This is an advertisement for now, TV, Sky Cinema and Entertainment Press and their class, no line up for this February. No TV is a streaming service. It's my favorite streaming service. And they have some hot content lined up for February that my tongue is hanging out for. In particular, I am really looking forward to a series called zero zero zero that is on the entertainment press and it's going to be available from the 4th of February. Now, why am I interested in this zero zero zero?

Because I haven't seen it. Two reasons. First of all. It's directed by the person who directed Gamarra, I love Gamarra, one of my favorite box sets, and it stars Gabriel Byrne and I think I'm just a Gabriel Bernstine. I just love Gabriel Byrne. Why do I love Gabriel Byrne? He's like he's like the physical embodiment of the smell of aftershave, and that's all that's the only way I can describe it. And it's like when you're a child and your dad walks past, are someone else's dad walks past and they leave behind them this trail in the ether of men's aftershave.

And you smell it. Gabriel Byrne is that he Reppert he's that he's the physical embodiment of the waft of of grown man's aftershave when you're a child. I can't explain it, but it's what I like about Gabriel Byrne. So I'm going to be watching zero zero zero on the entertainment pass and then on the TV Sky Cinema Pass, they've got the Tarantino collection, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill one and two. Once upon a time in Hollywood, Django Unchained.

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All right. OK. Get your seven day free trial. No. Of no TV, just look it up on the Internet, the entertainment pass and the Sky Cinema Pass. Boler boss, who costarred Buskers Welcome to The Blind by podcast. Thank you for the magnificent feedback to last week's podcast, which was. It was a long one about pint of Guinness, about the iconography of pint of Guinness. I like John Donat. It was called crack.

It was very enjoyable. If you're a brand new listener, go back and listen to some previous podcasts. I always suggest that. And if you're a regular listener, you know the crack. What is the crack this week? I have a very special treat, a very special treat. And it's something that I've been looking forward to for a long time because I'm going to have a chat with. Someone or someone, I really look up to a documentary maker by the name of Adam Curtis, I was going to interview Adam before us nearly this time last year.

I had a live gig in London which was sold out, which which I canceled. I pulled out because of the coronaviruses. It didn't feel safe. So I pulled the gig and Adam was going to be my guest. What can I say about the work of Adam Curtis? He's my favorite documentary filmmaker himself. And Werner Herzog would be my two favorite and. Adams documentaries in particular for me, what I thoroughly enjoy, a documentary called The Century of the Self Bitter, like hyper normalization.

He makes these they're hard to pin down and they're hard to describe. He uses a mixture of journalism, music and archive footage and most importantly, storytelling to make these absolutely captivating and interesting documentaries.

And it's fair to say as well that he's like the originator of the heartache. Like when I do a hot take on my podcast, what I'm kind of chasing is, is that Adam Cartus VIPR when you're watching a documentary and he'll make connections between two things, or he'll find a piece of information that you're kind of going, wow, I can't believe I didn't know that. And he constructs these he constructs really interesting arguments and connects unconnected things and uses storytelling.

He uses storytelling by which I mean set up conflict resolution, and he's an entertainment to create these documentaries that will really stick with you and will really get you thinking about the world and whatever is documentaries about. They're about everything, history, politics, sociology. But ultimately, what he's always trying to do with his documentaries, I think is trying to describe the feeling of now. And he's been making documentaries since the 80s. But at all times he's trying to figure out where are we right now, what what is the zeitgeist and the feeling of now?

And that's always something that's hard to pinpoint. But Adam does a good job of describing it. So you kind of get your head around where the world is at and as the world gets more and more complex and bizarre. Adam, as always, there was a documentary to make you go, I don't fully understand things, but have a bit of a better fuckin of a better grasp of what's going on right now. At least it's also it's a great honor to have him on the fucking podcast, too, because Adam doesn't do a lot of interviews.

He's a veteran, so he only does the interviews he wants to do. And the reason is on this one, I got to know, Adam, over the years, a few podcasts back, I spoke about my my dear departed friend, David Johnson, who was a promoter, a show promoter who I worked with in the U.K. who passed away recently. And he was friends with Adam Cartus. So Adam used to come to rubberband its shows in fucking Soho.

When I was gigging in Soho, like 2011 2012. Adam used to come to the shows because he was friends with my friend David Johnston, who was my promoter. And I used to have pints with Adam after the gig. And I didn't I didn't cop in my head because I knew Adam's documentaries, but because he doesn't appear in them, it's just his voice. I didn't know that, like the Adam who I was having a chat with and having a pint, which was the same fella on the documentary, because why would I make that?

Why would I make that connection between strange? And then, like a few months later, David Johnson says to me, oh, yeah, Adam Curtis, he makes these documentaries, you should check him out. And I'm like, all fuck. That's who I've been having pints with this whole time him. So I got to socialize with Adam a couple of times over in London. And he's an absolute lovely fellow gentleman, incredibly interesting person. And he's also been really supportive of me.

And because he works in BBC, really supportive of me and BBC when I started making my documentaries. Blind by undestroyed, which you can see on the BBC player, but when I made my first pilots like Adam made sure to pass it around within the because it has him within the BBC, he'd be a legend in the BBC, obviously. So he made a point to just pass that around to people and saying, you got to check out this fellow blind boy in his new documentary.

And that was a huge helped me. So Adam has a brand new documentary coming out called Can't Get You Out of My Head. And it's on the BBC player on February 11th, which is when the fuck is February 11th? It's this Thursday them and tomorrow, so on the BBC I player his new documentary series, Can't Get You Out of My Head, is airing an Adam sent me this documentary. He sent me the early edits of it like a month ago to get a look at it and to give to give feedback on it, which I'm like, holy fuck.

Adam Curtis is sending me his documentaries to give him fucking feedback. Couldn't believe it, but they're fantastic. They're really, really good. They're it's a seven part documentary. I believe it's it's hard to describe. A lot of Adam's documentaries are hard to describe. The hard to pin down. The only thing I can say is, like, you have to watch it. It's a maze. And trust me, that's what I always say with Adam's documentaries, it's billed as an emotional history of the modern world and what Adam always does with his documentaries.

Like I said, he's good as trying to describe the current cycliste to describe the feeling of nowness. He's great at doing that. It covers China, Russia, the rise of artificial intelligence. It's about individualism versus collectivism. It's about conspiracy theories. It's everything, if you like my podcast, you'll definitely like this documentary because there's a lot of parallels. We're interested in a lot of the same things. So you'll really, really enjoy it. Can't get you out of my head.

It's called and it's on the BBC player, February 11th. And it probably stay up indefinitely and check out his other documentaries, check out anything that Adam Curtis has made and Adam Curtis documentary. But in particular, Peter, like our hyper nominated normalization, they are also there. They're like three hours long. They're fucking incredible. They're both available on the BBC player. I mean, Bitter Lake in particular, it's part documentary, part fucking art like you'd see in a gallery.

Like, he'll have a seven minute scene and just music and images to create an emotion, you know, he does things that other documentary makers don't do and he also borrows from the language of modern art. Parts of Adam Curtis's documentary documentaries feel as if they should be installation pieces in a gallery. It uses that language, you know, so they really are phenomenal. Like, I can't watch fucking Adam Kurtz's documentary. Trust me, if you like this podcast, you will adore them.

They're fantastic. So I got to I got to have a chat with Adam and I got to be a little bit nerdy and ask him about his process and how he makes things and how he goes about it. But I hope you enjoy it. I hope you enjoy the chat. I hope you enjoy it. And I'm really excited to show this to you, because this is someone I really, really admire your art. Here we go. I'm a huge fan of your documentaries.

I've been a fan of your documentaries for since about 2010 and your documentaries.

They allowed me to how to explain this. I found out who I was as an artist.

Because of watching your documentaries, as in the way that you see something I always struggled with was I had this love of information and I wanted to know how can I communicate my love of information, but in a way that also feels creative. And your stuff showed me how to do that, how to communicate ideas to people, but to include narrative and to include sights and sounds and music.

And what has always intrigued me about your stuff is.

Like, do you consider your documentaries to be journalism or is it entertainment and like what are the boundaries there?

Well, I got to be honest, as I was growing up in television, I had exactly the same feeling as you did, is that I really loved information. I love stories. I love theories about the world.

But I looked around at the work stuff that was being done when I was in the BBC and elsewhere, and I just thought it was so boring.

I mean, really, you're not I mean, it just it was almost like they didn't really want people to watch or they or they only wanted a certain type of person to watch who knew the rules and the boundaries of that kind of thing. And I just I'd grown up like I think a lot of my generation liking music, liking films and talked about music, talked about films we liked and talked about culture. And I just thought, well, I suppose instinctively, why can't you put the two together?

I mean, yeah, it doesn't it's not entertainment in a certain inverted commas.

A lot of that that generation of journalists would use entertainment in a scathing way.

Disparaging. Yeah, totally.

And I just think that's that's just sort of wrong that you that there is there is you do not dilute the information through making it really intriguing and emotionally involving you just do that. And in many ways you make it more approachable, less threatening, less patronizing.

And in a way, you also open up to people who would normally never listen to those sort of posh programs at all.

And I'm not being it's democratizing, democratizing information. Yes, it is democratizing information. I mean, it's just really it's it. And since I was working the BBC, I also thought that's the sort of thing the BBC should be doing.

And also the other thing is I really enjoyed doing it because I could find a way of putting the songs. I liked him, bits of music I liked and I could be silly, which I like doing because I noticed that no journalism was silly and I just had fun. I mean, it was also sometimes agonizing and difficult, but it was I don't know, it just felt right. And and you and I just think I have this theory that a lot of people I knew because I grew up in the suburbs in Kent.

And I knew that a lot of people who were probably the first generation in their families to either go to a college, a polytechnic or university were really clever, really clever.

There was a sort of wave of cleverness and confidence beginning to come out of the suburbs, probably in the wake of education reform.

So something I'm not sure why, but they were uncertain. They were intimidated by that sort of how do you describe it?

Sort of a metropolitan snippiness, if you might put it that way, that that you could that they were clever but intimidated by it, by trying to when they want to show their cleverness.

And I just wanted to make films for me. Really, I was like that. Just just.

Do you feel sometimes that journalists will make shit for other journalists are like it's a problem I see with with academia, like I was complaining about.

Sometimes I listen to a podcast and the podcast could be about history. And I'm really, really excited. I'm finding this recently, actually, because it seems to be more of an English thing. I want to I want to learn loads about the Anglo-Saxon because I'm only recently getting interested in the Anglo-Saxon.

And when I go to Podcast's to learn about it, the title of the podcast seems really interesting. And then it's for academics. Yeah. Speaking to each other and they seem to just want to impress each other rather than communicate their knowledge to the uninitiated listener. And then I don't give a fuck about it because I don't want to hear for academics talking in a language only they understand.

You know, you'll find as a journalist, I have a lot of problems. Academics. I mean, they're academics I know, who are really great and wonderful.

But I have a theory that I think it's more of a problem than just that. It's that a lot of the people who are in the professions that used to have a status and importance because they told us what was what in the world, don't really know what's going on any longer.

And I think that started somewhere in the 1980s when they discovered because they tend to be liberals, that the politics of the time and power of the time was moving away from them. And they retreated into can only put it in a snippiness, a sort of a distance and a slight chilliness in the way they do with material. And I I think it's a smokescreen to disguise the fact that they don't really know what's going on.

I mean, of to be honest, none of us really know what's going on.

Yeah, but good journalism tries to get out there. It makes it clear that it doesn't fully know what's going on, but it makes a really good attempt to try and do it because it's got the time and the money to do that rather than retreating into a language. And it's more than that.

It's such a slight distance that I chilliness from the subject, which puts you off, I feel, because for me, one of the good things I find about your work is if I, if I if I'm if I'm meeting somebody, if I'm having a pint and I'm telling somebody to watch and Adam Cartus documentary, what I find really good is I find it difficult to explain in a good way.

I think it's what I always say is you just have to watch it. I can't I can't tell you why it is the way it's not just a documentary. You just have to watch it. And then they do watch it and they get back to me and they say, oh, I know what you mean. I understand now.

And what your documentaries to what you just described there about I mean, nobody knows what's going on. It's it's always sometimes it's easy. To pinpoint a site, Gaist, 10 years on, it's it's now when I look back at 2000, we say and 9/11, I can comfortably get a flavor and a sound and a sense for that period. And I can fit comfortably into this narrative because I have distance. But when I try and do that right now, that gets really, really confusing.

And in that confusion is an anxiety. And your films, because you deal with the you always deal with what right now the feeling and emotion of right now. And when I come away from your documentaries, I get a feeling of I have a language to at least I'm in the territory of understanding what's happening right now. And that now alleviates my existential anxiety a little bit.

Thank you. I think what I try and do is two things I try and do journalism that attempts to explain as best I can what has led to now, whether it be terrorism or economics.

But but I think you probably instinctively I mean, I don't fully and I don't think it completely through, but I think you're right because I am trying to use music and film in an imaginative way as well to create a mood.

I also try and in a way portray the mood of now, because I think that's a very interesting kind of modern journalism.

If you live in an age like we do at the moment in which people's feelings are very much at the forefront of everything in life, I mean, it's the age of individualism. What we feel is is seen as very important both in consumerism, but also in politics as well.

Then in a way, explaining portraying how people are feeling is as important in journalism, as portraying us as describing the facts. And if you can somehow put the two together, which I think is what I try and do, then I think that's a sort of modern kind of journalism which touches on the way people are feeling at that moment, which I think is really good.

I mean, I think in the past, in other societies, there was a different kind of journalism, which was much more what they were called patrician.

They would tell you what's real. But that was at an age when people expected to be told what's what. Now, in the age of individualism, people expect to figure things out for themselves. And I think you have to respect that. And I try and respect that, but try and create a mood that allows people to think things out.

I don't know. I can't expect any more than that.

And I'd like to know about your process because your process really intrigues me and. Like you, you use B rolls of I don't know how broad the right word, the way that you find footage, you find news footage that a cameraman would have shot. But I know that it meant you're going through hours and hours and hours of footage to find the right little poignant moment.

I mean, what what what is your process looked like from the most recent series that's coming out this week? Can't get you out of my head, which I've seen all seven episodes of. And it's fantastic. I absolutely loved it. But it's huge.

It's massive. It's really, really big. And you have a number of different teams in there. And how how do you begin that process? What's your first thing that you do when you get I do you get a central thesis idea or is is your process process based? You don't know. You're kind of searching. And in that searching, the narrative comes about it's it's a process.

I start with a number of things.

I start with stories I like because, you know, I'm a journalist and I like stories and I find stories about people's lives and people's experiences really interesting.

And I start with that and I research those. And what I would then tend to probably do is go and research footage, which sort of relates to them.

But but instead of going, oh, I must have that. I must have that. And then that's done. I just let my eye and mind wander through the archive. I just I mean, the great thing is, what does that process like?

Like, are you sitting in in a BBC office and like how many people are on your team to make?

When I'm doing the thing, I just wonder what. That's me.

Is it just you? And did you do you edit the thing yourself?

And like I edited it myself, I've never understood why people don't themselves. It's like being a journalist and letting someone else write the stuff.

You know, you're often not fucking allowed. I'd love to be able to edit it myself. I'm simply not allowed. I know this quite well. I mean, you're so you're so lucky in that respect to to because I'd be the exact same if I was like my preferred medium at the moment is podcasting. And the reason I prefer podcasting is I'm I'm the artist. I have full control over how I edited and how I'd like it to be. And one of the critiques I have of working in television, which I've been working for ten years, I have an idea at the start and then I bring this idea to a commissioner and then several other people get involved.

And then by the time the end piece is there, I'm simply left with a diluted version of my own idea and something I'm not fully happy with. And I never understand why TV wants me to do that. And I'm so kind of I'm envious of your process because you get to you get to tell everyone to fuck off and just say, this is what I'm doing and deal with it when it's finished.

The key thing is never be a presenter. Ever be the producer. I'm a producer.

Don't. But you consider yourself a presenter because your voice is honest. I know my voice is on it, but I'm not the presenter. I'm the producer.

And if you're a producer working in television, you are the person who I mean, of course, you have to respect the hierarchy of power. You have to do follow all the legal and compliance rules.

But but you are seen in a different way. It's not what I am. And that has given me much more freedom and have if I was if you were a presenter, you are given producers who are there to help you do it, which leads to lots of different voices.

I mean, I got other people coming in at a later stage to help me. I have an extremely good executive producer. I have a wonderful producer.

I have researchers know. I know. Well, because really, I mean, the deal I've done with the BBC is that these things don't cost very much money.

Yeah. In return for the horrific pandemic television, I get a lot of time to research proper time.

And that is just and to look at footage and that that's the deal and that's the way it goes. In answer to your question about how I do it, is the great thing about footage now is it's a lot of it is digitized and it's called Quick Time Files and a quick time file you can scroll through so fast.

And most of it a lot of it is not very you know, it's just rubbish or is boring. But every now and then you see something and I will go, I like that. Just I like it not necessarily for any factual, straight narrative way.

I just like the mood that shot a series of shots have and I will note it down. And I have a good memory and I have a sort of visual memory and I remember it. And then I will be a year later I'll be editing some section of the film. I'll be dust. I'll be desperate for a shot, because often when you're dealing with subjects like computers and finance, there's very little to illustrate.

Yes, I will remember that shot because it's got the it sort of resonates with the mood that I'm trying to create at this at that point in the edit.

So I would just go and find it and put it in. And oftentimes it doesn't work, but sometimes it does. It's it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning. I'm also trying to create a mood in the films, as well as tell you a story and narrate a series of facts, because I think that is also integral to journalism.

Can you tell us so can I get you out of my head? What to you is the central thesis of this new film or this new series?

I think really what I'm trying to do in the whole series is trying to explain to people why there is this strange disconnect in our time between the fact that increasingly more and more people want change. They want things to change.

They feel that the world they are living and not just in America and Britain, but also in Russia. And I think in China, too, there is a sense that a lot of the regimes in power have run out of ideas and they are more and more manically just trying to hold things stable.

And in the face of that and in the face of growing inequalities and growing corruption, there is a desire for change. Yet at the same time, what is not emerging from the groups that you would expect to come up with new ideas or new ideas of different ways of running, managing and making a better society? I mean, I just got intrigued by this starting a few years ago. You get and you've got groups coming up like the Occupy movement.

You also got Donald Trump coming up. You know, he's he promised to get rid of the corruption in Washington and.

The sort of things that actually many of the left would agree with. Yeah, that was the strange thing for me when Trump came about, when that movement came about. I remember I remember so much of what the rise I want say that so much of what Trump people were looking for to me sounded like the type of shit that Michael Moore and his ilk were looking for 10 years previous. Yes, exactly.

It was. It was I mean, it was almost word for word that Trump was saying, why why are we fighting these horrible, horrific wars abroad which are not making America safer and also killing hundreds of thousands of people?

Why have we closed down all our factories creating communities where everyone has become addicted to opioids? Why is the infrastructure of the country falling apart? And why are the banks, Washington, corrupt?

And you think, yeah, OK, I agree with all that. And then, of course, Trump gets into power. And if you look at the last four years, despite the what's the word, the chaos and the fury, actually nothing's changed. The inequalities, the corruption and the infrastructure of America have carried on completely untouched.

I don't know if you noticed that we didn't because we got obsessed by all sorts of other things, like whether he was a tool of Vladimir Putin, but actually nothing changed.

So what intrigued me was why why was this why was this block against imagining other kinds of futures when there is this increasing desire for change?

And I decided just to try and do it in a way that I've done, which is slightly different from what I've done before.

In the past, I've tended to follow one idea or one set of ideas and how that played out in the world.

In this one, I want to show how there have been lots of tributaries, lots of streams over the past 70 or so years that have that initially seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but have all flown, flowed down and created this sort of sea of now that we're swimming in.

And I start Ellerston, where the roots of that uncertainty and anxiety and fear of the future came from. And in that sense, I was just trying to do a history of the roots of present day desire for change, yet also fear and uncertainty about how to change and a feeling that somehow everything is inevitable and you can't change it. There was this strange mix of our time and I just wanted to explain the roots of that historically by telling a number of different stories.

One thing I like the the continual battle between collectivism and individualism throughout the film is something I found really interesting and and also as well, this, like in your previous films, like Hyper Normalisation in a Bitter Lake, you didn't put as much of a lens on China as you have now, but in can't get you out of my head. China plays up quite a huge role. Why is that? And why didn't like. In in a bit, Bitter Lake would say, when you spoke about Russia in particular, the likes of Vladimir Surkov, the adviser to Putin, why now in this film, do you speak more about China and less about Russia?

Do you think Russia is not as influential as it was five years ago? Are they is Russia blown out of proportion?

Well, I think you said it yourself.

Now, Russia is important to China because China is a rising power. But also having researched it and I've been to China quite a lot and I know some quite a few Chinese people who who have family hope in Beijing. It's not as confident as it seems. And there is a lot of dissatisfaction and there is a massive amount of corruption under the surface. And but but even more fundamental than that, I just noticed that no one in television had done a history of our relationship to China overall at all.

And it's incredibly important that, you know, to go back to the point about what Trump was complaining about.

Yeah, all the factories were shipped off to China and to other places.

And and China then began to ship vast amounts of cheap goods to America.

The banks, which were the rising power in America as the industry decline, lent people the money through debt to buy those goods.

And this sort of strange system began to emerge, which crashed in 2008, although it stumbles along still. And I just wanted to tell the roots of that. And I just thought, you know, if China is so powerful, is so important and there is this growing fear of it. You know, it's interesting. You mentioned Russia five or six years ago. The big villain was was Putin. Have you noticed he sort of receded and it's now Xi Jinping is the front line of our time.

Putin did very well during the Trump era because he was seen as this dark villain. Yeah. Who'd given you Donald Trump?

But then, like I always remind myself that Russia has an economy the same size as Italy. Yes, quite.

And also remember that Russia's politics are far more chaotic than we think in the West. The idea that somehow Putin sits in the middle and controls everything, it's just not true.

I mean, he's it's a it's a it's a corrupt, out of control kleptocracy in many ways. But I want to.

But whereas Xi Jinping is now the central villain of our time in the West, and I think that's going to grow. And in the face of that, I just want to tell the history of our relationship to China, not I'm not the history of China, although obviously I'm telling parts of that I want to show our relationship to it.

And also make when you say our. Do you mean the West or do you maybe I mean the West.

Because one thing. One thing I often wonder about with Britain in particular is and it's one thing I love about your documentaries, you speak about the uncomfortable truths of the British Empire, like when you speak about China in can't get you out of my head. You make a point of saying that Britain flooded China with opium in the 18th century as a means of control. Similarly, in Bear Lake, you mentioned the Sykes Picot agreement in the Middle East where Britain and France totally fucked over the Middle East.

Do you think how does Britain's imperial past, does that prevent this type of discourse happening, even Hong Kong shit like that?

You know, I don't think we fully quite remembered what we did. And I'm not trying to do the trick.

I know that I'm an Irish person. I expected. But I was. But I, I think one could easily get lost in a sort of circular feedback of guilt.

And I think there's something in a way more interesting is that we have forgotten the legacy of of structures of power we left behind and and how that has come back to haunt us in all sorts of strange ways.

I mean, in the fifth film, in the series that you were talking about, I try and tell the history of what happened after we flooded China with opium.

I think it started in the 1940s, 1841. We were one of the big forces that wrecked that Chinese empire. I mean, there were other forces pulling it apart at the time. It was declining empire, but with that, opium tore it apart. And what's interesting about that is that not only did that make the Chinese very angry with the British, it also caused, first of all, guilt amongst the liberal middle classes in the late 19th century in Britain that then mutated and morphed into fear.

And you got this thing which was called the yellow peril at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, when this wave of fear.

It happened in America as well, that the Chinese were setting up opium dens in all the cities, especially in the east end of London, where they were planning and plotting to destroy the the people of Britain.

It reminds one very much of the fear of al-Qaida in the early parts of this century.

It was an absolute wave of fear and that are the roots of that, I think have gone very deep into the uncertainty of our time.

But what I'm really trying to say is that is that empires bring with empires, bring with them ghosts and memories which have much have much bigger dimensions than just simple guilt. Please.

But these ghosts and what I find interesting is that these. The ghosts and memories, it's as if the guilt in the British consciousness of having done this to China rather than accept and acknowledge the guilt it sublimates itself into now a fear of the colonized people doing to the British what was done to them. Like I touched on it in a podcast a few weeks back because I was looking I did a podcast on Guinness and Ireland and the history of Guinness in Ireland as part of our culture.

And what I found really interesting is Guinness was founded in the seventeen nineties in Ireland and in Ireland. At that time we had a thing called the penal laws, which were a 200 year set of laws that meant that Irish Catholics couldn't own land, couldn't hold public office, couldn't get an education, the complete disenfranchisement of the native Irish population. But at the same time, the Guinness family who were selling alcohol to the Irish people were these quite imperialistic, would have identified as British and would have been quite unionists.

And it reminded me so much of what you were saying about China. And then from that, we ended up with a stereotype of the Irish as being drunk and violent. And it reminded me of, like you were saying, the yellow peril or the the Fu Manchu. Yes, it's a sort of I think what I'm generally trying to suggest in these films is that the legacy of an empire is a little more complicated than possibly the left imagines. They they often just go, oh, it's just we were horrible and racist.

Well, that's true. We were. But there was a much more subtle effect on us.

And one of the characters I look at whose story I tell a lot in the series is a guy called Michael Defreitas, who then became a revolutionary called Malcolm X. He came here from Trinidad in the 50s, became a gangster, worked for a slum landlord called Peter Rackman. But he saw something in the in the English, which was more than just racism. He he called it Englishes. He said it was racist and he said it was vicious.

But he said there was also a melancholy, a sadness underneath it all at what they'd lost and a fear.

And and I think I think that's a very interesting area to look at. And I think it sort of suffuses our I noticed during the after Brexit happened a lot of the people who were really shocked by Brexit, who hated the idea of Brexit, they were shocked not only because the working classes had turned around and bitten them in the bum, but but but they also thought, how can how can our country have come to this?

It's awful. It's almost like their dignity had been offended that they still had a sense of entitlement, is what I'm trying to say, which was foregrounded that possibly they deserved as the country they are part of.

It's gone very deep, but in subtler ways.

But possibly the left has really imagined. And and if I do want to change society in this country, you're going to have to deal with that sadness and that melancholy and that fear as much as you are going to have to deal with the overt racism.

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You just have to come along and see it like the podcast. Share it, you know the crack. Let's go back to the chat with Adam Curtis. Now, in this bit, we speak about conspiracy theories.

Do you see a parallel then as well between we said the yellow peril that was present in early twentieth century Britain and America and now what we have today, which is kuhnen because the documentary deals with a modern day conspiracy theory, too. That's like Trump supporters now in 2021. They seem to genuinely believe that the people in Washington are a race of lizard like paedophiles. Well, I haven't.

How come you didn't touch on Davidek? Our David Icke? Well, he he's the original lizard man. The truth about.

Kuhnen, I have a much more banal view Cuno The truth about the last four years is that despite all the agony about Donald Trump in America, he didn't actually do anything.

It was he just I mean, he did things in foreign policy. He he screwed up the Iran deal and he just a very strange things with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Yeah. But domestically, apart from lowering taxes for rich people, which I think Republicans just tend to do as knee jerk thing, he didn't actually do much else. He didn't repair the infrastructure America. He didn't get rid of the corruption in America. And he didn't build a wall, as far as I know.

In the face of that, everyone retreated into sort of conspiracy theories.

And his supporters will say the reason he couldn't do it is because Trump was being kept back by the state.

And I think Kuhnen was basically there or the reason for its rise in an influence was there because it sort of allowed an excuse for why he wasn't doing anything. It was the paedophiles, a cabal of paedophiles in Washington that were preventing him building a wall or making things better or bringing the factories home from China. That was it. So it was a sort of it was an excuse. I don't see Kuhnen as this great big dark threat that a lot of people on the left do it.

It was an excuse, to be honest. I mean, if I was going to be brutal just as much as their opponents on the liberal and the left looked to the conspiracy theory about Vladimir Putin as a way of avoiding facing up to the fact that they didn't have any other options to offer in the face of Trump.

So everyone retreated into conspiracy theories in in the last four years, everyone went down the rabbit hole. And that's still that, as far as I can see.

Here's a question and it's something that I struggle with, and I'd like to know your opinion on it. So I consider myself a person who is a critical thinker. I consider myself someone who's able to look at evidence and not be swayed by conspiracy theory. Boss, and this is a central tenet of the new documentary like. Sometimes I see a conspiracy theory and then I go, Jesus, that's not I'd never believe that. And then I look at actual recorded history of conspiracy theories, such as you touched on on MK Ultra, which was the CIA mind control program like.

How do you how do you how do you balance those two things and how do you what when is when does a conspiracy theory become utterly ridiculous and when is it like this is what I'm getting at to one of the most poignant moments I feel from Peter Lake, which you made in 2014, 2015. What always stuck with me was when you spoke about Putin's adviser, Vladimir Surkov, and how Vladimir Surkov had taken ideas from the world of avant garde art and put these into Russian politics in particular.

What Russia did was for the government to fund both right wing groups and left wing groups at the same time purely to create a sense of chaos. So people just gave up. And I think that was really prophetic.

And it makes me wonder now, like just last month, the leader of the proud boys was shown to be an FBI informant. And like I know from looking at the history of the CIA, the FBI, they will insert themselves in any group, whether it's right wing or left wing, they will simply insert themselves in their job so they can see what's going on. And. What I'm trying to ask is my hunch, my feeling at the moment, right, this is just my hunch.

I think that's in America. The right wing groups like the Proud Boys are the groups like Antifa, I reckon they're both infiltrated by CIA, FBI and it's being controlled. And I don't know, is that too mad or is that believable? And I can't measure in myself when have I gone too far? That's the problem I have. When have I gone too far with a conspiracy theories theory? And now I'm two sentences away from thinking that Bill Clinton is a lizard.

Well, I mean, you've put your finger on the problem of our time is where is the the the thing that allows you to judge whether what you're describing is a conspiracy or a conspiracy theory?

And remember, they are two completely different things. There are there are conspiracies, you know. Yeah.

And there have been recent ones.

You could argue that that possibly suggesting that there were weapons of mass destruction hidden in the deserts of Iraq and the fact that you couldn't find them prove that they existed was a conspiracy theory. Sorry, was a conspiracy theory. That was a conspiracy, because we now know the facts behind that.

There are conspiracy theories which no one has yet managed to prove.

And what I'm what I try and trace in these films is that in the age of individualism, as those in charge, as those in power gave up on telling us, giving us a big picture of the world and said, no, you as individuals go and have a nice time by yourselves in a in a world of consumerism and your own dreams and your own stories, that worked very well for a while, but really from about 2008 on when it crashed.

The downside of individualism is that when things go bad, you are on your own. And it's quite frightening. It's like going out into the woods on your own at night is frightening. Whereas when you go into the woods with your friends at night, it's really good fun. You're on your own in the woods after 2008. And in the face of that, what you then find on the Internet is a strange mixture of evidence of real conspiracies like, as you say, M.K. Ultra, that back in the 1950s the American government secretly did try and mind control human beings.

It's not a science fiction thing they did, but that then gets mixed up with other theories that the Illuminati are really the secret rulers of the world, which is a conspiracy theory. But because in that frightened dark wood post 2008.

Yeah, individuals had no measurement, had no sense of proportion because those in power had effectively given up trying to explain the world to the people because to be to be brutal, they didn't know what was going on and the journalist didn't know what was going on. They hadn't. They hadn't. And I think still probably don't know what's going on. And in the face of that, people just started to assemble those fragments together.

So as I show in the films, you get these extraordinary dream worlds emerging, which were believed by millions and millions of people, that the most of the major stars from beyond, say, through to Britney Spears, had all been brainwashed or mind controlled by an alliance between the CIA using mccoughtry techniques, the Illuminati and Walt Disney.

And millions of people believe that. Well, there was I then began to research that I went to interview people who did believe it. I began to realize that actually underneath they didn't completely believe in what they liked was the fact that they lived in a world where no one told them any stories. Nothing made sense at all. So in the face of that, why not believe something extraordinary like that? Why not?

And I think some people have suggested that things like conspiracy theories and in particular Cuba and on Cuba and on like the shit that I'm here and in Cuba, that's not new to me because I've always had an interest in conspiracy theories.

Going back to, like Alex Jones are the stuff that David Icke speaks about. I've always been aware of that, but I considered it to be fringe. And in the past two years, it's now really mainstream. And now people I know have got their aunts and uncles thinking that the world is run by interdimensional shapeshifting lizards and it's becoming a real issue. But one thing someone has proposed, which I think is interesting, people who are engaged in Kuhnen in on an online basis, what they're actually doing is they're playing a fantasy game like Dungeons and Dragons, except they don't know what they're doing is what I think some do.

I think some do and some don't is the truth. Well, there are deliberate trolls.

There are especially like I know they're on websites like 4chan and Reddit, a lot of Kuhnen stuff started. It off with younger kids trying to see what shit they could make boomers believe. Yes, exactly when it got onto Facebook.

Yes.

And also, you know, the one thing you can really upset good thinking liberals with is conspiracy theories. They get really upset by them. And so it's a way of provoking. But you're right, a lot of people believe it. And I do think it was that. I mean, look, conspiracy theories have always been around, as I show in the films, because a conspiracy theory about the Illuminati in the early eighteen tens in America.

Yeah. A group from Bavaria had actually infiltrated the American government and were controlling it.

Then in Ireland, men in the eighteen hundreds in Ireland, there was a group of British people who believed that the British were descended from the twelve tribes of Israel and they used to try and dig up Irish Celtic sites. And then writers like Bates' Irish people used to fight them off with axes because there was this British tribe that believed themselves to be descended from the twelve tribes of Israel and they were full on conspiracy theorists.

Yes. So I mean, well, I think not new.

It's not new. Conspiracy theories emerge, especially at times when those in power seem to have run out of a way of explaining the world. And I would argue that a lot of my profession journalism ran out of no people began to realize that journalists didn't really know what was going on from about 2001 onwards. I mean, that's what I was dealing with in the power of nightmares is is a suspicion in the back of a lot of people's minds is the journalists didn't really know what was going on.

And the same was true that they didn't think the politicians really what was going on.

And those groups whose job traditionally was there ever a time really where they did Dinham like I mean there were times when I'm thinking of grand narratives like, all right, a.e Cold War capitalism versus communism.

That's a nice tidy little narrative. I mean when does this. I think it's fair to say in the West, we don't believe in religion anymore. I think that's a fair thing to say when you compare it to other times in the West, in the West, we no longer make. That's when I think of China and what China has done with the social credit system.

What they've literally done is invented God, like everything I was told God was, which was omnipotent, omniscient, that in China they've basically invented that through the social credit that they have.

That's a very good observation because I've always thought that they're Santa Claus. That same thing is waiting to be done here. I think it's slightly away. I think so, too. But the fetishization of artificial intelligence, which happened in the last four or five years, lots and lots of journalists going on about how this this was going to be the future. They were going to control everything because the computers and the data know more about you than you do about yourself.

And you suddenly think hagwon. They're talking about religion. They're talking about God, because this isn't God supposed to know you better than you know yourself.

Everything when I was a kid, man, like, yeah, because I grew up Catholic. So I was told that God was real up until I was about ten years of age. And I did believe it until my until I started to think for myself. And I used to be afraid to be alone with my own thoughts because I knew God was listening. Yeah. And then I got to an adult age and I went, brilliant. I have my own thoughts now and nobody's watching.

But now with your phone, I don't I'm scared of talking around my phone sometimes because what I think is that like in China, where they have the social credit system and if people aren't familiar with this, basically your data is shared with the government and depending upon your behavior, you are rewarded or punished by society.

So if you if you go to the off licence too many times in one week and you're seen as someone who drinks too much, then next week when you need your washing machine fixed, you're going to be put on the end of the queue. You're being punished for bad behaviour. The difference is our phones are still share in the same amount of data in the West.

But what I just the government hasn't flipped the switch to control is what it. Yes.

What I liked about the social credit system is that they gather data from everywhere. So if the data shows that you are cheating at computer games like everyone cheats, that actually may push you down the social credit system.

I mean, at the end of the films, I try and try and put forward. I mean, I can't mean I don't know, I'm just a journalist. I'm trying to explain and I try and put forward what are the three roads going into the future that I see possible. And one of them is that China model, which is is that in an age where politics has run out of big ideas, ideology, and just wants to hold the world stable and try and manage it, increasingly, they may turn to that that data driven system in which you just treat people as components and system.

You don't bother with what they think or feel any longer because that's just too complicated and you just reward them with treats. And if they are not rewarded, you do what the Chinese are doing with the weaker population, the Muslim population in Xinjiang, you in inverted commas, re-educate them or reprogram them. That's one option. I don't think that will happen in the West because individualism here is so deeply ingrained. It's deeply ingrained.

But one thing that does makes me fearful is, like we said, the Patriot Act in America, which you mentioned in the film, too, because of 9/11 and 9/11, made Americans in particular so terrified and so heart. I remember like I remember when 9/11 happened. And I remember being shocked at the average American person in the news truly struggling to understand why anybody would want to attack America. They couldn't understand that. They were like, why don't we help everybody?

Why would you want to attack us completely unaware of American behavior in the Middle East and the Patriot Act, which basically allowed it stripped away freedoms that people had around their data and around their privacy. So I sometimes think all it takes is an activating event here that's frightening enough. And then we suddenly agree to the sharing of our data.

To be precise, what happened after 9/11 is the Patriot Act. It didn't take away laws. What it did is it got rid of what might possibly be being prepared as laws by the Federal Commission. OK, yeah, but you're right. The shock of it got rid of the growing worries about that. And it did. And it was part of that shift away from the idea that the individual should be private to being open because otherwise you might put yourself at risk.

You the data is important to stop any future attacks.

But remember, after that, within about four or five years, there was a big reaction against some of the anti-terror legislation that might hear.

Latin America is being brought in, I think we're more resilient to that, I do I do think that I think the opposite.

I think that what's emerged in this story in the West, especially with the social media corporations, is that you you manage your society not by shutting them down and just collecting data on them. You manage your society by creating a complete, continual sense of hysteria. I mean, if you're if you look at the last you see what what I point out in the films or try and point out in the film is that by about 2015, 2016, what the social media companies realize is that what they call high arousal emotions activate the emotions, etc.

The phrase are absolutely key to profits because it means you remain engaged online longer and that means you click more and that means more profits. So what you get these things go viral content factories, which constantly send round memes, which are there to outrage you. I mean, they they amuse you as well. But they found that outrage and anger are the most high arousal emotions. And then into this mix comes the most high arousal figure of all, Donald Trump and Brexit, which creates this infernal system.

I mean, in the last four years, every day I just had this picture that Donald Trump wakes up, thinks of what really awful thing he can tweet about, tweets it, and immediately millions of people outside locked into a feedback system with him get angry as well.

And you've got this feedback system of high arousal emotions which just keeps everyone trapped. It's almost like they're trapped in a pantomime inside a theater while outside in the real world, actually, nothing much changed.

And and the old structures of power carried on moving money around in the way they wanted and nothing got done. So what I'm saying is that there are two ways of running the world in this sort of fragmented mass democracy.

Either you do what the Chinese do, which is ignore what people feel and just treat them as components in a system.

And more you go, no, let's go the other way.

Let's create a sort of a historical society in which everyone is sort of frozen into a hysteria which repeats itself again and again. And people like Donald Trump and his opponents become almost codependents in that system and therefore nothing changes either. I'm not saying this is a conspiracy at all. It's just one of those things that the society stumbled upon in the absence of any other.

I guess it just happened and it happened because those who were in power at every level had run out of any other ideas of how to run society. You know, the liberals didn't have any other alternative to get the people who voted for Donald Trump back. The newspapers were running out, were going bankrupt, and they found that Donald Trump brought them more clicks. Donald Trump could have Kuhnen, which allowed him to explain why he wasn't doing anything.

The the the intelligence services could stop being villans any longer because they told us about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist and instead become heroic truth tellers, leaking secrets about the conspiracies behind Donald Trump.

And everyone won from this hysteria, but nothing actually changed.

And it is this strange thing we've lived through over the last four years that I try and chart at the end of the series is that it was hysterical. It felt completely dynamic, but actually in real terms, it was almost totally static. I'm going into that, of course, came Black Lives Matter, which I think is yet again the next thing knocking at the door saying, no, there are really big structural problems in the society. We want change and that you can't you can't hold that histeria there forever.

There are always things knocking at the door and Black Lives Matter was the next one.

Um, regarding what you were saying there about Diatta, I mean, the high arousal emotions and how this continually keeps us online and the who benefits from that, our Google, Facebook, these huge corporations that benefit from our data.

Like I reckon Twitter had had happened about Donald Trump, I think Donald Trump saved Twitter, like Twitter is a quieter place now. Without Donald Trump, there is no outrage.

Donald Trump saved a lot of people. He saved The New York Times. He saved a lot of major newspapers that possibly would have gone bankrupt without him. I mean, you know, really, he he he saved a lot of things. And I think they're very sorry to see him go underneath. Mm hmm.

Hopefully that hysteria will die down. But I think we will look back at those four years as a very strange moment. I mean, the same is true here.

Hope so. There was this for years. That assumes a bit of normality. Yes. Well, I don't think you're going to go back. You can't.

The slogan that people said, Joe Biden, I don't know you had it, which is let's make America normal again. But but I don't think you're going to be able to go back to that because I'm waiting for the next crazy shit to happen.

That's what I'm waiting for.

Who is the next enemy and what absolutely batshit mad things do we have to deal with now?

But you see that that what you've just said is what I'm trying to point out in these films is in a way, the ideology of our age. There is a sort of feeling of inevitability about everything instead of being instead of being thinking, no, there are these things that are wrong about the world, like climate change, like inequality. And actually we as human beings can try and do something about this. What we have come to this feeling about is that somehow everything thing is inevitable.

It just happens to us. And I do think that's partly one of the functions of conspiracy theories.

We spend our time with conspiracy theories, imagining what they are doing to us rather than spending our time imagining how we could change the world for the better.

So in a way, conspiracy theories have become a way of just blocking change amongst the very groups of people who want change because you're always suspicious of everything.

And do you think individualistic attitudes is what leads to that? That we're consistently selfish in navel gazing and this prevents us from looking outwards and looking at it?

I'm more sympathetic.

I think that that age of individualism, which was glorious and wonderful and allowed us to be free of being controlled by otoliths in a way that has never happened before in history was wonderful. But it's now decaying. And it's and people, instead of being empowered and confident on their own, are feeling uncertain, anxious and alone.

And in the face of that, they are turning to things like conspiracy theories to all sorts of fears because no one is explaining the world to them.

And I think within this as well. Adam, you you lay out the rise of the opioid crisis in America.

Yeah, well, you know, the opiate that is a response to factories closing across America.

I mean, I remember going through spending two weeks in West Virginia and just before Trump was elected 2015, it was astonishing. The factories are closed. I mean, I remember going to a town in West Virginia and the woman who ran the motel I was staying was just saying, this is this is a zombie town now. And she was right. It was like a zombie town. I don't mean that in any nasty, patronizing way. People really were wandering out in a really blank, frightened way.

And as I try and charge of the films is that that is a response to those fears and uncertainties. People retreated into opioids, which is a form of synthetic heroin, and heroin creates a safe bubble. It makes you feel safe in that bubble. That's that's how it works. That's its effect. And that's what people did. They retreated. And and I think what I'm charting these films is that retreat not just amongst the people who hurt, but amongst those who were in charge as well.

They retreated. And we are now left in a society which doesn't really make sense for people. That's the problem. And the old and there are two arguments here. One is I may be being nostalgic about, is that the old idea of what journalists did, what politicians did, what people like you and I did was actually try and make stories that help people make sense of the world more. We are undergoing a massive shift, possibly because of the rise of the Internet in which we've given up on stories and we just experience stuff.

And it may be in 200 years time we will be looking at people who are totally unlike us, totally uninterested in stories, who have learnt to live almost like in a day to day, just experience, just just sensation that that that the stories were just a moment in history or we are in the eye of the storm between one great big historical moment which told grand stories which all began to fail about 50 years ago.

Now, 50 years later, we are in this quiet moment, the eye of the storm with just fragments and fragments of trillions and trillions of stuff on the Internet and all around us in the real world as well, none of which makes sense, which makes us feel anxious and uncertain. And we're waiting for the next story to come along.

Someone somewhere out there will take all those fragments and reassemble them into a new big story. I've no idea where it's going to come from. I don't think it's going to come out.

But we're in this funny little moment of history where actually a Christ, a Christ, basically, we're living in a world without meaning.

That's where we've got to at the moment. Yeah. And we're waiting for something or someone to come along with meaning. That's the other alternative. I don't know which it's going to be, but I do think we are in this strange little moment. Yes.

I do wonder like when. I guess so. When I get so utterly confused by reality and I can't make sense of it.

One thing I say to myself is, Jesus Christ, I would love I wouldn't it be so beautiful to have the certainty of religion? Wouldn't it be so great if either of what Islam says or what Catholicism says or whatever? Wouldn't it be lovely if that's what I actually believed? How simple would my life be if I could just obey ten rules and obey them? And then this gives me an eternity of happiness.

Yes, but more and more than that, what religion also gives you is it gives you consolation in the face of the inevitability of your own death. You're not alone. You are part of something that's going to go on beyond you. All that has disappeared at the moment. And yes, I don't think religion will come back, but I think something else will come back that offers you something like that. But I can't we we mustn't try and go backwards.

I mean, there are so many people who want to go back to an old kind of rationalism, which is what the people around Trump, the early people around Trump wanted wanted to do and sort of Brexit. You don't want that. And you don't you certainly don't want the ethno nationalist right in Europe. You just don't want to go back. What I try and say at the end of the films is that surely it's time to start trying to imagine something that has never existed before.

And I quote this. This guy called David Graber, who was an activist, he was part of the Occupy movement.

He was an anthropologist as well. And he wrote this thing that I've always thought was absolutely wonderful and sort of sums up what I believe is, he said, The ultimate hidden truth of the world it is, is that it is something we made and could just as easily make different. And I've always liked that because what it contains with it is that truth that we did this, however frightened and anxious and feeling of inevitability. We have we made this all together, this world, which means that actually we can make it differently.

We just need to regain the confidence. And that's what I'm trying to say in the films. I'm trying to trace why our confidence collapsed, all the different reasons for that, so that we can stop going back to an old ethno nationalism or to an old kind of rigid religion that actually genuinely we might be able to imagine something new.

I find that idea quite thrilling, but that's not the thing you say in an age of anxiety. But I do think it's got to the point where that's going to happen inevitably. But it would be better to try and own the future than just let it happen to you. That's what I think.

You so you started off making things on television, but now your last three pieces have been on the BBC player, which means that you can effectively have them like better. Lake was three hours long. Do you prefer to have the freedom of the player where you can kind of make something as long as you want it? Or do you miss the constraints of television or something? Has to be 60 minutes or 30 minutes.

I what I found making stuff online was, yes, you can make something longer, which means you can make it more involved. But what I also discovered was I knew it myself is that when people watch stuff online, they bring a different kind of sensibility to it.

It's more relaxed is the wrong word. It's more open. People are using it to people are making a choice to watch you online and they know they could stop and start.

They can bookmark it. It's more like making a book. And in that and because you've got that new sensibility, you can make things more complicated and involving and you don't they somehow I can't explain this.

I don't know if you've noticed this online. People can be really vicious online, but they can also be very permissive online. I what I used to write a blog, if you got something wrong, they'd pointed out if you were completely straight about you said, yes, you're completely right. I got that wrong. I change it everywhere when I find it. It's when you're breaking the rules.

There are people expected to fight with them. And when you come up with honesty, you break the rules.

Yes, going to be the Internet allows them. And it was really good like that. And I somehow felt what I learnt from that.

Was to if you could make great big programs that were somehow more involving, more open and I think the audience like that and I think a lot of the people who still make television programs haven't quite cottoned on to the fact that the audience are much more open to things that are complicated and involving and sometimes have bits in the just. They're just they're like real life, you know, in the films. I've just made process as well.

Adam, like when you sent me on those seven films, it took me more than a month to watch them.

And the reason is when I watch your stuff, like I could be ten minutes into it and then you say something and then I have to pause it and they have to go to Wikipedia because you've given me a train of thought and it's like I got to learn more about this shit before I go back. So the way that I'm consuming is now completely different.

Yes, but that's exactly what I mean. I also realized that in a way, you could also cut a lot out in the old way of making television programs, because you have to somehow assume you're explaining everything to everyone.

So actually, even if I know that 80 percent of my audience know already something, I have to put it in because there's the 20 percent who don't. With these films, you can just sort of you don't have to put everything in because, you know, they can stop and start and go and find things out or go off on their own tangent and then come back to it.

And I really like that.

So when I did Bitter Lake, I would I would literally put in things that I knew they could go and find out more about if they wanted to or if they didn't.

So it becomes a much looser relationship and a much more respectful relationship with the audience, because you just assume that they're going to use what they want to do rather than just being my prisoner. For what documentary makers do you enjoy?

Who inspires you? Who has inspired you?

To be honest, I don't really watch much documentaries. I tend to read the people who have inspired me write writers.

I mean, the person the person who inspired me most, who I got everything off is a American novelist that everyone's forgotten about now who wrote in the 1920s and 30s, who's called journalist Pasos, and he wrote this gigantic novel called USSI, which is an epic about the sort of rise to power of America in the early part of the 20th century. But he did it in a way where he intercut between narratives of fictional characters, narratives of real people, and this strange thing which he called the camera eye, which was just raw experience that made no sense, just fragments and images and things.

And ever since I read that, I thought, well, I can do that in film. Why not?

And what it sounds like a synopsis of what you do with documentaries.

What he's doing is, in a way, what I'm trying to do, which is don't get rid of all the raw experience, but try and pull it together to make people look and feel look at it differently, make it feel differently. But don't get rid of the raw experience. I mean, I don't know if you noticed, but every now and then in the films, I will just put in some stuff like this, some music, and then that's my space to feel something.

Yes. And just sort of feel that actually the other part of life is just stuff happens and it's then assembled later into meaningful stories.

But sometimes there are just fragments and you know that yourself in life, suddenly you just have an experience. It's gone and it doesn't make any sense and it never probably will. It just happened. And I think that's as much part of the realism of our time as the joined up stories.

Perfect. Thanks a million, Adam. That was absolutely fantastic. And thanks for your time. And I hope everyone gets a squint at the new documentary, but have a smash and even have a lovely evening. A very nice, cheap lumber yard.

I hope you enjoyed that. And. Check out Adam's new documentary. All right, February 11th can't get you out of my head on the BBC I player. And I'm aware that, you know, you can only get the player if you live within the realm of the English Queen, but if you're smart, if you're smart, VPN and things like that, you can find a way around it and you can watch it in Ireland. All right. I didn't say that.

I heard you can do that the hard. That's the thing you can do. I'd never do that. I'm all right. I'll catch you next week. I'll catch you next week. I'll have a hot take. About what? I don't know. I don't know. But I'm going to have a roster of attack next week, I guarantee. God bless. ACost recommends podcast's, we live to the legend that is Vickki feel like you Shivon married, right?

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