Matty: Hello and welcome, my name is Matty and this is the next episode of Vocation. Once again, I'm very pleased to announce and join by the great Ralph Ellis. And today we're going to be speaking a bit about Ralph's cancellation. And so before we get into the specifics, Ralph, can you speak to us a little bit maybe just about what, did this occur? Maybe just a bit of the background information, what was happening leading up to this and we'll maybe dive in from there.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ Yeah, this was back in 1997, 1998, that sort of time. ⁓ This topic was big. This is, you know, looking at the pyramids and the megaliths. There was a lot of interest in it. Speculation coming up to the millennium. Why that should matter, I don't know, because I mean, if anything, the dates are encoded in the stars, not in our current. calendar system. you know, if there was anything strange going to happen, it would be on the turn of the next great year, which is not in my reckoning until 2300, something like that. Because this particular constellation, we're in Pisces at present, the great month of Pisces, it's a little bit bigger than most of them. So it's a little bit longer. So we're talking about 2300, 2400 years. for that particular great year. ⁓ So yes, the stars don't go according to our standard calendar that we're using today. Having said that, we turned the first century, year zero, well, year one, not because Jesus was born, that became ⁓ year one because we came from the great month of Aries into the great month of Pisces. So yes, our standard calendar is partly based upon the astrological signs and symbols. So yeah, there was lots of interest coming up to the millennium. I got involved in this because I had all of these novel ideas about, you know, Giza and Avbrin Stonehenge, which we've already talked about in previous ⁓ videos and my work was significantly different to anybody else's. It was unique, it was novel, it was interesting. ⁓ I'd put out a few sort of tentative articles just mentioning it, but of course you don't want to mention what you're actually doing, ⁓ which was wise as it happens because yeah, it was all stolen. ⁓ But there we go. ⁓ The problem was same as, you know, just off show, we were talking about trying to get more exposure, more videos. ⁓ It's difficult to get into these spheres. You know, I was talking about publishing at the time, so it's very difficult to get into publishing unless you know a publisher, unless you can be introduced. ⁓ It's funny how this operates sometimes. because I got rejection after rejection, which most authors do, you get piles and piles of rejections. You're not famous until you've got a pile of rejections that's about a meter high sort of thing. ⁓ But this other chap slipped in, never written anything in his life before and got a major publishing contract with Random House. Don't know how that works, but we'll come across that in a minute. So I was thrashing around, you all the publishing houses, trying to advertise my wares, you know, these are my ideas. I can make this really interesting book for you and getting absolutely nowhere. And ⁓ then this agent came along. He wasn't actually very well established as an agent, but anyway, he was ⁓ an author's agent, publishing agent. And he said he could help because he thought the manuscript was interesting.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and so he wanted obviously as an agent he wanted to see you know two or three chapters ⁓ and yes he said we could push this forward we can get a contract with one of the major publishing houses and then that went on and on and on you know you begin to realize that perhaps you know this guy isn't what he says he is you know he's not actually
Matty: I see, ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: producing the goods. ⁓ And suddenly, as I said, this other author, who's never actually published anything in his life before, got a two page spread in the Sunday Times about his expedition to Egypt to go and find the Hall of Records and a major publishing contract and huge advance in the realms of I think if I remember correctly it was something like a hundred and twenty thousand pounds advance. This is in 97 that was a fairly substantial amount of money. ⁓ We'd no background at all you know ⁓ and I didn't know this guy from Adam nobody knew who this guy was ⁓ but suddenly
Matty: Yeah, it's like 10 million a day. Yeah, with no background. So you know.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: my agent was the agent for this other guy. ⁓ well, that was so, you know, my agent got nothing for me whatsoever, but suddenly, suddenly he's latched on to this other guy who's been in the Sunday Times, you know, one of the top selling broadsheets in Britain. And ⁓ suddenly there's
Matty: strange.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Giza fever, might say, pyramid fever, you know, over these new speculations, because he was, you know, in his article in the Times, he was saying we're going to do this and that. This is where I think the Hall of Records and so on is there was a speculation back in those days about a Hall of Records. We've spoken about this in previous videos where ⁓ a repository of the ancients was located somewhere which had all of their records and manuscripts and whatever. He said he had found it, you know, a of triangulation here and there, and he knew exactly where it was supposed to be hidden. So. But then I noticed that a lot of his material seemed rather familiar. And then, well, you know, OK, well, two people can have the same idea, I suppose, you know. So anyway, I was still.
Matty: ⁓ Jesus, yeah, no no. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: plodding along trying to get to publication. And ⁓ so it came to a point where I was deeply suspicious. So the only way you can actually guarantee your copyright is to publish. Once you publish and you send your books off to the British library, you have to send off six books, you know, to establish your copyright. ⁓ then you have some security. So there was only one way out of this. I self-published. It was the only way to do it. I had no idea how to self-publish. I came across this lady who helps self-publishers and she told me the way to do it. Obviously had to ⁓ pay for her services and then she would pay for, ⁓ she would handle the books and actually act as a not a publisher, but a distributor and things like that. So, I mean, she was very, very helpful ⁓ in getting it all organized. And I published within the space of about two stroke three weeks, you know, because the manuscript had been written. It was a matter of collating it and putting it together, making it into ⁓ a format that the printer could read because I didn't have it in a format that printers could use.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I didn't even know what a PDF was in those days. So I had to grab a very rudimentary early Apple computer and print it all into PDF and send it off to the printers. ⁓ so I got a book. This was my book, ⁓ Thoth, Architect of the Universe, which I do not have a copy of, which is unfortunate ⁓ because I've
Matty: Yeah, yeah. I'll put a photo up of it.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, you can put the jacket up. I've just happened to have moved house so many times since then. It's very difficult to cart books around with you. ⁓ So lots of things like that got lost. Anyway, so I had a book and it was selling reasonably well, you know, for a self-published ⁓ item. And then we went to a
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: a conference organized at Grand Lodge, ⁓ not by Grand Lodge, they have some rooms next door called the Connacht Hall, I think it's called, next to Grand Lodge in Queen Street. And people hire out the halls and they do conferences. And there was this conference on, ⁓ you know, the pyramids and megalith and all of that sort of business. And this other author gave a presentation. presentation from my book.
Matty: No way. This is the same author that's got the double spread and yeah, he's went back to your published book then and this rascal.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, this one, yes. So, but this wasn't just similar material, this was a lot of it was exact material. And so that's now a real problem because this guy has got a major publishing house. There's this major book coming out. know, everything's promised. It's coming out in what, three, four months or whatever it is. ⁓ And it's organized by a major publisher. And of course, I'm not a major publisher. I'm just, you know, Joe Bloggs with a self-published book. So I sent a letter of complaint to this this new author guy and got no reply. Yeah.
Matty: What was your reaction first off just seeing this at the conference?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ I seem to remember I got very hot. You know, we have this saying of being hot under the collar. It's a real physiological thing. I was steaming. Steam was coming out of my ears. ⁓ Because it was so obvious that this was my material. It wasn't just similar. It was my material. And it was so obvious that
Matty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see. Yeah, yeah. I'm furious. It's outrageous.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: the only conduit that would have taken this material in that direction was the agent that I had who had had some of my chapters. And it just so happened that all of the chapters I didn't give to him were not in the conference talk, you know, things like that. So, yeah, I was not a happy bunny at that point.
Matty: It's not a coincidence. yeah. I know what mean. I'm you wrung his neck.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I could be steam-rolled completely. mean, this guy was going to come out, he was going to sell thousands ⁓ of these books on the first day because there was a
Matty: can imagine. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: There was, ⁓ you know, ⁓ what do call it? An avalanche of interest in this new book. So it was going to be a bestseller. They were promoting it as a bestseller.
Matty: Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know if you get two pages in the Sunday Times, like, you know, this is a big deal back in the 90s. This is the biggest advertisement you could get, sort of, even... Unbelievable. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It is. It was the biggest Sunday newspaper, you know, as advertising goes, that's the best you can possibly get. ⁓
Matty: And even just before we get further into it, we're talking about somebody stealing your work. Give people maybe a bit of a feel for how many hours and days and weeks and years did you spend researching this and then compiling it and put together? Because it must have been probably even a couple of years of your life, is it, or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ yes. ⁓ yes. Yeah, yeah, it would have to be at least a couple of years before we got to this point for actually compiling all of this information. And remember, it's original work and it was completely different to everything else that had been written. And that's the important bit, because quite often you get these books, even now you can still buy these books on the shelves and they're just
Matty: Yeah. All original work. Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: regurgitating the same old material, going over the same things, they're all talking about stitching, they're always talking about Hancock, and Hancock was talking about stitching, so they're all sort of talking about each other's in perpetuity, I think is the word, they're just going round in circles. And my work was completely original, original thought, just me looking at these ⁓
Matty: Yes. Yeah. Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And the only way to really show this is if people go back and look at the previous video we've done. I'm sure you'll link it in the notes at the bottom. You will see how different my work is to everybody else's. And that's difficult to do. To have original thought is quite tricky, it's difficult. It's like, I cannot imagine.
Matty: Absolutely. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I'm not a musician, I cannot imagine how someone can dream up a new tune. Because tunes to me is a tune and you just copy a previous tune and that's your tune. I have no idea how you compose a completely new separate tune, but people do. But I have the ability to look at data in a different fashion and see something different in it that no one else has seen and all of every chapter every idea I've had in that book is completely novel completely new and and it makes sense I think you know it's it's a little bit esoteric you might say it's it's off on a limb because it's not standard it's not classical but it makes sense and it's all from the original data so you know you can take it whichever way you want but
Matty: Absolutely. It's, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It makes the book exciting because this is new material. There's nothing worse than reading the same old garbage time and time again just written by a different author. ⁓ And so that was, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Matty: Yeah. It's it's first. Yeah. I was going to say it's just first principle reasoning from the very beginning is where you started from and each each step in thought you took us along the way of the path of it. And then this is what laid out to the whole journey off it. And it's it was completely unlike anything else I've seen online. I've read a lot of these books of Hancock's and different people's.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Mm.
Matty: They're quite famous now on the Joe Rogan show and these sort of things, but none of them touched the work you brought us through in last couple of episodes that people will have watched before coming onto this one. But yeah, sorry, going ahead Ralph, we were up to seeing this. yeah. You were boiling under the collar. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Well, yes, that's the main problem. It's not just that I've written a book. It's that it's your baby. You've conceived this. You've brought it to life. ⁓ It's literally your baby. And then someone has gone and stolen your baby. And you think, well, that's not nice. That's not how this should work.
Matty: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This is the gentlemanly world of publishing. And the biggest publisher in the whole world was Random House. I don't know if they still are, but they were at that time. Surely this sort of thing doesn't go on within an establishment like Random House. So the next thing I did is I sent a letter straight to Random House. And ⁓ so I had written. two, three letters to the author, got no reply over a week, 10 days. I sent a letter of complaint to Random House. I got a next day reply by DHL. ⁓ okay, so I'd hit a raw nerve here somewhere. So things started to hot up after that. So they entered into negotiation, they started offering me money.
Matty: Yes, yeah, yeah. and Just before that, what does your agent say when you spoke raise this to him or did he just cut you off? He had blanked you, yeah. I see, I see. So yeah, straight away with the money offer, it seems like they knew this was coming, this was new, it happened, right, we'll just pay him off, whatever he does.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ he gone. He gone. He disappeared. Yeah, he wouldn't answer any calls. Yeah. Well, that made me suspicious because up until that time, I had presumed that random random house knew nothing about this. But the rapidity of their reply suggests that maybe they did know something about it. I don't know. Well, they certainly did later on, that's for sure. So ⁓ they got on to the author and it was the author himself who offered me money. So he offered me 10 percent. I said no.
Matty: It's too soon. Mm-hmm. Naturally.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: He offered me 15%. I said, look, what I want is what I, I want to see how you've treated my material. You're obviously using my material. And from the way you actually gave it in the conference, you were saying, I, I, I, I, I did this, I did that. This was my thought. I want to see how you're treating my material in your book. Are you giving proper references? Are you saying that, you know, Ralph Ellis originally thought of this idea, et cetera, et cetera. Can I see the chapters that you actually put it in? Which is not unreasonable because ⁓ I'd already had, ⁓ because people had seen ⁓ my book that I had privately published and they had come to me and said, you know, we would like to quote material from your book. and I said, yes, of course you can quote this and quote that. Normally I give something like a maximum of ⁓ three or four quotes, no more than one paragraph for each quote, et cetera, fully ⁓ referenced and so on. ⁓ But one guy sent me a fax of... sent me a fax of the material that he had written, including my quotes. Another guy sent me the two chapters from his new book, which included my material. So I could see the two chapters. I could see how he had used my material. I so this is fairly normal. But of course, this guy wouldn't do it. wouldn't say, well, he promised. said he would send me, he had sent me the whole manuscript. course, nothing arrived. ⁓
Matty: Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: That was my main concern. I wanted to see how the material was being used. ⁓ Obviously it was potentially advantageous to me. If my material was in a famous book, therefore people would come back to my book and see what I'd originally written about it. ⁓ But I wanted to see that it was sensitively and professionally used, which obviously it wasn't. ⁓ The offer went up to 25 % so I could have 25%. 25 % of the royalties and 25 % of the advance. I mean, that's quite a lot of money. So I said, no, go away. I want to see how you're treating my material first. Because quite apparently, it was fairly obvious that they just wanted to put this book straight out without any changes to it at all. And he was not crediting
Matty: It's big money here we're talking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: me whatsoever. And that turned out to be true.
Matty: So he was willing to give you the money without sending you the manuscript. He was already trying to lock it down that way. These unscrupulous people here.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yep. Yep. But I wasn't mentioned in the whole of his, it turned out, because I never saw it until it was published, he never mentioned me once in the whole of his book.
Matty: Unbelievable, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Not even in the references.
Matty: He's like a modern day Josephus Flavius here. Unbelievable. I can't imagine the rage you were feeling. I'll be... Random House will be burning the house down. Sorry, go ahead Ralph.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was he was a definitely a Josephus Flavius. Yes, he was. ⁓ Yeah, so It's... It was annoying because I didn't. I was sort of out of my depth because I am just a lone player fighting against effectively against Random House here, which is a very large corporation, and it got worse later on. It got much worse. ⁓ So so I wrote to Random House and said, look, negotiations with this author are not going well. I've got no idea what he's doing with my work.
Matty: Hmm. Thanks
Bishop Ralph Ellis: how it's being referenced. Please don't use any of my work until I can see the chapters, how it's being used. Either the chapters in which it's being used or just the pages ⁓ in which it's being quoted, just fax me across just those pages. I don't need to say anything else in the whole of the book. ⁓ And they refused. So. What did they say? They said they wrote back and said they because negotiations are broken down, they will now remove all of my material from their book. Everything, everything will removed and you will get nothing and there will be no mention of you whatsoever. I said, well, OK, no problem. That's fine by me. sounds like a lot of work to me because obviously my work was a key part of this book and now they're going to have to go through the whole book and repaginate it rewrite it taking all of my material out so that didn't make sense to me at that point but you know what can I do ⁓ and so then all I did is sit and wait then until publication so publication was I think it was 3rd of June 1998, so we're talking a long time ago here, we're talking, we're coming up to almost 30 years now, that you know this was the very start of my publishing career and it wasn't going well. So it came out in 3rd of June 98 and I heard that they had pre-sales copies over in Salisbury and I happened to be down in the
Matty: Yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: southwest at the time so I went to Salisbury grabbed a book from the local bookseller, can't remember what it was called actually but anyway so opened it up and I was horrified. ⁓
Matty: Is this the book here? Do you have it? Yeah, yeah. You've got the air book, the counterfeit book. Hall of the gods.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, I haven't got my book but I've this one. So it's in the Hall of the Gods.
Matty: Nigel Alpeby, this is the scoundrel here. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, Nigel Appleby, yes. ⁓ And a fairly large sort of book. lot of information in it. Standalone, if it had been original work, it would be quite interesting, actually. But I think the amount of work that the author did was about that much.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. The title page.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: about one page. So anyway, I was scanning through this very rapidly. And I suddenly found that that is all my work.
Matty: No way.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: That is all my work. And that's... and that ⁓ it went on and on. were 70 pages of mine that were taken and thrown into this book. And the problem was that where I've highlighted it, that is verbatim from my book.
Matty: That's crazy. Wow. Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So this is not that an idea has been copied because surprisingly within copyright you cannot copyright very easily an idea.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: someone else can have the same idea as you and as long as they write it in their own words with their own explanations there's not a great lot you can do about it ⁓ however this is all verbatim straight from my book the only difference is ⁓ it now said I did it as in
Matty: Unbelievable, isn't it? Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Applebee did it. ⁓ I did it, I did it, I did it. ⁓ yes, my book had been rewritten in this new book, completely, and I was flabbergasted because now Random House were involved, because Random House themselves had written to me and I had it in writing that they would remove all my material and they hadn't.
Matty: ⁓ yeah, that's nice a little. That's unbelievable. Mm. Mm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I couldn't believe that a large corporation would do this because it's leaving themselves wide open to legal action. They have promised to take it out, they haven't, they've published. That's pure... My lawyer used called it flagrant plagiarism and it comes under the Copyright Act, section 107 of the Copyright Act as a criminal act. Although I didn't know it at that time, I just thought this was, you know, private prosecution or something of that nature. But it turned out to be criminal because it was flagrant. Because they had known about it before publication. And they had published in order to produce profits. I think that there are three things that make it a criminal offense. You've got to know about it. ⁓ you've got to flagrantly ignore it and you've got to do it for profit and things like this nature. And that sort of makes it criminal in the end, which I found out eventually, but not initially. So. ⁓ Yes, so I sent a ⁓ by priority mail. So I wrote a letter of complaint that afternoon, sent it off by DHL immediately to get there the next morning ⁓ with a copy of my book. And I'd hurriedly gone through and done all of that highlighting into my book so they could see what had been taken and sent it straight off to Random House. basically saying there's been plagiarism. Please remove this book from the shelves of all bookshops. Not imagining that that will actually have a big effect on a major corporation. Here's this little minnow biting at the ankles of a major corporation. And so I sent this off and nothing happened, nothing happened. On day three, the book was pulled from the shelves.
Matty: Right.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So it was taken off sale in every bookshop in the land. It was taken off sale. And I was hugely surprised at that. Yeah, relieved as well. But all of this to and fro of letters and so on and nothing getting done, nothing getting done, make this complaint and suddenly the book's disappeared.
Matty: I'm sure it relieved a little bit too. I wonder what they were thinking, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Must have thought you just would have went away, or... It's hard to know, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I really, yeah, I don't know, because there is a particular woman ⁓ who is overseeing this particular publication. Each publication has a particular editor. What did she call herself? I forget what she called herself. ⁓ She called herself, ⁓ no, that's the legal manager. No, anyway, whatever she was, she... oversaw this particular book from beginning to end, know, liaising with the author, getting the publication, liaising with all the editors and the paginators and everything else that has to be done to make a book. It was all her little baby. And so she is the one who knew that there was potential plagiarism and did nothing about it. And I presume my letter had gone over her head, maybe or something. to a higher up manager who maybe didn't know anything about this and suddenly came down and said, what the hell are you ⁓ Dear Maria. I don't know if Maria still works at Random House, but anyway, this was not her finest moment.
Matty: I see. I'd be surprised.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ So anyway, ⁓ yeah, the book was pulled and Random House admitted clear evidence of plagiarism in the bookseller, The Trade Magazine. Apparently, everyone in the book trade was utterly astounded by this because no publisher has ever admitted to plagiarism. They actually took out like an advert and put it in to the bookseller saying all books, you know,
Matty: Yes. Wow. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ to be withdrawn because of plagiarism in this book and so okay the next day I get priority mail letter from this high-powered lawyer in London ⁓ the Queen's lawyer seriously yeah literally yeah yeah yeah the same
Matty: Alright. Serious. Like, literally? Yeah? ⁓ wow. Yeah, That's nuts. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: same lawyer. ⁓ So this is not a cheap lawyer like I was using, know, down in the back streets somewhere. ⁓ This was a very expensive lawyer, ⁓ came straight on to me and offered me 10 % of the royalties. So we're going through the same old charade again. And if I didn't agree on to take 10 % and let the book be sold, they would do something else.
Matty: again. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: not in that fashion, not in the fashion we've just seen with all of those ⁓
Matty: Mmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: all of those. direct, not quotes, stolen material, verbatim stolen material. I'm not having that back on the shelves in the fashion it is. I don't mind if it's rewritten and rewritten sensitively so that I get some credit for some of my ideas. So I said, no. He said, well, 15%. I said, 25%. No, go away.
Matty: Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Well, we'll try and do something different with it then. We can't stop this book being published. So anyway, ⁓ at that point, ⁓
Matty: Is this the point? Okay, go ahead.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I got another letter. 11 other authors contacted me. They had all been plagiarized as well.
Matty: Right? Wow, unbelievable from this one book. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So there were 11 other authors. So this included Robert Temple, Andrew Collins, Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas. Robert Bovell, Graham Hancock, amongst others. So loads and loads of people came whizzing onto various chat boards and so on. got all sorts of letters saying, ⁓ he's plagiarized me too. We've all been taken. yeah, in all there were 12 authors were plagiarized in this book. That's why I say that the amount of work the author did was probably one or two pages.
Matty: Yeah,
Bishop Ralph Ellis: The rest of it was all borrowed. ⁓
Matty: Is this... I was just going to ask, you're starting to paint a picture that there's something going on behind this Nigel Applebee guy. Am I cutting ahead too far? Do want to go through the story and bring up who this guy is, who's behind him, who's... There's a fishy smell here. Just want to get in that there.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: But, yeah, no, go ahead. That's what everybody thought. But I don't know if that's correct or not. He was connected to the army, but he was only a territorial. He made out he was an army major, he was only a territorial. He seemed to have a reasonable amount of sort of army type backing. He got apparently ⁓ permission to dig in Egypt.
Matty: Hmm. life of a life. Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: which nobody gets. I mean, you can't go to Egypt and say, I want to dig. It's just virtually impossible. Especially if you don't have, you know, a major university and a PhD and everything else, you know, to go with it. You're just not allowed to do it. And yet somehow he sort of, Egypt claimed he didn't afterwards. But at the time, everyone thought that he had permission to dig in Egypt, north of the Giza Plateau.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ So yes, it did seem to a lot of people that this guy had some backing, because how do you walk into the Sunday Times and get a two page spread?
Matty: Yeah. Did you say he had no prior books? This was his first book or? This makes no sense. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Nope, here's the first book. He had no ⁓ credentials that would give him permission to do anything. ⁓ He had never been to a university, had never done history, he had never been on any digs or excavations or anything. He just came from absolutely nowhere and said, I've got this idea for a book and got Sunday Times promotion and then a major publishing house. with an advance. You don't get advances, you know, if it's your first book you're lucky to get a publishing contract, let alone getting an advance on it. Nobody gets advances on their books. Yeah, yes, back then. You know nowadays that would be 500,000 or more. Yeah.
Matty: over a hundred thousand pounds back then too. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're talking at least a quarter million. Yeah, exactly. For a book too. Like what sort of book makes that kind of profit anyway on top of it all? know, yeah, unbelievably few, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Very few, very few. There's always lots of fishy things going on in publishing. ⁓ The fishiest I ever saw was ⁓ President Obama, who while he was president, he got a educational publishing contract, went to a particular publisher. When he left being president, ⁓
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: That same publisher gave him an advance on a book for his memoirs and I think the advance was 60 million dollars.
Matty: 60 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: But as you're saying, notebook ever makes that did seem like a after the fact backhander.
Matty: No, I think it's a... Yeah, yeah,
Bishop Ralph Ellis: for the educational publishing. And so there are strange dealings you might say within the publishing industry. So, and it did seem that there was some something strange going on with this particular book that this guy was suddenly promoted from absolutely nowhere ⁓ to, yeah, being the sort of star.
Matty: or shenanigans that go on here.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: not the Hancock who had already had, you know, a very famous bestselling book, not the Beauval, suddenly there's this nobody for no good reason. It's very odd.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. And he clearly had inner context to bypass this sort of red flag mechanism that would flare up about plagiarism. Whereas when you sent it after it was published, somebody else got a hold of it and it's shut down immediately. But all prior to that, clearly, whether it's this Marie or whoever, was on his side to push this out of the way and all already. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah. Yeah. how she thought she'd get away with it. I've really got no idea because you know.
Matty: Exactly, this is the one cardinal sin, you know, of this big publishing is this plagiarism.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, it was already clear that I irate before the book had even been published, let alone after. Had she never read the book herself? Did she just believe the author? You know, because I know this author, this author would say, no, it's not real ⁓ plagiarism. No, it's all my own work. It's, you know, that's just that crazy guy over there. Don't worry about it. He did have the gift of the gab, this guy.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Strange, this? Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: He was very eloquent. could persuade, know, Coles to Newcastle and all that sort of business. He would have been a good salesman. ⁓ So did he just bamboozle this girl and this lady and she never bothered to read the book? I don't know. It might have been sheer incompetence. It's quite possible.
Matty: Hmm. Yeah. And the lawyer that was the Queen's lawyer, was that hired by him or was this by on behalf of the publishing house? Yes. Yeah, I see. Yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, by Random House. Yeah, that was by Random House. Yeah, that was their in-house lawyer who was the Queen's lawyer. ⁓
Matty: Yeah. And so you'd unbelievable. You'd turn down their offers. These other 11 authors then collays with yourself. And where does the story lead on from there? Sorry, Ralph.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, so Robert Boval took charge. So I had this lawyer, just a local lawyer that was helping me write these letters. So Boval came in and took charge and took charge of my lawyer as well in order to prevent because the fear was that this book would be republished, it would be put back on the shelves and nobody wanted that. So he organized all the letters going across the random house saying don't you dare, he organized a spy to go into ⁓ the other authors, the plagiarist author, he organized a spy to go into their camp and do a report on them. So this guy who's actually ⁓ a famous author went into their camp and wrote a 14-page report on what they were doing.
Matty: This is a fascinating story.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: as a way of stopping them from writing this book again and putting it back on the shelves. And then he sent out this, this went out to all 12 authors who had been plagiarized. ⁓ The Rules by Beau Val. ⁓ The Eight Golden Rules by Robert Beau Val. Never, never underestimate the enemy. The enemy is the plagiarist author. Never assume he's out of action until ⁓ conclusively proven, never volunteer information except which you deliberately want the enemy group to know about. Always remember that what seems like a gift, Greeks bearing gifts, could be a ploy to extract information from you, i.e. promises of a TV show or newspaper. always try to record exchanges with the enemy, his agents and his possible moles. This is interesting because Robert Boval used to record every ⁓ conversation he had ever had. So he had a room in his house, because I went to his house obviously doing all this, he had a room with thousands and thousands of cassette recorders of all of the recordings he had ever made on his telephone. He recorded everything with everybody. ⁓ So yeah, you've got to record your exchanges with the enemy. Always make sure you coordinate your moves with your fellow players. ⁓ If meeting with the enemy or his suspect moles, ⁓ a time and place must be chosen by yourself. So this is how seriously he was taking this, you in order to stop this book coming back on the shelves again.
Matty: Wow. It's got deep. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: However, it was only my book that was preventing ⁓ republication because it was flagrant, because it was verbatim, and because they had been forewarned before the plagiarism actually took place. So there was no way that Random House could say, ⁓ it was a mistake, you know? It just happened to be similar material. was a mistake. We didn't mean to do that because they've been forewarned and they had already said that they would take the material back out again. ⁓ So it was only my book that was stopping republication. That's why the lawyer was only negotiating with myself, not with the other 11 authors, although the other 11 authors will say, ⁓ but we were plagiarized as well, yes, but your plagiarism didn't count because it wasn't flagrant. They could easily back that to one side and say, you know, that was just a mistake. didn't, it wasn't real plagiarism. ⁓ So this dragged on for a couple of months and they're still musing about republication of this book. And so Robert Boval decides to just go to Random House because he'd written for, I think he had written for Random House previously. I mean, he was a published author and I think one of his books came out via Random House. So he marched off to Random House in order to have it out with them, you know, what are you doing sort of thing. So he rang me up on a Saturday morning having seen Random House and he said, good news, Ralph, good news. you've got a publishing contract with Random House. for £5,000 advance. Okay, well thank you very much, that sounds really good. But you've got to sign this peace deal with the plagiarist author. And I looked at this peace deal and it said, the plagiarist author promises never to publish this book again with the same jacket cover.
Matty: was the catch. ⁓ Material.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: with the same name and the same jacket cover. What? So I said, well, that's, yeah, that is not watertight at all. It's as watertight as a colander. ⁓ But thanks for the deal with Random House. That's very kind of you. I'll go down to Random House on the Monday and we'll sort it out. And he said, no, you've got to sign this peace deal now with the author.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Madden.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Otherwise it's all off the table. And if you don't sign, you will never go to any conference, you will never write any book, you'll never do any film ever, ever again. You've got to sign now. So I just went, that to the modern youth is how you put a telephone down in the old world. You mean you don't swipe. Yes. So, and it was much better in those days as well because it went crash. It was much more physical. ⁓ yeah, absolutely. You could get some rage on that.
Matty: You didn't swipe? Yeah, yes, yeah, There was a satisfaction on the end of it. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ So yeah, so what's gone on? know, what why is this? Why is this happening? ⁓ Well, we soon found out because ⁓
Matty: Crazy.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This comes.
Matty: How old were you then, Ralph? Out of curiosity, dealing with this. How old were you then when you were dealing with this, sorry? If I may ask.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ I must have been in my 30s I suppose you know because this was 30 years ago yeah so I must have been in my mid mid 30s something of that nature yeah. ⁓ yeah I was still doing a proper job yeah I wasn't an author yeah I'm still doing a proper job which had to be done while this was all happening. ⁓ So the book had been withdrawn
Matty: Hmm. And you're still working and doing everything else in life and then this is on top of it it comes through Yes, yeah Yeah
Bishop Ralph Ellis: after three days, we'd had all of these machinations, then Boval had this sudden change of heart apparently and saying that we've got to make peace with this guy and the deal he came up with was full of holes basically, it meant nothing. So I didn't agree to it. And then the next week, ⁓ well, next two weeks, there was announcement of a joint ⁓ Cruise on the Nile with Robert Boval and Nigel Appleby.
Matty: Geez I was about to ask you what did they offer him to do this to?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So Robert Boval had tied up with the plagiarist author to go on a Nile cruise and to do, ⁓ there was a conference and there was talk of a book as well between the two of
Matty: Wow. Right?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And of course, in order to put out that book, they needed to be able to use some of my material. That's what I suspected, of course, because why else would they need a peace deal between me and the plagiarized author? ⁓ And Boval then publicly called for all of the other plagiarized authors to forgive and forget. And then Appleby himself ⁓ wrote an article in one of these magazines praising Boval's fairness and how they can work in the future on all of this sort of business. So that put me in a difficult spot because now I was the one who was preventing any of this from happening. because I was refusing to sign this peace deal, ⁓ would allow, effectively would allow repubblication of this book because the peace deal was like a calendar as I said, it in no way stopped that book from being republished. So, but that would ruin my book completely, you know, who's gonna buy my book when all of my material is already in this other book anyway. and the £5,000 advance from Random House of course did not exist. So I went to Random House and they told me to go to Foxtrot Oscar. There was no contract with Random House. It did not exist. ⁓ So yes, I was being played for a fool. But I wasn't quite as foolish as somebody thought that I might be.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's mad.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So I stood my ground, it was the only thing I could do. A week later there was a full page advert in Quest magazine for a tour of Egypt by Robert Boval and the plagiarist author. So what could I do at that point? Well it was only at this point in the proceedings that I found out that this was a criminal offence.
Matty: believe.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Now that made life much easier because I did not have to prosecute, the police did. That's the advantage. I don't have to take out a private prosecution. The police can do it for me. ⁓ So I went to the police and they said, nothing to do with us, Gov. Because you can see the law, the law is section 107 of the Copyright Act. And so you go to the police and they go, nothing to do with us.
Matty: yes, yes, I see, I see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Try the copyright agency. So you go to the copyright people. Nothing to with us. Try, I don't know, something else, patent department. Yeah, what do they call these brand images when you have your brand name? Try them. Went to them. No, it's nothing to do with us. So it turned out we had a law.
Matty: Sounds like the police. Yeah. Classic government run agencies here. Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: that nobody had bothered to give to an administration to actually administer. So we had a law with no teeth, which was absurd. So I went to parliament. So it's getting worse and worse, this little story. So I had to go to parliament. I had to go to the attorney general with my MP from Bournemouth, as it was then.
Matty: This is a movie in itself. Yeah, yeah
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and so the attorney general then so this was read in parliament they actually stood up and read this in parliament to the attorney general that this is unsatisfactory that you've got a law that nobody is going to administer so eventually the attorney general ⁓ and this is in Hansard you can look it up in Hansard ⁓ said okay it's got to be the police that do it so now we had an agency to actually administer this law so i went along to ⁓ the police And I had to go up to London for this because it was in their jurisdiction. And they did not want to know really because, know, they're catching, well, actually, they never catch criminals either. you they're supposed to catch criminals, not supposed to catch plagiarists, you know. ⁓ So they weren't terribly interested. So they rang up Random House and said, look, we're going to need all your data on this. Can you send all of your information across, you know, so we can have a look at it?
Matty: Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and Random House didn't cooperate. So they had to send the flying squad down there to do a raid on Random House to get all the material. yeah, don't upset the police by not cooperating. The police don't like it. They were not interested at all up until then. As soon as there was zero cooperation, Random
Matty: Right, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah, yeah. This is a crazy story.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Sorry, the police got all upset.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. I wonder why Random House didn't cooperate though. This makes me think again, they're really trying to protect this fishy gentleman here and that he must have some sort of standing in there with someone. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It's It's possible, it is also possible, this has never happened before in the history of publication. And so a lot of people didn't know the law, perhaps, didn't know the implications of the law, because it's 10 years in prison. They didn't know that at the time. You would have thought, my, initially I had a London lawyer who was involved in
Matty: Yes, I see. But you have the Queen's lawyer there advising them, you know? You'd have thought, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ copyright because I wanted a lawyer who knew that sort of field so I got a copyright lawyer in London who was absolutely useless and he didn't know it was a criminal offense either it was only my local lawyer when I went to a local lawyer who said you know do you know it's a criminal offense ⁓ so perhaps they didn't get the right advice from the lawyer perhaps they were so arrogant that
Matty: Yeah. I I hear. Right. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This has never happened in the history of publication that nobody has actually taken a publisher to court for ⁓ copyright. Well, my lawyer used to call it flagrant plagiarism, but it's under the Copyright Act. ⁓ But so, yeah, so that sort of escalated it. so, yes, Random House got raided apparently by the police. So my policeman told me and. ⁓
Matty: That's true. Mm-hmm. Yeah, very good.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, the fine is imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years if it's flagrant. And of course this was because they knew about it in advance. ⁓ Suddenly the tour of Egypt by Boval and the Plagiarist was canceled. ⁓ Suddenly all the rumors of a book
Matty: Mm-hmm. But yeah, good. Yeah, I know.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: disappeared. So if there was a book, and we don't know if there was, but there were lots of rumors that there was going to be a joint book between the two of them, that disappeared as well. ⁓ Because they couldn't use my material, you know, because I had refused. There was no peace deal.
Matty: course. But this Povell character that you were familiar with, you saying you went round to his house even, where was his morals in this? He knew the plague arised off you. You'd been round to his house, the guy's house, you were working together initially, and then what he'd go, I'll just throw him under the bus. Yeah, right. This is an archetype of people, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Josephus Flavius again. There are too many Josephuses in this world. I you've only got to look at what happens in politics sometimes with these self-serving politicians ⁓ who are always in it for their own good, for their own money. ⁓ There are too many people like that in many industries. And it's disappointing that, there are... too many people with lax morals that they would just do anything for their own personal good, their own personal fame, their own personal finances, whatever it happens to be.
Matty: I... Yeah. I hope I... Mm-hmm. How big of an author was he in this space of ancient Egypt on these megalithic things? he well known as he or was he ⁓ also an obscure figure? Yeah, I'm not familiar with him. So he's quite a big name in here.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ Oval, yes. okay. Yeah, he was the guy who did the Giza star correlation ⁓ book. So that was where in the last video, when we were looking at the shaft angles pointing at stars, that was his idea and was the basis of his bestselling book. It was quite a good bestselling book that one.
Matty: Right? Yes. Yes. That was his.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ but again co-authored so he had had the same problem that I had had in that no publisher was interested and he had been touting this book around many publishers for quite some time and finally he somehow got co-authored with ⁓ Adrian Gilbert
Matty: I see, I see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And think Gilbert was more famous because he'd already written a book and he'd already had a publisher. And so he had an inroad into getting a publisher. And so they co-authored this book ⁓ between Bovall and Gilbert. And that's the only way he could get it published. Same problem that I've been having. He had this book and no one would publish it. ⁓ But it became a bestseller and it became Robert Bovall's book.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And if you ever went to any conference, he never mentioned Gilbert once. Even though he was the co-author on the book. I forget the name of this book actually. I've probably got a copy in there somewhere. But anyway, it's a relatively famous book. So.
Matty: sick yeah yeah Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Boval would have been wanting another bestseller because he had not had anything to come up with after that particular book. There was no sequel to it. And so he would be looking for a bestselling sequel. And of course, the plagiarist had already had these ties with the Sunday Times and strong ties with Random House and so on.
Matty: Yes, sorry. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Perhaps it was a deal that was too good to refuse if you don't mind trampling on everybody else. Because that may, if that was the way this was going to go, it would mean trampling on many of the other authors as well. We don't know because ⁓ subsequently he denied that there was a book, but there was a conference and there was a tour of Egypt because we have the advert.
Matty: Yeah. Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: In Quest Magazine we still have the advert for that. So that cannot be denied. So this
Matty: I see. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This tour was rearranged, so it became a tour with Hancock and Boval. and I had been invited on this tour as a guest speaker. I had to pay my own way to go down there but I've been invited by Hancock as a guest speaker. So I went down to Egypt to go on this. It was on a cruise, one of those cruise ships that goes up and down the Nile. So I went to the boat and I was going up the gangplank and Boval stopped me from going on the boat. He sent the ship's captain to stop me going onto the boat. So I was stuck on the gangplank and I refused to leave. So I sat on this gangplank for about three hours with my bags, waiting to go onto this boat. And of course the captain wanted to depart, know, they got a schedule to meet, you know, and he couldn't depart with me sitting on the gangplank.
Matty: Right, yeah. Get on ya. Yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So I just sat there and dangled my legs over the side and it was quite a nice day because it was winter. And eventually Graham Hancock had to come down and say, look, just let him on board for God's sakes. So I got onto this tour and did my guest speaking, which I think I only did two talks or something, but there we go.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. You're just whistling away. Very good.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ But this was part of the business of banning me. You remember when we had this conversation on the Saturday when he said, if I don't sign the peace agreement, I'll never work again. I'll never go to a conference or film or anything. And then we went to, ⁓ I had an invite from carte blanche in South Africa. It's one of these famous documentary series ⁓ from the days when South Africa was rich and could afford these things, which it can't now.
Matty: It's long gone.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ And talk about Keystone Copts Capers. Carte Blanche were trying to film Robert Boval and they were trying to film me. ⁓ So they were trying to delay Boval on one side of the pyramid while they were interviewing me on the other side of the pyramid because Boval said he would not cooperate if I was on the film. So he banned me from the film, but Karl Planck didn't want that idea. And they tried to get me on the interview anyway, without his, know, didn't matter what he said. And suddenly this cry came out, profile's coming. So he was coming around the other side of the pyramid. So we had to sort of pack up all the filming equipment and run around the other side of the pyramid. So you can see that
Matty: believable. You
Bishop Ralph Ellis: yeah he was making good on his word because all my conferences had been cancelled after that so I turned up at one because I was determined to turn up because I'd had an invite for this conference so I turned up and they gave me five minutes so again I'd been cancelled so ⁓ yeah there were many machinations behind the scenes in order to make me persona non grata And of course, Boval was trying to do that to all of the other authors as well saying, ⁓ don't get involved with that Ellis guy, you know, and there's Hancock going, well, why do we want to get involved with Appleby? He's just stolen all our material. So why do we want to get involved with him? there was, yeah, nobody quite knew what was going on.
Matty: Yeah, of course. Yeah, right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and I did end up as persona non grata for quite some time. So my book has been relatively unknown because of that. ⁓ So if viewers don't know of my work, Thoth, architect of the universe, and I'm sure a little image will appear suddenly. Just like Mergent Gears. And now you know why.
Matty: Yes, yeah, like magic.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I was effectively canceled. That's why I became a lone ranger doing all my work with my other material, because I went on to, because this is important because. I turned out to be a prolific author. But Boval could have stopped this from happening completely. So all of this work might never have happened because if I had become disillusioned with publishing, if I had lost all my money because of this, because I got no money. initially from this whatsoever it was only because I was I wouldn't say I was independently wealthy I was independently poor but I did have another job and ⁓ even though that job was intermittent you might say so I I was not working all the time however that intermittency I was an airline captain now you might think okay well the guy is well paid no because I only worked I was working as a freelancer and so I was only working
Matty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Mm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: you know, six months of the year, whatever, ⁓ in some of the worst low run airlines you could possibly imagine. ⁓ Although I did work for EasyJet at one point as well. I mean, although at that time, EasyJet was pretty low run as well. When it started, was a shoestring operation when it first started, but I won't talk about that too much. But anyway, because I had all of this time off, I was able to do...
Matty: I see. Yeah, yeah. I see. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: other work and Robert Boval nearly scuppered all of this work so nobody would have known about this. Where is Solomon? ⁓ He's in Egypt. There are videos on this of course ⁓ so people can go back and have a look at all the videos we've done on the vocation channel. ⁓ King Jesus, nice big fat book, very well worth reading. All of this
Matty: Absolutely. Imagine this hadn't been done. You know, identifying the historical Jesus. Like, this is crazy. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, yeah, all of this could have been, could have all been published by Random House, you know, had this not happened. You know, Random House could have had some bestsellers on their lists, but they didn't because of Robert Boval and The Grey Oceifer, my King Arthur book. All of those books didn't become bestsellers.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. crazy.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: primarily because of Robert Boval because obviously having taken a publisher to court, which I did in the end, took them to court and also had the police raid them, I was fairly persona non grata to all of the other publishers as well. So they wouldn't touch me with a barge pole because I had this bad reputation. I'd taken random house, the only person to have ever taken random house to court, you ⁓
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ And I did.
Matty: Do you want to walk us through a little bit of this court case? How long did this go on for? What happened there? I see. Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Well no, because they settled out of court. So as soon as this rattled on, so it didn't actually go to court until 2002, so this was like four years later. And you know there have been letters backwards and forwards, I was still trying to get the police to prosecute them and police didn't really want to know, they were quite happy that the book had been pulped. So by this time the
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: book had not only been taken off the shelves, it had been pulped and it was fairly clear that they could not use any of that material in that book ever again. So that book was dead in the water. And the police at that point were relatively happy that they'd done enough work on it. So back in 2002, so this was like four years later, I then took them to court and immediately they settled out of court. Oh, that's the wrong one. and they paid me a load of money.
Matty: Yeah, fantastic. Very good. So they should've. Yeah, justice. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So yeah, after all of this time. So again, when the other authors say we were plagiarized, yes, but borrowing your ideas is not actually copyright ⁓ under section 107. You can copy other someone else's ideas and rewrite it in your own words and explain it in a different fashion. ⁓ That is not plagiarism, that is not copyright under section 107. So again, only my book was stopping this book, this plagiarist book from being published. And so yeah, they settled out of court immediately and they paid me. So I was the only one to ever get paid ⁓ by Random House. And that's why I became persona non grata to the other publishers.
Matty: Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I'd taken random house to court. So that is the genteel world of publishing. But there is a postscript.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, yes, good, good.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: the funniest postscript you've ever heard in your life. ⁓ Talk about, I don't often have a belly laugh, but I was rolling on the floor at this one. ⁓ So I, ⁓ I should probably do a share on this. Why not? Let's do a ⁓ screen share.
Matty: Yeah. ⁓ Very good. ⁓ super. Even better.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ window. The Gorniad. Here we go. the Grornyad. ⁓ One of the worst papers in the UK but there we go that depends on your politics I suppose. I don't know if people know it is known as the Grornyad and it's so much known well because they could never spell back in the old days of hot type it was internationally famed for its bad spelling so it's known as the Grornyad and you can actually put in Grornyad
Matty: No. I see, I see. That's hilarious.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: dot co dot uk and it'll come up with this page here.
Matty: That'll come off.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: If we type in groenia.co.uk and press enter, it comes up with the guardian.
Matty: That's hilarious, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: There we go. And so now you've got the Guardian.
Matty: because they were so famous for spelling wrong, even get their own name wrong. Yeah, yeah, that's hilarious. no worries.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Absolutely. So I'll stop that share and I'll go back into the other page ⁓ because we have this post script So this came out a few years later. and this comes from it says more than 19 years old this comes from 2006 so we're moving on another four years ⁓ after the court case that I had with Random House and the Guardian printed this and we might as well read it because it's just so funny it's a commentary on a book a new book that has just been printed and it says trapped surrounded betrayed this is just after the gulf war So just to put this in perspective, trapped, surrounded, betrayed, they didn't exist and they shouldn't have survived runs the blurb for the SAS veteran Major Neil Arden's Desert Fire. That's his new book Desert Fire. ⁓ The shocking true story of a covert unit of British and US black ops specialists on a dark and bloody mission to Iraq that wasn't all it seemed. Too right it wasn't. ⁓ In its dark and bloody entirety, it was a figment of Major Arden's fervent imaginings. When we call about this minor inconvenience, the publishers, Hodder, which is another big publisher in the UK, concede that the book has been withdrawn due to the impossibility of verifying the material and questions about the author. It seems the scribe may have been one Nigel Appleby, whose 1998 masterpiece Hall of the Gods simply flew off the shelves until another 12 writers claimed copyright infringements, plagiarism and misrepresentation. Desert Fire, Hodder stressed, came to it through a reputable agent, was ghosted by a respected author,
Matty: I
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and got the all clear from an independent SAS expert. But if you ask us, Major Arden blows his cover long before he gets to the high spec RDX explosives. I'm just moving on about here. Desert fire kicks off in the autumn of 2002 with our hero heading for Whitehall to meet his controller. I caught the London train. in Ross on Why begins the second paragraph.
Matty: Unbelievable, isn't it? Yeah, so just lying is second nature to some people. It doesn't bother them whatsoever. Yeah, yeah, this is crazy. So he clearly learned from his lessons. He straightened out and there's a happy end.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: See ya. ⁓ yes. But... But how do you walk into a second publisher?
Matty: I
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Having been kicked out of one publisher for plagiarism, how do you walk into another publisher with this book idea, ⁓ which is a total figment of his own imagination? How do you persuade them that this is, that you are genuine? This is a genuine story and a really exciting story. And as it says here, was got the all clear.
Matty: There's something fishy with him.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: from an independent SAS expert. So what does that say about the SAS expert? ⁓ Yeah. And it came through a reputable agent.
Matty: Trust the experts.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Now I was told that the agent was the same agent that was representing him with Random House. So how did that reputable agent then... recommend this guy a second time when knowing that his first book had been plagiarized. ⁓ Because as I said before, know, going to a publisher and getting ⁓ a book published is difficult. Not many people manage it. There are many books that end up ⁓ thrown in the bin because they are never published because it's so difficult to get ⁓ a contract with any publisher. And yet this guy got two. two contracts, two publishing contracts with advances on two books that were fictitious. Well, the second one wasn't plagiarized, it was just made up.
Matty: He must be quite the sweet talker. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just straight up. It's crazy, isn't it? Like, yeah, unbelievable. Do you want to expand out? Is there more to this story a little bit or do you want to expand out? What's I'm sort of interested in what the rest of your career, what your reception has been like? I know you were saying you were sort of stonewalled from some of these major conferences and things. What's the general perception of things that went on afterwards and the rest of your career?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, straight made up. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. ⁓ No, I was pretty much ⁓ cancelled ⁓ from most major conferences. I did go to some of the minor conferences and they were great actually. We had a guy up in Liverpool who courageously put on these conferences because he had no money and not much of a reputation in the market and he just put on these conferences and got all these people to come along and they were quite successful, I have to say. ⁓ Very good, but these are very much the fringe conferences. ⁓ lately, since this is all blown over, I've been going into some conferences because a lot of people have forgotten about this. ⁓
Matty: it.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and it sort of died down and I don't really want to resurrect it but it has to be said to people that you know publication is very tricky. ⁓ How do you actually get your ideas into print via a major publisher when these sort of things go on all the time? It's difficult. ⁓ So it's worth explaining what the pitfalls are when you have an idea and you want to try and put a book together. It's possibly quite why a lot of people now go down the self-publishing route. A, it's being made easier because the technology is there for people to do it themselves now anyway. You don't even have to have a printer nowadays. Most of my stuff comes through Amazon on print on demand. And so you can just send manuscript into Amazon and they all print it for you. Having said that I've just been kicked off Amazon which is very very peculiar, it doesn't help me at all. My books are still for sale on Amazon but I'm not allowed onto Amazon so I can't control anything with my books on their site, I've been banned from Amazon and I really don't know they had a new thing
Matty: Really? ⁓ Why is this? When did this happen? What?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And I think this is law, this is a change in the law regards, ⁓ I think it's regards income and finances and things of that nature, I don't know. But you had to, ⁓ no, maybe it's. It might be due to ChatGDP and these new AI things. They're getting a lot of AI produced books coming through and they're trying to cut through, ⁓ cut down on the number of AI slop books that get published. And so they wanted identification. So I put through my identification and they said, sorry, you failed identification and you're
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: no longer welcome on Amazon. So I've been kicked off Amazon. What do you want? I sent my passport. What else can I send? No explanation as to why. No explanation whatsoever. You've just failed ⁓ identification. I'm here. Look, this is me. I have a passport. I gave you my passport. What more do you want? ⁓ Yeah, so that's another.
Matty: Strange. Very weird. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So there are many pitfalls in all of this business. It's not just about researching and writing, which it would be nice to get back to just researching and writing. But I have to say, you know, good 30 % of my time has been taken up on doing other things, which are nothing to do with research whatsoever. So I could have been more productive, but I was otherwise engaged. And I had to do...
Matty: crazy.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: work as well, I had to do a proper job as well. Even though it was only, mean, for two of these, you know, especially for this one, I actually took two years off work. In fact, it ended up as three years off work to go and write it because it's difficult to concentrate if you're having to break up your research, do some research, go off and do your work and then come back some months later and
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: get back into the research again, it really breaks it up. It's not very ⁓ good way of ⁓ writing a book. ⁓ So yeah, on some occasions I just took time off work and sat down and wrote.
Matty: And a lot of your work has been on sort of revisionary theology and you described it. And so I imagine there's been a lot of pushback from different religious types or scholars in this field who probably aren't too happy what you've been writing about there. And so what sort of reactions have you got? What sort of cancellation forces came your way due to it? If you know what I mean.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Move. Yes, I've had various cancellations. ⁓ This happens on the modern video networks as well. ⁓ I got caught up in one and ended up at the center of ⁓ one of the cancellations. ⁓ One of the authors, ⁓ yeah, he's a fairly prolific author, Dr. Robert Price, ⁓ anyone who knows anything about ⁓ alternative Christianity and so on. He's a prolific author, very, very good. And ⁓ he was ⁓ using a particular video channel, which the young guy became his surrogate son, basically. They were around each other's houses, you know, and he was like father and son. And then suddenly the son kicked him in the teeth.
Matty: Right?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: for, well, because Price is right wing, he's a Trump supporter. And of course, this young ⁓ lad accused him of every ism in the book and recorded this tearful video saying how terrible and evil Dr. Robert Price is, you know. And a lot of people thought that was, you know, if you don't want someone on your video channel, just say, don't want you on, you know.
Matty: Yeah. Bye
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Don't try and ruin the guy and ruin his reputation in order to bring him down. So I complained about that. ⁓ And then I had exactly the same happen to me with another guy. And these two guys, these two young guys are like twins together. don't know. They didn't know each other before, but they did go off to Israel together later on. And I fell foul of something.
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And we think there is a machination behind the scenes by a particular religious group ⁓ because there were two of these other authors, video channels makers, who I'd been on many times and they thought my material was wonderful. ⁓ They turned around and said to Dr. Robert Price, don't use any of Ellis's material. because he was talking about my material in his video. Don't talk about anything of Ellis's. Jesus, King of Edessa book. Otherwise we'll tear you to pieces. we will do a hit piece video on you, worse than the other guys done. And so to his credit, Dr. Robert Price said, go Foxtrot Oscar, go forth and multiply. ⁓ I think Alice's material is.
Matty: Wow.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: is interesting, is valid, it is backed up by all the references, you know, I'm still going to use it. And so they made this terrible video again about Dr. Robert Price, saying he's a misogynist, he's a racist, he's a homophobe, he's against BLM and all of the standard woke stuff, you know, and they were trying to rip.
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Dr. Robert Price to shreds simply for hosting some of my material because I wrote a couple of articles for him and so on. That's the sort of people we come across. And then they did the same to me as well. They made a similar video about myself saying I was a racist and a misogynist and all that sort of business. All based on completely untrue ⁓ things they'd made up. It's so easy to try and trash somebody if you just make up some material. ⁓ Because it was, it was all made up. I ended up making a ⁓ video, a contrarian video, answering all the questions. And it's a bit sad that you have to go and do that, but you have to...
Matty: course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: justify the fact that you know this this is all made up you have to tell everybody that these people are just out to get you and it seemed between myself and Dr. Robert Price of course we were talking about this quite a lot that this was all organized behind the scenes it wasn't just these video channel makers it was organized behind the scenes by a ⁓ particular religious group Because remember, all these new video channels, they're all working on a shoestring.
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: you're not getting huge money yourself you know from any of these videos you know you just don't make a lot of money out of videos and these guys were getting semi-professional and so they were relying on on video income of course ⁓ and they I think they both had families I'm not quite sure I can't remember both of them had been fundamentalist Christians and turned into ⁓ agnostics or atheists or whatever so they both had a very similar background
Matty: Of course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Both were financially strapped. Both were, I would say, open to persuasion if someone came along with a nice fat wad of money. And we've already seen this before with the Nigel Appleby book. It's the same old playbook, isn't it? People have their price all the time. These people always have a price. And I think that's the reason why they suddenly made these videos.
Matty: I Boval. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ trying to destroy it and the thing that they said to Dr Robert Price was interesting is that they were only going after Robert Price because he supported myself and because he supported my Jesus King of Adessa book and was discussing it and that was the reason they actually made these hit piece videos against him. ⁓ which again suggests that there was a religious organization who didn't want this information to come out because it is revolutionary, it is shocking, it does undermine the classical Christian story, it doesn't undermine the the Jesus story because you know does it really matter if the guy was crucified in AD 70 instead of AD 30 does that really make a difference? ⁓ It does change it because it makes him a real king, it makes him a wealthy person, not a pauper prince of peace. He becomes a real king, a wealthy king, who is involved in a very real secular dispute with Rome. So that changes, I suppose, but the rest of the gospel story all remains the same. It just means that this supposed son of God was rather more influential than the gospels make out. ⁓ So I think, yeah, that there were machinations behind the scenes and someone wanted this book buried. So if people want to know the truth, the truth that they've tried to bury on numerous occasions, this is the one. With this jacket cover as well, not the old jacket cover, ⁓ there are some old editions running around which are not as good as this one. ⁓ So, yeah.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah, understandably. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: all interesting stuff it's a bit of a minefield this publication game so yeah i've had lots of pushback from various people i've had fatwas you know because i write about islam as well in the back of this book in fact ⁓ my adesa book because adesa was taken over by islam of course so i write about that so i've had pushback i've had various threats from
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can see, I can see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: various individuals. ⁓ It does mean I've had to move house on a few occasions, but there we go, you that's life. ⁓ You ⁓ don't get into this game if you can't take the ramifications of it. It is a minefield. People's lives do depend upon it. You know, if you're working in the church, if you are a
Matty: Yeah, fair play. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: priests, know, or whatever within the church, your whole life is based upon this material and your whole income and ⁓ life depends on this material. You don't want it necessarily being changed by some ⁓ odd researcher who just comes in with all of these new ideas. ⁓ And it doesn't always go down well with academia because academia has the same rigid structures as the church does. Now you can imagine the church has this rigid structure, know, these are our gospels, that's what happened, that's the way interpret this material. And it's very difficult for them to change their minds. But academia does exactly the same. They have their own academic structures, and you have to keep within that history and those structures. Otherwise, as an academic, know as a tutor in university or something like that you could just as easily lose your job if you go out on a limb and start saying that Jesus came from Edessa and you know you're a theologian that Oxford or Cambridge or something you can't do it you know because your life depends your income depends on you towing the classical line because you too could be thrown out the same as any priest could And so you get pushback from ⁓ these academics. I had a piece ⁓ in the Daily Mail about my book, which I had to pay for, by the way. You can pay for articles. Not all of these articles just arrive by research, by a reporter. They're bought. And so I bought a reporter to go and report on my book.
Matty: I see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and he wrote this. It wasn't very big, it was only a quarter page article on my book. But to make it more spicy, of course, they then went for commentary for various ⁓ theologians from Oxford and whatever. What do you think about this book? And of course they said, ⁓ it's rubbish, it's rubbish. Not one of those commentators, those theologians, had ever read my book.
Matty: Yeah, of course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So they're pushing back, they're saying it's rubbish, without ever having read a single word of my book, which is totally unprofessional, because everything they said was a complete nonsense. It's not what I wrote in my book, you know, the things they were making up. I mean, one of them, this is a theologian, said ⁓ Jesus was clean shaven.
Matty: Yeah, of course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So Ellis is completely wrong. Well, there are some Roman ⁓ images of Jesus that have him as a Roman and therefore clean shaven. Of course, Jesus was a Jew. He was a Nazarene Jew. The Nazarene did not cut their hair. That's the whole point of the Nazarites, the Nazarene, is they did not pull their hair. They had long hair. And of course, if he came from Edessa,
Matty: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: which is where I say he did come from. All of the Odessan monarchs had long hair and beards. ⁓ They were very much Hesute. That's why Josephus Flavius called them barbarians. He didn't call them barbarians because they had a different language, which is the classical interpretation of barbarian. ⁓ He called them barbarians because they had long hair. Barba, from which we get the word for a
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Barber in the Latin ⁓ and that's where he was using his barbarian. They didn't have a foreign language because they were using the same language as Josephus Flavius so it was nothing to do with language. ⁓ you get these theologians writing these complaints about my book you know because they've been asked to give a response you know what do you think about Ellis's book? ⁓ rubbish! protecting their own positions because they've never read my book. If they had any interest, if they were true academics, they would maybe want to read some of this material, maybe to converse with me and say, well, you said this, I think you said this, you know, what's your explanation for this? You know, perhaps write a letter to me, an email, you know, we do have emails nowadays. ⁓ But no, of course, they didn't, they just want to rubbish it because they want to
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: keep the standard classical interpretation intact. And that's within academia, not just within the church. So yeah, there's lots of pushback, but yeah, you you expect that. ⁓ Science and history only advances one death at a time.
Matty: That's right.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So within the academic system, the old guard have to die off before the new ideas can come through. So we're really waiting for all of the old guard within the university system to die off. Sad as it is, you know? ⁓ But it's not all doom and gloom. mean, there's been a lot of people who are more enlightened, who ⁓ have appreciated, you know,
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: the depth of the work and how it's fully referenced and all brand new ideas and so on. People like Dr. Robert Price, who I would have expected to have pushed back against it. And he did initially when he hadn't fully read it, but he had the good nature to actually write to me and say, well, I don't agree with this and allow me to explain myself. And then he said, well, ⁓ actually, that sort of makes sense. And he sort of came around to my point of view that while he didn't fully agree with everything I was saying, it made sense and it was well argued. And that's what he was saying on his podcast and so on. So, yeah, there've been quite a lot of positive responses, especially from the general public. You know, the general public really do like these new interpretations, these new ideas. So it's been fully worthwhile. enterprise and it's still going. The books are still flying off the shelves. Well, they're still selling for a self-publisher. They're still selling.
Matty: Yeah, very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. I am. I was partly asking why, because I'm almost sure during this podcast, I'm going to get some shenanigans coming my way down the line. And I'm almost thinking, what's the right game plan to have here? Yeah. Should I? What do you think, Ralph? Should I work to save up a pot of dough to keep out to the side and then go, right, ⁓ I have a stability here. Let's go balls to the walls with this show now. Or should I keep trying to play it safe for a bit because of.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, you probably will. You
Matty: We're in this era of cancellation, this woe culture, you know what I mean still? And it's like, ugh. I don't know if I be asked, my whole profession sort of ripped away from me and going through that, but I wouldn't have started if I wasn't ready to do it, like, so I'm ready to go for it, but I'm at the early stage.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I you. Well, as a podcaster, you do have the advantage because you stay above whatever is being said. The fact that you have someone on your podcast doesn't mean you agree with them. And the way you handle them ⁓ is going to be the sign of whether it's going to be a good and trustworthy channel or not. If you're simply just agreeing with everybody.
Matty: Yeah. Mm. Exactly.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: then that puts you in a difficult position. But if you're independent and just asking them questions, so even, you know, likes of myself, know, but, but explain this. And we're probably gonna do this later with a Q &A or something of that nature. ⁓ In order to preserve your independence, you don't want to get caught up too much in it because for instance, I've done
Matty: Yes. Yeah. Mm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ video channels talking about chemtrails I know lot about ⁓ that material because I've been in aviation ⁓ 45 years or so ⁓ and given point of view and the interviewer sort of looks at material and ⁓ asks me the questions and they've also gone the other side and asked for a chemtrailer. to go on the same channel, which is difficult because I think of course Chemtrails is a complete load of nonsense, but if handled well by the interviewer on the video, you can stay above whatever's being said by even someone like Chemtrailor. To me, that's a complete... nonsense conspiracy. And yet you can still go there as an interviewer and ask these people if you keep yourself above it, if you keep independent and ask the right questions in order to make the show interesting ⁓ without showing your... your true beliefs too much because what I'm thinking about is thinking about ⁓ Tucker Carlson.
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Now, Tucker Carlson is a fantastic right-wing interviewer who seems to have got caught up too much with his views on Islam. So from being a totally right-wing interviewer, ⁓ he's now gone totally pro-Islam, which doesn't ⁓ concord at all with his standard viewership. And of course, now he's got tons of criticism from his standard viewer base because they think he's actually gone in ⁓ and promoting that point of view. So instead of staying above it and just interviewing, you know, some influential Muslims and whatever, and just staying above it and giving an interview with their points of view, he's actually now agreeing with it and promoting it. And that's totally the wrong way to go. Because he's lost most of his viewership now. Nobody trusts him anymore. He seems to have done a complete vault farce. And again, we come down to this money business. There's loads of rumors, and I don't know how established these rumors are, that he's been paid to change his mind. He's now saying the total opposite to what he was saying before. But we've seen this before, haven't we?
Matty: Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Money talks, unfortunately, and you wouldn't have thought it would talk with someone like Tucker Carlson, who's now independently wealthy. mean, he's done, he was working for Fox for, I don't know how many years, know, decades maybe on a huge salary. ⁓ It's not as if the guy is short of money. Why would anyone like that want to take?
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: money to change their views, if that's what happened. We don't know if that's what happened, but that's what people are saying. But these things happen, these things do happen. ⁓ So yeah, that's the only thing you can do as an interviewer. ⁓ Another one who's doing quite well at present is Matt Beale in America, who's come on ⁓ and started his own ⁓ podcast now, video channel.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah. I'll check him out.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And yeah, he's doing quite well having what I would consider to be cranks on. However, as he says, well, that's not my business. I'm just interviewing them. And as long as it makes an interesting video and as long as he pushes back on something that, you know,
Matty: Interview. ⁓ Interviews.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: sounds really idiotic, ⁓ then that's his job. His job is to ask questions and see what the people say. Even though I would be a very poor interviewer because I wouldn't have those people on in the first place. But you can't be an interviewer if you only have people that agree with you.
Matty: Yeah. Fair enough. ⁓ Of course, of course. Yeah. I'm thinking a little bit. This is the point of why I sort of started with the interview style of this podcast. It was to get different people on different opinions. I feel like I'm trying to build it up to a stage of where there's a bit of independence where I start giving my opinion on this and start going forward with what I've been researching in my own time and my own point of view, which I think I'll get in trouble for. But I stay tuned people. It's down the line.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, that's difficult, you know, to do that. ⁓
Matty: Yeah, I think I'm just gonna have to ride the wave at some stage, isn't it? Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, it does make it more difficult. I even don't like it sometimes on some news channels where the interviewer says, yes, that's right, that's right, that's right. Talking to someone about a news item is not the point of having the reporter or interviewer to agree with what is being said. We want to hear what the person says. ⁓ And there are lots of these new. video ⁓ news reporters who have been kicked out of some of the majors and they've started their own, ⁓ who do like the sound of their own voice and they do the 10 minute question. So they've got this poor guy sitting there, or gal, whatever it happens to be, who's been invited in to the show and the interviewer goes on for like 10 minutes with one question.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because they love the sound of their own voice so much. And you can see the other, you know, the person who's been brought in for interview going, it's yeah, when's my turn coming around? ⁓ So yeah, it's a difficult business, but I'm sure you'll find your own way through it.
Matty: Was it my turn? Yeah. I get it. Yeah, yeah. I get you. I am... I'll navigate the way. no doubt. It'll be a fun journey. I'll see where this leads. Yeah. We're probably coming up to near two hours again here, Ralph. Have you any final remarks about the old cancellation you want to pack in there or should we wrap it up there for another week?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: No, think we've been through it in a fair amount of detail. It's just a warning for anyone, basically, if you're doing research. This is what you've got to be wary of. ⁓
Matty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: try and find your way through this system. Don't trust. You gotta trust some people. This is the trouble. You gotta trust some people, but don't trust everybody. ⁓ Even especially now on X and so on where people can private message you and so on. they can promise the world unless you know these people, unless you've actually seen them, yeah, don't trust them.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean, yeah, understandable.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: There's so many scammers out there, it's untrue. ⁓
Matty: There's plenty of Josephus Flaviuses in the world, know? Yeah, yeah, they keep their eyes peeled.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah there are and you probably find this this woman who's actually a man and she's based in Mumbai or something you know and ⁓ there when I started on X ⁓ and you know I'm relatively famous I suppose so I get a lot of people joining I must have got 50 advances ⁓ advances ⁓ from unknown people saying ⁓
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: um really love your work can I talk to you and of course they're all scammers they're all every single one is a scammer um especially because they're always you know like a busty woman or something you know saying I really love your work they're all scammers I used to get 50 a day of those I was spending half my time going through x deleting all of these comments from you know
Matty: Of course, yeah. ⁓ Of course, yes, yeah, Just biting the hook there. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: private messaging until I found out how to limit the number of private messages coming in.
Matty: Yeah, and they'll pay you in Bitcoin and all of these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. Absolutely. ⁓ All right, well, we'll leave it for there then, I guess, for another week. Thank you so much again, Ralph. Thank you again for your time and for sharing your story here and for everything else beforehand. Again, I really do appreciate it. And I was one of those random people messaging you on X.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It's all that sort of stuff. ⁓ it's rampant. It really is. Yes.
Matty: So yeah, thank you again. Everybody find the links, they'll be down below for all of Ralph's books and his work. Please check him out on the social medias as well also. And yeah, please like and subscribe if you like what's going on at this channel and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Cheers Ralph.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Cheers.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ Yeah, this was back in 1997, 1998, that sort of time. ⁓ This topic was big. This is, you know, looking at the pyramids and the megaliths. There was a lot of interest in it. Speculation coming up to the millennium. Why that should matter, I don't know, because I mean, if anything, the dates are encoded in the stars, not in our current. calendar system. you know, if there was anything strange going to happen, it would be on the turn of the next great year, which is not in my reckoning until 2300, something like that. Because this particular constellation, we're in Pisces at present, the great month of Pisces, it's a little bit bigger than most of them. So it's a little bit longer. So we're talking about 2300, 2400 years. for that particular great year. ⁓ So yes, the stars don't go according to our standard calendar that we're using today. Having said that, we turned the first century, year zero, well, year one, not because Jesus was born, that became ⁓ year one because we came from the great month of Aries into the great month of Pisces. So yes, our standard calendar is partly based upon the astrological signs and symbols. So yeah, there was lots of interest coming up to the millennium. I got involved in this because I had all of these novel ideas about, you know, Giza and Avbrin Stonehenge, which we've already talked about in previous ⁓ videos and my work was significantly different to anybody else's. It was unique, it was novel, it was interesting. ⁓ I'd put out a few sort of tentative articles just mentioning it, but of course you don't want to mention what you're actually doing, ⁓ which was wise as it happens because yeah, it was all stolen. ⁓ But there we go. ⁓ The problem was same as, you know, just off show, we were talking about trying to get more exposure, more videos. ⁓ It's difficult to get into these spheres. You know, I was talking about publishing at the time, so it's very difficult to get into publishing unless you know a publisher, unless you can be introduced. ⁓ It's funny how this operates sometimes. because I got rejection after rejection, which most authors do, you get piles and piles of rejections. You're not famous until you've got a pile of rejections that's about a meter high sort of thing. ⁓ But this other chap slipped in, never written anything in his life before and got a major publishing contract with Random House. Don't know how that works, but we'll come across that in a minute. So I was thrashing around, you all the publishing houses, trying to advertise my wares, you know, these are my ideas. I can make this really interesting book for you and getting absolutely nowhere. And ⁓ then this agent came along. He wasn't actually very well established as an agent, but anyway, he was ⁓ an author's agent, publishing agent. And he said he could help because he thought the manuscript was interesting.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and so he wanted obviously as an agent he wanted to see you know two or three chapters ⁓ and yes he said we could push this forward we can get a contract with one of the major publishing houses and then that went on and on and on you know you begin to realize that perhaps you know this guy isn't what he says he is you know he's not actually
Matty: I see, ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: producing the goods. ⁓ And suddenly, as I said, this other author, who's never actually published anything in his life before, got a two page spread in the Sunday Times about his expedition to Egypt to go and find the Hall of Records and a major publishing contract and huge advance in the realms of I think if I remember correctly it was something like a hundred and twenty thousand pounds advance. This is in 97 that was a fairly substantial amount of money. ⁓ We'd no background at all you know ⁓ and I didn't know this guy from Adam nobody knew who this guy was ⁓ but suddenly
Matty: Yeah, it's like 10 million a day. Yeah, with no background. So you know.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: my agent was the agent for this other guy. ⁓ well, that was so, you know, my agent got nothing for me whatsoever, but suddenly, suddenly he's latched on to this other guy who's been in the Sunday Times, you know, one of the top selling broadsheets in Britain. And ⁓ suddenly there's
Matty: strange.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Giza fever, might say, pyramid fever, you know, over these new speculations, because he was, you know, in his article in the Times, he was saying we're going to do this and that. This is where I think the Hall of Records and so on is there was a speculation back in those days about a Hall of Records. We've spoken about this in previous videos where ⁓ a repository of the ancients was located somewhere which had all of their records and manuscripts and whatever. He said he had found it, you know, a of triangulation here and there, and he knew exactly where it was supposed to be hidden. So. But then I noticed that a lot of his material seemed rather familiar. And then, well, you know, OK, well, two people can have the same idea, I suppose, you know. So anyway, I was still.
Matty: ⁓ Jesus, yeah, no no. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: plodding along trying to get to publication. And ⁓ so it came to a point where I was deeply suspicious. So the only way you can actually guarantee your copyright is to publish. Once you publish and you send your books off to the British library, you have to send off six books, you know, to establish your copyright. ⁓ then you have some security. So there was only one way out of this. I self-published. It was the only way to do it. I had no idea how to self-publish. I came across this lady who helps self-publishers and she told me the way to do it. Obviously had to ⁓ pay for her services and then she would pay for, ⁓ she would handle the books and actually act as a not a publisher, but a distributor and things like that. So, I mean, she was very, very helpful ⁓ in getting it all organized. And I published within the space of about two stroke three weeks, you know, because the manuscript had been written. It was a matter of collating it and putting it together, making it into ⁓ a format that the printer could read because I didn't have it in a format that printers could use.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I didn't even know what a PDF was in those days. So I had to grab a very rudimentary early Apple computer and print it all into PDF and send it off to the printers. ⁓ so I got a book. This was my book, ⁓ Thoth, Architect of the Universe, which I do not have a copy of, which is unfortunate ⁓ because I've
Matty: Yeah, yeah. I'll put a photo up of it.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, you can put the jacket up. I've just happened to have moved house so many times since then. It's very difficult to cart books around with you. ⁓ So lots of things like that got lost. Anyway, so I had a book and it was selling reasonably well, you know, for a self-published ⁓ item. And then we went to a
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: a conference organized at Grand Lodge, ⁓ not by Grand Lodge, they have some rooms next door called the Connacht Hall, I think it's called, next to Grand Lodge in Queen Street. And people hire out the halls and they do conferences. And there was this conference on, ⁓ you know, the pyramids and megalith and all of that sort of business. And this other author gave a presentation. presentation from my book.
Matty: No way. This is the same author that's got the double spread and yeah, he's went back to your published book then and this rascal.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, this one, yes. So, but this wasn't just similar material, this was a lot of it was exact material. And so that's now a real problem because this guy has got a major publishing house. There's this major book coming out. know, everything's promised. It's coming out in what, three, four months or whatever it is. ⁓ And it's organized by a major publisher. And of course, I'm not a major publisher. I'm just, you know, Joe Bloggs with a self-published book. So I sent a letter of complaint to this this new author guy and got no reply. Yeah.
Matty: What was your reaction first off just seeing this at the conference?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ I seem to remember I got very hot. You know, we have this saying of being hot under the collar. It's a real physiological thing. I was steaming. Steam was coming out of my ears. ⁓ Because it was so obvious that this was my material. It wasn't just similar. It was my material. And it was so obvious that
Matty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see. Yeah, yeah. I'm furious. It's outrageous.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: the only conduit that would have taken this material in that direction was the agent that I had who had had some of my chapters. And it just so happened that all of the chapters I didn't give to him were not in the conference talk, you know, things like that. So, yeah, I was not a happy bunny at that point.
Matty: It's not a coincidence. yeah. I know what mean. I'm you wrung his neck.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I could be steam-rolled completely. mean, this guy was going to come out, he was going to sell thousands ⁓ of these books on the first day because there was a
Matty: can imagine. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: There was, ⁓ you know, ⁓ what do call it? An avalanche of interest in this new book. So it was going to be a bestseller. They were promoting it as a bestseller.
Matty: Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know if you get two pages in the Sunday Times, like, you know, this is a big deal back in the 90s. This is the biggest advertisement you could get, sort of, even... Unbelievable. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It is. It was the biggest Sunday newspaper, you know, as advertising goes, that's the best you can possibly get. ⁓
Matty: And even just before we get further into it, we're talking about somebody stealing your work. Give people maybe a bit of a feel for how many hours and days and weeks and years did you spend researching this and then compiling it and put together? Because it must have been probably even a couple of years of your life, is it, or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ yes. ⁓ yes. Yeah, yeah, it would have to be at least a couple of years before we got to this point for actually compiling all of this information. And remember, it's original work and it was completely different to everything else that had been written. And that's the important bit, because quite often you get these books, even now you can still buy these books on the shelves and they're just
Matty: Yeah. All original work. Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: regurgitating the same old material, going over the same things, they're all talking about stitching, they're always talking about Hancock, and Hancock was talking about stitching, so they're all sort of talking about each other's in perpetuity, I think is the word, they're just going round in circles. And my work was completely original, original thought, just me looking at these ⁓
Matty: Yes. Yeah. Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And the only way to really show this is if people go back and look at the previous video we've done. I'm sure you'll link it in the notes at the bottom. You will see how different my work is to everybody else's. And that's difficult to do. To have original thought is quite tricky, it's difficult. It's like, I cannot imagine.
Matty: Absolutely. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I'm not a musician, I cannot imagine how someone can dream up a new tune. Because tunes to me is a tune and you just copy a previous tune and that's your tune. I have no idea how you compose a completely new separate tune, but people do. But I have the ability to look at data in a different fashion and see something different in it that no one else has seen and all of every chapter every idea I've had in that book is completely novel completely new and and it makes sense I think you know it's it's a little bit esoteric you might say it's it's off on a limb because it's not standard it's not classical but it makes sense and it's all from the original data so you know you can take it whichever way you want but
Matty: Absolutely. It's, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It makes the book exciting because this is new material. There's nothing worse than reading the same old garbage time and time again just written by a different author. ⁓ And so that was, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Matty: Yeah. It's it's first. Yeah. I was going to say it's just first principle reasoning from the very beginning is where you started from and each each step in thought you took us along the way of the path of it. And then this is what laid out to the whole journey off it. And it's it was completely unlike anything else I've seen online. I've read a lot of these books of Hancock's and different people's.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Mm.
Matty: They're quite famous now on the Joe Rogan show and these sort of things, but none of them touched the work you brought us through in last couple of episodes that people will have watched before coming onto this one. But yeah, sorry, going ahead Ralph, we were up to seeing this. yeah. You were boiling under the collar. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Well, yes, that's the main problem. It's not just that I've written a book. It's that it's your baby. You've conceived this. You've brought it to life. ⁓ It's literally your baby. And then someone has gone and stolen your baby. And you think, well, that's not nice. That's not how this should work.
Matty: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This is the gentlemanly world of publishing. And the biggest publisher in the whole world was Random House. I don't know if they still are, but they were at that time. Surely this sort of thing doesn't go on within an establishment like Random House. So the next thing I did is I sent a letter straight to Random House. And ⁓ so I had written. two, three letters to the author, got no reply over a week, 10 days. I sent a letter of complaint to Random House. I got a next day reply by DHL. ⁓ okay, so I'd hit a raw nerve here somewhere. So things started to hot up after that. So they entered into negotiation, they started offering me money.
Matty: Yes, yeah, yeah. and Just before that, what does your agent say when you spoke raise this to him or did he just cut you off? He had blanked you, yeah. I see, I see. So yeah, straight away with the money offer, it seems like they knew this was coming, this was new, it happened, right, we'll just pay him off, whatever he does.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ he gone. He gone. He disappeared. Yeah, he wouldn't answer any calls. Yeah. Well, that made me suspicious because up until that time, I had presumed that random random house knew nothing about this. But the rapidity of their reply suggests that maybe they did know something about it. I don't know. Well, they certainly did later on, that's for sure. So ⁓ they got on to the author and it was the author himself who offered me money. So he offered me 10 percent. I said no.
Matty: It's too soon. Mm-hmm. Naturally.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: He offered me 15%. I said, look, what I want is what I, I want to see how you've treated my material. You're obviously using my material. And from the way you actually gave it in the conference, you were saying, I, I, I, I, I did this, I did that. This was my thought. I want to see how you're treating my material in your book. Are you giving proper references? Are you saying that, you know, Ralph Ellis originally thought of this idea, et cetera, et cetera. Can I see the chapters that you actually put it in? Which is not unreasonable because ⁓ I'd already had, ⁓ because people had seen ⁓ my book that I had privately published and they had come to me and said, you know, we would like to quote material from your book. and I said, yes, of course you can quote this and quote that. Normally I give something like a maximum of ⁓ three or four quotes, no more than one paragraph for each quote, et cetera, fully ⁓ referenced and so on. ⁓ But one guy sent me a fax of... sent me a fax of the material that he had written, including my quotes. Another guy sent me the two chapters from his new book, which included my material. So I could see the two chapters. I could see how he had used my material. I so this is fairly normal. But of course, this guy wouldn't do it. wouldn't say, well, he promised. said he would send me, he had sent me the whole manuscript. course, nothing arrived. ⁓
Matty: Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: That was my main concern. I wanted to see how the material was being used. ⁓ Obviously it was potentially advantageous to me. If my material was in a famous book, therefore people would come back to my book and see what I'd originally written about it. ⁓ But I wanted to see that it was sensitively and professionally used, which obviously it wasn't. ⁓ The offer went up to 25 % so I could have 25%. 25 % of the royalties and 25 % of the advance. I mean, that's quite a lot of money. So I said, no, go away. I want to see how you're treating my material first. Because quite apparently, it was fairly obvious that they just wanted to put this book straight out without any changes to it at all. And he was not crediting
Matty: It's big money here we're talking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: me whatsoever. And that turned out to be true.
Matty: So he was willing to give you the money without sending you the manuscript. He was already trying to lock it down that way. These unscrupulous people here.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yep. Yep. But I wasn't mentioned in the whole of his, it turned out, because I never saw it until it was published, he never mentioned me once in the whole of his book.
Matty: Unbelievable, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Not even in the references.
Matty: He's like a modern day Josephus Flavius here. Unbelievable. I can't imagine the rage you were feeling. I'll be... Random House will be burning the house down. Sorry, go ahead Ralph.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was he was a definitely a Josephus Flavius. Yes, he was. ⁓ Yeah, so It's... It was annoying because I didn't. I was sort of out of my depth because I am just a lone player fighting against effectively against Random House here, which is a very large corporation, and it got worse later on. It got much worse. ⁓ So so I wrote to Random House and said, look, negotiations with this author are not going well. I've got no idea what he's doing with my work.
Matty: Hmm. Thanks
Bishop Ralph Ellis: how it's being referenced. Please don't use any of my work until I can see the chapters, how it's being used. Either the chapters in which it's being used or just the pages ⁓ in which it's being quoted, just fax me across just those pages. I don't need to say anything else in the whole of the book. ⁓ And they refused. So. What did they say? They said they wrote back and said they because negotiations are broken down, they will now remove all of my material from their book. Everything, everything will removed and you will get nothing and there will be no mention of you whatsoever. I said, well, OK, no problem. That's fine by me. sounds like a lot of work to me because obviously my work was a key part of this book and now they're going to have to go through the whole book and repaginate it rewrite it taking all of my material out so that didn't make sense to me at that point but you know what can I do ⁓ and so then all I did is sit and wait then until publication so publication was I think it was 3rd of June 1998, so we're talking a long time ago here, we're talking, we're coming up to almost 30 years now, that you know this was the very start of my publishing career and it wasn't going well. So it came out in 3rd of June 98 and I heard that they had pre-sales copies over in Salisbury and I happened to be down in the
Matty: Yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: southwest at the time so I went to Salisbury grabbed a book from the local bookseller, can't remember what it was called actually but anyway so opened it up and I was horrified. ⁓
Matty: Is this the book here? Do you have it? Yeah, yeah. You've got the air book, the counterfeit book. Hall of the gods.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, I haven't got my book but I've this one. So it's in the Hall of the Gods.
Matty: Nigel Alpeby, this is the scoundrel here. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, Nigel Appleby, yes. ⁓ And a fairly large sort of book. lot of information in it. Standalone, if it had been original work, it would be quite interesting, actually. But I think the amount of work that the author did was about that much.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. The title page.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: about one page. So anyway, I was scanning through this very rapidly. And I suddenly found that that is all my work.
Matty: No way.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: That is all my work. And that's... and that ⁓ it went on and on. were 70 pages of mine that were taken and thrown into this book. And the problem was that where I've highlighted it, that is verbatim from my book.
Matty: That's crazy. Wow. Wow. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So this is not that an idea has been copied because surprisingly within copyright you cannot copyright very easily an idea.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: someone else can have the same idea as you and as long as they write it in their own words with their own explanations there's not a great lot you can do about it ⁓ however this is all verbatim straight from my book the only difference is ⁓ it now said I did it as in
Matty: Unbelievable, isn't it? Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Applebee did it. ⁓ I did it, I did it, I did it. ⁓ yes, my book had been rewritten in this new book, completely, and I was flabbergasted because now Random House were involved, because Random House themselves had written to me and I had it in writing that they would remove all my material and they hadn't.
Matty: ⁓ yeah, that's nice a little. That's unbelievable. Mm. Mm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I couldn't believe that a large corporation would do this because it's leaving themselves wide open to legal action. They have promised to take it out, they haven't, they've published. That's pure... My lawyer used called it flagrant plagiarism and it comes under the Copyright Act, section 107 of the Copyright Act as a criminal act. Although I didn't know it at that time, I just thought this was, you know, private prosecution or something of that nature. But it turned out to be criminal because it was flagrant. Because they had known about it before publication. And they had published in order to produce profits. I think that there are three things that make it a criminal offense. You've got to know about it. ⁓ you've got to flagrantly ignore it and you've got to do it for profit and things like this nature. And that sort of makes it criminal in the end, which I found out eventually, but not initially. So. ⁓ Yes, so I sent a ⁓ by priority mail. So I wrote a letter of complaint that afternoon, sent it off by DHL immediately to get there the next morning ⁓ with a copy of my book. And I'd hurriedly gone through and done all of that highlighting into my book so they could see what had been taken and sent it straight off to Random House. basically saying there's been plagiarism. Please remove this book from the shelves of all bookshops. Not imagining that that will actually have a big effect on a major corporation. Here's this little minnow biting at the ankles of a major corporation. And so I sent this off and nothing happened, nothing happened. On day three, the book was pulled from the shelves.
Matty: Right.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So it was taken off sale in every bookshop in the land. It was taken off sale. And I was hugely surprised at that. Yeah, relieved as well. But all of this to and fro of letters and so on and nothing getting done, nothing getting done, make this complaint and suddenly the book's disappeared.
Matty: I'm sure it relieved a little bit too. I wonder what they were thinking, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Must have thought you just would have went away, or... It's hard to know, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I really, yeah, I don't know, because there is a particular woman ⁓ who is overseeing this particular publication. Each publication has a particular editor. What did she call herself? I forget what she called herself. ⁓ She called herself, ⁓ no, that's the legal manager. No, anyway, whatever she was, she... oversaw this particular book from beginning to end, know, liaising with the author, getting the publication, liaising with all the editors and the paginators and everything else that has to be done to make a book. It was all her little baby. And so she is the one who knew that there was potential plagiarism and did nothing about it. And I presume my letter had gone over her head, maybe or something. to a higher up manager who maybe didn't know anything about this and suddenly came down and said, what the hell are you ⁓ Dear Maria. I don't know if Maria still works at Random House, but anyway, this was not her finest moment.
Matty: I see. I'd be surprised.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ So anyway, ⁓ yeah, the book was pulled and Random House admitted clear evidence of plagiarism in the bookseller, The Trade Magazine. Apparently, everyone in the book trade was utterly astounded by this because no publisher has ever admitted to plagiarism. They actually took out like an advert and put it in to the bookseller saying all books, you know,
Matty: Yes. Wow. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ to be withdrawn because of plagiarism in this book and so okay the next day I get priority mail letter from this high-powered lawyer in London ⁓ the Queen's lawyer seriously yeah literally yeah yeah yeah the same
Matty: Alright. Serious. Like, literally? Yeah? ⁓ wow. Yeah, That's nuts. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: same lawyer. ⁓ So this is not a cheap lawyer like I was using, know, down in the back streets somewhere. ⁓ This was a very expensive lawyer, ⁓ came straight on to me and offered me 10 % of the royalties. So we're going through the same old charade again. And if I didn't agree on to take 10 % and let the book be sold, they would do something else.
Matty: again. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: not in that fashion, not in the fashion we've just seen with all of those ⁓
Matty: Mmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: all of those. direct, not quotes, stolen material, verbatim stolen material. I'm not having that back on the shelves in the fashion it is. I don't mind if it's rewritten and rewritten sensitively so that I get some credit for some of my ideas. So I said, no. He said, well, 15%. I said, 25%. No, go away.
Matty: Yeah, of course. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Well, we'll try and do something different with it then. We can't stop this book being published. So anyway, ⁓ at that point, ⁓
Matty: Is this the point? Okay, go ahead.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I got another letter. 11 other authors contacted me. They had all been plagiarized as well.
Matty: Right? Wow, unbelievable from this one book. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So there were 11 other authors. So this included Robert Temple, Andrew Collins, Christopher Knight, Robert Lomas. Robert Bovell, Graham Hancock, amongst others. So loads and loads of people came whizzing onto various chat boards and so on. got all sorts of letters saying, ⁓ he's plagiarized me too. We've all been taken. yeah, in all there were 12 authors were plagiarized in this book. That's why I say that the amount of work the author did was probably one or two pages.
Matty: Yeah,
Bishop Ralph Ellis: The rest of it was all borrowed. ⁓
Matty: Is this... I was just going to ask, you're starting to paint a picture that there's something going on behind this Nigel Applebee guy. Am I cutting ahead too far? Do want to go through the story and bring up who this guy is, who's behind him, who's... There's a fishy smell here. Just want to get in that there.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: But, yeah, no, go ahead. That's what everybody thought. But I don't know if that's correct or not. He was connected to the army, but he was only a territorial. He made out he was an army major, he was only a territorial. He seemed to have a reasonable amount of sort of army type backing. He got apparently ⁓ permission to dig in Egypt.
Matty: Hmm. life of a life. Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: which nobody gets. I mean, you can't go to Egypt and say, I want to dig. It's just virtually impossible. Especially if you don't have, you know, a major university and a PhD and everything else, you know, to go with it. You're just not allowed to do it. And yet somehow he sort of, Egypt claimed he didn't afterwards. But at the time, everyone thought that he had permission to dig in Egypt, north of the Giza Plateau.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ So yes, it did seem to a lot of people that this guy had some backing, because how do you walk into the Sunday Times and get a two page spread?
Matty: Yeah. Did you say he had no prior books? This was his first book or? This makes no sense. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Nope, here's the first book. He had no ⁓ credentials that would give him permission to do anything. ⁓ He had never been to a university, had never done history, he had never been on any digs or excavations or anything. He just came from absolutely nowhere and said, I've got this idea for a book and got Sunday Times promotion and then a major publishing house. with an advance. You don't get advances, you know, if it's your first book you're lucky to get a publishing contract, let alone getting an advance on it. Nobody gets advances on their books. Yeah, yes, back then. You know nowadays that would be 500,000 or more. Yeah.
Matty: over a hundred thousand pounds back then too. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're talking at least a quarter million. Yeah, exactly. For a book too. Like what sort of book makes that kind of profit anyway on top of it all? know, yeah, unbelievably few, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Very few, very few. There's always lots of fishy things going on in publishing. ⁓ The fishiest I ever saw was ⁓ President Obama, who while he was president, he got a educational publishing contract, went to a particular publisher. When he left being president, ⁓
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: That same publisher gave him an advance on a book for his memoirs and I think the advance was 60 million dollars.
Matty: 60 million. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: But as you're saying, notebook ever makes that did seem like a after the fact backhander.
Matty: No, I think it's a... Yeah, yeah,
Bishop Ralph Ellis: for the educational publishing. And so there are strange dealings you might say within the publishing industry. So, and it did seem that there was some something strange going on with this particular book that this guy was suddenly promoted from absolutely nowhere ⁓ to, yeah, being the sort of star.
Matty: or shenanigans that go on here.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: not the Hancock who had already had, you know, a very famous bestselling book, not the Beauval, suddenly there's this nobody for no good reason. It's very odd.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. And he clearly had inner context to bypass this sort of red flag mechanism that would flare up about plagiarism. Whereas when you sent it after it was published, somebody else got a hold of it and it's shut down immediately. But all prior to that, clearly, whether it's this Marie or whoever, was on his side to push this out of the way and all already. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah. Yeah. how she thought she'd get away with it. I've really got no idea because you know.
Matty: Exactly, this is the one cardinal sin, you know, of this big publishing is this plagiarism.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, it was already clear that I irate before the book had even been published, let alone after. Had she never read the book herself? Did she just believe the author? You know, because I know this author, this author would say, no, it's not real ⁓ plagiarism. No, it's all my own work. It's, you know, that's just that crazy guy over there. Don't worry about it. He did have the gift of the gab, this guy.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Strange, this? Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: He was very eloquent. could persuade, know, Coles to Newcastle and all that sort of business. He would have been a good salesman. ⁓ So did he just bamboozle this girl and this lady and she never bothered to read the book? I don't know. It might have been sheer incompetence. It's quite possible.
Matty: Hmm. Yeah. And the lawyer that was the Queen's lawyer, was that hired by him or was this by on behalf of the publishing house? Yes. Yeah, I see. Yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, by Random House. Yeah, that was by Random House. Yeah, that was their in-house lawyer who was the Queen's lawyer. ⁓
Matty: Yeah. And so you'd unbelievable. You'd turn down their offers. These other 11 authors then collays with yourself. And where does the story lead on from there? Sorry, Ralph.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yes, so Robert Boval took charge. So I had this lawyer, just a local lawyer that was helping me write these letters. So Boval came in and took charge and took charge of my lawyer as well in order to prevent because the fear was that this book would be republished, it would be put back on the shelves and nobody wanted that. So he organized all the letters going across the random house saying don't you dare, he organized a spy to go into ⁓ the other authors, the plagiarist author, he organized a spy to go into their camp and do a report on them. So this guy who's actually ⁓ a famous author went into their camp and wrote a 14-page report on what they were doing.
Matty: This is a fascinating story.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: as a way of stopping them from writing this book again and putting it back on the shelves. And then he sent out this, this went out to all 12 authors who had been plagiarized. ⁓ The Rules by Beau Val. ⁓ The Eight Golden Rules by Robert Beau Val. Never, never underestimate the enemy. The enemy is the plagiarist author. Never assume he's out of action until ⁓ conclusively proven, never volunteer information except which you deliberately want the enemy group to know about. Always remember that what seems like a gift, Greeks bearing gifts, could be a ploy to extract information from you, i.e. promises of a TV show or newspaper. always try to record exchanges with the enemy, his agents and his possible moles. This is interesting because Robert Boval used to record every ⁓ conversation he had ever had. So he had a room in his house, because I went to his house obviously doing all this, he had a room with thousands and thousands of cassette recorders of all of the recordings he had ever made on his telephone. He recorded everything with everybody. ⁓ So yeah, you've got to record your exchanges with the enemy. Always make sure you coordinate your moves with your fellow players. ⁓ If meeting with the enemy or his suspect moles, ⁓ a time and place must be chosen by yourself. So this is how seriously he was taking this, you in order to stop this book coming back on the shelves again.
Matty: Wow. It's got deep. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: However, it was only my book that was preventing ⁓ republication because it was flagrant, because it was verbatim, and because they had been forewarned before the plagiarism actually took place. So there was no way that Random House could say, ⁓ it was a mistake, you know? It just happened to be similar material. was a mistake. We didn't mean to do that because they've been forewarned and they had already said that they would take the material back out again. ⁓ So it was only my book that was stopping republication. That's why the lawyer was only negotiating with myself, not with the other 11 authors, although the other 11 authors will say, ⁓ but we were plagiarized as well, yes, but your plagiarism didn't count because it wasn't flagrant. They could easily back that to one side and say, you know, that was just a mistake. didn't, it wasn't real plagiarism. ⁓ So this dragged on for a couple of months and they're still musing about republication of this book. And so Robert Boval decides to just go to Random House because he'd written for, I think he had written for Random House previously. I mean, he was a published author and I think one of his books came out via Random House. So he marched off to Random House in order to have it out with them, you know, what are you doing sort of thing. So he rang me up on a Saturday morning having seen Random House and he said, good news, Ralph, good news. you've got a publishing contract with Random House. for £5,000 advance. Okay, well thank you very much, that sounds really good. But you've got to sign this peace deal with the plagiarist author. And I looked at this peace deal and it said, the plagiarist author promises never to publish this book again with the same jacket cover.
Matty: was the catch. ⁓ Material.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: with the same name and the same jacket cover. What? So I said, well, that's, yeah, that is not watertight at all. It's as watertight as a colander. ⁓ But thanks for the deal with Random House. That's very kind of you. I'll go down to Random House on the Monday and we'll sort it out. And he said, no, you've got to sign this peace deal now with the author.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Madden.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Otherwise it's all off the table. And if you don't sign, you will never go to any conference, you will never write any book, you'll never do any film ever, ever again. You've got to sign now. So I just went, that to the modern youth is how you put a telephone down in the old world. You mean you don't swipe. Yes. So, and it was much better in those days as well because it went crash. It was much more physical. ⁓ yeah, absolutely. You could get some rage on that.
Matty: You didn't swipe? Yeah, yes, yeah, There was a satisfaction on the end of it. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ So yeah, so what's gone on? know, what why is this? Why is this happening? ⁓ Well, we soon found out because ⁓
Matty: Crazy.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This comes.
Matty: How old were you then, Ralph? Out of curiosity, dealing with this. How old were you then when you were dealing with this, sorry? If I may ask.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ I must have been in my 30s I suppose you know because this was 30 years ago yeah so I must have been in my mid mid 30s something of that nature yeah. ⁓ yeah I was still doing a proper job yeah I wasn't an author yeah I'm still doing a proper job which had to be done while this was all happening. ⁓ So the book had been withdrawn
Matty: Hmm. And you're still working and doing everything else in life and then this is on top of it it comes through Yes, yeah Yeah
Bishop Ralph Ellis: after three days, we'd had all of these machinations, then Boval had this sudden change of heart apparently and saying that we've got to make peace with this guy and the deal he came up with was full of holes basically, it meant nothing. So I didn't agree to it. And then the next week, ⁓ well, next two weeks, there was announcement of a joint ⁓ Cruise on the Nile with Robert Boval and Nigel Appleby.
Matty: Geez I was about to ask you what did they offer him to do this to?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So Robert Boval had tied up with the plagiarist author to go on a Nile cruise and to do, ⁓ there was a conference and there was talk of a book as well between the two of
Matty: Wow. Right?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And of course, in order to put out that book, they needed to be able to use some of my material. That's what I suspected, of course, because why else would they need a peace deal between me and the plagiarized author? ⁓ And Boval then publicly called for all of the other plagiarized authors to forgive and forget. And then Appleby himself ⁓ wrote an article in one of these magazines praising Boval's fairness and how they can work in the future on all of this sort of business. So that put me in a difficult spot because now I was the one who was preventing any of this from happening. because I was refusing to sign this peace deal, ⁓ would allow, effectively would allow repubblication of this book because the peace deal was like a calendar as I said, it in no way stopped that book from being republished. So, but that would ruin my book completely, you know, who's gonna buy my book when all of my material is already in this other book anyway. and the £5,000 advance from Random House of course did not exist. So I went to Random House and they told me to go to Foxtrot Oscar. There was no contract with Random House. It did not exist. ⁓ So yes, I was being played for a fool. But I wasn't quite as foolish as somebody thought that I might be.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's mad.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So I stood my ground, it was the only thing I could do. A week later there was a full page advert in Quest magazine for a tour of Egypt by Robert Boval and the plagiarist author. So what could I do at that point? Well it was only at this point in the proceedings that I found out that this was a criminal offence.
Matty: believe.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Now that made life much easier because I did not have to prosecute, the police did. That's the advantage. I don't have to take out a private prosecution. The police can do it for me. ⁓ So I went to the police and they said, nothing to do with us, Gov. Because you can see the law, the law is section 107 of the Copyright Act. And so you go to the police and they go, nothing to do with us.
Matty: yes, yes, I see, I see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Try the copyright agency. So you go to the copyright people. Nothing to with us. Try, I don't know, something else, patent department. Yeah, what do they call these brand images when you have your brand name? Try them. Went to them. No, it's nothing to do with us. So it turned out we had a law.
Matty: Sounds like the police. Yeah. Classic government run agencies here. Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: that nobody had bothered to give to an administration to actually administer. So we had a law with no teeth, which was absurd. So I went to parliament. So it's getting worse and worse, this little story. So I had to go to parliament. I had to go to the attorney general with my MP from Bournemouth, as it was then.
Matty: This is a movie in itself. Yeah, yeah
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and so the attorney general then so this was read in parliament they actually stood up and read this in parliament to the attorney general that this is unsatisfactory that you've got a law that nobody is going to administer so eventually the attorney general ⁓ and this is in Hansard you can look it up in Hansard ⁓ said okay it's got to be the police that do it so now we had an agency to actually administer this law so i went along to ⁓ the police And I had to go up to London for this because it was in their jurisdiction. And they did not want to know really because, know, they're catching, well, actually, they never catch criminals either. you they're supposed to catch criminals, not supposed to catch plagiarists, you know. ⁓ So they weren't terribly interested. So they rang up Random House and said, look, we're going to need all your data on this. Can you send all of your information across, you know, so we can have a look at it?
Matty: Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and Random House didn't cooperate. So they had to send the flying squad down there to do a raid on Random House to get all the material. yeah, don't upset the police by not cooperating. The police don't like it. They were not interested at all up until then. As soon as there was zero cooperation, Random
Matty: Right, yeah, yeah. Right, yeah, yeah. This is a crazy story.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Sorry, the police got all upset.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. I wonder why Random House didn't cooperate though. This makes me think again, they're really trying to protect this fishy gentleman here and that he must have some sort of standing in there with someone. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It's It's possible, it is also possible, this has never happened before in the history of publication. And so a lot of people didn't know the law, perhaps, didn't know the implications of the law, because it's 10 years in prison. They didn't know that at the time. You would have thought, my, initially I had a London lawyer who was involved in
Matty: Yes, I see. But you have the Queen's lawyer there advising them, you know? You'd have thought, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ copyright because I wanted a lawyer who knew that sort of field so I got a copyright lawyer in London who was absolutely useless and he didn't know it was a criminal offense either it was only my local lawyer when I went to a local lawyer who said you know do you know it's a criminal offense ⁓ so perhaps they didn't get the right advice from the lawyer perhaps they were so arrogant that
Matty: Yeah. I I hear. Right. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This has never happened in the history of publication that nobody has actually taken a publisher to court for ⁓ copyright. Well, my lawyer used to call it flagrant plagiarism, but it's under the Copyright Act. ⁓ But so, yeah, so that sort of escalated it. so, yes, Random House got raided apparently by the police. So my policeman told me and. ⁓
Matty: That's true. Mm-hmm. Yeah, very good.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, the fine is imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years if it's flagrant. And of course this was because they knew about it in advance. ⁓ Suddenly the tour of Egypt by Boval and the Plagiarist was canceled. ⁓ Suddenly all the rumors of a book
Matty: Mm-hmm. But yeah, good. Yeah, I know.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: disappeared. So if there was a book, and we don't know if there was, but there were lots of rumors that there was going to be a joint book between the two of them, that disappeared as well. ⁓ Because they couldn't use my material, you know, because I had refused. There was no peace deal.
Matty: course. But this Povell character that you were familiar with, you saying you went round to his house even, where was his morals in this? He knew the plague arised off you. You'd been round to his house, the guy's house, you were working together initially, and then what he'd go, I'll just throw him under the bus. Yeah, right. This is an archetype of people, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Josephus Flavius again. There are too many Josephuses in this world. I you've only got to look at what happens in politics sometimes with these self-serving politicians ⁓ who are always in it for their own good, for their own money. ⁓ There are too many people like that in many industries. And it's disappointing that, there are... too many people with lax morals that they would just do anything for their own personal good, their own personal fame, their own personal finances, whatever it happens to be.
Matty: I... Yeah. I hope I... Mm-hmm. How big of an author was he in this space of ancient Egypt on these megalithic things? he well known as he or was he ⁓ also an obscure figure? Yeah, I'm not familiar with him. So he's quite a big name in here.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ Oval, yes. okay. Yeah, he was the guy who did the Giza star correlation ⁓ book. So that was where in the last video, when we were looking at the shaft angles pointing at stars, that was his idea and was the basis of his bestselling book. It was quite a good bestselling book that one.
Matty: Right? Yes. Yes. That was his.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ but again co-authored so he had had the same problem that I had had in that no publisher was interested and he had been touting this book around many publishers for quite some time and finally he somehow got co-authored with ⁓ Adrian Gilbert
Matty: I see, I see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And think Gilbert was more famous because he'd already written a book and he'd already had a publisher. And so he had an inroad into getting a publisher. And so they co-authored this book ⁓ between Bovall and Gilbert. And that's the only way he could get it published. Same problem that I've been having. He had this book and no one would publish it. ⁓ But it became a bestseller and it became Robert Bovall's book.
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And if you ever went to any conference, he never mentioned Gilbert once. Even though he was the co-author on the book. I forget the name of this book actually. I've probably got a copy in there somewhere. But anyway, it's a relatively famous book. So.
Matty: sick yeah yeah Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Boval would have been wanting another bestseller because he had not had anything to come up with after that particular book. There was no sequel to it. And so he would be looking for a bestselling sequel. And of course, the plagiarist had already had these ties with the Sunday Times and strong ties with Random House and so on.
Matty: Yes, sorry. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Perhaps it was a deal that was too good to refuse if you don't mind trampling on everybody else. Because that may, if that was the way this was going to go, it would mean trampling on many of the other authors as well. We don't know because ⁓ subsequently he denied that there was a book, but there was a conference and there was a tour of Egypt because we have the advert.
Matty: Yeah. Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: In Quest Magazine we still have the advert for that. So that cannot be denied. So this
Matty: I see. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: This tour was rearranged, so it became a tour with Hancock and Boval. and I had been invited on this tour as a guest speaker. I had to pay my own way to go down there but I've been invited by Hancock as a guest speaker. So I went down to Egypt to go on this. It was on a cruise, one of those cruise ships that goes up and down the Nile. So I went to the boat and I was going up the gangplank and Boval stopped me from going on the boat. He sent the ship's captain to stop me going onto the boat. So I was stuck on the gangplank and I refused to leave. So I sat on this gangplank for about three hours with my bags, waiting to go onto this boat. And of course the captain wanted to depart, know, they got a schedule to meet, you know, and he couldn't depart with me sitting on the gangplank.
Matty: Right, yeah. Get on ya. Yeah. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So I just sat there and dangled my legs over the side and it was quite a nice day because it was winter. And eventually Graham Hancock had to come down and say, look, just let him on board for God's sakes. So I got onto this tour and did my guest speaking, which I think I only did two talks or something, but there we go.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. You're just whistling away. Very good.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ But this was part of the business of banning me. You remember when we had this conversation on the Saturday when he said, if I don't sign the peace agreement, I'll never work again. I'll never go to a conference or film or anything. And then we went to, ⁓ I had an invite from carte blanche in South Africa. It's one of these famous documentary series ⁓ from the days when South Africa was rich and could afford these things, which it can't now.
Matty: It's long gone.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ And talk about Keystone Copts Capers. Carte Blanche were trying to film Robert Boval and they were trying to film me. ⁓ So they were trying to delay Boval on one side of the pyramid while they were interviewing me on the other side of the pyramid because Boval said he would not cooperate if I was on the film. So he banned me from the film, but Karl Planck didn't want that idea. And they tried to get me on the interview anyway, without his, know, didn't matter what he said. And suddenly this cry came out, profile's coming. So he was coming around the other side of the pyramid. So we had to sort of pack up all the filming equipment and run around the other side of the pyramid. So you can see that
Matty: believable. You
Bishop Ralph Ellis: yeah he was making good on his word because all my conferences had been cancelled after that so I turned up at one because I was determined to turn up because I'd had an invite for this conference so I turned up and they gave me five minutes so again I'd been cancelled so ⁓ yeah there were many machinations behind the scenes in order to make me persona non grata And of course, Boval was trying to do that to all of the other authors as well saying, ⁓ don't get involved with that Ellis guy, you know, and there's Hancock going, well, why do we want to get involved with Appleby? He's just stolen all our material. So why do we want to get involved with him? there was, yeah, nobody quite knew what was going on.
Matty: Yeah, of course. Yeah, right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and I did end up as persona non grata for quite some time. So my book has been relatively unknown because of that. ⁓ So if viewers don't know of my work, Thoth, architect of the universe, and I'm sure a little image will appear suddenly. Just like Mergent Gears. And now you know why.
Matty: Yes, yeah, like magic.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I was effectively canceled. That's why I became a lone ranger doing all my work with my other material, because I went on to, because this is important because. I turned out to be a prolific author. But Boval could have stopped this from happening completely. So all of this work might never have happened because if I had become disillusioned with publishing, if I had lost all my money because of this, because I got no money. initially from this whatsoever it was only because I was I wouldn't say I was independently wealthy I was independently poor but I did have another job and ⁓ even though that job was intermittent you might say so I I was not working all the time however that intermittency I was an airline captain now you might think okay well the guy is well paid no because I only worked I was working as a freelancer and so I was only working
Matty: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Mm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: you know, six months of the year, whatever, ⁓ in some of the worst low run airlines you could possibly imagine. ⁓ Although I did work for EasyJet at one point as well. I mean, although at that time, EasyJet was pretty low run as well. When it started, was a shoestring operation when it first started, but I won't talk about that too much. But anyway, because I had all of this time off, I was able to do...
Matty: I see. Yeah, yeah. I see. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: other work and Robert Boval nearly scuppered all of this work so nobody would have known about this. Where is Solomon? ⁓ He's in Egypt. There are videos on this of course ⁓ so people can go back and have a look at all the videos we've done on the vocation channel. ⁓ King Jesus, nice big fat book, very well worth reading. All of this
Matty: Absolutely. Imagine this hadn't been done. You know, identifying the historical Jesus. Like, this is crazy. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, yeah, all of this could have been, could have all been published by Random House, you know, had this not happened. You know, Random House could have had some bestsellers on their lists, but they didn't because of Robert Boval and The Grey Oceifer, my King Arthur book. All of those books didn't become bestsellers.
Matty: Yeah, yeah. crazy.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: primarily because of Robert Boval because obviously having taken a publisher to court, which I did in the end, took them to court and also had the police raid them, I was fairly persona non grata to all of the other publishers as well. So they wouldn't touch me with a barge pole because I had this bad reputation. I'd taken random house, the only person to have ever taken random house to court, you ⁓
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ And I did.
Matty: Do you want to walk us through a little bit of this court case? How long did this go on for? What happened there? I see. Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Well no, because they settled out of court. So as soon as this rattled on, so it didn't actually go to court until 2002, so this was like four years later. And you know there have been letters backwards and forwards, I was still trying to get the police to prosecute them and police didn't really want to know, they were quite happy that the book had been pulped. So by this time the
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: book had not only been taken off the shelves, it had been pulped and it was fairly clear that they could not use any of that material in that book ever again. So that book was dead in the water. And the police at that point were relatively happy that they'd done enough work on it. So back in 2002, so this was like four years later, I then took them to court and immediately they settled out of court. Oh, that's the wrong one. and they paid me a load of money.
Matty: Yeah, fantastic. Very good. So they should've. Yeah, justice. ⁓
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So yeah, after all of this time. So again, when the other authors say we were plagiarized, yes, but borrowing your ideas is not actually copyright ⁓ under section 107. You can copy other someone else's ideas and rewrite it in your own words and explain it in a different fashion. ⁓ That is not plagiarism, that is not copyright under section 107. So again, only my book was stopping this book, this plagiarist book from being published. And so yeah, they settled out of court immediately and they paid me. So I was the only one to ever get paid ⁓ by Random House. And that's why I became persona non grata to the other publishers.
Matty: Hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because I'd taken random house to court. So that is the genteel world of publishing. But there is a postscript.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, yes, good, good.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: the funniest postscript you've ever heard in your life. ⁓ Talk about, I don't often have a belly laugh, but I was rolling on the floor at this one. ⁓ So I, ⁓ I should probably do a share on this. Why not? Let's do a ⁓ screen share.
Matty: Yeah. ⁓ Very good. ⁓ super. Even better.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ window. The Gorniad. Here we go. the Grornyad. ⁓ One of the worst papers in the UK but there we go that depends on your politics I suppose. I don't know if people know it is known as the Grornyad and it's so much known well because they could never spell back in the old days of hot type it was internationally famed for its bad spelling so it's known as the Grornyad and you can actually put in Grornyad
Matty: No. I see, I see. That's hilarious.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: dot co dot uk and it'll come up with this page here.
Matty: That'll come off.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: If we type in groenia.co.uk and press enter, it comes up with the guardian.
Matty: That's hilarious, isn't it?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: There we go. And so now you've got the Guardian.
Matty: because they were so famous for spelling wrong, even get their own name wrong. Yeah, yeah, that's hilarious. no worries.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Absolutely. So I'll stop that share and I'll go back into the other page ⁓ because we have this post script So this came out a few years later. and this comes from it says more than 19 years old this comes from 2006 so we're moving on another four years ⁓ after the court case that I had with Random House and the Guardian printed this and we might as well read it because it's just so funny it's a commentary on a book a new book that has just been printed and it says trapped surrounded betrayed this is just after the gulf war So just to put this in perspective, trapped, surrounded, betrayed, they didn't exist and they shouldn't have survived runs the blurb for the SAS veteran Major Neil Arden's Desert Fire. That's his new book Desert Fire. ⁓ The shocking true story of a covert unit of British and US black ops specialists on a dark and bloody mission to Iraq that wasn't all it seemed. Too right it wasn't. ⁓ In its dark and bloody entirety, it was a figment of Major Arden's fervent imaginings. When we call about this minor inconvenience, the publishers, Hodder, which is another big publisher in the UK, concede that the book has been withdrawn due to the impossibility of verifying the material and questions about the author. It seems the scribe may have been one Nigel Appleby, whose 1998 masterpiece Hall of the Gods simply flew off the shelves until another 12 writers claimed copyright infringements, plagiarism and misrepresentation. Desert Fire, Hodder stressed, came to it through a reputable agent, was ghosted by a respected author,
Matty: I
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and got the all clear from an independent SAS expert. But if you ask us, Major Arden blows his cover long before he gets to the high spec RDX explosives. I'm just moving on about here. Desert fire kicks off in the autumn of 2002 with our hero heading for Whitehall to meet his controller. I caught the London train. in Ross on Why begins the second paragraph.
Matty: Unbelievable, isn't it? Yeah, so just lying is second nature to some people. It doesn't bother them whatsoever. Yeah, yeah, this is crazy. So he clearly learned from his lessons. He straightened out and there's a happy end.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: See ya. ⁓ yes. But... But how do you walk into a second publisher?
Matty: I
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Having been kicked out of one publisher for plagiarism, how do you walk into another publisher with this book idea, ⁓ which is a total figment of his own imagination? How do you persuade them that this is, that you are genuine? This is a genuine story and a really exciting story. And as it says here, was got the all clear.
Matty: There's something fishy with him.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: from an independent SAS expert. So what does that say about the SAS expert? ⁓ Yeah. And it came through a reputable agent.
Matty: Trust the experts.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Now I was told that the agent was the same agent that was representing him with Random House. So how did that reputable agent then... recommend this guy a second time when knowing that his first book had been plagiarized. ⁓ Because as I said before, know, going to a publisher and getting ⁓ a book published is difficult. Not many people manage it. There are many books that end up ⁓ thrown in the bin because they are never published because it's so difficult to get ⁓ a contract with any publisher. And yet this guy got two. two contracts, two publishing contracts with advances on two books that were fictitious. Well, the second one wasn't plagiarized, it was just made up.
Matty: He must be quite the sweet talker. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just straight up. It's crazy, isn't it? Like, yeah, unbelievable. Do you want to expand out? Is there more to this story a little bit or do you want to expand out? What's I'm sort of interested in what the rest of your career, what your reception has been like? I know you were saying you were sort of stonewalled from some of these major conferences and things. What's the general perception of things that went on afterwards and the rest of your career?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, straight made up. Absolutely crazy. Yeah. ⁓ No, I was pretty much ⁓ cancelled ⁓ from most major conferences. I did go to some of the minor conferences and they were great actually. We had a guy up in Liverpool who courageously put on these conferences because he had no money and not much of a reputation in the market and he just put on these conferences and got all these people to come along and they were quite successful, I have to say. ⁓ Very good, but these are very much the fringe conferences. ⁓ lately, since this is all blown over, I've been going into some conferences because a lot of people have forgotten about this. ⁓
Matty: it.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and it sort of died down and I don't really want to resurrect it but it has to be said to people that you know publication is very tricky. ⁓ How do you actually get your ideas into print via a major publisher when these sort of things go on all the time? It's difficult. ⁓ So it's worth explaining what the pitfalls are when you have an idea and you want to try and put a book together. It's possibly quite why a lot of people now go down the self-publishing route. A, it's being made easier because the technology is there for people to do it themselves now anyway. You don't even have to have a printer nowadays. Most of my stuff comes through Amazon on print on demand. And so you can just send manuscript into Amazon and they all print it for you. Having said that I've just been kicked off Amazon which is very very peculiar, it doesn't help me at all. My books are still for sale on Amazon but I'm not allowed onto Amazon so I can't control anything with my books on their site, I've been banned from Amazon and I really don't know they had a new thing
Matty: Really? ⁓ Why is this? When did this happen? What?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And I think this is law, this is a change in the law regards, ⁓ I think it's regards income and finances and things of that nature, I don't know. But you had to, ⁓ no, maybe it's. It might be due to ChatGDP and these new AI things. They're getting a lot of AI produced books coming through and they're trying to cut through, ⁓ cut down on the number of AI slop books that get published. And so they wanted identification. So I put through my identification and they said, sorry, you failed identification and you're
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: no longer welcome on Amazon. So I've been kicked off Amazon. What do you want? I sent my passport. What else can I send? No explanation as to why. No explanation whatsoever. You've just failed ⁓ identification. I'm here. Look, this is me. I have a passport. I gave you my passport. What more do you want? ⁓ Yeah, so that's another.
Matty: Strange. Very weird. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So there are many pitfalls in all of this business. It's not just about researching and writing, which it would be nice to get back to just researching and writing. But I have to say, you know, good 30 % of my time has been taken up on doing other things, which are nothing to do with research whatsoever. So I could have been more productive, but I was otherwise engaged. And I had to do...
Matty: crazy.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: work as well, I had to do a proper job as well. Even though it was only, mean, for two of these, you know, especially for this one, I actually took two years off work. In fact, it ended up as three years off work to go and write it because it's difficult to concentrate if you're having to break up your research, do some research, go off and do your work and then come back some months later and
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: get back into the research again, it really breaks it up. It's not very ⁓ good way of ⁓ writing a book. ⁓ So yeah, on some occasions I just took time off work and sat down and wrote.
Matty: And a lot of your work has been on sort of revisionary theology and you described it. And so I imagine there's been a lot of pushback from different religious types or scholars in this field who probably aren't too happy what you've been writing about there. And so what sort of reactions have you got? What sort of cancellation forces came your way due to it? If you know what I mean.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Move. Yes, I've had various cancellations. ⁓ This happens on the modern video networks as well. ⁓ I got caught up in one and ended up at the center of ⁓ one of the cancellations. ⁓ One of the authors, ⁓ yeah, he's a fairly prolific author, Dr. Robert Price, ⁓ anyone who knows anything about ⁓ alternative Christianity and so on. He's a prolific author, very, very good. And ⁓ he was ⁓ using a particular video channel, which the young guy became his surrogate son, basically. They were around each other's houses, you know, and he was like father and son. And then suddenly the son kicked him in the teeth.
Matty: Right?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: for, well, because Price is right wing, he's a Trump supporter. And of course, this young ⁓ lad accused him of every ism in the book and recorded this tearful video saying how terrible and evil Dr. Robert Price is, you know. And a lot of people thought that was, you know, if you don't want someone on your video channel, just say, don't want you on, you know.
Matty: Yeah. Bye
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Don't try and ruin the guy and ruin his reputation in order to bring him down. So I complained about that. ⁓ And then I had exactly the same happen to me with another guy. And these two guys, these two young guys are like twins together. don't know. They didn't know each other before, but they did go off to Israel together later on. And I fell foul of something.
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And we think there is a machination behind the scenes by a particular religious group ⁓ because there were two of these other authors, video channels makers, who I'd been on many times and they thought my material was wonderful. ⁓ They turned around and said to Dr. Robert Price, don't use any of Ellis's material. because he was talking about my material in his video. Don't talk about anything of Ellis's. Jesus, King of Edessa book. Otherwise we'll tear you to pieces. we will do a hit piece video on you, worse than the other guys done. And so to his credit, Dr. Robert Price said, go Foxtrot Oscar, go forth and multiply. ⁓ I think Alice's material is.
Matty: Wow.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: is interesting, is valid, it is backed up by all the references, you know, I'm still going to use it. And so they made this terrible video again about Dr. Robert Price, saying he's a misogynist, he's a racist, he's a homophobe, he's against BLM and all of the standard woke stuff, you know, and they were trying to rip.
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Dr. Robert Price to shreds simply for hosting some of my material because I wrote a couple of articles for him and so on. That's the sort of people we come across. And then they did the same to me as well. They made a similar video about myself saying I was a racist and a misogynist and all that sort of business. All based on completely untrue ⁓ things they'd made up. It's so easy to try and trash somebody if you just make up some material. ⁓ Because it was, it was all made up. I ended up making a ⁓ video, a contrarian video, answering all the questions. And it's a bit sad that you have to go and do that, but you have to...
Matty: course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: justify the fact that you know this this is all made up you have to tell everybody that these people are just out to get you and it seemed between myself and Dr. Robert Price of course we were talking about this quite a lot that this was all organized behind the scenes it wasn't just these video channel makers it was organized behind the scenes by a ⁓ particular religious group Because remember, all these new video channels, they're all working on a shoestring.
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: you're not getting huge money yourself you know from any of these videos you know you just don't make a lot of money out of videos and these guys were getting semi-professional and so they were relying on on video income of course ⁓ and they I think they both had families I'm not quite sure I can't remember both of them had been fundamentalist Christians and turned into ⁓ agnostics or atheists or whatever so they both had a very similar background
Matty: Of course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Both were financially strapped. Both were, I would say, open to persuasion if someone came along with a nice fat wad of money. And we've already seen this before with the Nigel Appleby book. It's the same old playbook, isn't it? People have their price all the time. These people always have a price. And I think that's the reason why they suddenly made these videos.
Matty: I Boval. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ trying to destroy it and the thing that they said to Dr Robert Price was interesting is that they were only going after Robert Price because he supported myself and because he supported my Jesus King of Adessa book and was discussing it and that was the reason they actually made these hit piece videos against him. ⁓ which again suggests that there was a religious organization who didn't want this information to come out because it is revolutionary, it is shocking, it does undermine the classical Christian story, it doesn't undermine the the Jesus story because you know does it really matter if the guy was crucified in AD 70 instead of AD 30 does that really make a difference? ⁓ It does change it because it makes him a real king, it makes him a wealthy person, not a pauper prince of peace. He becomes a real king, a wealthy king, who is involved in a very real secular dispute with Rome. So that changes, I suppose, but the rest of the gospel story all remains the same. It just means that this supposed son of God was rather more influential than the gospels make out. ⁓ So I think, yeah, that there were machinations behind the scenes and someone wanted this book buried. So if people want to know the truth, the truth that they've tried to bury on numerous occasions, this is the one. With this jacket cover as well, not the old jacket cover, ⁓ there are some old editions running around which are not as good as this one. ⁓ So, yeah.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah, understandably. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: all interesting stuff it's a bit of a minefield this publication game so yeah i've had lots of pushback from various people i've had fatwas you know because i write about islam as well in the back of this book in fact ⁓ my adesa book because adesa was taken over by islam of course so i write about that so i've had pushback i've had various threats from
Matty: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can see, I can see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: various individuals. ⁓ It does mean I've had to move house on a few occasions, but there we go, you that's life. ⁓ You ⁓ don't get into this game if you can't take the ramifications of it. It is a minefield. People's lives do depend upon it. You know, if you're working in the church, if you are a
Matty: Yeah, fair play. Yeah, yeah, I understand. Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: priests, know, or whatever within the church, your whole life is based upon this material and your whole income and ⁓ life depends on this material. You don't want it necessarily being changed by some ⁓ odd researcher who just comes in with all of these new ideas. ⁓ And it doesn't always go down well with academia because academia has the same rigid structures as the church does. Now you can imagine the church has this rigid structure, know, these are our gospels, that's what happened, that's the way interpret this material. And it's very difficult for them to change their minds. But academia does exactly the same. They have their own academic structures, and you have to keep within that history and those structures. Otherwise, as an academic, know as a tutor in university or something like that you could just as easily lose your job if you go out on a limb and start saying that Jesus came from Edessa and you know you're a theologian that Oxford or Cambridge or something you can't do it you know because your life depends your income depends on you towing the classical line because you too could be thrown out the same as any priest could And so you get pushback from ⁓ these academics. I had a piece ⁓ in the Daily Mail about my book, which I had to pay for, by the way. You can pay for articles. Not all of these articles just arrive by research, by a reporter. They're bought. And so I bought a reporter to go and report on my book.
Matty: I see.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: and he wrote this. It wasn't very big, it was only a quarter page article on my book. But to make it more spicy, of course, they then went for commentary for various ⁓ theologians from Oxford and whatever. What do you think about this book? And of course they said, ⁓ it's rubbish, it's rubbish. Not one of those commentators, those theologians, had ever read my book.
Matty: Yeah, of course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So they're pushing back, they're saying it's rubbish, without ever having read a single word of my book, which is totally unprofessional, because everything they said was a complete nonsense. It's not what I wrote in my book, you know, the things they were making up. I mean, one of them, this is a theologian, said ⁓ Jesus was clean shaven.
Matty: Yeah, of course.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So Ellis is completely wrong. Well, there are some Roman ⁓ images of Jesus that have him as a Roman and therefore clean shaven. Of course, Jesus was a Jew. He was a Nazarene Jew. The Nazarene did not cut their hair. That's the whole point of the Nazarites, the Nazarene, is they did not pull their hair. They had long hair. And of course, if he came from Edessa,
Matty: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: which is where I say he did come from. All of the Odessan monarchs had long hair and beards. ⁓ They were very much Hesute. That's why Josephus Flavius called them barbarians. He didn't call them barbarians because they had a different language, which is the classical interpretation of barbarian. ⁓ He called them barbarians because they had long hair. Barba, from which we get the word for a
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Barber in the Latin ⁓ and that's where he was using his barbarian. They didn't have a foreign language because they were using the same language as Josephus Flavius so it was nothing to do with language. ⁓ you get these theologians writing these complaints about my book you know because they've been asked to give a response you know what do you think about Ellis's book? ⁓ rubbish! protecting their own positions because they've never read my book. If they had any interest, if they were true academics, they would maybe want to read some of this material, maybe to converse with me and say, well, you said this, I think you said this, you know, what's your explanation for this? You know, perhaps write a letter to me, an email, you know, we do have emails nowadays. ⁓ But no, of course, they didn't, they just want to rubbish it because they want to
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: keep the standard classical interpretation intact. And that's within academia, not just within the church. So yeah, there's lots of pushback, but yeah, you you expect that. ⁓ Science and history only advances one death at a time.
Matty: That's right.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: So within the academic system, the old guard have to die off before the new ideas can come through. So we're really waiting for all of the old guard within the university system to die off. Sad as it is, you know? ⁓ But it's not all doom and gloom. mean, there's been a lot of people who are more enlightened, who ⁓ have appreciated, you know,
Matty: Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: the depth of the work and how it's fully referenced and all brand new ideas and so on. People like Dr. Robert Price, who I would have expected to have pushed back against it. And he did initially when he hadn't fully read it, but he had the good nature to actually write to me and say, well, I don't agree with this and allow me to explain myself. And then he said, well, ⁓ actually, that sort of makes sense. And he sort of came around to my point of view that while he didn't fully agree with everything I was saying, it made sense and it was well argued. And that's what he was saying on his podcast and so on. So, yeah, there've been quite a lot of positive responses, especially from the general public. You know, the general public really do like these new interpretations, these new ideas. So it's been fully worthwhile. enterprise and it's still going. The books are still flying off the shelves. Well, they're still selling for a self-publisher. They're still selling.
Matty: Yeah, very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. I am. I was partly asking why, because I'm almost sure during this podcast, I'm going to get some shenanigans coming my way down the line. And I'm almost thinking, what's the right game plan to have here? Yeah. Should I? What do you think, Ralph? Should I work to save up a pot of dough to keep out to the side and then go, right, ⁓ I have a stability here. Let's go balls to the walls with this show now. Or should I keep trying to play it safe for a bit because of.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, you probably will. You
Matty: We're in this era of cancellation, this woe culture, you know what I mean still? And it's like, ugh. I don't know if I be asked, my whole profession sort of ripped away from me and going through that, but I wouldn't have started if I wasn't ready to do it, like, so I'm ready to go for it, but I'm at the early stage.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: I you. Well, as a podcaster, you do have the advantage because you stay above whatever is being said. The fact that you have someone on your podcast doesn't mean you agree with them. And the way you handle them ⁓ is going to be the sign of whether it's going to be a good and trustworthy channel or not. If you're simply just agreeing with everybody.
Matty: Yeah. Mm. Exactly.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: then that puts you in a difficult position. But if you're independent and just asking them questions, so even, you know, likes of myself, know, but, but explain this. And we're probably gonna do this later with a Q &A or something of that nature. ⁓ In order to preserve your independence, you don't want to get caught up too much in it because for instance, I've done
Matty: Yes. Yeah. Mm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: ⁓ video channels talking about chemtrails I know lot about ⁓ that material because I've been in aviation ⁓ 45 years or so ⁓ and given point of view and the interviewer sort of looks at material and ⁓ asks me the questions and they've also gone the other side and asked for a chemtrailer. to go on the same channel, which is difficult because I think of course Chemtrails is a complete load of nonsense, but if handled well by the interviewer on the video, you can stay above whatever's being said by even someone like Chemtrailor. To me, that's a complete... nonsense conspiracy. And yet you can still go there as an interviewer and ask these people if you keep yourself above it, if you keep independent and ask the right questions in order to make the show interesting ⁓ without showing your... your true beliefs too much because what I'm thinking about is thinking about ⁓ Tucker Carlson.
Matty: Yes.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Now, Tucker Carlson is a fantastic right-wing interviewer who seems to have got caught up too much with his views on Islam. So from being a totally right-wing interviewer, ⁓ he's now gone totally pro-Islam, which doesn't ⁓ concord at all with his standard viewership. And of course, now he's got tons of criticism from his standard viewer base because they think he's actually gone in ⁓ and promoting that point of view. So instead of staying above it and just interviewing, you know, some influential Muslims and whatever, and just staying above it and giving an interview with their points of view, he's actually now agreeing with it and promoting it. And that's totally the wrong way to go. Because he's lost most of his viewership now. Nobody trusts him anymore. He seems to have done a complete vault farce. And again, we come down to this money business. There's loads of rumors, and I don't know how established these rumors are, that he's been paid to change his mind. He's now saying the total opposite to what he was saying before. But we've seen this before, haven't we?
Matty: Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Money talks, unfortunately, and you wouldn't have thought it would talk with someone like Tucker Carlson, who's now independently wealthy. mean, he's done, he was working for Fox for, I don't know how many years, know, decades maybe on a huge salary. ⁓ It's not as if the guy is short of money. Why would anyone like that want to take?
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: money to change their views, if that's what happened. We don't know if that's what happened, but that's what people are saying. But these things happen, these things do happen. ⁓ So yeah, that's the only thing you can do as an interviewer. ⁓ Another one who's doing quite well at present is Matt Beale in America, who's come on ⁓ and started his own ⁓ podcast now, video channel.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah. I'll check him out.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: And yeah, he's doing quite well having what I would consider to be cranks on. However, as he says, well, that's not my business. I'm just interviewing them. And as long as it makes an interesting video and as long as he pushes back on something that, you know,
Matty: Interview. ⁓ Interviews.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: sounds really idiotic, ⁓ then that's his job. His job is to ask questions and see what the people say. Even though I would be a very poor interviewer because I wouldn't have those people on in the first place. But you can't be an interviewer if you only have people that agree with you.
Matty: Yeah. Fair enough. ⁓ Of course, of course. Yeah. I'm thinking a little bit. This is the point of why I sort of started with the interview style of this podcast. It was to get different people on different opinions. I feel like I'm trying to build it up to a stage of where there's a bit of independence where I start giving my opinion on this and start going forward with what I've been researching in my own time and my own point of view, which I think I'll get in trouble for. But I stay tuned people. It's down the line.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, that's difficult, you know, to do that. ⁓
Matty: Yeah, I think I'm just gonna have to ride the wave at some stage, isn't it? Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah, it does make it more difficult. I even don't like it sometimes on some news channels where the interviewer says, yes, that's right, that's right, that's right. Talking to someone about a news item is not the point of having the reporter or interviewer to agree with what is being said. We want to hear what the person says. ⁓ And there are lots of these new. video ⁓ news reporters who have been kicked out of some of the majors and they've started their own, ⁓ who do like the sound of their own voice and they do the 10 minute question. So they've got this poor guy sitting there, or gal, whatever it happens to be, who's been invited in to the show and the interviewer goes on for like 10 minutes with one question.
Matty: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: because they love the sound of their own voice so much. And you can see the other, you know, the person who's been brought in for interview going, it's yeah, when's my turn coming around? ⁓ So yeah, it's a difficult business, but I'm sure you'll find your own way through it.
Matty: Was it my turn? Yeah. I get it. Yeah, yeah. I get you. I am... I'll navigate the way. no doubt. It'll be a fun journey. I'll see where this leads. Yeah. We're probably coming up to near two hours again here, Ralph. Have you any final remarks about the old cancellation you want to pack in there or should we wrap it up there for another week?
Bishop Ralph Ellis: No, think we've been through it in a fair amount of detail. It's just a warning for anyone, basically, if you're doing research. This is what you've got to be wary of. ⁓
Matty: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: try and find your way through this system. Don't trust. You gotta trust some people. This is the trouble. You gotta trust some people, but don't trust everybody. ⁓ Even especially now on X and so on where people can private message you and so on. they can promise the world unless you know these people, unless you've actually seen them, yeah, don't trust them.
Matty: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I see what you mean, yeah, understandable.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: There's so many scammers out there, it's untrue. ⁓
Matty: There's plenty of Josephus Flaviuses in the world, know? Yeah, yeah, they keep their eyes peeled.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Yeah there are and you probably find this this woman who's actually a man and she's based in Mumbai or something you know and ⁓ there when I started on X ⁓ and you know I'm relatively famous I suppose so I get a lot of people joining I must have got 50 advances ⁓ advances ⁓ from unknown people saying ⁓
Matty: Yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: um really love your work can I talk to you and of course they're all scammers they're all every single one is a scammer um especially because they're always you know like a busty woman or something you know saying I really love your work they're all scammers I used to get 50 a day of those I was spending half my time going through x deleting all of these comments from you know
Matty: Of course, yeah. ⁓ Of course, yes, yeah, Just biting the hook there. Yeah, yeah.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: private messaging until I found out how to limit the number of private messages coming in.
Matty: Yeah, and they'll pay you in Bitcoin and all of these things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. Absolutely. ⁓ All right, well, we'll leave it for there then, I guess, for another week. Thank you so much again, Ralph. Thank you again for your time and for sharing your story here and for everything else beforehand. Again, I really do appreciate it. And I was one of those random people messaging you on X.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: It's all that sort of stuff. ⁓ it's rampant. It really is. Yes.
Matty: So yeah, thank you again. Everybody find the links, they'll be down below for all of Ralph's books and his work. Please check him out on the social medias as well also. And yeah, please like and subscribe if you like what's going on at this channel and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Cheers Ralph.
Bishop Ralph Ellis: Cheers.
