0:03

Sodomy. Shit, fuck, god, damn

0:06

it. No, that's not the way to introduce the

0:08

post. I'm

0:10

so sorry. That was just the word sodomy.

0:13

That's not an introduction of of any sort.

0:17

I'm terribly sorry. Oh my god,

0:20

I'm so sorry. This is Behind the Bastards,

0:22

a podcast a fine Day

0:25

where we talk about bad people, and I've

0:27

ruined it. I've ruined our discussion of

0:29

genocide by mentioning the word sodomy,

0:31

and I apologize for that. You're

0:34

just kind of subverting the narrative, and I do appreciate

0:37

that. I don't know what a narrative

0:39

is. But speaking of narratives, the

0:41

subject of our episode today was

0:44

was the master of creating narratives?

0:47

Um? Also, Jamie Loftus,

0:50

you're the guest. Sorry, I got so caught up

0:52

in saying the words satomy quietly

0:54

that today you really gave your all

0:56

to it. And I know you're not feeling well, so

0:58

that that took a lot to it. That kind of

1:02

Are we talking about Aaron Sorkin, No,

1:05

we're talking about kind

1:07

of. I mean, okay,

1:11

so Chris Carter was the X Files

1:13

guy, right, were possible?

1:17

Maybe I think it was Chris Carter. We're talking

1:19

about the guy who inspired a lot of the

1:21

X Files, also

1:23

talking about the guy who inspired

1:25

Alex. It is Chris Carter. Okay,

1:28

I mean as long as as long as he inspired

1:30

Alex Jones. I think you're gonna say Alex Mack. No,

1:33

no, not Alex mac. But he also inspired

1:36

the Wu Tang Clan. Wow,

1:38

Okay, well you got a hand it to

1:40

him? What a life. Yeah,

1:43

we're talking about a real, a

1:46

real influential

1:48

piece of ship today. Um.

1:50

Some people, I think when I when I mentioned the

1:52

Wu Tang Clan, the folks who know this guy recognized

1:55

who it is. But we're talking about Bill

1:58

Cooper. Have you ever heard

2:00

of Bill Cooper? I

2:02

have, but I don't know in which of these

2:05

contexts I've heard of them. Was he

2:07

like a conspiracy

2:10

got like a conspiracy

2:13

he was? He was a radio show host

2:15

who was kind of the first Alex

2:18

Jones in a lot of ways. Man.

2:20

He also was a very successful

2:22

author of a conspiracy book

2:25

that um went on to become

2:27

one of like the foundational documents

2:29

of American gangster rapp Um.

2:31

The first paragraph of his Wikipedia

2:34

page, I'm excited. Yeah, he's

2:37

quite a character. I like the

2:40

first paragraph is just a full journey.

2:43

Holy sh it. His real name is not even

2:45

Bill, isn't it isn't his real name, It's William.

2:48

It's William. But isn't that also not even in

2:50

his real name? UK William

2:53

Milton Williams my grandfather's

2:55

name. So we're gonna take that Bill. He's

2:58

Bill. Yes, I've decided that

3:00

already. Don't. Like, Yeah, I have a long I

3:02

have a long and it hasn't really failed

3:04

me yet. I have like a long distrust of

3:07

someone that insists on going by three

3:09

names, and um,

3:11

I have a feeling that this is no different. No,

3:13

No, he was pretty consistent about

3:16

just Bill. But yeah, you

3:18

still shouldn't have trusted him because he was

3:20

a famous liar. Um.

3:23

Okay. So kind of

3:25

the reason I think this is important to talk about today

3:28

is that um AT at the present

3:30

moment, Jamie eleven Q and on believers

3:33

are currently have uh like

3:35

active congressional candidates have they have either

3:37

won primaries or runoffs. Um,

3:40

and we'll be on the ballot in November. Yeah.

3:44

And if if you're if you're just joining

3:46

us from the year two thousand fifteen, um,

3:50

some ship has gone down First off, you

3:52

might want to now

3:55

yeah, yeah, should just

3:57

turn your car and angle. Yeah

4:00

so uh. Q and On the

4:03

qua on conspiracy theory basically states

4:05

that the whole Democratic Party and and all

4:07

global political leadership is

4:10

part of a satanic cult that drinks

4:12

the blood of children. Um.

4:15

Donald Trump was chosen by our military

4:17

and also Jesus to take power and root

4:19

out this cabal of devil worshippers. And

4:22

we talk about at the barbecues I have at my house.

4:25

Yeah, as as you should. Um.

4:27

In some versions of the conspiracy, JFK Jr.

4:30

Is a crucial part of it. Um. But that's

4:32

very much a contentious issue within within

4:34

this community. So there's

4:37

even I mean there's at least one of the Q and

4:39

On candidates is also hot,

4:41

which I found to be. Yes, there's some hot

4:43

ones. Yes, I know the hot people were

4:46

in Q and On that did

4:49

you know. I was just like, okay, so they

4:51

know skincare at very least Yeah,

4:54

okay, I mean you can you can give a shit

4:56

about you know, your pores. And also believe

4:59

that the Luciferian Cabal

5:02

has been orchestrating global politics

5:05

in order to harvest to dream of chrome

5:07

from the blood of children child

5:12

Yes, well, I mean actually yeah, but that's

5:15

something some of us just learned by accidents.

5:18

So uh yeah, Q and On, it's

5:20

pretty silly, pretty silly stuff. And it's

5:22

so silly that all credible media kind of

5:24

ignored it for three years and pretended it wasn't

5:26

happening until there were hundreds

5:29

of thousands of Americans who believed it, and

5:31

eleven of them who might wind up in Congress.

5:34

Michaels, one person that

5:36

you went to high school with, deeply powerfully

5:39

would die for Q and On, would die for

5:41

this conspiracy. Yeah. Michael Flynn,

5:44

a lifetime military intelligence man,

5:46

a general, and a former member of President Trump's

5:49

staff, recently had his whole family

5:51

swear an oath of allegiance. Uh like

5:54

the mysterious que and his cause. So,

5:57

um, it's a problem. It's become an

5:59

issue. It's a real

6:01

issue, and it's not like there's the only thing

6:03

to do about it is kind of laugh because of how how

6:06

much of a problem it is. But it really is not

6:08

a laughing matter. It's a very serious

6:10

issue. Um, it's it's and and

6:12

it's worth noting. Like Q

6:15

and On, for a long time, people would talk about it as a

6:17

conspiracy theory, and one of the researchers

6:19

I follow, Sarah high Tower, UM,

6:21

has kind of been making the point for quite a while that like

6:24

calling it a conspiracy theory really misses

6:26

the point. It's a cult. Um, it's

6:28

and like it's a religious

6:30

movement. And

6:32

I think at this point you could probably make a pretty good

6:34

case that Q and On is the USA's

6:36

fastest growing new religious movement

6:39

UM, which is again a real problem.

6:41

So the question, one of the questions we should all be

6:43

asking ourselves is we we try to deal

6:45

with this thing that's happening, is how did

6:48

we get here? Um? Like,

6:50

well, the question I've been asking myself is who is Q?

6:53

I've been asking myself this for many years. See,

6:55

I think that's the least important thing in the world. Actually,

6:59

uh, but yeah, I I at

7:02

this point, the belief system

7:04

has gone so far beyond whatever

7:07

the individual or individuals who are like

7:09

posting the Q drops actually

7:11

have been pushing people to do that. It's like, I

7:14

think, kind of almost immaterial who Q is?

7:17

UM. So the

7:19

broader question when we look at like Q and on,

7:21

and we look at just the fact that we're in a place right now where

7:23

like the guy who got elected president

7:26

is a famous conspiracy theorist who

7:28

has like repeated conspiracy theories

7:30

about the active pandemic killing people

7:33

during his administration while delivering

7:35

like like news

7:38

to the nation about the pandemic. Like the

7:40

fact that that's where we are right now, um

7:43

like kind of begs the question

7:45

how the fund did we get here? Um? And there's a number

7:47

of theories about like how

7:50

conspiracism um became

7:52

what it is in American culture. Uh.

7:55

And it it kind of starts in the nineteen

7:57

seventies with the work of a British sociologist

7:59

named Campbell, who coined the term cultic milieu

8:01

to refer to the kinds of supportive cultural

8:04

environments that allow cults to form.

8:07

So prior to Campbell's work, most

8:09

experts had kind of seen cults as freak

8:11

phenomenon, strange and

8:13

terrible, like things that just sort of happened,

8:15

Like some charismatic guy would come along

8:18

and he would enthrall the brains of

8:20

a certain group of people, and then you'd have a cult,

8:22

and it was just sort of like this thing that happened,

8:25

um, as sort of like a freak curiosity

8:28

um. But Campbell's argument was that cults

8:31

didn't come out of nowhere, and they weren't primarily

8:33

the product of whatever individual or individuals

8:35

were behind them. They kind of grew mushroom

8:38

like from a fertile cultural substrate. You had

8:40

to have like a culture that

8:42

could support the growth of cults,

8:45

and certain things in a culture,

8:47

certain like um trends within a

8:49

culture would make it much a much

8:51

more fertile ground for cults to sort

8:53

of like form and thrive in. So that's like what

8:55

a cultic milieu is. Uh. In the book

8:58

A Culture of Conspiracy, scholar Mike Barkun

9:00

notes, quote, the cultic milieu is

9:02

by nature hostile to authority, both because

9:04

it rejects the authority of such normative institutions

9:07

as churches and universities, and because no single

9:09

institution within the milieu has the authority

9:11

to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within

9:13

it. As diverse as the cultic milieu is,

9:16

however, Campbell finds in it unifying

9:18

tendencies. One such tendency is

9:20

its opposition to dominant cultural

9:22

orthodoxes. This is also a major

9:25

characteristic of the culture of conspiracy, within

9:27

which the reigning presumption is that any widely

9:29

accepted belief must necessarily

9:31

be false. Okay,

9:34

so that that sounds a little familiar. It

9:37

definitely does. I

9:39

feel like the like conspiracy.

9:42

Uh, like the conspiracy

9:46

label is used to be dismissive

9:48

too often of like, oh, it's kind

9:50

of a fun tabloid story.

9:53

More more so. And then when you start calling

9:55

it a religion which has much of the same properties,

9:58

it's suddenly become serious.

10:00

And all of a sudden, there's hot people running for public

10:02

office. Yeah yeah, or

10:05

or you know, compounds outside

10:07

of Waco getting burnt down by the FBI,

10:09

a number of things. Do you just bring Waco in here?

10:11

I'm this, we're gonna talk so much about

10:13

Waco today, getting into Waco today.

10:16

Oh yeah, we're gonna be wake up ready for

10:18

Waco today. Nobody

10:20

wakes up ready for Waco except for

10:23

David Koresh briefly but not more.

10:25

Yeah. So, uh,

10:27

we live in a culture of conspiracy now,

10:30

and and I think a lot of Americans are kind of

10:32

waking up to the extent to which that is

10:34

happening and continuing to happen. And what a problem

10:36

it is, um And it wasn't this

10:38

kind of cultic milieu that

10:40

that has

10:42

overtaken a lot of even mainstream

10:44

culture now, like didn't didn't happen

10:47

by accident. It was formed kind

10:49

of intentionally by individual human beings

10:52

who tended it like a good farmer tends to soil,

10:54

and made basically made our culture

10:56

into one in which a

10:58

famous conspiracy theorist could not just

11:01

get to become president, but could could get to

11:03

like shout out his nonsense

11:05

um to like, could

11:08

get to like shout out conspiracy

11:10

theories about an active plague while it was

11:12

going on, and have millions of Americans say, well,

11:14

like, surely that guy's right. Like the fact

11:17

that we're there now isn't

11:20

an accident. It was it was like

11:22

the yeah, I don't

11:24

know, this is this is a bad way to introduce this. There's

11:27

a lot of that. I'm trying to like

11:29

kind of even wrap my head around here because

11:31

the problem is so extensive, and

11:34

there's a number of individuals who were sort

11:36

of behind bringing us to this point because

11:38

this wasn't always the case. You know, there used

11:40

to be you can't really what we're looking

11:42

at. What we're looking at as the root cause

11:45

of of why we are where we are

11:47

culturally right now and politically right now.

11:50

Is the death of any kind of shared conception

11:52

of truth. It's not possible to have

11:54

that because a huge chunk of the country, whenever

11:57

somebody claims to be

12:00

hims to be like trying to tell them facts

12:02

about the world UM now

12:04

kind of automatically will reject those

12:06

facts if they're in opposition to you

12:08

know, whatever belief structure that

12:11

person has UM and will

12:13

form the fact that like some professional

12:16

person is telling them that that that their beliefs

12:18

are wrong, will kind of graph that automatically

12:20

onto this conspiratorial belief about

12:23

the nature of of of the world at

12:25

the moment, like the fact only accepted

12:28

truths exactly exactly.

12:31

And today we're going to talk about probably

12:33

the man who's most responsible

12:36

with kind of setting off

12:38

that domino chain reaction that led

12:40

to the death of truth. I'm not going to say that that

12:42

that this guy killed truth on

12:45

his own, UM, but Bill Cooper

12:47

probably deserves more credit for

12:50

building our cultic milieu UM

12:52

than any other single person. And

12:54

only again, like two kinds of people

12:56

really recognize Bill's name today. The first

12:58

kinder folks who like study conspiracy

13:01

and the history of right wing extremism, the militia

13:03

movement. Those folks will have heard of Bill

13:05

Cooper. The second kind of people

13:07

who know Bill Cooper today are

13:10

are fans of nineteen nineties gangster

13:12

rap. Yeah.

13:15

Yeah, it is the Wu Tang clan. I'm

13:17

thrilled that we have found this intersection

13:19

at Long Last. Yeah. Yeah,

13:22

yeah. Bill left a really big influence

13:24

on both worlds. And it's kind of fascinating as

13:27

to why. Um So, Milton

13:29

William Cooper um So, Yeah, that's

13:31

the name, Jamie. He is a Milton um

13:34

It's really unfortunate. Was born on

13:37

May six, nineteen forty three, in Long

13:39

Beach, California. His father,

13:41

Milton Vance Cooper, was an Air Force

13:43

pilot who got his start flying for the US

13:45

military before the Air Force even existed.

13:48

Milton wisely went by the name Jack,

13:50

which is a much better name for a pilot,

13:53

Jack Cooper. That's a good that's a good pilot

13:55

name. Yeah, that's just a good old fashioned MGM

13:57

renamed. Yeah, and you'll note

13:59

that like neither Milton William

14:02

nor Milton Vance ever went by the name Milton,

14:04

because it's a it's an objectively bad

14:06

name. Well, I mean, just you know

14:08

say which you will about his life choices, but he

14:10

did make at least one solid Yeah.

14:14

No, no, he made the right call there. Um

14:16

and yeah, as a little kid, Bill went

14:18

by little Jackie um, which

14:21

is is Yeah.

14:23

I don't like that's perverted. I don't like that. Yeah.

14:27

So Bill's ancestors had come from all

14:29

over the British Isles, which you shouldn't call

14:31

the British Isles because it wipes out the existence

14:33

of Scotland and Ireland, two nations that were

14:36

kind of oppressed by the British for centuries.

14:38

But I want to challenge the British and the Irish

14:40

to unite and finally wipe out the English,

14:42

and I feel like goading them this way might work. So just

14:45

as a note in the future, when I call something

14:47

the British Isles, it's because I'm trying to orchestrate

14:49

the destruction of the English people. Yeah, you're just trying to

14:51

people to radicalize and get some done. Yeah.

14:54

Yeah, so like you know, I'll I'll

14:56

refer to them properly Scotland

14:58

and Ireland when you in Wale, when you do

15:00

something about the English. Um.

15:02

Yeah.

15:05

Yeah. So anyway, Bill uh,

15:08

Bill's family came from all over the aisles, and

15:10

they wound up in the United States. Uh, and

15:12

kind of all over the United States. He had family that fought

15:14

on both sides of the Civil War. Um,

15:17

there were a lot of frontiersman in the Cooper

15:19

family. As a boy, Bill was particularly

15:21

taken by stories of his great grandfather, who

15:24

he would later call a real cowboy. Uh.

15:26

He wrote later that as a child, he saw photos

15:29

of his great grandpa. Yeah.

15:31

He would later write that as a child, he saw photos

15:33

of his great grandpa quote standing in front of a

15:36

saloon with a six gun in his belt.

15:38

Now, Bill was a famous liar. And this is

15:40

probably a lot of just wret

15:42

A lot of those guys really like as as

15:45

a rule, it was like a fake that was a constructed

15:47

image in the first place. That's fun fun.

15:50

Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, and yeah,

15:53

but this is what Bill, This is what Bill at least

15:55

thought it was important for people to think about his family

15:57

background. They were cowboys. Yeah,

16:00

this is a very mature cowboys and horse thieves.

16:02

He was also like, oh, yeah, and one of them got hung as a

16:04

horse thief. Yeah it was Yeah.

16:07

So the Cooper family moved constantly

16:09

to accommodate Jack's military career.

16:11

And this was not a low stress period to

16:13

be the family member of somebody doing what

16:15

Jack was doing in the military. The Cold

16:18

War was at its coolest level. Nuclear

16:20

annihilation was a constant threat, and

16:22

young Bill grew up knowing that at any moment his

16:24

father might be sent off to die in a

16:27

war that would almost certainly kill his family

16:29

in nuclear hell fire as well. Um,

16:31

it was a stressful way to be a kid. Um.

16:34

I I know that particularly well because my

16:36

dad and Bill had very similar childhoods.

16:38

Actually, my dad was about about

16:41

a decade younger, UM, But his

16:43

dad, I don't. I don't even know what my grandpa on

16:45

that side of the family actually did. He was a civilian

16:47

employee of the Department of the Defense, and he was constantly

16:50

in Southeast Asia, and we don't know, like nobody

16:52

really knows anything else about what Grandpa

16:55

was doing. I think he was probably

16:57

posing like a cowboy in front of a saloon.

16:59

If I probably posing like a

17:01

cowboy. But like my dad

17:04

has these memories of like when the when

17:06

the there were stateside, when the Cuban

17:08

missile crisis hit, and he was just like he

17:11

and I think his mom like drove him and his sister

17:13

out to like family who lived

17:15

away from a city, and they just stayed

17:17

there for days without really knowing anything, just

17:19

knowing that like something had happened, and

17:22

dad says, like, you guys shouldn't

17:24

be in the city. Yeah.

17:28

Yeah, it was like in a lot of there were a lot

17:31

of kids who grew up, uh, Like my

17:33

whole family in this period of time were military brats,

17:35

and there was a lot of like it was a stressful thing to

17:37

be like, you know, because you're always you're always

17:39

worried that nuclear annihilation is around the damn

17:41

corner. And so Bill grows up with

17:44

this kind of apocalyptic expectation

17:46

is just a constant part of his reality.

17:48

Is like a little kid. Um,

17:51

so that's not great. Um yeah, the

17:53

bioy Yeah, and it's yeah. The biography

17:55

Pale Horse Writer by Mark Jacobson, which

17:57

is a biography of William Cooper, notes

18:00

quote, once while his father was assigned

18:02

to Lajah's Field on ter Sierra Island

18:05

and the hisurs uh, the young Cooper was

18:07

sitting in the base reck room watching a movie when

18:09

the projector ground to a halt. The lights came

18:11

on and a plea was made for blood donors.

18:13

I knew immediately something terrible. It happened.

18:16

Running outside, Cooper saw that a B twenty

18:18

nine super Fortress had crashed. I saw men

18:20

on fire running through the night. Cooper wrote

18:22

in Behold a Pale Horse, I was only nine

18:24

years old, but felt much older. That's

18:28

not great. Yeah, yeah, that's not

18:30

great. Ye's the problem at the beginning,

18:33

all of these stories start out with like just

18:36

a traumatized, broken

18:38

little boy. There, we need

18:41

to start well, no, this is probably, but they're

18:43

like, there needs to be some sort of muppet babies

18:45

for for the bastards.

18:47

Yeah, bustard babies there, and

18:49

then they can just all go to a child therapist

18:51

and really talk ship through and saving a lot of

18:54

trouble. Yeah, except for Saddam,

18:56

who would have absolutely smuggled in a gun

18:58

and shot that therapist, like shot that therapist

19:00

immediately. Was Yeah

19:03

he was, he was, you know, are

19:05

born that way? He was, he was. He was a

19:07

hardened gangster by thirteen. Yeah,

19:11

but also had the heart of a poet, you

19:13

know. Yeah, well of course, yeah, like al

19:16

Capone, right right. So

19:18

in his own book Behold a Pale Horse,

19:20

Bill which is a great name for a book. It

19:23

is a great name for a book. Bill. One thing you'll learn

19:25

about Bill is that he was a fantastic marketer.

19:27

And that's an objectively incredible title.

19:29

Like I'm it's a memoir, no,

19:32

no, no, no, it just includes a section on

19:34

his background. We'll talk about what Behold

19:36

a Pale Horse is because very

19:39

influential, Like, it's kind of it's a very

19:41

appealing title. Well it's

19:43

but it's from that book that uh, that

19:45

line in the Book of Revelations. But again we'll

19:47

talk about that in a little bit. So, yeah, it is a

19:49

great title, and I'm kind of frustrated that he took

19:52

it because it would be a great title for a book

19:54

right now about Yeah,

19:56

So anyway, um, Bill would later

19:59

write himself right a his upbringing that quote,

20:01

I didn't always love my father. He was a strict

20:03

disciplinarian. My dad did not believe

20:05

in spare the rod, and his belt was put

20:07

to use frequently in our family. And

20:09

like most children who grew up in such families,

20:12

Bill grew was like Bill

20:14

grew up with a like basically

20:16

focusing all the time on how to avoid getting in

20:18

trouble, like right, That's the thing you learn as a kid

20:20

with authoritarian parents who punish you, um

20:23

physically particularly, is how to not

20:25

get in trouble. Um. And he

20:28

was regularly the focus of his dad's anger,

20:30

which kind of yeah, his his whole life

20:32

was his whole life as a kid was revolved

20:34

around hiding from his dad's anger. Um.

20:37

And yeah, he grew up with the feeling that

20:39

quote, rules didn't mean much until I got caught

20:41

breaking them. And discipline

20:44

like this has the effect of kind of training

20:46

children to be exceptional liars. Um.

20:49

It teaches them to always have a story, a really

20:51

believable story, in order to not get in trouble.

20:53

And there's actually research to back this up. In two thousand

20:56

and sixteen, Victoria talwar an expert

20:58

on children's social cognitive develop a minute,

21:00

McGill University published a study

21:02

on this. I f L Science reported quote

21:04

tal Warren and her colleagues developed a test to identify

21:07

effective young liars called the Peeping Game.

21:10

Taking her test to West African schools,

21:12

one with relaxed rules and one with harsh disciplinary

21:14

regimes, the peoples were asked to guests, without

21:16

looking at it, which object is making the noise

21:18

behind them. Importantly, the last object

21:20

made a noise that was different from any sound it could

21:22

actually produce. For example, a baseball would

21:25

make a squawking noise. If any children knew

21:27

what this final object was, they were clearly

21:29

taking a peek at it while unsupervised. During

21:31

the experiment, the supervising adult leaves the room

21:33

and upon returning asked the child two questions

21:36

what the object was and if they peaked at it. Talwar

21:38

discovered that the more relaxed school showed a

21:40

distribution of liars and truth tellers similar

21:43

to that found in many Western schools. However,

21:45

in the strict school, the children proved to be extremely

21:47

rapid and effective liars. Um

21:51

So that's going to become very relevant

21:53

as we talk about every single thing Bill says

21:55

about his life. Uh so,

21:58

much of the information we have on Bill's filthood

22:00

comes from Bill himself. And again, he's

22:02

a he's a liar. So

22:06

yeah, okay,

22:09

this is difficult, This is tough with

22:13

him, but that's because he wants to and that's because

22:15

he's a good liar. That's because he's a good

22:17

liar. That also doesn't mean that he's lying about

22:19

everything, and in fact, there's a lot. He's definitely

22:21

telling the truth about um, including

22:23

the fact that his dad. I have new trouble believing his dad

22:26

was an authoritarian, you know, parent,

22:28

because he was a military man, and that's real fucking

22:31

common. I have no trouble believing that

22:33

he was constantly stressed out as a kid

22:35

about nuclear war, because that's what it was

22:37

like growing up in the fifties on a military

22:39

base. Yeah.

22:43

So that said, though, we're going to we're

22:45

going to enter into a lot of areas where we

22:47

have Bill's version of the of what happened

22:49

and what's more likely to have

22:52

happened, and they diverge quite rapidly.

22:55

So uh. Bill's relationship with his

22:57

mother was a little more positive than his relationship

22:59

with his father. He describes her as the kind of woman

23:01

who used to be called a Southern bell, the

23:03

type of women that men like to dream about when they're

23:05

lonely. She's the kindlest, gentlest woman I've

23:08

ever known. Once she likes you, she cannot be driven

23:10

away. She is loyal to a fault. Um

23:13

that that will become a little bit more relevant

23:16

later too. So Yeah, Bill was

23:18

a high spirited, sensitive mama's boy who

23:20

moved around too often to build strong ties, and

23:22

one of the few constants in his youth was

23:24

Armed Forces radio. Bill was obsessed

23:26

with the emerging popular music of the day, particularly

23:29

Sam Cook. Moreover, he fell in love

23:31

with the idea of being a DJ, which at

23:33

the time was the guardian and arbiter of popular

23:35

youth culture. Yeah,

23:39

and again, all of a sudden, it's

23:41

kind of weird the extent to which Bill and

23:43

my dad had the same childhood because my

23:45

dad also grew up on military bases wanting

23:47

to be a DJ and like doing that

23:49

in high school and ship, Um,

23:52

it was like the cool thing. Like it's not now, but

23:54

at the time, like being a DJ was the coolest thing

23:56

you could fucking be. Uh, Proberties,

23:58

you are just saying it's not, curl the coolest

24:00

thing you could be, because it still is. Asking

24:03

the coolest thing you can be is

24:05

a white guy who does a podcast about

24:08

politics.

24:10

That's that's that's what this is. The conspiracy

24:12

theories are that's actually

24:14

a popular Q and on belief is

24:16

that having a podcast is cool. You

24:19

know what, who definitely actually

24:21

does think that having a podcast is cool? Who

24:25

the products and services to support this show?

24:27

They'd fucking better. Uh,

24:32

Lord in Heaven, we're

24:40

back. Uh. And I just I have some

24:42

good news for everybody. We have a new

24:44

face mask that will be selling in the behind

24:46

the Bastard store. Uh. It

24:49

just says f d A approved to prevent all

24:52

diseases. Um, so you

24:54

know when we're as we're talking about

24:56

colts, Jamie, I just want everyone

24:59

to know I am, in act doing everything

25:01

I can to to to get us

25:03

violently rated by the Food and Drug Administration.

25:06

That that is the goal. So grab

25:08

your kids, uh, take them

25:11

to my compound in the mountains, put them

25:13

in a basement, and we'll wait for the f DAY to

25:16

come firebomb us. Um yep.

25:20

But a beautiful image. What a beautiful

25:22

image. Yeah, we're gonna

25:24

make them do it. We're gonna

25:26

we're gonna radicalize the f d A, Jamie.

25:29

That's my goal. That would be kind of fun. It

25:31

would be neat fun, radicalized with

25:33

good outfits. Yeah yeah, yeah,

25:36

Well I don't know. Well,

25:38

but the FDA and crop tops see what happens. So

25:40

okay, fine, as long as as long as

25:43

you know they're still like unaccountably violent.

25:45

That's my my dream for the f d A.

25:47

Oh, they're extremely violent. I'm just saying like a

25:50

cult that it like a Heaven's gate. You know, it's

25:52

like there, you

25:54

know they have they have no morals, but also

25:57

you know they look nice. They match. Okay,

26:00

okay, okay, well we'll we'll

26:02

talk about this more. So.

26:04

Bill was a Yeah. Bill Bill as

26:06

a as a kid on the military based like

26:09

falls in Love with the idea of being a dj um

26:11

in an age sixteen, while he was living on Tachikawa

26:14

Air Base near Tokyo, he got his very first

26:16

radio show on the Armed Forces Networks

26:18

Radio teen program

26:22

Radio teen. Bill

26:24

would later write quote, I was called the Mad

26:26

Lad and my theme song was Quiet

26:28

Village by Martin Denny. And this

26:30

is, Yeah, he's a huge dork,

26:32

And it's the fact that he picks Quiet Village

26:35

is really interesting because it is it is not the

26:37

kind of song you might expect a seventeen

26:39

or a sixteen year old to make his like introduction

26:42

music when he comes on the fucking

26:44

radio. It's like it's

26:46

a mournful ballad about lost love

26:48

that starts with the lyrics alone in my quiet

26:51

Village, I pray you will be returning one

26:53

day to me returned to me alone,

26:55

living with the memory of you promising you'd

26:57

always be true to me, be true to

26:59

me. So that's a little weird

27:01

for sixteen year old Billy just

27:04

right eye energy to it. There's

27:07

equivalents of this. It's really

27:09

unsettled, like like you can you can kind

27:11

of tell Bill is not going to go good places.

27:14

Yeah, this isn't this isn't

27:16

going to end well, Okay, it's

27:19

intense very

27:21

to Yeah. So,

27:23

as a young DJ, Bill finally felt the

27:25

acceptance that had been cruelly denied to him

27:27

by his father's constant travel. He would later

27:29

recall being elated that quote, hundreds

27:32

of teenagers all over Japan were dancing

27:34

to the music I spun on my little machines.

27:37

He managed to convince himself that millions

27:39

of Chinese teens were also listening into

27:41

his radio program, which could

27:43

not have been true um, and that the communists

27:46

said had jammed his signal to stop

27:48

it. Which, okay, this isn't

27:51

like your DJ energy

27:53

is like not just that people don't have access

27:55

to it. There if

27:58

in communism, if they can listen to my sad

28:01

songs about quiet like villages

28:03

and girls not liking me, enough. Oh my

28:05

god. Uh

28:08

yeah, even at age sixteen, Bill was convinced

28:11

that he had somehow become the target of a global

28:13

communist movement, um of

28:15

the global communist movement, which is is funny

28:17

and again he's probably just inventing

28:20

this decades later. But also I wouldn't

28:22

be surprised if at the time young Bill Cooper convinced

28:24

himself the Communes were trying to stop his terrible

28:27

radio show. So teenaged

28:30

Bill was convinced that rock

28:32

and roll music was the very best advertisement

28:34

for capitalism possible. And to be honest, he

28:36

was probably right about that. It's

28:39

actually something too that's actually

28:41

at that time. Yeah, I think

28:43

a lot of teenagers in Cuba

28:46

got a really unfairly

28:48

rosy idea of American culture by

28:50

listening to the Stones and Ship. I

28:53

don't like that. I don't like the feeling of agreeing

28:55

with him, but yeah, I'm on board for that

28:57

one. Yeah, No, he's probably right about that. Nowto

29:00

the rock and roll listen,

29:03

I think I'm very skeptical of this rock and roll

29:05

music that the kids are listening to. I think it might be dangerous

29:09

as an adult. Bill Witho mourn in

29:11

his writing that Chuck Berry was thrown in

29:13

jail for two years rather than being made

29:15

Secretary of State, quote like he

29:17

should have been. So

29:20

he believed Chuck Berry should have been the Secretary of State.

29:22

And it's probably here that I do you know much about

29:24

Chuck Berry, Jamie not

29:27

really know the right side of who

29:29

he is. His music sounded like, yeah, I

29:31

mean, father of rock and roll, incredible musician,

29:34

historically an important musician. He

29:37

was also thrown in jail for transporting a

29:39

fourteen year old across state lines for a moral

29:41

purposes India.

29:45

Okay, well, yeah, like it wasn't

29:47

a mild It wasn't like a like,

29:49

it wasn't that they weren't just going after him to

29:51

like shut down this rock and roller he was.

29:53

He was sexually trafficking a teenage

29:55

girl. I mean, to continue on my

29:58

anti rock and roll tirade,

30:01

which rock artists of this arrow was not

30:03

doing that. It was that is that

30:05

is very fair. We had some ship but

30:07

no one, but no one wants to talk about it.

30:10

No, I mean, Billy Joel didn't.

30:12

But but that's the only one. I

30:15

bet that it was just that, not that he

30:17

didn't that he couldn't because he would

30:19

have been terrible at sex trafficking. Really,

30:21

he would have been horrible at it. So

30:25

can't be a good liar. No, no,

30:27

he can't. He's an innocent

30:29

man. So in nineteen eighty eight,

30:31

Chuck Barry was arrested again and charged

30:34

for punching a woman in the face so hard she required

30:36

stitches. He was also accused by

30:38

multiple women and girls of filming them in the bathroom

30:40

of his restaurant. So, I don't know, maybe

30:43

not the best pick for Secretary of State, although

30:45

even with that resume, he would have been better than kissing

30:47

Jerry I was supposed to say. I'm like, there have been worse

30:50

people as

30:52

secretary of state. Oh, that's so depressed.

30:54

There's truly not one rock legend that

30:56

isn't the most horrifying person

30:59

though there they were all monsters. It turns out

31:01

when you like elevate mostly

31:03

young teenage in twenties something

31:06

men to like effectively

31:08

living gods. Uh, they do horrible,

31:10

horrible things repeatedly. Really have been known

31:12

to take advantage of it. Yeah, yeah, it turns out

31:15

to be a bad call. So in nineteen sixty

31:17

learn from it, though, Yeah, we don't do that anymore.

31:19

It doesn't happen anymore. No, and it

31:22

never will again. Yeah.

31:24

In nineteen sixty two, nineteen year old Bill

31:26

Cooper joined the Air Force. The Navy

31:28

was his first choice, but he got sea

31:30

sick easily, and he didn't think he'd be able to handle a career

31:32

on a boat. Um, this will be slightly

31:35

ironic. Later, uh, young Bill chose

31:37

to enlist rather than joining as an officer,

31:39

which surprised his family because his family, you

31:41

know, his military tradition had been officers.

31:44

Um. He wound up going to a technical school

31:47

outside of Amarillo, Texas, where he later

31:49

claimed to have seen real atomic bombs.

31:51

Quote. I worked around them on a daily basis.

31:53

Because of that, I had to wear a dosimeter just in

31:55

case I was exposed to radiation. Bill's

31:58

first gig was in the field maintenance squadron,

32:01

watching after everyone's quarters and basically keeping

32:03

their work area police. It was a job

32:05

that kept him alone a great deal of the time, and so

32:07

he was sitting on his own and the barracks watching TV

32:09

on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

32:12

was shot by Bernard Montgomery Sanders. As

32:14

Bill later wrote, quote at that

32:16

point, huge tears began to stream down my

32:18

face. Waves of emotion rushed through my body.

32:20

I felt that I had to do something, so I picked up the direct

32:23

line to the command center. I choked back tears.

32:25

When the command duty officer answered, I told

32:27

him that the president had just been shot in Dallas.

32:29

There was a pause and he asked me, how do you

32:31

know he has been shot. I told him that I had watched

32:34

it on television and then hung up the phone. I was

32:36

numb all over. You

32:40

know, people, you know, it's

32:43

just so what President Kenny got shot? Get

32:45

over it by Bernie Sanders.

32:47

Yes, absolutely to

32:49

it. I think I have actually

32:52

brought this up on this show before. But it's my favorite

32:54

fact, my favorite fun fact

32:56

about the assassination

32:58

of JFK, which is that meat Off was there.

33:01

Yes, you did bring it up. I

33:03

would think to bring it up.

33:06

Meat Loaf is like thirteen or fourteen

33:08

years old, and he was like I guess he lived

33:10

in that area and he went like with

33:12

his family to see that he was. He

33:15

was there. So would we have bad

33:17

out of Hell had JFK lived? We may not

33:19

know. That's a shame that we have bad

33:21

out of Hell. I love,

33:24

Okay, I

33:26

know that I famously hate rock and roll,

33:28

but I do kind of like that Out of Hell me Love's a terrible

33:30

person, but you know he was fine

33:32

in fight Club and bad out of Hell is pretty good. Yeah,

33:35

and he'd probably I don't know, I had

33:37

something to do with the jfk assassination anyway,

33:39

I think yeah, he was pro of the Youth the

33:42

youth plot, Yeah he was. He was spotting

33:45

for Bernie Sanders a sniper scope. Um

33:47

So, now Jamie,

33:50

uh So,

33:52

you can kind of see in that little paragraph like

33:55

and this is this is again from something that Bill writes

33:57

decades later. But he's kind of like he's

34:00

kind of like sprinkling into his life story

34:02

these little bitty elements of conspiracy.

34:05

Like obviously he calls the duty officer and

34:07

the guys like how did you know he'd been shot? And

34:09

like nothing else happens, but there's this little

34:11

insinuation that like, you know, Bill had kind

34:13

of stumbled onto something a little bit and like that will

34:15

happen repeatedly. That happens repeatedly

34:18

in his narrative of his early life that he

34:20

later publishes. Um, He'll he'll

34:22

drop these little like if it like he kind

34:24

of he kind of frames it almost like a movie, right,

34:26

where like he drops these little bit of hints about

34:28

the vast conspiracy and his his childhood

34:31

like stories of his early life. Um.

34:34

And he does it really well like it's it's it's

34:36

it's good good storytelling. Um.

34:39

Which is something that like Bill has a real talent

34:41

for is is telling stories because

34:43

he's a great liar. Um. Yeah.

34:46

So uh. He also brought

34:48

aliens into the mix in his his

34:50

his biography, but not in a way, not

34:52

in a way that was super cookie. Um. This is

34:54

this this part, this is the way he does this I actually

34:57

think is really effective as a storytelling tool.

34:59

Um. Quote. It was during this time when he was he was

35:01

working um in the Air Force, that a

35:04

couple of sergeants kind of adopted

35:06

me. We went out to clubs together and usually ended up chasing

35:08

women and drinking a lot of beer. They told me

35:10

several stories about being attached to a special

35:12

unit that recovered crashed flying saucers. Sergeant

35:14

MIAs told me that he had been on one operation that transported

35:17

a saucer so large that a special team went

35:19

before them, lowering all telephone poles

35:21

and fence posts. Another team followed and replaced

35:23

them. They moved it only at night. It was kept parked

35:26

and covered somewhere off the road during the day, since

35:28

we were always half tanked. When these stories came out,

35:30

I never believed them. Sergeants were known to

35:32

tell some tall tales to younger guys like me.

35:35

So that's a good that's a good way to kind of start sprinkling

35:37

this ship into your narrative. That's really that's

35:40

really smart. I feel like that doesn't come out come

35:42

up enough of like, well, I wasn't totally

35:45

sure at first. It sounded a little weird. It sounded

35:47

a little bit. But the more I listened, there,

35:49

that's that. That is effective

35:51

storytelling. Yeah, that's good storytelling.

35:53

Yeah. The assassination of President Kennedy

35:56

brought several more days of apocalyptic stress

35:58

to young Bill Cooper. The nation went to the brink of war

36:00

with Russia because nobody knew what the funk was going

36:02

on, and Bill spent his nights sleeping under a

36:04

B fifty two loaded with nuclear munitions,

36:07

waiting for the order to go. So again, to

36:09

understand Bill Cooper's mindset, you have to understand

36:11

this kid spent like the first several decades

36:13

of his life, sometimes literally

36:16

sitting next to nuclear weapons, knowing that,

36:18

like all human life could end in

36:21

moments. It's like there's no moment

36:23

of his life that he is not deeply

36:25

stressed out. Yeah, deeply

36:27

stressed out and just waiting for the apocalypse

36:30

to him like that. Yeah,

36:35

it's a it's a tough it's a tough way

36:37

to grow into being an adult.

36:40

Sure, sure, yeah.

36:43

So thankfully the order

36:45

to end all human life via nuclear

36:47

annihilation never came. In the nineteen

36:49

sixty six Bill got an honorable discharge

36:51

from the Air Force. He immediately decided

36:53

to join the Navy next since his seasickness

36:56

had apparently improved. And Bill was, you know, shipped

36:58

over to serve on a submarine in Hawaii that because

37:01

apparently his C six C sickness

37:04

improved. As A yeah, the way

37:06

he describes it as like, after four years

37:08

in the Air Force, he was like, I've always wanted to be in

37:10

the Navy. Like I'm not gonna let I'm gonna I'm gonna

37:12

get over this this problem and do

37:14

I don't Yeah, so Bill

37:18

or something and was like it

37:20

sounds like he he bought a drug store supplement.

37:23

Yeah. Probably so. Bill claims

37:25

he got along famously with all of his new comrades

37:27

in Hawaii, including his best friend,

37:29

who Bill takes great pains to inform us, was

37:31

a black sailor named Lincoln Loving. Um,

37:34

which I had. There

37:36

are actual people named Lincoln Loving, so

37:39

he might not have been making that name

37:41

up. It does kind of sound like the name a

37:43

white guy would make up for a black sailor

37:45

to be his best friend. In the narrative of his life.

37:48

Uh, Bill's other best friend was an American

37:50

Indian who he doesn't give us the guy's real

37:52

name, but informs us that he was nicknamed Geronimo.

37:56

Um. So I don't I can't

37:58

say that Bill's lying about this, but maybe

38:00

I can. I can say that I'm pretty

38:03

sure he's lying about this. The sounds

38:05

yeah, fake as hell. Yeah.

38:08

Anyway, while Bill was stationed in Hawaii, he

38:10

poisoned one of his shipmates. Uh.

38:12

In fact, the guy who was the ship's cook. Now.

38:15

Bill claims that this is because, for no reason

38:17

at all, the cook banned him from eating in the mess,

38:19

and he also insists that the cook was a drunk

38:21

and Bill was nobly worried he might endanger

38:23

the other crew members. While underway, Bill

38:26

wrote quote, I won't tell you what I laced

38:28

his vodka with, but it wasn't anything you'd

38:30

ever want to drink. Believe me. I kept that chief

38:32

so sick he was transferred off the boat for medical

38:35

reasons. I didn't want to hurt him, but it was either get

38:37

rid of him or starved to death. I made up my mind that

38:39

chief or no chief, I wasn't going to see on a boat

38:41

that wouldn't feed me. Um

38:44

so real willing to poison

38:46

his fellow sailors, which

38:48

is I feel like this? It

38:50

seems like maybe he had a real problem with

38:52

this guy. I feel like most most most

38:55

people would have found a way to do that that didn't

38:57

involve poisoning a man. But I don't

38:59

know. I mean, listen, desperate

39:01

times, desperate test sometimes you

39:03

got a poison a guy. Um.

39:05

Anyway, the Navy was only ever supposed

39:07

to be a stepping stone on Bill's way to achieving

39:10

a bizarre, and in my opinion, pointless dream.

39:12

He wanted to be the first member of his family to serve

39:14

in all four branches of the armed forces,

39:16

which is a weird dream, isn't

39:19

that like kind of a like that's

39:21

just like what if I went to four high schools?

39:24

Like what is the point that is in

39:27

that? It's like the egot, but

39:29

you've always are doing shitty jobs.

39:32

Uh and it's not at all like the egot

39:34

because they'll take anyone pretty much. Um

39:36

okay, interesting irrational goal. But anyway,

39:39

he never got to do this because by the time he was near

39:41

the end of his four years in the Navy, the Vietnam

39:44

conflict had really started to heat up, and Bill

39:46

requested deployment to a combat zone and

39:48

the Department of Defense was like, absolutely,

39:51

we keep getting all these guys killed. So yeah,

39:53

like you you, You're more

39:55

than welcome to go to Vietnam Bill, Okay,

39:59

cool? Um. So Bill was sent

40:01

to a naval support unit in the Quaviat

40:03

River Quang Tree Province, and

40:05

this was a really dangerous posting. Bill's job

40:07

was to captain a river boat. Um,

40:10

motoring up and down the river. Sounds

40:13

like he's been alive for a hundred years already.

40:16

Yeah, he's in his twenties. Um.

40:18

Yeah, and he's do If you watched Apocalypse

40:20

now, yes, you know the you know, the

40:23

like a huge chunk of it there on that boat with the machine

40:25

guns that get shot at repeatedly. Yes,

40:28

that's Bill's job, Like Bill does that

40:30

for real, Um, And it's

40:32

it's a really it's one of the most dangerous

40:34

gigs you could have in Vietnam, like because you're on

40:36

these like fiberglass boats that are basically

40:39

big moving targets that have no armor

40:41

on them. So it's it's it's a

40:43

bad it's a dangerous gig vibe.

40:47

Okay, yeah, yeah, whatever else you can

40:50

say about him, and well we're gonna say mostly bad

40:52

things about him. Bill Cooper saw some ship. Um.

40:55

His best friend during training was a guy named

40:57

Bob Baron, and both men made a pact to

40:59

drink at of Scotch and the other man's memory

41:01

if they died in battle. Uh. Bob shipped

41:03

out first, and he was killed almost immediately

41:06

UM treat

41:10

for Bill Um. Bill

41:12

Cooper felt that now Vietnam was quote

41:14

a personal war. They had killed a part

41:17

of me. UM. He claims that once

41:19

he reached the river, his boat engaged the enemy

41:21

more times than any other boat

41:23

that ever patrolled that river. We kept the enemy

41:25

off the river and I never lost another man. I

41:28

can't tell you if that's true, he's almost certainly exaggerating.

41:31

But he won awards and stuff for gallantry under

41:33

fire, He had a really he did some ship in Vietnam.

41:35

Um, And it's it's probably fair to say

41:38

that Bill's service in Vietnam

41:40

was the only time where his like imagination

41:42

of who he was as a person came close

41:44

to being the real thing. Um.

41:47

So, you know, Vietnam is in some ways

41:49

a really positive experience

41:51

for Bill, but he also walks away from it horribly,

41:54

horribly traumatized. And obviously

41:56

he's a man who grew up in the fifties to

41:58

a father who was incapable of having emotional

42:00

conversations, and Bill grows into an

42:02

adult with combat trauma and no

42:05

no capacity to deal with it in any in

42:07

any way. Um.

42:09

But his service earned him a promotion to

42:11

the Office of Naval Intelligence in Hawaii,

42:14

where he worked on the briefing team for Admiral

42:16

Bernard Clary, commander of the U. S. Specific

42:18

Fleet UH. In order to do this job,

42:21

bill security clearance was upgraded to

42:23

top secret Q sensitive Compartmentalized

42:25

information Q. Yeah

42:28

Q I hear yeah, yeah, that's where and

42:30

that's where Q and on comes from is like Q was a

42:32

level of military intelligence classification.

42:35

I thought it was just a spicy continent.

42:39

No, Bill Cooper is clearly cute.

42:41

No he's not because spoilers,

42:44

he dies violently. But um yeah,

42:46

so giving Bill

42:48

Cooper any kind of security clearance

42:51

would prove to be one of the worst mistakes the US

42:53

Navy ever made, a second only to its

42:55

continued failure to finally destroy the city

42:57

of Boston. Bill Cooper was a competency,

43:00

but giving him access to top secret information

43:02

was a really bad decision, because not because

43:04

Bill was a spy or because he would in any way

43:06

reveal actual secret information, but

43:09

because he was exactly the sort of guy who knew how

43:11

to dine out for the rest of his life on the lies

43:13

that his position with Admiral Clary allowed him

43:15

to tell. He later trying to not

43:17

act on the fact that you said competent

43:20

Seman, I'm sorry I stopped listening.

43:22

I thought you were going to defend the city of Boston,

43:24

because I know you're from that whole eastern chunk

43:26

of the country. Listen, there is no defending the

43:28

city of Boston. Glad we agree on

43:30

this, ja There's no I mean by

43:33

all means watch Patriots Day on

43:35

Netflix. It's in the top ten right now.

43:38

And um, I can't watch it because

43:40

it will give me PTSD PTSB.

43:45

He will give me. It's just Mark Wahlberg. I'm

43:47

kidding. Um, there's no defending

43:50

the city of Oka

43:53

full You know what? Do

43:56

you want to get beat up by my uncle? So she

43:59

I don't take what kind

44:01

of my uncle will will

44:03

kick? And I'm kidding. My uncle is a grifter.

44:06

He's pretending to be on disability, but he's not. Well,

44:08

what's that that's my rochette that I'm holding

44:11

can take? I'm

44:14

in a challenge. Are salutes at

44:16

home? To figure out who Jamie's uncle is? A report

44:18

him to? I

44:22

mean, talk about it, guys. We're talking about

44:24

good liars. Someone talk to my

44:27

uncle. He's it's

44:29

not Jamie's uncle. Oh

44:32

is it time for that already? Transition I've ever

44:34

done? I'm so sorry, but also fun the Boston

44:37

Salt. You know you want to know who won't tell

44:39

on you for committing disability fraud? The

44:42

products and services that support this podcast?

44:45

Oh thank god. My family really can't handle

44:47

another situation like this. We're

44:57

back. We're

44:59

back, my family. The last time my family

45:01

went to court, we all had to testify that my grandma

45:03

had thrown a TV at my grandpa.

45:05

So don't talk about the city of Boston. A

45:11

very Boston story. Watch

45:13

your grandma throw roku at your grandpa.

45:16

See how you like it, Oh,

45:20

Jesus. So Bill

45:22

gets this job working for the admiral, and he

45:24

gets top secret security clearance about it,

45:26

and he uses the fact that he had this gig

45:29

for the rest of his life to kind of make

45:31

the lies that he will later tell about the

45:34

US government, um to give them like an

45:36

air of truth um. As he later wrote,

45:38

quote, I began to see things at first that made

45:40

no sense to me. President Nixon was on television

45:42

giving a speech, an incredible speech, saying that we were

45:44

conducting no bombing raids in North Vietnam, Cambodia,

45:47

and Lao. Five minutes later, intelligence

45:49

came into the office with k a figures of

45:51

sorties over exactly the targets. Nixon

45:53

said, the Americans weren't bombing. I would shake

45:56

my head and wonder what in the world was going on here?

45:58

That wasn't right. I never said anything at time,

46:00

most of us never did. I never imagined the people

46:02

in charge of the country would light of the people like that.

46:04

I was raised to think that this was impossible.

46:07

Now that part may or may not have been true. The bombing

46:09

raids he's talking about happened, but it was also

46:11

common knowledge by the time he actually wrote about them.

46:14

His biographer Mark Jacobson seems

46:16

to believe in this part and think that it was kind of a turning

46:18

moment for Bill where he starts to distrust

46:21

the government in a real way. Um.

46:24

But once his career is a conspiracy theorist

46:26

got going, Bill started focusing on other things

46:28

he'd seen in the Admiral's file cabinet.

46:31

First and foremost was evidence that President Kennedy

46:33

had been assassinated by his own Secret Service agent,

46:36

William Greer. This was a remarkable feat.

46:38

Yeah, yeah, because number one it was Bernie

46:40

Sanders and number two Greer was driving

46:43

JFK's Limo at the point the president

46:45

was shot. And Bill hand this like weird conspiracy

46:47

theory of like a shellfish tox and

46:49

pellet gun that was built into the body if I think an

46:51

umbrella. Um. But for the rest

46:53

of his life, when Bill would be like talking about government

46:56

conspiracies, he'd say like I saw the evidence

46:58

of it and the Admiral's fire in cabinet, and like

47:00

he would say that about fucking everything sounds

47:03

like a game of clue. So this job

47:05

is very fortunate for Bill Cooper because

47:07

he did have a security clearance at one point,

47:10

and he basically it would allow him to lie for the

47:12

rest of his life about having seen evidence

47:14

of like evil government plots. That

47:16

kind of reminds me of like when I guess,

47:18

I guess in context to my life,

47:20

when someone like works on a TV show

47:22

that's good, but they do nothing but that, then they

47:25

associate themselves with that TV show

47:27

for the rest of their lives. Yeah.

47:31

So yeah, Bill Cooper like

47:33

kind of for for uh, sort

47:35

of an example of the way Bill would later frame his

47:37

relatively brief period of time working as

47:40

basically the Admiral Secretary. Um,

47:42

I'm gonna quote from a speech he gave at Hollywood

47:44

High School in nineteen nine. Yeah,

47:48

it's weird. It's weird that that got to happen. Huh

47:51

every time it sounds like a fake place.

47:55

Right away, I knew I was seeing what I was not supposed

47:57

to see. Material never intended for my eyes.

47:59

The grits were there what had been covered up the trees

48:01

in this betrayal, I looked right into the heart of

48:03

it. Everything about the war was in there, the story

48:06

behind the alleged attack by the Vietnamese navy,

48:08

and the gulf of talking, the death counts, the Americans

48:10

dealing with corrupt South Vietnamese government.

48:12

That's what I learned in Vietnam. I thought I was fighting

48:14

for my country, and I found it I was really fighting for

48:16

big business, the coming one world government,

48:19

Cooper told the audience. It was a devastating

48:21

realization. This is from his biography Pale

48:23

Horse Writer. So Bill

48:26

continued to do his job in the Navy, but when the time

48:28

came up to either sign up for four more years

48:31

or leave, he opted to quit this time. Soon

48:33

Bill was back in the mainland United States without

48:35

a job for the first time in his adult life. And he'd

48:38

kind of grown up obsessed with the idea

48:40

of like living you

48:42

know, like kind of a stereotypical Americana

48:45

life, you know, living in like a small town with

48:47

like a close knit community. Um,

48:49

and that was when he gets back

48:51

to the US. He winds up and like the

48:54

California, like big cities in California,

48:57

like the fucking Bay Area and stuff, and he's

48:59

like, this is so different than like what life

49:01

is supposed to be like in America. Something must

49:03

have gone horribly wrong. And people who

49:06

knew Bill as a kid will point out, like, Bill

49:08

never knew the like quote

49:10

unquote like real America that he would

49:12

spend the rest of his life obsessed with living he like

49:14

lived on military basis. He never knew.

49:17

It was just like a projection of like

49:19

the media he was consuming, exactly

49:21

exactly, like he grew up having

49:24

this kind of miserable childhood and longing

49:26

for, you know, the kind of America

49:28

he saw on the television, which never really

49:30

existed anywhere. Um yeah,

49:34

so uh yeah. Bill

49:36

winds up in the Bay Area. He gets a job as

49:39

a diving instructor, He buys a

49:41

motorcycle, and he attempts to lead a

49:43

normal life. Um but, as Bill would

49:45

later claim, his sense of guilt and outrage over the things

49:47

he'd learned to overpower would overpower him.

49:50

So he like he later claims that

49:52

basically he's he leaves the

49:54

military with the knowledge of all these horrible secrets,

49:56

you know, these these evil programs that the government

49:58

is instituting to a filing. Yeah,

50:01

yeah, this evil filing cabinet full

50:03

of secret government plans to suborn

50:06

the liberty of the American people and destroy

50:08

freedom. Um. And so

50:10

he decides to start like going after he

50:13

claims, um that he goes

50:15

to a reporter and like starts giving

50:17

him the information that he's gotten. Um.

50:19

And he's trying to like basically do what Woodward and Bernstein

50:22

you know, did, and be like a deep throat to them

50:24

to like reveal all these horrible government conspiracies.

50:27

Um. And when he's midway through this process,

50:30

he's tracked down and he's almost murdered by

50:32

government men. Now. Bill claims that this

50:34

happened while he was on his motorcycle driving

50:36

on Skyline Boulevard. A black

50:38

Cadillac limousine pulled up behind him and

50:40

ran him off the road. Bill would

50:42

later write, quote, two men got out and climbed

50:44

down to where I lay, covered in blood. One bent down

50:47

and felt for my carotid pulse. The other asked if

50:49

I was dead. The nearest man said no, but

50:51

he will be. The other applied good. Then

50:53

we don't have to do anything. Now.

50:56

I felt that lie could have used a second draft.

50:58

Yeah, I think he to use an editor on that

51:01

one. Um so.

51:03

Bill claims he recovered, only to be run

51:05

down a month later by the same Cadillac, and

51:07

this time the assassination was closer

51:10

to his success. They damaged his right leg badly

51:12

enough that it had to be amputated above the knee.

51:15

Car yeah, same car, same limousine.

51:18

Yeah yeah. And while

51:20

he was in the hospital recuperating, Bill claims

51:22

the same government men came to visit him again. They

51:24

only wanted to know if I would shut up or if the next

51:26

time should be final. I told them that I would

51:28

be a very good little boy and that they needn't worry about

51:31

me anymore. Obviously, these

51:33

are all lies. Bill's motorcycle accident

51:35

had a completely mundane explanation. He lost

51:37

control of his bike and almost died horribly

51:40

as a result of the fact that he was a bad motorcycle

51:42

driver. Um yeah.

51:44

And this is like what his family like. His dad when

51:46

this got brought up to him, his dad was like, what the funk

51:49

is he talking about? It wasn't the government, like he was. He

51:51

fucked up and crashed his motorcycle, and

51:53

like I had to pay for his medical

51:55

bills because he would have been bankrupted otherwise.

51:58

Um. And this was part of

52:00

why Bill light about this was because his

52:02

relationship with his dad was strained and he couldn't

52:05

like admit that he needed his family's money

52:07

for a medical issue, especially when he'd caused

52:09

himself. So it was the government. Yeah,

52:12

um,

52:14

yeah, I love I love his little soft

52:16

core line about I'm going to be a good little boy.

52:19

What you do? Yeah, that is

52:21

that is sexy, objectively

52:23

sexy. Yeah, little

52:25

Jackie in I'll be a good little boy.

52:30

Jamie for

52:34

blowing your mind with my amazing ideas.

52:37

I think you need to get off this

52:39

skype call right now and start writing.

52:42

Yes, I'm sorry, I have a

52:44

final draft filed to take And

52:47

that was That was the last time any of us ever talked

52:49

to Jamie. She was too big a star after

52:51

making her Bill Cooper pornography

52:53

video of

52:56

brain failure four pages into

52:58

I'll be uh

53:03

So. The mid nineteen seventies and early nineteen

53:05

eighties were a real rough period for Bill.

53:08

Um. He had a fucking shipload of PTSD.

53:10

He was missing most of a leg, like he's

53:13

in a bad place. The seventies aren't

53:15

a good time for Bill. Um

53:17

and medical science didn't really formally

53:20

recognize post traumatic stress disorder is the thing

53:22

until it was added to the d s M in like nineteen

53:24

eighty. Um So for most of the time that

53:26

Bill was struggling with it, um, the term

53:28

was used as post Vietnam syndrome when

53:31

like doctors believed it was a problem at

53:33

all. Um And in the US in the

53:35

nineteen seventies, it wasn't like a very welcome

53:37

place to admit you were struggling with mental

53:39

health issues related to your military services.

53:42

Like Bill wasn't didn't

53:44

talk about this ship to anyone for quite

53:46

a while. Um, he's just burying his

53:49

trauma with the what's certainly even

53:51

more PTSD from a horrible motorcycle

53:53

accident. He he's he's

53:55

a damaged boy. Um

53:58

And I I'm saying that in the colledge

54:00

that that should not at all, um

54:03

mitigate what comes next, because we're going to talk

54:05

about his incredibly

54:07

long history of profound spousal abuse.

54:10

Uh. So, we don't know how many

54:12

women that Bill Cooper married in the seventies.

54:14

Um. What, Yeah, we have no

54:17

idea. It's a lot. It's too

54:19

many women. So

54:22

how can that be true? How can you? Yeah,

54:25

because he was a famous liar. Oh

54:28

yeah, maybe making up what

54:31

well? No, no, no, no, no, no, he we

54:33

we know he had a number of them. It's just that

54:35

we don't know how many of them there were because he lied

54:37

about to all of them about the others and

54:39

wouldn't acknowledge them. And yeah, we'll talk about it'll

54:42

this will make more sense than a little bit um,

54:44

his biographer writes, quote and his voluminous

54:46

FBI file. Cooper's father, Jack, is quoted

54:49

as saying that his son had been married or engaged

54:51

at least nine times. According

54:53

to Jack, Bill was still in high school when he got engaged

54:55

to a seventeen year old Japanese girl. The

54:58

elder Cooper had to break it up. A year later,

55:00

living on Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma

55:02

City, Cooper again got engaged to another

55:04

young Asian woman. Now Bill's

55:06

marriages weren't kept secret to protect his exes

55:09

or whatever kind of super cool spy explanation he

55:11

probably would have preferred people believe. The

55:13

ugly reality is that, especially as an

55:15

adult after his military service, Bill

55:17

was wildly unstable and violent, and

55:19

living with him was a waking nightmare for most

55:21

of the women that he married. UM. He kept

55:24

his prior relationships hidden because nobody would

55:26

want to marry a guy with Bill's history. UM.

55:28

In nineteen seventy six, he got hitched to Jenny's

55:31

Pell Um, who told Bill's biographer later

55:33

that I was number four. I think so

55:35

again. Nobody has a real clear idea, even his wives,

55:37

of like how many people he married. UM,

55:41

but he gets married a shipload uh

55:43

quote. I had no idea what I was getting into. One

55:45

minute he'd be the sweetest, warmest guy. Then he'd

55:48

changed start yelling at me for no reason. It

55:50

was like living with Dr Jacklin Mr. Hyde.

55:52

We were living in Union City, near Hayward. Bill

55:54

was working in Oakland at the diving school. He'd get

55:56

up at six to drive to work. I tried so hard

55:58

to be a good wife. Every day. I had clean, make

56:01

dinner for him. I said a nice table waiting for him

56:03

to come home. In the beginning, he'd rush home and give

56:05

me a kiss, bring flowers. It was great. Then

56:07

he got home later and later it could be after ten or

56:09

midnight. Sometimes he didn't come home at all. I

56:11

be beside myself, trying to figure out if he was all

56:14

right. It was really awful. I'd sit there at the dinner

56:16

table, looking at the cold food and crying my eyes

56:18

out. When he did come back, he'd say he was tired

56:20

and go straight to bed. I didn't understand what was happening.

56:22

I thought it was all my fault. And then there's

56:24

a number of possibilities about like what Bill was

56:26

doing at the time. He very well may have been cheating. Probably

56:29

was cheating because he was constantly had

56:31

a carousel of women kind of going um.

56:34

He also had like a bunch of really unsuccessful

56:36

business ventures. He had an art gallery that failed,

56:38

So maybe his fucked up career was

56:40

on his mind. Yeah,

56:45

terrible, it's bad. And he was also

56:47

he was also an alcoholic and increasingly

56:49

like an increasingly like vicious

56:52

drunk during this period of time. So he was up probably out

56:54

drinking a lot of the time. And Janice described

56:56

him as a monster when he was drinking.

56:58

Quote, he'd get a use of mentally and

57:01

after a while physically. I tried to make excuses

57:03

for him. The war, his leg. He always

57:05

told me the men in the car would come back to finish

57:07

the job. One day he hit me gave me a bloody

57:09

nose, knocked me out. I called the hotline. They

57:12

told me to get out of there. Tony was just a little

57:14

baby. Then the next day we drove built to work and

57:16

just kept going. We moved in with my parents in Los

57:18

Altos. I only saw him one more time after that,

57:20

when he drove up to get his stuff. I thought he might

57:22

stay a moment talk to his son, but he just got

57:25

the things and left. And Bill

57:27

we don't actually know many kids Bill had, either, but they all

57:29

kind of have the same story as this one, where like he

57:32

he'll have a couple of kids or a kid with

57:34

one of these women and then he

57:36

will be a violent

57:38

monster and she will flee with the kid and

57:40

Bill never tries to reach out again. Um.

57:43

God, miserable.

57:46

It's not good, it's not great. It's not a good

57:48

way to be a person. Um.

57:51

And it is like you look at Bill's history and

57:53

again, not to mitigate the profound spousal

57:55

abuse, but it's like, yeah, hard to imagine how

57:57

this guy grows up good at being in a

57:59

relation ship. Yeah, impossible for

58:01

him to be good in relationships. I just, oh

58:03

God, I hate that. I

58:06

hate that there's so many victims of that cheese. Yeah,

58:08

a ton of victims. Janice's story

58:11

is probably very similar to a number of bills,

58:13

unknown number of wives. Uh. It's important

58:15

to note that the monster Bill could take quite a

58:17

while to come out, and he was very good at charming

58:20

women um in the meantime, As the story

58:22

of his ex wife Sally illustrates.

58:25

Bill and I started talking. I liked him, but he was

58:27

smoking. I told him, smoke really bothered

58:29

me. I'm allergic. He looked me right in the eyes,

58:31

said all right, and crushed his cigarette into the

58:33

ashtray. He said he'd been smoking since he

58:35

was fourteen, a couple of packs a day, But for

58:37

me, he was going to quit. I asked him when he

58:39

pointed to the cigarette in the tray and said, I already

58:42

did. He never smoked another cigarette

58:44

as long as I knew him. We started dancing.

58:46

He had this kind of old world formality about

58:48

him, that military thing. I suppose. He was

58:50

a very graceful dancer, very light on his feet

58:53

for a big guy. It wasn't until later that I

58:55

realized he had an artificial leg. You would never

58:57

have guessed it. Plus he made me laugh. He

58:59

was Zany, always acting out these incredible

59:01

stories. He did these funny impressions. I

59:03

love to hear him talk. It didn't make a difference

59:05

what the topic was. He knew everything about it.

59:08

He had this tone in his voice. It just draws you

59:10

in. You can hear it on the radio. He was

59:12

perfect for that. We got married on

59:14

Catalina on the steps of the Wriggly Mansion.

59:16

The party was at l Galleon. Bill planned

59:18

the whole thing, told the band what to play. It was

59:20

great, but then he started drinking and picking

59:22

fights. I guess that should have been a sign. My

59:24

girlfriend said I was crazy to marry him, but

59:27

I really loved him. So

59:30

yeah, yeah, it's not great. It's

59:32

not and it's I'm

59:35

trying it just in kind of trying to classify

59:37

Bill. I don't know that. I don't know

59:39

that he's what you'd call a predator because I

59:41

don't think I don't think he had a whole lot

59:43

of control over what he was doing. I think he

59:46

was a pretty broken person. But he also didn't

59:48

go to like extreme measures to win back the

59:50

women who left him, like when he when he

59:52

violently chased them away. He would just

59:54

kind of pretend they never existed, move on to the

59:56

next person. I mean that's still like pretty

59:58

clear. I mean it's hard a ball. Yeah, yeah, definitely

1:00:01

an abuser. But I don't he's not like I

1:00:03

don't think he's like seeking women out and like trying

1:00:05

to psychologically fuck them out. Like, I don't

1:00:07

think there's any kind of like planning in it. I think

1:00:09

Bill is one of these people

1:00:11

who has like violent

1:00:14

mood swings and no control over them and no desire

1:00:16

to really control them. Yes, deeply

1:00:19

selfish, Yes, yes,

1:00:21

yes, absolutely, and just yeah

1:00:24

that's that's that's the feeling you get from him.

1:00:26

His mood swings seemed to come more or

1:00:28

less at random, um, and

1:00:31

probably was a mix of a number of things.

1:00:33

Um. He was also like working a pretty

1:00:35

unsatisfying life at this time, a lot series

1:00:38

of horrible dead end jobs, repeated

1:00:40

failed business games, and you get the feeling

1:00:42

he was taking that out on his family as well. Um,

1:00:44

But he also took it out on everyone around him. And

1:00:47

one of these dead end jobs, Bill got into an argument

1:00:49

with his boss and punched through a plate glass

1:00:51

window to try and strangle him.

1:00:53

Um. So he is not

1:00:56

a not a not a planner. That

1:00:59

this point, he really is just by

1:01:02

the seat of his pants at every turn. Yeah,

1:01:04

punching through a plate glass window is

1:01:06

not something you do if you're thinking a lot about

1:01:09

your violence. So

1:01:12

he was let go from that job. And obviously

1:01:14

money was always tight because Bill repeatedly

1:01:17

got fired from jobs for being a violent piece

1:01:19

of shit. Um. Yeah.

1:01:21

And also he couldn't stop from getting the women

1:01:23

that he was with pregnant. So we got Sally pregnant,

1:01:26

like, you know, pretty much as soon as they get married,

1:01:29

their daughter, Yeah, competent salmon

1:01:31

um their daughter Jessica again,

1:01:34

like, we don't know how many kids he had um.

1:01:37

Yeah. Sally later recalled quote,

1:01:39

he was the most loving, attentive dad. He'd play

1:01:41

with Jessica for hours. He seemed so happy,

1:01:43

but then just like that, he'd go off start

1:01:45

yelling. I blamed it on the drinking, but it was more than

1:01:48

that. It was like he became possessed, not in control

1:01:50

of himself. I tins up every time he came

1:01:52

into the room. One night, when Jessica was little,

1:01:54

we went to chuck e cheeses. Bill was drinking.

1:01:56

He got abusive, calling me. I

1:02:00

mean, that is something that happens at Chucky Cheese. I mean,

1:02:02

no, no, what no one's going to be sober?

1:02:04

I would I would be more worried about No.

1:02:06

Wait, I don't want to make that reference. Um,

1:02:09

that's bad. Still, how's

1:02:12

birthday carries at Chuck E Cheese? Is no one

1:02:14

is sober and no one is getting along? Yeah?

1:02:16

No, no one should get along. I don't know. I

1:02:19

don't want to. This story goes in a bad place,

1:02:21

so I don't want to make the drinking jokes

1:02:23

about Chuck E Cheese. Is that normally? Like

1:02:25

are a real positive part of my life. I

1:02:27

loved I love talking about what a bad place

1:02:29

Chuck E Cheeses is. But this, this story

1:02:31

is real dark. This is one

1:02:33

of the worst Chuck E Cheese stories I've

1:02:36

ever heard. And that's saying something. Yeah,

1:02:39

Bill was drinking. He got really abusive, calling

1:02:41

me names. I told him I'd had enough to stop

1:02:43

the car, let us out. I was holding Jess in my lap.

1:02:45

We didn't deal with seatbelts like today. I opened

1:02:47

the door to go when Bill turned and pushed me and

1:02:49

Jess out of the car with his artificial leg.

1:02:52

It was like getting hit by a four by four. We went

1:02:54

flying. I was okay, but then I looked

1:02:56

in Jess's tiny face was all cut up. So

1:02:59

he keeps a wife and infant daughter

1:03:01

out of a moving vehicle after getting drunk

1:03:03

at Chuck E Cheese? Is um, Jesus

1:03:05

Christ, why they have a to drink

1:03:08

cap now? First of its Bill

1:03:10

Cooper. That's the Bill Cooper rule of

1:03:12

Chuck E Cheesus. That is so that

1:03:15

is very upsetting and very It's

1:03:19

not the first time that has happened at a Chuck E Cheese,

1:03:21

not the fiftieth time that's happened at a Chuck E

1:03:23

Cheese. No, for

1:03:26

reasons that are probably too depressing to think

1:03:28

about. Sally didn't leave for good after that. She

1:03:30

set up a meeting between her Bill and their

1:03:32

pastor to try to talk things out, and the

1:03:34

subject of the conversation quickly turned

1:03:36

to Vietnam and Bill. As soon

1:03:38

as like, the pastor kind of started asking him questions

1:03:41

about his service, Bill got violently angry.

1:03:43

He started screaming and became so incensed

1:03:45

that Sally's pastor had to call the v A to

1:03:47

come and pick him up. Um, So the

1:03:50

couple splits in like nineteen eighty two,

1:03:52

and during this time Bill is going to Long Beach College

1:03:54

and trying to make use of his g I bill, and

1:03:57

he spends a lot of time. They're like, this is kind

1:03:59

of the first time in the early eighties after

1:04:01

his his this marriage X

1:04:03

breaks apart where he starts to kind of

1:04:05

deal with his PTSD UM

1:04:08

by writing about it. So he does

1:04:10

like essays and stuff about um

1:04:13

what like he and other veterans

1:04:15

are kind of experiencing one of his essays,

1:04:18

and most people were doing at that time.

1:04:21

He does to an extent try to process his

1:04:23

trauma. He writes an essay titled Vietnam

1:04:25

Are we still suffering Casualties? Ten years

1:04:27

later? Um? And in it he wrote

1:04:29

quote on the campus of Long Beach City College.

1:04:31

Aspector reaps its harvest ghastly.

1:04:34

It stalks the future of those who know it's past,

1:04:36

any of us who have stood against it and survived.

1:04:38

The demon strikes down dreams, educations,

1:04:40

and even minds. It is insidious in nature

1:04:43

and rides upon an undercurrent of memories, ignorance,

1:04:45

and fear. It is not dead as many believe,

1:04:48

nor is it a figment of the imagination. It

1:04:50

is as real, as real as the earth we walk upon.

1:04:53

He's writing about his PTSD, and

1:04:55

he's writing pretty

1:04:57

well about it actually, like Bill's not

1:04:59

a bad writer, um

1:05:01

and he uh no, and

1:05:04

he One of the interesting things that happens during

1:05:06

this time is he meets a young Vietnamese

1:05:08

refugee at Long Beach College and gets to

1:05:10

like interview her, and he has this realization

1:05:13

that like when he was the way he later described

1:05:15

as like he realized that if he'd encountered

1:05:17

this woman when she was a young girl in Vietnam, he

1:05:19

probably would have shot her. And this like

1:05:21

really fucks, like Bills, you

1:05:24

can't over exaggerate how

1:05:26

much Vietnam fox this man up. Yeah,

1:05:30

which is which is you know, like a story ful

1:05:32

lot of people, Yeah, it's yeah,

1:05:34

and you know, to be fair, a lot of people who don't kick

1:05:36

their wife and infant child out of a moving

1:05:38

car, so like certainty

1:05:41

that you will then do that. Um

1:05:45

yeah, but yeah, it's a rough

1:05:47

like Bill is. And this will become

1:05:50

really appropriate because of the man he grows into.

1:05:52

Bill is like the fucking poster child for

1:05:54

how badly American imperialism

1:05:56

fox up young

1:05:58

men, the young men who are two

1:06:02

of like, how American imperialism

1:06:04

sucks you up? How like PTSD fucks

1:06:06

you up? How like the expectation based

1:06:09

on like media and like expectations

1:06:11

versus reality fuck you up. There's

1:06:14

no there's no limit

1:06:16

on ways that this guy's fucked up.

1:06:18

Case study a lot of lessons in

1:06:20

the story of Bill Cooper. So Bill gets

1:06:22

married again in nineteen eighties six, and that worked out

1:06:24

about as well as you'd expect. By the tail end

1:06:26

of the Reagan years, he had nearly

1:06:28

two basketball teams have failed marriages in

1:06:30

their rear window, a head full of bad memories

1:06:33

and no real prospect for worked. The

1:06:35

future looked bleak. Yeah,

1:06:39

um, so the future looked bleak for

1:06:41

Bill. But then in nineteen Jamie

1:06:44

there came a single shaft of

1:06:46

brilliant sunlight. Bill Cooper

1:06:49

discovered the Internet. No,

1:06:52

I know, I know, the worst thing

1:06:55

that could have happened to this confirmation

1:07:00

of the whole thought he's

1:07:02

ever had in his life. Yeah,

1:07:05

it's it's it's unfortunate that

1:07:07

things about that way. Yeah

1:07:09

he was. Bill Cooper was one of the very

1:07:12

first people on the Internet. Yeah, like,

1:07:15

one of the very first human beings to really

1:07:17

get into it. Um, and the late nineteen

1:07:19

eighties Internet was a real different beast than the modern

1:07:21

one. There was nothing that really worked like social media,

1:07:24

but there were b b s s, which were essentially

1:07:26

forums. So if you remember what forums were,

1:07:28

you can if you can think back to a time

1:07:31

before Facebook. Bill's kind of

1:07:33

into that sort of thing, um, and he

1:07:35

quickly discovers parannet, which

1:07:37

was dedicated to the paranormal, particularly

1:07:39

UFOs And yeah,

1:07:42

so Bill gets super fucking into UFOs

1:07:45

um and into this community of like UFO

1:07:47

nerds and like really the first online

1:07:50

community of UFO nerds that exists. Yeah,

1:07:52

this is such early Internet ship. It's

1:07:55

like every annoying couple in their forties

1:07:57

met on an Internet forum. Yeah, just

1:08:00

exactly. Yeah, though legally as

1:08:02

well, um, that's in the constitution.

1:08:04

So Mark Jacobson suggests that flying

1:08:06

saucers and sort of like belief in UFOs

1:08:09

was quote the first populist truth or issue,

1:08:11

the first time the authorities denied something

1:08:13

that a large percentage of the population believed

1:08:16

to be true. And this is probably accurate

1:08:18

in a culture of conspiracy, scholar

1:08:20

Michael Barkon notes, quote, within

1:08:22

a few months of the first modern claim of a flying

1:08:24

saucers siting in nineteen forty seven poles

1:08:27

showed that of the population had

1:08:29

heard of them. By nineteen sixty six, that

1:08:31

figure had risen to ninety six percent, and

1:08:33

more importantly, forty six percent of all

1:08:35

Americans believed UFOs actually existed.

1:08:38

More than a decade later, in nineteen seventy

1:08:40

eight, thirty percent of college graduates

1:08:42

believe they existed. At that time, the number

1:08:44

of Americans who believed UFOs were real reached

1:08:46

its highest level fifty seven percent.

1:08:49

Now Wow, by nineteen

1:08:51

ninety the number of UFO true believers

1:08:53

had actually fallen to about forty seven percent,

1:08:56

and it was still at around that level six years later.

1:08:58

And this suggests that the Internet so much

1:09:00

allow for the spread of a

1:09:02

belief in UFOs, as it did help to

1:09:04

make those beliefs kind of more durable by building

1:09:06

communities for people like build to explore

1:09:09

and expand on existing theories. And

1:09:11

this allowed for very

1:09:13

different kinds of conspiracy theories

1:09:15

to merge. For example, there's

1:09:17

always been stories about an alien crash

1:09:20

landing in Roswell since like nineteen seven

1:09:22

UM, and there'd also been conspiracy theories theorists

1:09:25

who believe that JFK had been murdered by someone

1:09:27

besides the widely accepted culprit, who

1:09:29

is, of course Bernard Sanders

1:09:32

accomplished me yeah. Um.

1:09:35

And then starting in the mid nineteen eighties,

1:09:37

there was Majestic twelve, and in brief, Majestic

1:09:40

twelve conspiracy theory purported

1:09:42

to be a set of briefing documents for

1:09:44

the incoming newly elected president and

1:09:46

forming him of the existence of a secret organization

1:09:49

of the world's dozen most powerful people.

1:09:52

M J twelve is like the first hidden global

1:09:54

government conspiracy theory um,

1:09:57

and it was formed in the wake of the Roswell land

1:09:59

Like this, this hidden global government was supposedly

1:10:02

had been formed in the wake of the Roswell landings to deal

1:10:04

with the newfound existence of aliens. Now,

1:10:06

the initial claims of the m J twelve conspiracy

1:10:09

theory were rather basic, because this document actually

1:10:11

was only like, I think, a dozen pages or something. But

1:10:14

once m J twelve hit the Internet

1:10:16

in the late nineteen eighties, a funny thing started

1:10:18

to happen. Conspiracy theorists

1:10:20

began grafting their pet conspiracy theories

1:10:23

onto m J twelve. Writing in

1:10:25

the jfk assassination and the Tonk and

1:10:27

Gulf incident, which you know was the spark behind

1:10:29

the Vietnam War and a bunch of other shady

1:10:31

stuff into the machinations of the Majestic

1:10:33

Twelve. Now. The most

1:10:35

successful of these conspiracy fan fiction

1:10:37

authors was a fellow named John Lear, the

1:10:39

son of a guy of the guy who created the Leir Jet.

1:10:42

Lear's theory was that the leaders of the US

1:10:44

had made a devil's bargain with aliens back

1:10:46

in the nineteen sixties to hand over American

1:10:48

citizens and cattle to them for mutilation

1:10:51

and experimentation in exchange for technology.

1:10:54

But the aliens, yeah, yeah, this

1:10:56

is this is the X files, right, like

1:10:59

this is actually like is literally what the like

1:11:01

John Lear, And then the work that Bill Cooper

1:11:04

does with Lear is the inspiration for

1:11:06

all of the X Files. Clearwater

1:11:08

Revival playing in the background of this Devil's

1:11:10

deal with the Aliens is good. I feel like

1:11:12

I'm there. Yeah yeah, so

1:11:14

you know, Lear, Lear

1:11:17

in Cooper, once they got together, would kind

1:11:19

of argue that actually, the Majestic twelve

1:11:22

um were had we're kind of getting

1:11:24

like grifted by the

1:11:26

aliens, that like the technology they were getting

1:11:28

wasn't very good and the aliens were way more

1:11:30

brutal with their abductions than they were supposed to

1:11:32

be um, and so like

1:11:35

the conspiracy evolves under Lear into

1:11:37

like claiming that the Allies in the military

1:11:39

had balked at this this like

1:11:43

agreement with the Aliens, and that was what led

1:11:45

to the creation of the Strategic Defension Initiative

1:11:47

Reagan's Star Wars Missile program.

1:11:51

Is. What's

1:11:53

happening is the Internet is making conspiracy

1:11:56

theories had largely been sort of spread by

1:11:58

kind of you know, there'd be some underground newsletters

1:12:00

and stuff, but also people just kind of spread these

1:12:02

these fake documents that we're purporting to

1:12:04

be like the and this is like throughout the eighties,

1:12:07

these documents that were claimed to be like, you

1:12:09

know, evidence of one conspiracy or

1:12:11

another. And the Internet brings all starts to bring

1:12:13

all this ship together, so like we can take

1:12:15

your take your cork and take it from your corkboard

1:12:18

and really start to compare some ideas. Yeah,

1:12:20

yeah, um, I'm gonna quote from the book

1:12:22

A Culture of Conspiracy on sort of what happened

1:12:25

like the impact of of John

1:12:27

Lear's uh, what's called the Leer

1:12:29

statement, which is like his personal

1:12:31

theory about MJ twelve. The Leer

1:12:33

Statement is brief, only seven printed pages,

1:12:36

but dizzying in its claims. It elevates m J

1:12:38

twelve to a conspiratorial position nowhere

1:12:40

hinted at in the original papers themselves,

1:12:42

and implies a web of subsidiary conspiracies

1:12:45

to silence the news media with that in the academic

1:12:47

community, and to must lead the UFL community

1:12:49

as well. According to leer upologist

1:12:52

William Moore, the figure most identified with

1:12:54

the MJL twelve papers was probably

1:12:56

himself a disinformation agent in the

1:12:58

higher of MJ twelve. So you

1:13:01

also start to see like what's

1:13:05

essentially like this big over conspiracy

1:13:07

that's being created. Like it's not

1:13:09

just it's not just aliens exist, It's not just

1:13:12

there's a secret world government. It's not just JFK

1:13:14

was killed, you know, um by

1:13:16

the CIA or whoever. It's like all of these

1:13:18

things are part of this massive, branching,

1:13:21

impossibly influential conspiracy. What

1:13:23

you're seeing is the precursor for the kind

1:13:25

of conspiracy that qan On is right,

1:13:28

Like this is when that first starts happening,

1:13:30

and Bill Cooper is one of the guys on the

1:13:32

ground making it happen. He's one of the most influential

1:13:35

people in this early little online community.

1:13:38

UM. And you know, Bill had

1:13:40

kind of just started by sharing tales

1:13:42

of of aliens and stuff in

1:13:44

paranet um, but he very quickly graduated

1:13:47

into like writing about Lear's work and

1:13:49

adding conspiracies to it. And Lear

1:13:52

and Cooper soon like become friends and

1:13:54

start talking and start working together on

1:13:56

like expanding kind of

1:13:58

people's idea of what a conspiracy

1:14:01

could be. UM. And here's how

1:14:04

it'll be less so in just a second.

1:14:06

Cooper's biographer actually interviewed Lear

1:14:09

um pretty recently. Uh, and Lear was very

1:14:11

old at the time. But here's how Leir described

1:14:13

the two men's early friendship. I

1:14:15

heard there was this guy on parannet who was supporting

1:14:17

what I said, Bill Cooper. He was writing into

1:14:19

the bulletin board saying he'd worked in the Office of Naval

1:14:22

Intelligence and see this incredible amount of top

1:14:24

secret material. And he could vouch for word

1:14:26

for word fifty percent of what I said. Lear

1:14:29

and Cooper spent a lot of time together through nineteen

1:14:31

and nineteen ninety. I liked him from the beginning.

1:14:33

Lear recalled he was smart, and he had a good sense

1:14:35

of humor and amazing memory. He also could

1:14:38

drink me under the table, which wasn't so easy to do

1:14:40

back then. When I saw him put away a fifth of Scotch

1:14:42

before lunchtime, I knew he was my kind

1:14:44

of guy. Then he'd be off on something else,

1:14:47

that was Bill. One minute, he'd be wrapping himself

1:14:49

in the flag, standing up and reciting parts of the Constitution

1:14:51

verbatim. Then he'd be like a beat nick at a jazz

1:14:53

club. Hey daddy, oh, hey daddy Oh. He

1:14:56

might have pulled a gun on me three or four times. Then

1:14:58

again I pulled a gun on him too. Okay,

1:15:02

So just to summarize, he's

1:15:04

like, I knew this guy. We were going to be friends when

1:15:06

I found out he was very sick in his head,

1:15:10

that there was a little hope that he

1:15:12

was going to seek out help or get

1:15:14

any support from someone in his life. I was all

1:15:16

about this, and I thought it was really cool because

1:15:18

I shared these same issues, because I have

1:15:20

the same problem. We both

1:15:22

had violent mood swings and pulled firearms

1:15:25

on each other regularly. That's what we have interested

1:15:27

in addressing this. No, therefore,

1:15:30

were going to be good friends soon.

1:15:32

Bill Cooper developed his own hypothesis based

1:15:34

off of Lear's theory about global elites trading

1:15:37

human souls for alien technology and

1:15:39

excited online rants. Bill would claim to have

1:15:41

access to top secret information that at least

1:15:43

sixteen alien craft had crashed and been

1:15:46

found by the US government UH

1:15:49

aliens had been recovered dead, and one had been

1:15:51

recovered alive, but was always very specific

1:15:53

in these kind of posts. According to Mark

1:15:55

Jacobson quote, Cooper's rewrite

1:15:57

of Lear's hypothesis added new items like

1:16:00

a particle beam weapon and machinery

1:16:02

for cloning and synthetic genetic duplication

1:16:04

of humans to the shopping list of Lear's and holy

1:16:06

tech for flesh deal. He also tweaked

1:16:09

the timeline of government alien interaction. Now

1:16:11

there were three separate meetings, the most significant being

1:16:13

the signing of the formal agreement, which took place

1:16:15

on February tenth, nineteen fifty four, and

1:16:17

Murrock now Edwards Air Force Base near

1:16:20

Lancaster, California. The historic

1:16:22

event had been planned in advance and the details

1:16:24

of the treaty had been agreed upon Cooper rights

1:16:26

in the secret government. President Eisenhower

1:16:28

had been vacationing nearby Palm Springs

1:16:31

when he was spirited away to the base on the pretext

1:16:33

that he had an appointment with his dentist who happened

1:16:35

to be Dr tim tote Leary, father of

1:16:37

the LSD guru Timothy Leary, which

1:16:39

of course would make it into later conspiracy theories,

1:16:41

but is true. Uh yeah,

1:16:45

yeah. So it's not hard to see

1:16:47

why Bill's alternate version of history played

1:16:49

well with very online people. It's fun,

1:16:52

um yeah. And and Bill wasn't content

1:16:54

with just being a giant among the very first and

1:16:56

the very saddest conspiracy nerds

1:16:58

and the internet kind

1:17:00

of fun. Everything is connected vibe

1:17:03

to it that people a yeah, yeah,

1:17:05

yeah, yeah, and he get he starts to get kind of famous

1:17:07

within this community for that, and he's soon he's speaking at

1:17:09

like conventions and stuff, UFO conventions

1:17:11

all around, like he's kind of in demand by later

1:17:14

angel Fire fan sites. Yeah.

1:17:17

And in ninety nine, Bill decides

1:17:20

he's going to take things a step further because he doesn't want

1:17:22

to just be limited to the Internet. So he prints

1:17:24

out five thirty five copies of

1:17:26

all of his findings on extraterrestrials,

1:17:28

and he sends out copies to every member of the U

1:17:31

S House and Senate. UM. And he'd

1:17:33

written so much like these documents he was

1:17:35

sending everyone in Congress um

1:17:37

were so extensive that the whole endeavor costs

1:17:39

twenty seven thousand dollars. Yeah

1:17:44

yeah, what yeah,

1:17:49

he in like nineteen eight

1:17:52

nine money. Yeah,

1:17:55

okay, Yeah, Bill's

1:17:57

dedicated. His guides

1:18:00

for Congress included a helpful taxonomic

1:18:03

guide to all the different aliens species out

1:18:05

in the galaxy, including two different kinds of

1:18:07

gray aliens and the draco Moffman.

1:18:10

Um. Yeah, let's

1:18:16

not let's not make fun of mothman here,

1:18:18

okay, Okay.

1:18:21

Now, Bill obviously hadn't seen anything like

1:18:23

these creatures in person um, and but

1:18:25

he was, you know, at this point claiming openly,

1:18:28

you know, he'd been claiming for years to his friends of all

1:18:30

the secret seed seen in that admiral's cabinet.

1:18:33

And now he starts like justifying, like, this

1:18:35

is how I learned about all these aliens from

1:18:37

the cabinet. Um. This is a very

1:18:39

wise cabinet. Yeah, that that admiral

1:18:41

really kept a lot of different ship just under

1:18:44

his desk, And apparently Bill had

1:18:46

a ton of time to really read it and take

1:18:48

it in, and you know, well, you know, you know

1:18:50

a lot of three Martini lunches happened

1:18:52

happening in the Admiralty back then, you know. So

1:18:57

uh yeah, So

1:19:01

Bill sends all this off to Congress,

1:19:03

along with an offer to undergo hypnotic

1:19:05

regression to convince Congress he was the real

1:19:07

deal. Um. No one took him up on the author

1:19:10

but could yeah, just let

1:19:12

me hypnotize you. I can come into you. My ideas

1:19:14

are good. No, you just have to. You

1:19:16

have to hypnotize me and take me back

1:19:18

to the past. Oh and then I will

1:19:21

give you the Oh, I see what he's doing. Okay,

1:19:23

watch like thirty different episodes of the

1:19:26

X Files for more information on hypnotic

1:19:28

regression. I guess so.

1:19:32

Yeah, and nobody

1:19:34

at Congress ever gets back to Bill, but he later will

1:19:36

write that at least sending all of this nonsense

1:19:38

out to them had quote prevented the government from

1:19:40

arresting or harming me, and he moved by them

1:19:42

would be interpreted as total confirmation of

1:19:45

everything that I had revealed. Um.

1:19:48

A lot of faith to have in this evil

1:19:50

government. So luckily

1:19:52

for Bill, the late nineteen eighties saw the meteoric

1:19:55

rise in popularity of the UFO movement,

1:19:57

and Bill became one of its first celebrities.

1:19:59

He started to make money selling his different writings

1:20:01

on extraterrestrials, and he was invited to speak

1:20:03

at the Mutual uf Phone Network Moufon

1:20:06

Symposium in nine now.

1:20:09

The mouf On Symposium started with disaster

1:20:12

when on Saturday evening, an

1:20:14

m J twelve expert named William

1:20:16

Moore admitted that he had colluded with an Air

1:20:18

Force Office of Special Investigations employee

1:20:21

to spread false information to UFO researchers,

1:20:23

which is exactly what like Lear and

1:20:25

Bill Cooper had been claiming UM.

1:20:28

But unfortunately, More admitted to

1:20:30

that some of the disinformation he had spread UM

1:20:33

was like one of the pieces of fake, you

1:20:35

know, leaked government documents that Bill

1:20:37

had used as a major source in his own work

1:20:40

UM. Mark Jacobson writes quote. This was particularly

1:20:43

troubling for the Lear Cooper contingent, since Lear

1:20:45

had included a fair amount of this work in his hypothesis.

1:20:48

It brought the galling possibility that much of the MJ

1:20:50

twelve story that revealed Washington malfeasance

1:20:52

was itself part of a government directed disinformation

1:20:55

program. Following more speech, Cooper ended

1:20:57

up at Lear's home in a rage. He was roaring

1:20:59

drunks, dreaming that he had been set up and demanding

1:21:01

to know who I was really working for. Leir recalled,

1:21:04

that was one of those times I thought he might kill me. By

1:21:06

the next day, Cooper had calmed down. Who cared

1:21:08

what Millia William Moore said anyway, the man was

1:21:10

a liar, a fake, less than upon in the larger

1:21:12

game the original m J twelve papers,

1:21:14

where Bogus Cooper said a pile of craft designed

1:21:17

to lead you right through the rose Garden. The

1:21:19

truth, the real truth, the one he learned while looking through

1:21:21

Admiral Clary's cabinet, was still out there,

1:21:23

ready to be told. So after

1:21:25

this all happens at his first really

1:21:28

big speech at move Ons, Bill gets on stage

1:21:30

and he delivers a captivating lecture that

1:21:32

relied very heavily on his own experiences stumbling

1:21:34

upon top secret information while working for the

1:21:37

Navy. I'm gonna play you a little segment of that

1:21:39

right now, Jamie. That's what

1:21:41

I sent you, Jamie over text. Yeah, and

1:21:43

this will give you an idea of kind of where Bill is

1:21:45

in terms of a pitch man, how he isn't

1:21:47

delivering his information at kind

1:21:49

of the start of his career because he's not really

1:21:52

on the radio yet. Okay,

1:21:54

so he's still he's still finding his voice. He's

1:21:56

still finding his voice. And fine, hey,

1:21:58

you know we've all in there or accounts

1:22:01

that there were four. I saw

1:22:03

pictures of three of those

1:22:05

dead alien bodies in a report

1:22:08

called Project Grudge, which also

1:22:10

included material from a report

1:22:12

called Blue Book Report Humber

1:22:14

thirteen. So

1:22:17

I'm not sure whether there were three or four. I

1:22:20

saw photographs of three of those bodies

1:22:22

for sure. Really,

1:22:25

it doesn't make any difference if there was one

1:22:28

or fifty. The important thing

1:22:30

is that it occurred and that

1:22:33

there were dead alien bodies

1:22:35

that were not of this world. Okay,

1:22:38

um, yeah, you know he

1:22:41

does kind of have the energy of a Reddit

1:22:43

user who is who is on stage

1:22:45

for the first time. But it sounds

1:22:47

like Key course corrects this later in his life.

1:22:50

He sure does. But we'll

1:22:52

hear a lot of thing thrown out. There's ideas

1:22:54

being thrown out in a decent shirt. Yeah,

1:22:57

in a decent shirt. So yeah, one

1:22:59

are shown that from that is that like what Bill saying

1:23:01

is obviously absurd, but he's smart enough not to

1:23:04

dwell on any like one piece of data for long

1:23:07

a very matter of fact the way it's delivered.

1:23:09

Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that Bill

1:23:11

really starts to do so like UFO conspiracy

1:23:13

theories had for most of the time that existed just kind

1:23:15

of been this theory that like there's aliens out

1:23:18

there and the government doesn't want you to know about them.

1:23:20

Bill finds a way to really

1:23:22

connect UFO conspiracy

1:23:25

theories to people in a much more kind of emotional

1:23:27

level, because you know, by this point the late

1:23:29

nineteen eighties, everyone's pretty

1:23:32

aware that things have started to go wrong since

1:23:34

World War Two, Like most Americans are

1:23:36

like, this doesn't seem like the path we were supposed

1:23:38

to be on um

1:23:40

And Bill kind of is

1:23:43

the first guy to be like, what if we just blame it all

1:23:45

on aliens? Like what if

1:23:47

that's the reason things went wrong? A shortcut?

1:23:50

So I had to come up with a great one. It is

1:23:52

interesting too, just even like listening to how

1:23:54

he talks of how he seems

1:23:56

to be kind of using this like military

1:23:59

way of carrying himself to like have

1:24:01

a level of authority. It's not really the same

1:24:04

kind of conspiracy theorist carrying

1:24:07

oneself that you see now. It's very it's

1:24:09

not like a media personality. It's

1:24:12

like a He sounds like a

1:24:14

military person saying that weirdest should

1:24:16

I've ever heard. Yeah, uh

1:24:18

and and he yeah. Another quote

1:24:20

from that speech where he kind of goes

1:24:23

into detail about how

1:24:25

the aliens said fucked things up for America,

1:24:27

I think is salient to end on for this episode.

1:24:29

Quote Without the aliens, you can't make

1:24:31

sense of anything that's happened in this country for the past

1:24:34

forty four years. But the aliens in the middle, and

1:24:36

you've got all the answers. Your own government is

1:24:38

selling your children drugs and you don't seem to care.

1:24:40

Your own government has given away the power of the people,

1:24:42

and you don't seem to care. There is an apathy

1:24:44

that is running rampant in this country that is deadly.

1:24:47

Whether or not there are aliens, where now truly

1:24:49

a nation of sheep and ladies and gentlemen.

1:24:51

I assure you sheep are always led

1:24:53

to the slaughter. It's here I should note

1:24:55

that Bill Cooper is probably the man who invented

1:24:57

the words sheeple wow.

1:25:00

Yeah. He's the sheep oh guy yeah,

1:25:03

popularized. If you saw about

1:25:05

any of what he said with a

1:25:08

absurd devotion to capitalism.

1:25:11

I agree with it. Well, it's just about

1:25:13

aliens. With devotion to capitalism,

1:25:16

you're onto something. Because one of the things that I think

1:25:18

separates Bill from guys like Alex Jones

1:25:20

is I don't think Bill was primarily a grifter.

1:25:23

I think Bill was a guy who, for all of his

1:25:25

many, many horrific flaws,

1:25:27

um like, recognized

1:25:30

that things were really fucked up. And

1:25:33

he created this because he was a liar

1:25:35

and a fabulous um he had,

1:25:37

he created this, and because he was kind of like

1:25:40

fundamentally mentally incapable

1:25:42

of really admitting what had

1:25:44

gone wrong. He creates this whole

1:25:47

schema to justify

1:25:50

or to to explain to people

1:25:52

who don't want to admit what the

1:25:54

actual problem is why things are

1:25:56

fucked up in America. And that's

1:25:58

really like the genesis. That's why conspiracy

1:26:01

is so fucking popular today in large

1:26:03

parts because things are fucked up. Everybody knows

1:26:05

it, and a lot of us are desperate to not

1:26:08

stare the real problem in the face. And Bill Cooper

1:26:10

was the first guy to really get good

1:26:12

at providing people with something that would let them

1:26:14

not stare the real problem in the face. Um

1:26:17

And I don't know the extent to which we'll get into

1:26:19

this a little tomorrow or in

1:26:22

part two. I don't know the extent to which Bill

1:26:25

knew what he was doing.

1:26:28

Um, I don't know the extent. There's definitely a

1:26:30

part of him that was a pitchman and a con artist,

1:26:33

and there's a part of him that I think was

1:26:35

like a patriot who was legitimately

1:26:37

traumatized by how fucked up he watched

1:26:39

his country become. I don't really know, um,

1:26:42

but it seems like both things are kind of going on.

1:26:44

He truly is like suffering of a

1:26:47

lot of definitely suffering.

1:26:49

Yeah, he's definitely suffering. He's definitely

1:26:52

has some mental illness issues, and

1:26:54

um, I can't wait to hear what

1:26:56

he does next. Well,

1:26:58

Jamie, first, you're gonna have to tell us where

1:27:00

they can find you next so that you can

1:27:03

Okay, well

1:27:06

sure you can. Well you can follow

1:27:08

me and Twitter. This

1:27:11

never feels right, Uh,

1:27:14

you can follow me on Twitter. You can listen

1:27:16

to my podcast My Year in Mensa, which

1:27:20

there will be I think there will be another episode

1:27:22

of and some developments in in

1:27:24

the near future. And you can listen

1:27:27

to the Bechdel Cast

1:27:29

every Thursday Feminist

1:27:32

Movie podcast and yeah,

1:27:36

all right, and you can find me somewhere.

1:27:40

No one, no one's, no one's ever learned

1:27:42

how though? Um So you

1:27:45

can follow him at I right, okay on Twitter.

1:27:47

He doesn't believe in Instagram.

1:27:50

I don't believe in Instagram now um or

1:27:52

or the TikTok's what

1:27:54

the kids are doing? All right? I think you would be

1:27:57

really good at TikTok, Robbert, you

1:27:59

would fucking love TikTok.

1:28:01

It's a bunch of angry teenagers. You would

1:28:03

say fuck the patriarchy. It's you

1:28:06

would love it, and you would be good at it.

1:28:08

I don't recommend it. I don't know, absolutely

1:28:11

not unless it makes me years

1:28:13

old

1:28:16

lawless skin TikTok. If you're

1:28:18

looking for a teenager to tell you that your

1:28:21

parents are racist, TikTok, that's

1:28:24

my looking for Kelly and Conway's daughter.

1:28:27

Yes, being on the right side of history,

1:28:29

tiktok' looking for.

1:28:32

If you're for teenagers that are trying to make

1:28:34

it so that there's empty seats

1:28:36

at Trump rallies, also, tiktoktok

1:28:41

are your sponsor. No, I'm kidding, I'm

1:28:46

I'm so tired even thinking about TikTok

1:28:49

um. I'm so tired thinking about young

1:28:51

people in general. Um,

1:28:53

alright, old alright, old guy. The podcast

1:28:55

over, yep.