Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Entertainment Series 10: Tom Secker / Government & Hollywood / Propaganda / Aliens / CIA & Homeland

Transcript

Entertainment Series 10: Tom Secker / Government & Hollywood / Propaganda / Aliens / CIA & Homeland · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of come together,
• 0:15
  Tom Sucker. Welcome.
• 0:17
  I'm so happy to have you here. The creator of spy culture, an
• 0:20
  awesome website. How are you I'm.
• 0:23
  Great. Thanks.
• 0:24
  Thanks for having me. It's good to be talking to you.
• 0:26
  Yes, yes, I'm really excited to be talking.
• 0:28
  I, I came, I came across your work by accident, but but once I
• 0:34
  saw it, my, my eyes lit up and, and I caught fire because this
• 0:38
  was because it's some of the coolest work and contrary
• 0:42
  actually to what I want to hopefully, you know, open our
• 0:44
  conversation about contrary to lots of other work, your work is
• 0:48
  meticulously sourced and really, really well detailed.
• 0:52
  And it's, it's, it's tons of fun to just go through and you can
• 0:56
  learn so much just from, you know, just your timeline is
• 0:59
  incredible. Oh, the CIA Hollywood timeline.
• 1:02
  Yeah. Oh yeah.
• 1:04
  That's incredible. That's really amazing.
• 1:07
  Thanks. Thanks.
• 1:08
  That took a lot of lot of time. Well, I mean, it's years and
• 1:11
  years of research that ultimately went into that.
• 1:13
  But even just putting it together took days, weeks, I
• 1:16
  can't remember a couple of weeks maybe.
• 1:18
  So yeah, that was a bit of a labor of love, that one.
• 1:21
  I always wanted to take pretty much everything I had, or at
• 1:24
  least the essence of everything I had on the CIA and Hollywood
• 1:27
  and put it together all in one place for people.
• 1:29
  So yeah, yeah, any anyone who's listening, go look at the CIA
• 1:33
  and Hollywood timeline. It's a it's a lot of, lot of
• 1:36
  work. It's spyculture.com.
• 1:38
  Yeah. And it's, it's again,
• 1:39
  meticulously done, super well sourced.
• 1:42
  I was just reading through it before you hopped on.
• 1:44
  I was reading about the CIA document that you posted about
• 1:48
  their mishandling of Zero Dark 30 and, and our and, you know,
• 1:51
  and, and basically all regulations as far as far as,
• 1:54
  you know, the way that the government supposed to relate to
• 1:56
  Hollywood. But we're going to, I'm sure
• 1:59
  we're going to talk, we're going to dive into a lot of these type
• 2:01
  of topics. The I, I, I, I wanted to
• 2:05
  actually begin, if you don't mind.
• 2:07
  I saw what it must have been a relatively new post because I
• 2:10
  missed it the first time I went through.
• 2:11
  Was your post about the weird scenes inside Laurel Canyon
• 2:14
  book. Yeah, I, it's funny because I
• 2:19
  didn't talk about this book for months, but it happened to be
• 2:22
  that the podcast that I recorded that mentioned it, the author
• 2:25
  was what asked me to hold off a couple of months to publish it
• 2:29
  until his newest book came out. So I just released it the other
• 2:32
  day and I happened to talk about this book then too.
• 2:35
  But I read the book and I was really excited to get my hands
• 2:38
  on it. And I and I heard about it being
• 2:40
  talked about in a couple of podcasts and I picked it up and
• 2:42
  I start going through it and I, and, you know, red lights just
• 2:47
  started going off my head and alarm bells started ringing.
• 2:50
  I said, this feels just not great.
• 2:55
  And then and then I and then, and then I read and then I got
• 2:58
  up to parts that I really didn't know about, you know, like for
• 3:01
  example, the Grateful Dead and, and, and Pig Pen's relationship
• 3:04
  with Janis Joplin and yeah, and, and, and, and her, you know, her
• 3:08
  mysterious death and not really mysterious was an overdose.
• 3:12
  Everything was just, everything felt like it was being shoved
• 3:16
  needlessly into conspiracy and it felt like it didn't have to
• 3:20
  be like there's plenty of great, there's plenty of crazy stories
• 3:23
  out there that we don't have to necessarily.
• 3:27
  We don't have to fictionalize everything or, or I guess what's
• 3:32
  the word for it when you we conspiracize everything.
• 3:36
  Well, I mean, that's what the book does.
• 3:37
  It tries to take all these disparate stories about
• 3:41
  relatively disparate people. I mean, there's some
• 3:43
  interconnections at at various points, but it turns it into
• 3:47
  this grand overarching conspiracy theory about pretty
• 3:50
  much everything that was going on at that time, culturally
• 3:53
  speaking. And also it it, it amalgamates
• 3:56
  so many different things. There's this the whole thing
• 3:59
  about the the Lookout Mountain Observatory or Lookout Mountain
• 4:03
  Laboratory, which is in Mcgowan's book, is supposedly
• 4:07
  the sort of top secret military facility that's somewhere in
• 4:10
  Laurel Canyon. But he doesn't really seem to
• 4:13
  know that much about it. And it's almost like the absence
• 4:15
  of information is a cause to be suspicious, right?
• 4:19
  And and he claims it was somehow at the center of this CIA
• 4:22
  military intelligence, create the hippie movement, influence
• 4:27
  the hippie movement, overarching conspiracy theory that kind of
• 4:29
  runs through the whole book or most of the book anyway.
• 4:32
  But he doesn't cite any evidence for that.
• 4:34
  He doesn't cite any connection between any of these musicians
• 4:38
  and film stars and so on, these hippies that lived in Laurel
• 4:40
  Canyon and the actual Lookout Mountain Laboratory.
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  And as far as I can tell, there basically is no connection
• 4:47
  except they happen to live in the same or exist in the same
• 4:49
  geographical area at the same time.
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  It's sort of, there's a lot, there's a lot of conspiracy by
• 4:54
  association in the book, and there's a lot of conspiracy by
• 4:57
  geographic location in the book because these people lived
• 5:01
  around the corner from these people.
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  They therefore must have been connected in some profound way.
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  But were they or did they just know each other?
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  Did they sometimes go to parties with each other?
• 5:10
  Did they occasionally record an album or a song together?
• 5:13
  I mean, that doesn't prove a conspiracy.
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  It's just what people do, right? Yeah, and it's just as easily
• 5:19
  likely as it is unlikely. I mean, you know, I mean, I have
• 5:21
  so many friends that and and I think about this quite a bit.
• 5:23
  Oh man, with with the whole Jeffrey Epstein story where I
• 5:27
  think how many people are on this quote UN quote list or how
• 5:29
  many people associated with him really just really like just
• 5:33
  knew him on a superficial level that are now just getting
• 5:35
  bundled up with him. And you know, I'm just there,
• 5:37
  there are plenty of people, I'm sure that had a lot of
• 5:39
  wrongdoing, but there's a lot of people that I mean, I think I
• 5:43
  could think about so many people in my life that I've had
• 5:46
  positive associations with that I haven't kept up with that.
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  I've had a year of friendship with a couple of month
• 5:51
  relationship with and then disappeared.
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  And I haven't heard from them in 10 years.
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  And I find out that there one day, you know, some kind of
• 5:56
  terrible sex offender and I've been really, you know, and, and
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  I and I said I had a relationship with them ten years
• 6:01
  ago where I knew them for a couple of months or for a year
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  or two. Guilt by association.
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  Like it could be, but it could just as equally not be.
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  Absolutely. I've.
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  I've known some people in my life who I was even friends with
• 6:14
  for quite long periods of time who turned out to be doing
• 6:18
  horrible things. Doesn't make me responsible for
• 6:23
  that. It doesn't mean that I I'm in
• 6:26
  any way guilty or I'm in any way responsible or liable for what
• 6:29
  they did. And I know what you mean about
• 6:31
  the Epstein thing, because it still isn't clear exactly to
• 6:34
  what extent Maxwell and Epstein were entrapping people or
• 6:41
  providing these, I don't want to call them services, but we're
• 6:44
  providing essentially underage sex slaves or trafficked.
• 6:50
  Yeah, yeah. Teenage girls and what have you.
• 6:52
  We don't actually know the extent to which that was
• 6:54
  happening. It seems it must have been
• 6:55
  happening to some degree. But then people leap in and say,
• 6:58
  oh, because this person is on a flight log, they were once on
• 7:01
  this plane or they flew on this plane 6 times, right?
• 7:05
  And that means they flew on a plane.
• 7:07
  That doesn't mean they necessarily knew everything
• 7:08
  Epstein was up to, let alone we're participating in it.
• 7:11
  Some of them we have to assume were, but we don't know which
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  ones. And until people actually
• 7:17
  outline some solid evidence of this being more than just an
• 7:21
  association with Epstein, I'm not really sure where we go with
• 7:25
  it. And that is a real problem,
• 7:27
  because I do think something very serious and very dark and
• 7:29
  very sick and twisted and psycho stalker creepy pervert
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  paedophile thing happened there. But I don't know exactly who was
• 7:37
  and wasn't involved. I certainly don't believe
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  Epstein killed himself. I'll, I'll say that much.
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  I can't. I can't imagine it.
• 7:43
  It's possible, but I can't imagine it.
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  Have a lot of time with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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  But, you know, and I think you're right.
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  And I and I and I think that end of the day, there has been so
• 7:52
  much good work done and there is so much information available.
• 7:57
  If you want to do your homework and if you want to make it
• 7:59
  happen, excuse me, phone drops. If you want to make it happen,
• 8:02
  you can do it, you know, and so that's that's kind of what
• 8:05
  bothers me about a lazy conspiracies or and I'm not
• 8:09
  going to call weird things that inside of Canyon a lazy
• 8:12
  conspiracy per SE, because the author obviously put a lot of
• 8:14
  effort into actually writing the book and getting information
• 8:17
  that he did. But it feels like he stopped a
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  step short of what he could have.
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  And I think that we, you know, it's it becomes a dangerous
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  game, you know, because like, like you said, it just becomes
• 8:26
  association and that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
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  So I think I think it's I think it's a good point.
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  I think it's really interesting. I mean, the biggest problem I
• 8:36
  have with that book, which I outlined in the podcast episode
• 8:40
  that I did, reviewing it and honestly tearing into it in
• 8:43
  places, people, people don't have to agree with my opinions
• 8:46
  in that one. But I would actually ask that
• 8:47
  you at least go and have a read or a listen to it and consider
• 8:51
  have I been a little bit suckered maybe by some some of
• 8:54
  the things that people have said here?
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  Or have I maybe been a little bit lazy in my own thinking and
• 8:58
  taking some things too seriously or just taking them for granted.
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  The biggest problem for me is that at no point does McGowan
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  mention any of the actual cultural warfare operations that
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  we know were going on at that time, including it, including in
• 9:12
  Los Angeles, let alone the CI as infiltration of the hippie
• 9:17
  movement, the anti Vietnam War movement, Operation Kale.
• 9:21
  If you want to look up Operation Chaos, it was this CIA
• 9:24
  infiltration and spying operation looking at the the
• 9:28
  radical left, the hippie movement, the anti war movement,
• 9:31
  all of that and infiltrating, getting in there some ways and
• 9:34
  presumably trying to sabotage and disrupt in some fashion.
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  And you would think that's directly connected to most of
• 9:41
  what only some of what Mcgowan's talking about.
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  And yet it isn't mentioned anywhere in the book.
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  And so I'm wondering if you want to you really want to flesh out
• 9:49
  this theory that he's espousing. That's just an obvious place to
• 9:53
  me to look is to associate it with this, to situate it in that
• 9:56
  context of what is definite and already known, rather than this
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  relatively loosely affiliated and awfully often loosely
• 10:04
  defined conspiracy theory that he he does espouse.
• 10:09
  Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because I feel
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  like it's, it's hard to even do that much homework and collect
• 10:14
  information that he did without coming across that.
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  I mean, I'm a casual reader and I've, you know, and I've come
• 10:19
  across way more than what? Than what at least.
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  Listen, I didn't finish the book.
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  I got about, you know, just about a little bit less than
• 10:27
  halfway through and just said, I, I, I don't have the patience
• 10:30
  to keep on going with this. And and I really try to push
• 10:34
  through and I really do. But I was like, I have so many
• 10:37
  books I want to read and this is really isn't giving me too much
• 10:39
  to work. It's not even giving me homework
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  to do so. So I had to put it aside for
• 10:43
  now. But I'm happy that that you I'm
• 10:45
  happy that you have a similar perspective with me.
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  And then, at least to me that when it comes to this book,
• 10:50
  because I love that point in history.
• 10:53
  I love that music. I love that time.
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  I'm fascinated by it. The book Chaos by Tom O'Neill.
• 10:58
  I don't know if you read it, I I thought was a remarkable work
• 11:02
  that really brings a sheds a lot more light onto this into this
• 11:07
  world without really making he he he provides so much
• 11:12
  information without me. He does the opposite of of what
• 11:15
  McGregor does. He he, he provides all the
• 11:17
  information without coming to any definitive conclusions and
• 11:20
  says there's too many interplaying factors over here
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  for me to say for sure what it is.
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  And in too much evidence has been destroyed and too many
• 11:26
  people are dead now for me to be able to really make a decision.
• 11:30
  But there was some weird stuff going on, you know, and here's
• 11:34
  the record of the weird stuff. And here's Jolly West and here's
• 11:37
  and here's the introduction of amphetamines in San Francisco.
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  And here's that, you know, here's Manson with, you know,
• 11:41
  meeting with, with Jolly WX amount of times.
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  And like, what does it mean? I don't know, but here's the
• 11:47
  data, here's the hard facts. Do with that as you will, I
• 11:50
  think that's that. That's a much more preferable
• 11:52
  way of going about it. Well, and just for what it's
• 11:55
  worth, I do think there was some a lot of weird shit going on in
• 11:59
  the San Francisco part of the with with Tim Leary and all of
• 12:02
  that kind of thing. There is definitely something to
• 12:05
  that and if people want to give. Me about Tim Leary's
• 12:09
  relationship, if you don't mind, because I, I, I know the name
• 12:12
  for sure. And he's a counterculture hero.
• 12:14
  He's a beat, I think, right? Or the end of the pre hippie
• 12:18
  around that time. Yeah.
• 12:19
  Yeah. But I never heard about his
• 12:21
  relationship with any kind of government association.
• 12:24
  Do you? Do you, do you know off the top
• 12:26
  of your head, you know, any more detail than that?
• 12:29
  Well, certainly he had some involvement with the CIA.
• 12:31
  That's fairly well established. He was being, I'm pretty sure,
• 12:34
  being spied on by the FBI simultaneously.
• 12:37
  And there is this whole thing about the CIA running
• 12:39
  experiments, including in San Francisco with, with acid, with
• 12:43
  LSD. They were sometimes running
• 12:45
  essentially brothels where they would ensnare.
• 12:49
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they would ensnare
• 12:51
  clients, get them to come in, dose them up with acid and then
• 12:56
  film them to see what the hell happened.
• 12:58
  And these are pretty, I mean that's a pretty messed up
• 13:00
  experiment and potentially very dangerous experiment or series
• 13:04
  of experiments operations they were running.
• 13:06
  Exactly where that connects and overlaps with with Tim Leary,
• 13:10
  I'm not 100% sure, but it was happening at the same time in
• 13:13
  basically the same place, to some extent the same place.
• 13:16
  So therefore we have to assume there is a connection there.
• 13:19
  And yeah, that part of the AP movement, certainly the more
• 13:22
  sort of drug fueled psychedelic or excessively maybe psychedelic
• 13:27
  part of the AP movement I do think was being infiltrated and
• 13:30
  manipulated. But that's a bit of a different
• 13:32
  thing to what was going on in Southern California around Los
• 13:35
  Angeles and Laurel Canyon. So I'm not sure if those two
• 13:38
  things are actually integrated in any way.
• 13:40
  They, if there were, if there were operations being run in
• 13:43
  Laurel Canyon and certainly I think the FBI were spying on
• 13:45
  some of these people. We know that much.
• 13:50
  Are those things connected or not?
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  Or in what ways are they connected?
• 13:53
  I'm, I'm still not sure about that.
• 13:55
  I have a lot of scepticism about the hippie movement, despite
• 13:57
  being essentially A hippie. I mean, I wasn't born until the
• 14:00
  1980s, but I absorbed a lot of the hippie philosophies, the
• 14:03
  hippie anarchist philosophy growing up.
• 14:06
  Nonetheless, I do have a lot of questions about this movement
• 14:09
  and, and it is a disparate movement.
• 14:11
  There are it is multifaceted and to be fair, McGowan does say
• 14:16
  this. He does say isn't just one
• 14:17
  amorphous movement or one very specific movement.
• 14:21
  There's like different wings of it.
• 14:23
  And he does say that as far as he's concerned, a lot of this
• 14:25
  was about trying to divert people from the more practical
• 14:29
  anti war, anti Vietnam War in particular side of the movement
• 14:33
  and get them more towards to just take drugs.
• 14:35
  You know, TuneIn, drop out free love.
• 14:39
  And I'm not, I'm not actually a huge fan of that hippie
• 14:43
  movement, to be honest. But some people are.
• 14:45
  I mean, people can make their own judgments on this.
• 14:49
  Yeah, I say I'm very happy that I could look at the hippie
• 14:51
  movement in the rearview mirror because if I was born in that
• 14:54
  time, I have a very difficult time believing I'd have as
• 14:57
  balanced as a life of it as I do now, you know, And I'm living
• 15:01
  with more of the echoes and the ripple effects of that of that
• 15:04
  culture. And I could embrace it in the
• 15:06
  way that I feel is appropriately anachronistic, as you said, as
• 15:10
  you, you know, as you're putting it.
• 15:12
  But yeah, I feel that. I, I, I feel the same way.
• 15:15
  And what's what, what I think is is interesting or curious
• 15:18
  perhaps and just completely speculative is that it seemed
• 15:22
  like that, that, that, that federal agencies.
• 15:25
  And there's certainly a paper trail with this.
• 15:27
  And there's another great book, Blitzed I believe by Norman
• 15:30
  Orwell, 00 Norman Ohler, German author, and he has a couple of
• 15:36
  great books, but this book tripped, I'm sorry, tripped is
• 15:40
  the book. And he and he, there's a paper
• 15:42
  trail of LSD from Switzerland to Nazi Germany, straight to
• 15:46
  straight to the state straights, pretty much straight to San
• 15:48
  Francisco. And, and what's interesting is
• 15:52
  that people didn't really know what LSD was going to do.
• 15:57
  And it looks like towards the late 60s, early 70's, the FBI or
• 16:02
  the CIA or whatever government agencies were experimenting with
• 16:05
  the impact of LSD, saw that it kind of was mushroom into its
• 16:09
  own culture. And they ended up introduce,
• 16:11
  introducing amphetamines into the culture and, you know,
• 16:14
  heroin and speed and stuff like that.
• 16:16
  And that ended up causing enormous decay and 'cause, you
• 16:19
  know, that was the end of the summer of love was.
• 16:21
  And, you know, I've read multiple accounts of just, of
• 16:24
  just regular everyday people that were living there that were
• 16:27
  great, you know, dead heads or fans of just, you know, just
• 16:30
  real hippies. And, and they said the, the, the
• 16:33
  just over the, over the course of a couple of months, it just
• 16:35
  felt like everyone went from loving each other and sharing
• 16:38
  food and the diggers and, and, you know, and free love and free
• 16:41
  culture and that's art and sharing to just like a bunch of
• 16:44
  zombies in the street. And they said, we have no idea
• 16:47
  what happened. But but again, the work from
• 16:50
  from Tom O'Neill sheds a little bit of light into, into the,
• 16:54
  into the introduction of of speed and those uppers into,
• 16:59
  into the culture that was really doing really well with the
• 17:02
  psychedelics, I think, or for the most part, you know, with
• 17:04
  the psychedelics. But they are two fundamentally
• 17:08
  different. I mean, metabolically, they're
• 17:10
  two fundamentally different kinds of drugs.
• 17:14
  I think people want to take psychedelic drugs.
• 17:15
  I mean, I've taken a few in my time.
• 17:17
  And so I do know, I know personally what this can be like
• 17:20
  and what kind of influence it can have on you.
• 17:22
  And it can help open the the doors of perception if you like.
• 17:27
  It can certainly help broaden your mind, can certainly help
• 17:29
  open you up your imagination up to different possibilities.
• 17:32
  Whereas cocaine, amphetamines, those kind of things.
• 17:37
  Honestly, I've I've occasionally tried them and they just don't
• 17:40
  work for me at all. They don't, they don't seem to
• 17:42
  fit with my metabolism or my my mentality.
• 17:46
  And I can see how on mass this can help shift a movement and
• 17:50
  shift the culture and make it more about that sort of buzzy
• 17:54
  impulsive. It's got to be now, now, now.
• 17:56
  But then you crash because it's all sort of now, now, now and
• 17:58
  then you crash and then you don't do anything.
• 18:00
  Whereas psychedelics is a bit more medium long term, it's a
• 18:03
  bit more slow paced in many respects.
• 18:05
  It's like I say, metabolically and in terms of biorhythms and
• 18:09
  everything, just a fundamentally different kind of drug
• 18:12
  experience and a fundamentally different kind of culture that
• 18:14
  results. Sure, sure.
• 18:16
  Yeah. I mean, and I, I guess, I guess
• 18:20
  they're both quote UN quote medicines in the right
• 18:22
  application in different way. But yeah, I, I tend to agree.
• 18:25
  I have no interest in the uppers and the speed and the
• 18:29
  amphetamines and stuff. I'm I'm much more curious about
• 18:32
  these unexplored sense of the consciousness and, and the whole
• 18:35
  psychedelic trippy type of world in general anyway.
• 18:38
  So for me, for me personally, it does, it doesn't speak very much
• 18:41
  to me either. I, I have so many things that
• 18:45
  that I kind of want to dive into and this has been, this is great
• 18:47
  already. One thing that I was curious
• 18:50
  about to hear your thoughts or an observation I made while I
• 18:53
  was going through your timeline a little bit was one thing that
• 18:56
  I noticed first of all was that the OSS pre CIA, which was the
• 19:02
  government institution that had preceded it.
• 19:05
  I think the CIA was for what is 45 or 46 around that year.
• 19:09
  It's 47. It's the National Security Act,
• 19:11
  the same time the Department of Defense was founded.
• 19:14
  Right, right, right. And but until then, even until
• 19:17
  then, the government was aware of the enormous impact of film
• 19:20
  on society and its potential for propaganda.
• 19:23
  And what I've noticed was that the 40s and the 50s felt a lot
• 19:26
  more like the like the influence or the job of the government was
• 19:31
  to direct the stream. And then in the 60s and 70s and
• 19:36
  became more about fighting a narrative.
• 19:39
  And so you kind of have a shift in strategy, at least what it
• 19:44
  looks like to me from, hey, we have open heart.
• 19:47
  We have, you know, we have a relatively open society that is
• 19:51
  that is malleable that we could kind of push along different
• 19:54
  types of social stigmas or philosophies or political ideas.
• 19:58
  And right now? Maybe what maybe people will
• 20:01
  like them, maybe they'll eat them up.
• 20:02
  And so the 40s and 50s felt like they're a little bit more about
• 20:05
  like, you know, that's when they buy the rights to the to to
• 20:08
  Orwell's books. And that's when, you know, they,
• 20:11
  they actually in the whole, I want to talk about honey traps
• 20:15
  too, But I mean, the 60s and 70s is much more about pushing back
• 20:19
  against what this anti government, anti war, anti, you
• 20:23
  know, anti establishment culture became.
• 20:25
  So is, is that, do you think that's a correct assessment or
• 20:28
  do you know that? Do you think it's something
• 20:29
  else? I think you're right that the
• 20:33
  certainly the post war consensus, the kind of liberal
• 20:36
  internationalism that grew up post World War 2, a lot of the
• 20:40
  earlier CIA operations seem to be based around that.
• 20:45
  They seem to be based around, let's firstly try and maintain
• 20:48
  this fairly cushy consensus society that is emerging or has
• 20:53
  possibly existed for a while. And like you'd say directing
• 20:56
  that a little bit, directing that in without necessarily
• 21:01
  trying to challenge much or subvert much, right.
• 21:04
  Well, oral, I mean, the other side of things is the stuff that
• 21:06
  was targeted against the Soviet Union, the Cold War propaganda.
• 21:10
  But then again, that's part of the same thing is that we're
• 21:12
  saying sort of there is this liberal international consensus
• 21:15
  and somehow the communist Soviet Union is a rogue element
• 21:18
  fighting against this. It's like, well, there's they
• 21:20
  are on the UN National Security Council.
• 21:22
  So I'm not quite sure how you square that circle, to be
• 21:25
  honest. But but yeah, once you get into
• 21:29
  the 60s, you get Vietnam, you get the the beginnings of the
• 21:33
  end of that consensus society and the age, the end of the age
• 21:36
  of innocence in America. A lot of historians think that
• 21:39
  actually started in the 60s. It was not just Watergate, but
• 21:43
  Vietnam, I think to some extent after after Eisenhower left.
• 21:47
  And then politics became so acerbic and and angry, angry,
• 21:53
  viciously angry at times in the Nixon Kennedy election.
• 21:57
  And because one side of that one, everyone on the other side
• 22:00
  got really quite pissed off for some reason.
• 22:03
  Well, for obvious reasons. And so that consensus society
• 22:07
  started falling apart and it started becoming this more
• 22:10
  polarized and fractured society that we certainly now live in
• 22:13
  where everything is sort of niche and there is no consensus
• 22:16
  really on anything much anymore. And and so, yeah, they were
• 22:19
  fighting against certainly the more radical and subversive
• 22:22
  elements of that, while also trying to assert themselves and
• 22:26
  brand themselves because the CIA, all the people knew the CIA
• 22:30
  existed in the 40s and 50s, but officially they didn't really
• 22:34
  confirm or deny much of anything.
• 22:36
  But then post Bay of Pigs, the failure at the Bay of Pigs in
• 22:40
  the early 60s, a lot of people were suddenly thinking, well,
• 22:43
  who the hell are the CIA? What the hell are they up to?
• 22:46
  And so they had to go into a more public branding mode where
• 22:48
  they actually had to try and brand and and PRFI the CIA
• 22:53
  itself. They had to turn it into
• 22:55
  something that what did have a public image, whereas I mean,
• 22:59
  even, excuse me, even that concept of a spy agency, a
• 23:02
  secret agency, having a public image is itself kind of self
• 23:06
  contradictory and paradoxical. And yet it's what they've been
• 23:09
  doing since at least the early 60s.
• 23:12
  Why? And just as a parallel in this
• 23:14
  country, at the same time, you get the James Bond movies, the
• 23:18
  early James Bond movies. Now, the British government at
• 23:21
  that time didn't admit that MI 6 existed.
• 23:24
  In fact, they often denied that it existed, even though lots of
• 23:27
  people knew it existed. And yet you still have this very
• 23:30
  public branding of MI 6 through the James Bond novels and the
• 23:34
  James Bond films. So it's like you can talk about
• 23:36
  this in Hollywood while the government itself is still
• 23:38
  pretending it. It's not a real thing.
• 23:40
  It doesn't exist anymore. So again, paradoxical PR, if you
• 23:44
  see what I mean. Certainly, Certainly.
• 23:47
  Yeah. And I imagine that one job, but
• 23:49
  I think that one job is so much harder, you know, And I mean, I
• 23:52
  just know this from my own experience.
• 23:54
  I teach high school and I find it so much easier to direct a
• 23:59
  stream of the students and the populate the general population.
• 24:03
  I find it so much easier to kind of feel out where they are and
• 24:07
  then help. OK, I see that you guys are
• 24:09
  really antsy today. Let's direct the class to
• 24:11
  something that's a little bit more oriented towards
• 24:13
  conversation as opposed to just sitting and reading or writing,
• 24:16
  right? Or you guys are looking a little
• 24:18
  tired today. So let's, you know, let's, let's
• 24:19
  take things a little differently as A and, and that's a much
• 24:22
  easier job. It's a much easier it's much
• 24:25
  easier to be effective when you're trying to do that as
• 24:28
  opposed to when people are, you know, if it then if my student
• 24:32
  is exhausted, I say, come on, let's go get up, get moving.
• 24:35
  And and you just met with enormous amount of pushback
• 24:38
  because you're not meeting people with where they are.
• 24:39
  And so I imagine that the propaganda.
• 24:42
  Or even meeting them halfway, right?
• 24:44
  Yeah, sure, sure. Exactly.
• 24:46
  And I imagine the propaganda job is, is, is that much more
• 24:49
  difficult when there's a huge sentiment like, why are we in
• 24:54
  Vietnam, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and I think
• 24:57
  that and, and, and, and for better, for worse.
• 25:01
  When we have a breakdown, for example, and, you know, for
• 25:03
  modern, a modern reference, if you ask the Trump administration
• 25:07
  today why they went to Venezuela, you know, why we did
• 25:10
  what we did in Venezuela, you literally get 3 or 4 different
• 25:13
  responses depending who you're talking to.
• 25:15
  You know, Marco Rubio is going to say one thing, Trump's going
• 25:17
  to say something else. Pete Headset is going to say
• 25:19
  something else. Tulsi Gabbard's going to say
• 25:20
  something else. And, and each of them probably
• 25:23
  have their own perspective that they're coming from, but it's
• 25:26
  weird because there's not like this organized facade anymore.
• 25:30
  It feels too uncoordinated and there's too much, there's too
• 25:33
  many flying parts for anyone to even be to have this organized
• 25:36
  facade. It just it feels like it's
• 25:39
  really hard to contain. It is.
• 25:42
  There are too many spinning plates.
• 25:44
  The world has got more and more complicated, more and more
• 25:46
  populated. The economies are in most
• 25:49
  countries are in not great shape.
• 25:52
  Widespread consensus, any kind of democratic consensus doesn't
• 25:55
  really seem to exist anymore. Normalized trust has fallen
• 25:58
  through the floor in Western society.
• 26:00
  Most people in most Western societies don't trust public
• 26:03
  institutions, don't even necessarily trust other people
• 26:06
  just generally in the society that much anymore.
• 26:09
  And So what you're seeing, I think it as a reaction from the
• 26:13
  system is it's attempting to become more authoritarian in
• 26:17
  order to try to maintain its position of authority.
• 26:19
  But as it becomes more authoritarian, more people are
• 26:22
  rebelling against it, or at least becoming cynical and
• 26:24
  distrustful of it. And so that dynamic is just,
• 26:26
  it's a, it's a race to the bottom.
• 26:28
  It's a downward spiral because the more people distrust the
• 26:31
  government, the harder the government tries to mess with
• 26:34
  their heads and, and just lie about everything that they're
• 26:37
  doing in order to try and maintain their position.
• 26:40
  But they can't actually to maintain that position because
• 26:42
  trust is just sinking through the floor anyway.
• 26:44
  So you see what I mean? It's a downward spiral in
• 26:46
  democratic politics. Not that I'm a huge fan of
• 26:48
  elective democracy. I'm just saying from a from the
• 26:51
  point of view of someone observing this, that's what it
• 26:53
  feels like to me. That's what it looks like to me.
• 26:56
  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Listen, I, I, I, I don't think.
• 26:59
  And I think that this is also another thing that's come up
• 27:02
  with a partisan and polarized world.
• 27:05
  I don't think there's anything wrong with criticizing, with
• 27:07
  having some, with having love for something and pointing out a
• 27:09
  flaw in a, in a way that it could be better, you know, like,
• 27:13
  and, and the fact that people take that as an as an offense or
• 27:16
  an insult is it's just so bizarre to me.
• 27:18
  If you told me, hey, I think you're, I think you're a great
• 27:20
  podcast host. It would have been really
• 27:22
  helpful if you interrupted me a little bit less.
• 27:24
  I'm going to say screw you, pal. Like you know, you, you're not
• 27:27
  you're on my side. You're not on my side.
• 27:28
  I feel like, OK, I appreciate the foot and the feedback.
• 27:30
  If that's if that's something I've been blind to, I'm not
• 27:32
  aware of or I was aware of, but I do need to hear that
• 27:35
  reinforcement. Great.
• 27:36
  Please go ahead. You know, but.
• 27:38
  We all need a little negative reinforcement.
• 27:40
  We all need a little positive reinforcement.
• 27:43
  Generally I try and I try to be more positive and encouraging
• 27:47
  when I do criticize people. But other times I do just lose
• 27:50
  my shit and say whatever it is that I'm thinking.
• 27:51
  We all, we all make mistakes. We all sometimes go a little far
• 27:54
  in the things that we say. But you're right, it is, it's
• 27:59
  not just polarized, it's it's fractured.
• 28:02
  There's a, there's a real spectrum here where anyone who
• 28:05
  exists in any particular political and social demographic
• 28:09
  is trained almost in within that bubble and certainly encouraged
• 28:14
  and conditioned within that bubble to be suspicious of
• 28:16
  anything from any other bubble. And so, and you have to be
• 28:20
  loyal, you have to be very, very loyal to the bubble.
• 28:23
  So even if you're inside it and you say, well, actually, I mean,
• 28:26
  for the most part, I love this political movement.
• 28:28
  I agree with most of its principles.
• 28:29
  I'm I'm on board with trying to elect this candidate or
• 28:32
  whatever. But I do have some problems
• 28:33
  with, with some of these policies that you're suggesting.
• 28:36
  It's like, no, no, you're not allowed to question the policies
• 28:38
  we're suggesting. You have to be completely loyal
• 28:39
  to us because otherwise you're a secret Trumpist or a secret
• 28:42
  Democrat or a secret this secret Zionist, whatever.
• 28:45
  And it's like, you're allowed to be multifarious.
• 28:48
  You're allowed to have more than one opinion about something.
• 28:51
  You're allowed to feel more than one thing.
• 28:53
  We contain multitudes. Each individual contains
• 28:56
  multitudes and is more than one thing.
• 28:59
  But certainly politically these days in terms of the media
• 29:02
  politic landscape that we find ourselves in is supposed to be
• 29:05
  just this thing. You're a part of this
• 29:07
  demographic, you're part of this political movement.
• 29:09
  You have these beliefs and any variation on that is treated
• 29:12
  with suspicion and quite often hostility.
• 29:15
  But we do we, we contain more than one thing.
• 29:18
  We are complex beings and we should just be fucking honest
• 29:21
  about that, to be honest. I I hear hear.
• 29:25
  I could not agree. I could not agree with you more.
• 29:28
  I I totally agree. I wanted to ask, I, I, I, when I
• 29:31
  was going through your timeline, I didn't notice that there was
• 29:33
  sometimes where, and you do make this fair, to be clear, which is
• 29:36
  I want to ask you, there are times where you say that I don't
• 29:40
  have a record of support from whatever government institution,
• 29:45
  but there are signs of support on particular films, right?
• 29:48
  And I'm not even bringing up any particular example unless you
• 29:52
  want to provide me with one. But I just did notice that you
• 29:54
  do that sometimes where you say, you know, there's no official
• 29:57
  record of the CIA or the FBI supporting this film.
• 30:00
  However, there are signs, there are signs of support.
• 30:03
  But what what would what would indicate whether a movie or film
• 30:06
  or a television show has has the support of an agency or not?
• 30:10
  And how would you identify it? But.
• 30:12
  With the CIA, it's quite complicated and difficult
• 30:15
  because they lie about everything all the time.
• 30:17
  But it can be something as simple as a piece of stock
• 30:21
  footage of CIA headquarters at Langley.
• 30:24
  You don't necessarily have to go to the CIA to get that, but for
• 30:28
  the most part people do. So you see something like that
• 30:31
  in a film, you think, have they at least gone and got some kind
• 30:34
  of courtesy support? Just a little bit of stock
• 30:36
  footage, that aerial panning shot of Langley that we've seen
• 30:38
  in so many films or use of the CIA seal that you know they.
• 30:43
  That's a big one, The compass. Rose with the eagle at the top
• 30:46
  and all of that. You don't necessarily have to
• 30:49
  get the CI as permission to make a some kind of thing up on the
• 30:52
  wall or on the floor or whatever to show that it is ultimately
• 30:56
  public domain. But still, do you really think
• 30:59
  Hollywood film makers are just going to go fuck the CIA?
• 31:01
  What are they going to do to us? No, they're going to, they're
• 31:04
  going to go and ask permission. And if even if it's just a
• 31:06
  little bit of permission here, a little bit of help there, a
• 31:09
  little bit of technical advising or consultancy that's
• 31:12
  essentially off the books, that happens all the time.
• 31:15
  And so these little hallmarks of CIA support or just for example,
• 31:21
  if if a filmmaker, TV producer hires a former CIA officer as a
• 31:25
  consultant, what relationship does that consultant have with
• 31:29
  the agency? Because they are being hired to
• 31:31
  talk about the CIA and they are supposed to send everything that
• 31:35
  they publish about the CIA through the pre publications
• 31:38
  Review Board. Do they do that with technical
• 31:40
  advice and consultancy? Because some of these people
• 31:43
  have said in interviews, public interviews have said, actually,
• 31:46
  I run everything that I do on the agency past the agency's
• 31:49
  Office of public affairs or someone within Langley.
• 31:52
  And I don't know if that's true for all of these consultants or
• 31:55
  not. But so that's another one of
• 31:56
  those little hallmarks of were the agency involved possibly at
• 32:00
  one stage removed or something in this maybe.
• 32:03
  And it is how they like to do things.
• 32:04
  They do like to recruit assets and not necessarily do the
• 32:07
  things themselves as CIA officers, but find someone else
• 32:10
  to do it for them. So there's also this, this
• 32:13
  lawyer, Rich Klein, who I mentioned, I've mentioned loads
• 32:16
  of times on my side. I emailed him actually try to
• 32:19
  get him on the podcast like you get them.
• 32:23
  I, I came across, I, I, I found his e-mail and I was like, I
• 32:25
  want to hear about your experience, man.
• 32:29
  Well, there are CIA documents that describe him as a long time
• 32:32
  contact of the Office of Public Affairs at Langley, which to me
• 32:36
  just says CIA asset. I mean, that's what that means.
• 32:38
  Ultimately, this guy was, he's a lawyer.
• 32:42
  He was in the State Department, I think under the Clinton
• 32:45
  administration in the 90s. He then joined Kissinger
• 32:49
  Mclarty. So Henry Kissinger and Mack
• 32:51
  Mclarty's law firm that then split into two law firms.
• 32:54
  And Rich Klein went off with Mclarty and started running this
• 32:58
  offshoot or office within that firm called MC Clarty Media.
• 33:01
  It's a media consultancy. And he said, he said in
• 33:04
  interviews, I'm not really a movie guy.
• 33:07
  And so I'm left wondering why on earth are you that now this
• 33:10
  movie consultant for this inside the Beltway Washington, DC law
• 33:13
  firm? It doesn't.
• 33:14
  That just doesn't quite add up to me, Rich, to be honest.
• 33:17
  I think I think you may be a bit of a plant to be honest.
• 33:19
  Rich Klein, I have said many times you are ACIA asset.
• 33:24
  It's because you are clearly some kind of CIA asset.
• 33:28
  But there again, if he's working on say, a Transformers film,
• 33:32
  something that doesn't depict the agency at all, does that
• 33:34
  imply that they had any influence on that?
• 33:36
  Maybe, maybe not. It's another one of those little
• 33:39
  hints that you have to think through and think what what
• 33:42
  would be the CI as interest in this?
• 33:45
  And is part of it just about developing relationships,
• 33:47
  winning friends, influencing people?
• 33:50
  And it's, and it's part of it actually about influencing
• 33:52
  content, the stuff that we see when we actually turn on the
• 33:55
  screen and and watch something. Often I don't know is the
• 33:58
  answer. Often I simply don't know to
• 34:00
  what extent the CIA were involved in something.
• 34:03
  But I included all of that stuff in the timeline because I was
• 34:05
  trying to be as be as comprehensive as possible.
• 34:08
  There's no point in doing something like that without
• 34:10
  trying to be as comprehensive as possible.
• 34:12
  Yeah, and to be fair, you again, you did it.
• 34:15
  You did an awesome job. I wouldn't have even thought.
• 34:17
  I also reached out to another gentleman that that that popped
• 34:19
  up on your on your list quite a bit, Robert Baer.
• 34:24
  Yeah. Reach out to him before I before
• 34:26
  I even knew that you before you before I read your timeline,
• 34:29
  which is how I just I was like, that's great validation to know
• 34:32
  that I'm heading the right direction.
• 34:34
  I'm trying to reach out to people that you already that
• 34:36
  you've been, I guess pre vetting for me.
• 34:38
  I appreciate that. So, you know, I was just like,
• 34:42
  because I would love to just hear what their what their
• 34:44
  perception is and what and, and what their and what their
• 34:47
  answers to the public would be. Just like, Hey, tell me about
• 34:50
  your experience and like, what, what, what was that about and
• 34:53
  why, how did you get involved? Why are you involved?
• 34:55
  Do you like it? You know, and and kind of just
• 34:57
  hear the human end of their justification to themselves,
• 35:01
  because I think a lot of people don't especially you get
• 35:04
  approached. And I feel like this way about
• 35:07
  I've been showing my high school class the movie Miracle since
• 35:10
  I've been teaching high school. And that's about that 1980
• 35:12
  hockey US Olympic team that the fought the Soviets.
• 35:16
  And the movie provides an enormous amount of context into
• 35:18
  what was going on at the time, You know, the Iranian, the
• 35:21
  Iranian embassy hostages and the, the issues with gas, the
• 35:26
  shortage in the country and, and Watergate was fresh in
• 35:29
  everyone's mind. And I just one mess after the
• 35:32
  next. And then, you know, this scrappy
• 35:35
  team of, of, of college players come together, Team USA, this
• 35:39
  underdog team that, that skates and beats the Soviets and, and I
• 35:43
  show this movie my class. I think, you know, not all
• 35:45
  propaganda is necessarily bad propaganda.
• 35:47
  Not all this, this, this encourages A scrappy effort and
• 35:52
  unity and working together and, and whatever, whatever you think
• 35:56
  of kind of the, the notion of, let's say, deleting the
• 36:00
  individual identity for the sake of a larger country and a larger
• 36:03
  purpose. Whether you agree with that or
• 36:05
  not, I can definitely hear the argument being made.
• 36:07
  And I'm sure a lot of people really feel like they're doing
• 36:09
  their patriotic duty to the country by having a positive
• 36:12
  impact on the way Americans perceive America, you know?
• 36:18
  In short, not all propaganda is inherently evil.
• 36:21
  I agree with that. I mean, and pretty much
• 36:23
  everything in media is propaganda anyway of some sort
• 36:26
  or another. And even even a film, even some
• 36:30
  of the worst films that I've seen from a political point of
• 36:33
  view, stuff where I really hate the politics that it's trying to
• 36:36
  inject into the minds of its audience.
• 36:38
  Sometimes I still quite enjoy it as a movie, just as a thing to
• 36:42
  watch. You can feel more than one thing
• 36:44
  and have more than one reaction to something.
• 36:46
  And I think that's. What movies?
• 36:47
  What movies bother you like that, can I ask?
• 36:49
  I'm sorry I hate to cut you off, but just what examples of
• 36:52
  movies? One of the best examples is the
• 36:56
  first Iron Man film, because that's AUS Air Force sponsored
• 37:01
  kind of mythologizing of the war in Afghanistan to some extent.
• 37:05
  And where the central character gives this lovely press
• 37:08
  conference where he speaks out against the military industrial
• 37:11
  complex and how he's, you know, spent most of his life making
• 37:14
  weapons that have just cost people their lives and destroyed
• 37:17
  property and, you know, just made things worse.
• 37:19
  And then he proceeds to make this incredibly high tech
• 37:21
  weapon. And the rest of the film is
• 37:22
  actually about watching him blow stuff up.
• 37:26
  So there is a a contradiction there in terms of is this film
• 37:29
  actually criticizing the war in the military industrial complex
• 37:32
  or not? Is it glamorizing it or not?
• 37:35
  It's a little difficult to say. Certainly there's a lot of
• 37:37
  politics in that film that that bugs me and that frankly, I
• 37:41
  disagree with a lot of it. Nonetheless, it's an enormously
• 37:44
  entertaining film. And Robert Downey Junior was
• 37:46
  perfectly cast as Tony Stark. And it's really fun to watch.
• 37:50
  It just is a really fun superhero origin story.
• 37:54
  The first Wonder Woman film actually feel the same about.
• 37:56
  I really like the first Wonder Woman film just as a piece of
• 37:59
  cinema, but it is this mythologizing of World War One
• 38:03
  has some weird gender politics in it.
• 38:05
  I have to say some stuff that I find a bit predatory and
• 38:08
  disturbing. It certainly in moments in a
• 38:11
  film it's like that. And it ends up, as with so many
• 38:15
  of these films, in this massive, overly laden CGI, overly long,
• 38:19
  overly loud, sensorily overwhelming, bloody battle
• 38:24
  sequence that doesn't really tell us anything.
• 38:26
  It doesn't add that much to the film.
• 38:29
  And that was supported by the British military, the British
• 38:31
  Ministry of Defence, a lot of these sorts of films.
• 38:35
  When I find out who, who actually supported them, I'm
• 38:38
  like, that makes sense. That's why it has that sort of
• 38:40
  politics. It's either something that that
• 38:42
  institution has insisted on in some cases or at least
• 38:45
  encouraged in others, or just film makers know if we want
• 38:48
  their help, we have to flatter their preconceptions and we have
• 38:51
  to flatter their agendas. And it sometimes it's difficult
• 38:55
  to know exactly what's happened in any individual case, but I'm
• 38:58
  just using these superhero movies as examples because
• 39:01
  they're the ones that are coming to mind.
• 39:02
  And I wrote a book on on Super Bowl Co wrote a book on
• 39:04
  superhero movies and how a lot of them are propaganda.
• 39:07
  What's the cause? I'd love to read it.
• 39:10
  Superheroes movies and was it no hang on superhero movies and the
• 39:14
  state or is it superheroes movies and the state?
• 39:17
  I keep forgetting it's the most recent book I've written.
• 39:18
  I can't bloody remember the title anyway, it's the one.
• 39:21
  It's the one I wrote with Tricia Jenkins.
• 39:22
  People can if they look up Tom Seka, Tricia Jenkins superhero
• 39:25
  book I'm. Sure, because movies and the
• 39:27
  state have the US government shaped cinema.
• 39:29
  Oh man, I am so excited to read this book.
• 39:31
  I'm ordering this right now, by the way.
• 39:32
  I love this because you know what?
• 39:34
  And if this is half as well sourced as as the rest of your
• 39:37
  site, I'm sure that I'm going to love it.
• 39:38
  So then in that case, and can I, I ask now, how do you, and I've
• 39:43
  been thinking a lot about this for my own life, how do you
• 39:46
  filter information, find information that you feel like
• 39:49
  is reliable that isn't just propaganda?
• 39:51
  I have my own answer that I've really been thinking about a lot
• 39:54
  recently, but I'd love to hear your perspective on this.
• 39:57
  Well, that's a tricky one, because some of the some of this
• 40:00
  is theoretical, some of this is more philosophical or spiritual,
• 40:03
  where you just have to try to. Approach things from lots of
• 40:07
  different angles. Try and spin them around 45°,
• 40:10
  ninety degrees, 180°, spin them on different axes and just see
• 40:13
  what does this look like from different perspectives.
• 40:16
  There's also just a quality of source material thing.
• 40:19
  If you're talking about news media or any kind of journalism
• 40:22
  is what's the quality of sources?
• 40:24
  Is it all anonymous officials who were quoted saying such and
• 40:27
  such off the record, deep background.
• 40:30
  Well, those people could be anyone and they could be saying
• 40:32
  anything and that journalist could just be making the whole
• 40:34
  damn thing up because no one checks this stuff.
• 40:37
  Editors don't give a damn. They don't check this stuff.
• 40:40
  They don't actually say, well, I want to hear the recording of
• 40:42
  the phone conversation you had with this source.
• 40:44
  They just assume that their journalist is either telling the
• 40:48
  truth or they just don't care if they're making it up.
• 40:50
  So I mean, this is one of the reasons why I'm so frankly
• 40:54
  obsessive and fetishistic about publishing documents on my site
• 40:58
  is to show this is the actual paper trail I've been able to
• 41:00
  find. You might not agree with every
• 41:02
  interpretation Ioffer of it. You might see other things in it
• 41:05
  that I've missed. Of course.
• 41:06
  Please, please look and try and figure that out for yourselves.
• 41:09
  That's one of the reasons why I put it out there is so that at
• 41:12
  least people have the primary source material.
• 41:14
  At least they can actually go as close to the source as possible,
• 41:16
  the sort of origin server of the propaganda machine, and see what
• 41:21
  it actually is doing and has done and has said about itself.
• 41:26
  Yeah, like I say, different interpretations are always
• 41:28
  possible. People can criticize things and
• 41:30
  analyse things from different angles than I can.
• 41:32
  I'm only one person. By trying to see things from
• 41:35
  lots of different angles, by drawing together, you know,
• 41:39
  reading a lot of history books, I've read a lot of philosophy,
• 41:41
  critical theory, just loads and loads of different stuff.
• 41:44
  Listen to interviews with different people, listen to
• 41:45
  podcasts with different people. And try and just let all of that
• 41:50
  not necessarily wash, wash over you, but get into your head.
• 41:52
  So it's there and it's available to you.
• 41:55
  So when you are being lied to, you're a bit more likely to go.
• 41:58
  I've heard something about this before and I think this person
• 42:01
  might be lying to me or at least making something up to some
• 42:04
  degree. So at least you can filter out
• 42:06
  the crap. That's the main thing.
• 42:08
  It's like there are no perfect sources of information.
• 42:10
  My website is not perfect. I am not perfect.
• 42:13
  I'm not claiming that at all. I just try and be better than
• 42:16
  most and I try and be as open source about where I got this
• 42:18
  information from as I possibly can and provide it just as a
• 42:22
  public resource, as a thing for the sheer number of journalists
• 42:25
  and students and academics and teachers and so on who've got in
• 42:29
  touch with me over the years. Either to say I found this
• 42:32
  really useful, this thing I found on your site, or asking
• 42:34
  me, do you have anything more on this?
• 42:36
  Do you have any other unpublished files?
• 42:37
  And trust me, I have files I will never get around to
• 42:40
  publishing. I may one day do a massive
• 42:42
  document dump without any analysis or anything.
• 42:45
  It's your links to everything I've never published that I've
• 42:47
  just, you know, never found the time to upload and sort through
• 42:50
  and write about. I might do that someday.
• 42:53
  But seriously, if you are interested in this and there is
• 42:55
  something that sort of, there's a little bit of it on my site,
• 42:57
  but you may be thinking, well actually I'd like to know about
• 42:59
  some other films like that. You can e-mail me.
• 43:02
  And if I've got any further documents on it, I will just
• 43:04
  send them to people. I'm not in any way try to keep
• 43:07
  this secret or holding anything back.
• 43:08
  I want this stuff to be out there.
• 43:10
  I want people to use it. I want people to read it,
• 43:12
  whether they're writing a master's dissertation or they're
• 43:15
  writing an article for some media outlet or if they're just
• 43:18
  interested in it, or if you're just interested in this thing
• 43:20
  and want to learn more, you can feel free to e-mail me.
• 43:24
  Or I mean, some people know my my social media or phone number
• 43:27
  or whatever, but mostly it just emails the best.
• 43:30
  If you get me in in touch with me like that, I will happily
• 43:33
  stick something up on a cloud server and just send you a link.
• 43:35
  It doesn't take me very much time at all.
• 43:37
  I'm happy to do it. Yeah, and I appreciate it.
• 43:40
  And again, this is, this is fun work.
• 43:43
  It's important work. And it's really, and it's and
• 43:46
  it's interesting too that that that's what I love about it.
• 43:48
  It's, it's so, it's so niche, but so relevant.
• 43:52
  And one of the three reasons, the reason why I, the reason why
• 43:55
  I became fascinated or even obsessed with the film world to
• 43:59
  begin with was because when I was younger, I was in high
• 44:02
  school and I was always getting rejected by, by any girl that I
• 44:06
  was friends with that, that you know, that I ever dreamt, dreamt
• 44:09
  to be more than that. And, and I was, and I called
• 44:12
  myself this hopeless Roman, yeah, I'm OK now, this hopeless
• 44:17
  romantic. And I thought to myself one day
• 44:19
  I was talking to a couple of friends of mine.
• 44:20
  I'm like, what does it even mean to be romantic?
• 44:22
  And like, every time I think romantic, I think of like an
• 44:24
  Adam Sandler movie walking on the beach and 51st dates or
• 44:27
  something like that. And I don't even know what the
• 44:29
  word means. And then I realized how much of
• 44:31
  my understanding of everything I've kind of left up to, to to
• 44:35
  film and to movies and to entertainment that to dictate to
• 44:38
  me what things should be. And, and in some cases it's
• 44:44
  better. In some cases I realize it was
• 44:45
  worse. And I said, you know, I want to
• 44:46
  be a part of this to try to have a positive, you know, influence.
• 44:50
  But I think that I think that I think that people realize this.
• 44:55
  And I think the work that you're doing is really, really cool and
• 44:58
  really, really fun. And again, spyculture.com and
• 45:01
  I'll put the link to it in the in the in the what do you call
• 45:04
  it in the show notes for sure. The way the way you described is
• 45:07
  very similar to what I actually had concluded as well, which was
• 45:10
  pretty much, I feel like we can end the film world is kind of
• 45:13
  like this too. We can either live in a world
• 45:16
  where an algorithm algorithm is pushed on us, or we can kind of
• 45:19
  build our own algorithm of our own trains of thought.
• 45:21
  And what you said about history, I thought was particularly
• 45:25
  insightful and relevant because the more that the more that I'm,
• 45:29
  you know, keeping up with current events while
• 45:31
  simultaneously reading history or learning, learning about the
• 45:35
  places that the current events are occurring in, the more I
• 45:38
  realize that nothing really has been is that new and, and all
• 45:43
  this has been done before. And so one of the best markers
• 45:48
  of how of ways to determine information I've noticed is to
• 45:53
  find a, is to find a simple and reasonable motive like money,
• 46:00
  for example. You got to make money.
• 46:02
  You got to have profits. You know, if there's a war in
• 46:03
  Venezuela, are we trying to kidnap their, you know, their,
• 46:06
  their, their leader. What you know, what, what, what,
• 46:09
  what, what is there to follow is that, you know, historically,
• 46:12
  have we ever been involved in Venezuela?
• 46:13
  Who has relationships with Venezuela historically?
• 46:16
  And what have they been importing or exporting and what
• 46:18
  are they valuing? And then you say, it's so easy
• 46:21
  to see, you know, but all you had to do is do a couple of a
• 46:23
  couple of you had to do a couple of deep dives or listen to a
• 46:25
  couple of podcasts about the history or read a book or two.
• 46:30
  You could sit on the couch and let everyone yell at you what
• 46:34
  they think it is. And the more that you engage in
• 46:36
  it, the more specific the bubble's going to be.
• 46:39
  But that's allowing the algorithm to happen to you as
• 46:42
  opposed to you shaping your own your own perspective, I feel
• 46:44
  like. I mean, absolutely, I agree with
• 46:48
  that. I don't use social media much
• 46:50
  partly because it's now been so algorithms that it's impossible
• 46:52
  to find anything you really want to see.
• 46:54
  Or half the time it is also it it that sit on the couch, let
• 46:59
  the TV shout at you kind of approach to understanding the
• 47:03
  world will just make me put people more shallow and more
• 47:06
  impulsive. Rather than be a being able to
• 47:09
  have that self-discipline to reflect and challenge their own
• 47:12
  assumptions. And maybe clear out some of this
• 47:15
  accumulated soul baggage and soul poison that we've been
• 47:19
  subjected to in a lot of ways or sometimes allowed into ourselves
• 47:23
  over the years or decades that we've been alive.
• 47:26
  And you're right, this sort of this sort of propaganda,
• 47:29
  cultural propaganda in particular, has been around for
• 47:32
  as long as human civilization has been around.
• 47:35
  I I was a theatre studies student at school and one of the
• 47:38
  things we learnt about, yeah, shocker.
• 47:44
  Yeah. One of the things we learnt
• 47:45
  about was how in ancient Athens, a lot of the plays that they put
• 47:48
  on were designed to be cathartic for the audience.
• 47:51
  They were designed to help cleanse the the citizens and
• 47:55
  civilians of Athenian society, ancient Athenian society, of
• 47:59
  whatever was plaguing them, of whatever was bothering them,
• 48:02
  that there was a psychological or soulful aim here.
• 48:05
  And OK, that was something imposed by the Athenian elites
• 48:09
  and then almost unabashedly, and it's something we know quite a
• 48:13
  lot about now. If you if you're fascinated by
• 48:16
  ancient Athens, as I have sometimes been, is that a good
• 48:20
  thing or a bad thing? Is it partly good?
• 48:22
  Is it partly bad? Was it sometimes a good thing
• 48:24
  and sometimes a bad thing? Consider those kinds of
• 48:27
  perspectives rather than this sort of knee jerk.
• 48:29
  It has to be good or it has to be bad or it is propaganda.
• 48:31
  Therefore it's this, you know, that kind of impulsive, shallow.
• 48:35
  It's this. Therefore it has to be that or
• 48:36
  it has to be this thing, all that thing.
• 48:38
  It can't be both. It can't be neither.
• 48:40
  That in particular I'd I'd say is one of the most important
• 48:42
  critical thinking skills to to develop and to try and
• 48:45
  internalize is whenever anyone is telling you it's either one
• 48:49
  thing or another, this binary thinking, you have to make a
• 48:52
  binary choice between it's either pro this thing or anti
• 48:55
  this thing. Ask yourself the question, is it
• 48:57
  both or neither to try and remind yourself of that question
• 49:02
  and you'll, you'll make a, a quantum leap forward in your
• 49:05
  critical thinking and your ability to resist the easy
• 49:09
  temptation of just going, Oh, well, it has to be one of these
• 49:11
  things. So I'll just pick, I'll pick
• 49:13
  inside the column A of column B. So I'll pick column B and and
• 49:15
  that's who I am and that's who I, I will always be.
• 49:18
  Don't do that. Basically just don't do that.
• 49:20
  Have the self-discipline and the self respect to go.
• 49:23
  I think this is actually a bunch of crap, and it's neither.
• 49:26
  I think there's another perspective here where there
• 49:27
  might even be a hundred other perspectives here.
• 49:30
  Or maybe it's actually both simultaneously, as paradoxical
• 49:33
  and self contradictory as that might appear.
• 49:35
  Sometimes paradoxical self contradictory things are true.
• 49:38
  Yes, a lot of times they are. A lot of times they are.
• 49:42
  Yeah. I, I mean, I don't know if I
• 49:44
  don't know if this made you its way into the, into the UK news
• 49:47
  cycle, but in the States, we're having this, you know, enormous
• 49:51
  conflict with ICE in the state of Minnesota just the other day.
• 49:55
  It looks, it doesn't look good. I don't know the full context,
• 49:58
  but there was this, this, this, I, I believe an ICU nurse was,
• 50:02
  was killed by ICE and he had, and he had a, and he had a gun
• 50:07
  on him, although he had never taken it out.
• 50:10
  They only discovered that he had the gun once he was, I think
• 50:13
  already getting kind of beaten up a little bit or pushed around
• 50:17
  a little bit. And then once they discovered
• 50:19
  the gun, I think that was an excuse to go, you know, to
• 50:21
  continue whatever they're up to, which is essentially I, it's
• 50:24
  killing him. I mean that they, they, he was,
• 50:26
  he was killed as from what I see from my, from from what I was
• 50:29
  able to see from the from the. Video.
• 50:32
  I agree. And, and then do this enormous
• 50:36
  immediate response on the right and again, a right that, that
• 50:40
  I'm not criticizing for the sake of criticizing because I don't
• 50:44
  like the left or the right or I don't like, I'm historically
• 50:46
  left or right. I'm not.
• 50:47
  I, I, I, I haven't been historically politically
• 50:50
  anything because everything has been so inconsistent that it's
• 50:54
  that I've had my own values and everyone's been letting me down
• 50:56
  about it. But like, you can't have a gun.
• 50:58
  And if, if you go to, if you go to, you can't carry a gun if you
• 51:01
  go to protest, like you can't carry a gun if you go to
• 51:04
  protest. If you said the same thing
• 51:07
  three-year, if, if the Joe Biden administration or the Obama
• 51:09
  administration said the same thing, you would be on the
• 51:12
  street with pitchfork say, you know, I mean, I don't even know
• 51:15
  what you're talking about. And so to demand that your that
• 51:19
  that that your base abandoned their values to be on your side
• 51:26
  is it is, is, is just, I mean, if politics feels like Hollywood
• 51:31
  now, politics feels like it's an extension of Hollywood.
• 51:34
  Tim Dylan, who's an awesome comedian and very, very funny,
• 51:36
  and I'm split about what I think about what he thinks, but I
• 51:39
  think that he's endlessly entertaining and brilliant.
• 51:42
  And I think that he says the same thing.
• 51:44
  He's like, it just feels like this is just like a it's just a
• 51:47
  show. It's a movie and it just feels
• 51:48
  dumb at this point. And I can't help but but think
• 51:52
  that a lot of people around the world are becoming more and more
• 51:54
  aware of this and feel that way very, very strongly.
• 51:58
  For sure. I mean, politics is just
• 52:00
  Hollywood for ugly people. As was it Jack Valenti said that
• 52:05
  or something. Anyway, whoever it was who said
• 52:06
  that, it's just. It's a great phrase.
• 52:09
  It's a great quote. Yeah.
• 52:11
  This is what they do. They just gaslight people.
• 52:13
  They light them up and they. I mean, they, they killed that
• 52:15
  guy, certainly. And from what I've seen, I've
• 52:18
  mostly, I don't know if it's actually been in the English
• 52:21
  British media cycle much at all. I followed it.
• 52:23
  What I know about that, I followed through the project on
• 52:25
  government oversight, which is, in my opinion, a very good
• 52:28
  organization. They do a lot of good e-mail
• 52:30
  bulletins. And I actually get caught up on
• 52:32
  quite a lot of things quite quickly that way.
• 52:34
  But yeah, they they project on government oversight.
• 52:39
  I think it's pogo.org. Certainly I recommend people
• 52:43
  taking a look at their e-mail newsletters and maybe signing up
• 52:46
  for those. It's a much better way than to
• 52:48
  it. For sure.
• 52:49
  Awesome. Thank you.
• 52:50
  Yeah. So anyway, I'm sorry, continue
• 52:51
  your thought. I'm sorry.
• 52:53
  Well, this is what it's going to say, that they've somehow
• 52:55
  convinced, like you say, if this has been Biden who'd said this,
• 52:59
  that you can no longer in any way have a gun at a protest.
• 53:01
  I think there are quite substantial portions of people
• 53:04
  on the on the right, particularly the libertarian
• 53:06
  right, who would be absolutely apoplectic about this.
• 53:09
  They would be rejecting it. They would be saying this is
• 53:11
  government authoritarianism. We're not going to stand for
• 53:13
  this. We're not going to take this.
• 53:15
  And in my opinion, to some extent, quite rightly, if I
• 53:19
  lived in the States, I, they don't know.
• 53:21
  I suppose it depends which part of the states I lived in as to
• 53:23
  whether I would have a gun. I certainly don't have some kind
• 53:26
  of blanket. No one should ever own private
• 53:28
  firearms. People own private firearms in
• 53:30
  this country. And it's not, it's not like a
• 53:33
  significant problem as far as I can tell, outside of, you know,
• 53:36
  gangland and, you know, organized crime.
• 53:40
  It's mostly, it's mostly just people who I don't know, maybe
• 53:43
  do a bit of hunting, maybe they live on farms or something.
• 53:45
  It's much more of a rural thing than a city thing in this
• 53:48
  country. But at any rate, you're right
• 53:50
  that that sheer hypocrisy of, oh, we're now accepting, we're
• 53:54
  now somehow being gas lit into believing that this principle
• 53:57
  that we've stood by and there's been a real sort of maybe it's
• 54:00
  not a principle, just a general attitude in politics for a long,
• 54:04
  long time that we don't want the government dictating to us
• 54:07
  whether or not we're allowed to carry firearms or what exactly
• 54:11
  were allowed to do with them or not do with them.
• 54:13
  Whether you agree with that belief or not, it is one that's
• 54:15
  been maintained by the American right for a long time.
• 54:18
  And yet all it takes is to suggest, oh, because it's about
• 54:21
  now about immigration, It's now about ICE and immigration
• 54:24
  enforcement. Oh, now you have to be on the
• 54:26
  side of that. So now you have to choose, are
• 54:28
  you in favor of privately owned firearms or are you in favor of
• 54:32
  cracking down on the, on the so-called bleeding illegal
• 54:35
  immigrants, whoever, whoever the hell you think these people are?
• 54:37
  And I mean, it's not like you can tell by looking at someone
• 54:40
  where they were born or whether they've got certain paperwork
• 54:43
  and so on and so on. And yeah, from what I
• 54:45
  understand, the ICE officers, if you want to call them that
• 54:49
  escalated that situation. They basically picked a fight,
• 54:51
  escalated it, and then when things started to go bad, they
• 54:54
  killed someone. And it's just the same as we've
• 54:56
  seen from police and FBI and all sorts of, especially government
• 54:59
  federal agencies and the big city police departments.
• 55:03
  They do this sort of thing all the time.
• 55:05
  They provoke situations, they pick fights, they escalate them.
• 55:08
  And if anyone fights back, suddenly the person who's
• 55:10
  fighting back is the problem, but they're not.
• 55:13
  Wrist is what they call them. Something like that lone wolf
• 55:17
  whatever, some sort of absurd media label.
• 55:20
  But it's, it's just bollocks to be honest.
• 55:22
  It's just bullshit. People are allowed to reject the
• 55:24
  authority of the state. They're allowed to fight back
• 55:26
  against it, especially when it's actively impressing them in that
• 55:29
  moment. It's not, it's not like this
• 55:31
  person went and shot a politician because of something
• 55:34
  they said three years ago. That's, that's, that's a very,
• 55:36
  very different thing that we're talking about.
• 55:38
  People are allowed to rebel against the government.
• 55:40
  If you're not allowed to rebel against the government, then
• 55:42
  you're essentially living in a fascist security state.
• 55:45
  And I I don't want to live in a fascist security state and
• 55:47
  pretty much no one does. Well, some people do, but, but I
• 55:51
  think that they don't, they don't think about the
• 55:53
  repercussions. I think.
• 55:54
  And I'm actually trying to teach my students about a lot of that
• 55:56
  stuff now. I'm teaching them the, the the
• 55:58
  giver. Now, I don't know if you if you
• 56:00
  remember that book, but that was that was that was a really good
• 56:03
  example of it. Yeah.
• 56:06
  And you know what? And I don't think there's
• 56:07
  anything wrong. Like I've had friends that
• 56:08
  brought it up to me because it's funny.
• 56:10
  I tend to be on the left-leaning end of my, you know, for my
• 56:13
  right wing friends and then more right wing for my left wing
• 56:17
  left-leaning friends. But they're like, what do you
• 56:18
  think of this Sound like, dude, I think it's terrible.
• 56:21
  Every time a government agent kills a civic kills a citizen of
• 56:25
  their of their, of their government period.
• 56:26
  Like if you want to talk about how it has to escalate the
• 56:29
  particular one off, whether it could have happened or whether
• 56:31
  it shouldn't have happened, you know, we could talk about that
• 56:34
  particular case. I was like, but dude, like you
• 56:37
  can say I want to get rid of the let's say whatever you say you
• 56:41
  are against having the, the immigrants in this country
• 56:44
  undocumented or illegal or we're trying to get them out.
• 56:47
  Let's say you're for that. That doesn't mean you're for
• 56:49
  government killing citizens like that one.
• 56:52
  A does not equal B. They're not mutual.
• 56:54
  They're not mutually exclusive. And it's not fair to, it's, it's
• 56:58
  not fair to ask people to line themselves up with that camp and
• 57:01
  again, throw away all their values.
• 57:02
  But I, I digress. I'm going to talk.
• 57:05
  I want to, I want to actually, I want to ask your thoughts, if
• 57:09
  you don't mind. And maybe this is a little
• 57:11
  bonkers, but I don't know if it is, what's your thoughts on the
• 57:14
  relationship between the government, Hollywood, aliens,
• 57:20
  or a little bit more of the paranormal stuff?
• 57:21
  Because there's a lot of documentation that the
• 57:24
  government at least takes this stuff very seriously.
• 57:28
  There's a lot of, there's a lot I, I don't know, I have to
• 57:30
  actually find the hard documents about Spielberg being associated
• 57:34
  with the government. But certainly I heard that
• 57:37
  there's, there's a lot of relationships there.
• 57:39
  Do you have anything on that or do you know anything?
• 57:41
  About that, Well, Spielberg has definitely made a whole bunch of
• 57:44
  films that were supported by government agencies, an awful
• 57:47
  lot of which star Tom Hanks, if you want to.
• 57:49
  Yeah, for some reason he's, he's just addicted to making state
• 57:52
  sponsored propaganda with Tom Hanks relief was for about 20
• 57:55
  years. You know, certainly the the
• 57:57
  aliens thing that has shifted. It used to be for a long time
• 58:03
  that the military would reject any UFO movie, extraterrestrial
• 58:08
  movie, anything like that. They had a big fight on
• 58:10
  Independence Day in the mid 90s over whether or not they were
• 58:14
  going to support that film, which included bizarre stuff
• 58:17
  like some military official actually wrote a memo saying
• 58:20
  that the Area 51 facility that they go to in the third act of
• 58:24
  the film, second third act of the film, that that should
• 58:27
  actually not be run by the government in any way.
• 58:29
  And they wanted it to be some kind of, you know, nonprofit,
• 58:33
  fairly vague organization, sort of non state in some fashion.
• 58:37
  And one of these military officials even suggested having
• 58:40
  that facility be run by an extraterrestrial disguised as a
• 58:43
  human being. So this is some kind of, you
• 58:45
  know, David Icke, lizard man, shapeshifter, I don't know what.
• 58:51
  It's a really bizarre thing to read in one of these one of
• 58:54
  these documents. Like what do you make of that?
• 58:58
  Well, maybe that military official just liked David Icke
• 59:01
  like that sort of idea. I don't know.
• 59:06
  But certainly since the certainly since the turn of the
• 59:09
  2000s, the military has now been involved in a tonne of
• 59:13
  extraterrestrial and UFO movies. Spielberg's version of War of
• 59:17
  the Worlds, which I'm not a big fan of that film.
• 59:20
  I have to say I did do a podcast on it some years ago, or I was
• 59:23
  on a podcast discussing it some years ago and it was just kind
• 59:25
  of like petty gripes, the podcast.
• 59:27
  Every single scene we had some kind of gripe out, pretty much.
• 59:32
  It's a good time and I hope you had a couple of Guinness, a
• 59:35
  couple of beers of you or something like that.
• 59:37
  We do, we do have a good time talking about that and having
• 59:40
  having a good bitch about the film.
• 59:41
  But that had that an absolute ton of military support of all
• 59:45
  the, all the documents that I've been able to find on that,
• 59:47
  they're all on my site now. And then into the late 2000s,
• 59:51
  early 2000 and 10s, you get Pacific Rim and that battle Los
• 59:56
  Angeles and a whole bunch of other alien or extraterrestrial
• 59:59
  invasion movies. The first Superman Warner DC
• 1:00:03
  Universe film, Man of Steel, is essentially an alien invasion.
• 1:00:07
  Film. It's not really a superhero
• 1:00:09
  film, it just happens to have Superman in it.
• 1:00:11
  It's otherwise a moderately generic alien invasion film.
• 1:00:15
  Loads of military support on that one.
• 1:00:18
  On and on. I mean, you can.
• 1:00:19
  You can lead. Read a list of these things on
• 1:00:21
  my site. Captain Marvel was a centrepiece
• 1:00:25
  of this. It was a centrepiece of this
• 1:00:26
  effort to try to essentially weaponize the UFO movie to
• 1:00:32
  promote the militarization of space.
• 1:00:34
  And they've been trying to push some version of the military's
• 1:00:37
  been trying to push some version of this, you know, boots on the
• 1:00:39
  moon, bases on the moon, some kind of satellite based weaponry
• 1:00:43
  since I think the early 70s was as far back as I was able to, to
• 1:00:48
  find anything on it. So that has been building for a
• 1:00:51
  while. And when you see in the 2000 and
• 1:00:54
  10s, you have all of these UFO declassifications, all of these
• 1:00:57
  videos, all of these documents, they're suddenly saying,
• 1:00:59
  actually, we've had a ton of this stuff for decades and we're
• 1:01:02
  now just going to dump it all online.
• 1:01:03
  Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents,
• 1:01:06
  UFO files from the Navy, the Air Force, whoever, same in this
• 1:01:09
  country. British Ministry of Defence just
• 1:01:11
  started dumping. Yeah, vast amounts of
• 1:01:13
  documentation through the National Archives, finally
• 1:01:16
  admitting that. Yeah, actually we seem to have
• 1:01:17
  had a whole bunch of. It's not just some crackpot
• 1:01:20
  who's stoned and sat on a hillside who's claimed they've
• 1:01:22
  seen a UFO. It's actually our own military
• 1:01:24
  officials who are saying they've been abducted at times and
• 1:01:27
  things like that. So whether or not you believe
• 1:01:30
  those things, make your own judgment calls.
• 1:01:32
  I, I don't know, actually, a lot of the time I'm not sure why I
• 1:01:37
  think of a lot of that stuff, but certainly there is this
• 1:01:39
  thing in the 2000 and 10s when Space Force got on the military
• 1:01:42
  agenda again, they started pushing it in Hollywood in 2015
• 1:01:47
  I believe. And this was done covertly.
• 1:01:49
  This wasn't done through specific film projects they were
• 1:01:51
  working on. It was actually a producer at
• 1:01:54
  Marvel at the time called Jeremy Latcham, who Trisha interviewed
• 1:01:59
  for our superhero book, superhero movie book.
• 1:02:02
  And he said there was this senior Air Force Colonel
• 1:02:06
  general, certainly a high up official, high up officer in the
• 1:02:09
  Air Force hierarchy, who was out in Hollywood shortly after the
• 1:02:13
  2nd Avengers movie came out, Avengers Age of Ultron.
• 1:02:17
  And that was in 2015, two thousand and 1516.
• 1:02:21
  Before Trump even gets elected the first time, the US military
• 1:02:25
  are pushing Space Force in Hollywood and pushing the
• 1:02:28
  weaponization and militarization of Space Force in Hollywood.
• 1:02:31
  So then Trump comes in and he sort of latches onto this thing.
• 1:02:34
  It was obviously a Pentagon plan.
• 1:02:36
  It's I know it was branded as a Donald Trump thing.
• 1:02:39
  It wasn't. The Pentagon were pushing this
• 1:02:41
  for years, if not decades before Trump ever even got into office
• 1:02:44
  the first go round. And then he becomes so, you
• 1:02:47
  know, makes this big announcement, this whole new
• 1:02:48
  branch of the military, all the rest of it.
• 1:02:51
  And around the time that Trump starts making these
• 1:02:53
  announcements, the Air Force ran a tour essentially kind of junk
• 1:03:00
  it for Hollywood types going to Space Command.
• 1:03:03
  And among the people who went on that tour were the producers and
• 1:03:06
  the two Co directors of Captain Marvel.
• 1:03:09
  So then Captain Marvel comes out right as Space Force is being
• 1:03:13
  officially founded, give or take.
• 1:03:15
  This timeline is I've, I've put this on on my site and I think I
• 1:03:18
  did an episode on Captain Marvel and I've done other articles on
• 1:03:21
  this. This was clearly a concerted and
• 1:03:25
  coherent propaganda effort to take the supposed threat of
• 1:03:29
  alien invasion and use it through Hollywood among other
• 1:03:33
  means, but through Hollywood as a justification for militarizing
• 1:03:36
  and weaponizing space. It's like it's the new threat.
• 1:03:39
  It's no longer or alongside the terrorists and the ISIS and
• 1:03:43
  Russians and Chinese and all the other threats that they
• 1:03:45
  constantly bombard us with and tell us are they sort of
• 1:03:48
  existential threat, existential risk to our civilizations.
• 1:03:51
  It's now we've got to worry about the the you know, green
• 1:03:53
  headed multi eyed Martians or whatever, whoever, whoever the
• 1:03:57
  hell they are in all these different films.
• 1:03:59
  And so many of those films are supported by the military.
• 1:04:03
  The CIA has had a slightly different history with this
• 1:04:07
  because sometimes they've actually pushed or encouraged
• 1:04:10
  ufology as a subculture. They've sometimes, it seems,
• 1:04:15
  been involved in UFO movies going back to the day the Earth
• 1:04:18
  stood still in the early 1950s. That some people believe was
• 1:04:22
  some kind of CIA experiment to see how people would respond to
• 1:04:25
  this or what they thought of it or to just put the idea out
• 1:04:28
  there. You know, just trying to
• 1:04:29
  acclimatize people to this idea that there might be a big alien
• 1:04:32
  invasion or alien alien arrival at some point.
• 1:04:37
  And maybe it's already happened and it just all got covered up
• 1:04:39
  or something weird. And we don't know, do we?
• 1:04:41
  We don't know if, if Roswell, NM if there was a crash in 47, it
• 1:04:46
  seems there was most of the evidence tends towards something
• 1:04:49
  happened there, but what the hell it actually was.
• 1:04:52
  I don't know. I I mean, I, I haven't dug into
• 1:04:55
  it in great depth or anything, but just I mean as much of how.
• 1:04:58
  Contact. The what?
• 1:05:00
  Once the what? Sorry.
• 1:05:01
  It was called moment of contact. I don't.
• 1:05:07
  I've only become aware of it very recently and it was about a
• 1:05:10
  Brazilian case where apparently a crashed UFO and beings were
• 1:05:17
  not only recovered, but actually, and there's records of
• 1:05:20
  this. There was a, there was an alien
• 1:05:26
  or not human entity that was taken to a that was taken to two
• 1:05:29
  regional hospitals in Brazil. 1 turned it away at the door and
• 1:05:33
  the other one got checked out And the officer that had handled
• 1:05:39
  actually like scooped up the injured being got a little bit
• 1:05:43
  of bacteria under its nail, his nail and died very short very
• 1:05:48
  shortly after. And then they just got when you
• 1:05:52
  locked this up just the other, just the other day, the head
• 1:05:55
  neuro, the head neurosurgeon, I believe at the hospital to, to
• 1:06:01
  come before Congress and say that I had contact.
• 1:06:05
  I had eyes on this being for several minutes and was and,
• 1:06:10
  and, and, and, and he had, and, and then there was a group of
• 1:06:14
  other doctors that had worked with him for 3035 years that all
• 1:06:17
  are testifying to his very sound state of mind and being.
• 1:06:21
  And like, you don't know what, that, what that meat, you know,
• 1:06:24
  I mean, and I, I, I, I, if you're interested in this kind
• 1:06:27
  of thing or like the potential truth of it, moment of contact
• 1:06:30
  and, and a lot of work is being, is unfolding in real time right
• 1:06:34
  now. And I don't know what to make of
• 1:06:35
  it either. Like this stuff is this stuff is
• 1:06:38
  wild, but it does feel like we've been like I, I, there's a
• 1:06:42
  very, it feels like it's been a slow drip exposure event that
• 1:06:47
  like over the course of time, people are becoming more and
• 1:06:49
  more, you know, through film and through lore and through
• 1:06:52
  podcasts and through information, people are becoming
• 1:06:55
  more and more open to this concept when particular in
• 1:06:57
  America, it's it's so ridiculed, it's crazy.
• 1:07:01
  And well, I think it's it's simultaneously being normalized
• 1:07:04
  and ridiculed, which makes it a little difficult to understand
• 1:07:07
  what's the agenda here? Is it only one agenda or the
• 1:07:09
  multiple agendas in terms of the propaganda around this
• 1:07:12
  particular subject? Sure.
• 1:07:14
  Like countering the thing that bothers me the most about it is
• 1:07:17
  that people see this thing, that OK, so we do seem to be getting
• 1:07:21
  more and more evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth.
• 1:07:25
  And that is most likely, it would seem by now, unless all of
• 1:07:29
  these things are somehow fabricated or all of these
• 1:07:31
  things are somehow hallucinations.
• 1:07:32
  It seems that there has been some kind of alien crash, alien
• 1:07:35
  visitations, abductions, things like that.
• 1:07:38
  These things do seem to have happened.
• 1:07:40
  As. As if I had to, if I had to
• 1:07:42
  hedge my bets, that's the side I'd go on.
• 1:07:44
  Yeah, but how, how is the system responding to that?
• 1:07:47
  Is it saying actually, it says this could be a great thing,
• 1:07:50
  This could actually be an amazing thing for the human
• 1:07:53
  race? It's going no, no, no.
• 1:07:54
  They're a threat. There's something we have to
• 1:07:56
  militate against. There's something we have to be
• 1:07:58
  afraid of that we go back to that, you know, that that very
• 1:08:02
  negative energy, that very negative response to it.
• 1:08:05
  We we revert to the to seeing it as a national security threat
• 1:08:10
  when it's like, well, it isn't even a national security threat
• 1:08:12
  anyway. If it is a security threat, it's
• 1:08:14
  a global threat. But I don't really see it as a
• 1:08:17
  threat anyway. I mean.
• 1:08:20
  Because we're all here. Well, if this has been going on
• 1:08:22
  since the 40s or 50s, like everyone's been saying, or even
• 1:08:25
  longer than that, I mean, they loves us alone to be here for me
• 1:08:29
  and you to be talking, you know, I mean, like life is still going
• 1:08:32
  on. Things are OK.
• 1:08:32
  And if anything, a lot of the speculation is that a lot of the
• 1:08:36
  great advancements that we've made have been have have been
• 1:08:39
  as, as, as a consequence of their technology.
• 1:08:41
  And so like you said, it doesn't seem like it's it's going to be
• 1:08:43
  a threat as much as an opportunity to evolve.
• 1:08:48
  Or just an opportunity to learn more and try to understand
• 1:08:51
  ourselves better, which I guess, yeah, I mean, that's what you're
• 1:08:54
  saying. That's a form of spiritual
• 1:08:55
  evolvement. Or yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:57
  Evolvement, but also technological evolvement.
• 1:08:59
  Evolution. It would seem that that is,
• 1:09:02
  again, if, if we, if we assume that these crashes and things
• 1:09:05
  and, and landings and whatever else has happened have taken
• 1:09:08
  place, it would make sense that some of that technology has been
• 1:09:12
  reverse engineered and understood and has found its way
• 1:09:14
  into something that we're now using.
• 1:09:17
  I mean, does anyone really understand, for example, how the
• 1:09:20
  Internet works and where it came from?
• 1:09:22
  Because it's lots of different pieces from lots of different
• 1:09:24
  places that have to come together in a particular way for
• 1:09:27
  us to get the Internet that actually works, including things
• 1:09:30
  like encryption and decryption in the Internet.
• 1:09:32
  And you know, I won't get into a lengthy Babble about my concerns
• 1:09:38
  about exactly where the Internet came from and my questions about
• 1:09:40
  that. But all of these technologies
• 1:09:42
  that we now enjoy and many of which are really cool in terms
• 1:09:46
  of facilitating this conversation, for example,
• 1:09:49
  wouldn't be possible back in the 90s.
• 1:09:51
  We just wouldn't be able to have it.
• 1:09:52
  I don't think wouldn't even be able to get in touch.
• 1:09:55
  Wouldn't be I wouldn't even had a website.
• 1:09:57
  You wouldn't even had a podcast. It just wouldn't have happened.
• 1:09:59
  And that's not that long ago. So that's great.
• 1:10:03
  You're. In the bucket, literal drop in
• 1:10:04
  the bucket relative to to everything else you know.
• 1:10:09
  And so I, I don't see it as a threat, partly just because I've
• 1:10:13
  spent my whole adult life living in this politics of fear world
• 1:10:17
  where almost everything is described in scary terms and
• 1:10:20
  everything is a threat. And it doesn't matter which
• 1:10:22
  person or type of person we're talking about, which country
• 1:10:25
  we're talking about, which I mean, people, people blather on
• 1:10:28
  about like social media being a threat.
• 1:10:30
  Well, it's just a technology. It depends on how we choose to
• 1:10:33
  use it and how we use it. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of
• 1:10:36
  apps and websites. It's not inherently threatening
• 1:10:39
  to anyone. So we have to make, we have to
• 1:10:42
  make better choices. To be honest with a lot of these
• 1:10:45
  things, and I'll say that, but I just, I generally reject this
• 1:10:49
  mentality of, of making fear the primary reaction to things.
• 1:10:56
  I've lived with enough, enough fear in my own personal life
• 1:10:59
  because I mean, some people know this, a lot of people know this.
• 1:11:02
  I suffer from PTSD. I'm not going to get into
• 1:11:05
  exactly what's happened to me. It's caused that, but it's a
• 1:11:08
  long term, it's a long term condition.
• 1:11:10
  So I know fear. I know fear better than I think
• 1:11:12
  most people do, or at least I've lived with a lot more fear than
• 1:11:15
  a lot of people have. And so I kind of just almost
• 1:11:17
  reflexively reject it when the media tries to impose it on me,
• 1:11:20
  or when politicians try to impose it on me and others.
• 1:11:23
  And fuck that. No, we've got more than enough
• 1:11:25
  fear in this world. We don't need more.
• 1:11:27
  We don't need to artificially make people more traumatized and
• 1:11:30
  more fearful and more anxious and more stressed and more
• 1:11:33
  paranoid, because frankly, we've had enough.
• 1:11:36
  We've suffered enough from this stuff anyway.
• 1:11:39
  I certainly have in my own life. I know loads of other people who
• 1:11:41
  have too. And so, yeah, I, I just almost
• 1:11:44
  knee jerk reflexively go, no, I don't, I don't buy this thing,
• 1:11:47
  this latest threat that you've lined up and you're now hyping
• 1:11:50
  up in the media and maybe you've been hyping up for years,
• 1:11:53
  decades, possibly centuries in some things, with some things.
• 1:11:57
  I just don't buy it. I don't want to buy it.
• 1:12:00
  And so unless someone shows me some incredibly compelling
• 1:12:02
  evidence that we are being bombarded by alien attacks
• 1:12:05
  without somehow noticing it, then I'm, I'm just, I'm just not
• 1:12:08
  buying that worldview. I'm not buying.
• 1:12:10
  It's not even a worldview. It's a universe view, a Galaxy
• 1:12:12
  view, a solar system view, whatever you want to call it.
• 1:12:15
  I just don't buy that way of looking at things.
• 1:12:17
  Yeah, well, I mean, we do know that the most effective way to
• 1:12:20
  control people is through fear, right, Because fear, I think my
• 1:12:24
  understanding of at least my fear of my fears in general, and
• 1:12:27
  I tend to be a pretty fearful person as as far as historically
• 1:12:33
  is, is the is I feel like fear for a lot of people is the is
• 1:12:38
  the in the the the cut you're you're not confident in your
• 1:12:42
  ability to handle the unknown or what you're about to face.
• 1:12:46
  And and and that's why people like familiarity.
• 1:12:48
  And that's how people prefer even to struggle with a similar
• 1:12:52
  issue than potentially face an unknown solution.
• 1:12:55
  That which is a famous expression that out of the the
• 1:12:57
  devil that you that you know, then the solution that you don't
• 1:13:00
  know. And I think that a lot of people
• 1:13:03
  feel like that. But I think that, listen, if you
• 1:13:06
  want to study people and big and, and groups of people and
• 1:13:09
  fear, you don't have to look much further than COVID.
• 1:13:12
  You don't have to look further than Trump's, you know, entire
• 1:13:15
  political career. You don't have to look further
• 1:13:18
  than Biden's, Biden's presidency.
• 1:13:20
  I mean, the, the you, you can look anywhere and everything is
• 1:13:23
  just about a culture of and this is the worst thing ever.
• 1:13:26
  And like you said, you know, personal life is complicated
• 1:13:30
  enough. It's so hard to get through
• 1:13:32
  day-to-day and live your life as a human being and try to
• 1:13:35
  accomplish something and you know, and have meaningful
• 1:13:37
  relationships and really do something with yourself.
• 1:13:40
  It's hard enough to do that without the entire world
• 1:13:42
  imposing just one in one catastrophe after the next, just
• 1:13:47
  lining up and bombarding you with it all the time.
• 1:13:49
  So I commend you for for, for, for not playing that game and
• 1:13:52
  for rejecting that view. I think it's really valuable.
• 1:13:55
  Well, I commend you too. I think it's a really important
• 1:13:57
  thing. The the reasons, the the biggest
• 1:14:00
  driver of human behaviour is how people feel.
• 1:14:02
  If people feel less fear, less anger, they're likely to behave
• 1:14:06
  a lot better. They're likely to be able to.
• 1:14:07
  They react to things a lot better for one and, and, and be
• 1:14:11
  proactive in, in more ways. It can be hard, quite hard to be
• 1:14:14
  proactive in your own life when you're bombarded by fear because
• 1:14:17
  it is paralyzing. It does keep keep you in the
• 1:14:20
  same place. And it can be hard to confront
• 1:14:22
  or sometimes some people impossible to confront, at least
• 1:14:24
  for a time. You know, these things
• 1:14:26
  overcoming and and recovering from these things can take a lot
• 1:14:29
  of time. Just personally speaking and
• 1:14:32
  just, I know, I know a lot of people who suffered from various
• 1:14:35
  things and have a lot of trauma in their lives and they're sick
• 1:14:38
  to death of all of this stuff too.
• 1:14:39
  And they often just switch off because it's like, I don't, I
• 1:14:42
  don't need any more fear and anger in my life today.
• 1:14:44
  I don't need to be paranoid and neurotic.
• 1:14:45
  I'm already paranoid and neurotic enough to be honest.
• 1:14:51
  Everyone I know that watches too much news is already already has
• 1:14:55
  enough anxiety and, and, and fear in their lives to, to, to,
• 1:14:59
  to be able to cut that out and still be and still have a have
• 1:15:01
  plenty to work on, you know? And so you're right, a lot, a
• 1:15:06
  lot of people do go for what's familiar because it seems to be
• 1:15:09
  comfortable. And we are simultaneously
• 1:15:12
  creatures of habit. And so we like the familiar and
• 1:15:15
  we like the things that we know and that we think we can rely on
• 1:15:18
  and feel we can rely on. But we are also creatures of
• 1:15:21
  imagination. And imagination can be
• 1:15:24
  pessimistic or optimistic. You can catastrophize and
• 1:15:28
  imagine the worst case scenarios and that can hold you back.
• 1:15:31
  Or you can try and be optimistic, try, try and be
• 1:15:33
  loving and optimistic towards yourself, towards others,
• 1:15:36
  towards the future and think things can get better because
• 1:15:39
  they can using every single time I've I've hit the emotional rock
• 1:15:44
  bottom in my life, things have got better afterwards.
• 1:15:46
  And I keep trying to remind myself of that, that yeah, life
• 1:15:49
  can be really horrible at times, but it can also be fantastic at
• 1:15:53
  times. And that you can overcome these
• 1:15:55
  things and you can keep going and you can get better.
• 1:15:58
  And I say, maybe we need to somehow weaponize the optimistic
• 1:16:02
  imagination against the pessimistic imagination, or at
• 1:16:06
  least at least instrumentalize it against that.
• 1:16:10
  And that's, that will, that will get us somewhere that will
• 1:16:13
  improve us, that will lead to better societies and better
• 1:16:16
  individuals and just a more kind of compassionate and
• 1:16:19
  understanding and mutually accepting of differences and and
• 1:16:23
  so on and so on. All the things that a lot of
• 1:16:24
  people actually want from society, or at least would feel
• 1:16:26
  a hell of a lot better if that's what our our human civilization
• 1:16:29
  was more like. I think that's possible.
• 1:16:32
  And it's not just I think it's possible.
• 1:16:33
  I know it's possible. I know it from my own life and I
• 1:16:36
  know it from the lives of others.
• 1:16:37
  Yeah, yeah. And that's the goal of this
• 1:16:39
  podcast. I mean, the goal of this podcast
• 1:16:41
  is to be that hopeful alternative and to say, yeah, I
• 1:16:44
  try that whatever, whatever, whatever rabbit hole I go down,
• 1:16:49
  there's, there's almost always something positive that could be
• 1:16:52
  done about it or something not even necessarily positive, but
• 1:16:55
  some some form of autonomy where you could take your own response
• 1:17:00
  and your own reaction into your own hands and do something about
• 1:17:02
  it in a way that is not necessarily what is prescribed
• 1:17:07
  to, you know, for you. And I think that's really,
• 1:17:09
  really valuable. And we can try and overcome
• 1:17:13
  conditioning. We can't always do it.
• 1:17:16
  But there is more to human behaviour than just the BF
• 1:17:19
  Skinner conditioning and response.
• 1:17:20
  That's not all we are. We aren't just input output
• 1:17:23
  machines. We can have, we can do something
• 1:17:25
  about that. We can interrupt those
• 1:17:28
  conditioned, enculturated, impulsive responses to things,
• 1:17:32
  even if they're things that were driven into us as children.
• 1:17:35
  Some people can overcome those. I think everyone can overcome
• 1:17:38
  them at least a bit. And, and, and not feel quite so
• 1:17:42
  enslaved and not actually be quite so enslaved to these
• 1:17:44
  conditioned responses to things and to that mentality of
• 1:17:48
  pessimism and catastrophizing and falling down the emotional
• 1:17:52
  wells. You know, the spirals that I was
• 1:17:54
  talking about before, they're just as much individual
• 1:17:57
  psychological, emotional spirals as they are on mass.
• 1:18:00
  On the scale of a country of three, 400 million people like
• 1:18:03
  you live in, it's the same thing.
• 1:18:06
  It's all the same feelings, ultimately.
• 1:18:08
  So we have to recognize that and we have to try and do something
• 1:18:12
  about it. And it isn't always possible,
• 1:18:15
  but it is often possible. Yeah, yeah, beautiful.
• 1:18:19
  I want to, I want to, I want to actually end with the last, you
• 1:18:23
  know, 10-12 minutes that we got if that's OK.
• 1:18:27
  I want to act. I want to talk to you a little
• 1:18:28
  bit about the separation of power and influence that you
• 1:18:33
  think because I we know and, and this is not with how just with
• 1:18:38
  Hollywood, this is with anything that is regulated.
• 1:18:42
  It feels like has a revolving door with industry insiders and
• 1:18:46
  the regulators. And I, you know, and like you
• 1:18:49
  mentioned, you know, before we, we mentioned our buddy Rich, was
• 1:18:52
  it Rich Klein? Is that who that his name?
• 1:18:55
  You know, he seems to be one of these type of examples, but do
• 1:19:02
  you think the government, how much of A distinction do you
• 1:19:05
  think that there should be, for example, Right.
• 1:19:08
  And I know that this and I'm sure this does happen because I
• 1:19:11
  saw this on the site films that go ahead without CIA approval or
• 1:19:15
  without government approval. They want you to change this and
• 1:19:17
  they push back on a script about this.
• 1:19:19
  How much control do you think? Do you think they should say,
• 1:19:22
  hey, we'd like for you to do this, but do whatever you want
• 1:19:24
  or it's important that you do this because of it.
• 1:19:26
  It it affects XY and Z situation.
• 1:19:29
  Do you think that there should be some kind of relationship or
• 1:19:31
  you think it should be completely fractured?
• 1:19:35
  I mean, ultimately I'm anarchist, so I don't think the
• 1:19:37
  federal government or any kind of government should exist.
• 1:19:40
  But within the existing superstructure and paradigm, I
• 1:19:45
  think it I think that the relationship is, it's fine to
• 1:19:49
  have some kind of access relationship to these assets,
• 1:19:51
  but they are publicly paid for assets.
• 1:19:53
  So why should these agencies be allowed to deny them to film
• 1:19:57
  makers? Because that's the real power
• 1:19:59
  that they have. Sometimes films on TV shows
• 1:20:01
  don't even get made because not because the government
• 1:20:04
  necessarily censors and blocks them, though that does happen,
• 1:20:07
  but just because they deny them access to something.
• 1:20:10
  If you, you can't make a. Had a note a drama set on a
• 1:20:14
  aircraft carrier without access to an aircraft carrier.
• 1:20:16
  I mean technically I suppose you can try and do the whole thing
• 1:20:18
  with CGI, but it looks schlocky and digitized and sooner or
• 1:20:22
  later people will notice and lose interest because it looks
• 1:20:24
  like everything else. The real thing always looks a
• 1:20:26
  bit better. So if you can't get access to
• 1:20:29
  that aircraft carrier, you can't make your film or TV show set on
• 1:20:32
  it. It's that thing.
• 1:20:34
  It's that they have the power of denial and the power of softer
• 1:20:38
  or harder censorship, depending on exactly which project and
• 1:20:41
  what relationship they have with the film makers and so on and so
• 1:20:43
  on. It isn't always a uniform
• 1:20:45
  process on every single project they work on, but it is that
• 1:20:48
  power of denial, that power of refusing access.
• 1:20:51
  Why shouldn't film makers who pay their taxes and all the rest
• 1:20:54
  of it, be able to access these things?
• 1:20:57
  All they're saying is we want to go and shoot a couple of scenes
• 1:20:59
  outside CIA headquarters or FBI headquarters or whatever it
• 1:21:02
  might be. Why should those agencies be
• 1:21:05
  allowed to turn them down because they don't like their
• 1:21:06
  content? That is actually a denial of
• 1:21:09
  critical speech or free speech against the government in some
• 1:21:12
  ways. That was if you call that a
• 1:21:14
  first, that would be that would be like a free speech that that
• 1:21:18
  that you're prohibiting free speech at that point is your, is
• 1:21:21
  your, is your take on that. Yeah, yeah, I, I, I agree with
• 1:21:25
  the, I'm not a constitutional law expert, of course, but I
• 1:21:28
  agree with some of the people who, who are, who've said they
• 1:21:31
  consider this a violation of the 1st Amendment.
• 1:21:34
  And so why, why should film makers have their have their
• 1:21:37
  rights violated in that way? Why should audiences have their
• 1:21:41
  rights to be able to hear this kind of thing or see this kind
• 1:21:44
  of perspective on a screen or however they're consuming it?
• 1:21:47
  Why should they be denied that, especially when the number one
• 1:21:51
  reason why things get rejected and denied is that they're
• 1:21:53
  critical of the government in some fashion.
• 1:21:56
  It's not necessarily they're critical of an individual
• 1:21:58
  president or something like that.
• 1:21:59
  It's, it's the government in general, it's the institutions
• 1:22:02
  themselves. That's what they're really
• 1:22:04
  protecting. And I think that's wrong.
• 1:22:07
  I, I think it's deeply wrong. So if you are going to have this
• 1:22:10
  sort of relationship, it has to be 1 where you can't reject a
• 1:22:14
  request due to content. You might be able to reject a
• 1:22:17
  request because someone comes to you and says I want, you know,
• 1:22:19
  115M1 Abrams tanks and you just don't have a spare 115 tanks on
• 1:22:24
  that day. I get that sometimes
• 1:22:26
  administratively people are do get a bit carried away and ask
• 1:22:29
  for the impossible, but if they're asking for something
• 1:22:33
  that loads of other film makers have had access to but you just
• 1:22:35
  don't like their script, I don't think that's a justifiable
• 1:22:37
  reason to deny them at all. And so it's either access for
• 1:22:41
  everyone or or access for no one.
• 1:22:43
  Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.
• 1:22:45
  I couldn't believe I just watched Homeland for the first
• 1:22:49
  time this year and I could not believe that that that show was
• 1:22:52
  able to get made even. I mean, and, and, and, and, and
• 1:22:58
  according to your site, it looked like it got a lot of
• 1:23:02
  green lights from various government bodies, including the
• 1:23:05
  CIA. But that movie does not that
• 1:23:08
  show rather does not make the American government or American
• 1:23:12
  history look very good at all. And I am shocked with how far
• 1:23:16
  they're willing to go as far as, you know, this, these deep CIA
• 1:23:20
  agents or the CIA going row against the president or, or
• 1:23:23
  even this the drone campaign and everything that I didn't know
• 1:23:28
  any history about that. Even my, my, my parents who I
• 1:23:31
  told them to watch the show, they didn't know anything about
• 1:23:34
  that either. And it kind of highlights a
• 1:23:36
  really not great period of American history that I'm
• 1:23:38
  shocked that the agencies kind of let the show, the showrunners
• 1:23:41
  get away with for eight seasons or however long it was.
• 1:23:45
  If if this was the US military, they wouldn't have. the US
• 1:23:49
  military is obsessed with positive image imagery of itself
• 1:23:53
  the CIA seems to actually quite enjoy.
• 1:23:55
  I think it's partly because the CIA is sort of half stocked with
• 1:23:59
  statistic psychopaths. More.
• 1:24:01
  More than half. More than half, yeah.
• 1:24:03
  Maybe more than maybe more, but they they seem to they seem to
• 1:24:08
  enjoy this dark image of the CIA, this torturing, drone
• 1:24:12
  striking, murderous, completely corrupt, win at all costs means
• 1:24:16
  to an end kind of approach to the CIA because it scares
• 1:24:20
  people, it intimidates people. It means that people don't want
• 1:24:23
  to fuck with the CIA. It mean, it might even mean that
• 1:24:26
  the, the Russians or the Chinese or whoever else might be
• 1:24:28
  watching this overseas and thinking actually, if, if the
• 1:24:31
  CIA is kind of openly admitting on a, a popular network TV show
• 1:24:34
  that they do this stuff, maybe we shouldn't mess with them
• 1:24:37
  quite as much as we were thinking of messing with them.
• 1:24:40
  There is a, it's, it's like I was saying about positive
• 1:24:43
  reinforcement versus negative reinforcement.
• 1:24:45
  The the shows like, I don't know, Jack Ryan, Amazon's Jack
• 1:24:48
  Ryan that offers generally speaking, a very positive
• 1:24:52
  reinforcement of the CI as image.
• 1:24:54
  Homeland in some ways is much more negative in in a lot of
• 1:24:58
  places. I think it's a fantastic piece
• 1:25:00
  of television in most of its seasons.
• 1:25:03
  Some of them some of them aren't so good as others, but some of
• 1:25:05
  them are absolutely great. TVI.
• 1:25:06
  Mean it flips the whole war of terror on its head.
• 1:25:09
  It's, it's, it's really the whole Middle Eastern war.
• 1:25:11
  At least it flips on its head. And it really, it really brings
• 1:25:15
  up a lot. And it's funny because around,
• 1:25:17
  because just a couple months earlier, I was really doing a
• 1:25:19
  lot of homework and finding out what our, you know, how America
• 1:25:23
  kind of caused a lot of the War on Terror to ourselves.
• 1:25:27
  And this brought that all to light.
• 1:25:29
  And I'm like, but if you're doing this, Americans aren't
• 1:25:31
  going to trust or people watching this aren't going to
• 1:25:34
  trust agendas anymore. And I understand what you're
• 1:25:37
  saying about the about trying to, you know, flex perhaps, or
• 1:25:41
  to show almost like almost in a psychopathic way.
• 1:25:44
  Hey, we're not even apologizing the way that we do things and
• 1:25:47
  you better watch out. But that's not a really good way
• 1:25:50
  to make friends and at a time. And and and this is obviously we
• 1:25:53
  could we can't start this with 5 minutes left.
• 1:25:55
  But as China with a with a massive economic and social and
• 1:26:00
  political is becoming a huge force.
• 1:26:03
  It's over. It's absolutely overtaking
• 1:26:05
  American majority of the world. I don't think that it's really
• 1:26:10
  beneficial to make ourselves look like a bunch of
• 1:26:12
  psychopaths, you know? You, you, you wouldn't because
• 1:26:17
  you're not psychopathic. But I do wonder it is a bit like
• 1:26:22
  the the psychopathic serial killer who when they're
• 1:26:25
  eventually caught, just confesses or other other
• 1:26:29
  psychopathic predators. When they're caught, quite a lot
• 1:26:31
  of them confess because one, they don't really give a shit.
• 1:26:35
  They're just cold blooded and they don't actually care that
• 1:26:37
  much what happens to them. But also some of them like to
• 1:26:39
  boast. Some of them have that
• 1:26:40
  narcissistic quality of like, yeah, I killed 17 people and
• 1:26:43
  it's taken you 20 years to catch me.
• 1:26:46
  They actually want to boast about what what it is that
• 1:26:48
  they've done. So there may be an element of
• 1:26:50
  that in some of the CI as Hollywood PR.
• 1:26:53
  And I do think intimidation propaganda is a real thing.
• 1:26:56
  They want us to be scared of them.
• 1:26:59
  If you look at something like The Good Shepherd, which is this
• 1:27:02
  quite conspiratorial CIA sponsored film where it suggests
• 1:27:06
  that a lot of the CIA originates in the Skull and Bones Yale
• 1:27:09
  secret society or semi semi secret fratity, whatever you
• 1:27:13
  want to call it. Sorry, excuse me.
• 1:27:17
  A very a very much plays up to that.
• 1:27:19
  I don't know mythology. How about that myth about the
• 1:27:22
  CIA? Is it a myth?
• 1:27:22
  Is it a reality? People couldn't again, make
• 1:27:24
  their own judgments on that. But there is quite a lot of dark
• 1:27:27
  stuff in CIA sponsored films that when I'm watching it, I'm
• 1:27:30
  thinking there's no way the military or the FBI would put up
• 1:27:33
  with this. They would only want they would
• 1:27:35
  want a much more positive image and maybe a tiny, tiny little
• 1:27:38
  bit of, you know, one guy goes rogue and does something wrong.
• 1:27:41
  They can tolerate that. But the notion of the whole
• 1:27:43
  institution is somehow corrupt or terrifying.
• 1:27:46
  They won't do. They just won't, won't accept
• 1:27:49
  the CIA. On the other hand, they seem to
• 1:27:51
  see the benefit of both the more happy, positive PR, the happy
• 1:27:57
  positive image of the CIA, and the negative, scary, terrifying
• 1:28:01
  image of the CIA. They actually seem to see value
• 1:28:03
  in both, which makes you wonder what the hell they they're
• 1:28:07
  really up to. And also what the hell is it
• 1:28:10
  that they do that we don't already know about?
• 1:28:12
  Because that's the thing. It's like once you're caught
• 1:28:13
  drone bombing and torturing and all the rest of it, what what
• 1:28:16
  option do you have? Do you then try and put the
• 1:28:18
  genie back in the bottle and convince people actually, we're,
• 1:28:20
  we're good, We didn't actually do this, this sort of thing that
• 1:28:23
  much? Or do you try to normalize it?
• 1:28:25
  Do you try to make people accept it?
• 1:28:28
  And I think Homeland from a propaganda point of view, is a
• 1:28:30
  massive normalization project. It made people, you know, it
• 1:28:34
  makes people more cynical, makes people just go, oh, well, this
• 1:28:36
  is this is what happens. There's nothing we can do about
• 1:28:39
  it. This is just the CIA is too
• 1:28:40
  powerful and too evil and too terrifying.
• 1:28:43
  And so it's kind of exciting to watch in a spy drama, but in
• 1:28:46
  terms of the real world, I'm not going to challenge this because
• 1:28:49
  then they might drone bomb or hack me or torture me or, or
• 1:28:51
  something else. So it does scare people.
• 1:28:55
  Again, the negative images do scare people.
• 1:28:57
  And that that is the only rationale I can offer for why
• 1:29:00
  the CIA gets involved in films and TV shows that don't in any
• 1:29:04
  way really portray them, but not very much portray them very
• 1:29:07
  positively. I got you, I got you.
• 1:29:10
  I think that's a perfect place to leave it, Tom.
• 1:29:13
  This was a ton of fun. You're such a pleasant, such a
• 1:29:18
  pleasant person to talk to. Thank you so much for the time.
• 1:29:20
  I hope we can maybe do this again because I have AI have a
• 1:29:23
  whole list of notes over here that we didn't get a bunch of
• 1:29:26
  it, but but I hope we could do this again in a couple of months
• 1:29:29
  maybe. Thank you so much for your time.
• 1:29:31
  This is so much fun and I'm going to post your whatever you
• 1:29:36
  would like for me to share as far as your website and your
• 1:29:39
  socials. You don't have social or you
• 1:29:40
  don't use it very often, but your website and your contact
• 1:29:44
  and I'll be happy to and I and I would love to talk again and be
• 1:29:46
  in touch. Oh, sure.
• 1:29:48
  I mean, you've got my e-mail. Let's do this again sometime.
• 1:29:50
  And it's been great talking to you.
• 1:29:52
  I really enjoyed this. I think we've looked at this
• 1:29:54
  from a a different perspective than a lot of the interviews and
• 1:29:57
  things that I've done. So yeah, let's have another
• 1:29:59
  conversation sometime. I'd love it.
• 1:30:01
  Awesome. OK, well, feel good again.
• 1:30:03
  Cheers to your health, good health to both of us and lots of
• 1:30:06
  lots of lots of good work together, hopefully in the
• 1:30:09
  future. Thank you so much, Tom.
• 1:30:11
  Take care man. Take care, yes?
• 1:30:12
  Bye.