Meaning a man like this man letting butterfly flapping his wing.
They've down in a force.
Man, it gonna cause a tree fall, letting five thousand miles away.
Man, nobody see nobody else. You mightn't see that. You don't need to know it. Man, you don't like you followed another story and you got back to feel like that's the win. Man. Don't like to nag on the panel. Man, Now you don't get no better man, no kind of anyway.
Let's take it for granted that there is an attempt to control us. There are institutions, both cultural and political, that exists to shape the way you think, the shape the landscape of the cognitive war. The info war is one man once said, and it is an interesting thing that there's both a science and an art to it. Some of it is applying large numbers, while other parts
of it seem almost like sorcery. The ability to spend narrative, the ability to give someone a reason that they think is completely legitimate for why they do what they do. And that's really what power is. The ability to convey legitimacy. Certainly, certainly some part of it its force. It is the ultimate form of power. I can make you do something, but once you're in you need that legitimacy. You need people to see you as the guy who ought to be in charge, or at very least the guy who
is completely and totally in charge. And there are two broad types of leaders, as Machiavelli tells us, the lions who lean towards that force of arms men like Charlemagne, and the Foxes, those who rule through manipulation and narrative control, much more like our current elite. And because we are in a system of foxes, we are in a system
of total narrative control. The whole thing is designed to change what you think, obviously about political events, but also well who you are, what you do, what a good person does, and so without ever having a commisar in the room, people will fall in line. There certainly is a threat, but so much of it is done through
social signals. That's why I think this episode is interesting because when we're primarily talking about public relations, exactly that wizardry, the blending of statistical modeling and what we actually understand, and it's very easy to pick out, especially if you look further back in time, because it was less sophisticated at least from some perspective. You look at political radio, whether ours the German or the Russians from the nineteen thirties,
and it's almost comically sincere. It's the sort of big brother stuff, big head on the screen, jingoistic music, and constant radio propaganda. But it's never gone away. Far from it. The form has changed, even if the underlying science of control is all the same. It's why I think that so much of the right wing dissonance sphere got its
start in media analysis. That is one element of this, using Hollywood, using literature as a way to sort of like a spike protein, inject ideological material into your brain at a level that you might not even be conscious of it. It's one of those things that it's easy
to dismiss as sort of tinfoil hat nonsense. You've seen, I'm sure the people who take this way too far, the idea that everyone on your television screen is an AI demon or a secret troon, you know, the overlay of course of the male and female skull over any person of any relevance whatsoever. It can drive you crazy. And there's a certain degree to which it seems designed
to do exactly that. Designed to channel people into these sort of limited hangouts where their legitimate concerns can be safely contained, sort of like a pearl, almost rounded off within the organism and reduced to something ultimately harmless, at least the regime, but for conscious dissonance, right, for people who understand that they must sort of find their way through this cognitive landscape. An understanding of these tools right,
how your mind is changed is important. Something I've been talking about is the algorithmic level, how social media can change what you think based off of what you're seen, but you're being shown. Obviously, you add a financial incentive to that. You know, people creating content will receive more money, less money, more viewership, less viewership for talking about certain topics, And it's not hard to look at it and see this sort of rainbow colored panopticon, you know, being built
around you. But I think it's important to understand how we got here, right, the basis of this dark art figures like Edward Brenees, certainly, but there are many others we will reference. It's important to know how we got here because once you've picked up on the trend, once you've looked at an older version of propaganda something that's easier to identify. We've honed your skill, you're more perceptive. You can sort of see the lines running through it.
And look, it's sort of the perfect time to talk about this after the Iran War, which seemingly is wrapping up, which I think is a good thing. But I don't think it was a good idea. I think it was started for stupid reasons, waged poorly, and now we're sort of scrambling for less than we had before. But it's
a conversation for another day. One of the things that marked it, and you heard this in my coverage as well as my friends, you know, Darryl Cooper, Veris, Scott Horton, all saying that it's very difficult to understand what's happening. There's so much narrative, so much propaganda. It's very difficult to divine what's actually happening. Because one of the additional features of this propaganda system is it's completely and totally shattered.
There are multiple different parties warring for your brain at all times. Sure, the lefties are wrong when they say that the Russians won the twenty sixteen election for Trump, but there's very clearly a Russian information opp there are Chinese information ops, certainly Israeli, an American, but many others as well. It isn't simply just one unified them. Although let's be honest, some figures appear more often than others. But this pr landscape is everywhere. You need to understand
it or else you can't parse anything that's happening. I mean, even look at someone like Erica Kirk, who's someone amazingly fumbled her position into being widely reviled despite having you know, one of the most sympathetic stories imaginable, an example of course of how that can turn wrong. But there are many other figures, Bill Gates who successfully redeemed his reputation at least for some portion of the public, Politicians, Bills positions, whatever.
This is how politics is waged. I think you'll enjoy this episode. It's a little more lighthearted. We get into serious stuff, but you know, a lot of it is kind of joking back and forth. And before I start it off, just like to thank you guys. As I've said, obviously we just hit five hundred episodes, but also this is the one year anniversary at least when I'm recording this on the eighteenth of me becoming a professional, full timer going for it, and the growth has been significant.
I appreciate you guys for that. It's going well. Not a wealthy man by any means, but I can support myself largely due to you guys, and I can't thank you enough. If you're interested in supporting me well, for a few bucks a month, go to Patreon, Substack, or gum road get the episodes early and ad free. Can I start check out our sponsor, Axios, remote fitness and coaching service I use constantly. I've been using for years.
It's a part of my routine and i'n't done the math, but I think a large percentage of the guys in Axios are there because I told him to and they stick around. It's a good service. It's worth your time. So head over there, and without further ado, here's the episode. All right, Aaron Clowntown Chronicle, How you doing man?
I'm good man. It's a little rainy here. I don't know what it's like all the way out there, but it's hot.
The answer is hot. I live in the South. The answer is always hot. It's just is it hot and raining or hot? And you wish it were raining. There's really nothing in between.
I spent a lot of time in Texas, and I don't think I understood heat until I live there, because I spent most of my life and am currently in the Midwest, where it's not that bad. I mean, it does get hot. It also gets very cold, but not Canada cold, you know what I mean.
Yeah, I think I've just determined that wherever you pick to live on the North American continent, you will be miserable for at least six months of the year. And really the only thing you get to pick is which six months or all of them.
Right, and which what kind of misery you want to live in for those six months? You know? Yeah?
Yeah, Like you can pick fire right where there's the whole state burns, you can have enter or you can just live on the Gulf coast and get flooded by hurricanes and then shot to death. Uh and I guess that's the local weather.
Yeah, well, I mean this is this is like a very very Newsy show, now, isn't it. Since we're talking about the weather to started off, do you want to go into sports next?
See Aaron I am on a month's long crusade to purge relevance for my podcast. So you know what I think if we started doing a weather segment, uh, it would It would accomplish two goals, which is one, keep me from talking about anything real and two drive my audience crazy. Oh and so uh yeah, I mean it seems like there's a big stormfront coming in from Boise today.
Oh lord, here we go. You know, it's funny speaking of weather. I was just doing a stream with my buddy Newsfist. We do a stream called clown based life Forms once a week. It's all.
I just saw a Newsfist not that long ago. He was at the same conference I was in Tennessee.
Yeah. He uh, he's in the States and he's very very happy to be here. But our last stream, I almost got blown away by a tornado and I didn't even know it.
That would be a great way to sign off, just just like loud rushing noises and the mic goes dead. Just just make sure you don't respond to a DM for like two three weeks to really freak people out.
Well, what's funny is, so the power went out and I was like, ah, man, I didn't think that this storm was that bad. And so, you know, I'm bitching and complaining on my show on the stream. Like when I finally get back in through my phone, I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, it's just a bad storm. I guess that's
the Midwest. It wasn't until the next day that I went out that I realized there were two tornadoes, one to the south of me and one to the north of me, and they just skirted right around my little bug hovel up here in the apartment center of somewhere Wisconsin. You know.
But well, here's the I think, is someone with the podcast Aaron, Yeah, you have to figure out, you know, how you're gonna do it, Like, what's your dB Cooper style solution to exit the game after you've embarrassed yourself, you know, ruined your life. And I've long said what I'm gonna do is, uh it just you know, start a live stream, can carry on like normal, and then just fire a gun out the window and never record another episode again, which I realized I may have now
spoilt the secret. So if I am killed by agents of Masad mid live stream, no one will care because they'll assume it's just part of a practical joke. Have you put thought into.
This have I Uh, well, see, I had one podcast before called We talked About Dead People, which was a history podcast combined with like a comedy sketch podcast, which was probably the craziest thing I ever did that one about seven years and the way we ended it was my co host had children.
Ah, yeah, that's the classic. That's the classic end to it.
Yeah. So then I just disappeared into the wilderness until I started Clowntown Chronicle, which is somehow a more serious podcast. Sometimes it's crazy, history can be weird.
Well, we're not entirely here to talk about faking our own deaths on the internet and the weather, although I assume we'll get back to it. But uh, you're a mass communications guy, and I'm going to put you on the spot because I've given you exactly one bill O'Reilly giff of context for what we're going to talk about. And look, I'm I'm I have no idea about communications, public relations, or anything, but I can tell when it breaks down. I can tell when it breaks down pretty
obviously it's clear. And again, this may not be your expertise, so I may just be asking you, as as a fellow podcast american, what in the world is going on with Erica Kirk.
Well, first off, she's a I'm informed by an AI video I saw of Elden Ring that she's a boss called the Kabbalistic Witch. Okay, I don't know if you saw that.
So that was I mean, that's where I source all of my news anyway, So I mean we're going straight to the horse's mouth.
Erica Kirk is a victim of bad PR, which is to say, I think she's also a client of what was it Stormy was talking about the Adelman or at least is it the Adelman Firm? I forget what they call themselves. I discovered that like three years ago, and I remember looking into it being like, wow, look at this list of clients.
I can't believe the craziest guy on poll was entirely correct.
Yeah, exactly exactly. So when I see a thing like Erica Kirk and like the destruction of her PR campaign, I look for a few things that, you know, see, I'm not like Encyclopedia brown guy, where I can like pull up references right out of my brain. I'm not that kind of smart, right, But what I am good at doing is detecting patterns of cringe.
So what you're saying is, Aaron, you're a wizard.
I think we talked about it before the air. I'm a wiz tard.
No, no, no, Aaron, that's the best. What you do is you make a joke that's funny to you and me, but the audience is left confused and angry, and that prolonged experience of just simmering rage, that's what you want to cultivate with an audience. I found.
Yes, that's true, so let me ruin it for you. I was telling Jay before the show that when you study mass communications, you get ninety five percent retards who kind of like movies and television, and then you get five percent who are basically wizards. They understand a realm of communication and mask mind control that is indecipherable from black magic. Does that clear that up, everybody? I just ruined the show, Jay, Oh you did.
Look, I'm going to have to redirect the masad hit team who's going to ruin my fake death to your apartment in Wisconsin, and either them or the weather engineers are going to send this time three tornadoes. Because clearly was not enough to punish you for ruining this show. But honestly, man, I know exactly what you're talking about. Like, I don't have a ton of experience, but I have read my Burns, and you read enough Edward Burnees and you come to the conclusion that, Wow, this guy is
a genius. And also he's a psychopath. Yes, right, yes, And then you read into the history of him basically getting every woman in America to smoke because he was getting paid by Philip Morris. Oh yeah, and you're like, okay, well, clearly he can do it. Thankfully he never used those tools again.
Yeah. Well, see, that's the thing is Edward Burnees was a was a bit of a thief, right, so a lot of his techniques he actually stole from people who preceded him on most of his research, and just sort of like film, there's a category of people who see a tool and try to think to themselves, how can I use this for the worst things possible? And then there's autistic people who first discover the tool and become interested in it, and they write all the good stuff
that those other guys just steal thirty years later. So Brene's got a lot of his crap from a guy named Gustave Lebon who wrote a book in eighteen ninety something I think called The Crowd, which was a study of crowd psychology, and I ended up just reading the entire friggin thing for my Patreon because I'd never read it before. And you have to understand that this book was basically a disintegration or breakdown of how's psychology worked
before the advent of mass media control. Right, So the closest thing we had at the time was basically the early days of telegraphy and the newspaper, and before that we had like smoke signals and town criers. But this is an interesting dovetail, actually, because my interest in history revealed a lot of things about our past. Number One, it's actually more interesting than everyone gives it credit for. Just because they didn't make a movie about it doesn't
mean it's not movie like or interesting. And that was a lot of my work, and we talk about dead people. But the other thing is how much history actually changed when mass communications came on the scene. Because because we live in a world where all of that stuff is ubiquitous and everybody carries a camera in their pocket, they don't understand that there was a before time, right where you couldn't just record everything or stream everything or write
anything down when you wanted to. There was a before time when the only form of communication that you had was basically letters and talking to people. So you think about, for example, the one of the one of those moments. I don't know if you've ever done this, but have you ever been reading something and then it's just like you lean back in your chair and it's like that meme where the lights start shooting out of the guy's brain. Have you ever ever seen one of those? Yeah? Have
you had one of those moments yourself when you're reading? Oh?
Yeah, I mean I can think of a couple where you can just like feel your brain exploding. Yeah, Like it's a novel, but Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, which is like truly and totally indescribable, Like I think I was nineteen when I read it, and I could physically feel my brain getting bigger and like splitting apart. So yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Yeah. So the biggest, the biggest moment I ever had where I literally saw into the ether was when I read the transcript. I think of the first telegraph that was ever sent from coast to coast in the UK. Have you heard this story?
No, no, I haven't.
So the first the first telegram that was sent. I'm going to mess this up some autists in the comments. It's gonna be like that was actually the one that was sent from Scotland to English. I don't care man long distance telegraph. The first thing ever sent was what
half God wrought? Yeah? Is that a bit fretty ominous? Yeah, So you think about that, it's like, okay, So the realization when that kind of thing starts coming out is that we can now instantaneously communicate lies across entire countries. Now we can do it instantaneously across the entire world with video, AI generated video and that sort of thing.
We can say anything that we want. And so our understanding of information gathering and narrative construction is rapidly changing in the modern day just because of the amount of technology that we have.
Oh, I mean one hundred percent. And you see this interacting with older people, right, people who grew up in kind of the before times that they are. It's almost like the Dodos, you know, where they're not evolved for predation, and so they're just getting absolutely brain blasted by this sort of like desert of the real. Yeah, you know, I think about this. I was over at an older family member's house and we were just talking and he had the TV on, and I realized he was watching
an AI generated documentary about World War two. Oh and sure it was about like a logistics team or whatever, but it was so clearly all made up. It was just like AI hallucination. And the guys just sitting there watching it like nothing. You know, I thought's on the TV, it's got to be even if it's not true, it's got to at least be, you know, in some way related to the facts. And it was kind of ominous.
You're like, no, you were just listening to machine hallucinations over like six figured images of like a diverse group of American gis in France, you know.
Yeah, And so yeah, that's exactly right. And actually I did a stream recently with news Fist about this, talking about boomers getting one shot at about AI with AI videos about secret books of the Bible, with the yeah, yeah, have you seen this yourself.
I haven't seen this, but I'm in no way surprised.
Yeah, so boom boomers catch a lot of shit, and I understand it, but you have to understand, this was the first generation that actually grew up with a mass communications system already in place, and they grew up with people like Carson on the TV, people who looked like you and me and who sounded like your friends and interviewed famous people and that sort of thing. How on earth were they supposed to know that that was a weapon, right, So, like, I have to give Boomers a little bit of a
pass there because gen z is really funny. They think that because they sort of inherently figured it all out, and they know that this stuff is already fake, like from cradle from the cradle, they figured this out. That they have a hard time conceptualizing the idea that perhaps there was a time and it's it's not because they're stupid, it's because there's there's a difference between knowing things and
realizing them. They have a hard time conceptualizing of a time in history, which was all of known history where people didn't have an insane, electronic crazy uncle who overstayed his welcome in your living room and has gone from saying, uh, you know, the world might freeze or it might burn up, but definitely you need to be worried about nukes and
hide under your desk is the best strategy. Like they you, younger people really have a hard time conceptualizing I talk like I'm old, but younger people have a hard hard time conceptualizing that. There didn't use to be a giant voice box that squatted in your living room all day long barking orders at you. And now we all notice it because it's so offensive. It's just all day long.
It's like a super negative, narcissistic person just saying all of the meanest things that can think of, all the time. And so naturally, young people just never watch TV obviously it's stupid, but older people still watch it. And the reason they fall for AI generated documentaries is because they're not listening for the information so much as they're listening for the sounds that it makes. You ever see the I think it's the logo for RCA? Was it RCA?
I think I know what you're talking about?
With a dog?
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah Nipper the dog, so like, I don't think you could say that.
Oh whoops, yeah, sorry, that was his name though, Nipper. He's on the logo because after his master died, there was a record player that played his voice and the dog would sit by it for comfort, and so that was put on the That was basically put on the logo because it was like, Oh, isn't that sweet. It's his master's voice. I am going on a tear here, so I apologize to.
Keep going, keep going.
Okay. So, so boomers are listening to things that make them feel comfortable. They're used to the sound of the official man, as we call him on Cowtown Chronicle. We lifted that from somebody doing a very in depth stream about this walking through some foreign country. He said, people just wait to hear the official man. They don't They don't really listen for the content. They listened for the soothing sound of the official man, which is where that sort of news caster. You know. Nipper was a dog
from England. He is best known as the subject of his Master's voice painted pust You.
But you know that kind of stuff, Yeah exactly, what you mean, the kind of like attitude of assumed authority.
Yeah exactly. I yes, So I can go on really crazy tears about this sort of thing. But I think you see what I'm driving at, which is that the world has changed with how people consume information. Gen Z is mostly interested in true things that are grounded in reality, and the older generations like Gen X and boomers, they barely know any different because they've been living in a mass media simulation for most of their lives.
Well, and to be honest, right, there's kind of, you know, multiple elements to this where look, they lived in a much more unified media atmosphere than we do, yes, where if you've only got three sources, right, like the big three networks and okay, you've got radio as well, but they all say roughly the same things, and you see people acting calmly rationally in what debate there was was sort of tightly constrained. Well, okay, you're not really hearing
anything else. Like, sure, I realized there was counterculture, there always was, but like, that's a unified media atmosphere. And then you know, you turn on the Internet, where it is every extremist position on any issue blasted into your eyeballs at all moments, and you simply could not come
to that conclusion. There would be no way to. And so you know what, I get that, I certainly share that sympathy, and I think it's also a popular misconception that people view a lot of the things that people attribute to boomers are actually the fault of either the silent generation or the greatest generation right too, before them and the boomers did not invent advertising. They were merely the first generation that was born into it, at least in that way, because you can you can look at
how advertising changed before and after. Burne's like, it's almost kind of charming to look at like turn of the century advertisements. It's like, by our soap, it's the best soap. Here are all the things about the soap, you know, it's like incredibly informational. Whereas Brene's ushered in this new sort of identity and emotion based system of that basically thought control. So I mentioned, of course the was it
the freedom Torches campaign with Brenees? Is that correct? That's right where he basically tied smoking into women's liberation, right, the Suffragette movement, that young hot women were at protests smoking cigarettes, you know, tying that to both an identity right and in that of being a liberated woman, and also attaching attaching social cachet to it. Right, This is what the you know, the upper echelons are doing.
Right.
You want to be like them, don't you? And Okay, sure it took a while to kind of become ubiquitous. But you know, when you when you also consider the explosion of wealth in the country when the Boomers were born, and also the time that you know, advertising was able to be entrenched, and also the boom of public media. But I mean, you could even go back to FDR's fireside chats to see the way in which, like mass
media became a tool of political propaganda. It's like, yeah, it's no shock, they came out a little weird, like it's almost a miracle.
They're not worse right, right, you know, And actually that's a really good point. Burnet's in all of his studies and even Gustave Lebon, who I mentioned earlier, they were studying a people who were unaffected by mass media culture. So all of their techniques seem primitive and primordial in a way because they're working on people who are completely unprepared for what's coming. Right. So, like you said, boomers and older generations were born into a world that suddenly
had advertising, and then they adjusted to it. And do you watch any ads? I mean, I don't browse the Internet without an ad blocker. I was disturbed to find out two out of three people still browse the Internet without ad blockers.
Yeah, I mean I will see advertisements, but you know, I use many ad blockers. I haven't like watched other than sports. I don't think I've seen an ad on a screen in forever.
Yeah. So the ad structure and the way they used to be were like, here's the soap, here's the qualities of the soap, here's the size of the soap, and here's why it's better than our competitors. All very fact based, very and not really connected so much to status until they figured that one out, and then everything became about status.
And as we sort of worked our way through that, through that trust that was built from, you know, a society that was homogeneous, where everyone walking down the street wore a hat and read the newspaper on the train and they're the bus on their way to work. That sort of capital that they had to work with has
now been spent. So now we live in a world where everybody is sort of atomized and already suspicious of external messaging that's sort of overt And what's interesting is you hear people, you know, yearning for the times when movies weren't obviously trying to manipulate you. Oh so you mean like the nineteen tens, maybe maybe nineteen twenty. You know, you look at you so like you look at how people use photography. Way back in the early days. What
did they take pictures of. They took pictures of people that just looked ordinary. They didn't have a facial expression, they were just sort of blank faced. They would take pictures of the lake. Sometimes they take pictures of their cats, like normal people things. And you can go through any antique store in Wisconsin and you'll find just a treasure trove of old timey photographs that all look the same. And then people got bored of the medium. It used
to be a fast thing to see a camera. You can see these video they're not videos, but you can see these film strips of people stopping and just staring at cameras in the early days. And then it became well known, and so the people who were basically working in film started to wonder if that there was if there was more that they could do. And it's just it's just one of those weird things where almost immediately when people realized that they could do trickery and film
and they could create illusions in film. They went as far out as they could possibly go with what was available to them at the time. Now, you have to remember, there's a there's a popular story about uh an early film. I don't remember what it was called, but it was a It was a camera that was sitting on a train track and the train was coming toward the camera, and they played it in a dark, little, you know,
theater back in the day. And there's all these people who hear this story, and again, I don't know if it's true, but there's something about it that rings true. When the train got close enough to the camera that it looked life size, the people in the theater started to get up from their seats and try to get out of the way. Now you laugh at that, and you go a haha, those stupid people, don't they realize
it's a film strip. And it's like, don't you realize that they're making a calculation based on what they know, which is I can get up and just avoid getting run over by this train if it's real, or I can sit here and have something to prove by not moving and get squished by a train. Does that make sense?
Oh, one hundred percent, Because what you're doing is you're basically it's a novel circumstance, you know, and you have whatever the thirty years of your life plus however much kind of like real infused genetic memory you have, you know, all pushing you one direction, you know, and okay, they'll like the small rational part of your brain. It's like, yeah, well like five minutes ago, I bought a ticket. Is fighting up against the weighted experience, both personal and genetic,
that tells you to get out of the way. And that's what kind of makes this so interesting is that all of these circuits abused by mass media mass control are very old. They made a lot of sense in a previous era, and now they are taken out of their ideal context and sort of distorted to new ends, if you see what I'm getting at, Aaron.
Oh yeah, I did some studies in virtual reality and simulation in the early days of Oculus Rift when the thing still weighed thirty pounds, you know, the FOV was like two, you know, you couldn't see anything and it was blurry and people were somehow playing Minecraft in this
sort of thing. And the studies we did prove that the brain was using the same pathways when it was in the Oculus rift that it used for real life experience, and there was something that I experienced when I took time off from this stuff, because it was quite frankly, I had a bad feeling about it. I came back in probably six seven years down the line and tried on a new VR headset, and it was the fidelity
was much higher. And one of the reasons I didn't put one on again for as long as I possibly could was because when I was thinking about my time in the game, I was remembering it as if I was there, which is a big difference between remembering like watching a movie or playing a game on a flat screen or something. Oh, I was playing video games. When your mind starts forming memories with that kind of locational or local information, that sort of thing, it feels very
very different. Now people become acclimated to this and they start registering those memories is within the simulation, but at first they their brain can't tell, which is a little scary when you think about it.
Not to be well, and that's something Yeah, sorry, I just forgot to unmute my microphone. But it's one of those things where when we were talking about you know, violence in video games twenty years ago. What was the guy's name that we were all supposed to.
Hate, Jack something I don't remember.
But people sort of inoculated themselves to this argument of, hey, look, you know the pearl crutching. You know, members of society that are really worried about me playing Mortal Kombat. They're they're idiots. They don't have anything to their argument. And okay,
fair enough. Maybe there's no direct correlation between enjoying, you know, a fighting game at the arcade and you know, sawing someone's head off, And I'm willing to accept that, But that core argument that your brain has a tough time differentiating between virtual and actual reality, that's simply a fact, right, And you see this all the time if you've ever interacted with someone who is chronically online, where you see that the online world has fully displaced their sense of reality.
And yeah, sure it's fun to laugh at those people they ought to be really just mercilessly bullied and mocked. But like it's still happening to you, it just hasn't reached the level of mania. If you see what I'm getting at Airic.
Yeah, there's a lot there. I mean, first off, the thing I think of his study we did with people who had never seen a television show in their life. So like like ten year old kids who grew up in the in the sticks way way out there, never saw a television, weren't allowed to watch it, and we were like, hey, we'd like to pay you to come in here and watch a movie for the first time.
And the same thing happened every single time. And I saw this happen a couple of times even personally, with people who just weren't exposed to expose to movies or media because they weren't allowed growing up. I was in the homeschool community. Growing up, there were a lot of kids you'd never seen movies. But when you put a person in front of a movie, or generally speaking, a ten to twelve year old in front of a movie
who's never seen one, they have the same reaction. They just stop, they click off, and they just stare at this thing and actually pready common feature is their mouth drops open and you can see like stars dancing in their eyes, like WHOA, what is going on here? Because they're swept up into a story that's more vivid than anything they've ever seen. In their lives. That was sort of one of those zones. When I was in the you know, the retard section of before I was a full whiz tard, I was still.
You hadn't started your journey, they haven't given you your wand.
Yet Yeah, where I was, I was in the dumb ass section, going huh, how interesting. Let me write that down. And then you know, as I would think about it, I would be like, now, why did they all do that? Why did they all like respond to that flickering light the same way like a bug or a moth. You know.
Well, and if you've ever gone down the deep dive on gone down the deep dive on video games, they understand this as well. I remember reading a paper when I was in college like ten years ago that was basically explaining that the developers called Duty had figured this out, that they were using the matchmaking in the game to engineer money out of you. So what they would do is they'd figured out, well, you know, we can predict player behavior, you know, on how good of a game
they have. Right, they're matchmaking, and if we show someone you know, a new gun or a skin or a cosmetic or whatever that keeps beating them over and over again. This can be engineered, Well, they are x percent more likely to buy it, and after they buy it, well, what do we do? We reward them. It's Pavlovian conditioning, right. You can you associate buying the new thing with better games, so they are distorting, right, the actual game itself, which
isn't really the product per se. You are the product, right, and the game is basically the game is poor choice of words, but that the con is basically how much they can socially engineer you to giving them your money. It's not just the sixty dollars on the box.
Right, And when that kind of stuff was first being talked about, it sounded like a conspiracy theory. But now that we have you know, AI bots scraping all your data all the time and trying to create, you know, a holographic you that it can just advertise to consistently and changes based on your preferences and your stage in life and things that it predicts, and can even examine the content that you're watching pixel by pixel to make sure that you get more of that. Now it doesn't
sound so conspiratorial anymore. And you know, we go back. I know you do streams and or maybe not streams of podcasts with people about movies and movies. When you go back and you look for the programming, and it's so obvious now, isn't it?
Oh one hundred percent? And that's what I think is so interesting about media analysis, you know, is absent time, it's much easier to see it because you know, the correct dosage required to work on you or ey is so much higher in some ways, so much lower in others. Right, we're kind of we're good at picking out certain aspects of this that you can go back, You can jump
back fifty years and it screams at you. You can see exactly you know what's happening, Like a great example of something like a dead Poet's side.
Yeah.
Right, you go into that and you're like, wait a minute, this movie is a giant It's a political op. I mean maybe literally. You know, I'm not going to say like they engineered Robin Williams at Area fifty one, although I could be convinced they definitely yet seen vertical format video over Elden Ring gameplay. But if someone makes it, I will believe it. I will quote Candice Owen's stake my entire online career on it. But right, it is
so like saturated with political and ideological propaganda. Right, it is trying to change how you think and how you act. And the point of you know, bringing up the gaming stuff is like this isn't this is so much more
advanced than you think. Right, it is so much more capable, not even down to like what symbols are used, or who's the good guys versus the bad guys in the video game something that you know is much easier to pick up on, but also even down to your experience in like interacting with the product is designed to shape you.
Yes, yes, actually, if you think about it. The reason they do, the reason this this mass media control through movies and television shows, et cetera, et cetera, seems so antiquated to us is because they didn't have the technology to literally get in your brain and cut it into the shape that they want. Right that you have to understand Hollywood doing this for one hundred years to several generations of Americans and basically everybody in the world that's
them playing nice. They if they could just turn you into a perfect little slave where you just sat around and consume their bullshit all the time and never ask questions. They would do it. They with our current technological limitations, they can't it. So they do everything that they can to do that without direct manipulation of the brain. You know a book that I frequently reference, and it's actually kind of a meme on my show at this point is that Hideous Strength. Have you ever read that one?
Oh?
Yeah, it's a huge favorite of mine. Yeah, Frickin' great book.
I read that the first time when I was when I was going through all this stuff in the first place, like training in this reading about it all the time, and one of the things that one of the nice members said it says in it when he's talking to Mark I think at the beginning of the book, he says, you know, we're going to start with like propaganda and all of that stuff, and then you know, if everything goes right, we'll move right into direct manipulation of the
brain prior to birth. Okay, that's the that's sort of the practical way of looking at what it is that they want to do. There's an interesting thing that's that's happened with propaganda and propaganda. So currently I have my co host Adam he talks about this all the time. He calls it turning over every rock. So the media simulation or maybe not simulation is probably the wrong word to use to to explain exactly what the media environment that we've grown up in had a lot of areas
that you were not supposed to look at. And you know what these are, because they're the types of things that can get you banned or arrested in other countries and that sort of thing. You're not allowed to investigate these things. But because everybody has traversed and navigated an entire century is worth of media, found all of the important bits and sort of drank from the fire host, so to speak. They're out of interesting content from that century.
So what do they do. They start turning over other rocks, the rocks that the adults told you never to turn over. They start you know, what's in that cookie jar? After all? And so propaganda as we understand it, really, you know, as most people understand it, where it's like, oh, they hit, they hit a subliminal message in the movie or in the music. You know, this conspiracy theory is about like, you know, worship Satan in a Led Zeppelin song or
something like that. Like that's all experimentation. They just they were trying to figure out what would work in the shadowy black box of human psychology. So there's this interaction that occurs between an audience and a speaker that they've been trying to dissect for about one hundred years, and the techniques that they end up using are the ones that are sort of timeless, which is why you see what's his name? Who's that guy? Just appeared on Joe Rogan?
Dean Rayden. Have you heard of Dean Raiden? I haven't no. So he wrote this book that I'm currently listening to. Uh, let me pull this up here so I don't get it wrong, The Science of Magic, which is about how which is about how viewers and mass consciousness actually changes reality. Now these are topics that you know, CIA spokes have been looking into since like the days of MKL trend stuff like that. And this guy's connected to Project Stargate and all that crazy conspiracy sound and stuff.
Oh you're you're speaking my language.
Yeah, have you heard of Stargates?
Oh yeah, I'm way down that rattle.
Yeah.
I'll put it this way. If one of your friends is bringing over a girl for the first time to meet. You do not bring up Project Stargate. It scares the hose.
Sensing there's a story there.
But you pretty much got it. It would about as well as you'd expect.
What was it about men in leadership have a lot of hoe scaring beliefs or something like that.
Yeah, it's the same thing. You know, women want a man who reads, until they find out that any man who reads as some of the most violet and extreme beliefs possible.
Yeah, man, did I run into that? But anyway, so this guy's hitting the popular scene and his whole thing, the science of magic. You think about how funny that is, right, Like science was supposed to eliminate this airy fairy stuff about magic and manifestation and that sort of thing. And now what are they doing. They're turning over that rock. Because perception is something that does have an effect on reality.
And if you really want to put it into a sort of a materialistic zone, just imagine you're in a room of one hundred people and all of a sudden, a screen pops up on the wall and says to those hundred people, Jay Burden in the corner is a spy and he's here to kill you, and if you don't tackle him right now, the bomb's going to go off and you're all gonna get poisoned or something. Now those people make the same calculation that the people in
the theater made about the train. They go, well, better safe than sorry, and so they tackle you and they demand to know your donation information so they can send money to your show.
See, I'm so glad that's where it ended. That's where all stories should end. Actually, And for less than six dollars a month, you can subscribe to j Martin, which, by the.
Way, listen as a as a fellow podcaster, I respect the game. I understand that you need these kinds of things to help. So people, it's five bucks. It's like buying the Man of Coffee a quick trip like thank you Aaron one some month. Yeah, and I want you to know you'll be coming back on You've passed the test, which is killing for me. And if you get someone to shill for you and they find two friends, eventually everyone can have a podcast and we will achieved Utopia
podcast America. They're never gonna let me back on the way this show's gonna end is there's gonna be just a gun shot in the background, and then sirens a few minutes.
Later, and then the sound of three tornadoes approaching.
Uh yeah, I'd be like that that video of the Florida man going out with a shotgun and be like, I ain't taken down. No tornado is gonna take me.
The shotguns pointed the other way. The tornados will never take me.
A lot.
Maybe that's how that that guy that the Clinton got mad at shot himself two times in the back of the head.
It was a tornado accident.
He just threw his sig P three twenty into a tornado and it spun around so much it shot him twice.
Yeah. Death by age of mythology God power. Yeah, that needs.
To be the new euphemism. Right, Oh have you heard about the Clinton body count? Don't you mean the age of mythology to God powered death? Sokka, it doesn't quite roll off the tongue, will workshop it?
Yeah? Uh oh man, that's funny.
I got, I got really, I really torpedoed this. So you were talking about this hypothetical situation where you know, I was in a room, a screen popped up and said, you know, he's got a bomb in his coat, tackle him now.
Yeah. Yeah, so mass manipulation sort of works that way as it forces people into uncomfortable situations where they have to make those kinds of calculations. So, you know, when I was first going to college, like, there was this thing going around called social experiments. Did you ever have some douchebag in your circle who like engaged in these social experiments?
I was a little young for this, but yeah, I'm familiar with what you're talking about.
Yeah. So, like these fools would go out and like stand next to a building and just stare at the wall, and they would they would basically keep count of how many people came to look at what they were looking at. There was this other thing where they'd look up at the sky and they'd point and they'd write down how many people looked up in the sky to see what they were looking at.
Example not too long ago of the guy taping the banana to the wall at the moment.
Yeah. Yeah, So that's that's how a lot of this stuff works, is it's all influenced. They can't make you do it, so they just they just measure. You know,
they're not hurting anything, just taking measurements. Nothing to see here, you know, perfectly harmless, and you know, it's it's hilarious on the internet and everybody watches these, you know, these TikTok shorts about people doing things like this, but social pressure and manipulating the mind of a of a sort of mass audience eventually turns into a situation where you start asking the questions that Edward Burnet's was asking, and Edward Burne's you know, like I said, he was sort
of the guy who you know, saw fireworks and turned it into a gun, Like he was like, how can I use this to hurt people or make money or manipulate people and that sort of thing. And you know, there's no there's no need to go into the whole connection with Freud and all that stuff, but the psychoanalysis culture of the early twentieth century sort of ended up there, sort of like everything else. Like when we develop a new technology, it eventually gets turned into a weapon somehow.
It's never you know, they say, if it's if it's free, you're the product, right, But if it's free, you're really the experiment. Most of the time they're tracking something that doesn't have anything apparently to do with what it is that they're testing, so there was this there was this attitude in the early days of like, how do we talk people into doing things that they that are against
their best interest? Right? So the way they would do this is they'd have the official man come on the television and say, what you really want to do is you want to go to war with those horrible people over the sea and destroy them forever, because you know such and such and so, because they still had had
they still felt like they had to convince you. Well, the way it developed around the same time that they were turning this stuff into a full blown weapon was instead of convincing individuals to come together and do this, how about we just changed the entire sea. What if we just changed everybody into, like I said earlier, the perfect slave who just listens to everything that we say. And so it went from how do we convince this individual out here to how do we change that individual
into being what it is that we want? And I believe that's part of where the NPC phenomenon and meme comes from, is that through a combination of fear programming, repetition, and all that other spooky stuff that all the you know, those horrible COVID deniers accuse the government of doing. I sort of see that as sort of their approach to everything. The people in charge of these things are basically trying to terraform the human terraform Western consciousness altogether into being
a subject people. And that sounds really big. So maybe I should pause. There might be a tornado head in my way for that moment.
Well, I mean, I think that you know that ability to set the null hypothesis right, the common received wisdom. I mean, that's really what power is, the ability to dictate the terms on which the argument happens. You saw this very successfully on the issue of immigration. I am
not arch plan Truster, but I will say Trump broke that. Yeah, whatever good or ill we could say of the man, but you saw this where there was one side, which is, you know, libtard central, which is basically, immigrants are awesome, we love them. And then the other side was, well, as long as they're legal, who cares. And that was the acceptable bounds of the debate. But if your goal is to transform the population of America, you're more or less fine with both halves of that. Right, you were
still getting what you want done. Both sides of the argument. Ultimately serve your.
End, right, That's exactly right. So the way to control the tree is to control the route. So if you can lay the ground for the preconceptions that an entire society has about who they are, what they believe, and what they will fight for, you control everything about them. I mean, there's probably a few other factors in there, like don't get me wrong, Like I said, I'm not encyclopedia Brown. I mostly just vibe cast I don't really do data anymore. I did all my research for we
talk about dead people. But that is definitely what it feels like it does. It feels like what they're trying to do is get to the very root of society. And I think that's definitely why they go after religion, and they're trying to replace any form of structured spirituality with this sort of like hallucinogenic like hippie culture. Does any of that ring true?
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, and I think that you see that with like the transcendent, where there's a once that once that stone is turned right, once we have entered that framework, the idea is to channel it into something the regime is completely and totally okay with, which is either you doing psilocybin in Ecuador, you know, and it's simply kind of a hallucination of your brain. You experience ego death whatever or alternately, right, the kind of
like UFO stuff. And I think it's been really interesting to me how apparently comfortable our government is with UFOs and having that be an explanation, I'm gonna be honest, this is kind of a low IQ reading on it. But my thought is if there were anything to it, they wouldn't want us talking about it. And then, you know, you compare that to you know, the way that our
government treats other expressions of spiritual belief. And I will leave it at that, right, the idea is to channel that inclination into something that is harmless and or beneficial.
I mean, you know, look at the relationship between you know, certain religious figures and prominent world allies, and understand that like that, in the same way that the inclination to heed the wisdom of the crowd is baked into the human I mean, just like can baseline human matter, that same instinct, the spiritual instinct, whatever you say about it,
that is another vector of control. And I think the mistake is and you see this from a lot of kind of low rent analysis like look, I'm going through the moon is a harsh mistress behindlight, which is actually it's pretty good. It's fun to read recording an episode on it tomorrow, and okay, look, you know there's the kind of obligatory aside where the libertarians can't stop talking
about age of consent. But also there is this idea that things that these things, the system of control are, anything they use as a weapon is inherently illegitimate because it is used as a system of control. And it's like no, no, no, no, you don't understand. That is a part of what it is to be human. That's how it works. Yes, Now to what end it is directed? Well, that's the battlefield, right, that's what actually matters functionally.
Yeah, it's interesting you bring up Hinhlan specifically that book. I actually started that sometime last year. I took a long journey into science fiction because in a lot of ways, science fiction sort of set up and or supported the precepts for the twenty first century in a lot of ways, like you know, nineteen eighty four people talk about it all the time, is like, oh, you know, it's not supposed to be an instruction manual, and yet it was what are you going to do about it? It did
a great you know, it did a great job. Everyone's on nineteen eighty four is this super serious, important book, and it's like, well, we'll look at it. What does it depend on? It depends on sort of a universal technology called the screen that sits in everyone's apartment all the time. And one of the privileges of the elite is turning that off. Are they forcing you to keep your television show on, you know, or are you an elite and turn that friggin the thing off? Anyway, That's
probably all I had to say about that. I probably lost your point, But.
No, no, not at all. But I think that there's a mistake in pointing out these systems of control, to say, the underlying thing and of itself, whether that's you know, having a social constant conscience, wanting to get along with your neighbors, right, religion, whatever, as the problem in and of itself, and one if you set that up as your enemy, woo boy, you're gonna have a tough time fighting that. But also right, just because a system a circuit is being used to control you, does not mean
that system or circuit is illegitimate. Like I mean, look like the human drive to reproduce is a phenomenal way to socially control people. But if we stop using that circuit, you know, we end up like the Shakers.
Yes, that's that's a great point. There's one thing that I kind of want to point out about that because you're exactly right. People see this and they go, oh, they're controlling us. All control is bad. It's like, if you did enough studies on mass psychology and how people work, and a great book to start with is The Crowd by Gustav Lebon, you realize that the normies are going
to be controlled by something. It's what they expect, and they should have somebody in charge of them who doesn't want to bilk them for everything they're worth, who doesn't want to trick them into going into unpayable debt to get a bigger car. Like the normies have incredible power as sort of a mass consciousness, hive mind kind of thing. The fact that it's been sort of left to these pirates in Hollywood to abuse them and train them to
hate themselves and cheer for their own death. That's not the fault of the normy that because that's what they do. You know, there's no reason to get angry at them. And you know, red pilling normies is you know, I've heard some derision for that on some of your interviews as well, and I tend to agree. Normies are supposed to be able to clock in, clock out, enjoy their life and not think about losing everything because they said a naughty word on the internet. That's not for them, right.
But the way that we've seated this ground of of you know, gently goating the normis or say the mass, the major mass of the United States, basically to swindlers and circus freaks. That's a major failure. But now that we have the technology, you know, Jay Burden, you're saving the world and people should totally donate to your show so you can keep doing all right, So I.
Am specifically saving the world me personally. I know this. Yes, the men in my walls are talking to me. I have bugs under my skin and if you don't give me five dollars, three Israeli controlled cyclones are headed to the location right now. This is an actionable threat. I've contacted my friends at the Weather Department, the real one, not that not that one and you listener are in the target zone. This is a threat. I am threatening.
You all are so actually hilarious. One thing that Newsfest says frequently is how shocked he is that they just let the podcasting world go like they just Isn't that crazy? Yeah?
I mean you you really, especially on like the audio platforms, you have to cause a stink to get them mad at you. Like I could think of, Okay, you've got Alex Jones, right, and then my friends at Blood Satellite, who I think are only banned on Spotify, and I have no idea why. I do know what they could have said many many things, but it's weird to get a band only on Spotify, right, Like you really have to create a stink?
Yeah, yeah. Actually, the only two episodes I ever had banned from my history podcast we talk about dead people. Two of them they there was Donald Ewen Cameron, who was the Canadian psychologist who was basically one of the heads of mk Ultra, which I put out very angrily once the uh, once the beer bug had hit the entire planet. That one got banned, and the other the other one that got banned was the one on Nikolai Chauchescu.
Oh really, that's surprising. That's kind of a deep cut for them.
Isn't that interesting? So, Nikolaie Chauchescu. The reason I don't want to I don't want to pretend like there's some glorious story to this. They probably just banned it because I used the Hook soundtrack for a sketch. But I think they banned that one because the story ultimately is
how a podcaster destroyed a dictator. Nikolai Chaoucheski. There were a lot of like shaky things that were happening around then, but the straw that broke the camel's back was a videotape made by a pastor in his basement, like a literal podcaster was one of the major things that broke that whole thing down.
See, this is what I've been saying for a long time, Aaron, is that that podcasters are the heartbeat of America. We are a mass untapped natural resource, and we deserve at the very least six dollars a month for episodes early in ad free on Patreon, substack or coming.
I knew you were going to do that.
That was a layup man. Yeah, Like the funny thing is legitimately, I'm sponsored, and my sponsors are always getting on me for forgetting to shill for them or for me, and so I have corrected that by shilling ten times more than I ever will at one episode. But dude, this was a ton of fun. I have to have you on again. But uh, where can people find you?
Man? So you can listen to my media analysis and slap analysis podcast, The Clowntown Chronicle on YouTube, Spotify and everywhere else the podcasts live if you want to access. We talk about dead people, be prepared. It is a history show designed for dum mass millennials who don't understand anything, so there's a lot of swearing on it. I know many people's christianiers have complained to me about it, which is fine. And you can also find me on x My handle is at CTC meme Cast. That's it. That's
all I have to show. Also, Axios Fitness, you forgot to you forgot to do.
Your Oh see look at that. I've streamlined this so much. Then I have guests come on to do my shilling for me. I mean, at this point, Aaron I should just train like a Claude bought to just like every five to ten minutes, say like, yes, that's interesting, carry on, and then just optimize this whole thing, like what am I doing? Actually working? This is one of the look you maybe out there in an oil field in a coal mine and you think you've got it tough. Try
talking into a microphone for forty five minutes you ingrate? Yeah, we give you too much. Working men of America. You are you think think you make things? I talk for a living, Aaron Man, This was a ton of fun, and everyone at home, keep your head up like it last forever.
Good Night,