Entertainment Series 10: Tom Secker / Government & Hollywood / Propaganda / Aliens / CIA & Homeland

0:01 Welcome to another episode of come together, Tom Sucker. Welcome. I'm so happy to have you here. The creator of spy culture, an awesome website. How are you I'm. Great. Thanks. Thanks for having me. It's good to be talking to you. Yes, yes, I'm really excited to be talking. I, I came, I came across your work by accident, but but once I saw it, my, my eyes lit up and, and I caught fire because this was because it's some of the coolest work and contrary actually to what I want to hopefully, you know, open our conversation about contrary to lots of other work, your work is 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 learn so much just from, you know, just your timeline is incredible. Oh, the CIA Hollywood timeline. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's incredible. That's really amazing. Thanks. Thanks. That took a lot of lot of time. Well, I mean, it's years and years of research that ultimately went into that. But even just putting it together took days, weeks, I can't remember a couple of weeks maybe. So yeah, that was a bit of a labor of love, that one. I always wanted to take pretty much everything I had, or at least the essence of everything I had on the CIA and Hollywood and put it together all in one place for people. So yeah, yeah, any anyone who's listening, go look at the CIA and Hollywood timeline. It's a it's a lot of, lot of work. It's spyculture.com.

1:38 Yeah. And it's, it's again, meticulously done, super well sourced. I was just reading through it before you hopped on. I was reading about the CIA document that you posted about their mishandling of Zero Dark 30 and, and our and, you know, and, and basically all regulations as far as far as, you know, the way that the government supposed to relate to Hollywood. But we're going to, I'm sure we're going to talk, we're going to dive into a lot of these type of topics. The I, I, I, I wanted to actually begin, if you don't mind. I saw what it must have been a relatively new post because I missed it the first time I went through. Was your post about the weird scenes inside Laurel Canyon book. Yeah, I, it's funny because I didn't talk about this book for months, but it happened to be that the podcast that I recorded that mentioned it, the author was what asked me to hold off a couple of months to publish it until his newest book came out. So I just released it the other 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 on it. And I and I heard about it being talked about in a couple of podcasts and I picked it up and I start going through it and I, and, you know, red lights just started going off my head and alarm bells started ringing. I said, this feels just not great. And then and then I and then, and then I read and then I got up to parts that I really didn't know about, you know, like for example, the Grateful Dead and, and, and Pig Pen's relationship with Janis Joplin and yeah, and, and, and, and her, you know, her mysterious death and not really mysterious was an overdose. Everything was just, everything felt like it was being shoved needlessly into conspiracy and it felt like it didn't have to be like there's plenty of great, there's plenty of crazy stories out there that we don't have to necessarily.

3:27 We don't have to fictionalize everything or, or I guess what's the word for it when you we conspiracize everything. Well, I mean, that's what the book does. It tries to take all these disparate stories about relatively disparate people. I mean, there's some interconnections at at various points, but it turns it into this grand overarching conspiracy theory about pretty much everything that was going on at that time, culturally speaking. And also it it, it amalgamates so many different things. There's this the whole thing about the the Lookout Mountain Observatory or Lookout Mountain Laboratory, which is in Mcgowan's book, is supposedly the sort of top secret military facility that's somewhere in Laurel Canyon. But he doesn't really seem to know that much about it. And it's almost like the absence of information is a cause to be suspicious, right?

4:19 And and he claims it was somehow at the center of this CIA military intelligence, create the hippie movement, influence the hippie movement, overarching conspiracy theory that kind of runs through the whole book or most of the book anyway. But he doesn't cite any evidence for that. He doesn't cite any connection between any of these musicians and film stars and so on, these hippies that lived in Laurel Canyon and the actual Lookout Mountain Laboratory. And as far as I can tell, there basically is no connection except they happen to live in the same or exist in the same geographical area at the same time. It's sort of, there's a lot, there's a lot of conspiracy by association in the book, and there's a lot of conspiracy by geographic location in the book because these people lived around the corner from these people.

5:02 They therefore must have been connected in some profound way. But were they or did they just know each other? Did they sometimes go to parties with each other? Did they occasionally record an album or a song together? I mean, that doesn't prove a conspiracy. It's just what people do, right? Yeah, and it's just as easily likely as it is unlikely. I mean, you know, I mean, I have so many friends that and and I think about this quite a bit. Oh man, with with the whole Jeffrey Epstein story where I think how many people are on this quote UN quote list or how many people associated with him really just really like just knew him on a superficial level that are now just getting bundled up with him. And you know, I'm just there, there are plenty of people, I'm sure that had a lot of wrongdoing, but there's a lot of people that I mean, I think I could think about so many people in my life that I've had positive associations with that I haven't kept up with that.

5:49 I've had a year of friendship with a couple of month relationship with and then disappeared. And I haven't heard from them in 10 years. And I find out that there one day, you know, some kind of terrible sex offender and I've been really, you know, and, and I and I said I had a relationship with them ten years ago where I knew them for a couple of months or for a year or two. Guilt by association. Like it could be, but it could just as equally not be. Absolutely. I've. I've known some people in my life who I was even friends with for quite long periods of time who turned out to be doing horrible things. Doesn't make me responsible for that. It doesn't mean that I I'm in any way guilty or I'm in any way responsible or liable for what they did. And I know what you mean about the Epstein thing, because it still isn't clear exactly to what extent Maxwell and Epstein were entrapping people or providing these, I don't want to call them services, but we're providing essentially underage sex slaves or trafficked.

6:50 Yeah, yeah. Teenage girls and what have you. We don't actually know the extent to which that was happening. It seems it must have been happening to some degree. But then people leap in and say, oh, because this person is on a flight log, they were once on this plane or they flew on this plane 6 times, right? And that means they flew on a plane. That doesn't mean they necessarily knew everything Epstein was up to, let alone we're participating in it. Some of them we have to assume were, but we don't know which ones. And until people actually outline some solid evidence of this being more than just an association with Epstein, I'm not really sure where we go with it. And that is a real problem, because I do think something very serious and very dark and very sick and twisted and psycho stalker creepy pervert paedophile thing happened there. But I don't know exactly who was and wasn't involved. I certainly don't believe Epstein killed himself. I'll, I'll say that much.

7:41 I can't. I can't imagine it. It's possible, but I can't imagine it. Have a lot of time with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, and I think you're right. And I and I and I think that end of the day, there has been so much good work done and there is so much information available. If you want to do your homework and if you want to make it happen, excuse me, phone drops. If you want to make it happen, you can do it, you know, and so that's that's kind of what bothers me about a lazy conspiracies or and I'm not going to call weird things that inside of Canyon a lazy conspiracy per SE, because the author obviously put a lot of effort into actually writing the book and getting information that he did. But it feels like he stopped a step short of what he could have.

8:22 And I think that we, you know, it's it becomes a dangerous game, you know, because like, like you said, it just becomes association and that doesn't necessarily mean anything. So I think I think it's I think it's a good point. I think it's really interesting. I mean, the biggest problem I have with that book, which I outlined in the podcast episode that I did, reviewing it and honestly tearing into it in places, people, people don't have to agree with my opinions in that one. But I would actually ask that you at least go and have a read or a listen to it and consider have I been a little bit suckered maybe by some some of the things that people have said here? Or have I maybe been a little bit lazy in my own thinking and taking some things too seriously or just taking them for granted. The biggest problem for me is that at no point does McGowan mention any of the actual cultural warfare operations that we know were going on at that time, including it, including in Los Angeles, let alone the CI as infiltration of the hippie movement, the anti Vietnam War movement, Operation Kale.

9:21 If you want to look up Operation Chaos, it was this CIA infiltration and spying operation looking at the the radical left, the hippie movement, the anti war movement, all of that and infiltrating, getting in there some ways and presumably trying to sabotage and disrupt in some fashion. And you would think that's directly connected to most of what only some of what Mcgowan's talking about. And yet it isn't mentioned anywhere in the book. And so I'm wondering if you want to you really want to flesh out this theory that he's espousing. That's just an obvious place to me to look is to associate it with this, to situate it in that context of what is definite and already known, rather than this relatively loosely affiliated and awfully often loosely defined conspiracy theory that he he does espouse.

10:09 Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because I feel like it's, it's hard to even do that much homework and collect information that he did without coming across that. I mean, I'm a casual reader and I've, you know, and I've come across way more than what? Than what at least. Listen, I didn't finish the book. I got about, you know, just about a little bit less than halfway through and just said, I, I, I don't have the patience to keep on going with this. And and I really try to push through and I really do. But I was like, I have so many books I want to read and this is really isn't giving me too much to work. It's not even giving me homework to do so. So I had to put it aside for now. But I'm happy that that you I'm happy that you have a similar perspective with me. And then, at least to me that when it comes to this book, because I love that point in history.

10:53 I love that music. I love that time. I'm fascinated by it. The book Chaos by Tom O'Neill. I don't know if you read it, I I thought was a remarkable work that really brings a sheds a lot more light onto this into this world without really making he he he provides so much information without me. He does the opposite of of what McGregor does. He he, he provides all the information without coming to any definitive conclusions and says there's too many interplaying factors over here for me to say for sure what it is. And in too much evidence has been destroyed and too many people are dead now for me to be able to really make a decision. But there was some weird stuff going on, you know, and here's the record of the weird stuff. And here's Jolly West and here's and here's the introduction of amphetamines in San Francisco.

11:39 And here's that, you know, here's Manson with, you know, meeting with, with Jolly WX amount of times. And like, what does it mean? I don't know, but here's the data, here's the hard facts. Do with that as you will, I think that's that. That's a much more preferable way of going about it. Well, and just for what it's worth, I do think there was some a lot of weird shit going on in the San Francisco part of the with with Tim Leary and all of that kind of thing. There is definitely something to that and if people want to give. Me about Tim Leary's relationship, if you don't mind, because I, I, I know the name for sure. And he's a counterculture hero. He's a beat, I think, right? Or the end of the pre hippie around that time. Yeah.

12:19 Yeah. But I never heard about his relationship with any kind of government association. Do you? Do you, do you know off the top of your head, you know, any more detail than that? Well, certainly he had some involvement with the CIA. That's fairly well established. He was being, I'm pretty sure, being spied on by the FBI simultaneously. And there is this whole thing about the CIA running experiments, including in San Francisco with, with acid, with LSD. They were sometimes running essentially brothels where they would ensnare. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they would ensnare clients, get them to come in, dose them up with acid and then film them to see what the hell happened. And these are pretty, I mean that's a pretty messed up experiment and potentially very dangerous experiment or series of experiments operations they were running.

13:06 Exactly where that connects and overlaps with with Tim Leary, I'm not 100% sure, but it was happening at the same time in basically the same place, to some extent the same place. So therefore we have to assume there is a connection there. And yeah, that part of the AP movement, certainly the more sort of drug fueled psychedelic or excessively maybe psychedelic part of the AP movement I do think was being infiltrated and manipulated. But that's a bit of a different thing to what was going on in Southern California around Los Angeles and Laurel Canyon. So I'm not sure if those two things are actually integrated in any way. They, if there were, if there were operations being run in Laurel Canyon and certainly I think the FBI were spying on some of these people. We know that much.

13:50 Are those things connected or not? Or in what ways are they connected? I'm, I'm still not sure about that. I have a lot of scepticism about the hippie movement, despite being essentially A hippie. I mean, I wasn't born until the 1980s, but I absorbed a lot of the hippie philosophies, the hippie anarchist philosophy growing up. Nonetheless, I do have a lot of questions about this movement and, and it is a disparate movement. There are it is multifaceted and to be fair, McGowan does say this. He does say isn't just one amorphous movement or one very specific movement. There's like different wings of it. And he does say that as far as he's concerned, a lot of this was about trying to divert people from the more practical anti war, anti Vietnam War in particular side of the movement and get them more towards to just take drugs.

14:35 You know, TuneIn, drop out free love. And I'm not, I'm not actually a huge fan of that hippie movement, to be honest. But some people are. I mean, people can make their own judgments on this. Yeah, I say I'm very happy that I could look at the hippie movement in the rearview mirror because if I was born in that time, I have a very difficult time believing I'd have as balanced as a life of it as I do now, you know, And I'm living with more of the echoes and the ripple effects of that of that culture. And I could embrace it in the way that I feel is appropriately anachronistic, as you said, as you, you know, as you're putting it. But yeah, I feel that. I, I, I feel the same way. And what's what, what I think is is interesting or curious perhaps and just completely speculative is that it seemed like that, that, that, that federal agencies.

15:25 And there's certainly a paper trail with this. And there's another great book, Blitzed I believe by Norman Orwell, 00 Norman Ohler, German author, and he has a couple of great books, but this book tripped, I'm sorry, tripped is the book. And he and he, there's a paper trail of LSD from Switzerland to Nazi Germany, straight to straight to the state straights, pretty much straight to San Francisco. And, and what's interesting is that people didn't really know what LSD was going to do. And it looks like towards the late 60s, early 70's, the FBI or the CIA or whatever government agencies were experimenting with the impact of LSD, saw that it kind of was mushroom into its own culture. And they ended up introduce, introducing amphetamines into the culture and, you know, heroin and speed and stuff like that.

16:16 And that ended up causing enormous decay and 'cause, you know, that was the end of the summer of love was. And, you know, I've read multiple accounts of just, of just regular everyday people that were living there that were great, you know, dead heads or fans of just, you know, just real hippies. And, and they said the, the, the just over the, over the course of a couple of months, it just felt like everyone went from loving each other and sharing food and the diggers and, and, you know, and free love and free culture and that's art and sharing to just like a bunch of zombies in the street. And they said, we have no idea what happened. But but again, the work from from Tom O'Neill sheds a little bit of light into, into the, into the introduction of of speed and those uppers into, into the culture that was really doing really well with the psychedelics, I think, or for the most part, you know, with the psychedelics. But they are two fundamentally different. I mean, metabolically, they're two fundamentally different kinds of drugs.

17:14 I think people want to take psychedelic drugs. I mean, I've taken a few in my time. And so I do know, I know personally what this can be like and what kind of influence it can have on you. And it can help open the the doors of perception if you like. It can certainly help broaden your mind, can certainly help open you up your imagination up to different possibilities. Whereas cocaine, amphetamines, those kind of things. Honestly, I've I've occasionally tried them and they just don't work for me at all. They don't, they don't seem to fit with my metabolism or my my mentality. And I can see how on mass this can help shift a movement and shift the culture and make it more about that sort of buzzy 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 then you crash and then you don't do anything. Whereas psychedelics is a bit more medium long term, it's a bit more slow paced in many respects. It's like I say, metabolically and in terms of biorhythms and everything, just a fundamentally different kind of drug experience and a fundamentally different kind of culture that results. Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, and I, I guess, I guess they're both quote UN quote medicines in the right application in different way. But yeah, I, I tend to agree. I have no interest in the uppers and the speed and the amphetamines and stuff. I'm I'm much more curious about these unexplored sense of the consciousness and, and the whole psychedelic trippy type of world in general anyway.

18:38 So for me, for me personally, it does, it doesn't speak very much to me either. I, I have so many things that that I kind of want to dive into and this has been, this is great already. One thing that I was curious about to hear your thoughts or an observation I made while I was going through your timeline a little bit was one thing that I noticed first of all was that the OSS pre CIA, which was the government institution that had preceded it. I think the CIA was for what is 45 or 46 around that year. It's 47. It's the National Security Act, the same time the Department of Defense was founded. Right, right, right. And but until then, even until then, the government was aware of the enormous impact of film on society and its potential for propaganda.

19:23 And what I've noticed was that the 40s and the 50s felt a lot more like the like the influence or the job of the government was to direct the stream. And then in the 60s and 70s and became more about fighting a narrative. And so you kind of have a shift in strategy, at least what it looks like to me from, hey, we have open heart. We have, you know, we have a relatively open society that is that is malleable that we could kind of push along different types of social stigmas or philosophies or political ideas. And right now? Maybe what maybe people will like them, maybe they'll eat them up. And so the 40s and 50s felt like they're a little bit more about like, you know, that's when they buy the rights to the to to Orwell's books. And that's when, you know, they, they actually in the whole, I want to talk about honey traps too, But I mean, the 60s and 70s is much more about pushing back against what this anti government, anti war, anti, you know, anti establishment culture became.

20:25 So is, is that, do you think that's a correct assessment or do you know that? Do you think it's something else? I think you're right that the certainly the post war consensus, the kind of liberal internationalism that grew up post World War 2, a lot of the earlier CIA operations seem to be based around that. They seem to be based around, let's firstly try and maintain this fairly cushy consensus society that is emerging or has possibly existed for a while. And like you'd say directing that a little bit, directing that in without necessarily trying to challenge much or subvert much, right. Well, oral, I mean, the other side of things is the stuff that 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 saying sort of there is this liberal international consensus and somehow the communist Soviet Union is a rogue element fighting against this. It's like, well, there's they are on the UN National Security Council. So I'm not quite sure how you square that circle, to be honest. But but yeah, once you get into the 60s, you get Vietnam, you get the the beginnings of the end of that consensus society and the age, the end of the age of innocence in America. A lot of historians think that actually started in the 60s. It was not just Watergate, but Vietnam, I think to some extent after after Eisenhower left. And then politics became so acerbic and and angry, angry, viciously angry at times in the Nixon Kennedy election.

21:57 And because one side of that one, everyone on the other side got really quite pissed off for some reason. Well, for obvious reasons. And so that consensus society started falling apart and it started becoming this more polarized and fractured society that we certainly now live in where everything is sort of niche and there is no consensus really on anything much anymore. And and so, yeah, they were fighting against certainly the more radical and subversive elements of that, while also trying to assert themselves and brand themselves because the CIA, all the people knew the CIA existed in the 40s and 50s, but officially they didn't really confirm or deny much of anything. But then post Bay of Pigs, the failure at the Bay of Pigs in the early 60s, a lot of people were suddenly thinking, well, 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 they actually had to try and brand and and PRFI the CIA itself. They had to turn it into something that what did have a public image, whereas I mean, even, excuse me, even that concept of a spy agency, a secret agency, having a public image is itself kind of self contradictory and paradoxical. And yet it's what they've been doing since at least the early 60s. Why? And just as a parallel in this country, at the same time, you get the James Bond movies, the early James Bond movies. Now, the British government at that time didn't admit that MI 6 existed. In fact, they often denied that it existed, even though lots of people knew it existed. And yet you still have this very public branding of MI 6 through the James Bond novels and the James Bond films. So it's like you can talk about this in Hollywood while the government itself is still pretending it. It's not a real thing.

23:40 It doesn't exist anymore. So again, paradoxical PR, if you see what I mean. Certainly, Certainly. Yeah. And I imagine that one job, but I think that one job is so much harder, you know, And I mean, I just know this from my own experience. I teach high school and I find it so much easier to direct a stream of the students and the populate the general population. I find it so much easier to kind of feel out where they are and then help. OK, I see that you guys are really antsy today. Let's direct the class to something that's a little bit more oriented towards conversation as opposed to just sitting and reading or writing, right? Or you guys are looking a little tired today. So let's, you know, let's, let's take things a little differently as A and, and that's a much easier job. It's a much easier it's much easier to be effective when you're trying to do that as opposed to when people are, you know, if it then if my student 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 because you're not meeting people with where they are. And so I imagine that the propaganda. Or even meeting them halfway, right? Yeah, sure, sure. Exactly. And I imagine the propaganda job is, is, is that much more difficult when there's a huge sentiment like, why are we in Vietnam, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and I think that and, and, and, and for better, for worse. When we have a breakdown, for example, and, you know, for modern, a modern reference, if you ask the Trump administration today why they went to Venezuela, you know, why we did what we did in Venezuela, you literally get 3 or 4 different responses depending who you're talking to. You know, Marco Rubio is going to say one thing, Trump's going to say something else. Pete Headset is going to say something else. Tulsi Gabbard's going to say something else. And, and each of them probably have their own perspective that they're coming from, but it's weird because there's not like this organized facade anymore.

25:30 It feels too uncoordinated and there's too much, there's too many flying parts for anyone to even be to have this organized facade. It just it feels like it's really hard to contain. It is. There are too many spinning plates. The world has got more and more complicated, more and more populated. The economies are in most countries are in not great shape. Widespread consensus, any kind of democratic consensus doesn't really seem to exist anymore. Normalized trust has fallen through the floor in Western society. Most people in most Western societies don't trust public institutions, don't even necessarily trust other people just generally in the society that much anymore. And So what you're seeing, I think it as a reaction from the system is it's attempting to become more authoritarian in order to try to maintain its position of authority.

26:19 But as it becomes more authoritarian, more people are rebelling against it, or at least becoming cynical and distrustful of it. And so that dynamic is just, it's a, it's a race to the bottom. It's a downward spiral because the more people distrust the government, the harder the government tries to mess with their heads and, and just lie about everything that they're doing in order to try and maintain their position. But they can't actually to maintain that position because trust is just sinking through the floor anyway. So you see what I mean? It's a downward spiral in democratic politics. Not that I'm a huge fan of elective democracy. I'm just saying from a from the point of view of someone observing this, that's what it feels like to me. That's what it looks like to me. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Listen, I, I, I, I don't think. And I think that this is also another thing that's come up with a partisan and polarized world.

27:05 I don't think there's anything wrong with criticizing, with having some, with having love for something and pointing out a flaw in a, in a way that it could be better, you know, like, and, and the fact that people take that as an as an offense or an insult is it's just so bizarre to me. If you told me, hey, I think you're, I think you're a great podcast host. It would have been really helpful if you interrupted me a little bit less. I'm going to say screw you, pal. Like you know, you, you're not you're on my side. You're not on my side. I feel like, OK, I appreciate the foot and the feedback. If that's if that's something I've been blind to, I'm not aware of or I was aware of, but I do need to hear that reinforcement. Great. Please go ahead. You know, but. We all need a little negative reinforcement. We all need a little positive reinforcement. Generally I try and I try to be more positive and encouraging when I do criticize people. But other times I do just lose 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 in the things that we say. But you're right, it is, it's not just polarized, it's it's fractured. There's a, there's a real spectrum here where anyone who exists in any particular political and social demographic is trained almost in within that bubble and certainly encouraged and conditioned within that bubble to be suspicious of anything from any other bubble. And so, and you have to be loyal, you have to be very, very loyal to the bubble. So even if you're inside it and you say, well, actually, I mean, for the most part, I love this political movement. I agree with most of its principles. I'm I'm on board with trying to elect this candidate or whatever. But I do have some problems 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 we're suggesting. You have to be completely loyal to us because otherwise you're a secret Trumpist or a secret Democrat or a secret this secret Zionist, whatever. And it's like, you're allowed to be multifarious. You're allowed to have more than one opinion about something. You're allowed to feel more than one thing. We contain multitudes. Each individual contains multitudes and is more than one thing. But certainly politically these days in terms of the media politic landscape that we find ourselves in is supposed to be just this thing. You're a part of this demographic, you're part of this political movement. You have these beliefs and any variation on that is treated with suspicion and quite often hostility. But we do we, we contain more than one thing.

29:18 We are complex beings and we should just be fucking honest about that, to be honest. I I hear hear. I could not agree. I could not agree with you more. I I totally agree. I wanted to ask, I, I, I, when I was going through your timeline, I didn't notice that there was sometimes where, and you do make this fair, to be clear, which is I want to ask you, there are times where you say that I don't have a record of support from whatever government institution, but there are signs of support on particular films, right? And I'm not even bringing up any particular example unless you want to provide me with one. But I just did notice that you do that sometimes where you say, you know, there's no official record of the CIA or the FBI supporting this film.

30:00 However, there are signs, there are signs of support. But what what would what would indicate whether a movie or film or a television show has has the support of an agency or not? And how would you identify it? But. With the CIA, it's quite complicated and difficult because they lie about everything all the time. But it can be something as simple as a piece of stock footage of CIA headquarters at Langley. You don't necessarily have to go to the CIA to get that, but for the most part people do. So you see something like that in a film, you think, have they at least gone and got some kind of courtesy support? Just a little bit of stock footage, that aerial panning shot of Langley that we've seen 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 and all of that. You don't necessarily have to get the CI as permission to make a some kind of thing up on the wall or on the floor or whatever to show that it is ultimately public domain. But still, do you really think Hollywood film makers are just going to go fuck the CIA? What are they going to do to us? No, they're going to, they're going to go and ask permission. And if even if it's just a little bit of permission here, a little bit of help there, a little bit of technical advising or consultancy that's essentially off the books, that happens all the time. And so these little hallmarks of CIA support or just for example, if if a filmmaker, TV producer hires a former CIA officer as a consultant, what relationship does that consultant have with the agency? Because they are being hired to talk about the CIA and they are supposed to send everything that they publish about the CIA through the pre publications Review Board. Do they do that with technical advice and consultancy? Because some of these people have said in interviews, public interviews have said, actually, I run everything that I do on the agency past the agency's 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 not. But so that's another one of those little hallmarks of were the agency involved possibly at one stage removed or something in this maybe. And it is how they like to do things. They do like to recruit assets and not necessarily do the things themselves as CIA officers, but find someone else to do it for them. So there's also this, this lawyer, Rich Klein, who I mentioned, I've mentioned loads of times on my side. I emailed him actually try to get him on the podcast like you get them. I, I came across, I, I, I found his e-mail and I was like, I want to hear about your experience, man. Well, there are CIA documents that describe him as a long time contact of the Office of Public Affairs at Langley, which to me just says CIA asset. I mean, that's what that means.

32:38 Ultimately, this guy was, he's a lawyer. He was in the State Department, I think under the Clinton administration in the 90s. He then joined Kissinger Mclarty. So Henry Kissinger and Mack Mclarty's law firm that then split into two law firms. And Rich Klein went off with Mclarty and started running this offshoot or office within that firm called MC Clarty Media. It's a media consultancy. And he said, he said in interviews, I'm not really a movie guy. And so I'm left wondering why on earth are you that now this movie consultant for this inside the Beltway Washington, DC law firm? It doesn't. That just doesn't quite add up to me, Rich, to be honest. 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. It's because you are clearly some kind of CIA asset. But there again, if he's working on say, a Transformers film, something that doesn't depict the agency at all, does that imply that they had any influence on that? Maybe, maybe not. It's another one of those little hints that you have to think through and think what what would be the CI as interest in this? And is part of it just about developing relationships, winning friends, influencing people? And it's, and it's part of it actually about influencing content, the stuff that we see when we actually turn on the screen and and watch something. Often I don't know is the answer. Often I simply don't know to what extent the CIA were involved in something.

34:03 But I included all of that stuff in the timeline because I was trying to be as be as comprehensive as possible. There's no point in doing something like that without trying to be as comprehensive as possible. Yeah, and to be fair, you again, you did it. You did an awesome job. I wouldn't have even thought. I also reached out to another gentleman that that that popped up on your on your list quite a bit, Robert Baer. Yeah. Reach out to him before I before I even knew that you before you before I read your timeline, which is how I just I was like, that's great validation to know that I'm heading the right direction. I'm trying to reach out to people that you already that you've been, I guess pre vetting for me. I appreciate that. So, you know, I was just like, because I would love to just hear what their what their perception is and what and, and what their and what their answers to the public would be. Just like, Hey, tell me about your experience and like, what, what, what was that about and why, how did you get involved? Why are you involved?

34:55 Do you like it? You know, and and kind of just hear the human end of their justification to themselves, because I think a lot of people don't especially you get approached. And I feel like this way about I've been showing my high school class the movie Miracle since I've been teaching high school. And that's about that 1980 hockey US Olympic team that the fought the Soviets. And the movie provides an enormous amount of context into what was going on at the time, You know, the Iranian, the Iranian embassy hostages and the, the issues with gas, the shortage in the country and, and Watergate was fresh in everyone's mind. And I just one mess after the next. And then, you know, this scrappy team of, of, of college players come together, Team USA, this underdog team that, that skates and beats the Soviets and, and I show this movie my class. I think, you know, not all propaganda is necessarily bad propaganda.

35:47 Not all this, this, this encourages A scrappy effort and unity and working together and, and whatever, whatever you think of kind of the, the notion of, let's say, deleting the individual identity for the sake of a larger country and a larger purpose. Whether you agree with that or not, I can definitely hear the argument being made. And I'm sure a lot of people really feel like they're doing their patriotic duty to the country by having a positive impact on the way Americans perceive America, you know? In short, not all propaganda is inherently evil. I agree with that. I mean, and pretty much everything in media is propaganda anyway of some sort or another. And even even a film, even some of the worst films that I've seen from a political point of view, stuff where I really hate the politics that it's trying to inject into the minds of its audience.

36:38 Sometimes I still quite enjoy it as a movie, just as a thing to watch. You can feel more than one thing and have more than one reaction to something. And I think that's. What movies? What movies bother you like that, can I ask? I'm sorry I hate to cut you off, but just what examples of movies? One of the best examples is the first Iron Man film, because that's AUS Air Force sponsored kind of mythologizing of the war in Afghanistan to some extent. And where the central character gives this lovely press conference where he speaks out against the military industrial complex and how he's, you know, spent most of his life making weapons that have just cost people their lives and destroyed property and, you know, just made things worse.

37:19 And then he proceeds to make this incredibly high tech weapon. And the rest of the film is actually about watching him blow stuff up. So there is a a contradiction there in terms of is this film actually criticizing the war in the military industrial complex or not? Is it glamorizing it or not? It's a little difficult to say. Certainly there's a lot of politics in that film that that bugs me and that frankly, I disagree with a lot of it. Nonetheless, it's an enormously entertaining film. And Robert Downey Junior was perfectly cast as Tony Stark. And it's really fun to watch. It just is a really fun superhero origin story. The first Wonder Woman film actually feel the same about. I really like the first Wonder Woman film just as a piece of cinema, but it is this mythologizing of World War One has some weird gender politics in it.

38:05 I have to say some stuff that I find a bit predatory and disturbing. It certainly in moments in a film it's like that. And it ends up, as with so many of these films, in this massive, overly laden CGI, overly long, overly loud, sensorily overwhelming, bloody battle sequence that doesn't really tell us anything. It doesn't add that much to the film. And that was supported by the British military, the British Ministry of Defence, a lot of these sorts of films. When I find out who, who actually supported them, I'm like, that makes sense. That's why it has that sort of politics. It's either something that that institution has insisted on in some cases or at least encouraged in others, or just film makers know if we want their help, we have to flatter their preconceptions and we have to flatter their agendas. And it sometimes it's difficult to know exactly what's happened in any individual case, but I'm just using these superhero movies as examples because 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 superhero movies and how a lot of them are propaganda. What's the cause? I'd love to read it. Superheroes movies and was it no hang on superhero movies and the state or is it superheroes movies and the state? I keep forgetting it's the most recent book I've written. I can't bloody remember the title anyway, it's the one. It's the one I wrote with Tricia Jenkins. People can if they look up Tom Seka, Tricia Jenkins superhero book I'm. Sure, because movies and the state have the US government shaped cinema. Oh man, I am so excited to read this book. I'm ordering this right now, by the way. I love this because you know what? And if this is half as well sourced as as the rest of your site, I'm sure that I'm going to love it. So then in that case, and can I, I ask now, how do you, and I've been thinking a lot about this for my own life, how do you filter information, find information that you feel like is reliable that isn't just propaganda?

39:51 I have my own answer that I've really been thinking about a lot recently, but I'd love to hear your perspective on this. Well, that's a tricky one, because some of the some of this is theoretical, some of this is more philosophical or spiritual, where you just have to try to. Approach things from lots of different angles. Try and spin them around 45��, ninety degrees, 180��, spin them on different axes and just see what does this look like from different perspectives. There's also just a quality of source material thing. If you're talking about news media or any kind of journalism is what's the quality of sources? Is it all anonymous officials who were quoted saying such and such off the record, deep background. Well, those people could be anyone and they could be saying anything and that journalist could just be making the whole damn thing up because no one checks this stuff.

40:37 Editors don't give a damn. They don't check this stuff. They don't actually say, well, I want to hear the recording of the phone conversation you had with this source. They just assume that their journalist is either telling the truth or they just don't care if they're making it up. So I mean, this is one of the reasons why I'm so frankly obsessive and fetishistic about publishing documents on my site is to show this is the actual paper trail I've been able to find. You might not agree with every interpretation Ioffer of it. You might see other things in it that I've missed. Of course. Please, please look and try and figure that out for yourselves. That's one of the reasons why I put it out there is so that at least people have the primary source material. At least they can actually go as close to the source as possible, the sort of origin server of the propaganda machine, and see what it actually is doing and has done and has said about itself.

41:26 Yeah, like I say, different interpretations are always possible. People can criticize things and analyse things from different angles than I can. I'm only one person. By trying to see things from lots of different angles, by drawing together, you know, reading a lot of history books, I've read a lot of philosophy, critical theory, just loads and loads of different stuff. Listen to interviews with different people, listen to podcasts with different people. And try and just let all of that not necessarily wash, wash over you, but get into your head. So it's there and it's available to you. So when you are being lied to, you're a bit more likely to go. I've heard something about this before and I think this person might be lying to me or at least making something up to some degree. So at least you can filter out the crap. That's the main thing.

42:08 It's like there are no perfect sources of information. My website is not perfect. I am not perfect. I'm not claiming that at all. I just try and be better than most and I try and be as open source about where I got this information from as I possibly can and provide it just as a public resource, as a thing for the sheer number of journalists and students and academics and teachers and so on who've got in touch with me over the years. Either to say I found this really useful, this thing I found on your site, or asking me, do you have anything more on this? Do you have any other unpublished files? And trust me, I have files I will never get around to publishing. I may one day do a massive document dump without any analysis or anything. It's your links to everything I've never published that I've just, you know, never found the time to upload and sort through and write about. I might do that someday.

42:53 But seriously, if you are interested in this and there is something that sort of, there's a little bit of it on my site, but you may be thinking, well actually I'd like to know about some other films like that. You can e-mail me. And if I've got any further documents on it, I will just send them to people. I'm not in any way try to keep this secret or holding anything back. I want this stuff to be out there. I want people to use it. I want people to read it, whether they're writing a master's dissertation or they're writing an article for some media outlet or if they're just interested in it, or if you're just interested in this thing and want to learn more, you can feel free to e-mail me. Or I mean, some people know my my social media or phone number or whatever, but mostly it just emails the best. If you get me in in touch with me like that, I will happily 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. I'm happy to do it. Yeah, and I appreciate it. And again, this is, this is fun work. It's important work. And it's really, and it's and it's interesting too that that that's what I love about it. It's, it's so, it's so niche, but so relevant. And one of the three reasons, the reason why I, the reason why I became fascinated or even obsessed with the film world to begin with was because when I was younger, I was in high school and I was always getting rejected by, by any girl that I was friends with that, that you know, that I ever dreamt, dreamt to be more than that. And, and I was, and I called myself this hopeless Roman, yeah, I'm OK now, this hopeless romantic. And I thought to myself one day I was talking to a couple of friends of mine.

44:20 I'm like, what does it even mean to be romantic? And like, every time I think romantic, I think of like an Adam Sandler movie walking on the beach and 51st dates or something like that. And I don't even know what the word means. And then I realized how much of my understanding of everything I've kind of left up to, to to film and to movies and to entertainment that to dictate to me what things should be. And, and in some cases it's better. In some cases I realize it was worse. And I said, you know, I want to be a part of this to try to have a positive, you know, influence. But I think that I think that I think that people realize this. And I think the work that you're doing is really, really cool and really, really fun. And again, spyculture.com and I'll put the link to it in the in the in the what do you call it in the show notes for sure. The way the way you described is very similar to what I actually had concluded as well, which was pretty much, I feel like we can end the film world is kind of like this too. We can either live in a world where an algorithm algorithm is pushed on us, or we can kind of build our own algorithm of our own trains of thought.

45:21 And what you said about history, I thought was particularly insightful and relevant because the more that the more that I'm, you know, keeping up with current events while simultaneously reading history or learning, learning about the places that the current events are occurring in, the more I realize that nothing really has been is that new and, and all this has been done before. And so one of the best markers of how of ways to determine information I've noticed is to find a, is to find a simple and reasonable motive like money, for example. You got to make money.

46:02 You got to have profits. You know, if there's a war in Venezuela, are we trying to kidnap their, you know, their, their, their leader. What you know, what, what, what, what, what is there to follow is that, you know, historically, have we ever been involved in Venezuela? Who has relationships with Venezuela historically? And what have they been importing or exporting and what are they valuing? And then you say, it's so easy to see, you know, but all you had to do is do a couple of a couple of you had to do a couple of deep dives or listen to a couple of podcasts about the history or read a book or two. You could sit on the couch and let everyone yell at you what they think it is. And the more that you engage in it, the more specific the bubble's going to be. But that's allowing the algorithm to happen to you as opposed to you shaping your own your own perspective, I feel like. I mean, absolutely, I agree with that. I don't use social media much partly because it's now been so algorithms that it's impossible 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 the TV shout at you kind of approach to understanding the world will just make me put people more shallow and more impulsive. Rather than be a being able to have that self-discipline to reflect and challenge their own assumptions. And maybe clear out some of this accumulated soul baggage and soul poison that we've been subjected to in a lot of ways or sometimes allowed into ourselves over the years or decades that we've been alive. And you're right, this sort of this sort of propaganda, cultural propaganda in particular, has been around for as long as human civilization has been around.

47:35 I I was a theatre studies student at school and one of the things we learnt about, yeah, shocker. Yeah. One of the things we learnt about was how in ancient Athens, a lot of the plays that they put on were designed to be cathartic for the audience. They were designed to help cleanse the the citizens and civilians of Athenian society, ancient Athenian society, of whatever was plaguing them, of whatever was bothering them, that there was a psychological or soulful aim here. And OK, that was something imposed by the Athenian elites and then almost unabashedly, and it's something we know quite a lot about now. If you if you're fascinated by ancient Athens, as I have sometimes been, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is it partly good?

48:22 Is it partly bad? Was it sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing? Consider those kinds of perspectives rather than this sort of knee jerk. It has to be good or it has to be bad or it is propaganda. Therefore it's this, you know, that kind of impulsive, shallow. It's this. Therefore it has to be that or it has to be this thing, all that thing. It can't be both. It can't be neither. That in particular I'd I'd say is one of the most important critical thinking skills to to develop and to try and internalize is whenever anyone is telling you it's either one thing or another, this binary thinking, you have to make a binary choice between it's either pro this thing or anti this thing. Ask yourself the question, is it both or neither to try and remind yourself of that question and you'll, you'll make a, a quantum leap forward in your critical thinking and your ability to resist the easy temptation of just going, Oh, well, it has to be one of these things. So I'll just pick, I'll pick inside the column A of column B. So I'll pick column B and and 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. Have the self-discipline and the self respect to go. I think this is actually a bunch of crap, and it's neither. I think there's another perspective here where there might even be a hundred other perspectives here. Or maybe it's actually both simultaneously, as paradoxical and self contradictory as that might appear. Sometimes paradoxical self contradictory things are true. Yes, a lot of times they are. A lot of times they are. Yeah. I, I mean, I don't know if I don't know if this made you its way into the, into the UK news cycle, but in the States, we're having this, you know, enormous conflict with ICE in the state of Minnesota just the other day. It looks, it doesn't look good. I don't know the full context, but there was this, this, this, I, I believe an ICU nurse was, was killed by ICE and he had, and he had a, and he had a gun on him, although he had never taken it out.

50:10 They only discovered that he had the gun once he was, I think already getting kind of beaten up a little bit or pushed around a little bit. And then once they discovered the gun, I think that was an excuse to go, you know, to continue whatever they're up to, which is essentially I, it's killing him. I mean that they, they, he was, he was killed as from what I see from my, from from what I was able to see from the from the. Video. I agree. And, and then do this enormous immediate response on the right and again, a right that, that I'm not criticizing for the sake of criticizing because I don't like the left or the right or I don't like, I'm historically left or right. I'm not. I, I, I, I haven't been historically politically anything because everything has been so inconsistent that it's that I've had my own values and everyone's been letting me down 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 go to protest, like you can't carry a gun if you go to protest. If you said the same thing three-year, if, if the Joe Biden administration or the Obama administration said the same thing, you would be on the street with pitchfork say, you know, I mean, I don't even know what you're talking about. And so to demand that your that that that your base abandoned their values to be on your side is it is, is, is just, I mean, if politics feels like Hollywood now, politics feels like it's an extension of Hollywood. Tim Dylan, who's an awesome comedian and very, very funny, and I'm split about what I think about what he thinks, but I think that he's endlessly entertaining and brilliant.

51:42 And I think that he says the same thing. He's like, it just feels like this is just like a it's just a show. It's a movie and it just feels dumb at this point. And I can't help but but think that a lot of people around the world are becoming more and more aware of this and feel that way very, very strongly. For sure. I mean, politics is just Hollywood for ugly people. As was it Jack Valenti said that or something. Anyway, whoever it was who said that, it's just. It's a great phrase. It's a great quote. Yeah. This is what they do. They just gaslight people. They light them up and they. I mean, they, they killed that guy, certainly. And from what I've seen, I've mostly, I don't know if it's actually been in the English British media cycle much at all. I followed it.

52:23 What I know about that, I followed through the project on government oversight, which is, in my opinion, a very good organization. They do a lot of good e-mail bulletins. And I actually get caught up on quite a lot of things quite quickly that way. But yeah, they they project on government oversight. I think it's pogo.org. Certainly I recommend people taking a look at their e-mail newsletters and maybe signing up for those. It's a much better way than to it. For sure. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. So anyway, I'm sorry, continue your thought. I'm sorry. Well, this is what it's going to say, that they've somehow convinced, like you say, if this has been Biden who'd said this, that you can no longer in any way have a gun at a protest. I think there are quite substantial portions of people on the on the right, particularly the libertarian right, who would be absolutely apoplectic about this.

53:09 They would be rejecting it. They would be saying this is government authoritarianism. We're not going to stand for this. We're not going to take this. And in my opinion, to some extent, quite rightly, if I lived in the States, I, they don't know. I suppose it depends which part of the states I lived in as to whether I would have a gun. I certainly don't have some kind of blanket. No one should ever own private firearms. People own private firearms in this country. And it's not, it's not like a significant problem as far as I can tell, outside of, you know, gangland and, you know, organized crime. It's mostly, it's mostly just people who I don't know, maybe do a bit of hunting, maybe they live on farms or something. It's much more of a rural thing than a city thing in this country. But at any rate, you're right that that sheer hypocrisy of, oh, we're now accepting, we're now somehow being gas lit into believing that this principle that we've stood by and there's been a real sort of maybe it's not a principle, just a general attitude in politics for a long, long time that we don't want the government dictating to us whether or not we're allowed to carry firearms or what exactly 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 been maintained by the American right for a long time. And yet all it takes is to suggest, oh, because it's about now about immigration, It's now about ICE and immigration enforcement. Oh, now you have to be on the side of that. So now you have to choose, are you in favor of privately owned firearms or are you in favor of cracking down on the, on the so-called bleeding illegal immigrants, whoever, whoever the hell you think these people are? And I mean, it's not like you can tell by looking at someone where they were born or whether they've got certain paperwork and so on and so on. And yeah, from what I understand, the ICE officers, if you want to call them that escalated that situation. They basically picked a fight, escalated it, and then when things started to go bad, they killed someone. And it's just the same as we've seen from police and FBI and all sorts of, especially government federal agencies and the big city police departments.

55:03 They do this sort of thing all the time. They provoke situations, they pick fights, they escalate them. And if anyone fights back, suddenly the person who's fighting back is the problem, but they're not. Wrist is what they call them. Something like that lone wolf whatever, some sort of absurd media label. But it's, it's just bollocks to be honest. It's just bullshit. People are allowed to reject the authority of the state. They're allowed to fight back against it, especially when it's actively impressing them in that moment. It's not, it's not like this person went and shot a politician because of something they said three years ago. That's, that's, that's a very, very different thing that we're talking about. People are allowed to rebel against the government. If you're not allowed to rebel against the government, then 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 pretty much no one does. Well, some people do, but, but I think that they don't, they don't think about the repercussions. I think. And I'm actually trying to teach my students about a lot of that stuff now. I'm teaching them the, the the giver. Now, I don't know if you if you remember that book, but that was that was that was a really good example of it. Yeah. And you know what? And I don't think there's anything wrong. Like I've had friends that brought it up to me because it's funny. I tend to be on the left-leaning end of my, you know, for my right wing friends and then more right wing for my left wing left-leaning friends. But they're like, what do you think of this Sound like, dude, I think it's terrible. Every time a government agent kills a civic kills a citizen of their of their, of their government period.

56:26 Like if you want to talk about how it has to escalate the particular one off, whether it could have happened or whether it shouldn't have happened, you know, we could talk about that particular case. I was like, but dude, like you can say I want to get rid of the let's say whatever you say you are against having the, the immigrants in this country undocumented or illegal or we're trying to get them out. Let's say you're for that. That doesn't mean you're for government killing citizens like that one. A does not equal B. They're not mutual. They're not mutually exclusive. And it's not fair to, it's, it's not fair to ask people to line themselves up with that camp and again, throw away all their values. But I, I digress. I'm going to talk. I want to, I want to actually, I want to ask your thoughts, if you don't mind. And maybe this is a little bonkers, but I don't know if it is, what's your thoughts on the relationship between the government, Hollywood, aliens, or a little bit more of the paranormal stuff?

57:21 Because there's a lot of documentation that the government at least takes this stuff very seriously. There's a lot of, there's a lot I, I don't know, I have to actually find the hard documents about Spielberg being associated with the government. But certainly I heard that there's, there's a lot of relationships there. Do you have anything on that or do you know anything? About that, Well, Spielberg has definitely made a whole bunch of films that were supported by government agencies, an awful lot of which star Tom Hanks, if you want to. Yeah, for some reason he's, he's just addicted to making state sponsored propaganda with Tom Hanks relief was for about 20 years. You know, certainly the the aliens thing that has shifted. It used to be for a long time that the military would reject any UFO movie, extraterrestrial movie, anything like that. They had a big fight on Independence Day in the mid 90s over whether or not they were going to support that film, which included bizarre stuff like some military official actually wrote a memo saying that the Area 51 facility that they go to in the third act of the film, second third act of the film, that that should actually not be run by the government in any way.

58:29 And they wanted it to be some kind of, you know, nonprofit, fairly vague organization, sort of non state in some fashion. And one of these military officials even suggested having that facility be run by an extraterrestrial disguised as a human being. So this is some kind of, you know, David Icke, lizard man, shapeshifter, I don't know what. It's a really bizarre thing to read in one of these one of these documents. Like what do you make of that? Well, maybe that military official just liked David Icke like that sort of idea. I don't know. But certainly since the certainly since the turn of the 2000s, the military has now been involved in a tonne of extraterrestrial and UFO movies. Spielberg's version of War of 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 on a podcast discussing it some years ago and it was just kind of like petty gripes, the podcast. Every single scene we had some kind of gripe out, pretty much. It's a good time and I hope you had a couple of Guinness, a couple of beers of you or something like that. We do, we do have a good time talking about that and having having a good bitch about the film. But that had that an absolute ton of military support of all the, all the documents that I've been able to find on that, they're all on my site now. And then into the late 2000s, early 2000 and 10s, you get Pacific Rim and that battle Los Angeles and a whole bunch of other alien or extraterrestrial invasion movies. The first Superman Warner DC Universe film, Man of Steel, is essentially an alien invasion.

1:00:07 Film. It's not really a superhero film, it just happens to have Superman in it. It's otherwise a moderately generic alien invasion film. Loads of military support on that one. On and on. I mean, you can. You can lead. Read a list of these things on my site. Captain Marvel was a centrepiece of this. It was a centrepiece of this effort to try to essentially weaponize the UFO movie to promote the militarization of space. And they've been trying to push some version of the military's been trying to push some version of this, you know, boots on the moon, bases on the moon, some kind of satellite based weaponry since I think the early 70s was as far back as I was able to, to find anything on it. So that has been building for a while. And when you see in the 2000 and 10s, you have all of these UFO declassifications, all of these videos, all of these documents, they're suddenly saying, actually, we've had a ton of this stuff for decades and we're now just going to dump it all online.

1:01:03 Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, UFO files from the Navy, the Air Force, whoever, same in this country. British Ministry of Defence just started dumping. Yeah, vast amounts of documentation through the National Archives, finally admitting that. Yeah, actually we seem to have had a whole bunch of. It's not just some crackpot who's stoned and sat on a hillside who's claimed they've seen a UFO. It's actually our own military officials who are saying they've been abducted at times and things like that. So whether or not you believe those things, make your own judgment calls. I, I don't know, actually, a lot of the time I'm not sure why I think of a lot of that stuff, but certainly there is this thing in the 2000 and 10s when Space Force got on the military agenda again, they started pushing it in Hollywood in 2015 I believe. And this was done covertly.

1:01:49 This wasn't done through specific film projects they were working on. It was actually a producer at Marvel at the time called Jeremy Latcham, who Trisha interviewed for our superhero book, superhero movie book. And he said there was this senior Air Force Colonel general, certainly a high up official, high up officer in the Air Force hierarchy, who was out in Hollywood shortly after the 2nd Avengers movie came out, Avengers Age of Ultron. And that was in 2015, two thousand and 1516. Before Trump even gets elected the first time, the US military are pushing Space Force in Hollywood and pushing the weaponization and militarization of Space Force in Hollywood.

1:02:31 So then Trump comes in and he sort of latches onto this thing. It was obviously a Pentagon plan. It's I know it was branded as a Donald Trump thing. It wasn't. The Pentagon were pushing this for years, if not decades before Trump ever even got into office the first go round. And then he becomes so, you know, makes this big announcement, this whole new branch of the military, all the rest of it. And around the time that Trump starts making these announcements, the Air Force ran a tour essentially kind of junk it for Hollywood types going to Space Command. And among the people who went on that tour were the producers and the two Co directors of Captain Marvel. So then Captain Marvel comes out right as Space Force is being 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 did an episode on Captain Marvel and I've done other articles on this. This was clearly a concerted and coherent propaganda effort to take the supposed threat of alien invasion and use it through Hollywood among other means, but through Hollywood as a justification for militarizing and weaponizing space. It's like it's the new threat. It's no longer or alongside the terrorists and the ISIS and Russians and Chinese and all the other threats that they constantly bombard us with and tell us are they sort of existential threat, existential risk to our civilizations. It's now we've got to worry about the the you know, green headed multi eyed Martians or whatever, whoever, whoever the hell they are in all these different films.

1:03:59 And so many of those films are supported by the military. The CIA has had a slightly different history with this because sometimes they've actually pushed or encouraged ufology as a subculture. They've sometimes, it seems, been involved in UFO movies going back to the day the Earth stood still in the early 1950s. That some people believe was some kind of CIA experiment to see how people would respond to this or what they thought of it or to just put the idea out there. You know, just trying to acclimatize people to this idea that there might be a big alien invasion or alien alien arrival at some point. And maybe it's already happened and it just all got covered up 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 seems there was most of the evidence tends towards something happened there, but what the hell it actually was. I don't know. I I mean, I, I haven't dug into it in great depth or anything, but just I mean as much of how. Contact. The what? Once the what? Sorry. It was called moment of contact. I don't. I've only become aware of it very recently and it was about a Brazilian case where apparently a crashed UFO and beings were not only recovered, but actually, and there's records of this. There was a, there was an alien or not human entity that was taken to a that was taken to two regional hospitals in Brazil. 1 turned it away at the door and the other one got checked out And the officer that had handled actually like scooped up the injured being got a little bit of bacteria under its nail, his nail and died very short very shortly after. And then they just got when you locked this up just the other, just the other day, the head neuro, the head neurosurgeon, I believe at the hospital to, to come before Congress and say that I had contact.

1:06:05 I had eyes on this being for several minutes and was and, and, and, and, and he had, and, and then there was a group of other doctors that had worked with him for 3035 years that all are testifying to his very sound state of mind and being. And like, you don't know what, that, what that meat, you know, I mean, and I, I, I, I, if you're interested in this kind of thing or like the potential truth of it, moment of contact and, and a lot of work is being, is unfolding in real time right now. And I don't know what to make of it either. Like this stuff is this stuff is wild, but it does feel like we've been like I, I, there's a very, it feels like it's been a slow drip exposure event that like over the course of time, people are becoming more and more, you know, through film and through lore and through podcasts and through information, people are becoming more and more open to this concept when particular in America, it's it's so ridiculed, it's crazy.

1:07:01 And well, I think it's it's simultaneously being normalized and ridiculed, which makes it a little difficult to understand what's the agenda here? Is it only one agenda or the multiple agendas in terms of the propaganda around this particular subject? Sure. Like countering the thing that bothers me the most about it is that people see this thing, that OK, so we do seem to be getting more and more evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. And that is most likely, it would seem by now, unless all of these things are somehow fabricated or all of these things are somehow hallucinations. It seems that there has been some kind of alien crash, alien visitations, abductions, things like that. These things do seem to have happened. As. As if I had to, if I had to hedge my bets, that's the side I'd go on.

1:07:44 Yeah, but how, how is the system responding to that? Is it saying actually, it says this could be a great thing, This could actually be an amazing thing for the human race? It's going no, no, no. They're a threat. There's something we have to militate against. There's something we have to be afraid of that we go back to that, you know, that that very negative energy, that very negative response to it. We we revert to the to seeing it as a national security threat when it's like, well, it isn't even a national security threat anyway. If it is a security threat, it's a global threat. But I don't really see it as a threat anyway. I mean. Because we're all here. Well, if this has been going on since the 40s or 50s, like everyone's been saying, or even longer than that, I mean, they loves us alone to be here for me and you to be talking, you know, I mean, like life is still going on. Things are OK.

1:08:32 And if anything, a lot of the speculation is that a lot of the great advancements that we've made have been have have been as, as, as a consequence of their technology. And so like you said, it doesn't seem like it's it's going to be a threat as much as an opportunity to evolve. Or just an opportunity to learn more and try to understand ourselves better, which I guess, yeah, I mean, that's what you're saying. That's a form of spiritual evolvement. Or yeah, yeah. Evolvement, but also technological evolvement. Evolution. It would seem that that is, again, if, if we, if we assume that these crashes and things and, and landings and whatever else has happened have taken place, it would make sense that some of that technology has been reverse engineered and understood and has found its way into something that we're now using.

1:09:17 I mean, does anyone really understand, for example, how the Internet works and where it came from? Because it's lots of different pieces from lots of different places that have to come together in a particular way for us to get the Internet that actually works, including things like encryption and decryption in the Internet. And you know, I won't get into a lengthy Babble about my concerns about exactly where the Internet came from and my questions about that. But all of these technologies that we now enjoy and many of which are really cool in terms of facilitating this conversation, for example, wouldn't be possible back in the 90s. We just wouldn't be able to have it. I don't think wouldn't even be able to get in touch. 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. And that's not that long ago. So that's great. You're. In the bucket, literal drop in the bucket relative to to everything else you know. And so I, I don't see it as a threat, partly just because I've spent my whole adult life living in this politics of fear world where almost everything is described in scary terms and everything is a threat. And it doesn't matter which person or type of person we're talking about, which country we're talking about, which I mean, people, people blather on about like social media being a threat. Well, it's just a technology. It depends on how we choose to use it and how we use it. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of apps and websites. It's not inherently threatening to anyone. So we have to make, we have to make better choices. To be honest with a lot of these things, and I'll say that, but I just, I generally reject this 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 because I mean, some people know this, a lot of people know this. I suffer from PTSD. I'm not going to get into exactly what's happened to me. It's caused that, but it's a long term, it's a long term condition. So I know fear. I know fear better than I think most people do, or at least I've lived with a lot more fear than a lot of people have. And so I kind of just almost reflexively reject it when the media tries to impose it on me, or when politicians try to impose it on me and others. And fuck that. No, we've got more than enough fear in this world. We don't need more. We don't need to artificially make people more traumatized and more fearful and more anxious and more stressed and more paranoid, because frankly, we've had enough.

1:11:36 We've suffered enough from this stuff anyway. I certainly have in my own life. I know loads of other people who have too. And so, yeah, I, I just almost knee jerk reflexively go, no, I don't, I don't buy this thing, this latest threat that you've lined up and you're now hyping up in the media and maybe you've been hyping up for years, decades, possibly centuries in some things, with some things. I just don't buy it. I don't want to buy it. And so unless someone shows me some incredibly compelling evidence that we are being bombarded by alien attacks without somehow noticing it, then I'm, I'm just, I'm just not buying that worldview. I'm not buying. It's not even a worldview. It's a universe view, a Galaxy view, a solar system view, whatever you want to call it. 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 control people is through fear, right, Because fear, I think my understanding of at least my fear of my fears in general, and I tend to be a pretty fearful person as as far as historically is, is the is I feel like fear for a lot of people is the is the in the the the cut you're you're not confident in your ability to handle the unknown or what you're about to face. And and and that's why people like familiarity. And that's how people prefer even to struggle with a similar issue than potentially face an unknown solution. That which is a famous expression that out of the the devil that you that you know, then the solution that you don't know. And I think that a lot of people feel like that. But I think that, listen, if you want to study people and big and, and groups of people and 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 political career. You don't have to look further than Biden's, Biden's presidency. I mean, the, the you, you can look anywhere and everything is just about a culture of and this is the worst thing ever. And like you said, you know, personal life is complicated enough. It's so hard to get through day-to-day and live your life as a human being and try to accomplish something and you know, and have meaningful relationships and really do something with yourself. It's hard enough to do that without the entire world imposing just one in one catastrophe after the next, just lining up and bombarding you with it all the time. So I commend you for for, for, for not playing that game and 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 thing. The the reasons, the the biggest driver of human behaviour is how people feel. If people feel less fear, less anger, they're likely to behave a lot better. They're likely to be able to. They react to things a lot better for one and, and, and be proactive in, in more ways. It can be hard, quite hard to be proactive in your own life when you're bombarded by fear because it is paralyzing. It does keep keep you in the same place. And it can be hard to confront or sometimes some people impossible to confront, at least for a time. You know, these things overcoming and and recovering from these things can take a lot of time. Just personally speaking and just, I know, I know a lot of people who suffered from various things and have a lot of trauma in their lives and they're sick 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 don't need any more fear and anger in my life today. I don't need to be paranoid and neurotic. I'm already paranoid and neurotic enough to be honest. Everyone I know that watches too much news is already already has enough anxiety and, and, and fear in their lives to, to, to, to be able to cut that out and still be and still have a have plenty to work on, you know? And so you're right, a lot, a lot of people do go for what's familiar because it seems to be comfortable. And we are simultaneously creatures of habit. And so we like the familiar and we like the things that we know and that we think we can rely on and feel we can rely on. But we are also creatures of imagination. And imagination can be pessimistic or optimistic. You can catastrophize and 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 loving and optimistic towards yourself, towards others, towards the future and think things can get better because they can using every single time I've I've hit the emotional rock bottom in my life, things have got better afterwards. And I keep trying to remind myself of that, that yeah, life can be really horrible at times, but it can also be fantastic at times. And that you can overcome these things and you can keep going and you can get better. And I say, maybe we need to somehow weaponize the optimistic imagination against the pessimistic imagination, or at least at least instrumentalize it against that. And that's, that will, that will get us somewhere that will improve us, that will lead to better societies and better individuals and just a more kind of compassionate and understanding and mutually accepting of differences and and so on and so on. All the things that a lot of people actually want from society, or at least would feel a hell of a lot better if that's what our our human civilization was more like. I think that's possible.

1:16:32 And it's not just I think it's possible. I know it's possible. I know it from my own life and I know it from the lives of others. Yeah, yeah. And that's the goal of this podcast. I mean, the goal of this podcast is to be that hopeful alternative and to say, yeah, I try that whatever, whatever, whatever rabbit hole I go down, there's, there's almost always something positive that could be done about it or something not even necessarily positive, but some some form of autonomy where you could take your own response and your own reaction into your own hands and do something about it in a way that is not necessarily what is prescribed to, you know, for you. And I think that's really, really valuable. And we can try and overcome conditioning. We can't always do it.

1:17:16 But there is more to human behaviour than just the BF Skinner conditioning and response. That's not all we are. We aren't just input output machines. We can have, we can do something about that. We can interrupt those conditioned, enculturated, impulsive responses to things, even if they're things that were driven into us as children. Some people can overcome those. I think everyone can overcome them at least a bit. And, and, and not feel quite so enslaved and not actually be quite so enslaved to these conditioned responses to things and to that mentality of pessimism and catastrophizing and falling down the emotional wells. You know, the spirals that I was talking about before, they're just as much individual psychological, emotional spirals as they are on mass.

1:18:00 On the scale of a country of three, 400 million people like you live in, it's the same thing. It's all the same feelings, ultimately. So we have to recognize that and we have to try and do something about it. And it isn't always possible, but it is often possible. Yeah, yeah, beautiful. I want to, I want to, I want to actually end with the last, you know, 10-12 minutes that we got if that's OK. I want to act. I want to talk to you a little bit about the separation of power and influence that you think because I we know and, and this is not with how just with Hollywood, this is with anything that is regulated.

1:18:42 It feels like has a revolving door with industry insiders and the regulators. And I, you know, and like you mentioned, you know, before we, we mentioned our buddy Rich, was it Rich Klein? Is that who that his name? You know, he seems to be one of these type of examples, but do you think the government, how much of A distinction do you think that there should be, for example, Right. And I know that this and I'm sure this does happen because I saw this on the site films that go ahead without CIA approval or without government approval. They want you to change this and they push back on a script about this. How much control do you think? Do you think they should say, hey, we'd like for you to do this, but do whatever you want or it's important that you do this because of it.

1:19:26 It it affects XY and Z situation. Do you think that there should be some kind of relationship or you think it should be completely fractured? I mean, ultimately I'm anarchist, so I don't think the federal government or any kind of government should exist. But within the existing superstructure and paradigm, I think it I think that the relationship is, it's fine to have some kind of access relationship to these assets, but they are publicly paid for assets. So why should these agencies be allowed to deny them to film makers? Because that's the real power that they have. Sometimes films on TV shows don't even get made because not because the government necessarily censors and blocks them, though that does happen, 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 aircraft carrier without access to an aircraft carrier. I mean technically I suppose you can try and do the whole thing with CGI, but it looks schlocky and digitized and sooner or later people will notice and lose interest because it looks like everything else. The real thing always looks a bit better. So if you can't get access to that aircraft carrier, you can't make your film or TV show set on it. It's that thing. It's that they have the power of denial and the power of softer or harder censorship, depending on exactly which project and what relationship they have with the film makers and so on and so on. It isn't always a uniform process on every single project they work on, but it is that power of denial, that power of refusing access.

1:20:51 Why shouldn't film makers who pay their taxes and all the rest of it, be able to access these things? All they're saying is we want to go and shoot a couple of scenes outside CIA headquarters or FBI headquarters or whatever it might be. Why should those agencies be allowed to turn them down because they don't like their content? That is actually a denial of critical speech or free speech against the government in some ways. That was if you call that a first, that would be that would be like a free speech that that that you're prohibiting free speech at that point is your, is your, is your take on that. Yeah, yeah, I, I, I agree with the, I'm not a constitutional law expert, of course, but I agree with some of the people who, who are, who've said they consider this a violation of the 1st Amendment.

1:21:34 And so why, why should film makers have their have their rights violated in that way? Why should audiences have their rights to be able to hear this kind of thing or see this kind of perspective on a screen or however they're consuming it? Why should they be denied that, especially when the number one reason why things get rejected and denied is that they're critical of the government in some fashion. It's not necessarily they're critical of an individual president or something like that. It's, it's the government in general, it's the institutions themselves. That's what they're really protecting. And I think that's wrong. I, I think it's deeply wrong. So if you are going to have this sort of relationship, it has to be 1 where you can't reject a request due to content. You might be able to reject a request because someone comes to you and says I want, you know, 115M1 Abrams tanks and you just don't have a spare 115 tanks on that day. I get that sometimes administratively people are do get a bit carried away and ask for the impossible, but if they're asking for something that loads of other film makers have had access to but you just don't like their script, I don't think that's a justifiable reason to deny them at all. And so it's either access for everyone or or access for no one.

1:22:43 Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. I couldn't believe I just watched Homeland for the first time this year and I could not believe that that that show was able to get made even. I mean, and, and, and, and, and according to your site, it looked like it got a lot of green lights from various government bodies, including the CIA. But that movie does not that show rather does not make the American government or American history look very good at all. And I am shocked with how far they're willing to go as far as, you know, this, these deep CIA agents or the CIA going row against the president or, or even this the drone campaign and everything that I didn't know any history about that. Even my, my, my parents who I told them to watch the show, they didn't know anything about that either. And it kind of highlights a really not great period of American history that I'm shocked that the agencies kind of let the show, the showrunners 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 military is obsessed with positive image imagery of itself the CIA seems to actually quite enjoy. I think it's partly because the CIA is sort of half stocked with statistic psychopaths. More. More than half. More than half, yeah. Maybe more than maybe more, but they they seem to they seem to enjoy this dark image of the CIA, this torturing, drone striking, murderous, completely corrupt, win at all costs means to an end kind of approach to the CIA because it scares people, it intimidates people. It means that people don't want to fuck with the CIA. It mean, it might even mean that the, the Russians or the Chinese or whoever else might be watching this overseas and thinking actually, if, if the CIA is kind of openly admitting on a, a popular network TV show that they do this stuff, maybe we shouldn't mess with them 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 reinforcement versus negative reinforcement. The the shows like, I don't know, Jack Ryan, Amazon's Jack Ryan that offers generally speaking, a very positive reinforcement of the CI as image. Homeland in some ways is much more negative in in a lot of places. I think it's a fantastic piece of television in most of its seasons. Some of them some of them aren't so good as others, but some of them are absolutely great. TVI. Mean it flips the whole war of terror on its head. It's, it's, it's really the whole Middle Eastern war. At least it flips on its head. And it really, it really brings up a lot. And it's funny because around, because just a couple months earlier, I was really doing a lot of homework and finding out what our, you know, how America kind of caused a lot of the War on Terror to ourselves.

1:25:27 And this brought that all to light. And I'm like, but if you're doing this, Americans aren't going to trust or people watching this aren't going to trust agendas anymore. And I understand what you're saying about the about trying to, you know, flex perhaps, or to show almost like almost in a psychopathic way. Hey, we're not even apologizing the way that we do things and you better watch out. But that's not a really good way to make friends and at a time. And and and this is obviously we could we can't start this with 5 minutes left. But as China with a with a massive economic and social and political is becoming a huge force. It's over. It's absolutely overtaking American majority of the world. I don't think that it's really beneficial to make ourselves look like a bunch of psychopaths, you know? You, you, you wouldn't because you're not psychopathic. But I do wonder it is a bit like the the psychopathic serial killer who when they're eventually caught, just confesses or other other psychopathic predators. When they're caught, quite a lot 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 much what happens to them. But also some of them like to boast. Some of them have that narcissistic quality of like, yeah, I killed 17 people and it's taken you 20 years to catch me. They actually want to boast about what what it is that they've done. So there may be an element of that in some of the CI as Hollywood PR. And I do think intimidation propaganda is a real thing. They want us to be scared of them. If you look at something like The Good Shepherd, which is this quite conspiratorial CIA sponsored film where it suggests that a lot of the CIA originates in the Skull and Bones Yale secret society or semi semi secret fratity, whatever you want to call it. Sorry, excuse me.

1:27:17 A very a very much plays up to that. I don't know mythology. How about that myth about the CIA? Is it a myth? Is it a reality? People couldn't again, make their own judgments on that. But there is quite a lot of dark stuff in CIA sponsored films that when I'm watching it, I'm thinking there's no way the military or the FBI would put up with this. They would only want they would want a much more positive image and maybe a tiny, tiny little bit of, you know, one guy goes rogue and does something wrong. They can tolerate that. But the notion of the whole institution is somehow corrupt or terrifying. They won't do. They just won't, won't accept the CIA. On the other hand, they seem to see the benefit of both the more happy, positive PR, the happy positive image of the CIA, and the negative, scary, terrifying image of the CIA. They actually seem to see value in both, which makes you wonder what the hell they they're really up to. And also what the hell is it 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 drone bombing and torturing and all the rest of it, what what option do you have? Do you then try and put the genie back in the bottle and convince people actually, we're, we're good, We didn't actually do this, this sort of thing that much? Or do you try to normalize it? Do you try to make people accept it? And I think Homeland from a propaganda point of view, is a massive normalization project. It made people, you know, it makes people more cynical, makes people just go, oh, well, this is this is what happens. There's nothing we can do about it. This is just the CIA is too powerful and too evil and too terrifying. And so it's kind of exciting to watch in a spy drama, but in terms of the real world, I'm not going to challenge this because then they might drone bomb or hack me or torture me or, or something else. So it does scare people.

1:28:55 Again, the negative images do scare people. And that that is the only rationale I can offer for why the CIA gets involved in films and TV shows that don't in any way really portray them, but not very much portray them very positively. I got you, I got you. I think that's a perfect place to leave it, Tom. This was a ton of fun. You're such a pleasant, such a pleasant person to talk to. Thank you so much for the time. I hope we can maybe do this again because I have AI have a whole list of notes over here that we didn't get a bunch of it, but but I hope we could do this again in a couple of months maybe. Thank you so much for your time. This is so much fun and I'm going to post your whatever you would like for me to share as far as your website and your socials. You don't have social or you don't use it very often, but your website and your contact and I'll be happy to and I and I would love to talk again and be in touch. Oh, sure.

1:29:48 I mean, you've got my e-mail. Let's do this again sometime. And it's been great talking to you. I really enjoyed this. I think we've looked at this from a a different perspective than a lot of the interviews and things that I've done. So yeah, let's have another conversation sometime. I'd love it. Awesome. OK, well, feel good again. Cheers to your health, good health to both of us and lots of lots of lots of good work together, hopefully in the future. Thank you so much, Tom. Take care man. Take care, yes? Bye.