Knowledge Fight - #853: Chatting with The Squatch Guys
Aired: 2023-09-29
Duration: 01:48:22


=== Sarah's Bright Spot (03:50) ===

[00:00:17]  knowledgefight.com.
[00:00:20]  It's time to pray.
[00:00:21]  I have great respect for knowledge fight.
[00:00:23]  Knowledge fight.
[00:00:24]  I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys.
[00:00:29]  Knowledge fight.
[00:00:29]  Dan and George.
[00:00:31]  Knowledge fight.
[00:00:32]  I need money.
[00:00:36]  Andy in Kansas.
[00:00:40]  Andy in Kansas.
[00:00:41]  Stop it.
[00:00:42]  Andy in Kansas.
[00:00:46]  You're on the air.
[00:00:47]  Thanks for holding us.
[00:00:49]  Hello, Alex.
[00:00:50]  I'm a first time caller.
[00:00:51]  I'm a huge fan.
[00:00:51]  I love your room.
[00:00:52]  Knowledge fight.
[00:00:53]  No, no, no, no, no.
[00:00:58]  I love you.
[00:00:59]  Hey, everybody!
[00:01:00]  Welcome back to Knowledge Fight.
[00:01:01]  I'm Dan.
[00:01:01]  I'm Jordan.
[00:01:01]  We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones.
[00:01:06]  Oh, indeed we are, Dan.
[00:01:08]  Jordan.
[00:01:08]  Dan.
[00:01:09]  Jordan.
[00:01:09]  I have a quick question for you, sir.
[00:01:10]  What's up?
[00:01:11]  What's your bright spot today, buddy?
[00:01:12]  My bright spot is fall is right around the corner.
[00:01:15]  Fall.
[00:01:15]  Possibly upon us.
[00:01:17]  Is it?
[00:01:17]  Yes.
[00:01:18]  And that means one thing.
[00:01:19]  And that is, where there's originals, Green Apple is back.
[00:01:24]  So good!
[00:01:25]  I have literally never heard of those!
[00:01:26]  So good!
[00:01:27]  I found them last year.
[00:01:28]  Werther's Originals, chewy.
[00:01:30]  Not a hard candy.
[00:01:32]  Don't like the chewy ones.
[00:01:33]  But it's a caramel apple flavor, and it works perfectly.
[00:01:36]  It is so good.
[00:01:38]  So good.
[00:01:39]  I was at Marshall's the other day with friends of the show, Marty and Sarah.
[00:01:44]  And I found this, and I got very excited.
[00:01:47]  And Sarah was like, well, if you like it, you should get two bags.
[00:01:51]  Because she's an enabler.
[00:01:53]  That is the most Sarah thing to say.
[00:01:56]  And I fell for it.
[00:01:57]  Of course you did.
[00:01:58]  I got two bags.
[00:01:59]  Because she's the devil.
[00:02:00]  Yes.
[00:02:00]  And another thing that's at Marshall's, look at this.
[00:02:04]  We're not doing just the tip waffle cone tips.
[00:02:07]  Just the tip.
[00:02:08]  The best bite.
[00:02:09]  Is the name of it.
[00:02:10]  That's a dick thing.
[00:02:11]  Haven't you?
[00:02:12]  You've seen that before.
[00:02:13]  I had never until like two weeks ago, me and Sarah went to Marshall's.
[00:02:18]  Look, here's the thing.
[00:02:19]  Okay.
[00:02:20]  Michael's, the craft store, is under, it's a floor under Marshall's.
[00:02:25]  And so she and I have gone to the craft store to get some fake plants for my walls and stuff.
[00:02:30]  Sure, sure, sure, sure.
[00:02:31]  And so she has wanted to go to Marshall's, so we've gone up to Marshall's both times that we've gone.
[00:02:35]  First time, I saw the Just the Tips, and I got furious.
[00:02:38]  And we met up with you afterwards, and I yelled at you about them.
[00:02:42]  You did!
[00:02:43]  For quite some time.
[00:02:44]  And so then we went back the other day and I got some.
[00:02:47]  I bought the bag because I was like, I had to have made it up.
[00:02:50]  Yeah.
[00:02:50]  And I didn't.
[00:02:51]  It's right here.
[00:02:52]  It's right there.
[00:02:53]  And they're good.
[00:02:53]  All right.
[00:02:54]  They need to change their name.
[00:02:55]  It's offensive.
[00:02:56]  To what?
[00:02:57]  Balls Deep.
[00:02:59]  That's the only thing that makes sense.
[00:03:01]  I don't know.
[00:03:02]  That's the only one that makes sense.
[00:03:03]  Anyway, what's your bright spot?
[00:03:04]  My bright spot is there's a documentary series called Telemarketers, and it's really, really good.
[00:03:12]  Is it about telemarketers?
[00:03:13]  Yeah, but a specific kind.
[00:03:16]  There's all these interesting characters who were like former felons, couldn't get a job anywhere but this...
[00:03:23]  Cold calling center, right?
[00:03:25]  And one of the guys was really, really good at it and then starts unraveling this mystery that it's tied...
[00:03:32]  Dan?
[00:03:33]  I'll watch it.
[00:03:34]  Don't spoil anything else.
[00:03:35]  It goes to the top!
[00:03:37]  I'll watch it.
[00:03:38]  That sounds very interesting.
[00:03:39]  I'm worried that if you say anything more, it'll give away.
[00:03:42]  It's telemarketers.
[00:03:43]  There's some really, really HBO.
[00:03:45]  Okay.
[00:03:46]  I think I have a password.
[00:03:47]  If not, I'll steal yours.
[00:03:49]  Take that, streaming services.
[00:03:51]  You'll never catch us.
[00:03:51]  Support the workers.

=== Thanks Us, Hypocritical Podcast (11:01) ===

[00:03:53]  The Pirate Bay.
[00:03:54]  So, Jordan.
[00:03:56]  Yes, Dan.
[00:03:57]  Today we have an episode to go over.
[00:03:58]  But we're not going over anything.
[00:04:01]  We're talking to some people.
[00:04:02]  Oh, no.
[00:04:03]  Generally, interviews are your territory.
[00:04:06]  I've been doing them solo recently, yes.
[00:04:08]  And I do appreciate you doing them because with this Europe trip especially, it really does help take a little bit of the burden off with having to prepare these episodes and get ready and stuff.
[00:04:18]  So kudos and a tip of the cap to you.
[00:04:22]  Thank you very much.
[00:04:23]  But today it was an interview that it only seemed right that we both did.
[00:04:27]  And we both had to be there.
[00:04:28]  Yes.
[00:04:29]  And that is, of course, we are interviewing...
[00:04:32]  Solomon Berg, the Major who is a friend of the Ambassador Sasquatch, and Lieutenant Daniel Jordan, the two guys who did that.
[00:04:43]  Yeah.
[00:04:44]  And, you know, I think some people will maybe think this is slightly hypocritical of me, but we address some of the reasons why I think it's not hypocritical to interview them.
[00:04:55]  Though...
[00:04:56]  Their experiment and what they did by going on Project Camelot is definitely something that I don't advocate that people do.
[00:05:04]  But I do think that it's still...
[00:05:06]  What they were aspiring towards and the kind of messaging that they were trying to inject into it, I think that justifies having a decompressing session, debriefing, because they're fake military people, with them.
[00:05:22]  Interesting dudes.
[00:05:24]  Yeah, I would say that whatever judgment you may have on...
[00:05:30]  Should, shouldn't, yes, no.
[00:05:32]  But it's a very interesting conversation worth listening to, and it's a point of view that's worth hearing out.
[00:05:38]  And I think that all the criticism that would be levied would be towards me.
[00:05:42]  And I would say, if you think that it's hypocritical of me, I appreciate your position.
[00:05:46]  I respectfully disagree.
[00:05:48]  Yeah.
[00:05:49]  But also, we are four people, and it's on a Zoom call.
[00:05:53]  It's intense sometimes.
[00:05:54]  I want to apologize a little bit for some crosstalk, and maybe...
[00:05:59]  Some sound stuff.
[00:06:00]  But, you know, it's fine.
[00:06:02]  It's worth listening to.
[00:06:04]  But, we'll be back after another episode?
[00:06:09]  I don't know.
[00:06:09]  We have to do a beginning and an end here.
[00:06:11]  We don't have to do a beginning and an end right now.
[00:06:13]  Enjoy the episode.
[00:06:16]  Is that what we do?
[00:06:17]  Hey, everybody.
[00:06:19]  Jordan.
[00:06:19]  Yes, Dan.
[00:06:20]  We are currently on our tour in the UK.
[00:06:25]  We have crossed the ocean.
[00:06:26]  Yes.
[00:06:26]  When you are listening to this, that will be the case.
[00:06:28]  But for now, we are still in Chicago.
[00:06:30]  And we are joined by a couple of folks who have a little interview.
[00:06:38]  This is a strange interview to have because a couple of things.
[00:06:44]  One.
[00:06:46]  I didn't think this conversation would ever happen.
[00:06:49]  For sure.
[00:06:50]  I thought this was going to be a dangling thread that would live as sort of a mysterious...
[00:06:55]  Everyone knows what happened, but there's never a debrief conversation about it.
[00:07:01]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:01]  Full closure seemed like something that would almost be preferable not to have.
[00:07:06]  Well, in a movie...
[00:07:08]  This is a, like, sunset, like, you know, this is a Kaiser Soze walks away, a limp goes away kind of thing.
[00:07:18]  But then the other reason is I think I may have been a little bit unfair about these folks.
[00:07:26]  And I would like to, before I introduce them, start with a slight apology that I was pretty harshly critical.
[00:07:35]  And maybe it had to do just with one failed bit.
[00:07:41]  But joining us is Solomon Berg from the Project Camelot episodes about the Ambassador Sasquatch, also known as Barry, and Lieutenant Daniel Jordan, also known as Andrew.
[00:07:57]  Gents, thank you for coming on.
[00:08:00]  Thanks for joining us.
[00:08:02]  Thanks for having us.
[00:08:03]  Yeah, thanks for having us.
[00:08:05]  Absolutely.
[00:08:06]  First voice was Solomon, and the second voice was Daniel Jordan there.
[00:08:10]  Just to be clear on who everybody sounds like.
[00:08:13]  So, I'm sure everyone is interested in the full story, and I'd like to get into your intentions and how you came up with this.
[00:08:27]  But, where would you like to start?
[00:08:31]  What's foremost on your all's mind?
[00:08:34]  So, Andrew is the one actually who introduced...
[00:08:39]  This is Barry speaking, Solomon.
[00:08:41]  Andrew is the one who introduced me to Knowledge Fight about almost like two years ago, roughly.
[00:08:49]  And so I kind of want him to start that part of the story, and then I'll kind of jump in when it seems relevant.
[00:08:58]  Sure.
[00:08:59]  So, Andrew, you did not appear on Project Camelot as a performer, as it were, but you were more conceptually crafting some of the idea, from my understanding.
[00:09:15]  So, I'm a pretty long-time listener.
[00:09:20]  I'd say I've been listening for about three years, and at Thanksgiving, two years ago, All the cousins were hanging out, introduced Barry to the show, and told him, in particular, there were some episodes that he might have a particular interest in, more of a sci-fi angle to them, called Project Camelot.
[00:09:40]  And that was the introduction, and we kind of just went from there.
[00:09:46]  And a few months later, I believe it was in episode 200.
[00:09:51]  In fact, I know it was in episode 200 of yours.
[00:09:55]  Jordan makes an offhand comment about wouldn't it be great to have a Squatch murder mystery or something to that effect and introduce that to Carrie.
[00:10:07]  And so that just sort of rattled around in my brain and I just couldn't get rid of it and, you know, brought the idea up to Barry.
[00:10:15]  And, you know, we sort of just went from there in terms of the origin story.
[00:10:22]  That's pretty much it.
[00:10:24]  Came from you guys, actually.
[00:10:26]  That's one of the bizarrer things that we have accidentally created.
[00:10:33]  If everybody walked around turning offhand things that I said into real life, I would have left a swath of destruction on this planet behind me.
[00:10:42]  Yeah.
[00:10:43]  And I would like to say, too, that if you had only done some form of that, like a Squatch murder mystery that was an elaborate joke or a prank or something, I would not probably want to have a conversation with y 'all.
[00:10:59]  Because I think if what you did was purely prank-based, there's kind of a harshness and a cruelty to it.
[00:11:07]  But it was so clear from...
[00:11:10]  Listening to the way that information was conveyed, the way that there was a very concerted effort to make sure that when you talk about aliens and stuff, there wasn't monolithic groups of them.
[00:11:24]  It was so clear that there was something else behind it.
[00:11:27]  There was messaging behind it.
[00:11:30]  When did that develop?
[00:11:32]  How did that idea develop as you were going from Sasquatch murder mystery...
[00:11:40]  Well, Barry, I'll just say there was a definite theme, at least in the beginning, of a Jewish alien.
[00:11:49]  And both, obviously, Barry and I are Jewish, and not practicing particularly for myself, I'll say.
[00:11:56]  But that was a sort of road that we decided to go down.
[00:12:00]  And I will say, before we get into it, is, you know, some parts of Berg were...
[00:12:07]  Intentionally absurd to both directions.
[00:12:11]  So it was, you know, he had leftist ideas, but at the same time, you know, he was forced to wear sort of the garb maybe of a right winger.
[00:12:21]  So, but Barry, do you want to sort of take it away?
[00:12:24]  Yeah.
[00:12:25]  So, you know, my conception, you know, we were talking about, you know, the references to Squatch, you know, in episode 200.
[00:12:35]  And saying, like, well, you know, we should involve Squawks somehow.
[00:12:38]  And when I was about 11, so, first of all, backstory.
[00:12:43]  When I was a kid, like, in my, like, preteen years in teens, I was like Carrie.
[00:12:50]  I believed in a lot of UFO stuff and Roswell and the Grays, or rather, I wanted to believe.
[00:12:59]  It's a lot of fun.
[00:13:01]  Yeah, and, you know, I was always into science fiction and kind of the bigger cosmic picture, and I, you know, but being a kid, you know, you're not really trained yet to, like, discriminate, you know, sources.
[00:13:20]  You know, so as an 11-year-old, I used to enjoy buying weekly world news from, you know, the drugstore.
[00:13:29]  And I remember one time, you know, in, like, fifth grade, I was, you know, browsing the, you know, magazine aisle and picked up the Week in World News, and there was a story in there about a farmer sighting a flying saucer landing and, like, an army of Sasquatches walking out.
[00:13:50]  So the implication being that these Sasquatches were, in fact, alien.
[00:13:56]  And so that was kind of in the back of my head when Andrew bought Squatch.
[00:14:01]  And immediately I kind of suggested, well, what if Squatch is kind of a pseudo-Jewish space alien, like from a diaspora people?
[00:14:11]  And, you know, our human characters who became Solomon Berg would be like a Jewish Randy Kramer, like a Jewish super soldier.
[00:14:21]  Who also looks up to Randy Kramer, of course, as a hero.
[00:14:25]  And that's funny because when Terry brought up Randy and some of the discrepancies between my story and his, my response to her in part three in our third interview was essentially, well, Randy's older than me.
[00:14:38]  He was on Mars Authority.
[00:14:39]  You know, it's a perfectly logical explanation within the absurd context.

=== Empathetic Communication Skills (02:15) ===

[00:14:44]  Yeah, and even in the first one, you're talking about, like, he was a soldier, I'm in, like, support corps.
[00:14:51]  Like, there is a built-in...
[00:14:53]  Yeah, built-in explanation for it.
[00:14:56]  So, I did actually study anthropology in college.
[00:15:00]  Anyway, I went from being like a preteen or a teenager who really hardcore believed to, by the time I was 18, I was more of a rational skeptic, philosophical materialist.
[00:15:11]  And I studied anthropology in college, although I did not become an anthropologist in practice.
[00:15:19]  I'm sure everyone wants to know what Solomon Berg's actual day job is.
[00:15:26]  I am an outpatient therapist and the director of a mental health clinic.
[00:15:32]  Interesting.
[00:15:32]  So I do therapy.
[00:15:34]  I supervise staff who provide therapeutic and behavioral services to adults and children.
[00:15:44]  I'm a social worker by training.
[00:15:48]  You know, I used to be like a one-on-one, you know, with kids, what they call TSS, their support staff, and then I was a case manager, and I did child welfare.
[00:15:59]  You know, it's interesting.
[00:16:01]  That makes sense, actually, you know.
[00:16:03]  I wouldn't have guessed it, but it makes sense, the ability to empathically or empathetically communicate with Carrie the way that you did.
[00:16:11]  And then on top of that, the history of studying anthropology makes sense, because there was...
[00:16:16]  A lot of stuff that it's like, well, this would be hard to just, like, cram and then be able to discuss in a conversational manner.
[00:16:27]  Yeah, only a philanthropologist can do this.
[00:16:33]  Or someone at least with some background in anthropology.
[00:16:39]  So, you know, a transition from anthropology undergrad to working in human services is not all that uncommon.

=== Still Considering Anarchy (02:56) ===

[00:16:47]  You know, I ended up going back to grad school and getting my MSW.
[00:16:57]  And now I have a couple more letters after my name.
[00:17:02]  But I don't want to get too specific because I don't want anyone to, like, identify me personally.
[00:17:08]  Yeah, that's important.
[00:17:09]  Privacy is key.
[00:17:11]  But during the time that I was in grad school, I also got very actively involved in a lot of, like, radical left, street organizing, direct actions, and some labor organizing.
[00:17:27]  As you can see by the tattoo, I...
[00:17:30]  So, actually, my best experience in democracy was I was a founding member of the Philadelphia IWW, and early on when we formed the branch, I was involved in writing a bylaw that clarified the definition of a boss who was not allowed to join IWW and wrote this amendment that we passed.
[00:17:58]  And later forced me to leave the organization when I became a boss.
[00:18:02]  And I still consider myself an anarchist.
[00:18:06]  I still consider myself ideologically an anarchist, although it's a little hard to practice anarchism when I am upper management.
[00:18:15]  These are the rubs, you know?
[00:18:18]  Well, you know, in capitalism you have to survive, and I had to survive by moving up.
[00:18:25]  I'm good at what I do, and I love doing it.
[00:18:30]  You don't have to be a hypocrite, too.
[00:18:32]  You can take your position and deal with people underneath you in a way that you would approve of.
[00:18:39]  There are ways that you can do it better than someone else, perhaps, but maybe not ideologically pure to some.
[00:18:48]  I'm probably one of the lesser evil bosses.
[00:18:54]  For now, that's good enough.
[00:18:57]  I was involved in...
[00:19:00]  He'll be second against the law when the revolution comes.
[00:19:06]  You can tell he supports trans youth from his deeply held positions.
[00:19:13]  So that was actually my statement to Carrie.
[00:19:16]  That was an ad-lib, and I was exaggerating slightly.
[00:19:20]  I have been...
[00:19:21]  A state's witness in child abuse cases.

=== This Is Bullshit (15:37) ===

[00:19:25]  And I have worked with children who were trafficked or groomed or otherwise sexually exploited.
[00:19:32]  But it's not like I've broken up child trafficking rings or some high level stuff like that.
[00:19:37]  It was more like I was an advocate for kids.
[00:19:42]  Well, I'm not going to make a movie about you then.
[00:19:45]  It's a frustrating conversation to have with Carrie and we've had it.
[00:19:51]  So many times with her, both on the show and off the show, she communicated in a way that was like a string of right-wing talking points.
[00:20:05]  You mentioned Barry's patience.
[00:20:09]  It was...
[00:20:10]  It was amazing, and it was required.
[00:20:13]  And every method of communicating with her, even getting her attention at first, was incredibly difficult.
[00:20:21]  And she became erratic in terms of communication and in terms of her requirements.
[00:20:30]  And so it was a patience testing.
[00:20:34]  That's where I would like to ask this question.
[00:20:38]  How did you begin to talk to Carrie?
[00:20:41]  Like, what was the process for getting on the show like?
[00:20:43]  We contacted her first on Telegram, and I had crafted some, you know, kind of, you know, manic statements about, you know, my eye-opening experiences with extraterrestrials and with...
[00:21:00]  Being she might know as the Sasquatch or Yeti.
[00:21:04]  And when she proved to be kind of hard to get her attention on Telegram, we actually switched to WhatsApp.
[00:21:15]  So I was communicating with her through WhatsApp primarily.
[00:21:21]  It took months to get any response at all from her after initially reaching out through the channels that she had designated as how to get a hold of me, reach out to me here, XYZ, and it was just not working.
[00:21:35]  I can empathize a tiny bit with her situation, because even as, like, for me, it's difficult to, you know, I can't get back to everybody who sends an email, and I'm sure that the things that she gets from people are substantially...
[00:21:49]  Closer to I know Sasquatch than the emails that I get.
[00:21:53]  Like, I'm sure she hears a ton of, you know, various claims.
[00:21:56]  And her Telegram channel is literally a non-stop garbage fire, as are her online distribution methods.
[00:22:05]  So, like, she has a rumble, and as a sort of a fun thing, we would go back and read some of the comments, both on her Facebook Lives, her rumbles on her website, and it is just...
[00:22:17]  Neo-Nazi dumpster fire.
[00:22:19]  Yeah, a lot of people didn't like you guys.
[00:22:22]  Oh, yeah.
[00:22:23]  We took a lot of flack on Reddit.
[00:22:27]  I could not stand to look at those comments.
[00:22:30]  I did follow the conversation among wants on Reddit and Discord, but I didn't engage.
[00:22:37]  I never interacted with anyone who was discussing Burger Squatch.
[00:22:43]  I just observed and...
[00:22:44]  We've held back and practiced some incredible self-restraint, which is kind of difficult at times, but necessary.
[00:22:53]  The desire to defend yourself must have been huge.
[00:22:56]  Or to tell, like, this is the point of this thing.
[00:23:01]  This is the point of this thing.
[00:23:02]  While people are speculating.
[00:23:03]  And they're telling us that we're ruining our own favorite podcast.
[00:23:08]  Reddit actually figured out I was a social worker.
[00:23:11]  There was one Reddit thread that...
[00:23:13]  put the pieces together or they were like speculating or like because someone was like he does sound like maybe he actually works in the field of anthropology and someone else was like No, he sounds more like someone who took four years to be at the college, he has an undergrad, and then went on to some kind of human service field, like maybe a social worker or an advocate or something.
[00:23:35]  That was Andrew.
[00:23:38]  There were some shockingly close guesses.
[00:23:42]  That one blew my mind.
[00:23:44]  That one was, I was honored and laughed so hard.
[00:23:49]  Another one that blew my mind, and this is mostly from, well, it's actually all three times that he appeared on Carrie's show.
[00:23:57]  She very earnestly, I think, at the end, made sure that he would be receiving, and we heavily encouraged, all communications that Carrie received.
[00:24:09]  Fan mail.
[00:24:10]  To pass those messages along.
[00:24:12]  And boy, that is a treasure trove of stuff because those are only the people who are the most true believers sending her.
[00:24:19]  Please send him the phone number of this person who has the antidote to the toxins that he's suffering from.
[00:24:27]  Someone gave us Stella Emanuel's phone number.
[00:24:31]  That's important.
[00:24:33]  Stella from InfoWars.
[00:24:35]  One of the same doctors recommended.
[00:24:38]  Yeah, she'll clear you of the demons and make sure you don't get any more vaccines.
[00:24:42]  It's going to be great.
[00:24:44]  Yeah, exercise the spirit of the reptile venom.
[00:24:48]  Yeah.
[00:24:48]  I didn't see, and granted, I probably didn't look too deeply, I didn't see a lot of biggity comments about your appearance, but there were a fair amount that it was pretty clear that the message that you were putting into your story about your experience with Squatch Didn't resonate, as they say, with them.
[00:25:11]  And it was too empathetic and too caring.
[00:25:15]  In some ways, it was just like, this is bullshit.
[00:25:18]  This guy, he's not seen an alien.
[00:25:22]  This guy doesn't want a million people to die!
[00:25:27]  Yeah, it was kind of gatekeep-y, almost, even, of that space.
[00:25:32]  Well, but that goes to, you know, actually my whole theory of Carrie, and I think Andrew and I have a somewhat different appraisal of Carrie than you and Jordan might.
[00:25:43]  Well, I mean, you have more firsthand experience, so I would be interested to hear.
[00:25:48]  We would speculate, you know, how much of a true believer versus a grifter is Carrie, right?
[00:25:55]  And by the end of this experience, my impression is that...
[00:26:01]  I think Carrie has her own beliefs about the secret space program and UFOs and aliens and stuff.
[00:26:08]  And maybe some of that is very influenced by like Ashiana Dean and obviously Mark Richards and kind of her go-to sources.
[00:26:17]  Although I think she and Ashiana Dean have only sort of superficial things in common.
[00:26:23]  Ashiana Dean's conception is much more new agey and Carrie's is much more like Militant, you know, sci-fi-ish.
[00:26:33]  But I think Harry sees herself as the curator of the weird.
[00:26:40]  I think she sees herself as a kind of gatekeeper.
[00:26:43]  And she sees it as her mission to sort through the 80% of bullshit to get to that 20% of truth.
[00:26:52]  And I think I did do some research and uncovered some things about Her former partner, Go Ryan, and his involvements with something called Project Serpo,
[00:27:07]  which was a host engineered by a guy named Rick Doty, who appears from, as far as I can tell, to have been a former Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer who was like a Cold Warrior propagandist who was part of,
[00:27:25]  you know, during the Cold War, The intelligence community and military intelligence were very concerned about the community of alien abduction believers and UFO people because they felt it posed a security risk that these were gullible people who now had access to increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology and were trying to uncover.
[00:27:52]  Things about UFOs that actually might have led them to chance upon actual real stuff the military was working on, like advanced communication systems and stuff like that.
[00:28:07]  Soviet infiltration could happen.
[00:28:09]  Right, that was their concern.
[00:28:11]  They felt that this group of people could easily be cultivated as foreign assets by Soviet or Chinese intelligence.
[00:28:21]  And so there were counter surveillance programs conducted by the government on these communities, much as there were, you know, like similar to COINTELPRO, you know, against anti-war and black liberation movements.
[00:28:37]  So, you know, to the extent that this group feels they've been persecuted, well, you know, there is some truth to that, because people like Doty...
[00:28:47]  We're involved in engineering hoaxes and gaslighting private citizens.
[00:28:55]  There's a good documentary called Mirage Man by Mark Wilkington that goes into this that is for the watch.
[00:29:04]  I know that...
[00:29:06]  Oh, sorry.
[00:29:07]  This guy worked with Bill Ryan on something?
[00:29:10]  Is that what you're saying?
[00:29:12]  I think there's one degree of separation between Carrie Cassidy and Rick Doty and that That is Bill Ryan, because Bill Ryan was the webmaster for the Project Serpo, which was a hoax that claimed...
[00:29:27]  I don't think he knew it was a hoax.
[00:29:28]  I think he was duked by Doty.
[00:29:31]  Doty's cover was flown in the late 80s at a UFO conference by a ufologist who he had manipulated.
[00:29:38]  And then he had to fight his way out of the conference.
[00:29:41]  Well, no, no, no.
[00:29:42]  He wasn't at the conference himself, but his cover got blown, and I think at that point, you know, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations cut ties with him, and he kind of pitched his star to, like, coast-to-coast AM and the UFO community and became, you know, went from being an actual government propagandist to just another grifter.
[00:30:04]  And he's actually been on Coast to Coast AM.
[00:30:08]  I think one of the shows he was on was the same show as, like, Whitley Schreiber was on.
[00:30:13]  But I know that...
[00:30:15]  I'm pretty sure he manipulated into Bill Ryan.
[00:30:19]  So I don't know if he and Carrie had actually ever met.
[00:30:23]  But one thing Dodie would always say was, you know, 80% of what I say is lies and 20% is the truth.
[00:30:29]  And that's how you...
[00:30:34]  Well, I think through some kind of osmosis, Carrie probably internalized that.
[00:30:43]  Maybe Bill Ryan repeated it to her or something like that.
[00:30:46]  But I think that's the way Carrie sees her content.
[00:30:49]  And I think that Carrie doesn't actually believe any of the very contradictory stories that her guests tell.
[00:30:58]  Like, I don't think she believed, you know...
[00:31:00]  There seems to be like a whole industry sort of grown up around Carrie of yes anding her and obviously we participated in that but I've noticed when she has guests on her show they sort of let her They just kind of let her go.
[00:31:26]  They let her speak and they say, wow, yes, Carrie, really, you know.
[00:31:30]  And so when we first started listening to her through Knowledge Fight, I thought for sure she was a true believer.
[00:31:36]  I thought we were both, Barry and I, pretty sure, close to 100% belief.
[00:31:41]  And I think by the end of the whole project, we're both at 0%.
[00:31:44]  We don't think she believes.
[00:31:47]  I'm very close to zero.
[00:31:49]  I'm even closer to zero.
[00:31:52]  Just because she's a grifter at the end of the day.
[00:31:55]  Either way, that's low.
[00:31:57]  I see...
[00:31:59]  I think if I understand Barry correctly, what you're saying is that she is willing to enter...
[00:32:07]  Or, like, she doesn't believe the bullshit that she lets her guests spew.
[00:32:10]  Like when Eddie Page is like, you're a pre-ADN, you know, like this.
[00:32:15]  But she still believes weird space stuff.
[00:32:19]  It's not like she's in reality and is grifting outside of reality.
[00:32:23]  She's still too removed from reality before we get to...
[00:32:27]  Yeah, whatever will make her the most money, I think, is what she believes.
[00:32:32]  And I think, from my experience of watching...
[00:32:34]  She's motivated by money and attention.
[00:32:36]  She's motivated by money and attention and influence.
[00:32:39]  And I think that there is a...
[00:32:41]  From what I've seen, when interacting with a guest who's making a claim...
[00:32:46]  Kind of goes along with it for the most part, unless it interacts with something that Mark Richards has said or Ashiana Dean.
[00:32:55]  Like, if it contradicts those kinds of things, then there'll be some pushback.
[00:32:59]  But other than that, it's just, I'll believe anything.
[00:33:01]  Kind of.
[00:33:02]  Yeah.
[00:33:02]  Right.
[00:33:03]  And she writes her own stories, like, and I don't know if you ever saw the third.
[00:33:09]  I will say, I watched about the first hour of it, and then I had to move on to something else, and I never got back to finishing, so I apologize.
[00:33:18]  That's fine.
[00:33:19]  Something that she mentioned, though, was sort of characterizing Berg's initial, or characterizing a prior statement that he had made about, it was specifically about Israel and whether Israel had...
[00:33:34]  It was run by the Anunnaki.
[00:33:37]  And Berg had very clearly said, yes, there's some Anunnaki in the Israeli government, just like there's some Anunnaki in any government.
[00:33:46]  And the issue was not necessarily with the people of Israel, but a very select number of people in the government.
[00:33:53]  Turned into, later in the last episode, Israel is completely run by the Anunnaki.
[00:33:59]  I remember from your prior interview, when you said that Israel is completely run by the Anunnaki, which is the exact opposite of what he said.
[00:34:08]  I went back and watched the video, and it's like, that's just, so she'll, you're right, she'll push back in certain things, and some things she'll just rewrite in the moment, because the audience that she's speaking to is, and I submit, you know, insert whatever she is.
[00:34:25]  I would characterize her as an average white lady with average white lady racism and average white lady antisemitism filtered through UFOs and conspiracy theories.
[00:34:42]  I've watched some of her other stuff and she has gone so far, and I think even one of your episodes covered this, she's gone so far as to say that Jews have Anunnaki blood or that the Jews are descended from Anunnaki.

=== Uniqueness of Anti-Semitic Paranoia (02:56) ===

[00:34:56]  So she's literally saying Jews are lizard people.
[00:35:00]  Yeah, and there's a tradition throughout some of this paranormal community stuff that I'm not sure exactly where it traces back to, but there are some schools in it that just believe that Hebrew peoples come from space.
[00:35:17]  And that does not exist.
[00:35:20]  For people of Hispanic descent.
[00:35:24]  That doesn't exist within these paranormal and alien worldviews.
[00:35:30]  That isn't described to other groups.
[00:35:33]  There is a uniqueness to the anti-Semitism that gets filtered within this.
[00:35:38]  Right.
[00:35:38]  Because of Jews' historical connection to religious texts that are canonically part of...
[00:35:49]  I think there's, if you're trying to integrate mainstream Christianity with some kind of pseudo-materialist, you know, understanding of the cosmos, then it's kind of, you know, if you're raised in even a vaguely anti-Semitic culture,
[00:36:08]  and maybe you're not fully aware of it, there is that kind of knee-jerk or compulsive, you know, go-to of like, Well, you know, maybe, you know, the Hebrews of the Old Testament were influenced by aliens or descended from aliens or engineered by aliens.
[00:36:29]  I actually remember part of my journey in my teens from being a believer to a skeptic involved going to the thrift store where years ago I had discovered the Von Daniken books and finding another book with a very similar cover.
[00:36:45]  From the same publisher called The Lost Tribes from Outer Space.
[00:36:50]  And the original French title was The Jews from Space.
[00:36:55]  And it was actually somewhat...
[00:36:58]  When I read it, the ideas in it were somewhat similar to, like, Raylianism, but way more antisemitic.
[00:37:07]  And, of course, the first, you know, chapter of the book explains why it's not antisemitic.
[00:37:14]  Yes.
[00:37:14]  Oh, yeah.
[00:37:16]  As somebody who's been reading a lot of John Birch Society materials in the last, like, couple years, I will say that the most anti-Semitic and racist books often start with a chapter about how they are not anti-Semitic and racist.

=== Scientist's Perspective (10:09) ===

[00:37:29]  Yeah.
[00:37:29]  You might need that for a library fight, I gotta say.
[00:37:31]  That sounds...
[00:37:32]  Needs to be on the show.
[00:37:33]  If I can find a copy of the Jews from space, I'll send it to you.
[00:37:37]  That would be awesome.
[00:37:38]  My mom just sent me a guidebook for the Masons.
[00:37:41]  That, uh, apparently, like, her great uncle was in the Masons, and so now I have a little, uh, it looks almost like the size of a pocket constitution, but it's much bigger, and it's a guidebook for the Masons, and it's mostly, like, here's how you fold a shirt.
[00:37:57]  It's the right way to do it for a Mason.
[00:37:59]  Is it in mirror writing?
[00:38:01]  Nope.
[00:38:02]  Nope.
[00:38:03]  It is not secretive at all.
[00:38:04]  It is boring as shit.
[00:38:06]  Here's where you place the candles.
[00:38:08]  Alright.
[00:38:09]  That's actually...
[00:38:12]  Okay.
[00:38:13]  No, no, no, go for it.
[00:38:14]  What were you going to say?
[00:38:15]  Well, I was just going to say, like, the trappings, Carrie's trappings was very important, and it was one of the things that I thought Barry did a great job on was he knows her, he knows the knowledge-fied coverage of Carrie's various iterations, like, almost probably better than you guys remember it.
[00:38:33]  I mean, and so he would use, he would use, yeah, I mean, he was using, you know, He would insert her story back at her and have those trappings which enabled him to get the messaging in.
[00:38:47]  And so I thought that was a really important part of it, like, you know, telling the story of the, what was it, the dogs, Barry?
[00:38:56]  Oh, the mercantile dog.
[00:38:58]  The mercantile dog story and things like that that was, right, referencing back to her.
[00:39:04]  Stuff was the key to her heart, and it let you in, and then that's where you could sort of make your own stuff.
[00:39:12]  It gives her the feeling of being influential and important, and then at the same time, it also creates a scenario where in order for her to contradict you, she has to contradict herself, kind of, and that's a bizarre place to be in.
[00:39:26]  And I think Carrie has just enough self-consciousness that she knows there are Certain things she can't push back on when she has a Jewish guest.
[00:39:38]  Because there were things I could say on her show that she couldn't push back on.
[00:39:44]  I was laughing there because that's a bummer.
[00:39:47]  She was presenting me as an expert.
[00:39:49]  She was presenting me as a scientist.
[00:39:51]  So one thing, you didn't mention this on your show, but one thing, if you watch the full cut videos...
[00:39:59]  One thing that has always occurred to me in science fiction fantasy is the conflation of race and species by writers.
[00:40:06]  And it's essentially just scientific racism and it reinforces racism in the real world when like, oh, Babylon 5, you know, the Narn and the Suntory are racist, not species.
[00:40:16]  No, they're species.
[00:40:17]  They evolve on different planets.
[00:40:19]  They are not genetically related.
[00:40:21]  They cannot hybridize.
[00:40:23]  They are alien species, not alien races.
[00:40:26]  And this is a...
[00:40:28]  Trope in sci-fi and fantasy, but we're focusing mostly on sci-fi right now because that's the more, you know, scientific of the racisms.
[00:40:38]  And so Carrie was having me on, presenting me as an expert anthropologist, an expert in human evolution and biology and biological and cultural anthropology, so she couldn't quite argue.
[00:40:54]  With my expert opinion, because she was hosting me live without the ability to edit.
[00:41:00]  And I don't know why she does that.
[00:41:05]  Yeah, that does seem unwise.
[00:41:09]  It's not great editorial judgment.
[00:41:12]  Yeah, yeah, for sure.
[00:41:14]  But anyway, hold on, let me just finish real quick.
[00:41:17]  Pardon me.
[00:41:18]  So my point being, she...
[00:41:23]  One thing I kept doing when she would say race and she was referring to alien species was I would say species.
[00:41:30]  You mean species.
[00:41:30]  And at one point I broke it down a couple times for her.
[00:41:34]  We're talking about biological species, not race.
[00:41:37]  Race is not a scientific concept.
[00:41:38]  And there's one point where she kept saying race and I kept saying species.
[00:41:42]  Species.
[00:41:42]  Species.
[00:41:43]  Until she started self-correcting.
[00:41:46]  I somehow don't remember that.
[00:41:47]  That's fascinating.
[00:41:49]  It happened several times.
[00:41:51]  It was something that Byrd was extremely 100% consistent on.
[00:41:55]  Because when I talked to Carrie, because I have that background in biological anthropology, I would insert a lot of real scientific terminology.
[00:42:08]  Yeah, that's what I was getting at.
[00:42:09]  The environmental cataclysm on prehistoric Earth.
[00:42:14]  Was the Toba Catastrophe.
[00:42:16]  That's a real theory about how there was a bottleneck, a genetic bottleneck in the human population about like, I don't know, like in 74,000 years ago or something like that due to massive super volcanic eruptions and, you know,
[00:42:31]  like 99% of humans and human as a genus, not a singular species, almost like it is at the time, you know, got wiped out and, you know, a handful of You know, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and, you know, Flores, Homo floresiensis and other isolated human groups survived that bottleneck and humanity really almost went extinct.
[00:42:58]  So there was a lot I was loading onto her that was actual real science or at least good theory.
[00:43:07]  Again, you know, 80% of...
[00:43:11]  Truth, 80% lie, 20% truth.
[00:43:15]  Right, right.
[00:43:15]  So, and because I was familiar, you know, had a basic familiarity with the subject material I could pull off.
[00:43:23]  Right.
[00:43:23]  The experts.
[00:43:25]  He was presenting the app.
[00:43:26]  Right.
[00:43:26]  So hold on.
[00:43:27]  Hold on.
[00:43:27]  Hold on a second.
[00:43:29]  I'm just going to pout over here.
[00:43:36]  I want to know that specifically.
[00:43:38]  How much of that is something, how much of the story did you guys have coming into it, and how much of it is improvisation in the moment?
[00:43:46]  And I'm going to ask my question.
[00:43:48]  Was your intention to also mirror that 80-20 rule where the 80% is the Squatch aliens and the stuff like that, and then the 20 is the real science, what you're describing about the scientific racism?
[00:44:04]  Yeah, the scientific racism of the species-race conflation, that is exactly what I was talking about, about the monolithic nature of these races.
[00:44:16]  It's a really good way, and a better way, to put exactly the complaint about, like, all Draco are grumpy, or whatever.
[00:44:24]  You know, like, that...
[00:44:26]  She asks me, aren't the troggs...
[00:44:32]  Not a positively oriented species.
[00:44:35]  And my response was, well, Kerry, they react with hostility to human encroachment, but I wouldn't say they are not a positively oriented species.
[00:44:43]  I don't know every tribe.
[00:44:46]  Yeah.
[00:44:47]  It denies cause and effect, almost, to look at people that way.
[00:44:52]  There's little nuances as well.
[00:44:54]  I believe the Trogs, as I conceived them when we were writing the plot, to answer that question at least on the plot, the general plot was written.
[00:45:03]  Barry hasn't really said it, but Barry's a writer.
[00:45:06]  Barry's a sci-fi writer.
[00:45:07]  I've written three unpublished sci-fi novels.
[00:45:10]  I've gotten nearly published.
[00:45:12]  I've sold a story to a radio show.
[00:45:15]  I'm working on getting my novels published.
[00:45:18]  Current schedule, it's hard for me to do submissions and agent queries.
[00:45:22]  Sure.
[00:45:23]  But there was nuance to a lot of different things that she didn't pick up on because she couldn't possibly have because there were things that came out of Barry or my head.
[00:45:31]  So, like, the trog in my brain was actually sort of a World of Warcraft-inspired idea.
[00:45:39]  And, you know, sort of, I never played the game, but I know some of the stories.
[00:45:44]  And so when she was...
[00:45:46]  Grilling Barry on, you know, aren't the trugs more like, you know, the way this other, one of my other guests said.
[00:45:54]  And, you know, Barry could say, well, you know, I can only tell you what I can tell you.
[00:46:00]  And there was ad-libbing sections on top of the storyline where we just had the rough outline of he's going to meet a lizard.
[00:46:07]  You know, they're going to do this thing, but there's not necessarily going to be a...
[00:46:12]  A very charismatic lizard.
[00:46:14]  It's like how they wrote Curb Your Enthusiasm.
[00:46:17]  You know, like there's a basic idea and then go for that.
[00:46:20]  You meet a lizard.
[00:46:21]  What happens next?
[00:46:22]  I don't know.
[00:46:23]  Well, that's, I mean, that's fascinating to me because like, obviously, I guess it has to be written because there's so many specifics of the way that you guys laid out the story and it was presented.
[00:46:36]  But at the same time, it does feel like you, Barry, you roll so well with The questioning that Carrie is putting forth and being able to wiggle through situations.
[00:46:48]  I wouldn't describe myself as having been a theater kid exactly, but I did do a lot of improv comedy in dramatic serial improv classes in high school and college.
[00:47:01]  And I did used to act in school plays and stuff.
[00:47:05]  I was Mr. Toad in my third grade teachers.
[00:47:10]  Wind in the Willows?
[00:47:12]  Hell yeah.
[00:47:13]  The general rule was yes and, though.
[00:47:17]  I mean, the general rule was, if Kerry states it as fact, and it's not something...

=== Patriot Underground Shift (13:06) ===

[00:47:21]  You did not follow that rule, then.
[00:47:24]  Well, the 2020 rule was definitely in my mind.
[00:47:29]  I mean, I wasn't, you know, working it out algorithmically in my head, but I always kind of...
[00:47:36]  Going back to that grade of truth, and that was also part of the messaging about trans rights and trying to give practical, real advice that deconstructs some of her toxicity and bigotry.
[00:47:51]  And to be clear, when I say yes and, a lot of those yes ands are in the form of no buts.
[00:47:57]  So it's allowing what she's saying and just slightly correcting.
[00:48:01]  Right, and that's kind of the thing that I find very interesting about this, is because you're going on to this show and it's fundamentally a conflict before it begins, right?
[00:48:11]  You're going on the show specifically because the show is wrong.
[00:48:15]  And you're going on the show in order to agree with her into...
[00:48:19]  Not believing what she believes anymore, right?
[00:48:22]  Right.
[00:48:22]  Now, is this targeted at her or at her audience?
[00:48:25]  Or were you guys just throwing this out there as an experiment to see if you could even do it?
[00:48:31]  It was an experiment, and I will say...
[00:48:34]  You both gave two different answers.
[00:48:36]  No, I mean, it was an experiment.
[00:48:38]  We had no idea what was going to happen, but I will say, like, as an example, for Carrie specifically, and Barry already touched on it, but in the third episode, she was not only self-correcting...
[00:48:48]  To Species, while Barry was still there.
[00:48:51]  I saw her on another interview she did with Patriot Front.
[00:48:57]  Sorry, Patriot Underground.
[00:48:59]  All the Nazis get confusing.
[00:49:00]  But basically, she was self-correcting herself now, without Berg there.
[00:49:06]  And she got very defensive of Berg in that interview.
[00:49:09]  So it was an hour and a half, two hour interview.
[00:49:14]  And she's talking about all her normal stuff, COVID and the vax and all that.
[00:49:19]  But then at about 54 minutes into this interview with Patriot Underground, they bring up Berg.
[00:49:25]  And Patriot Underground watched the third episode and had some questions.
[00:49:31]  But his first question had to do with, you know, what part of the story we told Carrie about, you know, Berg's activities involved going to Brazil to train Brazilian astronauts on first contact procedures.
[00:49:43]  And while he was in Brazil, he learned about this character, Malchenix, who is an Anunnaki bounty hunter who, you know, murdered indigenous activists in the rainforest, a la Predator, and then takes out a bounty on Squatch.
[00:50:01]  And I had said that Malchenix has worked for the Bolsonaro government.
[00:50:08]  Berg had been working for, his name is Silva, I believe, the current president.
[00:50:13]  He's a leftist.
[00:50:15]  He's a better guy.
[00:50:16]  And Patriot Underground's problem in his first question was, well, isn't Bolsonaro the good guy?
[00:50:23]  One of our good dudes, yeah.
[00:50:25]  But what about, you know, how can, you know, isn't Bolsonaro a white hat?
[00:50:32]  We like Bolsonaro.
[00:50:34]  You know, that was how it launched into this discussion of Berg, where Carrie got very similarly defensive of Berg as she gets of Mark Richards.
[00:50:44]  But she specifically, it's an interesting watch.
[00:50:49]  You should watch it.
[00:50:50]  Yeah, I'll check that out for sure.
[00:50:51]  I usually tune out anything else she does.
[00:50:55]  It's 54 minutes in.
[00:50:57]  You can skip to the 54-minute mark and you'll be right there where it gets caught up.
[00:51:03]  And in this video, she makes a couple kind of almost woke points where she's like, well, Berg may be, quote-unquote, more of a Democrat than a Republican, which obviously is very provincial.
[00:51:18]  I'm not right through the Democratic Party.
[00:51:20]  I'm an anarchist.
[00:51:21]  I'm a leftist.
[00:51:22]  I don't even consider Democrats really leftists.
[00:51:25]  I'm much more aligned with, like...
[00:51:27]  Sofia, from Mars, who you recently had on your show.
[00:51:31]  Sure.
[00:51:31]  That's much more aware on that ideologically.
[00:51:35]  But, you know, to her, there's only Democrats and Republicans, so Berg is more of a leftist.
[00:51:40]  And she defends this by saying, well, Berg has been to other planets.
[00:51:44]  He's been to space, so of course he's not going to have a provincial worldview.
[00:51:48]  And then she calls out mainstream Christians, because Kerry is very anti-church.
[00:51:55]  Definitely believes in God and Satan, but she's sort of anti-religious.
[00:52:00]  I think she more believes in Satan.
[00:52:02]  Satan, for sure.
[00:52:03]  Yeah, but she was talking about how, you know, if there is a God, and I believe there's a God, she believes there's a God, I don't believe there's a God, but she was saying if there is a God, God's not just God of this earth, God made aliens too.
[00:52:17]  Whoa!
[00:52:18]  And of course, and she kind of implies that like...
[00:52:24]  That broader perspective is why Berg maybe has these left-wing views and aligns with, as she put it, LGB whatever.
[00:52:34]  She's extremely dismissive of LGB.
[00:52:36]  Right.
[00:52:37]  She can't even finish the phrase on LGBTQ without saying whatever.
[00:52:42]  Another area I would highly recommend you watch is actually the end of the third episode.
[00:52:47]  I couldn't believe some of the philosophical U-turns she almost makes.
[00:52:54]  She quoted Marx in that interview with Patriot Underground.
[00:52:58]  She unknowingly quoted Marx and said, religion is the opiate of the masses.
[00:53:02]  Yeah, I mean, she believes or she at least utters some things sometimes that I don't know that she actually holds in her head.
[00:53:12]  Because there were some of the sort of...
[00:53:15]  I don't remember the specifics, to be honest, but in that third episode, I know you only watched the first hour.
[00:53:20]  I'm encouraging you to watch the last hour.
[00:53:22]  The first hour really is what got my...
[00:53:26]  It starts off tense because she clearly doesn't believe her.
[00:53:30]  It's just a story and scenes.
[00:53:34]  Right.
[00:53:35]  And it builds and she basically ends up saying, you know, I don't know how to put it, but basically she's...
[00:53:43]  She just kind of loses the thread.
[00:53:48]  They get off the story, and they just start sort of philosophizing.
[00:53:51]  And I thought it was actually one of the most interesting...
[00:53:54]  I wanted to understand Cary better as a person, and I think we sort of get to that at the very, very end.
[00:54:01]  And I don't know if it's because of the ruse that we pulled, which is, you know, about around his illness, which was sort of drawing sympathy out of Carrie.
[00:54:11]  But there was a distinct change near the end.
[00:54:14]  And, you know, and so back to your original question, you know, was this targeted at Carrie or her listeners?
[00:54:20]  You know, I don't think we had a strong plan, but it certainly affected her, I think, in the very end calculus.
[00:54:27]  He did internalize some anti-oppressive narratives.
[00:54:33]  Obviously, she's still a raging anti-Semite.
[00:54:35]  Sure.
[00:54:36]  Who believes that Jews are lizard people and lizard people run Israel.
[00:54:40]  And to be clear, I'm not a fan of the Israeli government.
[00:54:43]  I'm not defending, you know, apartheid there.
[00:54:46]  But our inability to differentiate between Jewish and Israeli is very talented.
[00:54:53]  Yeah, I think a lot of folks in her community have that exact difficulty.
[00:55:00]  What you're talking about there is...
[00:55:05]  Exactly why I think that what you're doing or what you did is worth having a conversation with you as opposed to leaving it unspoken.
[00:55:18]  And that is the ability or at least the experiment that you undertook seems to be geared at is it possible to make those behavioral changes by introducing correct information?
[00:55:34]  With that 80% of fun space shit thrown in.
[00:55:39]  And I'm curious about when that became an idea that you were going to pursue and whether it felt like that was possible.
[00:55:52]  When you started the first interview, did you feel like that was something that was going to even be in the cards?
[00:55:59]  Well, so...
[00:56:03]  I don't think we were really expecting to be invited back.
[00:56:08]  But she wanted to know about Mars, and Jordan, you wanted to know about Mars.
[00:56:13]  You wanted to know more about Mars, Jordan.
[00:56:17]  So we knew we had to do a follow-up, and we did it a few weeks later, which maybe was a little too soon.
[00:56:23]  It was three months, actually.
[00:56:26]  And like I said, you know...
[00:56:29]  Maybe it was a little too soon.
[00:56:30]  If we could do it again, we wouldn't do the Lionel calls.
[00:56:34]  You know, that was an error on our part.
[00:56:37]  And like I said earlier, when we were not recording, neither Andrew nor I are professional comedians.
[00:56:43]  And getting critical feedback on joke structure from professional comedians...
[00:56:48]  Hey, you took improv classes.
[00:56:50]  You said you did some improv counting.
[00:56:52]  Yeah, I took improv classes and I did some...
[00:56:55]  But ironically, I was the kind of guy who was always laughing on stage and couldn't keep my shit together, and yet I was able to film in total maybe six or seven hours with Carrie without breaking character or laughing.
[00:57:12]  I almost choked when I was telling her about the demons in part three.
[00:57:18]  That was very hard for me not to laugh.
[00:57:23]  All three episodes were shot in my apartment, and so I had to watch all three.
[00:57:27]  You did some good set dressing.
[00:57:29]  You could not be in the same room.
[00:57:31]  I was not allowed to be in the same room, but I also had to observe this all without laughing and stifling my laughs when I did laugh, which was many, many times.
[00:57:40]  But I want to talk about the timing and the scheduling.
[00:57:44]  So the initial...
[00:57:45]  June, we sort of did our initial touch with her.
[00:57:49]  We were invited back in September, and I think the excitement of wanting to answer a lot of Jordan's questions specifically, but really both of you, was like, we were excited to like...
[00:57:59]  See, this is why this is dangerous, is because it's like you're communicating with us through her.
[00:58:04]  Yeah.
[00:58:04]  A little bit.
[00:58:05]  And we got carried away, but, you know, Barry had the glyphs because Jordan wanted to see those glyphs, you know, and so...
[00:58:12]  And then we got a lot of negative...
[00:58:15]  Yeah, we got a lot of negative feedback after the second episode.
[00:58:18]  And I will say also, a relative of ours, a common relative, passed away, a very important relative in our lives.
[00:58:26]  And that was one of the reasons why we took Not A Problem.
[00:58:29]  But also at least somewhat, you know, this whole thing, weirdly enough, I like to think is sort of in her honor.
[00:58:38]  And as far as set dressing, some of the items on the desk, you know.
[00:58:43]  We're related to her and white people in our family.
[00:58:46]  There's actually a book in part two.
[00:58:49]  On the shelf, there's a book that my great-uncle, his grandfather, owned about hoaxes and scams.
[00:58:58]  And skepticism.
[00:58:59]  Yeah, skepticism.
[00:59:00]  That's really cool.
[00:59:02]  So my great-uncle's grandmother was...
[00:59:08]  I mean, she was sort of a...
[00:59:10]  she identified herself several times to me as a non-believer.
[00:59:14]  We had our own internal...
[00:59:16]  Very skeptical.
[00:59:18]  We were kind of raised in a very humanistic Jewish tradition.
[00:59:23]  Yeah, we had our own internal jokes, too.
[00:59:25]  And they were...
[00:59:26]  To be fair, they were knowledge fight jokes, you know, like Alex eating sandwiches during breaks and things like that.
[00:59:32]  And just having Berg eat a sandwich just nonchalantly during the interview.
[00:59:37]  And smoking the joint, too, was kind of a pushing the envelope transgression.
[00:59:43]  Carrie, so Andrew said to me at one point, months after we did this, when we were prepping for our part three, or no, after we'd done part three.
[00:59:52]  That he thinks Carrie is very bad at confrontation and that it actually made us feel a little bad in hindsight because Bird rolls that joint on her show and lights up having, you know, claimed that he quit tobacco.
[01:00:10]  And referred earlier to the Martian psychoactive herb that the teenage caveman soldier smoked.

=== Uncommented On, Strange (15:44) ===

[01:00:16]  And that Andrew Jordan hit the pipe when you found it.
[01:00:20]  That was very dangerous.
[01:00:21]  And she doesn't say anything.
[01:00:23]  She doesn't say, like, hey, what are you doing?
[01:00:27]  You're doing drugs on my show.
[01:00:30]  She's in California, right?
[01:00:32]  It's cool.
[01:00:33]  Yeah, but also, I mean, obviously, like, a lot of conservatives smoke pot.
[01:00:40]  And I don't think Carrie necessarily has a problem with weed, but the fact that it went uncommented was strange.
[01:00:50]  Uncommented on, yeah.
[01:00:52]  Uncommented on, that was strange.
[01:00:54]  That's kind of where I would like to go with that next, is that conversation about 80%, 80-20.
[01:01:04]  In this situation, you're going to meet her on her playing field, so to speak.
[01:01:10]  But in that vein, how is it that you're not feeling a mix of, am I offending this person when I'm not laughing?
[01:01:22]  Do you know what I mean?
[01:01:22]  I'm having an ingenuine interaction with this person, and I'm doing it in such a way that I am aware they are not.
[01:01:30]  So I'm taking advantage of that mismatch in information.
[01:01:34]  And I'm just interested to see if that is something that you feel bad about or even care about.
[01:01:42]  A serious consideration for me because of the work I do and my training and my ethics.
[01:01:48]  I do have to uphold a certain code of ethics as a social worker.
[01:01:56]  Before the first interview, I had an audio.
[01:02:01]  Conversation with Carrie, a long conversation with her through, you know, what's that called?
[01:02:08]  And before I spoke with her, I said to Andrew, if I get even a whiff that Carrie is not mentally stable, we're calling this on.
[01:02:19]  That's good.
[01:02:20]  And it would be inappropriate for me as a professional who diagnoses people clinically.
[01:02:27]  Who I have direct interaction with to state what my clinical impressions were of Carrie.
[01:02:35]  But I don't think that she is in any significant way...
[01:02:42]  I don't think she has any kind of psychosis or anything like that.
[01:02:47]  She might maybe have some borderline narcissistic tendencies, but she's not...
[01:02:54]  She's not like a...
[01:02:57]  Hey, catch most of us on a bad day.
[01:02:59]  We've all got borderline narcissistic tendencies.
[01:03:01]  She's not vulnerable in that sense.
[01:03:02]  She's not a vulnerable person in the way that the patients I work with are vulnerable.
[01:03:10]  And I think if you were taking advantage of her, this would be a wholly different conversation.
[01:03:16]  Or this conversation wouldn't be happening, but also what you guys were like, the actual show itself.
[01:03:23]  I think it would have felt a lot different if there was a...
[01:03:27]  She pushed that, especially in the last episode, but in terms of, oh, Berg, you're sick.
[01:03:35]  Tell us your website.
[01:03:36]  Where can people go to give you money?
[01:03:38]  What do you need?
[01:03:39]  My community cares a lot.
[01:03:41]  And one of the things with the emails that we were getting forwarded from her supporters, a genuine, I would say...
[01:03:50]  And Barry can talk on it after.
[01:03:52]  I mean, two to three dozen emails genuinely concerned for the major and how who he needed to call right away and how much money he needed to raise to get these ingredients to eat that would cure his illness.
[01:04:06]  I mean, it was it was a genuine outpouring from her.
[01:04:09]  Just to clarify, because we never took her up on the offer to fundraise because we felt that it would have been absolutely wrong to financially exploit her viewers in any way.
[01:04:22]  I would say highly.
[01:04:28]  I didn't even respond to it.
[01:04:30]  I just ignored it when she said that.
[01:04:33]  Yeah.
[01:04:34]  And just to clarify really quick, because we didn't cover the third interview on the show, and some people probably didn't hear it, you all sort of made an exit from Carrie.
[01:04:44]  You know, there was a, this isn't going to happen again.
[01:04:47]  So after we did the second interview...
[01:04:51]  Andrew and I decided that we were going to do a third interview because Carrie had asked us to come back.
[01:04:58]  But Berg was going to be away for a while and inaccessible.
[01:05:04]  So what I did was I didn't respond.
[01:05:07]  I didn't even go on WhatsApp.
[01:05:08]  I didn't check.
[01:05:10]  Obviously, my phone would inform me if Carrie was messaging me, but I didn't go into the app.
[01:05:15]  So there was no double checkmark.
[01:05:18]  You know, like the message having been received for months.
[01:05:22]  I would say maybe for like, I don't know, eight or ten months.
[01:05:26]  Initially, we had always talked about a three-part arc.
[01:05:33]  Well, you're sci-fi dorks.
[01:05:34]  Everything's intelligent.
[01:05:36]  But when initial plans, and this was way back, was to have basically an agent come in.
[01:05:43]  And shoot, or in some other way, kill her.
[01:05:47]  Sure, sure, sure.
[01:05:48]  Live on.
[01:05:49]  No, we've all seen student films.
[01:05:51]  I totally get it.
[01:05:52]  It makes sense.
[01:05:52]  It was too difficult.
[01:05:54]  It was actually inspired by, there's an episode of The X-Files where Mulder was showing Scully a videotape of an alien autopsy, and Scully's like, oh, this looks so fake.
[01:06:07]  And then, like, a bunch of armed men break in and murder the...
[01:06:10]  The scientists who are dissecting the alien.
[01:06:13]  It's clear that it's not fake.
[01:06:15]  So that was kind of what I was thinking.
[01:06:17]  We want to have this interrupted interview that would end abruptly and the screen would go to black and maybe Berg's phone would fall and hit a button and you belong to the city would play or something like that.
[01:06:33]  That's interesting.
[01:06:35]  But that's dangerous.
[01:06:36]  Yeah.
[01:06:36]  I think that in Project Camelot world, that is dangerous because you could become too important to part of the lore if you did that and pulled it off.
[01:06:47]  That's part of the reason why we...
[01:06:49]  We were discussing it, and Andrew had said, you know, we have to have some kind of big reveal, you know, like Squatch is pregnant or something like that.
[01:07:00]  And we were talking about, we were spitballing, and I said to Andrew, what if Berg is dying?
[01:07:08]  And we were like, okay, what does he say he's dying of?
[01:07:12]  And I was like, reptile man.
[01:07:17]  But one of the very important things we felt about the very end was that And this is still part of our plan is we're sending a letter to Carrie to her P.O. Box, which has on it essentially a scrap of paper from Daniel Jordan, which tells her that the major is dead and that he died of COVID and that he would not, Daniel Jordan, participate in COVID denialism.
[01:07:47]  And so, you know, believe what you will, Carrie, but a great man is dead and he died of COVID-19.
[01:07:53]  And he died because he denied COVID.
[01:07:55]  Yeah.
[01:07:56]  We thought if we left it up to her, she would take the narrative and turn it.
[01:08:01]  And she still might, frankly.
[01:08:03]  You do have to maintain control of that character.
[01:08:08]  This will become a vaccine death, by the way.
[01:08:11]  She can't have that knowledge of her.
[01:08:14]  She can't be allowed to take control of that.
[01:08:17]  One of the reasons we reached out to you was because this is science fiction and people come back from the dead all the time in science fiction.
[01:08:25]  And we wanted to be very clear that we were not going to pull a Spock as it were.
[01:08:32]  We're not coming back.
[01:08:33]  There's not going to be a fourth Berg episode.
[01:08:37]  We're not going to do this again.
[01:08:40]  I think this is an important thing to point out, too, is you guys sent us an email a couple of weeks ago now, and we did not interact.
[01:08:51]  There was no contact between us before that.
[01:08:55]  And I kind of expected that we would never hear from you all, but it would just be something we were aware, that it was very clearly, like, connected in some way to our podcast, but, like, that it was, like, we'd never touched base.
[01:09:11]  And I'm glad that you did reach out.
[01:09:13]  Yeah, our original intention, that was a late development in the game.
[01:09:18]  Our original intention was we were just not going to break Space Bird or K-Pick.
[01:09:24]  We were not going to break character.
[01:09:26]  We were going to let this simmer.
[01:09:28]  We were going to leave it dangling, as you said.
[01:09:32]  But on further reflection, we felt a little bit manipulative and decided it was courteous to reach out to you and explain ourselves a little bit and assure you that Berg is not coming back from the dead, that he's been...
[01:09:52]  Killed off-screen.
[01:09:55]  You know, he died a tragic death, and he will not be making any further appearances on Project Camelot.
[01:10:03]  And, you know, one of the things, you know, when I was following the conversations on Reddit and Discord, which obviously I know you guys aren't in the Reddit, and you're not in the Discord, and for good reason, clearly.
[01:10:18]  Well, we'd just get overwhelmed and cry a lot.
[01:10:21]  Yeah, you'd get bogged down.
[01:10:22]  We just started posting on Instagram, and it's already going terribly for me.
[01:10:26]  It's going great for me.
[01:10:28]  It's funny, because Reddit seems to love squats but hate birth.
[01:10:35]  Which is only natural, you know, but Reddit, so on the internet conversation among the wonks, Centered around this concept of the quote-unquote crime directive, which obviously refers to your guidance never to call into Alex's show or try to prank Alex or mess with InfoWars or go out of your way to interact with Alex
[01:11:05]  because that would just play into his game and would only uphold it and bolster him and his voice.
[01:11:14]  And there was a question about whether the Prime Directive applied to Karen.
[01:11:20]  Can I clarify something really quick?
[01:11:22]  Please clarify.
[01:11:24]  Please clarify.
[01:11:25]  This is coming not from you, this is coming from Red.
[01:11:28]  So in terms of what a lot of wonks call the Prime Directive, I don't really...
[01:11:35]  Want to tell people how to behave.
[01:11:38]  And I don't really, I think it's my place to say, hey, don't prank people or whatever.
[01:11:43]  I think a lot of pranks are cruel and unnecessary, so I'm personally not thrilled with them.
[01:11:49]  But the guidance and the request to not call into Alex's show and fuck with him was based on the fact that we were studying Alex.
[01:11:58]  And that if people called into Alex's show and tried to mess with him...
[01:12:06]  I'm sorry, I live across from the fire station.
[01:12:10]  Oh, that's alright.
[01:12:11]  But it would alter what we're studying, and then it would become like a snake eating its own tail and become meaningless.
[01:12:18]  So I didn't want people to mess with Alex for that reason, that it would ruin the purity of what we were looking at.
[01:12:26]  With Carrie, it's less important.
[01:12:29]  But it is very important that people don't be cruel to her and make a joke of her.
[01:12:35]  If what you were doing was, like, she's the butt of a joke, I think that it would probably violate a secondary directive, maybe.
[01:12:46]  That wouldn't have shown up on our show.
[01:12:48]  But in terms of that kind of framework, I don't know if it exists as much in Project Camelot, because, you know, like...
[01:12:58]  Everything's nuts to begin with.
[01:13:00]  And the Prime Directive itself, as it's called...
[01:13:04]  Is gone, basically.
[01:13:05]  Because, I mean, I was part of the trials and stuff.
[01:13:09]  There's nothing we can do now.
[01:13:11]  I was frustrated.
[01:13:12]  It's named for the most often violated law in the Star Trek verse.
[01:13:17]  It is an ironic name for something you don't want people to...
[01:13:22]  Because there's a higher ethical good or there's a higher moral reason to get involved and be kind of an activist.
[01:13:29]  I will say the ability for Two kids, me and Barry, to just completely destroy a Discord in terms of like, oh, I think it's the greatest thing ever.
[01:13:42]  I think it's the worst thing ever.
[01:13:44]  They ruined the show.
[01:13:45]  Dan would not approve.
[01:13:47]  Dan would approve.
[01:13:48]  Jordan would not approve.
[01:13:50]  Jordan would approve.
[01:13:51]  I mean, it's unbelievable the drama.
[01:13:53]  Well, I guess we can settle that for the Discord.
[01:13:57]  We're fine.
[01:13:57]  I think the reason that I approve is because Of the experimental, progressive aspect.
[01:14:07]  Because I think that that is something that is a framework that is not understood.
[01:14:12]  We don't know the answer to the question of, like, can you get people to have better opinions by entering the superficial space that their bad opinions come from?
[01:14:24]  That's fascinating.
[01:14:29]  Yeah, if you give up on the conversation and you give up on a section of people, you can't expect them to change.
[01:14:36]  And so even if the things that you have to say will only convince a small percentage of people, if you give up on it, you're not going to succeed.
[01:14:43]  And I'm not a radical, but I am a leftist.
[01:14:46]  And I do believe in incremental change.
[01:14:49]  And I do believe that giving up...
[01:14:51]  Communicating your beliefs to even the most extreme groups is sometimes not the best strategy, because you can pull people back from the brink.
[01:14:59]  And if you're not going to engage in certain spaces, it's not like anti-Semites aren't going to.
[01:15:06]  It's not like they're going to leave it alone because they don't believe in aliens or something.
[01:15:11]  It's a place where a lot of that stuff can fester.
[01:15:15]  Yeah, I mean, the central question that is kind of being asked here is, I mean, Dan pointed it out just there.
[01:15:22]  You know, every community that we're seeing now is getting infiltrated with fucking Nazis, left and right, because they're willing to meet the community at the spot where the community is at.
[01:15:36]  Whereas it is impossible, realistically, to say, I am going to be a straightforward, honest person, and I'm going to meet this person about...

=== Meeting People Where They're At (11:46) ===

[01:15:48]  Aliens on their own space.
[01:15:50]  Because you are fundamentally lying to this person right away.
[01:15:54]  Like, the moment you say hello, you are lying.
[01:15:57]  So I'm interested in the idea of what is the difference between lying and just meeting somebody where they're at?
[01:16:07]  That's a great question.
[01:16:08]  You know, I have to meet people where they're at.
[01:16:16]  In therapy, when I'm doing 45-minute sessions with clients, I hear a lot of racism and a lot of anti-Semitism.
[01:16:23]  And people will say anti-Semitic things to a Jewish therapist because they expect, well, I'm not going to make it about me.
[01:16:30]  It's their session.
[01:16:32]  So they kind of will sometimes abuse or exploit that.
[01:16:37]  And there's other guys.
[01:16:40]  I can't push back against every time a client gets racist.
[01:16:45]  Or I would lose that client.
[01:16:47]  But there's a difference between putting up with it and joining in on the racism of the patient that you're talking to, though.
[01:16:58]  Right.
[01:16:59]  You have to find a way not to validate it.
[01:17:02]  And so, for example, sometimes when white, Christian, Gentile clients of mine have...
[01:17:10]  Made racist comments or seem to expect me to validate their racism.
[01:17:15]  I have said things like, you know, I have black clients too, so I hear both sides.
[01:17:20]  And keep it at that kind of like gentle sort of ribbing.
[01:17:24]  So where it's not like, you know, you fucking racist.
[01:17:30]  You know, it's more like, yeah, watch it because I want this office to be a safe space for everyone.
[01:17:39]  Including you and including my other clients.
[01:17:42]  And if you disrespect my other clients, I might, you know, I might feel some sort of way about that.
[01:17:49]  Andrew, go for it.
[01:17:51]  For God's sakes, Andrew, go!
[01:17:54]  Say your face, man!
[01:17:57]  Don't let anybody interrupt you anymore!
[01:18:02]  I was just going to say, you know, I think like when Carrie has people on her show.
[01:18:08]  You know, telling her that she's a...
[01:18:11]  I can't remember the guy's name.
[01:18:14]  Apadon, the guy that goes by that now.
[01:18:16]  Eddie Page.
[01:18:16]  I always forget his name.
[01:18:17]  Eddie Page, you know, Eddie Page, the racist alien, telling her racist stuff all the time.
[01:18:22]  Of course she's going to be surrounded by it, and if there's no one else saying the opposite stuff.
[01:18:26]  And so it is lying.
[01:18:28]  But at the same time, if you're not in the arena.
[01:18:30]  And so it's like, you have to be there.
[01:18:33]  There has to be some pushback.
[01:18:34]  And there's not.
[01:18:36]  And it's just interesting that...
[01:18:38]  Every single person that goes on to her show to grift is from the right.
[01:18:42]  And there's no reason that necessarily that group has to be right-wing.
[01:18:47]  They're interested in space.
[01:18:48]  They're interested in UFOs.
[01:18:49]  The new UAP stuff, it's a big group of political interest.
[01:18:54]  And for the right to have dominated it for so long and to still continue to dominate it today, it's not necessary.
[01:19:01]  But yeah, I guess if you aren't a true believer or a grifter, you do have to lie to get into the space.
[01:19:07]  Yeah, it's that idea, right?
[01:19:09]  Like, of course the right will dominate that space.
[01:19:12]  They have no problem with lying to these people.
[01:19:15]  And, I mean, that's not a left or right thing, but in terms of grifting, you're going to get more money by grifting people towards the right.
[01:19:23]  You're not going to get left-wing grift money as easily as you would the right.
[01:19:28]  We were worried about stolen valor, even.
[01:19:31]  Just even talking about using the rankings.
[01:19:37]  And my response to that is, you know, do you have a problem when Tom Hanks plays a soldier?
[01:19:42]  Like, do you have a problem with war movies?
[01:19:45]  I have a problem with war, period, so we don't need to worry about how I feel about Stolen Ballet.
[01:19:50]  Well, here's the way I thought about it in the context of this, is that it's almost impossible to take seriously...
[01:20:00]  You're pretending to be a soldier, or whatever.
[01:20:04]  SSP.
[01:20:05]  Within it, you are acting, like you said.
[01:20:10]  It very much seemed to me not a claim of position, but a saying the role for the purposes of...
[01:20:20]  The conversation.
[01:20:21]  It's not like you're trying to get a discount at some place by claiming that you're a major.
[01:20:25]  It's just, yeah.
[01:20:26]  No, I'm not enlisted, so I don't know what's offensive.
[01:20:32]  What was that?
[01:20:34]  I'm not applying for veterans' benefits.
[01:20:36]  I'm not trying to, you know, get some kind of privilege or something by claiming that I was in the Marines.
[01:20:45]  It was a script.
[01:20:48]  It was a fiction I was involved in.
[01:20:51]  And my role was no different than, you know, an actor in a movie.
[01:20:57]  Can I ask you a question here?
[01:20:59]  I think this would be...
[01:21:01]  You don't have an answer for it, probably, but it would be a very interesting question.
[01:21:05]  This is a great setup.
[01:21:05]  It'd be a very interesting question.
[01:21:07]  Is there a difference between somebody who is a true believer saying exactly word for word everything that you said to Carrie, and somebody like you who doesn't believe what they're saying?
[01:21:20]  I don't know.
[01:21:20]  I never really considered that.
[01:21:22]  Well, doesn't intention play into it, I think?
[01:21:25]  I mean, that's the question, though, when we're talking about meeting people in this space.
[01:21:30]  Yeah, but the intention of, like, if you're lying to, you know, self-enrich or, you know, abuse people in some way, then that matters.
[01:21:39]  And if you're doing it for...
[01:21:40]  I don't know.
[01:21:41]  Why am I answering a question that was directed to you guys?
[01:21:43]  I'm sorry.
[01:21:44]  I liked the concept, and I got to watch this firsthand, of people lying at each other.
[01:21:50]  Specifically, Barry and Gary just lying at each other.
[01:21:52]  But in a way, it had to be mutual.
[01:21:57]  There had to be a give and a take.
[01:22:00]  I think it comes down to human nature, I guess.
[01:22:05]  Would there be a difference between what Barry did and someone who...
[01:22:09]  I don't even know.
[01:22:10]  A person who was like Barry, if they were a true believer, That's really interesting.
[01:22:43]  You know, it's hard to hold on to that thought of like, her belief also dictates whether she is lying or not.
[01:22:52]  Yeah.
[01:22:53]  And I believe Carrie is a very superficial and transactional person.
[01:22:58]  Very transactional.
[01:22:59]  And in our interactions with Carrie, we were giving her great content.
[01:23:04]  She was getting views.
[01:23:06]  She was benefiting from this.
[01:23:08]  And I think because of what your views being somewhat controversial within her community in that space, I would assume that there's more engagement than a lot of other episodes that are just saying the same thing that everyone already believes.
[01:23:24]  And so that's probably even more of an incentive for her, quite frankly.
[01:23:29]  So, as far as this whole experiment goes, right?
[01:23:34]  Like, I'm trying to process it as a thing that you can then execute something from this information we have.
[01:23:42]  And it's like, I can't help but think, should we just train like 40 people in how to be this type of person?
[01:23:50]  Well, now you're talking about like a psyop team.
[01:23:52]  That is what I'm talking about.
[01:23:54]  That is exactly what I'm talking about.
[01:23:55]  This stuff doesn't exist in these spaces.
[01:23:58]  That's what you've pretty much proven.
[01:24:00]  Right?
[01:24:00]  And there's no way that it will naturally evolve in these spaces because it's based on entirely upon falsehoods.
[01:24:06]  So then we have to have a directed falsehood team infiltrating all of these different spaces to put these ideas into action.
[01:24:15]  Otherwise they won't get in there.
[01:24:17]  Period.
[01:24:17]  Right?
[01:24:18]  When I was a kid, when I was a preteen and like a middle schooler going online and reading about, you know...
[01:24:25]  Dracos and Grays and Roswell and Rendlesham and all that stuff.
[01:24:30]  You know, I would follow the links and sometimes I would wind up on anti-Semitic pages.
[01:24:38]  And then I would experience cognitive dissonance.
[01:24:41]  And eventually I convinced myself that there weren't alien visitors to Earth and aliens hadn't...
[01:24:52]  Engineered humans in any way or gifted us with any kind of genetic or cultural surplus.
[01:25:04]  I don't know if that's the right word for it, but I became a skeptic and a materialist largely because I kept running into that fringe right, which was fringe then.
[01:25:20]  I wouldn't call it fringe now.
[01:25:22]  One thing you've got to consider is that your average Bush voter of 2004 became your average Trump voter of 2016.
[01:25:32]  I think a lot of people already maybe had an inclination toward believing in things like interdimensional demons or, you know, that the Bible talks about UFOs.
[01:25:49]  Other stuff that's only recently been brought to the surface because now the mainstream right is so thoroughly dominated by conspiracy theory lore.
[01:26:04]  And there's such an overlap between the propagandists and the conspiracy theorists.
[01:26:12]  To touch back on Jordan's question, I think...
[01:26:15]  I felt so bold in 2004 to say that stuff.
[01:26:18]  Right.
[01:26:19]  All right, Andrew, go for it.
[01:26:20]  I think the answer is yes.
[01:26:22]  I think the answer is yes.
[01:26:24]  And I don't think we need to send out 40 teams.
[01:26:27]  And if you think about, you know, the men who stare at goats and all that stuff, like there's already probably plenty of government folks already thinking about how do you, you know, get into those communities?
[01:26:37]  How do you spread your messages?
[01:26:38]  Well, yeah, but I don't want them involved in these communities.
[01:26:41]  No, no, but how do you introduce the left-leaning ideas into the...
[01:26:45]  And the answer is yes.
[01:26:46]  Now, I don't think you need to recruit agents to go and do it, but I do think that what I would encourage folks to do is in your life, in your personal life, if you know someone who's a fringe person, if you know someone who's interested in the 10-foot aliens in Las Vegas, if you know people who are into those fringe things, don't shy away from engaging them in political terms and on topics that are...
[01:27:12]  You know, traditionally reserved for the right.

=== Profit Over People (12:29) ===

[01:27:14]  I would say, you know, encourage dialogue with those folks.
[01:27:19]  Don't ignore them.
[01:27:20]  Because if you don't inject it, then it comes from nowhere.
[01:27:23]  If you write people off, you end up kind of creating a click or an echo chamber.
[01:27:28]  Yeah, and you surrender them to those other negative voices, more or less.
[01:27:33]  They give up on people and they give up on society.
[01:27:38]  Yeah.
[01:27:39]  Well...
[01:27:40]  One thing I'm curious about is, we talked a little bit about, like, what you learned about Carrie, but I'm curious about, like, you guys experienced something that I think a lot of people didn't and shouldn't, and I'm curious what you learned.
[01:27:57]  Like, what did you walk away with the most of, like, through first-hand experience of this, this is the resonant image, the resonant message, the thing that's like, oh, damn.
[01:28:10]  That's nuts.
[01:28:11]  That you came away with.
[01:28:13]  The thesis.
[01:28:15]  One at a time, Andrew, you go first because you do not have the courage to burst through with an interruption.
[01:28:21]  And because I'm worried that darkness is about to absorb you.
[01:28:25]  There's a thunderstorm like I've never seen in my life going on outside right now.
[01:28:31]  From when we started recording to now, it's just like almost pitch black in your room.
[01:28:38]  I would say the number one thing is the profit motivation that I saw from Carrie.
[01:28:44]  It was genuinely not that shocking, but it was not just her own desire for profit, but her platforming and engaging folks for their own.
[01:28:57]  And it could even be as simple as something on one of her Rumble videos or something where someone's like, you know, buy this miracle medicine cure or some ridiculous thing and just her chiming in and yes, it's really good.
[01:29:10]  And being exposed to her Telegram channels and just the absolute echo chamber that's in there that is all so obviously profit driven.
[01:29:20]  That was something that I...
[01:29:22]  I knew from listening to your show that grifters grift, but I didn't really fully absorb how someone with a lot of eyeballs on their social medias just becomes almost, they become so reliant on the eyeballs resulting in dollars.
[01:29:41]  And it's everything, every agreement and disagreement ultimately with her, it stemmed from whether I think she thought she could profit off of it.
[01:29:50]  That's my main takeaway.
[01:29:51]  And so, like, even to the point of, like, the ideas and, like, everything, like, has a tinge of profit in it.
[01:30:02]  That's a bummer.
[01:30:03]  Like, so, for instance, it won't matter if she watches this.
[01:30:07]  Or if she listens to this.
[01:30:09]  No.
[01:30:10]  Because we don't.
[01:30:11]  Go Major Solomon Berg and Squatch and find the threads.
[01:30:18]  It's there for her if she were actually curious.
[01:30:22]  I don't think she's a curious person.
[01:30:25]  That's the bummer.
[01:30:27]  You'd expect somebody who talks all the time about space shit to be really curious.
[01:30:31]  And have a great imagination.
[01:30:36]  Imagine if Carl Sagan was just in it for the cash.
[01:30:39]  Whatever.
[01:30:40]  Pale blue dot my ass.
[01:30:42]  Give me the money!
[01:30:43]  I don't know if that's your takeaway, Mary, or not, but that would be my secondary takeaway, is her absolute lack of curiosity.
[01:30:51]  And as I think Jordan put it in one of the episodes where you covered us...
[01:30:57]  Her lack of commitment or her lack of investment in her own ideas, like, I had to remind her who the mercantile dogs were.
[01:31:06]  Yeah, that's, yeah.
[01:31:07]  She was confused by that momentarily, and I said, well, I believe you call them canonians, and then she had the recognition and was like, oh, yes, yes, yes, that is from my show.
[01:31:21]  Do you think that that's because if she had an investment in it, It would become clear how incoherent everything is?
[01:31:30]  No, I actually genuinely think she has a short attention span.
[01:31:34]  And also keep in mind, Carrie is like 70, roughly.
[01:31:40]  We think she's about 70. You never know with Pleiadians.
[01:31:46]  Could be any age.
[01:31:48]  You never know.
[01:31:49]  So one thing that was frustrating about Carrie, other than her being an erratic communicator...
[01:31:55]  She's one of these people who is always late or struggles to be on time.
[01:32:01]  I can relate.
[01:32:03]  Well, she's kind of scatterbrained.
[01:32:10]  I think she genuinely doesn't look like that.
[01:32:15]  There might, I don't know, maybe be a little bit of cognitive decline because she's getting up there.
[01:32:21]  I mean, she looks beautiful for her age, but...
[01:32:24]  Yeah, she reads like in the 50s probably.
[01:32:28]  No, she's older than that.
[01:32:30]  And when she didn't respond to us when we were setting up the third interview, when she didn't get in touch with us until like 50 minutes before the radio's time, I actually started saying to Andrew like, hey, you know, something might happen.
[01:32:44]  She might have had a call or something like that.
[01:32:47]  You know, that was something I had to consider is like she is, you know, my parents' age or maybe a little older.
[01:32:54]  And, you know, I'm starting to see them, you know, repeat themselves sometimes.
[01:32:59]  And my mom's been having more falls and medical emergencies.
[01:33:04]  And, you know, so that's something, you know, keeping the fact that she is a person in mind.
[01:33:11]  Yeah.
[01:33:12]  You know, she's not a cartoon.
[01:33:14]  She's not a, you know, I mean, she's pretty horrible, but she's not like a character.
[01:33:20]  Yeah.
[01:33:22]  She's not a thing.
[01:33:23]  She's an end in and of herself.
[01:33:24]  She has a personal life.
[01:33:27]  There's every possibility that something could happen to her that would be unfortunate and tragic.
[01:33:35]  So I did actually kind of worry.
[01:33:38]  I know she didn't have a fall or something.
[01:33:43]  I don't want that to happen to her.
[01:33:45]  Your empathy went into overdrive, basically.
[01:33:50]  Yeah.
[01:33:52]  We don't hold anything against Carrie.
[01:33:54]  I think, you know, she is who she is.
[01:33:55]  I don't think she's beyond redemption.
[01:33:57]  I don't think we hold anything against her as a human being.
[01:34:00]  I think we're fascinated by her.
[01:34:02]  But I also think that, you know, our experiment, at least for me, proved to me that she doesn't believe.
[01:34:08]  Almost anything, and sort of, it actually, it might, I thought she was a true believer, and as we went on and on and on, and got more and more absurd, it became more and more clear that it was just a profit-driven idea.
[01:34:20]  The fact that she didn't hang up on you after the Lionel calls is, like, that to me says a lot.
[01:34:25]  Because I would have hung up on your ass so fast.
[01:34:28]  I mean, the third episode gets more absurd, to be frank.
[01:34:31]  Like, you know, the devil is involved, and there's a...
[01:34:35]  The devil's gotta be involved!
[01:34:38]  Part of the reason I think Barry wrote that in was to say, like, how far can I push this envelope?
[01:34:43]  Like, literally.
[01:34:44]  So now here's my biggest question that I have.
[01:34:48]  This is something that's troubled me from day one.
[01:34:51]  Day one.
[01:34:52]  I think there are no heroes for the Squatch is maybe one of the most poetic, beautiful things I've ever heard.
[01:35:01]  Was this improvised or did you write that?
[01:35:04]  So that actually...
[01:35:06]  That was just a rebuke to great man theory.
[01:35:13]  Right.
[01:35:14]  I just hate great man theory.
[01:35:16]  That's fair enough.
[01:35:17]  So it wasn't written.
[01:35:20]  Just tossed it out.
[01:35:21]  At least for me, on my end.
[01:35:23]  Right.
[01:35:23]  Nice turn of phrase in the moment.
[01:35:26]  That's well done.
[01:35:26]  Yeah.
[01:35:27]  That's well done.
[01:35:28]  So that's why I said it was a Western construct, which I think threw Jordan a little bit because...
[01:35:35]  We're talking about space, but I was very specifically talking about historiography, theories of history, and sort of the patriarchal aspect of storytelling in Western civilization.
[01:35:52]  And the concept of what a hero is, is maybe very individualistic and arguably something that aligns more with capitalism.
[01:36:03]  And authoritarian structures maybe like the Soviet Union than my kind of brand of anarcho-socialism or Andrew's left progressivism.
[01:36:18]  No gods, no kings.
[01:36:19]  Right, no gods, no kings, no masters, right.
[01:36:22]  It was so much in the, I think the conversation where that came up was about The Squatch being kind of a...
[01:36:33]  A refugee and a press.
[01:36:35]  Yeah, and in terms of who's going to save the Squatch?
[01:36:40]  Is it going to be the reptiles or the Pleiadians?
[01:36:44]  And yeah, that rebuke of that idea is...
[01:36:47]  I don't know.
[01:36:49]  I mean, we made a button.
[01:36:50]  With that, you know, there's no...
[01:36:53]  I actually have one.
[01:36:55]  Yeah, that's why it's unethical for us to not talk to you on the show.
[01:36:59]  Right, we exploited each other.
[01:37:01]  Yeah, we have...
[01:37:02]  I mean, we don't have merch.
[01:37:03]  We didn't make any money on it.
[01:37:04]  We don't sell anything.
[01:37:05]  We gave it away.
[01:37:06]  But still, we stole the turn of phrase.
[01:37:09]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[01:37:10]  Well, and we need, you know, we need to send you this.
[01:37:12]  Oh, a Squatch mask.
[01:37:13]  Okay.
[01:37:14]  The gorilla mask.
[01:37:15]  This is the gorilla mask that actually inspired the ad-lib from Barry.
[01:37:18]  It's all about also maybe studying some Black and Miles.
[01:37:23]  I am amazed.
[01:37:27]  I've seen a lot of people speak off the top of their head, and I've never heard a phrase like, the Squatch has no heroes.
[01:37:35]  So good.
[01:37:36]  Anyway, I will stop hammering on that.
[01:37:40]  I think we should probably wrap this up because we've been going quite a while and I don't want to monopolize all your time.
[01:37:47]  But before we do, is there anything else that you wanted to bring up?
[01:37:51]  Is there anything else that you think is important that you'd like to impart?
[01:37:56]  The reason I had alluded to earlier, the reason that we gave him the name Solomon was because Solomon is the name of a king.
[01:38:05]  And Carrie has a thing for men who claim Arthurian lineage.
[01:38:10]  Project Camelot, right there.
[01:38:12]  Project Camelot, Bill Ryan, and Mark Richards.
[01:38:15]  Well, Bill Ryan, for people who don't know, is supposedly descended from King Arthur.
[01:38:20]  Right, and Mark Richards thought he was, I don't know, maybe the reincarnation of King Arthur or something, or intended to be the new.
[01:38:28]  Right.
[01:38:29]  And so there's a theme there with Carrie that she seems to be enthralled by men with Arthurian or maybe kingly lineage.
[01:38:42]  And so that was why we named Solomon Bird Solomon.
[01:38:46]  Do you think that that, like, translated to her?
[01:38:49]  That that, like, subconscious thing, like, actually, like, do you think she subconsciously got that?
[01:38:57]  No, not necessarily.
[01:38:59]  It was just sort of, you know, we were debating what his name is going to be.
[01:39:02]  It's got to be obviously very stereotypically Ashkenazi.
[01:39:07]  I was going to say, she's so anti-Semitic that just the name Solomon should be more than enough to get you across the finish line there.
[01:39:14]  Some of the names were a lot of fun, like Fiona Selene, my cat's name was Fiona.
[01:39:23]  Those are two cats' names.
[01:39:26]  Reddit correctly sussed that Lionel Sperlinghetti was named for Ferlinghetti, the poet who wrote Tyrannus Nets.

=== Final Thoughts (08:54) ===

[01:39:34]  Ah, I did not get that.
[01:39:36]  That was one of the questions I had, the Sperlinghetti.
[01:39:38]  The Lionel was clear.
[01:39:39]  I moved.
[01:39:42]  Fiona was the cat.
[01:39:44]  Yeah, and then initially I wanted it to be Lionel Spaghetti, but Barry did at that.
[01:39:52]  Yeah, I was not okay with Lionel Spaghetti.
[01:39:56]  Yeah, I will say, my final thing I want to say is you have multiple times, Dan specifically, maybe Jordan, said to not listen to your podcast from beginning to end, and I guess...
[01:40:12]  The kids call it these days, whatever, you know, where you watch a million shows in a row.
[01:40:17]  I don't even remember what it's called.
[01:40:18]  Binging, yeah.
[01:40:20]  I disagree because I listened to about 20 or 30 episodes, at which point I decided I had to stop, start from episode one, and listen exclusively from there.
[01:40:31]  Until the very last episode.
[01:40:33]  And even though I've been listening for about three years, that only just happened about two or three weeks ago.
[01:40:39]  So I've listened now finally to your entire catalog and I can say it was an incredibly entertaining three years.
[01:40:45]  I wish I could do it again.
[01:40:47]  I'm in withdrawal.
[01:40:48]  And I couldn't disagree with you more that people should binge your show.
[01:40:52]  Maybe not like 10 episodes a day, but there's nothing wrong with going to episode one and just starting the journey.
[01:40:57]  I love it.
[01:40:58]  I loved every second of it.
[01:41:00]  I did the same thing.
[01:41:02]  I binged it too after listening to a bunch of modern day episodes and the whole project.
[01:41:08]  He did it even faster.
[01:41:10]  He did it in like a year.
[01:41:14]  And was listening to it in my car, on the way to work.
[01:41:18]  I was listening to it when I wake up at 4am in the morning and smoke a spliff.
[01:41:25]  I think if you can handle it, it's fine.
[01:41:28]  But I do think that there's some people who it might be dangerous for.
[01:41:31]  I've heard people talk about Alex showing up in their dreams and stuff.
[01:41:35]  We thought you were about to do that.
[01:41:38]  You don't want to see Jordan that much.
[01:41:43]  I think my favorite criticism of our show is something along the lines of Jordan's really terrible for the first couple hundred episodes.
[01:41:49]  Yeah, we get that.
[01:41:50]  And it's like, really?
[01:41:53]  How can I be terrible for a couple hundred?
[01:41:55]  Just quit!
[01:41:56]  Stop listening!
[01:41:57]  If you hate me for a hundred episodes!
[01:42:00]  I could never understand the Jordan criticism.
[01:42:03]  You guys are the yin and the yang.
[01:42:06]  I don't understand people being nice.
[01:42:08]  I understand people hating me.
[01:42:10]  You guys use a format that I'm seeing more and more now of in podcasts.
[01:42:18]  Behind the Bastards and what the dollop also kind of do this where there is an expert and an everyman standard.
[01:42:27]  Yeah, they were way before us.
[01:42:29]  We were linked to that.
[01:42:31]  Or at least the dollop, yeah.
[01:42:32]  But that's what I'm, you know, as I'm getting more and more into podcasts and watching less and less TV, you know, that's something I've begun to notice is that that's a very common kind of platform.
[01:42:47]  You know, for a show in order to explore a subject material.
[01:42:51]  Yeah.
[01:42:52]  So we were kind of, I mean, obviously we had that in mind when we were, you know, devising all this.
[01:42:57]  We knew the dynamic and we knew how it would be constructed.
[01:43:01]  I think part of the issue is the mic down.
[01:43:04]  You know, I feel like the first couple hundred episodes, there was maybe an interruptery issue.
[01:43:09]  But again...
[01:43:11]  Oh, yes.
[01:43:11]  Oh, yes.
[01:43:13]  But so just in terms of that, you know, I think maybe that's how people got the wrong impression.
[01:43:17]  But you've got to have someone to bounce something off of, you know?
[01:43:20]  Yeah, totally.
[01:43:21]  The sci-fi writer Barry and me, not the writer, you know, we bounced ideas back and forth.
[01:43:26]  Yeah, even if you weren't both on screen at the same time, you know...
[01:43:29]  Now, having talked to you guys, I can see the presentation of Berg is a culmination of the two of you.
[01:43:39]  Yeah, it's almost like a reality TV show producer throwing notes at the guy while he's on screen.
[01:43:45]  Like, oh, try this!
[01:43:45]  Go into this situation!
[01:43:46]  From under the door so he doesn't hear the laugh.
[01:43:49]  But to his credit, I gotta say, Barry's ability to ad-lib with a crazy person is truly remarkable.
[01:43:55]  I was very, very impressed by that.
[01:43:59]  Actually, I have one more question.
[01:44:02]  What other references did we not get?
[01:44:05]  Oh, God.
[01:44:06]  I'm sure there are too many.
[01:44:08]  I don't know.
[01:44:10]  I will send you an email.
[01:44:12]  I will send you an email.
[01:44:14]  A list of inside jokes.
[01:44:16]  Yeah, which literally will have all of my ideas, and maybe I'll checkmark the ones that got in to the final.
[01:44:22]  I'm sure Barry has some as well.
[01:44:24]  Post that.
[01:44:25]  People would love that shit.
[01:44:27]  This agreement, when we were doing part two, Andrew sort of pushed a lot of references, and I tolerated it, but I didn't feel too formally about them.
[01:44:39]  I didn't want to get too locked down in references, and I could have maybe pushed back a little harder against some of the more overt references that maybe detracted a little bit from...
[01:44:56]  You know, the messaging.
[01:44:57]  I did love how subtle the, like, Fiona Celine always lands on her feet.
[01:45:01]  Yeah.
[01:45:02]  That was nice.
[01:45:03]  That was cute.
[01:45:04]  Well, guys, thank you so much for chatting with us.
[01:45:08]  This is very interesting, and like I said, I think that what you did shows...
[01:45:15]  At least a little bit of proof of concept in some ways for being able to...
[01:45:21]  The fact that you're saying that Carrie is self-correcting the species race kind of thing, as kind of minor as that may seem, that is something that matters.
[01:45:32]  It is.
[01:45:33]  I don't know how useful your findings are for other people who may want to explore that kind of thing, but it is fascinating.
[01:45:44]  And I'm glad that you did it, strangely.
[01:45:48]  I do want to say, you know, just for my final closing words, I'm glad it's over.
[01:45:54]  I didn't particularly enjoy interacting with Carrie because of the anti-Semitism.
[01:46:00]  And she's so erratic and unpredictable.
[01:46:02]  A lot of what she, like when she, when...
[01:46:08]  My story ends and she starts kind of quizzing and back-checking me against her other sources.
[01:46:15]  A lot of what comes out of her mouth can be triggering.
[01:46:19]  So I was eager to end this.
[01:46:23]  As we explained in our letter to you, we did not want to be a bottomless whale for her.
[01:46:30]  That would have served her interests more than ours.
[01:46:35]  Yeah, and I mean, it's probably got to be, you know, complicated at very least to, you know, deal with a situation where you're telling your story and putting the information in that you want with the awareness that there's a decent chance that no matter what I say, she'll use what I'm saying for her own purposes.
[01:46:56]  Like, that dynamic has got to be a strange space to live inside.
[01:47:01]  Yeah, it is.
[01:47:04]  Well, I mean, thank you guys so much.
[01:47:06]  This was awesome.
[01:47:07]  Before we go, I have to say one thing very clearly to the audience, not to you guys.
[01:47:11]  Before we go, we got one more.
[01:47:12]  No, this is for the audience.
[01:47:13]  Oh, okay, sorry.
[01:47:14]  This is for the benefit of the audience.
[01:47:16]  Be gone!
[01:47:17]  Yes.
[01:47:19]  There is, I want to make this clear, you guys didn't do this in order to get on our show.
[01:47:26]  When you emailed us, you weren't looking to come on the show, and I want to make it very clear to anybody listening.
[01:47:32]  If you do things to fuck with people for the goal of getting on our show, it is not going to work.
[01:47:40]  This is a very specific circumstance where there's other things involved.
[01:47:45]  If your email had not been abundantly clear that you were not trying to get on the show, it was my idea to ask you to be on the show.
[01:47:54]  You guys did not have anything to do with it.
[01:47:57]  We were pretty surprised.
[01:47:58]  I just want to discourage anybody from pulling stunts in order to get our attention.
[01:48:05]  Don't try this at home.
[01:48:07]  Exactly.
[01:48:08]  Yes, don't try this at home.
[01:48:09]  Thank you, guys.
[01:48:10]  We appreciate it.
[01:48:12]  Wish you all the best.
[01:48:13]  Rest in peace, Solomon Berg.
[01:48:15]  Andy in Kansas, you're on the air.
[01:48:16]  Thanks for holding.
[01:48:19]  Hello, Alex.
[01:48:19]  I'm a first-time caller.
[01:48:20]  I'm a huge fan.
[01:48:21]  I love your work.