Eugene Jarecki

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26:56Is it a religion? It's a religion. It's a religion. Yes, it's a religious sect. And for example, in Amishore. And it's a Christian religious sect. Yes, it's an Old Testament Christian religious sect. And understand it this way, the men andites are a different variation, a different interpretation of the same direction the Amishore in, but the men andites can drive cars. So by the time I got to Amishore, the men andites drive the Amishore out. So they get along with each other. They coexist. Yes. But they have a different set of beliefs and rules. Yes. And the Amishore in a fuzzy space as I encounter them, because they are having to deal with modernity.

27:32They can't survive the milk price doing it the old way they do it. So how do they do it? So for example, I came there and I worked on the Threshing Wheat. And that means that we were gathering the wheat from the field and then bringing it to a Thresher. Well, that trip to get to the Thresher was far because it wasn't on the farm because the church, locally, the leadership of it had decided, okay, we got a problem sticking to old ways we can't even eat. So how much can we bend toward what's happening and what they decided was we can have one Threshing machine that we collectively use. This is the kind of thing we all should be thinking.

28:07This is carpooling. This is a shared economy. They were doing it long before we were only doing it because it's being slammed on our head that the whole world's on fire. Do you think we ought to slow down our repacious use of everything? The Amish were against that for their own reasons in a sort of Calvinist self -denying way that seemed correct to the asceticism of that faith. So when I go there, what that's also doing is closing their mind a bit, you know, closing your mind a bit is good. You know better than anybody that meditation, the hardest thing I would struggle with if I tried to meditate in the way that you do is the dealing with the barrage of thoughts and mind wanderings.

28:52They've been in the business of don't go there. Or, you know, the beautiful thing about meditative practices as I see them evolving for Western people today. And that's all I can know about it because God knows what's real. But I know what I'm getting filtered to me through friends and guiding light people. Is, yeah, your thoughts may wander, don't get mad at yourself when they do. Just let them come back and just note that it keeps happening and it might happen less in the future and that'd be information for you about your own kind of mindfulness. There's a mindfulness that came out of that Amish faith that is probably similar to way those traditions of mindfulness in the East came organically too because if you're in touch, I mean there was a beautiful phrase by a Native American chief in TC McCluwen's book, Touch the Earth, a masterpiece.

29:42March McCluwen's daughter about Native American people and their wisdom. It's a compendium of Native American wisdom. I promise I'll send it to you because I love Touch the Earth. And in it, a chief says, the Native man squatting in his TP, smoking his pipe and contemplating his role in the larger universe was man at his highest state of advancement. Ever since the arrival of Europeans, we have been stunted in our growth. So I step off the bus in Amish country and I go and live and work with these people and I start to plumb the depths of what they know and don't know. I think a little bit like a brilliant fascination, but it evolved into something deeper.

30:28So one night by the gas lights that are burning over our heads and making a noise like gas burning and hot as blazes and garish light. It's not cozy little house on the prairie. This is hardcore gas burning, somehow that's okay in the faith. So we're talking and I say, do you guys know who Bill Clinton is? Because he was present. One of them said, does he live here in Apple Creek? And by the way, if anyone hears the words Apple Creek, yes, this is the same Amish town or 20 years later, a man saw children in the corn throwing pebbles at his car and he opened fire with an assault rifle and killed them all in the corn.

31:15Apple Creek is the site of a massacre of Amish people by the English because the Amish call us the English. They said to me, you're English, we're Amish. That's how they understand their role in our history, in the nation's history. And so he asked about Bill Clinton. Does America exist for them? Well, that was the next one was you'll love the answer. He's the perfect question. Does he live here in Apple Creek? No, that's not exactly it. The other brother said, I know he's the president of the United States of Ohio. This is a little bit like that. I think it's a Gene Robinberry story where they go on a time travel thing in the past and somebody actually dropped something off the ship and it changes the course of history and like that thing.

31:58I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say in here. I don't know what a little knowledge could do in here, but one of them says to me, you know, I left for a while. I did Romspringen. Romspringen is when they go off on their own. The filmmaker Lucy Walker has made a masterpiece called Devil's Playground. It's one of the most beautiful documentaries ever made. I'd love to see that. It shames what I did with the Amish because all I did with the Amish was being living work among them, but I didn't get to know what she got to know. She went really deep, but I'll say for the record that what I did get was beautiful.

32:30We sit and one of the kids says, yeah, I left the farm. Where'd you go? Down the road. He'd gone like four houses down. He's like, that's it. Well, that was the first time. Okay. And there was another time. Yeah. Where'd you go? Kansas. Okay. You went all the way to Kansas. Wow. And how was that? Where'd you go? Well, there were some other Amish in Kansas. So I started there and I was living among them, but they were much freer. They did more things than we do. Like what? Well, they saw movies. I said, do you see any movies? Yes, he said. And the brother is starting leaning forward in his chair because he doesn't seem to have ever heard this story.

33:12Yes. They don't talk that way. Yeah. So he's willing to talk to me because he's fascinated by what I think is interesting about him. He doesn't know why I found him interesting. He said, yeah, it's so this movie. I said, what movie? Witness. Well, that's a movie about the Amish. It's a Hollywood movie with Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford or something. I can't remember who was in it. So he says, I saw a witness. And I said, amazing. What did you get from? For the next hour and a half, he told me shot by shot. What he had seen. He knew every frame of witness. He knew every line. Like a man in a desert with a drop of water.

33:52He knew everything. And the brother was completely transfixed by the story of this Amish kid who's in a bathroom of a bus station when a murderer happens and that get to the end of the story. And it's amazing. I'm in awe. I loved hearing it again. The brother is fascinating. We're out in great time. He says to me, can I ask you a question? He said, how did they know to have the cameras there when the murder happened? I said, you know, I mean, no murder. It's a movie. I saw the murder. He said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not real. Yes, it is. And the Amish boy was there. I said, that boy's not Amish.

34:31Yes, he is. He's an Amish boy. He's in the men were English. You came. I said, no, they're actors. Do you know what an actor is? No. I said, it's a pretender. I said, okay, take today. When we were threshing, what was I wearing? He said, we gave you clothes because they gave me an Amish hat unbelievably uncomfortable. Amish shoes, what made a wood. An Amish overalls and stuff like that. And a shirt. And I said, so we were out in the field and I was dressed like Amish. Am I Amish? No, he said you're English. I said, but I was dressed like Amish. That's a movie. So I don't even know how. Do you know if they have fictional stories?

35:10Yarns, not outside of the retelling. You know how very often the Bible ends up being like, and then this happened and then this guy brought a goat to someone. And then there was a drought and then they found a thing. It's like that. They just have tall tales. Yarns spun about their own stuff. Anything more than that would seem like dancing with the devil in a way. Like when Bach was playing that chord and it was satanic. And you couldn't play that chord and it broke a wall open in music and it's the power chord today. It's the same thing. You start going into that stuff. You're getting off the reservation.

35:49So I had a groundbreaking time. Your inner experience of it was, this is different than anything I've experienced before. Hard to believe that this is happening. When you left there was your feelings like I want to spend more time there. I feel like these are my friends or do you feel like these are crazy people? I don't want to be around this. I definitely was already thinking that the standard operating procedure of the world in its capitalistic, classist, racist, monstrosity was really, really painting me psychically. So to see people who were outside of it, even if in a slightly bizarre way, because their seclusion has - But they're working together with a good outcome.

36:38Incredible community. We used to, we'd thresh in the field and this huge wagon would come, pulled by a tractor on certain days and by a horse on other days. And that depended whether it was a minute night with a tractor. So but in most days it was a big horse, kind of co -blooded horse. That thing would come empty with a giant jug. You know when you put a jug of water in the freezer and it ends up being half a block of ice and half some to try this water? That and it would sit there melting and we would all drink icy cold water while doing this thing. And then we would fill that wagon back up with, hey, with the water jug at the bottom of it, empty now.

37:17It would go back and it would come back the jug was full, the thing was empty and the threshing was going on. And our job was to load those in huge amount of, hey, huge amount of wheat. And the collectiveness of that action with those people was stunningly beautiful, chain gang. You felt the camaraderie? Yeah, I've seen the watermelon workers in Florida, the African -Americans, who still live in virtually a slave condition in Florida. And despite the indignities of the way that they're asked to work and break their backs, that we have summer watermelon, those guys have fucking comradery. And so there's a comradery in the self -imposed exile that the Amish have, that is also very beautiful.

38:04And I felt very drawn to understand better the examples. It's why I linked it to rust -fryingism because I'd been very drawn to rust -fryingism through the way in which Bob Marley from the tiny island he was coming from rock the world. It was the most famous man in the world. There were 75 ,000 people living in Jamaica. Sky was more recognizable than Elvis. And that power of a resistant idea. I've grappled with rust -fryingism over the years because it has problems. It's deeply sexist. It's got issues relating to that, I think. Everything has problems, right? So with the Amish, I was taking the good with the...

38:43I don't even want to call it a good and bad. I was taking the this and the that. And there was a lot of this and that. And Melvin is the reason I have an availability to countervailing viewpoints. And I've learned more and more to check the extreme arrogance that I had when I was younger when because George W. Bush was unleashing trillions of dollars to kill little people who had done nothing to America in a foreign country, I felt my operating procedure in response to that was either to assassinate him, but then that is both illegal and morally self -destructive because you're no better than he if you also kill because you think there's a reason to kill that's better than his reason, all despots think they're benevolent.

39:44So when I couldn't kill George W. Bush and see a moral totality in that, then I would make the film that by any means necessary tries to stop this thing. And then I'm in the editing room thinking, do I lie? What if I came across evidence that really they were behind 9 -11? What would I do? Would I be so captivated by my point? Because I know what we're doing is wrong. What if I know what we're doing is wrong? But then I find out that the victim is wrong too. Would I allow that? And my whole career has been the moments where I have to allow that. Where I have to let my discoveries be inconvenient.

40:24And I'll give you an example of that. The most beautiful one in my life that I think changed my politics. I was talking to a beautiful person in a prison in Oklahoma who is a murderer. So it begins with a beautiful person who murdered a man during a meth transaction and shot him in the head and killed him.

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42:26Transcription by David L. Can you tell me any more about the murder beforehand? Yes. What happened leading up to the murder? This guy had been on meth for several days. His name is Larry. We lovingly call him Larry the neo -nazi. He was a neo -nazi. He had been on meth for several days and then he came into a dope deal with this guy and he thought the guy was shorting him in some way. Things flew out of hand and he took out a gun and shot him. He's serving life in Oklahoma in what's called the walls in Oklahoma, the roughest prison they have. I spent a lot of time with Larry and I fell in love with Larry fundamentally.

43:01He's one of them. I'll send you a video of him. He's one of the most beautifully spoken, thoughtful people. As soon as I met Larry, I knew I was looking at what Elvis Costello in Oliver's Army called a white N -word and I only used that N -word trope because Elvis himself has expressed his quiet with the fact that he has a song that has the N -word in it. But why did he put it there? He put it there because race is a huge factor in human history and the oppression of peoples. In a modern era, we are all the N -word unless we are controlling the world and a smaller and smaller group of people are controlling the world and they have set us against one another to distract us while they rob the commons.

43:46They're robbing the treasuries of the world, they're destroying the world and they're keeping us fighting about pronouns and gender and race and all of the other toys that they throw on the counter for us to play with. So Larry the neo -Nazi was an unbelievable glimpse into the beautiful, majestic terrain inside a convicted white supremacist Nazi murderer. I had to deal with that. At the end of the interview I said to him having learned a lot about his journey. I said to him, I don't know if you know this but I'm a Jewish person, did you know that? And he said, I didn't know that. And I said, do you care?

44:27Not anymore. I said, one spawn of time? One spawn of time I would have walked away from you. And I said now, I figured we probably got more in common than we got different. We both want home, family, an R -piece of the American dream. I want everybody to have that. This guy speaks this way. I didn't write this shit. I'm literally just, it's burned in my memory because it was one of the most beautiful things anybody ever. I said, yeah, I couldn't believe it. I'm believeable. Larry threw me a giant inconvenience that day. I come in there and I'm making a film called The House I Live In, which is a look at the drug war in America and how it is a form of genocide basically against black people.

45:11And the more time I spend in it, I realize that because nobody spoke up for black people, you remember what Pastor Nemuller said. First they came for the trade unionists and I was not a trade unionist. So I said nothing. Then they came for the communists and I was not a communist. So I said nothing. Then they came for the Jews and I was not a Jew. And so I said, he goes, I don't know. And then he says, and when they finally came for me, there was no one left to speak for me. So I'm now sitting with a man and I'm realizing that more and more, there are people like him who are a white inward. They are getting the same shake that black people got and nobody stood up for them for the longest time.

45:48And I say to Larry, in the middle of this anti -prison movie that I'm making, the prison system is like concentration camps. It's throwing people in for the profit of an elite few. It's a monster that feeds on human beings. And I say to Larry, what's it like for you to have been in here? And he said, well, be in here in this prison, and I say my life. And I said, how's that? It's probably the best thing that happened for me in my life. It's given me a chance to think about who I am, what I believe in, what my goals are in life. Out there it was pure mayhem I couldn't. And I suddenly realize, Dostoevsky said, you can judge any society by the quality of its prisons.

46:33What does it tell you when a guy says, what's the quality of our society that you want to judge? It's better in here than out there for someone like me. So obviously, I'm talking to Larry and I'm learning that he is saying to me, before you make a movie that vilifies the prison system, you got to go much deeper than that, because this is just a convenient symptom, low -hang fruit for you. You got to go really deep on who's controlling this situation. And a story emerged from that where I would speak to prisoners after I spoke to Larry. I learned from Larry to speak to prisoners differently, the way Larry understood that prison was better for him, which a white progressive guy like me could never even find the guts to say, because it sounds like I'm endorsing incarceration.

47:23Larry wasn't, Larry was saying it was that fucked up out there. Family structures destroyed, neighborhoods destroyed, Walmart's built where there used to be community centers. Towns that now have been gutted of the real resources that head start a child in deference to the predation by corporations and the government. And drugs. All of it, you flood the streets with all the toxins you can so the natives will fight among themselves, and then you can have bigger police budgets. And I spoke to Larry and then I made a speech a day later. And it was the first time I ever made the speech that way, because I was speaking a lot of prisons, I miss those days, and I'm drawn back there.

48:04So I made this speech and I said to the prisoners, you know, in America today, I understand how relevant races. I see you all sitting here. You got Chicano guys over here. You got your skinhead area, nation guys over here. You got black inmates over here, and a bunch of rift raff over here. Some gender fluid. You got all kinds of stuff going on here. I said, you guys all think that you're in some gang fight with each other for advantage. The truth is, I can see all of you as a group, your poor people. I could tell you your poor people from two miles, your poor people, and the system is laughing at you, because it's got you fighting with each other so that you don't stop and wonder, it's not that I'm a pen of sheep and he's a pen of goats.

48:57Who's the shepherd? Who's got us in here? There's this adage I keep hearing lately about the jar with the red ants and the black ants. If you put red ants and black ants in a jar, and you leave the lid a little off, they'll just climb all over each other, just mill around like ants do. Busy body, talking to each other, and some pheromones, whatever. The moment you close a jar and shake it, the ants go back shit at each other. They eat each other to death, and they never ask, who's shaking the jar? That was what I started to be able to say to prisoners because Larry had taught me that it was not about race anymore.

49:36It had been about race when black people needed the rest of society to say, this is a part -tide, and we didn't, so now it's coming to your neighborhood, and now you, Larry, are in here with no distinction from the black eye next to you in the next cell. Stop fighting with him. Form a group here and stop letting the system divide you, and isn't that everywhere right now? It was an interesting thing when the Occupy Wall Street movement happened, because the Occupy Wall Street movement was everybody versus the elite. That's what it was, against the banking system, against the financial system, and somehow it morphed into today's black, white, left, right thing, which is a completely different and outdated issue.

50:26In the original Occupy, they were on to something. And it seems like maybe the powers that be figured out a way, maybe through financing, to change the focus of that, to get everybody against each other again, because the poor people against each other again. Yeah, Shakespeare said, busy, giddy minds with foreign quarrels. And in that day and age, the way you confused the public was with, there's a boogeyman from elsewhere coming to our shores. In these days, it's cleverer. Remember they always said, isn't the age of Facebook and Etsy and eBay? Isn't that going to be harder to make war? Well, yeah, people know a lot more about each other.

51:08There's a McDonald's, I think it was Tom Friedman. So there's a Golden Arches rule, countries that have McDonald's. They'll never have war with each other. That kind of idea. There was an idea at the dawn of this mega -capitalism, this turbo -capitalism we're in, that it would be peacemaking. Well, we're seeing that that hasn't been the case. It hasn't been a day without war since it started. But what I do think is true about it is that it is harder for Russian people to think that they should be bombing Ukrainian people than it was before the Internet. You're saying Russian people? Russian people.

51:40Yeah, Russian people's. They're not bomb, it doesn't matter. But what I'm saying is when a country has to get its soldiers from the populace, there's draft, but there's also been historically a tremendous amount of rallying patriotism. If you look at sports teams, in the way they're built about nations, in the way we all think about national fights, we are all programmed to be very nationalistic. Americans come to visit me in Germany, and you can't believe how much they talk about all the kind of German stereotypes. If you talked about anything in America with that kind of stereotype, people say you can't talk in those kinds of things, but they have no problem with Germany because once upon a time it was the other.

52:16Well, now the other is harder to construe as an international threat because we know the world much more. It's not so far into us. Players on soccer teams come from countries you want me to bomb. And I already saw their mom in the commercial kind of thing. Well, so then how do I generate a sense of boogie -man's more local? That guy's coming to take your job. Those gays are coming to change your child's perception of gender. Those abortionites are coming to invade your moral architecture. Tell me about the prison industrial complex. Yes, I think if people understood how the prison industrial complex works and what it is, it sounds so technical, what is that really?

53:01They would understand more of what's happening across American life, far beyond just the prison system. You can trace the outlines of industrial complexes in virtually all American industries. There's a pharma industrial complex. There's a banking industrial complex. There's a military industrial complex. There's an insurance industrial complex. It goes on and on. The prison version of it and the military industrial version of it are instructive each and their own way on how American life is disfigured. These are disfiguring forces. Walk me through exactly what they are. Okay, so let's start with the military industrial complex because to be fair, it's where the term originated.

53:47And it was oddly enough, Eisenhower. Eisenhower, a Republican president who had been the heroic general of World War II, becomes president in the wake of that and discovers quickly that the country America became through the victory of World War II is a very different country than the one he had studied at West Point, a very different country than the one that we idealize in our white people's dream life about the history of America. You know that lovely white picket fence country that forgets the death of the red man, that forgets the enslavement of the black man and the death of the black man by droves and black women and children?

54:27That fantasy is a million miles from what Eisenhower, a very honest person, discovers in the Oval Office. He discovers that the defense sector has exploded. It has become a defense sector. There was no defense department before World War II. And now suddenly there is a defense department. Suddenly there is an Air Force. Suddenly there is a CIA. There are so many instruments of government that had never been there about seven of them, the National Security Council, the National Security Advisor. All of these are posts that the director of the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense. Those are all posts and institutions that aren't in the Constitution that were needed more time.

55:14That's the military industrial complex. We emerge from World War II newly powerful, effectively a colossus, a stride the world and an empire. And as such, that sector, that one -that victory is now put on a pedestal, and everything in American life comes through that and we are told. Do you know those air stream trailers? That's recycled B -52 metal. You know that toaster oven you got? That was devised in the military for quick -bred making out on the field. You know that we're always told that everything, Gil Scott Heron, has an unbelievable song called Work for Peace, about the military industrial complex, best song, everything Gil Scott Heron does.

55:54It's incredible. This is double incredible. And in the song, he has two amazing lyrics. I mean, as many, but one says about the launching of the Gulf War. Not the Iraq War. This is already the Gulf War long ago. He says they brought us pot -bellied generals as luminaries. Two weeks ago I hadn't heard of the son of a bitch. Now of a sudden he's legendary. This idea that only the military can tell us about what should happen in war. When meanwhile, isn't it the non -military that thinks about peace? Isn't it the non -military? The people of clerical people? The people in the cloth? The people of human rights people?

56:34Hospital workers, doctors, teachers, shouldn't they have a say? At the height of the Iraq War, fairness and accuracy in reporting the Iraq War, Bush W's War. At the height of the Iraq War, fairness and accuracy in reporting did a study of all the major news outlets. And they saw that in the lead up to the Iraq War of 400 broadcasts, 393 featured military representatives, generals, admirals, colonels, etc., seven contained anti -war voices. These are all unelected people. They're unelected people, but they are the people who represent the joint venture between the capitalism of a media system, the capitalism of a weapons -making system, all of those capital interests, what Eisenhower called private pressure groups, meaning profit seekers warping the system, and those in governance who do their bidding.

57:33So this goes back a long way. But basically what Eisenhower was saying was, the defense sector is warping American policy by creating boogie man threat after boogie man threat that keeps us from enjoying a peace dividend. The war was won. We should have gone back and turned our swords back into plowshares, but we didn't turn our swords back into plowshares. We're told that keep them as swords, and now we've got to turn them into guns because the Russians are coming. So the military industrial complex warning happened out of Eisenhower's mouth, because he was afraid of what? He was watching the Democratic candidate who was running against him, John F.

58:12Kennedy, who was out on the campaign trail being a hawk, and accusing the former general Eisenhower of having let America fall behind the Russians in missile production, the so -called missile gap. So he was accusing Eisenhower of being soft on crime, basically soft on the Russians. Eisenhower was secretly spying on Russia. He knew we were ahead in missile production. He knew what Kennedy didn't know. He couldn't reveal that to Kennedy, but he even broke that rule to just shut him up, because he saw what this fear mongering was doing to making America rattled in their boots about the cold war and ready to keep spending for more and more missiles and bombs and planes.

58:54And Eisenhower called Kennedy's people in and showed them the secret you two photographs, and they said, oh, we had no idea. That's incredibly revealing to us. Two days later, he was back out on the campaign trail. Eisenhower is letting us fall behind the Soviets in missile production. Eisenhower saw that the defense people could warp American judgment and warp Americans understanding of the world by making them live in a constant state of fear of a boogie man for which you need an endlessly rising defense budget. That's the military industrial version.

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1:00:49And it's all just to basically siphon money out of the system. Yes. That's all it is. It's siphoning money for the rich, and in terms of who they bomb, why do they pick the places to invade? Gil's got her and said so they make so damn insane a worthy adversary. So they figure out how to make Saddam into the adversary of the week. And when he's done, they find a new adversary. They got to the point where they act on him as an adversary. But it's never actually about these bad people doing bad things. It would be extreme to say never. I don't think Saddam was a lovely man. It's also true. You know when someone's lying to you, they'll very often throw also truths in.

1:01:28This is also true. There's a lot of truth there. Most good lies incorporate some truth. It might have been a good idea for a collective way of saying Saddam Hussein should be a despotic leader. But then we'd have to say who are the other despotic leaders that we support? We want support in Saddam tremendously. So the deeper conversation we don't get into and the military industrial folks keep us at the superficial level of, you know, for example, Putin invaded Ukraine. We see that. We can see that Putin is a multi -billionaire bloodthirsty mother fucker. Okay, done. We get. That's a monster. The number one word that fairness and accuracy in reporting determined that kept appearing in all coverage of Putin's invasion of Ukraine is the word unprovoked.

1:02:16There are many things it is. It is horrible. It is war criminality. It is many things, but it ain't unprovoked. Explain. On his own, Putin is a mother fucker and is raping and pillaging. But Putin is not America. We have 860 military bases in 130 foreign countries. He has something like 12. I don't know what he's looking for. I don't want to conjecture. He doesn't have the track record of war that we have. We killed something toward a million Iraqis and now suddenly turned to him and say, how did you see George Bush's mistake? He made a faux pas about this. W. Bush was recently made a speech and he said, this terrible and unlawful invasion of Iraq.

1:02:55I mean, Ukraine. And then he caught himself and I have to say adorably for a killer. He said, oops. Well, same difference, I guess. Yeah. And then he said, I'm 75. Yeah. He's very endearing and I'm an forgiving person. Yeah. He was part of a system that ran a war that killed a lot of people. But if he's come to understand the folly in that and the tragic folly in that, he understands something that people don't who say unprovoked. Tell me the provocation. The provocation is the long story of NATO and Russia and the way in which countries neighboring Russia are more and more armed and trained and aided and abetted by NATO in a way that Putin feels is violative of the way the deal was struck to end the cold war.

1:03:46Does it seem do you think Putin's position is unreasonable based on the deal that was struck before and based on what NATO is doing? I think that he is unreasonable and those who are provoking him as well are unreasonable. It's not this or that and it's not what came first. Putin is not a girl scout that we're provoking. Stalin was not a girl scout that we provoked. We were looking for an enemy anyway. He happened to be an unbelievably terrible enemy. Putin is an unbelievably terrible creature, but we would be very remiss if we didn't do the math on what we are doing that is pushing the world toward that kind of calamity.

1:04:25Because that is real stuff. That's not a joke. That's not some Robert Kennedy conspiracy theory. I give you an example in the November before the March invasion. November before it there is a large story in the Wall Street Journal that says maybe a war in Ukraine is worth the risk. What does that even mean? That if we provoke Putin by doing the red line crossing that we are doing, he will probably fuck himself up. He'll probably overstep because it's almost like he's compelled to because he's leading a country where he said to his people, I have my red line and I've said it several times and they keep crossing it.

1:05:05They're going to run him out of town if they cross the red line on a huge level, letting Ukraine into NATO, arming Ukraine, doing all this stuff. So he is seeing the world his way and his way is to see it as I am an innocent and I represent the good people of Russia and I'm provoked. Object bullshit. We want to act like he's a boogie man. We are good people of conscience. Forget about the fact that we just bombed a million people over the past 30 years without any provocation. I've never apologized for it. There were no W &Ds. We're putting depleted uranium in the lives of children. No, we're good guys and he did this untoward.

1:05:41Of course we're involved. And once you accept that, you'll lead back to the military industrial complex who is in the business of always needing a worthy adversary. And so now we've got this guy to be the worthy adversary. But if it wasn't him, it would be someone else. It would be someone else and that doesn't mean that he's a good guy. That's the point. Nobody's a good guy. In this story, nobody's a good guy. Nobody's a good guy because at the end of the day, the operators of the world treat democracy like a cute narrative. The enlightenment offered up to act as a fig leaf on the age -old story of the powerful abusing the masses of less powerful.

1:06:31And so they basically say, Major Barbara has an incredible speech about this, where he says, basically, oh, don't talk to me about the government of your country and all those little toys you feed the public. I'm going to go back to my counting house now and call the tune. Pay the piper and call the tune. Well, pay the piper and call the tune. Major Barbara is a vision of the military industrial complex. It is the real conversation is happening at the adult table and it's driven by money. And all the rest of you are toying with pronouns and democratic ideas and illustrious stories and beautiful ideals.

1:07:09Well, I believe in those fucking ideals. They are making a mockery of it because they have the power economically in a deregulated world. I was sitting outside the other night and I watched Elon Musk's evil enterprise of starling go over my head. Why do I say evil? Because I believe the people of the world should have had the right to vote on whether they want the night sky to have his moving stars in it. But we're just told that somehow starling is for our collective benefit because we can chat and share idiotic TikTok videos more quickly. So of course the night sky should be sacrificed for billions of people who don't even use this technology, whose belief systems rely upon the sky being a certain way.

1:07:51It's a beautiful story about a twireg warrior who watches a moving star in the sky and his entire belief to satellite is just never seen one. I want to stipulate that the only way the military industrial complex can get its macabre trick over is by having a stranglehold on public officials whose lifeblood is the money they get in a broken election system. They need the money of certain corporate powers and those corporate powers turn our public officials into pleaders on behalf of whatever sector is at hand. So the military industrial complex figured out something called political engineering and it sounds techy but it's really fucking interesting and scary.

1:08:42The B2 bomber famously had a piece of it made in every single US state. The idea of that, where you say how can you build a plane and you can't ship the parts from all these states that can't be very efficient, it's not. The only thing it's good for is making sure that when the review time comes, do we need the B2 bomber? Should we be spending tens and tens of billions on this program when we don't even have an enemy with an air force? Is that a rational use of public money that isn't going to schools, head start hospitals, old people are values? Every person in that Senate, every person in that Congress is getting a piece of the action in their state.

1:09:26So voting against it would mean voting against jobs back in the district. So they figured out how to politically engineer systems so they keep getting ridiculous sums of money. That was the way of the world until political engineering sharpened its blade and figured out what the hell are we doing? We don't need the whole country, we don't need to get all the people in the Congress of the Senate. All we need to do is get the 12 people who sit on the appropriations committee that's side of the money. So all of a sudden the B2 bomber was only made in 12 districts. And then some people noticed that and said we are being politically engineered to the profit of select corporations and select high net worth individuals.

1:10:12And the lifeline of certain political careers is being made by that funding. That's how public policy is being worked. That is why the military industrial complex is an example of how you end up in a world where the majority of Americans support abortion, but laws are being passed all across the country. According to the wishes of a loud minority because the American system is being warped to cater to that loud minority. Why? Because they like this 1 % of people with very extreme views? No. Because that 1 % is what wins you elections if you're the Republican party. And I'm not a Democrat, so I'm not telling you from the other side.

1:10:50I'm telling you as a person who looks at this broader system, the Republican party and the Democratic Party both do the same thing. But the group that the Republican party is successfully pandering to is a group of people who have very, very extreme social views about race, gender, abortion, etc. The pandering to those groups is part of the political engineering process. Because what you're doing, you're going to be pulling the other side -pandor too. They pander to the groups that service virtue signaling parts of the population. They pander to the extreme left that are dealing with identity pronouns and things like that.

1:11:30Doesn't make light of the belief systems of either of those groups of people, but there's a reason we're hearing so much about them. We're hearing so much about them because they're tie -breakers. In an equally split country, you're hoping to get that splinter group on one side or that splinter group on the other. And the version that the Republicans run is one where what they are doing is saying we want Republicans to control the country. Because if they do, we wealthy people get lower taxes. For that, we're going to support candidates who pander to people with really extreme views that we don't even share ourselves.

1:12:04Donald Trump had many abortions happen on his watch in his life. Probably more than we know. He's not an anti -abortion person, but he's totally happy to pander to the anti -abortion crowd to get that 1 % that gets him in office. And then he and everybody like him who want lower tax rates, get that stranglehold. A different version of that is happening on the other side, but that is one where you can see the profit line very clearly. Well, you're arguing that the right side is setting up a scenario that leads to less taxes for rich people. Yep. If the government is corrupt and bad, why is more money for the government a good thing?

1:12:44Well, because it's blurry to call government corrupt and bad. Reagan vilified regulation in American life. Regulation is why bridges don't fall down. OSHA regulations are why workers are protected if they get hurt on the job. Sigarette labeling on packaging, thanks to Ralph Nader and others is why that's there. Seat belts in cars. You know, if we're driving down the road and I have an accident and I didn't have my kid in a seat belt, I kid didn't have the power to protect him. So I'm dangering a child. There are reasons for dignified and meaningful regulations as part of the social contract of a society.

1:13:24What the military industrial complex and other industrial complex do you trust the government to do that? Do I trust it more or less than people who are unelected profit seekers? Probably unbalanced more. Does that mean I think it's super competent? No. And you know why? When I got out of university, I thought all the right -eyed and bushy -tailed young people like me were all going to go into things like public service. And it turned out there was a giant sucking sound to McKinsey and all these other repacious firms whose basic job is to teach an army of young people how to rape the world. And pretend that it's in their interest, that they were asking for it, that it's somehow the economic system that's the equivalent of capitalism.

1:14:02Capitalism, democracy is not capitalism. They are utterly different. And in fact, there was that slogan when we were growing up, have it your way at Burger King. And what they mean is you can go into Burger King and unlike McDonald's where it's a set item that comes to you out of that hose somewhere with the pickles already on it, what not Burger King said you, you can have pickles, you can say don't want the mail, hold to this, hold to that, hold to this. You can have it your way at Burger King. Meanwhile, Burger King was owned by Pillsbury at that time. Pillsbury, which was polluting the river systems of America, poising them, you weren't having it your way, they were royally fucking you as a human species while pretending that having it your way you can entertain yourself with the pickles and the relics and whatever else.

1:14:46The issue here is that corporate power invades the public comments, corrupts politics by buying it off and then points to that politics and says look it's corrupt. Therefore, no need to change it. And I would say boycotts, strikes, the word sabotage comes from an age of workers. It's the same as the word clog. Clog and sabotage are the same. It was when you took your clog, you took your sabote and you would put it in the gears of the factory, a shoe, you'd stuff it into the gears of the factory to stop the machine from operating. As Mario Savio said, you've got to throw yourself upon the gears of the machine and say until this is fair, the machine is going to be prevented from continuing to operate.

1:15:33So I believe that the people are the force that represent the people's future and what happens is corruption comes in and then keeps us giddy, distracted, guessing over the kind of question you asked, well are they able to do it? I don't know, we sucked most of the brains out of regulatory agencies, Reagan killed the... I'm asking because I don't have any faith in the system, that's why I'm asking. I get that. And the trouble is unless we take a leap of faith to trust that good will come from a fair regulatory approach. Why was Elon Musk allowed to put those things into the sky without an international discussion about the sky being a public commons?

1:16:18Just because he's so rich, just because he's got momentum on the sky. No, because we all want to starlink. Right, so that's the thing, exactly. And so the funny thing when I made my Elvis movie, Alec Baldwin, at the end of the movie, he's sitting in Elvis's car and he turns to me and he says, you know this all started with Reagan, he said, because Reagan said to people, do you want a new swimming pool or should these kids over here get testing for AIDS? And Baldwin looked at me and he said, you want the swimming pool, don't you? And then he looked at me and he said, and you should have the swimming pool.

1:16:54That moment where Reagan allowed us to not care about our fellow man, that is deregulation, because regulations have always protected the weak from the strong. That's the only reason they're there. That is what they represented after kings and queens were raping the masses. Democratic movements stood up and said, you shall not continue to treat us this way. We will have collective bargaining. You won't gouge us into the ground. So regulation is the product of the tension between humanity and the corruption of leadership. It always has been. What we're in now is a vicious cycle where that leadership has so corrupted the game that we have lost faith.

1:17:37But as with any beautiful sport story, right when Rocky is completely lost faith is when he's got to take that one last leap of faith. We must be able to see the potential for people who I do think give a shit to resist. And it's for that reason that we are moving into a time where the wisdom, younger people, I have two kids, their generation is smarter than we were. They know a lot more. They know what gas lighting is. They know what greenwashing is. They know the perverse mechanisms that power has long used to trick us, to separate us into sheep and goats. They know those things in a way that I didn't know them when I was their age.

1:18:25What's come with that though is they're also quite nihilistic. So you want to say to them, but don't you see that in what you know compared to what I knew, there's a reason for you not to be nihilistic because there's growth in you. You're already a 2 .0 over my 1 .0. So the idea that it's corrupt this way, it's only corrupt the way it is right now. That's an echo of the white patriarchy that we've been living in forever. And the white patriarcs are terrified that they're losing ground and they are. In short, over white people won't be the majority in America. And that order is like a whale flailing on its way down.

1:19:04Donald Trump is a death rattle of white male supremacy. And trying to grab on how many laws can we change to keep us back in the 1860s? How much can we keep the electoral college still representing the slave holding state? How much can we make it? Wyoming voters. A Wyoming voter has something like 14 times the voting power of a California voter because Wyoming is bolstered by the way the electoral college system works. It's an insanity that stems from agricultural agrarian slave times. White male supremacy legislation is trying to hold that world and freeze it because there's some desperate that it's going away.

1:19:41But that's our opening. They're desperate for a fucking reason. Get the memo. They're desperate. That is where we have latitude to change the game and the discouragers will come from the places that say, but it's like this. Martin Luther King said, don't tell me about the continuation of something by telling me it's always been there. Systems change and they change when the rubber meets the road on the way it is. So the question now, for example, will the environment, will climate change and the chaos that it's unleashing? Will that bring us into a moment of real potential for change? Will there be a silver lining to this horror that says, I'm very example, if I go on a show, it's happened over several years, I'm going to talk to you.

1:20:27You're a dreamer. And I say, really, I'm the dreamer? You're running a world into the ground. It's on fire. I'm saying you probably ought to change course. You're saying release the hounds and double down on this. And I'm the dreamer. I'm a realist. You're a fucking dreamer. And your dream is a nightmare for everybody. That is clearer now to people than it ever has been before in the vivid images of the world on fire. The world flooded places that used to be sanctuaries are now gone. Places like Venice won't exist, etc. When that starts to happen, will you still be able to fool people into the complacency that color television started with?

1:21:07And then became now TikTok. That you can distract them with the materialism of a consumer appetite. And you can keep scaring them with boogie men and stimulating all their addictions. Pray on their porn addiction. Pray on their, and by porn, I mean the pornography of every situation. The fact that we listen for the crash at the end of a screech when we hear it on the road. That we have some weird fight or flight, old lizard brain, purion, level. You can work that shit. You can work people against their neighbor. Is that going to keep working when everything is an emergency? I had an emergency in my home state of Vermont and everybody was out the next day to help me.

1:21:49So it's a, I think something good is happening in all of this. Har and then becomes, is it fast enough?

1:21:59Is there any place on the planet where you can say the system here is working? Well, first of all, corrupt. Yeah, I mean, there's always individual efforts that are pointed to as almost test cases from countries. Portugal's policies on narcotics. Portugal's drug response to the global drug war was wildly successful based on science and based on a real understanding of addiction and had tremendously strong results unimpeach to this day, an embarrassment to the other systems that said it could only be the way that they do it. You've seen the onion headline that repeats itself after every school shooting.

1:22:42The onion only repeats one headline and they do it every time there's a school shooting. And it says no way to stop this says only country where this happens. Well, Portugal showed us how you could change narcotics policy. How did they change it? What did they do? They don't make it a criminal justice matter. They make it a matter of public health. It's addiction. You need counseling not to be locked up. You need to be helped to become a taxpayer rather than pushed into a box where you become a body from which profit is strong until you're dead. And they're an example. The experimenting universal basic income that went on in Finland is an example of something we're going to be headed toward which is what is going to happen?

1:23:25And what 50 % of the global population is no longer employed. What do people do? We've had industry for so long. We don't even remember what it was like to just wake up in the morning and grow your own food. And most people don't live where they can grow their own food. And most people live in societies that even make it hard for them to gather rainwater, let alone grow their own food. Are there other systems besides drug reform in Portugal that we can point to of things that work? Well, the universal basic income experiment in Finland worked. It was very interesting and had lessons that blew people's mind.

1:23:57Universal basic income is basically the idea that if you have people who are out of work like that, you will do better as a society if you give them a base level of income basically like expanded welfare. But what it means of welfare always say, well, if you give people things that they don't... They spend a lot of people around. Yeah, they won't work for themselves. What the Finns discovered when the experiment was done was when you compared giving people nothing with giving people a certain modicum income. The people who got a certain modicum income did more self -starting than the pure hungry because the pure hungry became demoralized in...

1:24:33Less desperation. Yes. So, moderated. Don't give them everything. If you give somebody everything everything, everything you'll ruin them. If you give them nothing, nothing, nothing, you rip the soul out of the equation for them. If you find a middle, a third way, a mindful science -based, education -based, enlightenment... We've had a war on enlightenment and education because it's inconvenient to the powerful to take on the information that would lead to better systems that would profit the powerfulness. There's no way to argue with the idea that trickle -down never happened. The promise of modern -day capitalism was that the rich would get richer and it would lift all boats.

1:25:13That is not what is happening. The richer becoming astronomically richer and the class gap is growing to a point where ancient Rome, the British Empire never dreamt of. We have the widest class gap in human history in exactly the age that promised us a great equalization. It was a lie and it was a lie well -crafted and delivered by the wonderful Ronald Reagan and his best awestruck style. And it's crept behind our critical judgment, our common sense because there's no common sense in the world that says it a group of executives sitting around a boardroom where there's a fiduciary duty to make money for the stockholders are actually thinking how do we help poor mama granny so -and -so in Wichita?

1:25:54They're not thinking about that at all. We saw what Enron did to those people. That's the boardroom. That's the truth Enron, go fuck yourself. That's the truth Milton Friedman, go fuck yourself. Now maybe they were innocent so didn't know but we know now. What you're describing are not racist policies. These are policies against poor people. Yes. And their policies actually to just profit at all cost. Oops, there's poor people. Listen, we got to do what we got to do and money makes the rules and blah, blah, blah. They always have a slogan for it. You ask other positive areas, Portugal is one in terms of drug reform.

1:26:29Finland is a good experiment in universal basic income, a model of what it could look like. And everywhere you look around the planet now, Gar Alperovitz wrote a book called America Beyond Capitalism. And it talked about just in American terms but globally it's even more impressive. The ingenuity and the inventiveness with which shared economies have emerged. The speed with which, you know, if you visit for example the city, a city like Berlin, forms of transport that are less wasteful than a large clunky automobile are proliferating like crazy. Are the impact studies done on what all those batteries mean and what all those discarded scooters are amounting to in a pile of mess?

1:27:11Probably not a lot but it's hard to argue with getting across town and burning the tiny amount of energy needed to carry one human body rather than getting across town and carrying a 3000 pound vehicle. So, those little developments, a lot of them coming from the technological sector, they are very promising. I believe that what is happening with alternative energy is fucking mind blowing. The problem is that the virtue signaling is getting out ahead of the real gains that are being made and they're distracting us into complacency. So, someone drives their electric vehicle, thumbs up to you that you're thinking it would be good to get us out of the headlock that the petroleum industry has had us in.

1:27:53But have you really looked at the impact study because you're driving a coal burning vehicle until further notice the dominant energy source for your electric vehicle is coal. So, if you're driving a coal burning vehicle, have you stopped to think about whether you're ready to be virtue signaling or should you say it's one step to get the electric car, now let me turn my continuing passionate obsession on this into what are we doing to get out of the petroleum sector? What are we doing to get out of this kind of electricity is lost between where it's made and before it gets to the ground? That's a huge part of it is that we have dumb grids all over America.

1:28:29The most unsexy topic that Christine Hawkewess to runs a energy utility in Vermont has made a popular notion among some people and it should grow is that every time we hear about something that's going to fix the world, it's usually brought to us by someone selling us that new product, that new electric car, that new wind turbine, that new solar panel. When, as you said, just looking around this room, the energy that is being burned in some plant somewhere to power the microphones that we're using to power that this can get out there, 75 % of it is lost between the plant and the ultimate installation where it's being done.

1:29:05That 75 % is a leaky shitty grid, doesn't sound very sexy, but it's like if your mother said, you want to go out, that sounds sexy, sounds fun, clean your room first. You've got to clean your room first, but it's not very sexy. So it's, I think all of us who have the opportunity to do so, and I fault myself for being nowhere near, satisfying in what I would consider to be an accountable standard for myself. We always have a reason, oh, when I'm done with this project, then I'll really check my footprint. Loser, that's not a possible way to think that, but it's very easy to fall into that because modern life is busy, there's a lot to get done, there are bills to pay, it's complicated, and we're easily distracted.

1:29:49And here I fault myself and also would say guilty as charged, but here's my guilty with an explanation. You always have these hopes and dreams about bettering your footprint, bettering the way you participate in this equation, and it's hard to get to because it's a one giant add on. And why is it happening? Because deregulation allowed massive centers of power to rape the public commons, and it's a lot to ask the human race to stand guard against forces at that level of intensity. When in fact those are the same forces, you know, this supposedly radical set of thoughts I'm expressing are going to go out around the world on the interweb.

1:30:29So in other words, my revolutionary thought can only go on, total plug is pulled. I live at the pleasure of the grid. Chuck D's thing about the grid that's going on right now. Chuck D, one of the greatest living Americans, could not have it more correct when he says what you're going to do when the grid goes down. My entire uvra, everything I've ever done in my life can only be shown to people so long as the great masters of the internet continue to let it be shown. You go try to look at some stories right now about American crimes in the past 20 years on the internet purged. You want to look at the crimes of Russian oligarchs, things you could find 504 error no longer found, file no longer found.

1:31:10Soon enough, if I make a good enough movie, I'll think it's good if they'd say file no longer found. If they'll pull a plug on it. So there's a weird condition in modern life, which is even to think radically. And later on, when I want to send you a note about this, because I love talking to you, I'll send you a note at the pleasure of the technology system that is raping us as we speak. And is it some evil doer somewhere no? It's an unstudied collective thrust in a direction that needs mindfulness. And it is not having mindfulness applied to it. Mindfulness is a catch word that is being used in the yoga classes, that the executives at those technology giants are using, because it makes them feel better for the morning, and they get to virtue signal before then going to work and continuing standard operating procedure.

1:32:03Sorry for getting excited. I asked you about theater and movies about an hour and a half ago. First question I asked. Yes. Tell me about the difference between theater and movies. I'll be asking you. I'm back. The difference between theaters and theater movies. Yeah, tell me about the art forms. How you see them is different. I think there's an analogy that would speak to you about the difference between studio music and live music. A play is a raw continuation of the oral tradition that dates back to tribal life, to skits and plays and morality parables and music and the log drum and the talking drum and the history back to cave paintings of representation by the homo sapien of the thing that Harari talks about in sapiens that we traffic in myth and we traffic in things that aren't there.

1:33:08Something extraordinary about the human being is the way in which story, all the way to love, all the way to friendship, all the way to loyalty, all the way to team spirit, all the way to self sacrifice. There are so many narratives that are available to the human being that we don't think other animals necessarily quite engaging. We might be judgmental. Lions may go through self sacrifice. We just don't know what it looks like. Dolphins might be talking Shakespeare to each other and we don't. And we think we know because it doesn't sound like us. It's kind of stupid what we do. We anthropomorphize this.

1:33:41But in a very fundamental sense, plays continued the long tradition of folk theater. People sharing the stories that gave them identity, community and a sense of a moral architecture of a crime will get punished or vengeance leads nowhere or an eye for an eye. The basic tropes in that way and what brings them to life is a collective experience where a group of players organized by a director and potentially some others ultimately to producers in the modern era have kind of emprasarioed an event that is definitely a direct relationship between the live performer, some script. And the audience and their reactions and the reactions shape the performance and the performance starts catering to the reactions and playing off of each other.

1:34:45And in that moment, the human in the audience is invited to apply what is being talked about on the stage to themselves because when they cough, the stage has to stop for a moment. When they cheer, the stage gets adrenalized. They're part of it. The demos is collective at that moment in the live theater performance. In the same way that the best concerts of our lives are these unbelievably transcendental experiences between a star, between a band, more a band, more a band. Let me scratch that. Fuck stars. And this individualism shit that America sold the world because the most beautiful things are the bands.

1:35:27They're the groupings of people. I watched Stuart Copeland a couple of weeks ago talk about sting. He talked about the day he met sting. You know all these bands always hate each other when they get older. They're rolling stones. Don't talk to one another but they're not. Not Stuart Copeland. Stuart Copeland talks about sting. With the same love he felt for him the day he met him. He glows for Stuart. He tells you in the interview he's not arrogant. He's just always been sting. He's always had a golden light around him. Gorgeous guy, brilliant guy, crazily talented. And he says, and he can play the bass and sing at the same time which is already amazing.

1:36:07And then he said, and he had an amp. And none of us had an amp. It's the most beautiful interview. But he's seething with love for sting. I raise this because that collective feeling that bands represent. You check an ego at the door and you become more than the sum of your parts. I was listening to your extraordinary work with Paul McCartney and the beauty of how he talks about how he and George and he and Paul, what they brought to the table and out of that mosaic comes beauty. Well, that's a statement to all of us about the strange mosaic that we're all a part of. Theater definitely does that.

1:36:48Movies are like a studio album potentially deeply controlled by the director who doesn't leave it up to Jesus on opening night. When I was a theater director, I used to say my last moment with this play is the dress rehearsal after that all bets are off because audience comes. The actors run away with it. I'm irrelevant. I don't have any role in my go out take and have a coffee with a movie. I can control and manipulate every frame. And the actors are instruments within that. I can't control what's started for me in a very author way. What is happening now is changing that. As if to say, you know, you see some of these once upon a time only studio bands that start to perform like Donald Fagan performs these days.

1:37:39He's unbelievable. And he was performing even before Walter died and steely Dan would never perform. Scritty Polly would never perform. And then all of a sudden you see green guard site out in the world like being a person. And you're like, wow, he's a quite endearing person. But the studio experience was such a control freakery of the late 90s, the 2000 things like that. And I think Napster, and you know this better than I do, but I think Napster blew apart the kind of nearly slavery. Remember Prince's cheek, the nearly slavery control that the record companies had over artists. And all of a sudden in that free for all live performing came back.

1:38:17And bands that were incredible live suddenly were hugely on the rise. So weirdly, a blow to the music industry in a way that I think has led to real damage for performers in one way in terms of like the way Spotify treats artists, etc. I get why people are deeply unsettled by that. But I also understand that the band collectivism from the jam bands, all those incredible music came back and stopped being a phenomenon of the studio only. There's beauty in that. But of course none of this are just fixed rules. My filmmaking now in the current project that I'm engaged in is a deeply collective activity.

1:39:01There's a term in Latin, Primos Interapadas, leader among equals. I strived when I was young to live up to something a guy said to me when he saw me directing Manazion. I was directing a play in Berlin when I was like 26 years old. It's a Shakespeare play. This old stage manager was watching. He'd been part of the Eastern block, watch theater, watch Gratovsky and other. He said he was impressed by me. I said, why? He said, Primos Interapadas, you're a leader among equals. And I thought, man, I fucking hope that's true. Anyway, I want to be that guy. I spent the time, because I don't think I really was like, I think he caught me on a good afternoon.

1:39:39I tried to be that afternoon for my career. I didn't get there until the last few years if I'm there yet. But if you walked into my room, you would think, poor Eugene, there's like 12 people in this editing room telling him what to do. Isn't he the director? And I'm at the editing machine. I often run the machine. And the truth is, I believe that when we're making concerned work about the human condition right now. I mean, if you're making a love story or comedy, you could be an auditor. There are many of them. Wes Anderson can be an auditor. Woody Allen can be an auditor. All those people can be a tourist.

1:40:14I am not an auditor. And I don't want to be an auditor, because I think that misunderstands that the problems of the world are collective and the solutions will have to be collective. What happened to poor Barack Obama, for example, is that America, as soon as he got elected, we were so fed up, pained by Bush in the embarrassment that had made the country. Everyone said, thank God he's in. He'll save the day. No single human being can do that. And we all sort of leave the job unattended when we assume that some individuals are going to save it. So that's why I corrected myself earlier when I said a star on the stage.

1:40:55I'm not so interested in the star on the stage. The band on the stage, the audience rises up. There's a dialogue between the band on the stage and the band in the arena. And you realize it's a big band when a band says you sing along with their song and over 20 ,000 people are all singing, we can't get no satisfaction. Now you have a public saying we can't get no satisfaction. So movies and plays in their traditional sense, different in that I would have said de facto movies are the province of an author. But they don't have to be that way. And in fact, more and more, in the same way that contracting in the world is becoming less about hierarchical contracting and more about collectivist worker -owned, America beyond capitalism kind of share structures.

1:41:42Equally too, we don't have to pay Hilton Hotel Corp. We can share each other's housing because mine's empty there and you can go stay there and we can go stay there. I think there is similar development happening in creativity where technology is, and I don't just want to use that word, technology. No, I mean it really specifically, the way editing technology, for example, on a film works is you can try in a nonlinear way many different versions of something. So if I have 10 or 12 people in the room, I have a focus group for how a wide cross section of the public might see my movie. And at the end of the day, I'm not making something for no one, I'm making something to express something to a wide public to promote a certain idea of a discussion that should happen.

1:42:26I'm trying to advance the public discussion by getting some smart people into a movie and put some interesting drama and some events and some nice music. And I hope you enjoy it and therefore keep thinking about it. If I want that, I need that group of people in the room to basically genius proof and idiot proof what I'm doing all the way from. I don't even know what you're talking about to. That's boring. I knew that a year ago. Okay, well, how do I find the middle there without making what Salvador Dali and Boonwell called an exquisite corpse? Right? Because you'll end up with an exquisite corpse of everyone just says, here's an opinion, here's an opinion.

1:42:58Okay, but movies can be made now in my view without the author top heavy. Sclerosis that came from the era where unbelievably talented people like Copa Laun Scorsese and Kubrick and others there, incredible. I live and die by them. But that was then and I don't know that that's the mode right now. I think it's far more interesting to imagine movies made for a public commons by a micro of the public commons. Are you ever surprised by what the room tells you? You walked out of one of my movies once I did and I was unbelievably moved by it. And you told me afterward that the reason you had walked out was because the information in the film was so dark.

1:43:48It was too upsetting. And that you were so upset by it. And I watched about half of the movie and I felt like I can't feel like this anymore too much. And I walked out of there wondering and I think it was extremely therapeutic for me. Is that what you're supposed to be doing? Are you upsetting people in an unproductive way? Are you so impressed that you came upon me? I think I'm not the typical audience man. I know that. And I walked out with that too. I was like, okay, but he's Rick Rubin. He's not really sensitive. I can't watch Harmoot. I can't watch anything. But you exist in the population.

1:44:39And I can't just say, oh, I only make movies for people like Eugene who like you can light a match near me and I like fire. So it taught me something that I also learned when I took Ayahuasca. I took Ayahuasca. I don't know if I'm arrestable for that, but I took Ayahuasca proudly. It's natural. I think about 10 years ago. Natural. Yes. I took Ayahuasca. I'm sure wherever you took it in the country is where they get those things. It was extraordinary. I had no experience with mind altering substances prior to that. It was kind of a geek. And I go from zero to Ayahuasca. I didn't go to like zero to marijuana.

1:45:18I went all the way to like a thing that is like an eight hour psychedelic. Incredibly interesting trip that I'll say nothing humorous about except that it was just full of humanity and full of depth and full of psychedelic enlightenment for me. And one of the things that happened was that I had been offered a blanket because they said my body temperature would drop during the Ayahuasca. And I'm too cool for school. I was like, look, I never get cold. I get a sweater on, don't I find. They'd also offered me a bucket in case I threw up because it's quite a thing. And I was like, you know, I got kind of an iron constitution.

1:45:56I'll be fine. They also offered me a bedroom. They said, you know what, at the end of the night, you're going to be a basket case. We don't want you driving home. And I was like, you know what, I got the hotel. I'll be fine. I said no to all their offerings. And they all said, oh, by the way, and the bathroom is, and I was like, you know what, I never have to go. Like a camel. I can go weeks without taking a leak. I'm fine. I'll be fine. I don't know whether I was insecure that I was doing it. I wanted to peer cool. I maybe I thought they were just coming to me like the geek in the room. And they're like, do you need training wheels?

1:46:28So I was like, I don't want training. So the evening starts cut to at a certain point about 10 minutes into the thing. First of all, I tell myself this drug is not going to affect me. I bet I'll be the only geek in the room. No effect. That's the last thing I remember 30 minutes later, I woke up and the whole room was vibrating and was psychedelic colors and sitting there like you are now. You look like a Mayan tribal monster coming at me with fractals. Okay. So I got my ass handed to me by that. Found it extraordinary. I could hear conversations across the room whispers as if they were in my ears.

1:47:04What's going on here? All of a sudden, I have to be. And I think to myself, you idiot, these people told you where the bathroom is. You could, I don't even know if I could stand up. It's like you wouldn't even know where the bathroom is. You're making a ruin the whole ceremony for everybody, fall down a flight in stairs. So I started laughing. And then I remembered that the first time I ever went to a yoga class, it was with my mother. And we both kept giggling the whole time because we couldn't get that strap around our foot. Every time I saw that she couldn't get the strap around the foot, I laughed every time she saw her.

1:47:34We were giggling, ruined the yoga class for everybody involved. And I thought my mother always laughs through adversity. She lost her sister. She lived during the depression. She's lost other loved ones. She's a very sensitive person. She watched black people blown away in front of her in the civil rights movement. She saw the wars and she laughed, and I was thinking, maybe it's a Jewish thing. So that's why we, anyway, I had this long conversation with myself about laughter in adversity. Well, it was right around then that I got really cold, just like they said I would. My body temperature plummeted.

1:48:11I had taken off the fancy sweater that I had. So now I was just wearing an undershirt and I had said no to the blanket. I start pouring around in the dark to try to find some lights or off. I had pouring around in the dark to try to find my sweater. And I've never taken LSD, but people who've taken LSD told me there's certain things you touch. You feel like you're touching the vulva of Mother Earth. Like you're like the home, you turn to the womb. It's the most beautiful thing. So I reach my sweater. I touch this sweater. Man, I almost had an orgasm just holding this sweater. I'm suddenly holding this unbelievably beautiful voluptuous cashmere thing.

1:48:49It's a beautiful sweater. That's a really rich, beautiful sweater. Exactly the kind of sweater that a comfortable white virtue signaling privileged person would own. But if he's Eugene, he always noticed that the labels had made in Malaysia. I'd always noticed that this one. I remember when I bought it. My first film had come out in England. It was a success in England. And they had a big screening of it. And the very next day I went to the Ralph Lauren shop and I bought this brown cashmere sweater. It cost more than any clothing item I had ever bought by a lot. It was 700 effectively dollars.

1:49:27Half price. So 350. But I knew it was 700 originally. And then I always used to see this purple, beautiful label made in Malaysia. So when I reached for the sweater on the ayahuasca, all of a sudden I was holding it. I was like, and I'm thinking, you're going to make out with this sweater. You're going to put the sweater on. You're cold. So I start to put the sweater on. I put it on. And you know when you have a sweater on and the sleeve goes a little too long for your wrist. And you can hold it. It's very comforting. You put your fingers down there. You feel like Simon and Garfunkel in the wind of the New York streets and it feels really nice.

1:49:58So I was holding the sweater there like that. And all of a sudden something pushed back. There was a hand in my sweater. And I closed it again and it pushed back again. And I closed it again. I kept going back. And all of a sudden I looked and in front of me straight in front of me was the Malaysian girl who made that sweater. And I burst into tears. And I thought, I think I'm fighting for social justice. It's all these films I'm making, but I'm a fucking clown. Man, I'm not helping anybody. She'll never feel the effect of any of those films. Just thank her for the sweater. So I was crying and thanking her and I hugged her and I kissed her and I thanked her for the sweater over and over again.

1:50:40And it utterly changed my politics to understand that there is a way of going about social change. And what I've been doing at that point was trying to change it from the top down. That young Malaysian woman Mirage told me that I was not maybe Mirage. Right. Or Mirage person. That visitor told me that I had a mission to reach people with these movies at a ground level. That is when my room became a collective. That's when my approach to this changed away from Autourism and into something that is without pretending I'm a saint because I'm not. But hopefully less arrogant place, more listening, more group, less Eugene.

1:51:37Are you ever surprised by what the people in the room say? When someone reacts, their reaction is your friend. When someone reacts positively, if they are speaking from substance, there's good reinforcement about that which you wonder if it's getting across. If somebody reacts problematically, there's very often an answer in it. If you're sensitive enough to listen. When Larry told me that prison was the best thing that happened to in his life, I could have either pretendity never said that because I'm making an anti prison movie. And that's not very convenient to suddenly have someone saying it's good for me.

1:52:16Or I could say what kind of a country you're living in when anyone could think that prison is better than what the country is like. That's a much bigger lesson and a much bigger story. Your concern about the heaviness of that topic for you meant that I think to myself, is there a danger in the way media is made? I live in a system that doesn't allow a lot of radical voicing. Therefore, when I do get on to the day, I do get on that soapbox, there's a tendency to say, this is my one chance, it's like network. I can't take, I'm fed up and I can't take it anymore. You feel like that. Well, that may be what's needed.

1:53:01And I'm all for the moments in history when Mario Savio says there comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part and you've got to throw your body upon the gears of the machine. I agree with that. And I am oriented that way. But we're entering a new time when there's so much information flying around and so much noisy information. Tick -n -hom before he died, I had the privilege to be at his monastery and Tick -n -hom the beautiful Buddhist engaged monk from Vietnam. At his monastery, he said, you know, when there's a crisis, like let's say the boat is sinking and you end up on the lifeboat with a group of people.

1:53:47People on that lifeboat will be all doing all kinds of frantic things, blowing the whistle, looking for the oars, strapping on all the life jackets, hollering and passing aircraft, whatever. If you sit quietly, people on the lifeboat will resent your tranquility. They'll resent your indifference. But you may be doing something deeply valuable to the people in that lifeboat. The dull sit -tunes, the still waters run deep. Maybe there's something else going on here. I think you have done that as a human Rick. I think you had the option to be a cliched version of yourself as a juggernaut in the music business.

1:54:27There's an obvious path where someone like you kind of never puts on the brakes or puts on the brakes in a kind of virtue signaling fakey, fakey way. And I don't think you strike people that way. I think you strike people as authentically trying to figure this out. And I think that the soapbox fervor that villainous forces caused me to have to engage in the world. And now, when there's so much noisy information, I need to check how to place the right thoughts with the right dignity perfectly formed. And the art of it is not, James Taylor said when they were young, they had bands and their idea of soul was value.

1:55:21It's not to just be loud or more outspoken or more shock you, but to texture it so that people lean in because you're actually placing out of the media circus that they've become accustomed to. If I can head in that direction, if I stay in media, because I'm not sure that I can convince myself any longer that media work is going to stop the fires from burning in a timely way. And if that's not the case, then I should just go grab a shovel or a fire extinguisher and help in a more practical way to reduce pain. I try to figure that out myself. I don't know how to do that yet, but that's where I probably am headed.

1:56:01The coward amiss is probably. But if I were to continue making media and certainly in the mode I'm in right now with the series I'm working on right now, which is very sensitive, with that kind of a project, I am looking for the measured approach that isn't camp versus camp. Let me simplify this so I get your vote. Let me simplify this because it makes it easier with our fundraising to know who to send the email fundraising thing to and who not to. There was something you said earlier about finding the inconvenient fact that comes up when you're making something. And I found that the documentaries that seemed to have the most power for me are the ones that don't tell me what to think.

1:56:44They just give me the information and the best versions give me all of the information from both sides and allow me to decide. And there's two phases in that because as a documentary filmmaker, which I've spent a lot of my life doing, I'm often told that people would like to not be told what to think. And then you go about it in the editing room, secretly knowing that you've got really strong opinions. So are you lying? Are you hiding your hand? Is that deceitful or is that diplomacy? Is diplomacy deceit or is it empathy affecting your behavior so that you suggest to someone that there might be a pathway to think but you have the respect for them to know that asking them to make a hairpin turn toward what you think.

1:57:34Is disrespectful. They took a long time to get to the way they think about it. Marcel Oful said of documentary making. He said, of course, my films have a point of view but I go out of my way to show how hard it was to arrive at that point of view. We often say that when we interview people, you go easy on your adversaries and hard on your friends. You let your adversaries tell it like they feel it. And your friends, you don't let them take shortcuts that where the world is simple like they want to make it sound. Those are good rules but I often ask myself, I am far more outraged and pained than I let my films tonally represent.

1:58:11And is that deceitful? Is that clever communication strategy of getting like somebody sits at an advertising table and says, women don't like such and such. So we're going to market smoking to women in the way by saying like in the early teens, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Ed Bernays. He came up with the whole concept of public relations. When he taught women on the streets of New York, he made it an event. He said to the papers, stand at the corner of 59th and paring, and you will see women carrying the torch of liberty. And he had five famous Debbie Thompson New York get to that corner and in the middle of the whole parade they hiked up their dresses and they had a little garter on and in there was a pack of cigarettes.

1:58:50And they all lit up a cigarette and the torch of liberty, America's Shining Beacon was forever associated with women smoking. Well are my films when I'm being mindful about how I'm communicating am I just am I actually just trying to get in your pants and use a clever way in. Or is it respectful of the distance you may have to travel to get there. And I think both are true and in the hands of someone ethically accountable, you'll get to a fair place. But there's no question that the push back from people in the room. You know, when I made my Elvis movie, the king, it was after you had walked out of the house I live in.

1:59:29If you see the Elvis movie, it was shaped by the tonal adjustment. It's as if you gave me a slight chiropractic adjustment of the way I was trying to make the road by walking and it's in the Elvis movie. It's in the way it delivers encouragement for a discourse. And there were lots of things I cut out that were much more outspoken and they felt great in the moment, but they didn't feel great in the overall when the film premiered at Khan. It was about 20 minutes longer than the ultimate the king that came out. And those 20 minutes had a lot of the previous iteration of me and a more measured let people lean in and get there themselves happen in the later version.

2:00:15And that's where I got a lot out of that that viewing with you and audience members over time. I was often noticing that I'd come out of look how much I talk shut up after a while, right? Well, in an audience for the eyes you make speeches and people at the end of them would come up to me and they'd say, wow, you're such a good speaker. Wow, you're so smart. Well, was that the goal or was I trying to get them to think about prison policy? So I was making myself the spectacle. So I stopped standing on the stage. I'd go to make a speech. I'd sit down sound silly, but I'd sit in the audience and I'd say to people, what do you do?

2:00:49Oh, I'm not interested. And I'm just a computer programmer. You're a computer programmer. Well, how racially diverse is computer programmer? No, it's something we'd be off into the racially racial diversity questions in the computer world. Rather than me making a speech from the stage that tells you that I have all the answers about race in America and hear the statistics and they're going to make you feel bad. And then you're going to go home and maybe watch John Stewart, maybe you'll take a drug, maybe you'll have some intimacy, maybe you'll break the cereal at night. Whatever your thing is, but the thing with me was not going to be activatable because it was too caught up with me being the exalted deliverer of bad news.

2:01:28That was a mode in documentary. It was a mode in the news cycle. And I think we need much more textured discussion of things that are much harder to solve than that. How do you decide what projects to move forward with? I imagine you have more ideas for projects than the ones that you execute. I do. And some of the ones that haven't happened are heartbreaking for me because they are more reflective of who I truly feel I am than the ones that represent a Venn diagram between that and what was achievable in the marketplace. So they said in a book off once that he was being hailed as the great American author and he said if only they could read me in Russian.

2:02:15And I often feel I never really get the chance to reflect in front of the public in the way that I'd like to as a creative person because there's a specific market niche for me of what I can get over with. And so some of the more inspired things I've sought to do haven't happened and I hope maybe for a rainy day, but you're not going to get to all of it. I'm not 12 years old anymore. So I choose them based on a Venn diagram between vision and viability. Are you surprised by the movies at the end of them? Is the movie that you set out to make and the movie that you finish making the same movie?

2:02:56They've generally taken on the inconvenient truths that I didn't know when I started. The Elvis movie is unique because I was making a movie about the death of Elvis as a metaphor for the death of the American dream and then his car came up for auction. And I was already making the movie and then the movie became a road movie in his Rolls Royce across America during an election year. And you would think I planned that like what a great idea to cross America and Elvis is Rolls Royce during an election year when Donald Trump is effectively vagicizing America and Elvis dies in the toilet. Right. Like that was unbelievable.

2:03:31The land that no I was just making a movie about the death of the American dream and the body of Elvis and then the car gave it shape. So the movie at the end is completed. How did the first thought of Elvis and the death of America? I'll tell you. I was making a speech about a lot of the kind of things we're talking about today. Where are we all going? What's happening to us? What happened to the country we were told about as kids? I mean, forget about the fact that America never was that for the masses of people. Forget about the fact that women couldn't vote, black people couldn't vote. Forget about all that stuff.

2:04:06But at least the idea Martin Luther King said the long arc of his rebends toward justice. America was the staging ground where yeah, there were huge problems like the problems of old Europe, but they were being solved here. That's a beautiful thought and America validly has claimed to that. We can hold against ourselves what happened to the Native American. We can hold against ourselves slavery, post slavery, the endless crimes of humanity. But we didn't invent those. We just lied about fixing them because we were fixing them and deepening them when two sides of our face. So looking at that country and talking with an audience one night, it was about the drug war and talking about the crimes against humanity that were happening in America to black people.

2:04:51I looked at or to see people and I noticed I'm talking about black Americans here. I'm in a room full of poor white people in Pennsylvania who've got their own version of this story and have their own incarcerated family members. And I said you all look the same way I feel which is sort of heartbroken that life isn't like we thought it was going to be. I said it's like something went wrong. It's like we've all become the fat Elvis like something that was once really sunny and seen as an off -hand comment. And an elderly man came up to me after the screening and said is that your next movie? I said what my next movie?

2:05:29He said the fat Elvis. That's a great idea. So I started making a thing about the fat. Wow. And that's a great example of essentially crowdsourcing. Yeah. It was a collaboration before it started. Yeah. It began in the mouth of somebody else. Beautiful. What were the other experiences of the bus trip? We really focused on the others. Yeah. Tell me some of the others. A lot of it was what happened on the bus itself. One night while crossing Kansas I had left the Amish and I was on my way across Kansas and I did some farm work in Kansas before going to the US. I was going to Cheyenne, Wyoming where I did some work in a mine.

2:06:04Sounds more exciting than it ended up being a mine in this day and age is not like an old coal miners daughter movie. It's more of an industrial task. And I worked inside a packaging area in the mine. Day labor. But on the way across Kansas to get there, a woman got on between Kansas City and Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri. And I had taken a window seat and it was there was only one seat left. I'm one of those people. I was like no one in the seat next to me like for all my claims about collectivism. I look for the one seat where I don't talk to somebody, wretched human being. But there you go.

2:06:43So I get on the bus and I take the one seat that has nobody next to me. And after some stops, African American woman tremendously obese came and she sat down next to me. And she got into that seat and really filled out the seat and lifted up the arm rest. Well, that was going to mean she was half in my seat. So I don't know that I put the arm rest down, but I think I bristle them. Anyway, she left the arm rest up and she starts filling up to and she's really grumbling that I even exist. She was really put off that I was occupying my seat. And so we settled in together for what was going to be a long haul.

2:07:32And I was reading Moby Dick. I had read Moby Dick before my life and I was rereading it. And did you speak to her at the beginning just you know very mild, but she wasn't in the mood to talk. A couple hours past, there's a road stop. We get off. We get back on things settle a little differently. What are you reading? She said. And I said, I'm reading Moby Dick. She goes, wasn't Dick Gregory in that movie? Dick Gregory, the preacher? And Dick Gregory. I even knew Dick Gregory was going to cheat on him. No, Dick Gregory. No, I don't think. Oh, yeah, I saw that movie at the Realtto. That Dick Gregory in it.

2:08:12It's about that whale, right? I'm real, she means Gregory Peck. So I said, you mean Gregory Peck? Peck Dick Gregory, that's right. It was at the Realtto. And I said, oh, that's amazing. So you know Moby Dick, that's wonderful. You like it? Yeah, I remember that movie. So we get to talk and we have a nice town hall in the movie. And we go on talking and she tells me about where she's coming from, which was Jolette Illinois, where she visited her grandson who was in prison. America sends young prisoners and older prisoners very often out of state to a prison not in their state, so that their family members have trouble coming to help them, represent them, advocate for them.

2:08:54It's one of our Nazi era level crimes that we commit against people who we lock up. We make it impossible for them to have support. She had just come many states to Jolette, Illinois. She was going back to Kansas and she was having to visit a grandson who was in jail there and she told me about how terrible it's going for him and how heartbreaking it is. And I said, well, I'm actually in a scene right now where young PIP, the black castaway on the ship, the Piquad, who was like the little boy of a slave family who'd castaway on a ship and in fact getting his freedom. That young boy during the middle of a fracas with a whale was knocked overboard.

2:09:44And he was, his little black head was bobbing up and down in the waves as Melville describes it with ever widening circles around him between him and the rest of the whale.

2:09:59He's just a little black slave boy. And so PIP is bobbing in the water and I was telling her the story about how when he finally does get back on the ship, he's been scared into madness that young PIP is never the same after this incident where effectively A happened, the others willing to leave him for dead. And Ishmael is kind of a gas to this model and you can see in it Melville's views of race in America and you can see the lack of care. You can see the brutality. And I tell her this and night falls. And I sometime while telling her the story of PIP, some cosmic parallel to her grandson was on my mind in some subtle way it was hard.

2:10:42Not to talk to a black American woman about her black American grandchild while reading Melville's sleeve, euro whale, epic with the black boy drowning in the ocean, not cared about by those on the ship. And so that all was floating around the air without me saying anything about it. And all the lights and the bus are off because it's nighttime in Kansas. And you can see just the wide expanse of the occasional lamppost and occasional dotted farm going along and she goes to sleep and she's sidled up next to me. And by now we are bosom buddies just like Quikwegg and Ishmael in the beginning of Moby Dick.

2:11:21We are intertwined. She and I as if she was motherhood itself. And I loved being next to her. And she I think had gotten more comfortable with me being there. And I was reading and I read along and I read along and it was nighttime and she was asleep. At least I thought she was asleep. And all of a sudden in the middle of the night with Kansas drifting by outside the windows, I hear her voice say to me, that whale killed that man didn't he? And I said, yeah, he did. And she went back asleep. And I remember thinking, Melvin, how did you know where to send me? How did you know how to make me understand people who have a very different level of privilege than I've had?

2:12:16So beautiful. You have to have those experiences. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable how the universe sets up these conditions that allows it to happen. And provided that you're open enough to recognize it when it's happening because there could have been a version of you who was just uncomfortable and didn't want to be there and not open to what is this at first seemingly unpleasant situation. But before I congratulate myself for being a sensitive guy in that situation, remember that I come out of a background that gave me the privilege and I don't just mean like economic privilege, the comfort of not being on the receiving end of brutality at all times that puts you on the defensive.

2:13:04I'm an open -hearted person because I'm a privileged person. I guess I didn't turn that into rape and pillage and maybe I should get some points for that. But I'm not that many. I mean, it should go with the territory that you don't go rape and pillage. It should be go. It should be standard that you don't judge people as you wouldn't judge a book by its cover. But in my case, I was really blessed by the way I was given the freedom to be free of a lot of isms, the isms that Bob Marley talked about, all those isms that represent isms and schisms. I didn't have those. I've been very blessed my whole life that we didn't have racism, sexism.

2:13:49We had weirdly none of that. We were children of flight. We'd been losers. For a day, we were suddenly on top. Don't get too comfortable. It could be over tomorrow and before we get to tomorrow, who else is suffering right now? And then as I got older and when you're doing the work, don't be paternalistic. You fuck. You're no different than anybody else. You're just being helpful today. You're not in a better position. You're a better person. You're not stronger. You're not anything just lucky right now. Use it with care and with humility. And I've done okay at that. I've gotten as lost as anyone would.

2:14:26I've had arrogant times where I thought I had the secret to save the world and I'm the movie maker who's going to stop the war. I had all kinds of embarrassing delusions. But as I've grown older, I have a moderated sense of my role in the collective and I don't think I'm living it correctly. I don't check in with me in 10 years. I hope I'm doing better. It's an interesting point you made about because you didn't grow up with controversy and because you come from an open -hearted place. There's a lot of the way the world works that doesn't occur to you naturally. And I would say that that's probably true for the majority of our ruling class.

2:15:05Would you agree? Yes. And I think the danger of that is that that blindness can lead to some really unexpected, inconvenient brutal outcomes. Yeah. Let them eat cake. I was talking to a screenwriter in Kingston, Jamaica. He was a brilliant young screenwriter and we were going to work on a Caribbean epic that I had wanted to get done. It was a story from my child that had to do with colonialism in the Caribbean, white guilt. And I talked to him about the screenplay and he had shown me another thing he had written. It actually written it for Rita Marley and he was a brilliant young white screenwriter from America.

2:15:49It was Henry Miller, strangely enough. And I talked to Henry and I found him so smart. And for maybe the 15th time, if I care about somebody and if I like them, I'll tell them very, very openly what I care about and like about them. When I tell you how much I admire you, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass. I actually want more of you to happen in the world. And if you don't get positive reinforcement, what's to stop you from going? I guess nobody noticed. Well, I'll just go back and be a hip hop repatient producer, money guy, like whatever. Like I think the right choices need to get positive echo.

2:16:25So I like to tell people. So I was telling Henry what a great screenwriter he was. And I guess I reached number 15 and he want to hear any more and he goes, don't cast me up. I said, what? Don't cast me up. I said, Henry, do you think I'm trying to get something from you? You think I'm trying to score advantage? I genuinely just think you're incredibly talented. I'm just used to telling you and not for me. I said, whoa, whoa, whoa. So Henry, his background, had built him to not have that kind of receptiveness. I once met Danny Hawk, the genius social justice poet in New York. So genius and so special.

2:17:06He couldn't even, he was Mario Savio. He couldn't participate, not even passively in a system. And so he just kept the line and taught in prisons and tell us, and I came up to Danny Hawk. He'd made Jail's hospitals in hip hop in New York. Just one of the most incredible one man shows I'd ever seen in my life about everything that mattered in American life at that time. And I came up to him and I said, Danny, it's so great to meet you. You don't know who I am. I'm just kind of an upcoming filmmaker. And I have this idea that I could really make your Jail's Hawks. I was going to make him the greatest things since sliced bread and he goes, so you can make it.

2:17:47Can you distribute it? And I was like, well, that's what that matter. It just make a great thing. And he was like, I've been through that. They control the means of distribution. It's not going to matter what you're going to make. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good kid. Call me back when you're further along. You know, and was he right? I don't think so. They made it wrong. We don't know. We don't really know. I would have made something beautiful. Yes. Because I was so passionately in love with it that the jadedness that the system does teach made us not be a unit that I think I think I deeply was just invested in his vision and wanting a lot more people to be touched by it.

2:18:26And he was understandably watching the marketplace make mints me that a good intention. So I get why he did it. But that kind of jadedness can really block great enterprises of I can remember a situation in recording studio once where a musician played a particularly mind -blowing part like the sky opened and came into the studio for this moment. And then this person was walking through the control room later and the engineer in the room said, oh, that was really great. And the artist looked at him and said, please don't say that. Like, I don't want to hear that. And it wasn't a guessing up situation.

2:19:04It was, I'm staying in this conductive place. Yeah. And any information I get from the outside is liable to pull me out of it. Yep. Yep. There's a book called the Inner Game of Tennis. And it's all about the psychology of tennis. And in the book, the writer says, if you're ever losing to someone, at a moment where you're both crossing to change sides at the net, say to them something like, your serve is amazing today. What are you doing with that serve? Won't serve well again, all again. Because you get him to think about it and spook the whole thing. Yeah. Tell me about your experience in Guantanamo.

2:19:45The Guantanamo that I know precedes the Guantanamo we think of as Camp Delta with War on Terror. It's not the Guantanamo of that. It's a previous Guantanamo. America's had Guantanamo for decades and decades. And at the time I went to Guantanamo, I went there because I was working on it. It's always called Guantanamo regardless of where it is. Guantanamo Bay, Naval Base is the Naval Base we have on the Cuban land of Guantanamo Bay. And the American government made a deal with the Cuban government of a previous era that gave us a kind of permanent lease on that piece of land. Huge controversy within Cuba about it because basically as Cuba has been an adversary of America, it's as if Russia had a base in Pennsylvania.

2:20:29It's kind of extraordinary abuse of the international system only made possible because America could nuke Cuba off the planet if they had an argument about it. So it might make right. Guantanamo Bay, I went there because I was working for Jesse Jackson, the Reverend, who I admired greatly in a lot of ways. And I was traveling with him when Bill Clinton asked him to go to Guantanamo Bay, Naval Base, where a large group of Haitian refugees had been brought to the West. And he was brought because it was suspected that they were HIV positive and they'd been brought and kind of quarantined at the Naval Base.

2:21:06And Jesse Jackson was supposed to go down there and deal with the fact that they had gone on a hunger strike at the Naval Base to protest that they'd been sent there when all they were doing was looking for asylum from the crimes in their country and the pain in their country. And here was a whole new pain. And Jesse Jackson in his inimitable way read the situation down there and instead of doing what Clinton wanted him to do, which was to pass it by the situation, he joined the hunger strike. Well, I had cameras with us because I had gotten permission to film this and I had never filmed anything in my life.

2:21:38I was a stage director and I'd made one little dramatic film, but I didn't film it. I wasn't guy with camera. I was just want to be famous movie maker. I wasn't like a real person. I was a pretend person. So all of a sudden I'm in a Naval Base and I've got cameras who I started filming when we got back to America. I got a call from Don Hewitt at 60 minutes. I didn't even know who Don Hewitt was. I knew what 60 minutes was. I left TV the whole television, but I didn't know Don Hewitt. And he called and he said, I heard you've just gotten back from Guantanamo Bay. And I said, yes. And he said, you are the first person who's filmed in the base.

2:22:13I don't know how you got access. We've had great deal of trouble filming in the area you were in and things like this. Could I see the footage? And I sold the footage to CBS. And I'd never sold lemonade in my life. I couldn't get arrested doing anything, but all of a sudden I'd sold something. And I think that was an invitation toward documentary. Documentary really took a strong place in my life a few years later when a particular project emerged that I wanted to film. But it began in Guantanamo Bay. My whole career as a chronicler of life seeking answers, not necessarily just by telling fiction stories begins in Guantanamo Bay.

2:22:52Wow, but it was just a random, yeah. That's why it was a random, another case of the universe kind of setting up the conditions to allow this to happen. Louis Pasteur, luck favors the prepared mind. I always admire my brother incredibly because there are moments in my brother's life where he's gotten lucky. But that's not really true. Other people would have had the same thing passed by them and they wouldn't have spotted it. You have to have a certain orientation to seize on those moments. And in that's where I said, I don't give myself such credit. I was raised and I'm very grateful to my parents and to my godfather and my siblings for creating a situation around me that made me sensitive without confinian isms that get in the way.

2:23:36How would you say your brother and you are different as filmmakers? He's a documentarian as well. Yes he is. And you have a third half brother. There's three brothers in my family, my brother Tom, my brother Andrew and me. And we do have a half brother Nicholas and Nicholas is also a filmmaker and very talented one. My brother Andrew and I are different in first of all, he's six years my senior and taught me a great deal. So there are similarities between us. In a magic matter. Many of them are innovative. Well, it's interesting. He really does generally pursue individual stories of injustice.

2:24:13And he's very often focused as he was in capturing the freedman's or he was in the jinks in stories of fascinating corruption. In the case of the jinks Robert Durst getting away with murder because he's rich and the way that isn't that the American story. And so Andrew looks at the particular from which you draw the universal. I tend to hit to grab onto universal systems, the military industrial complex writ large, the prison industrial complex. My movie Reagan is about the craziness with which America has become Reagan's country in all these years and all the complex. The complexity in that I choose generally topics that start universal and express themselves in the particular my brother finds a particular story and just really use Christopher walk in terms explores the studio space with it.

2:25:07He doesn't leave a stone unturned of what a topic had on offer. He finds it all in a way that I find stunning. I'm a huge advocate of my brother. Have you ever done anything on the CIA or FBI or the intelligence agencies? No, the current thing I'm doing is about that. Great. Vastley. Great. That's the first time I've I can't wait to see that. Test passed there. Do you have a time frame on when we'll be able to see that? Yeah, early part of next year. Oh, fantastic. Early part of the fantastic. Yeah. Would you say there's a theme that runs through all of your movies? Yeah, the tension between capitalism and democracy.

2:25:47It struck me at a young age that people were not distinguishing between capitalism and democracy. They thought having it their way at Burger King was democracy. When in fact having it your way at Burger King is really a token little gesture while Burger King has its way with you while corporate power shapes the world you live and you're not having it your way. You're having it their way and they're distracting you by titillating your consumerist impulses and distracting you from the hijacking of democracy by capitalism. So a difference between capitalism and corporatism. Yes, I would say that capitalism didn't have to be corrupt.

2:26:24It's that capitalism deregulated becomes cronyist and corporatist and it stops having any intersection with the public comments. And don't forget that Mussolini from whom we get the term fascism. Gentile who writes the dictionary at that time for Mussolini in which the word fascism is introduced is the bundling of political and corporate power fascism is a bundle and the bundling of fascism of political and corporate power is gentile is idea for Mussolini of where power lies in the American system. It's the same. We just didn't call it fascism. He was a newspaper person outside of my pay grade.

2:27:03No idea. I only know that as a leader he has gentile to write this dictionary. Gentile writes a dictionary brands fascism as a bundling of political corporate power and we think, oh god, those fascists. That's what we do. That is what American democracy. Mussolini's fascism was an outgrowth of socialism. Very often it happens that way that isms. This is where back to Bob Marley always back to Bob Marley isms and schisms when we endorse an ideology. We talk about Marxism. Reagan was always very careful to talk about anyone who was a Marxist as a Marxist leninist. Well Marx and Lenin are two different people.

2:27:49One of them is a social analyst. The other one is a, you could say very corrupt leader. Well the hijacking of Marxism into what becomes communism, a pornographic abortion of a system has nothing to do with Marxism. Marxism is a diagnosis on what's wrong with capitalism. So because communism hijacks it becomes incredibly convenient for the capitalist to go well we see where that ends up. Is there a thriving one somewhere in the world that works as any ism that gets implemented and then takes on the characteristics of organization invariably human corruption rises into view and did immediate. So it's anything that gets big it's like what Jesus taught was one thing and then what the church did from that is a different thing.

2:28:43It's the same it's Madonna and Brittany it's also Fidel Castro you know Fidel Castro you can't have false staff and have him thin. If you're Fidel Castro and you can take basically 12 men and overthrow a giant oppressive government. Then when you get into power you're not a girl scout. And you are going to start behaving like that which you overthrew now is that the only way to go. I hope not but histories examples are limitless of the well intended social movement that comes to embody that which it decried. I would like to think that we are students of history more than ever before that might mean that we learn from history more than ever before and it might mean that just as we now know what greenwashing is so it's harder to do it on us just as we know what being gaslit by somebody is so it's harder to do it on us somebody make us feel crazy for thinking something that's absolutely correct and just twist your mind in the same way we might see coming.

2:29:58The signals that this is not going to end well that someone's language has to be put to the test okay but what will you do when you are in office what can we hold you to account for etc. Am I idealistic to view that that would be possible I don't think so because so much of the world is not predictable right now and I think that in the horrors that are surrounding us that are happening the people of the world into the name. We have a chance to breathe new air into that and so I don't want to take it for granted that government can't work right don't want to take it for granted that all systems become corrupt and even because that's the road to tradition those who benefit from the status quo right now are the people who have invented all of the arguments of why it's always going to be this way.

2:30:51I was vegan for 23 years and I became a vegan based on the industrialized meat system being not healthy for the animals not healthy for us my assessment of the problem was correct what to do about it was become a vegan that was the wrong answer because it made me really sick I gained a lot of weight I got really depressed and I almost died now I eat regenerative farm animals. I'm much healthier and it's more in tune with the way the planet actually works you've used the word capitalism a lot of times today as the problem and I'm wondering if capitalism or Marxism or socialism could get big and become as bad as our current situation maybe the problems in capitalism maybe the problem is corporatism and things getting too big.

2:31:46Here I would offer this I share with you 100 % the reality that the choices you made about your nutrition yeah are illuminating about the way a fix can be a misguided step even though the original intention was right and I also share with you that you and I are people who have the comfort to shop at the perimeter of the supermarket when poor people don't even have a chance to go through meter veggies there's a lot of things that I can do. I'm just going right to the process food because it's cheap and that's the story of our nutrition class system and I only raise that because there is a pernicious notion of health at the center of that even if the shopping market was smaller even if it wasn't a chain the basic idea of the pricing the basic idea of how human beings how labor how capital function that is a skewed idea.

2:32:46That has put endless growth as we talk about getting big on a pedestal great at unberg said stop telling me your fairy tales of unlimited upward growth all the time that's just something you've told us as if that's a given the author who wrote capitalist realism Mark Fisher who I think took his own life even at the end of it all Mark Fisher wrote a book where he basically said capitalism's current mo is to make us think that it's the only system that was ever there when in fact for most of human history there been many other systems and isms this particular one has a recipe first it has a recipe for trading all for profit profit is king and everything else stands in the way and then because we're clever we're going to create some sales pitch called trickle down that tells you it'll lift all boats let the rich get richer and will all be better that has been disproven by history and yet we still talk that shit so capitalism first and foremost is a profit seeking mechanism that warps our priorities this does not tell you that socialism or communism marks is right marks diagnosed this is right is on a political system he's a analyst the systems that were implemented after marks those have challenges huge challenges they they until oppressing of people because they don't they say at the state owns everything so you don't get the pride of anything no incentive there's incentive and there's it's no allowing for human beings to have the feelings and the spirit they have it accounted for how to solve for that you know to say to Rick Rubin you're going to have the exact same rights and the exact same money and the exact same means and health care and whatever else as someone who doesn't necessarily bring the same talents energy labor whatever to the table you might think to yourself I don't know if that's fair to me I get why that's fairish sounding but that guy doesn't seem like he's working and I'm ready to work 18 hours a day is there any accounting for that that was a nuanced conversation that never happens instead they go we're the ones who say release the hounds fuck them all and these guys go fuck Rick Rubin and the one like him they shouldn't have any of these things and I don't think it's so important that they're so talented but excuse me while I listen to some of the records he's made like so it's it's very twisted it's it's a it's a series of hypocrisies keep Carl fucking marks out of this because God love that guy for having seen crazy shit coming and then he's stuff got hijacked and turned into you know crappy interscope records sorry but you know how did Karl Marx turn it in it's good well it's like interscope taking your shit and making it into pop crap right it's like Karl Marx had a cool thing going yeah and the Leninists and Communists turned it into another rape system but with all this being said I don't know I don't want to necessarily just give it up to size but let's go with that for the minute hypothetically if you made size matters a concern that's already regulations so now we're negotiating now we're already talking in a regulatory way and then the quick answer back would be Eugene show me how to institute regulation that doesn't become corrupt in itself and I'll say get money out of politics so you're saying there can't be regulation there can only be if you if you actually only got a lot of money on politics until you do that you'll that be awesome and that's that's that's a decision yeah and that's a decision that'll piss off lots of people but well it'll think it'll piss off the people in charge who will not allow it to happen okay there's a great one I was talking this shit that I talk about capitalism some years ago and the granddaughter of Dwight Eisenhower the president she came up to me the end she goes you keep criticizing capitalism I don't think you're an enemy of capitalism it sounds like you're an enemy of cronism like people do in favors for other people and corrupting the system and I said the corruption and I said yeah but Susan show me a capitalist system that hasn't become corrupt any system that hasn't become corrupt I'm with that and so I said we're showing that thing so then I said okay but let me take it on so the next I made another speech and at that second speech I took on what she said and I came out and I said hello everybody I'm Eugene and I am a free market fundamentalist I think there should be a free market I think people should be able to competitively play on the playing field as equals that means I don't want corporate power that blocks mom and pop from building a better mouse trap they have skewed the game so that regularly they can get away with murder and the other guys can't get a fire what you just suggested I vote for that and that we could do and that is like sync because the only answer somebody in power can be back is no no no I don't want it to be fair I only win if it's unfair well next we already know where you live you're afraid of competition if you're not afraid of competition great there has to be a mechanism to allow society to be fair and not hijacked by the very people I watch Elizabeth Warren make some comments about this I have mixed feelings about Elizabeth Warren but I'll tell you what I don't have mixed feelings about is the way she spoke to the billionaires of America she said I have heard that billionaires think I'm out to get them I've heard them say that I'm there to take away their hard earned wealth I admire your hard earned wealth you had an idea you had a skill you had a good or service you wanted to offer and you have done very well with that I only want to reflect here that you probably were educated in this country's education system paid for by taxpayers you probably rode the bus to school on roads paid for by taxpayer you probably started his first business and had a couple of people on staff who got certain benefits of loans and student thing or GI bail or whatever taxpayer money you had students who came up in your ranks and became the she goes you have scientists were him came out of our university systems at her paid for with taxpayer money she said I'm only asking you to recognize how much has gone into as investment by the public commons your success you're acting like you drove to work through the air and there was a no regulatory world the entire world was regularly you weren't murdered because we had laws against murder to be able to become the person you became and now you want to say hey I'm successful and I'll close the door behind me that is so twisted and fucked up and weak I just don't believe it'll stand the test of time the idealist in me thinks we will stop listening to hypocrites at some point I think Trump is helpful Trump is a helpful hypocrite I think it was question something I'm confused about I could remember reading all these reports books about the population explosion and that the planet can't hold this many people and it can't be managed and there's too many people and then I hear Elon Musk talking about we need to have more children because there aren't enough people are they just looking at different stats what happened Elon Musk is an example of the modern phenomenon that the making of wealth is confused with the possessing of wisdom I find Elon Musk clownish as a thinker I watched Elon Musk and I'm a nuclear thinker and I watched Elon Musk asked about his desire to relocate us to Mars and someone quite normally pointed out that it's rather cold on Mars and not so habitable and Elon Musk with a straight face said not a problem will warm it up how would you do that ask the interviewer and he said you simply drop thermonuclear weapons on the poles of Mars okay so newsflash history of science nuclear weapons just because they're hot don't necessarily heat things out that's what a nuclear winter is many side effects can happen from a nuclear blast that's the least of them the idea that unscientifically he just throws off a comment like nuking the poles of Mars so that we can all have a have a homestead there tells you the depth of his thinking but what Elon Musk did was succeeded with the electric car ever since who killed the the electric car the incredible movie we don't know that there has been decades of obstacles to others who tried to do that and Elon Musk arrived and did an amazing thing and more power to him for the corporate achievement he's conducted but I don't want to get out of my lane and pretend to understand the population dynamics of that I can tell you that most conversations about where things are emphasize what we all are as human beings are supposed to do to fix our behavior and deemphasize the fact that better part of climate change is caused by organized industry whether it's the pollutions from the various petroleum industries all the way to meet all the way everywhere we look we see corporate power unregulated running a muck and poisoning life on earth and then we are told that it's because we left our light on does that mean we're exempt no tell you fucking lights off get your own grid working look at your backyard look at your behaviors if for no other reason that it makes you much more leery when corporate power says none of that should apply to them so we all are in this together but the leaders of it are at the corporate space the population numbers for example in Africa look how populace africa is look at what a tiny contribution africa is making to global warming so it isn't the bodies of people it's what the organization of those bodies usually very few of them creating a massive footprint america so if the wild leave a question many is is the overpopulation crisis that we were warned about is that it falls what the population enormity seven billion whatever we're at what that enormity it was four billion when i was a kid i'm just a he i'm just one lifetime that explosion that exponential explosion to now in the practices that humans engage in in their use of power in their use of resources we have passed the point where we are now using more resources than there are that's a death now until further notice until systems are evolved or until we change our ways remember that the in the climate change moment most responses to climate change have been about let me sell you a new technology that lets you continue to live life the way you've been living it none of it says to you are you living a meaningful life are you living an accountable life are you living a mindful life what changes could you make in your life that would reduce this and by the way not just blaming the victim and over here we're also going to change the way we burn this gas but do you need to consume as much as you're consuming we're going to service some consumption but while we reduce the strain on the central plant are you changing your behaviors both need to happen one if you just told the people to do it stop fucking stop having babies as too many people you're just blaming the victim and you're pretending actually away the real problem but if you give everyone a pass and just say it's industry doing it well we buy from those industries in my phone sitting right here are the rare earths that poor African children are being enslaved for and I'm using the phone talking about human rights over those phone calls huh so a big change is needed I don't feel that I'm in any way where I want to be in it or where a moral position would be in it recognition value is something but what have I done for that lately and I think that's a balancing act that is in the in the population question because the population question written wrong is ultimately about it's the numbers of people well there are lots of numbers of people in Africa but without the industrial organization of corruption that European states China America India have they're not rape in the world and their numbers are huge Michael Moore last produced a movie called Planet of the Humans and Errol Morris directed a documentary about Steve Bannon both were disgrace discredited and shamed is it possible to make an honest documentary today I think there's no ignoring that the impact of social media and quick fix very much endorphins servicing content on the internet designed with algorithms and other technologies to exploit our addictions and feed us quick fixes conditions the public to have a shortened attention span to look for I mean if you take it to its logical extreme it's the emoji happy sad embarrassed in love that it out those are not nuanced understandings of the human condition but they are the ones that corporate power has found sell the most get you oh I got likes like what is it like there are many shades of how you feel about something in history and when someone watches a movie they're originally they're watching something with many shades of what they I might not have liked the movie but I got it really made me mad or I like well did you like it well I don't know if I liked it I I felt in the deer hunter when he took out the gun I couldn't blame I felt like I had to look away but I saw it again because well you saw it again I saw the movie Triangle of Sadness last year talk to people about Triangle of Sadness Jenny's one of the best movies I've ever seen and people have I mean they hate I don't know if I can even see it based on the title it's unbelievably funny and interesting a real movie okay about a lot of things that we're talking about you I think you would you would find it very interesting but I don't want to say you'd like it yeah yeah because that's like telling you give it a like yeah yeah so the dialing down of content to quick emoji level opinions on how it services your mood or identity in the moment is creating a very corrupted and undermined landscape for the delivery of meaningful content because all of a sudden if I want to make something it's longer than two minutes boy you must be one of them they're academics you oh that's gonna go deep boy and I got I don't know if I have time for that I go right so meanwhile no it's a it's a love story it's a 90 minute film this is nothing it's it's it's it's cut in candy not cut in candy when the alternative is 12 two minute videos on a doom loop into the night where you go into a wormhole of of endorphin triggering that is there's no way to ignore that so when you say can you make an honest documentary one of the problems is you're trying to bring effectively medicine to people social if you're making social justice work like I am and it's not just that they don't want to take their medicine they're on a steady diet of of speed they're on a steady diet of crack and then you're trying to bring them granola and you know quinoa salad well I didn't want to make quinoa salad I thought I was making a really cool thing here but compared to your speed it's quinoa salad so then what am I gonna do gussie it up and make it more sexy make it shorter make the messages punch here put the ending at the beginning so I go wow that's cliffhanger there's all these pressures around me right now but I don't want a panda to that okay you're a great guy you don't want to pander to that 12 people see your movie okay okay well I'll pander a little bit I'll pander a little what I gotta how far do I have to go and now there's a product and it's been forged by that conflict between meaning and the repatius impact of capitalism on modern thought and there's no ignoring that so my heart goes out to the arrows and the Michael Moore's the world because it's not easy right now to try to represent fine truth well wait a minute you're aware that you're trying to share it with someone so in the way to finding it you certainly want people to see it so you're gonna leave that nuance in there that inconvenient thing you found or you're gonna say I'm the one that says planted of the humans I'm gonna plant my flag there I'm gonna plant the Steve Bannon flag no no he got big trouble okay so I won't do that next time okay that didn't pan out because that was got a lot of not likes you know so I'm gonna get likes so I'm gonna get likes I think I'll make one on bar specter I'll make one on panel Anderson I'll make one on because that's just more even I can go there they're like a built -in contradiction well that's not bad Alex Kimney made a bar specter movies totally cool panel Anderson movies amazing so there can be good but it's a hard navigation to get there so