Hello, I'm Dr. Stephen Hassan with another episode of the influence continuum.

I'm particularly excited about today's interview.

I've been waiting, actually, for a long time to capture our next guest, who is Gareth Gore, a financial journalist and editor with

close to two decades of experience, who has reported from over 25 countries, covered the

biggest financial stories. He has a podcast called The Syndicate, which tells the behind-the-scenes

stories of some of the biggest financial deals in history. He's written for Bloomberg,

Reuters, International Financing Review. And we're talking today about a really important book called Opus,

the cult of dark money, human trafficking, and right-wing conspiracy inside the Catholic Church.

This is a hot potato, and I am so thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with you about it

because I've known about Opus Day for decades as a cult expert.

And, you know, this is a group that thinks the Pope is satanic.

And, you know, once, you know, anyway, anyway we'll get into it but you started this journey

from the financial end right with a bank that you researched tell us how you got interested in this

story and and let's get into it We'll have a lot of fun.

Well, first of all, Steve, thank you so much for having me on. It's a real pleasure to be on your show. I know you've had your own run-ins with Opus Day over the years, and I'm sure over

the course of today's podcast, we can talk a bit about that. But yes, to answer your question,

I got into this completely by accident.

I knew next to nothing about Opus Day when I was coming into this.

And I certainly wasn't looking to write a story about Obis Day.

Basically, to cut a long story short, a bank in Spain collapsed in 2017.

And I, as a financial reporter, was sent to cover the story. Initially, it looked like any other bank collapsed, and we've had many of them over the past

15 years or so.

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