Introducing - The Gist: Birds Aren’t Real (SHHH … Don’t tell the Crested Warbler!)

Published Jul 26, 2024, 7:00 AM

Peter McIndoe is the founder of the Birds Aren't Real movement-slash-conspiracy theory. He is also the author of the book, Birds Aren't Real: The True Story of Mass Avian Murder and the Largest Surveillance Campaign in U.S. History. Peter doesn’t believe any of that, by the way, but he has good insights on the type of people who do. Plus, how public access to subway brakes, the inability to license a pot store, and a 30-year-old San Fransisco "shanty town" clearance offer lessons in can-do (and can't-do) governance. Please follow the show!

From peat Fish Productions.

It's the gist.

I'm Mike Pesca today on the show. In the Spiel, we tackle this ponderable cities getting it wrong, thus thrusting the citizenry into the position of wondering can government ever get it right? But first, there's a guy named Peter McIndoe who was born in rural Arkansas went on to start a movement. And this movement was we think tongue in cheek?

Is he serious?

There are guys who are serious about stupider things than Peter macindo's movement. Peter McIndoe sought to convince us and the world that birds weren't real. It was the birds Aren't Real movement. They would show up in different cities, they would have rallies and mostly young people would come out and try to claim that birds aren't real. They're replaced by the government, huge conspiracy. I think it's a joke, could be a mass improv movement. But like I said, I would have thought that about the lizard people in the flatter if those flat earthers and lizard people weren't real. I mean, lizard people aren't real, but the people who believe in lizard people are the most wonderful people of the world, and they're real. Peter McIndoe got support, he got attention, and then Peter McIndoe died, and he's with me now.

Hello, Peter, glad to be joining you from beyond the dead. Mike, thanks for having me.

Sorry, sorry about your death. So it's all birds except the North American tufted tip mouse.

Do I have that right?

You know, there are many different sects of belief within the bird truth universe. You know, it's we respect all of them. I do think that bird is a robot, though, I think every bird in North America, all twelve billion, are robots.

As a matter of fact, I've seen signs at your rallies that say reject the Saint Louis Cardinals, which is true. That's say big bird or a picture of big bird equal big lie.

That's also true.

Should I choose my fandom based on rejecting mascots? Does that do anything to oppose the Philadelphia Eagles unless they're playing the Arizona Cardinals, And then I don't know who to root for one hundred percent.

I mean, it's really just about what control do we as the civilian have. We have control over where we, you know, spend our money, where we offer supports. And the more that we you know, blindly go along and support these bird mascot teams, the more that we accept the propaganda that the government has forced upon us by making us cheer for the concept of a bird. You know, it's like a massive public humiliation ritual. They want to put the bird in the middle of the field and then have everyone applauding and cheering for it. So, I mean, I do think it's wise to go for teams without the bird mascot if you care about, you know, your purity on this earth.

Now, there were birds and then the government, you tell me, because you know you're in on this, the government systematically killed them or they were killed and then replaced with these surveillance spots.

Oh, it's a great question. So it's a great question. There were twelve billion birds in the American skies before the nineteen fifties. Around then, Alan Dolister, the director of the CIA, decided, Hey, there's twelve billion birds up here. We could kill them, swap them out, replace them with surveillance drone replicas in disguise designed to splay on the American people. So what they did is they got to a plane, a bunch of planes actually from a wonderful company called Boeing who's been up to all kinds of good things this year. And Boeing helped them fly over the entire country almost like a large lawnmower, spraying a poisonous toxin down onto birds which would then make them very sick, was contagious. They'd fall on the ground and pretty much disintegrate upon landing. As this was happening, you know, for every bird that fell, a drone rose, and the drones over the course of a forty year, systematics filled diskuies to the point where we're by two thousand and one, upon the signing of the Patriot Act, these guys are filled with twelve billion birds, and the American people are none the wiser.

And the presence of all these birds spying on us, what intel has it revealed?

Well, I mean it's been a long process, you know, with the birds, our real movement that it's been around since the nineteen seventies, and we're always looking for evidence and proof to show the people what's going on, you know, because I think like we intuitively have a mix of like prophetic dreams and no things passed down from other activists. But it's important to show the cold audience, you know, the people that may not be already identifying with the truth what's going on. So we've talked with ex CIA agents, specifically, this man named Eugene Price rest in Peace, who talked with us, sat down and said, listen, I worked for the CIA in the seventies. I did this, and I worked on the program. I worked on the bird Room surveillance program, and I am drenched in guilt. He said, every day he feels extremely guilty about what they did, specifically just killing twelve billion birds, and how he was complicit in turning America into the surveillance state, you know. So it was a great interview. We got him to sit down on camera with us, and I think that was some of the most compelling evidence in convincing the public.

Also, I have noticed, and I don't know if your movement has picked this up, but there are signs out there by people who know the truth, and they've appeared over the years. For instance, the lyrics to free bird. If I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me? That exactly parallels what happened to the birds and other Leonard Skinner lyrics. I mean, they're kind of an err attex for this movement. Can you smell that smell?

There?

A there's a slight different odor to the robotic birds than to the real birds.

For the people who were there, whose life span spans the time.

I do think that there are a lot of and I don't know how much of this, you know, it just occurs to me. Once you open my eyes to it. I began to see it everywhere.

It starts unraveling. You start seeing, oh, why is why why do the presidents not talk? They tweet on the bird app and then the tweets are covered on the bird logo media on NBC with a with a peacock right in our.

Face at peacock right right.

Yeah, it's really egregious. It's really egregious. And the more that you see, the more you tug on that little string, the more it all unravels.

Yeah.

And then for people who are like, oh, there are no conspiracies, you list a bunch in the beginning of the book, and some of them are bird related, right, not just uh, Operation mocking Bird. But I don't know if you know Project artichoke, which was trying to get people to become assassins.

That was originally named Project Bluebird.

Mm hmmm, No, that that That's the thing is. It's not all out there. It's not a new crazy concept you can google, folks. You know, it's really not you want, I mean, the thought that the government would do something dastardly and devious in the realm of avian beings, it's right there in on paper. There's proof. Also if you think, oh, the government would never do something like this, the government would never kill something, the government, the American government killing something, killing an innocent thing, killing something and replacing it with surveillance. There are far, far, far worse things that the United States government has done. They're on Wikipedia. You can look them up right now. MK ultra operation paper clip. You know these aren't these are conspiracies, folks. This is you know, it's what our country was founded on. Really, yes, and and unless you want to live in a you know, patriotic delusion about uh, you know, the the altruistic nature of our government, it's important to do your own research, you know, maybe live in reality a little bit, and then you'll though how to react to a lot of things that are about to happen in the future that may not be very good.

So I'm not going to do the cliched and scene, but I will ask Magataz that was that was fun, That was great. We could go on forever, and you did for years and years. I'm not gonna say never breaking character. But you founded this movement, you committed to the movement. But I sensed in our back and forth you weren't one hundred and two percent trying to sell me on this. I think if you were, you'd probably adopt a different persona that was a little off and a little crazy.

Yeah, that's the thing that was the persona for four years that I really embodied. You know. I started Birds Aren't Real in Arkansas and became very almost obsessed with it, with the idea of method acting this character as much as I could. You know, so here in our conversation it's a bit tongue in chic. It's a bit butt uh, buy right, Bud. You know, back in the day, I would talk with journalists, I would talk with people who were really just trying to decipher is this movement real? Is what this guy is talking about? Serious? You know? Not that they were considering birds may not be real, but they thought that I thought the birds weren't real. And then I was claiming I belonged to a movement that had been around since the fifties. And then we started growing a real movement in real life, you know, the thousands started joinings. Then the media is calling me saying, hey, who are you? What's going on? And you know, I would spend sometimes hours on the phone with journalists, break breaking down, you know, and you know, sometimes going into fits of rage because of how little the media understood what was going on.

Were you trying to literally fool them or was it more you were trying you were happy enough that if they got it enough to present your supposed character and information as a bit of a bit, because if it was a bit, then people might cot into it, and the right people, the kind of people who would come out to a rally and be mostly young people quote unquote in on the joke play acting, it would become almost like a spontaneous improv everywhere type Right, So is that what you were looking for, where you're looking for really really fooling people?

The answer is yes. The answer is both of those. I was trying to accomplish, and that's what we were able to do. You know, the idea was a bit of a rorshack test for boomers and gen z or for people that may not be as literate on meme culture, you know, or as aware of pranks and absurdist late Internet humor. You know a lot of people forty plus or not, and so you know, they would see the idea rorshack test immediately go, oh my god, this country is going to shit. This is you know, things are falling apart, conspiracies are sweeping the nation. We need to talk about this. Whereas if you're someone that you know kind of grew up on Twitter, you see this like, oh, this is clearly some messing around, you know. And so that created a really interesting duality where we had this improv everywhere type audience and we'd go hold rallies. I had a birds on real Vans satellites on the top, covered in decals, riddled with typos. We'd go around holding rallies and you know, we'd have hundreds of people show up, not people that actually believe birds weren't real, but people who understood the wink of it all. You know, they they understood the twinkle in the twinkle in the eye to every deadpan thing. Yeah, but it was and the wink.

The wink was built in there though, to give people the out.

Yeah. Yeah, there's an interesting game. You know, that's a delicate place to strike because it's really easy to make people uncomfortable, for instance. You know, it's really it's really really easy to kind of throw people up in the air. What's hard is to you know, give them that wink and let them know this was a joke, which then makes that makes the rest of it kind of unlocks it. It makes it valuable, you know. I know Andy Kaufman had this great performance where he's on stage and he's bombing the stand up set and it's so awkward in the room and everyone's so uncomfortable, and then he starts crying and wheezing. But then somebody rolls out congas and his wheezing is on the rhythm of the congress, and he starts playing the congas to the wheezing, and it's this unspoken reveal to the audience that it was all planned from the beginning, you know, without even saying anything, and the audience, you know, erupts an applause, they get it, you know. So it's a similar kind of game of okay if you if you're looking at it almost like a trapeze artist. You can throw somebody up in the air. It's really easy to do that, or easy to make somebody uncomfortable or question something. But the hard thing to do is to catch them. You know. That's the hard part of trapeez.

So you don't and from what I understand, you didn't know about Kandy Kaufman.

Yeah, that's right, that's right now. You know, I have this biography on my shelf right here. I become obsessed with them. But yeah, whenever I was, I think it was on an interview with The Daily Beasts in twenty nineteen or something. And you know, during these interviews, you know, right now, I think you know now that I talk about this after coming out of character, six seven years after the project, I like joking around about it. But in that day I decided the funniest thing I could do was be as serious as possible, you know, like that that that the concept of the character was the joke, and that if I were to, you know, do micro jokes, would kind of you ruin the point. So I would be in these interviews and be like almost on the virgin's ears and talking about something that really matters to me. And if they were to say, okay, but what are you joking, It's like, what are you talking about? Like why why would you call me and accuse me of that?

You know, there are clear antecedents for uh, some of the ideas that you based the birds aren't real aesthetics on and claims on. And you know, we listed a bunch of them in the beginning. But Q, there's a lot of que in there. Maybe you could tell me.

What sort of Q inspirations there were.

That van that's definitely Caesar Sayak and his van with like a thousand memes pasted to it, right.

Caesars, I've actually never heard of Caesar Sayak. There's the van was actually inspired by. There's a conspiracy called a Stephen King killed John Lennon. If you look that up, there's a man. It's really just a man who thinks that Stephen King, the author killed John Lennon. And so he has made a van covered. Indeed he actually has. He is like a fleet of these vans covered and Decal's explaining this, you know, and it really.

Is you gotta Caesar.

Sayak was the guy who mailed or like in effective pipe bombs to all these public officials, and his van was covered in right wing memes. This is around twenty eighteen, Like, oh, he obviously read that story. But Stephen maybe the Stephen King guy was based on Sayak? Maybe side these things all perpetuate themselves crazy.

Right, Wow, Yeah, I just looked up this van. I'm seeing I'm seeing it now. We actually had real similar design to this, and I think that, you know, we researched conspiracy vans a lot.

Decal design maker.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's the thing. When you really put yourself in the mindset of someone who truly believes something is the case they're trying to get out to anyone who will listen, they will cover whatever they have in it. You know, they'll wear the T shirts, will get their van, and it really and the maximalist design is really interesting too. There's not much aestheticssibility going on there.

But you know Sayak and you know he was like, damn it, I got a four inch by three inch space that's just white. What do I do with it? It's like one of those overly tattooed guys. It's very hard to cover up the old tattoo with the new tattoo.

And then one off hiss.

It's like, wait a minute, Obama, he just changes his mind. Obama is not a Kenyon. He's he believes in Reverend Jeremiah White.

What do I do? How do I address that on my van?

Yeah, it's your billboard to the world, you know, in his mind. It's like the I mean, I mean from really putting myself in the mindset of a conspiracy theorist, and why the van made sense was like, well, I'm censored on the internet, you know, like they can't censor me in physical reality, like I you know, it was like a real almost triumphant move. It's like, all right, well go gotcha. Government, Like you can't stop these stickers on my van, you know.

But right, government is nothing, can have no say in a motor vehicles on the roads.

Exactly. You asked about QAnon, though, which is a really interesting thought. I think a lot of people ask us about qan on which is interesting because birds aren't really started before QAnon, but two years before, which I mean, to your point is interesting because QAnon, I guess or the you know, millions of people are parts of q and on now or were, but all those people were exist things a year prior, two years prior. You know, it's like what were they doing then? What was what led them to that? You know, you don't go from being totally normal chilling normal life too. I'm you know, dedicating my life to the thought that democrats are eating are eating babies and like in my basement talking about that all day on forums. And yeah, I think I grew up around I know I did actually around people that now are part of QAnon. You know, I go on my my Facebook from back in the day, and I really only used Facebook in my early teenage years and then logged off for you know, ten years. And I remember I got on a few years ago, like what's going on Facebook? And it was all these people from my hometown on there. You know, they were my only friends, and it was crazy. It's like actual q and on theories, real conspiracies everywhere, And that became one of one of my biggest inspiration sources, was just Facebook. But yeah, I think it was just that fringe right conspiracy crowd in Arkansas that I really took a lot of inspiration from unintentionally for this, but I guess just like anyone says inspiration from their real life.

Yeah, so the real conspiracy theorists, and I've talked to a lot of people who've chronicled them.

And when we.

Wrote a book about the flat earthers, there's off and then after there's it's usually occasion by some horrible crime. They delve into a community. First it was four chan, then it was eight chan, and there's this thing going on where the joke or the fact that it is a joke kind of helps the people who are the true believers. And so you have this mix because before you were talking about you know, people my age or people your age, not my age.

People who are.

Younger immediately recognize this as a parody. But you know, parody, I'm not gonna say becomes reality. But there are people who are generally they hate Joe Biden. They actually do hate Joe Biden, and they know that QAnon isn't real, but they love putting the memes out there, or they love putting Pepe the Frog out there without necessarily believing all the Pepe the Frog stuff, or they call themselves gropers and sometimes they're called shit posters, So there is the ability to say I'm in on the joke, but also to perpetuate the joke. I know that it was probably that didn't happen with birds Aren't Real. Maybe it did, but my question is analyze that. What's the role of people who are there for the humor or there for the lulls, right, but also do provide some wind beneath the conspiratorial wings.

That's a great point. I don't know if you looked into Pepe the Frog at all, you're that phenomena. Have you looked into that? R? Yes, yes, yeah, really interesting. I think is kind of the similar eraror that you're talking about. Yeah, it's just this image of a frog, this cartoon that was a joke originally but then became co opted and became a symbol that represented something entirely different. I think that was a big fear with birds Aren't Real of mine, honestly, and that was the reason why I came out of character as well. So I wanted there to be something researchable, concrete somewhere where someone could say this, I made this up in Memphis. This has not been around for fifty years, you know, and I did feel, gosh, I guess that was twenty twenty two, a sense of responsibility, I think gratefully though, I was able to see how a lot of people interpreted the idea. It's hard to tell on the internet, right, especially when people are kind of in character with you in the comments. It's a bunch of numbers. You don't really know who your audience is or how your idea is impacting people. You know, I think that all the time, but you know, people I see with big numbers, you don't really know your audience, especially when you're operating in this satirical tongue in chek world, you know. So we started holding these rallies and I almost let out a big sigh of relief in twenty nineteen or so when I saw that everyone showing up was totally tongue of cheek. They totally got it, totally got the bit. And I mean, I think it was because we planted a series of winks throughout our work to where, you know, if you were the media looking for a sensationalized piece on you know, on whatever publication, you would report on its reel. But if you go three clicks deep, you can read about our history and see, Okay, when the government decided to kill all the birds, Alan Dalls was pissed because birds were pooping on his car in the parking lot and it really didn't help him out a lot, and he had like a real personal vendetta against these things. He called them flying demons and you know, wanted to get rid of them. And it's like it clearly gets to this absurd points deep down, and we tried to plant that wink and everything. But yeah, I mean, I remember the rallies were really being a good validator. And the last rally that we held at Washington Square Park in New York City, there were about three thousand people there and it was like this perfect massive, improvisational, immersive theater sort of experience where everyone was in character together for you know, two hours, being a raving bird mob.

Don't you think some percent of a q Andon rally or a conspiracy theory online are people who are telling themselves essentially that yeah, I know, ques not real, but it's fun. If pokes the people I want to poke, it gets them upset. Plus there is community to it. Maybe a certain group of people show up with their friends. See the wackier people inside the community, and that propels them along. I think that you're getting at not just the human dynamics that exposes the dearth of depth of conspiracy theories, but you're also even though you're kind of an anti conspiracy theory, you're also a conspiracy theory, like you're operating on a lot of the same human dynamics that they are, even if you have a metacognition. My point is that not everyone within the actual harmful conspiracy theories don't have at least that self concept that, oh, it's all a big joke and we're here for the lull.

I think that's a very very good point. Yeah, I have, I guess, gotten to talk with a lot of people throughout the years who are in those communities, and I think you nailed it when you said they get community out of it. I certainly think there was a bit of trolling, you know, but when you commit your life to something right, commit your life, which is which is what these people do their entire public persona, it's all they talk about with their families, you know, it completely encompasses them. I think that that happens when you hit the nail on the head. They get community from this not just community, but they get a sense of purpose, right I have, I have a direction in my life. My days are not for nothing and meaning, you know, you get a sense of identity, you know, like these are like some of the most core human needs, the things that I'm looking for every day, you know. And I think that it's certainly, you know, when you get into birds aren't real. There are certainly parallels of why people would join a meta fake movement and why people would join a real conspiracy theory, because maybe it has less to do with the truth that you're believing, but more so the belonging or the sense of belonging that that belief provides.

Do you think the standard way we diagnose them by we, I mean, let us say people who are affiliated with the Democratic Party, the very rational parts of the Republican Party, the mainstream, the establishment universities, most TV networks other than Fox. Do you think the way they die The New York Times, Washington Post, the way they diagnose the problem of misinformation and disinformation.

They're worried about it. They think that there are conspiracies.

I've read a lot of reporting, including reporting on what you've done, that understands a lot of where the scholarship is.

But are they getting anything wrong or missing some major factors.

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean I've spent a lot of time with I guess like disinformation experts over the past couple of years, since I came out out of character, got invited to the fact Checking conference and in Germany last year, and just got to meet people and see that people don't know how to stop this problem. It's almost a scary thing. You know, we need a new approach to this. Clearly the approach we're going off of is not working, and it does seem like a generally powerless, hopeless thing. You know, I'm sitting down with these people from Meta or Twitter who are trying to like control like rampant awful things online. They see the worst stuff online, not just conspiracy theories, but horrible criminal things, and you know, they're sitting there like we have no idea what to do, Like we're all all the fact checkers are in therapy for PTSD and for like they're going through insane things every It's a brand new problem. The world's never had this problem before, you know, so how do you solve it? I think that a big thing the media is missing is addressing it on a level of like I was saying, belief versus is belonging by telling people, Hey, your truth is wrong and you should believe in this truth, which clearly is not going to help anyone, you know. I think that there's also an there's an expectation of people to abandon their belief systems in a way that I think is unrealistic and that we need to adjust the expectation and think about, Okay, what's a way that we can you know, play these play this game smarter, you know, go about it from you know, if our goal is to live in a shared reality with others, and what's the most you know, productive means to get there. And I think there is a way to validate people's core sense of identity and self while criticizing, you know, something above that. For instance, you know, you can't you can validate someone's religious belief system, you know, if it's not hey full or something awfully. And I think that a mistake that I see establishment media making a lot or even just people in our lives, are you know, expecting people to abandon their religion and their political party at the same time, which is like when you say it like that, it's like, oh, of course people aren't doing that, you know, especially when they're just being told it, you know. And so I think that there are different types of approaches.

When you were deep into this was everyone you knew and who was in on it. Were they sending you every research, every bit of scientific or even just popular research showing crows could do this or magpies can do that, the repository of all interesting bird facts.

I feel like I know everything about birds. I feel like I know everything about not only birds, but also real bird drone surveillance that happens. Whenever I had made up this idea, I thought this is the most absurd possible thing, you know, But if you look up bird drone surveillance, India, bird drown surveillance, Chrya, they're doing it. They're like openly, you know, it's certainly not twelve billion of it. I'm certainly not every bird. But it is interesting, how I guess, with how technology has developed, that is a real thing.

Now do you like birds?

Oh? I love birds. I love birds. That's something a lot of people common misconception is I think birds are awesome. I think birds are a fascinating special creature.

Did you start off liking birds? Oh?

Yeah, I've always This is great. I've never had this conversation, but I'm glad it's gonna go out of the public. I love birds. I've always loved birds. I you know, there was a chickadee in our backyard in Ohio growing up before I moved to Arkansaw that I just, you know, loved and got a little chickade stuffed animal. Believe it or not, So maybe maybe it's been deep in my subconscious that the thought of a fake bird since I had that little chickeny stuffed animal. Who knows.

How did you make money while you were in the throes of doing this?

That's a great question. Have you heard of OnlyFans?

You're addressed up in a bird outfit?

No, birds aren't real. We sold t shirts. We sold merchandise. You know which is funny? It is it is almost similar to how a real conspiracy group, you know, would run the I think when it gets down to it, if you identify with an idea enough and there's an opportunity to represent it, you will. If it feels like, I don't know, a good representation of a part of your personality that you want to express to people on the billboard. That is a T shirt. You know, it's like, here's who I am. I'm you know, here's my beliefs. And if your beliefs are meta and ironic and sort of reflecting a culture of lunacy with lunacy, I don't know because I've thought about it. People really love the shirts and it allowed us to do this as a job for six years, believe it or not.

You know, see, if you were a real conspiracy, you probably have less compunction about direct fundraising and just ripping off your followers. And that's the reason that real conspiracies have have more momentum behind them.

Yeah, we never asked our followers for money. Maybe we should have. Maybe that would have turned it into a frenzy.

Yeah, commit to you think you're committed to the bit This would be great set up. Put the monthly recurring payment, show your show your alpha burder.

There are three levels.

We got the bald eagle, we got the golden eagle, we got the parrin falcon.

Which tier are you? Yeah? That is funny though, you.

Know, if you're if you're a current student, you could donate a chickadee level.

Yeah, we did have a like a boots on the ground activism network we called it, you know, not not people that pitched in money, but people that we would send stickers to. You know, we wanted to start chapters. That was a big part of spreading this idea.

You know.

Now and now the movement has millions of followers, but at the beginning, it was very difficult to get anyone to care about it on social media. You know, we were in Arkansas, We didn't have any connections or we didn't know anybody or have any money to do anything, you know, so we're like, how do you get an idea out there into the world. And we thought that a big part of marketing that people are missing in the modern day is the physical space, is planting, you know, baits and lures for people to be messengers to the internet for you know, we didn't have an audience necessarily, but a lot of people did, and if we could bait those people into posting about us, then boom, we're into the zeitgeist. And so you know, we started these chapters, right, we want fifty chapters in every state, you know, and even if they just had a couple people at them. We would send them activism kits, you know, so we'd say, hey, here's fifty stickers. If you put these up this month and take pictures of them, we'll send you fifty for you, and then fifty more to put up, you know, and it would It started the snowball effects where the more stickers that would up, the more people joined the local groups. And then before we knew it, you know, we had thousands of people in chapters across the US, and fifty of them, you know. So that's when we got the van and thought, okay, we're going to hire a minister of the Bird Brigade, that's what we called it. And we got you know, we hired our dear friend Claire, who wore a cloak and would get on zoom meetings with the fifty leaders of the chapters and they would all hold candles and discuss, you know the future of the movement. And I think that it was that real world efforts that really boosted this. You know, I think birds are Reel is considered like a very Internet thing, you know, but the I guess method to get to the Internet was very much reality. Yeah, using physical space.

Now, the one constant of almost all conspiracy theories, and the author of the Flat Earth book bore this out is anti Semitism.

But I'm sure you knew that.

But I'm sure you didn't want to seem so real as to lease your content with any of that.

Yes, yes, but you're right. No. I mean, I've researched a lot of conspiracy theories throughout the day, and it is it kind of always astounds me how many of them go down to anti Semitism. Yeah, I mean, you know, you go even the goofy ones like oh flat Earth, you know, what's what's going on with flat Earth? You look into that, and a lot of these have yeah, hateful roots. It's wild.

Yeah, it's always two steps to the Jews.

I want to ask you specifically about Fox, because Fox did you were on their show?

You were on the Jesse Water Show. There was a guest host there.

But they also put together a documentary about you, and I have to say I didn't pay the premium to watch it, but was the tone I sensed? Yeah, I just sensed that the tone was they were talking about you as if you guys were nuts. But did they think you believed it or what did you think they thought of your movement.

It's a great question. Yeah. I mean Fox reached out to me and said, hey, Fox Nation wants to do a documentary about the Birds Aren't Real movement, Not even the movement, but the conspiracy they said, And it was part of a conspiracy series they were doing where there's flat Earth, there was JFK, and there's birds Aren't Real, you know. And I mean that was honestly great news for me. Whenever I was planning birds Aren't Real. It's exactly what I wanted was not to be not to compete with satire groups or think of ourselves as comedy, but to think about it as this idea we were trying to see in society, so it would be you know, we were our competition was flat Earth, you know, as an idea. So when people thought of conspiracy, they think of oh, JFK, the bird robot thing and flat Earth. You know, we wanted to be in that because if you're there, that idea never goes away. You know, it's not like flat Earth was viral and then goes away. You know, it's just this word of mouth concepts to fixture and culture forever. But yeah, when Fox News reached out to us. I thought, Okay, they must know this is satire, but I'm just gonna play it straight with them, even though I came out of character two years ago. Their Fox News would be fun to fuck with them, And so I went in and it was very odd. They didn't seem to know that I was a character, or they didn't seem to have done their research necessarily, and I was just really messing with them, you know. And there was this one guy on set that was like, oh, it's an improp. It's like improv, but he wasn't the producers, and the producers were feeling very strange about it. So I was able to really just be like a total freak in the Fox News documentary, which was really fun. And that's when they ended up saying, Hey, we want to promote this documentary. Can you come on Jesse Waters, you know and talk to our host live? And I was shocked because I had never thought I'd be on live news again after I had, you know, vomited on Live News and you know, done a variety of different stunts. But they invited me on and I'm sitting down with their hosts in the studio and he looks over at me before the cameras turn on, and he goes, okay, wait one question before would the movement was started in nineteen seventy or nineteen sis seventy six? And I was like, oh, he doesn't know. He doesn't know it's twenty seventeen, Like he has no idea. It's like, oh my gosh. So I just looked him straight in the eyes and said, oh no, it's nineteen seventy six, soh okay, and wrote it down and then the entire interview was totally serious, totally serious, saying okay, how do you believe this? What's going on? And I was I was stunned. I was stunned.

Yeah.

I think he was interviewing it as if, by the way, who do you remember who the guest host was?

It wasn't Jesse.

I it wasn't Jesse. I was so disappointed. And that was this guy named Pete, A guy named Pete.

Oh yeah, Pete Hesse Pete. Hegeth that guy. Yeah, he's on the morning show now.

And I think he was conducting it as if he said to himself, look, this is a crazy guy. I think he's crazy. I meet him like a third of the way by saying, yeah, there's some drum surveillance, sure, because you know not, you can't just discount the fact that the government is in surveillance all the t time for that audience. But also, I think and he didn't keep you on for that long. It was a short segment. I think he was like, all right, Uh, Fox News Nation is promoing this documentary.

I'm not going to rebut it or embarrass anyone at the network.

So he gave you a yeah, Now do you think I didn't watch a documentary? What was the tone of that? Did they mock the idea or did they credit the idea?

How far? It was probably somewhere in between.

Right, It was somewhere in between. It seemed like the people in the editing room knew it, knew it was a joke, but the producers didn't. And so the interviews are very serious and everything was serious. But then they would have a cheezy sound effect, you know or whatever. But I was watching the other ones about real conception. That's my question. How different they did it the way? Yeah, they did it the same way. They're like, oh, this is a preposterous idea, you know.

Right, and then the question is why are they doing it? Is Fox specifically, it's because not to get two nefarious. I'm sure some of there are audience is exactly like us, just curious about it. Some of their audience is curious and that not so good.

Way right right, And that's the thing I mean, I I know, you know different people who their only thing is Fox News, you know, that's all they watch. You know.

Oh, after you did it, did you hear from people who Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask you.

Yes, I did, I did. I had some distant family members. Oh I always saw you pop up on Fox News, you know, uh, which is which is very funny.

So you could be for a while.

The book, the book is very funny, and I think it's probably the capstone to this caper. You could and you are invited to talk about disinformation from a perspective that almost no one else has. But do you think you're going to iterate and do another thing in the field of comedy and improv that might be not disinformation y or do you think you're going to stay in the world of disinformation but not you know, try to do an exact replication of conspiracy theory.

But this time with Woodchucks.

So two answers to that. One is that we have a big other project planned and it'll be coming out. I can't really say, maybe in a few months, maybe next year, but I could not be more excited about the project, and believe it or not, I can promise you it will be much bigger than Birds Aren't Real. So it feels like we're at the beginning of something right now and I'm excited for you for you to see.

Yeah, Birds Aren't Real was founded by I guess you could call him the sentinel Chicken of the movement. He alerted us early on to this phenomenon by Peter McIndoe his new book with Connor.

Gaidos's Birds Aren't Real.

The True Story of mass Avian Murder and the largest surveillance campaign in US history. Peter, congratulations on your resurrection and the book and the movement.

Thanks, thank you so much. Mike, thanks for having me.

And now the shpiel.

I was reading about a nineteen eighty six clearance of an urban encampment.

I e.

A shantytown, overseen by then San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein. What she did was she saw that dozens of people were sleeping outside in tents and makeshift shelters. Had been going on for five years. The citizenry was complaining, so she went in and took down the tents and makeshift shelters and put everyone in a hotel. Was it hard? Didn't seem that hard. Did it solve the problem? Did solve the problem of those people in that shanty town.

The San Francisco.

Chronicle interviewed a four year old girl who lived there. She is now thriving and credits the mayor for intervening. Quote, we got a new life because of that move. The mayor had us all make and I am still grateful for that. This woman grew up to be a veterinary technician, a successful manager, married with four children, and today lives in Paco's quote a tiny village where there's fresh mountain air and it's safe. Now what Mayor Feinstein did, First of all, it wasn't immedia. She was mayor for a while. The chantatown was there five years. It certainly doesn't represent a long term solution, But then again, every city has fire departments and they put out all the fires, and that's not a long term solution. And yet they still do it. They don't let those particular people catch fire or the houses next to that one house on fire, even if it's not a quote long term solution, because we don't embark on short term solutions instead of long term solutions. We embark on short term solutions as a solution to short term problems. And that is the thesis of today's shpiel. What happens when you don't do it, when you don't even commit to these short term solution Maybe because that's not a long term solution. Some will say, maybe because trying to aspire to the long term solution creates so many complications in achieving the short term solution that no solution is made. What about when you stupidly allow the problems of small towns or large cities or huge municipalities too fester. I think what you do then is you invite the idea that there are no solutions. So this is this is a defense of the short term solution. The low hanging fruit that is so often derided is not the solution to all that ails us. Yes, but it could be the solution to that thing, that one thing that's telling us right now, let us take pot shops, weed shops in New York. Little math here. In May of this year, the New York Times reported that there were two thousand rogue headshops. Do you know how many legal ones there were in New York as opposed to the two thousand operating without licenses?

This is from a May article eighty five.

Then a few months later Kurbed had an updated figure there were fifty seven legal weed shops in New York and twenty nine hundred illlegal ones. New York Times slightly tweaked a few months after that its numbers. The estimated licensed retailers sixty two unlicensed two thousand, nine hundred. This isn't like, oh, half the pot shops are illegal. This is sixty two out of twenty nine hundred. That would be just a little over two point two percent. New York didn't legalize weed, really, They just illegalized, arresting anyone for it, and then they did nothing. Well, now they're closing down a couple of dozen of the illegal shops, but they're not really putting the legal ones online any quicker.

Even if the overall goal.

Was good, You know, we shouldn't be spending resources locking up pot smokers or growers. I agree, with that, but that's not an actual policy. That's an opinion. Maybe it's even a law, but it's not a policy. Now, the governor did just fire Chris Alexander, the executive director of the Office of Cannabis Management, and she did so because there was no policy. And that's on her too. When you follow up trying to get a huge policy change, right the legalization of pot, and you address that change, you do change the law, but you change a policy. No pot, that's policy. It was enforced with a lack of a policy. There's no policy. Now they're just not arresting people who sell pot. Well, you endanger the future idea of policy writ large, I get the impression that when it came to pot, the reformers had a slogan and they had an agenda item, they had an end goal. They just didn't have a plan. These weren't serious people. Or maybe the elected officials or the bureaucrats who agreed with their plan, maybe even campaigned on their plan, never really had a plan. They just had a stance or a platform. Again, not serious and right now pot Gallup has been doing polls. Seventy percent of Americans now believe that marijuana should be legal. But what do you do with the next big change that is a heavier lift? Right when it's pulling at sixty percent or even at forty five percent, But you still think it's a good policy. Government needs to work and needs to show that it does work in order to change things that people are a little nervous about. Another New York example subway breaks. They're open to the public, you know, like Linux, but for subways. I don't know how a city chooses to have open access to breaks but not bathrooms. But here we are, and like the f train veering off the tracks, there we go.

Hello, thank you for writing the New York City subway. We at the MTA, we think of our writers as partners, as clients. That's why we give all of you access to the breaks. Now you might think, WHOA, that's not a great idea, but you would be surprised. It's worse than not a great idea. It's one of the most horrible ideas any municipality has ever adopted. As CBS Local News reports.

Police are looking for this man wearing a T shirt saying swag Don't Come Cheap. He's seen in this grainy surveillance video surfing the northbound two train at the fourteenth Street in some of the Avenue Subway station on Tuesday. Police say he rode several stops before he pulled the emergency brakes.

Who is to blame?

It's those damn kids, says the head of the MTA, Jano Lieber.

I've got to convince her that the kids. It's most the kids who are messing around that way. This is really unfair to other riders and it creates risk.

But you heard the stats and they're the same there for twenty twenty three, same stats this year, seventeen hundred times they pulled the brakes. Thirty made sense. I'll say the same thing I said about legal pot shops.

It's not like half of them don't work. Ninety percent don't even work.

More than ninety eight percent of the time someone pulled the brakes. It was a mistake, it was a prank.

And it was dangerous. There have been a couple of very big trained derailments. Then this report on WCBS. They hit up a professor, an NYU professor. Now this guy couldn't come in the studio. Is too busy working on complex solutions to almost intractable problems, so they wire them up remotely. It's a bad connection. It's obviously a fake background. But anyway, they needed him because only this professor could deliver the flaming arrow of insight to pierce this vexing conundrum.

Professor Katsuo Kirbyashi is the Chair of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the NYU tande In School of Engineering.

One solution is that and we eliminated that kind of the system, and they should get rid of this kandid direct access for these people to activate the emergency break eliminate.

The emergency brakes.

Well there you go, Thank you, tenured Professor katsu Glad we could all tap into his expertise. I don't know how many years of instruction, learning and study it took him to the side.

I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't just let any puts pull the emergency brakes, because we have shown they will.

We have hard problems. We've always had hard prods problems in San Francisco. Kevin Fagan who wrote about that Dianne Feinstein cleaning up the camp, you know, he acknowledged this situation has gotten much worse. They were twenty five hundred to four thousand homeless people every night in nineteen eighty six, and in San Francisco today it's eight thousand, so it's doubled. But then again, San Francisco used to spend in nineteen eighty six thirty million dollars a year, so with inflation that would be ninety million dollars. You know what their budget is on the homeless now, six hundred and fifty million dollars, and they have seventeen thousand beds of supportive housing and thirty eight hundred shelter beds. But still nothing gets to the root cause or the long term solution.

Of course you can.

You have to change the laws of San Francisco at most coastal cities to look more like Houston, which homeowners and the political class has historically been against. It's the only long term solution. Sometimes the short term solution does something, saves a four year old's life, shows the people in the city that something can be done. We have always had very hard problems, but by so pathetically addressing or managing the less hard problems, we don't just fail to solve those specific problems, we do create the greater problem of hopelessness. Cynicism a disbelief that anything can be done. Some problems are in fact extremely complex and intractable.

But lots really aren't subway breaks.

Let's be a tiny bit more practical, attentive, and intelligent un the solvable problems. Else we squander the will to tackle the big ones. And that's it for today's show. Cory Warra produces the gist. Joel Patterson's the senior producer, Leo Baum interns with us baumb It reminds me of the lyrics to What's Happening Baumba. Michelle Pesca is the special projects Quarternate Tricks of Peachfish productions.

To advertise, go to advertisedcast dot com. Slash the gist. Super dupery, dupery Thanks for listening.

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