Conrad Flynn Part 2 | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan

Episode: Conrad Flynn Part 2
Date: February 25, 2026
Host: Billy Corgan
Guest: Conrad Flynn

Episode Overview

In the second part of their conversation, Billy Corgan and writer Conrad Flynn explore the intersection of music, occultism, pop culture, and systems of power. They delve deeply into the creation and impact of avatars in public life, the mechanics of fame, occult influence in music, governmental interplay with celebrity culture, and the evolution of pop versus rock—connecting the dots between mass influence, ritual, and personal experience. The tone balances open-minded skepticism, first-hand stories, and incisive cultural critique.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Avatar and the Nature of Fame

• Avatars in Culture
  • The hosts discuss how public figures build “avatars”—identities separate from their true selves that are consumed and reinforced by audiences. Both agree this phenomenon is prevalent in music, film, professional sports, and politics.
  • Corgan: "What I attach to is it's the mechanics of getting people to buy into an avatar." (02:00)
• Historical Comparisons
  • Examples include Hulk Hogan/Terry Bolia, John Wayne/Marion Morrison, Lady Gaga, and more.
  • The process of becoming an avatar often leads to personal alienation and blurred boundaries between self and public persona.
• Public Demand for Avatars
  • Social and business incentives encourage celebrities to uphold these personas; deviation risks ostracization from the inner circle.
  • Flynn: "Other people's desire for you to be a thing can, of course, encourage you to be that." (09:34)

2. Wrestling, Pop Music, and Marketing

• Billy Corgan explains the parallels between pro wrestling and pop music in crafting larger-than-life personas to “work” the audience.
• Corgan: "Music seems to be behind this particular curve... people still want to believe that Lady Gaga is Lady Gaga all the time." (03:00)
• Both agree the "work" is more explicit in wrestling, but prevalent unseen in music and celebrity.

3. Secret Histories and Cyclical Pop Culture

• Conrad describes his Substack “The Flynn Effect,” where he tracks historical patterns like the parallels between Lennon’s political adoption by the New Left and Kanye West’s by factions of the New Right.
• Flynn: “There’s a picture of Abbie Hoffman where he looks exactly like Nick Fuentes... these countercultural things, they tend to repeat.” (06:53-07:29)

4. Power, the Occult, and Shadow Systems

• Rock & the Occult’s Secret History
  • Conrad relays stories, such as Jimmy Page’s acquisition of Aleister Crowley’s books and how prominent figures in British society often blurred lines between politics, occultism, and espionage.
  • Flynn: "The guy that Jimmy Page bought his Crowley books from was a famous labor member of Parliament named Tom Dreiberg... Crowley’s anointed successor." (23:43)
• Systems of Influence and Blackmail
  • Explains the real purpose of elite parties is less about hedonism, more about blackmail and control—relationships become assets and liabilities.
  • Flynn: "Those parties serve a very valuable purpose..." (29:24)
• Mutual Protection Among Elites
  • Both point to how scandals are sometimes contained due to a “gentleman’s agreement” to avoid mutually assured destruction, referencing cases like Jeffrey Epstein and Dennis Hastert.
  • Corgan: “There’s sort of a gentleman’s agreement... they’ll lob whatever mental hand grenades they want... but not those.” (31:33)

5. Conspiracy, Control, and Information Games

• Discuss how actual networks (powerful people across politics, media, and entertainment) operate more through informal connections and shared interests than overt conspiracy.
• Corgan: “Is it reasonable to think people actually run a particular business… they get calls or inferences from people above them in the power structure…?” (87:48)
• QAnon is described as counterintelligence—a diversion with a “kernel of truth” but designed to distract or misdirect, not expose real power structures.
• Corgan: “QAnon is a perfect example... sprinkled with enough kernels of truth that it would hold some fascination, but... to pull everyone away from something...” (32:16)

6. Pop, Occult Symbolism, and Systemic Trends

• Occult Imagery in Pop
  • The group debates how much occult symbolism in pop is sincere versus calculated marketing, but both agree it’s now omnipresent and complicated.
  • Flynn: "Some of them, I think, do it for real, but some know at this point that if you do put these symbols in videos, it's going to get eyeballs." (45:29)
• Marketing and Influence
  • Noted that young rappers today are highly literate in occult lore, referencing Manly P. Hall, Crowley, and sex magic.
  • Mentions the strategic “superstar push” in pop and rap (e.g., Kanye West, Sean Combs).
• Ham-fisted Symbolism
  • Corgan: “Most people are not operating in a sophisticated way when they deal with the symbiology. They’re doing kind of like Spooky 101.” (52:05)
• The Monkees as the Pop Prototype
  • Explores how groups like The Monkees became the model for pop acts and the commodification of authenticity in the music industry versus rock's disappearing cultural dominance.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Avatars:
  “I tried to create a clear delineation between my public and private personality when I was very young, and I continually ran into people who expressed overt and outward disappointment that I was not living up to the image they thought in their mind.” — Billy Corgan (09:45)

• On Exploitation and the Music Industry:
  “I see a system put in place in the last 20–25 years that was already there and existed in Hollywood, but it’s actually publicly commoditized now… And that, to me, is the heart of evil. Because what you’re doing is you’re giving people binary choices which aren’t binary choices at all.” — Billy Corgan (53:49)

• On the Occult’s Appeal:
  “They get into the occult, they do rituals, and it coincides with their success.” — Conrad Flynn (47:30)

• On Conspiracies & QAnon:
  “It was sprinkled with enough kernels of truth that it would hold some fascination, but it was not to get to any truth. It was actually to pull everyone away from something…” — Billy Corgan (32:25)

• On the Shift from Rock to Pop:
  “Rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture.” — Billy Corgan (61:54)

• On Navigating Fame:
  “The hardest thing for me, navigating the music business for over 30 years, is understanding you’re in a rigged game. And a sane person… goes, I’m not going to play the game anymore.” — Billy Corgan (83:16)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:35 — Flynn welcomes the comparison to a double album for this two-part appearance; Corgan dives into the wrestling analogy for pop artistry.
• 01:52–03:00 — Deep exploration of avatar building; the story of Bob Dylan and Gorgeous George.
• 06:53 — Flynn details the cyclical adoption of pop avatars by political movements in history.
• 14:27 — Corgan on speaking universal truths, audience reaction, and the persistence of public avatars.
• 23:43 — “Granddaddy of all rock and occult stories”: Crowley, Dreiberg, Jimmy Page, and British intrigue.
• 31:46–32:16 — The QAnon analogy; how controversies are managed, and certain ones are off-limits.
• 45:29 — Occult symbols in pop: sincerity vs. marketing.
• 53:49 — The moral binary between innocence/exploitation at the heart of Hollywood and pop.
• 61:54–62:37 — The intentional sidelining of rock by industry/cultural forces and its replacement by pop and rap.
• 87:48 — Is it reasonable to believe “levers of power” shape the entertainment business?
• 89:30 — Flynn asks Corgan about the feeling of quasi-fascistic crowd energy as a performer.
• 91:14–95:05 — Corgan discusses rock concerts as shamanistic energy rituals, the power of music to alter consciousness, and responsibility as a performer.

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Additional Topics

• Elite Social Ecosystems: Stories of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard as informal meeting grounds for American political, cultural, and business elites.
• Celebrity Meltdowns: Discussion of Kanye West’s rise and fall, handlers and handlers’ interests, and the system of moving stars up or down the influence pyramid.
• CIA and Music: Anecdotes about The Police’s Miles Copeland and alleged ties to government influence in music; the organic versus guided rise of musical acts.

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Concluding Thoughts

Corgan and Flynn circle repeatedly back to the paradoxes and mechanisms of power—spiritual, psychological, and institutional—that shape the modern pop landscape. They invite listeners to question received narratives, pay attention to the industries and systems shaping stars, and offer a sliver of spiritual advice for artists trying to maintain their integrity: to ground oneself in something larger than fame or the system—whether that’s faith, love, or personal authenticity.

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Next Episode Tease:
The conversation hints at exploring comedy's occult side (Del Close, L. Ron Hubbard, ritual in improv) for a potential third episode.

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Transcript

[A]

It's better off for everybody if we actually just don't start opening these doors.

[B]

If there was all this understanding and knowledge, why does it go on and then why does it stop going?

[A]

They get into the occult, they do rituals, and it coincides with their success.

[B]

Right. The public can't help but get into an argument about, is this not true?

[A]

One of the British members of Parliament. That was one of his colleagues, Jeffrey Epstein's essential father in law.

[B]

I have watched where incredibly powerful people seem to be above the law.

[A]

I mean, look what happened in the last few years with Solila Celebrities. I'll bring this up when people.

[B]

We gotta go viral here. Keep going. Conrad Flynn, welcome back to the TMO show. The first guest I've ever had back.

[A]

I'm excited. This is our own double album.

[B]

Well, it's Kiss Alive too. I think that's what we're going with. Anything you want to jump in on before I go down my particular rabbit hole? I mean, we've, we've. We've caught a little fire online. That's interesting. We good business together in wrestling parlance.

[A]

Yeah. Well, I want to ask you about wrestling at some point.

[B]

Sure. Yeah.

[A]

Well, I'll actually ask you. A friend of mine wanted me to ask. You once said that in music and rock history, the logic of wrestling and marketing is very similar to how pop works. In terms of pop stars are marketed or can be marketed in a way that's not unlike wrestling. In terms of getting someone over marketing, what kind of group. Are there any acts, including the Smashing Pumpkins, that you have ever analogized to a pop act where you're like, this guy, kind of like. It's like, I know Bob Dylan was famously influenced by Gorgeous George.

[B]

Oh, I see.

[A]

David Bowie and glam took itself from this British wrestler. In your work with NWA or in wrestling, do you ever. Have you ever noticed, like, what did you mean by that? And do you have any analogies to that to Sling and Pop?

[B]

I just think it's the. What I attach to is it's the mechanics of getting people to buy into an avatar. Right. And as the audience leans into the avatar, the artist or the person behind the avatar leans into it too. So you create almost like a third person.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Hulk Hogan. His real name was Terry Bolia. He wasn't Hulk Hogan, but he became Hulk Hogan. John Wayne wasn't John Wayne. He became John Wayne.

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

So I'm sort of fascinated by the mechanism of. Of creating the avatar and how whether it's a Bruce Springsteen or a John Wayne or a David Bowie, they figure out that they can sort of work with this third entity that exists between the audience and the person holding the marionette strings.

[A]

Well, that's something that Gorgeous George the wrestler said to Bob Dylan in Bob Dylan's memoirs. He said that they passed each other and Gorgeous George said, you're getting people to believe in it. Bob Dylan says, I'm not 100% sure that's what he said, but he's like, that's what I thought he said. And that's what's more important, is he said, you're getting people to believe in it.

[B]

Yeah. So wrestling is the. Is the overt expression and acknowledgement that that is what is actually happening. And now that the business has been exposed since Vince McMahon came out and said, okay, it's not real, circa 1989, now we have a lot of people actually exploring that through wrestling fan sites and on wrestling podcasts, like Is the. Is so and so doing a good job at the Avatar. Right. Music seems to be behind this particular curve culturally. People still want to believe that Lady Gaga is Lady Gaga all the time. And as someone who came out very early in the process, in the 90s, and actually started talking about these things and paid the price for it, because people did. People wanted me to be a rock star, not somebody explaining what a rock star is. Right. And now, of course, it's out. It's all very outward. But I still think it's funny that the public is still enamored with the idea that people are these people 24 7, when it's obviously. It's patently obvious that they're not. Right, right, right. So I don't know if that answered your question, but.

[A]

No, that does.

[B]

I tend to spend more time in the mechanism. And in. In essence, why is it that the public, by and large, is fascinated with this mechanism, which is now in plain sight? Right, right, right.

[A]

Well, as you said, you do a character long enough or a shtick long enough, you can kind of become that thing. You kind of disappear into it.

[B]

Yeah. And I've known very famous rock stars that at some point you go, wait, are you still in there? Because a few years back, I was talking to the real person, and now I'm talking to this avatar. Right. And, oh, by the way, I know you're not the avatar, so don't to run the game of the avatar on me. Right, right, right. And a lot of times in those circumstances, you actually get pushed out of the circle because they don't need somebody saying no, no, no. He's from Ohio or he's from Iowa. They want to really believe you go along with the munchkin version. Like, you. Whatever is the creation, you need to go along with it. You're going to be pushed out of freedom, at least in that particular fiefdom. I found it hard in the success of our first interview together. I find it hard because people will mention the clips and stuff that came out.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So I'm gonna put it on you try to explain to people what you actually do. Because I find it hard to explain.

[A]

I mean, I'm a writer now. I was developing these different projects about rock and the occult and some other Hollywood stuff, but as of right now, I'm working on the substack.

[B]

So you're out of work is basically what you're saying.

[A]

I'm always kind of half out of work doing stuff. I mean, how else do you have time to read so many weird books? That's. No, but things are coming up.

[B]

But is writer is your most.

[A]

Writer is the main thing. But, like, yeah, nowadays it's amorphous. Like, I've been doing podcasts and that. That requires some time, and I'll probably, you know, do my own podcast soon.

[B]

Yeah. Or maybe you're creating some form that we haven't sort of figured out yet.

[A]

That's. See, that's the publicist answer.

[B]

That's great.

[A]

He's not unemployed. He's doing too many jobs. He's doing all the jobs.

[B]

Well, you do have publicist DNA in there. Yeah, yeah. Because I find it hard sometimes to explain to people how you fit in, because, as you can imagine, well, most people want to say, well, he's right. And I found myself struggling with the word.

[A]

You can just say writer. That's very funny, because this is conversations I have with people for the years or people who are even close to me. Like, I have a hard time telling people, like, what it is you do or who you are. And I'm just like, you know, a writer reader enthusiast. But, yeah, writer is pretty much the main thing.

[B]

So real quick for people. Didn't see the first episode. You have a substack.

[A]

Yes, yes. We have the Flynn Effect, which I started a few months ago, and it's pretty much some current event, but a lot of history. Secret History of Pop. We did one on the Secret History of the wizard of Oz. The occult history with L. Frank.

[B]

Fascinating.

[A]

Yeah, we did that. I'm doing one right now on the similarity of the New left of the 1970s and the way that they kind of glommed onto John Lennon and the way that the New Right kind of glommed on to Kanye West a few years ago, kind of comparing Groipers with the Yippies and Abbie Hoffmanes. There's a picture of Abbie Hoffman where he looks exact. Exactly like Nick Fuentes pointing directly at a camera. That is eerie. And so I'm doing a thing right now about how these. These countercultural or subculture things, they. They tend to repeat. And. Yeah, so it's essentially about.

[B]

Okay, so let's explore that for a second. So do you think it's. In some ways it's these representative avatars? Like, are people responding to the same sort of signals?

[A]

Yeah, well, it's same thing in music where people want certain kinds of figures and they. They want certain kinds of things to identify. Well, I don't.

[B]

I don't know. Mr. Fuentes. He's from Chicago. My.

[A]

But it's good you don't know, huh? It's good you don't know. That's. You can get out of the way.

[B]

I'm fine to know anybody. I'm not afraid of anybody. But what I would say about Nick Fuentes if he. He. Well, I think he did interview with Tucker Carlson, but he. He talked about. Let's call it his origin story, how he had been this. Into this political. Whatever you want to call it. He's in Firestorm or. But he. He, in many ways, kind of feeds into this concept of an avatar, you see, because he was just a student and some things happened, and it kind of pushed him in a particular direction. And I don't know if it's true or not, but he basically says he had no plans on being this person. Right. But so it becomes. At some point, it becomes the idea of the. The object and the observer. Right. At what point does the object become aware they're being observed totally, and start to lean into the observation?

[A]

Well, that's something one of my favorite writers, Eric Hopper, talked about, where he's like, the people, you know, can almost cast you as something. Like they're a director, a casting director.

[B]

I love that you say casting, because this is very. This is something I'm very interested in.

[A]

Well, that's just it. So, yeah. The way other people's perception of you turn you into something because they want you to be that thing. I mean, as a rock star. I was talking to my friend Jake about this last night because he's worked as a Hollywood writer for a long time, and we were talking. He was talking about egos and the way certain people can get bad attitudes. And we were saying, I know this a little bit from my grandfather, but also just from the world of publicity. The way other people want you to be a certain jerky rock star, not to take the onus off of bad behavior, but the way that people in your circle want you to be this big authority figure and they want you to not be a pushover or they want you to be glam, ends up encouraging people potentially to take on the kind of bad attitudes they wouldn't otherwise have. Because people in their circle are like, come on, I'm not. I'm not dating, you know, Billy Corgan, the regular dude. I'm dating a rock star. Don't let them talk to you that way. Be this thing. And the way that you see other people wanting you to kind of be this thing again, not to take away the personal responsibility of bad behavior, but other people's desire for you to be a thing can, of course, encourage you to be that.

[B]

Yeah, I. I tried to create a clear delineation between my public and private personality when I was very young, and I continually ran into people who expressed overt and outward disappointment that I was not living up to the image they thought in their mind. Right. Now, when it extends into your family circle and your friend circle, that's like. Let's call it. That's the first iteration of it. Sure. What are they expressing? They're expressing like, shouldn't you be more into this? Right. The second iteration is then the public version where somebody, because they've seen you in a video or a magazine, shows up and they can't understand why you don't match what they have in their head.

[A]

Right, right, right.

[B]

And that's why I oftentimes say most rock stars and pop stars are sociopathic, because they quickly figure out it's a lot easier to play along. Right, right. Oh, like, oh, you think I'm this spooky guy who lives in a basement. Okay. I'm just going to play the spooky and I get a basement.

[A]

That'd be a fascinating study. Is testing for sociopathy amongst pop stars a controlled. That would be. That's something we should get funding for.

[B]

I would bet a lot of money on that one.

[A]

Yeah. To go back really quick to the Nick Fuentes thing, a piece I wrote about a month ago was comparing people like him and a lot of podcasters like Andrew Tate as essentially the new gangster rappers, where they get in front of a microphone and they say, like, the Most heinous make your mom cry stuff and that. That's the kind of modern purpose they serve. And I was talking about how commercially rap has been on the decline for the last few years and only half in jest do I point out that, like, the rise of certain kinds of podcasters tie in with this idea of like, this is like.

[B]

Well, sorry to interrupt you, but I think it's the thing that flashes is in a moment is like, who's on the mic? Right. And whoever can step up and get on the mic and get the attention. Well, that's where the energy is going to flow and the money. And right now it's really in the podcast space. Right.

[A]

So, yeah, so that's, you know, the bad boys.

[B]

So you're stepping into the ring here soon, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You're getting on the mic.

[A]

I already am. This is. We're recording, aren't we? This is.

[B]

Well, this is my mic, but. But you seem to do a good, good job of subverting it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So let's. One, one last thing because, you know, we are sort of openly kind of playing with the game of avatars and self reflection. So now that we've entered this particular space and in the conversation that we had, clips went viral. Sure, sure. A lot of stuff that I said during it and, and stuff that you said during. I was surprised people were as interested in it as they were.

[A]

I'm not stretching. When I saw those clips, I'm like, this will go viral. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, when you're talking about, like being approached by people.

[B]

So not to be overly reflective, but it feeds into what we're going to talk about. But what's your impression in that, in the, in the short term? Because, you know, you're entering into your own public sort of avatar phase. Sure.

[A]

Oh, I mean, like, it is strange, as you said, and it's very, very true. People end up having an idea of you that's based off this person that does and doesn't exist. It's the public avatar.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, occult concepts like tulpas or whatever of you, or it's like this, this third created creature that isn't you. And so at some point early on, again, the sociopathic nature of being a pop star or any sort of public figure, you have to like, pathologically turn off certain kinds of criticism in the sense of you can't listen to it all. And they're usually criticizing something that exists a little bit independently of you after a certain point. I'm not at that Point, but you certainly are where it's like the Billy Corgan that exists as an idea or as a Cartoo cartoon. At some point you're like, oh, I'm not that guy either. I get a kick out of that guy, you know.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I've been through this a few times. So I, you know, I just saw, I saw the wave coming in and I just kind of let it wash over everything.

[A]

It is, yeah, a wave.

[B]

Because the one thing I have found, and I'm going to put quotations around the word truth, right. When you speak something akin to the truth and let's call it universal truth, not man's truth.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

You know, because that's always arguable. But when you speak to universal truth, you get this kind of kickback reaction and it creates a cognitive dissonance, which is. Is that true?

[A]

Right.

[B]

You see some of the. Some of the grand public figures of our times, of course, the 20th century, who work in this polemic where they throw out something that's what they would in publicity terms call red meat. Right. They kind of throw red meat out. The public can't help but get into an argument about, is this not true? And I, at least in my own particular case, have learned if you say things that are essentially universally true, the argument is irrelevant because the argument is because people haven't actually thought the thing through. Right.

[A]

It's just dogma or cliche.

[B]

Their natural reaction is to personalize it. And you'll probably learn this yourself. They'll personalize and they'll make it about you. You know, they'll start attacking your song or, you know, your, Your failed career, whatever they, whatever. Conceptually, they think you're where your avatar is. Right. And. And even talking about avatars, you know, as I move through life, I deal, of course, consistently with, let's call it the general AV Avatar, what people think I am. Right. And it's kind of over 30 something years. It's kind of fallen into kind of a groove. Sure, sure. But then every once in a while, you step into a. Into a place where you realize that your, Your own conception of your avatar is out of step with the person who has some conception of you that's 10 or 15 or 20 years old. Right. That's interesting too. So then you almost get into time phase alignment, where the app. Where are we on the avatar arc? Because I'm living in the avatar today and I saw people's reactions to some of the stuff that we said together, and that's somewhat consistent with where my Avatar's sitting. Because I've been bubbling on the outside of culture for about 20 years, and many people went out of the way to basically say that that Avatar was dead, never to return. Right, right. So my resurrection of sorts and of Prince once said, you know what? Come back. I never left. But now you see people not only wrestling with whether or not what I'm saying is true, they're also wrestling with the idea that, how is he still standing here?

[A]

Right. The different. Like we were saying, the cartoon versions that they want to bring out, like, wait, this is still a cartoon version of me. This is also an older version of me. You're getting into something. I was talking about last night. So when the actor Matthew Perry, you know, he passed away last year, but a few years ago, he released his memoirs, and he caught some flack. Initially, Matthew Perry did, because he made fun of Keanu Reeves in his memoirs. But what's key about this and what ties in what you're talking about? He was making fun of Keanu Reeves essentially, for being, like, a dumb guy or a doofus. He was making jokes about Keanu Reeves that were popular in 1995.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Because in the mid-90s, people loved the idea of making fun of Keanu Reeves, essentially, as if he was his Bill and Ted character. That was his.

[B]

You know, I don't remember that.

[A]

Oh, no. It was a. Yeah. But in the last 20 years, Keanu Reeves went from being a guy that a comedian would make fun of for being dumb, which wasn't true, but was the, you know, the nature of the joke about him, to now Keanu Reeves is essentially the new Bruce Lee where, you know, people will. Mr. Trudeau, Bruce Lee quotes to him and be like, you know, be water. Keanu Reeves. In other words, Keanu Reeves has gone from being a guy whose avatar is the dumb stoner guy to being this worldly, wise, mystic Hollywood actor. Now, Matthew Perry didn't know that because for what, you know, he wasn't keeping up with.

[B]

Oh, so he was still. He was still in the mindset of 1995.

[A]

But it was. But people thought was like, what is Matthew Perry's problem with Keanu Reeves? Not realizing he was just essentially doing a very old joke, not realizing that he didn't know how old this joke was and that things have actually flipped in the. You know, quite the opposite. Keanu Reeves is now a philosopher and like a sage. He. You know, that's the new shtick. But to your point, people can have an old, old cartoon version of someone that is not only is so outdated, but the opposite has happened. So it's. I mean, it's sad now that Matthew Perry's dead, but people didn't know. Like, he was only making fun of him because this is what he remembered in 1995.

[B]

Well, the way I. The way I actually. If you want to talk about the mechanism of avatars, the way I. I actually subverted that process of people being stuck on my old avatars. I allowed them to die. Really? Yeah. I committed kind of a public sepu with the character. And even my therapist at the time said, you did a good thing.

[A]

That's wild.

[B]

He said they needed a body, and you gave him one.

[A]

The Mishima of pop. You know, that's really.

[B]

Well, we'll see if it works. We're still in this transitory phase here. But thank you for being on the podcast, because this is part of my outward war against.

[A]

This is fun.

[B]

Because here's the thing. It's very Philip K. Dickian, if that's even put it. But. But now we're into the battle of the avatars, right? Well, totally. Wait, stop, because I want to make sure that lands. Do you understand what I mean by that?

[A]

In terms of there being different pop versions of people that are totally plastic or created, that aren't real, but there are different versions.

[B]

Let's take it out of the realm of music for a second, because I think it's a. Because as we tape this, we're in the midst of the NFL playoffs. Right? Right. I was watching a quarterback talk about their perspective in. In what ultimately became a season that ended with the loss. It's pretty typical. Only two teams go to the Super Bowl. One wins. Da da. But the person was talking almost from this. I don't want to say what it was, but they were talking from the standpoint of they were actually beginning to build their avatar publicly. That. That their. That their. That their goal is not just to win Super Bowls, which in the world that I grew up in, that's all that mattered. Right? Right. In fact, there was a period in the NFL where they didn't want to show the players faces, and they were happy. They were behind masks because they could basically market the NFL, what they called the Shield. And then eventually Tom Brady came along and they realized, no, wait, it's actually better for business that we market these

[A]

companies, have a celebrity.

[B]

And now down the line, of course, now we've even intertwined pop music into. Into the NFL with. Right. With the oncoming marriage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. The point that I'm after was. I was stunned and somewhat pleased because here was a professional athlete in the prime of their youth and capability, already consciously talking about not having yet won a Super bowl, already consciously talking about that. Their plan isn't just to win and win a Super Bowl. Their plan is to build the avatar really well. Because in the professional sports world, if you have a long tail on your. Your logic, right. Your real money is going to come after you play. Right, Right. You're going to go on television. You're going to. You're going to be in commercials like Peyton Manning.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So I think you see now the consciousness of the professional athlete, that how they play and the way they market themselves, including how they dress, walking into the arena.

[A]

Sure, sure.

[B]

Is part of building the Avatar.

[A]

Oh, totally. Totally. When they lose, they're like, not only did I lose it, I'm not going to get that cameo in an Adam Sandler movie now. Because I'm not. I'm not.

[B]

But you could also argue losing the right way is part of building the Avatar.

[A]

Well, my grandfather in 76, he had this battle of the network stars race with Gabe.

[B]

Show everyone who your grandfather is. For those who didn't see TV's Robert

[A]

Conrad from Hawaiian Eye, Wawa west, and Black Sheep Squadron, bunch of television notorious Hollywood tough guy. Hollywood tough guy. Some would say hothead. And for millennials, they know him as the cop in Jean Gold Away, which for millennials, vastly outshines anything that their parents know him from. But he did this, one of the earliest celebrity reality t with the Battle network stars in 76, which I used to watch.

[B]

Oh.

[A]

I mean, there was only three channels, so everyone kind of watched. Everyone loved battle, but it's the hottest thing on tv. But there was a race he had with Gabe Kaplan, and it was.

[B]

That sounds like an SNL sketch.

[A]

Oh, no. I mean, it was. It was a proto SNL sketch. So there's a race between he and Gabe Kaplan because they couldn't figure out who was the winner of the last contest.

[B]

And so Gramps says, was it a worked finish?

[A]

Well, that's. It might be, you know, wrestling. It may have been. Well, so to your point, it worked out that Gramps lost this race because. So Gramps, who is this athletic guy from the wild wild west, he's considered to be this athlete. And he was. But he says to Gabe Kaplan, you and me are gonna race, and the winner of this will win the whole thing. And this is unscripted battle. The network stars, like, this is really hot reality tv. And I mean, like Bill Simmons says, it's like his favorite YouTube clip of all time. Gramps ends up losing the race to Gabe Kaplan because Gabe, he doesn't look as athletic as Gramps, but he was a former track. Gramps is 41, a huge smoker. Gramps gets smoked by Gabe Kaplan. It was this big shocking thing. It'd be like Adam Sandler beating the rock or something in something where you're like, really? I wouldn't think. But to your point about it's better to lose. Had my grandfather challenged him, been a bully and won, it would have had a Disney sports movie villain tone to it. But the fact that he lost and the underdog won, the surprising guy that played the nerd on TV won.

[B]

That's what makes me think it was a worked.

[A]

Gramps was too mad for it to be a work. He was too mad for it to be a work.

[B]

Well, how about this was the setup for the winner take all race, maybe a work.

[A]

I've heard from someone say that they were the one that said to Graham she should suggest a race. So, yeah, as you know the way

[B]

show, the carny in me from wrestling identifies the con.

[A]

There's a producer that's like, billy, you should go say this at the award show.

[B]

Okay, so if people didn't see our first episode, we kind of of dove into this era of your coming expertise, which is the occult and music or the occult and culture maybe is a better. Better way to say it. So let's start here. The granddaddy of them all, Crowley, because he's the. He's the go to, you know, Crowley's influence in music, people being influenced by Crowley in terms of writing music. And of course, there's the great association between Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin even buying Crowley's house and living in Crowley's

[A]

house, buying his books. I've got a story that's the granddaddy of all rock and the cool stories.

[B]

Okay, jump in.

[A]

So the guy that Jimmy Page bought his Crowley books from was a famous labor member of Parliament named Tom Dreiberg. Now, Dreiberg, he was Aleister Crowley's anointed successor back in the 1920s when he was in college. He was also a kind of. He was anointed as a Baby by C.W. ledbetter, who was also an occult leader and kind of Crowley's rival. So long story short, Dreiberg becomes a member of Parliament, becomes a spy. He's. He was part of George Orwell's list of 39 people that George Orwell gave the BBC where he's like, these guys can't be trusted to do anti communist propaganda. They're actually fellow travelers or spies.

[B]

And.

[A]

And so, long story short, this is Billy the Best, actual like rock Nia cult. It has everything. It has an A list rock star. So in 1967, when the Rolling Stones are famously in there, we don't quite know yet what we're gonna do phase where the early version of the stones from 63 to 66 is starting to wear a bit thin.

[B]

Is this where they go psychedelic?

[A]

Yeah, this is where they go psychedelic. They also almost do like music hall. The between the buttons era of like, I guess they're gonna have top hats now. Like, it gets a little bit. They're getting lost and they fire Andrew Lou Goldham. So Allen Ginsberg wants to introduce Tom Dreiberg to Mick Jagger and Ginsburg. You know, legends of the counterculture. But also famously, like, according to, you know, member of nambla, pedophile, like, you know, some very serious stuff. You know that about Allen Ginsberg.

[B]

I've heard the stories.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. So he.

[B]

I actually met Allen Ginsberg, so I always. No, but I like putting it out there because in my way of doing business, it helps if I have a three dimensional impression of the person. Right.

[A]

All people are people. Yeah. Regardless of whatever heinous stuff they get up to. But. So Allen Ginsberg wants to introduce Tom Dreiberg to Mick Jagger. And Dreiberg, again, is a spy. He has his own, like, you know, he's Aleister Crowley's successor. He's also later accused of.

[B]

When you say his successor, what is the.

[A]

So Crowley had wanted him to be the new world teacher, which is this messiah figure. Like Jiddu Krishnamurti was another one. And I sure CW Ledbetter actually was the one who anointed Krishnamurti to be that. So the idea was essentially that Crowley thought he would be this messianic figure that would usher in the next age of.

[B]

You could argue that he did.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

In his way, with sex, drugs and rock and roll, he did do that. And Tom Dreiberg, he sold his Crowley books to Jimmy Page. In other words, Dreiberg is a member of Parliament, friend of evil, and WA is like, you know, kind of into some freaky stuff. He's a spy and he goes to Mick Jagger, not unlike your viral clip, talking about how you were approached to, you know, to. By whoever. And he goes to Mick Jagger and he goes, I'd like you to become a member of Parliament. He goes, you represent the youth. You know, we really want to harness your rock star things. He goes, I believe in the revolution again, thanks to you. He goes, you really, really brought back my, like, socialist revolutionary instincts. And this is 67. And Mick Jagger's like, well, I don't know if I want to be a politician. And Dreiberg's like, well, you can just be a figurehead. We just need you to be the guy who's, you know, the public face of this stuff. But it's the fact that a guy who is a spy, a guy who has like, you know, p word pedophile ties, Skyberg, a guy who is Crowley's successor, sold his stuff to Jimmy Page that he approaches a rock star. And it's like, we want to kind of pull you into this scene. One of Dreiberg's colleagues, I mean, it is. It's a big body of colleagues. Was at the time was Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's father, that was also one of the British members of Parliament, that was one of his colleagues, Jeffrey Epstein's essential father in law. So that could also be a coincidence. But at the same time, is it

[B]

true that the father was also Mossad or is.

[A]

Well, that's widely considered too. So that's another spy case. And Crowley was a. Crowley was not only a spy. My. My friend Rick Spence, he's a historian. He wrote a book, Aleister Crowley, 666, about his spy work. So in other words, there's a lot of spy intrigue. There's a lot of, like, the ickiest Eyes Wide Shut stuff.

[B]

Okay, so let me stop here for a second. So I don't want to go too deep into it because this is certainly not my area of expertise. There's this kind of constant swirl around occult behavior, political classes, aberrant sexual deviancy, including pedophilia or pederasty. What is your general take on that? Is it. Is it? Is it? Is. Is it as. Is it organized in your mind or is it just power likes darkness because there's some sort of connective tissue. There's, you know, because what people will say is. And it's. It's similar to the rock argument. It's like, well, yeah, you give. You give people a bunch of money and a bunch of power, they're going to go crazy. It doesn't mean they're. They're worshiping Satan. It just means they just get into some freaky stuff. Well, that seems to be also partially what people are still trying to Sort out with, with the P. Diddy cases. Right, right, right. Because. Because invariably, and I have been in these situations, I have watched where incredibly powerful people seem to be above the law. Right. Well. And that just as a sort of an emotional comment. That's a weird place to be when you realize you're hanging out with somebody who doesn't play by any rules. Right. Including the speed limit.

[A]

Well, that's, that's a big question. I think we can answer a lot of it. Or some of.

[B]

That's what you're here to answer.

[A]

No, I'm here to answer all the big questions. The first of all, the Diddy thing. So like we talked about that and I talked to some people that, you know Hollywood and they were. And they said to me, like, you're absolutely right in terms of, of the purpose of certain kinds of elite sex parties and whatnot. It isn't that celebrities have a hard time getting people, getting women, getting boys. It's the fact that having a relationship or flings with people and not having extracted from you whatever the celebrity told them. I'm gonna introduce you to my manager. I want to read your script. Having the blackmail of having slept with someone and then that person coming back to haunt you. Those parties serve a very valuable purpose.

[B]

But I'm talking about the phase between, let's call it crazy behavior over here, occult weirdness, celebrity fame, models, billionaires. Right. And I, I've run enough in those circles to know the vibe. Right. And, and where the government sort of seems to get involved. Is that, what is your, what is your take on that?

[A]

I think, I think there is something there. I, I think that even going back a few years ago with the QAnon stuff, as crazy as a lot of it was, there were accusations Democrats could have made back to Republicans about high ranking Republican politicians who were famously pedophiles and caught up in certain stuff. And the fact that Democrats never thought to answer back those accusations.

[B]

Right.

[A]

To like the Dennis hastert thing from 2006, remember that?

[B]

Of course. Yeah.

[A]

So it's like he was three heartbeats away from the presidency. At any point during the QAnon thing, Democrats could have pointed back to Republicans and said, you accuse us of being pedophiles. The speaker of the House was a convicted pedophile.

[B]

And yeah, it was notoriously absent certain facts and evidence that somehow didn't seem to make it into the, into the

[A]

public, into the conversation. So that to me, and this is just my. What I infer from this, the fact that they never thought to like to bring up Hastert being in jail for pedophilia and being three heartbeats away from the presidency indicated that it's like it's better off for everybody if we actually just don't get. Start opening these doors and bring.

[B]

That's very. Sorry. There's very obvious to me that there's sort of a gentleman's agreement that there's things that they don't. They. They'll. They'll lob whatever mental hand grenades they want to lob, but they won't lob those grenades or another one.

[A]

Madison Cawthorn, remember him from a few years ago?

[B]

Madison Cawthorn, he came out and said,

[A]

yeah, he's literally like. There's like orgies and sex parties and he was elected a congressman, I believe he was wheelchair bound and handicapped. And you know, he was like, like, he's like, yeah, there's all these parties I get invited to gone immediately. Not only that, no one, no one brings him up. No one makes fun of him. He is just memory.

[B]

No, he was memory gold.

[A]

So, as you know, just the fact that some things happen and some things aren't brought up and some people aren't even brought up again as someone to kick.

[B]

But QAnon, sorry, but QAnon is a perfect example of where it was so obvious to me from my sideline that it was. Was some sort of government op. In.

[A]

In op. In terms of.

[B]

It was all counterintel. It was sprinkled with enough kernels of truth that it would hold some fascination, but it was not to get to any truth. It was actually to pull everyone away from something that. And when I see those things happening, at least again from my own perspective, I don't know what the purpose is. I just know it's happening. Right. Well, sorry, I once said something. I was invited to a Nantucket symposium where they bring a bunch of people in to talk and I can't think of the gentleman's name. Casey Neistat. Neistat. He was on CNN for a heartbeat. He was a social media early YouTuber, gained a lot of traction. CNN gave him a huge contract. He'd just gotten this big contract and he was brought in to talk to me in public in a former church or a current church. And who's sitting in the front row but Norman Lear, arguably the greatest television maker ever. And during the thing, and I said to Casey before the interview, you can ask me whatever you want. It was ostensibly a conversation about culture, and I think there might even be video of the interview if People want to check it out. And the entire interview was him going after me. Really? Yeah. Not in an overtly aggressive way, but in a way of calling me out about government conspiracies and things like that. And I thought it was very strange, right? This is classic, and I've been through it with the New York Times and everybody else, where suddenly I find myself in a situation. Now I'm on trial, right, With Norman Lear sitting in the front row, right? And the key moment in the conversation that. At least that I remember. And again, this is a full church in the middle of the day in Nantucket, and I've been flown in to talk, right? Why me? Why they pick me out of the lineup? Okay. Don't know. And this is a few years back. It wasn't like now, where I'm sort of getting a lot of attention. Okay. So. So the key moment says, you know, it's a lot of these, well, like, if I was playing contrarian with you, well, how do you know? How do you know he was Crowley's successor? How do you know this? And how do you know that he gave Jimmy Page those books, right? Like playing that role. So suddenly I'm being kind of somewhat grilled with this August.

[A]

You're showing footnotes in books and stuff like that.

[B]

Yeah, we're not talking about writing songs. We're talking about, like, how do you account for your contrarian opinions in public and how do you know these things? And I reached for analogy and somehow it landed. And I said, well, you know, sometimes when they examine the stars, they know that a star is there, but they can't see it. Right? And how did they know it's there? Because they see its effect, gravitational effect, on the other stars. And I said, so I know enough behind the wizard's curtain to see. I can see the gravity pulling things left and right. I don't have to see the source of the gravitational pull to know it's there. Right. Total silence in the crowd, which is how I knew it landed. So after that, who pulls me aside but Norman Lear, who's now passed away, God bless him. And he says, we need to have a conversation. And he said, when you come to LA next, let's get together and have lunch. I want to sort of have a real conversation with you about these things that you're poking at. Sure, sure. And my wife for years said, you really should. And I said, no, I know what that conversation is.

[A]

And where was it?

[B]

Well, in my estimation, and God bless Norman Lear was to kind of get me Back in line. And I don't mean knock me into line. It's like, look, kid, yes and no. I see what you're saying, but the world doesn't totally operate this way because it's my contention that people at the highest court of powers are pretty aware of how the game runs.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

These are not stupid people. They're, in fact, a lot smarter than I am.

[A]

They're very smart people.

[B]

Yeah. So why are they willing back to the avatar? Why are they willing to let one narrative go on in public? Why behind the scenes kind of run in this other game? Right. That's the crux of what I'm sort of after and where, you know, you and I can play the parlor game about this person in this period of time. But I think the bigger conversation, I think part of what drives you is, is. Is why are we having two different stories? Right. And when most of the American public, in particular, at least the public in the west, is fully aware there is another story.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Why are we willing to accept and not try to try to bring the two stories together kind of agree? And now, of course, the thing people say is a common set of facts. Well, when I hear that, that's when I want to run.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Because that's just another mechanism of control, because who decides what facts are? Right.

[A]

Well, this gets into something you and I talked about the first time, I think, which is the Cosby story, where it's like, I don't think anything woke people up to the fact that a lot of entertainment isn't what it seems. Like America's dad in the 80s, the guy that in 1983, if you wanted to sell something, the American public, you got Bill Cosby to sell Jello pops or whatever he was that trusted to find out later that he was abusing women, drugging them, raping them, and that people kind of knew about it, or, like, you could make jokes about it on Tina Fey's 30 Rock. It was that kind of like, we know about it, we can't do anything about it. That happened before QAnon. But when people are like, well, why are people questioning whether all these people in Hollywood or the music industry are actually these dark figures? Well, if you take America's sitcom dad, dad, and you expose him later, or it's revealed that he's not at all in this kind of like, okay, yeah,

[B]

so play the game here, because I'm still after the kind of the. Is there a connection between government entities and. And let's call it the. The swirl of culture. Right. If, if. Let's use Mr. Cosby as an example.

[A]

Right.

[B]

If it was known. And again, I don't know. I don't know enough about the facts of the case, but obviously he was convicted. If it was known that he was engaged in unsundry behavior. Does somebody somewhere along the way decide to sort of basically flip the switch and say, okay, and why would they flip the switch and let him do

[A]

that Until a certain point, that's where

[B]

people get into the sort of the P. Diddy aspect of it. That's part of the crux of the Epstein story, which is if there was all this understanding and knowledge, why does it go on and then why does it stop going on? Right.

[A]

No, I think there is something to that. And it's a question of why does the Department, Department of Justice decide that month to finally rein in Sean Combs? Why did, why did they decide to finally arrest and go after Jeffrey Epstein that month was, did they have something on some very powerful figure that was just like, you know, we should probably finally rein this in now? I think. Yeah, I think that's the case.

[B]

Okay. Would your, would your theory be that it's, it's governmental or is it just convenient because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's governmental.

[A]

In the case of City, were there certain public figures that were then at that month about to like, be in the public eye a lot more and they probably wanted to go.

[B]

Is it where they burn the lower person in the, in the, in the pyramid to, to, to like almost create a fire break?

[A]

No, I think in the case of Didi, I think you had him having those parties for 20 years. I mean, you talked about like everyone, you know, you've gone to adjacent parties where you're not necessarily going to all those rooms, but you each, it's a, it's a Puff Daddy party from the 90s. It's a very popular thing where there current politicians or figures who are, who are no doubt at those parties that in September of 2024 or August of 2024 were probably very concerned that over the past 20 years they were definitely at some of those parties, not necessarily engaged in anything like sordid, but they were at them. And could that have wrecked their political career?

[B]

Oh, I see.

[A]

If, if through the vast. Sean Combs, you know, close.

[B]

That's what I'm saying. I think we're saying the same thing. It's like, does somebody say, say this is getting too close so now we have to.

[A]

Yes, I think obviously in The Sean Combs. Why they. Why the Department of Justice at the time chose to raid his place In September of 2024, two months before an election, I think is pretty obvious, or not obvious. I think you can make a great case for why they chose two months before an election to make sure there was. There were absolute. There were absolutely no cameras.

[B]

So do you believe there's a. An independent apparatus that exists within the federal government agencies that sort of operates on their own sort of volition?

[A]

I mean, there's.

[B]

Or are there multiple. I mean, like, I think that's where most people get lost, and I don't certainly have any particular information which is if there's, if there's a man or a woman or people behind the curtain. Well, even if they're directing people, how do they direct them?

[A]

That's a very good question about networks and how that works. I think there are informal networks. This is my take, and I don't claim to be too knowledgeable on this, but I think that the analogy is to the entertainment industry. Someone could be a huge, huge, like, film mogul, and could that person make a few phone calls that would end the career or do something to someone in the music business, despite the fact that the person making the call is in film, of course, because they're a big, big player in the general network. So I think, could there be someone who isn't necessarily even an American, but they're a big enough person, media wise, government wise, that they can affect one of these government agencies? Like, of course, that's the thing. You were in Nantucket. All, all elites kind of at the highest level, know each other and kind of, if not get along. They all kind of know each other. So it's, It's. It's.

[B]

That's what I'm trying to say is, is I'm occasionally I get sort of dragged into this world. I chose to get out of that world early 2000s, but I get kind of dragged back occasionally. And in this case, the Nantucket thing somewhat sort of innocently. Right, right. Like, why are they calling me out of the blue? Why do they want me to come to this thing? Why am I. Am I on stage in front of a live crowd with this person who suddenly decides to kind of go at me about issues which are, like, in my mind, I wasn't. I. My take in. Because I'm sort of a fluid personality, was, okay, if this is what you want to get into here, that's fine. I have nothing to be afraid of.

[A]

Right. Well, no, that's this gets into something we haven't talked about with my family background. So half my family. Well, on both sides, you have Hollywood, but on one side of my family, I have relatives. I spent a few years growing up on Cape Cod, so I grew up on Martha's Vineyard for a few years.

[B]

So you know that crowd.

[A]

I know that crowd. And so this is the other side of my interest is that as a boy, you would see who would vacation on Martha's Vineyard, and you just know that anyone who was important in politics or the media, they all hung out there and there. So again, you were on Nantucket, the sister island to Martha's Vineyard. It's a very important network where anybody who's anybody informally make decisions or have just conversations about, like, what do we think about this politician? What do we think about that guy? So by even bringing you to Nantucket, that is like a hub for where certain kinds of important people do this sort of thing. So it doesn't surprise me that, like, on a more mundane level, you may have ticked off someone in that circle who's like, who is this guy?

[B]

Let's get.

[A]

Let's get Billy Corgan out here to talk about this. I mean, you notice they didn't bring you to middle America or to Florida or even Manhattan. You're in essentially the very wealthy elite's playground when. When you were asked to go to Nantucket, you look at where you were brought. So that I know as a boy on the Vineyard is like, especially in the summer. And it's not necessarily nefarious. It's just wealthy people like to know other wealthy people, but that's where stuff shakes down. So that always intrigued me. It's like, what's the actual economics of this? What is the actual network of this? But, yeah, the Vineyard, Nantucket, that's ground zero.

[B]

Yeah. I guess the question that can't be answered is how much of an organizing influence is there actually? Actually, you know, because the next question I want to get into is with pop music. And I certainly gained some traction by pointing out that pop had more connectivity to Satanism than rock music.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Of course, that got a few headlines, and I'm not surprised by that part of it. But when you look at the pop music landscape, let's say over the last 10 to 15 years, when it's been incredibly dominant, I mean, it's almost been. What's the word? Hegemonic. You know what I mean? It's almost so ridiculous. And in fact, there continues to be, even as we sit here and tape Today there continues to be a true schism in the music business between pop's alleged influence and yet rock's dominance as a ticket seller. And it seems very strange to me that there seems to be a vast disconnect between the two entities. And in my estimation, there's this kind of inward power struggle going on because as pop continues to try to maintain its hegemonic kind of control over the culture. Culture, right. And now that rock's been marginalized, really for the first time in the history of rock and roll, the last 15, 20 years, you could argue rock's been at its weakest point since Elvis showed up. What do you see in that landscape in terms of the occult? And, you know, because, you know, we've all seen the videos where people are holding the triangles I referred to in our last interview. But what do you see?

[A]

I think it's a couple things. On the one hand, some people do it cynically in the sense that they understand if we throw in some occult symbols and we throw in some freemason stuff, this is going to gain. This is going to get traction.

[B]

So on some traction with who?

[A]

With. With people who want to read into it and try to figure out, is this.

[B]

Do you think it's a parlor fun game or you think they're actually speaking?

[A]

Some of them. Some of them, I think, do it for real, but some of them know at this point that if you do put these symbols in videos, it's going to get eyeballs on it. Okay, there's. Some are just doing it because they know.

[B]

Yeah, but I'm saying, do you delineate between somebody being edgy and somebody. Somebody signaling.

[A]

You can always know. Some of them. I do think, obviously, signal. I was talking to a buddy last week and he was telling me about some of these young rappers and stuff. And he was telling me the extent to which in pop music, these guys are into the occult and they're talking deep occult history figures like Manly P. Hall and all this stuff. And I'm like, these are rappers who are into Manly P. Hall and not just Alistair Crowley. And also just the popularity now. He was telling me of like, sex rituals and sex magic and stuff. And that's. That's stuff that goes all the way back to the Bible in the. In the New Testament. When they talk about temple prostitutes, the women that are at the temple for spiritual reasons where you would. You would have a relationship with them, but it's. It's for a mystical or spiritual reason that you're trying to do it. He's talking about how popular that is with very, very young people and even with some pop stars. So there, there, that is that, there is that undercurrent. Really quick. A friend of mine, Rick Spence, he, I, I asked him, I'm like, when are do an episode on? He has this podcast called Strange As It Seems that covers a lot of this stuff. And I said, when are you going to do a Jeffrey Epstein episode? And what he says, he says, I'm just going to put Jeffrey Epstein under my sex magic episode. In other words, he just filed him under people who use sex ritualistically in a kind of Eyes Wide Shut sort of way. Okay, so in other words, that was a long way of saying it's multifaceted. Some of them do it earnestly to signal. Some of them do it as a marketing ploy, but it's like omnipresent in, in, in almost every aspect.

[B]

What would you akin that to is the say, you know, people talk about a fourth turning. Are we in a particular moment in time? If you believe in the spiritual battle, is the devil winning? Like, what is. How do you read all that?

[A]

It works for them in the sense of like a lot of them, they, they get into the occult, they, they do rituals and it coincides with their success. And so they, they, the more they

[B]

do,

[A]

it's, it's popular, it works for them. Also. I think there's also probably a demonic aspect in terms of they're just naturally attracted to it for lurid spiritual reasons. But I think it's, it also just works for them.

[B]

So does somebody watching this on their iPad somewhere that may be rolling their eyes. What would you point to, to say to them this is in your estimation, evidence hiding in plain sight?

[A]

Well, I would say this. There's a quote I keep meaning to bring up, but I never do. And one of my main interests in wanting to do this project was someone I brought up on the Tucker Carlson show Current 93, which I'm sure all Tucker Carlson audience members are familiar with current 93. But I brought up, I meant to bring up this quote by David Tibet, who was friends with Genesis P oridge, who you had great things to say about in terms of his influence as an artist. And David Tibet, he's like more of a gnostic, but he's like, like, you know, evil spirit, evil entities, demons are real. He goes, I believe in like a literal Satan. He goes, and of course, some of this people could dismiss it as mere drug use or whatever, but David Tibet is not a Christian. He's not Jewish, he's, He's not Muslim. He's. He's just someone who's dabbled in these things and he's part of a very influential or, you know, industrial. Not industrial, but, you know, it's hard

[B]

to quantify their music.

[A]

What if we spend the next hour trying to quantify goth, Billy? The next hour we just derailed it and we're just trying to figure out the exact definition of goth. No, but, but someone like David Tibet or Stash Glazowski, who I talked to you about, talking about the demonic evil entities and they're doing so in a way as an occultist, not as someone who is talking about.

[B]

I see. What I'm saying is, to the punters in the crowd, what would, what do you point to in popular culture that says this? This to me is evidence in plain sight that what I'm talking about isn't just theoretical.

[A]

It's. What's that quote about one of those, this architect where he says, if you want to see my work just around every aspect of pop culture or pop music does this stuff. Like, it's like saying what aspect of American pop culture strikes you?

[B]

But when we look back at clips of the Mambas and Papas, they weren't throwing triangles, they weren't wearing Freemason garb like I have on stage. I mean, what do you, what do you akin it to? And what do you want people to see in culture that you do if you. If to you it's so obvious. It's painfully obvious. Right, and you're a tour guide here, right? Give people a few things that you can point out so that they can, they can jump down their own record.

[A]

Sacred Geometry in Ariana Grande videos. Carrie Patey. Carrie Patey's Katy Perry's. Yes, that's her wrestling name. Katy Perry's, you know, Egyptianology and self conscious Illuminati symbols. You know, there's even like witch light things that like, you know, Taylor Swift has done some like vaguely witchy videos. Nothing too occult, but just, you know, kind of playing with this idea of the pop witch. Every artist does it or has some version of it, generally speaking, that's in the pop sphere to, to try to pinpoint any one of them. But those are just three examples, like saying, name something sexually suggestive in pop. It's like, I don't know, like.

[B]

No, I'm just. Because, because it's not. I'm. I'm. I'm in the crowd that knows these things to be true for me, right? But I know there's also an element that sort of doesn't get it because they say, well, what's. What's the big deal? Or. Right. Or. Or yeah, you can watch some YouTube video about somebody throwing up triangles, but it doesn't mean anything to me. In essence, the average American, rightly so, says, how does this have any effect on the way I see the world or my life? And I think I don't want to make the case for you, but in my case, I'd like to say you should at least be aware of the influence of these things. And even if you don't want to get into the spiritual battle quotient of it all, you should be aware that these things have an influence. And as someone who believes in the greatest. What do you call it? The. Not antiseptic, the greatest antibiotic or whatever. Is light a disinfectant?

[A]

Disinfectant, yeah.

[B]

I'm a big believer that light is where we're all going.

[A]

What would you say is the biggest influence, like, to. To. If you were to answer the question, what would you say in terms of the influence of this on pop and its effect or even as an artist or having been a, you know, a legend in this sphere, what have you seen where you're like, I've seen this firsthand in terms of the influence that's has on people?

[B]

Well, I take it in a slightly different direction because the symbiology to me is pretty obvious, but I also think it's pretty ham fisted. Most people are not operating in a sophisticated way when they deal with the symbiology. They're doing kind of like Spooky 101. Right, right. I tend to go down this particular rabbit hole and it might illuminate what I was trying to say about what I said, you know, that pop has more connection to Satanism than rock does. At this particular moment in time when you. It's the classic Hollywood story, you know, Mary Jane gets off the bus in 1934 with, you know, a twig of hay in her mouth and two years later she's. She's doing sex shows for Hollywood execs. And she never gets her Hollywood dream. You know, that's a tale off told.

[A]

Paul Schrader did a career at this.

[B]

Okay, so it's. I don't know, but that's beyond my knowledge base. But the exploitation of innocence or the exploitation of the dream is part and parcel to what this town operates on. When I see a mechanism or. Sorry, when I see a system built up, that is not that dissimilar than. Than porn. That is about exploiting human capital. Right. And narrowing and narrowing the definition of what makes something popular popular. So it could be commoditized. That, to me, is the heart of evil. Because what you're doing is you're giving people binary choices which aren't binary choices at all. Hey, you can get back on the bus to Kansas or you can do it this way. This is the way that it's done. And I've seen assist systemizing or a system put in place in the last 20 to 25 years that was already there and existed in Hollywood, but it's actually publicly commoditized now.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And. And if you want to. I don't want to name names because it'll turn into some sort of personality battle and it's not. What I see is these, these artists are given binary choices, and as the choices narrow, they become more and more pulled into the dark sphere of influence because that's the best way to get business done. Right. They may not necessarily consciously recognize the energies that they're playing with and also realized how they're being explored. Right. So that exploitation, is that at the heart of my satanic charge? Right. Because if you take something pure and beautiful and wonderful and most people who are incredibly talented have a certain purity to them. Right. You could even argue a divine spark that attracts millions to them. The exploitation of that is at the heart of. To me, the, the. The exploitation of human capital is at the. Is at the heart of what the devil is about. Right.

[A]

I agree. I think.

[B]

Does that make sense?

[A]

No, it does. And you brought up some things I've thought about and you articulated very well. David Bowie once said, this is during David Bowie's peak 1976 LA meltdown, where, you know, he was. He was having people, a witch, do an exorcism on his pool and stuff when he lived on Doheny.

[B]

And didn't a lot of that have to do with cocaine though too?

[A]

Yes. Yeah. But it's. As a Marxist would say, it's a dialectic. But yeah, he was, you know, he said Los Angeles is the worst horror movie he's ever seen. Hollywood was. And I think one of the key things to your point about binaries, about Los Angeles, that takes a while for people to understand. But I think is true to what you said about pornography versus Hollywood is that one of Hollywood's most. Its idea of glam, which, by the way, the concept of glam is an occult concept. It goes back to the idea of occultism and casting the glamour, casting a spell over the eyes of something that isn't real. No, glam comes from the occult. It's essential, essentially, a visual spell and making you think something's real when it's not. That's where glam comes from.

[B]

But see, the true spirit of glam is fun.

[A]

Glam. Yeah, glam can be fun in terms

[B]

of how it's being expressed in the arts. Right, right.

[A]

But I'm saying it's its origin. And with Los Angeles and Hollywood, the best spell there is, in a way, deals with the dividing line between the Valley and LA proper, where it's like, to your point, about pornography in la, they give you this idea that on the north side of LA is the Valley. It's seedy, it's underbelly. We exploit people, people. But this is Hollywood, where we don't do that, where this is where you can take your clothes off on camera. But this is good. It isn't porn when you do it with us. And that whole thing, that whole binary, especially as Hollywood struggles and some would say dissolves, the binary is being shown to be a false one, where it's actually, in my opinion, all kind of the same industry. And if you remove the Hollywood Hills and you just had a huge flat land between the Valley all the way to South Bend, people would understand this is all more or less dealing with the same concepts and dealing with similar kinds of exploitation. But what Hollywood does is they like to say, well, that's the cd, that's pornography. We don't do pornography. Because you're working with the European directors. But that's my main thing. That's the main Lynchian take I have on LA is that the border of the Hollywood Hills is a literal metaphor for how people don't see. This is all kind of the same in the industry. The CD stuff, the Note, the North Hollywood stuff, the porn stuff, the glam stuff. Yeah, it's the Entourage stuff. It's actually all the same business. Don't. Don't try to separate it.

[B]

Yes. I mean, it's certainly a town built on exploitation. I mean, that's at the heart of it. And the argument is, well, you know, it's Faustian. Right. You know, in exchange for this thing that only you have, you, the star, you get, you know, riches beyond your wildest dreams, or you get immortality, which goes back to the NFL player I was talking about. He. He's literally talking in terms of immortality, why he's still playing.

[A]

It's like, let's win, let's win two playoff games. Really quick, though, about Aleister Crowley. You know, one of Aleister Crowley's side jobs was he was a pop music manager for a girl group.

[B]

Okay, that's a new one to me.

[A]

Yeah, but isn't that. Is that the girl group? I don't know what they're called, but they were. There was like.

[B]

He wasn't a very good manager.

[A]

No, it was four or five. Five women that he. That he managed. But does that not make sense to you, that Aleister Crowley is also a manager? That he was literally.

[B]

Well, Kim Fowley, notoriously, you know, managed the Runaways and exploited the Runaways. And I actually had a run in once with Kim Fowley where he spent two hours trying to seduce me into his world. It was very interesting.

[A]

Now, see, now that should be a movie. That's. That's the Paul Schrader movie I want.

[B]

We're not there yet. What do you think? And this gained some traction from our first interview. My assertion that pop, of course, has been dominant in the cultural art in America on the musical side of the equation for at least the last 20 years. But my assertion also that. Don't people find it strange that rock, which has been the dominant social changing force of the 20th century, has been essentially sidelined? And my argument is on purpose, I think. Am I. Am I being. Sorry, there's a part B. Am I being. Am I. Am I being an aging rock star who's complaining about a changing of the guard? Or is there validity to that assertion?

[A]

I think there's validity to it on a couple levels, but the main one I think you could also look at is economic.

[B]

Where

[A]

to swap it out for pop, where the pop star does not write their own music to undo the Dylan change from the 60s, where it's assumed on some level that this person is also the talent that's doing this thing.

[B]

It was also critical to the. To the business model that you had to believe the artist was singing their song. Right.

[A]

I wrote, this is coming from experience. And however, as you know, we're talking about wrestling, however much that could be shtick at some point. It's like, my grandfather also was the publisher for the Monkees. And the Monkees at the time, their whole thing was, they're not writing their own songs. This is fake.

[B]

Well, they're the Monkees Rebellion. And, you know, Mickey Dolan sat in that very chair and we talked about it. The Monkey's Rebellion was about. Oh, yeah, taking, you know, taking back the power that they perceived that they Had.

[A]

Well, the only. My dad always say, the only movie premiere my dad's ever gone to was the monkey's movie head from 68. That is the only movie premiere. It's a very avant garde Godardian.

[B]

Mickey Dolenz and I talked about head for about 20 to 25 minutes, I think, much to his irritation. Well, there's a book written about Head. I don't know if you've seen it, about Head being a cultural watershed. But moment that the Monkeys basically made a movie making fun of the Monkeys while they were still the Monkeys. And it's a long book about it. And so I wanted to get Mickey's take because obviously he was there. Right. And he found it kind of almost overly wrought and overly intellectualizing. The Monkeys thing, which is, I guess, hard to do because it's thoroughly been. It's certainly been over examined. Sure. But I think it's actually been under examined because the Monkeys become the parable of what's done come. Right. The Monkeys are not the warning of what to avoid. Because if you stop the clock in 1966 and say, take your pick, the Beatles or the Monkeys, you'd say, the Beatles win every time. But the Monkeys end up being the model that comes in. Right. We don't have 20 Beatles now, but we have 20 monkeys.

[A]

There's 20,000 monkeys.

[B]

Okay, sure.

[A]

But no, I like that point. Head as a precursor to modern pop. And to your point, to your question with Mickey Dolan's. It's easier to control the group when the talent. Not to say that a lot of pop stars don't have a lot of talent. A lot of them are showcased that have been doing it since they were kids, but they're not writing the material. It's different from them in a lot of ways. Being a full fledged artist, this is a very raucous take. But it's easier from the standpoint of the label to shuffle people around when the talent requirement, it's much lower.

[B]

So you'd argue it's partially an economic driver.

[A]

Yeah, but I think. What do you think? A spiritual component.

[B]

I think, and I will say it overtly, I think that rock has been purposely dialed down in the culture.

[A]

When would you say that began?

[B]

Mid 2000s, late 90s, I think the first. And again, this gets wizard behind the curtain. Right. Somebody's going to say, well, how do you know? Or who was the wizard behind the curtain? All I know is I saw the gravity shift. Okay. If you were at MTV or around MTV 1997, 98, suddenly they decided rock was out. Right. When rock was still right. Very, very high up in the thing. And it was replaced by rap. Right. They immediately changed the way they, their standards and practices immediately shifted.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So now that things that weren't allowed were suddenly allowed, people were waving guns. Okay, so some people assert that the CIA was involved in all that. Again, above my pay grade, but I saw it happen. I did witness it happen. Okay, Right. And of course great music came out of it. So it's not like it's not a barren wasteland where something was pushed in that replaced something. Qualitative things and great artists came in. But there was this overt shift. I saw it happen. And then now, as you pointed out, rap seems to be waning in terms of its cultural influence. Right. Pop is completely dominant. Rapid rock is, is, is the probably the most dominant ticket selling thing in, in the western world. And yet there's almost no representation of rock and culture. Right. So why do we have that schism? I think they purposely dialed down the ability of rock stars to have a voice in the culture.

[A]

Well, that stuff does go on to your point.

[B]

Or. Sorry. Or, or those who exist within the ecosystem are based on basically, you know, they know they'll color between the lines so they don't have to worry about that.

[A]

Well, and that's, and that's, I mean we should have. You should have you, me and Mickey Dolan's talk about this. And that's exactly what Head is about. You know, about the story of the 80s biggest band and their CIA backing. Did you know about this?

[B]

After you.

[A]

Okay, so It's Miles Copeland Jr. The father of Miles Copeland III, the manager of the Police, and the drummer Stewart Copeland of the Police. So Miles Copeland Jr Jr famously was like there at the beginning of the CIA. He's also one of the early contributors to National Review, which Murray Rothbard, who's famous, he was like National Review was started with CIA money because he was antagonistic.

[B]

Well, that's why I don't read the National Review anymore. Right, right.

[A]

Rothbard was right. But so in the early 80s there's actually a funny backstory. So. So Copeland used to spy on the British agent Kim Philby, who's the basis for Harry Lime, Orson Welles. And the third man, he British, British agent who defected to Russia. He was secretly a Russian agent and he's Harry Lime, Orson Welles in the third man. So he would spy the father of the police, essentially on Kim Philby. In the 50s and 60s, when the members of the police were little boys, they Remember meeting this future spy what's funny and ties into the history of 80s rock. Kim Philby's good friend was Ronald Maloney, Milore, whose son? Joe Milore, Joe Strummer. So you have the biggest group of the 80s, the police, whose father is instrumental in like overthrowing countless governments. He's written a whole book about this from 89 called like, it's called like the Player in the Game or something. So 89, it is so pulped, it goes for like a grand on Amazon. There's no digital copies. It is a pulped book because he talks about his whole experience in the CIA. And Copeland, you know, Junior, not the. Not the son. He once said, he goes, well, you know, the Police were of sort a psyop, the band, he said.

[B]

He goes, okay, I didn't hear. This is all news to me. So I.

[A]

Which made Sting upset. But he goes, he goes, yeah, the Police were a psyop. He goes, you know, we wanted to see, you know, having that big of a ban with 70,000 people. But his book from 89, he talks about overthrowing governments, he talks about the evolution of the CIA, but there is that funny connection where he would spy on Philby. And Philby had a timeshare house that Joe Strummer as a boy would come stay in with Philby as well. So you had the police. Police, you know, vaguely right wing coded CIA. And then you had the Clash, famously left wing coded, both knowing Kim Philby, the basis for Harry Lime, the great noir spy. So that is a. That is a great rock and roll secret history.

[B]

Okay, stop one second. So to me, as a rock person, okay, that's. That's a lot to chew on. That's. Yeah, okay, but we'll take a 10 minute break. And you're like, okay, okay, but. But take it one step further. Do you are. Because I think this is kind of what I'm after today. For those who get caught up in Is this true or is this not true? Let's just talk about it from a systemic point of view. Is your assertion there that there is governmental influence that maybe even the artists are not aware of?

[A]

The artists are aware of it because Copeland the third, the manager of the Police, he said Donald Rumsfeld, who also a Chicago guy, Donald Rumsfeld, coincidentally, he dated my grandmother when they were teenagers in Chicago. So that's how big the psyop goes, apparently.

[B]

But no, but you know, somebody right now is typing. You're part of the story.

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's secretly Rumsfeld's grandson Rumsfeld, called the manager of the police around the mid-2000s, and he's like, how can we win the hearts of the Middle east through music? How can we use music to. So to your point, this stuff is really basic in terms of, like, as you know, music is very powerful. Entertainment is insanely powerful. If the government was not trying to recruit people to influence it or to control it or get. They would not be doing well.

[B]

The way I. The way I've quantified it, if that's the right word in my brain, is if you run everything right, culture, in many ways, is the thing that can be curated and controlled, but it. It. It has to have an organic kernel kernel. So, for example, when I talked about rap supplanting rock at MTV circa 97, 98, there was an organic impetus there. Right. The energy behind, you know, rap groups like the NWA was real.

[A]

Right, Right.

[B]

I mean, I was listening to him. It's not like. It's not like suddenly they dropped out from another planet. They represented something that was happening. Right. Okay. So the point I'm after is when. When you. When you see these shifts, these organic shifts, and they're based on sort of a kernel of energy, or let's call it a kernel of organic energy. Right. I guess what I'm after is. Is undoubtedly the Police is one of the great bands. The Clash were one of the great bands. Right. Is it. I'm trying to get. I'm trying to nail down, because obviously it's easy to just talk about, like, these people are connected. And then. And there's a sort of an insinuation there. And in your case, you're not insinuating. But my point is, how much of. How much of it do you think is actually people being pulled forward? Or they. Or they. I mean, I don't feel like people are being walked into a room unless they're at the highest levels. That's a different conversation. But I'm just saying it's, you know, sting at 18. You know, did somebody say, yeah, we're going to use him or. And. And they become what Hillary Clinton called useful idiots. They become part of something that they're not aware of. But you case. In your case, you're saying they are aware of it.

[A]

Well, I think in the case of, like, let's say, the Mick Jagger thing we're talking about earlier, one of him as a fan figurehead, to have Mickey.

[B]

But I'm talking about the specifics of this particular instance. Oh. Of the Police, because you're talking about very specific associations which I've never heard of before. Right. I take you at your word.

[A]

Okay, so I'll give you the ebook. I took pictures of each individual page because I'm like, I'm never going to get this under library alone again.

[B]

Sure. So, but I'm saying, okay, so let's say, let's just play a game like. Because I'm more interested in the system than I'm in the actual actors. Yeah. Because I think you need to go to the heart of the drive of the thing as opposed. Because sometimes somebody's. If it is counterintel pro or it is, it is government backed stuff. Right. Well, there's always going to be a smoke haze in there somewhere. Sure. It's purposely a trail that's almost impossible to follow. Sure. So, okay, so let's play this game. So is there an institutional aspect here where somewhere in 1982 somebody goes, right, the Clash represent this, the police represent that. We're going to get in behind and we're going to position them in this particular way because there are certain assertions that people have been pushed and propagated. Right. I'm making the argument from the other side, which is from my position I can see where people are kind of in a lane and they're pushed because they, because they're safe in that lane.

[A]

Right. I, I think that in the case of the, the Clash and the Police, the Clash thing is more coincidental. I don't think the Clash per se pushed by any government, but I think with the police and especially with their father being like, oh yeah, they had government backing or whatever. Which again, Sting didn't like.

[B]

But what did Sting say? Something about when you say didn't like it, what does that mean?

[A]

It' Copeland III's memoirs.

[B]

Sure. When you say he didn't like it, what does that mean?

[A]

He was like, I, I just, I, I haven't read the memoirs yet, but I read the article summarizing the memoirs and Sting in this case was like, I haven't read if he, if he negated it, rebuffed it or downplayed it, I don't know which of those. But I just know that like Sting was annoyed by that.

[B]

Well, I would be too if somebody said, well, you were, you know, you were a mildly talented person. We just chose you out of alignment because you were useful to us in this particular.

[A]

We wanted you to run through those features. Fields of Gold, in Sting's case, as part of the CIA. Yes. Fields of Gold, Yeah. I mean could the State Department have given them money or wanted them to push something again? You and I talked about this last time. Henry Pleasance, the music critic from the 50s, was a CIA agent. And the fact that he was a musician traveling the world was the perfect cover for that. Because as you know, it's like you're a musician, as we all know, if you're in Asia tomorrow, no one asks questions because it's like, well, you could always say private show, getting paid a fortune for it done, no questions asked, because it's the nature of a big musician. So musicians are perfect for recruitment in that way because unlike actors who, it's like you're not going to shine it to film a commercial.

[B]

I remember the, I remember the esoteric point that I was after and I got lost in it. Okay, sorry. No, what I'm saying is if you run everything, right, let's say the government does run everything. But culture requires an organic impetus. So in that way, if you follow my math, if, if artists rise organically from the streets, using the term liberally, you know, in my case, a middle class high school, if you, if you, if you rise up from somewhere and you, and you make yourself known, somehow it seems to me that somewhere you end up on a list. And I don't mean it's a, it's a list of anything bad's going to happen to you, you just end up on a list of influence, meaning these people. And as I've said to friends in private, America is what, 320, 330 million people? No one's ever quite sure.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Over 300 million people. Well, if you fall within the category of one of the thousand or five thousand most influential people in the country, wouldn't somebody in those corridors or power be somewhat responsible to somebody, say, keep an eye on that and let us know if we need to do anything?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And you can see it in all manner of ways. It's not all nefarious. It could be, suddenly somebody gets an ambassadorship, somebody's put on a USO tour, somebody, you know, there's ways to kind of pull people into systems. And the more that you're integrated into a system, the more likely you are to sort of go along with the system. Because debuck the system means you're going to lose the privilege of the system or the access.

[A]

Right. I agree with that completely that I think those things do it exist. And bureaucrats would love to sit there and compile those lists. That's actually a great job. I want you to figure out the 200 rock stars that we need to actually know about and you're like a 25 year old state department employee. That's a fun job.

[B]

Don't you think that's a reasonable thing to ponder?

[A]

It would be insane for them not to do it. I should say it would be incompetent and it would be foolish for them not to know who those people are. If you look at, I mean, look what happened in the last few years with celebrities. I don't bring this up when people.

[B]

We gotta go viral here. Keep going.

[A]

Okay, the Kanye west thing. So Kanye west has done innumerable harm the last few years. Going full Nazi in the last three or four years. And at the beginning of this I talked about how similar this was to John Lennon where John Lennon in 71 had his green card pulled and they were going to deport him because of his work with.

[B]

There's even a documentary about it. I have not seen it, but it's

[A]

called One on One or something like that.

[B]

But the documentary is called John Lennon versus the John Lennon versus US Government. There's a documentary about it.

[A]

But John Lennon had his green card. They wanted to deport him because of his influence.

[B]

Well, he was definitely hanging out with an interesting crowd.

[A]

Oh, he was hanging out with the Yippees and stuff, you know, Hoffman and Rubin and stuff. So when you have someone that's that famous who is doing stuff that's considered subversive. Again, regardless of what you think about either the politics on the left of Lenin or on the right with Kanye west, it has a tremendous influence. And for Kanye in the last three or four years to have been popularizing all kinds of anti J Jewish stuff has had a tremendously negative effect too. So by not, and I mean this in a positive way, to not be trying to like make sure rock stars are not going to go crazy and popularize like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a pretty pro social thing to check on in terms of like, hey, somehow let's take.

[B]

Yeah, let's take one step backwards. Yeah, on. On Mr. West. Because again, this is, this is my perspective and my vantage.

[A]

Yeah, I'd love to hear this.

[B]

Okay, so. So this is probably half true, but why we were recording our album Melancholy Infinite Sadness just down the block, like literally a block away. Kanye was working at the gap. That's my understanding of the story. And although I've never talked to him about it, I got the impression that some of the things that I was doing publicly in the 90s had some influence on his. Let's call it strategic thinking at the onset of his career, by playing a contrarian, you kind of create this polemic that I talked about before. This is all just sort of to set up the story. But so us being Chicagoans and seeing his rise as a star always had a particular interest to us because he's local, and there's not a lot of people who come up out of Chicago and have that level of influence or that level of fame. But at some point, it became obvious to me in particular that somebody flipped the switch on him and decided to push him to the moon. And I would point to, because I have spoken about this publicly, because I'm not trying to wade into it all, but things that he did, particularly that comes to mind was when he would jump on stage, when people would be receiving an award, he would hijack. Anybody else in the music business, if they had done that, they would have been canceled. Sure. And I don't mean canceled socially canceled. I mean, they would have canceled them because it's just bad business.

[A]

Right, Right.

[B]

But for some reason, he was allowed to persist in this. In this. And you could argue was rewarded for it. Right. I was once asked on Australian television live Morning. Good morning, Australia, what I would do if he jumped up on stage when I was receiving an award. And I said, I'm from Chicago, and all respect to a fellow Chicagoan, but I would have knocked him the out.

[A]

And that would have gone viral. That would have been a big clip.

[B]

It's out there if you want to watch it.

[A]

Yeah, that's. That's. No. If he had actually done that.

[B]

So what I'm saying is, and. And the reason I'm going on this whole thing, I'm trying to make it interesting. No, no, this is.

[A]

This. Trust me, this is very interesting.

[B]

Okay. The reason I'm setting this all up is I saw someone who had real talent but was pushed to the moon to use the wrestling. Pushed, in my esteemed estimation, in a way that felt like there was some other controlling aspect at work. And when people look the other way on what I saw as poor form behavior, where I know if I'd done it, I would have been thrown in the dustbin of history. You don't have to be a mathematician to do that math. Okay, so I see the setup over here. So, yes, I agree with you about let's call it the Fall and his poor public behavior since, But I'm just as fascinated with why he was put in that position.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

Because I can't think of anyone from that genre of music that has been pushed to that level.

[A]

Well, and remember when he.

[B]

Can you. Not like.

[A]

I mean, not like that. That was a very unique thing. And to your point, when he started to go off the deep end, remember he was doing screenshots of the text he was getting from Diddy, and Diddy was like, don't do this, don't do this. And Kanye was saying, don't kill me, Sean. Like, don't murder me.

[B]

Me.

[A]

I'm. I'm like, I'm walking off the reservation.

[B]

Okay, but. So what are you after here? Because I. Because there's a lot to.

[A]

Well, to go back to our earlier thing about, like, why was Sean Combs allowed to operate this for so long when apparently was, if not an open secret, a lot of people knew about it. It's interesting that when Kanye west was having his meltdown, which included, of course, many horrific aspects, but was him essentially saying, no handlers, I'm done. The person that was trying to rein him in was Sean Combs.

[B]

The.

[A]

The guy that. Who had, you know, very much ushered in his success, that he has a very close relationship with Sean Combs.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

You know, one critic.

[B]

Okay, so it's. But it's your argument. Sorry, go ahead and finish saying what you're saying.

[A]

I'm just saying it's. His rise with Combs is very interesting. Untangling the relationship there. Untangling kind of the macro music.

[B]

But I said the same thing about Puff Daddy, and I worked with Puff Daddy back in the day, so I was part of it all. But my point is, he was pushed to the moon, too, in his generation.

[A]

Right, right.

[B]

In that same era of the late 90s.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Like, he went from, you know, basically an obscure music producer to running the world within five years.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And. And for people who don't follow the math of what I'm after, Elvis didn't That. Running the world within five years. Madonna didn't run in the world in five years. Prince didn't. Michael Jackson didn't. Right. So why did they pick that guy? Right. To run the world. World. Right. And when I say running the world, they were suddenly. He was suddenly running the world. Right. He had power that was, like, way beyond the means of just a very successful music mogul, apparently.

[A]

I've seen that documentary. I have seen. Yeah. And that. That's.

[B]

I'm saying I witnessed it from. From the sideline of the whole thing. So I'm. What I'm after is. And I know people will personalize it and they can if they want. But I'm saying is. I'm more pointing to the wizard of Oz part of it all, which is, yes, you can talk about the personalities, but I'm watching the move. Why. Right.

[A]

Why was he.

[B]

Certain energies that seem to be cloistered and behind the scenes rally behind certain personalities and push them past what would seem to be even business savvy.

[A]

Right? That's a great question. I think there is something to that. I think there are people who obviously push and elevate certain stars.

[B]

Sure. So back to Mr. West. If he was put in this particular position of power and certainly, I think before his, his public crashing out. Right. You know, he was. His worth was estimated at somewhere between one and two billion dollars.

[A]

That's a pretty big crash out.

[B]

Let's. Let's just play the game from a slightly different angle. And it's in no way to encourage the behavior because I, too, was offended by it. But is there any point to his crash out was. Do you, do you. Do you see anything in him raising his hand saying, I don't want to be part of this thing that I've been sort of waiting, bound into?

[A]

When you're that big of a celebrity, you're your own industry. You're not just one lone artist. And so his freakout, I think, obviously, is part of some general. I'm.

[B]

I'm.

[A]

I'm unbuckling the seat belt. I want out of it. Of the whole music industry complex.

[B]

The logician. Is that a word? Logician?

[A]

Well, if it is, it is now, brother, I know this word.

[B]

The logical person in me says, you know, you can do it a little quietly, or you could just make an album about death like I did. Career up. Right, right, right.

[A]

There's a world where in 2022, you actually call him and you're like, brother, we're gonna make a double album together, and we're not going to go crazy on Jewish people. We're just going to make a double out.

[B]

Yeah. And that's.

[A]

And that's a much better version of this.

[B]

This doesn't go anywhere, but it is interesting to how these things work. There was a moment in time where, I don't know, I'd said something in an interview or something, and, and he, he called me. Kanye really never talked to him, had never met him before and still have never stood in his, his presence. And he called me, and it was like one of those things like, okay, get on the phone. And it was almost like he was poking around. If there's anything I wanted from him and I didn't want anything from him. So the conversation kind of went nowhere. It almost felt like a little bit like a kingmaker who calls out and says, do I have something you need?

[A]

That's very strange. What general era was like five years ago or it's 20, 20 years ago?

[B]

This would have been seven or eight years ago.

[A]

That's very strange.

[B]

Yeah. And it was after my comment about saying I would knock him the out,

[A]

that was it soon after or much later?

[B]

No, no, it was a few years after that.

[A]

That's very strange. I mean, what's your take when rock stars and pop stars have certain freakouts? I mean, we're talking about it, but it's like, do you always relate to them on some level in terms of.

[B]

Absolutely. Yeah. Um, again, it's hard because the way people's brains work in social media land these days. So again, no endorsement of the opinion or the behavior. But can I understand the freak out? Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Because I think the hardest thing for me, navigating the music business for over 30 years, is understanding that you're in a rigged game. Right. And a sane person, when they wake up and they realize they're in a rig game, goes, I'm not going to play the game anymore. Right. The only problem is it's the only game until the last 10 years.

[A]

And tell me this. If you're talking, let's say you're talking with a pop star who's 22, 25, and they're doing all right, but you may see signs of a future former Disney Channel star crash out, or you

[B]

just see there's one that comes to mind right now that's super talented.

[A]

Now what would you say to them if you're. If you have like a few minutes with them in terms of like, hey, you know, it may get. It's already crazy for you, in case it gets crazier, here's how you can kind of keep your head on straight. Here's what helped me.

[B]

I would start by saying you're invariably going to come up against some sort of wall that you cannot navigate with your charisma, your talent, or your. Your alleged power. And you will start to realize that most of the people around you are. Are. They're transactional. Right. And that's a haunting moment. Right. I went through that and had nothing to lean on and went crazy and in many ways kind of committed career suicide, which is not important for our conversation. But been there, done that. The only solution I found was God. And before Somebody rolls their eyes. My argument would be, if you believe in God or you believe in a higher, higher, let's call it thought or, or organizing principle of life, you can put those two together. In my estimation, love and truth are the same thing. By leaning into that part of my, my understanding, my intuitive understanding and my faith in the world and my faith in humanity, I actually found something that was antidotal to the system that I'd been brought up in. And that was the only way I was able to navigate it and eventually wander back to a musical career that's been quite successful for the past ten years or so. But that was very, very hard to do because in, in essence, you have to deal with this bunch of dark stuff behind curtains and you never know. I call this the land of maybe

[A]

that would make a good fancy novel for kids.

[B]

I've had a hundred, I've had 100 meetings that all went well and no one ever told me no. Just the phone doesn't ring again. Right, right. Well, as you know, and, and when you, and when you start having something they want, which I have started again, then the phone starts ringing again. Right?

[A]

Because they don't want to have said no to you. They want to say, I never said no to you. Like, we're still good. Like, oh, absolutely. I was just on vacation for four

[B]

months or 40 years. But, but, but I want to say one more thing because there are pop stars that I have, have a, I don't know them, but I have a personal affinity for, because I, I see their talent, I see their charisma, I see how they have an incredible opportunity to, you know, kind of throw up the Satan be gone part of the business. Sure, it's very difficult to do. And I understand the temptations and I understand how they're probably surrounded by about 400 yes people and they often look like stylists for some reason. That's a joke. Um, it's so hard because I have had these conversations in private with many young artists and to explain to them there's no way not to make a deal with the devil in the, in this biz. But you got to understand at what price? And if you can balance that, there is some way to kind of get through it. In my case, because I do get asked the question from 20somethings, what would you do in this system? I say, I'm not really sure other than to, you have to build your own system. You have to build your own. You almost have to be your own record label. You have to be your Own publicist. A lot of young artists figure out the marketing part because they learn and gain social media to their benefit, but they don't understand how to sort of navigate the people who actually have their hands on the levers of power.

[A]

That makes sense.

[B]

And, and one more point, and I would argue it as a supposition for anybody that's this deep into the interview, is it reasonable to think that people actually run a particular business? It could be superconductors, it could be the music business, that at some point along the way they get calls or inferences from people above them in the power structure. Not the power structure of that particular business, but the power structure of the world that say, we don't like that you're doing that, or we do like you do that, or we'd like more of that and a little less of that. Does that seem reasonable? Reasonable to people? I think most common sense people would say, yeah, I can see where that's possible. Does it mean they pick up the phone, say, we want to get you. We want you to get rid of Pop Star X, but we want you to push Pop Star.

[A]

Yeah, A red phone too, right?

[B]

Not really sure about that part. It might be more of a title type of thing, like, this is coming, this is gone. Right, Right. Which is. Which is something that I said I've witnessed and experienced personally. So it's hard for a young artist, particularly in their 20s, you know, young and full of ambition and they actually do have something to contribute to point to them and say, look, you need to look at the historical arc of this and understand where the political agendas are not going to help you, where the, your ability to generate money and resources and attention are not going to help you. You're going to have to rely on something far greater. And the only answer I have for that connects to what I would call the Godhead, or let's. Let's call it the spiritual history of humanity. Which is if you don't stand for truth, if you don't stand for love, if you don't stand for integrity, you will eventually pay. If you're paying with the devil, you'll figure that out when we leave this planet. But you will pay. There is no other way around it that I have seen.

[A]

Personally, I think they find that helpful. They could use that advice. I have a question I wanted to ask you because I was reading about the David Bowie 76 Rolling Stone interview with Cameron Crowe. He's talking about in Susan. Boy was in his own weird kind of politics and he was Saying, you know, at concerts, he goes, you know, at their worst, a rock concert, like, I feel like I'm a fascist leader. He goes, like, I have so much control.

[B]

Well, he had the haircut, too, going on.

[A]

That was the whole thin white Duke thing. But he's like, I have so much control. And, you know, you have examples of concerts famously gone tragic. Altamont, the Travis Scott concert. And in hindsight, people always point to the vibe of the concerts or Mick Jagger having a. He had a Greek tattoo that said the end at Altamods. And Travis Scott had stuff symbols up that people read into after the fact. But people always say, yeah, the environment, the vibe at these shows was very bad. I wanted to ask you, as a performer, but also just as someone who's been at shows, ton of shows, what's the darkest environment you've ever been at a concert where you're like, boy, this is either. Either where you're performing and you're like, this is kind of spooky, or something bad's gonna happen. Or a show you've attended where you're like, is this gonna end with someone dying? This is like the atmosphere here.

[B]

Well, we have had people seriously injured at our shows, and we. We actually had a horrible incident in Dublin island where a young woman was killed in the mosh pit from. From just the violence of the. The mosh pit. So I have experience that. But I would point to something slightly different. If you and I were just sitting around having a cup of Madame Zuzu's tea, I would say to you, invariably, if you deal in rock, you are dealing in shamanic energies. Sure.

[A]

We talked about the Robert Fripp quote about that.

[B]

Remind me, please.

[A]

He had said something when he was with Ken Crimson, that the energy in a rock concert is such that if you directed it the right way, he believes you could make the world rotate backwards. He goes, the amount of energy of people not only hearing the music, but being put in a certain state because of the music plays on the emotions.

[B]

Yeah. Hence, whether young rock artists understand this intuitively or not. Pop is after a different type of shamanism. Maybe you can pick that up in our third interview. But in our case, tribal drums, extreme, extremely loud guitars, slightly detuned at any given moment. So you're dealing with messing with brain hemispheres. And, of course, we all know that the drums are probably the most primal way to get somebody to unleash their kind of inner. Inner yourself with a capital S. So when you're standing in front of. You know, I think the biggest Concert I ever played was 220,000 people. But commonly, you know, let's say it's 5,000, 20,000 somewhere in that range. And then bigger festivals, 60,000 or more. You're dealing with a lot of human energy flowing in one particular direction. Right. And the, the shamanic part of it, or the. Let's call it the Zen warrior part of it, is this. You've got all this energy and your, your, your capability, if you're skilled, is to create a loop. In essence, refract energy back or feed into energy, so it creates an energy loop. And I will say there have been times in my life where the energy is so pitch intense that it's almost hard to describe other than when I've had peak drug experience audiences. Something goes on in your brain and I assume something's going on in a lot of the audience's brain. I don't know if it's dopamine, but there's that concept. If you've ever done drugs, people say, you know, the brain can produce everything your brain is capable of producing lsd.

[A]

Right, right, right.

[B]

DMT and all that stuff. So who knows what goes on there? But I have stood in those moments of what feels like utter chaos. Right. It doesn't necessarily mean violence. It just means there's a chaotic element that is impossible to do describe. And it is in those moments where the megalomaniac in yourself does ponder the idea. If you said, I think we should do X or Y, I'll tell you one quick funny story. And it's. It cost us dearly. We were playing a concert somewhere in the, in the, in the Midwest, and we had checked out from the hotel, which was across the street, and, and I said during the concert, hey, there's a party after the concert in James's room. James from the back band. And because we had checked out of the hotel, I thought, okay, great, we're not there. Sure. Well, 3,000 kids showed up at the hotel. It was a locked floor, which I also considered when I was making my joke. And people took the elevator to the sixth floor, went through the top of the elevator, broke into the closed seventh floor and destroyed the seventh floor.

[A]

Oh, my goodness.

[B]

And I got a call the next day from the manager saying, did you tell everyone to go across the street for three the party?

[A]

You have to pay for that.

[B]

Oh, yeah. Wow.

[A]

So that's. The Billy Corgan party planner career was off to a very slow start.

[B]

So it's a bit of a jokey thing, but again, I've seen The worst of it, in people being seriously injured, I've seen incredible moments of sort of, wow, if you could harness this energy. Not me, but if you could harness this energy, you know, there is that little bit of that we could change the. The world consciousness comes in, but it is always subtextually based on the ability to uncork that energy. And artists that are effective at that know how to do that, particularly if you play in a band that plays really loud.

[A]

That makes sense. And you can see why. To go back to Abby Hoffman, he thought he could get up and give an important speech at Woodstock.

[B]

Yeah, good luck.

[A]

And remember, Pete Townsend famously hit him with his. His guitar, as he should have, Right? So that was. That was. He was the original Kanye west, actually. Abby Hoffman getting up to take the mic. And he.

[B]

Pete sounds back to what I said

[A]

about he Townsend was you. He's like, no, you were getting hit with this guitar.

[B]

There have been. There have been moments where the crowd is so out of control. Not so much these days, but the crowd was so out of control that I had to stop the show and say, okay, nobody else can get on stage. This needs to kind of dial it down. Right? Right. And invariably a crowd starts to revolt against the. The messenger. And in every single instance, I said the same thing, and it must have happened 40 times. I would stop the concert and say, if one more person gets on stage, okay, I'm going to hit you with my guitar. And invariably, I would get flipped off and booed, and I'd say, okay, I'm six three, 220 pounds. Try it. And not one person would get on stage. Now think about now. Just stop. Pump the brakes on that. It's not even really meant to be a Boast. We are four people in that instance, standing in front of 8,000 people. Okay? If those 8,000 people want to get on stage, no boast is going to stop them. So what is it about the projection of the moment or the sense of power or even your own. Even your own delusion that convinces you that the four of you can stop the 8,000 of them?

[A]

That sounds like a MrBeast YouTube show where it's like four people with instruments versus 60,000 people in the crowd. That sounds like a YouTube contest show.

[B]

Yes. So again, ultimately, everything we're talking about is similarly rooted. It's the dynamics of power and spirituality,

[A]

too, of whatever's running through you at that time.

[B]

Sure. And where are you sourcing from if you're sourcing from a shamanic place? But it's integrally rooted in the Godhead. You're probably going to be okay. If you're going the other way and you really want that chaos and you want that chaos to feed something in you, you're asking for it.

[A]

Well, really quick you're getting into something there with the drums. There's a book from the 50s by William Sargent. It's considered like the best book. What it's worth on brainwashing. It was written. Co written by. With Robert Graves, the poet. But he uses that woman, Maya Darren, that we talked about who went to Haiti to stubborn. Went to Haiti to study booty possession. But there's a whole chapter and apparently was very influential on L. Ron Hubbard on drums. And the whole book was influential on Hubbard. Not the chap, the drums, but this whole thing on the nature of drums and the nature of brain waves and the way drums are the easiest way to agitate people.

[B]

You've taken it full circle. Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.

[A]

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah.

[B]

See, just leave it there. Is there any truth. Here's the last question. Is there any truth to the idea that they had a bet that.

[A]

Who?

[B]

L. Ron Hubbard and Aleister Kraus.

[A]

I've never heard that. What's the nature of the bet that

[B]

they both said that we're each gonna start a relation and let's see who wins.

[A]

Well, I'll tell you who said that. He told that to L. Ron Hubbard. And this would be the third episode. Cause we jump into another sphere of entertainment. Del Close, the shaman from Chicago, who was SNL's comedy teacher, who knew Charles Manson and L. Ron Hubbard. Dale Close, who again has taught everyone from Bill Murray to Tina Fey to Stephen Colbert comedy. He was a Wiccan priest.

[B]

You're talking about Del Close, the guy who was the reness at Second City.

[A]

Yeah, he was the improv teacher. But he said. He said he was the one that told L. Ron Hubbard the real monies in starting a religion. So that can be our third conversation, the occult side of comedy.

[B]

Let's see if we survive this conversation. All right, Conrad, thanks.