Chris Knowles | The Spandex Files: Creative Magic, The Kirby Conduit, & Demon Dinosaur

00:00 Alright, dear listeners. It has been a while since I cut in before a show with some preliminary message but it feels a little important to say that we recorded this before the chaos in the Middle East started Well...I mean this latest round of chaos of course But Chris has been here so often covering so many different topics that if I didn't at least mention this fact, then I could see it seeming weird to some listeners that throughout the whole conversation it wouldn't be referenced. Given the nature of every single conversation on every news channel podcast and social media account this week

00:38 I'm sure there are some who consider it a blessing to be able to enjoy this conversational time capsule from the faraway time of 15 days ago. The flip side is that i've gotten a lot of messages regarding how I feel about this Gaza-Israel situation and even a few calls to cover it quickly, and to be honest I still have a couple of episodes from my pre-Roman's birth stockpile to roll out And I don't have anything scheduled regarding this conflict on the calendar at this point. But, we've been well-trained over the last decade by a ton of great guests to parse through propaganda and see that the big machine loves to present us with very dramatic and emotionally triggering thoughts and images to rally us into giving them the green light to increase the violence and fulfill agendas that think tanks have dreamt up a long time ago."

01:33 And as for Exhibit A on that point, I would say see if anyone talking about this conflict can go five minutes without some mention of dead babies. So resist that emotional manipulation and consider the larger context and think really hard before you take things you hear at face value much like Ukraine-Russia There are many different places you can start a long, complex story to frame it in the way that you want. But I will never support collateral damage of any kind or the idea that its okay for innocent people to die because their government or military or even neighbor did something violent yet the power players on the global chessboard have always seen us as pawns

02:22 and they work hard to find ways at corrupting us into devaluing some innocent lives over others. I think it's important not to let that happen, despite the fact that i've already seen many people i considered bright minds a week ago who did get COVID right and Ukraine right for some reason they got tripped up on this one But let it be known that I'm already against the next war. And if you wonder how I feel about some future bombing or invasion or whatever, it's most likely some similar version of what I am saying now. The ones who plan wars are very rarely the ones who suffer any consequences from them. But I've already gone on too long and have a feeling this situation won't be over quickly so I'm sure we will talk about it down the road

03:14 But for now, just enjoy a nice conversation about Chris's latest book. The history and cultural impact of comics the very real and also symbolic death of the superhero archetype And a lot of interesting points related to different generations what it takes to produce quality art and how 24-7 connectedness has impacted us With, of course as to be expected a lot of high strangeness slash paranormal slash occult slash conspiratorial icing on the cake. I've thought a lot about the points that came up in this one most of the days since but enough rambling commentary from me let's get into it. No need for arduous seeking all you have to do is follow the clues

04:09 You start to see this as a simulation, as a type of computerized AI manufactured reality. We are playing like putty into the hands of the manipulators who are just setting us at war with each other. Mr. Zom will surely have a plan. Could we maybe something without the X-Men?

05:07 The power of Christ compels you people from the Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood. And in a reality that seems to run on not only cycles but also symbols synchronicities and stories what better parallel for where we are in the life cycle of the American empire than Hollywood's latest round of bright flashy bland explosion stacked juvenile shallow superhero movies blowing through hundreds of millions of dollars to appeal to nobody and losing hundreds of millions more in a string of truly impressive failures, while pretending that everything is business as usual. The proprietors of both being in total denial regarding their grossly overused playbook and their inability to do much more than fail harder. And just to put a fine point on it reality granted us the fact that the one headlined by twin versions of a they pronoun using psychopathic groomer, The Flash has become the biggest of the box office bombs

06:03 You could almost say the collective unconscious has given up on subtlety in a desperate attempt to be acknowledged by the completely captured denizens of the distracted states of America. And if anyone has taught me to heed reality's warnings, deconstruct the dream logic, listen to Liz Frazier and recognize The Watcher-worshipping elite class' ritual attempts to steer the cosmic ship...it is the ever great Christopher Lorraine Knowles! One of a small handful of returning guests in the too many to count club, and I'm happy to be doing this dance again hot on the heels of his latest book The Spandex Files The Death Rebirth And Redeath Of Comic Book Heroes which punctuates his final farewell to comic books and superheroes both of which defined his career for a very long time.

06:50 As you probably know by now Chris's claim to fame was his first book tackling the underpinning archetypes of the superhero genre, Our Gods Wear Spandex The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes. And he has written several other great scents like The Secret History Of Rock and Roll, The Wild Ride Novel that is He Will Live Up In The Sky and the well crafted collection of Secret Sun Classics that is The Endless American Midnight He teaches the art and science of synchromistic sleuthing at the Secret Sun Institute for Advanced Synchromysticism via Patreon. And you can find his world revolving around the long running and info-rich secretsun.blogspot.com One of my favorite people on this island earth, The OCD Driven Dot Connector Professor Of Pattern Recognition and Superhero Era Obituary Writer Chris Myman Welcome back to THC Oh man it's so great to be back Greg

07:44 Yeah man it's always a pleasure congrats on the new book it's a great collection of pieces all the new you predicted this rise and superheroes from a pretty obscure counterculture to this phenomenon that basically swallowed up everything and as that ride is clearly over. Maybe the Hollywood right itself is over too. It's like hard to say but what would you say to kick off this? conversation regarding the end of the cultural arc of Superheroes and its significance overall given where we seem to be in the timeline well superheroes who kind of like the last unifying factor that American culture really had the last

08:24 water cooler topic that you could name, in this age of fragmentation and micro marketing and social media and all these little bubbles that people live in. Superhero is really the last place that people could sort of go oh yeah I saw that movie because everyone went to see these movies I don't know how many people know, but pretty much my entire adult life was spent working in these fields. And i had worked for Marvel starting in 1995 maybe and it just suddenly ran aground in 2020. It just stopped dead and the last thing I worked on was The Eternals which I was really excited about when they announced it but that was like

09:10 before we edged into this nightmare realm of identity politics destroying everything. And really that's what happened in many ways, I think that everything has its natural lifespan and everything is sort of born lives and dies. I think superheroes death is possibly a little premature and I think that identity politics has a lot to do with it because with the end of Marvel Phase 3 with Avengers Endgame They just decided to dive straight into the whole ESG DEI thing and the results have been disastrous. Unambiguously disastrous, and the thing is I don't know how many people realize this but superheroes are really keeping the lights on in Hollywood And what we're seeing now is that we're seeing a fin de secla you know? We're seeing the end of the Hollywood that certainly I grew up with

10:08 and probably most of you younger listeners might be familiar with, it's over. I think that last weekend was the lowest not as far as gross because the grosses are just don't even when people talk about the grosses they don't even listen to it It's all nonsense okay? It's all inflated They play a lot of games with these numbers and stuff but as far as people's butts in seats I think it was the fewest people that have gone into movies last weekend, and that would be the weekend of the 23rd. I don't know if it will be ever but pretty close to ever and we're kind of in terra incognita now as we speak The Writers Guild strike is over which was a second longest strike since 1988 what they studios did is they just took advantage you just flush everything especially all these kinds identity politics driven things that they had signed up for during the whole George Floyd ritual

11:06 So, superheroes were really the last great myth. But as I've written and I wrote in Endless American Midnight, myths aren't forever. There's this kind of like Joseph Campbell misapprehension that myths can just go on forever. Myths are very much tied to the cultures that spawn them and a culture that spawns superheroes—the American culture of the Cold War era World War II, Cold War 60s 70s 80s and so on that America doesn't exist anymore and it's never coming back. And it's the same way, the way the West... I mean a lot of people have made this comparison with the Westerns and how the Westerns just kind of died in the 70s mid-70s or so

11:52 And it's because that American culture was gone. You know, the frontier was gone. Everything was electrified you know the interstates had connected... There was no place to project your imagination out in the West so that's when science fiction took over I mean it seems to me that we always need a place sort of project our imaginations into and I think the superhero realm was the last place that we could do that collectively and without this is going to sound strange, but I think it's going to help hasten the social disintegration that we're seeing across the board. Yeah and there might even be an analogy there about connectivity and the loss of myths with the westerns versus the superhero movies because you mentioned the highways and the electric connectivity in a physical sense and now we have this digital connectivity that

12:48 You know plays a role as well, and you make a good point that comic books and superheroes were a niche counterculture for nerdy boys who felt a bit on the outside And then they tried to transmute that into a mainstream genre That started off well But eventually seemed to have disdain for its own core customer And I feel like that's been done with all the counter cultures that. I enjoyed growing up video Video games punk music and even conspiracy stuff Punk is just dead but gaming and conspiracy are completely different than they were 20 years ago completely mainstreamed

13:25 And I think there is a sort of angst and frustration that everything is co-opted. It doesn't feel like there are any true countercultures left for the not so popular kids to get into and get that kind of charge, that you or I might've gotten in tends be in isolation but a charge that makes you feel like you're part of something even if it's small, it's just gone now where does a counter culture youth go at this point? Well, countercultures are really reliant on geography. Countercultures are really reliant on people getting together and sort of finding these abandoned spots to sort of coalesce. There was a big movement back say 10-15 years ago where people were trying to gentrify places like Detroit. All these artists would try to move in and start these new counter cultures. It just couldn't deal with the reality, socioeconomic realities that

14:24 inhibited that. When I was in the hardcore scene in Boston, it was a bunch of kids who were all deeply alienated Gen Xers from messed up families and we sort of found each other and we'd find each other because people would put up these little like hand printed posters on telephone poles or on bulletin boards at record stores or something But what it offered is like, you know come here. Come to this BFW hall that we've rented out. You know there's a place called the Media Workshop which was like an old theater that was on like an eighth floor of like a crappy building in Boston that was converted into a punk rock place and then there was a place called The Gallery East that during the day was a Kung Fu studio And then...you know they're all these places that you go and get together It's very hard

15:18 to build a counterculture of any lasting power or even any kind of resonance without that physical proximity. And what people like Giuliani and particularly Bloomberg did, say in New York is they shut down all the clubs. They shut down all the big dance halls. They just shut everything down that had any kind of nightlife because they were all doing the bidding of the real estate brokers right? Because if you have a big dance club in your neighborhood it's gonna drive your property values down right? So everything sort of moved over to Brooklyn. Well I mean that was fine but Brooklyn

15:57 not Manhattan, it's not in the center. It's not in the hub and with any counterculture as soon as it gets successful I mean there are all these hustlers and schemers that are just gonna zoom in and try to appropriate it and capitalize on it. That has always happened, it always will, its inevitable, you can't be stopped so I don't think that you can avoid that process. What you need to do is just become more resourceful and clever about building something new." How is that going to be built? Where's it going to be build? I don't know, the problem today also as well is the kids are so beaten down young people today

16:44 It's so depressing to me, particularly as like Gen X latchkey kid running wild through the streets of Boston all night. Just completely out of control on tame semi-feral and kids are so controlled and so hemmed in they can't express themselves. And I think they're starting to go a little sideways with all this other stuff that's fed into them. Mm hmm. To kind of elaborate on that, and this even touches on that connectivity point You make a good point later in the book about generational differences and why there's not much deep magical art.

17:22 let's call it anymore, you write a generation that has been so aggressively socialized as the millennials seem absolutely terrified to make its own mark. They seem perfectly content to remain mere consumers and curators since producing something like Watchmen for example means you have to step away from the herd and break all the rules something very very few of them are willing to risk anymore And I think that is an excellent point. The great stuff is usually produced by people who are somewhat isolated, somewhat hermit-like at least during the period of creation and millennials and to even further extent Gen Z they just don't ever experience that separateness that seems to be part of that important recipe what do you think that might mean for the collective psyche of younger generations?

18:15 Nothing good. I mean, I remember back when my own kids were in daycare they were in a Montessori school and I would watch the way that they were socialized you know, I'd watch the way that there was sort of almost dare I say institutionalized from a very early age and what people now call millennials or they used to call them Gen Y that didn't really stick too long. I called it the Day Care Generation And these are kids who are in day care since they were infants they had more experience with a Montessori teacher or some daycare provider than they had with their own mother. And I saw that and I'm like, this is gonna change the culture. This is gonna change people's expectations. And I saw it ironically as like... It is hyper-socialization but I think that there's an agenda behind to sort of create this collectivist totalitarian mentality. And today

19:11 with a lot of these people called Zoomers, Gen Z'ers or something. They can't ever be alone. I don't even know how many of them you want to be alone but you know you can't be alone when you're reachable through TikTok and Instagram and all these social media things so that's why the bullying just becomes so much more on a crisis level because you can't escape it wherever you go I mean, there's no place to hide anymore. And that, I think is really important. You know, I've talked a lot about the mystery religions. We've talked a lot about the mysteries of Dionysus and Mithras and Isis. Now what did they do? They went to a place that nobody knew about right? A lot times it would be underground. Then go to certain times in the year when people had something sort of look forward too instead of prepare themselves for. What they had was a place to escape

20:02 And I think the appeal of superheroes post 9-11 was that it was offering that kind of escape. If you can't escape, you can't dream, you can't imagine and any kind of magic...I talk a lot about magic in the book in The Spanish Files. They talk a lot about the magic of creativity which to me is I think it's the crown of magic, you know what i mean? It's like being able to create things. You know Alan Moore might run around with his little staff and his snakes and his little wizard hat and his little pretensions in his cape and this wand and so on but it's like what he does on paper or what he does with all these ideas that he's put forward and these memes you know like the smiley face meme watchmen anonymous you know The Guy Fawkes mess...I mean all

20:52 like super, super powerful memes that all came from his imagination. That's a much more powerful form of magic than I don't know, hocus pocus or anything you know what i'm saying? To me the joy that you feel in creativity creating something that's something somebody else has not thought about, somebody else hasn't imagined, somebody else hasn't created. It's just like an incredible rush you get that just cannot be equaled by anything else and I think that here is another problem. So now we have this hyper socialization that I think is literally soul destroying. Not using this as hyperbole but I think there's agenda to destroy young people souls

21:38 to drain their spirits and to destroy their souls. I'm not using this metaphorically, but the other problem is that everything has been done! You know what i mean? When I was a kid there was like getting back to comics DC Marvel Charlton that nobody read Harvey Archie...I mean just like less than 10 comic book publishers out there now there are hundreds of them it's like everybody's feeding this everybody's trying suck a little bit more milk out of that tea and it runs out. Nothing is eternal, nothing is immortal that we can create that we can make. It all lives and dies. And that's why one the reasons I wanted to do this book why I thought was really important to do it now is that we are at the end of their process like I said its premature process because the introduction up the identity polis virus but without that I think the best metaphor that I could draw here

22:40 People who don't dream eventually go insane. Whether it's some sort of organic problems, chemical problem whatever there is kind of problem that interrupts with that REM cycle and not only the REM cycle but the deeper states, the delta waves sleep they eventually go insane you know they get sick easier and that's what I think is happening to us as a culture. That's the microcosm. The macrocosm is that we no longer have like real dreams We have like this fake simulacrum, all this garbage that we're just constantly bombarded with. There's no magical power to it. There's no real magical energy because what we have is that we have a lot of people who become writers, become artists, become this and that and the other thing not because they have something to say but because its something they just want to be

23:34 you know, they want what they think that lifestyle is. They want to have the accolades and all this kind of thing. They don't really have anything to say and I loathe to say this but in some ways iIdon't know what there is left to say. The artists that I'm interested in—you know, I've always talked about David Lynch and Penélope Cosmatos who did Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy—it's like in order to really break through, people are gonna have to just do things that are so new and so different and not be afraid to fail. You know what I'm saying? Like not be afraid to just have absolutely nobody pay attention to you. That's how it builds back up because we cannot mine these old stories anymore. We cannot mine these old gods. It's the same cycle that you saw

24:23 say, like in the 5th century Rome when all the old temples were abandoned. People just didn't believe in this stuff anymore they're just so sick of hearing these stories and that's what helped spread Christianity and later Islam because it was just new stories you know? Stories that people hadn't heard! That had been ingrained into their culture So I think that superheroes...and people like Disney chairman Bob Iger sort of mentions yeah we did too much Marvel's big mistake was taking the feeling that you're partaking in an event. Everybody wanted to go see Infinity War and Endgame because they wanted to be part of this event, it was like a Super Bowl or something when it's just... You have all these really stupid TV shows like Loki and Scarlet Vision and She-Hulk and all these kind of things. Just devaluing the currency, you're taking away that feeling of specialness, of novelty

25:22 And I think novelty, and I think it's sort of the operant word here. You know without that sense of novelty it just becomes a chore. It really seems to me that like being into superheroes in comic books these days when the magic is gone and again I'm not using magic as like symbolic. I mean like the real magic, the real energy, the real magical energy when that magic is gone it just becomes a job you know? You gotta...it's so taxing watch all these stupid shows I see all these movies that just get worse and worse every year. And one more thing, I know you're probably waiting for me to shut up- Oh good. Okay. But one thing I do want to add is that we've talked a lot about the loss of expertise. We're going to reach a crisis point within the next five years civilizationally, I think. One thing if you've noticed in a lot of sort

26:22 feedback and reviews and stuff, particularly you know your invention the flash. Everybody's like the special effects in this are terrible! People are like the special effects of The Ant-Man were terrible and we're hearing this more and more it's like why these effects so poor? Well the problem is that nobody wants to just slave away forever doing this work which is really hard work really time consuming and has really bad effects on your health mental or physical for the money that Disney or whomever are willing to pay. So we're at a very interesting point because people are still trying to pretend that it's all business as usual, but all the fundamentals point to a much different direction and my question and the things I want to address in this book is like how is that going to affect culture large? Yeah excellent points! And I just wanted to go back

27:19 You know what you were saying about isolation and the connectivity and the idea that there might be an agenda behind this kind of activity and where. The technology is taking us well magic paranormal experience entity encounters these things tend to happen in rural places in the middle of a night, and the quiet stillness of our bedrooms Like sure, some experiences in magic are group experiences but it's a small group who are all kind of honed in on trying to have this experience. And they basically removed a lot of the

27:59 Conditions from general culture i had this quote that i wasn't sure i was gonna even get to because we talked about mk ultra a whole lot in previous conversations but, this little paragraph from the book makes the point you say. One of the mistakes made in researching the MKUltra nexus is misunderstanding what the black magicians of projects like MKUltra were really after. Assuming that they were after simple mind control, whose techniques have been known for very long time is the first mistake. Television cults and public school system where an are already highly effective mind control techniques

28:39 You say, I think what they were really after and could never tell their paymasters in Congress were ways of weaponizing the subtle powers of the mind. I think this kind of mind control suppressing the potentials of the mind to step outside of the linear boundaries of time and space is the unspoken driving force behind much of our history in politics And we've talked about that in many shows, about the war on drugs. Like any psychedelic that can take you out of baseline consciousness they didn't want that! They wanted us locked into consumer culture and just obeying big daddy government so the idea there being an agenda behind this extreme connectivity well... This is speaking to that, mission accomplished It's really ultimately about control

29:30 So you know, you just mentioned they didn't want any psychedelic drugs or something that would change baseline consciousness. Well they did! You know? They were doing all these experiments Operation Midnight Climax the acid tests certainly a lot of these counter-cultural expressions that seem to have way too much money and way too much reach you know certainly avenues for that what they wanted to do was control it now what they're doing alarms me and we've probably talked about before is what I call MK Alpha 3.0 where they want to get people into these labs and shoot them up with ketamine or this super long-lasting DMT that they're talking about now, they want to be able to own the playing fields. Now see the great thing about comic books and why comic books sort of became the last stage of popular culture sort of you know the omega stage right

30:29 is that nobody was paying attention to it. Particularly when all this creative work was being done, 60's 70's 80's same period from 61 or 63 to 86 where all the ideas that you see making billions of dollars were really created in just that little 25 year time window I mean, comic books. And I talk about this in a book and it's like everyone was like...I had to go to the back of the store but it was great because nobody is paying attention to me you know? I could read every comic book that was on the stands and I'd be literally in the very very back corner, like the most obscure corner of the store that you can imagine. It was great cause I could just read everything but its' like you need that and also what I was talking about with Escape

31:17 But the great thing about comic books is that it was such a penny-ante business that nobody cared about. The only thing that DC or Marvel cared about were the trademarks and the IP, they didn't care about the comic books so people could just do whatever they want. So when people can just do whatever they want, that's when interesting things happen and you haven't been able to do whatever you wanted in Hollywood for I don't know almost 40 years now? You know what i'm saying? It's like you've got to follow these very strict formulas because there's so much money at stake! What chills the countercultures and these kind of expressions that you're talking about is when money, big money enters the equation. And like I said in Karl's books it was such a penny ante business it was just so obscure and just

32:05 ignored by everyone until really the first Batman movie and then all of a sudden Hollywood's like, oh wait a minute we can make real money here. But you know forget about it was just nothing and that's what was so great about it was almost like a perfect storm You know he had the infrastructure the newsstands and these publishers So they did have reach But it was like that was the junk, that was like the bottom drawer of what they did as corporations. So you had a tremendous amount of latitude and tremendous amount of creative freedom for artists and so on. And there were a lot of people who took advantage of it but without that... See this is what I'm talking about when I was trying to sort of allude to in some other chapters in the book

32:53 People came in when the money, you know, when the cash registers started jangling. Say like in 2008 with The Dark Knight and Iron Man a lot of people started coming in thinking that this worked like a regular business or this worked like a regular part of Hollywood it didn't follow the same rules they didn't understand the rules and then after Occupy Wall Street when the entire corporate megastructure just like in a blind panic and decided that they had to replace class consciousness with race consciousness, and so on. So you have like a few years...so it's 2011, say 2015. So these people are all freshmen in college when this agenda really kicks in. They graduate in 2015

33:40 And then they start going into comp, and it's interesting too because 2015 when all these people who were sort of the focus of this program started to graduate that's when everything just started to go wrong. That's when Marvel decided they had a race swap all their characters and everything had to be like some sort agenda-driven, feminist whatever. They couldn't just let the characters be the characters everything had to be changed everything had to be reworked you couldn't have characters wearing sexy clothing they all had to be wearing like these very dowdy kind of army navy store looking outfits so there was a definite agenda and if you look at the timeline you can really see cause and effect and the cause

34:27 and effect killed the goose that laid the golden egg. It just took another seven years for that process to complete, because this is how Hollywood works. I mean movies can be in development for 10 years sometimes even 20 years all your contracts and signs it just takes a long time so another four years after this plague this virus entered into popular culture from these cultural studies programs and then the process plays it back out up to 2019 when all the things are all under development and all the contracts and so on that was signed before that. And then we have Marvel phase 4, which is just an absolute disaster! Don't let anybody tell you differently because listen I know whether a movie, a Marvel movie was making money or not because

35:17 If it was making money, they would send me an email and say we need more work. The great example of this is the first Thor movie nobody expected that to be a hit and then it was a hit and then like I kept getting like all these requests to do new pieces and stuff for the movies and so on and never happened with Captain Marvel you know, a turtle's oh god and now it's just over. And actually I'll tell you this is a little inside baseball and your listeners might appreciate this but it's like The division that I worked for, you know that I freelanced for at Marvel was called Consumer Products. And they just shut that division entirely down and Disney absorbed it all so its like the division that I worked out for 25 years of my life doesn't even exist anymore! You know what I mean? Its like over half my life is just gone or almost half my life is just flushed down a toilet because that is the reality of corporate culture. Corporate culture

36:15 and corporate culture I think is inherently inimical to creativity of any kind. Yes, I agree. There's always been this idea that capitalism and everything like the free market and all these kinds of ideas that were big in the 80s with Reagan and stuff sort of spurred creativity along and so on. Maybe it did at that point but the worm has turned to such an extent that corporatism is not only antithetical to true creativity. I think it's deliberately destructive to it. Yeah, you could say it's arconic! You can. Clearly the magic is gone and let's talk a little bit more about the potent magic that was there and some of these properties. I like this part you write about Hellboy which also speaks to the larger point about art and magic where

37:12 If you held a shotgun to my head and demanded that I prove my theory that pop art based in magical themes has the power to become a form of magic itself, i would ever so gently point the gun barrel towards the floor amble over to my bookcase and pull out one of my Mike Magnolia Hellboy collections. Only the magnolia ones mind you no one has been able to reproduce his voice or equal the synergy they can only come when a single creator is riding all of the horses It's not that the Hellboy stories drawn by other artists aren't very good comics, it's just that they're not magic. And then you go on to say words and pictures funny the ancient Egyptians certainly seem to understand the power of that alchemical marriage didn't they? Well elaborate on this idea for us what are the ingredients of that recipe for art to become magic and why is Magnolia's Hellboy such a good example of it

38:06 Well, first of all he's a great artist and he's a great writer and he's a very diligent researcher. I would recommend anyone interested in the kind of things that we talk about to read his Hellboy stories and some of the BPRD collections which is sort of like a spin-off. His stories are He just dreams on paper and it has the logic of the dream, but it also has the presence of a dream. His art style is actually rather minimalist right? I mean he's very very solid draftsman almost with kind of like great master types of anatomy skills but his drawing style itself is very minimalist but you feel like you're walking through somebody else's dream and The Hellboy character is almost incidental to it. Like The Hellboy character...you know it's almost like that becomes you

38:58 Because a lot of his stories, it's about the power of quiet and how quiet and eerie can have a much more powerful effect than jump scares and gore and horror. And so on like that I mean you won't see any of that stuff in his comments But he somebody who understands The occult from a researcher's angle. Yeah, yeah, I don't believe that He's a practitioner of the occult But he understands the history, he understands the subtleties and the ambiguities of the occult and these orders like these occult orders and so on like the tool of society and so on. I mean, he understands the inner workings let's just say. So

39:43 That's a very strange and interesting combination. We have somebody who is very good at what they do, very talented has a lot of experience drawing just like dumb superhero stories but also has that interest in these deeper and darker and creepier and more eerie types of topics And like I said, he knows his history. I've learned so much about a lot of these weird obscure corners of the occult from his comics you know what i'm saying? So I don't even know if people even read that stuff anymore. That's the other problem and it's the alchemy of time too. That book came around at the right time and there was an audience sort of primed for it. It was never like a huge hit but it was a very solid hit

40:35 And unfortunately, the movies just missed the point entirely. I mean, I'm not a huge Gail Montatoro fan. I kind of take him or leave him. He did like Pan's Labyrinth and Crimson Peak and a lot of these other movies. Shape Of Water? Shape Of Water... Well it's interesting too because all these people assume him as Shape Of Water but that character in Shape Of Water is straight out of... There's a Hellboy character called Abe Sapien who is that exact character. Oh, that's interesting. Anyhow... You know the Hellboy movies were just awful! It's like somebody who just completely missed a point and I don't know if that would be the Hollywood financier saying no bigger or bigger louder more explosions you know more this more CGI like that whole period of like i'll say like the early to mid 20s 2000s you know 2002 2003 to about 2007 2008 when the cgi just was

41:35 I mean, I remember watching that movie Van Helsing. Did you ever see that movie Van Helsing? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I remember watching that and thinking like, I hate CGI. Yeah, it's true! You know this is just taking me exactly out of the way ... And there was somebody like The Constantine Movie which again comes from comics. The Star Wars prequels. The Star Wars prequels were just oh my God. Like a little kid playing with the controls on a TV set or something, you know? It's just awful. Yeah. But I always get in trouble when I say stuff like that because there are probably a lot of people out there that like that was their first Star Wars movie and that's their favorite one where it's the thing that really hooked them but I'll tell you something, Star Wars and I write about this in the book as well

42:21 So many of the ideas in Star Wars come straight from comic books, like the most unsubtle way. I mean George Lucas just took things wholesale and it's just like why does Star Wars not matter anymore? Why do these shows and these films just keep failing and failing because you could... Like I said, you can only squeeze so much blood from that stone and they've squeezed every last drop of it a long time ago right so i want to bring this up you write a lot about jack kirby and there is a point when we're talking about the flavors of the occult or magic where you compare jack kirbys kirbian magic verses crawley's magic

43:05 And you talk about the dangers of going over to Krolian magic, but what do you see as the difference? How would you compare and contrast those for people who don't really even know what Kirby in magic might entail. Well let's get into this Jack Kirby is a very interesting case okay so this is a guy grew up on the Lower East Side went to war not only went to war, but when they found out that he could draw they decided that he was going to go behind enemy lines and sketch out everything you saw. You just became like a reconnaissance guy which is like really dangerous job. He was sent home because he had gotten frostbite so bad that they thought they're gonna have to amputate his legs

43:51 Kind of like, I would say pretty well into the spectrum. Okay? So there are a lot of interesting recipes here and it was very successful in the comics in the 40s much less so in the 50's kind of got blacklisted from DC which was like the prestige house ended up at Marvel which that people started and ended their careers at Marvel, you know what I mean? It was like pretty much the bottom drawer of the industry at that point in time. Stan Lee had an office that was like eight... You know Marvel Comics for a long time was like an 8x10 office in the Empire State Building just like this little nobody, just fly-by-night has been company so Kirby ends up there because he had some business dealings that got him blacklisted from DC

44:48 incredibly productive, but at some point in the mid-60s almost literally overnight his work just went from being like kind of clunky but cool kind of stylish. But it was obvious that he was destroying too many pages a day to everything like overnight just everything being like cosmic and everything's like pulsating with energy and everything is like plasma and everything is cosmic, and everything is the gods. And space and ancient astronauts... I mean he was doing ancient astronaut stuff in the late 50s right? And I wrote about this in a book but about 30 years ago a friend of mine who was also a big Curvy fan said to me you know I think he dropped acid in the 60s. And I was like what! What are you crazy?!

45:42 And it's like, no. I mean look what happened! It's like practically overnight it just goes from running the milk comic book stuff to being completely psychedelic tripped out insanity and I was like...it took me a long time to sort of wrap my head around that. Like I think it took about 15 years even start to entertain that notion but here is the thing so this guy GI Bill VA hospitals right? I think a guy like him was probably pretty good candidate for having major PTSD, right? You're going behind the lines in wartime Europe. Incredibly stressful and incredibly dangerous. There were stories that...I don't know if they were Parkville but he was captured by the Nazis at one point with his crew, his little platoon and they had to sort of fight their way out of it

46:38 He's the kind of guy that you can imagine just showing up, like he was living on Long Island at the time. Just going to some VA hospital and saying oh doc I just can't get these thoughts out of my head. You know I had a really tough time during the war and they're like Jack don't worry about it take this put this under your tongue. A little piece of paper just put it under your tongue. Just lie down we could turn the lights off maybe put a little nice music on and just relax. And then all of sudden it's just like You know, it's like complete insanity. Like you've never seen him and he stuff is like Kirby stuff is like more psychedelic than the actual psychedelic artists in his stuff was more just naturally insane like that. And then he moves to LA and he's living next door to Frank Zappa people. He's hanging out with Frank Zappa they get together and they smoke cigarettes and shoot the ball

47:37 I really think that somewhere along the line, somebody just flipped him something or maybe a little bit more than just something. Maybe he was part of this whole experimental process because talk about a perfect candidate for it but he channeled it all onto the page right? If people aren't familiar with who we're talking about... This is the guy who co-created Captain America Iron Man Hulk Thor He's actually involved in an earlier iteration of Doctor Strange, he was involved in an earlier iteration of Spider-Man. So he was like either the creator or co-creator all these billion dollar characters that will basically keep their lights on at Hollywood for the past 20 years and he had a hand to it. And he also like I said before his ideas were just ransacked wholesale The Star Wars

48:34 And if you start to look, like I said and you can just see it. You can just go online and just see how one cover is kind of clunky but stylized superhero stuff. But then the next issue was like... So his form a magic that I would say is purely instinctual and whatever might have happened in him but there's a lot of trauma involved in there. We've talked about you know, when I sort of came to this realization about MKULTURE not being what they thought it was that the sort of trauma aspect was very much like shamanic initiation or whatever the terminology is supposed to use for that is now. Medicine man holy man whatever how they take these kids basically teenage boys and just

49:30 traumatize the hell out of them, break their brains so they can quote unquote cross into the other world. Well, you know, I mean Kirby had that happen to him because of his environment and his upbringing at a time that he is in this very violent and crowded and dirty and dangerous neighborhood on the Lower East Side and then he ends up going to war being volunteered for the most dangerous job you can imagine. So I think that all these things just sort of broke it open, you know? It broke open the skull and out of that it's like he became a conduit, a channel for all these lack-of-a better term gods. Yeah

50:19 He had this whole thing with the new gods and everything like that. I mean, he was obsessed with these ideas and like I said he had been doing ancient astronaut stories 10 years before Chariots of the Gods? I mean, he was way ahead of the curve but I think I'm more and more comfortable... It's only taken me 30 years to become comfortable with the idea that they were probably sitting him down at some VA hospital in Levittown or something dosing him up I'll tell you another story though. So this is back in the 90s, and I was on my couch and I have a sort of stack of Jack Kirby comics, The Eternals Comics which is this big ancient astronaut series, and I was watching this thing on The Discovery Channel, this way back in the day when they'd actually show interesting things, I think it was called like Entheogenic Ancient Astronauts or Entheogenic Aliens or something? And it talked about this whole process that these ayahuasca shaman

51:18 they'd dose up and if they were doing artwork, they start drawing like figures and then they start drawing all these little dots. And that all these little squiggles. If you're familiar with Kirby's artwork, dots and squiggle are a big part of it saying so just like I remember watching that and just being like I had this incredible epiphany. I'm like holy shit but like I said it took me a number years after that to not think that was some sort natural process in my mind which I don't believe anymore yeah well i like the use of the word conduit because you call jack kirby an astro nastic you mentioned that ancient astronaut theory is a theme and several of his works and

52:03 I wanted to bring up this more obscure one that you talk about, Devil Dinosaur and one of its arcs. It's another comic i'd never heard of. You say this story has ancient parallels in the teachings of the more esoteric Gnostic cults and it's basically a Gnostic Garden Of Eden story But can you break down this demon tree arc for people as a good case study and seeing the kind of seeding that Kirby did of this stuff from a pretty obscure place to putting it right in his art in a strange way? All right. So towards the end of his career at Marvel, they were asking him to sort of create ideas for like Saturday morning cartoons

52:47 And Devil Dinosaur was one of them. And Devil Dinosaur was like the stupidest thing, it was this little ape boy who's friends with this big red dinosaur and they run around you know whatever the chronology is where apes supposed to coexist with dinosaurs I don't know it was just that you know an excuse to sort of come up with this idea for a Saturday morning cartoon Well Kirby being Kirby, he did like a couple just random stories and then he did this arc with these aliens. Not only aliens but robotic aliens so like AI aliens come down to these saucers and they see these little proto-homidate ape people running around and they're like oh we're gonna mess around with them you know? So it's just like classic Zachariah Sitchin kind of AAT stuff

53:34 And, you know it's in this comic book that supposed to be meant for like young kids. Right? And then he had the storyline where the spaceship is destroyed right with all these robots and this fight with the dinosaurs and so on. And all that's kind of left is a slight motherboard almost like his fragment of the computer but it has like a voice chip and everything like that. speaks and so on, and they call it the Demon Tree. And the Demon Tree creates this dome and like captures these eight people in it right? It's like Adam and Eve you know but there are these other characters sort of random other eight people running around

54:20 And Moonboy, who is Devil Dinosaur's little buddy is sort of imprisoned there. And Devil Dinosaur sort of breaks them all out of this dome, this garden that they're all being imprisoned by the demon tree. So it's really just like straight up Gnostic retelling of Adam and Eve you know, it descended so it's like the whole descent of the archons and so on. This spaceship comes down and is destroyed but it leaves this remnant and the remnant is trying to carry out the work in control that course of biology and human development and so on... And they're liberated by the devil! You've heard Gnostic stories that, you know, The Serpent

55:08 who is never identified as Satan in the actual text itself, which is very interesting. But the serpent was the liberator so the Sethians and the Olphites these you know particular Gnostic cults had this belief system that the serpent wasn't the devil but it was actually Christ. The serpent was actually an incarnation of Christ who came to liberate Adam and Eve from their imprisonment by the Demiurge. Prior time when it had arms and legs much like a dinosaur so you got the moon child and snake dinosaur from the garden of eden running around another part that i liked was you say

56:10 We have this garden of Eden story according to a Gnostic interpretation with the Demiurge being the fragment of a broken alien computer and just like the Demiurge, The Demon Tree claims to be omnipotent and all-knowing and imprisons its subjects. Note that even the name Demon Tree isn't all that far removed from Demiurge nor is Moon Boy that far from Moon Child so all these things are right there! Well, you know Kirby's got a guy he was very well read and he loved stuff like Fate magazine. You know all the kind of stuff that I sort of loved when i was a kid in the 70s like UFO magazines just weird Mad Myth & Magic all that kind of stuff so I'm sure that he probably came across something about the Gnostics in his readings. I don't know if he came across the whole idea

57:04 you know, the serpent is liberator. Because as far as I know those stories were first circulated popularly or published widely when Elaine Pagels published The Gnostic Gospels and i think that was either in 77 or 78 so that would have been roughly contemporaneous So it could be that he read this book that was just released and decided to lift ideas for his own storylines on it The other problem though is that, as I write about it and unfortunately I couldn't get as deep as i've gone to in the blog so if you want to sort of get deep into the weeds with this stuff go to the blog but Curvey was kind of like he knew things that he shouldn't have known. Like he saw things coming that he shouldn't have seen coming like he did this comic book called Olmec in the 70's

57:57 that had like virtual reality goggles, I mean exactly as we know them today. Smart bombs guided by television you know all these kind of you know non-lethal sprays that these global peace agents would use sex robots i mean all these kind of things that became pretty well circulated almost 20 years after he did this comic 15-20 years after that. He was writing about in like the early 70s, but at the same time that he did this... Now this is something that I couldn't really do in the book because I kind of have to walk you through it with the PAILS and stuff and it would just get too crazy with like the images and stuff But at the same time he's doing this whole story about virtual reality everything. He has his character who is just basically Saddam Hussein

58:49 And he has this image of like this character who's Saddam Hussein, right? Being pulled out of this bunker kind of thing. And the image is uncannily similar to that image that circulated in the US Army pulling Saddam out of his own little underground lair and then he's charged with weapons mass destruction all those kinds of things but at the same time Kirby is sort uncannily anticipating the whole Gulf War thing. And this is even before Saddam Hussein came to power, Hussein didn't come to power until 79 nobody knew who this guy was right? and you know he certainly wouldn't have known if you're like drawing comic books all day in your basement The other thing too is that he did the storyline where like an alien comes down and is like stealing all these artifacts a lot of them are like artifacts from

59:43 like Iraq, you know? Like the Shedu. Those bullmen, those winged bullmen that they had at the Baghdad Museum. But this all takes place in the context of a war between... It's so plainly an apes thing but he had everything was anthropomorphic. So there are these apes who live in the desert So it's in like Iraq basically and then the Tigers come over from Washington DC, but it isn't like... It's the second war because the sun who was leading this whole tiger army from base in Washington, D.C., was basically avenging the slice to his father who had the first war. So it's like George Bush! It's like you're like what the hell? Damn... And it said- You know and the thing is that there's a lot of this stuff in Kirby I mean The most famous example and when I put in the book is like the face on Mars That he drew I think in like 57 or 58 and then it sat in a drawer

1:00:47 for like almost 10 years and then was published I think in the mid 60s. It's called The Face on Mars, and it doesn't look all you know i mean whatever discussion you might have on that that's a whole other issue but he was sort of anticipating that and at the same time he drew those stories he also did this story that was like The Monolith like the whole thing in Clavius and The Monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey now you can say well maybe Kubrick or Clark had seen the story. Well, the problem is that their movie was already well into production by the time this thing was even published it was drawn again in late 50's and published in the mid 60's so Kirby just had this awareness The Kirby Conduit Yeah he knew... He was like getting signals from somewhere because he also did a story around the same time he did those Face on Mars stories that was very much like Jack Parsons and Marjorie Cameron

1:01:47 That was like really weird too. And this is like years before the whole Parsons and L Ron Hubbard and all that stuff was even known, was even talked about so he had this weird sense, like this prophetic sense. The only problem was that I think it was pretty deep into the spectrum and I don't think you could really organize a lot of this coherently But, you know I'll just say the interesting thing when you talk about astrology is that his birthday was the day before Elizabeth Frazier's birth. Well before we run out of time, I wanted to at least fold in some of your Barbenheimer post because it is a real whopper and

1:02:33 I, too saw that the guy who wrote the book about Mattel many years ago had the last name Oppenheimer and it's like what? That is so weird. That's pretty eerie but the connections go a lot deeper in fact they go all the way back to 1945 actually right well The whole Barbie thing i was really kind of shocked because Barbie is a whore. Because Barbie, as we know it is an exact copy of what was called Bild Lili, this German doll that was based on a comic strip about a whore, about a prostitute and it sort of became like kind of like a sex toy. Like these little dolls were you'd take them out at parties because they were anatomically correct and so on

1:03:24 So this woman from Mattel goes on vacation to Europe and comes across one of these things, and she's like I'll market these whore dolls to children. As you do? Yeah as you do but it's all that post-war period that so many people have talked about with like all the bomb testing and the UFOs National Security Act and Roswell and all this kind of crazy stuff right But there's also Barbelow from Gnostic mythology, let's just say. When I dug into that stuff—the whole Barbarum stuff—I

1:04:08 you know, because it's sex and death isn't it? Right. It's Barbie with the big bazoongas back in her early incarnation based not even base but just an exact duplicate of exact copy of this doll based on this comic strip or prostitute. You know, it's so weird when you dig into some of these things that we think are wholesome and then you realize that they're not I mean just recently On Twitter, I had to school Linda Carter again which was painful for me because being of my age and time she was just a sex goddess to me. But Wonder Woman was created by like a really messed up guy who of course was a psychological warfare instructor for the army and he's very open about his bondage and masochism and all these kind

1:05:00 weird things which all that stuff I hate but when you look at those old Wonder Woman comics it's so creepy and uncomfortable. A lot of stuff with like kids and like babies and just like weird, this was one cartoon where like Wonder Woman becomes a little eight-year-old girl but she still coming on to Steve Trevor sexually and stuff Oh God, you know where this is coming from. You know what this is now we understand that back then we didn't understand that kind of thing and we understand it now We understand how just sick and weird all the shit is And I think that again It's the same thing with Barbie and so many things that we were told were wholesome and wonderful are not

1:05:49 And you wonder if because these things emerge from these places, emerge from these minds, these psyches, these souls. If some of that doesn't carry over into the culture at large and I would argue that it does. Just in my life, yeah, I can't believe how much the culture has changed Yeah, I'm not saying that. I'm outraged by all of it because I think that people were kind of too uptight anyways you know certainly when i was growing up certainly the older generations were very tight and they're also very unhappy and that's a thing that I think a lot of people sort of pine for this lost golden age don't understand like how unhappy people were yeah they had a job for life but they hated it you know what I mean

1:06:39 and watching all this like really inert, and bland, and boring shit on television when you came home from work. You know? It wasn't like we were...you know the serpent entered paradise and we all fell it's a lot more complicated than that but at the same time it's like we have to be aware of something like Wonder Woman. But all the superheroes in general, getting back to the spandex files... I didn't really go into this in the book because I didn't think it was an appropriate venue but there is so much pedo shit and old comic books you would not believe. It's Batman and Robin sleeping on the same bed together and stuff. And those kid sidekicks man forget about that shit is really sus

1:07:28 But, you know it was ingrained in the culture. We just didn't recognize that and I remember when I was doing something for the Frasier blogs and some reason I was thinking about Flipper. If you've ever gone back and watched Flipper from the 60's it is just basically Namble porn. It's really weird and sick and strange like little boys running around with You know, these little tiny bathing suits and this big phallic symbol looking dolphin. It's like the weirdest... There couldn't be any women or girls in the show? It had to just be a man running around with little boys who were in a state of undress all the time?"

1:08:06 Going back to Barbie and the sex doll thing again, nothing is as wholesome as it appears on the surface. But I brought up 1945 because the connections between Barbie and Oppenheimer they go a lot deeper than just that book of the guy who wrote the Mattel biopic but you mentioned that in 1945 That is when Mattel was created by harold mattson and the husband wife duo of elliot and ruth handler interesting name. And then also the not commodity library was found that year maybe resident or relevant may be not but also, the trinity test the first

1:08:48 dropping of the atomic bomb the first major test of such a thing was in nineteen forty five the same year mattel was founded and then all these years later. And two thousand twenty three it's like this big meme phenomenon, and maybe the last big box office weekend who knows it might have been like the last little pop from hollywood because i don't see any other movies on the horizon that seem interesting but also lily i mean very close to lily, that lily is the foundational archetype of barbie and then of course you played barby.

1:09:26 Margot Robbie and then what was margo robbie in basically around the same time a movie called Babylon about the debauchery of Hollywood. And the poster is her dancing in a red dress, the scarlet woman? Yeah. I mean again, Is this too precise for human hands? Is this some orchestrated meme generation some kind of subtextual magic it's hard to say but it's the dream logic bleeding over perhaps I think it's sorcery. I don't think a bunch of people got together and said, well let's have Barbie and Oppenheimer come out at the same time and we'll sort of orchestrate this whole thing. I don't know if that's the case sort of at this end of the cycle but certainly during the late 40s in that post-World War II early Cold War era there were sorcerers at work they were i mean you know The Splitting Of The Atom all these kind of tests...The Bikini

1:10:24 you had Operation Crossroads, right? Where you go to make deals with demons. And then what emerges concurrently is this French designer comes over with his very revealing bikini and Barbie, I mean you can't separate those two right? That was a huge part of her appeal so i think that a lot of things were sort of set in motion and maybe not on a coordinated or strategic fashion But I think, let's just face it. Let's just call it what is there were a lot of sorcerers who were feeding a lot of this stuff into the culture. I mean UFO thing shortly afterwards right? You know my feelings about Roswell that was just basically a giant sorceress working. I think there are a lot of these workings being done and they change the culture, they change the shape

1:11:20 in the arc of history and certainly popular culture, right? Over the next I guess that would be 75 years now. And now it's reaching its end. It's all playing itself out and of course the superheroes you got to put in them the middle there because they're all part of this right? The superheroes and Barbie Rock and roll, and the bomb, and ducking cover. I mean all this kind of stuff is influencing what had been the largest generation of new human beings that the earth had ever seen—the baby boomers generation right? 76 million kids were born you know when all this stuff was being seeded into the culture do you see them going with it? And now they're dying out... And now we're at the end of that whole cycle right

1:12:08 So, we're at what they call like an axial point in history when new things start to emerge. When old things die and new things start to emerge. And that's why I've been thinking a lot about younger people and younger men. Every young man sort of wants to make his mark whether they acknowledge it or not somewhere in the back of their mind they want to raise a family and so on. They want to basically plant seeds. You're part of this whole process, this human endeavor and you want to plant your flag, plant your seeds but I'm kind of the feeling that it's like we've got to do away ... There is just old bad energy like woke is a big part of it because people think woke is what they call the successor ideology

1:12:59 Woke is a rearguard action on behalf of the old, dying generation. It's their attempt to keep their legacy alive in some ways because as we know I mean, woke all comes from the CIA and from all these corporate think tanks and these foundations for it. Foundation in Rockefeller and MacArthur, I mean, all of these big rich old families. It's really them trying to manipulate the forces of history to their own advantage or what it ultimately boils down to is the rich using the poor to keep the climbers off the ladder

1:13:40 because that's really what it boils down to in the real world, in real time. So it is the end of the cycle so if I was a young man today I don't know if I'd try to plant seeds so much as I would trying like be part of the process we are clearing away all the deadwood you can't plant seeds and like a polluted and barren field and there needs to be renewal of all these natural energies that are part nature, which is entirely cyclical. So we're in a historical cycle and younger people today I don't envy them but I think that they would have much more pleasant and fulfilling lives if they understood their part in this grand theatrical production. Their part is to clear away the deadwood right? This old Burmese thinking

1:14:41 all this corporate nonsense, all these corporate ideas that have killed all these viable cultures. You know when you talk about how these countercultures are killed they're all killed by corporations ultimately. These rapacious corporations are always the agents of their destruction. This stuff all needs to be cleared away I don't know what shape or form that's going to take iIdon't know how long that's going to take it might take 10, 15, 20 years. I don't know that's not my part in the production i've sort of done my part and now it's up to people to realize that what is going on now with like the great reset and all this other stuff is basically a bunch of old men trying to have some semblance of their old science fiction fantasies come to fruition transhumanism ai robotics i mean all this stuff whatever

1:15:39 real world applications it has, it all eventually comes from science fiction. As well as these whole ideas of like 15 minute cities and renewable energy and all this kind of stuff. It seems to me that you have like Biden is 80, Nancy Pelosi's 82. Klaus Schwab... Kissinger is what? Almost 100. You know what I mean? It's like we have this gerontocracy of these old people who all were raised on this utopian ideal of global community and redemption through science and all these kinds of things that we now know were lies or at best myths but they're not going to let go of it

1:16:24 they want to take the rest of us down to hell with them. You know what I mean? Because you gotta understand how powerful, particularly in that post-war period, this whole myth of the great human community and the United Nations and better living through science and all these kind of things...you gotta understand that this was a religious epiphany for these people. This was their religion. This whole idea of rationalism even though simultaneously, most of them are Masonic sorcerers or Kabbalistic sorcerers or whatever. They know they're dying. They know their time has come and gone really and they're just hanging on past the due dates so it was like this last gasp thing with the central banking currencies

1:17:16 pretty much biological control through mRNA and all these kind of manipulations. It all comes from science fiction, which is steeped in the occult. A lot of the early science fiction comes from there and With terms like the great reset, it is almost like they're trying to hijack that process you described that is supposed to be for the younger generations of clearing out the deadwood. That's exactly what I'm saying! They're like no we're going to do this too. We made the mess and we're going to clean up and make the next mess. And its like your time is up actually. You may be in a position of power but you will not be here in 10 years so maybe just go retire to petto island

1:18:01 the next generation get to work? Hopefully not five years, but that's the whole thing what they've said about the boomers. They never want to let go of their reins and hand them off to someone else and the problem is they didn't do what previous generations have done and mentor and train people to take their place. Because they didn't want their place being taken. Yeah, now they're just the landlords for all the 30-somethings that can't afford the rent and there is no passing of the torch It's despicable! When I was a kid it's like you turn 65 when you retire. You know? Period.

1:18:40 Trump is what, 74? You know it's like these people are just sticking around way past their sell-by date. And it's just weighing everything down and I just read this statistic today about just the phenomenal rise in over 65s. Now here's the thing, I mean I think that because of the camera and television we became a very ageist society. It used to be that older people were sort recognized for their wisdom and their experience, right? And the baby boomers are like no 70 is the new 40. It's like they can never let go of them being the new kids on a block, the young upstarts, the young turks so we are just weighed down as a culture, as a society, as a planet by this old dead useless energy

1:19:36 and it has to be cleared away. And this is what I talk about in the final chapter of The Spandex Files, it's time to put these toys away okay? It's time for us to grow up and have adult conversations and tell each other stories about being adults and being responsible not these childish fantasies that you know have dominated the culture for the past 20 years at least You know, a lot of it comes from my generation. So we were latchkey kids and we were neglected you know I mean the whole nine yards...I got the whole trip right? I got one from every column right and when you're a kid you're talking about the TV was your best friend and its like when we were kids its like this is all we had. And you sort of cling to that and don't want to let go of it and that has just stopped

1:20:32 people have to stop going all these stupid movies because they're all the same and they're just getting worse. Well, the numbers seem to suggest they are stopping I hope so but we need to get back into like more sophisticated more mature kinds of stories and ideas and thoughts and concepts you know because we've allowed... The term i use in the book is that real life super villains used to superheroes to take over the world And I think that's kind of true. You know, it's like millennials particularly were infantilized up until their late 30s and 40s. The oldest millennials are now in the early 40s right? They were immersed in this Harry Potter and Twilight and Marvel superheroes and all this kinda stuff. It was just like eating nothing but dessert for your entire diet. It's the same exact

1:21:32 They go to Disneyland and they don't have any kids. Yes! Listen, I don't like General Buller bashing because we're all hostage to our circumstances of time and place But, you know as a Gen Xer believe me we're the ones who got the brunt of it because the boomers hated us and let us know every day how much they hated us and like saw our asses direct competition. We've been written out of history now with entire generation people have been written out...we don't even exist anymore like literally its almost become a meme like how we'd be written out of history

1:22:12 But a lot of that was the bummers. That's like, we were the kid brothers... A lot of us were kid brothers or bummers and it's just like, we're just seen as snot-nosed punks who could never do anything right. And unfortunately all these accidents of history I think conspired against certainly millennials. I don't bash millennials in the same way other people though. I know like the whole hipster thing was so toxic and horrific which has destroyed a lot valuable ideas and concepts in our culture. But you're a millennial, I mean you grew up in like the glory days of human culture. I mean 90s it's like consumer culture was ever a time when people were richer and more comfortable but the problem is that this little fluke of history that we all enjoyed for 10 or so years

1:23:06 was not part of the permanent human condition. And I think a lot of people raised in that environment and during those times, expected to be. Yeah, I think that's true and the 90s do feel special you know the decade right before 9-11 took us into Patriot Act surveillance state territory and an endless war and then the internet hijacked creativity and connectivity destroyed the value of isolation to bring it full circle and yeah that's the situation we're in now but What are you going to do about it? Well, what you're going to do is realize your part. Understand who you are and realize that you're a part of something bigger than yourself okay. You're part of a bigger game. You know you're a player on a bigger field it's not all about you

1:24:02 It's not all about what you want or what you need. It's also about your part to play in this process. Yeah, I hope a lot of people listening feel inspired by that. I certainly do. I get renewed by our conversations because I start thinking about my own role in this and the trajectory of what I want to do with this platform that I built and I agree it's important to have more mature conversations The joke is that people don't stick around for a two hour conversation anymore, especially without video. In this age and it's like well maybe that's the barrier of entry that is necessary to create some kind of digital counterculture that isn't really absorbed by the big machine and maybe there's value in that and hopefully other people realize it." I think it's happening. I think people are doing it we just don't know about it

1:24:58 But I think regaining our attention spans, it's a good first step to take. Like today I was just thinking about like why do I have my phone next to my bed? Because it's too much of a temptation and just oh let me just look this up or check my email and then all the sudden you're looking at completely irrelevant sports statistics. It's like because the algorithms are very good catching where your mind is going to wander to. Amen! So, you know just I guess in closing my career kind of started with Our Gods Were Spandex right? And now that part a bit putting an end too. I think it's good to say goodbye to things It's good to let things go. I think it's the healthy part of your development not only emotionally but spiritually

1:25:55 I'm not clinging to old forms, you know. Not clinging to old fantasies no matter how powerful or how comforting they were because the security blanket just becomes a noose as far as i'm concerned well said wise words and I could do it all day but speaking of adult things I do hear the family piling in the front door they give me the two hours of silence you know that's what I get Then I got to go do the adult thing, but you are one of the greats. It's always a pleasure. I can't thank you enough for all the previous interviews and the time you've given me and the audience here and your work is great. I really enjoyed the latest book as much as the previous entries. And is there anything else we should leave the people with maybe what you got in the works at the old Institute? Well, I'm glad you mentioned that

1:26:46 A little bird told me that somebody might be working on a handbook, sort of how to synchronicize your own life. Wow! Just going to put that out there I've been spending a lot of time thinking about like why do i do what I'm doing and what purpose does it serve? And like I'm starting to have some good solid answers that I feel are driving the next phase of the work that I do It's exciting and I've been talking about it at the Patreon, and a lot of people are excited about it. So that's the path that I want to take. Yeah! I really think there is some kind of subtle zen-ness to you now

1:27:32 compared to maybe previous times we've spoken and it's great to see you seem quite happy in your role at this point. Thank you, thank you. Yeah well keep fighting the good fight always a pleasure and take care! Thank You Greg Yes, the return of the always entertaining Christopher Laurie Knowles. Hot on the heels of a great new book! My hard copy just arrived yesterday thank you Chris and I really did have pretty lengthy sections of my outline regarding his breakdown of the symbolism of Dark City and The Fifth Element And even a comic called Night Force which i hadn't heard about but Chris made me want to read it

1:33:33 But comics are very high on that list. I hope that even if you never liked comics, you can appreciate them as a lens in which to see the bigger ideas and the seeding of a ton of THC themes? It was fun! Thanks Chris. Check out what he's doing with The Secret Son Institute on Patreon because his OCD means that he churns out A LOT of really deep stuff and a ton of film breakdowns that are just top notch And with that said, let's just scope out the meetup calendar and call it in. Alright well... The day of multiple events I think 4 or 5 That is October 14th! That's today So you probably already know if you're going to one of those But they would be in Edgewater Colorado Rappingers Falls New York Lansing Michigan Or Huntington Indiana Check the calendar for more details October 18th, the PlayStation Virtual Meet Up

1:34:32 October 20th, the Cincinnati Ohio meetup and we'll throw in November 3rd. The High Springs Florida high springs brewery meetup now that I think of it maybe there's so many October 14 events because it's the eclipse today Wow did that slip my mind? But yes go watch it with some friends In fact the Edgewater Colorado one does say Eclipse Meet up right there So there you have it but either way I guess I should wrap this up so I can check it out myself I think it's going on right now But let's rebuild those local subcultures based on weird out-of-the box interests. They're needed now more than ever, and hopefully this episode setting sail during such an eclipse gives it that little extra oomph to reach more people and bring in more plus signups That's my little intention for the day but... The people that really know about these things tend to say that magic doesn't work when you talk about it And that eclipses are usually negative omens

1:35:34 But I guess in true going against the grain fashion, let's do it anyway and just hope that my whole world doesn't fall apart. Thanks for listening! Thanks again to Chris and thanks again to damnmyeyes from my favorite of the new intro submissions Your Move counterculture co-opters millennial manipulators and agents of the crumbling entertainment empire your fucking move From space it was falling, its light started calling It's making crop circles again Just as I was looking up it showed me all the hidden stuff And now I'm all enlightened and zen Nothing mass is this hard Silver ship circ- Now I'm not asleep Don't obey the elite Gotta be into the head

1:36:35 Now I start to wonder, now we're not the sheep that they bred us to be. Got a beam through the head! Now we start to wonder, now we start to wonder... See you have corruption crimes since the visitors set me straight. I encourage you to go when you see the saucers glow on my way away The masses is hard silver ships are

1:37:18 Now we're not asleep, don't know but gotta beam to the how we start to wonder No we're not the sheep that reads to beam to now we start to wonder Now we start to wonder We'll see these things up in the sky Just as the system starts to die Balls fading

1:38:10 And next round they'll erase This time we have faith Cause we're not the sheep that they feed to their head Now, We start to wonder now were not asleep cause we got THC and... Now,We Start To Wonder Now,We Start To Wonder Now,We Start To Wonder Now,We Start To Wonder And I start to wonder How we start to wonder? Now,We Start To Wonder Again!

1:38:54 ♪ Don't you wanna get ♪