Bonus: Four Died Trying Director John Kirby and Producer Libby Handros

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[SPEAKER_00]: Today's bonus episode of Solving JFK features a conversation with the producer and director from the film Ford died trying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Today we're joined by John Kirby and Libby Handros.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their series examines the lives and assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: through more than 130 interviews with family members, colleagues, eyewitnesses, and other people who were connected to these events, their project asks a central question, what connects these four murders and how did their deaths reshape American political history?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Four-died trying is being released in chapters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Each one is crafted as a standalone film, and the prologue is now available on major streaming platforms, and introduces many of the themes that we'll carry through that series.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So today we're gonna talk with John and Libby, and just kind of understand more about four-died trying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a really awesome project, and I'm honored to have you guys with me today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Solving JFK.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for having us.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks very much.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I watched the film when it first came out, you know, when you watch it in the second time, it's a little more, you can kind of pick up more stuff, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I remember watching it when it came out and thinking it was good.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that I finished it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I got pretty far and something pulled me off track.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But man, I watched it last night and
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was, it was incredible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's so well done.
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[SPEAKER_00]: You guys, I mean, the, the, my main takeaway was that the, the, the first episode, the prologue episode, it's just a really, really good sort of entrance into the whole concept for, for anybody who's kind of not familiar with it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So,
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[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I don't want to give the whole thing away just by telling you how great it was, but the production in particular is really, really strong like all the transitions and the animations and the sort of the vintage vibe of everything I just thought it was really well done.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Well, thanks so much.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's great to hear that we worked hard on it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We're in year 10 now.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I want to hear all about that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So I guess just to start from the top, what are your respective backgrounds?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I know John, you're the director and living your other producer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But how professionally would give you sort of the skill sets to be able to put this thing together in such an excellent way?
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think my background is in investigative journalism and particularly investigative documentary journalism.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is a piece of investigative journalism and investigative journalism is storytelling.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And so therefore, I've been working in this field since 1983, first on a series called Inside Story, with Hotting Carter, which was the first criticism series
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[SPEAKER_01]: and that did many documentaries about press issues and then we went on to do more long form documentaries and the notions that underlie Fordi trying are things I've been looking out along with my business partner John here now for years.
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[SPEAKER_01]: We did a film with Louis Lapp on the editor of Harper's Magazine called the American Rolling Class, which is a dramatic documentary musical, which looks at who the ruling class is.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, this project intersects with the deep state in the ruling class because what were these four men doing that angered that group so much that they had to be assassinated.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's been in my wheelhouse for decades.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I should clarify, everyone, it's inside story is different from inside addition.
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[SPEAKER_02]: People often think that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But inside story that Libby worked on for so long was a PBS show that ran for a number of seasons.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And it was the first nationally televised press criticism show.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I came to work with Libby on a project we did with Lewis Lappum, actually was an examination of the media.
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[SPEAKER_02]: triumph of the tabloid press that we did with Lewis, and but I come from working on, you know, films for HBO and other networks, and Libby and I did the American-rolling class for the BBC, and the Sundance channel, and, you know, we've gone on to do many other projects together for film festivals, theatrical release, and other, and other venues from Discovery Channel to you name it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So,
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think that what we're fortunate enough to combine are the kind of the unicorn here is that we do come from a traditional broadcast background, but we always both of us in our lives and careers.
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[SPEAKER_02]: are we're interested in things that went beyond the scope of normal broadcast television.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So we're bringing that kind of oddball combination of having some production shops with an interest in this forbidden history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And so Fordi trying just in terms of
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[SPEAKER_02]: the uh... how you guys got together uh... and and what the uh... the genesis was for for the project can you just kind of uh... one bit for that yeah we we um... had a friend named Nick Bryant who's done who actually did the most important some of the most important work i would say on the absteen files he he did that work years ago before anyone was talking about it before he for you were for it was it okay to speak about and polite society he had broken that story along with the story of the franklin scandal which is
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[SPEAKER_02]: equally or if not more disturbing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so I discovered Nick through reading his work and Nick put us together with somebody who had an interesting idea, which was, you know, what are the children of the assassinated?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Think about the
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[SPEAKER_02]: what happened to their parents.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And to make a long story short, we agreed with this person who got a lot of money to do a first, it was a film,
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then it evolved into kind of an episodic series and it evolved since then into a kind of a franchise of feature films and and that happened for a number of reasons it took it ended up taking for instance.
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[SPEAKER_02]: months and years sometimes to get, for instance, the King family to sit down and talk.
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[SPEAKER_02]: We're Bobby Kennedy Jr. or, I mean, we knew five people in common with Bobby Kennedy Jr. and we couldn't get that interview to happen as quickly as we would have liked.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, and that was the case throughout all these interviews and many of our interviews are final interviews.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we probably had the last interview with someone like Mort Saul, who was the president's Joe Criter along with being probably the first significant political comedian.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He became an investigator for Jim Garrison of interestingly enough after being probably the most highest paid comedian to that point in history.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, and, you know, did Gregory and speech writers for the Kennedys, and so this expanded by mutual agreement with our partner into a much bigger thing than it started, and so that's why we've decided that this format, you know, these days you can format things in so many ways, we could chop it up into little episodes later, but we're going to be releasing a film at a time
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[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, I want to come back to that suppression.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But what you're covering is so it's for people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, it's easy to put them together because, you know, that'll happen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They're all, you know, political assassinations of the 1960s.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in watching the film, again last night, what struck me is,
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[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the theme I noticed is that they all were vocally against the Vietnam War.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Kennedy was killed earlier on, so he maybe not vocally so much, but they all were sort of against the Vietnam War.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that
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[SPEAKER_00]: and just sort of anti-imperialism generally is what brings them together or is there another aside from just being the political assassinations of the 60s like what do you guys see in the and those assassinations and in those people that makes you kind of want to cover them all together.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's beyond the Vietnam War, all four men actually were for peace, and they didn't want the foreign entanglement, and so Kennedy, at the end of his life, was making reproachment with cruise-chev, and Martin Luther King, of course, was a peace activist, and so was Malcolm X. I mean, he came out against the war in Vietnam long before anybody else did.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So it's not just the war in Vietnam, it's the whole notion of peace, and not having all these little wars all over the world.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and it's not healthy to be for peace because of course there's something called the military industrial complex yeah but if you go down the list right you look at starting with Kennedy I mean there there wasn't a sector of the establishment that he didn't upset right so he's at war with uh
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[SPEAKER_02]: The steel combine, you know, he's going to get rid of the oil depletion allowance.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He's making, as Libby said, reprochement with cruise chef.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He's doing the same with Castro.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He's talking about fuel withdrawal from Vietnam, which was an action that he had inherited.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, even though he was definitely an anti-communist, which though some of the people he
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[SPEAKER_02]: who ended up killing him, probably thought he was soft on communism, but he wasn't.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't interested in capitulating the communism.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He just thought that the whole way we were going about it was wrong, and I can tell you more about what's going to happen in film one where we really explore.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's called Jack Joins the Revolution, and we really explore his anti-colonialism, his anti-imperialism.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But if you go down the list with Kennedy, I mean everything, you know, and then he and his brother are going after the mob.
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[SPEAKER_02]: you know, which is a tangled story because of his father.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So down the list you go, they need to get to Malcolm.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Malcolm, you know, had basically softened his kind of race-based approach to some degree.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He was going to use the UN as a means of going after the United States for human rights abuses against its black citizens.
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[SPEAKER_02]: but he was coming together with people like King and, you know, the two of them together was a terrifying prospect in people like Jagger Hoover.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, Malcolm gets a very bad rap.
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[SPEAKER_02]: People think he was like some kind of, you know, pro-militant violence kind of guy.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He was about protecting people by any means necessary from, you know, corrupt corruption and racism, but he
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[SPEAKER_02]: In the end, he had become this amazing international figure and was beloved all over the world, and he was becoming a major cold war embarrassment.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He was about to show up at this conference called the Bad Dung Conference, where he would have been speaking few all these third world leaders.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, he was a major threat in that regard.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They were fearful of the rise of what they call the Black Messiah.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Jade Groover writes about that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In
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[SPEAKER_02]: There are many places that shows up in the FBI files.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Then of course King is not only, he makes a speech April 4th, 1967, where he formally announces his opposition to the Vietnam War, and what is probably his best speech.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It's a devastating speech where he calls out the war crimes of our national security state.
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[SPEAKER_02]: people, poor people of all races to Washington, as you see in the prologue, as we briefly sketch.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And that was a terrifying prospect to the powers that be to have a real kind of occupy Washington where these people would not leave of all races.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Because of course, the major, however they go about doing it, whether it's through sort of naked, old school, racist policies, or new school,
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[SPEAKER_02]: policies.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The idea of dividing people along racial identity is very crucial to the ruling class.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So they love that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He was saying, forget about that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Let's all get together or camp on the Washington Mall until Congress does something about poverty.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, very, very scary.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So a year to the day after
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[SPEAKER_02]: He made the speech that connected poverty at home to the war abroad.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He was killed April 4th, 1968.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Then you get to Bobby and Bobby, of course, you know, new in ways that he could not express publicly who killed his brother.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And he was looking into that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And he made the decision to run reluctantly because
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[SPEAKER_02]: He understood that there were guns between him in the White House as he's told a friend.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And he also didn't want it to look like it was a vendetta against Johnson, et cetera.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But he was going to pull us out of the Vietnam War and he was making a kind of connection to
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[SPEAKER_02]: you know, impoverished farm workers and, you know, the dispossessed throughout this country Appalachia, the ghettos, he was, really, he had always had a kind of a priest-like mission, you know, a kind of a,
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[SPEAKER_02]: a sense of mission, but he was taking that to a level that I think was very scary to these establishment, and they just didn't want to see him in a place where he could possibly wield the instruments of government to go after the perpetrators of his brother's death, for instance, and to kill the cash cow that was the Vietnam War.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, these guys, they all intersect in kind of one killing almost couldn't have happened without the other, and there are many other
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[SPEAKER_02]: from Lemumba to Dog Homerschole to Fred Hampton that kind of get covered as we go culminating in people like John Lennon.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But these state has always state crimes against democracy have always included assassinations and those were the four big ones.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And they did forever alter the world that we live in.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So the way you've done this, so I saw on your website, 130 interviews, is that about, right?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Is that, you've been to a lot of people?
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[SPEAKER_00]: I guess my question, a few questions, then I want to talk about some of the specific people you interviewed because as I'm watching and I'm going no way, that's, they didn't get my read-a-lure ends.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's not my,
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's morita.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just like yelling at the TV.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but anyway, um, so, uh, when you, when you do these interviews, are you, because you know you're not going to get that many shots at the people, how far down the road, do you have the project mapped out such that you would be able to get all of the information you need to get, when you interview them, uh, I guess I'm asking kind of like a procedural question,
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, I mean, initially, to begin with, we had a huge board and as names would come up, I mean, a lot of documentaries are made where you read one book and then, you know, all those interviews are kind of there in the book, like my Xbox, Outskidney makes great documentaries this way, you know, and the writer has basically gotten all the interview subjects you need right there.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Now, we,
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[SPEAKER_02]: had four major historical figures to do and we were kind of rewriting the political history of the country and it took hundreds and hundreds of books and hundreds and hundreds of articles and as we are running into things and we're finding new leads and going from one place to another and it's like okay this person all we definitely all I've got to get her before she
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[SPEAKER_02]: then we're also racing the clock right because a lot of these people are older now so we're doing that's the procedure and then of course as we're sort of imbibing all this you know the former head of HBO films used to say that you could solve these kinds of crimes in the editing room right because you're kind of putting it all together and it's kind of the the pattern becomes very clear and so
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[SPEAKER_02]: We're rate, you know, various ideas that we had going in, changed, and evolved, and grew.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, meeting Vince Solandria, who I saw in your questions, you know, I mean, Vince Solandria for people who don't know, I mean, he gives us, I mean, Jim Douglas himself, who wrote, of course, the great JFK and the unspeakable why.
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[SPEAKER_02]: uh... he died white matters he helped set us off on this course he was a friend of ours at the time and when we got this gig we reached out to him because we've been on this kind of uh... path before we even were connected with this executive producer so in any event
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, Vince gives you a concept like false that false mystery, right, which is something we can talk about later if you want.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, you run down the ball, the field with that and all the things that make this McKinity assassination in particular a false mystery.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then, you know, you look at the divide and the camps between,
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[SPEAKER_02]: you know, the people who were like, oh, it's the mob, it's the CIA, it's Lyndon Johnson, etc.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then you're like, wait a second, isn't there something that ties all of this together?
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there are people being a little bit unnecessarily exclusionary.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so recently we've been flushing out a whole area that hadn't that we hadn't started with flushing out before.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So,
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[SPEAKER_02]: So it's an iterative process as Libby's fond of saying, and it's a cumulative process, and it's an associative process, and a lot of stuff is happening as we go.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And most of the people we interview did not say yes the first time around.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It took years to get some of those people as John was saying,
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[SPEAKER_01]: and it really was a process and and we actually read all their books.
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[SPEAKER_01]: So we'd sit down and talk to somebody and they'd be like, oh my god, you read our book all the way through or you read all of my books all the way through and the background books as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So who actually did the interviews and you guys just split them up or you
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it would depend.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, for instance, Sandy Serrano really wasn't comfortable talking to a guy, you know, for instance.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And then Kathleen Kennedy Townsend wasn't talking to a woman.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, sometimes it gets put like that.
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[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I mean, because I'm also the editor,
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[SPEAKER_02]: asking the questions, but Libby and I will have worked up those questions for days beforehand and weeks when you consider all the reading that has to be done.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So it will really depend on the situation and sometimes we just hand it back and forth as reciting there.
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[SPEAKER_01]: And we went in with very prepared questions because actually, if you do your questions correctly, they should tell a story.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The question should tell a story and the answers flush out that story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And James Douglas, one of the guys that you interviewed, his, the way that he writes, he kind of writes like thematically like that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, in JFK, the answer to be
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[SPEAKER_00]: I could see that being an influence on what you guys are doing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He's got a new book out to called Martyrs to the Unspeakable, which is really good.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But he really was our spiritual guide and he's the one, you know, I was, you know, this is many years ago now.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But I was,
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[SPEAKER_02]: incredibly ignorant, and I was ignorant of, of, vincelandry, who we, of course, he dedicates in part, JFK and the unspeakable, too.
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[SPEAKER_02]: So we were very lucky to, obviously, to, to know Jim and to talk to Jim, and then we were incredibly fortunate.
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[SPEAKER_02]: to talk to Vince, because very few people have ever gotten to do a sit-down interview with Vince Selendry, and he really is the godfather of all Kennedy researchers, Mark Lane, everybody sat at his knee, because of course he figured it out with his brother-in-law on assassination weekend, but that's another story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about the false, would you call it the false mystery?
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean this is this is Vince's concept of false mystery and you know what it means is is that everything that you need to know about this is right there it's it's all not even hidden in plain sight it's it's staring at us in the face the real mystery is not who did it the mystery is really in us
21:28.454 --> 21:34.299
[SPEAKER_02]: Why, why do we, I mean, this is my addition to the concept of false mystery, but that's the real mystery.
21:34.319 --> 21:34.701
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like
21:34.883 --> 21:41.570
[SPEAKER_02]: What prevents us from really doing something about this and or seeing it when it's so clear, right?
21:41.630 --> 21:49.037
[SPEAKER_02]: So for instance, he'll use the examples of, you know, the crime scene is destroyed immediately.
21:49.097 --> 21:52.361
[SPEAKER_02]: Like everything you can need to know about like who did it is right there, right?
21:52.421 --> 21:57.626
[SPEAKER_02]: Because they take gunner governor, Connelly's close to the dry cleaners immediately.
21:58.047 --> 22:03.372
[SPEAKER_02]: They bang out the dense in the limousine and send it back to Ford and wash out all the blood.
22:03.352 --> 22:06.856
[SPEAKER_02]: and they let the prime suspect be killed while in police custody.
22:07.276 --> 22:09.618
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, are they, you know, the alleged prime suspect.
22:09.659 --> 22:16.786
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, he and his brother-in-law, and I'll just tell the short version of this story, we're sitting there assassination weekend.
22:16.806 --> 22:19.248
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can't remember about Vince, an eighth grade.
22:19.549 --> 22:29.960
[SPEAKER_02]: He stood in front of him as a math class, right after Pearl Harbor, and he said, you know, the whole idea that this came as a surprise to the American National Security State is totally ridiculous.
22:30.300 --> 22:31.401
[SPEAKER_02]: It was, in fact,
22:31.381 --> 22:47.854
[SPEAKER_02]: a a provoked attack in order to push a recalcitrant public into the war a recalcitrant american public and of course he's been totally born out by everything from cables and other historians maybe he did that naith grade so he was like 12 or 13 right.
22:47.834 --> 22:58.865
[SPEAKER_02]: So now fast forward, he's sitting there on assassination weekend with his brother-in-law, and they are watching as Oswald's being taken around, and he says, I'm just a patsy.
22:59.287 --> 23:02.957
[SPEAKER_02]: And at that point, they say to each other, okay, we'll
23:02.937 --> 23:04.959
[SPEAKER_02]: give them the benefit of the doubt.
23:04.979 --> 23:19.816
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, if he lasts through the weekend and gets to trial, then it is what the authorities are saying it is, and if he dies by the end of the weekend, will know that this was a national security state killing order at the highest level.
23:20.397 --> 23:30.328
[SPEAKER_02]: And there, you know, there are a series of logical steps you can actually just get to to realize that another aspect of the false mystery of this is.
23:30.308 --> 23:46.866
[SPEAKER_02]: the the communications that were sent to both the cabinet plane that was flying back from the conference in Hawaii and and the and air force one with these people who had just been part of this traumatic event and what's the message and our after Oswald's
23:46.846 --> 23:50.291
[SPEAKER_02]: captured, they basically say, we got the guy.
23:50.351 --> 23:52.114
[SPEAKER_02]: There is no conspiracy.
23:52.715 --> 23:53.156
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
23:53.616 --> 23:54.298
[SPEAKER_02]: Case closed.
23:54.798 --> 24:08.820
[SPEAKER_02]: And as Vince puts it so powerfully in our film, they're basically saying, we don't care what you heard or what you saw or what you smelled and these were guys who were combat veterans who knew they were in an ambush.
24:09.762 --> 24:14.901
[SPEAKER_02]: we're going to say who did it and you're going to say what we say, period.
24:15.242 --> 24:16.246
[SPEAKER_02]: That's it.
24:16.266 --> 24:18.253
[SPEAKER_02]: So right there they're just telling you.
24:18.554 --> 24:21.057
[SPEAKER_02]: they're being brazen about it.
24:21.117 --> 24:35.957
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, he reads the war and report, he really, okay, they've got all these witnesses that say they heard shots coming from over here and they've got these witnesses that say they heard him from over there and they got other witnesses that they heard both and yet they don't put it all together.
24:35.977 --> 24:38.821
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not really trying to figure it out.
24:39.201 --> 24:45.169
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's another, that's another clue that shows you this is a false mystery.
24:45.149 --> 24:49.614
[SPEAKER_02]: and that the people at the highest levels are the ones that ordered this killing.
24:49.634 --> 24:55.160
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, the people who spoke out and said, I heard this, I saw that, et cetera.
24:55.260 --> 24:56.561
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's 90, some of my people.
24:56.922 --> 24:58.443
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not have long lives.
24:58.964 --> 25:05.751
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not good for your longevity to have very publicly kept saying that you disagreed with what was in the war and report.
25:06.452 --> 25:11.798
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, especially if you had some kind of first-hand information, you know, a lot of those, as we know, I wouldn't this is died.
25:12.655 --> 25:31.542
[SPEAKER_00]: right and and they a lot of them they go a single car accident heart attack heart attack heart attack and then ten you know ten twelve years later they show everybody the heart attack gun during the church committee hearings who's so it's like some point yeah they've been able to do and do so for a long time
25:31.522 --> 25:36.651
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, right, uh, toxic shellfish turns out, uh, hell of a drug.
25:37.413 --> 25:39.376
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so I did a prior.
25:39.496 --> 25:47.050
[SPEAKER_01]: I did a program on on four knowledge of Pearl Harbor and the investigative journalist who wrote the book on that diet of shellfish poisoning over the Atlantic.
25:47.941 --> 26:04.819
[SPEAKER_02]: bad air plain food but anyway media he was going to reveal too much like can't even talk about Pearl Harbor all that you can't even talk about the Reichstag fire all these years later and that was Nazis then anyway go ahead yeah um i haven't out these involved in JFK
26:05.693 --> 26:23.297
[SPEAKER_00]: auto scores ain't the auto scores any angle we can uh... i'm going to have to unpack that at some point so we'll we'll look at it you're gonna have to you're gonna have to interview hank aporelli's uh... co-writer who's still alive Leslie Leslie i'm i'm at her briefly uh... in Dallas in twenty twenty two
26:23.581 --> 26:26.705
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but, uh, but yeah, I'd love to do that.
26:27.085 --> 26:34.314
[SPEAKER_00]: So, uh, you know, one thing I've learned from just studying JFK, not the others three gentlemen.
26:35.315 --> 26:48.711
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, it's just that it's so vast that it's really hard to, especially if I was going to make a film or try to, uh, document or even like a themed series, like to, to try to figure out.
26:49.214 --> 26:51.098
[SPEAKER_00]: how to attack it, you know what I mean?
26:51.178 --> 26:53.202
[SPEAKER_00]: How to take a bite at the apple, it's so big.
26:53.222 --> 26:58.191
[SPEAKER_00]: And to think where to go, I know it's a real challenge for JFK.
26:58.231 --> 27:05.365
[SPEAKER_00]: So my question to you is, given that you have four of them, where is everything going and what's next?
27:05.445 --> 27:07.088
[SPEAKER_00]: And do you have an approximate timeline?
27:08.452 --> 27:09.333
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't need it.
27:09.353 --> 27:09.733
[SPEAKER_01]: Go ahead.
27:09.813 --> 27:10.995
[SPEAKER_01]: You can talk about the next film.
27:11.015 --> 27:25.490
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, basically, as I say, you've got to let this, because we're not doing it from a script that we've pre-written, where we're, you know, and we're not doing it from a book that somebody else did, and we're putting it together.
27:25.750 --> 27:30.055
[SPEAKER_02]: You put it together from the materials on hand, and that's the living witnesses, right?
27:30.095 --> 27:36.822
[SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes, you know, so that's why, for instance, just doing the kids wasn't going to cut it.
27:37.730 --> 27:54.777
[SPEAKER_02]: not all the kids have all the story right and and it was a really pardon me important to us to talk to people like Paul Shrade who was you know the guy who was one of the guys who was shot along with Bobby Kennedy the night at the ambassador he was the labor adviser to Kennedy
27:54.757 --> 27:57.623
[SPEAKER_02]: and we were able to speak with him before he died.
27:57.663 --> 28:08.065
[SPEAKER_02]: He had been, you know, really working hard to get Sir Haun Sir Haun freed from prison because the ballistic showed that Sir Haun Sir Haun could not have killed Bobby.
28:08.466 --> 28:15.280
[SPEAKER_02]: So we go with the, you have to lean into what you have and answer your question like how do you deal with this giant?
28:15.260 --> 28:24.715
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, case, you know, so there's going to be a bias towards, you know, the people like Maria Lorenz or Sandy Serrano or the people that we were able to speak with.
28:25.396 --> 28:32.627
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes you try to get interviews that you can't get or, you know, you just missed them by months or weeks or whatever in their dead now.
28:33.188 --> 28:39.057
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think each of those people provides a window into what is a shared reality.
28:39.037 --> 28:41.321
[SPEAKER_02]: each of them will take you to the same place.
28:41.862 --> 28:47.130
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, obviously there are some that are, you could argue, or misinformation, or they're certainly partial.
28:47.491 --> 28:53.340
[SPEAKER_02]: But really, what I think sets us apart is, we have a major focus on what these people were doing.
28:53.661 --> 28:55.304
[SPEAKER_02]: That's woven throughout.
28:55.644 --> 28:58.068
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's what Jim Douglas does in his books.
28:58.088 --> 29:01.614
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you really learn what these people were, what they were about.
29:01.975 --> 29:05.280
[SPEAKER_02]: And in learning what they're about, you learn who their enemies were.
29:05.260 --> 29:08.704
[SPEAKER_02]: And in learning here, there are enemies where you learn what happened to them.
29:08.724 --> 29:16.194
[SPEAKER_02]: So the next film that is currently being suppressed right now is called Jack Joins the Revolution.
29:16.795 --> 29:19.699
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's a combination of stories.
29:19.879 --> 29:24.685
[SPEAKER_02]: It, you know, we realized that people didn't understand the red scare and the cold war.
29:24.705 --> 29:26.567
[SPEAKER_02]: Like people, you know, younger than me, you know, they just weren't around for that.
29:26.587 --> 29:33.276
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and
29:33.256 --> 29:45.694
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, COVID and the COVID locked down period sort of as some analogies to the red scare, but you know, we wanted to make sure that people really got what the red scare meant.
29:45.734 --> 29:54.927
[SPEAKER_02]: And so what it meant for Kennedy to not be a McCarthy, his brother did work on McCarthy's committee for a moment, but he got out of it.
29:54.907 --> 30:06.728
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they kind of saw McCarthy as a kind of a funny figure, but you know, what he and not just him, but that whole period did to the country was terrible.
30:07.089 --> 30:15.143
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there are people who defend McCarthy now saying, okay, there were, you know, so called communist in the government, be that as it may.
30:15.123 --> 30:26.025
[SPEAKER_02]: the way in which the red scare was conducted in the United States had a terrible effect on freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and just human progress in general.
30:26.466 --> 30:31.917
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think even libertarian and conservative friends of ours who
30:31.897 --> 30:44.768
[SPEAKER_02]: appreciating McCarthy in some ways now really need to think about that because the way in which this being in this country from 1947 to about 1960 was terrible.
30:45.008 --> 30:51.994
[SPEAKER_02]: If you were any kind of an iconoclastic thinker or a creative person, man, I don't want to interrupt.
30:52.014 --> 30:53.315
[SPEAKER_02]: Did you want to add something?
30:54.056 --> 30:56.018
[SPEAKER_02]: You look like you wanted to talk anyway.
30:56.038 --> 31:01.262
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just agreeing with what you're saying
31:01.242 --> 31:04.708
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I've always been very troubled by the McCarthy period.
31:04.808 --> 31:06.511
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yes, I pat myself on the back.
31:06.572 --> 31:12.642
[SPEAKER_00]: I know I'm so forward thinking, but but I the reason why is it's just a slippery slope.
31:12.683 --> 31:13.704
[SPEAKER_00]: How can it is one thing to go.
31:13.885 --> 31:15.087
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, communism's evil.
31:15.167 --> 31:17.151
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're fighting a battle against communism.
31:17.251 --> 31:19.134
[SPEAKER_00]: Our geopolitical enemy, the Soviet Union.
31:19.234 --> 31:21.498
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I can give my head around that.
31:22.099 --> 31:22.440
[SPEAKER_00]: But
31:22.707 --> 31:29.056
[SPEAKER_00]: Then when you apply it to, hey, this person wants to have a reasonable social safety net.
31:29.476 --> 31:30.117
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
31:30.157 --> 31:32.300
[SPEAKER_00]: Sounds might be a communist.
31:32.460 --> 31:38.128
[SPEAKER_00]: It basically precludes, you know, thought, free thought.
31:38.168 --> 31:40.391
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
31:40.831 --> 31:43.575
[SPEAKER_02]: And we'll send you an advanced copy of the film.
31:43.635 --> 31:44.897
[SPEAKER_02]: You're right on target.
31:44.937 --> 31:49.423
[SPEAKER_02]: That it precluded all kinds of free thought and creative thought.
31:49.724 --> 31:52.788
[SPEAKER_02]: any kind, and people became really timid and frightened.
31:53.148 --> 32:11.672
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's actually, so film one is a kind of combination biography of Kennedy's early life, where you see his war experience, that story that John Hershey and both and Jim Doug was recount of his trying to save his PT crewmen by floating out in the Pacific.
32:11.992 --> 32:18.280
[SPEAKER_02]: That's in there where he comes from his Irish heritage.
32:18.260 --> 32:29.194
[SPEAKER_02]: This is something that doesn't really get talked about a lot, and it's really important because as wealthy as his father became, they never lost sight of their roots.
32:29.234 --> 32:43.693
[SPEAKER_02]: They were real kind of famine Irish, not Scotch Irish, they were famine Irish who came over in the 1850s, and you know, got involved in the kind of urban political landscape, and
32:43.673 --> 32:52.188
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and never lost sight of the fact that they came from an oppressed people that had been, you know, under the heel of the British for seven, eight hundred years.
32:52.588 --> 33:02.425
[SPEAKER_02]: So that is really, so despite all candidates privilege, he's got that deep in his soul so that when he is in Congress, he becomes the head of the.
33:02.776 --> 33:13.333
[SPEAKER_02]: subcommittee on African affairs, and so he is very sympathetic to anti-colonial struggles all over the world, and that's something that we talk about in this film.
33:13.434 --> 33:13.815
[SPEAKER_02]: So
33:13.947 --> 33:28.009
[SPEAKER_02]: So, on the one hand, so after the war, you know, you've got all these third world and, you know, you know, these colonial countries breaking the bonds and, and he's saying, we've got to help these countries.
33:28.110 --> 33:29.692
[SPEAKER_02]: We've got to be the beacon for them.
33:29.732 --> 33:32.817
[SPEAKER_02]: And no one really talks about this about Kennedy.
33:33.178 --> 33:36.523
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, and it's, the evidence is overwhelming.
33:36.543 --> 33:39.668
[SPEAKER_02]: He makes this speech, which Jim Douglas does mention,
33:39.783 --> 33:52.939
[SPEAKER_02]: about Algeria, which, of course, is a French colony, and it's struggling for its independence, and, you know, violently struggling for it, and Kennedy's saying, the French have got him with a draw.
33:52.979 --> 33:53.780
[SPEAKER_02]: They've got to go.
33:53.800 --> 33:55.902
[SPEAKER_02]: He's even saying this about them and Vietnam.
33:55.922 --> 34:02.830
[SPEAKER_02]: He's saying they've overstayed their welcome, and he's coming back as a young congressman, saying this on the news, and we've got the clips.
34:03.311 --> 34:06.735
[SPEAKER_02]: So here you've got a guy who's very clearly four,
34:06.715 --> 34:14.708
[SPEAKER_02]: He's against imperialism, whether it comes from the left, or I should say, from the west or from the Soviets.
34:14.968 --> 34:19.576
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the same time, you've got the rise of the CIA, and that's also in our film.
34:19.596 --> 34:23.262
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've got this, you know, and the dullest brothers, right?
34:23.302 --> 34:26.187
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've got this collision course, whereas the camera.
34:26.387 --> 34:30.073
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got this collision course happening between
34:30.053 --> 34:51.600
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, dullness and all the people that he represents in Kennedy and that spirit of freedom that's overtaking the globe and and and you know as what we think is one of the greatest and and you know and he's at home he's being said well what do you think about the All like you know all the communism and home he's like well, I think that's not really such a big deal.
34:51.800 --> 34:55.825
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we've basically dealt with that what I'm worried about is more this
34:55.805 --> 35:04.915
[SPEAKER_02]: and he comes out on the campaign trail and he blames the US and its neo-colonial policies for the rise of Castro.
35:04.975 --> 35:12.883
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like, look, the number two guy in Batista's government in Cuba was the American ambassador.
35:13.464 --> 35:22.453
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have nobody but ourselves to blame if these people were responsive to a guy who was saying I'm going to cure all the problems and get rid of this.
35:22.433 --> 35:24.977
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, U.S. back thug, but Tista.
35:25.338 --> 35:28.983
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like, we don't, we're on the wrong side of history here, guys.
35:29.043 --> 35:31.287
[SPEAKER_02]: That's his literal campaign.
35:31.768 --> 35:36.014
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how he's campaigning, which is like, you can't even imagine that today.
35:36.335 --> 35:38.759
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's just unthinkable.
35:39.280 --> 35:46.551
[SPEAKER_02]: And so just a quickly finished, so he's, so in this context, you've got, and then, so the red scares happening when you're supposed to just be like,
35:46.531 --> 35:59.114
[SPEAKER_02]: All meek and, you know, people were afraid to sign as you'll see in film one, they were afraid to sign a petition that was taken directly out of the Declaration of Independence because they thought it sounded too subversive.
35:59.634 --> 36:11.155
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's the mindset we're dealing with when he comes into office and he actually goes to see a blacklisted film, a film by a former blacklisted author, he goes to see Spartacus.
36:11.135 --> 36:26.493
[SPEAKER_02]: He sneaks out of the White House to do it, and he goes with his friend Redfay from the PT boats, and it's an incredible story, because he basically ends the whole Red scare in that moment, in that night, by going to see that movie.
36:26.513 --> 36:38.728
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone sees it, they've managed to turn the lights on and says, President Kennedy's here, and everyone stands up and gives him a standing ovation, it makes all the newspapers, and basically the Red scare is over at that moment.
36:39.890 --> 36:42.298
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I didn't know that story, that's cool.
36:42.640 --> 36:49.965
[SPEAKER_00]: You said that it was being suppressed, the first episode, Prologue is out now, then there's episode one.
36:49.985 --> 36:51.992
[SPEAKER_00]: So what can you speak about that or now?
36:52.816 --> 36:59.468
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, we can to some degree, um, we are in a dispute with our back or over, um, the release strategy.
37:00.210 --> 37:12.913
[SPEAKER_01]: We started to release the films and he changed his mind on that and, um, is stopping us from doing any further releases and so we're trying to resolve that situation so we can keep releasing in the chorus.
37:14.175 --> 37:16.900
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, and it's very unclear why he,
37:17.386 --> 37:25.054
[SPEAKER_02]: flipped around, you know, it's either sort of a lack of understanding of the business because we'd already told everyone what we were doing and he'd agreed to it.
37:25.675 --> 37:35.806
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lack of understanding of the particular situation that we were in, or he's being influenced by, you know, there is a guy who hovers around this with a really weird background.
37:35.866 --> 37:42.413
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's unclear, you know, exactly why it's happening, but we're basically fighting this out in the courts right now.
37:42.433 --> 37:44.035
[SPEAKER_02]: We were forced to sue him.
37:44.521 --> 37:47.470
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, so that's that's how these things happen.
37:47.510 --> 37:52.266
[SPEAKER_02]: That's how, you know, could be coin tell pro could just be stupidity, but that's where we're at.
37:52.988 --> 37:56.539
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let me ask you this.
37:56.806 --> 38:03.659
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, right now, of course, we have the task force on government secrets.
38:03.679 --> 38:08.428
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, it's not going to heal the world.
38:08.789 --> 38:11.855
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like the solution to everyone's problems.
38:13.478 --> 38:19.810
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say this is VZVJFK and MLK.
38:20.414 --> 38:26.222
[SPEAKER_00]: better to have had those hearings than not, but it's not like it's, you know, I'm saying like some earth shattering thing.
38:26.783 --> 38:32.751
[SPEAKER_00]: So aside from the, I bring up the task force because that's something that's actually the government.
38:33.011 --> 38:34.133
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the, it's Congress.
38:34.193 --> 38:42.965
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you know, a critic could fairly say that this is really just people trying to win political points, and et cetera.
38:43.025 --> 38:45.008
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's probably some truth to that as well.
38:45.468 --> 38:46.590
[SPEAKER_00]: But, um,
38:46.975 --> 39:06.925
[SPEAKER_00]: What what can we do at this point, I guess, because I you know, I talk a lot about I talk a lot about what can we do when it comes to JFK, but you know RFK MLK Malcolm X, is it a truth and reconciliation like hearings like what what would that look like.
39:06.905 --> 39:20.031
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I guess, uh, yeah, I'm just curious, like if you could have a your way to tie a bow on all these things so that, you know, we move forward with at least a common understanding of history.
39:20.171 --> 39:20.492
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
39:20.913 --> 39:25.081
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, I was the co-chair of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee that was started.
39:25.101 --> 39:27.225
[SPEAKER_01]: There was the brainchild of David Talbot.
39:27.205 --> 39:31.449
[SPEAKER_01]: and myself and Dan Sorper were the co-chairs of that and Dan, of course, passed away.
39:31.949 --> 39:35.632
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess last summer now and the idea was for new hearings.
39:36.153 --> 39:44.920
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem with hearings is there's still a vast, vast body of papers that are not being released.
39:45.320 --> 39:50.045
[SPEAKER_01]: The AAARB, the Archives of Sassination Records.
39:50.065 --> 39:51.486
[SPEAKER_00]: Sassination Records are being released.
39:51.506 --> 39:52.707
[SPEAKER_01]: Records are being released.
39:52.727 --> 39:56.470
[SPEAKER_01]: Identify tons more papers that still need to be released.
39:56.652 --> 39:59.397
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're still finding more.
39:59.437 --> 40:03.745
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I have to say, the loom of people did a great job on earth thing a lot of things.
40:04.226 --> 40:07.573
[SPEAKER_01]: And it may be that it is the false mystery.
40:07.633 --> 40:09.155
[SPEAKER_01]: We have already solved it.
40:09.516 --> 40:12.742
[SPEAKER_01]: And all that these papers are going to show us are little details.
40:13.203 --> 40:17.491
[SPEAKER_01]: And you've got to sketch a stitch little details together.
40:17.992 --> 40:19.555
[SPEAKER_01]: On the King assassination,
40:20.699 --> 40:29.553
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the problems is all the wire taps picked up very personal details of the lives of the kids, and so they've got to go through all of that first.
40:29.573 --> 40:38.067
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, Malcolm X's family has launched $100 million lawsuit in the court's wrongful death suit that's a brilliant document.
40:38.418 --> 40:45.170
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that the answer is going to continue to educate ourselves as much as possible.
40:45.210 --> 40:50.240
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think that, you know, it's not going to be handed to us on a silver platter.
40:50.600 --> 40:52.824
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not going to be like, okay, now we've got justice.
40:53.245 --> 40:58.755
[SPEAKER_02]: People have to basically, we all have to basically continue the process of growing up.
40:58.735 --> 41:04.128
[SPEAKER_02]: and growing up in this case means facing the unspeakable as Jim Douglas would call it.
41:04.650 --> 41:15.276
[SPEAKER_02]: And the more sophisticated we are in regards to that is depressing at journey as that can be, it's ultimately hopeful because without
41:15.256 --> 41:23.947
[SPEAKER_02]: without having that kind of core wisdom and understanding to face the unspeakable.
41:23.987 --> 41:28.352
[SPEAKER_02]: These things are just going to keep happening and they're going to get more and more sophisticated.
41:28.412 --> 41:32.377
[SPEAKER_02]: So you get things like 9-11 or you get things like the COVID lockdowns.
41:32.457 --> 41:38.344
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they do, they up the game and without a background,
41:38.830 --> 41:39.451
[SPEAKER_02]: in this stuff.
41:39.491 --> 41:49.112
[SPEAKER_02]: It really is incumbent on us to learn our history, to do our own thinking, and do our own research, something that was demonized during the COVID period.
41:49.694 --> 41:57.210
[SPEAKER_02]: And learn about what I think learning about what these guys were doing is such a great starting point because
41:57.190 --> 41:58.852
[SPEAKER_02]: that's where we should be going.
41:58.932 --> 42:17.091
[SPEAKER_02]: So it may be too late to bring a lot of the perpetrators to justice, but it's not too late to kind of set ourselves down a path that looks something more like what they were doing, which is about coming up with the kind of moral equivalent to war.
42:17.511 --> 42:24.919
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, Kennedy wanted that to be space exploration and take doing things here at home to improve
42:24.899 --> 42:31.930
[SPEAKER_02]: the situation of everyone through things that became perverted like the Alliance of Progress, USAID in the Peace Corps.
42:32.210 --> 42:38.080
[SPEAKER_02]: There is so much work to do at home, to keep us busy, to make us better in so many ways.
42:38.520 --> 42:41.705
[SPEAKER_02]: And so life need not be boring without war.
42:42.747 --> 42:44.670
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's a way to do this.
42:45.271 --> 42:48.696
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's studying their path.
42:49.233 --> 43:00.048
[SPEAKER_02]: I think is a great first step, waiting around for the next for the big, unredacted document, they've had all these time to make whatever documents.
43:00.108 --> 43:08.419
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's ain't the document, is it going to be J. Edgar Hoover, memo from J. Edgar Hoover to Lyndon Johnson.
43:08.960 --> 43:13.166
[SPEAKER_01]: On this date, we're going to do this, and we've hired these people in that match.
43:13.206 --> 43:15.409
[SPEAKER_02]: CC Allen Dulles, we're Allen Dulles, never.
43:15.389 --> 43:30.206
[SPEAKER_01]: It's there's pieces around and people will stitch it all together in different ways, but it really is I think you want to understand as John was saying what they were doing and who they were angering then you can understand it.
43:30.346 --> 43:36.393
[SPEAKER_02]: Then you can understand your world better and you can understand kind of what we need to do better because that's been lost.
43:36.694 --> 43:40.418
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Oliver Stone kind of showed everyone that.
43:40.803 --> 43:49.535
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, if you want to influence culture and you want to really move the discussion, the medium of a film seems to be the move.
43:49.895 --> 43:50.977
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I see, you know, a film.
43:50.997 --> 43:51.677
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
43:51.978 --> 43:53.159
[SPEAKER_02]: I saw it when I was 20.
43:53.179 --> 44:01.210
[SPEAKER_02]: I came out of the movie theater and I will, I'm only somewhat ashamed to say, I wept in my girlfriend's arms.
44:01.751 --> 44:10.202
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, she wasn't as effective as I was, but you know, I really, I knew that, and as we've since had the opportunity to interview him,
44:10.182 --> 44:15.730
[SPEAKER_02]: Zachary Skalar, his screenwriter, so that was a great kind of full circle for me.
44:16.751 --> 44:40.105
[SPEAKER_02]: But I knew intuitively that there was a huge truth being told in that film, and he did it so brilliantly and so powerfully, and so, and then you get the book of the screen play if you ever get it, and every line of the screen play is backed up with footnotes.
44:40.203 --> 45:06.025
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I agree with you that film and conversations like this are a powerful way to get it out and, you know, people really, you know, they have to read, they have to, you know, they have to research, they have to watch, you know, important films and documentaries and they've got to arm themselves against, because, you know, the same mentality, whether the same people are involved or not,
45:06.005 --> 45:11.936
[SPEAKER_02]: the same structures and the same kind of M.O.
45:12.337 --> 45:15.403
[SPEAKER_02]: is always at work and the same contempt for people.
45:15.443 --> 45:18.709
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I remember Dullis saying about the Warren report, right?
45:18.749 --> 45:21.715
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, nobody in America reads anyway.
45:21.976 --> 45:28.468
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, so, you basically felt like you can get away with anything because we're just, you know, we're going to want to just, you know,
45:28.634 --> 45:34.913
[SPEAKER_02]: eat hoes and, you know, surf the web and and will shut up.
45:34.933 --> 45:37.160
[SPEAKER_02]: But we have to not be that way.
45:37.441 --> 45:41.513
[SPEAKER_02]: And then maybe we'll get a better life out of it all.
45:42.050 --> 45:59.080
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, one thing I would like to really, and this, I agree with everything you just said, one thing I'd like to see concrete done on these four assassinations is to provide a little bit of balance to the textbooks, like to the mainstream, because I just think
45:59.768 --> 46:02.631
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, look, JFK, that's the one I know about.
46:02.651 --> 46:03.391
[SPEAKER_00]: So we'll talk about that one.
46:03.992 --> 46:09.797
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I don't think we're going to get, you know, uh, uh, what's the big textbook writer?
46:09.877 --> 46:10.778
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't make millions.
46:10.838 --> 46:12.539
[SPEAKER_00]: McGraw Hill, McGraw Hill.
46:12.559 --> 46:12.699
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
46:13.120 --> 46:19.225
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that we're going to get McGraw Hill to, to, you know, say that, uh, you know, there was a shooter on the grassy null.
46:19.706 --> 46:29.134
[SPEAKER_00]: But what they should do at a minimum is state the conclusion of the HSCA, state the existence of the ARB.
46:29.367 --> 46:35.516
[SPEAKER_00]: And then state that the file still aren't remained declassified if you could just put that in for graph.
46:36.257 --> 46:36.357
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
46:36.377 --> 46:36.657
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
46:36.717 --> 46:49.736
[SPEAKER_01]: And just think it even take it all the way up to present day and say that in in in in in in in 2023, you know, the president said we're going to release the files and it became very hard to release the files and there's still a lot of them that are missing.
46:50.157 --> 46:51.699
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, exactly.
46:51.839 --> 46:55.324
[SPEAKER_02]: And and and well, you're talking about it's tech like a,
46:55.456 --> 47:09.297
[SPEAKER_02]: a world in which textbooks were actually interested in teaching history, which is, you know, maybe step one would be that because, you know, it's just what Frederick Douglass's slave master said to his wife who was trying to teach him to read.
47:09.417 --> 47:11.119
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like, you know, we don't do that.
47:11.159 --> 47:14.064
[SPEAKER_02]: An educated slave is going to free themselves.
47:14.084 --> 47:17.008
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, that's the problem.
47:16.988 --> 47:19.213
[SPEAKER_01]: And then yeah, I'm sorry.
47:19.594 --> 47:20.275
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, let me answer her.
47:20.295 --> 47:30.899
[SPEAKER_01]: I know right sent a huge generation of kids to school and what had to college more than ever before and what happened is their kids graduated and didn't want to go fight in the Vietnam war.
47:30.939 --> 47:33.445
[SPEAKER_01]: So they've learned some very hard lessons.
47:33.475 --> 47:35.779
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I had a profound thought, believe it or not.
47:36.420 --> 47:44.172
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're at this intersection of the point where we zoom into this insane AI future.
47:44.192 --> 47:48.058
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, there's no grown-ups in the room.
47:48.138 --> 47:49.881
[SPEAKER_00]: And the, you know, the,
47:50.131 --> 47:54.539
[SPEAKER_00]: concerning the future is looking concerning even for an optimist like myself.
47:55.982 --> 48:09.507
[SPEAKER_00]: But, but it just really strikes me that the clock is sort of taking on what we're trying to do because trying to get people to pay attention to it before AI started to take over life.
48:09.487 --> 48:14.958
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, was a real challenge, and now it's like, why should I care about this?
48:15.199 --> 48:19.247
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, the answer is like, well, because it very well may have been a coup and nothing you believe is real.
48:19.287 --> 48:20.389
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why you should care.
48:20.970 --> 48:23.977
[SPEAKER_00]: But, but they kind of go, I don't know.
48:23.997 --> 48:27.664
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems a long time ago, and the world's crazy anyway.
48:27.644 --> 48:35.714
[SPEAKER_00]: it's just it's that's the challenge and I don't know how to get my head around that but I think you guys are fighting the good fight but yeah do you ever thought about that?
48:35.754 --> 48:49.872
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that I think that you know our friend Lewis Lappam started you know who was the editor of Harper's magazine he started a history quarterly called Lappam's quarterly where they would take
48:50.088 --> 49:12.872
[SPEAKER_02]: the sea money, and do like two, three thousand years of writers on that topic, and what you get from the constellations of history is the understanding that we've been here before, that all kinds of civilizations and different, you know,
49:12.852 --> 49:24.010
[SPEAKER_02]: eras have gone through almost identical history as they say, right, doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, and that we've heard this rhyme many, many times before.
49:25.552 --> 49:28.176
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's the crucial thing.
49:28.196 --> 49:30.320
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the founders were hearing this rhyme.
49:30.360 --> 49:30.540
[SPEAKER_02]: They
49:30.520 --> 49:38.299
[SPEAKER_02]: The Declaration of Independence is a document accusing the British crown of conspiracy, you know.
49:38.619 --> 49:45.576
[SPEAKER_02]: It's basically saying you're hiring, you know, these false these Indians to do raids on us, you're burnt, you know, you're.
49:45.556 --> 49:55.431
[SPEAKER_02]: you're sabotaging our economy, you're doing all this stuff that's nefarious that, you know, not everyone knows about, but we know you're doing it, and they eventually have the gumption to have a revolution.
49:55.511 --> 50:07.108
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you, you know, as he was fond of quoting, and I'm going to forget who said what, but you know, he who does not have 3,000 years of history at his back and calls living hand to mouth.
50:07.088 --> 50:08.631
[SPEAKER_02]: and what was the other one?
50:08.671 --> 50:12.620
[SPEAKER_02]: To not know one's past is to forever remain a child.
50:13.121 --> 50:19.674
[SPEAKER_02]: And so this is an answer to your, you know, the AI people who say, oh, well, what does that matter?
50:19.734 --> 50:23.342
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that we've got this, you're going to be completely rudderless.
50:23.322 --> 50:30.674
[SPEAKER_02]: in an AI universe where reality can be shaped if you don't have any moring in the past.
50:31.075 --> 50:38.648
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they've been faking photos or, you know, or in an Orwellian fashion rewriting history for a long time, but
50:38.628 --> 50:56.586
[SPEAKER_02]: This just gives them a new tool, but if you are going to be completely lost without the anchor of history, that's why everyone's going to read history, mainstream history, alternative history, read all the history that you can, and then you might have your bearings.
50:56.566 --> 51:04.515
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you know, the old Santiago saying you'll be, if you don't do that, you'll be condemned to repeat it because that's what we've been doing.
51:04.555 --> 51:06.718
[SPEAKER_02]: We've been repeating these cycles of history.
51:07.018 --> 51:09.782
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you know, the Reichstag fire.
51:09.902 --> 51:13.566
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, the Nazis burned down their own government building and take over.
51:13.586 --> 51:18.011
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, that model is the reason why they don't even talk about that today.
51:18.051 --> 51:21.055
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been to the Reichstag Museum and wandered around Berlin.
51:21.035 --> 51:27.807
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't like to admit that that happened today because that same kind of thing happens all the time up into our lifetimes.
51:28.288 --> 51:38.206
[SPEAKER_02]: So the idea that governments can do stuff like that is like, oh, so it's like, you got to learn that kind of history and the basic history.
51:38.226 --> 51:40.731
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, what are the good things about
51:40.711 --> 51:48.543
[SPEAKER_02]: this country, the founding of this country, the tools that gave people like Kennedy, he felt Kennedy felt he could do something with this.
51:48.583 --> 51:50.746
[SPEAKER_02]: He could do something with the American presidency.
51:50.766 --> 51:54.992
[SPEAKER_02]: He could make America be in Langston Hughes's phrase.
51:56.074 --> 52:00.701
[SPEAKER_02]: He could have it emerge or what's the fulfill itself?
52:00.761 --> 52:01.402
[SPEAKER_02]: What do they say?
52:01.642 --> 52:02.624
[SPEAKER_02]: Actualize.
52:03.024 --> 52:04.747
[SPEAKER_02]: He could make an actualize.
52:05.208 --> 52:06.870
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, that's the whole key.
52:06.850 --> 52:12.979
[SPEAKER_02]: everyone who says why do I look at that and it's because if you don't look at that, you are going to have a clue about the future.
52:13.465 --> 52:37.144
[SPEAKER_00]: yeah but it's it's just so well done and i'm i'm gonna watch everyone since it comes out uh... uh... i'll be retweeting you guys and promoting you going forward and i'm a fan and one last thing did i hallucinate which is possible move dot com just getting that did i hallucinate or um... did i see you john on a show with someone wearing a grassy and old t-shirt
52:37.597 --> 52:41.083
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, no you saw that and I was wore it again tonight.
52:41.243 --> 52:42.065
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that was right.
52:42.385 --> 52:44.028
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was like, dude, I designed that shirt.
52:44.068 --> 52:46.612
[SPEAKER_02]: That's why Is that your shirt?
52:46.893 --> 52:47.614
[SPEAKER_02]: That's my shirt.
52:47.634 --> 52:48.856
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, nothing to see here.
52:48.916 --> 52:50.158
[SPEAKER_02]: Nothing to see here.
52:50.238 --> 52:50.839
[SPEAKER_02]: You're shirt.
52:51.020 --> 52:52.322
[SPEAKER_02]: That's my favorite shirt.
52:52.783 --> 52:54.085
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's my favorite shirt.
52:54.145 --> 52:55.387
[SPEAKER_02]: I almost wore it.
52:55.647 --> 52:58.091
[SPEAKER_01]: I just I didn't want to let me wear some all the time.
52:58.312 --> 52:59.814
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's that's that's my shirt.
52:59.834 --> 53:02.018
[SPEAKER_00]: I designed that like in season one
53:02.217 --> 53:14.267
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a brilliant design, it's hysterical, I mean, you know, in a Cobb sort of way, but very camping fun and I love, I love wearing that shirt, so you're a graphic artist as well.
53:14.287 --> 53:18.859
[SPEAKER_00]: I just thought like it would be a funny idea to have like, um,
53:19.058 --> 53:39.109
[SPEAKER_00]: to have a like a postcard dealer plaza would not let nothing to see here coming up and smoke from the grass in all you know what I mean like oh do you can I buy it as a postcard as well uh well no that's like what it's based on the the design concept okay well I don't now you have to make postcards of it because I would use those as my Christmas cards
53:39.089 --> 53:44.454
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I have like five of these, which shows like, you know, the descent of man into sheep.
53:44.954 --> 53:46.736
[SPEAKER_02]: So I have like thought like that.
53:46.956 --> 53:48.277
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I'll have to get one of those.
53:48.297 --> 53:48.898
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
53:48.918 --> 53:54.223
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can have something that's got like commentary that's not too obvious.
53:54.503 --> 53:57.085
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what I mean, the only people who are paying attention will notice it.
53:57.105 --> 53:58.406
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the kind of things I like to do.
53:58.887 --> 54:03.471
[SPEAKER_00]: But yes, you guys, I got a run, but it was such an honor to to speak to you.
54:03.751 --> 54:05.293
[SPEAKER_00]: And I look forward to talking to you again.
54:05.333 --> 54:07.174
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm a fan of your work.
54:07.194 --> 54:09.096
[SPEAKER_00]: And you've got a supporter in me.
54:09.076 --> 54:10.720
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, thank you so much.
54:10.740 --> 54:13.927
[SPEAKER_02]: And likewise, likewise, keep sending me shirt links.
54:13.947 --> 54:16.592
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to be your number one costume definitely.
54:16.673 --> 54:17.675
[SPEAKER_02]: There's all right.
54:17.695 --> 54:19.880
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks guys so much appreciate it.
54:19.900 --> 54:20.481
[SPEAKER_00]: Have a good night.
54:20.541 --> 54:20.942
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye bye.