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June 30, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

02:03:26

Sidebar with Mark Groubert - Viva & Barnes LIVE STREAM

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	We are live, and I believe it is not a second past the required start time of 7 o 'clock, people.
	How are we doing?
	Okay, now, tonight, for anybody who doesn't know who Marc Grubert is, now, apparently he says his last name is pronounced Grobert like Colbert, except Grobert, but being from Quebec and understanding the French language, it is Grubert, regardless of how he likes to pronounce his last name.
	Mark Ruber, I only know him from what I've seen on Eric Hunley's channel and his streams with Robert Barnes.
	And so when I say I only know him from there, I think I know a lot about him.
	That if anybody else had watched those streams, you would know that about him as well.
	Super interesting guy.
	Investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker, and anecdotes.
	It's basically like the gossip of the Hollywood legal world.
	I would say it's like high school on steroids.
	So we're going to be there shortly.
	And now I saw that actually as I saw Harmon say the exact same thing.
	Let's see.
	F, good, means we're on.
	Viva, a cowboy look.
	I figured I had to look cool for Gruber because my other shirt, you know, is a little too stiff.
	Let me just undo one button.
	Let's see.
	Hold on.
	Is this good?
	That's better.
	Sound is excellent.
	Good.
	Goober.
	Yeah, it could be Goober.
	It's not.
	It's Goober.
	Anyhow.
	We're going to have an amazing discussion.
	I know everyone out there thinks I feel left out when I see Robert and the sidebar guest making a connection, so to speak.
	I suspect that's going to happen again tonight, but it's going to be interesting.
	Don't feel bad for me.
	I like watching.
	First of all, I think Robert and Mark are going to have a lot more to talk about than I could ever even know questions to ask, but we'll get there.
	Viva Elvis.
	Oh, wait, wait.
	I saw one.
	Sexy Viva.
	Thank you.
	Now, what was I going to say?
	Oh, I was supposed to wear the robe at one point.
	Okay, either way, let's get into these standard disclaimers before we go live.
	Superchats.
	YouTube takes 30% of Superchats, and I know that can miff people, so if you want to support the channel, you can support us at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	We have an amazing community there.
	We're supporters, in addition to getting all the stuff that's on YouTube and Rumble.
	I get a lot of exclusive content, and it's phenomenal, if I do say so myself.
	And everyone there gets sneak peeks of my daily, basically daily vlogs now.
	For example, everyone had seen my Bill Cosby judgment breakdown two hours before the rest of the world saw it.
	So where was I with that?
	Yeah, YouTube takes 30%.
	If you don't like that, you can support us elsewhere.
	I have Patreon and Subscribestar, but Locals is the place to be.
	Already miffed.
	If you're going to be miffed if I do not get to your super chat...
	Don't give the super chat because I don't like people feeling miffed.
	Super chats are not a right of entry into the conversation, so if I miss it, that's it.
	And I was going to say, if your super chat is just abusive for the sake of being abusive, I'm not going to read it either.
	It is not a right to be abusive to the guest or anybody, but you get a highlighted comment if that's your thing.
	Occasionally...
	I bring up a chat without reading it and it says something offensive and I can't be held responsible for that.
	Bill Cosby was used by women.
	Okay, that might be one of them.
	If I don't read it and it comes up either by accident or until I've read it and I take it down, these are the risks of doing things live.
	But the Bill Cosby, my goodness, people.
	It's an amazing thing is the wrong way to describe it because it's just the system not working properly.
	And which leads to injustices, even when you might very well have been dealing with someone who in all likelihood was guilty of something to be determined because, oh man.
	Anyways, if anyone hasn't seen what happened, go check out that blog.
	I broke down the judgment.
	The judgment is basically, excoriating might be the word, the lower court for allowing evidence, for allowing a trial to happen when...
	An initial prosecution was announced to be, you know, permanently set aside, that they were not going to prosecute Bill Cosby specifically so that they would allow his accuser to sue him civilly, where he would be compelled to testify in the civil trial without being able to invoke the fifth because of pending criminal proceedings.
	So they announced that they were going to prosecute.
	Then they let him go testify civilly.
	He made some incriminating statements in the four depositions in that file.
	Comes in after the old one retires or moves on.
	Decides they're going to prosecute anyhow.
	And use the statements he made in the civil case against him in the criminal case.
	Yep, let's see what we've got here.
	I've got a golden ticket to chat.
	Robert Gray.
	So, I think we've been going live for five minutes.
	Oh yeah, that's the other thing.
	We're live on Rumble.
	And Rumble has been doing extremely well these days.
	Establishing itself as an alternative.
	A free speech alternative.
	Based in Canada.
	Oh yeah, that was what I was going to say.
	And they just nabbed possibly the largest account on the interwebs, Donald Trump's account on Rumble.
	So they're making headway in the internet world.
	And it's a good place for creators because it's monetized.
	It's a good place for people who want to see uncensored information.
	People now think of free speech like it's a weapon of destruction of sorts.
	You're going to go on Rumble and you're going to see and hear things that are going to bring you over to the dark side.
	People have forgotten what free speech is, having lived under the proverbial sword of Democles on YouTube for so long.
	Okay, no legal advice.
	That's the other thing.
	This is probably going to be very little law talk in tonight's sidebar, but it's going to be interesting.
	Now, I see everyone in the house, so what I'm going to do is make sure that Everything is in order.
	Good.
	I'm going to bring in Robert.
	No, I'm going to bring in Mark.
	Then I'm going to bring in Robert.
	And this, I believe, is the format we like.
	Robert, Mark, how are we doing?
	I like this format.
	Everybody's equal in this format.
	There's no high, low.
	There's no cast system.
	This is much better.
	And when I bring up a chat, a comment like this, it doesn't block any of our faces.
	Go Habs Go, game two tonight.
	I would rather be doing this than watching the game.
	Is that true?
	Sorry.
	Okay, I mean, Robert, Mark, where do we start?
	Everybody knows I like to start with childhood, and Mark, from what I understand, your childhood is going to be interesting, but the history of your family is interesting.
	But before we get there, elevator pitch for anybody who doesn't know who you are before we get into who you are and how you became who you are.
	I don't know if there's an elevator pitch for this.
	The last time I was in an elevator, I got into a fistfight with Oliver Stone.
	After a pitch that went bad at FX before 35 people who came to see the dog and pony show.
	So a pitch in the elevator didn't work.
	I don't know if this one's going to work.
	What can I tell you?
	Brooklyn Jew.
	Does that sound like anything you can relate to?
	Been to Montreal.
	I've had smoked meats in Montreal.
	I don't know what they are, David.
	You know what?
	It is just pickled meat to preserve for longer in harsher times.
	But Mark, now you mentioned it, what generation American are you?
	First, second, like your parents are from Europe?
	Fourth.
	Grandfather born in Brooklyn, 1901.
	His father, born in Poland, comes over to Brooklyn, I think in the 1880s.
	Then, you know, we've been Brooklyn people since then.
	You get a special piece of paper when you're born in Brooklyn that you could show anywhere.
	It's kind of like the...
	Letters of Transit from Casablanca.
	Now, I mean, you sort of lived through the sort of progression of New York.
	To me, New York reflected a certain aspect or it was emblematic of American life.
	And you had early 60s New York, which is the sort of madman era, but where you had this veneer of corporate respectability and American middle-class success.
	But right next to it...
	That is sort of the mob and organized crime and everything else that's going on.
	Then you have late 60s New York.
	This is where Malcolm X comes to the fray.
	This is where everything that goes crazy in the late 60s happens in New York.
	Then you have sort of the 70s malaise of New York.
	And then you have the sort of 80s corporate sort of Reagan-esque, very Trump-ish recandescence in the 80s in New York City.
	What was it?
	I mean, you actually experienced that.
	What was it like first sort of growing up in New York before the late 60s?
	Well, for me, it was different because my grandfather, Jack Bloom, was the campaign manager to the mayor of New York, a one-term Democratic reform mayor named Impelitieri, who was an Italian.
	My grandfather was part of the later the Medesposito Democratic machine out of Brooklyn.
	So I grew up in a political household.
	I mean, he was an accountant.
	He was a bag man, I assume, for the Democratic machine in Brooklyn.
	But specifically about Impeliteri, who was a one-term mayor that no history has boxed this guy out.
	I'll tell you why in a second, why it's relevant to today.
	There was a guy named O'Dwyer who was a Tammany Hall mayor in 1950 in New York.
	And O'Dwyer was corrupt.
	And O'Dwyer was coming under investigation from the feds.
	And there was nowhere for O'Dwyer to go.
	So a Democratic president sent him to Mexico City as the ambassador to Mexico to avoid federal indictments, Robert.
	Okay.
	So this guy, Impeliteri, was the president of the city council.
	And he was appointed acting mayor of New York and had a run in a special runoff election, of which...
	My grandfather was his campaign manager, oddly enough.
	So he wins that election, serves for like three years.
	They have a Democratic primary, and he's voted out in the primary by Tammany Hall, who didn't want him there in the first place.
	He was the guy who came up with the idea for something called parking meters, and he put them all through the city of New York to generate income.
	So impelitary is a weird guy.
	But the reason impelitary is important today...
	It's because there's a guy under investigation in a big city today, and one guy after another keeps rolling over.
	And it's getting closer and closer to that mayor of this big city.
	And that mayor is Italian, and his name is Garcetti.
	And Garcetti has been given the golden ticket to India, not unlike Impelitari's ticket to Mexico that was given to him by another Democratic president named Truman.
	The reason I'm telling this story today is not about my grandfather, but the relevance of the move by Biden to get Garcetti out of here is quite noticeable.
	Nobody's made this connection, but one guy after another under Garcetti who made his bones in the building trades in L.A. with Chinese contractors, it's not bizarre to see him flee to India.
	If you understand the impelitary O'Dwyer story of 1950 in New York.
	Mark, there was a Dwyer that I remember who, it was the famous video, like the first time I'd ever seen something like that, the Bud Dwyer who took his own life on live television.
	This is O'Dwyer.
	This is an Irish old Paul from Tammany Hall, New York.
	This has nothing to do with Bud Dwyer.
	This is an Irish politician who was part of Tammany Hall who was corrupt.
	And everybody was feeding at the trough, and Truman gave him a golden ticket to get out.
	And when I read what Biden was doing with Garcetti, I went, holy shit, it's exactly the same fucking move.
	They must have looked back in their own playbook and said, hey, we did this in 1950 in New York.
	We can get Garcetti to India.
	Get him out of here.
	Because one city councilman after another has been taken down by the FBI here in L.A., David and Robert.
	And it's getting closer and closer to Garcetti.
	In a situation where I think we may have what you call unindicted co-conspirators, Robert.
	Well, I mean, it's a lot like even though the season sort of went AWOL for other reasons in terms of its writing, but it's where the I think it was season two of Goliath was was sort of exploring and hinting at was using that sort of that actual story and just narrating it through film or television in that case before it had become a really public, well-recognized story.
	But it's still, you know, getting an ambassadorship is still a better ticket than getting a Ron Brown commerce trip to a war-torn region.
	while you're in the federal law.
	Oh, touche, my friend.
	I forgot about that.
	Wow.
	Wow.
	Anyway, so...
	Don't remember.
	Oh, Ron Brown and his wife.
	Well, not his wife.
	His mistress had turned rat and Ron Brown was the bag man for the entire Democratic National Party at the time.
	And so Billy Boy sent him on a commerce trip because he was the Secretary of Commerce.
	Sent him on a commerce trip to war-torn Balkans.
	And he didn't come back.
	His plane crashed.
	A lot of incoming fire that night when they were landing.
	Yeah, there was.
	I think Hillary fought off gunfire, didn't she, when she landed?
	Oh, yes, she has.
	She has repeatedly on multiple occasions.
	Well, anyway, to answer your question, David, a lot of kids, Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island.
	My mother double-dated Woody Allen, went to Midwood High School.
	He could have been my father if it wasn't for Phyllis, who was actually dating him, but they went on these double dates as Allen Konigsberg.
	My mother said he was a pimply-faced guy who carried a clarinet case, but inside the clarinet case...
	Was his pool cue, and he'd cut school and go shoot pool all day.
	So he could have been my dad, but my mother decided to marry a jazz drummer who she met at a battle of the bands, and it didn't really work out for me.
	So now, what did your parents do?
	How many siblings did you have?
	And what was your childhood like?
	Quite a loaded question.
	You know, this reminds me of time.
	I want, just to digress.
	I once wrote an article about the art cop of LAPD.
	This guy's name is Don Harisic.
	He's a one-man band.
	And all he did was solve art crimes in L.A. for 20 years.
	So I do the piece.
	I write it for the paper.
	Very good piece.
	And I said, you know what?
	He's telling me about all these cases.
	I think there's a TV show in this of all the cases, kind of like the FBI files.
	So he's like half-assed.
	He doesn't really want to get involved.
	Goes to the media person of LAPD, and I have to go down and pitch this.
	And every single uniformed official in LAPD was sitting around a table grilling me like I was Charles Manson.
	Their relation to the media is so bizarre that they treated me like a suspect.
	How did you find us?
	Who are you?
	They were going to fingerprint me.
	It was the craziest thing ever until being interviewed by two lawyers tonight, which is why I tell the story.
	Anyway, so I grew up in...
	Like I said, in Coney Island, which is Avenue K, Woody Allen across the street, went to a school there.
	We moved to Sheepshead Bay, which is a little bit south of there.
	Went to a special school called PS194, which was an experimental public school in Brooklyn, where in second grade you were given Spanish language and French you were given in third grade.
	There were language classes.
	It was...
	It was kind of like a Stuyvesant high school for elementary school kids.
	So in fifth grade, they had something called the new math.
	I don't know if you know what that is.
	It was short division.
	It was different shortcuts to do math.
	It was in fifth grade.
	So the New York Times came into the classroom and they interviewed me.
	And I, being a wise-ass Woody Allen type kid, the guy said, how do you like the new math?
	And I said, of course.
	It's ten times better than the old man.
	So they print that in the paper.
	My mother smacks me in the head when I get home for being a wiseass, you know, and to the New York Times.
	But that was the beginning of my media interaction with newspapers, you know.
	And what was life like at that time in New York City?
	I mean, if you were to describe it screenwriter style.
	I'm trying to remember a movie that might capture it, you know.
	Sheepshead Bay was like unbelievably great because it was kind of a boating community.
	Like they had boats there and fishing and the beach.
	You know, it was really South Brooklyn.
	Even Coney Island was South Brooklyn.
	I mean, all my relatives, when Trump opened Trump Village, which was in Coney Island, every relative in Brooklyn moved into Trump Village.
	And Trump Village was a middle class, moderately priced housing project.
	In Seagate, which is next to Coney Island, he put up about three or four buildings, kind of luxury buildings, but the rents were moderately priced, and every middle class person in the region wanted to get into Trump Village, as did my grandparents and as did all my uncles and aunts.
	So every time you went to see them, you had to go to Coney Island, which was great, you know, which is where I grew up anyway, on the rides and the bumper cars.
	Like, growing up in Coney Island is like growing up in a state fair or something, because you could just walk over and get on the bumper cars, see some sort of an embryo in a jar.
	You could see the bearded woman.
	You know, I mean, it was just a freak show.
	You know, you go on the cyclone and throw up if you want.
	But is it like, I don't know how old you are, and I don't know if it's totally impolite to ask, but when you're growing up there as a child, is it safe?
	Is there a lot of crime?
	Is it gritty?
	No crime at all.
	No crime at all.
	In fact, years later, When I was going to college in New York, I went to the new school for a graduate master's degree in optical psychology, of all things, which involves Mueller-Lyer illusions, the color test.
	Optical psychology was a weird little niche.
	But the point is, I worked at my uncle's coffee shop on 42nd Street in Manhattan called Shelley's, and it was between 8th and 9th Avenue.
	At the height of the insanity of the 70s, this uncle left me with his restaurant at night.
	Which is incredibly insane.
	I mean, I was like 18 years old and running a restaurant in the middle of Times Square.
	That's how crazy this was.
	I learned everything I know from the street from that period of time on the deuce, as they called it.
	I was right next to the Terminal Bar and Grill.
	The Elk Hotel was upstairs.
	There were pimps everywhere.
	And I mean colorful, not like this HBO knockoff crazy crap movie that they made, which was made by guys from Baltimore.
	This was real on at its peak in Times Square when I was there, you know, running this coffee shop.
	My uncle said, there's going to be a lot of scammers, so be careful.
	Yeah, I mean, because, yeah, because I was going to say that you go from sort of the sort of almost idyllic or idyllic Coney Island 1950s or early mid-1960s to Times Square 1970s New York, which is a very different New York.
	I mean, that New York is a...
	I mean, Jimmy Breslin praised it, but not everyone else was such a fan of that.
	It was when you could go through Times Square and see somebody shooting up here, you know, somebody doing this or that over there, things like that.
	Yeah, it was quite crazy, but I had nothing to compare it to.
	I mean, other than growing up in Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay, I mean, I played in Little League, which was across the street from my apartment building.
	You know, we had a group of kids.
	When I was growing up in Brooklyn and Sheepshead Bay, Your gang of kids was like 35 kids from the ages of 13 to 18, David.
	Just so you understand the zeitgeist of what we're up against.
	You had guys who had been in the service who came back.
	Every single game we played of the street games that were popular back then, which were stoop ball, punch ball, slap ball, box ball, seven boxes, stick ball.
	There were 100, Ringolivio, Red Light, Green Light.
	That's all we did 24-7.
	And the people who played that, there was no age limit.
	You could be anywhere from 13 to 18 and jump into a game.
	We played Chinese handball.
	Everything down, by the way, was called Chinese.
	Anything you did with a ball that you hit down was called Chinese because we believed the Chinese were down under us on the earth.
	So there was regular handball and there was Chinese handball where you hit the ball down onto the sidewalk, up against the wall, and it went down the line.
	Of King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. You could have these games with 20 people in them, and indeed we did, because there were so many kids out in the street safely at the time.
	There was no video games.
	There was no TV to watch.
	We came home, watched Officer Joe Bolton and the Three Stooges, Captain Jack McCarthy and Popeye, and that was it.
	You were kicked out of the house.
	You couldn't stay in the house.
	You had to go out and play these games, and nobody wanted to stay in the house, to be honest with you, because you had so many kids in the street.
	Playing these dozens and dozens of games like Scully, where you filled up a bottle cap with melted crayon wax, and you hit it around a chalk box on the sidewalk or in the middle of the street.
	These games apparently handed down from generation to generation to generation.
	And they started with the Industrial Revolution, and organized sports became something that the Industrial Revolution had to deal with.
	Adults and kids played all these games together.
	The game of marbles, when you take your thumb and forefinger from marbles, that is designed to strengthen your thumb and forefinger for bow and arrow shooting.
	All of these games had cultural relevance to real life.
	Ringolivio, which is 20 kids chasing 20 kids, was designed for sheep herding and grabbing loose sheep.
	And all of this stuff went back to England in the 1700s.
	All of these street games that went to America, that went to Japan, that went to Europe, that went to Germany.
	It was called Relivio in Germany.
	It was called Ringolivio in Brooklyn.
	There was like a collective Jungian unconsciousness of street games, I believe, among kids.
	They were able to somehow know these games that crossed all cultural barriers.
	There are Dominican kids right now on 181st Street in Manhattan playing Scully.
	And they have no idea where it came from.
	And my parents played it.
	And my grandparents played it.
	And they all played these games going back to Europe.
	You know, and they had a cultural purpose.
	Organized sports started when parents had to go to the factories to work.
	And they had one day off.
	And on that Sunday, they organized to play the games they used to play with kids.
	Mark, I'm going to ask you.
	One question.
	I'm going to read this chat, then ask you the question, then we're going to work into the career of what you've been doing.
	First of all, what you're describing sounds idyllic in terms of a childhood, in terms of growing up.
	Radically different from my own childhood where we were brought up with fundamental fears like razor blades and apples and kidnappers and you couldn't go to night.
	Now, we might have had different types of parents.
	Now, the question is this.
	Is your recollection of this accurate or was life just totally different and much healthier for youth than it is today?
	And then to lead into the next question, my favorite National Lampoon cover, buy this magazine or we'll kill this dog, likely says more about me than the magazine and before Gruber's time.
	So question is, was your childhood actually fundamentally What I see on the streets?
	Yeah, I don't see kids on the streets anymore because they're helicopter parents who are scared that their kids are going to be kidnapped by Pizzagate.
	Kidnappers or something, and I don't see that out there, and especially with Xbox and TV and everything else.
	I don't see the games that we played.
	At one point this show, America's Street Games, I had pitched it as a show with LeVar Burton as a host.
	We almost got this thing made as a series for Nickelodeon, I think, in the mid-90s.
	I'm not sure what happened to that show, but it was about all the different street games that we all grew up with all over the country.
	It wasn't just New York.
	These street games were in Chicago.
	Like I said, they were in England.
	Ring Around the Rosie, Pocket Full Posey, Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down.
	Goes back to the epidemics of, you know, plague in England.
	That's where those come from.
	I mean, these games are centuries old.
	But idyllic, yeah, it definitely was.
	I mean, we were kind of like the Bowery Boys.
	You know, Leo Gorsi and the Bowery Boys.
	We would go over to the concrete handball court.
	In the schoolyard, take a can of lighter fluid, spray your name 90 feet with lighter fluid, and then set it on fire, David.
	You know, just to see your name in flames for 30 seconds.
	You know, we'd go over to the Graham Theater and take rocks and knock the giant red letters out of the marquee until you could spell your own name in your bedroom with the marquee letters from the theater.
	So, I mean, you know, there was some criminal activity.
	I had a friend named Peter Leitner.
	I told the first joke I ever heard in my life.
	We used to hang out in a place called Sid's Luncheonette on Plum First Street in Brooklyn.
	And we'd sit at the counter reading comic books, stealing the tips, and making Sid, who looked like Larry from The Three Stooges, rip his hair out.
	And he would constantly come over and say, you getting anything?
	You getting anything?
	Get out of here.
	Get out of here if you're not getting anything.
	So Peter Leitner, at the age of like nine, had the prescience of mind to say to an adult, would you shut up, Sid?
	I'm getting a headache.
	And that joke lasted for years.
	The fact that a kid said that to an adult was the funniest thing we'd ever heard in our lives.
	Now, Peter Leitner later would come up with a scheme to go down to Flatbush Avenue with a hacksaw.
	And saw off the parking meter heads of 50 parking meters, take him back to his bedroom, smash him open with a sledgehammer, and take us all back to Sid's Luncheonette and Plum Church in Brooklyn and buy us vanilla ice cream sodas.
	So you've got to give it up for Pete to lighten it wherever he is today.
	The funny thing is what you're describing is sort of like what I feel is my life was the transition of.
	You're describing what was common activity at the time.
	We did similar things when we were kids.
	We used to break things, set things on fire, use salt, peter, and sugar to make smoke bombs for Halloween.
	We did it in the era where it was bad, you'd get punished, but you wouldn't get arrested and criminalized for the rest of your adult life.
	Now you do these things, you get arrested and criminalized for the rest of your life.
	So we have the three generations of where society became unduly harsh on kids being kids.
	Okay, well, I mean, it's interesting.
	I love people in the chat are saying you can really tell a good story, but we need to get to your life, Mark, and to what you're doing, and your career.
	Let's start first with what led you to Bard?
	Oh, I got a scholarship to go to Bard.
	My parents wanted me to go to a state school, and I didn't want a part of going to Albany, which my brother eventually did, or one of these other state schools, and I wanted to meet freaky people.
	And I got a full scholarship.
	Just to answer your question, my father was a mechanic at Kennedy Airport, David.
	So I grew up at Kennedy Airport.
	I grew up on airplanes.
	My parents flew all around for free.
	We used to go to San Juan and places for free.
	But he was a blue-collar transit worker, a union guy, and we were a blue-collar family.
	Everything in our house was miniature because it came from a plane.
	We had miniature bottles of liquor, miniature pillows, miniature salt and pepper shakers.
	Everything in our house looked like an airplane.
	Now, did he meet any of the other people that worked at some of those airports?
	Well, some of the people that didn't necessarily work, but the folks that helped things fall off of trucks.
	Well, okay, so you're talking about the Lufthansa heist, obviously.
	I'll just say this.
	My father told me something very interesting.
	Many, many times the wheel well would open up as they were landing and somebody would jump out and run into the marsh or Jamaica Bay.
	Usually flights out of the Dominican or the Caribbean, they would get up in the wheel well.
	And if the flight did not go up very high, they were able to survive.
	If it went higher, they would freeze to death.
	And when the wheel came down, they would drop out onto the runway and they'd have to go out and get the body of the dead guy.
	Or if it was a low flying flight, they would survive.
	And when they came down, they would run off into the marsh and become a member of the Society of Queens.
	So that was a weird airport story.
	But we would have Christmas parties at the airport, and he would put me in the cockpit in a giant jumbo jet and have me open up the swing tail of a cargo plane by throwing a few toggle switches.
	And when you're 10 or 11, that's the greatest rush you could ever have, is to sit in a cockpit and open up the tail of a cargo plane.
	I don't know.
	But we flew a lot.
	We flew a lot because we flew for free.
	Now, what was life like at Bard?
	Because it had its reputation.
	Explain that, because what is Bard for those of us who don't know?
	Bard is like a pseudo-Ivy League school for the bad kids who couldn't get into Yale like Robert and have some sort of wealthy, super wealthy parents, but they're crazy.
	It's like a mental institution for Ivy League students, if that makes any sense.
	Walter Winchell called it the Little Red Whorehouse on the Hudson.
	Because not only was it communist, it was also a whorehouse on top of that.
	So when I got there, it's a small school.
	It's like 600 or 700 people.
	But right on the Hudson, about 100 miles up from New York, David.
	You know, so sometimes we'd go to Montreal, right on the same train line, by the way.
	So that place, when I got there, was three to one women.
	And I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.
	The first day I was there...
	I had sex with a woman named Crazy Alice Bernstein in a bubble bath in my dorm bathtub, which I had for some reason, in John Jacob Astor's Manor House, where I got a room and a guy showed up in a butler's costume, a butler's outfit, like out of Sunset Boulevard with a footlocker.
	And he said, where shall I put Master Turner's belongings?
	I didn't know I had a roommate.
	So I said, well, Master Turner's not coming in here.
	And I closed the door and had this.
	There was a room overlooking the Hudson River with a terrace and a barbecue in John Jacob Astor's manor house.
	It was crazy.
	So Crazy Alice Bernstein comes over and we have sex and a bubble bath, day one of school, day one.
	Now, I don't want to say she was crazy, but the reason she was called Crazy Alice Bernstein was because she would forget the English language for weeks at a time and simply talk baby talk.
	Do I ask the obvious question?
	Are we changing names?
	This is all fictional characters.
	I don't do that.
	I hope she's still good because I always loved Crazy Alice Bernstein.
	I think she would even admit that she was Crazy Alice Bernstein.
	You know, so what am I saying?
	Anyone who speaks or loses the English language and speaks baby talk for a week or two at a time, you know, there's not much you could say about them.
	Now, what led from Bard to the new school?
	And can you describe what the new school was?
	Okay, so I get kicked out of Bard for lewd behavior.
	The dean said I did too many lewds.
	So that was bad.
	He said if I would have kept my room as clean as I kept my pot, I would have kept my scholarship.
	So I came back.
	I went to 42nd Street, and I worked for a year at my uncle's coffee shop in the heart of the deuce.
	Saved up all the money for my scholarship.
	Saved it up.
	I asked my mother for some money and she said I have to buy a living room set.
	So that was out.
	So I had to work in this coffee shop, save up the full freight at the time.
	Go back.
	I paid the full freight for a year.
	And they said to get your scholarship back, you had to get four A's.
	So I got three A's and a B plus.
	And they said, sorry, tough luck.
	You should have gotten a fourth A. And I, you know, it was just ridiculous.
	They fucking ripped me off.
	So then I went to the new school in New York.
	Can you describe what the New School was?
	The New School for Social Research was an old New York institution that went back to the 30s where European teachers actually came over and taught courses to a lot of adults, actually, who were emigres from Europe during Hitler's time.
	A lot of professors who were fleeing Nazi Germany came over there and started teaching.
	And it was kind of a progressive intellectual bastion in the West Village of a graduate school.
	It was undergraduate and graduate.
	It was both.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So I was studying optical psychology for some reason in a master's program.
	There was a combined BA master's program.
	And you say, what is optical psychology?
	Now, David knows what it is, but I'll explain it to the audience.
	It involves like Mueller-Lyer illusions.
	Have you ever seen those where the line segments have arrows on the end and it says which line is longer and which is shorter?
	It involves the Max von Lucia color test, which is second to the Rorschach, but a distant second where you take eight primary colors and put them into a sequential order of preference.
	Optical psychology is a whole.
	Bizarre field.
	Why I was in it, I have no idea.
	But it was fascinating at the time.
	There was a guy who came up with a theory about putting numerical ratings on art.
	That was one professor I had.
	And he took us to the museum.
	We'd look at Rembrandts from like 30 feet away and still be able to take in the depth.
	His theory was, the greater the artist, the further you could go away from the actual painting and still take it in.
	And we went, really?
	So he would...
	Show us the system that he had.
	He came up with a numerical art rating.
	So that's how I ended up with the new school.
	So what led from there to National Lampoon?
	Oh, okay.
	So you have to wait for somebody to...
	Wait, I think he's muted over there.
	You're mute, Vivo.
	I'm an idiot.
	Explain what the National Lampoon is, because I only know National Lampoons from the National Lampoons vacation, Chevy Chase, and so on.
	Okay, so there's the Harvard Lampoon, and Matty Simmons, who invented Weight Watchers and the Diners Club card, and a guy named Len Mogul, bought the rights to make a national magazine out of the Harvard Lampoon.
	So the Harvard Lampoon is the college humor magazine of Harvard.
	So they take like Henry Beard, who was at Harvard, and Doug Kenney and a couple other guys, and they start the national version of the Harvard Lampoon.
	That's where it came from originally.
	So you're talking about 1970, 71 in there.
	They put out a national magazine.
	They get advertising.
	The Lampoon name, you know, is attached to the magazine with a national level.
	Years later, that would lead to those movies.
	All of the movies came from articles in the magazine, David.
	We were instructed from the beginning.
	They didn't have to instruct us.
	We kind of knew what we were doing.
	We were trying to come up with articles that would become the next vacations or European vacations.
	You know, like John Hughes was an editor before me.
	P.J. O 'Rourke was there right before me.
	Chris Miller was there right before me, who wrote Animal House.
	I mean, Chris Miller told me that it's really about Brown.
	And he said that in his fraternity, they were listening on the radio one night, and there was a high-speed pursuit on the radio, and the police were in pursuit of a guy who crashed into a tree, killed himself, and his brains were splattered on the tree.
	And it was like a block from the dorm.
	So Chris Miller got up with his glass mug of beer, went over to the site where the accident was, scraped the brains off the tree.
	Into the beer mug and brought it back to the dorm to show the fraternity members.
	And he said Universal didn't want that in the original script.
	And that was in the original Animal House script, by the way.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	What was that like?
	Well, one, what led to National Lampoon?
	And what was it like working there?
	What led to it for me?
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	So, yeah, I went to college with a guy whose father owned the magazine.
	You know, so we were all comedy guys anyway.
	You know, but you couldn't get a job there unless somebody was fired or died.
	So in one fell swoop, his father, who was Matty Simmons, fired PJ O 'Rourke and a bunch of guys.
	It was called the Saturday Night Massacre.
	And all these guys got fired in one night.
	And a lot of the reason was, this is a little in the weeds, but they had the buyout clause at any time to buy out their shares of the magazine.
	And they pulled the string one week on Maddie and said, we're invoking the clause of the buyout.
	This was in 1978 when it was at its peak.
	You know, after Animal House, the magazine was number one in the country.
	The advertising, we had the number one album.
	We had the recording studio.
	We had Bellucci in there.
	We had Chevy Chase who were making records.
	And there's a studio in the office.
	And everything was number one.
	So these guys, Beard et al, decided to cash in the chips at that time.
	Maddie and Lynn, the owners, were obligated to pay out in cash from the bank across the street and come back with the money.
	And they flipped out.
	They didn't want any part of this.
	But they did do it.
	And they did pay them out.
	And they left with suitcases full of cash that day.
	A couple of years later, PJ and these guys get fired.
	And there was an opening for me in 1985 to come in and kind of do what Kenny had done.
	Doug Kenny had done like the Vietnamese baby book.
	And my stuff was political and humorous, like I had shown you, the Klaus Barbie doll.
	I did mass murder or trading cards.
	I did stuff with the art department.
	That was my thing.
	I was able to come up with these visual things.
	Having been a comic book geek my whole life, I was able to work with the art department.
	Instead of writing long prose, which I really didn't have the skills for at that time, I was able to work with the art department to come up with Capitalist Hall of Fame plaques.
	Sexual Jeopardy, the home game, which Merv Griffin sued me over.
	We ended up in federal court with Merv Griffin suing me in National Lampoon for intellectual property theft.
	And to watch a guy in black robes reading your piece from Lampoon up on the bench and laughing was worth the price of admission because he threw it out under parody.
	And we went out the door laughing from that case.
	So I did a lot of visual stuff like that.
	The mass murderer baseball cards was a big deal because I did a lot of press at the time.
	Nobody had ever made these trading cards before, and I saw how the Associated Press was glorifying the amount of mass murders like they were baseball players, like they were Babe Ruth.
	You know what I mean?
	They were putting the numbers up and the...
	They're doing it today.
	It's the precursor to what we've grown accustomed to in terms of fear porn media.
	I guess at one point they learned because they learned that by celebrating these incidents, you basically created copycats.
	So they went off of that, but they went back to it.
	But yeah, this is just a precursor to what we live in today.
	Yeah, there was some article by the Associated Press where they listed them and it looked exactly like a baseball article.
	And they had their numbers ranked like it was Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays.
	And I just said, obviously, it was political satire, which is what I was doing.
	My whole niche was political satire.
	And I just thought these are baseball cards.
	So we took a photo of each mass murderer, put them on the front of the card, put their stats on the back, you know, with some cartoon on the back, just like a baseball card.
	And we did, you know, Harvey Glattman, the rope murderer.
	We did, you know, all the different mass murderers.
	Edward Gein, you know, from Wisconsin, I think.
	And it went crazy.
	The media went berserk over this, thought I was glorifying them.
	And mine was obviously a satire of the Associated Press, so I had to go on the radio and some press to explain that this was a political satire against the Associated Press at that time.
	I mean, that's kind of the point with, like, parody and satire that Lampoon did always really did well, which was just to expose the deep truth of something through parody and satire that morally horrified them.
	But what should have morally horrified them was the fact they were glorifying it in the first instance.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, we were trained to write.
	We had to practice.
	To write in certain styles.
	Like, if there was a Cosmo parody, you had to write like Cosmo.
	If there was a New York Times parody, you had to write like the New York Times.
	You had to work at this.
	You just didn't...
	It was so funny, because years later, this thing came out, which was...
	What's the thing with just the headlines that they have now?
	Not the Babylon.
	Babylon Bee and Onion.
	The Onion.
	And everybody's...
	We were just laughing, going, it's just a headline.
	There's no article.
	You could do this all day.
	What, are you kidding me?
	That's the article.
	So, go ahead.
	Do you remember there were things called wacky cards, and I don't know which predates what, but the wacky cards were making fun of, like, brands.
	Tide, they had Toad, and it was stickers, and they were just making fun of brands.
	I imagine those wacky cards post-date these serial killer cards, or do they predate it, or do you know?
	Well, there's the Garbage Pail Kids cards that before what you're talking about, that was after my thing.
	All of this comes after me.
	None of these before.
	I mean...
	I was the first one to do this thing.
	There was nothing before this.
	There were no cards at all.
	There were no cards there were.
	My grandmother worked for Topps in Brooklyn.
	She worked for Topps baseball cards.
	So I ruled the neighborhood because she brought home cases of Topps baseball cards every weekend as a secretary.
	And I was able to dominate.
	I did not know we were going to talk about this.
	I literally just pulled this out of the closet because I said maybe my Pavel Bure.
	Rookie card with his stupid rollerblades is worth something today.
	Sorry, I had to because it was just too...
	Anyway, I was so greedy with the cards that I would glue the heads together and glue the tails together.
	And when you flip them at the bottom of your pile, if you pulled out a tail card or a head card, you could take the pile by flipping the tail card.
	You know, if the last card up was tail, you had to match it.
	And I didn't need it.
	It was just pure greed.
	I'm going to go to hell.
	I'm going to go to baseball card hell.
	Because of that.
	But yeah, so I had a lot of baseball card influence as a kid, and I think that's where the mass murderer cards came from.
	Now, this is the interesting thing.
	Sometimes you go to Twitter, and you see certain handles who you don't know make edgy jokes, and they post a tweet, and you think it's sincere, authentic, but it's total parody, and sometimes the sarcasm translates badly over a tweet.
	This sounds like the exact same thing, like Mark Twain's history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
	You put out these cards.
	People actually take them seriously and think that some lunatic is glorifying and celebrating serial killers as opposed to commenting on the media.
	Right.
	Well, it's a compliment at first.
	You take it as a compliment that you dupe them.
	You really revel in the glory of having duped the media thinking it was that you love mass murder.
	But then you have to explain it so it's kind of a childish thing on their part.
	But at first, if it's taken like that, it's great.
	It's great.
	I don't mind that.
	Go ahead.
	That's the great gift of parody, to have it taken seriously.
	I mean, parody doesn't work if it's not serious.
	People are not confused about it.
	Like, you know, I put up a tweet the other day.
	I said a guy on death row asked for the Pfizer vaccine for his execution, and the execution was delayed.
	Now, obviously, it's just satire.
	Where'd you get this?
	This is a conspiracy.
	You can't write this.
	I mean, it's all lost in a totalitarian climate.
	I mean, there were no comedy clubs during the Third Reich, David.
	There was no Hitler's comedy cellar.
	There was a cellar, but it wasn't Hitler's comedy cellar.
	You know what I mean?
	The worst thing that goes is comedy, and you can ask Stephen Colbert about that.
	Well, now, I heard...
	This is interesting, because you talked about this with Eric, and I think it's phenomenally interesting.
	You talked about the Jets are in, you know, whatever, 1600s England, where you had...
	People laughing at the king through the jester.
	He would walk the line but not cross it.
	First of all, I don't know historically how often the jester got killed for crossing the line.
	It was a socially understood zeitgeist where the buffer between the people and the king was the jester.
	He was the buffer.
	If the king was a maniac, I guess he could kill it, but then the people would rise up.
	There'd be a lot of trouble.
	And obviously the jester had to walk a thin line, but so many of these cultures had it.
	You know, with the jester as the buffer between the king and the people, there must be something psychologically satisfying for both parties for that to be a thing, in my opinion.
	You know, even today, the first thing they took down were, you know, the comics were the first ones to go when this whole crazy thing started.
	First guys out of the shoot were the comics.
	You know what I mean?
	When you think about the Communist Chinese Party, very few top, you know, stand-ups come out of China today.
	Very few.
	Same with the Soviet Union and the rest of it.
	The comedy was just not something you could do.
	In part because of how true it is, what would you explain as to how totalitarian societies are incompatible or totalitarian culture?
	Look, if I'm the totalitarian society, I'm telling you the truth and the story.
	If there's another guy doing that, that's trouble.
	You know what I mean?
	If Robin Williams is doing it and the government is doing it, you may listen to Robin Williams.
	If Lenny Bruce is doing it, you're going to have to arrest Lenny Bruce because Lenny Bruce is going in and he's talking.
	I mean, it all kind of starts with Lenny and Mort Sahl and even Lord Buckley, who, if you want to talk about Bill Cosby, Bill Cosby stole Lord Buckley's act, which is a side story.
	I'm only thinking about Lord Buckley because of Cosby's release.
	When you look at what Lenny was up against and how they crucified him for going after the Catholic Church, the real crimes that Lenny was indicted for, as George Carlin told me many times, were crimes against the Catholic Church.
	He'd go into Philadelphia on an Ash Wednesday and there'd be a jury with 12 people with ashes on their forehead, which is not good if you're on trial in Philadelphia on Ash Wednesday.
	His crimes were crimes of blasphemy.
	Paul Krasner was an old friend of mine.
	Krasner was the link.
	For multi-generations, Krasner was the editor and founder of The Realist magazine, which was a forerunner to the national lampoon in many ways.
	Paul Krasner was a genius who bridged the 60s and the 50s, socially and politically.
	Krasner was friends with Lenny Bruce, and he was friends with Abbie Hoffman.
	You know, and he testified on acid at the Chicago 7 trial.
	I think he threw up on himself at one point, and he brought acid to the defendants within the trial as it was ongoing.
	Not in the Sorkin movie, by the way.
	Yeah, I mean, everything about the Chicago 7 trial is fascinating, but their ability to turn satire, to turn on a court, it's really unprecedented and unparalleled, but genius at multiple levels.
	The genius of Abby, and I wrote this screenplay about Abby Hoffman and Mark Rydell was attached to direct, and it's just a long story.
	It was on the front page of Variety.
	And it was being auctioned off for a huge price, and Robin was attached at one point, and various people were attached to play Abby.
	But the story that I discovered going up to Wellesley Island near the St. Lawrence River, where David was fishing and having his dog roll around in raccoon poo the other day, I discovered one of the most incredible stories of all time, that Abby was on the 10 most wanted list of the FBI.
	Well, you know, because of a drug deal in a hotel in New York.
	And he did do the drug deal.
	He did try to make money off that cocaine sale.
	And he then fled.
	He went underground.
	The weather underground wouldn't help him.
	They turned their backs on him.
	These wealthy kids, you know, corporate sons and daughters in the weather underground were not going to help Abbie Hoffman.
	He ends up at McGill University with a QLF, David, helping him in Montreal for a while underground.
	He's arrested in Montreal, and he eats his address book.
	He ends up in a jail in Montreal, somehow gets across the border back into New York State, just as they were faxing his wanted poster to the border guards at the Canadian border, just to weave you into this stuff.
	Abby settles on Wellesley Island, which is right across the way from you, up by in upstate New York, and he's hiding out.
	As Barry Freed.
	And he's been on the run for six or seven years from the FBI's on the 10 most wanted list of the FBI.
	He's hiding out there as Barry Freed.
	And somebody gives him a document that the Army Corps of Engineers is going to blow up the St. Lawrence River to widen it for cruise ships and destroy the ecological area surrounding the St. Lawrence River.
	And he's confronted with outing himself or letting this go.
	And he stays as Barry Freed.
	And takes on the Army Corps of Engineers and actually testifies before Moynihan's commission in Congress and is victorious in defeating the Army Corps of Engineers and destroying the St. Lawrence River as a man hunted by the FBI on the 10 most wanted list of the FBI as an alter ego named Barry Freed.
	Now that's an American hero story.
	That's different than this cock and bull.
	of Bernadine Dorn and Ayers and all these other wealthy kids running around with dynamite.
	I mean, Abby was the real thing.
	You know, one of the great Abby stories of all time, he invites the press into his bedroom on the Lower East Side, and he's got two girls and a guy, and they're naked, and they're having an orgy, and he's got a water gun filled with water, and he says it's sex fluid, and if he squirts it on us, it's just going to make you sexually uninhibited, and you'll go crazy.
	So he squirts it on the people in the bed, and they start.
	You know, ripping each other's clothes off as part of the theater act.
	And he says, should I squirt it on you to the press?
	And they start running away out of the apartment because he threatened to squirt them with the sex water.
	You know, I mean, that's genius.
	That's what we need today.
	That's what I was hoping that this guy, what's the guy's name with the horns on his head?
	Geez Louise.
	Baked Alaska.
	I was hoping.
	Oh no, Baked Alaska is a different guy.
	The guy with the horns on his head is from Arizona.
	He calls himself the Hugh Shaman or something like that.
	The point is, I was hoping that out of this entire debacle, some new Abbey would rise up out of the fucking ashes and lead us in a comical way through this totalitarian bullshit.
	Because when Abbey went to levitate the Pentagon during the March on Washington, He said, I am here to levitate the Pentagon.
	And the military went inside and called for an evacuation of the Pentagon.
	And the generals kept running out because Abbie said he was going to levitate the Pentagon and shake out the demons with a guy named Allen Ginsberg standing next to him chanting in some Buddhist chant.
	I mean, that's incredible political theater.
	That's what's missing today.
	And the left does not have that any longer.
	That's what Abbie brought to the table.
	Mark, I want to bring this up because this person is asking a question that might make me believe they know something I don't.
	Mark, can you talk about your undercover work?
	You did investigative journalism.
	Yeah, I've done a lot of undercover work.
	My hero is Hunter Thompson.
	What we called immersion journalism back in the day where you become...
	Like Hell's Angels, like you were talking about the other day, Bob.
	Immersion journalism was a type of gonzo journalism that was started with Thompson.
	And I, for instance, I wrote a huge series of articles for the LA Weekly where my whole beat was corrupt rehabs in LA.
	I would, you know, uncover these corrupt rehabs that were taking people's money, is what he's referring to.
	And I did a series of articles, eventually a book called Rehab Nation, which is on Amazon right now.
	Which you can purchase.
	It's called Rehab Nation Inside the Celebrity World of Rehabs.
	And on one occasion or two, maybe even three, I went in as a patient into the rehabs posing as a patient, which is a long tradition in American journalism.
	Now, the L.A. Times, on their editorial guidelines, will not accept undercover journalism.
	And I heard you guys talking to O 'Keefe about this two weeks ago.
	You know, the L.A. Times will not accept that type of journalism any longer.
	They changed their policy.
	So you cannot go undercover and do a story for mainstream media any longer, which I'm sure O 'Keefe is aware of.
	But in this one particular story, I went to the harshest rehab in L.A., a place called Impact.
	And it's got a lot of gang members.
	There's a lot of prisoners on parole.
	There's a lot of guys who are there right out of jail.
	If you violate the rules, they take you back to jail.
	You know, let me just put it that way.
	So you're in these bunk beds with these guys who just got out of prison, and I had to pose as a drug addict in there to learn this story of how it ran inside this place called Impact in Pasadena.
	Now, this is getting into something which might be touchy, but I'm going to ask the question anyhow.
	So you founded a rehab in California, but...
	Are you a recovering alcoholic?
	Are you recovering in rehab yourself from issues?
	No, no, no.
	I'm not talking about that, but I'm saying I was never in a rehab myself.
	This is strictly from a journalism point of view.
	Because we saw the corruption of the rehab industry, a group of my friends and I started a luxury rehab with the help of the Grammy Foundation here in L.A. There's a group called Musician's Assistance Program, MAP.
	And MAP helps addicts who are, you know, rock and roll and country stars get back on their feet.
	So we opened up a rehab just for that era.
	And it was a house, a mansion off of Canaan in Malibu.
	It was one of those little cul-de-sacs off of Canaan.
	And it was a house owned by Gary Felder, who was the guitar player for the Eagles.
	So he donated the house and we put in a recording studio and ran it for a year or two in Malibu to see what it was like.
	We ran it, you know, straight up to show that it could be done.
	You know, his wife came back from the Himalayas and kicked us out at one point.
	But, you know, it worked very well for a year or two.
	You know, Hunter Thompson was obsessed that the lead singer with the Eagles was an undercover fed.
	I don't know if you know that.
	He used to go off on it randomly at one of those bars he hung out at near Aspen.
	But it was during when Hunter was deep, deep, deep in immersive journalism of a different kind.
	Now, what led to the transition from National Lampoon to undercover reporting, investigative journalism?
	Okay, so I'm at National Lampoon.
	I get a call from MTV.
	MTV says, we want you to start a magazine for us.
	We'll give you any amount of money you want.
	I said, okay, sign me up.
	So I started MTV Magazine from scratch.
	It was the first complete desktop publication in the country.
	100% done on Macintosh.
	Had never been done before.
	Had the backing of MTV and Bertelsmann Music, BMG, the Germans.
	And we did the entire magazine desktop style.
	You know, printing it out on a Mac.
	Monthly magazine for MTV.
	It reflected the different shows that were on MTV.
	We had Yo!
	MTV raps, all the shows at that time that were on TV.
	We had a section in the magazine for each of them.
	So that magazine was huge.
	I mean, it lasted for a couple of years.
	And then Bertelsmann and MTV got into a fistfight of some sort over money.
	And we were like the bastard stepchild in between.
	But I hired all my freelance friends and became a god among men.
	Giving them all salaries and medical insurance and everything else.
	And it was a rock and roll magazine.
	But it was a different kind of rock and roll magazine because we had the MTV audience and we had a built-in name from MTV.
	And it lasted as long as it could until they fought about the money, you know, the two of them.
	Then I took the money.
	I went to film school at NYU.
	So I did that while I was at film school.
	I started to produce theater in New York.
	I discovered a kid named John Leguizamo who was in a cafe performing different characters.
	I got money from Chris Blackwell, who was the Jamaican owner of Island Records, and he gave me a quarter or half a million dollars to put it on Off-Broadway as a theater piece.
	So Island, Chris Blackwell gave me the money to do Mambo Mouth.
	Mambo Mouth was a huge hit.
	We won the Obie Award.
	Every star in New York showed up every night.
	John was killing it.
	He did about eight, nine characters that were radically different.
	On stage, one man for hours.
	Unbelievable performer.
	And it was just me and him putting on this thing every night.
	You know, we had the old Orpheum Theater, which was an old Yiddish theater in New York that was haunted by Yiddish ghosts.
	I swear to God, it smelled like chicken soup.
	There was flonking everywhere.
	You go into a room, there'd be a dead chicken.
	You thought it was smuggled over on the SS something or other.
	And anyway, so we put on this show every night.
	I sold it to HBO.
	We did it for HBO, which was a huge hit for HBO.
	And then I also then did Mo' Funny Black Comedy in America for HBO, which was the definitive history of African-American comedy as a documentary, an hour and a half for HBO, which they still run, I think, you know, in February every year or somewhere on HBO.
	So that was a huge, you know, show for me also after I did Mambo Mouth.
	I remember going up to, I used to go to the Montreal Comedy Festival every year, David, to look for talent.
	And I found a group called the Blue Man Group.
	Everyone, yeah, this was, I mean, everyone, if you don't know the Blue Man Group, you're too young or too old, I guess.
	So the Blue Man, I was, you know, looking around because I was, I had had such success with finding avant-garde talent that it was just easy for me to see it.
	I don't know.
	I was always able to see it.
	And I saw it in John and I saw it in other people that, you know, it was easy to pull off.
	And the Blue Man Group said the last place we ever want to be is TV.
	And I went, what?
	And they were opposed to television.
	I said, well, it's not television.
	It's HBO.
	You know, that lark.
	And they didn't want any part of television.
	And they ended up in Vegas, of all things.
	You know, quite successful.
	Don't get me wrong.
	I don't begrudge them.
	But every time I came over to their apartment, I lived on the Upper West Side for 20 years.
	They lived on...
	I think on West End Avenue or something.
	They would just laugh in my face that I was a psycho asking them to be on TV.
	And I was like, I never really got it.
	I never really got what they were going for, but I guess it was Vegas, which is what they wanted, and they got what they wanted.
	But anyway, so, you know, I went to film school.
	I started producing this stuff and I was going back and forth for years from New York at a place out here in place in New York.
	And I would just go back.
	They might have been.
	I got to tell you, you couldn't tell one blue man from the other.
	My recollection, we took a high school trip to New York in 1996.
	I saw Blue Man Group where we're talking about childhood stuff that would get you in bigger trouble today.
	I used to put gin in a little rubbing alcohol bottle and that was the way to smuggle it over the border.
	Was like the most revolutionary thing I'd ever seen.
	I was 16, 17, and it blew my mind.
	I don't know if this was young into their career, but I think it only existed in New York at the time, but maybe I just didn't know better.
	It was the most glorious thing I'd ever seen.
	It was a marvelous show.
	It ran for a long time.
	It really did.
	There was another one called Stomp that ran for a long time, also at the Orphium.
	Guys with Garbage Cans, just absolutely brilliant dance show.
	Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I was into in New York as a producer of theater.
	But then I went back to writing.
	When I came out here, I started writing my own scripts.
	I worked with a guy named Joe Vasquez who had written and directed a film called Hanging with the Homeboys, which won the Sundance Award.
	And John was in that.
	And I was part of this whole Latin crew in New York with Jellybean Benitez, who was having an affair with Madonna, and Joe Vasquez, who did Hanging with the Homeboys on Leguizamo.
	So I was an honorary Latino at this point.
	And so I came out here and I started working on different projects, some black, some Latin.
	You know, back then you could.
	I wrote a thing called Black to Africa.
	And they said, you can't write it.
	You're a white guy.
	And I said, you bought the treatment.
	What are you talking about?
	It was a Fox family.
	And they said, no, you got to find a black writer.
	So we're going around looking for black writers.
	And every guy we found was worse than the next.
	We finally found a guy.
	We gave him my money.
	He then smoked crack for 11 months, wrote us a letter saying the money's gone.
	I'm in rehab.
	Good luck.
	Thanks.
	And that was the end of Black to Africa.
	But anyway, so, you know, I was able to make some headway with a lot of different projects out here as a writer, as a screenwriter.
	And I learned how to do it by doing it.
	You know, it was the only way to really learn how to do it was to do it.
	And at the same time, I was an investigative reporter for the LA Weekly.
	There was a time where I was also the reporter, not reporter, I was editor.
	Of the Weekly World News, David.
	I was a guest editor for the Weekly World News, and I had to cover Bat Boy.
	I don't know if you're aware of Bat Boy in Canada.
	And Bat Boy, is that a comedian?
	I do think I recall seeing this on the National Enquirer once upon a time.
	Okay, so Bat Boy was the star of the Weekly World News, which was owned by the National Enquirer, of which I was editor for a brief period of time.
	In 2001 or something, I don't know, David Pecker brought me down there as an editor for a while, and it was right after the anthrax effect, which had killed the photo editor of National Enquirer, who had opened up an envelope in the photo building, which was next to my office, and was overcome by anthrax and died.
	So I said, oh, this is the kind of job I want, where people die, you know.
	So I become editor of the Weekly World News.
	And I thought, well, what can you do with this?
	You got Batboy?
	So I had Batboy hunting for Ben Laden in the caves of Bora Bora.
	What you did was you wove Batboy into contemporary news stories, right?
	So I had him hunting for Ben Laden, David, in Bora Bora, which I think was where he was originally hiding.
	You know, the craziest job I ever had.
	Everyone knew that this was not legitimate news.
	It's not true.
	People took it seriously.
	I'm sorry.
	People, I had a woman call up one day at my desk.
	I answered the phone and she said, I have a photo for you, a rare photo.
	And I said, what is it, ma 'am?
	Because they had really crazy people call up.
	And she said, it's a photo of Jesus in the clouds.
	So I said, we have hundreds of those.
	She said, no, this is different.
	She goes, this is Jesus with another guy.
	I said, what?
	She says, yeah.
	I go, what's the other guy?
	She goes, it's Jesus and Karl Marx in the clouds.
	I said, all right, send it over.
	So I bought it for $75.
	But this is amazing.
	Like, this is an era where you would have this, I forget, World Weekly News, whatever.
	Bat Boy escapes, like a boy that is the product of a human and a bat.
	You didn't need it to be censored.
	You didn't need it to come with, like, fact-check warnings.
	You just relied on people's good sense or bad sense as to who's going to believe it without the warnings.
	And now we're living in a world where the shunning the Bat Boy worldwide news, whatever it was, has now turned into shutting down stories which a year later turned out to be true.
	And nobody's seen this transition who hasn't lived through it.
	What ended up happening with the world?
	I forget what it is now.
	The news thing.
	Oh, I think like most analog situations, they went online for a while.
	And, you know, it's probably a website.
	But, I mean, my situation is I have one foot in the analog world and one foot in the digital world.
	For my generation, I've spanned both worlds.
	I mean, there's stuff for mine in Lampoon.
	It's never been digitized.
	There's plenty of stuff from MTV that's never been digitized or scanned.
	And I mean, I have, you know, all these copies, Steely Dance, never going back to my old school.
	I'll tell you that right now, according to Steely Dance.
	And that's where that comes from, by the way.
	He's right about that.
	But anyway, yeah, I mean, you couldn't get away with this today.
	Even David Pecker, when I was at the Weekly World News...
	He had a Quonset hut filled with attorneys.
	And every article you wrote, you had to take into that Quonset hut and have it vetted by that room of 50 fucking attorneys.
	Now, the bulk of them were really in there for the National Enquirer and their celebrity news.
	But we still, even as the Weekly World News, we had to walk it in there and get it vetted, David, by the team of lawyers for AMI.
	So, Pecker had a zero lawsuit tolerance policy.
	I remember him telling me this.
	Any lawsuit that comes, you're fired.
	But was it more litigious at the time or less litigious compared to 20 years later?
	No, I think there was a period of time in the 80s where it was super litigious.
	I think there was a period of time where it was just every day.
	I think a lot of that's disappeared now.
	I don't think anybody's suing the National Enquirer.
	I didn't even know the National Choir.
	I don't know if it still exists.
	I didn't know that it still exists.
	My mom used to buy it when we were growing up.
	I'll tell you one thing about National Lampoon.
	The only lawsuit we ever lost was the Volkswagen.
	If Ted Kennedy had driven a Volkswagen, he'd be president today.
	It was an upside down.
	A Volkswagen would have helped float.
	How did you lose that lawsuit?
	Was it on copyright infringement?
	It was copyright infringement.
	Volkswagen was with Gray, or I forget which agency, and they had the Volkswagen floating upside down.
	It was part of their marketing campaign.
	The Volkswagen floated.
	So, I don't know, we got lazy.
	So we took a similar, you know, mocked-up photo and said if Ted Kennedy had driven a Volkswagen, he'd be president today.
	Funny, but I think Volkswagen, the Germans, didn't find it so funny over in Deutschland.
	They also had another one during that time period that had Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader get together to do a critically important auto recall.
	All different variations of that humor, which was fantastic.
	The only apology we ever had to make was one of the early issues, like in 1970, when Mickey Mouse was skiing down a woman's tits.
	That was a cover, and that was just an apology to Disney.
	That wasn't a litigation situation.
	I mean, mine...
	With Sexual Jeopardy, the home game, which I eventually gave to Howard Stern, that went to federal court, and Merv Griffin was laughed out of the courtroom.
	So there was a number of these that were thrown out for parody.
	Now, what was it like working for LA Weekly?
	How did that come about?
	How did it come about?
	Oh, I know.
	My first assignment was to cover the Woodstock Festival.
	Because I think I was back east all the time.
	So I went up and covered it for the weekly as a rock festival.
	Because I had a lot of rock and roll bona fides having the MTV magazine.
	So I covered it as a music journalist.
	And then I had a show on VH1 called Rock and Roll Confidential, which is kind of the hush-hush of its time, Robert.
	And I covered murders of rock and roll people.
	The Curse of Sheryl Crow and the Murder of Brian Jones.
	And it was on VH1, the sister station, MTV.
	And it was kind of a detective's investigative music journalist show about bad things that happened to...
	What is The Curse of Sheryl Crow?
	Well, The Curse of Sheryl Crow is they had a group called the Tuesday Night Music Club, which was a bunch of studio musicians who hung out and jammed together in a house in Silver Lake.
	In a studio.
	And they had no intention.
	They all had their own record deals.
	It wasn't a commercial thing.
	It was just a jam.
	And she was just a background singer.
	And David Barewald was part of it.
	And a bunch of other studio musicians.
	So one night she stole the tapes.
	And she took them to a record label.
	And got herself a record deal.
	Based on these tapes that she absconded with.
	Then people started dying.
	She had a hit called Leaving Las Vegas.
	She went on Letterman to say it was a biographical story.
	The guy who wrote the novel was in the Hollywood Hills that night and blew his head off, watching her on Letterman, claiming that she was the genesis of leaving Las Vegas, which was later, he was played by Nicolas Cage in the movie.
	That guy blew his head off because of Sheryl Crow.
	Another guy died of autoerotic asphyxiation in his house in Silver Lake.
	Who was her ex-boyfriend?
	A bunch of these different dominoes started falling.
	Who was that guy?
	Can there be two stories?
	I remember David Carradine.
	That was the story.
	This was before Carradine.
	I forget the guy's name.
	What's that?
	It doesn't matter.
	The fact that there's more than one, I've always found out.
	There was a bunch of them.
	It became a thing.
	I don't know.
	Sometimes I do it when I'm lonely, but I'm careful.
	You know, I'm not like these guys.
	They're cowboys.
	They're cowboys.
	But anyway, so I did VH1 Confidential, and that was pretty nice.
	And then I started to get, you know, more and more into immersion gonzo journalism with the LA Weekly, where I would do entire issues myself.
	What is gonzo journalism for those who don't appreciate the term?
	It's the style of Hunter Thompson, where it's edgy and you put yourself into the story.
	It's a, what's called, what was originally called by Tom Wolfe and others, the new journalism.
	That's where it came from.
	It was not this old style journalism.
	You were part of the story.
	Let me just sum it up that way.
	Like what Vice, for those of us who are more familiar with Vice, what Vice does?
	Like they had their Slab City where somebody goes and lives in Slab City for a year.
	Yeah, that's where they got it from.
	Yeah, that's where they got it.
	That's what Hunter Thompson was famous for.
	And I was a sycophant of Thompson, so I did it too.
	I just did it with rehabs and other areas of society that I thought needed that type of journalism.
	I didn't do it with all of them, but my style was...
	There was no way to stop it.
	My style was sarcastic and satirical, so I was never good at being a straight journalist.
	It was always my point of view.
	So you've talked about this before, and I've been trying to figure it out.
	You talk about the corruption in the rehab industry.
	So flesh out what that corruption is for those of us who can't even possibly envision what the corruption could be in the rehab industry.
	All right, I'll tell you this.
	I was an expert witness in a federal case last year of two rehabs fighting each other to the death.
	One is called Passages, and the other was...
	Oh, Passages.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So Passages said they had the cure for addiction, and they marketed the cure for addiction for $87,000 a month.
	And there is no cure prediction.
	It's like a perpetual motion machine, David.
	$37,000 a month.
	Oh, yes.
	How many months does it take you to discover the cure?
	Is it one month or ten months?
	One month is never good enough.
	No, no.
	One month is not enough.
	Oddly enough, it takes two to three to get the cure.
	And he claimed some incredible 92% cure rate.
	The other guys didn't have the cure, so they were at a financial disadvantage.
	I remember contacting the FTC about this, the Federal Trade Commission, for the articles, and they told me that they are busy with their hands full with phony cancer cures.
	They don't have the time for phony addiction cures.
	I remember the guy telling me that on the phone.
	Not that he disagreed with me.
	He said, we just don't have the manpower to fight phony addiction treatment cures.
	I would go undercover in places like that, David, to find out what was really going on and to write articles about it from a gonzo point of view.
	That eventually led to the book, Rehab Nation, Inside the Secret World of Celebrity Rehabs, which you can get on Amazon.
	What would be the lead takeaway from your perspective as to why these rehabs are not what they claim to be?
	Just so you know...
	In 2006 or 2007, they passed Proposition 36 in California.
	Proposition 36 was treatment over jails, which morally was a good thing, but they unleashed everyone onto a society that didn't have enough rehabs, and they knew that.
	So the standards for a rehab intentionally were so low as to be a six-bed facility with a septic tank.
	In other words, a one-family home was designed intentionally to handle this massive overflow of people that were released for Proposition 36 in California.
	So a lot of the rehab sprung up at that time to take in this flow of business.
	Now, most of that was low-end.
	The people who were on the bottom of that were...
	But celebrities and wealthy people did not want to go to those rehabs with the great unwashed, Robert.
	So they created luxury rehabs.
	Originally, there was just promises.
	But all of a sudden, there was passages.
	All of a sudden, there were all these different luxury rehabs that would bring in five-star chefs, have unbelievable bedrooms, unbelievable, you know, horse therapy, art therapy, all this different thing, which David's grandmother would call bubomysis.
	And it was just a crock of shit, and they charged whatever they wanted for people who were willing to pay for it.
	So this guy, Chris Prentice, took it to the next level, saying he had the cure for addiction.
	Now, this goes all the way back to the 1930s, where there was a guy, there's a long history of this in American medical societies, of people saying they had the cure for addiction.
	This is a long history, and especially in California, especially in Southern California.
	So it's an unregulated industry, to answer your question.
	It was a simple license for having six beds and a septic tank.
	Now, I pulled up the Betty Ford Clinic, and I never even thought about this in terms of the history of that.
	I don't know if you have anything to say about the Betty Ford Clinic, but I guess one thing about these luxury clinics, first of all, Promises was the name of one, and Passages was the name of the other?
	He intentionally named it Passages, so it would have an A, and you'd hit it first before you saw Promises on the list.
	Intentionally, that's where this goes.
	When I was the expert witness in this case last year, the entire case was about these two dinosaurs, these two guys, who hate each other's guts, fighting over their advertising and denouncing each other.
	One guy bought a website and spent $50,000 a week denouncing the other guy on his website called The Fix, which became this addiction website, and it had reviews of rehabs.
	He bought the website simply to destroy the other guy by giving him one star.
	So the other guy, Prentice, was countersuing.
	There was slap involved here and blah, blah, blah.
	So he's countersuing, you know, saying this guy is trying to destroy my business, which was true.
	And I was an expert witness and waiting, you know, to go up.
	I didn't have to testify, but I was subpoenaed.
	I had to sit through this federal case last year of these two guys who've been fighting for 15 years, these two maniacs.
	Both of them were multi-millionaires, to answer your question.
	Both of them multi-millionaires.
	And now, am I wrong in thinking that at these luxury clinics, despite all the promises and passages into a new life, you still can procure whatever it is that you were addicted to in the first place, and that might be part of the problem of these luxury facilities?
	Listen, you know, Ivana Trump went in there, she brought a dog, she had a gigolo in there.
	I mean, you can do whatever you want for that money.
	It's like going to the Ritz-Carlton.
	You know what I mean?
	Yeah, I had a celebrity client who explained how you can get certain things in.
	Officially, you're not supposed to have those things present, but what it really is is a luxury vacation to dry out at a very expensive rate.
	I mean, one of those guys, not those two, but another facility, I asked him, how do you define success?
	He's talking about 90% success rate.
	He's like, they go to one AA meeting after they leave.
	I was like, well, okay.
	I was shocked at the time.
	This guy, he doesn't care at all about whether these people get cured.
	It was also used by publicists to hide out their clients who may have raped or killed or pillaged.
	That became a thing in the 90s to dump people in there while the courts were sorting out your case.
	That became a hiding place for different clients.
	May or may not have been addicted to something.
	I don't know.
	It's also a useful blackmail extortion ring.
	I mean, the way they handle...
	If you don't pay the bill, then they basically say, golly gee, we'll have to sue and disclose a lot of stuff.
	That'd be unfortunate.
	Right.
	There's also people who walk out and they don't give you your money back.
	Even though you signed the contract high as a kite on heroin, they still continue to hit your...
	There's been a number of these cases in the courts, Robert, about people trying to get refunds from rehabs they walked out on in two or three days.
	And the rehabs have been successful in fending off these attacks so far because they feel that if everybody walks out, they're never going to get paid.
	You know, because people just, I'll get clean in two days.
	I'll fuck you.
	I'm not paying you the 80 grand.
	You know, I understand that part too.
	Mid-tier and up, that they are not the cleanest, neatest set of actors, that's for sure.
	Right, but just to get back to your point, there's three levels, David, and Betty Ford is in the middle.
	Betty Ford is a non-profit establishment that comes from the Hazleton model.
	The Hazleton model came out of Minnesota in 1947 after the war.
	These guys came back from World War II.
	They went to Hazel's Den in Minnesota, and they started a rehab that became Hazleton.
	That's the Minnesota model.
	That involves 12 steps.
	That involves going to meetings.
	That's completely legit by today's standards.
	I'm not talking about that model.
	I'm talking about the new model called the Malibu model, which is now considered a separate model.
	There's also the lower working class models of places like Cry Help and Claire and here that are like $5,000 a month.
	Also totally legit, you know, for working class people.
	Those are completely legit.
	The upper model is where I specialize in, that Malibu model, which was, you know, run by Ghanus.
	And charlatans and people who are hustlers.
	That's what attracted me to it, you know, was those hustlers.
	So I dove in as a, you know, reporter.
	Now, speaking of corruption, how did you get into the stories of Oswald, the Kennedys, the different assassins, all of that kind of stuff?
	How did that come about initially?
	The Oswald thing, let me just backtrack.
	Well, the Abbey thing was one thing.
	And then I started to get into, of course, like many of us, I mean, I saw Oswald shot on TV live with my mother sitting next to me on the couch.
	I mean, I got sent home from school.
	We're playing punch ball, PS194, guy with a radio, the president's been shot.
	You know, I lived through that.
	So there was a natural affinity towards the subject matter.
	But there was a point in time where I just said, I am going to research the shit out of this thing.
	And I wrote.
	A ten-hour miniseries for Oliver Stone, and it was five two-hour scripts just about Oswald.
	His life growing up in New Orleans, growing up as a kid, you know, fighting against racial segregation, when he was on the trolley cars, you know, sitting with the black kids.
	I started from the beginning with Oswald, and Oliver loved it.
	And what became this ten-hour miniseries, Oliver had never done TV, so we had to go around, me and him, and pitch this thing.
	To HBO, Showtime, Netflix, Amazon, FX, all of these places.
	And that became the most incredible dog and pony show ever created.
	Because we would go in and Oliver would have like 10 agents.
	And then they would bring in 45 people from their corporation to hear this pitch.
	Not so much for the subject, but to see Oliver Stone.
	You know what I mean?
	And there was always a spook in the room, Robert.
	There was always one guy in that fucking room.
	Who did not belong.
	And Oliver and I would look at each other and go, who's that guy?
	Right?
	The guy they didn't introduce.
	And he would be the guy examining my documents.
	Because what Oliver did was, he would merely set me up and say, Mark's going to do this thing and he's going to explain it.
	Because you had to explain it verbally.
	And the pitch was over two hours long.
	The pitch that I had to do before these corporations was one to two hours.
	And Oliver just sat there.
	He didn't do the pitch.
	But they came to see it because of his name.
	You know, that's how we got it.
	By the time you're doing the pitch, what level of production are you into?
	What level of research?
	How much work has already gone into this particular, like, into the project itself?
	I did it, it took me a year and a half, two years to write the scripts, so they were all finished, and they were five two-hour scripts, so ten hours of a miniseries that I spec'd out on my own, and that got his attention, you know, and...
	I remember Shia LaBeouf read them all in one night in London in a hotel room, and he said, I'm your Oswald.
	And we had Shia LaBeouf, and we wanted Shia LaBeouf.
	We really did.
	And then he went crazy, and whatever happened to Shia happened.
	But the Dog and Pony show, that project led me to bond with Oliver on a bunch of other stuff, to answer your question.
	I was going to say, was that how you met?
	Yeah, our agents took this up.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, I didn't know him at all.
	It was just from the writing.
	He just said this was some of the best writing I've ever read in my life.
	And it's funny because I modeled my screenplays after his.
	I mean, he was my hero.
	For the person who doesn't understand how this works, you spent a year and a half now doing the research, drafting the script.
	You're sitting on something, and then you have to hope to have the connections to find someone to pitch it to in the hopes that they do something with it?
	Okay, so my agent...
	He had the scripts.
	He sent them to Oliver.
	Oliver read them.
	And then Oliver and I became partners.
	And then you have to go around and sell it.
	Now, this is not a movie, David.
	So it's a strange animal because it's a 10-hour miniseries.
	And Oliver's never done that.
	And either had I, you know, for that matter.
	So we had to go to these TV networks, which he had never done either.
	So he didn't know TV.
	I didn't know it.
	And we went HBO, Showtime, Netflix, all the different channels, one after another.
	And these rooms would be packed to see this freak show, you know, of Oliver Stone and me.
	It became like the cause celeb was to get into this room, you know, of people to listen to me for two hours talk about Oswald.
	And now what is the current status of it?
	Okay, the current status of it is this.
	We are doing a Mercury Theater production of it with celebrity readers, post-production, Foley, sound, scoring.
	With Thomas Jane's company, Thomas Jane was involved since the beginning of the project, by the way.
	He played General Edwin Walker.
	Thomas Jane was, his part in the movie was Edwin Walker.
	So Thomas Jane came to the pitch meetings with us also.
	And he is a big fan of Milius's, as I told you, by the way.
	But he, his company came up with the idea to do this as a podcast.
	And not just a podcast where you're reading the scripts.
	We're talking about fully produced with sound effects and visuals and celebrity acting.
	Like old school 1920s radio.
	Right.
	We want to make it like the Mercury Theater.
	We want to make it like Orson Welles.
	And it's high production value.
	We've got the company on board that's providing the facilities.
	I mean, Ben Foster has come on as Oswald.
	So we're going to go to Matthew McConaughey and Harrelson.
	All of Tom's friends are going to probably take a part in the reading, and we'll show them briefly on some background camera work of the reading, but what we want to do is mix it, have Foley, have Score, have some video put up of the events concurrently on YouTube that you're listening to as part of the screenplays, which is a brilliant idea.
	It's not my idea, it's their idea, and it's going to be 10 hours long, so it's going to be a massive, massive piece of work.
	In your research, what surprised you the most about What you found out?
	I think the family connection of Oswald to the intelligence organizations, he had the Murat family out of New Orleans.
	They were all also intelligence people.
	He had a first cousin, Marilyn Murat, who was the equivalent of a schoolteacher that went around the world who was intelligence.
	All of the Murats, which was his mother's sister's family out of New Orleans, were tied to intelligence out of New Orleans.
	That was probably the most beautiful.
	Especially back then, they liked to make, that was a family business.
	Yeah, no, no, absolutely.
	I didn't know, I mean, there were so many revelations.
	It would take me a long time to say how many revelations there were.
	I mean, the fact that he worshipped I Led Three Lives, the TV show and the book, how he wanted to be an undercover operative from the age of eight, you know, that he went to Minsk and he, when he left Minsk, he took his diary and taped it to his stomach.
	He went to a safe house in Rotterdam where he was debriefed.
	By two intelligence operatives from ONI.
	He was part of an ONI campaign to put 8 to 12 quote-unquote phony defectors behind the Iron Curtain.
	He went to Camp Perry to learn how to do that.
	He learned Russian at the Monterey Language School up in Monterey, California.
	Same place that Obama's mother learned Russian and Obama's father from Kenya learned Russian.
	So there are a lot of revelations as to...
	Oswald's involvement as an intelligence operative out of Minsk.
	He was basically a human intelligence gatherer.
	They had no other way.
	He went to Minsk.
	He found out the bus schedules.
	He found out how you buy stuff in department stores.
	All of the nuts and bolts of how to live behind the Iron Curtain in Minsk was what he wrote in his diary.
	And that was what was turned over in Rotterdam when he was debriefed coming back from Minsk.
	So he was a human intelligence operative at that point.
	And I assume, is the thesis of the story that he was the lone gunman?
	No, it's so funny.
	Yeah, it's kind of funny.
	I mean, you know, it's funny because Ruth Payne gets him the job.
	You want to talk about families?
	Ruth Payne gets kicked out of El Salvador in 1983 because the leftists, the American leftists who were there, out her as a CIA operative.
	They take her to the border of El Salvador and they kick her out in 83. And her husband, Michael Payne...
	Worked for Bell Helicopter.
	His family lineage goes back to Thomas Paine and the Declaration of Independence, the Paine family.
	Ruth Paine and Michael Paine have a son who directs a movie called Who Killed the Electric Car?
	You know, and it turns out that that Paine lives across the street from me right here, oddly enough, in Los Feliz.
	But yeah, the Asian family is part of it.
	You're right.
	In talking about sort of, you mentioned that, you know, the spooks in the room as you're trying to do this presentation at various locations.
	What led to your interest in what became the recruit, but was originally the farm, and we'll get into the whole lawsuits about that, and who, you know, made a cameo appearance of their own accord in that suit.
	What led to your interest in that in the first place?
	Well, I had researched Campiri because of Oswald.
	I'm sorry, David, you want to say something?
	What does spook in the room mean?
	Oh, they had an intelligence operative in the room when I was pitching the stuff.
	They had a guy looking at the documentation to see what was going on so he could report back.
	It was just cut and dry.
	He had no role in being there.
	You know, what do you do?
	Is that individual identified as such, or is he one of the people pretending to be?
	No, no, no.
	He's just a guy sitting there.
	He's not identified.
	This is Bob.
	You know, it really was stupid.
	Some of them had titles, but they were consultants.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, there are people that if you've been in enough rooms, you can recognize them.
	Yeah, they stand out.
	They're not like the douchebags from Beverly Hills.
	All of a sudden, the guy, he looks like a military guy.
	What's he doing in there?
	But to get back to the recruit, Camp Peary had interested me because of the training, and I stumbled onto the factoid that to graduate from Camp Peary, they had to go on a mock reel mission.
	And the mock real mission was very real, is the thing that I stumbled onto in my research.
	And the mission sometimes is in the town of Williamsburg, as I was talking to Eric Hundley about.
	And Eric was aware that certain things went on in the town of Williamsburg.
	But a lot of times they took them to Colorado and out of the state, Robert, and had them on the craziest, really weird missions.
	And that was the hook for me, plus the fact that there was a father-son.
	Teaching relationship between the mentor and the student.
	And I was intrigued by that relationship, which later became Al Pacino and Colin Farrell in the movie itself, The Recruit, which was The Farm before it was The Recruit.
	But when I wrote The Treatment, which was a long-ass treatment called The Farm, it was optioned by a company called Phase One.
	It was on the front page of Variety.
	There was a lot of hoopla about it at the time, 1996.
	And I started to write the script, and a guy from the company left.
	And apparently he took the project with him, and the company disappeared, right?
	So this guy took it.
	He went to a place called Spyglass, which was a Disney subsidiary.
	And all of a sudden, I guess the project must have taken off.
	I didn't know it was taking off, but I got a call one day from my agent.
	I'm in Greece.
	And he says, congratulations, they're making the farm.
	And I went, great.
	And so he calls them up and they said, we've never heard of him.
	How does he get involved in this?
	They don't know who I am.
	So my agent was, you know, William Morris, Pat Dollar, a legitimate guy.
	He says, they don't know you.
	And I go, well, what are we doing now?
	So we had to sue them.
	And we ended up in federal court.
	But the real beauty of the case, like I was telling you, was the deposition.
	And you two guys must love depositions.
	The deposition is like the one-man show of lawyering.
	It's where these guys really shine.
	I was in a deposition for this rehab case, and they almost went to blows.
	The lawyers were both Steptoe and Striss Marr.
	They almost started fighting in the room.
	I went, this is great.
	So in this deposition, I had a former DA of San Francisco as my attorney and a big...
	Miami criminal attorney is my attorney.
	Two guys.
	And they were deposing the supposed screenwriter of this project, a guy named Roger Towne, who is the not-so-successful brother of the legendary Robert Towne.
	So Roger Towne comes into the deposition at 9 a.m., reeking of alcohol, which is not a good thing in a deposition, I would imagine.
	And we start asking them questions about, you know, where'd you get this information?
	Where'd you get this?
	And they're working with a guy named Chase Brandon, who's at Langley in Virginia, who's the CIA Hollywood liaison.
	So they're giving us, in Discovery, they're giving us the faxes, the actual faxes, that he's sending to Langley and getting notes back from Chase Brandon.
	And it turns out that my lawyer looks at the headers and footers on the faxes, and it turns out they're going the other way.
	That Langley is writing the script and this guy is merely putting notes on the faxes and sending them back.
	He was a cutout.
	Exactly.
	He was a cutout.
	So they get up and they leave the room and they come back and the lawyer says we're invoking national security.
	And my lawyer cracks up in a civil case and goes, what?
	And they refused to continue with the deposition from that point.
	They must have called Langley and told him to come back with national security as an answer.
	And that long sort of history, like I tell people, Zero Dark Thirty, aside from maybe what the SEALs did, everything else about that film is fake.
	It was entirely the CIA re-scripting the Bin Laden story.
	Someone sent me the book that's behind me by Seymour Hearst, The Truth About the Bin Laden Death.
	Which is much closer to the true version in which none of the Zero Dark Thirty version is anywhere yet.
	The Killing of Ozama Bin Laden by Seymour Hersh.
	It was a gift from a local subscriber.
	I won't disclose his name because he might work in an interesting place.
	But the nature of it is...
	Almost all of Zero Dark Thirty, totally fake film, a CIA-crafted film.
	It was the beginning also of a little bit of wokesterism, because it's all women heroes, and that torture was critical, not it was utterly useless and counterproductive.
	Basically, it was a Pakistani whistleblower who blew the whistle on what was going on as part of another...
	Concern about the security of nuclear weapons in Pakistan.
	And what they were supposed to do was take him out of there and then find him in a cave in Afghanistan.
	Oh, right.
	That's right.
	I remember this.
	Yeah, but their ego was so high and Obama being Obama was scared Bob Gates was going to rat him out.
	Right.
	So he had him whacked on site.
	Right.
	And then they did that.
	Totally ludicrous CIA cover story, who the main guy helping to cover the CIA's illicit torture activities and their illicit spying activities on the Senate, of course, was none other than Mr. Durham, who has now gone missing.
	Durham's in Bora Bora with Bat Boy.
	Oh, yeah, correct.
	That was more credible than Zero Dark Thirty.
	The only scene of mine left in the recruit is the scene where...
	Colin Farrell is kidnapped by operatives and tortured in a room, and the wall opens up, and it's a classroom.
	And that's really, besides the overall project, which is mine, a totally intact scene.
	And ironically, this is the scene that the CIA protested the most to have removed from the movie, and the producers said, no, it's the best scene in the movie.
	We're not going to take it out.
	So it's still in there today as a complete scene that I wrote, which is the torture scene with the wall opening up.
	Now, in your overlapping work, I have a thesis that people who want to contest the institutional narrative, people who may have sourced information, or people that are just good analyzing the available information, that often you can find the deeper truth, kind of like what Hunter Thompson talked about, finding the truth in a grain of sand, that fiction is often the most factual thing that's out there.
	Whether you're talking about John LeCuray or you're talking about James Elroy or you're talking about others like that, that often you find that if, let's say, I had high-level secret information, maybe I talked to a Seymour Hersh, but more likely...
	Maybe I just have it leaked into some sort of film, television, someplace else.
	It's a way to get the idea out there without necessarily easy fingerprints coming back or upsetting and antagonizing too many people.
	I mean, people forget.
	I mean, all those E. Howard Hunt and the rest, those guys couldn't help themselves.
	They were writing fiction.
	Everybody wrote a novel.
	Exactly.
	Oh, Frank Sturgis and those boys.
	I mean, Sturgis is all over E. Howard.
	I mean, E. Howard Hunt basically confesses half of what they did because he wanted to take credit for it, like the producer in Wag the Dog.
	Get Nightwatch by David Atlee Phillips, the man who masterminded the physical assassination of JFK with William Harvey, the guy who dug the tunnels under the Berlin Wall and was kicked out of the White House by Bobby Kennedy.
	Which leads me now to my Bobby Kennedy project, which is RFK Must Die, which is my new script that I'm trying to have made about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and Sirhan's innocence in the matter.
	Sirhan's coming up for parole again in October, by the way.
	I'm doing a filmed interview this weekend with Paul Schrade, one of the surviving, the last living surviving member of the assassination at the Ambassador, Schrade.
	I spoke to him last night, still alive, 96, has his faculties.
	I'm going to bring over a film crew over the weekend and do a filmed interview of him.
	And Thomas Jane and I are working on this project to get the Robert Kennedy script made, which is called RFK Must Die, which is what Sirhan supposedly wrote repeatedly under hypnosis in his diary over and over and over again, RFK Must Die, which is called automatic writing, you know, in the hypnotic vernacular.
	My movie follows a guy that nobody knows about, Robert and David, named Baxter Ward, who was the number one anchorman in L.A. for many years on ABC News.
	Baxter Ward made more money than the national anchors at the time in 1969 and 1965 to 69. He was on ABC News.
	Baxter Ward, because of the assassination, begins to look into it and begins to have on TV specials, on TV.
	Analyzing the assassination, bringing the witnesses.
	He doesn't buy into it.
	He gets Noguchi, he gets the autopsy, and he says, something doesn't seem right here.
	And he begins to put it on ABC.
	He's kicked off of ABC, goes to KCAL 9, and at KCAL 9, because it was a lower-rated TV network, they were so low, they gave him editorial carte blanche.
	And he brings everyone onto the show.
	He puts together an investigative crew, not unlike the movie Spotlight, you know, up in Boston with the Boston Globe.
	Where they begin to investigate the Catholic Church.
	This is what Baxter Ward does as an investigator and a reporter.
	He brings in a group of people, and they divide up the assassination of RFK into slots that they all branch off and begin to investigate.
	And he discovers William Joseph Bryan Jr., who is the Jolly West of his day.
	And William Joseph Bryan Jr. is a guy who invented jury selection.
	He came up with this.
	He had a degree in psychiatry.
	He had a degree in law.
	He wrote the book, The Chosen Ones.
	He worked with F. Lee Bailey.
	He was a master hypnotist.
	He hypnotized Albert DeSalvo into saying he was the Boston Strangler, Robert.
	And we say to ourselves, why would Sirhan have anything to do with Albert DeSalvo?
	Well, in his diary, he writes repeatedly, die Albert, die DeSalvo, Albert DeSalvo, die.
	Writes it over and over and over again in his diary because he was hypnotized by William Joseph Bryan, the master hypnotist who worked with LAPD.
	And this guy was the guy who was the film consultant on a movie called The Manchurian Candidate.
	He deprogrammed Korean-American prisoners of war who came back from Korea after the war.
	He was the CIA deprogrammer.
	He was the master hypnotist.
	He taught F. Lee Bailey how to select a jury.
	He worked with the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans.
	He went down to help Clay Shaw with his jury selection.
	So anyway, so this guy, William Joseph Bryan, is on ABC radio the night of the assassination with a guy named Ray Bream, who was the biggest radio guy at the time on ABC radio here in L.A. And he says, whoever the assassin was, it was a post-hypnotic suggestion, and he'll never remember killing Kennedy.
	In real time, the night of the assassination of the ambassador.
	He says this.
	And later on, he ducks a bunch of questions.
	He later admits to various people that he programmed Sirhan, and he becomes the antagonist of my movie, RFK Must Die.
	And this guy backs the ward, just to tell you what this guy does.
	He quits the news business and runs for county supervisor of Los Angeles and wins and becomes a county supervisor, one of the five kings of Los Angeles.
	And he holds hearings, the first and only hearings ever in the RFK assassination, because he takes over the coroner committee, an obscure committee in L.A., where he brings in a guy named Thomas Noguchi to testify in open court in the hearings here in L.A. about the assassination.
	And Noguchi's autopsy demonstrates completely and conclusively that RFK was killed by a gun one inch behind the back of his ear or touching the back of his head.
	And 35 witnesses said Sirhan never got within three feet of it.
	Have you seen what Bobby Kennedy said earlier this year?
	Bobby Kennedy Jr.?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I'd like to see if we can hook up with him.
	And I'm going to talk to Paul Schrade about it.
	Because Bobby Kennedy Jr. brought his whole family over to Paul Schrade's house, and he had them listen to Paul Schrade explain in detail what happened the night their grandfather was killed.
	So Bobby and Paul Schrade are pretty close, and I'm going to talk to Paul Schrade this weekend about the film.
	Paul Schrade loves the script, by the way.
	What's the timeline on this in terms of getting to the final stage?
	We have to find a production company that's willing to throw down and make the movie.
	You know, Thomas Jane is attached.
	We've got a bunch of other people attached, but we need a production company to come in and make this into a film.
	I mean, Sirhan is up for parole in October, and now that Bobby Kennedy Jr. has come out and Cesar is dead, who actually killed his father, I mean, he got hip to this at a pretty late stage.
	I mean, I was way ahead of him.
	I've been researching this for a number of years.
	I mean, the killer is clearly the late Thane Eugene Caesar, who has a...
	Incredibly high clearance at Skunk Works over at Burbank as an intelligence operative, and he's working the first night at the hotel, and he leads Kennedy, you know, into the kitchen by the arm.
	And, you know, I mean, takes his gun, shoots him in the back of the head, tells LAPD he sold the gun four months before, but Baxter Ward and his investigative team find the retiree in Arkansas with the actual receipt.
	From Thane Eugene Caesar that he sold him the gun three months after the assassination, not three months before, as he told LAPD.
	And LAPD protected this guy for 35 years.
	He lived right out here in the Valley.
	So here's a question, potentially the production company is going to be asking this, but in today's day and age, with today's collective memory, is there not a risk that this is too far removed from any sort of current...
	You know, awareness that there's going to be a lack of interest because people will not have lived through this or be sufficiently familiar to know why this is so phenomenally interesting.
	Well, traditionally, that question is enveloped by star power in Hollywood.
	Nobody cares about all the president's men except when you put Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the movie.
	Now everybody's excited about all the president's men.
	I mean, the answer to your question is movie stars.
	Yeah, I mean, when they did...
	They did the movie, Bobby.
	I mean, I thought it had great potential, and it really, you know, they had the actors.
	They just didn't have the script to carry it, in my view.
	Right.
	That was Emilio Estevez's project.
	It's really like a day in the life of the Ambassador Hotel, right?
	Yes, it is, unfortunately.
	Which is now gone, disappeared.
	They tend to tear these guys down.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, the reality of it is that they, you know...
	We dug these two bullets out of the pane, the divider, where the last two bullets were taken out.
	And they thought they had this taken care of because the LAPD destroyed the doorframe.
	And they destroyed the ceiling panels.
	They destroyed everything, except for a guy named William Bailey.
	And William Bailey is important because William Bailey was there that night.
	And William Bailey was there working for an organization officially called the FBI.
	And he filed a report with the FBI.
	He was on the job.
	And he took photographs of the two bullet holes in the door, and he circled them, and he said bullet holes, and he examined them.
	And he is an expert witness in the case that Baxter Ward gets his documents and the photos from Bailey, almost like a deep throat figure in the case.
	So the FBI, in a lot of ways, stumbles onto the truth simply by doing their jobs.
	Now, do you have a hypothesis as to why he was killed?
	All my hypotheses, if you think about 63 and 68, there's three guys killed.
	Three guys are killed in the five-year period, which is MLK, RFK, and JFK in a five-year period.
	One man links all three.
	One man.
	Not an organization.
	Organizations don't kill people.
	Leaders of organizations kill people.
	And at that point, I believe the CIA was after Dulles.
	It was not a leadership-driven organization that could order this type of stuff.
	There's one man who could, and that man was LBJ.
	Every role leads to LBJ, Bob.
	The last three initialed individual.
	So did you do some research into LBJ?
	Oh, yeah.
	I've written a miniseries about LBJ also, so I'm shopping that one around.
	LBJ, just amazing revelations.
	I'll just tell you that both Bill Moyers and Dick Goodwin, They both come back and compare notes and their notes are exactly the same.
	Two separate psychiatrists said their employer, whoever he may be, was a megalomaniac, sex addict, alcoholic, bipolar madman, That they should get away from.
	So Dick Goodwin says to Moyers, I'm out of here.
	So he turns in his resignation to LBJ.
	LBJ calls him in his office and says, I'm sending you to Vietnam.
	And he goes, what?
	He says, I've got a teaching offer at Oberlin College.
	And he goes, you ain't going to Oberlin, son.
	You're going into the bush.
	And he gives him his draft notice in the office to Dick Goodwin.
	And Dick Goodwin says, well, I guess I'm not going to go to Vietnam.
	I'll be here on Monday morning working for you.
	And LBJ goes, damn straight you will be, son.
	I mean, you're talking about a guy drank two quarts of Cuddy Sark a night, took his cock out, ran around the White House, called a jumbo, went into the men's room in Congress, was fucking Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was a congresswoman from Hollywood, brazenly, brazenly in one of his five offices.
	LBJ, every road leads to LBJ.
	There is no other road.
	Well, let me ask the obvious question.
	I'm asking it for the benefit of everyone else who doesn't already know the answer.
	What would LBJ have had against MLK, JFK, and RFK?
	Okay, well, I mean, first of all, he said about RFK, he was going to cut his throat.
	He hated RFK.
	Their feud was legendary, David.
	That is pretty much common knowledge.
	With JFK, of course, he was going to drop them from the ticket.
	His job, along with Connolly, was to move the parade to Dallas, which they did.
	They kept browbeating JFK to come to Dallas in the fall back in April of 63. He was going to be dropped from the ticket, and his career was essentially over.
	When he first signs on, he tells JFK, he writes him a letter, said he's going to be co-president of the United States.
	And the Kennedy boys look at this with the age, and they're laughing their asses off.
	So they belittle him for four years.
	They send him on every foreign trip they could possibly think of.
	He's drinking, you know, Cuddy Sarkley.
	It's gone out of style.
	He's a mad dog.
	He knows his political career is over.
	And his last chance of becoming president was in Dallas on November 22nd.
	And I'll tell you something else.
	If it was unsuccessful in Dallas, the next stop on the parade was his ranch for a barbecue.
	And my sources tell me that...
	If he did survive Dallas, if something went wrong and he went to the barbecue, he was never leaving that ranch.
	And for MLK, I believe the same thing, that him and Hoover were best friends.
	And that was between the two of them, him and Hoover.
	The hatred of MLK by Hoover.
	I was going to say, the other thing, one of the darkest calls I've ever heard is the call from LBJ to Alan Dulles to come back.
	And the way he says, our beloved friend, talking about John F. Kennedy's assassination, is just one of the darkest, nasty, just the way he puts it, it has this very, it's so obviously...
	Cynical, sarcastic, but it goes beyond that.
	It's just a real close view of evil in its own way.
	He is pure evil.
	He really is pure evil.
	I have never seen anything quite like this.
	Everybody else is either a laymox, or they don't know what they're doing, or they're grifters, they're corrupt like Biden, or they're naive like Jimmy Carter.
	But this guy was absolutely, from day one, his own grandmother said, you're either going to end up in the penitentiary or the grave.
	This is his grandmother.
	I mean, this guy...
	The closest approximation that I have to LBJ, though he doesn't measure up to LBJ and to the severity of it, is Bill Clinton always reminded me a lot of LBJ.
	Similar backgrounds, similar styles, similar sociopathology that could go 25 different directions.
	I mean, there's not many people that can be a harasser, a rapist, an abuser, a charmer, to be an adulterer.
	That's a rare combination of traits, but Bill Clinton and LBJ were two of the few people who could...
	I'll just think.
	He refuses to send...
	This is LBJ regarding RFK.
	He's having brain surgery after being shot in the head.
	LBJ refuses to let him use Air Force One to fly the top Boston surgeon to LA.
	Okay, think about that.
	He then refuses to let him be buried at Arlington Cemetery, which he eventually had to relent because he was a Navy guy.
	I mean, the sheer anger that this guy had towards RFK was breathtaking.
	Breathtaking.
	And he said that he would cut his throat.
	For those who don't know, even though he left because RFK had not entered the race yet in 68 because of how badly he got hit in New Hampshire, the real reason he left is he couldn't stand getting humiliated by Bobby Kennedy, who he knew was now going to enter the race because of the weakness he showed in North Carolina.
	So he claimed Bobby Kennedy for him not being able to run for re-election in 68. Right.
	He had Hoover tailing him for two years.
	He got reports from Hoover just about Bobby Kennedy's movements for a number of years before the death.
	I mean, the fact that these two guys, in my story, Manny Pena, who was a captain of LAPD, and Hernandez, who was a sergeant.
	These are two Latinos who were farmed out by LAPD intelligence or the CIA.
	They were both used in Central and South America to interrogate and to torture down there.
	It was one of those guys that convinced the young Mexican-American woman who saw the woman in the polka dot dress leave.
	That's right.
	That's Hernandez, torturing Serrano.
	Yeah, so that tape still exists, not because of an accident.
	They believe that that is a scalp that they kept of flipping her.
	That's why that tape exists.
	That Serrano tape of him.
	There's a tape of a woman, David, who saw a girl in a polka dot dress leaving the RFK assassination at the ambassador saying, we killed him, we killed him, we killed the RFK.
	The woman in the polka dot dress had to be discredited.
	So they brought in Hernandez, Hank Hernandez.
	It was the master abuser of the lie detector machine.
	The lie detector was not used to detect lies.
	It was used as a form of interrogation abuse.
	And he broke down...
	And if you don't know, just look at where this guy was employed before and after he magically airdrops into L.A. Right.
	Yeah, he was loaned out to AID.
	He was loaned out to the CIA to go down to Central and South America to interrogate foreign leaders in those countries.
	And Manny Pena, who had the Monica Manny shoot'em up Pena, shot 11 men in the bank robbery division out in Simi Valley when he was an LAPD captain.
	He also was farmed out to the CIA.
	Both of these men are brought back to Special Unit Senator, which is the name of the investigation into the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.
	They were the guys who bottlenecked the top of the investigation.
	They're the ones who jammed up the investigation.
	They flipped witnesses.
	They interrogated witnesses.
	They intimidated witnesses until everybody shut the fuck up and they went with this one-man CIA non-story about Sirhan being a lone nut from Palestine.
	We might have to save some material for the next stream, Mark.
	I was told that we have to discuss one thing pertaining to UFOs, and I don't even know the question to ask.
	But we're running out of time, so we should get to this before we leave.
	And we've got to plug Eric Hundley's show, which is coming up next, unstructured on whatever channel that is, on whatever bad channel that is.
	I've got to do Eric's next week, so we're going to talk about the CIA and the relatives of people in the CIA next week on Hundley's show.
	So people can tune in to Hunley next Thursday to see me talking with him about more of the CIA stuff.
	But regarding the UFOs, in 1978, I was coming back from Kingston, New York, through a town called Jewett.
	I had an art center that I ran up in Woodstock after I got out of college.
	I ran a nonprofit art center, and we were coming back through Jewett, and there were these circular lights in a field that was about 75 to 150 feet in circumference.
	Just lights going around on the ground.
	And me and my girlfriend and another girl got out of the car, went down into the field to examine the lights.
	And when we were down there, a black car pulled up with three men in suits in back of her car up on the hill where we parked.
	And we were frozen in the field.
	We couldn't move.
	And we were talking to each other.
	We were not high.
	We were not on acid.
	We were just talking about being frozen.
	And eventually the car drove off with the men in it.
	This is a spooky thing because it's in the middle of nowhere, David, in upstate New York.
	Nowhere.
	There's no houses.
	There's no anything.
	It's just farmland.
	So we were spooked.
	I'm with two girls.
	You know, we're in our early 20s.
	You know, it was a freaky thing.
	So we look at the pulsating lights.
	We're down there for about a half an hour.
	We get unfrozen when the car drives away.
	We're speechless.
	You know, we were talking to each other when we were frozen in the field saying, are you frozen?
	And I don't mean cold frozen.
	I just meant like we couldn't walk.
	We were just standing there.
	And we get back to the car.
	We drive home.
	Cut to, I work at Lampoon.
	I meet a guy for lunch, having nothing to do with this.
	His name is John Keel.
	And Keel says, I tell him the same thing, and he says, where was it?
	And I said, in Jewett.
	And he goes, Jewett?
	He takes out a map, and he shows me all the sightings of UFOs going back to 1947 in Jewett and the surrounding areas.
	And he says, you were in ground zero for UFO sightings.
	I went, what?
	And this guy, John Keel, wrote the Mothman Prophecies, and he was one of the leading experts on UFOs in the world.
	And he simply explained to me that these were what they later became known as Men in Black, who were there to meet the craft, and unfortunately, we were in their way.
	So they just tried to wait us out, and we couldn't move, you know, so we just stayed there.
	And believe me, I was not a UFO person before this, and I had no conspiracy UFO ideas.
	I was not into UFOs.
	This is just my own anecdotal story, first-person account of what happened to me.
	Keel backed it up.
	He said, Jewett, since the end of World War II, has had more UFO sightings than any other region in the Northeast for whatever reason.
	And that's what happened.
	I've never told it publicly.
	I've never even talked about it.
	The only reason I'm bringing it up is because...
	He was talking about it with Barris because of the UFO report coming out.
	I've never talked about this.
	The only reason I'm talking about it is because of the UFO report and Elizondo.
	What's amazing is I've heard these stories over the many years and that the government has always been very dismissive.
	The media has been very dismissive.
	And then they come out with a report that says 143 out of 144 we can't explain.
	It happened and we can't explain.
	You guys could have said that about 50 years ago.
	You know, I mean, but so many of the people that have witnessed this are military people, people who would know the difference between, you know, a star.
	That was one of the excuses for the Minot Air Force Base, which, you know, has a weird connection to Son of Sam, but that's a whole nother story.
	But the, you know, those are 16 different, one incident, 16 different Air Force people saw it, and the Air Force told them, no, you were just seeing stars.
	They're like, that isn't what we saw.
	And it's also very common description.
	It's not like totally radically different, unidentified flying objects.
	They often look like the same thing and many people have a similar interaction with them.
	So, you know, who knows what the real truth is, but you can't.
	What the government basically admitted is that there was a truth that they'd been lying about for half a century.
	Right.
	You know, Annie Jacobson in a book on Area 51, the LA Times writer, talks to these military guys out at Area 51 in New Mexico and she...
	She said that the original two greys that were found in the Area 51 craft had their heads surgically altered.
	And in her story, they believe that they came from Russia as part of a Cold War disinformation deception to scare the shit out of the American people.
	Their heads, they were actually teenage Russian boys or Algerians or whatever that had some kind of surgery on their heads to make them look like they were aliens.
	And this is what they were covering up.
	And she also said...
	Well, they told her that Stalin was so enamored by the War of the Worlds duping of the American public that he laughed his ass off and said, we have to do something like this to the Americans.
	They're that fucking stupid.
	Well, it's interesting to think that everybody jumps on the UFO and immediately goes to these untenable type of very interstellar theories when there could be a lot more plausible explanations that are a lot less glorious.
	It's still kind of amazing on an international scale of war of disinformation.
	Yeah, no, she said, I mean, they told her in the book that the craft itself was dropped like an X-15 underneath a Soviet bomber that came over the Bering Strait and it glided all the way to New Mexico, like a thousand mile glide or 400 miles, however it landed, and had these two kids in there who had their head surgically altered, and this was...
	You know, a disinformation campaign by the Soviets, which is not that insane.
	If you think about it, it's not that crazy.
	You know, if War of the Worlds with Orson Welles causes the amount of insanity that we hope to cause with our radio broadcast with Oswald, anything's possible.
	All right.
	Now, with that said, I think, okay, we're two hours in.
	Mark, we're going to have to keep some stuff so that we have something to talk about, and we'll do this again.
	We didn't even get to the good stuff, you know.
	And it's better that way.
	Now the crowd knows who you are.
	We're going to be able to rewatch this.
	I see a lot of people saying, I've got to rewatch and take notes.
	I've got to rewatch and fully digest, and then probably go back and watch some more of your other interviews.
	But we'll do this again.
	This is phenomenal.
	So you're going to be on Hunley next week.
	Hunley is on YouTube.
	It's either Unstructured or Eric Hunley on YouTube.
	On Locals, it is...
	Robert, what is it on Locals?
	Oh, it's unstructured.locals.com, and I'll be at a live chat after the show at vivabarneslaw.locals.com.
	Mark, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes afterwards.
	Everyone in the chat, it was a lively chat, and yes, I was trying to keep a straight professional face reading some of the chat.
	That was a lively chat I saw going on there.
	Oh, cool.
	Thank you, everyone, for tuning in.
	And that was a knuckle fist.
	I mean, who could ask for that?
	Now, Mark, by the way, where can everyone find you?
	Oh, at Lord Buckley on Twitter.
	L-Y is that L-E-Y in respect to Lord Buckley.
	And then my name on Facebook and Instagram, at Lord Buckley on Instagram.
	Lord Buckley.
	Yes, Lord Buckley.
	Okay, everyone.
	Not Mark.
	Look him up.
	Will do.
	Okay, Robert, Mark, stick around for two seconds.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much, and we will see you soon.

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