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Episode 306 - Cameron Reilly - The Psychopath Epidemic
In this episode, I speak with Cam Reilly about psychopaths.
00:00 Welcome to the Podcast: Introducing the Theme and Special Guest
00:39 The Regular Rhythm: Panel Discussions and Special Features
00:59 Diving into 'The Psychopath Epidemic': An Author's Insight
02:10 The Impact of Psychopaths in Power: A Deep Dive
05:18 Exploring Psychopathy: Definitions and Distinctions
05:46 Understanding Sociopaths vs. Psychopaths: Clinical Perspectives
27:14 The Role of Capitalism in Empowering Psychopaths
35:39 The Power of Propaganda in Shaping Public Opinion
47:14 Unpacking the Echoes of McCarthyism Today
48:15 The Influence of Think Tanks and Media Narratives
51:35 Navigating the Maze of Information and Trust
52:54 Seeking Truth in a Sea of Opinions
56:02 The COVID-19 Debate: Experts and Contrarian Views
01:01:03 Addressing Psychopathy in Leadership and Organizations
01:02:31 Exploring Solutions and Ethical Considerations
01:14:53 Podcasting, History, and Finding Reliable Sources
01:23:07 Reflections and Future Directions
Find out more about Cam at https://cameronreilly.com/
Listen to his podcasts at https://thepodcastnetwork.com/
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to your listener.
Speaker:This is the iron fist and the velvet glove podcast.
Speaker:This is a podcast where we talk about news and politics and sex and religion.
Speaker:And on this occasion, I have a special guest who I consider to be somewhat of an
Speaker:expert when it comes to sex and religion.
Speaker:And he's not too shabby on news and politics as well.
Speaker:Cam Riley, welcome aboard.
Speaker:I consider myself a bit of an expert on six to Trevor.
Speaker:Thanks for asking.
Speaker:Well, if boasted about it often enough that yeah, I think we all
Speaker:know we've got more to get up to and congratulations on your efforts.
Speaker:You got to advertise as you know, my marketing background taught me that.
Speaker:Very good.
Speaker:So if you're new to this podcast every second week, we have a little panel
Speaker:discussion where a group of us sit around, talk about the news and events,
Speaker:particularly in relation to Australia.
Speaker:And then the wider world.
Speaker:And then every second week I've decided to do something special, either a book
Speaker:review or an interview or something else.
Speaker:And this is that special weekend.
Speaker:Cam Riley is the guest this week.
Speaker:And cam amongst his many accomplishments is he's an author.
Speaker:And he wrote a book called the psychopath epidemic.
Speaker:Why the world is so fucked up and what you can do about it
Speaker:by the way, language warning.
Speaker:Normally we don't drop the F bomb too often in this podcast, but with cam
Speaker:on board, keep, keep the kids away until you've had a re listen to it.
Speaker:And so cam the psychopathic, bring your seat backs to their fully
Speaker:upright position and make sure your seat belts fully fastened.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:If you're.
Speaker:If you're watching this live, then make some comments and
Speaker:hopefully what you S comments.
Speaker:You might more peer in the chat room and they'll start to appear on
Speaker:the screen and we might answer some questions or whatever they come along.
Speaker:So feel free to make some comments there, and that will impress cam
Speaker:with the technology on his podcast.
Speaker:So have a go at that.
Speaker:So, Kim the psychopath epidemic what's the premise of the book.
Speaker:What's, what's the elevator pitch.
Speaker:What's it about?
Speaker:Oh, I know what you're doing here, Trevor.
Speaker:You figure throw a camera in a softball question.
Speaker:I can sit back, eh, put my feet up for the next 45 minutes while he just rattles up.
Speaker:But I'll I'll take the bite and run with it, nonetheless.
Speaker:So the, yeah, the psychopath epidemic, the premise is that the vast majority
Speaker:of the problems facing the world today caused by are the result of.
Speaker:Psychopaths in position of power and wealth in our major institutions,
Speaker:businesses, religions politics, the media, the military, the police education, the
Speaker:list goes on, but they're probably the big five or six that obviously direct
Speaker:a large percentage of the world's this.
Speaker:And I came to this conclusion after many, many years of thinking
Speaker:about really, really, if you're drill down to it, what's the real
Speaker:problem with what's going on today.
Speaker:And I remember I was, I was writing another book.
Speaker:And it was thinking about all of these, all of these stories that I've collected
Speaker:over the years for my various podcasts about people in positions of authority
Speaker:and all of those sorts of institutions, just doing really stupid, bad heinous.
Speaker:And thinking why, like, why, like I know humans do that, but why, when you're
Speaker:in a position of authority and, and trust, would you allow yourself Wally?
Speaker:Why, if you're bill Clinton, would you be getting blow jobs in the oval office?
Speaker:Like really why?
Speaker:I mean, sure.
Speaker:You want to get blow jobs, but there's plenty of other places as the president,
Speaker:you could probably do that outside of the actual oval office itself like that.
Speaker:The, the risk that you're taking on is insane.
Speaker:It's, it's ridiculous.
Speaker:Anyway, after I'm reading a number of books on psychopaths, coincidentally and
Speaker:thinking about bosses that I'd had and organizations that I'd worked in large
Speaker:organizations and small organizations, organizations like Microsoft,
Speaker:where I worked for six or seven.
Speaker:I came to the realization that when you look at the, the characteristics of
Speaker:people who rank highly on the psychopath test, people who exhibit the classic
Speaker:psychopath behaviors, and then you look at the people that are running these
Speaker:sorts of organizations, there's a very high overlap if you'd have Venn diagram.
Speaker:And then I started to think about, well, does it make sense that people who.
Speaker:Had these sorts of characteristics could rise to positions of power in management
Speaker:and these sorts of organizations.
Speaker:And I realized, yes, it does the fact that you that's what you would expect.
Speaker:You would expect a psychopath to be able to rise through the ranks because famously
Speaker:they're able to think one thing and say another they're the smiling assassins.
Speaker:They're the people who learn to exhibit the sorts of behaviors
Speaker:and say the sorts of things that they think people want to hear.
Speaker:Should we just give a quick and dirty definition for a
Speaker:psychopath and a sociopath?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, it's an interesting, like if you read the medical literature, if you
Speaker:read the DSM five, the, the, the medical establishments diagnosis of disorders
Speaker:there is, there's really no distinction between sociopaths and psychopaths.
Speaker:They all get lumped together in to antisocial personality disorder.
Speaker:Generally though, when you read sort of the more mainstream literature,
Speaker:there's a little bit of divisiveness around it, but I J I came to the general
Speaker:conclusion that most psychiatrists who've worked in this space and a clinical
Speaker:psychologists tend to think that the differences people are born a psychopath
Speaker:and they're all you're made a sociopath.
Speaker:If you experienced.
Speaker:Extreme trauma.
Speaker:As a young child ran the ages of 4, 5, 6, the classic fictional example
Speaker:I always use as Dexter and the decks, the TV series, or his mother brutally
Speaker:murdered, and then sat in the blood for hours before he was rescued.
Speaker:It fucks with your, your empathy center, your ability to feel empathy and express
Speaker:empathy towards others among others.
Speaker:Or you're born with that.
Speaker:And if you go back through history, you know, there's plenty of evidence.
Speaker:It's nothing that would stand up for a clinical psychologist is plenty of
Speaker:evidence that psychopaths have always been with us in one shape or form.
Speaker:It's just that in years gone by, we call them Kings and generals and Pope
Speaker:and you know various other titles rail barracks, railway barracks.
Speaker:Yeah, still, it's still just trying to get a quick and dirty definition.
Speaker:Would you, would you sign something like a psychopath would be somebody
Speaker:with a strong desire for power and, and a disregard for the rights of others?
Speaker:Like as the sort of willingness to just walk over and ignore the
Speaker:rights of others seems to be the key part of being psychopath.
Speaker:Is that, is that really a key part?
Speaker:Yeah, but I want to shout out to the people in the chat room,
Speaker:Tony and dire straits that were in Sydney for the screening of
Speaker:my film, because only you guys.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Appreciate that.
Speaker:You might've just before COVID that was the last thing ever screened
Speaker:in any cinema in Australia before.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:The key characteristics they have an immense an innate sense of . They innately
Speaker:believe they are better, smarter and deserve more than the people around them.
Speaker:And over time, they quite often a justified in thinking that because they do
Speaker:get away with more than the people around them get away with mostly because the
Speaker:people around them, I don't try and pull the sort of shit that a psychopath will
Speaker:pull, because we have a combination of empathy and guilt, which they don't have.
Speaker:And also because psychopaths just have the innate skills to bullshit their
Speaker:way through lots of situations where most of us would, would get caught out.
Speaker:So they have an innate sense of superiority.
Speaker:They have a very high appetite for risk.
Speaker:They're willing to take enormous risks predominantly because they are
Speaker:convinced they will succeed because they believe they are superior.
Speaker:They will get away with stuff.
Speaker:And again, the ones that you see as senior leaders of organizations
Speaker:typically have been successful, they have taken a lot of risks.
Speaker:They have gotten away with it.
Speaker:They're, you know, there are psychopaths with a very high IQ who, and quite
Speaker:charming who get away with all this stuff.
Speaker:And then there are the ones that don't, they burn out very early on, but those
Speaker:are the ones that get away with it.
Speaker:Tend to have a very high IQ just with our society at the moment.
Speaker:Cam, there seems to be very little accountability, at least in politics
Speaker:and in business where companies are failing and yet the CEOs move on and
Speaker:get a nice job as some other company at a similar or better pay scale or level.
Speaker:And the same with our politicians.
Speaker:They're there.
Speaker:They're right.
Speaker:Perhaps for downplaying the risk, because if you're looking at the way
Speaker:our society is running at the moment, people seem to just get away with stuff.
Speaker:But I don't know.
Speaker:I don't feel.
Speaker:It was as easy to get away with previously.
Speaker:So the risk isn't there.
Speaker:One of the things I explore in the book is what are the, what are the
Speaker:symptoms of a psychopath culture in an organization or in a country?
Speaker:Why, what are the, what are the symptoms when there's been enough psychopathy?
Speaker:For a long enough and the conditions are right, that you can bring an entire
Speaker:population along with you, or you can, you can erect the necessary foundations in
Speaker:sort of a business culture with business expectations that it becomes normalized.
Speaker:Psychopathic behaviors become normalized.
Speaker:And in fact expected, it's like, when, you know, if you'd say that a so-and-so
Speaker:politician is corrupt and people will say, well, that's all politicians are corrupt.
Speaker:You know, particularly if it's a member of their own party, it's a member of a party.
Speaker:They don't like it.
Speaker:They're like, oh yeah, they're corrupt.
Speaker:If you particularly talk to Americans, you're talking to American Democrat,
Speaker:the Republicans are all evil.
Speaker:If you point out corruption in the Democrats, they're like, well,
Speaker:every, all politicians are corrupt.
Speaker:Come on, least they're not as bad as that guy.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:It's the normalization of these sorts of psychopathic behaviors that we've seen
Speaker:over decades and decades of capitalist democracies, which I think in particular
Speaker:make it easier for psychopaths arrives.
Speaker:But before I get distracted by that.
Speaker:The other key thing.
Speaker:And the thing that all of the medical literature will point to is a lack of
Speaker:empathy or very, very low empathy, not necessarily zero empathy, but very,
Speaker:very low empathy because most of them.
Speaker:If we hurt somebody or a group of people, if we have to, if we have to, you know,
Speaker:screw over somebody at work, if so we get the promotion and they done, or if we have
Speaker:to fire a thousand people on Christmas Eve, so we get a bonus and they'll get
Speaker:laid off for most of us, we could do that necessarily are John dyes straight?
Speaker:Is John.
Speaker:Hi, John.
Speaker:Good on you, John.
Speaker:John discovered your podcast through me, so you're welcome and
Speaker:never stop paying for my podcast.
Speaker:So, you know, you saw on the outs with the name junk.
Speaker:I'm kidding.
Speaker:Kidding, kidding, John.
Speaker:Love you time, John.
Speaker:Where was I going with that?
Speaker:Oh yes.
Speaker:If you do, most of us can do bad things.
Speaker:We can cheat on our spouse, lie about our taxes.
Speaker:We can fire people.
Speaker:We can do all this sorts of stuff, but we feel bad.
Speaker:And we you know, we, we lose sleep, we lose weight, we get,
Speaker:we, we have, you know, stress.
Speaker:We, we, we get sick sometimes when a psychopath does those things, they have
Speaker:the best night's sleep of their life.
Speaker:They feel like they've got hashtag tiger blood.
Speaker:And they're a hashtag winner because they're willing to do what
Speaker:the losers are willing to do to get ahead and to get more bear.
Speaker:And that's the key thing.
Speaker:I think that differentiates the 99% of us from the one to 4% that rank highly
Speaker:on the psychopath test, according to most clinical psychologists and
Speaker:psychiatrists who work in this field.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:One of the theories long enough answer to your
Speaker:one of your theories.
Speaker:Organizations becoming psychopathic.
Speaker:You mentioned business religious political, but you talk about
Speaker:organizational Darwinism where where, and you can obviously expand on this canvas.
Speaker:I'm sure you will, but it talks about the culture is, is maintained because
Speaker:if you're not going to fit in with that sort of psychopathic culture,
Speaker:you won't even apply for the job.
Speaker:You ain't progress through the organization and you'll probably leave.
Speaker:So just want to describe how our organizations find it really hard
Speaker:to change because the people are sort of weeded out or filtered
Speaker:to match up the organism.
Speaker:Yeah, this is something that Chomsky and Herman pointed out in
Speaker:manufacturing consent back in the early nineties, I think which was
Speaker:based on the work of a Brisbane boy.
Speaker:But they call it the five filters, the way that organizations filter
Speaker:out troublemakers basically.
Speaker:But yeah, like if organizations, whether it's religious or corporate or
Speaker:political, whatever, obviously the first filter is the the application process.
Speaker:Like, they will tell you in the in the job ad what it is or the
Speaker:seek ad, what they're looking for.
Speaker:And so they're filtering out people who will read that and go,
Speaker:well, that's obviously not me.
Speaker:Then there's another, there's another filter, which is the interview process
Speaker:where obviously they're trying to weed out the people that they don't think of the
Speaker:right cultural fit for the organization.
Speaker:And if it's a psychopathic culture or a broken culture, they're obviously looking
Speaker:for people that will, will fit within that culture and won't make waves, but
Speaker:people will sneak through that, you know deliberately or accidentally though,
Speaker:they will, or sometimes they'll have certain hiring goals for diversity or
Speaker:something and people will get through.
Speaker:But then once you're inside of the organization, if you see behaviors going
Speaker:on inside of the organization, and I saw this at Microsoft, that your not.
Speaker:Comfortable with ethically or morally.
Speaker:Well, first of all, you need to know what your ethical and moral framework is.
Speaker:And most of us don't because we've never sat down and gone through that exercise.
Speaker:And I sort of walk people through how maybe to do that in the book, but most
Speaker:of us don't get taught that in life.
Speaker:But if you do feel awkward about the something, and you, you don't want
Speaker:to go along with a decision or make a decision, you kind of know that if you
Speaker:don't somebody else will and they will get the promotion, they will get the
Speaker:bonus and their job will be secure.
Speaker:So that quite often people will just go along to get along, as they say, or if
Speaker:you see somebody else doing something, you have to make this decision.
Speaker:Do I speak out about it or not?
Speaker:If you speak out about it inside of the organization, the dominant
Speaker:culture will usually shut you down in a number of ways either.
Speaker:In a very harsh way or in a soft and gentle way, but generally shut you down.
Speaker:If you're creating waves, then you have to make the decision.
Speaker:Well, do I ju you know, if you see this enough and you just decide, I
Speaker:can't be part of this, do you stick around and try and make change?
Speaker:Do you make waves inside of the organization, which, you know, there's,
Speaker:there's a lot of risks to your, both your, your broader reputation in your industry.
Speaker:If you do that, plus obviously your ability to take the job or will get
Speaker:promoted inside of the organization.
Speaker:Or if you just leave, if you quit, then obviously the culture
Speaker:just keeps ticking along.
Speaker:They just, you know, fill someone, fill that gap with someone else.
Speaker:If you become a whistleblower, if you, if you become a Snowden and
Speaker:you try and Snowden the organization or the, you know, the guy who blew,
Speaker:blew the whistle on the ATO, or, you know, we have a number of organized,
Speaker:a number of examples in this country.
Speaker:You know, the organization will come after you and try and destroy your reputation,
Speaker:hit you with massive lawsuits that as a, an individual punter, you've got very
Speaker:little ability to defend yourself against they will try and crush and destroy.
Speaker:And one of the things I pointed out in the book, I think you can tell a lot about.
Speaker:How healthy the culture of an organization is by the way they
Speaker:deal with whistleblowers and the way they deal with customers.
Speaker:Generally speaking businesses that treat customers like shit, probably have a
Speaker:fairly psychopathic culture organizations that genuinely care about their customers
Speaker:and go out of their way to make their customer's experiences positive,
Speaker:probably a sign of a healthy culture.
Speaker:And it's the same with the way they treat, treat, treat whistleblowers
Speaker:organizations with a healthy culture.
Speaker:If somebody goes, leaves the organization and goes and goes into the meeting and
Speaker:says, Hey, listen I worked there and they've got some fundamental problems,
Speaker:ethical problems, moral problems, et cetera, a healthy organization.
Speaker:You would like to think we'd go.
Speaker:Wow.
Speaker:That I'm really glad that you told us about that.
Speaker:We're going to bring in an independent, external investigations
Speaker:it team to, to go and look at this and we're going to do an inquiry.
Speaker:We would love you to be part of that because you know, the, the,
Speaker:the ethics of our organization is really important to us.
Speaker:And, you know, as well as the perception of our organization, let's, let's
Speaker:deal with this in a wholesome manner to make sure that we get a good
Speaker:outcome versus we're going to crush you and destroy you and turn you
Speaker:into sand beneath our boots, which is what most organizations tend to do.
Speaker:Yeah, so, so a psychopathic organization is quite adept at, at the, at the
Speaker:leadership that percolates to the top.
Speaker:We've gone through this filtering process to be psychopaths politically in tune
Speaker:with the nature of the organization.
Speaker:So, cam question for you, the former Soviet union was that
Speaker:a psychopathic organization.
Speaker:You think?
Speaker:Yeah, I think, well, you know that I've spent hundreds of hours talking
Speaker:about style and I'm like Porsche.
Speaker:I know.
Speaker:And so, so my question is if it was a psychopathic organization and
Speaker:Gorbachev comes along and basically says, looks around and goes, well, I
Speaker:don't like the look and smell of this.
Speaker:I think we call it a day and we move on to a different project.
Speaker:Have you got an explanation?
Speaker:Which in fact he didn't do Gorbachov never intended to shut down the Soviet union.
Speaker:That was never his intention.
Speaker:Never his plan, but anyway yeah.
Speaker:W w let me your first got your first question.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:I think particularly understanding, I think Stalin had a lot of problems he
Speaker:had to deal with inside of the USSR when he took over, they were facing some
Speaker:massive existential threats, but yes, he does seem to give exhibited classic
Speaker:psychopathic behaviors and his attempts to direct the ship in the direction that
Speaker:he thought it needed to go in in order to survive after him, the guys that
Speaker:came after him probably to lesser extent than Stalin, I think they were trying
Speaker:to manage the thing they inherited.
Speaker:Of course, when Gorbachev came along and decided to open it.
Speaker:So Glasnost and Perestroika were definitely things that go to the
Speaker:shelf wanted to do, he didn't want to shut down the Soviet union or
Speaker:get rid of communism or anything.
Speaker:Like I just, he wanted to make it better.
Speaker:He wanted to improve what they were doing a little bit like dong shall ping
Speaker:did when Mao died and he took over.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:He also sort of pulled back on the sort of authoritarian rule
Speaker:of neighboring countries though.
Speaker:Is that, is that true?
Speaker:Is the theory I'm leading to is that.
Speaker:Button I've got to the top, but nobody actually realized that he wasn't actually
Speaker:like the rest of them in some ways that he was kind of an aberration and then
Speaker:they'd promoted this guy out thinking he was a psychopath, like the rest of them.
Speaker:And once he got there was like, hang on a minute.
Speaker:That's not quite what we bag into poise a little bit different to what we thought.
Speaker:And that was, I don't know.
Speaker:I don't think he would have got there if Stalin was still running the joint,
Speaker:but we can down over the years, but I think everyone there at the time
Speaker:knew that, you know, they were, they were broke as a, as a, as a country.
Speaker:They were broke as a philosophy.
Speaker:They had, it was riddled with holes by, you know, the, the
Speaker:eighties when Gorbachev came in.
Speaker:So they were looking, they were looking for change, probably they
Speaker:didn't expect him to pull a golf Whitlam and just you know, rewrite
Speaker:everything overnight as he did make some massive existential changes to the.
Speaker:Hmm.
Speaker:So you've painted a picture where we've got at least turning back
Speaker:to the west where we've got in our political, our corporate, our religious
Speaker:organizations sort of psychopathic controllers in in many cases as an
Speaker:explanation of why we're in a mess.
Speaker:And these people are not doing what the rest of the
Speaker:community would like them to do.
Speaker:And the question is why don't the, the masses, the people
Speaker:rise up and revolt care.
Speaker:What's stopping people from saying, hang on a minute.
Speaker:We don't like this.
Speaker:We don't appreciate what you're doing.
Speaker:And we want you to stop.
Speaker:Why, why is there, why, why aren't we up in arms about it?
Speaker:Hmm.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:That's, that's the big question, right?
Speaker:So I think there's a couple of answers to that.
Speaker:I think part of it is we still don't understand psychopaths.
Speaker:You know, I, I think that the majority of people out there today, when they
Speaker:think psychopath or sociopath, they think serial killer Ted Bundy, or they
Speaker:think Hitler or Starla or POL pot or something like that, dictator, mass
Speaker:murderer, or a, you know, lower level mass murder, or like a Ted Bundy.
Speaker:This is pre-Trump.
Speaker:I wrote the book sort of pre Trump came out late Trump, but he may
Speaker:have changed the scales on that.
Speaker:People, you know, I, in the book, I talk about the idea of garden variety,
Speaker:psychopaths, not your, you know, it's, it's the vast majority of psychopaths
Speaker:out there, the ones who do the most damage, aren't the Hitlers or the, the
Speaker:starlings or the Ted Bundy's, it's the Cardinals and the CEOs and the prime
Speaker:ministers and the people like that who do the vast majority of the damage.
Speaker:But we, we, we haven't, you know, the whole idea of psychopaths
Speaker:is only seven years old.
Speaker:It only really the, the, the early research was being done in the fifties,
Speaker:in the, in the U S and it's really only been in the last 20 years that
Speaker:it started to make its way into the mainstream lexicon that people think
Speaker:about it, but it's still hasn't filtered down where we don't look at it.
Speaker:Our manager or our priest or our wife or husband, or our next door
Speaker:neighbor or the police chief and say, oh yeah, they're a psychopath.
Speaker:You know, we're not familiar with the psychopath checklist.
Speaker:We're not, we're not familiar with the behaviors of a psychopath.
Speaker:So we w we, we don't, we, we still attract in this medieval view of
Speaker:evil oh, so-and-so did that because Hitler, Hitler, you know gas, the
Speaker:Jews, because he was evil Stalin allowed for the whole Lama door.
Speaker:Homola door.
Speaker:If one of the, the, the famine in the Ukraine, because he was evil.
Speaker:We, we think in terms of evil or bad apples, we don't think about, and this
Speaker:gets back to my earlier book about free.
Speaker:We, we don't yet think about human behavior in terms of biochemical events
Speaker:happening in the brain that every human action, every thought every action is
Speaker:the result of neurochemical events, biological events happening in the brain.
Speaker:We don't, we haven't yet mainstreamed normalized a
Speaker:scientific view of human behavior.
Speaker:We still are wrapped up in this homonculus religious view of a
Speaker:soul and a spirit, and even so.
Speaker:You know, atheist, secular people who listened to the show, I guarantee
Speaker:you, 99% of the people watching this right now, listen to your podcast.
Speaker:Still believe they have free will.
Speaker:There's absolutely no scientific evidence for free will never has been, never
Speaker:will be because it's scientifically probable in Paul's implausible and
Speaker:impossible, but people still cling to it even atheists because they just
Speaker:haven't adopted a fully scientific view of who they are and how they work.
Speaker:And it's the same with psychopathy.
Speaker:So we don't think in terms of psychopaths.
Speaker:So I want us to think about psychopaths in those terms.
Speaker:Like we're always going to have them.
Speaker:They're just a fact of life.
Speaker:It seems we need to prepare for them.
Speaker:We need to manage them.
Speaker:And the second part of it is just that bit where you said
Speaker:we've always going to have them.
Speaker:I think somebody I know once said, yeah, I just accepted.
Speaker:I'm not outraged.
Speaker:It's a common thought.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:The, you are in fact the inventor of the right Harris
Speaker:soundboard, which I had forgotten.
Speaker:I don't get enough credit for that.
Speaker:I don't get enough credit for vending podcasting on your podcast
Speaker:and you don't get enough credit for inventing the right Harrison.
Speaker:I want to get onto, I want to get on to one of your theories.
Speaker:No, wait, wait.
Speaker:So the other reason we don't rise up is because we've had a
Speaker:hundred years of, of propaganda telling us the rising up is bad.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Every, every revolution in the world, unless it's support.
Speaker:By the west is a bad revolution.
Speaker:The people should not rise up because rising up is a thing that
Speaker:terrorists slash communists do.
Speaker:And thirdly, why we don't is because we're fat and happy.
Speaker:Most of us in the west, we like, well, yes.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Psychopaths are running things and climate change and bloody, bloody Blauer,
Speaker:coronavirus fuck-ups and vaccine fuck ups and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker:But I've got a big house and a big TV and a couple of cars in the garage.
Speaker:And my kids go to a good school and I go on vacation while I used to before
Speaker:COVID really who wants to rock the boat when you've got a big middle class?
Speaker:No one wants to rock the boat.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:On, on this sort of area, one of your theories is that capitalism has.
Speaker:Enabled psychopaths.
Speaker:You said we've always had psychopaths, but there's something about capitalism
Speaker:that brings them more power and makes it easier for them to operate.
Speaker:I think reading in your book, you mentioned that really in olden days,
Speaker:unless you were a prince or a high priest or somebody, there were very few people
Speaker:with actual power and most people were scuffling around in the mud planting
Speaker:some crops and tending to some cattle.
Speaker:And if you are a psychopath, there was a limit to the
Speaker:influence that you could have.
Speaker:And modern capitalism has, has sort of created a dynamic where psychopaths can
Speaker:flourish, where they couldn't previously, and they can do a lot of damage.
Speaker:I'm going to read a quote here, dear listener, as I'm reading this, you have
Speaker:to imagine who, who wrote this and Came, you'll not only have to answer because you
Speaker:know, the answer it goes on for people.
Speaker:And it goes on for a bit because I haven't a chance to say anything.
Speaker:I'll, I'll take this opportunity to say something and you can have a drink.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So private capital tends to become chatted in few Hanes, partly because
Speaker:of competition among the capitalists.
Speaker:And partly because technological development in the increasing division
Speaker:of labor encouraged the formation of larger units of production
Speaker:at the expense of smaller ones.
Speaker:The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital.
Speaker:The enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by democratically
Speaker:organized political society.
Speaker:This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected
Speaker:by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced
Speaker:by private capitalists, who for all practical purposes, separate
Speaker:the electric from the legislator.
Speaker:The consequence is that the representatives of the people do
Speaker:not, in fact, sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged
Speaker:sections of the population.
Speaker:More either under existing conditions, private capitalists, inevitably
Speaker:controlled directly or indirectly.
Speaker:The main sources of information press radio education is extremely difficult.
Speaker:And indeed in most cases, quite impossible for the individual citizen to come
Speaker:to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
Speaker:And who do you think said that?
Speaker:And cam and his book keeps possibilities, shag Rivera, Fidel Castro, and
Speaker:letting me and Lennon Noam Chomsky.
Speaker:I would've put Chomsky as a good one for that Julian Assange and
Speaker:the answer was none of the above.
Speaker:It was in fact Albert Einstein.
Speaker:So there you go.
Speaker:Ideal listener the sort of increased power of the oligarchy, their control of
Speaker:the political process and the difficulty for just the ordinary citizen to.
Speaker:To make intelligent use of his political rights summed up by Albert Einstein.
Speaker:Good.
Speaker:Quite defined cam.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:There's if you haven't read Einstein's writings on social and philosophical and
Speaker:political issues, it's well worth reading.
Speaker:He He was very articulate and very passionate about those things, but
Speaker:people tend to forget or just don't pay attention to that aspect of Einstein.
Speaker:And he was writing that, I think in the fifties you know,
Speaker:obviously it's even worse now.
Speaker:And so to get back to the reason why I think capitalism has made it
Speaker:easier, you articulated it well, it's about social mobility, right?
Speaker:So if you go back a couple of hundred years ago, if you were born in a
Speaker:village somewhere, whether it was the U S or Europe or wherever and
Speaker:you are a psychopath, you, you will one of this one, two, three, 4%.
Speaker:There's born a psychopath psychopathic tendencies.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Like you could maybe end up being the Tarrant of your little village.
Speaker:Maybe if you're in Renaissance, Italy, what it ended up as a mercenary, you
Speaker:could have, you know, and there's some instances like Ludovico sports is fine.
Speaker:Who made himself the duke of Milan.
Speaker:He was a mercenary for hire to various Pope's and leaders of Florence let the
Speaker:Medi cheat until he was rich enough.
Speaker:And he could go and build a big enough mercenary army and take Milan
Speaker:and make himself the duke of Milan.
Speaker:But that didn't happen very often.
Speaker:You know, it was there, there were instances of that, but really, if you were
Speaker:a psychopath, you either got knifed in the back by the people in your village.
Speaker:Cause you were just a fucking swearing.
Speaker:If I can't swear freely, I can't articulate myself.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:If you're a complete cunt, you get, you get nothing by somebody
Speaker:in your village eventually, right.
Speaker:That, oh, if you survived, you, you would rise up and you'd be a mini tyrant.
Speaker:But it was very difficult to become you know a Baron or a king or, or,
Speaker:or a Bishop even, you know, they had a fair amount of wealth and power.
Speaker:Then along comes a modern capitalism, particularly American style capitalism.
Speaker:It doesn't matter where you're born in America or Australia or the UK,
Speaker:or most places of the world today.
Speaker:It doesn't matter what little village you're born.
Speaker:If you're a psychopath, you can you know, get enough money to get on a bus or
Speaker:get on a train and go to the big smoke.
Speaker:And then you get to the big smoke and you work your way up.
Speaker:You know, you, a Wolf of wall street, it, you start off in the
Speaker:mail room and you work your way up.
Speaker:You stab people in the back and you climb the ladder.
Speaker:Well, there are these organizations that will encourage psychotic
Speaker:behavior, psychopathic behavior.
Speaker:So in the village where you are sharing resources, to some extent, and you're
Speaker:sort of monitoring the commons and whatnot, Th that sort of behavior
Speaker:is going to be looked down upon.
Speaker:Whereas in, in some of these sort of organizations that have
Speaker:been created in capital yeah.
Speaker:That sort of behavior suddenly becomes valuable, whereas before
Speaker:it wasn't, that's, that's sort of a given ization sort of there.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:The psychopathic behavior in the west now is encouraged and rewarded.
Speaker:As long as you don't go too far or get caught out.
Speaker:And that happens, you have the Enrons the guys, and I talk about Enron.
Speaker:I got like a whole chapter on Enron in the book.
Speaker:These guys were fated by the business media, the business establishment, the
Speaker:banking industry, politicians in the U S everyone loved Enron until it turned out.
Speaker:It was a complete house of cards and it collapsed.
Speaker:But you know, you look at the The, the transcripts of some of the conferences
Speaker:between the CFO of Enron and the financial journalists before they collapsed, where
Speaker:journalists were asking questions about their financial lives porting, and the
Speaker:CFO was just literally abusing them and calling them names on the call, just as
Speaker:an arrogant piece of shit that he was like, they were just super, super arrogant
Speaker:psychopaths, but that kind of behavior tends to be if you're willing to make the
Speaker:hard decision in for the sake of practice.
Speaker:Then organizations of all colors will snatch you up and it's left and right.
Speaker:It's not just Republicans.
Speaker:It's not just the liberal party.
Speaker:It's the labor party.
Speaker:You know, the plenty of people who worked with Kevin Rudd after he left office,
Speaker:the first time came out and said it was a psychopath, complete psychopath.
Speaker:It's all about him, right?
Speaker:It's it's not the left or right thing because psychopaths
Speaker:don't have an ideology.
Speaker:They w their only ideology is me.
Speaker:And they will look for the gaps, look for the holes where they think they
Speaker:can get in where they have a foot in the door and they will get in trouble.
Speaker:Work their way up through and, you know, classic Donald Trump supposedly
Speaker:was a Democrat 25 years ago.
Speaker:Then he just switched, became a Republican because he doesn't
Speaker:have an ideology outside of me.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Why w where can I get more wealth and power?
Speaker:That's the only thing that psychopaths care about.
Speaker:So they're, they're, they're left, right?
Speaker:Priests CEOs.
Speaker:They come in all flavors old colors but they do tend to be white men
Speaker:at the end of the day, the majority of them appear to be white.
Speaker:Hmm, cam white man.
Speaker:I w I wanna move on to concepts around messaging and propaganda.
Speaker:So this is important part of the whole idea, isn't it.
Speaker:So just reading a couple of excerpts from your book here as they have to do
Speaker:it, the elite, the psychopaths know that if we wanted to, the public could start
Speaker:a revolution and cripple the economic system that keeps them on top at any
Speaker:time to prevent that we need to be kept ignorant of the relevant facts, overworked
Speaker:poor, heavily in debt and distracted.
Speaker:So, and all of that tags, systematic brainwashing, and another part
Speaker:he's actually, you're quoting Alex Carey in this part and
Speaker:Australian social psychology.
Speaker:Is he the guy to do with named Tomsky?
Speaker:Is that the same guy, right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So KA, Carrie wrote a book and then died very young.
Speaker:And he wrote this book in the eighties about 86 on this, and then he died and
Speaker:Chomsky and Herman were friends of his and they picked up his work and fleshed
Speaker:it out into manufacturing consent.
Speaker:And they, they, they give him credit in the foreword of the book as
Speaker:being the progenitor of these ideas.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:There you go.
Speaker:So a couple of quotes from this Alex Carey the 20th century has been
Speaker:characterized by three developments of great political importance, the
Speaker:growth of democracy, the growth of corporate PR and the growth of corporate
Speaker:propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
Speaker:I like that.
Speaker:And then this other one corporate propaganda has two main objectives to
Speaker:identify the free enterprise system in popular consciousness with every charity.
Speaker:And to identify interventionists governments in strong unions, the
Speaker:only agencies capable of checking the complete domination of society by the
Speaker:corporations of identifying them with tyranny, oppression, and even subversion
Speaker:cam wins like to wax on about propaganda and how that's working in our society for
Speaker:a good five minutes while I have a drink.
Speaker:Thanks.
Speaker:Yeah, no only five.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, you know, Chomsky's got a great saying where he says when most people
Speaker:think I'm paraphrasing, of course, but, but most people think of propaganda.
Speaker:They think of.
Speaker:You know, a third world dictator star propaganda with the picture of the, the
Speaker:fear or the, the dictator up on the wall.
Speaker:And, you know, it's, it's very overt.
Speaker:It's very heavy handed.
Speaker:Whereas propaganda in the west is much more sophisticated and
Speaker:Chomsky actually, I think coined the phrase for a proper gender.
Speaker:So it doesn't tell you necessarily what to think, but it creates a small window.
Speaker:You know what we now call the Overton window in some ways about what's
Speaker:acceptable to think about, right?
Speaker:So if you read you know, the mainstream media on many issues, you'll see that
Speaker:there's a very limited set of parameters for what's acceptable discourse and
Speaker:anything outside of that is either scorned or ignored or just given very little.
Speaker:Thai very little coverage.
Speaker:So, you know, if you talk about, I'll just interrupt about this Overton window.
Speaker:So, cause there's a bit here in your book this is a analysis for media matters.
Speaker:So cable news channels used variations of the label far left or extreme
Speaker:in discussions about Democrats progressors and their policy ideas
Speaker:over six times more often than I used variations of the label far, right.
Speaker:Or extreme while talking about their conservative counterparts.
Speaker:So every four weeks, yes, every four week period, CNN and MSNBC and Fox news
Speaker:disgust extremism on the left or right.
Speaker:A total of 547 times, which was 86% of the instances frame the
Speaker:American political left as extreme.
Speaker:So that's part of that sort of proper agenda where.
Speaker:When talking about the left, it was the extreme left in 86% of cases.
Speaker:And very rarely was it the extreme ride, even though if you look at American policy
Speaker:and politics compared to the rest of the world, they were way over on the right.
Speaker:And the
Speaker:right is right of Gangas Kahn and their left is still on the right of Gangas card.
Speaker:Isn't it?
Speaker:Bernie Sanders is called the extreme leftover.
Speaker:There, here he'd be in the liberal party, you know, he's like, he's like, so, so,
Speaker:so mainstream for, you know, most of us you know, he just wants healthcare.
Speaker:So, yeah, look, there, there is a limited, like the other example of
Speaker:we're gonna use as that communism, when we're talking about, you know, our
Speaker:socioeconomic system here in Australia and the mainstream media and you know,
Speaker:what's right and what's wrong, there's never any discussion of, of, of socialism
Speaker:or communism in the mainstream media just isn't allowed to be a topic of discussion.
Speaker:That's just never comes up.
Speaker:Well, maybe we should think it.
Speaker:No, you can't even can't even have an intelligent conversation about it.
Speaker:It's just verboten you not allowed to go there.
Speaker:So, yeah, the, the, the propaganda has been very, very heavy and, you know, in
Speaker:my cold war podcast series, we've gone back and looked at in the United States.
Speaker:What happened in the thirties during, you know, when FDR came in.
Speaker:So Roosevelt came in, obviously the new deal even though he was a blue blood
Speaker:aristocrat, He realized that there needed to be some fairly fundamental changes
Speaker:to the way that the U S economy work, they needed to be a welfare system.
Speaker:He comes in a couple of years into the great depression.
Speaker:In fact he said to the wall street bankers several times, listen,
Speaker:I'm your best friend, because if I don't do this, the guys with the
Speaker:pitchforks and the torches are going to do this, like they did in Moscow.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So I am your best, have your first, last best line of defense against
Speaker:the great on wash because communism was becoming increasingly popular in
Speaker:the U S at the time as it was right around the world during the thirties.
Speaker:But the the business leaders.
Speaker:We're dead against any sort of changes happening, no government regulation
Speaker:no allowances for unions, no wealth sharing, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker:And so they figured out eventually it took them a couple of decades.
Speaker:It wasn't till the fifties that they really got good at this.
Speaker:They started aligning, aligning themselves with evangelical pastors
Speaker:and their selling point was listen.
Speaker:If Marika goes communist, if the people get what they want and
Speaker:it becomes a communist country communists don't like religion.
Speaker:So religion goes, so I feel it becomes communist your gone, right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Even though before, you know, before that Simon actually Roosevelt
Speaker:himself was a member of a Christian Church that was pro socialist.
Speaker:It was a socialist religious organization that was arguing for more welfare and
Speaker:distribution of the wealth and, you know, you know, curbing the power of
Speaker:businesses and that kind of things.
Speaker:Anyway.
Speaker:So they started aligning themselves with the priests and the priests that
Speaker:got on board with this, not all priests did initially, but the priests that
Speaker:got onboard got a shit ton of money from business leaders in the U S they
Speaker:could use that money to build massive churches with, you know, big organs and
Speaker:big choirs and big car parks and all of the business elite, all the bosses.
Speaker:First guy who did it was a guy in Los Angeles, all of the elite of Los Angeles.
Speaker:Guy's church now, their employees were like, well, the boss is going to that
Speaker:church, so I should go to their church.
Speaker:So all of the, the church attendance left all these little churches that didn't get
Speaker:on board with the pro capitalist program and went to the big capitalist churches.
Speaker:So they, they reinforced in the minds of Americans that America means Christianity.
Speaker:Christianity means America.
Speaker:You know, Jesus, you know, his last dying wish was to create America.
Speaker:And capitalism is the last thing he said on the cross.
Speaker:Didn't make it to the Bible, but it was really, you know, and you know,
Speaker:Bless America and wealthy wealth became associated with godliness.
Speaker:So God was favoring you, if you were wealthy, it was a song it's clarity
Speaker:doctrine, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And if you're not doing well, well, God's got a plan for you, you know, that's okay.
Speaker:You know, there's a plan for you, which goes right back to St.
Speaker:Paul actually, or perhaps you hadn't been godly enough and there must've
Speaker:been something you'd been doing.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:And the moments are a big part of this too.
Speaker:You know, the Mormons, you know, their whole shtick is where the
Speaker:richest best church in America, because God loves us the most.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:We're the most American religion because God loves us the most.
Speaker:What would you know about Mormons?
Speaker:Mary I've been married to two ex moments in my life.
Speaker:I know.
Speaker:Well, so anyway yeah, so the propaganda lining a certain kind of a worldview
Speaker:has been very heavily invested in, in the United States and because
Speaker:the United States after world war two, took over global culture,
Speaker:particularly in the west, it's trickled down into all of our countries.
Speaker:Now in Australia, you know, Menzies tried to ban the communist party.
Speaker:I mean, we had just as much problem in this country with our, or.
Speaker:Thought you weren't allowed to be a communist in this country.
Speaker:He had two cracks at outlawing it, the Supreme court threw it out both
Speaker:times or whatever we call it here.
Speaker:The high court threw it out both times, but it eventually got sort of wound down.
Speaker:But he, you know, he had he spent decades trying to get rid of any
Speaker:sign of communism in this country.
Speaker:Well, there's, there's a reincarnation of that McCarthyism with the current
Speaker:China, anti China propaganda is just where I started with it started
Speaker:with Russian gut Russia gate.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:You know, Putin, you know, Trump was Putin's bitch and all of, you
Speaker:know, I, you know, I did many, many shows on that, on the bullshit filter
Speaker:over the years that Trump was in power, like this incredible media.
Speaker:Storm about, you know, Russia gate backed up by now, nothing nada Zinn.
Speaker:They had nothing.
Speaker:And yet even, even Mueller report eventually came out and said, I can
Speaker:find no evidence of collusion, but try telling that to Democrats today, like
Speaker:18 months later after the Mueller report came out, they still believe that Trump
Speaker:colluded with Putin to win the 2016 St.
Speaker:Legend electric.
Speaker:There's just no getting through because there was so oh much propaganda
Speaker:about that from the mainstream media and the Democrats over there.
Speaker:And now, yes.
Speaker:Now all of a sudden it's pivoted to China.
Speaker:China's the great evil China's going to come and eat your babies.
Speaker:China's I saw a statistic which was about.
Speaker:They, they surveyed countries about their fear of whether
Speaker:they would be invited by China.
Speaker:And Australia's fear of being invaded by China was higher than Taiwan.
Speaker:Now our fear of China was higher than Taiwan's fear of China invaded by Taiwan.
Speaker:It's fear of being invaded by by China.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Speaking Taiwan is part of China.
Speaker:I just want to say that.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:I think one would be to just point out that he never gifted
Speaker:Taiwan to the Kuomintang.
Speaker:They stole it and he just had other things to do at the time.
Speaker:But he's coming for the ghost of Mayo is coming for it.
Speaker:Thank you, Ken.
Speaker:Yeah, it's irrational because we've, we've just had yeah, for most.
Speaker:So thank you.
Speaker:Restream stream.
Speaker:I do mean, so it's originally.
Speaker:Yeah, look, it's you know, we, we've just been under this barrage
Speaker:of, of anti-Chinese media coverage in the last couple of years.
Speaker:It's astounding.
Speaker:And if you've studied McCarthyism and you've studied the red scare,
Speaker:like I've been doing for the last few years for the cold war show, it's just
Speaker:completely obvious what's going on.
Speaker:It's it's just a replay of that in the most blatant form.
Speaker:And people just fall for it again, as they always do, because.
Speaker:We're kept busy and poor and broke, who has tie out apart from
Speaker:us jobless, unemployed podcast.
Speaker:We don't have anything else to do.
Speaker:Then read books, you know, and embarrassingly, as my listeners know,
Speaker:I get all of my knowledge from books.
Speaker:It, you know, no one else gets the luxury to do that.
Speaker:They're too busy work and real jobs to put food on the table and a big house and
Speaker:a big TV and a couple of vacations a year and a couple of nice cars in the driveway.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:One of the podcast is generally I know you're the exception, but most
Speaker:of us don't have those things either.
Speaker:Don't mention that pizza oven.
Speaker:One of the sort of key parts in that cam is are these think tanks, particularly
Speaker:when it comes to China and defense issues.
Speaker:And when you're looking at.
Speaker:If somebody comes out and, and beat up what a threat China is to our
Speaker:sovereignty and, and our trade routes, you know, our trade routes with
Speaker:China, ironically, invariably, these people are part of some think tank.
Speaker:They, they, you know, that it doesn't matter if it's ABC or channel seven
Speaker:or Murdoch press or whatever, they'll trotting out these experts who will be,
Speaker:you know, with some think tank and you, people are under the impression that these
Speaker:think tanks are neutral entities, that they are actually sitting there thinking.
Speaker:And they're all of course just funded by Interestingly, the
Speaker:defense force contractors.
Speaker:And of course, they're going to come out with these lines.
Speaker:So there's just not enough recognition of the insidious role of these think tanks
Speaker:in a lot of this stuff, because they get reported in the media that you'd kind of
Speaker:like to trust like the ABC or, or groups.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah, I've got a whole chapter or two in the book about lobby groups,
Speaker:front groups experts it's bad here.
Speaker:It's worse than the U S you know, you will see all of the media channels were
Speaker:tried out their former, you know, their military experts that are former Pentagon
Speaker:or CIA, or if it's local domestic issues, FBI people, they're on, you know, they're,
Speaker:they're part of the establishment.
Speaker:They're on the payroll.
Speaker:The thing that the, the front groups, which are the think tanks usually funded
Speaker:by a whole variety of nefarious, sources that again, unless you're a podcast
Speaker:too, and you have the ability to go and actually go, well, who the fuck is this?
Speaker:And you look it up and you spend an hour drilling down into it, which
Speaker:your average punter isn't going to do.
Speaker:You don't realize that these people are on the payroll.
Speaker:Yes, but the media, oh, we've got 30 seconds.
Speaker:We need to feel quick.
Speaker:Who do we have?
Speaker:And, you know, obviously these organizations are always putting their
Speaker:people forwards as available experts to be talking heads when you need one
Speaker:on TV and they're going to try it out, the establishments, a narrative on cue.
Speaker:And no one's going to question it because we don't even have any
Speaker:journalists anymore in this country.
Speaker:I see a Rupert's laying off more people this week it's, you know, it's been
Speaker:trimmed to the bone journalists have written their own epitaph over the last
Speaker:30 years as they've let this happen.
Speaker:They've become basically PR hacks for big corporations and not question
Speaker:it while you know what they were playing, playing violin on the
Speaker:Titanic while it was going down.
Speaker:And all of a sudden there.
Speaker:Below the water line, they're going, oh, this isn't right.
Speaker:What's going on.
Speaker:What's happening to my job.
Speaker:All of a sudden they give a shit when it's their jobs that are affected.
Speaker:But you know, for the last 20 years, while they've let the mainstream media
Speaker:just obliterate any sense of genuine, independent journalism and keeping the
Speaker:bastards honest, they just look the other way, took the Patriot and shut
Speaker:up because of the psychopathic cultures inside of our media organizations
Speaker:to see, I did see what I did there.
Speaker:That was a Larry David.
Speaker:I brought it for loop back psychopathic.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:And the way you're sort of tiny, the voice dropped off right at the end,
Speaker:indicating the end of your spiel.
Speaker:And for me to come in, it was, you're a real prize.
Speaker:So cam a part of all this then is where do we get our information from that we can
Speaker:perhaps trust more than other information.
Speaker:And I see in your book that you gave a little link to your own website,
Speaker:Cameron riley.com/news-sources.
Speaker:Forward slash, and they've got a list there of some independent
Speaker:investigative journalists who you kind of trust to some extent.
Speaker:So the sorts of groups you've got their investigative journalism, you've got
Speaker:international consortium of investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh, Matt
Speaker:Taibbi, strategic culture foundation dances with bays Alan McClain lab.
Speaker:So I recognize some of those names.
Speaker:U S news, you've got Noam Chomsky, Chris hedges, Dimmi DOR Australian.
Speaker:You've got Caitlin Johnston, middle east, Robert Fisk, sadly deceased a
Speaker:couple of Reddit areas in podcasts.
Speaker:You've listed background briefing within masters, useful idiots
Speaker:with Metta Amy, moderate rebels.
Speaker:There's a glaring omission in the podcast list.
Speaker:Cam.
Speaker:I think I've mentioned this before I've checked the bank account Trev.
Speaker:I didn't see the deposit.
Speaker:So there's a, there's a limit to, you know, my ethics
Speaker:and independent journalism.
Speaker:Now I will, I will, I will I can see the reason you have me on
Speaker:now was just to, to fix that up.
Speaker:That's all become clear.
Speaker:Yeah, look, I think, you know, I bang on a lot.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:In the bullshit filter podcast about epistemology and heuristics, you know,
Speaker:we and I'm gearing up to do another show, big, long show on current state of COVID
Speaker:conspiracy theories in a couple of weeks.
Speaker:But you know, we, we can't all be experts on everything.
Speaker:Little, you know, I can't even be an expert on one thing.
Speaker:Let alone everything.
Speaker:So we, we need to have some kind of philosophy for where we're
Speaker:going to get our information from.
Speaker:And I think it starts with, you know kind of layman's epistemology.
Speaker:Like, how do we know what's true for us?
Speaker:What, where do I get truth?
Speaker:How do I think truth is derived?
Speaker:Where does truth come from?
Speaker:How do I know?
Speaker:What's true.
Speaker:And so for me, when it comes to looking at contemporary news issues you know,
Speaker:I'm trying to go back to the people that are qualified experts in their domain.
Speaker:If so, if it's, we're talking about COVID it's epidemiologists or, or people that
Speaker:represent the mainstream consensus view for, you know, an act of discipline, they
Speaker:actually know what they're talking about.
Speaker:Then there can be a lot of people in that sense, a lot of people with the
Speaker:training and the, the, the qualifications.
Speaker:So then it comes down to my heuristics, like in terms of my
Speaker:rule of thumb, who do I turn to for this particular subject matter?
Speaker:And why do I turn to that person or that group?
Speaker:So for me, it would have to be that they have a track record in, in, you
Speaker:know, being honest, having a high level of integrity you know Cohen,
Speaker:their views coinciding with what seems to be the mainstream scientific
Speaker:view or the view of the best thinkers in this space, as opposed to here.
Speaker:Cause there's a fringe view on everything.
Speaker:So everyone can find an expert these days, you have to try and figure out who do
Speaker:I trust and why do I trust that person?
Speaker:So if you come to me, if I, if I give you.
Speaker:Point of view on a subject and you say, well, where did you get it from?
Speaker:I'll tell you what my source is.
Speaker:And then if you give me an opposing view, I'll say, well, you know, and
Speaker:I often do this when I get people on to debate me on their podcasts
Speaker:and they go, well, what's your song.
Speaker:And if you can't give me a quick one, A credible source for where
Speaker:you're getting your data or your analysis of data from then the
Speaker:conversation's over to meaningless.
Speaker:If you don't have a credible source.
Speaker:And if you can't tell me why you trust that source and why you think
Speaker:that source is credible, I'm not going to waste my time talking to
Speaker:you because you're a flake, right?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I don't give a shit what your opinion is.
Speaker:If you can't back it up with data or analysis of data from a credible source.
Speaker:And tell me why that source is credible.
Speaker:I'm not interested, right?
Speaker:You're just another decade with an opinion.
Speaker:So it's important that we think about these sorts of things and we compile
Speaker:a list of sources and, you know, I encourage people to check out my
Speaker:list, share your lists with me and tell me why you like your sources.
Speaker:And let's come up with a list of sources that we think are worth paying attention.
Speaker:Did you find if this one you're doing on COVID did you find with COVID it was a
Speaker:little bit strange or disappointing or inexplainable to some of the people who
Speaker:on their face had good qualifications as epidemiologists who were coming out
Speaker:with some quite crazy theories that seemed to be quite contrary to the
Speaker:general community of fellow experts.
Speaker:Like I just sort of noticed myself in investigating these that you
Speaker:would see this name, say something, maybe it was that the great
Speaker:Barrington declaration or whatever.
Speaker:And I think one or two of the, the authors of that on the face of it
Speaker:seem to have, you know, a career as an epidemiologist, and then they've
Speaker:come out with these statements and you think, well, That's that's odd.
Speaker:I can, you know, I get it when a YouTuber with no experience in epidemiology, who's
Speaker:a self-described problem-solver has a million views and says something and
Speaker:you say, well, okay, you don't have any expertise, but I just found with COVID.
Speaker:Did you find that at all in your research that you had some genuine experts in you
Speaker:scratched your head as to, as to why they had flipped compared to the rest of them?
Speaker:Well, so then you need to ask the question why what's going on there.
Speaker:You need to have some sort of an answer to that question.
Speaker:If you have people that are on paper, qualified experts in their profession.
Speaker:And, you know, with that document, the last time I looked at it, which
Speaker:was a while back, but you know, a good percentage of the people who signed
Speaker:the document had, you know, were not practicing active epidemiologists.
Speaker:They were geologists expressing an opinion on COVID and that kind of stuff.
Speaker:But you know, the people that are eminently qualified, you have
Speaker:to ask yourself, well, why, why do they have an opposing view?
Speaker:And like people, you know, and I'm the first person to say that, you
Speaker:know, science progresses through once fringe, voices that then work
Speaker:their way into the mainstream.
Speaker:So there's nothing inherently wrong with fringe contrarian voices.
Speaker:That's how science works.
Speaker:We all understand.
Speaker:Hopefully those of us that pay attention, understand that that's how science works.
Speaker:But the way that science works is that those fringe contrarian voices need
Speaker:to make their case successfully to the consensus mainstream of scientists before
Speaker:the rest of us should accept that as being the best current version of the truth.
Speaker:The fact that a fringe person says it as true doesn't
Speaker:necessarily mean that it's wrong.
Speaker:But it also doesn't necessarily mean that it's true.
Speaker:So how do you tell what is most likely to be true?
Speaker:It's when you have the consensus.
Speaker:So yes, you'll get these documents where there will be a handful, Joe, you
Speaker:know, from the total global number of actively practicing epidemiologists,
Speaker:the ones that are signing documents like that is the vast minority of them.
Speaker:So yeah, there's still a fringe, voice and science at the end of the day where
Speaker:the whack job conspiracy theorists, or not like this is built around consensus.
Speaker:Like my film, I keep telling people, I don't care if you don't
Speaker:like what I said about how the Bible was written in my film.
Speaker:And I don't care if you've got some guy with a PhD in new Testament
Speaker:studies who disagrees with it.
Speaker:The view that we expressed in the film was the mainstream view of new Testament,
Speaker:PhD level, new Testament scholars.
Speaker:That's not necessarily meaning that.
Speaker:It's the mainstream view of the consensus.
Speaker:I don't give a fuck if you've got a fringe voice that says they're wrong.
Speaker:Congratulations.
Speaker:But that doesn't matter.
Speaker:It doesn't matter what a guy says.
Speaker:It's the same with COVID sites, right?
Speaker:Well, you've got to catch phrases.
Speaker:Is it QE, CUI bono, QE bono.
Speaker:What's what's the phrase you use?
Speaker:What's the Latin, come on, help me out.
Speaker:As the advocate, as Diablo saying, I need help with my CUI bono.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:CUI bono.
Speaker:It's from Cicero used it, but Cicero got it from somewhere else.
Speaker:But I mean, to who benefits when he was, when he was working as a lawyer,
Speaker:he would often ask the question who benefits from this situation.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So I know when I'm looking at articles about these things, the first thing I do,
Speaker:you know, if we were going to do something on COVID or whatever topic we're looking
Speaker:at is for even reading the article, I would say, well, where's it coming from?
Speaker:What's the publisher.
Speaker:And then secondly, who is this journalist?
Speaker:Who's writing this who's this person, what's their story.
Speaker:And then I would begin actually reading the article if the headline has,
Speaker:has got me in with some clickbait or something, but and trying to work out.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:It's taking more podcasts you're taking.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:You can take the time to think about these things.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:But a Joe blow.
Speaker:No, he's going to read the headline if that, and move on, you know,
Speaker:listen to Alan Jones and move on.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Now just finishing up with your book cam, cause I know you're a busy man
Speaker:and you've got things to get to.
Speaker:So I want to just so with the psychopaths and the problems they're
Speaker:causing and the infiltration into our powerful organizations, and it's very
Speaker:difficult for us to do anything about it because we're subjected to propaganda.
Speaker:So it's hard for the average Joe to even know what's going on.
Speaker:It's and as I was reading the book, I w you know, you're painting a grim
Speaker:picture and I kept thinking to myself, gee, I can't wait for the ending
Speaker:where there's a neat little package of, of a solution here to, but that
Speaker:wraps it all up and goes to today.
Speaker:Here's all we have to do to fix things.
Speaker:And unfortunately, there really wasn't one care.
Speaker:Yes, there was, it took a lot of time to write that last chapter, Trevor.
Speaker:Yeah, well, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I got
Speaker:from it, which was what can we do?
Speaker:Question mark.
Speaker:It would be basically.
Speaker:Getting our shit together.
Speaker:So we've got time to be informed by reliable sources so that we
Speaker:can work out whether we're being lied to or bullshitted too.
Speaker:It was kind of, did you read the whole chapter?
Speaker:I think you just, did you get some, did you get the velvet
Speaker:glove to read this for you?
Speaker:From Cairns or wherever the fuck did the top man do this one?
Speaker:It's like, it's got highlights all through it.
Speaker:No, I looked at the last chapter.
Speaker:What do we do about it?
Speaker:Yeah, the superversion is a lineup, all the psychopaths and shoot them.
Speaker:But you know, the sec the, the, the easier version is, yeah, look,
Speaker:there's, there's a couple of things.
Speaker:Number one, I think we all need to do our own analysis on our
Speaker:own ethics, morals, and values.
Speaker:We need to understand what we're willing to participate in and what.
Speaker:Willing to participate in, because if you aren't clear on that, it's very easy to
Speaker:do, go along with the flow and be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Speaker:We also do need to think carefully.
Speaker:We about the sort of stuff that we put in our brain and the news
Speaker:sources that we pay attention to and why we pay attention to them.
Speaker:And, you know, as I posted on Facebook today, I think you know, the podcast
Speaker:that you listened to is very important.
Speaker:And you know what the world really is lacking.
Speaker:I think at the moment, more podcasts by celebrities, where they
Speaker:interview other celebrities about how great it is being a celebrity.
Speaker:I think that I don't think there's enough of those out there right now.
Speaker:I think this one we saw that we celebrities dire straights.
Speaker:No, I have not done an audio version of the book because not allowed
Speaker:to, because I signed a deal with my publisher, where they have the rights
Speaker:to produce the audio book and not me.
Speaker:And they sold that on to someone else who hasn't done it
Speaker:because of COVID and whatever.
Speaker:So there you go.
Speaker:I can't even do it if I wanted to.
Speaker:I'm legally not allowed to do an audio book of my own book, even
Speaker:though I'm a podcaster and I talk for a living you should seen.
Speaker:Yeah, I should have.
Speaker:Yeah, well, I signed it.
Speaker:I signed the contract, you know, what are you, what are you going to do?
Speaker:But the, the, the, the main and all of this that I took a lot of time to think
Speaker:about it for apparently pointlessly.
Speaker:When writing the book is that inside of our organizations, we need to figure
Speaker:out who the psychopaths are, and we need to ring fence the psychopaths.
Speaker:Now being psychopaths isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Speaker:Know, I think psychopaths have qualities.
Speaker:You know, you could argue that Steve jobs was a psychopath and I know
Speaker:not everybody is a fan of Steve jobs, but the flip side is I am.
Speaker:I love my iPad.
Speaker:I love my iPhone.
Speaker:I love my AirPods.
Speaker:I love my Mac book and I have Steve jobs to thank for all of those things.
Speaker:Now Steve also did some really shitty stuff in his lifetime.
Speaker:If you've read Walter Isaacson's biography on him or seen many of the films that
Speaker:have come out or whatever, you've also got the us military to think as well.
Speaker:Like there's that book about?
Speaker:So many of the inventions fanned in the iPhone.
Speaker:Out of public institutions.
Speaker:There was that book.
Speaker:That was my fucking book.
Speaker:I talk about that in my book that all of these inventions get
Speaker:funded by public money and then ended up in private Peyton's in,
Speaker:up in private hands and private.
Speaker:Well, anyway, fuck me.
Speaker:You didn't really read the book.
Speaker:Did you?
Speaker:I was thinking of that Mariana lady.
Speaker:She wrote a book a bit.
Speaker:The whole thing was about that, so yeah.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Mariana, trench lady never heard of it.
Speaker:So anyway, yeah, Chomsky's been talking about that for, for decades.
Speaker:So we need to understand who the, so, so I want everybody easy for me to say, cause
Speaker:I didn't have a job, but everyone that has a job, whether you're in a business
Speaker:or politics or religion or whatever, Creative movement inside of the organized.
Speaker:Don't do it by yourself.
Speaker:Cause you'll get knifed, create a movement, get 20 people, 30
Speaker:people, 50 people give them my book, buy 50 copies of my book with
Speaker:corporate funds and handed out.
Speaker:Create a, create a psychopath committee.
Speaker:You don't have to call it that, but create a committee in your organization
Speaker:to try and get, or particularly management to sit psychopath tests.
Speaker:Everyone have a certain level inside of an organization should
Speaker:have to sit a psychopath test.
Speaker:So we know who the psychopaths are.
Speaker:Now I'm a bit skeptical about soccer pass tests.
Speaker:It's going to get that everyone will well, psychopaths will just lie.
Speaker:No, they won't lie on a psychopath test usually unless they really think
Speaker:something is hinged on this because.
Speaker:They don't give a, they don't give a fuck.
Speaker:What you think about who they are.
Speaker:They're proud of who they are.
Speaker:They're a winner and you're a loser.
Speaker:And then I give a shit what your little says they are because they're
Speaker:a winner and they're in control and they're in power and they're going
Speaker:to win regardless of what your little form says, they're going to win.
Speaker:That's what they think because they don't care.
Speaker:Secondly, they're proud of it, thirdly you know, that's, it,
Speaker:there's really only the two things they they're proud of who they are.
Speaker:There are the, you know, if they think they might lose their job, which they
Speaker:probably don't, if they're a senior manager in an organization, we need
Speaker:to, we need to figure out who they are.
Speaker:And ideally this should be, we've done, you know, during the hiring
Speaker:process, but obviously it's too late and all these instances yeah.
Speaker:We need to figure out and then we need to ring, fence them
Speaker:there, buy, ring, fence them.
Speaker:I just mean it could be as simple as that.
Speaker:If you have a senior manager who ranked highly on the psychopath
Speaker:test, you have a committee of people who are not psychopaths.
Speaker:We know this because they did the psychopath test who get to evaluate
Speaker:the decisions that the manager is making against a, an ethical framework.
Speaker:That's all.
Speaker:So they can continue to make decisions and continue to have power.
Speaker:We're just trying to avoid them, making decisions that are psychopathic.
Speaker:Let them make all the good decisions in the world.
Speaker:Just stop them from making so an extra layer of management over
Speaker:their decision-making to filter out the really bad stuff they might.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:There's like a regulatory committee, a governance committee that just makes
Speaker:sure that they're not doing heinous shit.
Speaker:It's just too hard to get rid of these people.
Speaker:Cause I would have thought the answer was let's all get together and,
Speaker:and try and get rid of this person.
Speaker:No that's cause you're you know, church of Satan guy, you think satanic?
Speaker:Yeah, no.
Speaker:As I said, I don't necessarily think that would be a good thing.
Speaker:I think psychopaths particularly have qualities.
Speaker:Well have particular qualities.
Speaker:I mean, that, that could be beneficial.
Speaker:You know, if I go back and I look at Julius Caesar Alexander, or Napoleon
Speaker:or Stalin, or, or, or, you know, you name it jobs gates, I can rarely see,
Speaker:or somebody early in the common section bomber, you know, I've worked for Bama.
Speaker:Yeah, Baba definitely you know, these guys have strengths that we want
Speaker:to, you know, it's Atlas shrugged, it's iron ran Atlas shrugged, right?
Speaker:These guys have strengths that society might need to drag
Speaker:as forwards to make progress.
Speaker:Maybe it was only Steve jobs that could come out with the iPhone and the, I,
Speaker:you know, the, the, the, eh, the iPod where this, how beautiful is that?
Speaker:And like a 2004 model iPad.
Speaker:Whatever it doesn't work sadly, but I had kind of does have a charge that
Speaker:maybe he just can't, he can't get a charger like that anymore either anyway.
Speaker:But we just wanna, we want to enable them to make the good stuff, to stop them from
Speaker:making bad decisions into reply, to dive straight to said, I talk about Chomsky.
Speaker:Like he's the Messiah?
Speaker:No, he's just the world's leading intellectual and has been, you know,
Speaker:since I interviewed him in 2005 on gay world, he, I think the day or earlier,
Speaker:he'd been a call by the economist, the world's leading intellectual.
Speaker:And then I had to interview him the next day.
Speaker:So that wasn't stressful.
Speaker:But you know, I think Chomsky is a very, very intelligent
Speaker:guy who spent his entire life.
Speaker:Thinking about two things the way Americans America's political system works
Speaker:predominantly and you know, we're, you know, our foundations of speech come from.
Speaker:Can you think of a good example of a psychopath being dealt with well in an
Speaker:organization sort of either curtailed and reigned in, or can you, is there any
Speaker:public well-known example of that at all?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Well, I'll go back to Steve jobs.
Speaker:So, you know, you go back to the late eighties when Steve was kicked
Speaker:out of apple by the board, because he was, they thought a danger to
Speaker:the business that he co-founded.
Speaker:They removed him from the organization.
Speaker:And then the organization struggled for the next, whatever, 13 years 11 years,
Speaker:I think then he came back and he was a very different guy when he came back,
Speaker:he a lot more time and a lot, a lot of self-reflection I think possibly still a
Speaker:psychopath to work for difficult guy to work for, but he seems to have got it.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:You know, I, I watched a clip of a, of him today, actually on YouTube or
Speaker:something from one of his early Mac worlds or keynotes, you know, after
Speaker:he came back and somebody got up in the audience and was criticizing some
Speaker:decisions that he made about a lot of the products he was getting rid of.
Speaker:And he said, You know, one of the things that I think makes great businesses great
Speaker:is that they are focused on customers.
Speaker:First.
Speaker:They think about how can we make customers' lives better.
Speaker:And then they go do that.
Speaker:As opposed to sitting around with a bunch of engineers saying, what kind of
Speaker:technology can we build then building it and then trying to figure out how
Speaker:to sell it to people, which is what apple has been doing for the last
Speaker:10 years and what we're going to do.
Speaker:From now on is we're going to put the customer first for the center of
Speaker:everything that we do now go into an apple store today and tell them that your
Speaker:AirPods have stopped charging properly, or that your iPhone batteries got a
Speaker:problem and see how long it takes them to replace it and give you a brand new pair.
Speaker:And tell me that, that message didn't make its way into the DNA of the organization.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:He's been dead for 10 years and that is still.
Speaker:Very obviously at the center of their business culture.
Speaker:I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've still got an iPhone seven because
Speaker:every time I try and take it back to apple to get a new one, they just give
Speaker:me a new one to go, oh, it's this one?
Speaker:I'm like, oh shit.
Speaker:I was hoping you would give me just take this spot.
Speaker:It's fine.
Speaker:Don't worry.
Speaker:So yeah.
Speaker:Look, I think there was an example you know what Lee, the wizard
Speaker:says, Julie Caesar, I think Julius Caesar wasn't a psychopath.
Speaker:It was Brutus and Cassius who assassinated.
Speaker:He moved the psychopaths in that particular instance.
Speaker:But don't get me started on that.
Speaker:I can't think of many other examples.
Speaker:I mean, there's plenty of examples of the ones like somebody mentioned before.
Speaker:Elizabeth fan OSCE or whatever her name was from the blood startup
Speaker:that got shot down in flames.
Speaker:There's lots of examples of psychopaths burning out and failing, but in terms
Speaker:of curbing their worst behaviors and enabling to do good, I'm not exactly.
Speaker:I'm not exactly sure.
Speaker:I have any gray.
Speaker:I didn't come up with any for the book.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:And if you, and if you can't get rid of a psychopath here in
Speaker:your boss as a psychopath, and you're stuck there, just move on.
Speaker:If you can't get rid of him or if there were not going to be any overseeing of,
Speaker:of the decisions, then get away from them.
Speaker:Would that be finding another job?
Speaker:If you can just stop beating your head against a brick wall or they're
Speaker:just too dangerous to hang around?
Speaker:Well, you know, that's what happened to me in Microsoft.
Speaker:I resigned because my boss was a psychopath and I tried all
Speaker:of the legitimate internal.
Speaker:Mechanisms for dealing with that and just got nowhere.
Speaker:So I ended up getting a big, bad industrial relations lawyer to
Speaker:come and relieve me of the art, my obligations to the organization.
Speaker:But you know, when you do that, you just leaving the problem there.
Speaker:Like, if you can.
Speaker:Do something about it.
Speaker:I strongly urge people that use again.
Speaker:I said before, it's easy for me because I am my own boss.
Speaker:And I'm the only psychopath that I have to worry about on a day-to-day basis was Ray.
Speaker:But me and Fox, like surely don't get me started.
Speaker:That's a, that's a future problem.
Speaker:And you know, by elder boys, she'll one of them is a narcissist.
Speaker:I'm not sure he's a psychopath, but definitely a narcissist.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:So we'll wind it up.
Speaker:Can can we get to say, well, that's what I was going to say.
Speaker:Let's, let's divide the next five or 10 minutes to plugs because half
Speaker:the audience in the chat room, but X bullshit filter, sort of people who
Speaker:have come across and I've now joined me.
Speaker:So this is my, to sort of send them back in your direction as well.
Speaker:So say for the people who don't know you can, if, well, let's start with podcasts,
Speaker:you've got a number of history podcasts, and you've got the bullshit filter.
Speaker:And so if they go to the podcast network.com.
Speaker:And I will see a list there and go ahead, Cameron raleigh.com, but yeah,
Speaker:podcasts never for the, all the podcast.
Speaker:So we do a show, a regular show on ancient Rome.
Speaker:We started with Julie Caesar up to Nero at the moment.
Speaker:They're very deep dive stuff.
Speaker:We did we, we were doing it.
Speaker:We did a series on Alexander, the great, which went for 150 episodes or something.
Speaker:We're doing a very long series on the cold war.
Speaker:We're currently in the middle of the Korean war on that very
Speaker:deep, deep dive, sort of a series.
Speaker:We do a series on the Renaissance.
Speaker:We're currently episode 16 on Leonardo da Vinci, but that's hundreds of episodes.
Speaker:It we're into the Renaissance.
Speaker:The bullshit filter where I just talk about whatever's on my mind in any
Speaker:given month well, actually Sean had, Joel says, psychopath committee sounds
Speaker:like McCarthyism or witch hunting 2.2.
Speaker:Well, actually it is.
Speaker:But yeah, we, we need to, this is the, if I'm right, this is the great
Speaker:threat to civilization psychopath.
Speaker:So we, again, but I'm not saying that were blackballing them, like McCarthy
Speaker:tried to do, I want to get them fired.
Speaker:As I keep saying, they have good points, what sort of qualities we want to retain
Speaker:the positive qualities, just limit the, the, their ability to do harm really.
Speaker:And so then yeah, they're the podcast most obviously to QA V right?
Speaker:My investing podcast with Tony cornerstone, which we do every, every
Speaker:week where we teach people how to invest.
Speaker:Warren buffet basically.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And then I've got the film that came out and died quickly just prior to COVID
Speaker:we had a solid screening in middle.
Speaker:The Soledad screening in Sydney, but only half the people turned
Speaker:up because Sydney was half in lockdown on the night it happened.
Speaker:And then the Brisbane screening, which I know you were coming to didn't happen
Speaker:because the cinemas shut down the day that the screening was to be held at
Speaker:the barracks in March of last year.
Speaker:So you can, it's marketing the Messiah.
Speaker:You can see it, you can find it on YouTube.
Speaker:You can find it on Amazon prime.
Speaker:You can find it on the website, marketing the messiah.com.
Speaker:But I went out and I interviewed 12 experts on early Christianity.
Speaker:Most of them have a PhD in new Testament studies or biblical studies or ancient
Speaker:history or something like that.
Speaker:And I was really just trying to get them to help articulate the
Speaker:mainstream consensus view on how Christianity got started.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Who was there, who did it?
Speaker:What was the progression of events?
Speaker:That went from Jesus through to the new Testament.
Speaker:Being written basically sort of kept it with the writing of the gospels.
Speaker:Didn't go right through to, you know, the, you know Constantine and,
Speaker:and, Theodosius and all of those sorts of things, which I have done
Speaker:in detail in my Renaissance series.
Speaker:Because you can't understand the Renaissance without
Speaker:understanding the dark ages.
Speaker:And you can't, this is the Renaissance series that started in Yvette 180.
Speaker:Is that right?
Speaker:270 CA yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:With the persecution of Diocletian you can't understand the dark ages
Speaker:without understanding the rise of Christianity, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker:So yeah, but the film is a, is a comedic like a slightly humorous, depending on
Speaker:who you ask, if you go to the reviews on Amazon prime, half the audience,
Speaker:give it five stars and think it's.
Speaker:The other half are Christians and give it one star and say it gets boring
Speaker:and terrible and factually incorrect.
Speaker:And I'm a complete tool.
Speaker:So there's nothing like being divisive, but it's it's, it was true.
Speaker:I tried to do a fair, balanced, nice feel marketing the Messiah.
Speaker:Sean.
Speaker:There's a poster behind me.
Speaker:And if you can see that the screen has been like that's the no.
Speaker:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker:I'll put a link in the shine nights.
Speaker:Poster.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Marketing the Messiah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It's yeah.
Speaker:I tried to do I tried to be fair and, and nice.
Speaker:I tried not to be too offensive or nasty or mean so half the
Speaker:scholars in the film are Christians.
Speaker:Half of them are probably atheists.
Speaker:I, I think, I mean, I didn't really ask people, but I
Speaker:think they were half and half.
Speaker:I tried to make it half and half and they're all, there's no theologians.
Speaker:There's no.
Speaker:Rabid atheists.
Speaker:It's all.
Speaker:Well, 11 out of the 12 scholars are PhD level scholars, and
Speaker:then there's David Fitzgerald.
Speaker:Who's written a bunch of books on early Christianity and I liked Dave and I
Speaker:wanted him on to sort of you know, be my mouthpiece really in the thing,
Speaker:because originally when I shot it, I didn't think I would be on camera, much
Speaker:thought it would just be the scholars.
Speaker:But then in the editing room, it was obvious that somebody
Speaker:needed to string it together.
Speaker:And there's some, you know amusing, slightly offensive animations
Speaker:in there to helping tell the story, south Parky style stuff.
Speaker:So, yeah, that's the film.
Speaker:I'm probably quite, I'm quite proud of how it turned out.
Speaker:We should do a Brisbane screening at some point cam.
Speaker:Why not.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, it's too hard to fucking do anything in COVID, right?
Speaker:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker:It might, my luck I'll organize it.
Speaker:It'll we'll go into lockdown the day it happens again.
Speaker:So yeah, when COVID is Hmm.
Speaker:I'll try it then.
Speaker:So of all those that came listed one of my favorites was in the cold
Speaker:war podcast where you were speaking about how men loved that stuff.
Speaker:So that was good.
Speaker:So, and we did a, did a really big, deep dive on the Vietnam war and
Speaker:Hoshi men and, well, we haven't really gotten to the Vietnam war yet.
Speaker:We haven't really got up to the American involvement, but we did the
Speaker:early stages of him trying to get rid of the French and the Japanese
Speaker:and then the French again, then.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So yeah, the guy you described seemed in the end, quite an honorable guy
Speaker:and, and sort of, not really the psychopath that people might've thought.
Speaker:If you hear the name team, you know, he must've been a psychopath.
Speaker:And in fact, he was just, he was, he was Jesus man.
Speaker:He was really Jesus.
Speaker:He was like this nice.
Speaker:I mean, I say, no, I was gonna say nice old guy, but he literally spent his
Speaker:entire life from the age of 19 through to when he died in his late sixties,
Speaker:early seventies as a, a freedom fighter trying to free Vietnam from colonial
Speaker:oppression, there was dedicated, he was poor for the vast majority
Speaker:of it living in little mud hearts.
Speaker:I just watched platoon all of the stones platoon, if you haven't seen that since
Speaker:listening to my series on Occi men, it's worth going back and looking at
Speaker:it with those that viewpoint, you know These Vietnamese, just trying to kick.
Speaker:And yet another wave of colonial invaders out of their country
Speaker:led by Jose and his team.
Speaker:So, Hm.
Speaker:So there's my tip.
Speaker:Dear listener, get onto the bullshit filter if you're not sure amongst
Speaker:all those, which, which to support go to the cold war podcast and
Speaker:head to the one about hygiene.
Speaker:That was good.
Speaker:So it's free to really well.
Speaker:What we're doing now is are all our archive episodes
Speaker:up until the current year.
Speaker:So all of the archive, episodes of Renaissance bullshit and cold war free.
Speaker:It's only the current year of episodes, like 20, 21 episodes that are under
Speaker:the paywall with the Caesar show.
Speaker:It's the reverse, the, all of the old episodes are under the paywall
Speaker:and the current stuff is free.
Speaker:I don't know why I'm just testing different economic formats models.
Speaker:Very good.
Speaker:Any to land, to investors, the QAV one.
Speaker:So, all right, cam.
Speaker:Well, I really appreciate having you come on and make life easy for me for
Speaker:a week where I can just let you, you gotta, you gotta return the favor.
Speaker:We ain't going to come on my show and talk about Leonardo
Speaker:da Vinci for a couple of hours.
Speaker:You could probably do the COVID one.
Speaker:If you want help on that, I've been battling COVID
Speaker:conspiracy theories for awhile.
Speaker:I'm sort of up to speed on a fair bit of that.
Speaker:So yeah, he's going away.
Speaker:Ray's going on yet?
Speaker:Another vacation.
Speaker:So right week after, next is going to be my COVID deep dive week.
Speaker:And when does Ray go away?
Speaker:Week after next.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:He's away for a week or 10 days or something.
Speaker:So that's what I'm doing while he's away.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Well, sign me up.
Speaker:There we go for that one.
Speaker:Good.
Speaker:Very good.
Speaker:Thank you.
Speaker:Dear listeners in the chat room, you've been magnificent for some reason, it
Speaker:didn't play on your Facebook page cam.
Speaker:We're going to investigate why just the technology didn't work.
Speaker:But anyway, we'll explain and Joe we'll work something out and alright.
Speaker:I pay him my condolences for Peter to, I only met him once
Speaker:when we had lunch together and my kind of guy, I was a very fun.
Speaker:Yeah, that was really for tutors because did listen to my friend, Peter
Speaker:had a love of, of the Bible in terms of it's as a historical document, he
Speaker:loved talking about the letters of some poll as to whether that proved
Speaker:the existence of the historical Jesus.
Speaker:And I was having either a coffee or a lunch with Peter every week.
Speaker:And in the back of my mind, I thought, gee, it'd be good
Speaker:to get paint with cam Monday.
Speaker:And I was driving to pick up paint.
Speaker:And at that moment you rang and said, what are we doing?
Speaker:You know, you want to have a cup of coffee?
Speaker:And I said, great, I'll put the three of them together.
Speaker:And we went to a coffee shop and the two of you just going hammer
Speaker:and tongs over chapter and verse literally of the Bible and all.
Speaker:And and it was really good.
Speaker:Pete enjoyed it.
Speaker:I did, it was a really good conversation and one of the highlights for me.
Speaker:So it was good.
Speaker:It was great.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It's lovely.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:Enough reminiscing, dear listener, talk to you next week with the panel.
Speaker:We'll be back then.
Speaker:Thanks, cam.
Speaker:Talk to you later.
Speaker:Bye.
Speaker:Okay.
