Ain’t no Rock and Roll: Brad Skistimas on the DarkHorse Podcast
Bret Speaks with Brad Skistimas of Five Times August in the wake of his newest release: “Ain’t No Rock and Roll”Find Five Times August on X: @FiveTimesAugust (https://twitter.com/FiveTimesAugust)Find Five Times August at: https://www.fivetimesaugust.com/*****This episode is sponsored by The Wellness Company: Services and supplements including Spike Support Formula, for vaccine injuries and long Covid. Go to twc.health/DARKHORSE to save 15% of your order.*****Find Bret Weinstein on X: @BretWei...
I have the distinct pleasure of sitting this afternoon with Brad Schistimus, who is the lead singer, the marimba player, and the harpsichordist for the band Five Times August.
Actually, I don't know that it has any of those things in it.
I do know that you have a wide variety of stuff going on.
Brad, welcome to Dark Horse.
Most people are probably not going to have heard of you unless they are connected into certain dissident circles.
Can you give us a sense of who you are and where you came from?
Yeah, so I started Five Times August when I was 18, like right after high school.
And, you know, I kind of at that time wanted to be a, you know, just acoustic singer-songwriter kind of guy, John Mayer-ish, Dave Matthews-band kind of up-and-coming songwriter.
And down that path, I ended up getting songs licensed to MTV and ended up touring a lot of colleges back then, and this was about 2003 or 4.
And that's what I did for about 10 years, doing songs, you know, pop love songs.
Drew in the country, had some albums in Walmart and Best Buy stores, and I was doing stuff.
I took a break when I became a family man, started up a kids music project called the Juicebox Jukebox.
And that's what I was kind of doing prior to the COVID world.
And then it kind of shut me down musically.
And then I came back sort of as this kind of protest artist writing about what was happening in the world.
So this is certainly how I became aware of you, and I must tell you the first time I heard a song of yours, it's almost indescribable.
It gave me a kind of hope at a moment that was extremely dark.
The COVID dissidents, and I consider you very much a COVID dissident with a special skill set, but the COVID dissidents faced
An absolutely unholy world where we were being demonized in very close quarters and very personally as if we were somehow morally defective and so selfish that we would not go along with, you know, the slightest inconvenience even to save the lives of our family members and, you know, our countrymen.
That was a very ugly period.
And to hear somebody Rise up musically and challenge that order and do it so eloquently.
The song in question, the one that brought you to my attention, was Sad Little Man, which is a song about Anthony Fauci.
And, you know, there's so much about it that I still just feel is important, including the recognition that this Strangely powerful person who, as unbelievable as it sounds, was not only responsible for our terrible response to COVID, but also likely responsible for its creation.
That's a tremendous amount of power.
And to musically put him in his place and describe him as the The pitiful creature that he must be in order for him to do what he did was it was brilliant and it was heartening and I know it was heartening to many and not just me.
Thank you.
Yeah, I, you know, up to that point, I was sort of writing on a broader scope on what was happening in the world.
And there was this figure that was very God-like to a certain side of the aisle that I felt like, like, nobody is gonna, like, call this guy out, you know?
And I felt like, you know, the song itself I wrote in a way that wasn't, if you listen to the song by itself, it doesn't say Anthony Fauci.
It doesn't even say, you know, the word vaccine in it or anything.
I wanted to write something that Would sound just as good 20 years from now and have historical backstory to it.
So when you're like, oh, I wonder who he was writing about, you know?
And then when you look into it, you go, oh.
And it's not really until you see the video of that song that you're like, oh yeah, that's Anthony Fauci.
Because what I did was sort of create this animated video of him as a snake oil salesman traveling through these different towns.
And ultimately the town catches up to him.
But it was something else.
Like it was something that I hadn't done before in my career where I'm calling somebody out directly.
I'm putting their face into the video and saying, this is the guy.
Not sure what the repercussions were going to be, just overall.
And it did definitely put me on another level of what was happening.
Because shortly after that, my Wikipedia page had disappeared after 10 years.
YouTube was censoring the video for medical misinformation, which really, like, is absurdly ridiculous, because there's nothing you can pinpoint about the song or the video.
It's just that they didn't like it, obviously.
So things like that started happening after that song.
Interesting.
And I guess I had never put together that you don't mention Anthony Fauci there.
I love that.
And I'm reminded Of the story of the Beatles song, I guess I'm not entirely sure I know the title of the song, but here come a little flat top.
Come Together.
Come Together, right, exactly.
You know the story of that song?
I know tons of Beatles lore, but you go ahead.
In this case, that song was written as a campaign song for Timothy Leary, who was running for governor of California.
And I hope I have this story right, but John Lennon was asked about the fact that he had used it Even though it was written for Timothy Leary and, you know, it doesn't mention Timothy Leary.
But he said it was a little bit like, you know, at the dry cleaner, at some point, if you don't pick up your suit, we're going to use it for something.
So anyway, the idea that...
Such an iconic song, you know, yes, may have been written about Timothy Leary, but it extends beyond that.
And I like the idea that your sad little man is ready for the next person who inhabits such a role, and it will no doubt fit them equally.
But that brings me to another point, which is your songs aren't just songs.
You put together these videos and we will end up showing another song of yours here shortly but these videos are extremely artfully put together and you know it's I'm a little bit reminded of the animations that come with Monty Python that basically
I don't want to overly describe it, but the story of Anthony Fauci as the sad little man is told in this very compelling way that does reduce him to this two-dimensional character with, you know, the power to shoot syringes out of his mouth and things like this.
But I did want to call attention, am I right, you do the video in addition to the music?
Yeah, I do.
The videos are sort of an extension of the song itself, and I knew early on as I was writing these songs.
They just needed that visual documentation to go along with it.
It's one thing to write the song and put it out and hope people hear it, but it's just the times.
We live in such a visually gratifying time that when you see it and connect the visual with what I'm saying, and the fact it's all coming from the same source, it adds a different element to it and feeling.
I don't think I could hire anybody to make these videos the way I do anyway, because I put so much thought into each frame, almost, that I want you to watch it, you know, ten times over, because there's a lot of Easter eggs and little details that you can pick up on after you watch it the first or second time.
You'll go back and see something new every single time.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
The number of little details.
I went back and I watched a couple of your videos today and I spotted things I'd never seen before.
So yes, they are extremely rich and layered and very compelling and the music is irresistible.
Anyway, it's sort of the full artistic package, and I don't know how much you know about me.
I'm an evolutionary biologist, and I think a lot about Questions like, what is music?
Why does it exist?
It's a huge expense that every human culture invests in.
And I know that it has the power to move mountains.
And I know that when it's absent, it is a desperate sign.
In fact, one of the things that troubled Heather and me about the BLM movement was that it was so tone deaf that there was something it was it was just it was malformed that its chants were just discordant and troubling and there was no there they didn't even aspire to a beautiful movement it was just ugly at its inception and
So anyway, you're showing us the flip side.
You're using... and you know, what kind of world are we living in that you can...
Create a piece of art that doesn't even name the person in question that levels an accusation only if you understand what has been taking place and the idea is well then we all know what was taking place so you definitely leveled an accusation and that accusation is incorrect by definition so therefore I don't know if they threw you off or removed the videos or what they did but the idea that they would take action against art tells you exactly who they are.
Yeah, that was a real eye-opener for me because as an artist, you know, stepping into this This field of just speaking out in general, you know, before I released these songs, I was sort of dipping my toe into posts online, you know, just sort of saying my opinion here and there on Facebook.
And it was something I hadn't done before because I knew I was about to upset a certain, you know, I had two decades worth of fans.
So I was like, I worked really hard over the years to just Be right in the middle and, you know, bring everybody together through music.
That's what it's about and unifies us.
And once I started speaking out, yeah, you saw that sort of tsunami hit you of anger and resentment.
And it's just an interesting thing to see, to experience.
But I forget where I was going with that, but you just sort of trailed me down memory lane there.
Yep.
Well, maybe that leads us...
To the next question, which is, um, so you have a new song out and the song again, struck me very powerfully.
And it, it dovetails with some of what you've already said about your own origin story, that you, you were trying to be a rock and roller.
You were, you know, you weren't out to make waves, you were out to make music.
And then, as it has happened to many of us, history happened to you.
And I don't know what it is that clued you in to the broken nature of the official narrative on COVID.
Do you know what it was?
Well, so my oldest son, I have three kids, my oldest had been injured by his early childhood shots, and so my wife had gone down this rabbit hole long ago.
So by the time COVID came around, I had heard so many things in my ether, but as a bumbling dad, you just sort of go, oh that's, you know, we'll worry about that when, you know, I think a lot of dads are like that.
So, you know, thank God for the Google moms who really let their mother bear instincts kick in.
And so that stuff was in my ether.
Then by the time COVID came around, it was at my doorstep.
And, you know, you could see what was happening.
The masks were coming in and social distancing.
None of it made sense.
And I felt like I needed to speak up, you know, for my kids sake.
I didn't like the way the world was, what it was turning into.
And I didn't want them to look back 10 or 20 years down the road and be like, you know, what did you do back then about it?
And I had a platform.
So I decided to sort of, you know, step forward and say something, but it was also, um, You know, looking around, wondering where my musical heroes were, because they weren't showing up.
My whole life is music, not just writing it, but it's how I spend my leisurely time, listening to music, shopping for records.
That's what I've done since I was a kid, so I had these heroes that I had anticipated to say something.
And, you know, most of them didn't.
And then the other half that did made a Pfizer commercial or, you know, a tweet telling you to be cool and get vaxxed.
And then there was, you know, guys like Eric Clapton and Van Morrison out of that generation, and they were the only two to really say anything at all.
So it was really disheartening.
So, yeah, I have a new song out now called Ain't No Rock and Roll, which is addressing this entire Emotion of looking at rock and roll and realizing that maybe it was a farce the whole time because there was never a greater time to speak up against the man than right now.
The last three years, the door was wide open to say, damn the man.
And, you know, like I said, very, very, very few of them actually showed up.
Yeah, almost none.
And it's stunning in light of all the lyrics we could all recite, all of the things that they led us to believe that they believed.
If they believed him at all, they sure as hell don't anymore.
It's amazing.
My suggestion is so that people have some idea what we're talking about that we play that song now and I will say a large fraction of our audience listens on podcast but the visuals here are important too.
You will understand a lot better the full nature of the accusation leveled in this beautiful song if you watch it so if you can't watch it right now consider going back when you're sitting at a screen that's Capable of showing it to you and finding the song and looking at the video.
It's really, really good.
All right, so let's play it.
Rock and Roll Ever since they sold out Rolling Stones
All the words that were sung in the past Will never feel the same when we're looking back All the old men sitting in their makeup chair With their gold record walls really couldn't care All the fame feels the same when you've had enough So they don't bother standing up
And there ain't no peace in love Ever since the 60s, kids grew up.
All the drugs and the girls and the cash.
After all the songs, it was gone in a flash.
All those bad boy rebels and the attitude.
What a show, we didn't know that none of it was true.
Only self-serve, entire establishment We were all so innocent Because there ain't no rock and roll And the blues has lost its soul All the punks gave the man control And every pop star's bald and sold
No, there ain't no, ain't no rock and roll And there ain't no Joan and no Bob No one stuck around for their protest job All the stars and the big farmer whores Shilling for a check from their corporate shores
All the actors say what they're paid to say No one stuck around for their protest job All the stars in the big farmer horse Shilling for a check from their corporate shores All the actors say what they're paid to say While the fans take the blame All the once cool fools that were me and you Well, they pushed us all away Because there ain't no rock and roll And the blues has lost its own
All the punks gave the man control And every punk star's ballin' so No, there ain't no, ain't no rock and roll And there ain't no boss, no queen Never was a rage against the damn machine
No, there ain't no fighter in the flu.
No more rockin' in those free world shoes.
All the high strung neo young wannabes.
Yeah, their silence has been deafening.
All the suits lick the boots of the government.
What they sang they never meant Because there ain't no rock and roll And the blues has lost its soul All the punks gave the man control And every pop star's falling so
No, there ain't no, ain't no rock and roll
No, there ain't no rock and roll All right, so it is quite a song, and my guess is it can't have been easy for you to write that song about people that you clearly respected.
You know, it's funny because I wrote that song last November, and it was inevitable.
I almost feel like it was the first song that I wrote, even though it wasn't.
But the emotion that is in the song that really drove me to speak out, you know, was sort of the genesis of this entire whole Avenue that I've been down musically so it was going to happen and then when I wrote it I thought Yeah, you know that's that's really saying something and you know How how much more rock and roll can you get in calling out rock and roll as it stands now?
It's funny to be considered Something of a rebel now because looking at all those guys and those figures in the video I was never going to be that.
I was never going to be sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
I was just a clean-cut acoustic guitar guy.
But it turns out that being a family man and, you know, just sticking to your convictions as a father and, you know, somebody who cares about their country is the most rebellious thing that you can be in these times.
Yeah, and then putting the video together was another thing because I was looking at, there's a lot of my heroes in that video, former heroes, where I'm like, it pains me to put you in here, but this is the way it is now.
You know, I feel like I gave So much grace more than I should have to say when you come in to say something when you know when is when is Bob Dylan going to say something when is you know Paul McCartney, or, you know, we all expected Neil Young to be one of those guys.
Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine.
And they just completely let us down.
And then you see, not just did they not show up, but like, what are they in the news for over the last three years?
Neil Young's angry about misinformation.
He's drawing a line in the sand saying, you can either have me or Joe Rogan.
Well, he lost that battle.
And then Bruce Springsteen is having, you know, vaccinated-only audiences.
That was a big one.
To be like, what are y'all doing segregating your audience in a place where that's supposed to unite us despite our differences at concerts?
You know, it doesn't matter what what your political affiliation is or anything you stand there together and you sing these songs and then you go home and you say that was great that was very unifying and all of a sudden uh vaccinated only can get in or special vaccination clinics set up at the concerts all this crazy stuff um and then yeah so the joke became rage against the machine you know is is now raging for the machine And I think, you know, everybody saw it.
Everybody saw it happen in real time.
So it's very disappointing.
Well, when I saw your song, I had this odd feeling because the music is, you know, I won't call it folk.
It's not exactly folk.
I don't want to insult you by pigeonholing you into a genre, but it sure is how closer to folk than it is punk.
But my thought was, This is the new punk, right?
This is somebody who actually is saying it like it is and doing it in spite of the fact that it's personally painful to call out your own heroes and say, where the hell were you?
I gave you how long and you didn't show up.
In fact, you showed up on the other side.
What's wrong with you?
Well, a lot of us are there.
I mean, I will point out maybe you're, you know, you're an unlikely punk.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I don't know what I'm, I'm supposed to be a nerd.
I'm a biologist, right?
I'm supposed to be geeking out on, uh, you know, I dunno, protein synthesis or something.
And here I am like fighting the man.
So I guess we are all called by this terrible situation into roles that we did not imagine we would be in.
Right.
Yeah, you know, that was something that was that that sort of woke me up was that it happened simultaneously watching my musical heroes become sort of the dorks and sellouts or whatever.
But then the doctors and the scientists that actually risked everything That actually did speak up against the band.
They became the rock stars to me.
They were now, like, the rock and roll rebels.
And I think that that's so crazy how the paradigm has shifted over the last three years because nothing is what it was.
So, which is very exciting, too, because it brings back the attitude of it all.
Like, I'm clearly I don't look like a punk rocker, but my attitude in doing what a punk rocker would do Is there in the same sense that Dr. Speaking Out is very rock and roll.
And so, you know, that's that's a new kind of thing.
I don't know what you call that.
It's, you know, because I do think rock and roll as it as it was, like I said earlier, is is sort of just a farce.
It's a T-shirt and Target store at this point.
You know, there's all these grunge bands that, you know, started in the 90s, Pearl Jam and Nirvana.
And now they're just that t-shirt.
It's their logo on a t-shirt at Target, which was the very antithesis of everything that they were singing about back in those days.
So there's something new happening, and there are, you know, there's new artists speaking out.
independent artists who aren't tethered to major labels and managers and stuff, and we're starting to sort of find each other.
There's artists that have been kicked out of bands, very popular bands, that There's a new band called The Defiant, who is sort of a supergroup of guys that have gotten kicked out of their bands.
One of those being Pete Parada of the band The Offspring.
Everybody knows their hits from the 90s.
He's teamed up with Dickie Barrett from the band The Mighty Mighty Bostones.
There's a guy in the band, in that very band from Smash Mouth, who wrote All Star and Walking on the Sun, all these songs.
So they've created a new, like, they're the rock and rollers, right?
Like, if you're wondering where they were, they braved it, they went through it, they convened together, and they have an album coming out.
And that stuff's really exciting to me to see.
Well, it's really exciting to me too, and I have a number of thoughts that follow from that.
Forgive me, this is one of my defects as a podcast host, is that I'm going to put a couple things on the table at once, which it is what it is.
A, the analogy between what you're seeing in music, what we saw in medicine, what we saw in science is quite close.
The entire institution of science failed.
The entire institution of medicine, of journalism, these things revealed how bankrupt they were.
But in each case, a tiny number of people, and really compared to the size of the institutions, it's tiny.
They created, I don't think they knew that this was what they were doing, but they created grassroots institutions that substitute for the failed institutions that just couldn't be rescued.
And, you know, the idea of a supergroup composed of people thrown out of their bands because they wouldn't take a vaccine or wouldn't inflict vaccines on their audience.
Wow, that is a hell of an origin story, right?
Powerful stuff.
So it's heartening that that process, right?
Let's put it this way.
The tiny number of people was really close to zero, but it wasn't zero.
It was a small number of people who I will say were And really, the story that you've told us makes this clear.
It is the small number of people who are willing to take a financial hit, a major one, maybe even an unrecoverable one, in order to do and say the right thing.
And the real story is, why is that so rare?
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That was something that I told my wife for months as I started speaking out, because especially as an indie artist, if you're lucky enough to make a living making music, you've already won the lottery, you know?
It's a very rare thing.
And then to speak up against what the industry is telling you to do, you know, and that parallel runs with with, you know, doctors and scientists as well, because there's a certain expectation on how you should behave and what you should say.
But when you go against it, yeah, you feel the you feel the brunt of it.
But out of that, I've been really talking about this a lot lately.
We're at this turning point.
This stuff that didn't exist three years now exists, and it's a great silver lining of it all.
I've found myself as a songwriter in this journey, and these bands and artists that are now speaking up that actually um have something to say after years of watching sort of music turn into fluff that doesn't mean anything it's become very formulaic and it's basically just what i call hump music you know it's just out there and it's just it doesn't mean anything it's and so um Yeah, but there's a beautiful thing happening.
Communities of all different kinds, and once these different lanes line up, that's the new world.
And that's super exciting to me because we now know which doctors to trust, which scientists have integrity.
Which artists have something to say and really mean it, who are willing to risk it all.
And it is a rare thing, you know, because of, I think, maybe the pace at which life is designed for us to live by.
Nobody has time to risk.
you know, their bills and, you know, we got to get to work and then we got to get home and cook and then we got to get the kids to bed and we're all just trying to pay our bills.
And like, I don't have, you know, for the average person, they're just trying to get by.
So they don't want to think about, you know, taking a risk.
They'd rather just put the mask on, right?
And just go along to get along.
And I was having this conversation earlier today about, you know, imagine had we all stepped forward at one time.
There were pockets of us that did, and we have made it here this far, and there are more waking up.
But if we all had stepped forward at one time, how much crap would we be dealing with right now?
Probably far less.
And hopefully, we can encourage more people to take that risk moving forward.
Hopefully, people are going, you know what, I've had enough.
Yeah, I went along with it early on.
There are those people.
I went along with it early on, but then I caught on.
Well, it's going to take people longer than others, and those conversations need to be had, I think.
There certainly isn't any amnesty for certain people in the media, but on a personal level, on a community level, I think those conversations Should and can be had, because I think a lot more people have woken up than, you know, certainly the media gives us credit for.
But I guess I'm rambling, but that's to say there's something happening.
Well, there is something happening, a couple of things happening, and I want to come back to two of them, but specifically on your last point.
I want to describe it as I see it.
And there is a part of me, I will just confess, that is hoping that when you hear it this way, it will inspire you and you will put something devastating together to make this point in a way that I can't possibly.
So I'm not expecting that to happen, but it would be lovely if it did.
Here's the point.
We got almost nobody is taking these COVID boosters.
Okay?
We did that.
We broke their narrative.
Their bullshit that they were using to inflict these dangerous shots on people, including children, for whom there was never the slightest argument for doing it.
We broke their narrative.
Almost nobody is listening.
That's great.
But why, with 98% of people at least not eager to get that shot, are we still isolated?
My feeling is now it has gotten much less expensive to stand up.
And I don't like that people who woke up as a result of the fact that some courageous people put their careers on the line and in fact lost job after job, got demonetized, had suffered a direct hit on their family's well-being.
After people put that much at risk, It is now time that you can stand up and say, yep, I had it wrong.
I was standing in the wrong place.
Now I get it.
And now I've got these people's back because they had our back when we weren't being very nice to them.
Yeah, it needs to happen.
I think that it's Yeah, we all want that.
I'm sorry.
You know, I was wrong.
And this is coming from you.
The reason why it's so hard to get there is because they called you a murderer.
They ended 20 year 30 year lifelong friendships and family relationships over this thing.
You know, they thought You know, one to two shots to get your life back.
And now, you know, in the moment, you know, the moment I saw that that COVID-19 vaccination card, I was like, I remember having conversations with friends where I'm like, you know there's four spots on that card for a reason, right?
And they're like, you know.
So there's so much dupedness that they're soaked in.
It would take so much letting go of their ego to come back around to even say, I'm sorry.
But it's also To your point, action needs to be taken, right?
And we see guys like... I separate it, and there's the everyday average person, but then there's these monsters in the media.
There's guys like Piers Morgan who said the nastiest things, and then one day decide to walk back, right?
Oh, I'm so glad we don't have to wear masks anymore.
Whatever it is that hit him, and he starts walking back slowly.
It's our obligation to say, no, no, no, you don't get to do that.
What do you, if you really feel that way, what are you going to do about it?
How are you going to rectify what you've participated in?
And go ahead.
Well, I just wanted to say.
It's not even rectify what you've participated in.
There may be nothing you can do about that.
I'm not even really looking for I'm sorry.
I'll take it.
I think there are a lot of apologies owed, but it's really not what I want.
What I want is your rock solid assurance that you understand what happened and will never do it again.
That's what I want.
I want safety going forward for me, my kids, all of the people who stood with us against this madness.
Those people deserve never to face that again in their life.
And to the extent that people, I don't even think they understand that they switch sides.
Mm-hmm.
You were told, you were telling people, get your shot.
If not, you're a bad person.
And now you're not getting your shot.
Mm-hmm.
And you don't, maybe you think you're putting it off.
No, you're afraid.
You now realize how dangerous these things are.
You're afraid to get it, as you should be.
But that fear, we tried to tell you back before you got any of them.
And now is the time for you to say, you know what?
That didn't sound true to me at the time.
I now know how confused I can be.
I won't do that again.
No more witch hunting.
I'm out.
I will not hunt witches because witches don't exist.
Witches are the people trying to tell you this is not good for you or your children.
Yeah, I think that it's hard because for people like us that have been so deep down this sort of, you know, you would call it a rabbit hole, right?
There's people that are not even on the circumference of it up top.
They're a hundred thousand miles that direction.
And you're right.
You know, they don't know.
They don't know that they've switched sides because they're just kind of following the wave of things.
And it really illustrates actually just how, you know, it illustrates that mass formation, right?
That we've all sort of fallen in line, not all of us have fallen in line with, but so many have.
Everything has sort of become a football team, so to speak, whereas what team are you on?
Are you on team mask or anti-science altogether, right?
There's these big labels on the other side.
Um, and I think that there's a huge swath of people that know, you know, innately something's wrong, but they don't know how.
They don't have the information.
They're just waiting to see where it goes.
And a lot has happened because of people like us breaking down that narrative piece by piece.
And it's really good to see it.
But yeah, I think I like your way better, you know, in a sense of just like the assurance that, look, you know, you don't even have to say, You're sorry.
Just don't do it again and promise me that.
That's actually exactly right.
Yeah, I mean, seriously, that is the deal I will explicitly make.
If you put it right so that we know where you stand, you're clear about it, and you're not going to do it again, we're square.
I don't need your apology.
Right?
I know that you probably thought you were doing the right thing at the time.
I get that.
Yeah.
But it needs to never happen again because we're talking about the literal safety of children.
It couldn't be more important.
So, I wanted to point to another something, if we can go back to something you said earlier.
The group of people who emerged, the courageous dissidents who fought together and endured these terrible slanders, they give me a tremendous hope.
I will certainly say to anybody who's trying to understand the lesson of where we are and how we got here.
Wow, is it painful to lose friends and colleagues and people you thought you could trust because the mass formation of the moment tells them that you must be the villain.
That's really unpleasant.
On the other hand, It is telling you something you need to know.
It's telling you who can't handle it.
And you don't want to think you can handle it, or somebody can handle it, and trust them in a moment where you discover that and you can't afford it.
So, reality has done us a favor by revealing the people who just couldn't shoulder the burden that they had.
And it has done us a great service revealing those who could, who, frankly, we wouldn't know their names if this terrible chapter had not unfolded in a way that revealed them.
But I am put in mind of a little model that I keep.
Again, you're not going to know this.
You'd have to, you know, people who watch the podcast know that I had a discussion with a guy, Steve Patterson, and he and I agree that we are in a scientific dark age, even though it doesn't look like one.
It's a cryptic dark age.
But anyway, my model of a dark age involves the fact that it is always true when our scientific understanding of the world gives way in favor of whatever the You know, the dangerous mysticism is that replaces it.
There are always people who continue to practice science quietly, privately, and I call them keepers of the flame.
Right?
And I think what you have described suggests to me that music is the same way.
Almost the entire music industry, almost everybody you could name, failed.
They revealed that all of the lyrics, if they had ever meant them, they stopped meaning them.
But a number of people emerged and they demonstrated the strength of character.
It's small compared to the number who failed, but my guess would be...
That music is going to reemerge, that there's going to be a revival of deep, important music.
And frankly, who do you want to listen to?
Somebody who just revealed that they don't get it and aren't honorable enough to admit that they screwed it up?
Or do you want to listen to the people who stood up under fire and figured out how to phrase this stuff so that we could all see it?
That sounds like the beginning of a new musical movement.
And interestingly, I don't think it has a genre.
I think it stretches across all genres.
Anybody who stood up, I'm interested.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, the guys that are coming out, these sort of underground indie artists that have said what they wanted to say, that have been documenting this time, they're the new wave of things, I think.
And it does cross Multitude of genres.
I mean, there's several big rappers that are now busted into Billboard charts and actually competing with mainstream rap.
There's guys like Bryson Gray and then there's Jimmy Levy and Hi-Rez have been putting out great stuff.
And then there's the new band I was telling you about, The Defiant, which is like a super group of punk rockers, right?
There's even a guy named Foundering on Twitter who does ragtime, and it's really great to see because it's the message, right?
It's about the feeling.
It's not even so much the genre anymore.
It's not that that's rock and roll, but what you're describing is the feeling of it, right?
It's the message behind it.
Yeah, there's an opportunity there.
This is the foundation for the future, right, of art and culture, to get back to art that means something.
You see a lot of people sharing, there's a lot of like Twitter accounts that'll share old culture and say, what happened, right?
Look at this marble statue that we could never replicate anymore.
And we've just gotten away from that.
The whole industry has been commercialized and formulaic.
They've figured out the formulas to every facet of it.
You can only go so far with that, right?
You can only push the boundaries so much that guys like Lil Nas lap dancing on Satan in his music video is like, it's not even surprising anymore.
So what is surprising is when somebody sings about God or somebody sings about, you know, against the narrative, when somebody sings about Anthony Fauci, right?
Oh my gosh, I can't believe they said that.
So that is a great opportunity, right?
There's a, it's another silver lining that I look at.
It's like you have to go through, I call this time period, like this, especially in America because we're still a young country, but like it, we're going through like a pubescent time where it's ugly and our voice is changing and it's, we don't really know who we are.
But on the other side of that, you become this mature individual.
I think humanity as a collective is going through this time where we're going, Ooh, half of us are going like, let's slow down a little bit and not charge ahead in the name of progress.
And then there's other, there's another half of us that are just ready to devote our time to Oculus Glasses and live out our life doing that thing.
But, um, I digress, but yeah, there's an opportunity there.
Yeah, there's an opportunity there.
And I think, frankly, so I spend a lot of time thinking about the way society is organized, and I consider myself a liberal, but I consider myself a liberal Because I don't think we have a choice but to change.
If I thought we could survive by not changing, I would say change is—we have just witnessed the huge danger of change.
But in this case, I think we have to change sufficiently to get to a new stable place, because where we are, We can't stay and we can't go back.
Neither of those are possible.
So anyway, I call myself a reluctant radical.
I don't want radical change.
I know radical change is dangerous, but I don't think we have a choice.
That said, I think we stand at a crossroads.
There is a choice in front of us and I think it's very, once you figure out how to look at it, It's actually quite clear and pretty easy to describe, and you'll forgive me for taking this digression here, but in light of your special position in phrasing things so that people can grasp them on a deeper level, it's worth talking to you about it.
There's something that I would call the West.
And the West is the idea that you should not be trying to rig the world in favor of your people.
What you should want is a set of rules that doesn't rig it in favor of anybody's people.
And in such a world, you deprioritize the population that you come from, and you collaborate with whoever brings something to the table that makes them good to collaborate with.
And we all get wealthier.
We are enriched by collaborating with people on the basis that it's a good thing to do.
And that is in competition with the way the world used to work.
The world used to be all about one lineage displacing another, and the problem is that the system that I call the West is better in every way.
It's safer.
It's fairer.
It's more liberating.
It's more fun.
It makes us all wealthier, but it's also more fragile.
It's a much more difficult state to provide the conditions to maintain it.
And when economic growth comes apart, it collapses and it collapses back into this lineage against lineage violence.
So my point to the world kind of is This is the choice.
Are we going to figure out how to stabilize the West?
We never finished it.
We never got all the way there.
We never completely gave up on what race you came from, but we did get pretty close and now it's going backwards because the growth has run out and now we're looking at each other with suspicion and the answer is okay.
Well, that's that's the gateway to hell.
We're going backwards into hell, and we have a choice, and we could say, hey, maybe we all fight that together.
Right?
Let's not go back to hell, and if we can't fight it off, fine.
At least we tried.
But at the moment, I see the West coming apart, and I don't think people know Right.
Yeah, I think humanity in America peaked in the 80s and 90s.
It's like we were almost there.
I grew up in a world where you didn't really think about the color of the skin of the person you were watching on TV for who you were listening to.
And then all of a sudden, you know, after 2000, basically, you know, for me, 9-11 was the mark that everything changed in my life.
I was 18 at the time.
And all of a sudden, these things started coming into play that I never thought about.
Yeah, we started digressing.
We started going backwards from there, I think.
I think that people are wanting to... I don't think that...
I think that the way forward is community.
I think that it's not going to come from the top down and we're going to vote somebody in and they're going to save the day and change everything.
I think it's going to have to come incrementally through.
It starts in your home and then your neighbors and then your neighborhood.
Getting back to taking control of things, I think that's why so many people want to grow their own food again or homeschool again.
You're seeing these resurgences of control because we've given up on that over the last 100 years for the sake of convenience.
And that's what I mean like earlier when I say I think humanity collectively is going, hold on a second, you know, maybe we don't need to wear goggles all day and eat printed meat, 3D printed meat.
That is a really sad picture you paint there.
I mean, it's not like I haven't seen it, but yeah, you put a pretty fine point on it.
So I do want to go back to one thing you said.
It's not like we're going to vote somebody in and that's going to fix things.
And I agree with you.
On the other hand, I would ask people not to dismiss the possibility that voting somebody in who could unplug the matrix would be a good step to allow us to discover those other things that we need to figure out on our own and do in our communities.
We have an antagonist.
I don't know what its name is.
I don't think it's the WEF, but there's obviously something that doesn't care about us that is constructing mechanisms of control, is plotting to unhook our ability to discuss what it's up to and decide whether or not we're going to fight it.
And whatever that thing is, it would not be bad to have a champion in high office who agreed that it was intolerable.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's just interesting, you know, watching the shape of things right now because I do get very pessimistic about the next election cycle because it took me a long time to think, to even consider going from teenager into adult to go like, oh, maybe my vote does matter.
But then You vote and you contribute and you feel proud about it.
But going into this next election between World War III starting up and another pandemic on the rise and Agenda 2030, I feel like there's so many things in play right now that might even just prevent us from even getting to that point.
Yeah, I don't know, but but you're right in that sense that, you know, it would be great still to have somebody there that does align with us.
In that sense.
Yeah, it is.
It's at least it's at least worth a shot.
Yeah, right.
I mean, yeah, that's where we are as Americans.
I think, you know, it's like you don't want it.
You still have to be hopeful about it.
Well, I mean, Yeah, do you have to be hopeful?
You know, I think there are two things that motivate people.
One of them is hope, and the other one is fear.
And I must tell you, I am motivated at this moment by my fears of what happens if we do not get a handle on this.
so if I didn't think there was any hope I wouldn't do it But, um, it's not the, uh, well, there's overwhelmingly hope and we just got to get the job done.
It's the holy crap.
We are, uh, right.
We have been cornered by something and, uh, this is not the moment, uh, for cowardice.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's a, it's definitely a, I mean, we're in the middle of a war.
It's psychological obviously, but like, um, Yeah, I just went blank as you were talking to me, but I think that what I was going to say was the fear that drives us is it transitions into hope, right?
It's like I spoke out because of my fear of the world that my kids were going to grow up in.
But you have to be hopeful, otherwise, you know, what's the point in doing what we're all doing?
Because I do believe that underneath all this froth, there's just a bunch of like, Crap thrown on top of the best time to ever be alive.
Like really, it should be the best time to live right now.
We have these incredible tools and we're all connected.
It's just that they're all corrupted and tainted and controlled.
So, and then, and then you toss on ridiculous things like, you know, the The trans movement and things like that, where kid, that's your biggest worry in life is whether or not to cut off your penis so you could be a woman.
Like, that's not really what life is supposed to.
That's not supposed to be something that you worry about in life.
It's not a sign of a healthy moment.
Yeah, it's an indication that we're fairly far off road here.
Yeah, but it's also an indication that, like, things are so good in a way that that's what people have to worry about, right?
And so then there's that on top, but then they have to create these, you know, every day we're pummeled with something new, these distractions and these things to try to keep us in fear.
And I think that, you know, for me personally, like every day, it's just sort of making me stronger.
The last three years have made me... I'm not the same person I was three years ago.
I'm much stronger than I ever was.
And I'm willing to take risks I wasn't willing to take.
Every week, the more ridiculous it gets, the more I just sort of go, I sort of laugh at it, you know?
It's become so absurd that you almost have no choice but to just turn around and laugh at it, which I think is also, you know, one of the best ways to fight against the absurdity and darkness is just by mocking it and laughing at it.
That's one of the reasons, like, why I wrote Sad Little Man, why I call out some of these dark figures, is because That's the best way to belittle them is just laughing and saying, you can't, you can't hurt me.
You're just a sad little man.
Right?
Yep.
No, I think you're exactly right.
And there's something so utterly powerful about the ability of music, not only to articulate that point, I can articulate that point.
But what you do by phrasing it musically is you actually place it in the correct emotional context for people to feel it well beyond their ability to just comprehend it.
I wish there were words to explain how important that is, that people actually understand at an emotional level that this is the position from which they want to be speaking.
They do not want to be doing the sad little man's business.
They want to be speaking back to the sad little man.
And anyway, it is a unique property of music and a unique gift of the musician that they are able to guide somebody emotionally to the deeper meaning of a truth like that.
It's very powerful.
Yeah, it is interesting to see the, you know, there's the side that I'm sure you find yourself in a lot, where you're arguing stats and data and which doctor said what or which scientist said what, but as a musician, like, it's been interesting.
To be on this side of it, because it is an emotional thing.
I think that's it's one of the reasons why we share documentaries or memes, even, you know, it hits us in an emotional way.
And there are these little tools that we have that when you can't find the right words or somebody is exhausted from the articles that you're sending them, you can sort of just place this piece of music out there or this video or this image, whatever it may be.
And it resonates and does everything you would have wanted it to do.
You know, the point that you were trying to drive home comes through so much easier that way.
Yeah.
And I also think, you know, your point about humor and laughing at these things rather than cowering is powerful.
And even I wish people understood that, you know, they have a fear of being isolated.
That was the primary tool that was used to manipulate them and to turn them into savage witch hunters.
But people need to spot that actually the people they were hunting Are in the position that they would prefer to be in, right?
To have a telephone full of contacts that, you know, are not going to believe bullshit about you.
People who will stand up for you, you know, who wouldn't leave you to bleed on a battlefield.
That's a hell of a set of contacts to have, especially in a confusing era like this.
And so anyway, yes.
You know, those of us on the dissident side took a lot of hits on our well-being.
I still wouldn't have preferred to be on the other side for anything.
In fact, I find the idea horrifying.
Right.
So if people can get that, if they can allow you to lead them emotionally to a place of feeling powerful, talking back to the man, as it were, then that's a big piece of the battle.
Yeah, it's been interesting to get messages from people that have actually sent me that, you know, saying, I showed your video to my mom and dad, who got the first two shots, and it really kind of, you know, jarred them a little bit.
That's a very powerful thing, and that's something that I didn't have really before in my music career, because, you know, I was just singing love songs, or, you know, we used your song in our wedding, you know, that is a beautiful thing, and I appreciated that, you know, in a different way, but historically, in the context of all this, to know you have the ability to
Shake somebody, to wake them up a little bit, to crack that thickness, you know, open a little bit is very It's just a cool thing.
I traveled to the UK in August, and I was there for an event called Jam for Freedom, and it was three days of music artists, freedom-minded music artists, Performing, and there were speakers there.
And it really showed me, meeting people there, what I had been working towards, the purpose of my music.
Because I arrived there and was meeting people, and it wasn't just one person here and there.
There were families coming up.
My son loves your song, you know, Sad Little Man, or Gates Behind the Bars, even, which I thought was hilarious that, you know, this nine-year-old boy was You know, totally into this song about hating on Bill Gates.
But then when I performed and I sang, God Help Us All, and you have all these people under a tent singing your chorus back to you, singing those words, Oh God Help Us All.
That's why I remain hopeful about things, because the unity is there.
And all of the divisive rhetoric that they try to split us apart with, it didn't make its way through to some of us.
And we're all working towards this new This new world, and we talk about the Great Reset all the time, but it's like we have an opportunity to make it our reset, because the world that we thought existed didn't really exist, and that's been revealed to us now.
So we get to take the items that we liked about it, that we wanted to be real, and actually make them real, you know?
That's kind of the A crazy thought is to think about the illusion turning the illusion into reality now.
I love that view of it, and I can certainly, you know, I'm not a musician.
It's one of my great regrets in life that I never picked up an instrument.
I can certainly imagine people singing your chorus back to you and that driving you forward, realizing that you actually reached people.
I have that effect a little bit.
It's obviously not music, but, you know, people come up and tell me what I've said that meant something to them or what Heather and I have discussed, and it is very reifying.
But I also agree We are in a very dark place, but that dark place is part of us having a choice about what future we want and the ability that people are finding to come together and to recognize That they don't want this.
They know they don't want this.
I don't think anybody who isn't profiting from it directly wants a world like this.
Even the world of 20 years ago, as flawed as it was, wasn't this.
So maybe, maybe there is enough Momentum and energy, and there's enough creativity amongst the small number of artists who are now going to be the only authentic music that we've got, that can drive us to make the right choices and at least take a shot at putting the ship back on course.
Do you feel like that outside of music, that there's enough people sort of waking up Well, again, I think the core issue is this.
A huge number of people are somewhat awake.
And if they could be just driven, hey!
Time to get up.
It's the rest of the way you gotta go, right?
You saw something, you know you don't want that shot, now let's work backwards and figure out how it is that people got to the point of mandating something upon you that you now realize was never in your interest.
What does that mean?
What does that require of you?
I do think that they could wake up, but at the moment they're too comfortable because it's fine for them not to say, not to tell you that they've switched sides, not to Even confess to themselves that they're never going to get the shot, right?
So I want the people who are somewhat awake to go the rest of the way.
Then there's a tremendous amount of hope.
There are a lot of people, a huge majority are now skeptical.
And then I will say the other part of this, which I probably shouldn't from the point of view of leaving hope as intact as possible.
The events of the last week and a little have divided these grassroots coalitions that were emerging.
There's something about the crisis in the Middle East, the attack on Israel that is causing people within the COVID dissident community to forget what they learned.
Right?
They are now, some of them are participating in more witch hunting, and it's got to stop.
But I think we have to also learn the larger lesson, which is You, it sounds to me from what you've said, and you tell me if this is wrong, it sounds to me like COVID was the battle that woke you up and it turned you into a warrior, which was not something that you thought you were going to be.
Now, the thing is, COVID was in many ways, clearest picture you're ever going to get.
The nature of the COVID battle revealed all of the structures that jeopardize us.
But Having been through a few of these battles now, I know that each one has its own nature and that people who see one often miss another.
And anyway, what we need are people who actually put together the larger lesson.
COVID is just an example of something.
COVID is an example of something larger.
And what you need to do is have a model rich enough that when the next thing happens, you're not fooled even at the beginning.
Right?
So anyway, I hope that happens.
Right.
Yeah, I think that, you know, the thing that I'm sort of bracing for is the next pandemic that comes our way, because it's going to be It's likely aimed at children and it's going to have a whole new set of emotional manipulators or something that make a lot of people that felt secure in how they feel right now have to second guess themselves.
And I am at a point where it doesn't matter what it is, COVID related or not, I don't I don't take anything at face value anymore, and you can't rush into it emotionally, no matter what it is, because you have to ask why you're seeing it.
We know we live in a time where the wrong word can get you censored, and all of a sudden now we're seeing All these graphic images online from, you know, the wars taking place right now.
And you have to ask yourself why you're seeing those, why you're allowed to see those.
Like, we know there are gatekeepers, right, on the other end.
That's one of the big lessons that we learned from the last few years.
Is that there's people on the other side controlling what it is you're allowed to see.
At least they're doing their best to suppress what they don't want you to see.
Sometimes they can just remove it.
But all of a sudden, you know, particularly in the last week or so.
We're seeing things that you would never have anticipated seeing, and we're allowed to see it.
And so that's my initial thought, is why are we allowed to see this?
And where is it coming from?
And there's a laundry list of questions you have to ask yourself in what you're seeing.
We live in the age of artificial intelligence, for crying out loud.
You have to question what it is that you're seeing, if it's real or not.
And it's not that you're denying that anything is taking place.
It's not that you're saying, oh, it's not happening at all.
It's just... Why this edit?
Right.
Yeah.
Why am I seeing this edit?
Yeah.
So I embrace your call to skepticism.
And I do think that is Of all the lessons of the pandemic, the clearest of them is that it's the stuff that you accept at the beginning, because nothing specific has told you to start questioning, that you regret later.
And really, the people who shined earliest were the people who were already very much on their guard.
So I think, you know, Until and unless we are freed from whatever it is that is working so hard to control the information environment, remaining on high alert is always a good idea.
Yeah.
And I always wonder how much would change if we just turned off the screens, you know, and we just stepped away.
Because, you know, we see it with media.
I mean, we've already kind of done it unintentionally with media.
You know, people have learned to distrust the media more and more over the last, you know, decade or so, just further and further drifting away.
So we've kind of turned off the news.
A lot of people still haven't, but a lot of people have.
And it's like, if we were able to do the same thing, just with social media in general, getting back to just reality in a sense, because You know, whether it's a war or it's COVID or it's just, you know, a funny cat video, the internet primarily is just little bits and pieces of things happening, but it's not really reality.
So maybe, you know, we just slowly, one by one, start turning it off or something.
I'm not sure.
Well, I agree with you about the danger of not turning it off.
I don't know about the plausibility of getting people to turn it off.
But even just the disconnection from things that are not virtual, The difference in the ability to fool somebody who has expertise in the physical world where things actually are or are not true, do or do not work, and somebody whose world is entirely a social reflection, that's a huge gap.
And so even if people can't turn off their screens, just making sure that some fraction of what they do is meaningful and physical is liable to make them, uh, harder to fool.
Right.
Yeah, I agree.
I don't know.
I'm thinking about my kids.
I'm thinking about, you know, our intention to keep them screen-free.
And I think that there is that another generation that will be coming up behind the screen-focused generation that will be detached more, you know, because there is parents out there paying attention to what that is doing to their kids.
Yeah I hope so and I will tell you my kids are 19 and 17 and we did keep them away from screens for a very long time and then ultimately it didn't make sense because it was necessary for them to play the role that they played but I will tell you even that Even having kept it away until it really just didn't make sense anymore, I wish I'd kept it away longer.
Interesting.
They've ended up great, but my sense is the danger of these things is so high that it would be impossible to be too cautious.
Yeah.
Well, you think about just even just grown adults.
I mean, we all have our faults with it.
You know, I'm on way more than I really should be because I am just always constantly working, you know.
So, you know, unfortunately, my kids see that and I have to be conscious of it.
And, you know, there are areas where it makes sense.
You know, you should learn that skill, you know, learn a little bit of photoshopping, video editing or whatever it is.
But yeah, it's a balance.
It's a tricky, tricky thing, for sure.
Yep.
All right, Brad, is there anything else you want to say before we wrap this up?
Uh, not much.
Just check out Five Times August.
Um, you know, look it up on the internet.
They find you.
Yeah.
Five Times August.
You have a website, right?
Yeah.
Fivetimesaugust.com is the website.
And, um, we've got records and CDs and all the digital links on there.
And, um, you know, look up the videos if you get a chance, if you haven't heard the music before.
And, um, you know, I really, I think it's, it's, It's an important time for these artists that are speaking up to really support what they're saying.
These are the ways that we really do change culture.
When I put out the album Silent War last year, to my surprise, when it came out, we actually made it to number five on the Amazon charts next to Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.
Oh, hell yeah!
Yeah, it's amazing, and it's a testament to what this movement can do when we vote with our dollars.
That album was recorded in my bedroom, under a zero-dollar marketing budget.
To be up there next to those kind of artists, that's what we can do.
Not just myself, but check out those other artists as well.
Yeah, excellent.
And I would just ask my audience, if you want to embolden the people who stood up, giving them music that speaks to them and urges them on is a very wise investment.
So I hope people will come find you at 5timesaugust.com.
And I hope people will check out those videos, which are available for free online.
They really are well worth watching, not just listening to.