The Blindboy Podcast - Adam Curtis

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

I chat with legendary documentary maker Adam Curtis about his new film "can't get you out of my head" An emotional history of the modern world Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bola bus you custard buskers. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Thank you for the magnificent feedback to last week's podcast which was... It was a long one about Pints of Guinness, about the iconography of Pints of Guinness. I liked doing it, it was good 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 I have 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 I really look up to a documentary maker

by the name of Adam Curtis I was going to interview Adam before at nearly this time last year I had a live gig in London which was sold out which I cancelled I pulled it because of the coronavirus

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 favourite documentary filmmaker himself and Werner Herzog would be my two favourite

and Adam's documentaries in particular for me what I thoroughly enjoy a documentary called The Century of the Self Bitter Lake Hypernormalization 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 hot take like when i do a hot take on my podcast what i'm kind of chasing is that Adam Curtis vibe where 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 Struck's 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 what are his 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 is always there with a documentary to make you go i don't fully understand things but i have a better fucking i have 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 he's 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 UK, who passed away recently, and he was friends with Adam Curtis, so Adam used to come to Rubber Bandits 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 Johnson, 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 with was the same fella on the documentary because why would I make that why would I make that connection it'd be too strange and then like a few months later david johnson says to me oh yeah adam cartis he makes these documentaries you should check him out and i'm like holy 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 fella, gentleman, incredibly interesting person. And he's also been really supportive of me, because he works in BBC, really supportive of me in BBC when I started making my documentaries, Blind by Understries, which you can see on the BBC player. But when I made my first pilot,

Adam made sure to pass it around within the because his 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 fella blind buying his new documentaries and that was a huge help to 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. Thursday man, tomorrow.

So on the BBC iPlayer, his new documentary series Can't Get You Out of My Head is airing. And 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 there 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 they're hard to pin down the only thing i can say is like you have to watch it it's amazing 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 at trying to describe the current zeitgeist, 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'll probably stay open definitely and check out his other documentaries check out anything that Adam Curtis has made any Adam Curtis documentary but in particular Bitter Lake

or Hyper Normalization 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 of 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 carter'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 and i can't i can't watch fucking adam carter's documentaries 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 i hope you enjoyed the chat i hope you enjoyed and i'm really excited to show this to you because this is someone i really really admire yart 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 do i explain

this i i found out who i was as an as an artist because of watching your documentaries as in the way that you 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, 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 love stories I love theories about the world but I looked around at the work the stuff that was being done where I was in the BBC and elsewhere and I just thought it was so boring I mean really you know what I mean it just it 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 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 And I just thought, well, I suppose instinctively, why can't you put the two together? I mean, it's not entertainment in inverted commas.

A lot of that posh generation of journalists would use entertainment in a scathing way. Disparaging, yeah. Totally. And I just think that's just sort of wrong. That you do not dilute the information through making it really intriguing and emotionally involving.

You just do not. 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 class snobbish. I call it democratizing information.

Yes, it is democratizing information. I mean, it's just really, it's it. And since I was working in the BBC, I also thought that's the sort of thing the BBC should be doing. 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 in, bits of music I liked in, I could be silly, which I like being, 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 I just think, I had 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, 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 educational reforms or something i'm not sure why but they were uncertain they were intimidated by that sort of how do you describe it a sort of a metropolitan sniffiness if you might put it that way that that that you could they were clever but intimidated by by trying to when they wanted 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 or like it's 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-saxons because i'm only recently getting interested in the anglo-saxons and when I go to podcasts to learn about it, the title of the podcast seems really interesting. And then it's four academics 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 four academics talking in a language only they understand, you know. You'll find as a journalist, I have a lot of problems with academics. I mean, there are academics I know who are really great and wonderful. But I have a theory that I think is 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 an 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. the politics of the time and power of the time was moving away from them. And they retreated into, I can only put it in a sniffiness, a sort of a distance and a slight chilliness in the way they deal with material. And I think it's a smokescreen to disguise the fact that they don't really know what's going on. I mean, to be honest, none of us really know what's going on. But good journalism tries to get out there. It makes it clear that it doesn't fully 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 and the money to to do that rather than retreating into a language and and it's more than that it's it's a sort of slight distance and a chilliness from

the subject which puts you off i feel because for me um one of the good things i find about your work is if i'm if i if i'm if i'm meeting somebody if i'm having a pint and i'm telling somebody to watch an adam carter's documentary what i find really good is i find it difficult to explain in a good way i it's what i always say is you just have to watch it 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 with your documentaries too 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 zeitgeist 10 years on it's it's it's now when i look back at 2000 we'll say and 9-11 yeah i can comfortably get a flavor and a sound and a sense for that period and i can fit it 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 with 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 um 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. 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 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, 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 would call patrician. They would tell you what's what. But that was at an age when people expected to be told what's what now in the age of individualism people expect to think things out for themselves and i think you have to respect that and 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. I'd like to know about your process because your process really intrigues me. Like, you use B-rolls of...

I don't know if B-roll is 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 going through hours and hours and hours of footage to find the right little poignant moment. I mean, what does your process look like? 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.'s massive it's really really big and you have a number of different themes in there and how how do you begin that process what's your first thing that you do when you get like a 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 a it's a process i start with a number of things i start with stories i like because you know i'm a journalist i 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 um but i 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 you the great thing in the what is that process like like are you sitting

in a bbc office and like how many people are on your team to make when i'm doing that i often wonder with that's me is it just you and did you do you edit the thing yourself i'm like i edit it myself i've never understood why people don't edit themselves it's like being a journalist and letting someone else write the stuff you've researched you're often not fucking allowed i'd love to be able to edit it myself i'm simply not allowed i know it's quite odd i mean you're you're so you're so lucky in that respect to to because i'd be the exact same if i'm what like my preferred medium at the moment is podcasting and the reason i prefer podcasting is i i'm i'm the artist i have full control over how I edit it 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 10 years

I have a 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 you don key thing is never be a presenter ever be the producer i'm a producer you don't but you consider yourself a presenter because your voice is on it i know my

voice is on it but i'm not the presenter i'm the producer and if you're a producer working on in television you are the person who i mean of course you have to respect the hierarchy of power you have to follow all the legal and compliance rules but but you are seen in a different way it's and that's what i am and that has given me much more freedom than say if i was if you're a presenter you are given producers who are there to you know help you do it which leads to a lot of different voices i mean i get other people coming in at a later stage to help me i have an extremely good executive producer i have a wonderful producer do you have researchers no i 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 perfect pandemic television i get a lot of time to research proper time and that is just and and to look at footage and that that's the deal and that's the

way it goes um 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 on what'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 it's boring but every now and then you'll see something and i will go oh i like that just i like it not necessarily for any factual straight narrative way i just like the mood that shot or 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 later, I'll be editing some section of the film. 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. I will remember that shot because it sort of resonates with the mood that I'm trying to create at that point in the edit. So I will just go and find it and put it in. Oftentimes it doesn't work, but sometimes it does. It goes back to what you were saying at the beginning. create at this at that point in the edit so i will just go and find it and put it in oftentimes

it doesn't work but sometimes it does it's it it goes back to what you were saying at the beginning i'm also trying to create a mood in the films as as well as tell you a story and narrate a series of facts because i think that is also integral to journalism um can you tell us so can't get you out of my head what 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 in, 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 are new ideas of different ways of running, managing, and making a better society i mean i i just got intrigued by this starting a few years ago you get endlessly you get groups coming up like the occupy movement you also get donald trump coming up you know he's he promised to get rid of the corruption in washington and 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 so much of what the right or I won't 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 previously. Yes, exactly. It was I mean, it was almost word for word that Trump was saying, why are we fighting these 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 and creating communities where everyone has become addicted to opioids? Why is the infrastructure of the country falling apart? And why are the banks

in 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, 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 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 differently 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 wanted to show how there have been

lots of tributaries, lots of streams over the past 70 or so years that initially seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with each other, but have all flowed down and created this sort of sea of now that we're swimming in and are slightly lost in, 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 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 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 in your previous films in like

hyper normalization in uh 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 a quite a huge role why is that and why didn't like in in bitter lake we'll say when you spoke about russia in particular the the likes of vladimir sarkov the advisor to putin why now in this film do you speak more about china and less about russia do you think russia is 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 it no russia is important um i did china because china is a rising power but also having researched it uh and i've been to china quite a lot and i know some quite a few chinese people who are who have family high up 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. But even more fundamentally than that, I just noticed that no one in television had done a history of our relationship to China. At all. At all. And it's incredibly important. 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 China then began to ship vast amounts of cheap goods to America. The banks, which were the rising power in America as the industry declined, 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 Putin. Have you noticed he's sort of receded? And it's now Xi Jinping is the frankly villain of our time. Putin did very well during the Trump era, because he was seen as this dark villain, 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 is just not true. I mean, it's a it's a it's a corrupt out of control kleptocracy in many ways um 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 wanted 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 wanted to show our relationship to it and also make when you say our do you mean the west or do you mean i mean the west because one thing one thing i often wonder about with britain in particular is and it's it's one thing i 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 Bitter 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've fully quite remembered what we did.

And I'm not trying to do the tradition. Oh, I know that. I'm an Irish person. But I think one could easily get lost in a sort of circular feedback of guilt. I think there's something in a way more interesting is that we have forgotten the legacy of structures of power we left behind. 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 1840s, 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 a declining empire. But 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. amongst the liberal middle classes in the late 19th century in in britain that then mutated 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 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 um it reminds one very much of the fear of al-qaeda in the early parts of this century it was an absolute wave of fear and that

the roots of that i think have gone very deep into the uncertainty of our time. What I'm really trying to say is that empires bring with them ghosts and memories which have much bigger dimensions than just simple guilt. Please, go on. 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 yes like um i i touched on it in a podcast a few weeks back because I was looking, I did a podcast on Guinness in 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 1790s 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 gently trying to suggest in these films is that the legacy of an empire is a little more complicated than possibly the left, is a guy called Michael De Freitas, who then became a revolutionary called Michael 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 English which was more than just racism. He called it Englishism. He said it was racist and he said it was vicious, but he said there was also a melancholy,

a sadness underneath it all, what they'd lost and a fear. And I think that's a very interesting area to look at. And I think it sort of suffuses our... I noticed, do you remember 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 they also thought, how can our country have come to this it's awful it's almost like their dignity

had been offended that that they still had a sense of entitlement is what i'm trying to say which was far grander than possibly they deserved as the country they are part of it's gone very deep but in subtler ways than possibly the left has really imagined and and if you 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 the overt racism i'm going to take a little break right now so we can have our ocarina pause I'm gonna play my ocarina the clay whistle so that an advert is gonna be played a digitally inserted advert advert which I don't know what it's gonna be it depends on

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I'm making an ongoing live video game musical which it's hard to explain. 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'll say the yellow parallel that was present in early 20th century Britain and America and now what we have today which is QAnon because the documentary deals with a modern day conspiracy theory too that 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 David Icke are a race of lizard-like paedophiles. Well, I haven't... How come you didn't touch on David Icke? He's the original lizard man.

The truth about QAnon, I have a much more banal view of QAnon. The truth about the last four years is that despite all the agony about Donald Trump in America, he didn't actually do anything. I mean, he did things in foreign policy. He screwed up the Iran deal. And he did some very strange things with Saudi Arabia and Israel. But domestically, apart from lowering taxes for rich people, which I think Republicans just tend to do as a knee-jerk thing, he didn't actually do much else.

He didn't repair the infrastructure of 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. Yes. And his supporters... Because they will say the reason he couldn't do it is because Trump was being kept back by the deep state.

Exactly. And I think QAnon was basically there, by the exactly and i think q anon was basically there or the reason for its rise in an influence was there because it it sort of allowed an excuse for why he wasn't doing anything it was the pedophiles a cabal of pedophiles 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 it. So it was a sort of, it was an excuse. I don't see QAnon as this great big dark threat that a lot of people on the left do. 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 in the last four years everyone went down the rabbit hole and they're still there as far as i can see here's a question and it's it's something that i struggle with and i'd like to know your your opinion on it so i i consider myself a person who's a critical thinker i consider myself someone who's able to look at evidence and not be swayed by conspiracy theory but and this is a central tenet to the new documentary like sometimes i see a conspiracy theory and then I go, Jesus, that's nuts.

I'd never believed that. And then I look at actual recorded history of conspiracy theories, such as you touched on MKUltra, which was the CIA mind control program. Like, how do you balance those two things? How do you spot... When does a conspiracy theory become utterly ridiculous?

And when is it... Like, this is what I'm getting at, too. One of the most poignant moments I feel from Bitter Lake, which you made in 2014, 2015, what always stuck with me was when you spoke about Putin's advisor 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 give 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 and the FBI they will insert themselves in any group whether it's right wing or left wing they will simply insert themselves in there just 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 in America the the right-wing groups like the Proud Boys or 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 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. Where is 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 conspiracies, you know. Yeah. And there have been recent ones. You could argue 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. 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 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 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 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, MKUltra, 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,2008, 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 brutal, they didn't know what was going on. And the journalists didn't know what was going on. 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 most of the major stars from Beyonce through to Britney Spears had all been brainwashed or mind controlled by an alliance between the CIA using MKUltra techniques, the Illuminati and Walt Disney. And millions of people believed that. Although as 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 it. 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? Some people have suggested that things like conspiracy theories, and in particular QAnon, QAnon, like the shit that I'm hearing in QAnon, that's nothing new to me,

because I've always had an interest in conspiracy theories. Going back to, like, Alex Jones or 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 shape-shifting lizards

and it's becoming a real issue but one thing someone has proposed which i think is interesting people who are engaged in q anon in on in an online basis what they're actually doing is they're playing a fantasy game like dungeons and dragons except they don't know they're doing it well 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 q anon stuff started 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 um good thinking liberals with is conspiracy theories they get really upset

by them um 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 there was a conspiracy theory about the illuminati in the early 1810s in america yeah um that a group from bavaria had actually infiltrated the American government and were controlling it then. In Ireland, man, in the 1800s in Ireland, there was a group of British people who believed that the British were descended from the 12 tribes of Israel and they used to try and dig up Irish Celtic sites.

And then writers like WB Yeats, Irish people, used to fight them off with axes because there was this british tribe that believed themselves to be descended from the 12 tribes of israel and they were full-on conspiracy theorists yes so i mean well i think it's 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 realise 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 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 knew what was going on. And those groups whose job traditionally... Was there ever a time really where they did though, Adam? Like, I mean, when I'm thinking of grand narratives, like, all right, East 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, we no longer like that's when i think of china and what china have done with the social credit system that what they've literally done is invented god like everything i was told god was which was omnipotent omniscient the in china they've basically invented that through the social credit that's a very good observation because i've always thought that that for santa claus that that same thing is waiting to be done here do you remember the through the social credit system. That's a very good observation because I've always thought that... For Santa Claus. That same thing is waiting to be done here. Do you remember the...

I think it's slightly dying away now. Yeah, I think so too. But the fetishization of artificial intelligence, which happened over the last four or five years. Lots and lots of journalists going on about how 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, hang on, they're talking about religion they're talking about god because 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 10 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 license 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 behavior the difference is our phones are still sharing the same amount of data in the west but what i just the government hasn't flicked the switch to control us with it yet the one i liked about the social credit system is that they that they gather data from everywhere. So if the data shows that you are cheating at computer games, like looking up cheats,

that actually may push you down the social credit system. I mean, at the end of the films, I try and put forward, I mean, I can't, I don't know, I'm just a journalist, I'm trying to explain, but 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 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 data-driven system in which you just treat people as components of the 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're not rewarded, you do what the Chinese are doing with the Uyghur

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 hurt 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 it they were like why us 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 what to be precise what happened after 9-11 is that the patriot act it didn't take away lures what it did is it got rid of what might possibly be being prepared as laws by the federal um commission trade commission yeah um and but you're, the shock of it got rid of the growing worries about that. 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. 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 both here and in America was being brought in. I think we're more resilient to that. I do think that. I think the opposite. I think that what's emerged in the West sorry in 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 look if you look at the last you see what what i point out in the films or try and point out in the films is that by about 2015, what the social media companies have realized is that what they call high arousal emotions, activating emotions is their other 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. And that means you click more and that means more profits. So what you get are these things called viral content factories, which constantly send around memes, which are there to outrage you. I mean, 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 almost a system and or you go no let's go the other way let's create a sort of of hysterical 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 ideas. 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 QAnon, which allowed him to explain why he wasn't doing anything.

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

came Black Lives Matter, which I think is yet to get the next thing knocking at the door saying, no, there are really big structural problems in the society. We want change. And you can't hold that hysteria 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 data i mean the high arousal emotions and how this continually keeps us online and the people who benefits from that are Google, Facebook, these huge corporations that benefit from our data. Like, I reckon Twitter hated having to boot Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump saved Twitter. Like, Twitter is a quieter place now without Donald Trump. There's less 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. Yeah. He saved a lot of major newspapers that possibly would have gone bankrupt without him. I mean, you know, really. He saved a lot of things. And I think they're very sorry to see him go underneath. Hopefully, that Assyria 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.

I hope so. I hope so. Because to say that assumes a bit of normality. Yes. Well, I don't think you're going to go back. You can't. There was that slogan that people said Joe Biden had, I don't know that he had it, which is let's make America normal again.

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 the next crazy shit to happen that's what i'm 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 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 selfishly navel-gazing and this prevents us from looking outwards and looking at systemic change?

No, I'm more sympathetic. I think that that age of individualism, from looking outwards and looking at systemic change. 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 old elites in a way that has never happened before in history, was wonderful. But it's now decaying. 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... And within this as well, Adam, 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 in uh 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 at was just saying, this is a zombie town now.

And she was right. It was like a zombie town. And 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 chart in the films, 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 how it works. That's its effect. And that's what people'm charting in 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 there are two arguments here. here one is which 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 or 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 that maybe in 200 years time we will be looking at people who are totally unlike us totally uninterested in stories who have learned to live almost like in a day-to-day just experience just just sensation that that that this that 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 and now 50 years later we are in this quiet moment in 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 it was someone somewhere out there will take all those fragments and reassemble them into a new big story i have no idea where it's going to come from i don't think it's going to come out of art and that but but we're in this funny little moment of history we're actually a christ a christ

basically no 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 get 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 wouldn't it be so beautiful to have the certainty of religion

wouldn't it be so great if either 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 10 rules and obey them and then this gives me an eternity of happiness yes but 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 mustn't try and go backwards. I mean, there are so many people who want to go back to an old kind of nationalism, which is what the people around Trump, the early people around Trump wanted to do,

and sort of Brexit. You don't want that. And 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 guy called David Grae graber who was an activist um 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 within 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 our age of anxiety but i do think it's got to the point where something that's going to happen inevitably but it would be better try 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 bitter 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 where 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 involving but what i also discovered was or so i knew it in myself is that when people watch stuff online they bring a different kind of sensibility to it that it's it's more relaxed is the wrong word it's more open um people are choosing it too people are making a choice to watch you online and they know they can stop and start they can bookmark it it's 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 found when i used to write a blog if you got something wrong they'd point it out and if you were completely straight about you said yes you're completely right i got that wrong i'll change it everyone went oh fine it's when you're breaking the rules there people expect you to fight with them and when you come out with honesty you break the rules the internet allows that it was really good like that. And I somehow felt what I learned from that was that if you could make great big programs that were somehow more involving, more open. And I think the audience likes 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 there like real life you know in the films i've just made the 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 10 minutes into it and then you say something and then i have to pause it and i have to go to wikipedia because you've given me a train of thought and it's like i gotta learn more about this shit before i go back yeah so the way that i'm consuming is now completely different

yes but that's exactly what i i mean i also realized that in a way you could also cut a lot out it the old way of making television programs is you have to somehow assume you're explaining everything to everyone. So actually, even if I know that 80% of my audience know already something, I have to put it in because there's the 20% who don't. With these films, you can just sort of put,

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 an hour. What documentary makers do you enjoy? Who inspires you or who has inspired you? To be honest, I don't really watch much documentaries. I tend to read fiction. The people who have inspired me are writers. I mean, the person who inspired me most, who I got everything off, is an American

novelist that everyone's forgotten about now, who wrote in the 1920s and 30s. He's called John Los Pasos. And he wrote this gigantic novel called USA, 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? Well, 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 again 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 there's a guy. Some music. Yeah, 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 and you know that yourself in life suddenly you just get an experience it's gone and it it doesn't make any sense and it never probably will it just happened and 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 um i hope everyone gets a squint at the new documentary but uh have a smashing evening have a lovely evening all Alright. You too. Very nice to talk to you.

Bye bye. Yart. I hope you enjoyed that. Check out Adam's new documentary. Alright. February 11th. Can't get you out of my head. On the BBC.

iPlayer. I'm aware. That. You know. You can only get the iPlayer. If you live. Within the realm of the English Queen. But if you're smart, if you're smart, VPNs, things like that, you can find a way around it and you can watch it in Ireland. Alright?

I didn't say that. I heard you can do that. I heard that's a thing you can do. I'd never do that. Alright. I'll catch you next week. 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 roaster of a take next week I guarantee you God bless Thank you. © transcript Emily Beynon rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City

at torontorock.com. Thank you.