Roger Avary and Joe Rogan dive into Orson Welles’ technical genius, like Citizen Kane’s reverse tracking shot and Touch of Evil’s single-crane border-town sequence, contrasting it with digital cinema’s flatness and corporate-driven storytelling. Avary praises Guillermo del Toro’s Nosferatu (2024) for its candlelit horror, while critiquing modern media’s prioritization of propaganda over art—from Star Trek’s decline to AI’s rise in filmmaking. They link The Counselor’s sulfuric acid rituals to Epstein files and Moloch theories, questioning plausibility amid public apathy. Avary speculates on historical revisionism, like Fomenko’s New Chronology, and compares societal indifference to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, arguing reality may be far stranger—and more manipulated—than mainstream narratives allow. [Automatically generated summary]
Because when he made that movie, when he made Citizen Kane, which was about William Randolph Hearst, William Randolph Hearst essentially shut down one of the most talented guys alive at the time.
Well, yeah, and he was doing things that nobody else would do.
It's like he's like, oh, I want the camera down here, like on the phone.
Well, we can't get the camera lens down that low.
What you're talking about is impossible to do.
And so he would just grab a pickaxe and just start chopping away at the studio concrete and dig a hole in the ground so you can put the camera down that low.
Yeah, he was obsessed with getting a vision on screen that was, even today, is so advanced.
There's a shot in the very beginning when young Kane is like a little kid and he's out there playing with Rosebud.
He's out there playing with the sled in the snow and the camera is on him and then it kind of starts pulling back and it pulls through a window and then we see his parents and the trust attorney and the camera keeps backing up all the way into the room.
Well, to do that in a studio and to have all that snow and everything, you need so much light, but you also need a lot of light inside the, because the exposure change.
It's like an amazing, incredible dolly shot, a reverse tracking shot.
So in order to maintain that background exposure of the little kid in the window and the foreground, what you're not knowing is how much light they're using on the interior part in order to create that balance between the two with the film stocks back then.
And the other thing is that table gets flown in.
Like they move that table into the shot because it's in the way of the camera move.
Yeah, well, now you have a white paper that Netflix gives you.
And that I think, was it Ben Affleck that was talking about it?
You know, how you've got to have a beat in the beginning and you've got to have this and this and this and regular things.
I mean, there was this book by Sid Field, which was a screenwriting book that, you know, at one hand, it gave a kind of formula on what a movie should be.
You know, by page seven, your inciting event should happen.
And by page 30, the first, you know, he had everything mapped out by page.
And that eventually found its way into the hands of studio executives.
And they were like, oh, now we know what a screenplay is supposed to be structured like, you know, in order to have proper story arcs and structures and a satisfying design.
And that's just the next iteration is Netflix giving you a white paper saying you have to shoot with these cameras.
You have to process at these labs.
You have to have tech specs that are within this range.
And that's now extending to story because they've analytically looked at what audiences are able to process now, which is less and less, probably because of the COVID shot, completely frying their pineal glands so that they can no longer pay attention to anything.
And then on top of that, the mind control device of cell phones.
And with all of that, they're now like, well, how do we maintain the audience?
I mean, there's something magical about being in a movie theater.
You know, it's, you know, you're in this congregation.
You know, Quentin always talks about how, you know, movies are my church.
Well, it is a congregation, and you're having, you're sitting in the dark next to someone you don't even know.
They might have completely different ideologies, race, creed, color, like everything is different about them.
And yet you're sitting in the dark next to them, having this ecstatic dream, this waking dream, sitting like insects looking at the flicker on the screen, and you're sharing this kind of experience that you're physically trapped in.
You don't get up and leave the theater and, well, you might if you have to go to the bathroom or get some popcorn or something, but they'll even bring that to you now.
You're having this kind of ecstatic experience, absorbing the movie with someone you don't know, and you're sharing your bodily electricity with them.
And I think this kind of, this is the magic that they often talk about of movies.
It's not necessarily the movie itself on screen.
It's the shared experience of being next to people.
Do you really think that that's by design, or do you think that's just a natural function of streaming and televisions and phones and having access to things instantaneously?
You notice that all of the executives – Well, yeah.
I mean, part of it is technology, but technology gets pushed and brought to the forefront for specific reasons.
And, you know, digital cinema hasn't been the greatest thing for the creative process.
And I think we see that in the works that we're looking at.
I mean, if you watch stuff on Netflix and whatnot, we can see that it doesn't have the same power and impact.
And also, you know, when you were making a movie, when you were making a film on film, it was like every time you turn on the camera, you're burning money.
It's like every single frame is like four cents or whatever, whatever the calculation was.
And so that was actually an expensive part of the process.
And so, you know, there was all this preparation to get everything ready.
Like, oh, we want to get all of the props in place, you know, right before we shoot.
And the actors are in their trailer and they're figuring out what they're going to do.
And then you're on your way to set and people are like, hey, I'll see you in the moment.
And what they mean by that is when the cameras turn on and you actually hear that happening, suddenly everything pops into play.
And suddenly you're performing in front of, you know, what you're attempting to do is capture lightning in a bottle.
And you don't even know that you have it right away.
You ask your DP, like, do we have it?
And it's like, oh, well, there was some dust in the frame or a hair in the frame.
Let's get another one.
You get another one.
And like, then you hold that all in the dark, all that film, because you can't Can't expose it, and you send it off to the lab.
And then some alchemist at the lab at the castle, you know, puts it into a potion, and he, and the next day, what comes out are these like little stained glass windows, and you watch it, and you realize what you got.
You're like, we did it!
We captured something.
Okay, now everything is different.
You, you know, you show up on set, and everything's digital, and you've got producers, and network executives, and broadcasters, and everybody's there, studio people in Video Village, and they set up like a little tent, and everybody's sitting there in their Canadian goose jackets on high chairs, and they're looking at a big color-corrected monitor, and there's a guy doing color correction in a van.
And they're basically watching an approximation of what it's going to look like in the end.
And they're sitting there.
Okay, on my first film, there was none of that.
I had to stand next to the camera.
We didn't even have videotapes.
Stand next to the camera and look at the actors and see, did the actors do what I wanted them to do?
And now, you know, they just turn on the camera, and it costs more money to stop the camera and to restart it again.
So you just let it roll.
And you're just like letting it go.
And you're like, hey, the director now is like, hey, go back, start over, and smile this time.
And then they redo it.
And then the editor is now like having to take those takes and separate them in the editing room.
And the actors are like, suddenly, the moment is gone, in other words.
And the problem is now suddenly you've got a chorus of people sitting there who are like, oh, yeah, you got it.
I saw he got it.
Didn't you get it?
Yeah, you got it.
But you as the director still have to run back and forth to the camera and to the actors and everything.
And you're like trying to keep it all in place.
And look, neither is worse than the other.
They are both paint, but one is watercolor and one is oil paint.
And those are opposingly different.
You know, if you were an oil artist during the British Renaissance of watercolor paint, where all of a sudden watercolor came out and everybody wanted watercolor, why would you try to make your watercolor paint look like oil or vice versa?
They're just completely different mediums.
They're both paint, but they're different.
And so digital has its advantages and its purposes.
You can, you know, because you can run like a long mag of video, I call it video.
Everybody calls it digital cinema, but that was just to push it through.
And actually, the technology is different.
With film, light travels through the glass.
It travels through a gate.
It exposes the silver and the acetate.
And then you keep it all in the dark and send it away.
With video, the light travels through the glass.
It strikes the golden sensor and then it bounces back into the glass.
And that's why video or digital cinema is flatter by nature than most film.
And so to combat this, filmmakers have started to do the exact opposite of what we used to do.
It used to be that you would go to shoot something, you're outside, you're on set, I've got my camera on Joe, and I have the sun behind me because I want all that light on you, for the most part.
I'm over-exaggerating my point.
And the analogy would be, or the saying would be that at the end of the day, you go home and the back of your neck is sunburned because you've always had the light behind you.
Now, because the image is flatter, they rotate the camera 180 degrees and they shoot into the sun to get lens flare.
And Lens Flair gives you the illusion of depth where there is none.
I always thought that like when you would watch soap operas, I was like, why do they look so weird?
And it's because they were shooting them on video instead of on film.
Like when we were filming News Radio, the sitcom, we were doing it on film.
And they were like really adamant about doing it on film.
Like they really wanted it to be on film.
And then there was some process where you could make video look like film.
And I was like, this is so interesting.
It's like we're designed, like when you take your photo with your camera on your phone and you use portrait mode, which is you blur out the background.
Because you would never be able to sell that if that cinema never existed.
Like if cinema never existed and video came around and then it was normal video, like soap opera style, and then someone came along and said, hey, let's make it blurry in the background.
It's almost like we've become accustomed to the faults and nostalgically we look at them as if it's a positive.
I liked parts of it, but as a whole, it just kind of about it, but I mean, Blade 2 is probably my favorite film of his because it's like the least of, well, actually, it's quite a bit of him, but it's just the most accessible for me.
I mean, the thing about Werner Herzog, when he made his Nosferatu, the Murnau movie, which is the original Nosferatu, the very first one with Max Schreck.
So the thing about Werner Herzog as a filmmaker is that most filmmakers have their forefathers that they can look back to.
They have a generation before them that they can kind of imprint on.
And because of the brutality and tragedy of World War II, he had none.
There were no German filmmakers that he could look to.
And so he had to look to his grandfather, basically, which was Murnau, when he made it.
And so his film is almost like haunted by the original.
And then he brings, you know, Werner Herzog grew up not using a telephone until he was in his teens.
He'd never seen a telephone before.
He had grown up like in Upper Bavaria in the mountains.
And so he comes like his film is almost displaced in time.
It's like skipped a generation.
And he does things like he'll show two actors in the most emotional part of the movie when Mina and Jonathan Harker are at the beach and they're basically saying goodbye.
And normally in a Hollywood film, they would cut to a close-up so that we could see the tears.
We would cut to that close-up.
But because his film is, because he's displaced in time, he stays back.
Like he doesn't even bother shooting a close-up.
To him, it's more melancholic to show them just isolated as figures in a wide shot.
And it truly is.
And so his film is super powerful that way.
And then you have Klaus Kinske, who is the madman actor of German cinema and who is like, I mean, there's a documentary called My Best Fiend, which is about the relationship between Herzog and Kinske.
And there's an amazing scene in the beginning of that where Werner Herzog visits the apartment that he rented in, I think it was in Berlin, where he was first becoming a filmmaker and where he first met Klaus Kinske.
And he goes there and it's now occupied by these two, just very conservative, this German couple.
And he starts going through the house and saying, oh, yes, here, this is where Klaus went crazy and he started smashing it and shitting on the walls.
Because he was an insane guy.
He was like, his whole thing was about provocation.
I mean, I have to say, this movie feels haunted, as haunted by the Herzog version, as Herzog was haunted by the Murnau version, as if it's a continuation for me.
It would be like, I encourage anybody to enjoy all three of them, I guess.
The guy just disappears, and all of a sudden he's way far away.
There's a lot of that in this movie.
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So, the scene when they get him to sign papers, when he's get up to that questions about the young clothes, many superstitions here that may seem backwarm to a young man of your high learning.
I mean, it's very much a candle-lit movie, which I like because I don't like a film where you're pretending that people are in a candlelit, but it's really well-lit.
And it can do things in darkness that film just doesn't have the capacity to do.
And so it's an excellent choice.
When we did Silent Hill, we made the choice of whenever we're in the dark, we're shooting on digital, and whenever it's during daylight, we're shooting on film to create a kind of dissonance between the two.
And so, and that's largely because digital loves dark, and this is a great use of it.
I'm warming up to it.
I've been waiting.
I bought it on Blu-ray.
I have the movie.
I mean, I keep it.
It's in that stack.
I've just been waiting for the right time to expose myself to it.
Okay, this is, to me, this is better than, you know, it's, I have a very high watermark for Arthurian mythology.
Like, to me, Excalibur is the high watermark.
And this really went there.
This, like, I had a chip on my shoulder when I started watching this.
I was like, okay, this is very unlikely that I'm going to enjoy this production.
But they did it for like a, for a micro budget, effectively.
They made something that is absolutely kind of reinvents the mythology and they do it like proper television where you kind of love the characters and they weave an entire reality and universe that is just fantastic.
And it's done for like, you know, for very, very little.
You know, they're spending billions making these Lord of the Rings things and like nobody cares.
They're just awful to watch.
And in the meantime, these guys just, you know, without anybody paying attention, cranked this out.
And I've only seen four episodes of it, but I am like completely blown away by it.
And so, yeah, Billy Hayes, he was the actual character or the person who lived the experience.
And so the movie is a kind of propaganda element.
And that's like all Hollywood does that.
You kind of accept whenever you're making a movie that you're being used in a certain level to do something, whether it's to, you know, on a very basic level, whether it's just to like, you know, mortify or scare audiences or to do things.
And we see that more and more, obviously, in media as the director, the personal propaganda, when you have something personal that you want to get on screen, has become more and more diminished.
And you have sort of more corporate propaganda kind of taking over.
And I think the most probably crass example of that is DEI stuff in movies and pushing characters in situations that are just completely out of whack.
And so she puts Star Trek on, you know, like at around five o'clock.
Star Trek comes on.
Original?
Well, we cycle through, we go chronologically from, you know, the original series through The Next Generation and then DS9 and then Voyager and then Enterprise.
And then we look back to, and sometimes, you know, when you show an episode like in DS9, there's an episode called Trials and Tribulations, where all the characters go into the past and they kind of interact with Trouble with Tribles and they kind of blend them into the set and everything that's happening.
We'll then go back and watch Trouble with Tribbles or, you know, same thing with Wrath of Khan.
We'll do this, you know, so we'll kind of connect it all together.
And so, but every day there's at least two or three episodes of Star Trek playing in my house.
It's like I usually have to wrestle away the controller to say we're watching a movie now.
And so, and my children were like basically raised on Star Trek and, you know, the sort of morals behind Star Trek.
And, you know, and people complain about, oh, you know, I don't like DS9 as much.
It's not as dynamic.
I hate Bejor and blah, blah, blah.
But I think Captain Sisko is one of the most amazing captains there is because he's also a father and there's all these like father-son lessons that are going on throughout it.
It's like really elaborate television.
And by the way, all that kind of DEI stuff is still in it.
It's still there.
They're exploring all sorts of things.
In Star Trek the Next Generation, Riker, who's like the second in command to Picard.
In that one, there's an episode where he goes to a planet of neuters that are just, you know, they have one gender and he falls in love with one and they kind of waken up out of their single gender thing and realize, oh, I'm female.
And that person then gets taken and reprogrammed.
And then there's an episode where Cork is turned into a woman in order to, for some cockamame-y reason that they come up with in the show.
And he kind of likes it.
He's like getting into it.
So it's not like they aren't exploring gender and not just beating you over the head with it.
It's somehow integrated into good storytelling.
And I think something happened at the studios where they fired all of the legacy people and they hired on a bunch of new people who just weren't as good at storytelling and or as respectful of the canon, I guess you could say, is what it was.
But those seasons of Star Trek are, which I guess you could call the from the Gene Roddenberry into the Rick Berman era.
And I mean, they had such amazing writers.
They had guys like Renee Ashaveria and Naran Shankar, and they had technical advisors.
And so if you were just into the tech, you could really like, and most of our technology and most of our aspirations have come from Star Trek.
Our telephones are basically tricorders.
And when we see it on Star Trek, like, oh, we talk to the computer.
Well, I want to have that.
And so somebody figures out a way to develop that and to make it so.
And they have a sort of like tongue-in-cheek quality, but they bring all the, you know, all the writers from the original and showrunners and people like that.
And the original directors like Jim Con, God, I'm like blanking on his name, I want to say Conroy, but it's, I think it's whatever.
And so they bring everybody back and it has a little bit more of the same spirit.
Another really good Star Trek-ish thing is Galaxy Quest, something that got kind of buried with Sigourney Weaver?
You had, I think it was, I think it was here, Ben Affleck was on, and they were talking about AI and how it always goes to the middle.
And, you know, it always goes to the middle.
It always goes to the middle.
And I was like, like J.J. Abrams always goes to the middle.
And boy, was that Star Wars he did, the middle, where he just basically took the Luke Skywalker story and just reinterpreted it with a strong, strong woman, you know, character.
And I just thought it was bland and just tasteless and just, you know, nothing new.
And all of a sudden, he's, you know, kind of, he's like a lunatic.
And you're like, everybody's following him?
Like, he's like, he's distasteful.
He's distasteful all of a sudden.
But every now and then they would show a battle scene and it's like, okay, I can like Ridley Scott's doing his thing again.
And you know who's also really good in it is, God, I can't remember, Joel Egerton, who plays Ramses.
It's really funny because Joel Egerton is, you know, usually you imagine Egyptians when they're cast as being kind of tall and, you know, sort of noble looking and everything.
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He's kind of like this butch, like sort of tough, you know, wide-bodied butch Ramsey, like just kind of like a tough Ramsey's.
So the next Ridley Scott movie I watched, which I stayed away from, and with great apologies to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, was The Last Duel.
And I just kind of avoided it.
I was doing other things at the time, and the poster looked awful, and I was like, I'm not going to go see that.
And then I put it on after watching these other two, and I was like, okay, here we go.
Let's go again.
And lo and behold, one of the best films of the century.
In my absolutely first of all, those guys know how to write a script and I know that they wrote it with Nicole Hofsonotter or whatever her name is.
And look at, and look at Ben Affleck like that, when I saw him blonde, I was like that's one of the reasons it kept me away from it, but he's hilarious in the movie.
And Adam Driver is magnificent and like this relationship that these two guys have and it's kind of a Rashamon story, meaning that uh, like Akira Kuracawa's Rashaman, which was three stories that are all sort of the same event told from different perspectives and so, and Matt Damon is like a revelation and this movie says so much about Hollywood.
Like when I watched this I was like okay, i'm Matt Damon and Quentin is uh, Adam Driver for sure.
Like Adam Driver totally knows how to like you learn about Hollywood in this film and i'm sure they're writing it like knowing about Hollywood, that the way to really get along in court is to join the orgies.
You know, to be in the orgy with everybody is like how you get along.
It's like uh uh, we all fuck together and that's how we do it.
But Matt Damon, who by all accounts in this is a great, you know, he's a fighter, he's a great knight, he's true in his heart, but he's just a like a pill to hang out with and he doesn't go to the orgies and because of that he's just kind of marginalized and the whole movie plays off of this friendship that just kind of goes awry, where jealousy comes into play and uh and, and it's ruinous to everything, until they're finally fighting in the very end.
And this is where Ridley Scott just does what he does, which is he has this insane fight between these two guys which, like was just every blow was painful to look at and this to me, was the best Ridley Scott movie i've seen of the century.
I mean, I guess Blackhawk Down.
I also very much like Gladiator, although Gladiator 2 I throw that in.
I love Gladiator One, though Gladiator One is magnificent.
It had some kind of secret sauce in it.
That was fantastic.
And Gladiator Two, it just kind of goes through the paces.
It's just kind of everybody shows up, speaking of showing up.
When Segurney Weaver shows up in Uh Exodus, Gods And Monsters, she's not even trying at all, she knows that she's there for a paycheck.
Like she just shows up and she just like, does not put on an accent of any kind, she just shows up and just speaks the lines and then i'm out of here, i'm going into Morocco or whatever, into Into town.
It just looked like she was so excited when an actor makes a choice with a character and it just doesn't work and they don't realize it, but they're committed to it.
And the other Ridley Scott movie that I just watched that I hadn't seen, again, I avoided it partly because of the title of the film.
And just nothing excited me.
I thought it was a comedy.
In fact, I'd been avoiding it.
It was on my plex.
There it is.
I look at the thing.
It looks like a comedy.
It's got Javier Bardem and Cameron Diaz, and they're all kind of Javier Bardem looking exactly like Robert Downey Jr., like in it, like just kind of this crazy Robert Downey Jr. in his crazy phase, you know, with like colorful glasses and everything.
Robert Downey Jr. with like a broken up nose or whatever's going on with that nose.
And, okay, so I put on the counselor.
And this movie, so looking at that, I thought this was a comedy.
I thought, oh, it's going to be a romantic comedy.
This movie, after I saw it, I was like, I feel like I've seen too much.
I feel like I know too much now about the world.
Like, it's, and it, and it, and it's made like right before.
And I think this movie was kind of a disaster for Ridley Scott.
And he, you know, had to recover from it, I probably, because of the failure of it.
And yet, Ridley Scott's, and he's cranking out movies like every year.
He's doing a movie.
It's like just knocking them back, knocking them back.
He's constantly making films.
And so that was why I hadn't.
And so finally, I was like, well, I got to catch up on some Ridley Scott.
And Quentin had been talking about Black Hawk Down and how much he loved it and how he thought it was the best film of the century.
And, you know, he's largely correct.
That's not a bad, I could have done without the UNICEF commercial at the very beginning, where it's just like, you know, a little UNICEF commercial about people starving in Africa and Somalia.
But the rest of the movie is just insanely beautiful.
And so I wanted to check out all the movies I hadn't seen of his.
And so that's why I started researching them and looking them up again.
And like the counselor, how did that fall through the cracks?
I can't believe that everybody's just kind of like, oh, well, okay, and they're moving on with their lives.
Did you see that guy at the Atlanta airport flipping out the well-dressed black dude who just freaks out in the Atlanta just like a couple of days ago?
I saw it on YouTube.
No, I saw it on Twitter or X.
And this guy is just freaking out in the Atlanta airport.
He's like, I read the Epstein files.
Like, all of you, you're going about your lives like nothing's happening.
Look at your old zombies.
And he's right.
It's like invasion of the body snatchers.
Everybody is just numb to everything.
Like, dudes, we had a global pandemic, aliens, you know, all these revelations.
Like, you know, it's just like how vampires can't go into a house unless they're invited.
They tell you, you know, what's going on ahead of time.
It's predictive programming.
And once you say it out loud and you put it out there and make fun of it and do a little skit, like they, like, Stephen Colbert did a little skit on his show where, oh, here's a baby.
I'm going to take this baby and I'm going to give it to Moloch.
And he goes into like a cloudy red furnace and hands the baby over.
And he's, oh, the baby's going to be fine.
And they make a joke about it, and the audience laughs.
Well, I think with the Epstein files, people are, because of these emails that have been released, people are just now starting to be aware of the bizarreness of the code and some of the things, like the facts.
Like, let's just talk about the sulfuric acid.
So, this was like right after he was indicted in 2009.
Well, yeah, not only that, I think that there's sacrifices going on every day in Los Angeles.
I mean, you know, allegedly, like, you know, high-level musicians, let's say, high-level female musician, is like, you know, killing chickens every day, doing sacrifices.
Like, you know, high-level.
I don't want to say names because I don't want to get sued.
Some commentary notes that a remote island with water treatment and energy systems could plausibly stockpile such quantities for one to two years of operations, although others argue that using it directly for reverse osmosis, as stated in one social post, is technically questionable for membrane health.
Highly corrosive, strong mineral acid that can severely burn skin, eyes, dehydrate, and char organic material, which is why it features in both legitimate industrial processes and in darker hypotheticals online.
And so what you do is you find somebody when they're young and they're less inhibited or uninhibited and you catch them doing something that is illegal and maybe you even provide the mechanism for that to happen.
And then once it's happened, you now have the video proof or the audio proof or whatever proof you have.
You've got proof of it and you show it to them and you say, look, this is what we have on you and we can ruin you at any minute.
But you know what we're going to do?
We're going to give you $20,000 a month or we're going to give you $20 million a year, whatever level that is, instead.
And you're going to work for us.
And What else explains some of these people who were so flipped out about like, you know, about Trump?
Like, he's a pots.
He's a, like, it's over the top.
It's, you know, it's strange how people behave in regarding that.
Well, there's this guy, Anatoly Fomenko, who's a Russian mathematician and historian.
And he wrote a book called The New Chronology.
It's actually a series of books.
It's like six volumes, and I've read them all.
And also his addendum book, The New Chronology.
He has an addendum book about it.
And he basically says that all of history has been changed.
About a thousand years have been added to the timeline in order to justify land claims.
And those land claims largely have to do with Eurasian – the Eurasian horde and the elimination of the Eurasian horde by collusion between the Vatican, the Romanovs, the – So you mean like the Mongols and the Huns?
Yeah, there was a, and if you look on very, very old maps, you see that there used to be a country called Tartaria that was in existence.
And at a certain point, they wiped them out.
And so his theory, and it's just a theory, it's just a posit, but when you see how history is constantly being rewritten in real time, it's not so hard to believe.
And then he uses astronomical evidence and mathematically kind of proves it.
And he basically says that, let's see if I can get this right, that Rome and Greece and Egypt were actually active till around 1600.
If you're a Byzantine guy and you're like, hey, I want to move to the country and you look over at France, let's say, and Germany, and you're like, yeah, there's all these indigenous peoples there, and we want to wipe them out.
And so you hire, you know, a mercenary.
You hire a guy named Charlemagne and you get him to go in there and kill all the chieftains in one day.
Like 5,000 chieftains were killed in a single day, apparently, by Charlemagne.
And you completely wipe out everything and then you move in.
You become Jerome, Jerome I, and you run Paris.
Or you begin France.
And what it really is is just land.
And so you add time to the timeline in order to justify that land claim.
Because what makes more sense that history was cruising along like this and then suddenly flatlined for a thousand years and then picked up again?
Or does it make more sense that somebody took that time, the dark ages, and kind of added to the timeline?
Yeah, but it's all like, you know, written down by the Jesuits who were completely in the control of, you know, it's that history, history is easily changed.
And in fact, we see history being changed before our eyes in real time.
Well, there's some scientific evidence that for some people, at least, it crossed the blood-brain barrier and had some sort of a detrimental effect on their cognitive function.
Whether you like Trump or not, and I'm not like a I don't really like anybody, but it definitely added a road bump in the actions of the cabal of the Clintons and the Obamas and the bankers that control them.
And that's when you see the movie The Counselor, that's what you realize is that, wow, the cartels are the banks and they are law enforcement and they are the media and they are everything.
Well, the Bolsheviks were essentially a kind of, I mean, it's not correct to say communism, but it's basically a kind of authoritarianism in the guise of egalitarianism and helping the world know we're all going to be equal and everything.
And they were socialism.
Yeah, they were murdering Christians and social.
And, you know, we're very, very close to that now.
We're very, very, we're on, we're standing on, civilization is standing on the precipice at the moment.
And by the way, you know, after this podcast comes out, people are going to be like, oh, Avery's crazy.
Avery went to jail.
Avery's a killer.
They're going to say all sorts of shit about me to discredit anything that I say.
And that's fine.
Like, I'm easy to discredit.
And so it's not really my right to speak up anymore about anything.
Yeah, and that guy who owned the building, who bought it, who took out the insurance policy, and then had Elliot Spitzer kind of push it through and force it through so that he could receive his billions in insurance claims that made the decision.
Because they wanted to tear down that building, and it would have been too expensive to do.
Reputable structural engineers have basically also proven the towers could not have fallen the way they fell without explosives, you know, pre-planned explosives.
And the people on the scene, the rescuers on the scene, the people who were there said, yeah, I heard explosion.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
They're describing the sounds of controlled demolition.
Also, if you wanted to digest data, you wanted to destroy data.
Like, didn't the part of the Pentagon that got hit wasn't, and that was also a day after Rumsfeld was saying that there was trillions of dollars that were unaccounted for?
Didn't the accounting part of the Pentagon get hit by that air quotes plane?
The building contained about 24,000 gallons of diesel fuel for generators used by tenants like Solomon Brothers and the Emergency Command Center.
Floors 46 through 47 and parts of the lower level were mechanical spaces while files from federal investigations, Secret Service cases were stored there but lost in the collapse.
I had this really dumb guy on the podcast once that was a skeptic, a professional skeptic and he was really angry with me for saying that it looked like a controlled demolition.
You know, you're promoting a dangerous conspiracy theory.
I'm like, no, I'm saying it looks like you're saying it doesn't look like a control.
Let's watch Building 7 collapse because it's kind of kooky.
Now, one thing that people do point out that is true is that the center, like there is a small structure at the top of the roof of Building 7, that collapses first.
And it does it, like, I think a minute before the actual building.
It's built over a Khan Edison substation, requiring large transfer trusses on lower floors to support the tower above, creating long span floors vulnerable to thermal expansion.
Long, unsupported floor beams and girders up to 50 feet connected to critical, critical interior columns like column 79 with sheer studs that failed under fire-induced lateral loads rather than just gravity.
The exterior tube frame provided stiffness, but the open interior layout lacked redundancy to prevent fire-induced progressive collapse with connections not designed for horizontal thermal forces.
Okay, that's a cute way of saying that's why it fell at free fall speed and looks like a controlled demolition.
Because if that was my building, I would say, give me my fucking money back.
You made this shit-ass building, this building got lit on fire and just collapsed on itself?
Let's watch it collapse.
Because the way it collapses is so kooky because it really does it at free fall speed or close to it.
It's strange.
Like, there has never been a building that looks that intact that falls like that.
It's weird, man.
I mean, it's fucking weird.
Anybody that says it's not weird, look, this is how it happened.
It's weird.
Now, the planes hitting Tower 1 and Tower 2, okay, that makes maybe more sense to me.
So why is it collapsing uniformly from the top down into the base?
Why doesn't the base where you have this incredible fire load, why doesn't that weaken and it fall over sideways because it no longer has structure anymore?
Why is it every floor has the same amount of damage and it gives in at the exact same time?
That kind of doesn't make sense because the fire is not uniform throughout the building.
It's not like the building is one gigantic flame ball and then it all gives out at the same time.
But even then, I would think it would tip over.
It would fall to the side.
Falling into its base, that seems to indicate some sort of a control.
Like it was done uniformly.
They time it.
When you watch, like in Vegas, when they blow up a casino, it's like and then it does that.
Let's watch an actual controlled demolition.
So when you watch an actual controlled demolition, it looks just like that.
You know, we were talking about predictive programming and how movies and like spells can predict stuff in advance and kind of prepare you for the future of what's coming.
You know, in 1999, a movie came out which was effectively a manifesto.
And that movie was called Fight Club.
And what's the end of that movie?
The end of that movie is the collapsing of the buildings, which are the financial system of the future so that they can create a new future.
Who produced that movie?
Arnon Milchon.
Who is Arnon Milchan?
And they got a commercial director to do it, Fincher.
And he's an excellent director.
And I think it's an excellently, beautifully made film.
But who is Arnon Milchan?
Well, you know, he himself has said, I am a Mossad agent.
And he said that out loud.
Like, that's not me saying that.
That's him saying that.
And Fincher said, oh, yeah, my last movie, that was made by an arms dealer.
Well, that's him.
That's Arnon Milshon.
And so, you know, and what's another Arnon Milshon movie?
The Medusa Touch with George C. Scott and I think Lee Remick.
And in that movie, what happens?
An airplane crashes into a building.
And you could probably pull that one up too.
An airplane crashes into a building.
This guy's obsessed with airplanes crashing into buildings and buildings collapsing in movies.
And so what's likely?
You know, has he been reading these scenario plans that defense departments make and that are maybe Mossad plans that are made?
I've worked for the DOD through John Milius, and we wrote scenarios.
They gathered together a bunch of Hollywood writers into a conference room, like a, it was like more like a ballroom, but like a small one, and gather a bunch of us together around a table and said, let's come up with ways on how to attack Los Angeles.
And we all wrote scenarios on how to attack L.A.
And now they just use AI to do all that.
But so, you know, has he just been like reading these?
Does he have access to them?
And so he just puts them into his movies.
Well, that movie was made in 1999.
And what happened right after that movie got released?
Those buildings came down.
9-11 came down.
And so is it predictive programming where you're showing the world what's to come and that makes it almost somewhat acceptable to do?
Well, that's the thing about the pejorative term conspiracy theorist.
It's slapped on things and it immediately sort of diffuses any real questioning of, oh my God, are things this bad?
Is there this much?
But as time goes on and you're confronted with more and more information, and I think we're in the beginning stages of reckoning with these files that were just released where so many people like, I haven't really read much of it.
I've only read the things that are really outrageous that my friends have sent me because I'm just trying to maintain my sanity.
I want to raise my children in a world that is a peaceful world and where people respect each other and where we can like, you can make something out of yourself, you know, through hard work and through merit.
You know, it's like, that's the world I want to live in.
And more and more, it feels like we're not in that world.
Did you see that thing that was just released today?
I think it's the AI company Anthropic.
I think that's the company.
So one of its engineers resigned and essentially said that humanity is doomed and he's going to move to the UK and just write poetry and just wait it out.
Yeah, they're going to populate that town with suddenly 800 war-capable men from another country are going to move in and they're going to move into the local someplace that the West has conveniently been bombing and creating refugees on.
So like if they've been engineering this long game and engineering the collapse of legitimate governments all throughout the world, bombing places, creating refugees, and then having these not just open border policies, but inviting and helping people get into countries and then giving them money when they get there.
I feel like we're increasingly in the movie Children of Men.
And I mean, that movie was a pretty accurate futurist example of where we're heading with collapsing birth rates and at least portions of civilization looking at extinction.
Here's the letter I shared with my colleagues explaining my decision.
That's a lot to read.
What is the synopsis?
Just ask perplexity what the synopsis of what this guy said.
Okay.
Sharma, who built defenses against AI-assisted bioterrorism and pushed for transparency on model risks at the San Francisco AI firm, announced his resignation on Monday.
He described struggles to let values guide actions amid mounting pressures, planning to return to the UK for a poetry degree and step back from the spotlight.
His exit follows other safety team departures amid Anthropic's launch of Claude Opus 4.6 and a massive $20 billion funding round at $350, $350 billion valuation, fueling debates on balancing safety with commercial speed.
Okay, but what is he saying specifically is the issue?
I mean, look, this guy's built something, and all of a sudden, he's realizing all the players that are funding it are likely, you know, scary, scary people.
I think fondly of this famous Zen quote, not knowing is most intimate.
My intention is to create a space to set aside the structures that have held me these past years and see what might emerge in their absence.
He's already working on his poetry right here.
I feel called to writing that addresses and engages fully with the place we find ourselves, and that places poetic truth alongside scientific truth as equally valid ways of knowing.
I mean, a lot of astrophysics is based on a false premise that P equals P prime, and that the sun is designed a certain way, and it's completely wrong.
And everything that we know about the stars and how we view the nature of the universe is fundamentally incorrect.
You know, I have to say, like, I mean, I'm a provocateur, and so I'm always interested in finding that which upsets people's concepts of things.
And that's partly because I'm a screenwriter, and I'm looking for these kind of conflicts and interesting ideas and stuff like that.
So take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.
But the big one, the biggest conspiracy theory that freaks everybody out is flat Earth.
Now, I don't know what the Earth is, but experientially, through the testimony of the eyes, it is flat.
And there is very little chance that I will ever in my life, or most of us, will ever in our life experience anything other than what is effectively a flat Earth.
And the way laser sighting across large bodies of water or navigation maps for air travel for pilots is always the presumption of a flat Earth.
It's always in the pilot manuals and on maps.
Well, if you're flying a jet at low altitude, you're not making corrections for curvature, even though you're going fast enough where you should be.
And so what's actually happening there?
Well, and so the idea is, look, I don't know what the world is or what the realm that we're in is, but experientially, from my perspective in life, it is nothing but a flat Earth.
I'm saying that even the NASA, the guys who actually do those composites, those are composite imagery of – listen, I'm not – I am not saying that – But it seems like you're saying that the Earth is possibly flat.
Everything's round and that's because I'm not even I'm not even certain certain that space exists that Well, that the moon is anything more than a plasma.
This live video feed from the International Space Station has been interrupted because you're watching too much due to either a change in the onboard camera configuration or a loss of signal with the communications network.
The video will return when the connection is re-established.
And listen, I'm not saying that we're not living on a globe or at least an oblate spheroid, as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, but have you ever noticed how spasticated that guy gets whenever you throw out the word flat earth?
He flips out like the way Robert De Niro flips out on like irrationally, he flips out.
Who then put in jail women and then they have to pay for their electrolysis and breast augmentation, which is okay.
At what point in time do you say that this is some sort of a bizarre agenda that you're trying to get us to accept something that doesn't make any fucking sense?
So much so that you're willing to house male prisoners in with females because they say they're a male with an intact penis.
And then even after they get female prisoners pregnant or rape them.
But do you know how many people would have to be involved to promulgate this idea that there's a flat earth and you've got to cover up that thing and pretend it's round?
And what's the motivation of covering up the fact that the earth is flat?
I mean, if we're really fundamentally getting down to it, it's about God.
And it's about what is this realm that we're in?
And are we part of creation?
And, you know, why would it be more likely to be available?
Every culture, every culture throughout recorded history draws us in this kind of flat earthish environment with a dome, a firmament that covers it up until like when, the 1930s or something?
And I mean, the other option is that we are just specks of nothing floating around in an endless, vast nothing that goes on forever, and that you are completely insignificant, that you are not God's perfect creation, which I think you are.
Well, that doesn't, they're not mutually exclusive.
You know, just because we are in this vast cosmos that's almost impossible for our mammal minds to grasp the magnitude of it doesn't mean that God's not real.
Yeah, it's a very fascinating statement by this mathematician.
We talked about it on a recent podcast, was that how strange is it that we find out that the universe is made out of math and that it's encoded in the universe itself?
So a tool that we used that human beings created to measure the universe, it turns out that that tool is how the universe is actually encoded.
And there is a striking resemblance between many of the runes with Hebrew.
And so these ideas and these glyphs and symbols that Odin first saw while hanging upside down from the tree and learned language and how to speak are somewhat universal across the planet.
Let's get to that for a second, but let's find out what Jamie's saying.
Primarily used in Jewish mysticism and religious studies to find hidden spiritual meanings in sacred texts like Torah by assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters and words, revealing connections between concepts and exploring the universe's underlying structure.
What's interesting is it's an older language, but doesn't that seem like a more complex language?
A language that combines numerical value with words?
If you said something to me, it's not just implied by your tone or by the context of what you're saying that I understand what it means to you, but it's in the numerical value of the words.
That seems like a better way to communicate than just nouns and verbs and adverbs.
Rather than bifurcating numbers and letters together.
It sounds like a way better move.
I mean, doesn't it?
It seems like if you can understand that, and if you grew up with that, that seems like that would be a much richer and deeper way of communicating.
Isaac Asimov wrote a book called Asimov on Numbers, which is fantastic, which talks about this.
And he talks about Kalahari Bushman who have no concept of the number zero and how they process and understand concepts like when no one is around, if the village is empty, and things like that.
And so just different people are just trying to figure out how to articulate everything.
And computer programming is a language that utilizes numbers.
You're pulling people out of the Stone Age and dropping them into, or maybe the Iron Age and dropping them suddenly into this idea that we're missing a thousand years.
And then it curves and it travels sideways across the sky until it meets a certain orbit, and then it traveled and dropped off in Australia 35 minutes later.
I went to the city.
Out of your view.
No.
I watched the entire thing from the command center.
And the fact of the matter is, even at the height, even at the height that these are orbiting at, and I'm not saying, like, presuming a globular planet, and even the word planet, plane, it's like a plane, you know, or the horizon is horizontal, like, you know, even presuming that, the height that they're at right now, you would still only see, you know, a circular,
you'd see the limit of your vision, which has a...
If we are in a simulation and if consciousness affects the reality of things and they are only real if we are experiencing them, that's when things get really squirrely.
And so because they had no other way to describe things based on where the sun was going to be during the solar equinox, they also were aware of the precession of the equinoxes, which is the wobble of Earth's orbit.
So Earth spinning around doesn't spin perfectly.
There is a 26,000-year wobble, and you can predict it by the night sky.
Due to 26,000-year axial precession cycle, the North Star changes over millennia.
While Polaris is the current North Star, other stars have held this position, including Thuban, 3,000 BC, and future stars will include Arai, Alderman, Aldurman, and Vega.
So it's not the same star.
It's just what is dependent upon where we are in the precession of the equinoxes.
We know where they've been able to accurately predict the motion of the precession of the equinoxes based on the constellations, which are clearly mapped out.
So we understand this wobble.
And this wobble may be responsible for cycles of Earth's climate, how things change and be dependent upon where the equator sits and where these poles sit and kind of wiggles around.
Well, the cosmologists will say things that still need to be, if you're making statements, they still need to be, you still need to disprove the other proofs.
You can't have to at a certain effect of an Earth that's a globe if you go to the other side of the Earth and it's dark out when it's sunny in California.
When I get on the plane later today and I'm flying back and I look outside, I'm going to see a flat, you know, a flat horizon, a horizontal horizon before me.
And when I land, and everything else is faith-based.
But what's interesting about it is that if you extract the faith that you have in these kind of ideas and you supplement it with the faith of these other ideas, they're exchangeable.
They're only exchangeable if you don't understand the data and if you don't understand what's actually been measured or if you don't understand the path of satellites or if you don't understand how many different people would have had to lie about this shit and not achieve the same observational results that all these different space agencies have.
That the idea that they're all in collusion, that Japan and India and even countries that hate each other, they're all in collusion on this lie that the Earth is round.
It seems much more likely that there's a bunch of people with schizophrenia that think that the Earth is flat and they make these YouTube videos where they're very compelling because they're articulate and they use great words and they say it all in a nice way without being challenged by real facts along the way by someone who actually has studied this their whole life.
Well, that's kind of what I'm getting at is there is so much out there that it falls to faith.
And also, what does it really matter?
That's kind of what I'm getting at, ultimately, is what does all of that really matter?
What does it matter to anybody that there's a cabal of 8,000 plus people who are secretly controlling the world and doing occultism and drinking baby blood?
What does it really matter as long as you can just have your daily pint?
You've moved away from the concept of the earth being flat and it's a giant lie that's promoted by a huge group of people that aren't even connected in any way, shape, or form to evil people that are involved in cult-like rituals, which has, by the way, always existed.
And this is why it's very difficult for people to imagine today that some of the things that you're hearing from the Epstein files, like the potential that they were eating children or killing children, or that they use that sulfuric acid to boil bodies.
We don't want to believe in evil that is that deep.
But in my opinion, if you can find out that evil is real, right?
Evil most certainly is real.
There's evil acts that we have documented all throughout the world.
There's evil that the cartel does.
I just watched a video where the cartel chopped this guy's head off and put it on a drone and flew it over to where the other cartel was.
I believe that if I was a demon or if demons were real, they would get people to do things which are verifiably true that they have done.
If you were a demonic idea and you got into Oppenheimer's head or Patton's head or anybody's, and you wanted them to do something horrific to a bunch of innocent people, and you could say, this is because we're at war.
So we're going to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.
Like, that's a demonic act.
It's a demonic act of eliminating hundreds of thousands or 100,000 plus people off the face of the earth who did nothing.
They're just citizens that are unfortunately involved in a country that is in a conflict with some people that they don't even know, and then you just got vaporized like that.
Like, let's imagine this is the AIDS crisis, and you know that AZT is killing people, but you also know that you are making an insane amount of profit off of killing people with AZT, and you have already established a narrative, and Fauci said this publicly, that the reason why they only prescribe AZT is AZT is the only thing that is both safe and effective.
He literally used the same language that he used to do.
By taking a virus, funding it, even though it was illegal to fund it in the United States, by doing it through EcoHealth Alliance and then, you know, farming it out to them, they do it at the Wuhan lab.
And you are, in fact, doing gain of function research on a virus designed for human beings to make it more deadly and more contagious.
There was a researcher in Canada at the Manitoba Level 4 lab, Dr. Kui, I think is how you pronounce her name.
And she was the one who solved Ebola.
Like, she had come up with the vaccine for Ebola, which is manufactured by a California company that is basically a Chinese company.
And like a rock star, she had made a, like, it was like a hit.
She had a hit, a huge hit.
And just like a rock star, everybody's asking you, what comes next?
What comes next?
And so she started actively working, working really, really hard at coming up with that next thing.
And, you know, like most people, you don't want to stand in line.
And these level four labs, you know, they have to, whenever you move your research from one lab to another, you have to go through all sorts of stuff in order to do that because it's all patented.
All of these microbes and viruses and Ebola strains and whatnot.
It's all patented.
And so, for example, there was this one kid who was working at the lab in Canada, and he was moving, I think, to the one in Atlanta.
And so he was crossing the border, and he didn't want to have to reproduce all of his work.
And so he just put it into a thermos inside of a thing and tried to cross the border and he got caught.
Well, she got caught in 2019 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, basically moving stuff from Canada via Air Canada freight from Manitoba, from Winnipeg.
This is the Winnipeg lab, to Wuhan.
And they were moving everything.
And I tracked where those were there, because I was writing a screenplay about it.
And so I tracked, like, where did that come from?
Well, it's like the cutter, or maybe it was Abu Dhabi, I can't remember, the lab there, and then that went through, in order to get around it, got sent to the one in Amsterdam, and that got sent to her.
And she was able to do all this stuff.
And she was basically just shipping, you know, everything, Hanta and all these patented things to Wuhan, you know, in order to do it.
And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police basically, you know, stopped it.
And she got like walked out of the laboratory and everything because they were like, is there a misappropriation of money going on here?
Like, what are all these flights that are occurring?
And they redacted who her financer was.
And we still don't know who her financer was, but it's one of three people.
Yeah, they were engineering stuff, and then she would ship them via Air Canada freight from Winnipeg directly to Wuhan, literally on Air Canada flights.
So you're flying on Air Canada to Wuhan and down below in cargo, there's all this like, you know, some shit that goes on.
Leprosy and some horrible strain of something.
It's something that's patented.
And then they're just shipping it over to, and, you know, none of this has come out.
Like some papers in Canada, you know, like the Winnipeg Free Press or something, was trying to cover it, but it just gets kind of buried.
That was one of the weird things that I had also seen that I don't know if it's true in the Epstein files, that there was talk about engineering a pandemic.
So 2017 email originally from 2015 discussions to Bill, widely assumed to be Gates, forwarded to Epstein, proposed recommendations and technical specifications for pandemic modeling of various strains.
It focused on healthcare data, simulations for preparedness, and neurotechnology, not creating or engineering a virus.
Gates Foundation later ran public event 2001 and 2019, a standard exercise with John Hopkins and WHO predating COVID reports.
That whole public event 2001 is fucking weird.
Event 2001 is weird.
Context and debunking pandemic simulations are common public health tools like those for SARS or flu.
Right, but why is Jeffrey Epstein involved in these discussions?
I think they just did, like, supposedly they just did massive redacting.
But sometimes you can see, like, oh, the name is short.
It's probably Bill.
And then the one that comes after that, if it's a little longer, it might be Clinton.
And if it's a little shorter, it might be Gates.
But again, that's just, you know, there's no foundation.
It's like plausible deniability until they release all these names.
Did you notice that Jeffrey Epstein's Fortnite account suddenly became active in Tel Aviv and that somebody is playing under his, right after his supposed death.
Well, they say it's like Pazuzu, and we're presented with an actual devil.
But when you actually watch the movie, there's kind of evidence that, and people have talked about this, that there's evidence within the film that it's more than just demonic possession, that the demonic possession comes from someplace.
And by the way, Jeffrey Epstein was doing also funding research in how trauma affects clairvoyance and telepathy and things like that, how you're able to invoke those out of traumatic, out of trauma.
And in The Exorcist, there's, you know, you have Reagan, who's Linda Blair, and there's that party scene.
You remember in The Exorcist, they're making a movie within the movie.
They're actually shooting a movie.
The character of the mother is she's acting in a film inside of the movie, and there's a director in that film.
And they have a big party scene after it.
And the director, he's basically yelling at the butler, her houseman, calling him a Nazi and stuff like that.
And he's like, I bet you went bowling with Goebbels and things like that.
Well, for a while, he vanishes from the party.
And we later see Reagan afterwards completely flipped out, like laying in bed.
And then after that, she comes, and then he's leaving the party, and he turns to the mother, and he's like, I have to tell you something.
And so, and then after that, Reagan comes down and she looks to the astronaut guy and says, you're going to die up there.
And then she pisses on the floor.
And everybody's like, shit.
And from that moment on, there's all this like highly sexualized devil speaking through her with a British accent.
And the guy, the director, is a British guy.
And so the implication, and then he is for some reason left with Reagan and then gets thrown out of the balcony and his head is twisted all the way around and he dies as a character.
So the implication is that the director is the one who has raped Reagan and thus invoking this demonic presence into her.
And he did this movie Kinjite with Bronson, and that all has kind of like a weird pedophilic thing.
He did this movie, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, where Peter Proud dies, and then, or rather, Peter Proud remembers his reincarnation.
He remembers his iteration of his other self, who was murdered.
And then he hunts down the woman who maybe did it and then starts sleeping with her daughter, which is basically sleeping with his daughter because he's reincarnated.
So this guy, as a filmmaker, has done all this.
And so the question, and so William Peter Blatty worked on that film with Shirley McLean and shortly thereafter wrote the book The Exorcist.
And Sasha in her autobiography even mentions, you know, the person on the cover of the book looked a lot like me.
And everybody's saying, oh, it's just a coincidence.
And, you know, well, I never walked down the stairs on all fours and I never vomited pea soup or whatever that none of that ever happened to me.
But there's a pretty dark implication behind the whole film.
And I brought it up with William Friedkin.
Hey, is this meant to be Jaylee Thompson?
Did this, like, is this a way to talk about that that actually happened?
You know, in real life, he said, I cannot talk about that, but I'm not saying you're wrong.
Whoa.
And so, you know, and there's actually a moment where Reagan is talking to her mother and she's like, well, do you like him?
Do you like him like you like daddy?
And so there's this idea that he's been coming over and they've been having this affair.
And then all of a sudden she says to her daughter, and it kind of jumped out at me when I re-watched it.
She says to her daughter, well, I like pizza, but I wouldn't marry one.
And I was like, oh my God, there's like a pizza reference in the middle of this, in the middle of everything that's happening.
Well, it jumped out at me and The Exorcist is in the early 70s.
And so, what is it, 1971?
And that movie that he did with Shirley McLean, who is effectively, that's the movie that they're shooting inside of the movie.
And so this was a way for Peter Benchley, I mean, not Peter Benchley, yeah, William Peter Blatty, to kind of transcode all of that.
And the astronaut in the film, Shirley McLean, talks about the, I can't remember if it was her husband or boyfriend that she remarried who was an astronaut.
And in her autobiography, she talks about how he was cloned.
He came back from space and a different person that he was cloned.
And she kind of, everybody kind of laughed it off, like, oh, it was just kind of a joke that I wrote into my autobiography.
So people speak through movies and they hide information in films.
And so I think that some more than others, right?
Yeah, William Peter Blatty, kind of who was doing all sorts of Ouija stuff with Shirley McLean, who was really into that kind of thing back in the late 60s and early 70s.
And, you know, he sits down to write his book, and what's he writing about?
Well, he's writing that movie's about Shirley McLean, her daughter, Sasha, Saatchi, I'm sorry, Saatchi, and the astronaut.
And, you know, it's all and Jaylee Thompson, who basically he eviscerates within the film, but in a way that nobody really connects it.
It all happens off-camera.
But the implication is that she was raped by that director.
And from and from that moment on, has a kind of, you know, she's speaking with a British accent as the devil.
It's his voice, actually, that's coming out of her.
She's talking about, you know, being raped by a crucifix.
Because it told the story of ancient Rome through, you know, through Shakespeare and through history and through Plato and all these kind of ideas of ancient Rome or Socrates and all these ideas of ancient Rome.
And then it told a very ground-level story from the perspective of like handmaidens and centurions.
And it still has Mark Anthony and Cleopatra and everything going on in it, but it tells a very, you know, soap opera-like drama through it.
And so there was this other show, and it had been out like three seasons when I started watching it.
And it did the exact same thing.
Nobody had ever, like, nobody was talking about it.
Or you can watch it on YouTube or you can watch it.
I think Netflix eventually, I think it was Netflix, eventually bought it.
Now they're showing it.
Basically, you can see it anywhere.
They give it away the way the Gideons give away the Bible.
And, you know, I thought it was fantastic.
And then season two came around and suddenly they had all this money and they're doing all these like, you know, they've got this ancient Judea set with cobblestone streets and, you know, like this detailed set and Roman colonnades and stuff like that.
And I was like, wow, like they really got a big budget.
And then I looked it up and it's like, oh, no, they're using the Mormons have all these standing sets for their biblical productions in Utah.
And they're incredible.
These sets are unbelievable.
If I had known, it's like Chinnacheeta in Utah.
It's absolutely fantastic.
And the characters are, like, they only have money for like three Romans costumes, probably.
And so they're kind of like making do with what they have.
But they've got this guy playing the legate there who is hilarious.
He's in the first season.
He is absolutely hilarious.
And the show is great.
And then like proper television, you're watching it and you're starting to love these characters.
And you're starting to, like, it's, and it's, you know what it is?
The bread and butter of Hollywood is revenge and wrath.
Like, that's what makes, that's the, the fuel that pushes most Hollywood movies.
It is much more difficult and requires much more maturity to make a movie about forgiveness.
And this kid, Dallas Jenkins, I call him a kid, but he's not a kid.
That's an insult.
He's super great.
He is making every single episode is effectively, because it's the Gospels, about forgiveness.
And he has done this magnificent, unbelievable achievement.
And the show is huge now.
They've got like seven seasons.
They've built a studio, you know, like outside of Dallas-Fort Worth on a Salvation Army property that they've built sound stages and everything.
And it is, and like, and that's like, you can get it anywhere.
You can watch it anywhere.
And they're making programming that should have been on HBO.
It should have been produced by HBO the way Rome was.
And instead, it's just, it's coming out of the ether.
And it's almost like with the inattention given to, you know, most modern, or rather, the way that people are making things that they're focused on wrath and revenge,
like this other thing, like the Pendragon cycle and the chosen, have kind of risen out of the vacuum that those other, that the studios and broadcasters have kind of created because they're no longer making that kind of product, at least not as much.
And so I think this is actually one of the most exciting times in media and television.
I find it like almost impossible to get a movie going.
Like I'm, you know, I'm like an independent filmmaker.
I go out there and I usually work on a script and then I figure out the budgets and I figure out and I go out and I hit the pavement and it's a really hard part.
Probably because I'm a flat earther kid.
I am not a flat earther.
I just like to provoke people.
But, you know, I go out there and I try to get this stuff made and it's like almost impossible.
And then I built a technology company over the last year and basically making AI movies.
And all of a sudden, boom, like that, money gets thrown at it.
And all of a sudden, just by attaching the word AI and that it's a technology-based company, all of a sudden, investors, you know, came in and we're in production on three films now.
I know, that's the crazy thing is that it was so easy for me to get that going and so difficult for me to get a traditional movie going through the traditional route, like going to, you know, A24, blah, blah, blah, trying to like, you know, hit the pavement.
Oh, I have to go to Europe to gather together financing and everything like that.
No, just put AI in front of it and all of a sudden you're in production on three features and we're making a Christmas movie, a family Christmas movie that'll be in theaters this holiday season.
We're making a faith-based film for next Easter and then we're making a kind of big romantic war epic.
And like as classical movies and we have like a proprietary stack of technology that we use for our process.
And I partnered with this company, Massive Studios AI, and formed my company, which is General Cinema Dynamics.
And I'm based here in Texas now, or my company is.
And I'm slowly transitioning.
Nice.
And it's like, it's actually kind of, I think, you know, so many people are against AI, like Guillaume and, you know, love him, but he's like, fuck AI, fuck AI.
But all it is is visual effects.
And I have experience like with that Beowulf movie doing it.
And what used to be a million dollars a minute is now $5,000 a minute.
And so to do it really, really well, like it looks kind of amazing, actually.
And so I think for independent cinema and for the future of film and television production, these are super exciting times.