhere became really good at the internet almost suddenly.
And that was his work.
And for us, that felt really bad because a lot of the stuff he was doing was stuff he had learned from watching us or taking part of things with us or even stuff he had figured out and then we had learned from him.
But it was a mutual respect thing before he ran off.
And so a lot of Anons felt like it was on them to deal with the stuff he was doing online, to try and take down those websites, take down those Twitter accounts, take down those Facebook pages that they were using to recruit.
And that's sort of where that started.
So it was personal.
It was very personal at that point.
Okay, so a hackers collective, that's anonymous.
How did they go about, because they have had some success.
I've got a report here from CNN.
I think it was last November.
This is what the news report says.
The hacktivist group Anonymous has reportedly uncovered plots by ISIS for terrorist attacks in various places they name to occur on the 22nd of November.
A subgroup of Anonymous called Op Paris Intel published a statement claiming they found details about an imminent attack by IS just over a week after 130 people were killed in Paris.
In other words, you've had your, if you can call them, successes.
Yeah.
There are a few groups of people kind of working at the same goal that are using the anonymous moniker and other hacker monikers to do this.
And I think they've done a great job.
I mean, not only those, but they have taken down thousands of Twitter accounts that were just being used to try and recruit youth from other countries, which is, I think, a horrible thing.
And just all the other stuff they've done.
There was a small offshoot of the main group who actually were reporting some of their findings to the FBI.
And, you know, some people disagreed with that and thought they could just do it the vigilante style that we're all used to with Anonymous.
But in the end, it did lead to some interesting interactions.
Well, we've read about this, of course, and presumably it's still ongoing.
It will make some people uneasy, though, Greg, and you'll know what I'm about to say because it's been said to you before, that it's uncontrolled.
The people who are doing this, all right, they're doing it on behalf of all of us, supposedly, and the aim is to bring down the communications which will stop the terrorist attacks or at least limit them.
But there will be people who say, well, you're not controlled.
You need to be controlled by some government or some agency.
You can't just go out there and the phrase is take the law into your own hands.
Right.
So the real question is the actor that is, sitting on the subway train in New York with a big gun.
Yes, absolutely.
Vigilantism is the right word to describe this stuff.
And at this point, I've got to say I accept that word.
I really do.
I believe it is what is going on, and I believe it is right.
When governments don't act, the people have to.
And if we've got a word that describes it, use that word.
But it's illegal.
There may be a justification for it, and we all know what that is.
But if it isn't the FBI doing it, if it's not MI5 or MI6 doing it over here, then it's without the law.
Absolutely.
So at that point, you've got to ask yourself, do you really believe that right and wrong and legal and illegal are synonymous with each other?
Because I don't.
There would be a lot of people in positions of power, of course, who would sharply disagree with what you're saying.
You know, they say there is black and white, there is good and bad, there is legal and illegal.
You cannot disagree with that.
Oh, there are a lot of people who will disagree with me and all sorts of positions of power.
And that's fine for them to disagree.
But the only reason they're disagreeing is because the things that we do affect their power.
Now, I have no view on this.
That's my job.
But there is the possibility, isn't there?
But then we see security services do this as well and governments, that you may get it wrong.
So if you target an individual you believe is trafficking information that may lead to a terrorist attack and you take down that person's systems and you out them, there is always the possibility that you as individuals without government, outside government or agencies, have it wrong.
And that's a tremendous responsibility to bear, isn't it?
It absolutely is.
And it has happened a couple times, actually.
The people who did it in both instances that went really public when, you know, let's say Anonymous got it wrong, were told multiple times before they went forward with names that no one believed that yet.
Please wait.
We're still gathering information.
But they seemed to want to be the ones that told the press.
And that's how it happened.
I think the people who do these types of ops and do this type of work really don't want to get it wrong.
I will say this, though, that if the governments of the world were doing the various things that anonymous and other hacktivists find themselves doing, then it might be getting done with a little more oversight and a little more checks and balances.
The only reason the anons are doing it is because the governments aren't.
And I completely accept your point, but there will be other people listening to this right now pointing at their radio saying, that's not your job.
Absolutely.
And I sit there a lot of times when I've been part of these types of operations, staring at the wall for hours afterwards saying, didn't someone go to college for this?
Why is it on people like me to do things like this?
And it is because we believe it's right.
Ryan.
And if we've said that anonymous is, by definition, by what it is, it's an amorphous group of people who come together at a particular time to do a particular thing.
If part of the organization, and if we look at organizations like, and I'm trying to think of an example, and the only one that I can think of is the mafia, and that's not really analogous with what you do.
But, you know, organizations like That.
If somebody gets it wrong, if they err, if they make a mistake, there is a discipline.
We've all seen the Godfather.
We know what punishments are rained down on those people.
If somebody in Anonymous makes a major mistake, and presumably from what you've hinted just now, that happens, are there punishments?
Are there systems of controls, checks, and balances on them?
There are.
You know, one of the bigger ones was someone who goes by the handle the Anon message.
And I'll say that because just like most of the other people around Anonymous, we all got very angry with how that person acted in regards to some events where names were posted that shouldn't have been.
And a bunch of other Anons decided at this point the only way to make that person go away was to attempt to put their real name on the internet and to come after them and tell everyone in the media that they do not represent us, whoever us happened to be at that point.
But it's really hard to do because, again, since it's anyone who wants to use the name, you don't really have any kind of hierarchical structure.
It literally has to be that they become the target of another op.
So the greatest sanction that you have as a group of people, I say you have, they have, is that you can remove the thing that is your name, the anonymity.
If you remove the anonymity, you expose somebody, you put them out there, you make them naked to the world.
For years before Anonymous became such a global thing, that was the biggest attack that an Anon would use against another Anon was, I can find your name because that's one of our skill sets.
Don't upset me.
Go with the flow.
Get things.
The idea of the Hive mind was that there would be a consensus and you would go with that consensus.
And the people who worked against it, well, the fear for them is that Anonymous would then turn their eyes on you and you're the next target.
And so it was kind of self-healing in that way.
Greg Haush, a fascinating guest, I think you will agree from my radio show at Talk Radio.
Let's hear now from Louise Harrison, who was a guest in July on the radio.
The sister of George Harrison, now 85 years of age, living in Missouri, she runs a Beatles tribute band these days and has written a book about her brother, her remarkable, amazing brother, who was always as much as I love John and Paul and Ringo.
George was always my favorite Beatle for his spirituality, his integrity, and the fact that he stuck to his beliefs all the way through his life.
And he lived an interesting life and he lived, from what I've seen and read, a very decent life.
So I was very keen to know more about George Harrison and his spirituality.
And thanks to my friend Roger Sanders in California, I was able to connect to Missouri and to Louise Harrison.
The phone line is not the very best quality, but you can certainly hear every word that she says.
So let's get the story of Louise Harrison's little brother, who became a Beatle, George Harrison.
You know, I was interested in the program that you had before, this one, where you were talking about finding life on other planets.
And I often joke about the fact that I believe that I came from another planet, and my spacecraft crashed by mistake on this one and dropped me off.
In Missouri?
Well, it didn't drop me off in Missouri to begin with.
That's just where I happen to be now.
So look, I mean, you know, joking apart, it sounds to me like you share some of that spirituality that your brother had.
Well, actually, you know, the whole thing is so crazy because the spirituality came from my mom and dad, mostly from my dad.
And actually, I finally wrote a book about a couple of years ago because I was so frustrated because everybody was talking about George being the quiet beetle when he wasn't the slightest bit quiet and him talking about how he suddenly, you know, in his later years, discovered spirituality when that had been a part of our lives right from the time we were little kids.
Right.
I mean, were you always in...
No, you don't have to be in church to be spiritual.
In fact, that was one of the arguments that my dad had was that he found, his feeling was that all of the religions were actually getting you away from the feeling of God because he felt that the Creator was not, what's the word, it didn't divide itself into bits.
The Creator of everything looked at everything all in one big, you know, what would you say?
If you put it all in one big bowl, but you don't separate it all out.
And so that was the way we were brought up, to believe that we're all God's children and we don't have to be killing each other because somebody thinks they've got a different God.
Wow, well, that was for that era, that was what, sort of 1950s, that was a very advanced way to think, wasn't it?
Well, my dad was a very advanced man.
And that, again, is one of the main reasons why I was finally talked.
For 40 years, people had been saying to me, when he's going to write a book, and I said, there's so many books about the Beatles, he certainly don't need one more.
But people would say to me, yes, but you have a different perspective because you're not looking at the Beatles as, you know, fame and fortune.
You're looking at them as part of the family.
And so I said, well, okay, so finally, and again, because there was so much misconception, I thought, well, okay, maybe I should try to give the true thing that happened rather than the bunch of nonsense.
And it was funny because actually when I wrote the book, I gave the manuscript to an agent and he took it down to all of the major book companies in the country.
And he came back after a few months and he said, you know, I'm not getting much interest in this.
Everybody's asking me, does she have any real good juicy dirt on the Beatles?
And did you look at it?
I said, well, that's not what I'm interested in doing.
So if that's what you've got to do to write a book, then forget it.
But anyway, again, I have a Beatles tribute band called Liverpool Legends.
And the guys in this band had talked to me a lot.
we're sitting in the dressing room at night in between the acts of our show, and they knew a lot of the things about my early life.
And they said, you know, Lou, you really should try to let people know what's, you know, what the real thing was, as opposed to all of the myths.
I think that's terribly important because, look, it's half a century ago, and unless you do it, it's going to get forgotten, isn't it?
That's true, yeah.
Well, I did finally get the book out, but again, I ended up with a very, very small little mom-and-pop book company, and so he hasn't really been able to market the book.
And so, although it's turned out to be a pretty good book, and those people that have gotten it seem to think it's pretty good, but it hasn't gotten much, what would you say, hasn't got legs yet.
What's the title of the book?
What's it called?
What's it called?
It's called My Kid Brothers Band, also known as the Beatles.
And the reason I called it that was because when I first came to this country in 1963, my mom started sending me the singles, you know, that the Beatles were putting out.
And being a bit of a ham, as you may have noticed already, I started running around all the radio stations within a couple of hundred miles of where I was living.
And I was going in there and I was saying, hey, this is my kid brother's band in England, and they're number one in England, and maybe you should be playing them over here.
And of course, I didn't use the word beetle because, you know, back then they would have thought I was, you know, what you call exterminating company or something.
So, you know, that word was not being used in any other context except for an insect back then.
So I just kept calling it my kid brother's band.
But anyway, as far as the book goes, I'm not trying to, you know, beat the bushes for the book, but there is a possibility of people.
I have somebody in California now that has a website called Letters from Mum, M-U-M, and they are also, you know, getting the book out if people order it from them.
But that's no big deal.
Let's get back to talking to them about George, okay?
Totally, yeah.
One quick thing, though.
You said that you were in America from 1963.
Now, they went on the Ed Sullivan show.
Was it that year or the year after?
So you were there before they were.
1964.
Right, so you were there before they were.
Yeah, I spent most of that year.
In fact, you know, after I wasn't having too much interest coming from the radio stations and I was taking their records around, I started getting the cash box and billboard and variety magazines and studying how the American music business works because it's so different from Britain.
You know, in Britain, if the BBC notices you, that's all you need.
But in the United States, at that time, there were at least 6,000 independent little radio stations.
So it was a totally different endeavor.
So I started writing to Brian Epstein and George Martin and Dick James and relaying to them how the thing worked over here and what they needed to do.
And I was telling them that they needed to get a far better record label, one that had a lot of clout, because unless the people in the radio stations were getting a Cadillac or something for playing the records, they weren't going to be playing it.
In the days of Payola.
Payola going on, you know.
So I was trying to advise them as to what was the best way to infiltrate into this country.
So I spent months and months doing that.
So you paved the way, and this is something I've never heard before, Louise.
I'm really pleased that we spoke.
You paved the way for their invasion of America.
Let's face it.
Well, yeah, that's another of the things that the guys in my band keep laughing about.
They say, you know, 50 years later, nobody still knows anything about what you did.
And I'm going to be 85 next month.
They say, you know, maybe you should let people know before you actually go back to your own planet.
I think, well, I hope we're helping in our own little way.
Now, I want to talk about your brother.
Let's get to it now.
What was it when he was little and when you were both in Liverpool?
Were there any signs that you saw?
Now, you say that you were both spiritual because of your dad, but were there any signs that you saw in him that he was special, that he was different?
Well, in one way, yes.
I remember, you see, I was 11 when he was born, so obviously he was my baby brother.
And I had two other brothers in between, he and I. So, you know, I was used to, you know, taking them out for walks and taking them to the movies.
And, you know, if mum and dad went to the movies occasionally, I would look after them.
But I remember George being, at one point, he was, this is an example.
When he was about 12, he had, I don't know, some kind of sickness that he was in hospital for a week.
And as you know, in England, they don't allow people to be coming from the outside and spreading their germs over the patients.
We were only allowed to visit him once.
Well, it was on a Sunday afternoon, and there was myself and my husband at that time, my mum and dad, and two other people that were from George's school, and somebody else, I can't remember who there was, but there was like five different bunches of people that came to visit him.
And the thing that I found remarkable about him was that even though we were all different little bunches of people, he never at any time let any of us feel as though we weren't welcome.
He would talk to each different little group and, you know, whatever they were wanting to talk about and kept everybody feeling very, very engaged.
And I remember thinking afterwards, why, he could make a very, very good diplomat with the way he was able.
And the other thing about him always, right throughout his life, was that any of his friends, even If it had been years in between seeing them, he would always be able to pick up a conversation almost where he left it off the last time he saw them.
He had a great, great memory for the people and the things they were interested in.
And so he had a real genuine interest, not in necessarily in people per se, but in the actual person and what they were all about, and a real genuine interest in making them feel comfortable and being concerned about their concerns.
Now, he became this person who joined the Beatles and they went to India and they met the Maharishi, which we'll get into.
But at that early stage, was there any sign that George was interested in other cultures, other religions, other people's way of seeing things?
Well, though again, that came from our early life because when I was born, my dad was working with the Cunard Steamship Company, and he was going on cruises all around the world.
So I can remember as a very small child sitting at my dad's feet and hearing him telling me stories about all the different countries, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Australia, Adelaide, and all of these different cities and places he'd been to and telling me about the different kinds of people and the different things that they, the different lifestyle they had and the different cultures they had.
And so, of course, my younger brother, he would hear the same stories as well, you know, as he got to the age to be interested.
So right from the get-go, we were totally, totally aware that it wasn't just Arnold Grove that the world, you know, that there was a huge planet out there and there were loads and loads of different things and different kinds of people on it and that we were all again part of what the creator had created.
So, you know, very early signs of what George later became.
What about his interest in music?
Now, Liverpool, we both know, was a great melting pot, and one of the reasons was, you said about the Cunard connection and the great ships.
Everybody had an uncle in the Merchant Navy, and your uncle in the merch, as they called the Merchant Navy, would bring back records, rock and roll records, from the U.S., from New York and from every part.
That's true.
In our case, it was Uncle George who was in the Merchant Navy.
But I think just from the little story that my mum told me, his initial interest in music started when Elvis Presley was on TV there one time.
I don't know whether it was a clip that was flown in or what.
I don't think Elvis ever actually went to England and did a show, but it was a clip on TV.
And my mum said that a few nights after Elvis had been on TV, that George, he was probably only about 14 at the time.
And she said he came this one evening, he came, he said, almost like whispering in her ear, he said he was kind of embarrassed and a little bit, what was this word, you know, sort of tentative about even talking to her.
And she said, he came over and he said, hey, mum, he said, what's up, love?
She said, hey, do you think, remember that guy that was on TV the other night?
And she said, yeah.
She said, well, do you think maybe you could save up and get me a guitar?
So she said, well, yeah, I could probably do that.
So she said, you'd like to learn the guitar?
He said, yeah, he said, I think so.
I think I could, that's the kind of job I could do.
And that was the start of his interest in wanting to learn the guitar.
All wonderful stuff, Louise.
I want to get to the spirituality and what George later became and the connection with the Maharishi and the tie-up with the sitar ace Ravi Shankar, who was a very big influence on George.
I want to talk about all of that stuff and about how George handled fame and the fortune that came with that and the notoriety, because he wasn't a great one for all of that.
So this hour, we have George Harrison's big sister, Louise Harrison, and thank you very much to my good friend Roger Saunders in California, who I know will be listening now, who helped to make this happen.
Roger Saunders is a man steeped in music, and without his contribution to all of this, I would not have had Louise on tonight.
Louise, we've talked about the early years and how it was pretty obvious that George was special and how he saw Elvis on the TV and thought he would like to do that for a job and then started to learn the guitar.
From what I've read and heard, but you know what documentaries are like and biographies are like, it all sounded like a bit of a roller coaster from that point.
It all happened very quickly for him and the other three.
Yes.
What exactly were you leading into there?
Well, just basically the speed at which George learned the guitar, got into music, met the other three of the Beatles.
They were the, what were they, the quarrymen, the silver Beatles, and then there was a rapid progression to being what they became.
I remember many times I'm asked the question about the names of the Beatles.
How did they come by their name?
And I think the best one to explain that was when John had that inspiration one time.
And he said, one day an angel came floating down on a flaming pie and said to us, henceforth you will be Beatles with an A. Didn't that appear on the cartoon Yellow Submarine as well?
It may have done, but that was John's inspiration.
They all got fed up of telling everybody all of the different names they'd gone through.
And so he came up with this just to basically shut people up and say, here, this is the ultimate explanation and you don't need anything more than this.
John, of course, was always a great one for getting himself into trouble with the words that he would say once comparing the Beatles, of course, to Jesus Christ, which in America was a massive sin.
And there were people burning Beatle records and stuff, but they came through it all.
How did George?
He spent years trying to explain that one away, because he was actually on the side of Jesus rather than against him.
And, you know, he never ever said that they were better than Jesus.
All he ever said was that there were more people flocking to Beatle concerts than were flocking to church those days, which was totally true.
But again, well, as you may, I don't know if you're watching or aware of anything that's going on in America right now, but I remember from in England, I think we have a relatively sane way of electing people, but over here it's just total chaos.
And so, you know, that's the way Americans do things is they go way beyond the call of duty.
And I think the same thing happened with that quotation of John's.
No, I saw the Republican convention this week, and I guess the Democrat one will be exactly the same.
The Beatles found fame, of course, and it happened very quickly.
In 64, they went on the Ed Sullivan Show in America.
They became massive in the United States.
Not possible for them to leave their hotel room because they would be mobbed by fans, desperate to get a piece of them.
How did George handle fame?
Because he was more spiritual, he was the quiet guy, how did it impact him?
Well, he found it to be a disaster, really, in many, many ways, because the bad part of fame, and I've observed this too, not that I've been famous myself, but the bad thing is, and especially in their case, is that all of the predators come out of the woodwork.
And, you know, first of all, they had somebody come along that, again, George was furious about it, but somebody came along and I won't mention her name, got John hooked on heroin.
And, you know, people were doing all kinds of things.
They were coming up and saying, oh, you know, we'll do this for you and we'll do that for you.
But all they were doing really was trying to, you know, knuckle in on the fame and the fortune.
I think we call them hangers-on, don't we?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, it was just really disgusting, the things that went on.
And, you know, I mentioned this quite a bit in my book about how when people were patting them on the back, you had to be careful that he took the knife out after they left the pat, you know.
Because people were just so awful.
Not everybody, of course, but there were so many predators that just were disgusting.
Well, that explains.
Sorry, Louise.
I'm sorry to interrupt it.
We've got a bit of a delay on the phone line, so it makes it a little difficult for both of us, doesn't it?
But we're getting there.
That explains the fact that George, in a clip that we heard at the beginning of this, said, I've experienced it all, I've been through everything, and nothing was giving me any answers.
And that is how once the Beatles discovered, and I'm guessing it was George who discovered the Maharishi first, but I don't know that story.
Perhaps you will know that.
They discovered India and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
For George, this was the answer to all of that rubbish, all of the falseness, and all of the madness around them.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I met Ravi myself many times, and he did have a sort of a calmness about him that was very much like my dad.
And my dad was only five foot seven, so he wasn't a big, tall guy either.
And Dad was always very, very calm.
I can never, ever remember, except for once in my entire life, when he was actually angry.
Very, very calm person.
And that same demeanor, Ravi Shankar had, and he had it because of what he believed in.
And I think George was drawn to that because, you know, although he'd grown up with Dad, Dad was a whole different experience to, once he got into the Beatles and was being pulled at from every side for all kinds of different reasons, to be able to find somebody who was calm and collected and had a center to himself.
And George was drawn to that because for a change, he could get into something that really mattered instead of all of the fluff that was going on around him, the fluff of the glitz.
And a great quote that Sam, my technical producer, has just reminded me of is that George said that Ravi Shankar was the only person who impressed him because he didn't try to impress him.
Exactly, exactly.
You know, it's funny because in my lifetime, I've met dozens and dozens of celebrities, and there's probably a few of them that are really sincere and genuine.
But for the most part, they stand there and sort of preen themselves as much as to say, oh, you poor things, you may stand here and adore me.
But George rejected all of that.
And so you're saying that Ravi was the gateway to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is that right?
Oh, absolutely.
Because, you know, for a change from the people he had been meeting, here was somebody that had that calmness and had something genuine and something serious about him that was more in tune with what George probably remembered from his early childhood.
I think people over here didn't really understand, though, when George in particular, but you know, these black and white films on the news in England were talking about the Beatles are getting into transcendental meditation, which was what the Maharishi did.
I don't think over here people really understood what that was all about, but this became so much a part of George's life, didn't it?
Yes, very much so.
I think the great thing for him with transcendental meditation was he was able to, you know, get away from, to shut himself off from all of the clamor and the noise that was going on around him and to be able to become quiet and center himself in the realization that we, the being within us, that the life force within us is actually a little drop of God.
And that was what our father taught us, that our life is a drop of God.
And we're all connected because each one of us has a drop of God within us.
And the other thing, too, that Dad taught us was that what abilities we had and skills And abilities that we had, they also are gifts from God, and that we have to use them wisely.
And that was what Dad always said to us, which is why George was so concerned about, you know, when he started to learn the guitar, that he wanted to become the best at it that he possibly could.
Because there, again, Dad always said, whatever abilities you have, those are gifts from God.
And whatever gifts the Creator give you, you should use them wisely.
Louise, George said, and we heard in that clip, he said that he was very interested in discovering what death was all about, because that is from the moment we are born, we are heading towards that.
And great writers and thinkers over generations have tried to understand it.
Far as you know, in your communications with George over the years, did he come to understand the meaning of death as he faced it himself?
Well, I think so.
I think he did.
It's kind of hard to say because I didn't talk to him quite a lot in that last year of his life.
Unfortunately, the people close to him didn't encourage him to, in fact, didn't even let his family know how ill he was.
So we didn't have a chance to speak to him much.
But I think he'd always believed from the teachings that he followed that the eternal being or the drop of God that is within us, once we leave the body,
that that drop of God is still alive and what we call our eternal soul, which so many religions do believe, that we have the life force is not something that you can kill.
So that's one of the things that I believe also, that the life that I have with me right now is going to continue even when I leave my body.
And let's face it, I'm going to be 85 next month, so I probably won't be with the body for too much longer, although it's going to change.
Look, one of the stories about, and Paul Gambaccini referred to it in that news bulletin that I did on the day that we got the news that George had died and I had to tell London on the radio that that had happened.
Paul Gambaccini referred to the fact that because George lived...
Because he practiced what he preached, when somebody broke into his mansion in Henley on Thames and was effectively trying to rob the place and stabbed him, he was chanting Hare Krishna at the time.
He was chanting effectively peace and love as that was happening.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, again, when you say that George said what he believed, another teachings from my dad was he always quoted to us, this above all, to thine own self be true, and it follows as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to anyone.
And that was very, very prevalent in our upbringing, that particular quotation by Shakespeare.
After having lived a spiritual life as George did, and having lived this life of peace and being this person who many people saw as a great beacon of calmness and a wonderful man, did he feel that it was a particularly cruel blow, bearing in mind all those things, that he was struck down with cancer?
I don't think so, because let's face it, whatever illness we get is basically our gateway to leaving the body.
So he was seeing this as part of the natural cycle, and if you have to complete your journey that way as opposed to another way, then so be it.
All things must pass, as he himself said.
Yeah.
I don't think he was, you know, I mean, let's face it, nobody's happy to find out they've got a bad disease, but there are certain ways of accepting, you know, the things that you cannot, what is it?
I think the Alcoholics Anonymous thing, they have something about accept the things that you cannot change.
And I think that's very true for anybody to look at.
You know, by all means, do everything you possibly can to change the things that you can change.
But if it's something that's beyond your powers, then accept it gracefully and don't fight against it because you're just going to be worse off if you fight against something that you have no power over.
The seconds are ticking down on us, Louise, and thank you very much for doing this.
One final thing to ask you.
A story that I've heard, I think it was on a documentary, but it's been written about, and I don't know whether you heard anything about this, was that at the point of death, the story goes, George, and I know this will sound bizarre to some people, apparently physically glowed, and that was reported by Olivia, his wife.
Have you heard that?
And can you confirm that?
I've heard that, but I mean, that's how she saw it, I guess.
Right.
You know, it's not something that I know anything about because I wasn't there.
And in a few words, when you think of George, what do you think?
How do you remember him?
What do you remember?
As a very, very wonderful, friendly, lovable, full of life, full of fun, and very, very caring brother.
He was a joy, a delight, right from the first time I looked at him when he was eight hours old, the first time my mum allowed me to hold him.
And I remember looking at him then and looking at his beautiful long eyelashes and his big brown eyes and his fingernails, which are all completely grown, because he waited an extra three weeks before he entered the world after he was due.
So he waited until he was completely finished.
And I remember looking at him and thinking, wow, this is the most fantastic brother you could possibly have.
Some of the great guests from my radio show that you can hear every Sunday night on National Talk Radio In the UK.
More great guests coming soon here on The Unexplained Online.
Thank you very much for your support for my activities.
You know, sometimes it isn't easy and it hasn't been easy and it's a bit of a struggle.
You know, life, one way or another, you'll know about this.
And your constant support for me and the nice things that you've been saying and the guidance that you give me, because I don't think that I'm God's gift to broadcasting, all of those things are really gratefully received at my end.
And thank you very much indeed.
Thanks very much to my webmaster, Adam, at Creative Hotspot, for all of his hard work.
Another edition of The Unexplained coming very soon.
Until next, we meet here on The Unexplained online around the world.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London.
And please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And please, above all, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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