Rob Ager Takes Us Beyond The Meaning Of The Monolith With Collative Learning
Rob Ager explores cinema's hidden narratives, linking Kubrick's Lolita chess imagery to pedophilia and critiquing transhumanism as a cult replacing religion. He details using hypnosis to repress childhood spider trauma while warning of false memory risks, then connects the Franklin scandal and Bohemian Grove rituals to elite dehumanization. Ager argues power brokers join groups like Scientology to feel alive again, suggesting Robin Williams' death may be a cover-up, before advising mobile privacy measures and concluding that truth transcends political sides. [Automatically generated summary]
So, you know, I've been lucky enough over the years to interview famous comedians like Tommy Chong and Bill Burr, Patrice O'Neal before he passed, political figures like Giuliani, Cornell West, even Liz Truss, former UK prime minister.
But for me, this is probably going to be one of the most fun ones out there because Rob Ager is probably one of the most respected people in my mind that does research, especially in the arena of cinema.
Now, when I say that, you know, people always ask me, Burmese, what do you watch?
You know, what political pundits do you watch?
I really don't watch a lot of that stuff outside of the mainstream media and maybe what's in the social media zeitgeist.
I like to hear from people that do real research.
And this guy is that person, Rob Ager.
Now, Rob, I want people to know about your website first, collativelearning.com.
And of course, I forgot to not frame the Epstein files there, but we're going to get to that too.
And then, of course, you've got the two YouTube channels as well.
And I originally found you on YouTube.
Man, really back in the day, I would say it's probably 2009, 2010 with your meaning of the monolith video.
And Kubrick for me, you know, growing up as a kid, I was constantly in video stores.
Two of my friends owned mom and pop video shops.
So by the time I was like a teenager, I'd already seen A Clockwork Orange and 2001, A Space Odyssey.
And I'll be honest, like the first go-around, especially as a young man with most Kubrick films outside of maybe Full Metal Jacket, there's a deep discomfort, really not getting not only a lot of the symbolism, but maybe even a lot of the main plot lines.
I'm not saying it's Lynchian or anything like that, but you know, a lot of those movies are close.
And even, you know, I was probably in college, you know, in 99 when Eyes Wide Shut.
I didn't love that movie, you know, but it came around to me.
So my first question for you, and I know I've rambled for a bit here, is how did you start collative learning in the first place and kind of make this leap into an arena that wasn't really there?
You know, outside of like the Siskel and Eberts of the world and what was on television, you certainly didn't see the type of in-depth film analysis you were doing.
And when did you make that decision?
Well, I was making films myself, writing and directing, and doing a fairly sloppy job of it, or maybe just an average job of it.
But I'd spent a lot of time over the years studying psychology and hypnosis.
I'd learned how to do hypnotic transinductions.
I was learning how to do therapy and counseling because I'd worked in mental health and all that kind of stuff for years.
So I'd worked with literally thousands of like mental health patients, homeless, abused young people, all that kind of stuff, you know.
So I had a lot of experience with all that kind of stuff.
And something that really had a big effect that made me get into doing the film analysis stuff from that was that I was learning a lot about how to read human communication, non-verbal communication.
Because if you're doing like therapy or counseling with somebody, you have to be able to read the non-verbal signals.
You'll ask a client a question and typically they will answer it non-verbally before they speak.
And the non-verbal answer is often very different to what they say consciously.
So you have to be able to read that stuff if you're going to do therapy.
So I came from a sort of background of doing that stuff.
And that also combined with, this is something I think you'll relate to.
If I read correctly, you used to be a graphic designer when you were younger.
Is that right?
Yeah.
So for me, we didn't have that in my high school, right?
And I graduated like 97 at 17.
So I was pretty young getting in there.
So I'd seen some commercials for Photoshop, and I actually wanted to go to the Art Institute of Philadelphia.
I've gotten accepted there.
Poor kid, long story.
Rug pull at the end.
So I end up going to SUNY Oneana.
I'm an upstate New York guy.
And they gave me full access to the computer lab.
So I ended up being a beauty school dropout.
You know, I drop out.
Yeah, I'm making money as a pizza guy.
I like going to the bars and things like that.
But I picked up a lot from other students and really even in front of me.
I mean, if you saw how much tech was in front of me right now, Rob, you'd be sick.
And yeah, I gravitated towards all of that.
You know, until 2004, right before I kind of broke into with the other two guys, the documentary filmmaking, I'd gotten my first desk job right outside of Cooperstown, New York.
I was doing print design.
And if you've ever seen those old school black and white Investigate 9-11 t-shirts, that was my design.
We printed those up.
We were giving those out.
So, you know, for me, that was a big thing that I wanted to transition because there was, first of all, I'm not saying I was the best artist in the world.
I was always into comic books as a kid and there was always that kind of dream.
But as far as like a manageable living, although, you know, I have, I kind of can relate to you.
I've worked for myself a lot over the years and especially recently.
And really, that's the only way to go.
But, you know, to make a living, you know, you kind of have to get these other skill sets down.
So, you know, doing things you don't want.
But you're right.
Graphic designer all the way.
Okay.
So, yeah, well, obviously you can relate to that.
Kubrick's Visual Psychology00:03:17
So it's basically it's what is called in the world of hypnosis, something called visual acuity, which is where you're very sharpened up to notice things visually and you have to do it with the clients and stuff like that.
So I was getting that from the hypnosis stuff.
And I was also getting it from the visual arts where I was doing sort of graphic design stuff.
I worked in video games and it was my first job that I had doing video game graphics.
But even before that, I was always drawing and painting and I was always trying to draw and paint to make things look photorealistic.
I wasn't doing cartoons or anything.
So when you're trying to make things look photorealistic, you have to put aside your conscious verbal descriptions of what the world looks like and actually draw what you're really seeing, you know?
So that combined with the hypnosis stuff, that primed me to go into the film analysis stuff and pay attention to the visual elements of film and over the verbal narratives that are presented by the characters.
And it helps you break down the acting as well.
But it was totally by accident that I was doing that stuff.
And I started studying movies like Alien and The Shining and Psycho, just trying to figure out what makes these movies so incredible to watch.
There's got to be something going on because these directors are doing consistently good films, amazing films.
And it's not like there are any bad scenes in these movies.
Every scene is so well done.
What is it that they're doing specifically that sets them apart from other directors?
So I'm looking at the visuals and the movies, trying to break it down.
And I was hoping to just find sort of subliminal things that they might be doing that would affect the feelings of the viewer, you know, certain camera angles and certain lighting and things like that.
I was not looking for any kind of hidden messages in their films at all.
But that's what I started to find.
It was like, oh my God, in Psycho, there's foreshadowing where the windscreen wipers on the car window when she's driving to the hotel before she gets killed in the famous shower murder scene.
She's talking to herself and hearing voices, just like Norman Bates does.
And she's looking out the window, and the rain's coming down, and the window wipers are like a friggin' a knife slashing down.
I was like, oh my God, they're setting us up psychologically for the shower scene.
So things like that I was picking up on.
And the first one in The Shining was the Native American genocide theme.
Starts picking up on that.
And then a few different things in the movie Alien as well.
And it all just snowballed from there.
But I definitely sort of came to realize fairly quickly that Kubrick had gone beyond simply putting in subliminal stuff to enhance the emotional experience of the film.
He was actually encoding hidden messages.
And the moment that I really realized that was the discovery of the relationship between the monolith and the movie screen itself.
You take the monolith, you flip it that way, and it's the movie screen.
We are the apes.
The film is here to intellectually improve us.
When I came across that, I was like, oh my God, I can't believe what this guy has done.
This is incredible.
And then from there, the rest of the stuff that was in his movie started to unravel.
And I was like, wow.
Tony Robbins and NLP Roots00:03:53
Okay.
So that's where all that started.
Yeah.
So you mentioned the psychology aspects and you kind of talked about foreshadowing and the visual cues.
When you're in this field, is neuro-linguistics programming something that's coming into play?
Because, you know, I hadn't heard of that until actually post-loose change.
I was at a conference and I came across a guy still known today, Richard Andrew Grove.
And he introduced me.
In fact, I felt like he was trying to hypnotize us at the time and employ it.
And I'm like, what is going on here?
And he talked about a guy named Richard Bandler.
And prior to that, I was familiar with Darren Brown that kind of employed a lot of those NLP things, but didn't really know the genesis of it.
So, you know, with the idea of neuro-linguistics programming, is that something that you became very familiar with while you were doing that work and then kind of use that?
Absolutely.
NLP, I mean, it's a huge subject in itself that I've hardly ever talked about in my videos.
But at some point, I need to do a massive deep dive on the subject because this is a huge one and it's a massive contributor to my work as well.
And even the term sensory acuity is used a lot by the NLPers.
I first came across NLP in my mid-teens, around about age 15, 16 years old.
I was having a lot of troubles with my upbringing.
I was in a really rough, low-down neighborhood, no role models around, anything like that.
But my dad had been a psychiatric nurse for years and he had some interesting books.
And he was always getting me interested in reading psychology when I was a kid and stuff like that.
So he had a big influence.
So I used to read some of his books and he had this book on his shelf called Unlimited Power by this guy called Anthony Robbins, who's like this big success coaching guru in America today.
And Anthony Robbins had sort of blown up at the time and become very successful.
You know, I'm 15 years old.
I am a psychological mess.
And I read Tony Robbins' book and I was like, wow, here's someone who's actually talking positive about how to get things done, achieve things, how to change things.
And that had a massive influence on me.
And I slowly started sorting myself my life out.
But Tony Robbins got a lot of his stuff from NLP.
He had been had some training with Richard Bandler and I think John Grinder, the other guy.
So I read about NLP in his book.
And then I went and got the proper NLP books, which were much more deep and sophisticated.
So by that time, I'm about maybe 18 years old and I'm reading books like Frogs into Princes and Transformations, not the conspiracy book Transformations.
That's Transformation of America by Kathy O'Brien.
Yeah.
My audience will know that's a different one.
We've talked to Kathy before.
Yeah, you spoke to her, have you?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, on this group one, she hangs out with Roseanne Barr.
And Roseanne also, you know, she was on that Reawaken America tour that I fell into.
You know, you watched that presentation that I did over there.
And I actually ended up on like eight or nine of them.
Like, I end up on these kind of weird journeys too, obviously.
Like, you know, I get pigeonholed into these different things.
And depending on the political climate, either, you know, back in the loose change days, you know, I marched with like the code pinks of the world and, you know, the left love me.
And then, you know, during the Trump administration, when people were kind of waking up to the corruption of the COVID nightmare and all these other things, you know, the right thinks I'm a conservative.
And I'm like, I hate all of you guys.
Like, you know, I want to talk to everybody to kind of bring it.
I'm exactly the same as that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's tough, right?
Because I'm not here for team baseball.
I mean, the things that we're talking about are really, you know, sophisticated tools of not just communication, but control and domination, right?
Space Narratives and Tunnel Vision00:15:25
And whether that's something you see on an individual level with casework or on a political level or a business level.
And I would argue, I mean, really since World War II, there's so much of this that could be defined as techno-fascism, right?
And not real nation state power that we never address, especially with what's going on now.
All the lines are blurred.
And it's not one party that's going to save you.
You know, it's the rugged individualism.
It's the kind of thing that they preach about inside these books of quote-unquote self-help.
And I often couple that with this idea of the secret.
You know, all these things can be exploitative too, right?
Like getting people behind the robin.
It's like, not everybody's going to make it through the Tony Robbins program.
And, you know, not everybody with a vision board is going to get a house and win the lottery.
I hate to tell everybody that.
But if you work towards these goals and you are positive and you take advantages of whatever the universe provides, I do believe that's a real thing.
And that's kind of, I think that's really part of the human destiny.
I don't know.
I know we're getting so far away from movies here, Rob, but I think it's important because, you know, a lot of people, another thing that's great about you is you do your own thing.
Like, I don't, I've never seen you be audience captured.
And I've also seen, you know, a lot of people do that as well.
So before we kind of get into, you know, I want to talk transhumanism and 2001 specifically.
What's your favorite Kubrick scene?
Not film, because I'm pretty sure The Shining is probably your favorite film.
It's the one you've opined about the most.
No?
The Shining's not even my favorite horror film.
It's not even my favorite Kubrick film.
For some reason, it's funny.
It's like there's a massive public obsession with The Shining.
And because I've done videos on it, they've done really well.
People assume that I'm obsessed with The Shining.
But no, I've done just as many videos on 2001 of Space Odyssey, just as many on Alien.
I've done tons of videos on the Star Wars films, Eyes Wide Shut.
There's lots of other Terminator.
I've watched a lot of them, Rob.
But anyway, a favorite scene of Kubrick's throughout all those movies.
Oh, my God.
That's a really tough question.
I mean, the one that springs to mind, it's not an individual scene, but it's a chunk of a Kubrick film that I think is just completely, utterly mind-blowing.
And when it came out, it was just something that had never been seen before is the entire end sequence of 2001 of Space Odyssey.
You know, when they get to Jupiter and it just goes, the narrative just completely disappears and becomes this visually encoded experience.
And Kubrick's like, no, you're not getting any words, any dialogue to explain this.
It's all visual.
You either figure it out or you just sit there confused and get upset, you know?
And yeah, I think that was pretty special, what he did with the end of that film.
So, so then what's what's the movie then?
What's the movie?
Yeah, what's the movie?
I mean, if it's not the shining, which would what's the favorite movie?
My favorite movie altogether.
No, no, Kubrick, Kubrick, your favorite Kubrick movie.
Favorite Kubrick movie.
I think it would be 2001.
Yeah.
I mean, it is the most visually impressive.
It's probably the one I most think about, especially.
And this is a good segue into it.
One of the things that really strikes me about that film is especially the visualization of what becomes modern day space and the public's perception of what modern day space is, right?
It's not Star Wars.
It's not rockets.
It's not, you know, Star Trek and that type of sci-fi.
It's much more based in realism.
And then, you know, the story of its genesis with Arthur C. Clarke writing the novel alongside of it, it not being based on anything.
That adds to the mystery of it.
The fact that NASA did work with him on that and then provided him that lens for Barry Linden, which is like the most underrated film he does.
I absolutely actually love Barry Linden just because it tells the story of like a terrible person who social climbs.
This is one of the narratives that I, you know, I could follow the first time around.
It's a familiar story, actually, isn't it?
And that you end up empathizing with at some points, especially towards the end.
You know, I thought Game of Thrones actually picked up on a lot of those tricks throughout the scumbaggery of all their characters as well.
So getting into like 2001, a Space Odyssey and that perception of space, I watched you on a panel and somebody asked you about it.
And you talked about how a lot of it you felt he was expressing the absurdity of like long-term space travel.
Why is that?
And do you kind of agree with my assessment that a lot of that stuff is what people kind of perceive as like what a modern-day space program would look like?
Yeah, I mean, I suppose when I first saw 2001 in my teens and for years afterwards, I respected it as being the most realistic space movie ever made.
And you could still argue that it is.
I mean, at least it's got space as being actually silenced.
Very few movies have even got that.
But I started to question things later on.
In particular, the whole section with Hal, the way Hal behaves and is very manipulative and lies and tried, well, literally kills some of the crew.
And I'm like, hang on, what's going on here?
Because this movie is sort of hailed as being like this pro-space race movie.
And all the people who are talking about the traveling to the stars and stuff, they always cite 2001 as if it's an actual vision of the real future that is coming.
And yet we get past the year 2001 and none of it's happened.
You know, we don't have the Mars bases.
We haven't traveled to Jupiter.
We certainly haven't achieved interstellar travel.
Most of the stuff that we see in 2001, the film, has not happened.
And I was thinking, well, okay, so the film got it wrong.
And yet the film is still revered as if it's like a vision of the future.
What's going on here?
And why did Kubrick pick an actual year for the title of the film?
Why didn't he have it vaguely set at any time with no specified year so that it would always be an enigma that could not be disproven?
It was almost like he set the narrative up to fail.
It was inevitable that the year 2001 would be reached and then the public would look back and go, how accurate was that movie?
Not very accurate at all.
So all that stuff was coming together.
And then I was comparing the scenes where you have the spaceships at the start of the movie after the apes throw the bone in the air.
And it's got nice music, beautiful music, and this is fabulous and glorious.
And, oh, isn't it fun going to space?
And then later in the movie, they get to Jupiter and the music completely switches to terrifying, scary music.
And everything looks huge and terrifying.
And Jupiter is really scary because it's so big and it's got that big red eye that's three times the size of Earth.
And I'm looking at this and I'm thinking.
This isn't a vision of an amazing future in space.
This film has flipped.
You know, it's gone from the propaganda positive version to the, oh my God, space is terrifying and hostile to us version.
And then in the middle of the film, it doesn't exactly promote the space race either because Dave Bowman is he goes out to collect the dead body of his buddy who's been lost in space.
And as he's flying out away from the discovery ship and it becomes a small object in the distance, he's lost in the void of darkness and he's trying to collect this dead body and bring it back.
And I'm watching that and I'm thinking, no human being on earth has ever been as isolated and lonely as Dave Bowman is in that scene.
He is millions of miles away from any living human being.
You've got the people in the sleeping pods on the ship, but they're going to die anyway.
And I'm like, my God, this movie isn't a positive presentation of the future.
I'd also been reading up a bit on all of the ideas about space travel that had been bandied around for years in the science community since the 1960s.
And I'd come to realize myself that it was massively overblown and that the science community had hugely overestimated what they were capable of and what was going to come.
And I sort of came to the conclusion that Kubrick saw that.
It's like he'd researched their stuff and he knew that they were full of shit, basically.
And so he'd gone to them and he'd fooled them and he'd said, I'm going to make this movie that's going to promote your ideas.
And then he made the movie, but he had the movie flip the message as it goes through.
It starts off as being the propaganda piece they want.
And then it gradually, that narrative falls apart and it becomes something else entirely, part of which is the basic message that outer space is terrifying and hostile to humans.
It's not this wonderful place that we can easily explore.
Yeah.
And kind of agree with that.
At the same time, I think there are a couple of things that he does kind of get spot on, especially technology-wise.
For instance, it's the first time we see these touchscreens that are also going to interact kind of like iPads that do come into fruition.
And then when you talk about Hal and AI in general, you know, you talk about him killing all these things.
But like right now, when I, first of all, this idea that AI hallucinates, I think that's the most ridiculous thing in the world.
I really hate that they frame it that way.
No, you've programmed it around certain narratives, so it's purposely lying to us.
And then the other thing that I found about AI, and again, this kind of gets into that deception of Hal, is that as it lies to you, if you call it out, like if you have a long conversation that you know what you're looking the answer for and you know you're going to get a certain narrative in the beginning, it'll apologize to you and it will patronize you.
It'll tell you how smart you are.
Oh, you're so you're so smart.
You've got it and try to make you feel more comfortable.
So, you know, throughout the whole thing, you know, Hal is trying to act covert, but understanding that he's going to be taken out.
You know, I don't believe any of these things.
I mean, you watch my presentation could ever truly be conscious.
That's the big lie.
You know, I mean, don't get me wrong.
Yeah.
I mean, they could probably mimic it extremely well at some point, which is ultra dangerous.
And I don't know why you would want to create these entities.
But then the big thing about space and what makes me say the agreement with you, and this is probably where we're going to differ.
For me, you know, I know all the arguments against the Apollo missions and for them, right?
And we were obviously doing something there.
And whether or not we went to the moon, I would say with rocket technology, if they're telling us the truth, you know, almost 250,000 miles away and then back.
I highly doubt it because the Russians were kicking our ass in every way with rocket technology.
And the farthest they've been up is less than 300 miles.
Now, they just set that dragon capsule with the billionaire, you know, and that's hey, and we're very, you know, diverse now.
We've got two women in space at the height, but even then, at the Karman line, they're under a thousand miles.
So now I've got to believe that like technology, especially stuff that still blows up, goes literally 250 times more than what they just did, barely, and comes back.
Now, that's a big problem for me, especially when I don't know the logistics of the physical moon other than what I'm told.
And I just kind of have to believe.
And you talk about the darkness and emptiness of space.
You know, when I read, I don't know if you're familiar with Annie Jacobson's books, but if you haven't read those ones, I would, she did Area 51 and she did a ton, like a lot of these people that were in these underground bases doing the nuclear experiments and all these other things were recruited through NASA.
So, you know, they were hotshot pilots and then they got to do these stuff.
And especially the story of the ox cart caught my eye, right?
Because we have an atmosphere, a stratosphere, et cetera, ionosphere.
But when they were getting up to a certain level, around 60,000 feet, all of a sudden they were getting blacked out.
All of a sudden, these blotches would come out, right?
And they couldn't figure it out for a while.
But what had happened was through the nuclear testing, they'd sent a bunch of the insects up in where they were lighter.
So they were floating there and they were basically going against the windshield and blacking them out at a certain point.
You know, so those are the exactly.
Those are exactly those are the interesting facts that like I'm not sure that all of space is a vacuum.
In fact, I kind of doubt that.
I would imagine there's varying degrees.
I mean, you look at just the electromagneticism of Earth.
So kind of what, what is your feeling on that?
Because again, they're telling us we're, they've been telling us we're going back to the moon forever.
But now they've set the date again for Artemis in, I think, 2028.
But I'm not sure if you're aware of it.
Last year, when they did that capsule thing, they also sent an Artemis ship around the moon and they literally put a stuffed animal Snoopy in a spacesuit on that ship, supposedly.
What are your thoughts, Rob?
Yeah, I know, I know, I know.
No, you know what?
I mean, it's funny.
You started off with all that saying this is where we're going to disagree, but you haven't really said much that I disagree with.
I mean, I've never been one for running around saying, oh, fake moon landings.
I don't do that, but I don't run around saying, oh, we definitely went there either.
I don't know enough about the science.
I've heard a lot of very convincing arguments that we didn't.
And I've heard a lot of quite effective debunks as well of some of the sillier arguments and stuff.
But yeah, absolutely.
The fact that we have not sort of been back there and created these big bases like we see in 2001 or space odyssey has me thinking, well, hang on.
What the hell?
Why is this not happening?
And so, yeah, I mean, there's a few different subjects like that where I don't really go and talk and try and persuade people on any of those issues.
You've got like the moon landing, you've got the 9-11.
Like, say with 9-11, that's a subject I never talk about on my videos because people have pretty much already made their minds up.
There's so much information for them to explore in both directions.
And, you know, people can go make their own minds up and that's it.
And I don't really believe that I've got much to contribute on that subject beyond what's already been said.
I've got my own thoughts and feelings on it.
And I've explored it in a range of areas on that issue and on the moonland and on many others.
But with a lot of these subjects, it's like people have this tunnel vision.
They've picked the narrative and they stick with it.
Dr. Strangelove Confessions00:15:29
And sometimes I'm on the side of the debunkers and I think they've got great arguments.
And in those situations, I'm like, you folks, they're calling you conspiracy theorists because you are acting fucking nuts.
That does happen with.
Oh, you mean like the masks and Jim Carrey wasn't in France?
There's other situations where I've got it the other way.
And I'm like, no, the establishment narrative there is the garbage one and the evidence is there for the other.
But in those situations where there's been a lot of controversy in the media, usually people have just divided themselves into these two extreme camps and neither will listen to the other.
And you can go and try and talk to one side and bring them across.
And I generally feel like it's a waste of time and effort with a lot of those things.
So I like to try and explore things where people are open-minded.
They haven't picked the narrative already.
And yeah, that way you can reach people in a state where they're more open to information.
So, you know, that kind of could transition because I still want to get into more transhumanism stuff with you.
But because we got to the moon stuff and I mean the shiny, right?
So that's the big one.
Like I obviously room 237 came out and that kind of brought it into the mainstream, this idea that supposedly Kubrick had faked the moon landing for NASA.
It was part of the deal.
And this was his big admission.
Now, I've also seen Kubrick's Odyssey by Jay Widener.
But then I disagree with a ton of the stuff that Jay Widener puts out outside of that.
I think that he did a pretty good job in that film to try to convince that argument.
At the same time, back when I was, you know, late 90s, early 2000s, big pirate back before Torrance, I think I was on like the Morpheus Network or Kaza.
And I had downloaded this, what I didn't know while I was watching it, what would be a mockumentary about Kubrick and the moon landing.
And it had, I believe it had Kissinger in it, but I know it had Donald Rumsfeld in it.
Yeah, I was just going to say Donald Rumsfeld was in that one.
Yeah, I've seen it.
Yeah.
So I'm watching this thing.
And obviously, I'm not, I don't know, it's scripted.
And I'm like, how is Rumsfeld?
Because I'm obviously now like well aware of Rumsfeld and all these people, even kind of like pre-9-11, you know, a little bit.
I'd gotten into the geopolitics just slightly with the Clinton scandal and all that.
And I'm like, this, what is going on here?
And then they get to like, I think they had his wife in it too.
In fact, I'm sure of it.
They had Vivian Kubrick in there as well.
Yeah, she was in there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then they show the picture of the moon and it's got his license.
And I throw my hands up and I'm going, come on, you got to be kidding.
Like, you know, because I'd also at this point, there were some archives online.
And I, you know, I read like the Majestic 12 documents and when I could get on MK Ultra and all these other things, I'm like, I can go download this right now.
And then within like 30 seconds, the gag reel comes in, right?
And they're starting to read this thing.
So I'd always goofed on the idea and I'd never, ever, ever considered it until, obviously, these people are pointing it out.
Obviously, in room 237, you have the Indian genocide in there.
There is a lot of stuff that screams Americana Cold War for sure in that film.
You're one of the few people out there to talk about the child sexual abuse narrative, especially at length.
What are your thoughts on that idea of this is his big confession to the moon landing?
I don't know if you've ever addressed it at length or even at all.
I have.
I made, I think it's a half hour video I've actually got on here on YouTube, which is a debunk of the interpretation of The Shining as a moon landing confession.
I won't recite the whole video, but yeah, it's there.
It's got some really good debunks in it.
And the comment section is mixed.
There's some people who are clinging on and calling me names and everything.
There's a lot of people in there who are like, yeah, okay, I think you've debunked this, you know.
But there's really nothing in The Shining from what I can see that screams moon landing.
You've got the rocket on Danny's sweater, and that's it.
There's nothing else in the film that you can actually say is a clear reference to the moon landings.
Even that one is not necessarily a clear reference to the moon landings itself.
Well, well, actually, sorry, what I mean to say is that it's not a clear reference that Kubrick faked the moonlands.
I mean, obviously, there's a callback element there to 2001 of Space Odyssey.
But as you said, I'd done the video on the sexual abuse interpretation, and that's been very well received, that video.
I absolutely stand by that interpretation.
I believe I was the first one to put that out there, actually.
And I actually interpret the rocket on the sweater as being like pointing at his mouth.
You know, it fits with all of that.
Because I was thinking, okay, let's say if I'm Kubrick and I want to encode a confession in The Shining about the moon landings, surely I would include somewhere some shots of the moon itself outside of the Overlook Hotel.
And I would include lots more references than what we actually find in the film.
It's like, if this was supposed to be a confession, you didn't do a good job of encoding it because he's left very little in there that is a clear reference, you know?
So, but when you look at like the Native American themes, there's pictures of Native Americans in the hotel.
There's dialogue about Native Americans.
There's plenty of evidence that the decor of the hotel actually includes Indian designs.
So all of that stuff is clear references to the Native Americans.
So you've got that theme there, but I just don't see that level of specific inclusion of metaphors about the moon landings.
I don't see it in The Shining at all.
Although I will say that I do believe that Kubrick believed that the moon landings were going to be faked.
I think he believed that when he was making 2001.
I don't think he was hired to do it because he'd made Doctor Strangelove.
I don't see why they'd trust him.
I just want to talk about that for a second.
All right, good.
I'm glad you brought it to that because for me, listen, I find it very hard to believe that somebody that was that anti-establishment would do that for any reason whatsoever, unless, you know, the most duressive symptoms, right?
He, like you said, he may have been hinting at he thought it was faked.
That's a possibility.
But when you talk about Dr. Strangelove, and that was, I didn't watch that one until later, certainly.
I'd watched Full Metal Jacket before that.
And I'd say this, those are probably my two quote unquote favorite movies that I can just watch and kind of have a good time with.
I was kind of surprised how much I enjoyed Doctor Strangelove.
But like, again, there's, although there's like the duality that you've pointed out with Full Metal Jacket and the two separate distinct parts of it, it still has this one running person and military narrative.
Hey, I'm getting ingrained in the military.
Now here's war.
It's great fun to watch.
I mean, you can be a complete idiot and enjoy Full Metal Jacket, no problem.
Yeah.
And again, probably when I saw it at maybe 14, 15 years old, I don't want to say I was a total moron.
I was doing all right in school, but again, not as astute as now.
But when I watched, you know, first of all, something that, you know, by probably, I probably didn't watch it till almost 2008, nine, maybe 10, you know, when everything is now graphically perfect and you've seen things like saving Private Ryan, et cetera.
And some of the graphics are maybe a little hokey.
You forget all that.
Peter Sellers is just magnificent and the war room and the humor.
And it's just, it's got so much foreshadowing of really what the military becomes in my eyes later on.
And what, you know, because I remember running around as a, I turned 20, I went to Woodstock 99.
I turned 20 there.
And I'm like, this isn't Russia.
This isn't community.
I'm just a moron.
I think America's number one.
I have no idea, you know, what we've done, any, any of that stuff.
You know, none of that's unraveled to me yet.
So, you know, that movie, to me, I just can't.
And one of the reasons I understand they recruited him for 2001 A Space Odyssey and kind of reached out was he was able to get the inside of that bomber plane.
That's the main arc of the story.
So correctly, just from getting military magazines kind of the genius of Kubrick and you know repositioning that, and I think that's again why, when you look at 2001 A Space Odyssey, so most of it just looks like uh, Werner Von Braun models that you see at the Disney, things like spot on right, and he gets the insides right.
So he literally had the the, the designers from NASA and the other places from corporate media and stuff all coming in and helping out.
I mean, there's a behind the scenes documentary on 2001 which was made not for the public, it was made to sell the movie to other corporations while it was in production.
Uh, it's called A Look Behind The Future.
I believe it's here on youtube.
It's fantastic.
But you see the technicians Fred Ordway and people like that from NASA and other corporations they're all there on set helping design things and so yeah, that brought the realism there.
Yeah well, I um, I know you were probably heading in a certain direction what you're saying there, but just wanted to um, add a point in there, which is that Kubrick did an incredibly smart thing and that okay, so he made doctor strange love and that really annoyed the military.
Of course it's bound to and um, but at the same time, he impressed people with his um, his increasing narrative skills uh, his increase, increasing technical efficiency and, as you say, about getting the, The technicalities of the plane and cockpits and terriers just right, just from checking in magazines.
So, all of that and stuff, I think, like the overall corporate establishment at the time looked at Kubrick and went, My God, this guy is super skilled.
But at the same time, he's upset us with this Doctor Strangelove movie.
Oh, what to make of this guy?
Because, you know, Strangelove was highly appreciated.
And there were people in the establishment who appreciated it as well, because there were people who were trying to fight against this Cold War narrative.
And they were praising Kubrick for having done what some of them said was the biggest step forward in breaking the hypnotic hold that the Cold War had on the people.
Doctor Strangelove had a massive effect in breaking that stranglehold.
So there were parts of the establishment that appreciated it and they don't want to get blown up in a nuclear war.
So, you know, it's not like all the establishment just wanted war with Russia.
So he had friends and enemies in the establishment.
And then, in order to sell the 2001 Space Odyssey to those people, you know, he did the genius move of approaching Arthur C. Clarke, getting him involved, developing the narrative with him.
But on the side, he was developing the secret narrative that he didn't even tell Clark about.
So he has Clark develop the surface narrative that would please the investors.
And meanwhile, he's developing the hidden stuff that is going to emerge from the movie later.
And so he gets Clark to go to America and go and speak with all these corporations.
And they all loved Arthur C. Clarke anyway.
So that's how he sold it to them.
And it was a brilliant move.
I don't think I've ever heard of any other filmmaker doing that in history.
But, you know, the establishment over there, all the corporations, they might have thought, well, okay, he did Doctor Strangelove.
Maybe he was just being a bit of a rebel and he's got it off his chest and now he's calmed down.
But he's teamed up with Arthur C. Clarke and we know we like him.
So maybe Kubrick's one of us now.
I think that was the trick that he played on them.
Yeah.
So speaking to that, you know, you look at a guy like Arthur C. Clarke, you know, some of the themes, like you talk about later on when he does The Shining, you have this sexual abuse of children.
Later on, an eyes wide shut, you know, at least the exploitation and pimping out of teenage girls, maybe beyond that.
And obviously seems to also get to maybe ritualistic and mind control abuse.
You know, I saw you in this great Epstein video you did actually talk about the allegations against Arthur C. Clarke.
Now, I've only vaguely gone into those.
And as I understand it, he was never convicted of anything.
But certainly, when you look at the United Kingdom and the power structure, one of the most notorious would be Lord Mountbatten, who the FBI knew, you know, was with young boys and was codenamed Lord Mount Bottom in these documents.
Andrew has had his problems with quote-unquote teenage girls.
Do you think that this is something because Kubrick was in those circles, he eventually wanted to discuss?
Because he always kind of talked about women as objects and the sexualization.
Even in like you look at Dr. Strangelove, right?
And the colonels and the young women and the secretaries and all of that.
You know, you could even say he's taken a feminist perspective in some ways in that.
But, you know, I don't see it until later on, even with something like a Clockwork Orange.
You know, Alex and the girls he picks up seem to be pretty age-appropriate, at least in the surface narrative.
You've talked about some of the other types of abuse there as well.
So what are your thoughts on that?
On whether.
Well, where he picks up, whether or not you think Kubrick was around these sort of people.
And that's why, although they're not the driving narratives of these films, they continually appear.
Okay, yeah.
I mean, I've heard a lot of people say, you know, Kubrick was an initiate of the 33rd degree mason and stuff like that.
I don't think it was anything like that.
From what I can see, he had a preoccupation with this right going back to his very first feature film, which was called Fear and Desire.
And he made that when he was about 22, 23 years old, I think.
And not many people have seen it, but there is a scene in that movie where there's a soldier who's got a woman tied to a tree.
And the soldier is trying to sort of seduce the woman.
And it's clearly got the Kubrickian abuse of women elements that surfaced again and again in his movies as they went on.
And then later on down the line, he does Lolita.
And, you know, the novel was very clearly about pedophile, Pedrast, whichever you want to call it.
I think the girl was 10 or 12 years old in the novel.
But of course, Kubrick couldn't do that in the movie.
So him and the writer of the novel, they teamed up and they changed the narrative so that the girl became 15 years old and it became a forbidden love rather than a physical attraction.
And it actually surprisingly worked incredibly well for that film because there was a 90s adaptation of Lolita that was a lot more faithful to the novel.
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And I can't enjoy it because I hate the main character.
And I don't even like the girl in it because she's so manipulative as well.
And it is true to the novel, but the film version that they did, it presented the lead character as someone you can actually sort of relate to.
He doesn't come across as a complete and total scumbag.
But that is still there if you're willing to look at it.
So he made them relatable, but also twisted.
If he was completely 100% twisted, I don't think the film version would have worked.
So Kubrick was dealing with that subject matter early on.
And he did encode little things in Lolita, hinting at the darker aspects of the novel as well.
But he was struggling with the sensors at the time.
They kept blocking him.
He would send scripts in and they'd say, no, no, we know what you're doing there.
Remove that line of dialogue.
Remove that metaphor.
We know what that means.
Get that out.
So he was having to go really sophisticated to slip the hidden messages in and try and bypass the centers.
And he did it in various ways.
Like the lead character, Humbert Humbert, he's playing chess with the mother of the girl he's trying to get into bed.
And there's all these little things going on with the chessboard.
Like there's the stroking of the bishop with the fingers.
And she says to him, you're trying to take my queen.
And he says, that is my intention.
And the queen is the daughter, of course.
So there's things like that.
He messages him slipping in.
So Kubrick was onto all of this stuff about paedophilia way back then, you know, in the 1960s.
Why he became preoccupied with that so early on in his career, I'm not sure.
I think it was the Lolita novel that really smacked him and made him realize what the psychology of those people is.
And there's also an element in both the novel and film of Lolita to do with Hollywood.
You know, the other paedophile character in the film is a guy called Claire Quilty.
And he's a Hollywood playwright and he's connected with all these actors and he has all these parties and stuff.
And that's very eyes wide shut.
And Kubrick, as he sort of became successful with his first handful of movies, he moved away from Hollywood.
If you read his biographies, he was mixing with the establishment quite a bit in Hollywood.
And I think he got to see firsthand the sexual egos that were going on and the people in Hollywood who just wanted to bang every girl they could come across and all that kind of stuff.
So, I think he became aware of all of that through Hollywood itself, through direct experience, and through the novel of Lolita, teaching him the psychology of it all.
And I think that stuff stuck with him through his career.
Yeah.
So, let's talk about another subject that you've also done outside of Kubrick, and that's transhumanism, right?
I mean, a ton of the films you've talked about, whether it's Terminator or you've mentioned Aliens, especially Prometheus, right?
You know, for me, when you look at transhumanism, obviously there's a wide array of what that could mean, right?
And technology to me, it still is that hammer can build a house, bash ahead in, you know, has the duality to it.
But at the end of the day, there are these two major sects: there are the people that want to somehow biologically live forever.
And then on the other end of this, I feel like they want to trick people into thinking you can somehow upload your consciousness into some kind of a machine or bio-machine, et cetera, and live forever.
When that's not, I'm sorry, they can't even tell you what consciousness is, folks.
It's the most ludicrous thing in the world.
So, you know, you look at Prometheus, right?
And from the story of, you know, the tree of life on the fountain of youth, people have wanted to live forever, right?
And with, you know, the, I forget what the company is, Wayne Corp, Whalen Corp, Whalen Corp's head.
I mean, that's the whole thing, right?
He's an old man.
It's almost over.
He's hoping that he can make contact with these beings and somehow become immortal, right?
Yeah.
So, first of all, what do you think are some of the most compelling transhumanist themes you've seen in films?
And then what is your viewpoint on transhumanism and those that are kind of in control of promoting it right now?
Because we've seen it.
I think, I mean, you've done a ton on Star Wars.
And damn it, Rob.
I mean, I was that little guy.
I must have watched Empire Strikes Back on video three dozen times.
You know, you don't think twice about Luke getting his arm back, right?
Like, you're like, yes, that's exactly great.
Or you're not really realizing, even at the end of Jedi, this kind of transformation that Vader's made from, you know, I'm more machine than man now.
You know, I feel like Lucas had a lot of warnings in there, but at the same time, you know, how cool is something in your eye that's like a camera and all these other things.
So you've really been talking about films that have dealt with this issue for a long time.
What do you think the themes are in Hollywood?
Obviously, they're varied that you've covered that are most compelling.
And then what's your viewpoint on transhumanism altogether?
Okay.
Compelling arguments for transhumanism.
I am struggling to think of any.
I don't find hardly any of it convincing.
There's plenty I could say against it, though.
Transhumanism is effectively a cult these days.
It's a cult that combines academics and rich people who, as you said, they want immortality.
They want the same thing that religion used to promise to people, but still does promise it.
But a lot of people don't buy that idea from religion these days.
But a lot of people who wholesale reject religion really reject it severely.
They embrace this transhumanism, AI, all that kind of stuff.
And I think they're just doing that because it offers them what religion doesn't.
They no longer find religion believable, but this one, they're like, oh, this I can buy into, you know?
So I think it's a religious motive and it's cult-like in that respect.
Something I'm really getting onto this last like six to 12 months.
And I've made one or two videos about this, just short ones, I think, is this whole notion of hard determinism where the idea that humans are just choiceless robots.
And, you know, everything that we say, think, and do was all decided by the Big Bang.
And therefore, you're already a robot.
Now, to me, that is a propaganda lie.
that is designed to convince people that you're not human in the first place.
So that way we can turn you into a robot because you're already a robot, you know?
And I think that's the kind of logic that's going on there.
Can I just interrupt?
Because I think there's also two other things that kind of go into this.
And they're almost, I mean, they're mirror images of each other, in my opinion.
So they have this multiverse theory that's now becoming more and more mainline science, right?
And this idea that there's infinite realities.
And for me, I don't believe that.
I think that this is it.
You got one shot at the title.
There are no other realities.
But in doing so, it demoralizes you because this idea that, you know, I could be the poorest of the poor, the richest of the rich, the best of the best or the worst of the worst, you don't really make your decisions.
You're basically those zeros and ones.
And that brings you into this promise of a quote unquote metaverse, which is a multiverse, because you can do anything and you can be anything and you can live any reality.
And it's this kind of seductive tool that at the end of the day takes away your entire humanity and is one.
I mean, again, you've dealt with the mentally ill.
We all have our issues with self and who we are and the struggles of life, right?
But this idea that there are no biological realities or restrictions that you might have to work past to do certain things is utter nonsense.
And yet that's the sale continually with these themes, in my opinion.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a huge flaw in human nature.
I think it's the biggest flaw in human nature is our tendency towards denial.
You know, when the evidence points in a certain direction and we are like, no, no, I don't accept that because it's too painful.
It's not what I want.
So I'm going to pretend that a different reality exists despite the evidence.
That is the biggest flaw in human nature.
We do it as individuals.
Pretty much everyone does it.
I know there's been times in my life when I've done it.
There might be still some subjects I'm doing it.
And we do it collectively as well in a lot of ways.
And so again, that goes back to the religion thing.
When they're promising this, this alternate reality, this digital reality where you can be anything and do anything, that's just like heaven.
You know, religion promised heaven.
You go to heaven and everything's perfect.
It's the same thing over there.
Yeah, it's a funny one.
It's like a lot of people are really unhappy in the world because I am just this physical being and it's got limitations.
And they don't want to accept those limitations.
We see this with children where it's like they run around to superhero costumes and they're drawn towards narratives where people have superpowers.
When I was a kid, kids watched superhero movies.
And then later on down the line, it's like, oh, no, superhero movies for adults.
To me, that all ties in with it as well.
And realistic heroes actually doing things that are physically and psychologically possible.
That has been disappearing from media, from movies and all that kind of stuff.
And everything's all become about superpowers.
And to some extent, I would say that is deliberate.
But to another extent, it's just sort of something that's just naturally come about because that's the way we humans are.
Well, let me say, let me say something about that.
Do you think it's kind of because you just mentioned two aspects of it, but I would also argue that we've celebrated gangsterism as well at that same time that we stopped looking like you know at watching like the Tucker movies in the 90s where he's he tried to take on the man and give everybody the car for 50 years, you know, true story, or at least based on it, to things that you've covered, like Scarface and this idea of Tony Montana.
I mean, I can't tell you how many Scarface posters I saw up at college.
And what was the biggest show during college?
It was The Sopranos, right?
And you had this new kind of hero in Tony Soprano.
Now, I'm not, I'm not against art, and I'm not saying, but I'm certainly saying that those narratives have shifted where people kind of gravitate towards that.
In fact, it's cool to be called gangster and it has been for a very, very long time at this point, you know, since probably the 90s and the advent of hip-hop into popular culture, where that is actually a positive moniker and almost the inversion of what we thought.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I mean, that pretty much ties in with where I was headed with what I was previously saying anyway, is that this kind of pathology has existed for a long time where we're drawn towards villains.
We're often drawn more towards villains in movies than we are towards the heroes.
And the whole superpowers thing that goes right back to James Bond.
James Bond is a superhero.
The psychological powers that he's got, and he has no fear.
And any situation he's in, he can always come up with a genius plan of escape.
He is basically a superhero.
So that's always gone on.
But what was the one you just mentioned something then?
Scarface and the gangsters.
Sorry, the gangsters.
Yes.
No, that one is really interesting to me in the respect that for me, the cinematic experience I've had of that that most punches home is, I remember I saw Goodfellas on a cinema when I was, it was my seventh, 17th birthday, I think it was.
Best birthday present ever.
Went to the cinema, watched Goodfellas, blown away.
Me and my dad were just in awe of the whole movie.
But there was a line in that that stood out to me, which is where Henry Hill at the start he's talking about the general gangster life.
And he says, all those goody-good people who work their shitty jobs for bum paychecks and didn't have the guts to do anything with their lives, they're losers, they're dead.
If we wanted something, we just took it.
And I'm like, that is not a complete lie.
There is some truth to that, you know?
And so you can kind of understand.
I mean, we live in a society, we get a lot of great things out of society, but we also get oppressed in a lot of ways.
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And sometimes we have to go against the system.
Sometimes we have to even break the laws in order to rebel and defend ourselves against what's going on.
You know, I mean, not in the way that they do in Goodfellas.
Well, listen, man, again, you look again at what we just lived through, like literally five or six years ago, and I had to move.
You know, I lived, we had to get out of New York State.
I mean, unjust laws should never be followed, number one, especially that.
But everybody breaks the law in some respect.
You're speeding.
Oh, yeah.
You're jaywalking.
You know, I guess, you know, I don't want to take it to the do-as-thou wilt mentality because I think that, you know, there should there should be a moral dogma amongst human beings.
And that's why they ultimately not only this promise of, you know, life after death, but, you know, moral structure that you want for your community, your family, your neighborhood, et cetera, is kind of embedded in these religions as well.
But again, we're now talking about people that, you know, it's not just taking what you want, it's taking other stuff and by force.
But at the same time, you know, you look at, let's use Trump as an example.
And I was a reluctant Trump voter three times.
And I warned people, you know, in 15 when he was running.
I said, just so everybody understands, number one, the guy is a womanizer.
I'm not, I don't think that he wasn't, you know, a misogynist.
He wasn't banging Stormy Daniels.
I'm not under illusions.
He cheated on all his wives.
I remember all these things growing up.
He ran beauty pageants.
He was Epstein's friend.
You know, I was one of those first people that was even acknowledging the relationship before the crazy dancing video had gone out.
I'm like, you guys got to come to grips with reality.
He had rode on Trump's plane, et cetera, et cetera.
So misogynist.
Then he's an actor, right?
Even before he had reality shows, dude was on WWE Wrestling all the time or WWF when I was a kid.
I mean, he was everywhere.
He's on Oprah, always selling himself, always selling stuff.
And I said three, he was a gangster.
I go, if you believe that they let him build casinos in Atlantic City and all that property in New York without the help of organized crime, you're an idiot.
You're a moron.
You don't understand how things actually work.
They literally work hand in hand with all of those.
And that's, and I go, he's still better than the other girl or the other lady.
Still better.
Sorry.
I just hate to say it, but that's the reality.
And most people aren't, even though none of what I said should really be controversial, right?
Everything I just said is in the public record.
It's out there.
I'll get shouted down.
You know, he's, I think TDS goes both ways, right?
You got one end that think that he's, you know, literally the second coming of Jesus Christmas.
And then the other end where everything is literally at the at the right hand of Lucifer and everything's evil.
And it's, that's just not the way the world works or this guy.
Yeah.
Do you think people gravitate towards movies because they do kind of they try to deviate that, right?
They too try to make it simplistic narratives in many senses where those different deviations are much more apparent than in real life.
And then that essentially gets into real life where people have to play team baseball.
Like it's just like this psychotic tick where they can't just go, all right, I like what you did there.
Not great there.
I don't worship you or worship this or that.
I mean, you know, I loved the Yankees for a time, but they were the worst team in baseball when I was growing up.
It was, I mean, literally the 80s were a terrible time for them.
And when they started winning in the 90s, great.
I've kind of outgrown baseball, but I see that type of team.
I mean, you're in Europe, man.
Like the soccer thing is out of control there.
Like it's a religion, right?
So I know it's a jumble there, but where is that lineation in films?
And is it simplified to kind of control people in some way or at least tell these stories?
Well, the propaganda side of things is, you know, I've had a lot of people say, oh, you know, this newspaper headline is propaganda or this movie is propaganda.
It's like, I don't think things can just be put in that one single box.
There are propagandistic elements to most media, even stuff that I put out, even stuff that you put out.
We might not be aware of how we're doing it, but we have our own biases.
And some people would be able to see those biases that we ourselves can't see.
So I accept that there is probably some propagandistic element to my own work.
I try consciously for that not to be the case.
I think that's everywhere.
And I don't think that there's very much media that fits only as propaganda, or this one is absolutely zero propaganda.
I view a mixture in everything.
I mean, you look at like newspapers and the way that the article is structured, you've got this big bold headline, which is dumb and low intelligence, doesn't require any thought, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You know, it's like a lyric from a song or something.
It's so oversimplistic.
Now, they didn't invent that.
The people who make newspapers did not create that.
That's something that exists in human nature anyway.
Humans tend to, you know, I said earlier that the biggest flaw in human nature is denial.
I think the second biggest one is people's refusal to engage with complexity.
People are looking for the most simple, no-brain summary of an issue so that they can just remember the headline and go, oh, I've got it.
If I just spelt that headline, it'll sound like I know what the hell I'm talking about.
So I think the newspapers, even when they're trying to be truthful, they're trying to appeal to that side of people, this oversimplistic element that goes on.
And so, yeah, to that effect, I don't go around sort of like, I hate this piece of media because it's total 100% propaganda.
And this one's absolutely wonderful.
And you said that about the politicians as well.
I find very few things in life actually fit into a purely black or white box.
There's always nuances of good and bad in everything, you know.
And, you know, even with some of the darkest subjects, there can end up being sort of almost positive elements going on there, or truthful elements, maybe would be a more accurate term.
You know, like with the whole Epstein and pedophilia thing, as a society, as a whole, we show a collective sort of tendency toward pedophilia.
That's going to be some people watching are going to be like, what?
What are you saying?
No.
Look at the music videos.
Britney Spears in a school uniform jumping around and everyone's like, Whoa, you know.
Look at the way we dress our young girls and teenagers with the mini skirts and all that kind of stuff.
We push this sexualization of children in various ways as a society.
Wide Eyes, Wide Shut Themes00:06:40
And some parts of the world, they look at we in the West and they're horrified by what they see in that respect, you know.
So, uh, yeah, I just see pros and cons, black and white, in most contexts in life.
Yeah, that's a bit of a vague answer I've given you there.
It's a big university.
Vague's fine.
I mean, you do everything so intricately anyway.
But because we're on that subject, right?
I mean, this is probably a good place to get into wide eyes wide shut and kind of wrap it all up.
So for me, when I watched Eyes Wide Shut, and I remember watching AI After because that was also supposedly Kubrick in collaboration with Steven Spielberg, kind of post-humanistly, him giving that vision.
Also, a film that I felt very dirty and didn't love watching, but like kind of watching those themes, you know, again, revisiting them.
It's like, all right, you know, now I totally get it.
With Eyes Wide Shut, again, you know, didn't love it, didn't love the narrative, didn't love the ending.
You've certainly talked about the social classes, but kind of embedded in that, you know, I do kind of look at this narrative.
First of all, I think that his wife is one of these kind of monarch sex slave girls that's actually at the party, right?
I think that's why when he comes home, it's there.
That's the message.
At the very end, when the two guys walk away and they're not concerned with their daughter, not, you know, I wonder whether or not they're, you know, again, this kind of silent deal may have been cut because they are social climbers.
They're not, I mean, the woman, forget about it.
She seems like the worst person in the world.
There is kind of this moral struggle tale of Bill, who's like consciously kind of wants to get laid, but then every circumstance, it's just not there, you know, from the young girl trying to be sold by the shopkeeper who ends up selling him to the Japanese businessman to the prostitute that takes him up.
And then, you know, kind of the choice for what, Red Cloak and, you know, the other, the same, you know, the doctor villain, if you will, that's having sex with a prostitute, you know, one of these monarchs while his wife is downstairs and doing cocaine and all these things.
You know, I don't know what you know about Sidney Pollack, but aside from being a director and actor, he was also an arms dealer.
Like he dealt arms with Arnon Milken, you know, another Hollywood guy, etc.
So, you know, why do you cling to the novella kind of dream sequence and not this kind of overarching idea of a high-level network of these people, especially with that old man at the end?
Like, that was the cap for me.
You only see him in the background.
You know, Nicole Kidman for me, I mean, that's kind of like the Lucifer character that's totally in on the group as well, and the seduction guy, right?
And then by the end of it, the kid is such a minimal part of the story to have it round about.
You've got the bear symbolism that you've talked about.
And even, you know, I did that video on the Zodiac Club, the magic thing with the Zodiac symbol on there.
Take it away, Rob Ager.
I know there's my film analysis, everybody, of eyes wide shut.
Okay, a whole bunch of things to explore there.
The first is that, yeah, I do believe that there is a dream narrative element going on there.
I think the film works both ways.
I don't think it's a single narrative.
I think on one level, it is a dream in which the people at the Summerton Mansion with their big orgy are basically a psychological representation of the people at the first party at the beginning of the film, Ziegler's party, where they're all acting nice on the surface and polite and over sophisticated dancing to this lovely piano music and all that kind of stuff.
And then you see the Summerton Mansion and all of the surface glitter is stripped away.
And this is what people, these people, are about.
It's about wanting to bang people behind closed doors.
It's about wanting to take sexual advantage.
It's about power games, who's got higher status than who.
It's about everybody in the room doing only what they are permitted to do by the leaders.
That was already there in the early party in the film, but it was masked, you know.
And then later on, you see the people are being artificial.
You can't see their faces.
They're all wearing masks because they're all being fake.
So that's the I view it on one level like that.
At the same time, I do believe that Kubrick was trying to expose real elite societies.
Yeah.
I don't think that the society that we see in the film is actually a real one.
I think of it as a hybrid society.
Kubrick was exploring these kinds of issues all over the place.
I've been to the Kubrick Archives and I've looked at his research materials on Eyes Wide Shut.
He was researching occult societies and stuff, but he wasn't just researching a single one.
So, from what I can see, the society that we see in the film is a hybrid society that combines elements of Freemasonry.
It even includes elements of Christianity in there as well.
You know, it includes the witchcraft cults who were obsessed with yoga back in the 1930s and stuff like that.
So, you get sort of yoga elements built into that whole scene.
There's loads of different historical references and different secret societies that are all blended together in that sequence.
And Kubrick's not, he's not saying there's just one, he's saying there's tons of these, and this is the core pathology behind all of them.
That's the way I view it.
Regarding the ending with the little girl, I think that is specifically about Kubrick's own daughter having ran off with Scientology because she did during the production of Eyes Wide Shut.
Christian Kubrick has come out and talked about this in some newspaper interviews.
And the daughter, Vivian, she was a redhead, and the daughter in the film is a redhead.
And she goes off with these two guys who, as you said, are almost like handlers of some kind.
Well, that's what they have in Scientology.
I mean, Christian Kubrick even said that after Stanley died, Vivian, the daughter who went off with Scientology, she came to her dad's funeral, but she had Scientology handlers with her who wouldn't let her talk to her family.
Pimp Hooker Authority Dynamics00:14:25
Yeah.
So I think that ending was Kubrick being pretty upset towards the end of making Eyes Wide Shows.
He'd lost his daughter to Scientology.
And I think he put it in the film about that, my daughter being taken away by the Scientology cult.
Yeah, that's what I don't think that was like Project Monarch or anything like that.
However, I do want to mention some stuff about this Project Monarch and Artichoke and all those things.
I'm glad that's exactly where I wanted to go with the next.
Good, good.
Because I've got some things to say about that.
And some people won't be happy with me saying this, but I don't think that those programs, those attempts to program people, really work that well at all.
I did hypnosis for years.
I studied it.
I've been studying psychology and conditioning and stuff like that throughout a lot of my life.
And you cannot program a person.
It can't be done.
You can influence a person.
You can condition them.
You can manipulate them, but you can't program them because with a computer, you install a program and then the program just stays there forever.
It never changes unless somebody comes and alters the program from outside.
You can't do that to a person because if you try, if you really intensely condition someone to have a certain type of behavior or response, and then you walk away and you say, oh, I programmed them.
Great.
That's done.
You walk away.
It starts to fade away.
The programming fades away over time.
It can be quickly, it can be slowly, but people have a tendency to break programs.
People have a tendency to say, you know what, I don't want to do that anymore.
I think I'll do this.
And that works across the board.
And this goes back to the transhumanist thing.
One of the biggest fantasies from transhumanism is the desire to program people and have it stick and make it absolutely reliable so the person can never break out of the program to make people into robots.
But we humans, we keep defying them by breaking the programs.
So we get all of these massive propaganda pushes and things like that that go on in the media.
And they tend to work for a little while.
A lot of them fail flat out from the beginning because people are smarter than those propagandists think they are.
But a lot of these big propaganda programs fall apart very quickly over time.
People just start to question things.
And, you know, so that's the general thing.
Don't think that those tests and stuff that were done by the CIA and stuff way back in the 50s and 60s and so on, I don't think they got great results.
I don't think they successfully managed to create systems where you can absolutely reliably program people.
I think it's too risky.
There is a form of, I guess you could call it programming that I think works far better, and that's bribery.
And our whole system is based on that.
If you want somebody to do something, you pay them enough money to do it.
And a lot of people will just go, I'm in, I'll do it.
And you don't have to fight against them not wanting to do it because I want the money, you know.
And that's what happens.
You want someone assassinated.
If you give a big enough payment, somebody will step forward and go, oh, I'm up for that.
I will do it.
You know?
So, yeah, I don't think that Artichoke and Monarch and those programs, I think there's a lot of myths around that stuff.
I don't think it was nearly effective as they say it is.
Although I have seen people like Darren Brown have done like demonstrations where they say, oh, you can do it.
But I wasn't convinced by the demonstrations that I saw from those people.
Of course, I'd have to go into detail on those shows.
Well, I mean, all right, so let's talk to Aaron just for a second because he does have the one where, what is it, William Fry is his name, the comedian out in the UK, you know, gets assassinated after assassinated after the trigger of the woman in the red dress to try to remake the supposed Robert F. Kennedy Sir Han Sir Han operation.
I'm not sure if you've seen that one, but don't know if I saw that specifically.
It's online.
And if you haven't, you should watch it because basically he takes from a very large pool of people from the very beginning, like over 100 people, and progressively makes these things that he's doing them more hard, more difficult.
Like, for instance, putting their body in ice-cold water and not feeling it and being there for a while.
And again, I'm always intrigued because you wonder how much just subliminals alone can do.
And supposedly, that's what Darren's doing.
Darren is not coupling this with any trauma, which is obviously a big part of things like Bluebird and Artichoke and MK Ultra, supposedly, or drugs, which I know they focus on LSD, but there's a ton of these drugs.
And then you look at the drug companies that work for him.
It seems like they actually end up using a lot of these drugs in the field of psychology.
You look at somebody like Epstein, right?
And he's able to manage a harem.
Now, you look in those documents.
He's got one document that's like hundreds of pages long on mind control for some reason in there.
Who knows if they're reading it or they just downloaded it again?
I have no idea.
But then also has a nursery of quote-unquote trumpet plants.
And, you know, there are drugs.
You know, there's a reason that people get taken advantage of when they're drunk, right?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So when you have something like that, continually, I mean, like you said, through manipulation, you can control people, but at the same time, it wears, you get hookers hooked on drugs to control them.
Yeah, pimps do it all the time.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Do you think that there's the possibility that they have that type of relationship?
Maybe not with assassins, but certain people for things.
I mean, you look at, for instance, a part of MK Ultra, Midnight Climax, right?
Where they have the double mirrors, they have the Johns.
I would be very doubtful that the girls they were using, especially during that time period, were all 18 plus like they were carding them.
Those girls are probably controlled by drugs, but at the same time, they're probably also experimenting with truth serum with the Johns to try to see what they'll tell these girls outside of just small talk, et cetera.
Do you think that's the extent of where it goes?
Or is there the possibility of something more like a you know, you talked about uh you talked about uh James Bond, but the modern day version of that would be the born films and they lean heavily in that kind of mind control soldier direction, but they've all got to be on like a certain pill to continually uh maintain that type of programming, etc.
Yeah.
Well, what are your thoughts on that?
Like, like where is the line of possibility?
Like, like, is it all just the kind of control you would get from a pimp to a hooker?
Or can you think it could go beyond that?
Well, the stuff that you've outlined, yeah, I mean, that that stuff certainly happens.
By the way, sorry about the lighting here.
It's, it's gone a lot darker.
Um, uh, kind of appropriate for where our conversation has gone.
But yeah.
Um, so uh, the how can I put this?
Um, I'm trying to think of it.
Um, so you know what?
I've lost a little bit of train of thought of where we were at then.
So, your question was because you threw a few questions out there, basically, of where you think mind control really exists.
Outside of movies, you know, you've talked about like the hooker-pimp drug relationship, yeah, but at the same time, you know, they're doing all of these different experimentations on truth serums, etc.
Hollyweird has certainly promoted the born idea.
So, you're asking me what I believe the limits are of how yeah, I mean, again, you're somebody on the inside.
I mean, I had no idea you had a background in NLP before this.
I think that that in itself, um, you know, there's always somebody in high school or college.
They always call them charismatic, but in reality, a lot of it is they are employing these type of techniques where their tone changes, they make contact at the right time, they're displaying, you know, the things in NLP that grab you.
Where is the line on human beings?
Because, you know, again, we talked about Kathy O'Brien earlier and Transformation of America.
And she says that line is answered.
I got to admit, I saw the Kathy O'Brien interviews from back in the day when she first came out and I got the impression she was either mentally ill or lying.
Sorry, but that's that's what I say.
She didn't seem convincing to me at all.
Um, I mean, I've worked with people in mental health who will tell you all kinds of crazy stories.
I've worked with multiple people who told me they were Jesus, multiple people who told me that they were the devil, and they would be really, really, you know, convincing the absolute conviction.
And they would cite a load of supposed experiences in their own lives that supposedly supported it.
So I know how people can lie about these things or convince themselves of it, which I've saw a lot of, you know.
I always wanted to get the people who all thought that they were Jesus or the devil and get them all in one room and say, argue it out amongst yourselves, which one of you is really Jesus.
I'll tell you, that would be a wonderful video to put on YouTube.
Okay.
So yeah, a lot of the stuff that you've described there, yes, people can be massively manipulated.
People can be arguably controlled in a short term.
Yeah.
They can be conditioned.
But what it tends to require, if you want programming that sticks and never changes, that in itself doesn't work.
I mean, even like the pimp with the hooker, he's got her hooked on the drugs and stuff.
There are some prostitutes who get out of it.
They break out of it and get away from the pimp and they get straight and go and live a normal life.
All of these situations that you're talking about are not 100% reliable because there are people who get out, you know?
Even with cults, Charles Manson, he used a lot of drugs and things like that to mind control the people who were His members of his cult, but he couldn't 100% program them.
They were capable of breaking out of it, and some of them did.
And of course, once he got put away in prison, those people, a lot of them, went off and lived their own lives elsewhere.
They didn't go around murdering people once his influence was gone.
So, like, something I always find very funny about the media is that we will get like a certain message that's pushed upon us.
And it's like a lot of us can look and go, That's garbage.
And the media will keep pushing that same message endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.
And I always thought to myself, How stupid are these people?
Do they think that repeating that message over and over and over a thousand times is going to convince me of it?
It's not doing it.
Um, but I think there's another aspect of that, and that the people who do get convinced of certain messages, um, the message isn't embedded forever, so they have to keep reinforcing it.
So the media will keep pushing the same message again and again, just in case the previous programming starts to fade away.
Do you get what I mean?
Yeah, no, well, I think repetition is a huge part of it.
And to me, you know, you kind of talked about this mat, you know, what became popularized as mass formation psychosis on these issues where people just kind of like rapidly go into them.
But you know, in some respects, Rob, I mean, we just bombed the shit out of Iran, bro.
Like, like that narrative of evil Muslim now has gone on in my country for close to 30 years, right?
And it's like, you know, you wonder what we can break out of.
And then, you know, I asked you.
But how many people, how many people have fallen for that narrative at the moment?
Well, again, enough to let them do it.
I don't think it's that many, but again, again, you have these cultists that brought into a new narrative of Donald Trump, savior of the universe.
So now all of a sudden, it doesn't matter what he does, right?
I've been around these people.
It's very disconcerting.
And again, it goes into this team baseball identity.
I guess the other question I'd ask you about, you know, we kind of talked about.
So before you move on to the next question, can you hold that question a moment?
Yes, yes.
I don't know if you need to write it down.
No, no, no.
I got what I want to ask you.
Don't worry.
There's something really important to want to say on this stuff that relates to what you were just talking about.
Again, this is something else I've wanted to do a video on for years and never gotten around to it.
And that is, there's this, what I call parental authority dependency syndrome.
A lot of people, it's like they've grown up and they enjoyed the protection of their parents.
You know, mummy and daddy make everything safe and nice.
And they had it too easy, and the parents were too nice.
And so they never learned how to separate themselves from authority.
And as they get older, they're always seeking out a replacement for the protective parents.
That replacement can be a political party, a religion, a street gang.
It can be anything, any sort of grouping where there's authority that offers protection.
And when people have that mentality, they're terrified of standing on their own and not having somebody else to guide them and protect them.
Those people will deny reality and will cling on to a particular authority.
And they will say, This is the authority that is going to look after me.
And it can be Trump, it can be Obama, it can be anybody or anything.
But that is the core problem is they've never learned how to separate themselves from the parent.
It's like they're still kids wanting the parent there.
That was my authority.
Dependency syndrome.
The acronym for that is PADS, P-A-D-S.
I, again, you know, I mean, go watch my rants, especially like before they were locking it down.
And then in, no one's my daddy.
Don't act like you're not my mom.
You're not my dad.
And even then, I moved out when I was a teenager.
You know what I mean?
Recovered Memories and Phobias00:10:30
And my brother often talks about that.
That maybe that's why we don't go along with these things because we did rebel quite a bit and did have a rougher upbringing, and people have had it for too good for too long.
But the question I wanted to ask you before we wrap: you know, when we're talking about these kind of, I guess, mind control programs, and we are talking about psychology, you know, especially in the 90s, regressive hypnosis and these found memories came out, right?
And I think a lot of them are untrue.
But at the same time, I look at that in reverse and then the ability to implant false memories into people and have them recite them as if they were real.
My guess is that a lot of these programs that they were running, that was where they were the most successful at.
So, not necessarily, yeah, you know, not necessarily being able to tell someone to do something or cue them to go do it, and then they totally forget it or they take themselves out.
Who knows?
Maybe that's real and maybe they've been able to do that.
But certainly, you know, I've often pondered, you know, that the NASA astronauts, you know, I just watched Charles, man, I'm forgetting his last name, but one of the last guys to go on the moon.
And he had a four-hour debate with Bart Sobrell.
The funny thing happened on the way to the moon guy.
And he just kept repeating the same thing over and over again.
Like, you know, it's like it's a remembered thing, and this is my response.
I mean, the other thing is, I see that reflected in the media and in real life, like you were talking about, you know, the people that say these things and cling on to them, they have a certain script and it is embedded in their brain.
What are your thoughts on that?
The kind of regression hypnosis, what can you really get out of it from like recovered memories?
And how susceptible do you think people are to ingrained memories that are just not real at all?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, straight up on the second one I'll mention about first is the implanting false memories.
That happens all the time.
Oh, by the way, just because it's gone so dark in here, I'm just going to turn this lamp around.
All right, you got it.
Yes, sir.
We've got a little bit more light there.
I can mess around with the settings on here, but it's probably going to cause it to go off.
So, yeah, people implant false memories in each other all the time.
You don't even need to do hypnosis to do it.
When we read newspaper reports, we make a visualization of an event, you know, like a news report will say, this person stabbed this person to death in this context.
And we make a movie of that in our minds.
And we treat it as if it's a memory.
What the real memory is just we saw some ink on a page that said some words, you know.
So, I mean, you can persuade somebody to go out and attack somebody else by, you know, if you say, oh, this person did this horrible thing to someone who you love, and you really make it persuasive, you can persuade that person to go and attack that person.
You know, so this kind of thing happens all the time, both by intention and unintention.
A lot of the things that we think of as memories are just things that we've imagined and have become part of our narrative in life.
So, yeah, that kind of manipulation can go on.
As for the regression thing and recovering memories, yeah, that can be pretty powerful.
I did have one incredible experience of that when I was learning hypnosis stuff.
I was going to hypnosis practice groups and we would experiment on each other.
And that's where I got some of the skills from was doing that stuff.
And we had a group on phobias.
And the idea was that kind of like there's probably some sort of an early trauma memory that caused your phobia.
And if you can uncover that memory, bring it into consciousness, then you can sort of analyze it and figure it out and reassess the memory, and your phobia can fade away.
And this guy did a hypnosis thing on me.
I volunteered.
I said, you know, do me.
I had a phobia of spiders that was really bad.
And so he put me into a very mild trance.
And I understood what he was saying.
I could remember a lot of what he was said.
It was only a mild trance.
But he basically told me that, you know, over the next couple of weeks, when you're asleep and you're dreaming, I want you to explore this issue in your dreams.
And within the next couple of weeks, I want you to find a way to recover that memory and present it in a dream so that you can wake up in the morning and remember what the dream was, what the experience was that caused this phobia of spiders.
All right.
And I was a bit sort of skeptical about this.
And it was almost two weeks later to the night that I had this horrific nightmare.
And in the nightmare, I was laying on the floor in my living room of my mother's house.
She'd remarried at that point.
I was laying on the floor and I was like half dead.
I was like injured.
And I was surrounded by huge spiders that were as big as people.
And they were on the walls, they were on the floor.
And they were killing each other.
And they were different colored spiders and different sizes.
And some of the spiders were dead.
And I was one of the ones that was nearly dead in the middle of the room.
Right.
And up in the corner, my dad's face was looking down and laughing at me.
Right.
I woke up drenched in sweat.
Right.
I went and had a shower.
And I was like, what the hell was that about?
And then I went, I got back in bed.
And then the memory hit me.
The real memory hit me.
When I was a kid, my dad had, he had a, my dad was a bit messed up in some ways.
He'd had a horrible upbringing himself, you know.
So sometimes he was not appropriate with things.
And when I was about like six years old, he'd got this big glass bowl and he said, let's, let's do a little experiment.
And he went around the house, pulling the carpets up, and he got all these spiders from around the house, put them in the bowl, put them on the kitchen table.
And we watched them fight and kill each other.
About 20 spiders, right?
And in the dream, I was in the fucking bowl with my dad looking down at me.
Now, the question is, did that cause you to not have fear of spiders afterwards?
It helped me solve it.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Because I was able to go back to the memory and use like the NLP stuff and the hypnosis stuff to change the way I remember that memory.
You know, like for one thing, you shift yourself to a third person position.
So whenever I think of that memory now, I automatically shift to a position of watching myself in the memory from a different position, which is far less traumatic.
Just that alone.
And you change, I would change the memory to black and white.
And I would shrink the mental screen that it's on.
So I'm watching the memory on a distant screen in my mind in black and white.
Maybe put some like calm music over it to make it feel a bit less painful and stuff.
And yeah, just doing little tricks like that, I was able to change the memory.
And there were some other things that had gone on over the years after that that reinforced my phobia of spiders.
And I dealt with those as well because remembering that one allowed me to then remember the other ones as well.
So I went through them all.
And yeah, my phobia of spiders pretty much gone after that.
I mean, I don't love spiders.
A big spider's running on me, I'll jump like anybody else does, you know.
But if there's a spider in the room and it's over there and it's on the wall, I can just be like, Oh, I'm gonna get on with me.
Well, I had a tarantula as a pet for a short period of time.
I just let it climb around.
Yeah, that's how weird I am.
I mean, I was the kid, also grab, like my dad would have us grab snakes when we were younger.
So there was a bugs, all that.
I mean, I lived in ghetto apartments, man.
We had bats in my apartment one time.
That was maybe the most traumatic is watching the bats.
They were hanging on the uh, like uh the window uh panes and them like getting stabbed while they were asleep.
That maybe, yeah, bro.
So, yeah, I mean, that's an example of how powerful uh regression with hypnosis, you know, to pull out lost memories.
Uh, because I think that needed to come out in a dream because it was a it was a memory that was so stressful and repressed that it's like my conscious mind didn't want to deal with it.
So, in the dreams, my brain found a way of taking that memory and presenting it to me, uh, not just in terms of the memory itself, but when I when I was having the experience of watching the spiders in the bowl, what was stressful was me imagining being in the bowl with the spiders.
Yeah, that was the trauma.
It's the actual memory wasn't the real trauma, it was what I was imagining when I was watching what was going on in the bowl, and that's what came out in the dream, you know.
So, yeah, I mean, the recovering of memories can be very powerful, but at the same time, um, there can be a mistake that is made where you can put someone in hypnosis, have them imagine something that didn't happen, and persuade them that it's a real memory.
That that can that can happen as well, you know.
Um, there's a funny thing about the whole hypnosis, uh, it's for a lot of people who've got severe mental health problems actually do believe in mind control in various ways.
Um, I've met people in mental health who believe that they were hypnotized again and again and again when they were younger, um, and they're able to twist the narrative of their lives in whatever direction they wish, uh, just based upon creating fake memories and saying, Oh, that was something that I was, um, that I'd experienced and was hypnotized not to remember.
Um, and that becomes a sort of artificial memory generator in their mind, and then they just go off into an insane disconnection from reality with that, or they're just creating tons and tons of fake memories from it.
John Ronson and Franklin Scandal00:06:58
I've come across that, and it's a really tough one to overcome, you know.
Uh, yeah, so I don't know if that answers your question or not.
I mean, it's probably as close as we're gonna get.
I mean, for me, uh, you know, I look at some of them, like I don't know how familiar you are with the um Franklin scandal and uh the case uh there.
There's two different books.
Uh, there was the Franklin cover-up, which was got by a guy named John DeCamp, who was a lawyer and state senator and had represented um these young people that, again, you would have thought it just couldn't have happened.
You know, uh, it was a pedophilia ring of high-level politicians, it was led by this guy named Lawrence King, not that Larry King, uh, but very involved in the Republican Party.
And DeCamp himself was an ex-military guy, I think, that ran psychological operations in Vietnam.
So, I had always taken it with a pretty big grain of salt, that book.
Um, but at the same time, uh, I remember there was one part of it that like I literally almost vomited.
I had to put the book down.
It was very like it was you talk about how you visualize things while you're reading them.
Nick Bryant, the guy who actually got the Epstein black book published and the flight logs published in Gawker, all those years ago, he did a follow-up on it back when John DeCamp was alive.
And it's instead of the Franklin scandal, it's called the Franklin cover-up.
And it's been out about 15 years now.
And I know Nick pretty well at this point.
But I read that one and he found even more victims.
And then he had a hundred-page bibliography in the back, which were old news articles, the actual FBI reports, police reports, etc.
This was victims of this Franklin scandal cover.
Pierre, one second, I'll show you the book.
Okay.
We got it.
So, ah, this is the second book.
It's called The Franklin Scandal, the story of power brokers.
And sorry, these were victims of Epstein or no, no, not Epstein.
So he, like I said, he got, you would know him as the guy that got those published as well because he got he was an old Rolling Stones reporter and he'd done stuff on like the Hell's Angels.
But this right here is the bibliography at the end.
All sorts of documents.
And that's what I want, right?
I don't want just someone's narrative.
Also, I want the source documentation.
Yeah.
And, you know, this talks about kind of like the satanic ritual abuse of these kids, also getting them hooked on drugs as well, using them as drug mules, etc.
And, you know, not being turned into assassins, but the type of stuff that, you know, would be out of a horror movie, right?
And there was a recent case out in Salt Lake City that, if you read, you know, forget about the Epstein cannibal emails there, because I know that that's the wild thing out there.
I've told my audience the cannibal was actually a real restaurant.
The chef they're talking about is Francis Derby.
He's in the emails a thousand plus times.
I don't think that means they're eating flesh from those emails.
But in this one deposition in Utah, I mean, they're talking about cannibalism.
They're talking about like leather face type stuff.
It was like the wackiest case.
Someone did get convicted on it.
And then the powerful person who was in the government left the country and bought a Scottish castle with his wife.
Like, exactly.
These things are super bizarre.
And I don't think that they're out of the realm of possibility, especially when you get to decadent levels.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I do believe that there are multiple Epstein-type situations going on all over the world right now that are not even connected to Epstein.
I don't think it's a unique situation.
I think it's going on all over the place in different countries in different ways.
And probably in some of those situations, it's going to be even worse.
I don't know if you ever heard about in Adelaide in Australia.
There's been rumors for decades of an establishment there that kills people and does all these horrible things that you mentioned.
That one, I've always been curious about that one because there's been so many serial killer cases in Adelaide and things like that.
And that's a dark city.
There's something weird going on there.
So I'm not ruling these things out.
Well, let's talk about the weirdness then, since I still got you here.
And we talked a little bit about secret societies, right?
Like, for instance, you know, the Bohemian Grove, which is pretty big, and I've got nine of their actual annals that run back over a hundred years, you know, in large part.
It's like, you know, a fraternal order and a club, et cetera.
But it's always bizarre to me that you do have like the weird cremation of care ritual and these guys mostly who kind of espouse themselves as Christian conservatives, right?
And they're doing these weird things.
But then on top of that, you know, this is where they started the Manhattan Project.
This is where, you know, they picked political candidates that would become president, like Nixon and Reagan and Eisenhower speaking there after World War II before he gets the nod.
So it's like, you know, what that, you know, this isn't some, you know, club weirdos and drug addicts or, you know, people trying to find their social circles or some kind of like witch wiccan trend, you know, that type of thing.
These are like apex of the power structure type people doing this.
What are your thoughts on that?
Is it just and look, I'm in a fraternity.
We do goofy stuff.
We don't worship Minerva or the owl or anything like that.
There's no cremation of care.
But, you know, it's all there.
They also dress and drag a lot.
Like that's a big thing.
I often wonder if Hoffa was really into drag or they just caught him at the Grove a couple times and used that to blackmail him.
What are your thoughts on something like the Grove?
I'm quite familiar with the whole Grove thing.
I remember when that came out and I've explored that in bits and pieces.
And I've often wondered whether there's some connection between Kubrick and that situation.
In fact, there was one.
And the guy, I believe, who got Alex Jones into the Grove in the first place.
John Ronson.
Sorry?
John Ronson.
That's him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, John Ronson has got like connections with the Kubrick family because he, yeah, he worked with the Kubrick family on a documentary called Kubrick's Boxes.
And I watched that document.
That's him.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So that was John Ronson.
So, you know, I kind of wondered, you know, if John Ronson knew about what's going on at the Grove and he got Alex Jones in there, where did John Ronson get the information?
And why is he connected to Kubrick?
Maybe Kubrick knew about the Grove and maybe he got John Ronson.
Elite Behaviors and Transhumanism00:03:58
I don't know.
There could be something there.
Did you watch Secret Rulers of the World?
I've seen that, yeah.
Yeah, because he had that three-part thing, and then it actually turns into the men who stare at goats.
So, like, you know, the one on, you know, again, mind control and the idea that you could stop a goat's heart.
I'm super skeptical, obviously, of all those things.
And I think that you are as well.
But I also think that, you know, when you're talking about NLP and you're talking about taking your mind and putting yourself in a third-person perspective of the impossible of watching a memory that you experience first person, obviously, to me, there's something else to humanity.
I never tell people what to believe religiously, spiritually, etc.
But man, I didn't know that we were going to get this deep, Rob.
But what is the nature of reality?
Can I just mention a little sort of a theory I've got about these elites and why they're drawn to these kinds of bizarre behaviors?
I kind of got onto this years ago from, you know, studying the sexual psychology of, you know, sort of like sexual deviancy to do with like dominatrixes and all that kind of thing.
You know, people who go to brothels and have really weird stuff done that a lot of us would be like, oh, you wanted that done and it's painful.
And oh my God, what the hell are you doing there?
And, you know, studying in that realm, I sort of came to this conclusion that a lot of people who are in powerful positions, not just like really high positions, but people who are in like managerial positions and corporations and things like that, where they have to put an act on all the time.
You have to wear a suit all the time.
You have to say the politically correct thing all the time.
They're spending all day writing paperwork that has to be politically correct and doing speeches to teams and everything has to be carefully worded.
It's like they're not allowed to be themselves.
They become a robot.
And funnily enough, this is actually a form of transhumanism.
A lot of people, I think you mentioned this earlier.
In their efforts to climb the ladder and get higher and higher corporate positions, they lose their humanity along the way.
So, in a way, they are transhuman.
They transition from being human to being corporate robot.
That's something that really goes on.
And I think a lot of people, when they're in those positions, there's a part of them that still wants to reject it.
There's a part of them that wants to throw off the business suit, whether it's a man or a woman, and wants to get rid of all of the nicey-nice behaviors and wants to just go the other direction.
And I think those people step away and go to like dominatrixes and weird sex parties and things like that.
And they just want to do the craziest shit just to feel human again, you know.
It's like they're trying to balance themselves out.
Okay, I've done the nicey-nice thing over there.
Now I want to do the insane, crazy thing where I'm just going on impulse and not having to edit myself.
I think there's an element to that goes on.
And I think some of these secret societies probably operate with some of that going on as well.
Like you get the Scientology, a lot of rich people were drawn into that, you know, people like Tom Cruise.
And it's kind of like, I get the impression that a lot of them are kind of bored.
I've got loads of money.
I've got all this power and influence, and everybody wants to know me everywhere I go.
I can sleep with just about anybody.
I'm bored.
What's the next thing that will give me some excitement?
Oh, Scientology.
Oh, they got some wacky ideas there.
And then suddenly they feel alive again.
So I think a lot of that kind of stuff goes on.
It's people are drawn towards these cult things because they're unhappy with their own situation to begin with.
Robin Williams Autopsy Conspiracy00:05:08
And that can apply at any level of the economic ladder.
I think a lot of super rich people are extremely miserable and feel unhappy and have got no real purpose.
And I think a lot of them have got really low self-esteems as well because they know deep down how fake they've had to be for years to get to where they are.
And they're carrying on being fake.
And they probably thought one day I'll get up there and I'll become so high up the ladder that I won't need to fake anymore.
I'll be allowed to be myself.
And it never ever happened.
You know, I think there's a big sort of thing going on with that.
Yeah.
You know, there's a microcosm of that I often talk about with the Robin Williams story.
You know, you kind of talked about the boredom and stuff like this.
And I don't know what you know about Robin Williams and how he was found.
But to me, the episode.
We're going.
How did he die?
I don't know nothing about it.
Well, everybody thinks suicide is the official version, right?
Yeah.
But he was found with a belt around his neck in a door on a chair leaning and they delayed his autopsy and he was stiffened in a seated position.
And you can read the headline and they asked his family if he was an autoerotic fan.
Now, you know, obviously, you know, autoerotic asphyciation is not the way to go out.
And especially when you're doing Mrs. Doubtfire and these type of movies, he also did a full movie called World's Greatest Dad, where the whole storyline is he catches his son doing autoerotic association.
And then the next time he catches him, he dies.
And Robin is just this English teacher that desperately wanted to be famous.
And he happens to write a suicide note for his kid and hangs him up.
You know, he doesn't want his kid to be found that way either.
And the whole story is how he gets famous from this suicide note that was published and him talking about the experience that isn't real.
I think that Robin Williams probably again, you know, from and Bobcat Goldwait, actually, he was a good friend.
Like he was a Call of Duty guy.
He was a drug addict.
Like you said, he could sleep with anybody.
The people that get into these weird sexual things that me and you would think, like, why would you do this?
You know, like the comedian, the saddest guy out there, he ends up dying that way.
You know what I mean?
And sure, it's covered up, but that speaks to this idea that when you do have too much and things do get boring, you look for something else.
And sometimes it's in the darkest, most nether regions of society.
So, yeah, if you haven't looked at that one, there's a conspiracy theory for you.
So, let me get this straight.
You're saying that the conspiracy theory is that he killed himself in that way or that he was killed in that way.
Yeah, well, that he was he accidentally killed himself, as people often do.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know if you ever, I forget what the Steven Soderberg movie is, but uh, yeah, uh, sexualizing videotape, yeah.
No, no, there's another one uh later on with uh what is it?
Who's who's a pretty woman?
Uh, Julia Julia Roberts, Julia Roberts.
It's with Julia Roberts and uh, David DeCovny's in it.
And she gets set up on this date with DeCovney.
And it's like, you know, it's if you've never seen it's like this gritty type film, uh, but he doesn't end up showing up to dinner, so she goes over to uh get him in his room.
And I think they're on like a boat or something like that.
And he's accidentally killed himself from autoerotics asphyxiation, only with a bag over his head instead of the belt around his neck.
But I'm just saying, you don't hang yourself to kill yourself in a seated position with a belt around your neck and a door.
Like, that's not, you'd have to act.
I don't know how you would actually be able to keep yourself forward.
Um, and again, they delayed the autopsy.
You can read that headline.
Hell, we could bring it up right now.
Uh, there's just too many things to point to me.
They tried to say that he cut his wrist and that they there was no wrist cut.
Like, you look at the autopsy and all that.
I honestly don't know about the technicalities of that kind of stuff.
I mean, um, I have read things about people sort of hanging themselves with by doorknobs just by sitting down and stuff.
I don't even know how physically possible that is.
Well, actually, on the subject of um, you as you were mentioning that one about Robin Williams, there reminded me of another situation which is similar, except this one is more of a conspiracy.
Was um, I think it was David Carradine, the actor, yeah, oh, that's another one.
They, I, I watched uh Yakuzi, all of it.
I think he was doing a documentary on the triads or something, yeah, the Yakuza, yeah, the triads and the Yakuza, yeah, and then he suddenly gets an embarrassing debt.
I was like, nah, no, somebody's killed him there.
Well, who was it?
Tarantino on Stern said he was murdered, and he also said that the family said that he was actually like bound when they found him in the closet.
Like, like, there was no way, yeah, that is another we got conspiracy theories with Rob Ager.
He never goes that far.
Rob, you've been giving me almost two hours of your time.
Go to collativelearning.com and please.
If you're unfamiliar with his stuff, again, he's got great stuff on YouTube under Rob Ager, under collative learning.
Leave Your Phones Behind00:03:30
And I mean, I was reading your stuff back when it was like blog post days, big, long stuff.
Uh, you've got that too.
Uh, you are an absolute wealth of information.
This was an awesome conversation.
What would you like to leave the audience with, my man?
I would like to leave the audience with this.
I watched your speech on transhumanism.
I watched it last night in preparation for this podcast, and I was very impressed with your speech.
It was really good.
I was like, wow, here's somebody who actually knows this subject.
I hear so many people offering their opinions on AI and transhumanism where they fell for a lot of the lies, and you've seen through it all.
And I was watching and I was like, awesome.
Yeah, man, that's that's a thank you, man.
That makes me feel really good because, look, man, here's the deal: I was a naive kid.
I don't want to even say because I was in my mid-20s and I thought I was an adult.
But like when we did lose change, I really thought we're going to get justice.
We're going to stop these wars.
We're going to get our constitutional republic back, all these things.
And now I'm kind of at the point, especially with transhumanism that transcends traditional governments and really where we're moving as a society.
I'm always telling people, hey, stay human for as long as you can.
And that's going to be harder and harder as they sell us beyond wearables, as they try to sell you on Musk and Neuralink and all these other things.
So that's, I think that's the big battle of the day.
You think there's a bigger one out there?
Can I just add one thing on that, though, before we go?
I wanted to get this in somewhere.
Everybody, stop living through your mobile phones.
These are tracking devices.
Everywhere you go, everything you do is being tracked and recorded and passed around and put in data sets all over the world.
Use your mobile phone less.
Go out for a few hours without it.
Leave the damn thing at home.
There was a time when these things didn't exist and we were all fine and we didn't die because we didn't have our mobile phones with us.
Yeah, and buy yourself a Faraday blocker, which is a pouch, which you can put your phone in.
And every now and then, when you're not using your phone for a few hours, put the damn thing in the pouch.
It blocks all signal coming in and out.
Because if you're going to carry your phone everywhere with you all the time, you may as well have an implanted device in your hand that tracks you.
It's the same bloody thing.
So yeah, get off your phones as much as you can.
It's been a one simple thing that everybody can do.
Well, I also tell people to downsize on the apps.
Like, I don't have, first of all, I've never got on the social media craze outside of like, you know, I've had the YouTube channel since 2007.
You know, X is the only thing on my phone.
I have a Facebook, but that's family and home and desktop stuff.
No Instagram, no Snapchat, no TikTok.
You know, the more that you live your life through this little screen, it watches you as much as you watch it, if not more.
Yeah.
And we're going to try to.
And there's loads of free programs you can get that are alternatives that don't involve all of this corporate tracking stuff.
So do you use a like a Graphene OS or a Lineage OS phone?
Have you gone that far yet?
No, I haven't.
No.
I've experimented with those as well.
Rob Agerman, I hope we do this again.
We could talk forever.
Thank you so much.
Guys, you know the drill over here.
If you want to support the broadcast, 5, 10, 15 bucks, it means the world to me.