1170: Gareth Gore | This Vatican Cult Corrupts Courts and Sells Slaves

1170: Gareth Gore | This Vatican Cult Corrupts Courts and Sells Slaves

This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Gareth Gore: Most normal organizations when confronted with like super serious allegations of like human trafficking, grooming of kids, drugging your own members, spiritual abuse, breaking the seal of confession, they would come out and they would say, these are really serious allegations.

We are gonna take them very seriously. We're gonna investigate them, get to the bottom of them, and if anyone needs to be brought to justice, we'll ensure that's done. Op Oprah's day's response has been stick its fingers in its ears and go, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. This guy's a liar. This guy's a liar. And I think that's really quite telling.

This is an organization that has zero intentions of addressing its failures and addressing abuse inside of its ranks.

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show, I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a [00:01:00] better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional national security advisor, real life pirate or special operator.

And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, and of course I appreciate it when you do that. I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and Cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show, we're talking about a cult, a century plus old cult that permeates the Catholic Church, involves legislators, bankers, even justices of the Supreme Court, right here in the United States.

It's called Opus Day, and if you've seen the Da Vinci Code, you have a bit of an introduction to it, maybe a little fictionalized introduction to it. The truth of this called, actually, I find even stranger than the book and the movie, albeit without the murderous albino monk, here [00:02:00] to unwind all the craziness, is investigative journalist Gareth Gore, who started investigating the downfall of a major bank and found the insanely strange rabbit hole that we are discussing here today.

Alright, here we go with Gareth Gore. Thanks for coming down here, man. TYX Studios hooking up. This place is, uh. Well, first of all, one of the nicest studios in London. But thanks for coming on down. I know we tried to do this before. I have to say, when you first pitched me this, and I'm sure that I'm not the first person to give you this reaction, I thought, okay, what kinda Looney Tune Q Anon conspiracy theory nonsense is this because it just, it actually sounds too insane.

And then I obviously, as our conversation continued, I realized, oh, okay, this guy brought receipts. This is not like a weird internet meme conspiracy thing. This is a historical cult that has just not been put in check for how long? A hundred years. Almost a hundred years. Yeah. It's shocking. I read the whole book.

If I didn't read the book, I, I still probably wouldn't actually believe you. [00:03:00] So hopefully the audience comes along for the ride here, because it is one of those things where it's so ridiculous. You just think, how is this possible? What led you to investigate connections between this secretive group and the United States Supreme Court?

Gareth Gore: I mean, you are not alone in having that conclusion. I think even people that have been inside. Still years later trying to work out what the hell happened to them. Yeah. What happened. Yes, exactly. But I mean, so I, I fell into this completely by accident. So I, I'm a financial reporter by background.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Gareth Gore: And basically what happened was that in 2017, a huge bank in Spain just collapsed overnight, which kind of, you know, in this day and age isn't cool. It can happen. I was

Jordan Harbinger: there for the 2008 financial crisis banks collapsed. Yeah, precisely.

Gareth Gore: And in fact, up until that point, the previous 10 years, I'd spent a lot of time kind of traveling to Sweden, Germany, Russia, even reporting on bank failures and kind of reporting from the ground, trying to work out what happened.

And at first it seemed like the same old story of like, you know, this bank, a bunch of [00:04:00] guys. And they were almost all guys had, you know, taken too many risks, allowed things to get outta control, and kind of were too embarrassed to admit to their mistakes. And so the whole thing crumbled into dust. It seemed like that was the story.

And so I, and almost everyone else that reported this story wrote that and kind of moved on. But there was something about the story that kind of seemed a bit odd. For one, most of the shareholders that lost their money tried to sue, tried to get some of the money back. 'cause you know, literally the shares went from, I don't know, like a hundred euros to zero overnight.

And so they were like, what the hell? We wanna get some of this back. Right? So they were all suing. There were all these court cases, but the biggest show holder of all this kind of group, which called itself the syndicates, it seemed not

Jordan Harbinger: ominous at all.

Gareth Gore: Yes. If you're gonna pick a name, then

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, we wanna fly low keys.

So we're calling ourselves the syndicate, but you have to say it with a low tone and. Look behind over your shoulder before you say, I mean, that is act, it's act comically ridiculous.

Gareth Gore: Yes. I, and unlike so many elements of this story, you almost have to pinch yourself and you're like, is this for real? Like, right.

[00:05:00] It's like

Jordan Harbinger: Doctor Evil inventing this. It's just so if you're trying to run your cults under the radar, you guys are blowing it.

Gareth Gore: Yes. It's not the way to do it. But so this group seemed to be, whilst everyone else was suing, they seemed to be kind of intent on just quietly disappearing. So that p my interest, and so I began to dig.

And I basically fell into this rabbit hole. Mm-hmm. Which I almost feel like I'm yet to emerge. 'cause every time I feel like I'm kind of calling ads, I'm done with the book or whatever, something else drags me back in, someone contacts me or

Jordan Harbinger: whatever, and you're like, oh my goodness. It's either Good Fellows or The Godfather where the guy says, every time I try to get out, they suck me right back in as one of those mafia movies.

So the cult is called Opus Day. For people who are wondering what that is. Is it O-P-U-S-D-E-I? Two words? Yes.

Gareth Gore: Which is Latin for the work of God.

Jordan Harbinger: I think the audience is gonna either have never heard of them, or some people will go, wait, isn't that from the Da Vinci Code? And we'll get into that in a bit.

So the book starts with the collapse of this bank. Is Bunco popular or Bank Banko popular for US Americans out there? And this is [00:06:00] not a small bank that just went under, it's not like they just had a couple locations or they were headquartered in Madrid. This is like a, I don't, I won't say it's the JP Morgan Chase, but it's a massive bank chain.

Right? It was one

Gareth Gore: of the top five banks in Spain. They had thousands of branches across the country. It was impossible to walk around a city like Madrid or Barcelona. Mm-hmm. Without seeing one of these branches. So, you know, every Spaniard knew this bank. Absolutely. What happened if your money was in the bank when it collapsed?

So all the shareholders lost all of the money. Right? The bond holders, they lost billions too. The bank was kind of sold overnight in this kind of fire sale for parts,

Jordan Harbinger: basically for for parts. Okay.

Gareth Gore: It was sold for one Euro to bank called Santander, which is one of the largest banks in the world. For one euro.

For one Euro.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, well

Gareth Gore: fine. Um, so as part of that deal, they acquired all of the banks kind of assets and debts. They also acquired, and this is key to the story and we can get into this later. They also acquired the bank's old archives, which suddenly opened up this whole story to someone [00:07:00] like me who came knocking on the door asking to see the, see the receipts.

I'm surprised that they were willing to show you that stuff. I suspect I still haven't asked them why, but, um, I suspect they didn't know what they were sitting on. I think it was literally that. They'd acquired this warehouse full of papers and they were like, well that's, it's probably like really boring stuff.

If you wanna

Jordan Harbinger: waste your time going through that stuff, go right ahead. Don't expect us to supply the coffee.

Gareth Gore: This mess is not ours. So even if you find something, sure. Then it's not, you know,

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, and they're right. Yeah. They bought it for one Euro and they basically probably what saved the depositors who had their funds in there.

So they're like, we're the hero of the story. That's not gonna change. If you find something that the other thing did, it just makes us look better for having not dropped the ball on all these people's funds. That's true. So I assume there's smoke, there's fire. Right. So were there any shareholders that didn't lose money because they, I don't know, liquidated their shares a couple months prior?

Basically? Did anybody have a, a heads up that this was gonna happen and bail?

Gareth Gore: I don't think so. I mean, it was kind of a slow train wreck. I see. Okay. You know, these things often are, and [00:08:00] so the funny thing is actually the Opus Day foundations that were benefiting from the bank in which were semi controlling it, they basically put more and more money into the bank as it started to disintegrate, because for them it had been their cash cow for so many years.

And it had been such a core part of how the cult had kind of grown. It was the access to huge amounts, huge golden pool of money. It was the golden news for many years. And so I think they lost as much as everyone else because they were desperate not to lose control of this thing. And so they just kept putting in money right until the end.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. So how did the bank collapse? Because don't you kind of have to be abusively negligent with funds in order to lose that kind of business?

Gareth Gore: Yeah, I mean the bank was like massively overexposed to the whole real estate sector in Spain. I see. Which collapsed from post 2008. It there was just kind of a very slow collapse, never recovered.

Okay. I see.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So before we get into what you found in those bank records, 'cause I'm, I'm gonna guess it, it's not nothing, uh, otherwise we wouldn't be here. Let's do a little bit of background on Opus Day, the cult. We don't have to get too in the weeds on the [00:09:00] history of the people who started or whatever, but it sure sounds like it started, like you said, almost a hundred years ago and it kind of just sounded like a labor trafficking organization, for lack of a better word.

Gareth Gore: Okay. So Opus de kind of means the work of God was dreamed up, I guess he might say, or by this Spanish priest called Jose Maria Esri. He went on retreat in 1928 and um, whilst on retreat he had this, what he called a vision, he said it was directly from God. Yeah. For this kind of new organization.

Jordan Harbinger: These guys never make business plans.

They just get downloads directly from God. Right. They can't just sit around and make something up yourself.

Gareth Gore: It's interesting you kind of, you said that because it's impossible to know for sure, but my interpretation is, so he'd come from this family that had basically fallen from grace. They were a wealthy family whose father, basically, whose business went bankrupt.

And so they'd known the good times. They had all these servants and then suddenly they kind of hit rock bottom. The father died. And this guy, Jose Maria as the eldest son, I think he [00:10:00] felt this huge weight on his shoulders of having to kind of bring the family back up mm-hmm. To its kind of proper status.

So I think he really was on the hunt for a business idea. Yeah, it sounds like it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it sounds like it. And he maybe didn't have the acumen to start a proper business, so he is like a cult. Why not?

Gareth Gore: Yeah. And at one stage he trained as a priest, which is not, it wasn't that abnormal for the Y son at that stage in Spain.

In fact, my partner's uncle, who's the eldest man in the family, he, he also trained as a priest. Not Operas day, didn't join a cult, but, um, made a hard brain. Her, she was also from that, that part of Spain. So he, he went on this retreat and he, he got this vision and his idea was there was a gap in the market.

So if you are a Catholic, you are, you are either kind of an everyday Catholic, you go to mass every Sunday, you confess, whenever you s sin or whatever. You're, either that or if you want to go a bit deeper, you become a priest or a nun. And there was nothing in between. And he's like, you know what? There's a little niche here I could carve out for myself.

Sure. And so what he did was he, he invented this new organization, which [00:11:00] was for ordinary Catholics, but allowed them to go deeper into their faith.

Jordan Harbinger: So this is like, you're not the people who go to the gym three times a week. You're not the people who become professional athletes. You're the people who wanna go to the gym every single day.

Maybe you're running a triathlon. It's like, we need those Catholics. We want the ones who wanna 'cause they, they have these rituals that are serious. And I, I wanna talk about some of these. I don't wanna get ahead of ourselves here. The recruiting process for this sounds a little bit like Scientology.

It's like, Hey, you don't need those pesky friends and family that aren't into this as much as you. You gotta hang out with us. We're the ones who are really heads down on this and the love bombing about how great it is and how you're doing, like you said, God's work or they named the thing God's work.

Right. And it, it just starts to spread among, was it students at first? Was that kind of where they started? Yeah, initially.

Gareth Gore: Well, I mean, to begin with, he really struggled to get any recruits. I mean, he became so desperate at one stage that he went kind of to sit beside this dying woman. To kinda give her the last rights or whatever.

And he said to her, you know what, when you get upstairs, when you get to heaven, could you maybe like intercede? Could you maybe kind of send down a miracle for me to help me [00:12:00] get some followers at another stage? He almost quit the priesthood entirely because he just wasn't working out in the, like the first five years he had something like eight followers or whatever.

He was getting desperate, right?

Jordan Harbinger: But then he was like the worst influencer ever. Imagine asking a dead person, like, I just have a quick favor when you get up there. Can you just ask God to do me a solid? It's like, I'm gonna be the new guy or the new gal. I don't know how much cloud I'm gonna have. Well,

Gareth Gore: you know what?

Maybe it works. 'cause you know they have almost a hundred thousand members these days, so maybe, maybe that chat paid off. I'm not sure. Yeah. But um, he has God to gimme the blue check mark.

Jordan Harbinger: That's very what he's asking for. But

Gareth Gore: he started to hone his methods and he very quickly came up with this kind of blueprints for recruitment.

It very quickly became very culty as well. He talked about how you should never target people as a group. You should try and pick them off one by one. Never go after someone who's old and 25, because his belief was that once you hit 25, you began to ask too many questions. You became kind of set in your ways and it was hard to, your

Jordan Harbinger: prefrontal cortex has developed and you [00:13:00] won't fall into this nonsense anymore.

Gareth Gore: Absolutely. And and also like he, um, he told the people that he targeted, he told them not to tell their friends or family that they were considering joining. Mm-hmm. And so, you know, there are all of these real kind of red flags, right. For anyone on the outside. I mean, we cults were kind of not as widespread as they are now.

In some ways he was ahead of his time. Yeah. I mean, in some ways I've gotta take my hat off to him and be like, wow. I mean, this is way before Hubbard and, and Scientology and the rest of it.

Jordan Harbinger: And to be fair, the last cult that really took off was Christianity. I know that's gonna ruffle some feathers, but look, we're talking about the year zero.

It was by all definition, sort of a cult. It was just maybe a little bit less creepy. Yeah. Uh, than Ops Day or Scientology.

Gareth Gore: And so once he got these guys in, they were generally expected to live in an Oppa Day residence so that, you know, they could be watched and controlled 24 hours a day. And then they were given this thing that they call a plan of life, which is basically a, a schedule of prayer, mortification, and all kinds of other requirements.

Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: So what's mortification? Because [00:14:00] this is just one of the weird practices of the members and I think people who've seen, is it the Da Vinci Code movie? Yes. They show a little bit of that there. And it's decidedly creepy.

Gareth Gore: Yes. And there are lots of things about the Da Vinci Code, which are completely fictionalized.

You don't say, okay. So it's not a historically accurate

Jordan Harbinger: movie to

Gareth Gore: That's, that's, yeah. That's, thanks for coming in.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Gareth Gore: But some elements are true. And so the corporal modification, okay, what is that? It basically means hurting yourself. Okay. Punishing your body. Corporal mortification is something that Christians have done for hundreds of years, but it's kind of fallen out of

Jordan Harbinger: praxis.

So mortification mortified now means embarrassed, but I suppose before it means like some sort of degradation essentially. Yeah. Just like carrying the heavy wooden cross on your back kind of.

Gareth Gore: Absolutely. It's bringing yourself closer to Christ by kind of feeling the pain, I guess, that he felt on the cross.

Yeah. People do that in various different ways. The two ways in ops day, there are two kind of primary methods. There are other smaller things, but the two [00:15:00] main ones, they have these two devices. One is called the PSUs, which is like a barbed wire that you were around a part of your body. Normally the thigh, so you attach to the thigh and these kind of claws dig into your thigh.

You wore it for like two hours a day or longer. It's like a dog collar,

Jordan Harbinger: one of those pinchy

Gareth Gore: dog collars. It's kind of like a chain. It's kind of like a, it's a wire like chain, A spiky,

Jordan Harbinger: barbed wire chain with these

Gareth Gore: spikes that kind of go onto the inside. So whenever you sit down, you wear this under your trousers or whatever.

Oh, under your pants. Okay. Whenever you sit down, it digs into your leg. Why would you sit down? Why would you do anything? Yeah. Why would you put that thing on in

Jordan Harbinger: the first place there? Asking the real question and,

Gareth Gore: but you can work it around other parts of your body. So for example, the founder of Obste, this guy called Escriva, he was kind of obsessed with his weight, and so he wore this thing around his waist.

Possibly as as punishment also of his kind of gluttonous habits. Cheers. So one thing is the S, this kind of chain. The other thing is called a discipline, which is basically a whip. Normally it's a rope, maybe 3, 4, 5, 6 strands. And you take off your shirts. [00:16:00] Sometimes you take off your pants as well, and you whip yourself over your shoulder.

The founder of Obs Day took this to a whole new level. So he would attach razor blades Oh, to the end of the rope. So whenever he hit himself on the back, the razor blades would cut into his skin. Yeah. And you know, his followers would write about going into the room after he'd been doing this and there'd be blood like spattered around.

Oh my gosh.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes. It's pretty. Um, that's gnarly. It started out like something they do at Pride Parade in San Francisco and ended up like a Japanese horror movie. That's really gross, man.

Gareth Gore: It is really gross. And, and you know, like,

Jordan Harbinger: jeez,

Gareth Gore: these practices go on today as well. I mean, so people

Jordan Harbinger: are still whipping themselves with the cat of five tails or whatever this guy had.

Absolutely.

Gareth Gore: People are still doing this, this, in fact, they're different kinds of members of Obste. But if you are kind of one of the elite members, these so-called Aries, you're expected to wear the Cyli for two hours every single day without fail. And you, you're meant to do the discipline once a week on Saturdays.

Geez. So, yeah, it's kind of all part of the plan of life.

Jordan Harbinger: You can't pick your own, uh, flogging methods, I guess.

Gareth Gore: Life is so prescribed, so you [00:17:00] know, you get up at a certain time every day. The first thing you do is you get out to bed. You're not allowed to kind of doddle for even a second. It's called the heroic minutes.

You get outta bed, you kiss the floor, and the first word you say is S, which means I serve God

Jordan Harbinger: Uhhuh. Okay, so you're like a robot at this point. You're

Gareth Gore: kind of like a robot, and then you have a whole day of mass. You say like 15 different prayers. You've got these corporal mortification things to do. And you're also meant to go out to work and recruit people as well.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So they're super pious, but somehow there're also thieves that ended up bankrupting a bank somehow, or, I mean, is that a fair assessment at all?

Gareth Gore: Well, I mean there's this whole culture inside of obs day, which is that you should do whatever's necessary to basically expand the movement and to. So Esri called, he saw his followers as part of this kind of hidden militia.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Gareth Gore: That would infiltrate society and use their positions there to basically push society in the right direction.

Jordan Harbinger: That's extra creepy, right? That's the part where it's like you go from, Hey, let people do what they want. If they're gonna be [00:18:00] religious phonetics, we have religious freedom in this country.

Let 'em do what they want. They're not hurting anybody but themselves. And then it's like, oh, actually they're seeking to control. It's ironic because I'm guessing these are the same people that spread conspiracies about Jews controlling the world, and they're like, no, really, though, we're trying to do that.

Gareth Gore: Well, you know what, Riva was something of a conspiracy theorist himself. I

Jordan Harbinger: see.

Gareth Gore: And there was quite a big evolution. So initially when it started out that the group was in the kind of late twenties, early thirties, like I said before, it was basically this kind of elite organization to help Catholics just to kind of go a bit deeper.

But the backdrop here is super important because, so this is Spain, early 1930s, a country on the brink of civil war. Like the workers have literally risen up, overthrown the monarchy, and they're beginning to turn the backs on things like the church. So the church for centuries had controlled large parts of society, not least education.

And so people would like, what the hell? We don't want this like, yeah. And

Jordan Harbinger: so you said civil war. Sorry to interrupt. This civil war. So just like the communists versus, or am I too early for that?

Gareth Gore: I mean, there were [00:19:00] some communist elements, but it was more generally, I mean, it was kind of a coalition of the left.

I mean, literally the workers rose up and were like, we were sick of the old order, so they kicked out the monarchy.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Gareth Gore: And the socialists and a coalition took over and they started to unpick the church's dominance of a society. They secularized education, this kind of stuff. Things which are quite common these days.

So Escriva sees what's happening around him, and he's absolutely horrified. And so he begins to transform this group that he's begun to, to grow. And his writing's become really quite aggressive. He thinks there's a, a massive conspiracy going on. He thinks the Jews, the communists and the Masons are teaming up to like overthrow Christianity.

Right.

Jordan Harbinger: Meanwhile, the Jews are just like, leave us alone. Yeah.

Gareth Gore: Come

Jordan Harbinger: on.

Gareth Gore: No. And so he kind of rethinks the whole idea of Operas day, and he turns it into basically a kind of a political organization. He sees his followers as this kind of militia, and he literally tasked them [00:20:00] with infiltrating government business, the world of education, becoming journalists and kind of using their positions there to be this kind of gorilla, reactionary force that will fight back against these conspiracy.

But is it

Jordan Harbinger: domestic

Gareth Gore: only at this time, or are they trying to

Jordan Harbinger: christianize the whole planet?

Gareth Gore: He sees what's happening in Spain as part of this. Global battle. He calls it the re christianization of the world. Um, I'm guessing

Jordan Harbinger: that kind of thing doesn't happen peacefully.

Gareth Gore: Yes. Right. Well, no. He talks about, you know, people fighting and he very much sees it as a battle between his followers and what he calls the enemies of Christ.

Anyone that isn't part of Sair is an enemy of Christ. Mm-hmm. So, yes. But this stage, it's, it's just in Spain. But in the 1940s it begins to go international.

Jordan Harbinger: What does the, the Pope think about all this at this point? Is this like, oh, okay. Those are the hardcore Catholics, or is the, do they, are they secret and the Pope doesn't know about it

Gareth Gore: at first?

They kind of, not really on the Vatican's radar. Rivar is expanding the [00:21:00] kind of the organization diocese by diocese. So he goes into each diocese, which is kind of for non-Catholics, or what is that? It's kind of a local area kind of thing. Okay. Yeah. Like a county,

Jordan Harbinger: but for Catholics. Yeah, yeah. Kind of. Yeah.

I see.

Gareth Gore: And he, and he goes to Bishop in charge there and says, Hey, would you mind if we set up a residence and we kind of, you know, we're doing good work here, you know, whatever. But some bishops are kind of a bit suspicious. Yeah. So he decides at some stage, you know what, I need authorization from the Vatican itself.

'cause then we can go anywhere. Mm-hmm. And if we don't have to ask permission. And in, I think it's 46, he gets permission from the, the Vatican to do his work wherever. Yeah. And that kind of opens up the horizons and very quickly they start to expand to Portugal, across Europe and even to the States.

Jordan Harbinger: So who's leading Spain at this time?

Is this already the time of Franco? You like a military dictator? Is that fair?

Gareth Gore: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, Escriva, this supposedly deeply Christian Guy has absolutely no qualms about cosing up to this brutal dictator.

Jordan Harbinger: To be fair, that was de rere for the, wasn't the Vatican sort of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during this period of time [00:22:00] as well?

It's not like the highest moral standing, the catholicity you ever had that True, but I mean,

Gareth Gore: actually the, the, the victory of Franco in the Civil War is like a critical moment for the group Before the war, you know, he, he had all these grand ideas, but he really struggled to recruit. He comes back into Madrid in, I think it's March 39.

He literally rides into Madrid on the back of this military truck alongside all these Francois troops. And he arrives in this city that's been absolutely decimated. Mm-hmm. Hunger is everywhere. You've got kids kind of like hunting through garbage piles, potato skins. They want something to eat. Women are selling their bodies 'cause it's the only way to get money, get some food.

You've got all these diseases that have not been seen since the medieval times kind of coming back. So he is a good Catholic Christian priest. He arrives back and sees all this. And what does he do? Does he go out and help the people? No, no. He sets about making money and expanding his business. This thing, he calls the family business and very quickly he starts cosing up to the regime offering Opus Day services.

He basically offers to kind of go into team up [00:23:00] with the regime and he offers Opus Day as a service to basically hunt out any kind of subversive groups out there in factories and on the farms and to kind of help to kind of damp down any kind of political, um, uprisings or whatever. He also sets up all of these residences and Franco, like for people that don't know much about the Franco years, he was an absolutely brutal dictator.

Yeah. Even after the war, obviously both sides committed atrocities during the war, but during peace time, after the ceasefire, he murdered tens of thousands of his political opponents. He pushed like hundreds of thousands of people into concentration camps. Wow. He was sending left wing people to the Nazis to be experimented on.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh

Gareth Gore: wow. And meanwhile, Escriva, the founder of Op Day, is offering Opus Day services to help this guy. Escriva is hosting private retreats for Franco and his wife at the palace outside of Madrid. You know, it's incredible just how much of a blind eye he turns, you know?

Jordan Harbinger: So Franco's like a minor Hitler esque character in [00:24:00]

Gareth Gore: a way.

Yeah, and he actually wanted to, he really tried to cozy up to Hitler and offered him all kinds of things to help him. Hitler, I think very much looked down on down his, yeah. Hard time for this. Yeah. Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez, my God. These are some despicable characters. So the new members of this cult, I, I assume eventually these students who are in Opus Day, they start to form companies and come of age and get the, are they getting the jobs to have influence and are they being placed now that they've sort of won the Civil War and they're on the good side or the side, they're on Franco's.

Good side, they're able to, I dunno, work in the government or something like that. Yeah, no,

Gareth Gore: totally. So, so what happens is that Esri's got this vision of his members need to infiltrate the kind of upper echelons of society. Mm-hmm. In order to shape society. He's recruiting very much people from the elite, people from good families, people from money, people who've got great prospects, you know, Tamara's leaders.

He's recruiting them at university. And so like five, 10 years after recruiting them, many of these people are really climbing up the ladder. I. [00:25:00] By the fifties, a number of ministers in the kind of national government are members of Opus Day. And you know, the Opus Day network runs far and wide. Opus Day itself has several businesses, but also many of its members are kind of deeply embedded into a really corrupt society as well.

And so it's all through connection. So the closeness of Opus data, the regime. Means that a lot of its members in upper state itself gets lots of favors. So they get like export deals. They get the nod to like open up this new business. And so it becomes very beneficial financially as well. So a

Jordan Harbinger: revenue generating en enterprise at this point.

It's not just get the rich kids and they'll get their parents to send us money. Now it's, we've got special sweetheart deals with the government because we are cozying up to the dictator. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's another sort of left turn into making this a little bit more evil, right? It's like, okay, if you wanna whip yourself not at, you know, not we don't love it, but okay.

And then it's like, no, we're trying to take over the world and we're gonna do that by cozy up to this really crappy regime. And they're slowly getting [00:26:00] more and more evil kind of

Gareth Gore: from the sound

Jordan Harbinger: of it

Gareth Gore: and slowly getting bigger and bigger. I mean, by the fifties they were present in, I know like something like 20 countries.

Oh wow. Including the states. They've expanded to Latin America across Europe. They have thousands of members and you know, as this thing grows, the speed of expansion becomes greater because they've got more and more resources. Sure. And so they can open more residences, more schools and whatever. So the recruitment method becomes much more kind of efficient.

Jordan Harbinger: At what point do they go, Hey, we need a bank. How does that

Gareth Gore: come about? By the early fifties, they had already had a pretty big network of companies in Spain. They had bookshops and publishers. They had like a film distribution company. Okay. So like, you know, they were the equivalent of like minting kind of VHS cassettes kind of things.

Sure, sure. Or back in, you know, for, I mean it's kind of, but it, these were ways to make money, but I think they very quickly realized that there was a limit to how much this network of businesses could generate. And by getting the kind of [00:27:00] hands on a bank that would take them to a very different level.

Suddenly you've got access to this massive pool of savings that all the depositors have put in there. Like banks have balance sheets in the trillions of, of dollars. Wow. Of course we're not talking that level of money back then in, in the 1950s and certainly not in Spain. It took you from here to the ceiling the way they got into the bank as well.

It's kind of extraordinary. So I think it was the chief executive of the bank or the vice chairman or something. He found out about some dodgy deal that the chairman had done and he as a good Catholic was like, this is kind of, it was really eating at me. I need to like share this with someone. He was friends with someone from Opus Day and so he decides to basically open up his heart to this Opus Day guy, thinking that the Opus Day guy, you know, as another good Christian, he's gonna just give him some kind of confidential advice, Uhhuh and pat him on the back, tell him, you know, the moral thing to do.

Instead the LP day goes back and informs all of his colleagues back at the center, and they come up with a plan to use this bit of information to oust [00:28:00] the chairman. Oh my gosh. Gosh. And take control of the bank themselves.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's like a intelligence network instead of a confession booth.

Gareth Gore: Yeah. And And they hijack this bank and Wow.

And that alongside the victory of Franco. This is the other critical moment in opera day's history, where they suddenly take this turn and the sky's the limit.

Jordan Harbinger: You know who's probably not involved in human trafficking, the amazing sponsors who support this show, we'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and Nvidia.

AI is everywhere now from your inbox to your car, even how your coffee gets made, and businesses are scrambling to keep up. If you're not integrating AI into your systems, you're falling behind. Or at least that's the fear. Healthcare's no exception. In episode seven of the Cybersecurity Tapes, a major medical network Fast tracks a generative AI system to streamline patient logistics and gain a competitive edge.

But here's the thing, when you rush AI without fully understanding the risks, things can go sideways, fast ambulances rerouted patients, delayed systems overwhelmed, and in this case, it could have cost lives. The Cybersecurity Tapes is a podcast that [00:29:00] dramatizes these high stakes scenarios based on real cybersecurity failures, while also breaking down what went wrong and how to avoid it.

Check out episode seven of the cybersecurity tapes and just see how wrong AI can go when the pressure to keep up overtakes the need to play. Its mark. This episode is also sponsored by Caldera Lab. Most men's skincare either tries way too hard or doesn't really try at all. I just wanted something simple that works, and that's exactly why I started using Caldera lab.

I'm picky when it comes to moisturizers. I can't stand greasy, heavy feeling. I, I hate it. So when I tried the base layer from them, I was blown away. It's lightweight, it absorbs fast. It gives my skin a clean, hydrated feel. There's no weird shine, there's no residue. It's like my face drank a glass of water and finally chilled out.

I love it so much. I immediately ordered three more, so I never run out. No exaggeration. And the best part is it's simple. No five step ritual. There's no overpowering rugged forest scent. Just a clean nutrient rich formula that makes my skin feel smoother, healthier, a little less exhausted after a long days, or especially travel.

And if you care about ingredients, this stuff checks every box. Non-toxic, non [00:30:00] comedogenic cry, I don't even know what that means. Cruelty free. I know what that means. Even plastic neutral. No gimmicks, no junk. Just skincare that actually delivers.

Jen Harbinger: Whether you're starting fresh or upgrading your routine, caldera lab makes skincare simple and effective.

Don't settle for drugstore junk or steal your partner's products. Elevate your routine with skincare made for you. Head to caldera lab.com/jordan and use Jordan at checkout for 20% off your first order.

Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like and trust.

I'm teaching you how to build your own cult, I mean network for free over@sixminutenetworking.com. This course is about improving your relationship skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a good positive relationship with you. It is non cringey. It is down to earth. It does not involve slave labor.

For better or for worse, just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. In a few minutes a day is all it takes, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

You can find the course again, it's all free [00:31:00] over@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Gareth Gore. I know at some point it becomes about. Bringing in poor people from other countries or other parts of the country, and kind of using them to serve the members. I mean, this is also sort of very, I hate to use the same example over and over.

It's very Scientology, right? They do those audits on you where you have to confess things and they use it against you later. Mm-hmm. Yep. And they bring in kids from the Midwest and they basically say, oh, you're gonna go to Hollywood and hang out with Tom Cruise, and you, all you have to do is work for free full-time in our museum or whatever.

I mean, it's very much a similar recipe from the sound of it, honestly. I was gonna say, except for the religious thing. But Scientology has that too.

Gareth Gore: The thing that makes this so much worse is that this is an organization which has been legitimized by the Catholic church. Right. It's an official part of the Catholic church.

It has the stamp of approval from the pulp, from the Vatican. Wow. With Scientology. People are like, eh, just a minute. This is like just some crazy pokey people. It's, yeah. And like, wait, aliens, what are you talking about? Right, right, right. [00:32:00] But with Opus Day. People, I think when they're first introduced to op day, especially until recently when there wasn't much information about it, they just assumed, well, they must be good.

Yeah. 'cause they have the, you know, stamp of approval. So what they need, and I guess this is what you were alluding to, is they need workers. 'cause they need people to go out there, right. And to find targets, to groom them and to parents to get them into the group. They have this kind of elite army I would call 'em, of people called Aries.

These are people who've taken, they're not quite vows, but they've basically promised their lives to Opus Day. They take these pledges of poverty, which means that they give all of their money to Opus Day. They take a pledge of chastity, which means that basically they're married to Opus Day. And they also, which I guess is related to that, they take a pledge of obedience.

So whatever ops day requires of them, they do it. This is the kind of core group, the Aries, and they live in special gender segregated residences. They have a director watching over them who tells them kind of what to do, who to target, and they're constantly under pressure to go out there and [00:33:00] find recruits.

So you have those guys, the kind of the key workers. But at one stage in the forties, the founder kind of realized that I guess they were spending a lot of money on domestic servants at the residences. So they had all of these women who coming in to like cook and clean for the men and memories can be men and women, but they always had these kind of servant girls who would come in.

And he came up with this idea of why don't we open up membership to these servants? But they weren't allowed to join on the same terms as the other Aries. Sure. Okay. So he kind of invented this new class, this underclass of membership called the Numie Servants. And they were all women that this is not a class opened up to men.

And, you know, you were basically kind of, you would join as a servant and, and, um, in a way it became a, a source of free labor for Opus Day. Sure. 'cause once these servants became members, they were expected to hand over their paychecks, back to Opus Day. So Op Day was paying them and then saying, you need to give that back to us.

And at one stage just didn't bother paying. Stop them. Yeah. It's why [00:34:00] bother. And, um, the creation of this new subclass was the greatest gift that God had ever given to Opus dad. This goes on today and soon there's gonna be a trial in Argentina where Opus day's been formally accused of human trafficking.

Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: that's what this is. It's slavery. Yes. It's not a gift from God. You're just enslaving people.

Gareth Gore: Absolutely. And day. To this day operates this network of what it calls hospitality schools around the world.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, there's a euphemism. There's

Gareth Gore: a absolutely euphemism. And what they do is they go around to poor communities.

They knock on the doors, they find young girls, they, they find girls who are like 11, 12 years old.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh geez. They actually, very young girls, the

Gareth Gore: kids, they find kids and they say to the kids and the parents, Hey, you know, like around here, there are no prospects for your girl, but if you send her back to the big city with us, you know, over in Lagos or over in Bueno Aires or over in Mexico City, we run this amazing school where we teach the girls how to cook and clean and they work towards a qualification.

It's a way to a better life for [00:35:00] them. And so the girls and the parents, they're like. Sumit, these guys are from the Catholic church.

Jordan Harbinger: How bad can

Gareth Gore: it be? How bad can it be? Right. Well, yes. And the girls, only when they're kind of hundreds of miles away from their families, do they perhaps realize what's happening.

And they are manipulated, coerced, pushed into joining Golpes Day as these numeracy servants. It's a huge scandal and it's happening all over the world, across Latin America and Nigeria, the Philippines, Europe. And, and to be clear,

Jordan Harbinger: this is not 1950 where this is happening. This is still happening in 2025.

Gareth Gore: Absolutely. So there's this trial that's about to happen in Argentina. Some women have recently come forward in Mexico, but I know for a fact because the bank in Spain was financing the creation of all of these schools. Sure, yeah. So in the archives, I found all kinds of documents, which

Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

Gareth Gore: basically there's a whole network of these schools financed by the bank.

I dunno exactly how many, but we're talking dozens if not a hundred of these different schools around the world.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a great segue into [00:36:00] what else you found in those bank archives because it just seems to me if they were doing something so awful, they would've tried to get rid of the records. But then I think, okay, the Germans and the Holocaust, they used IBM machines and they tracked everything and they sure they burned some stuff, but there was just too much to get rid of.

Is that the same kind of situation we're dealing with here?

Gareth Gore: Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, the funny thing is, I mean, the collapse of the bank whilst terrible for all of the investors, you know, was great for, was great for me because Yeah. It worked out well

Jordan Harbinger: for you. Yeah,

Gareth Gore: because I mean like nobody would have ever been given access to those records.

They never expected in the wildest dreams that the bank would collapse. Sure. And then someone like me would come around sniffing around, kind of trying to piece things together. Pesky journalists. Exactly.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Gareth Gore: So I think there was just, maybe it was a similar thing with the Nazis. They just didn't think they were ever gonna get caught.

They didn't think they were gonna lose, they didn't think they were, have any accountability.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. If you own a bank, it's like, oh, you can keep track of this. No one's gonna, it's our bank. No one's gonna look it here. And also, a

Gareth Gore: lot of these guys, you know, the founder of Ops Day [00:37:00] had this kind of, these kind of phrases where he talked about things like holy ruthlessness and holy intransigence, which basically the message is.

Anything goes. If you are doing what God wants, then it's kind of okay to cut a few corners or to do a few wrong things. He actually told one of his followers, actually the guy that was leading the bank, he said, when you look around and you see people doing bad things, don't worry too much because you're probably gonna see these guys again in heaven.

It's kind of fine. God will kind of look the other way for certain

Jordan Harbinger: things. So I'm not a religious scholar, but I feel like the religious teachings of Jesus, et cetera, were not like, you can just do whatever you want. God's on our side. It's cool, it's just gonna look the other way. Yeah. And you know, by any means necessary, that doesn't seem like something Jesus would've said.

Gareth Gore: And also like Catholicism has this kind of, um, unique kind of get outta jail free card as well. If you confess and you repent, it's all fine. Right? I mean, this is this, this is

Jordan Harbinger: coming to you from the people who were like, Hey, your relative is in the seventh circle of hell. And if you wanna get them up a few [00:38:00] notches, just give us a bunch of money.

I. The corruption in this particular organization is not brand new. Yeah, no, absolutely. Geez. Oh my goodness.

Gareth Gore: But yeah, I mean, I mean like, so because they didn't think they were ever gonna get caught, I mean, this kind of stuff I found, I mean, there was one incident where one of the bank's employees, an op day member had been sent to Venezuela with a suitcase full of, of money.

And we don't know exactly what it was for, but it was probably to start up a new Alpa Day school there. Anyway, he got arrested 'cause actually the Venezuelan police thought he was a communist and it caused this big kind of diplomatic incident. This was before

Jordan Harbinger: they loved communists at Venezuela, I assume.

Yeah. This, well, yeah.

Gareth Gore: This was in the sixties actually, when, when Venezuela was like kind of oil boom kind of, uh, got it. Yeah. And the, this guy gets caught. There's this whole diplomatic incident and the, all these negotiations, he gets sent back to Spain, and when he comes back to Spain, he's collected at the airport by a bunch of S day minders who then put him into this mental asylum because they're worried that he's kind of gonna crack and he's gonna tell everyone what he was really up to and where the money came from and all that stuff.[00:39:00]

Then he basically disappears. Now this whole story is kind of documented in the bank's archives. Wow. And you, you know, like so many times in researching the book you kind of come across something and you're like, what? Like, and you almost can't believe what you are reading. Yeah. But it's there in black and whites.

You back it up with other evidence and you almost have to pinch yourself. Um, yeah. There's some incredible stories like that in the book.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. There are quite a few stories like that in the book as well. The, it seems like the group Opus Day begins to ask Catholics to essentially exert their influence in professional and political spheres.

I. There's a Supreme Court Justice in the United States that's in this cult, correct? We don't know

Gareth Gore: because

Jordan Harbinger: membership of Upstate is completely

Gareth Gore: private.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

Gareth Gore: But we do know that in the early two thousands, maybe your listeners will have heard of this thing called The Federalist Society.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We had a branch in my law school.

Gareth Gore: Oh, really? Mm-hmm. And how was that?

Jordan Harbinger: I just remember they were conservative and a couple of my friends were in it, and they're like, you [00:40:00] should join. It's right up your alley. But I don't really know much else. I, I'm not sure. So, I

Gareth Gore: mean, one of the, the most powerful guys inside the Federalist Society is a guy called Leonard Leo, who is a huge fan of Office Day.

He's given a huge amount of money to Opus Day. He sent his kids to the Alpa Day schools in um, Washington, dc. He sits on the board of directors at the Alpa Day Center in Central Washington. I mean, he has been the person who's probably single handedly most responsible for the kind of shift of the Supreme Court over the past 10 years or whatever.

In the early two thousands, there was this incident at the party, which this only came out recently, where a boss from the Federalist Society, and maybe that was Leo, maybe it was someone else. There was this incident where, um, at the party where I think Chief Justice Roberts had either just been appointed to the court or was about to be appointed, and this big boss from the Federalist Society said, don't worry.

He attends Opus Day, uh, evenings of recollection, kind of once a week. He's one of us. You don't need to worry [00:41:00] about him. Whether or not that means he's a member or not, I'm not sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Okay. Well, that's really kind of scary. Yes. Can you provide any sort of overview of methods or tactics that the groups use to influence political or maybe judicial decisions in any way?

Gareth Gore: Yeah, I mean, so I mean, I was talking kind of recently to a, a numie from Spain. So what happens once they've found people to recruit? The way that Opus Day operates is that of course you're expected to kind of whip yourself and do the rest of it and go to mass and confession, and the, but they also have this additional requirement, which is called, they call the chats.

It sounds nice and friendly, right? Whenever, whenever it

Jordan Harbinger: sounds that innocent, it's, it's always horrific, right?

Gareth Gore: And this thing is like, it's meant to be done every week or every two weeks, and basically Enumerate comes out to you and sits with you. And you open up your heart and you tell them everything about your life, your sex life, your professional life, whatever.

That's incredibly

Jordan Harbinger: awkward to think about.

Gareth Gore: And they give you guidance. Um, this, [00:42:00] yeah, this celibate No thanks. This celibate guy that you don't really know, kind of giving you guidance about your sex life.

Jordan Harbinger: A 40 year, year older than me, celibate man is gonna tell me what to do with my sex life. Sounds great.

Oh, I'm

Gareth Gore: sure. I'm pretty sure that the, um, the kind of sex life advice is always the same, which is like, you only have sex to procreate and you should be having as many kids as possible. So, I mean, that's basically all of the advice they need to give. I'm starting

Jordan Harbinger: to think I'm not a good fit for

Gareth Gore: open state

Jordan Harbinger: Garth.

Gareth Gore: Um, but these, I mean, these chats, chats kind of over the years have been used to kind of collect information and have been used also to abuse the kind of relationship, the confidence that the member puts into Opus Day. So, for example, I mean, one of the guys I was talking to recently, a guy from Mexico was telling me about every time he got back to the center after doing one of these chats, he had to put together this report card.

Now because they didn't wanna have a paper trail. The report card, and this was even in the two thousands, was put together on a typewriter with kind of a carbon copy underneath. So you're typing out all of, all of these intimate details about this guy you've just sat with about, I [00:43:00] dunno, like trouble he's having at work or like marital problems.

You're typing it all up into a record. One copy gets kept at the center, put into a safe there or whatever, and the other copy gets sent to the regional headquarters of Opus Day.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Gareth Gore: So for years they literally had all of these files with compromising information and you know, they would read this and work out ways of using this information to further their agenda.

I mean, okay. I should at this stage disavow people of the notion that there's some guy sat in Rome, head of office day issuing orders down to like Leonard Leo or whatever, that that's not the way it works. Red, the US Supreme Court. Well, yes. That's not the way it works. The way it works is that they use these chat sessions.

To gently push people into the right direction and often that oversteps the mark. So they might be told about how to think about a certain political issue and kind of, they misuse Catholic teachings to push them in a certain direction. I've heard stories about senior judges as well, members of obs Day being given [00:44:00] certain books and articles to read on cases that they're currently kind of sitting on as a way of like pushing them to make the right decision on certain things.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

Gareth Gore: So these chats, which are supposedly just meant to be like almost like a therapy session, helping you to be a better Catholic, I. Office day's collecting information and then using that information to work out what buttons it can press to maybe get you to give some more money or to team up with some other members of Opus Day to further this anti-abortion group or agenda that I, whatever this might be.

Jordan Harbinger: I was gonna ask about the that, because of course the abortion cases Rove, you wade in the United States, it's front and center, it has been for a while. And you get these justices on there and it's like, okay, if your whole mantra is by any means necessary and God's okay with our plan and isn't subject to the laws of man, how do we know you're making impartial judgments with respect to something like Roe v Wade?

And the answer is, you're almost certainly not doing that, and you're being [00:45:00] nudged to do what the church wants, which is completely inappropriate.

Gareth Gore: And actually not just what the church wants, because I mean, the kind of Catholicism that Opus Day has been pushing has been not the same as what Pope Francis was pushing during his papacy.

And it's too early to talk about Pop Leo, but it's um. These are not accepted Catholic teachings, and this is not what the Vatican is pushing. This is a very perverted reading of Catholicism. It's a very conservative, reactionary reading of Catholicism where they pick bits of the Bible to support what is really a kind of ultra conservative agenda.

I. It's using scripture to push back on anything progressive and for anything kind of left-leaning. And it's a misuse of, of religion, really. It's, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So is it safe to say that these people are more conservative than the Pope?

Gareth Gore: Certainly more conservative than the current Pope and the last Pope, whether they were more conservative than John Paul ii, who was pretty conservative and Benedict, I'm not sure.

I mean, actually John Paul II saw Opus de as a great ally.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:00] Yeah.

Gareth Gore: He gave them this kind of special status, which effectively allowed them to operate outside of the normal hierarchy of the church. He saw them as like his special army. I was gonna say it's like

Jordan Harbinger: Catholic Special Forces.

Gareth Gore: Precisely. I mean, so when he became pulp in the late seventies, the church, I mean, as it is today, was kind of deeply divided.

He didn't really know how Rome worked properly. He was worried about bishops in, you know, far-flung places like these states and Latin America who were maybe left-leaning and who weren't listening to his edicts. So I think he literally gave Opus Day this special status because he wanted them to be his special forces.

He would dispatch them to certain countries mm-hmm. That were causing trouble and say, go do your thing. And so he would basically kind of subvert and undercut the existing church structure in those countries in order to push his conservative agenda. Ste, we're very happy to do that. Sure, of course.

Jordan Harbinger: Do you think it's going to, I'm sure it's really hard for you to say, but if they got special status under that previous Pope, do [00:47:00] you think there's a world in which the current Pope is like, Hey, by the way, this is ridiculous and a perversion of the religion we should probably reel these guys in?

Gareth Gore: That already started to happen under Francis. I

Jordan Harbinger: see.

Gareth Gore: Upper state's been riddled with accusations of abuse for decades. Labor trafficking, what else? Labor trafficking, I mean, grooming of children. It's kind. Well, that's on

Jordan Harbinger: brand.

Gareth Gore: That's that. I mean the, the ranks, the numie ranks because of all the pressures on them.

Those ranks are absolutely riddled with mental illness. And what Opus Day does is it covers that up by heavy use of prescription drugs. So they have these opus doctors which prescribe drugs for, you know, enumerate is having a hard time, is sent to the Opus Day. Doctor comes back with this kind of long prescription of drugs they're meant to take.

You know, many of them I've spoken to people who've come out the other side, they leave Opus Day and they go and see a proper doctor and the doctor is like, why the hell are you on this long list of drugs? This is doing nothing for you and it's making you worse. So yeah, there's kind of drug abuse, all kinds of kind of financial [00:48:00] fraud and kind of spiritual fraud as well that we're talking about before with the chats.

So in the late 2010s, Pope Francis became aware of some pretty horrendous abuses inside of OBS Day and he decided to take action. And um, in 2022, the Pope issued this thing called a Motu Proprio, which is basically a paper decree. It's like this is an order coming from the pope. And he basically ordered them to get their acting order.

Wow. He said, like, you guys, you now have to rip up your statutes and start again. You've gotta kind of basically redraw your constitution because it's fucked up. He maybe didn't use those words. Yeah, he might, he might not. He's talking in Spanish, of course. So it's, uh, so it's, uh, right. But, um, it sounds nicer in time, but he, um, he basically put them on notice, say you guys need to clean up.

So since 2022, Opus Day has basically dragged its feet. Now, what's interesting about Current's events is that just before he died on Easter Monday, Pope Francis had been on the cusp of signing into law this huge reform of [00:49:00] Opus Day. So he'd all been kind of agreed with the Vatican. A week later, Opus Day was meant to have this big vote to approve it internally, and then it would get sent back to the pulp.

He'd sign it off and the reforms would be done. So within hours of the Pope dying, Oprah State canceled. Sure vote. They're like, eh, maybe we don't have to do this anymore. Right. And actually then there was this huge campaign started to lobby about for who was gonna be the pop. I was gonna

Jordan Harbinger: say, what if they probably, if their enemy is no longer in power, maybe they can get their own guy in there.

Gareth Gore: Well, was this extraordinary situation as well, situation for a time, Pope Francis's body was lying in state in St. Peter's Cathedral. Members of the public and the Cardinals were all kind of lining up to pay the respects. This one Opus Day Cardinal turns up and is photographed standing over the Pope's dead body, wearing his cardinal robes.

Now what's interesting about that is that a couple of years earlier, Pope Francis had banned this guy because of all of these sexual abuse allegations. He'd banned him from wearing his cardinal robes. I see. And banned him from making any public statements. He then [00:50:00] starts to use his time in Rome, his lobbying alongside a bunch of other kind of conservative forces within the church for a hard line conservative pulp.

They didn't get what they wanted.

Jordan Harbinger: That was my next question is, yes, Pope Leo, a hard line conservative or not so yeah. With

Gareth Gore: Pope Leo, they clearly didn't get what they wanted. And what's interesting is that Pope Leo, one of his very first acts, one of his very first audiences, he summoned the head of Opus day to come and see him and basically demanded an update about worthy reforms.

Where were we at? Where

Jordan Harbinger: were we at with that thing we were supposed to sign on Friday? Yeah. Yeah.

Gareth Gore: You remember that thing? What thing?

Jordan Harbinger: I don't, I don't remember. Oh, really? Let me refresh your memory. This is interesting.

Gareth Gore: I mean, for me that's a very clear signal that this pulp, um, sounds like it's a

Jordan Harbinger: priority.

Gareth Gore: Absolutely. Literally, day one, his first set of meetings, s Tay guy is brought in and explain where are we cleaning up the mess that

Jordan Harbinger: you've been making for the last century.

Gareth Gore: And there are signals coming from the Vatican. I've been hearing from sources that, you know, the messages to victims, you aren't gonna be [00:51:00] disappointed.

Mm-hmm. There's gonna be some big reforms coming at. So, I mean, we will see. Wow. Yeah. It's all a bit up in the air.

Jordan Harbinger: Are there any specific cases, let's say in the United States under the Supreme Court, that you believe were influenced by Opus Day? Besides Roe V. Wade?

Gareth Gore: I think the way to think about it, okay, so Opus Day, it's not just the Supreme Court, like Opus Day has spent years inserting itself into the very fabric of Washington DC in conservative circles.

And so yeah, a bunch of people will be members of Opus Day. But I think the best way to think about Op Day is as a network, some people will be members, other people are just have kind of brushes with, with members. Mm-hmm. Or with a network. And so it's about creating a, a culture. It's about informing that culture and creating kind of an ecosystem of people like us.

So that when Trump's looking to appoint the right person to head up, I dunno, department of Education or whatever it might be, there are a bunch of candidates here who are well versed in [00:52:00] Catholic teachings or in in kind of conservative Catholic teachings who can be relied on to push through the right kinds of, um, policies and, and rulings.

Jordan Harbinger: What are the implications of this for the future of, let's say, democracy and judicial independence, especially in the United States? Because if there's all these people sort of waiting in the wings and the rest of the folks are highly suggesting that they would be appointed to specific positions, the whole Illuminati, you know, the Jews control the world conspiracy that they've been projecting onto Jews, but it's actually happening with them.

Gareth Gore: Yeah, I mean there was actually this one priest in, um, DC a quite a famous Opus Day priest called, um, CJ McCloskey. And he didn't mince his words. He talked about this great battle coming and the potential for war and how good Catholics should expect to kind of go into battle with progressives and you know, there may well be blood or whatever and Oh,

Jordan Harbinger: like a real war.

Yeah.

Gareth Gore: Like absolutely like a real rule. Scary. [00:53:00] And you know, he very much kind of advocated for a kind of theocracy 'cause a theocracy. I think my understanding of it is that it's, it's kind of literally you have priests in charge who kind of Right. Take messages from God, ands. I don't think they quite see that happening, but I think, and we're kind of starting to see this to a certain extent with Trump, it's about having our guys in charge.

People who we can trust. Mm-hmm. People who are like us, who believe the same kinds of things, who have a very similar outlook on western civilization and what a family should look like and what schooling should look like and what society should look like. It's more about that than an Illuminati of like a group of guys getting in a room together and it's about a culture.

And Opus Day is, they have all of these plans in the US to expand. I mean, what they've very successfully inserted themselves into the Washington DC kind of circles. I mean, one stats are kind of like to talk about is [00:54:00] as a Catholic organization, you'd expect the op state membership in the states to be concentrated in predominantly Catholic cities.

Sure. So like places like Boston, Chicago, New York, Miami these days, I guess with the largest Hispanic population, but the largest op state community in the States is Washington DC And that's because that's where they focus their recruitment efforts and that because that's where you need to be to influence society.

So having, I guess, cracked the political judicial worlds. The next stage that they see is they really wanna crack the education sphere. So they have these big plans to expand the Alpa Day school networks across the country. They're already present at all of the Ivy League universities, but they have these big plans to again, expand their presence there to influence the kinds of debates that are happening on campus to try to kind of shift them to insert more conservative talking points.

But also the recruiting Tomorrow's elite as well. They've already got today's elite. It's about grooming the next generation of leaders to make sure they're also on the, on the same page.

Jordan Harbinger: I guess [00:55:00] they're not really hidden because you know about it, but it seems like they don't maybe really advertise this particular thing.

I mean, they're recruiting, but they're not necessarily advertising how much power that they're trying to in exert over specific cultural moments in the court, for example. This

Gareth Gore: is because, I mean, they very much like to keep kind of all of these things at arm's length. Um, 'cause it gives them plausible deniability.

Sure.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Gareth Gore: But also what's interesting is, um, what marks Opus Day out from the rest of the church is that for the rest of the Catholic Church, anybody's welcome to join. Whereas Opus days is by invitation only. You can't go onto the Office day website, punch in your details and get like a pamphlet in the post or brochure or whatever, and kind of, it's exclusive.

It's a club. It's, you know, they literally choose you as a member. See, see, they decide who they want. They decide whether that person's pliable, whether that person will be beneficial to the, to the group, and then you're invited in. So it's absolutely by invitation on me. Are

Jordan Harbinger: they true believers, all these people you think?

Or is it kind of like a power structure like any other?

Gareth Gore: That's a great question. I [00:56:00] think it depends how advanced Opus Day is in that country. I think here in the UK for example, upstairs is relatively small. And I think the people that join it here do it because they're really serious Catholics and they're looking for something Catholicism kind of pro or whatever.

Um, but I think in some parts of the world has so successfully inserted itself into society, particularly into kind of the political and business circle. So in places like Spain, for example, and across Latin America, I think being part of Opus Day and being part of the network can be extremely beneficial.

Mm-hmm. To you kind of, if you're starting a business right, you kind of, you might get a few connections or a few deals through your pals in Opus Day. It very much works like that in Spain.

Jordan Harbinger: Sort of like Scientology. I mean, I, I dunno that many other cults, so I'm constantly harping on this. But yeah, a lot of people, they join when they wanna become an actor because it's like, oh well all the producers in this town are in there.

Not all but many. And the [00:57:00] casting people are in here and they're kind of gonna pick you over the other people if you join and you're like, ah, it's kind of a club and it's some got the self-help element. And then after you, you're in it for a while, you're like, oh, aliens, huh. You know, whatever the next few levels of, of this thing are.

And it sort of sounds like that like, yeah, I'm Catholic, I'll go a little hardcore. Why not? It's kind of cool. I'm into it already. Yeah. Look, I got promote it the bank because one of the directors is Opus Day and I kind of came to it for some career advice and look, I'm on the partner track now or whatever, and then it's like, nah, you're in the club.

You don't wanna relinquish that. Yeah. For no good reason.

Gareth Gore: I see Opus Day in my mind it's a kind of politicized club kind. It's kind of like a boys club, although women are admitted as well. But with this kind of weird veil of spirituality, which does a couple of things. I mean, it kind of, it means that people who are considering joining kind of drop their guard.

'cause they're like, oh, it's just part of the Catholic church. It's kind of fine. But that spirituality element is also used to control people. Mm-hmm. It's also used, I think, especially in the world of politics, as a way of like you've got a priest patting you on the back saying, oh yeah, your [00:58:00] ultra right winging view on this.

It's kind of justified in the Bible. So it's kind of fine. It's kind of, it's almost like a reassurance kind of thing. I see. So it's a, yeah. So it serves a bunch of purposes. But yeah, I mean, I'm under no doubt it's kind of a deeply reactionary political network that uses this kind of veil of spirituality, basically to entice people in and to keep them in.

Jordan Harbinger: If you wanna support this show, all you need to do is fla the skin on your back, open with a whip, or support the amazing sponsors that make this show possible. We'll be right back.

This episode is sponsored in part by Aura Ring. So here's a question. How you feeling today? And a better one. Why do you feel that way? Well, you don't know. Probably. I used to think I slept okay, seven-ish hours. I didn't wake up groggy. It's all fine. But then I tried the AA ring and it was like, Hey, your deep sleep is garbage.

And that's the part that really matters for recovery, energy, brain function, basically everything keeping you together. Once I saw that, I made a few tweaks, cut screens earlier, cool the room down, dial in my evening routine, boom. My deep sleep went way up. I feel way better. And all of that insight from a ring that looks like a ring, [00:59:00] no screens, it's not a clunky BRI gadget, just clean, stylish, smart as hell.

And with eight days of battery life, I don't have to babysit this thing. It just works. Plus, there's this thing called circles. You can compare your sleep scores with friends or your partner, your family. Jen and I are always comparing scores. Oh, you got an 89? I got a 94. Uh, I wish. So if you wanna stop guessing and actually start understanding your health, give aura the finger.

Learn more@auraring.com slash Jordan. This episode is also sponsored by Wayfair. You know that feeling when you finally step outside, you take a deep breath and you think this is my spot. Jen's been on a mission to turn our backyard into a little oasis, and Wayfair has been her go-to Wayfair's. Got everything from lounge chairs and patio sets to outdoor bars, fire pits, gazebos, string lights, you name it.

We found an outdoor lounge set that instantly leveled up the space. Now we hang out outside. We work on our laptops with cold beverages. Also, shout out to Wayfair's. Delivery is super fast. The big stuff ships free. It all arrived hassle free. So whether you want a full backyard makeover or just a couple cozy touches, Wayfair makes it ridiculously easy to create your own personal oasis without the resort price tag.

[01:00:00] So if you're dreaming of outdoor movie nights, summer hangouts, or just a peaceful spot to sip your coffee in the morning, start with Wayfair. They got everything you need to make your home feel like your home, inside and out.

Jen Harbinger: Don't wait. Make your outdoor space your dream. Oasis today with Wayfair and enjoy it all summer long.

Head to wayfair.com right now to shop a huge outdoor selection. That's W-Y-F-A-I r.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.

Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored in part by Quince. I like to look sharp, but I'm not out here chasing trends. I just want clothes that feel great, hold up, fit right, don't cost an arm and a leg.

That's why Jen and I are into Quince. Their stuff is simple. It's well-made, and somehow it's half the price of the fancy brands without looking like a knockoff. This summer, I've been rotating through their linen shirts because I do be fancy. They're lightweight, but not flimsy, and you can dress them up or down without trying too hard, which is key when you're trying to stay cool, but you kind of wanna, you know, still look like you're grown up, like you dress yourself.

What I like most is that Quince cuts out all the retail middlemen and actually works directly with the same high-end factories used by the luxury guys. So you get top tier quality without the markups. If you're looking to level up your wardrobe without lighting [01:01:00] your bank account on fire, check out Quince.

Jen Harbinger: Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from Quince. Go to quince.com/jordan for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q UI NC e.com/jordan to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com/jordan.

Jordan Harbinger: If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment, support the amazing sponsors.

They make the show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable over at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, shoot us an email. We are more than happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show.

Now for the rest of my conversation with Gareth Gore. So Dan Brown writes the Da Vinci Code. Did this cause ruckus inside Opus Day? Because no group wants their thing fictionalized to be like a massive hit and make them look crazy. Psycho.

Gareth Gore: I remember during the kind of research for the book, I, I spent [01:02:00] some time in New York and I, I spoke to the guy there this, the Opus Day spokesperson who discovered that whole thing.

Part of his job was to kind of read Publishers Weekly, which for those people who aren't into the publishing world, is basically an industry magazine, which tells you like the latest titles that are about to be launched or whatever. And he was kind of flicking through this kind of on the lookout for anything that might be about Opus Day.

And he just comes across this crazy novel by this guy called Dan Brown who'd had a couple of like minor hits before this. Sure. But he wasn't really well known at this stage. This is like 2003 or whatever. And he finds out that this book basically. One of the main characters is an S day ery. Mm-hmm. An Albina monk there.

A mon Oh, the Albina Monk. I forgot about that. Yes. Yeah. Right, right, right. Who goes around killing people to keep churchy? Secret. Secret and yeah. So obviously all of that kind of bit is like made up or whatever. Right. But I think at first they were like really, like, we're kind of gonna be a kind of a group of that's ridiculed or whatever, but they, I think they very quickly realized that they could turn it to their advantage.

Jordan Harbinger: We're so famous, we got [01:03:00] parroted by this hit novel. Totally. Tom Hanks is in this movie with About Us,

Gareth Gore: and so they ran with it. Yeah. Mark. So they basically inserted themselves into the new cycle as like, Hey, you want, you've heard about the Da Vinci Code? Now come meet the Real, right, right. The Real Helper's Day, uh, which is this kind of highly polished public relations side of the organization.

They don't tell you about the human trafficking or the drugging or the grooming of children. They kept that secret. But, um, they told me that basically it was a turning point for them in the States. Suddenly they had a lot more members because people were like, ah. They very successfully inserted this highly polished image of Opus Day into the media.

And so, you know, you have pieces in like Time Magazine, the New York Times that were talking about, the real Opus day. Yeah. Which was anything

Jordan Harbinger: but real. I suppose they also would attract people who go, oh, I'm cool, being a little bit evil and justifying it with religion. So they probably get the contingent of those people as well, who are kinda like, I have no qualms abusing power.

I wa where do I get some?

Gareth Gore: There is that. There is that. Yeah. And actually I, I, you know, I get a lot of trolls [01:04:00] on social media result of, I can imagine my work. There are a lot of people that fall into that category of like, I'm gonna support these guys because they're the bad guys.

Jordan Harbinger: Right, right. And because, yeah, why not?

Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna ask if you feel like you've maybe got a little bit of a target on your back exposing this, or have you faced any resistance or danger in exposing this? Because a lot of times these groups don't love it when investigative journalists go through their archives and find a bunch of dirt.

Gareth Gore: Yeah. I mean, it was kind of odd because the opus day were. Helpful but not helpful through the process. Surprise, surprise. Yeah, because they were like, oh, we're totally transparent. We've got nothing to hide. Uh, and I was like, great. Show me. Let's go with this then. Yeah. Well, we're not, I mean,

Jordan Harbinger: we're not that transparent.

Gareth Gore: So Sorry. To their credit, you know, they arranged many interviews for me. They invited me into a bunch of their centers. I didn't just take their word for it. I also like did my homework and I met, you know, I arranged my own interviews, met former members, did a huge amount of digging in the archives, whatever.

But to answer your question [01:05:00] about do I, I mean, it's kind of been a weird experience. I mean, I fell into this story by accident. Mm-hmm. I didn't set out to write something about Operas Day. So I think they've kind of struggled a bit with that element because it's kind of easy if someone comes and writes a book who has an agenda,

Jordan Harbinger: then you get the albino monk after you.

Well, yeah.

Gareth Gore: Or, or someone who's like for maybe like a disgruntled former member who writes book. Sure. It's kind of easy to dismiss that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Gareth Gore: But because I fell into by accident. But they've tried, I mean like before the book came out, we had a few difficult months where Obvious Day hired an extremely expensive and extremely aggressive defamation firm.

Ooh. And especially in the uk that's tough, right? 'cause Yeah. Well actually this was in the US

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, it was, um, because I know in the uk, defamation is so much easier to harass people with.

Gareth Gore: Yes. Yes. I think, um, but because the main publisher was American Simon Schuster. I see. Right. They kind of, you know, they came after us, the.

And they sent a lot of kind of aggressive letters, basically. I mean, I think the intention was to make Simon Chester to think twice about [01:06:00] publishing this, but crap. He cashed his advance checks, so we kind of have

Jordan Harbinger: to sell. I think they were like trying

Gareth Gore: to send the message, you know, like, you know, maybe you've paid this kind of advance, but hey, there could be a lot more trouble.

And then why don't you just kind of like quietly let this book go away? Yeah. But to Simon, it's just his credit. They stood by me the whole way. Yeah, that's impressive. And you know, like it's, it's really impressive. And, you know, I, I thanked them and my, you know, hats off to them, but that wasn't the end of the kind of campaign, you know, before the book even came out, before they'd even had a chance to read a page of the book, they issued all of these statements saying it was all conspiracy theories.

It's all lies. Mm-hmm. I mean, like, how can you say something is lies if you don't even know what, what's written That true? What's written in there? Like it's, that's true. And then, um, assume

Jordan Harbinger: it's all lies. Yeah.

Gareth Gore: And once the book came out, they launched this whole kind of disinformation campaign. They tried to do this whole character assassination.

I've had all this kind of army of TRAs online. Mm-hmm. Trying to take me down. And also I'm

Jordan Harbinger: waiting for the emails that say like, oh, he took you for a ride. Everything he said was false. Yeah. You gotta have this other guy on it. Hear the truth. I get that every time I do something like [01:07:00] this, tell, here's another guy.

He'll show you the truth and you look the guy up and it's gonna be like a guy who's a lifelong priest from the Spanish church lives in Texas now. It's gonna be somebody like that.

Gareth Gore: Absolutely. I mean, I think, um, the most interesting thing for me is that most normal organizations when confronted with like super serious allegations of like human trafficking, grooming of kids, drugging your own members, spiritual abuse, breaking the seal of confession, they would come out and they would say, these are really serious allegations.

We are gonna take them very serious. We're seriously, we're investigating. Yeah. We're gonna investigate them, get to the bottom of them, and if anyone needs to be brought to justice, we'll ensure that's done. I. Opus day's response has been stick its fingers in its ears and go, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. This guy's a liar.

This guy's a liar. And I think that's really quite telling. This is an organization that has zero intentions of addressing its failures and addressing abuse inside of its ranks. Mm-hmm. Because the founder said the vision for Opus Day came from God, and because the founder wrote this vision down in meticulous [01:08:00] amounts of detail to challenge anything that the founder wrote down, is to challenge the whole foundation that this group is built upon is to challenge this notion that it's an idea from God.

And so they're trapped. They can't question anything about the way it runs because that's kind of what the founder said, and the founder said it came from God. So how can we challenge God? So they've kind of got themselves into this kind of vicious circle, I think.

Jordan Harbinger: Were there any specific moments during your investigation that really shocked or deeply disturbed you?

I mean, again, it's gonna be hard to pick one with the labor trafficking and all this stuff, but anything stand out?

Gareth Gore: I went out to Argentina to meet this group of 42 women there who were recruited as kids and basically enslaved by ALPAs day. And you know, meeting with many of those women, hearing their stories was just absolutely horrendous.

Mm-hmm. I mean, can you, I, I mean, I've got three daughters, two of them are that age where these girl, you know, and it's just to think of these poor kids being enticed with this kind of carrots of a better life [01:09:00] and then ending up being kind of led. Into this horrendous life of servitude. I mean, they were literally working 14 hours a day for no pay, 365 days a year.

They were not allowed to go out onto the street on their own unaccompanied. I mean, it's like the Handmaid's Tale. It really sounds like it. But in real life, one of the most uncomfortable moments was, you know, said it didn't have anything to hide. And so I said, look, I'd love to come into one of these schools that still exists in Argentina these days.

And I said, look, here's a school I fund. I know it was directly financed by the banks. There's a direct link to what I'm investigating. And they're like, ah, but it's all fine. All the girls are happy there. I was like, well, fine. Let me come in, like, let me talk to somebody. Yeah. And um, this went on for days, so like lost it.

And I'm like, look, I'm, I've got, I'm leaving tomorrow. If I don't speak to them tomorrow, then that's it. And oh, we'll try, we'll try. And then I get a call like in a few hours before I'm leaving. I'm afraid they've had a vote. Inside the school and the girls have voted that they don't want [01:10:00] to speak to you.

Yeah. These

Jordan Harbinger: people who are enslaved and have no, aren't allowed to go out on their own, have voted to not allow anyone to, they voted no,

Gareth Gore: they said they don't want you in 'cause they might be uncomfortable having a guy around and journalist, but they've nominated two people to come and be kind of spokespeople for the group.

You know, they'll meet you at the upper day office or whatever. So I was like, okay, well it's not ideal 'cause I kind of, you know, but fine. And so I went off and had coffee with these two young women. And I was like, yeah, so I heard that there was, you guys had a vote and, and they were like, what are you talking about?

And so I'm like, you know, it just so many moments

Jordan Harbinger: like that didn't, didn't even get the lie straight. Forgot to brief them on the bullshit that they gave you on the phone call. Oh my gosh.

Gareth Gore: So many moments like that were, you know, they feed you what sounds like plausible excuse or explanation or lie, and then you dig into it and you find out it's just all horseshit.

Jordan Harbinger: Like well orchestrated horse shit. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Hey, when you go there, he's gonna ask about the vote. We told him we all voted. And that you're the spokespeople. They just show up totally unprepared. Yeah, it's so, it's comically ridiculous, ridiculous

Gareth Gore: IOUs. I the thing word, you know, [01:11:00] basically I was asking about what had happened at the Vatican with Pope Francis and this clamp down and you know, this one senior guy in El day was telling me how it was all nonsense high.

You know, what really happened was this. And then the more I dug into the story and the more I asked him like, well, how can you say that? How do you know this? It became apparent that he was just making the whole thing up.

Jordan Harbinger: Making up. Yeah, sure.

Gareth Gore: But I think the reason they've got away with it for so long is because it's complicated.

Journalists don't have a huge amount of time. You know, they're on under pressure to kind of get the next story

Jordan Harbinger: generally. Yeah.

Gareth Gore: And so it's been, I think, quite easy for them over the years to brush people off with kind of these explanations about whatever. I only fell into this by accident. If the bank hadn't collapsed, then much of this story might have remained untold.

I

Jordan Harbinger: think so what, what's this about hiring retired FBI agents to investigate people? Do you wanna comment on that?

Gareth Gore: Yes. I mean, so that was so, I mean, a lot of people inside obs Day have been unhappy about Pope Francis and the way he was pushing the church in a slightly more progressive direction. And so they had this campaign [01:12:00] going kind of thinking, well, this papacy is kind of lost, but we can try to make sure the next guy is one of us.

And so they started this campaign and they hired a bunch of former FBI agents, former CIA agents to collect dirt on potential candidates for next pop. And they did this in the end. So when ahead of the, the conclave that has just happened, they published this website and published this book with all of this kind of dossier inside on each of the potential candidates.

The idea being that they were gonna smear a few of them and try to get one of the guys elected,

Jordan Harbinger: it failed. Wow. I'm sure that why it failed was probably a whole separate book. But it's interesting because you would think that if there's a actual real life conspiracy going on inside the church with all these levers of power, they probably had a pretty good chance of getting their own guy in.

And there's other people who are not interested in that.

Gareth Gore: Yeah. I mean, the conclave is literally like 130 guys who get to vote in secret. And so I guess kind of trying to push that [01:13:00] election one way or another, no one will ever know how many votes probably out go or whatever. Yeah, it

Jordan Harbinger: could have

Gareth Gore: been close.

It could, yeah. I mean like, so yeah, I mean, there was every chance that he might get that guy in and, you know, leaking the right information. He's not linked to upstairs as far as I know. But this, um, the nominated ambassador to the Vatican, this guy called Brian Birch, he's linked to a website that put out this crazy story about one of the leading candidates for Popp.

Just hours before the conclave about how this guy had collapsed and all these ambulances had to be brought, I mean, clearly. And they had to, they pulled the story in the end. I mean, it was part of this wider campaign to smear the liberal progressive candidates. Wow. With the hope of getting, uh, a more conservative, uh, Pope.

Jordan Harbinger: So what do you think Opus day's goals are now? I mean, back in the day it was re Christianized the whole world. Do you think they're maybe shifting it up a little bit or are they still kind of like, now we want the whole world to be re Christianized?

Gareth Gore: I think Opus Day right now is purely focused on survival.

It's pretty clear that Francis [01:14:00] wanted to bring them down or to, you know, push them to massively clean up. It looks like Leo wants to go the same way. Mm-hmm. So I think right now it's about trying to save as much of it as they can. I'm sure there are a bunch of diehards inside Elpas Day that are like, whatever the pop does, a bunch of us will carry on.

This is an organization that has hundreds of kind of shell companies around the world. They have assets in the billions. In the US alone, I totted up something like a hundred nonprofits that are linked to ops day. Really?

Jordan Harbinger: So this is

Gareth Gore: almost like a parallel

Jordan Harbinger: Vatican in some ways?

Gareth Gore: Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, after Pope Francis began to clamp down, they started to sell off some of the properties.

You know, they had this Tiffany mansion in Boston. They had this, um, 16th century castle on the banks of Lake Como in Italy. Wow. You know, they start selling this stuff off.

Jordan Harbinger: Why?

Gareth Gore: I think it's to have liquidity. Ah, I see. And to have money in the right places, [01:15:00] just in case Oppa stays closed down. Because these nonprofits officially have nothing to do with Ops Day.

So even if open stays closed down, they'll continue to kind of exist. And I think it's a way of restarting the project in another name. I see. Or, or, so I think there's still this kind of diehard core who no matter what happens with the Vatican, even if the Vatican closes it down, they'll still seek to kind of further the agenda.

They'll seek to carry out God's work and the teachings of the founder Riva, no matter what.

Jordan Harbinger: I am so curious what my Christian, and especially my Catholic listeners think of this. I'm sure that somebody who's listening to this is in Opus Day and is gonna be like, yeah, this guy's got it all wrong. Because I've, whenever I talk about Scientology, I get emails from people who are in Scientology, I don't know how high ranking they are, but they're like, you got it wrong.

It's like a self-help thing. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. But then you talk to, I don't know, Leah Remini or somebody who's high up in Scientology. And they're like, no, this is, it's

Gareth Gore: crazy. I think this is a good moment actually, to say that I think the vast majority of office state members are probably good people.

Yeah. They're

Jordan Harbinger: [01:16:00] just really hardcore Catholics who

Gareth Gore: don't have a clue what's going on. Like they don't have a clue about this human trafficking and the way that, you know, certain members are being drugged. Mm-hmm. And all of these abuses going on, I think. They would be absolutely horrified to find out what is going on inside the organization.

I mean, obviously I want 'em to read my book. Go read my book. You'd have to buy it. Go and get it from the library if you don't. Right. I was gonna say like

Jordan Harbinger: buy it, but maybe, uh, hide it under couch cushions. Well,

Gareth Gore: yes. Or you know, like I'm on Twitter and feel, you know, if you want to DM me, I'm happy to enter into conversation or whatever, but I haven't made this stuff up.

There are several other places you can go. I mean, in, in the nineties in the US there was a website set up by former members called the Opus Day Awareness Network. It's kind of fallen into disuse. There's a Spanish language kind of community called Opus Lidos on Reddit. There's an Opus Day community these days, an Opus Day exposed community.

There are lots of former members at their side. You know, if you are a member of Opus Day or you don't believe me for what, you know, you think this guy's got [01:17:00] skin in the game. He just wants to sell his book. Go speak to these other people and like find out what's really going on. There's an excellent documentary on HBO Max, which came out recently called How I Left Obs Day, which is the, I think it's 13 women former members of Ops day.

Some of them are these numer servants. Mm-hmm. From all over the world. You know, it's not just Argentina or Spain or whatever. They're from all over the world who talk about their experience. It's not just me saying this, this is a, yeah, this is a widespread problem. Yeah. It's so, so interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: In your opinion, what is the best way for the public at large to remain vigilant against these kinds of sort of hidden influences or groups?

Or is it just more like, be aware that if you're joining a hardcore religious organization, that maybe there's a shady side to it? I don't know. What do you think?

Gareth Gore: My advice with Tay would be to steer clear. You can't stay far enough away from this organization because once it gets its clutches into you, it will really rip your apart and, and take advantage of you completely.

I mean, my opinions on I'm not religious myself. Yeah. But I mean, [01:18:00] my opinions on Catholicism and religion more generally are like, if that rocks your boat mm-hmm. Does something for you. Religion can be a very positive thing. Fine. But EY is not a positive thing and in my opinion should be completely eradicated.

Jordan Harbinger: What do you think can be done to safeguard institutions like for example, the Supreme Court or, or just the judicial branch in general? What can we do to safeguard them from external manipulation by groups like Opus Day?

Gareth Gore: I don't know, and I kind of hesitate as non-American giving you guys advice about what, what to do.

I think

Jordan Harbinger: that the, maybe you should rethink that position. Uh, I think we could use a little external expertise.

Gareth Gore: Well, you know, we tried to give your advice like 200 years ago, whatever. Yeah. We weren't gonna, we didn't take that,

Jordan Harbinger: didn't take that well.

Gareth Gore: But, um, I mean, it's kind of odd for me as a Brit looking at the way the judiciary works in the US over here.

Being a judge is like being a politicized position. You don't get kind of Democrat doctors and Republican doctors, so why should you have that in the, in the judiciary? It just kind of seems very odd. That's a

Jordan Harbinger: really [01:19:00] good point. Yeah. Like,

Gareth Gore: I mean certainly here, so like judges appoint each other and it's kind of seen as a professional guild almost.

It's it's, they're not political appointee. There are no elections or whatever, and when now look across the pond and see how things are done there and how it's so politicized and how your stance on certain issues can mean the difference between you getting a position on the bench or not. I find that extraordinary,

Jordan Harbinger: extraordinary is a good word, right?

Sure.

Gareth Gore: I mean, especially since the judiciary is meant to be kind of the third pillar.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's the point.

Gareth Gore: You have the executive and you have the, the legislator, and this is meant to be a different thing that's kind of removed from those other two Right. Legs of government. Clearly it's not because you know, you have people who are, the Republican president is appointing Republican judges who are approved by Republican Senate and, and it just seems very strange and the UK judiciary is not perfect either.

Sure. But yeah, I just, what's with the wigs? [01:20:00] That's my question. Well, you know what? As a guy with,

Jordan Harbinger: you could use one. Yeah, sure. I could

Gareth Gore: use a word. Yeah. Maybe I'm in the wrong job. That's right. That's right.

Jordan Harbinger: Go to law school and you can pick up a wig. Gareth, thank you so much, man. Really interesting. We'll link to the book of course, in the show notes.

I appreciate you coming on. Glad we were finally able to do it.

Gareth Gore: Thanks, Jordan, for having me on. Been a pleasure.

Jordan Harbinger: Join us is Adam Gamal, a Muslim Arab American and former Egyptian refugee Recounts as rise to become a key operative of one of the US' most secretive military units in this two-part podcast series.

In part one, Adam delves into the high stakes world of counter terrorism and covert operations revealing the personal and ethical complexities of fighting terrorism. From within the

JHS Clip: shadows. I came to the US to give me the right to dream. In Egypt, you didn't have that option. It's not cliche, I'm not trying to recruit people to join the army, but I was like, here is a key actually to be as American as anybody can argue with you, and it was joining the military.

You end up there by, uh, pure determination, by having [01:21:00] grit and by being a bit lucky. So we were basically getting our tasks from Secretary of Defense level, joining special operation command in charge of three main missions, counter narcotic, counter terrorist, and hostage rescue. I believe myself, if my dad did not push me towards like getting the right education, and then maybe I would've went in the wrong direction.

So education gonna help people prosper. They're gonna help people actually critically analyze the information they are receiving. So when somebody's bullshitting them about, Hey, if you go to the bathroom with your right foot, not your left foot, you're going to hell. If you have an educated person gonna look at him and say, you know what, man, this doesn't make any fucking sense.

And then I believe to educating women is crucial because they are raising us. A lot of people spend more time with their moms than with their dad because they nurture us and they do all of these things. So if we have a population of educated women in the Middle East or in any of these countries, I think these countries will prosper and it'll be harder to convince these guys [01:22:00] to become terrorists.

Business is war and uh, business is good. When we give people the proper education. We all live

Jordan Harbinger: a better life. Tune in to uncover his unique journey and critical insights only he can provide. On episode 9 78 of the Jordan Harbinger Show, all Things Gareth Gore will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter wee bit wiser. The idea is to give you something specific and practical. Something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes, and if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It's a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six Minute Networking as well over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also, of course hit me up on LinkedIn in this show. It's created an association with Podcast one.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, [01:23:00] and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we've rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends. When you find something useful or interesting, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested in cults political influence and the like, definitely share this episode with 'em. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.