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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. ******. ****. ****. *** **** it. No, that's not the way to introduce what is highest, right? That was. I'm so sorry, that was just the word ******. That's not an introduction of of any sort. Sorry. I'm terribly sorry. Oh my God, I'm so sorry. This is behind the ******** a podcast having a fine day where we talk about bad people and I've ruined it. I've ruined our discussion of genocide by mentioning the word ****** and I apologize for that. And you're just kind of subverting the narrative, and I do appreciate that. I don't know what a narrative is, but Speaking of narratives, the subject of our episode today was was the master of creating narratives. Umm. Also, Jamie Loftus, you're the guest. Sorry. I got so caught up in saying the word ****** quietly that today's you're really gave your all to it and I know you're not feeling well, so that that took a lot to get that kind of comments. Are we talking about Aaron Sorkin? No, we're talking about. Kind of. I mean, you could, Jamie. OK, so Chris Carter was The X-Files guy, right? Where possible. Maybe. I think it was Chris Carter. We're talking about the guy who inspired a lot of The X-Files. Ohh, we're also talking about the guy who inspired Alex Jones. It is Chris Carter. I mean, as long as as long as he inspired Alex Jones. I thought you were gonna say Alex Mack. No, no, not Alex Mack. But he also inspired the Wu Tang clan. Wow. OK, well, you got to hand it to him. What a life. Yeah, man. Yeah, we're talking about a real a real influential ***** ** **** today. Some people, I think when I when I mentioned the Wu Tang clan, the folks who know this guy recognized who it is. But we're talking about Bill Cooper. Have you ever heard of Bill Cooper, Jamie? I have, but I don't know in which of these contexts I've heard of them. Was he, like a? Conspiracy got like, he was a conspiracy guy? Yes. Yes, I have heard he was. He was a radio show host who was kind of the 1st Alex Jones in a lot of ways. And he also was a very successful author of a conspiracy book that went on to become one of like the foundational documents of American gangster rap. First paragraph of his Wikipedia page. I'm excited. Yeah, there's he's quite a character. I like that. Say that the first paragraph is just a full journey. Yeah. Holy ****. His real name is not even Bill, isn't it? Isn't his real name. It's William. It's William. No, but isn't that also? Not even? Kind of didn't William. Yeah. Milton. William Cooper's my grandfather's name. So we're going to take that bill. He's bill. Yes. I I've decided that already. Don't like, yeah, I have a long. I have a long, and it hasn't really failed me yet. I have like a long distrust of someone that insists on going by three names and yes. I have a feeling that this is no different. No, no, he he he was pretty consistent about just Bill. But yeah, OK, you still shouldn't have trusted him because he was a famous liar. OK, so. Kind of the reason I think this is important to talk about today is that at the present moment Jamie 11 Q Anon believers are currently have like active Congressional candidates have, they've either won primaries or runoffs and we'll be on the ballot in November. Yeah. And if, if you're, if you're just joining us from the year 2015. Some **** has gone down. First off, you you might wanna, I don't know, end it now. Yeah. Yeah, it should just turn your car and angle. No. Yeah. So Q and on the Q Anon conspiracy theory basically states that the whole Democratic Party and and all global political leadership is part of a satanic cult that drinks the blood of children. Right. Donald Trump was chosen by our military and also Jesus to take power and root. This cabal of devil worshippers. And in some version we talk about it. The barbecues I have at my house. Yeah. As as you should in some versions of the conspiracy. JFK junior. It's a crucial part of it. But that's very much a contentious issue within within this community. So there's even, I mean, there's at least one of the Q Anon candidates is also hot, which I found to be. Yes, there's some hot ones. Yes, I know the hot people were in Q Anon that did you know, I was just. Like, OK, so they they know skin care at very least. Yeah. OK. I mean, you can you can give a **** about, you know, your pores. And also believe that the Luciferian cabal has been orchestrating global politics in order to harvest adrenochrome from the blood of children's blood is keeps them young. Well, I mean, actually, yeah. But that's something some of us just learned by accident. So, yeah, Q Anon. It's pretty silly, pretty silly stuff. And it's so silly that all credible media kind of ignored it for three years and pretended it wasn't happening until there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who believed it and 11 of them who might wind up in Congress. Michael Flynn, just one person that you went to high school with deeply, powerfully believes in it, would die for Q Anon would die for this conspiracy. Yeah. Michael Flynn, a lifetime military intelligence man, a general and a former member of President Trump's staff, recently had his whole family swear an oath of allegiance they like to the mysterious queue and his cause. So it's a problem. It's become an issue. It's a real issue. And it's not like there's the only thing to do about it is kind of laugh because of how how much of a problem it is. But it really is not a laughing matter. It's a very serious issue. It's it's and and it's worth noting. Like it Q and on for a long time. People would talk about it as a conspiracy theory, and one of the researchers I follow, Sarah Hightower, has kind of been making the point for quite a while that, like, calling it a conspiracy theory really misses the point. It's a cult. It's and and it's a religious movement. And I think at this point, you could probably make a pretty good case that Q Anon is the USA's fastest growing new religious movement, which is again a real problem. So the question, one of the questions we should all be asking ourselves is we, we try to deal with this thing that's happening is how did we get here? Like, well, the question I've been asking myself is, who is Q? I've been asking myself this for many years. See, I think that's the least important thing in the world actually. But yeah, I I. At this point the the belief system has gone so far beyond whatever the individual or individuals who are like posting the queue drops actually have been pushing people to do that. It's like I think kind of almost immaterial who queue is. So the broader question, when we look at like Q Anon, and we look at just the fact that we're in a place right now where, like the guy who got elected president is a famous conspiracy theorist who has like repeated conspiracy theories about the active pandemic, killing people during his administration while delivering like, like news to the nation about the pandemic. Like the fact that that's where we are right now, like kind of begs the question, how the **** did we get here? And there's a number of theories about. Like how Conspiracism became what it is in American culture. And it it kind of starts in the 1970s with the work of a British sociologist named Campbell, who coined the term cultic milieu to refer to the kinds of supportive cultural environments that allow cults to form. So prior to Campbell's work, most experts had kind of seen Colts as freak phenomenon, strange and terrible. Like things that just sort of happened, like some charismatic guy would come along and. You would enthrall the brains of a certain group of people and then you'd have a cult and it was just sort of like this thing that happened as sort of like a freak curiosity. But Campbell's argument was that Colts didn't come out of nowhere, and they weren't primarily the product of whatever individual or individuals were behind them. They kind of grew mushroom like from a fertile cultural substrate. You had to have like a culture that could support the growth of cults and certain things in a culture certain like. Trends within a culture would make it much a much more fertile ground for cults to sort of like, form and thrive in. So that's like what a cultic milieu is. In the book a culture of conspiracy, scholar Michael Barkun notes, quote, the cultic milieu is by nature hostile to authority, both because it rejects the authority of such normative institutions as churches and universities, and because no single institution within the milieu has the authority to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within it. As diverse as the cultic milieu is, however, Campbell finds in it unifying tendencies. One such tendency is its opposition to dominant cultural orthodoxies. This is also a major characteristic of the culture of conspiracy, within which the reigning presumption is that any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. OK, so that sounds a little familiar. It definitely does. I feel like the like conspiracy. Like, like, the conspiracy label is used to be dismissive too often of like, oh, it's kind of a a fun tabloid story. More, more so. And then when you start calling it a religion which has much of the same properties, it's suddenly become serious and all of a sudden there's hot people running for for public office. Yeah. Yeah. Or or, you know, compounds outside of Waco, getting burnt down by the FBI and number of things. You just bring Waco in here. I'm this. We're gonna talk so much about Waco today. We're getting into Waco today. Ohh, yeah. We're gonna be wake up ready for Waco today. Alright? Nobody wakes up ready for Waco. Except for David Koresh. Briefly. But not anymore. Yeah. So we live in a culture of conspiracy. Now, and and I think a lot of Americans are kind of waking up to the extent to which that is happening and continuing to happen and what a problem it is. And it wasn't this kind of cultic milieu that that has overtaken a lot of even mainstream culture now. Like didn't didn't happen by accident. It was formed kind of intentionally by individual human beings who tended it like a good farmer tends to soil and made basically made our culture into one in which a a famous conspiracy theorist. Could not just get to become president, but could, could get to, like, shout out his nonsense to like. Could get to like, shout out conspiracy theories about an active plague while it was going on and have millions of Americans say, well, like, surely that guy's right. Like the fact that we're there now. Isn't an accident. It was. It was like that. Yeah. I I don't know. This is, this is a bad way to introduce this. There's a lot of that. I'm, I'm trying to like kind of even wrap my head around here because the problem is, is so extensive and there's a number of individuals who were sort of behind bringing us to this point because this wasn't always the case. You know, there used to be, you know, kind of really what we're looking at, what we're looking at is the root cause of, of why we are where we are culturally right now and politically right now is the death of any kind of shared conception of truth. It's not. Possible to have that because a huge chunk of the country, whenever somebody claims to be claims to be like trying to tell them facts about the world now kind of automatically will reject those facts if they're in opposition to, you know, whatever belief structure that person has. And will form the fact that, like some professional person is telling them that, that that their beliefs are wrong, will kind of graph that automatically onto this conspiratorial belief about the nature. Of the world at the moment, like the fact that only accepted truths. Exactly, exactly. And today we're going to talk about probably the man who's most responsible with kind of setting off that domino chain reaction that led to the death of truth. I'm not going to say that that that this guy killed truth on his own, but Bill Cooper probably deserves more credit for building our cultic milieu than any other single person. And only again, like two kinds of people really recognize Bill's name today, the first kind of folks who like. Study conspiracy and the history of right wing extremism. The militia movement. Those folks will have heard of Bill Cooper. The second kind of people who know Bill Cooper today are are fans of 1990s gangster rap. That fans yeah, yeah, it's the Wu Tang clan. I'm thrilled that we have found this intersection at long last. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Bill left a really big influence on both Worlds and it's kind of fascinating as to why. So Milton William Cooper. So, yeah, that's the name Jamie. He is a Milton Miller. Yeah, it's really unfortunate. Was born on May 6th, 1943 in Long Beach, CA. His father, Milton Vance Cooper, was an Air Force pilot who got his start flying for the US military before the Air Force even existed. Milton wisely went by the name Jack, which is a much better name. For a pilot Jack Cooper, that's a good. That's a good pilot name. Yeah, that's just a good old fashioned MGM rename. Yeah. And you'll note that neither Milton William nor Milton Vance ever went by the name Milton because it's a It's an objectively bad name. Well, I mean just, you know, say what you will about his life choices, but he did make at least one solid. Yeah. No, no, he made the right call there. And yeah, as a little kid, Bill went by little Jackie, which is is I do hate that. Yeah. I don't like that's perverted. I don't like that. Yeah. So Bill's ancestors had come from all over the British Isles, which you shouldn't call the British Isles because it wipes out the existence of Scotland and Ireland, two nations that were kind of oppressed by the British for centuries. But I want to challenge the British and the Irish to unite and finally wipe out the English. And I feel like goading them this way might work. So just as a note, in the future, when I call something the British Isles, it's because I'm trying to orchestrate the destruction of the English people. Yeah, you're just trying to remind people to radicalize and get some **** done. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, you know, all. Will refer to them properly. Scotland and Ireland when you and Wales when you do something about the English. Yeah. Got rolls in your own. Yeah. So anyway, Bill Bill's family came from all over the aisles and they wound up in the United States and kind of all over the United States. He had family that fought on both sides of the Civil War. There were a lot of frontiersmen in the Cooper family. As a boy. Bill was particularly taken by stories of his great grandfather, who he would later call a real cowboy. He wrote later that as a child, he saw photos of his great grandpa. Yeah. He he would later write that as a child, he saw photos of his great Grandpa quote standing in front of a saloon with A6 gun in his belt. Now, Bill was a famous liar, and this is probably a lie because there just weren't a lot of those guys really like, as a rule that was like a fake. That was a constructed image in the 1st place. That's fun. Fun lie. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, and yeah. But this is what bill, this is what bill at least thought it was important for people to think about. His family background, they were Cowboys. Yeah. This is a very mature Cowboys and horse thieves. He was also like, Oh yeah. And one of them got hung as a horse thief. Yeah, it was. Yeah. So the Cooper family moved constantly to accommodate Jack's military career, and this was not a low stress period to be the family member of somebody doing what Jack was doing in the military. The Cold War was at its coolest level. Nuclear annihilation was a constant threat, and young bill grew up knowing that at any moment his father might be sent off to die in a war that would almost certainly kill his family in nuclear Hellfire as well. It was a stressful way to be a kid. I I know that particularly well because my dad and Bill had very similar. Childhoods, actually. My dad was about about a decade younger, but his dad, I don't. I don't even know what my grandpa on that side of the family actually did. He was a civilian employee of the Department of the Defense, and he was constantly in Southeast Asia. And we don't know, like, nobody really knows anything else about what Grandpa was doing. I thought he was probably posing like a cowboy in front of a saloon if I were just to give, probably posing like a cowboy. But like, my dad has these memories of like when the when the they were stateside, when the Cuban missile. Crisis hit and he was just like they he and I think his mom like drove him and his sister out to like family who lived away from a city. And they just stayed there for days without really knowing anything. Just knowing that like something had happened and Dad says, like you guys shouldn't be near get out of the inner city. Yes, that is terrifying. Yeah, it was like in a lot of there were a lot of kids who grew up, like, my whole family in this period of time were military brats. And there was a lot of, like, it was a stressful thing to be like, you know, because you're always, you're always worried that nuclear annihilation is around the damn corner. And so Bill grows up with this kind of apocalyptic expectation is just a constant part of his reality is like a little kid. So that's not great. Yeah. The yeah and and it's yeah. The biography Pale Horse Rider by Mark Jacobson, which is a biography of William Cooper, notes quote once while his father was assigned to Elijah's field on Terceira Island in the Azores, the young Cooper was sitting in the base rec room watching a movie when the projector ground to a halt. The lights came on and a plea was made for blood donors. I knew immediately something terrible had happened. Running outside. Cooper saw that B29 Superfortress had crashed. I saw men on fire running through the night. Uber wrote and behold a pale horse. I was only nine years old, but felt much older. So that's not great. Yeah. Yeah, that's not great. Yeah, that's the problem with the beginning. All of these stories start out with, like, just a traumatized yeah, just a cutie little boy there. We need to start. Well, no, this is probably, but they're like, there needs to be some sort of Muppet babies for yes, for the ********. Yeah, ******* babies there. And then they can just all go to a child therapist and really talk **** through and save them a lot of trouble. Yeah, except for Saddam, who would have absolutely smuggled in a gun. Shot that therapist, like. Shot that therapist immediately. So Tom was. Yeah, he was. He was. You know, some people are born that way. He was he was he was a hardened gangster by 13. Yeah. But also had the heart of a poet, you know. Yeah, well, of course, yeah. Like Al Capone, right. Right. So in his own book, Behold a pale horse bill, which is a great name for a book. It is a great name for a book. Bill. One thing you'll learn about Bill is that he was a fantastic marketer, and that's an objectively incredible title. Like, I'm is there a memoir? No, no, no, no. It it just includes a section on his background. We'll talk about what behold a pale horse is because very influential and, like, it's kind of, it's a very appealing. Title. Well, it's it's from that book that that line in the Book of Revelations. But again, we'll talk about that in a little bit. So yeah, it it is a great title. And I'm kind of frustrated that he took it because it would be a great title for a book right now about. Yeah. So anyway, Bill would later write himself right of his upbringing, that quote. I didn't always love my father. He was a strict disciplinarian. My dad did not believe in spare the rod and his belt was put to use frequently in our family and like most children who grew up in such families. Bill Group was like, Bill grew up with a like basically focusing all the time on how to avoid getting in trouble. Like, right, that's the thing you learn as a kid with authoritarian parents who punish you physically particularly, is how to not get in trouble. And he was regularly the focus of his dad's anger, which kind of, yeah, his his whole life was his whole life as a kid was revolved around hiding from his dad's anger. And yeah, he grew up with the feeling that, quote rules didn't mean much until I got caught breaking them. And discipline like this has the effect of kind of training children to be exceptional liars. It teaches them to always have a story, a really believable story, in order to not get in trouble. And there's actually research to back this up. In 2016, Victoria Talwar, an expert on children's social cognitive development at McGill University, published a study on this IFL Science reported quote, Taware and her colleagues developed a test to identify effective young liars called the peeping game, taking her test to 2 W African schools, one with relaxed. Goals, and one with harsh disciplinary regimes. The peoples were asked to guess, without looking at it, which object is making the noise behind them. Importantly, the last object made a noise that was different from any sound it could actually produce. For example, a baseball would make a squawking noise. If any children knew what this final object was, they were clearly taking a peek at it while unsupervised. During the experiment, the supervising adult leaves the room and upon returning, asked the child two questions. What the object was and if they peeked at it toward discovered that the more relaxed school showed a distribution of liars and truth tellers similar to that. Found in many western schools. However, in the strict school the children proved to be extremely rapid and effective liars. So that's going to become very relevant as we talk about every single thing Bill says about his life. So much of the information we have on Bill's childhood comes from Bill himself. And again, he's a he's a liar. So yeah, OK, this is difficult. This is tough because he lies about absolutely with him. But that's because he wants to do, and that's because he's a good liar. That's because he's a good liar. That also doesn't mean that he's lying about everything, and in fact, he there's a lot. He's definitely telling the truth about including the fact that his dad, I have no trouble believing his dad was an authoritarian, you know, parent, because he was a military man, and that's real ******* common. I have no trouble believing that he was constantly stressed out as a kid about nuclear war, because that's what it was like growing up in the 50s on a military base. Yeah. So that said, though, we're going to, we're going to enter into a lot of areas where we have Bill's version of the of what happened and what's more likely to have happened. And they they they diverge quite rapidly. So Bill's relationship with his mother was a little more positive than his relationship with his father. He describes her as the kind of woman who used to be called a southern belle, the type of woman that men like to dream about when they're lonely. She's the kindest, gentlest woman I have ever known. Once she likes you, she cannot be driven away. She is loyal to a fault. That that will become a little bit more relevant later, too. So yeah, Bill was a high spirited, sensitive mama's boy who moved around too often to build strong ties, and one of the few constants in his youth was armed forces radio. Bill was obsessed with the emerging popular music of the day, particularly Sam Cooke. Moreover, he fell in love with the idea of being a DJ, which at the time was the Guardian and arbiter of popular youth culture. Yeah, and again, all of a sudden it's kind of weird the extent to which. Bill and my dad had the same childhood because my dad also grew up on military bases wanting to be a DJ and like doing that in high school and ****. It's like the cool thing. Like it's not now, but at the time. Like being a DJ was the coolest thing you could ******* be, Robert. Easier just saying it's not currently the coolest thing you could be because it still is. Ask anyone that I've had actually is a white guy who does a podcast about politics. That's probably what this is. The conspiracy theories are running around like this. It's actually a popular Q Anon. Belief is that having a podcast is cool. You know what? Who definitely, actually does? Think that having a podcast is cool? Who the products and services that support this show? They'd ******* better. Ohh Lord in heaven. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying. Or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. 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I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. Always felt like an ambassador. Speaker but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break our handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker. From iheart. We're back and I I just I have some good news for everybody. We have a new face mask that will be selling in the behind the ******* store it it it just says FDA approved to prevent all diseases. So you know when we're as we're talking about Colts Jamie I just want everyone to know I am in fact doing everything I can to to to get us violently rated by the Food and Drug Administration that that is the goal so. Grab your kids. Uh, take them to my compound in the mountains, put them in a basement, and we'll wait for the FDA to come fire bomb us. Wow. Yep. What a beautiful image. What a beautiful image. Yeah, we're we're we're going to make him do it. We're gonna we're gonna radicalize the FDA, Jamie. That's my goal. That would be kind of fun. That would be neat. Like fun. Radicalized with good outfits. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Well with the FDA and crop tops see what happens. Yeah sound OK fine as long as as long as you know there's still like unaccountably violent that's my my my dream for the FDA ohh they're extremely violent. I'm just saying like a cult that like a heavens gate you know it's like they're you know they have they have no morals but also you know they look nice they match. OK OK OK we'll we'll we'll we'll talk about this more workshop this so Bill was a yeah Bill. Bill as a kid on the military. This, like falls in love with the idea of being a DJ. And at age 16, while he was living on Tachikawa Air Base near Tokyo, he got his very first radio show on the armed Forces networks Radio teen program team. Radio team Bill would later write quote I was called the Mad Lad and my theme song was quiet village by Martin Denny. And this is yeah, he's a huge dork and it's the fact that he picks quiet village is really interesting because it is. It is not the kind of song you might expect. 17 or 16 year old to make his, like, introduction music when he comes on the ******* radio. It's like this time it's a mournful ballad about lost love that starts with the lyrics. Alone in my quiet village, I pray you will be returning one day to me, return to me alone, living with the memory of you, promising you'd always be true to me, be true to me. So that's a little weird for 16 year old, Bill. Yeah, just wait, guys. Energy to it, you know? It's like there's equivalents of this. It's really unsettling. Like, you can you can kind of tell Bill's not gonna go good places. Yeah, this isn't this isn't going to end well. So is intense. Very two. Yeah. So, as a young DJ, bill finally felt the acceptance that had been cruelly denied to him by his father's constant travel. He would later recall being elated that, quote, hundreds of teenagers all over Japan were dancing to the music I spun on my little machines. He managed to convince himself that millions of Chinese. Means we're also listening into his radio program, which could not have been true, and that the communists said Jack had jammed his signal to stop it. Which, OK, this didn't happen. Yeah, DJ Energy is like, no, it's just the people don't have access to it there. If I could just get it in communism, if they can listen to my sad songs about quiet like villages and girls not liking me enough. Oh my God. Yeah, even at age 16, Bill was convinced that he had somehow become the target of a global communist movement, of the global communist movement. Which is it is funny. And again, yeah, he's probably just inventing this decades later. But also, I wouldn't be surprised if at the time, young Bill Cooper convinced himself the commies were trying to stop his his terrible radio show. So teenage Bill was convinced that rock'n'roll music was the very best advertisement for capitalism possible. And to be honest, he was probably right about that. They say that there's actually something to that that's actually at that time. Yeah. I think a lot of like, teenagers in Cuba got a really unfairly rosy idea of American culture by listening to the stones and ship. I don't like. I don't like the feeling of agreeing with him, but yeah, I'm on board for that one. Yeah, no, he's probably right about that. Now you're into the rock'n'roll. So listen, I think I'm very skeptical of this rock'n'roll music that the kids are listening to. I think it might be dangerous. As an adult, bill would mourn in his writing that Chuck Berry was thrown in jail for two years rather than being made Secretary of State quote like he should have been. So we believe Chuck Berry should have been the Secretary of State, and it's probably here that I do you know much about Chuck Berry, Jamie? Not really. No right side of who he is. Yeah. His music sounded like, yeah, I mean, father of rock'n'roll, incredible musician, historically and important musician. He was also thrown in jail for transporting a 14 year old across state lines for immoral purposes, violation of the man and of in jail. OK, well, yeah. Like it wasn't a mild, it wasn't like a like, it wasn't that they weren't just going after him. Was like, shut down this rock and roller he was he was sexually trafficking a teenage girl. I mean, to continue on my anti rock'n'roll tirade, which rock artists of this era was not doing that. It was that is that is very fair. We had some **** like that, but no one but no one wants to talk about it. No, I mean about it. Billy Joel didn't, but that's the only one I know of. I bet that it was just not that he didn't, that he couldn't because he would have been terrible at sex trafficking. He would have been. It would have been horrible at it. So you can't be a good liar. No, no, he can't. He's he's an innocent man. So in 1988, Chuck Berry was arrested again and charged for punching a woman in the face so hard she required stitches. He was also accused by multiple women and girls of filming them in the bathroom of his restaurant. So, I don't know, maybe not the best pick for Secretary of State. Although even with that resume, he would have been better than Kissinger is supposed to say. I'm like there have been worse people within word. And Secretary of State? Oh, that's so depressed. There's truly not one rock legend that isn't the most horrifying person. No, they're they were all monsters. It turns out when you, like, elevate mostly young, teenage and 20 something men to like, effectively living gods. They do horrible, horrible things repeatedly. Really have been known to take advantage of it. Yeah, yeah. It turns out to be a bad call. So in 1962. Learned from it, though. Yeah, we don't do that anymore. It doesn't happen anymore. That and it never will again. Yeah. In 1962, nineteen year old Bill Cooper joined the Air Force. The Navy was his first choice, but he got seasick easily and he didn't think he'd be able to handle a career on a boat. This will be slightly ironic later. Young Bill chose to enlist rather than joining as an officer, which surprised his family because his family, you know, his military tradition had been officers. He wound up going to a technical school outside of Amarillo, TX, where he later claimed to have seen real atomic bombs. Quote, I worked around them on a daily basis. Because of that I had to wear a dosimeter just in case I was exposed to radiation. Bill's first gig was in the Field Maintenance squadron, watching after everyone's quarters and basically keeping their work area policed. It was a job that kept him alone a great deal of the time, and so he was sitting on his own in the barracks watching TV on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot by Bernard Montgomery Sanders. As Bill later wrote quote at that point huge tears began to stream down my face. Waves of emotion rushed through my body. I felt that I had to do something, so I picked up the Direct Line to the command center. I choked back tears. When the command Duty Officer answered. I told him that the president had. That's been shot in Dallas. There was a pause and he asked me, how do you know he has been shot? I told him that I'd watched it on television and then hung up the phone. I was numb all over. Yeah, you know people, you know, it's just So what, President Kennedy got shot. Get over it. Every Bernie Sanders, yes, absolutely interested to it. I I think I have actually brought this up on this show before, but it's my favorite fact, my favorite fun fact about the assassination of JFK, which is that meatloaf was there. Yes, you did bring it up on the show. I think I love to bring it up. Meatloaf is like 13 or 14. Years old and he was like I guess he he lived in that area and he went like with his family to see them. He was he was there. So would we have bad out of Hell had JFK lived? We may not know. That's a shame that we have bad out of hell. I OK. I know that I famously hate rock'n'roll, but I do kind of like bat out of hell. Mila's a terrible person. But, you know, he was fine in Fight Club and bat out of Hell's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, and he probably, I don't know, it had something to do with the JFK assassination. Anyway, I think he was part of the youth. The youth plot. Yeah, he was, he was spotting for Bernie Sanders as sniper scope. So now Jamie. Was so you can kind of see in that little paragraph like, and this is, this is again from something that Bill writes decades later. But he's kind of like, he's kind of like sprinkling into his life story, these little bitty elements of conspiracy, like, obviously he calls the duty officer, and the guy is like, how did you know he'd been shot? And, like, nothing else happens. But there's little insinuation that, like, you know, Bill had kind of stumbled on to something a little bit like that'll happen repeatedly that happens repeatedly in his narrative of his early life that he later publishes. He'll he'll drop these little like if it like he kind of he kind of frames it almost like a movie, right where like he drops these little bitty hints about the vast conspiracy and his his childhood like stories of his early life and he does it really well. Like it's it's it's it's good good storytelling which is something that like Bill has a real talent for is is telling stories because he's a great liar. Yeah. So he also brought aliens into the mix in his his his biography, but not in a way. Not in a way that was super kooky. This is this, this part, this is the way he does. This I actually think is really effective as a storytelling tool. Quote. It was during this time when he was he was working in the Air Force that a couple of sergeants kind of adopted me. We went out to clubs together and usually ended up chasing women and drinking a lot of beer. They told me several stories about being attached to a special unit that recovered crashed flying saucers. Sergeant Meese told me that he'd been one operation that transported a saucer so large that a special team went before them, lowering all telephone poles and fence posts. Another team followed and replaced them. They moved it only at night. It was kept parked and covered somewhere off the road during the day since we were always half tanked when these stories came out. I never believed them. Sergeants were known to tell some tall tales to younger guys like me. So that's a good that's a good way to kind of start sprinkling this **** into your narrative. That's really, that's really smart. I feel like that doesn't come out, come up enough of like, well, I wasn't totally sure at first. It sounded a little weird. It sounded a little, but but the more I listened there, that's that. That is effective storytelling. Yeah, it's good storytelling, yeah, alright. But assassination of President Kennedy brought several more days of apocalyptic stress to young Bill Cooper. The nation went to the brink of war with Russia because nobody knew what the **** was going on, and Bill spent his night sleeping under a B52 loaded with nuclear munitions, waiting for the order to go. So again, to understand Bill Cooper's mindset, you have to understand this kid spent like the first several decades of his life, sometimes literally sitting next to nuclear weapons, knowing that, like all human life could end in moments. There's no moment of his life that he is not deeply stressed out. Yeah, deeply stressed out and just waiting for the apocalypse to hit. Like, that's his whole piece. Yeah. It's Milton. Yeah. It's a it's a tough. It's a tough way to grow into being an adult. Sure, sure. Yeah. So thankfully, the order to end all human life via nuclear annihilation never came. And in 1966, Bill got an honorable discharge from the Air Force. He immediately decided to join the Navy next, since his seasickness had apparently improved and Bill was, you know, shipped over to serve on a submarine in Hawaii. Bill claimed because apparently his C6C sickness improved is a very. Yeah. The way he describes it as like, after four years in the Air Force, he was like, I've always wanted to be in the Navy. Like, I'm not gonna let, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get over this, this problem and do it. I don't know. Yeah. So Bill joined the Navy Bean or something and was like, this would just say, it sounds like he bought a drugstore supplement. Yeah, probably so. Bill claims he got along famously with all of his new comrades in Hawaii, including his best friend, who, bill takes great pains to inform us, was a black sailor named Lincoln Loving which? I have. There are actual people named Lincoln Loving, so he might not have been making that name up. It does kind of sound like the name a white guy would make up for a black sailor to be his best friend in the narrative of his life. Bill's other best friend was an American Indian who he he doesn't give us the guy's real name, but informs us that he was nicknamed Geronimo. So I don't. I can't say that Bill's lying about this, but maybe I can. I can say that I'm pretty sure he's lying about this. This sounds. Yeah. Fake as hell. Yeah. Anyway, while Bill was stationed in Hawaii, he poisoned one of his shipmates, in fact, the guy who was the ship's cook. Now, Bill claims that this is because, for no reason at all, the cook banned him from eating in the mess. And he also insists that the cook was a drunk and bill was nobly worried he might endanger the other crew members while underway. Bill wrote. Quote. I won't tell you what I laced his vodka with, but it wasn't anything you'd ever want to drink, believe me, I kept that chief so sick he was transferred off the boat for medical reasons. I didn't want to hurt him, but it was either get rid of him or starve to death. I made-up my mind that chief or no chief, I wasn't going to see on a boat that wouldn't feed me. So real willing to poison his fellow sailors, which is. I feel like this. It seems like maybe he had a a real problem with this guy. I feel like most, most most people would have found a way to do that that didn't involve poisoning a man. But I don't know. I mean, listen. Desperate times, desperate times. Sometimes you get a poison. A guy. And anyway, the Navy was only ever supposed to be a stepping stone on Bill's way to achieving a bizarre and in my opinion, pointless dream. He wanted to be the first member of his family. To serve in all four branches of the armed forces, which is a weird dream. Isn't that, like, kind of a like, that's just like, what if I went to four high schools? Like, what is the point of that? Is there any honor in that? It's like the EGOT, but you've always are doing ****** jobs, and it's not at all like the EGOT because they'll take anyone pretty much. OK, yeah, testing, irrational. But anyway, he never got to do this because by the time he was near the end of his four years in the Navy, the Vietnam. Conflict had really started to heat up, and Bill requested deployment to a combat zone, and the Department of Defense was like, absolutely, we keep getting all these guys killed. So, yeah, like, you, you you're more than welcome to go to Vietnam, Bill. OK, cool. So Bill was sent to a naval Support unit in the quad, Viet River, Quang Tree Province, and this was a really dangerous posting. Bill's job was to captain a riverboat motoring up and down the river. Is it sounds like it's been alive for 100 years already. Yeah. He's in his 20s. OK yeah. And he's. If you watched Apocalypse now. Yes. You know, the, you know, the the like a huge chunk of it. They're on that boat with the machine guns that get shot at repeatedly. Yes. That's bill's job. Like, Bill does that for real. And it's it's a really it's one of the most dangerous gigs you could have in Vietnam, like, because you're on these like fiberglass boats that are basically big moving targets that have no armor on them. So it's it's. It's a bad it's a dangerous gig. It's a bad whatever. That's a bad vibe. OK, yeah, yeah. Whatever else you can say about him. And we're gonna say mostly bad things about him. Bill Cooper saw some ****. His best friend during training was a guy named Bob Barron, and both men made a pact to drink a bottle of Scotch and the other man's memory if they died in battle. Bob shipped out first, and he was killed almost immediately. Yeah, great for Bill. Treat for bill. Bill Cooper felt that now Vietnam was quote a personal war. They had killed a part of me. He claims that once he reached the river, his boat engaged the enemy more times than any other boat that ever patrolled that river. We kept the enemy off the river and I never lost another man. I can't tell you if that's true. He's almost certainly exaggerating, but he won awards and stuff for gallantry under fire. He had a really. He did some **** in Vietnam. And it's it's probably fair to say that bill service in Vietnam was the only time where his like, imagination. Of who he was as a person came close to being the real thing. So, you know, Vietnam is in some ways a really positive experience for Bill, but he also walks away from it horribly, horribly traumatized. And obviously he's a man who grew up in the 50s to a father who was incapable of having emotional conversations. And Bill grows into an adult with combat trauma and no, no capacity to deal with it in any, in any way. But his service earned him a promotion to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Hawaii, where he worked on the briefing team for Admiral Bernard Cleary, commander of the US Pacific Fleet. In order to do this job, build security clearance was upgraded to top secret queue sensitive compartmentalized information. Q Yeah, you are here. Yeah, yeah, that's where. And that's where Q Anon comes from is like, Q is the level of of military intelligence classification. I thought it was just a spicy consonant. I love to learn. Bill Cooper is clearly cute. No, he's not. Cause spoilers, he dies violently. But yeah. So giving Bill Cooper any kind of security clearance would prove to be one of the worst mistakes the US Navy ever made, a second only to its continued failure to finally destroy the city of Boston. Bill Cooper was a competent seaman, but giving him access to top secret information was it was a really bad decision. But not because Bill was a spy, or because he would in any way reveal actual secret information, but because he was. Exactly. The sort of guy who knew how to dine out for the rest of his life on the lies that his position with Admiral Clary allowed him to tell he later. Like trying to not act on the fact that you said competent seamen. I'm sorry I stopped listening. I thought you were going to defend the city of Boston, because I know you're from that whole eastern chunk of the country. Listen, there is no defending the city of Boston. I'm glad we agree on this, Jamie. There's no, I mean, by all means watch Patriots Day on Netflix. It's in the top 10 right now and I can't watch it. Because it will give me PTSD, but give you PTSB. Maybe it'll give me just Mark Wahlberg now. I'm kidding. Yeah, I just know there's no defending the city of salt. OK, I'll **** the Celtics. You know what? Just throwing it. Do you wanna get beat up by my uncle so he I don't take them? What kind of my uncle will will kick off? And I'm kidding. He my uncle is a grifter. He's pretending to be on disability, but he's not. Well, what's that? That's my machete that I'm holding because nobody can take. I'm gonna challenge our sleuths at home to figure out who Jamie's uncle is and report him to. Disability properties. I mean, talk about it. If we're talking about good liars, someone talked to my uncle. He's do you wanna go get not jamies uncle? No. Is it time for that already? Transition I've ever done? I'm so sorry. But also **** the Boston saw, you know? You wanna know who won't tell on you for committing disability fraud? Of the products and services that support this podcast, Ohh Thank God my family really can't handle another situation like this. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. 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That's better helpp.com/behind. Betterhelp.com/behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. Always felt like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. We're back. We're back. My family. The last time my family went to court, we all had to testify that my grandma had thrown a TV at my grandpa. So don't talk about the city of Boston, all right? Bill Cooper thinks Mary Boston story watch your grandma throw Roku at your grandpa. See how you like it all Roku. Uh, Jesus. So, uh, Bill gets this job working for the Admiral and he gets top secret security clearance about it. And he uses the fact that he had this gig for the rest of his life to kind of make the lies that he will later tell about you at the US government to give them like an air of truth. As he later wrote, quote, I began to see things at first that made no sense to me. President Nixon was on television giving a speech, an incredible speech, saying that we were conducting no bombing raids in North Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao. 5 minutes later, intelligence came into the office. Kia figures of sorties over exactly the targets, Nixon said. The Americans weren't bombing. I would shake my head and wonder what in the world was going on here. That wasn't right. I never said anything at the time. Most of us never did. I never imagined the people in charge of the country would lie to the people like that. I was raised to think that this was impossible. Now that part may or may not have been true. The bombing raids he's talking about happened, but it was also common knowledge by the time he actually wrote about them. His biographer, Mark Jacobson, seems to believe in this part and think that it was kind of a turning moment for Bill where he starts to. Distrust the government in a real way. But once his career is a conspiracy theorist got going, Bill started focusing on other things he'd seen in the Admiral's file cabinet. First and foremost was evidence that President Kennedy had been assassinated by his own Secret Service agent, William Greer. This was a remarkable feat. True. Yeah. Yeah, because number one, it was Bernie Sanders and #2 Greer was driving JFK's limo at the point the president was shot. And Bill had this, like, weird conspiracy theory of, like, a shellfish toxin pellet gun that was built into the body of, I think, an umbrella, but for the rest of his life. The bill would be like talking about government conspiracy, she'd say. Like I saw the evidence of it and the Admirals filing cabinet and like, he would say that about ******* everything sounds like a game of clue. So this job is very fortunate for Bill Cooper because he did have a security clearance at one point and he basically, yeah, it would allow him to lie for the rest of his life about having seen evidence of like evil government plots. That kind of reminds me of like when I guess, I guess in context to my life when someone like works on a TV show, that's good, but they do nothing but. But then they associate themselves with their TV show for the rest of their lives. Yeah. So, yeah, Bill Cooper, like kind of for for sort of an example of the way Bill would later frame his relatively brief period of time working as basically the Admiral Secretary. I'm going to quote from a speech he gave at Hollywood High School in 1989. Wow. Yeah. No, that's weird. It's weird that that got to happen, huh? Every time it sounds like a fake place, but it's a real place. Right away I knew I was seeing what I was not supposed to see. Material never intended for my eyes. The secrets. Were there what had been covered up, the treasonous betrayal? I looked right into the heart of it. Everything about the war was in there. The story behind the alleged attack by the Vietnamese Navy and the Gulf of Tonkin, the death counts the Americans dealing with corrupt S Vietnamese government. That's what I learned in Vietnam. I thought I was fighting for my country and I found out I was really fighting for big business, the coming one world government, Cooper told the audience. It was a devastating realization. This is from his biography, Pale horse rider. So Bill continued to do his job in the Navy, but when the time came up to either sign up for four more. Years or leave, he opted to quit this time soon, Bill was back in the mainland United States without a job for the first time in his adult life. And he'd kind of grown up obsessed with the idea of like living, you know, like kind of a stereotypical Americana life, you know, living in like a small town with like a close knit community. And that was when he gets back to the US he winds up and like the the California, like big cities in California, like the ******* Bay Area and stuff. And he's like, this is so different than like, what? Life is supposed to be like an America. Something must have gone horribly wrong. And people who knew Bill as a kid will point out like Bill never knew that like quote UN quote, like Real America, that he would spend the rest of his life obsessed with living. He, like lived on military bases. He never knew small town America or any of that was just what, like a projection of like the media he was consuming? Yes, exactly, exactly like he grew up having this kind of miserable childhood and longing for, you know, the the kind of America he saw on the television which never really existed. Anywhere, right? Yeah, yeah. Sad. So, uh, yeah. Bill winds up in the Bay Area. He gets a job as a a diving instructor, he buys a motorcycle, and he attempts to lead a normal life. But as Bill would later claim, his sense of guilt and outrage over the things he'd learned had overpower would overpower him. So he, like he later claims that basically he's, he's he leaves the military with the knowledge of all these horrible secrets, you know, these these evil programs that the government is instituting to the filing cabinet. Yeah, yeah. His The, This evil filing cabinet full of secret government plans to suborn the liberty of the American people and destroy freedom. And so he decides to start, like, going after. He claims that he goes to a reporter and, like, starts giving him the information that he's gotten. And he's trying to, like, basically do what Woodward and Bernstein, you know, did and be like a **** ****** to them to, like, reveal all these horrible government conspiracies. And when he's midway through this process, he's tracked down and he's almost murdered. The government men now, bill claims that this happened while he was on his motorcycle driving on Skyline Blvd. A black Cadillac limousine pulled up behind him and ran him off the road. Bill would later write. Quote, two men got out and climbed down to where I lay covered in blood 1, bent down and felt for my carotid pulse. The other asked if I was dead. The nearest man said no, but he will be. The other replied. Good, then we don't have to do anything now. I thought that life could have used a second draft. Yeah, I think he could have used an editor on that one. Yeah. So Bill claims he recovered, only to be run down a month later by the same Cadillac. And this time, the assassination was closer to a success. They damaged his right leg badly enough that it had to be amputated above the knee in the same car. Yeah. Same car, same limousine. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. And while he was in the hospital recuperating, bill claims the same government men came to visit him again. They only wanted to know if I would shut up or if the next time should be final. I told them that I would be a very good little boy and that they needn't worry about me anymore. Now, obviously, these are all lies. Bill's motorcycle accident had a completely mundane explanation. He lost control of his bike and almost died horribly as a result of the fact that he was a bad motorcycle driver. Yeah. And this is like, what? His family like his dad, when this got brought up to him, his dad was like, what the **** is he talking about? It wasn't the government, like, he was. He ****** ** and crashed his motorcycle. And like, I had to pay for his medical bills because he would have been bankrupted otherwise. Yeah. And this was part of why Bill lied about this was because his relationship with his dad was strained, and he couldn't, like, admit that he needed his family's money for a medical issue, especially one he'd caused himself. So it was the government. Yeah. Ohh yeah, the I love. I love his little softcore line, but I'm going to be a good little boy. Be good what you do. Yeah, that is, that is sexy. Objectively sexy. Yeah. Little Jackie in. I'll be a good little boy. Jamie? The memory for blowing your mind with my amazing ideas aren't I I think you need to get off the Skype call right now and start writing. I'm sorry. I have a final draft file to take care of, and that was that was the last time any of us ever talked to Jamie. She was too big a star after making her Bill Cooper *********** video. He died of brain failure, 4 pages into albeit. So the mid 1970s and early 1980s were a real rough period for Bill. He had a ******* **** load of PTSD. He was missing most of the leg like he's in a bad place. The 70s aren't a good time for Bill, and medical science didn't really formally recognize post traumatic stress disorder as the thing until it was added to the DSM in like 1980. So for most of the time that Bill was struggling with it, the term was used as post Vietnam syndrome. When. Like doctors believed it was a problem at all. And in the US in the 1970s, it wasn't like a very welcome place to admit you were struggling with mental health issues related to your military service. So, like, Bill wasn't didn't talk about this **** to anyone for quite a while. He's just burying his trauma with the what? Certainly even more PTSD from a horrible motorcycle accident. He he's he's a damaged boy. And I I'm saying that in the knowledge that that should not at all. Mitigate what comes next because we're going to talk about his incredibly long history of profound spousal abuse. So we don't know how many women that Bill Cooper married in the 70s. What? Yeah, we have no idea. It's a lot. It's too many women. So how can that be true? How can you not know? Yeah, because he was a famous liar. Ohhh. Yeah. Maybe making up why? Well, no, no, no, no, no, no. He we we know he had a number of them. It's just that we don't know how many of them there were because he lied about to all of them, about the others and wouldn't acknowledge them. And, yeah, we'll talk about that. This will make more sense than a little bit. His biographer writes quote in his voluminous FBI file. Cooper's father Jack is quoted as saying that his son had been married or engaged. At least nine times. According to Jack, Bill was still in high school when he got engaged to a 17 year old Japanese girl. The elder Cooper had to break it up. A year later, living on Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City, Cooper again got engaged to another young Asian woman. Now Bill's marriages weren't kept secret to protect his exes or whatever kind of super cool spy explanation he probably would have preferred people believe. The ugly reality is that, especially as an adult after his military service, bill was wildly unstable and violent, and living with him was a waking nightmare. For most of the women that he married, he kept his prior relationships hidden because nobody would want to marry a guy with Bill's history. In 1976 he got hitched to Janice Pell, who told Bill's biographer later that I was number 4. I think so again, nobody has a real clear idea, even his wives, of like, how many people he married. Lord, but he gets married. A **** load quote. I had no idea what I was getting into. One minute he'd be the sweetest, warmest guy. Then he'd change start yelling at me for no reason. It was like living with Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. We were living in Union City near Hayward. Bill was working in Oakland at the diving school. He'd get up at 6:00 to drive to work. I tried so hard to be a Good Wife. Every day I'd clean make dinner for him. I said a nice table, waiting for him to come home. In the beginning he'd rush home, give me a kiss, bring flowers. It was great. Then he got home later and later. It could be after 10 or midnight. Sometimes he didn't come home at all. I'd be beside myself, trying to figure out if he was all right. It was really awful. I'd sit there at the dinner table looking at the cold food and cry my eyes out. When he did come back, he'd say he was tired and go straight to bed. I didn't understand what was happening. I thought it was all my fault. Now there's a number of possibilities about like, what Bill was doing at the time. He very well may have been cheating, probably was cheating because he was constantly had a carousel of women kind of going. He also had like a bunch of really unsuccessful business ventures. He had an art gallery that failed. So maybe his ****** ** career was on his **** ******* making money. He's yeah, terrible, it's bad. And he was also, he was also an alcoholic and increasingly like an increasingly like vicious drunk. During this period of time, so he was probably out drinking a lot of the time and Janice described him as a monster when he was drinking. Quote he'd get abusive mentally and after a while physically. I tried to make excuses for him, the war, his leg. He always told me the men in the car would come back to finish the job. One day he hit me, gave me a bloody nose, knocked me out. I called the hotline, they told me to get out of there. Tony was just a little baby. Then the next day we drove Bill to work and just kept going. We moved in with my parents in Los Altos. I only saw him one more time after that when he drove to get his stuff, I thought he might stay a moment. Talked to his son, but he just got the things and left. And Bill, we don't actually know how many kids Bill had either, but they all kind of have the same story as this one, where like he he'll have a couple of kids or a kid with one of these women and then he will be a violent monster and she will flee with the kid and bill never tries to reach out again. That is, yeah, ******* miserable. It's not good. It's not great. It's not a good way to be a person. And it is like you look at Bill's history and again, not to mitigate the profound spousal abuse, but it's like, yeah, hard to imagine how this guy grows up good at being in a relationship. I mean, yeah, impossible for him to be good in relationships. I just ohh God, I hate that. I hate that there's so many victims of that. Geez, yeah, ton of victims. Janice's story is probably very similar to a number of bills, unknown number of wives. It's important to note that the Monster Bill could take quite a while to come out, and he was very good at charming women. In the meantime, as the story of his ex-wife Sally illustrates, Bill and I started talking. I liked him, but he was smoking. I told him smoke really bothered me. I'm allergic. He looked me right in the eye and said all right and crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. He said he'd been smoking since he was 14. A couple of packs. Today, but for me, he was going to quit. I asked him when he pointed to the cigarette in the tray and said I already did. He never smoked another cigarette as long as I knew him. We started dancing. He had this kind of old world formality about him, that military thing. I suppose. He was a very graceful dancer, very light on his feet for a big guy. It wasn't until later that I realized he had an artificial leg. You would never have guessed it. Plus he made me laugh. He was zany, always acting out these incredible stories he did, these funny impressions. I'd love to hear him talk. It didn't make a difference what the topic was. He knew everything. About it. He had this tone in his voice. It just draws you in. You can hear it on the radio. He was perfect for that. We got married on Catalina on the steps of the Wrigley Mansion. The party was at El Galeon. Bill planned the whole thing, told the band what to play. It was great. But then he started drinking and picking fights. I guess that should have been a sign. My girlfriend said I was crazy to marry him, but I really loved him. So yeah, yeah, it's not great. It's not great. I hate him. And it's. I'm trying it just in kind of trying to classify Bill, I don't know that. I I don't know that he's what you'd call a predator because I don't think, I don't think he had a whole lot of control over what he was doing. I think he was a a pretty broken person. But he also didn't go to, like, extreme measures to win back the women who left him. Like when he when he violently chased them away, he would just kind of pretend they'd never existed, move on to the next person. I mean, that's still like, pretty clear. I mean, it's horrible. Yeah, yeah, definitely an abuser, but I don't. He's not. Like, I don't think he's like seeking women out and like, trying to psychologically **** them up. Like, I don't think there's any kind of like planning in it. I think Bill is one of these people who has, like, violent mood swings and no control over them and no desire to really control them. Yeah, it's a deeply selfish, broken person. Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And just yeah, that's that's that's the feeling you get from him. His mood swings seem to come more or less at random and probably was a mix of a number of things. He was also like working a pretty unsatisfying life at this time. A lot series of horrible dead end jobs, repeated failed business schemes, and you get the feeling he was taking that out on his family as well. But he also took it out on everyone around him. At one of these dead end jobs, Bill got into an argument with his boss and punched through a plate glass window to try and strangle him. So he is not a not a not a planner. This point, like he really is just flying by the seat of his pants at every turn. Yeah, punching through a plate glass window is not something you do if you're thinking a lot about your violence. So he was let go from that job, and obviously money was always tight because Bill repeatedly got fired from jobs for being a violent ***** ** ****. Yeah. And also, he couldn't stop from getting the women that he was with pregnant. So he got Sally pregnant, like, you know, pretty much as soon as they get married. Their daughter. Yeah. Competent semen, their daughter Jessica, again, like, we don't know how many kids he had. Yeah. Sally later recalled, quote, he was the most loving, attentive dad. He'd play with Jessica for hours. He seemed so happy. But then, just like that, he'd go off, start yelling. I blamed it on the drinking, but it was more than that. It was like he became possessed, not in control of himself. I tense up every time he came into the room. One night when Jessica was little, we went to Chuckie cheeses. Bill was drinking. He got abusive calling me names. I mean, that is something that happens at Chuck e cheese. I mean, no. What? No what? No one's going to be sober. I would. I would be more worried about. No, wait, I don't wanna make that reference to. That's bad. I was going to joke. Like, still has birthday parties at Chucky cheeses. No one is sober and no one is getting along. Yeah. No, no one should get along. I don't know. I don't want to. This story goes in a bad place, so I don't want to make the the drinking jokes about Chucky cheeses that normally, like, are a real positive part of my life. I love. I love talking about what a bad place Chuckie cheeses is. That this this story is real dark cars is great. This is one of the worst Chuck e cheese stories I've ever heard. And that's saying something. Yeah, Bill was drinking. He got really abusive calling me names. I told him I'd had enough to stop the car, let us out. I was holding Jess on my lap. We didn't deal with seatbelts like today. I opened the door to go when Bill turned and pushed me and Jess out of the car with his artificial leg. It was like getting hit by a four by four. We went flying. I was OK. But then I looked and Jesse's tiny face was all cut up, so he kicks his wife. An infant daughter out of a moving vehicle after getting drunk at Chucky cheeses. Jesus Christ. This is where they have a 2 drink cap now. First of this bill Cooper. That's the Bill Cooper rule of Chuck E cheeses. That is so. That is very upsetting and very horrible. Bad. It's really bad. And you're not the first time that has happened at a Chuck e cheese. Not the 50th time that's happened at a Chuck E cheese. No, no. For reasons that are probably too depressing to think about, Sally didn't leave for good after that. She set up a meeting. Between her, bill and their pastor to try to talk things out and the subject of the conversation quickly turned to Vietnam. And Bill, as soon as like, the pastor, kind of started asking him questions about his service, bill got violently angry. He started screaming and became so incensed that Sally's pastor had to call the VA to come and pick him up. So the couple splits in like 1982 and during this time, Bill's going to Long Beach College and trying to make use of his GI Bill and he spends a lot of time there. Like this is kind of the first time in the early 80s after his. Is this marriage ex breaks apart where he starts to kind of deal with his PTSD by writing about it? So he he he he does like essays and stuff about what like he and other veterans are kind of experiencing. One of his essays in this. Most people who were doing at that time he does to an extent try to process his trauma. He writes an essay titled Vietnam are we still suffering casualties 10 years later? And in it he wrote quote on the campus of Long Beach City College. Spectre reaps its harvest, gastly its stocks, the future of those who know its past, any of us who have stood against it and survived. The demon strikes down dreams, educations, and even mines. It is insidious in nature and rides upon an undercurrent of memories, ignorance, and fear. It is not dead, as many believe, nor is it a figment of the imagination. It is as real, as real as the earth we walk upon. He's writing about his PTSD, and he's right. Yeah, writing pretty well about it, actually. Like, Bill's not a bad writer. And he hasn't. No. And he one of the interesting things that happens during this time is he meets a young Vietnamese refugee at Long Beach College and gets to, like, interview her. And he has this realization that, like, when he was at the way he later described is like he realized that if he countered this woman when she was a young girl in Vietnam, he probably would have shot her. And this is, like, really ******. So like bills, you can't over exaggerate how much Vietnam ***** this man up, how much PTSD. Yeah. Which is which is, you know, like. Story for a lot of people. Ohh yeah. It's just, yeah. And you know, to be fair, a lot of people who don't kick their wife and infant child out of a moving car, so like, yeah, not try. Yeah, certainty that you will then do that. Yeah, but yeah, it it's a rough like Bill is. And this will become really appropriate because of the man he grows into. Bill is like the ******* poster child for how badly American imperialism ***** up young men. The young men who are asked to enforce it levels too, of like how American imperialism ***** you up. How like PTSD ***** you up. How like the expectation based on like media and like expectations versus reality. **** you up. There's no. There's no limit on ways that this guy's ****** ** your case study a lot of lessons in the story of Bill Cooper. So Bill gets married again in 1986, and that worked out about as well as you'd expect. By the tail end of the Reagan years, he had nearly two basketball teams have failed marriages in their rear window ahead, full of bad memories and no real prospect for work. The future looked bleak. Yeah. So the future looked bleak for Bill. But then, in 1988, Jamie, there came a single shaft of brilliant sunlight. Bill Cooper discovered the Internet. I know, I know. The worst thing that could have happened to this man. Worst thing. The ohhh. No confirmation of the noble thought he's ever had in his life. Yeah, it's it's it's unfortunate that things that way. Yeah, he was. Bill Cooper was one of the very first people on the Internet. Yeah, like one of the very first human beings to really get into it. In the late 1980s, Internet was a real different beast than the modern one. There was nothing that really worked. Like social media, but there were BBS, which were essentially forums. So if you remember what forums were, you can, if you can, think back to a time before Facebook Bill's kind of into that sort of thing, and he he quickly discovers Paranet, which was dedicated to the paranormal, particularly UFO's and. Yeah, so Bill gets super ******* into UFO's and into this community of, like, UFO nerds and, like, really, the first online community of UFO nerds that exists. Yeah. This is such early Internet ****. It's like every annoying couple in their 40s met on an Internet forum. Yeah, just yeah, exactly. Yeah. Though legally as well, that's in the Constitution. So Mark Jacobson suggests that flying saucers and sort of like, belief in UFO's was, quote, the first populist truther issue the first time. The authorities denied something that a large percentage of the population believed to be true, and this is probably accurate in a culture of conspiracy scholar Michael Barkun, notes quote within a few months of the first modern claim of a flying saucer sighting in 1947, polls showed that 90% of the population had heard of them. By 1966, that figure had risen to 96%, and more importantly, 46% of all Americans believed UFO's actually existed. More than a decade later, in 1978, thirty percent of college graduates. Believe they existed. At that time, the number of Americans who believed UFOs were real reached its highest level, 57%. Now wow. By 1990, the number of UFO True believers had actually fallen to about 47%, and it was still at around that level six years later. And this suggests that the Internet somewhat didn't so much allow for the spread of a belief in UFO's as it did help to make those beliefs kind of more durable by building communities for people like Bill to explore and expand on existing theories. And this allowed for. Very different kinds of conspiracy theories to merge. For example, there always been stories about an alien crash landing in Roswell since, like, 1947. And there's also been conspiracy theories theorists who believe that JFK had been murdered by someone besides the widely accepted culprit, who is, of course, Bernard Sanders. Bernard Sanders, yeah, with the compost meatloaf, yeah, yeah. And then starting in the mid 1980s, there was majestic 12 and in brief, majestic 12 conspiracy theory purported to be a set of briefing. Documents for the incoming newly elected president informing him of the existence of a secret organization of the world's dozen most powerful people. MJ 12 is like the first hidden global government conspiracy theory. And it was formed in the wake of the Roswell land. Like this. This hidden global government was supposedly had been formed in the wake of the Roswell landings to deal with the newfound existence of aliens. Now, the initial claims of the MJ 12 conspiracy theory were rather basic because this document actually was only like, I think, a dozen pages or something. But once MJ 12 hit the Internet in the late 1980s, a funny thing started to happen. Conspiracy theorists began grafting their pet conspiracy theories on to MJ 12, writing in the JFK assassination in the Tonkin Gulf. Incident, which, you know, was the spark behind the Vietnam War and a bunch of other shady stuff into the machinations of the Majestic 12. Now, the most successful of these conspiracy fan fiction authors was a fellow named John Lear, the son of a of the guy who created the Lear jet. Lear's theory was that the leaders of the US had made a devil's bargain with aliens back in the 1960s to hand over American citizens and cattle to them for mutilation and experimentation in exchange for technology. But the aliens? Yeah, yeah, this is this is. The X-Files, right? Like, this is actually like, this is literally what the like John Lear and then the work that Bill Cooper does with Lear is the inspiration for all of The X-Files. Creedence Clearwater Revival, playing in the background of this devil's deal with the aliens is, did I feel like I'm there? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Lear, Lear and Cooper, once they got together, would kind of argue that actually the Majestic 12 were had. We're kind of getting like, **** grab grifted by the aliens that, like, the technology they were getting wasn't very good. And the aliens. They're way more brutal with their abductions than they were supposed to be. And so, like, the conspiracy evolves under Lear into, like, claiming that the allies and the military had balked at this, this, like, agreement with the aliens. And that was what led to the creation of the Strategic Defense initiative, Reagan's Star Wars missile program. Sure. I'm doing this. This this is. Yeah. Sense to me what's happening is the Internet is is making conspiracy theories had largely been sort of spread by kind of, you know, there'd be some underground. Newsletters and stuff. But also people just kind of spread these, these fake documents that were purporting to be, like, the. And this is, like, throughout the 80s, these documents that were claimed to be like, you know, evidence of 1 conspiracy or another. And the Internet brings all starts to bring all this **** together. So, like, all these, like, take your, take your cork, take it from your corkboard and really start to compare some ideas. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna quote from the book a culture of conspiracy on sort of what hat, like, the impact of of John Lears, what's called the Lear statement, which is like. Is personal theory about MJ 12. The leader statement is brief, only seven printed pages, but dizzying in its claims. It elevates MJ 12 to a conspiratorial position nowhere hinted at in the original papers themselves, and implies a web of subsidiary conspiracies to silence the news media with that and the academic community, and to mislead the NFL community as well. According to Leer ufologist, William Moore, the figure most identified with the MJ 12 papers, was probably himself a disinformation agent in the hire of MJ 12. Do you you also start to see like? What's essentially like this big over conspiracy that's being created? Like, it's not just, it's not just aliens exist. It's not just there's a secret world government. It's not just JFK was killed, you know, by the CIA or whoever. It's like all of these things are part of this massive, branching, impossibly influential conspiracy. What you're seeing is the precursor for the kind of conspiracy that qanon is, right. Like this is when that first starts happening and Bill Cooper is one of the guys on the ground making it happen. He's one of the most. Influential people in this early little online community. And, you know, Bill had kind of just started by sharing tales of of aliens and stuff in paranet. But he very quickly graduated into, like, writing about leers work and adding conspiracies to it. And Lear and Cooper soon, like, become friends and start talking and start working together on, like, expanding kind of people's idea of what a conspiracy could be. And here's how taken away it it'll be less. So in just a second, Cooper's biographer actually interviewed Lear. Pretty recently, and Lear was very old at the time. But here's how Lear described the two men's early friendship. I heard there was this guy on Paranet who was supporting what I said, Bill Cooper. He was writing into the bulletin board saying he'd worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence and see this incredible amount of top secret material and could vouch for word for word 50% of what I said. Leeran Cooper spent a lot of time together through 1988 and 1990. I liked him from the beginning, there, recalled. He was smart and he had a good sense of humor and amazing memory. He also could drink me under the table, which wasn't so easy to do back then. When I saw him put away 1/5 of Scotch before lunchtime, I knew he was my kind of guy. Maybe off on something else? That was bill. One minute he'd be wrapping himself in the flag, standing up and reciting parts of the Constitution verbatim. Then he'd be like a beatnik at a jazz club. Hey, daddy. O hey daddy O. He might have pulled a gun on me three or four times. Then again, I pulled a gun on him too. OK, so, so just to summarize, he's like, I knew this guy. We were going to be friends when I found out he was very sick in his head and that there was little hope that he was going to seek out help or get any support from someone in his life. I was all about this and I thought it was really cool because I shared these same issues because I have the same problem. Wow. We both had violent mood swings and pulled firearms on each other regularly. That's how we have interest in addressing this. No. Therefore we're gonna be good friends. Soon Bill Cooper developed his own hypothesis based off of Lee's theory about global elites trading human souls for alien technology and excited online rants. Bill would claim to have access to top secret information that at least 16 alien craft had crashed and been found by the US government, 65 aliens had been recovered dead and one had been recovered alive, but was always very specific in these kind of posts, according to Mark Jacobson quote, Cooper's rewrite of leaders hypothesis added new items like a particle beam weapon and machinery. They're cloning and synthetic genetic duplication of humans to the shopping list of leaders. Unholy tech for flesh deal. He also tweaked the timeline of government alien interaction. Now there were three separate meetings, the most significant being the signing of the formal agreement, which took place on February 10th, 1954, and MURROCK, now Edwards Air Force Base near Lancaster, CA. The historic event had been planned in advance and the details of the treaty had been agreed upon, Cooper writes in the secret government. President Eisenhower had been vacationing nearby Palm Springs when he was spirited away to the base. The pretext that he had an appointment with his dentist who happened to be Doctor Tim Tote Leary, father of the LSD Guru Timothy Leary, which of course would make it into later conspiracy theories. But is true OK? Yeah. Yeah. So it's not hard to see why bills alternate version of history played well with very online people. It's fun. Yeah. And and Bill wasn't content with just being a giant among the very first. And that's very saddest conspiracy nerds in the Internet 1980 kind of fun. Everything is connected. Time to it that people online love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he get, he starts to get kind of famous within this community for that. And he's soon he's speaking at like conventions and stuff UFO conventions all around. Like he's kind of in demand by later making Angel Fire fan sites. Yeah. And in 1989, Bill decides he's going to take things a step further because he doesn't want to just be limited to the Internet. So he prints out 535 copies of all of his findings on extraterrestrials, and he sends out copies to every member of the US House and Senate. And he'd written so much like these documents he was sending everyone in Congress were so extensive that the whole endeavor cost $27,000. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. What? Yeah. Hey, in like 1989 nineteen 89 money, yeah. OK, yeah, he's dedicated. His guides for Congress included a helpful taxonomic guide to all the different alien species out in the Galaxy, including two different kinds of grey aliens and the Draco Mothman. Now, yeah, that's what I heard too. Modran, Draco, let's not, let's not make fun of Mothman here, OK? Ohh, mothmen. OK. Now, Bill, obviously hadn't seen anything like these creatures in person and. But he was, you know, at this point, claiming openly, you know, he'd been claiming for years to his friends of all the secret seed seen in that Admiral's cabinet. And now he starts, like, justifying, like, this is how I learned about all these aliens is from the cabinet. This is very wise cabinet. Yeah. That that Admiral really kept a lot of different **** just under his desk. And apparently Bill had a ton of time to really read it and take it in and, you know, well, you know, you know, a lot of three martini lunches happen happening in the Admiralty back then, you know? You sure? Sure. Yeah, sure. So. Yeah. So Bill sends all this off to Congress, along with an offer to undergo hypnotic regression to convince Congress he was the real deal. No one took him up on the author. But cooter. Yeah, just let me hypnotize you. I can convince you my ideas are good. No, you just have to. You have to hypnotize me and take me back to the past. Oh, and then I will give you the. Oh, I see what he's doing. OK, watching his 30 different episodes of The X-Files For more information on hypnotic regression. I guess so, yeah. And then nobody at Congress ever gets back to Bill. But he later will write that at least sending all of this nonsense out to them had, quote prevented the government from arresting or harming me, and he moved by them would be interpreted as total confirmation of everything that I had revealed. Lot of faith to heaven, this evil government. Yeah. So, luckily for Bill, the late 1980s saw the meteoric rise in popularity of the UFO movement, and bill became one of its first celebrities. He started making money selling his different writings on extraterrestrials, and he was invited to speak at the Mutual UFO Network MUFON Symposium in 1989. OK, now the MUFON symposium started with disaster when on Saturday evening, an MJ 12 expert named William Moore admitted that he'd colluded with an Air Force. Office of Special Investigations employee to spread false information to UFO researchers, which is exactly what like Lear and Bill Cooper had been claiming. But unfortunately, Moore admitted to that some of the disinformation he'd spread was like one of the pieces of fake, you know, leaked government documents that Bill had used as a major source in his own work. Mark Jacobson writes quote this was particularly troubling for the Lear Cooper contingent, since Lear had included a fair amount of this work in his hypothesis and brought the galling. Possibility that much of the MJ 12 story that revealed Washington malfeasance was itself part of a government directed disinformation program. Following more speech, Cooper ended up at Lear's home in a rage. He was roaring drunk, screaming that he'd been set up and demanding to know who I was really working for, Lear recalled. That was one of those times I thought he might kill me. By the next day, Cooper had calmed down. Who cared what million William Moore said. Anyway? The man was a liar, a fake less than a pawn in a larger game. The original MJ12 papers were bogus, Cooper said. A pile of crap designed to lead you right through the Rose Garden. The truth, the real truth, the one he learned while looking through Admiral Clarey's cabinet was still out there, ready to be told so after this all happens at his first really big speech at Muffins, Bill gets on stage and he delivers a captivating lecture that relied very heavily on his own experiences, stumbling upon top secret information while working for the Navy. And I'm going to play you a little segment of that right now. Jamie, please. That's what I sent you, Jamie. Over text. Yeah. And this will give you an idea of kind of where Bill is in terms of a pitch man, how he is it delivering his? Information at kind of the start of his career because he's not really on the radio yet. OK so he's still he's still finding his voice. He's still finding his voice is finding his voice. Hey, you know, we've all been there or counts that there were 4. I saw pictures of 3 of those dead. Alien bodies in a report. Called Project Grudge which also included material from a report called Blue Book Report Number 13. So I'm not sure whether there were three or four. I saw photographs of three of those bodies for sure. Really, it doesn't make any difference if there was one or 50. The important thing is that it occurred and that there were dead alien bodies that were not of this world. OK? I you know, he does kind of have the energy of a Reddit user who is who is on stage for the first time. Yeah, but it sounds like he course corrects this later in his life. He sure does. But Part 2, we'll hear a lot of it being thrown out. There's ideas being thrown out and a decent shirt. Yeah. And a decent shirt. So yeah, one of the things that is from that is that, like, what Bill saying is obviously absurd, but he's smart enough not to dwell on any, like one piece of data for long. Very matter of fact, the way it's delivered. Yeah. Yeah. And and one of the things that Bill really starts to do so like UFO conspiracy theories said for most of the time that existed, just kind of been this theory that, like, there's aliens out there and the government doesn't want you to know about them. Bill finds a way to really connect UFO conspiracy theories to people in a much more kind of emotional level. Because you know, by this point the, the, the late 1980s, everyone's pretty aware that things have started to go wrong since World War Two. Like most Americans are. Like, this doesn't seem like the path we were supposed to be on. And Bill kind of is the first guy to be like, what if we just blame it all on aliens? Like what? What if that's the reason things went wrong? They're seeking a shortcut. So I have come up with a great one. It is interesting too, just even like listening to how he talks of how he seems to be kind of using this like military way of carrying himself to like, have a level of authority. It's not really the same kind of conspiracy theorist carrying oneself that you see now. It's very, it's not like. Media personality. It's like a you see sounds like a military person saying he does weirdest **** I've ever heard. Yeah, and and he yeah. Another quote from that speech where he kind of goes into detail about. How the aliens had ****** things up for America I think is salient to end on for this episode. Quote without the aliens you can't make sense of anything that's happened in this country for the past 44 years. But the aliens in the middle and you've got all the answers. Your own government is selling your children drugs and you don't seem to care. Your own government has given away the power of the people and you don't seem to care. There is an apathy that is running rampant in this country that is deadly. Whether or not there are aliens, we are now truly a nation of sheep. And ladies and gentlemen, I assure you sheep are always led to the slaughter. It's here. I should note that Bill Cooper is probably the man who invented the word sheeple. Wow. Yeah, he's the sheeple guy. Yeah, he's certainly popularized it. If you saw about any of what he said with a absurd devotion to capitalism, I agree with it. Well, that's just about aliens with devotion to capitalism. You're on to something. Because one of the things that I think separates Bill from guys like Alex Jones is I don't think Bill was primarily a grifter. I think Bill was a guy who, for all of his many, many horrific flaws, like. Recognize that things were really ****** ** and that he created this because he was a liar and a fabulous he had. He created this and because he was kind of like, fundamentally mentally incapable of really admitting what had gone wrong. He creates this whole schema to justify or to to explain to people who don't want to admit what the actual problem is why things are ****** ** in America. And that's really like the genesis. That's why conspiracy is so ******* popular today. In large part is because things are ****** **. Everybody knows it, and a lot of us are desperate to not stare the real problem in the face. And Bill Cooper was the first guy to really get good at providing people with something that would let them not stare. The real problem in the face. And I don't know the extent to which we'll get into this a little tomorrow or on in Part 2. I don't know the extent to which Bill knew what he was doing. I don't know the. There's definitely a part of him that was a pitch man and a con artist, and there's a part of him that I think was like a patriot who was legitimately traumatized by how ****** ** he watched his country become. I don't really know, but it seems like both things are kind of going on. He truly is like suffering of a lot of definitely suffering. Yeah, he's definitely suffering. He's definitely has some mental illness issues, and I can't wait to hear what he does next. Well, Jamie, first you're going to have to tell us where they can. Mind you next so that you can. Ooh, OK well, sure you can. Well, you can follow me on Twitter if this never feels right. You can follow me on Twitter. You can listen to my podcast my year in Mensa, which there will be. I think there will be another episode of and and some developments in in the near future. And you can listen to the Bechdel cast every Thursday feminist movie podcast. And yeah. All right. And you can find me somewhere. No one, no one's. No one's ever learned how, though. So. You can follow him at irate, OK on Twitter. He doesn't believe in Instagram. I don't believe in Instagram now or or or the Tik toks what the kids are doing. Alright. I think you would be really good at Tik T.O.K. Robert. You would ******* love Tik T.O.K. It's a bunch of angry teenagers. You were saying **** the patriarchy. It's very. You would love it and you would be good at it. Yeah, I recommend it. I don't know. I absolutely not. Unless you makes me feel 500 years old you're looking for, you know what makes me feel old? Flawless skin. Tick tock. If you're looking for a teenager to tell you. That your parents are racist Tik T.O.K. That's what you're looking for, Kellyanne Conway's daughter. Yes, being on the right side of history, Tik T.O.K. Already feel for teenagers that are trying to make it so that there's empty seats at Trump rallies. Also, tick tock tick tocks. Are you sponsor? No, I'm kidding. I'm I'm. I'm. I'm so tired even thinking about Tik T.O.K. I'm so tired thinking about young people in general. All right. All right, old guy, the podcast over. Yep. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's breaker handle the hosting creation distribution. And monetization of your podcast go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. 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