Episode 118: They Live

They Live was ahead of its time in many ways. It is an absolute conspiracy theory classic, and rightfully so!

➡️ We are living in a time of total clown shoes. 🤡

➡️ The character of Frank is pretty compelling because he represents the person who realizes he could wake up but deeply does not want to.

⚠️ Spoilers lie ahead!

Links:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/16598615

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/18923356

https://people.com/stephen-miller-wife-katie-miller-defends-him-after-white-house-correspondents-dinner-evacuation-11959926

https://pvto.weebly.com/uploads/9/1/5/0/91508780/eight_o%E2%80%99clock_in_the_morning-nelson.pdf

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14393320

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/

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My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses John Carpenter's 1988 sci-fi film "They Live," a conspiracy theory classic. She highlights the movie's themes of subliminal messaging and alien control over humanity, noting its relevance to current events. Sara reflects on the societal impact of technology on child-rearing and the media's portrayal of recent events, such as the White House Correspondents Dinner and the alleged pop-pop attempt. She emphasizes the importance of questioning narratives and authority, and shares her personal experiences with waking up to the truth, drawing parallels to the film's protagonist, Nada.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

conspiracy theories, John Carpenter, They Live, sci-fi movie, subliminal messages, alien invasion, human control, satire, Ray Nelson, Roddy Piper, military industrial complex, propaganda, societal pressure, AI in child rearing, White House Correspondents Dinner

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about John Carpenter's 1988 sci fi movie they live. It is an absolute conspiracy theory classic. I'm kind of surprised that I have not gotten here before now, but better late than never. It really knocked my socks off. I saw bits and pieces of it when I was a kid, back in the 80s. And then, of course, there are clips from the movie that have gone viral on social media, but I think this was honestly the first time that I ever sat down and watched it start to finish in one sitting, and it definitely did not disappoint. And yet, before I can even get into the meat and potatoes of this episode, and I will before I forget, interject, spoilers abound, there's no way for me to talk about a movie like this without spoiling some of it for you. So if you have not seen they live, I highly, highly recommend that you do bookmark this episode, download it, come back to it later, because I don't want to spoil it for you. If you're not familiar with this film, it is worth your time as of this recording, I didn't find it available free of charge anywhere on streaming. That, of course, could change. I think I paid three or $4 I like, cashed in some credit card rewards points, or use some digital tokens or something on Amazon Prime. And essentially, for all intents and purposes, I watched it for free because I cashed those in. But if you have to pay three or $4 so completely worth it. Some of the things that I have reviewed at other points in time. I would not have said that about but they live is worth your time and a few bucks of your cash. And yet, before I can dive in and talk about they live, it's like we're already living in they live. Last December, I recorded an episode. It was episode 98 about a couple of weird movies, the November men and the domino principle. Neither film would I highly recommend, to be honest with you, but the November men asks the question, could there ever be a truly left wing version of Oswald? And it's based on this quote from LBJ that the left doesn't pop pop people, that's a right wing thing. The left will get you in different ways, but they won't. They won't send out some lone wolf pop popper to do it. They if they want you gone. They have other ways besides that to make it happen. And so that film using Poppy Bush as the intended target, asks the question, could there ever really be a left wing version of Oswald, not somebody who's cloaked in the clothing of being a left wing nut or a communist sympathizer or whatever? But you know, could somebody like that ever show up and behave in that way? Or, as LBJ said, is it that the left gets you into in some other way? A right wing nut job might do it, but a left wing nut job is going to go about it in a different way. And so here we are, the White House Correspondents Dinner. So we're told some left wing nut ball went crazy, had written a manifesto against the Orange Man, excuse me, and decided to bust in. And have you noticed that in these situations, like any other situation, where they want you to see something crystal clear, you've got footage from any and all angles. I want to think about how I say this. I'm going to have to drop hints, and just hope you pick up what I'm putting down. But it's like whenever we get protest fodder, for example, it's always crystal clear, and you've always got MFS with cell phones everywhere, taking footage of it, whatever is the latest outrage porn, where we're supposed to take to the streets and loot and riot and freak the fuck out. That's always crystal clear, but yet, this video footage of our alleged pop popper Cole Thomas Allen, is all blurry, and you can't even hardly tell what's going on. It just looks like a figure darts out from nowhere and makes a run for it. So it's like, how is it possible that we have crystal clear footage when we're supposed to wink, you know, when we're supposed to be upset and pissed off? But for something as mayor. Major as a pop, pop attempt. So we're told we have grainy, ass, blurry fucking footage that looks like something from the 1980s Riddle me that Batman. So there's a dude. Cole Thomas Allen is like 31 he's being accused of rushing through a security checkpoint armed with a boom stick, or a couple of boom sticks and some knives, getting into a battle with law enforcement before they took him down. The preliminary reports on television that night said that the shush service popped him and he was deceased. Then all of a sudden, that story changed, and it was no, he's alive and he's going to be arranged, okay? And of course, he has to have three names, you know, like Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray Cole Thomas Allen. According to his social media, he did a summer internship. In the summer of 2014 he did a summer internship, allegedly, according to his his social media at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I've also seen some screenshots purporting that he had connections to Lockheed. That's Another riddle me. This batman moment the mainstream media is positioning this as what happened to this guy, like, did he have a downward spiral? Was he a nut ball? Because how do you go from having an internship at NASA to working at some according to them, low level tutoring job. I'm not here to throw shade on people that feel that they are called to be teachers or tutors. That's a hell of a difficult job, especially nowadays. I'm going to record an episode about Megan and AI and how I think AI is going to become highly involved in child rearing. Because, listen, I don't give a fuck if this offends you. In fact, I hope it does some of y'all out here just having kids as status symbols, as toys, as jokes. You don't want them. You don't raise them. You plug them in front of a TV, or you hand them a tablet or a device, and you expect everybody else, or society or the entertainment complex to raise them. And it's like, well, why did you have them? Oh, because of societal pressure. My mom and dad wanted me to, or my spouse leaned on me, or somebody said that I would be incomplete if I didn't. And it's like, Y'all need to raise this damn ass and kids now because they're becoming little juvenile delinquents and and hoodlums. So anybody that's got to sit in the classroom with these kids who have had no raising. They're like feral children, and not in a good way either. People say that about us, Xers, that we were feral children who had to raise ourselves and to an extent, yeah, we did, but nobody like sat us down with a tablet connected to AI and to the internet. I am so grateful. Like I'm not a technophobe either. I use AI, I use the internet. Obviously, this podcast wouldn't exist if I couldn't upload it to the internet for you to download it and listen for yourself. I'm not a technophobe. I'm just saying I personally am glad that we were really the last generation to fully come of age before technology took over. I think back to some of the idiotic things that I did as a teenage kid, and I'm like, I'm fucking glad there's no documentation of that, no embarrassing photos, because boy, they I'm sure I look like an idiot doing some stuff. So I'm not I'm not anti technology, I'm just really grateful that nobody sat me down with a tablet and gave me access to all of this stuff, misinformation, disinformation, pure insanity. I mean, one can make the argument that as Xers, we got enough of that via television and radio, because music for us was everything, making a mix tape that was a fun way to spend your time and listening to it, making the mix tape and listening to it, watching shit on MTV. We enjoyed doing that, but, man, I feel like we were feral in a different way. And if you're part of this generation, then you get what I'm saying, like, yeah, we drank out of the water hose, and it was like, your parents just turned you loose. And sometimes they locked the fucking door. Man, it was like, go play, come back. When the street lights come on, the boomers had to have PSAs on TV saying it's 10pm Do you know where your kids are? Because sometimes they didn't. So we went outside, we played, we rode bikes, we ran around, we climbed trees. We have played on swing sets and jungle gyms and playgrounds and shit like that. We weren't glued to a device that was putting in all kinds of propaganda in our heads, which, funny enough, ties into they live. But I just it's like some of y'all out here having these kids and. You want society, you want the entertainment complex, you want AI to raise these kids, and then it's not a wonder that they're hell beasts. They have had no raising, they've had no home training, they've had no discipline, and lot of y'all letting these kids and grandkids run your house. The kids tell the adults how it's going to be, and I'm like, well, it's not a wonder that they get to school and act like shitheads, because that's what they're allowed to do at home. Hello. So look, that's a long way around with a lot of editorializing to say, I am not going to hate on somebody that's a teacher or a tutor, because I am sure that they have a classroom full of goddamn shitheads that should have been raised appropriately by their parents, but the mainstream media is like how far this man has fallen. He must have been crazy. He must have been on a downward spiral to go from NASA to a lowly tutoring job. But we have to remember this is part of the story, the framing it as the downward spiral, a sad tragedy for someone who must have been mentally ill. Meanwhile, to me, it's like, Why do these people always have ties to the military industrial slash military intelligence complexes? Every fucking time, if you barely scratch the surface, you will find some connection to the military and, or the alphabet agencies and, or the Charlie India Alpha every time. So is this guy a patsy? Is he MK Ultra, or something like that, and he's been set up to take the fall for this, or is he just an actor, meaning it's not really that his life has been ruined. It's not really that anything bad is going to happen to him, per se, as it would with a true Patsy. Maybe he's going to be shuttled off somewhere to live under an assumed name, and for the rest of his life he can go be someone else, because he dutifully stepped in and played the role of Cole Thomas Allen, a guy who went nuts, made a manifesto about the Orange Man and then tried to pop pop people in a ballroom at the whatever Hotel. In the videos that have been posted, nobody looks particularly scared. There's one video of a dude sitting off and he's kind of like on the far left hand side of the screen eating. Everybody else is supposedly ducking and covering, and he's just sitting there eating his food like whatever man. I didn't really hear the pop pops. I mean, I guess they were there, maybe, but when the video that I saw and heard on the news, I couldn't even hear the pop pops. Then you have this old dude that's sitting off to the left hand side, just eating his ass off like also, okay, here's a tie in to the dead zone. Stephen Miller, who is the White House Deputy Chief of Staff was accused on social media of using his pregnant wife as a human shield. I had to laugh at that, not because, you know, if it were really true, okay, if this really was a pop, pop attempt, which, personally, I am highly, highly skeptical about. I'm skeptical about all three. Okay, going back to the mess with the ear, going back to the mess that was down in Florida. And now coming to this, I mean, not really passing my sniff test, if you know what I'm saying, if he really had used a pregnant woman as a human shield during something that was real, that would be horrible. But I'm thinking of Stilson from the dead zone. I'm like, my god, we just talked about this. Because part of how Stilson gets ruined, it's like Johnny comes after him, misses, but he doesn't completely miss, because still, soon uses a baby as a human shield. A journalist takes a photograph of it. It's everywhere in the media, and then still sends reputation is ruined because it's like, what kind of a scumbag uses a baby as a human shield? Then there's another rumor going around social media that this guy wasn't using his pregnant wife as a human shield, but was rather copying a feel. Because there is a photograph of him with his hand on her right breast. And I'm like, so that's somehow better, like, again, if it was real, if you were, if you really thought that you were in mortal peril, why would there be a dude over on the left hand side eating his ass off? I mean, unless you wanted that to be your last fucking supper, wouldn't you get up and try to hide? Wouldn't this dude be trying to protect his wife and unborn baby, if it was real? I know that men think about sex a lot, and I'm not throwing any shade on that either. Okay, I'm not a Puritan or prude, but I know that dudes think about sex a lot, but. But I would think correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think again. If you felt that your life was in mortal peril, you could potentially die. Your wife, your unborn child, could potentially die, you wouldn't be thinking, hey, you know what would be cool to do right now? Start feeling up my wife's swollen and sore pregnancy boobs. I would think that you'd want to get everybody down or out. You'd want to get protection for yourself and your loved one. You wouldn't be thinking, hey, I think I want to, you know, if I'm going to die tonight, I'm going to sit on the left hand side of this screen and eat a lousy hotel meal. Or if I got to die tonight, I think I want to squeeze my wife's titties one last time. I mean, I, I just the whole thing is a clown show. It's a giant pair of Big Red clown shoes, in my opinion. So with all of that said, it's a great time to segue into they live. In some respects, I feel like I'm reviewing this at the perfect moment in time, because it's like we're already living and they live. If you're still with me, select that frosty beverage of choice and we will saddle up and take this ride.

Just a reminder. Sara's award winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next nonfiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now back to the show.

They live is the kind of movie that was ahead of its time when it was released in 1988 it really didn't get very good reviews. Which quelle surprise? Can we really be surprised that the critics panned it? But as time has gone on, it gathered a sort of cult following, and people see it much clearer now than they did back in the late 80s. It's based on a short story by sci fi writer Ray Nelson, which was published in 1963 the name of the short story is eight o'clock in the morning. It is available as a PDF online. I'll drop a link to that. And I was surprised when I read the short story, because I feel like John Carpenter keeps some really good source material in the film, Roddy Piper plays this man named nada, which he's not named in the movie itself, but like if you watch the credits, that's when you find out, or if you go and you read eight o'clock in the morning by Ray Nelson, the protagonist in his short story was named George nada. Now it's a little bit different, having been published in 1963 but again, the overall like the gist of it, the basics, John Carpenter did a very good job of keeping the essence of the story intact, and that's probably one of the reasons why the movie is so good, because even though it can get hokey in places, it's Like driving you to a much more important message. So nada, played by Roddy Piper, is this kind of homeless drifter who drifts on in to Los Angeles where he's trying to find work. It's like he just shows up with the clothes on his back and a backpack, and that's it. And it reminded me of the story that Axel Rose has told about Welcome to the Jungle. Like he hitchhikes a trucker picks him up, takes him to LA and then whenever he's getting out of the semi cap, the guy's like, you know where you are? You in the jungle, baby? And it's like, yeah, so that that's more or less what happens. It's like, nada gets out there and he realizes that he's in the jungle. There's like a preacher talking about how they have recruited the rich and powerful to do their bidding. They control and enslave humanity. But you know, just sounds like the kind of person that you see busking and preaching on the street corner in large city, and he spends the night in kind of a homeless area back alley, this dude who lives in an apartment has his shades pulled up and the window open so nada can hear the TV. And there's some like Kardashian type. That's how it struck me. Anyway, some gal who appears to be famous for being famous is just like, Oh, it's so lovely to be on TV. It's so cool to be famous.

How many things did this movie predict now, the next day, he's milling around, and he manages to get a job at a construction site, because the guy tells him, like, well, this is union only, but he's unionized, so he's able to get a job, and he makes friends with this co worker named Frank. And Frank is played by Keith David. So he makes friends with Frank, and he's like, Hey, there's this place that we can go like, you don't necessarily have to sleep on the street. There's this little encampment we can go to, and it's basically a shanty town that's across the street from a church, and they have all kinds of ramshackle structures set up. They have electricity, they have a makeshift hot shower, and they have power running because, of course, they've got to have access to the TV. A hacker of some kind commandeers the TV broadcasts, and he tries to warn people that humanity is being treated like cattle, and the only way that you can discover the truth is to cut off the signal. You've got to cut off but it's like cut off the signal of what we're cattle to who, and the people who watch the broadcast say that they have a headache afterward. Nada is curious about all of this, and there's a community leader who's part of this shanty town slash church community, and so nada follows this guy, Gilbert and a preacher, into the church. It sounds like at all hours of the day and night they have choir music playing. But I mean, even late at night, two or three o'clock in the morning, it sounds like they're having choir practice. And he's like, no church would be having choir practice at two or three o'clock in the morning. This is weird. So one day, he follows Gilbert and this preacher into the church, and he discovers that this so called choir rehearsal that's going on is actually just a loop. It's like a loop of gospel music that's playing and there's a meeting inside this church of like the community leader, the preacher, the hacker that he saw on TV, etc, nada, finds equipment and boxes, but he manages to escape, and he finds this like cubby hole Before he before he gets flushed out and runs away, he finds this, like cubby hole with boxes in it, but he's not completely sure what's going on. The police come in and they've got, like, vehicles and helicopters and all of it, and they destroy both the church and the shanty town in a raid, and the hacker and the preacher are treated pretty savagely by the cops, and this only galvanizes, not as curiosity that much more. It's like something's going on with this church and the choir music put on a loop and the boxes, and then the police raid. This is not a normal shanty town and a normal church, not by a mile. So he very carefully sneaks back into the church after the raid, and he gets into this cubby hole, and he retrieves a box from the church, and it's full of sunglasses. So he takes a pair of the sunglasses, and he puts the rest of the box with the additional sunglasses in a dumpster, and like you know, covers it with some trash. Whenever he finally puts the glasses on, he discovers that the world is in monochrome, like black and white, and that everything is covered in subliminal messages marry and reproduce. Money is your God, obey and conform. And he's like, holy shit. And that is a meme you've probably seen. It's the clip that you've probably seen online before of him like it's his awakening. He's putting the glasses on and realizing just how much messaging and how much control is being put on the general human population, he also discovers that a number of people who appear to be people are not, but are instead these creepy, weird looking aliens that are hiding underneath the facade of being human, and these aliens have devices disguised as wrist watches, and they can do all kinds of things. They can communicate with each other. They can even teleport and disappear. There are surveillance drones. He wanders into a supermarket, and there's an alien who realizes that nada can see him. So then he gets confronted by two alien cops, and he manages to get away from them. He steals their boom sticks, and he goes into a bank, and he sees various employees and customers that are aliens, and he manages to eliminate some of them. And he takes a hostage named Holly Thompson. They go to her house, and he learns that she works for a television network. He tells her, like, put these glasses on. You don't have to take my word for anything. Just put these glasses on and see what happens. She manages, even though he's Roddy Piper, she manages to get a hold of him and throws him out of the window, and he like topples down a long, steep hill. And as she's talking to the police, she realizes that he has dropped the glasses in her house like before. She throws him out the window. She realizes that he's lost these glasses and that she has them now in her possession. So he's like, Well, shit, I've lost these magical glasses that allow me to see the world as it actually is, so I've got to go back to the trash can. His friend Frank comes back to give him his paycheck, and he's like, You got to stay away because you're on the news, like, this, is this? This is bad dude. You've really done some fucked up shit out here, but nada wants him to put the glasses on. And Frank is like, I don't, I don't want any of that. I've got family back home. I'm just out here trying to work and get money. I just want to take care of my family, right? And so this is a very competitive compelling argument. I'm gonna stop here and editorialize for a second, because this is a very compelling argument from people who don't want to wake up. I'm just trying to live my life, man, I got a spouse, I got kids, I got this, I got that. I don't want to awaken to the truth, because I just am focused on basic survival. But nada realizes that Frank is not one of the aliens. He is a fellow human being. They're friendly with each other, and he's like, I'm going to force you to put these glasses on. They have a fist fight. They have a very like 1980s action movie type fist fight in this alley behind the dumpster. But once nada finally gets the glasses on Frank, and Frank sees for himself what's going on. He realizes I don't, in fact, live in the world that I thought I did. So Frank agrees to help him, and the two of them go into hiding together. They run into Gilbert from the shanty town that was demolished, and he tells them about a human resistance, and they have developed. So they go to this meeting of this human resistance, and they learn that the people in this resistance are working on contact lenses, so that way people don't have to go around and kind of like, give a clue, you know, by having the magical sunglasses on. And they have learned about the aliens using global warming to transform Earth's atmosphere so that it will become more like their home planets atmosphere. They're sucking the natural resources of the Earth dry for their own gain. Imagine that also the aliens are bribing humans to do their bidding. Like we'll give you wealth, we'll give you fame, we'll give you power, if you will go along with our agenda. Holly shows up at the meeting, the lady that nada had taken hostage and the glasses fell off and landed in her floor. She shows up at this resistance meeting, and she has being in TV production. She has a theory about where the signal is originating, because part of how these aliens control humanity is through the signal that gets broadcast out through the boob tube, and then, of course, they're putting out propaganda and bullshit information on the TV all day long. However, the meeting gets raided by police. Most of the people who are there are killed. The survivors scatter and just try to do the best that they can to not be found. Nada and Frank get cornered by the cops in an alley. However, Frank has stolen an alien wrist watch, so he's able to mess around with it and open up a wormhole or a portal or something, and then they teleport to this alien spaceport, alien hideout place on earth. But it's like underneath this TV station cable 54 which is an alien run News Network. How appropriate now, when they teleport there and they start walking around to figure out where they've gone to, they discover a banquet hall. Also kind of funny, didn't we just have this, you know, supposed wh CD dinner with a supposed pop, pop, and then orange man is like, see, that's why I need a ballroom. I could have gotten it. Okay? So they go into this ballroom, and they see a meeting of aliens and their wealthy human collaborators, and they're like, Oh, this is great, like we've we've smashed the human beings who are turning against us. And they see this guy who had been a drifter that lived in the shanty town, but he's now working with the aliens, and he assumes that because he was a drifter in the shanty town who's now a collaborator, that nada and Frank must be in the same boat. So he gives them a tour of the facility, and he's just like, Hey, over here, we've got this and we've got that, and he's just being. Very loosey goosey about everything. The aliens broadcast a signal to prevent human beings from identifying them and to help them obscure their message, right? So that's like, somebody can be holding $1 bill, and in reality, it says money is your God, but the person only sees a normal dollar bill, so this guy's showing them how all of that works. Nada and Frank are able to locate Holly, and they fight their way. We get some more 1980s action movie battles. They fight their way to the transmitter on the roof, but Holly winds up murdering Frank, so then nada murders Holly and blasts the transmitter. He's ultimately pop popped himself by a police helicopter. However, as the signal shuts down from this giant transmitter satellite thing, he flips everybody the bird before he dies from his own injuries since this transmitter satellite thing has been destroyed, then we see humans waking up and realizing that aliens have been hiding amongst them for all this time. And just as a weird aside, there's a song from the soundtrack called the siege of justiceville, which was written by Alan Howarth and John Carpenter, and it made me immediately think of the film the siege of jadeville. I mean, that didn't come out until 2016 I have not seen it. Full disclosure, I know some people might throw rotten tomatoes at me, that same guy that plays dag in that film, The so called biopic of DAG, which I also have not watched, and I'm not going to watch. It's like, do they just call that guy? Anytime Hollywood needs to have somebody to play DAG. That's just who they fucking call, even though he looks and sounds nothing like DAG. Things That Make You say, Hmm, but I did just find that interesting, the siege of justiceville. And I was like, the siege of jadeville. That's a little bit weird. Now this is getting pretty prescient. In the short story, George gets bombarded by the same types of messages. Work eight hours play, eight hours sleep, eight hours marry and reproduce. Stay tuned to this station. Obey the government. We are the government. We are your friends, and you do anything for a friend. Wouldn't you obey work? It's like, oh my god, the I mean, it's being literal, but I just think that satire, good satire, can do that, because one of the things that I really appreciate about satire as a genre is that you can have satire that's very cunning and it's very buried. It takes some digging to figure out what's going on. Or satire can be slap you across the face, drive a straight pin with a sledgehammer. It can really lean into the absurd. And I think either way is beautiful. It just It depends on the nature of the story that you're trying to tell. I will pull the curtain back and say, I've been working. I'm busy with so many projects, but one of the things that I'm working on that scares me, frankly, this is one of those moments you know that David boy talked about, with your art, you should always go further out into the water, then your feet touch the bottom like your feet shouldn't be touching the riverbed. You should be farther out than what you feel safe doing. It should feel scary. It should feel dangerous, and it does. But I've been working on this book, and I didn't unalive myself, by the way, you know, should any harm ever befall me, I'm going on the record to say that I don't have any negative feelings. And you know, I would never do that. I've been working on this. This book does a satire, and it's not about satirizing DAG. It's really the opposite of that. It's about satirizing the shadowy web of power and the power structures that try to besmirch dag at every turn, portraying him as something that he wasn't, or sweeping him under the rug and acting like he wasn't anything important. We certainly see this with JFK. It's just done in a different manner. With JFK. It's more like he was a womanizer. He was a drug head. He abused Jackie. He didn't care about his kids. He would have totally rolled over and showed his belly and given the US over to the Soviet Union. He was basically just licking the boots of Fidel Castro and licking the boots of Nikita Khrushchev, on and on and on. He had a mistress in every port. He was banging women 15 at a time. He never took a drink of water, he never ate a sandwich, because it was just. Just constant sex. 24, 7365, that's how it's done with JFK. It's like you didn't really lose anything. And then I had an episode I recorded. I don't even know when I'll have to go back and drop a link to it, but it's Noam Chomsky saying, Who cares. Like people die all the time, and if one of them happened to be JFK, who cares? So that a lot of times with Kennedy, that's what we see, is he was a dirt bag. And so it doesn't really matter, even if we say, like, Yes, he was pop popped, and no, it wasn't Oswald, or it wasn't Oswald acting alone. There were greater power structures involved. Surely it doesn't really matter, because we didn't lose anything. It would be like if you were walking down the street and a penny fell out of your pocket. Would you really be that upset about losing a penny? No, you just say, Oh, well, that Penny's gone. And who gives a shit? That's typically what we see with the besmirching of JFK is legacy. Oftentimes with DAG, it's DAG is swept under the rug. He didn't really mean anything to anybody. He wasn't anything special, or it could be he wasn't really neutral. He was in bed with the West. He was totally doing the bidding of the Eisenhower administration. And so who really cares anyway if he got killed, or he was some obscure historical figure that didn't really mean anything to anybody? And so who cares, or he was celibate because he must have been a pervert, or he must have been some kind of closeted pervert who was having sex with every man he could get his hands on, or maybe some women too. Who knows, he must have been a perv, and it's like you wouldn't be going to the trouble of spreading all of these lies if he didn't actually matter, and he wasn't actually doing something important. So my satire that I'm writing really leans into the absurdity. And that's one thing that I love about this short story, is it. It's just very clear, obey the government. We're your friends. You do anything for your friend, right? Marry and reproduce money is your God now, I just, it's like, Yes, I just, I love, I love what's going on here. I love what's going on in John Carpenter's film adaptation they live. And then I love what's going on in this short story from 1963 where it's like, this is overt. And we're telling you, okay, all right, I'm gonna try to try to back the car in slowly. Here it's like we're telling you exactly what we want to tell you we're doing so through the veil of satire, because that's another good use of that genre. Whether we're talking about filmmaking, we're talking about novels, books, comic books, whatever. Sometimes an artist or writer is in the situation where they really, really, really want to say something, but they can't, but they can do so through the lens of satire or Sara CASM, and I'm just grateful that at least we have that option. And I think that the short story very much worth your time. It's only a few pages. I mean, you can easily sit down and read it in one sitting. They live the film absolutely worth your time as well. I would recommend that you read the short story and you watch the movie, because here we are, it's just overt theater now, like, Oh, I I narrowly escaped getting pop popped, even though it didn't really look like anybody was in danger. It didn't really look like anybody was in fear for their lives. I narrowly escaped this danger. But this is why the White House needs its own ballroom, right? Okay, this is why we need to be at war with Iran, even though, like no fucking body, except for some a handful of war hawks, you know, some shitheads like Lindsey Graham that never met a war, they didn't like, nobody fucking wants it. Nobody fucking wants it, even so it's like, hey, you know some weirdos with three names and a manifesto tried to pop pop me. So I need that expensive ballroom. Y'all need to still pay out the wazoo for gasoline and groceries, and you need to support this war with Iran because a looney tune could come and get me. Okay, sure, that's not much different than marry and reproduce, obey. You'd do anything for your friend, wouldn't you? Money is your God now, etc. I wish I could close this episode out on some happy note, be like shiny happy people holding hands. But there is a cost to waking up and paying attention, and that's one of the reasons why Frank. Like, resists it so much. You know, they they have a knock down, drag out brawl in that alley, because nada is like, all you have to do is put the glasses on, and he's like, No, I do not, do not want, will not do. And it takes him being Damn near killed to finally put the glasses on. And then once he does everything changes, he can't unsee it. And I think that whatever it is that wakes you up, as I've talked about before, Dave McGowan's book program to kill was huge for me. I read that book and I thought, my God, I'm terrified. I also remember, you know, back in 99 myself and the guy that was my boyfriend at the time, we went to see Eyes Wide Shut, did not get it at all. Neither one of us did. And we were like, What the fuck was that? It was long, slow and plotting with a lot of piano music. Fast forward in time to when I was in my 30s. I saw it again, and I was like, oh shit. It was the kind of thing where I thought I might have to sleep with the lights on. I was so profoundly disturbed, because I thought, This is how the world actually works, and this is the type of behavior that these hyper elites engage in. This is exactly what they do. Kubrick didn't just make up, in my opinion, a fictional movie. He's telling you this shit actually goes on. And with the release of the teffry Texting files, I don't know how anybody could doubt that anymore. It's like Dave McGowan's book program to kill freak me the fuck out. When I finally watched Eyes Wide Shut and understood it, that freaked me out. Not long ago, when I watched the BBC Three part documentary about Operation Gladio, that freaked me out. I still I find all of those things so deeply upsetting, so troubling. So there is a cost to waking up. There is a cost to not just looking at something that you see on the internet, not just looking at something that you see on the television. That comes from, let's say, a mainstream media so called credible news source, and taking it at face value. There's a cost to that, an intellectual cost, yes, because you can't just outsource your brain to other people anymore. But there's an emotional cost to that too, because it puts you in an existential funk. You're like, Am I in a shithole? Is this a simulation? This is like a giant video game that God is playing. Or is this like The Matrix where this is not real and we're plugged into a machine of some kind? I mean, my personal theory is, as the police said, we are spirits in the material world. I think we have a spirit. I think we have a soul that goes on after this. And this is just like a battleground, a proving ground, a school, a university, a place where we go to learn things, and hopefully we leave the world a better place than it was when we found it. Hopefully we make some kind of a positive difference. That is, at the risk of sounding corny, one of the reasons why I get on here week after we can do this podcast, is because I just hope somebody will get something out of it, something beneficial. I hope somebody that's been walking around with their head of their butt decides to pull their their head out of their butt and say, whoa. I'm not going to believe propaganda and nonsense. I'm going to question narratives. I'm going to question authority. I'm going to use my brain and come to my own conclusions. I'm going to seek out alternative voices. I'm not going to listen to the main networks and just, oh, whatever they say, it must be true, because otherwise they couldn't put it on the news. Right, right. Sure. So I get that it can be difficult to wake up. And I really think in that regard, Frank's character is one of the most compelling ones in the entire movie. That person who's like, I understand that you've had an awakening. I understand that you fuck it's fucked your mind up. But I don't go down that road. I just want to keep working my job, keep sending some money back home to my family, and just find a place to sleep at night where I won't get killed. I don't know about all this alien shit. It's also timely because we're seeing these scientists who supposedly have had connections to UFOs and space aliens that have been murdered. They're dying off in an alarming clip. And it's like so this is part of the psyop, because that's one theory, the idea that we're going to be told that aliens exist, they live among us, or they've been in contact with the White House, or the White House has known about them for generations. Is that going to be true? Or is that just a fucking psyop?

In a lie that's a giant distraction from something else that's much more practical and much more here and now. That's not a question that I can answer. It would be worth it to me to have a genuine expert come on the show, someone credible, not some crackpot that's like smoking dope in grandma's basement all night, but somebody who is a credible expert on that topic to just say like, Hey, are we? Are we really in a situation where we have extraterrestrial life forms that have visited Earth and that potentially live among us? Or is this a psyop that's designed to distract our attention? Because if we're thinking about outer space aliens or little green Martian men, we're not thinking about something that's much more practical and tangible? It's an interesting question to contemplate. At the very least, as I said, the short story and the movie are both very much worth your time. If you have to spend a few bucks on renting the movie, it's totally and completely worth it. It is, as I said, a conspiracy theory classic. In the meantime, stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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