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220609_Informed Consent Interview with CJ-HOPKINS-

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:00:08] Welcome to the program, everyone. I am Dr. Chris Martenson here with a very exciting episode for you. As you know, we’ve been working tirelessly, at least from my perspective, for years now, trying to figure out what’s going on, what is actually happening out there in the world and looking for frames that will help us understand it. Now, it’s a very complicated world, a lot of different ways we could look at this. We could look at it through an energy lens or a financial lens or a political lens or a geopolitical lens. And hopefully we’re trying to assemble a view of what’s happening in the world now. As you know, I’m a systems guy. I think if we understand the system that’s involved, we have a better chance of understanding the outputs of that system rather than just trying to analyze the outputs and make sense of it. So what’s the system today? Really honored to have with us. C.J Hopkins award winning playwright, novelist, author and the author of this extraordinary book here, which I’m going to recommend for everybody very highly. This is the rise of the New Normal. It’ll come like this, but without all the little Post-its, because that’s me marking up the book, doing what I do, which is reading and taking notes. And this one I had to take a lot of notes on. I was reading this book out loud to my fiancee over breakfast because passage after passage was really catching me. So before we dove into that, welcome to the program. It’s so good to have you here.

CJ Hopkins [00:01:29] You know, thanks so much for having me on, Chris. I appreciate it.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:01:32] So extraordinary book. And and I want to start with what’s extraordinary about it for me was a that that I had only very recently come across your writing. And as soon as I did, I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t come across it before. I think we’ll have a conversation about censorship and about how certain authors messages are limited. We’ll get to that later. But what caught me was this first chapter here after the introduction. It’s called The Great Chinese Bat Flu Panic of 2020, and it’s dated March of 2020 and already in March of 2020, you’re beginning to call into question things that years later, people are starting to finally get their head around. So let’s start there. How long was it before you’d heard about the great Chinese flu, before you started to wonder if maybe it was something different as then was being presented?

CJ Hopkins [00:02:28] It was right around then. Actually, it was it was, you know, late February and March of of 2020. You know, I tell you a story. I was running scriptwriting workshops at the time here in Berlin. So, you know, international writers from different places in Europe. And one of my writers was from Italy, and she went home for the holidays. And since, you know, 2019, Christmas holidays and New Year holidays. And she came back and gave everybody a really nasty flu. And so, you know, we all got sick. And my wife and I had it. And, you know, it was just a nasty flu. And it went away. And then it came back and it lingered for a while. I didn’t really think very much of it because here in Berlin, I usually catch a pretty nasty flu, you know, once or twice during the winter season anyway. And then all the stories start coming out in the news. And I think so. I think the thing that there were a couple of things that that set off alarm bells for me right away. The first one was just this iconic picture of, you know, people lying dead in the streets of Wuhan and with, you know, health workers with hazmat suits. And I think people can find this picture if they don’t remember it. It just seemed crazy to me. And and the second thing was when the W.H.O. announced that they thought that there was a fatality rate of I forget when it was 3.4, 3.7% or something. And I had a little fun with that. I think in the second essay of the book, when you start doing the math on that, it just the the propaganda that that that was unleashed right at the beginning of this just reeked of propaganda to me. It’s, it’s what I pay attention to generally. And it just it just reeked of official propaganda to me. And I just started doubting and then digging into it.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:04:37] Yeah. You know, I called this an official pandemic, I think, in January of 2020. But I was using the ozone guidelines. You know, they have a pamphlet out there. They have a booklet, a big PDF. This is what a pandemic is. So it was taking these boxes. And then the next thing I know, Tadros of the show is coming out saying, Well, we wouldn’t really want to block flights from this place. All these, you know, deadly pandemic viruses are located because, well, that might impact global trade to an unnecessary degree or it might be racist. Right. So these were these. That was my first scratchy record moment was like, that is absolutely not what you do. Textbook 101 if you’re really concerned about this thing. Alternatively, if your intent is to have this thing spread as widely as possible, those are the kinds of B.S. excuses you might give while you’re allowing flights to leave from Wuhan. And then I was looking at FlightAware, this tracker, and noting that China wasn’t allowing internal flights from Wuhan anywhere, but they were now going all over the world, including landing in Italy, where I think you’re you know, Bergamo had a horrible run of that in in March of 2020. So. Lot of scratchy record moments early on, weren’t there?

CJ Hopkins [00:05:54] There were. The other thing I think the other thing that sort of clinched it for me was watching the rollout of the new normal. I tried to document this in the book and well, you know, the book is is primarily a collection of essays that were written, you know, month by month as this as as it all happened. I tried to document it there and I tried to focus on it in the book a little bit. It really was it was bizarre. Okay. So just even if I just assumed, okay, there’s a nasty respiratory virus going around. Okay. And, you know, people should pay attention to it. Suddenly, suddenly, all of these mouthpieces of authority were announcing that there was going to be a new normal and that life was never going to be the same again and that society was going to have to be radically restructured. And I just I tracked this and I watched this just media outlet after media outlet, so-called health authority after health authority, government official after government official, you know, down to just tiny random blogs, you know, pumping out, repeating this message about how, okay, it’s time for a new normal. And just the idea, even even if I took the information that was coming out about the virus from the authorities, even if I took that at face value, the idea that global civilization, closed society needs to be radically restructured because of a nasty respiratory virus is just it’s just patently insane. It’s it’s insane on its face. And that’s that’s what really got me going. I’m I’m a student of ideology and propaganda. That’s mostly what I focus on. And that’s clearly what I was watching, was the messaging that was involved in it, rolling out this radical restructuring of society. And and we’ve seen it it’s ongoing, but to a great degree, it has been accomplished.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:08:09] Well, it has. And that’s what I really want to get to, because right here in in this first essay from March, which is at the front of your book here, you say, I like so let’s get to the systems around this. So we’re talking about, you know, what is this and why is it happening? You said, no, it doesn’t involve Bill Gates, Jared Kushner or the W.H.O. in a global conspiracy of Chinese Jew Jews defiling our precious bodily fluids with their satanic alien 5G technology. Love the sarcasm and stuff there. It’s a little less exciting and more abstract than that. See, I try to focus more on systems like global capitalism than on individuals and on models of power, as opposed to the specific people in power at any given time. Looking at things this way, the global lockdown in our brave new normal makes perfect sense. This is what I want to get to because that framing. So global capitalism, if I could translate, you’re basically saying, look, Klaus Schwab magically goes away, Bill Gates magically goes away and nothing changes because seamlessly two new characters rise into those top spots because of the system. What is that system?

CJ Hopkins [00:09:15] I call. You know, I’ve been using a nickname for it. I call it Global Cap. It makes some people crazy. Some of my conservative readers get get excited and need to defend capitalism. And I try to remind them I have a kind of complex view, perhaps uncharacteristically these days, which also annoys my my friends on the left of it. I do not see capitalism as as is this evil monster. It’s I think it’s good to remember capitalism is actually what freed us from the tyranny of kings and aristocracies and and all of that a few hundred years ago. It I focus on ideology. I’m not a financial expert. I’m not an economist. And so I’m looking at capitalism as as an ideological system. And I’m looking at global capitalism because that’s what that’s the system that we live under right now. What does capitalism do? How did it free us from those tyrannies and from the aristocracy and all of that? Ideologically, what it did is it basically decoded all of those despotic values that were governing society at the time. We used to live in a despotic world where if the king said something was worth, you know, £20, it was worth £20, you know, because if you disagreed, the king would send soldiers and kill you. Yeah. Or if the church said that, you know, God was X, Y and Z, then God was X, Y and Z or the church would send its soldiers, and it was a despotic world. Capitalism came along and decoded all of those values and and reconfigured power in society. And and that’s what capitalism basically does ideologically. Okay. So jump hundreds of years of that ahead to where we are now. I, I started tracking this in earnest right around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. I grew up in the Cold War world, you know, sixties and seventies and what have you. In 1989 got my attention. This what I had said is, okay, we are really entering a new world where we’re entering a phase of history that is truly unprecedented, because what we’ve got is one world that is completely dominated by a single ideological system. Right. You know, communism, Marxism, what have you virtually disappeared as a viable ideological adversary. And we became a global capitalist world till that happened, you know, starting in 89 through the early nineties. Okay. So what does that mean? That’s what I start asking. What does that mean? This has never been possible before in history. It is possible now. What is this global hegemon going to do? Right. And what I’ve been tracking for the last 30 years or so, it seems like the completely predictable behavior of a global hedge fund. Once you control the entire territory of the planet and you have no external ideological enemies anymore, what is left to do? Well, what’s left to do is clear and hold. You know, this is, you know, military term. This is what occupying forces do once they’ve conquered a country, they go around through the territory that they’re occupying and they identify little pockets of resistance, holdovers from the old regimes, what have you, and they eliminate them. And the whole purpose is to eliminate these little puppet pockets of resistance and create ideological uniformity. Right. Get everybody on board with the new program. If you look at the last 30 years of history, that’s what I see. Yeah. You know, so the Soviet Union falls apart. We become a global capitalist world. What does the global capitalist system do? It starts a clear and hold up. It starts in Eastern Europe and it goes in and destabilizes and restructures and privatizes, you know, some holdover societies there. And then we’ve got the global war on terror. The Middle East needed some serious destabilizing and restructuring, and that went on and on and on. Meanwhile, it’s also this clear hold up. This is destabilizing and restructuring is also happening, you know, in the heart of the empire. But it’s happening subtly and it’s happening gradually right up until about 2016. And at which point you get you start to see. This huge populist, quote unquote, populist backlash which leads to Brexit. Brexit, which leads to the rise of a lot of right wing or, you know, neo nationalist movements in Europe, which leads to the election of Donald Trump. And my my previous collection of essays is titled The War on Populism, because that’s pretty much what I covered all during the Trump years was global capitalism’s response to this populist uprising, you know, not in the Middle East, you know, not in some faraway country, but right in the major countries of the empire. And it was an absolutely unprecedented, draconian reaction on the part of the system to crush. You know, it wasn’t about Donald Trump. I’m not a Donald Trump fan, but but he became a symbol of people who were pushing back against the hegemony of what I call global capitalist ideology that continued all the way up to the end of the Trump term. And it’s culminated in the the so-called what is it, the attempted coup or what have you done on the Capitol by a bunch of unarmed, you know, people and seamlessly faded into the COVID pandemic? Right. What I’m. That’s a long babbling argument, Chris. What I’m the simple version of it is what I what I think I’m watching is the absolutely predictable behavior of a globally hegemonic system, which has nothing else to do other than eliminate internal resistance and consolidate and tighten its power over the territory that it controls. That’s the way that’s the way I understand if you if you dig into the facts surrounding the pandemic and you compare them with the authoritarian totalitarian measures and and propaganda programs and censorship programs that have been rolled out in response to it, it’s it’s these things are clearly about tightening control of society and not simply in response to respiratory virus.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:16:49] Yeah. Thank you for that. A lot to unpack there. And I want to it’s almost like you’re describing a global cult this year. Yeah, a lot of what I hear you talking about, because I’ve had to look into cults and cult like behavior, mass psychosis, formation. I I’m a scientist. I had to go down a lot of psychological and sociological roots to begin to unpack and understand what’s happening here. But what you’re talking about then I think there’s a part in your book which really caught me was when you were describing ideology. I like to unpack things, so can we just talk about that word? What is an ideology and what does it require of itself and its participants in order to be complete?

CJ Hopkins [00:17:30] It? It depends on on the context of the conversation that you’re having it in of an ideology. You know, almost any set of beliefs can be an ideology and call it ideology. When I say that I’m a student of ideology or I’m tracking ideology, I think I probably go back to Marxist definition of ideology, which is it’s not just a set of beliefs, but ideology is essentially it is. It’s what we think of as just the way things are. The past, the governing ideology, the ideology that actually has power over our lives is not the one that we can point at and say, you know, oh, look at this crazy stuff. These people believe it’s the ideology that we’re not aware of. It’s the things that we take for granted for axiomatic truths. And it’s it’s interesting. You can look at 20th century totalitarian systems and you can look at how ideology functioned, for example, in Nazi Germany and and and how people were, you know, reinforcing that ideology. And it’s relatively easy for us to do that. It’s almost impossible for us to look at our own ideology. And and our ideology is a global capitalist ideology. I talked a little bit about how capitalism decodes despotic values. Right. Well well, what does it put in their place? It’s it’s that’s the thing about capitalism is it really only has one value, which is exchange value. And and as a machine, as a system, all it really knows how to do is go into territories, decode whatever despotic values might still be there, and render everything a commodity or a potential commodity. Right. And just increase the flows of the market. Right now, I’m getting lost in my thoughts. How how what kind of an ideology does a system like that has, right? It’s not there’s no Mein Kampf, you know, there’s no, you know, the Communist Manifesto. The you can’t go in and find a book where someone has set forth this ideology. It’s it’s an ideology that that passes itself off as reality. You know, as as reality. It’s almost unidentifiable as ideology. And nonetheless, it is ideological. You know, I come from the theater and I used to drive my actors crazy. On the first day of rehearsal, I would sit them down. And these were Chris were talking downtown New York City. Okay. Experimental theater were all, you know, wearing leather jackets and berets and stuff dressed in black and, you know, reading for coats. And I would sit them down and I would say, Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best actor in the United States of America. And they would become furious with me. And I’d say, no, I’m absolutely serious. You know, at that time, Schwarzenegger, I think, had the highest income in Hollywood. And I and what I would say to them is, we can believe whatever we want. You know, you can worship whatever actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, whoever you want. But the fact of the matter is, in our society, we have no other measure of excellence other than earnings, income, money. Therefore, according to our values, Arnold Schwarzenegger is just the best actor in the United States of America. And what I was trying to point out to them is the difference between the private ideologies or the subcultural ideologies that we may hang onto and the ideology that actually governs our lives. You know, it’s a complicated and I think fascinating subject. Saudi Arabia is another example that I bring up often. Saudi Arabia is a theocracy not. Sure. And there’s an official ideology, you know, fundamentalist Islam and what have you. But when that ideology and that theocratic ideology comes up against global capitalist ideology, which ideology wins? Global cap in Saudi Arabia is is a is a key functioning part of the global capitalist system. And, you know, when when when they’re between a rock and a hard place, global can be rheology wins. Just another example.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:22:23] Yeah. Well it’s so this idea then that that an ideology though it even if it isn’t written down somewhere, it still has its own set of rules and it doesn’t like any as in a cult, the leader of the cult doesn’t really brook any dissent. So I really feel part of this clear and hold operation is I’ve been watching mainstream news, big tech, social media. I mean, I’m on the receiving end of of having been censored a bunch of times because I simply had an inconvenient sort of point of view, which often meant I was just a few months ahead of officially sanctioned news. Right. I could read a preprint and make a conclusion and deliver that conclusion to people, and I would find myself censored. And then months later, it’s okay to talk about that right around the lab leak, around some of the vaccine side effects that are now coming to light, etc., etc. It turns out just being out of step with the ideology is enough for an official spanking, whatever that means from the keepers of the system, those keepers of the system. Nobody has to instruct them to do that, though, right? There’s no there’s no smoky room with cigar chomping people laying down the law. Right. These footsoldiers know exactly how to behave because they’re within the ideology. Is that correct?

CJ Hopkins [00:23:37] Yeah. Chomsky made this point. Noam Chomsky made this point a long time ago. It’s, you know, of course, nobody needs to be handing out orders and telling these people what to do. They have been in order to get into the position of power that they’re in. They have them through a long conditioning process that started in their preparatory schools and then, you know, on through university and and what have you. And by the time they get into a position of power, they have a been extremely well trained in how to think and what to pay attention to and what not to. And and and they’ve they have internalized this. They’re not they don’t they don’t think. I believe most of them don’t think of themselves as propagandists. They actually believe that they’re reporting reality. It’s the of course, there are conspiracies, but but it’s not necessary to to think that way. You know, if you if you look at how the system functions, it it it really doesn’t it really doesn’t need conspiracies. You’re talking about censorship and the demonization of skeptics and dissidents and and critics. It’s another example. It might be a good example to try to try to shine a light on global capitalist ideology again, which I think is difficult to do. It’s just complex when we are demonized. And of course, I’ve been demonized since the beginning of this as a as well, like you have and so many of us have. And the way that if you look at the way that we are demonized, we are not demonized as traitors or not demonized as counterrevolutionaries. We’re not demonized for any political reasons. Right. We we are demonized as crazy people or we are demonized as liars. Right. Either what we are spreading is disinformation or misinformation, or it is just insanity because we have some sort of psychological condition. And and this is a perfect example of of the ideology of global capitalism that works because it can only exist by presenting itself as non-ideal, ideological. It presents itself as reality. Right. So who would possibly question reality? Who is, you know, crazy people? You know, only crazy people question reality or liars people who are intentionally lying. Right. So we’ve we’ve moved from a world of ideological conflict where, you know, you had advocates of capitalism arguing against Marxists and and and there was an actual ideological argument going on. Right. We’ve moved into a place where that argument is over and power is claiming the authority of reality for itself. Therefore, it demonizes its opponents, its critics, you know, not as political adversaries, but as crazy people, as abnormal people or as just boldfaced liars.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:27:17] Yeah. And I’ll go even further than that. I would suggest, as the othering is what I’ve been writing about this as this othering, watching Justin Trudeau do it against the truckers. Right. These weren’t just people who ideologically disagree. These were misogynists, rapists, Nazis, you name it. Right. So, so all of that. And then watching the physical treatment of, say, the jail by Macron in France, right where they were specifically taking their little laser optics with the with the beanbags and targeting people’s eyes so they could blind them. That that takes a level of depravity, of of othering. Like these aren’t just your opponents. These are subhumans at this point. I mean, is that am I overdoing it? But that’s how I saw it. There was no other excuse for 3000 people to have been maimed by the police in France unless they were trying to.

CJ Hopkins [00:28:10] Yeah. No, I don’t think you’re overdoing it at all, Chris. And you’re probably I’m sure viewers remember, you know, the iconic pictures of the police forces in Canada, you know, running over a woman who was in a walker or what have you and just mercilessly assaulting a bunch of protesters who were absolutely nonviolent. It was just classic nonviolent civil disobedience. But the othering, it’s it’s it’s dehumanizing. And this is something I think that’s common to all forms of totalitarianism. I think the thing that makes it unique in our case is maybe not entirely unique, but the the thing that I think is remarkable is the disappearance of the legitimate political argument and and the system’s assumption. It’s that the system has, as has taken unto itself, the authority to dictate reality. In other words, it is no longer arguing. It is it no longer has to argue with us. It doesn’t you don’t need to argue with crazy people. Right. And by dehumanizing us as lunatics or idiots or, you know, or liars, we don’t need to be argued with. We just need to be crushed. And and you saw this thematic all the way through the last two years. And and it continues now less intensely. But it continues now. I think it’s it’s something it’s something that I had been tracking before 2020. It’s something that I started tracking back in 2016. This this pathology zation of political dissent, where it’s no longer regarded as as a political position or a political argument, it’s simply here are these deviants who are deviating from the norm, who are deviating from reality, and they either need to be cured or crushed. So I think it’s I think it’s extremely insidious now.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:30:29] Now. So here’s the thing I have trouble with is that this ideology obviously has some internal inconsistencies that border on mad incoherence. Right. And so if you even start to point those out, you get that blank look and you know you’re the crazy person. So quick example is Edward Abbey said. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. It obviously is a self-destructive ideology to the cancer cell. That’s what capitalism has turned into, what I’m going to call capitalism. Good, true capitalism. You have actual price signals that feed back into the system through an open and fair market. We don’t have that. I’ve studied markets enough to tell you we have nothing even remotely close to free and fair and open pricing. We now have Pollock Burrows. We call it the Federal Open Market Committee. We call it the ECB, who know the true price of all things, obviously in their infinite wisdom. And so they set prices for money itself, debt, things that then feed into every other price. So we don’t even have good price signals. But you look at the world of food through the ecological lens and you say, Oh my gosh, you got the microplastics, you got the neonicotinoid devastation of the insect populations. You’ve got the basic, there’s no thiamin in the oceans anymore. How did we even mess that up? Right on and on and on. There should be some feedback signals coming back to the system saying, Whoa, Bucky, this this growth constant growth thing might have some issues you want to look at. You can’t have that conversation. The closest we can get is people flying around the world in jets, private jets, telling us that we need to take cold showers because of climate change. Right. So the incoherence is starting to mount. Doesn’t this create some cognitive dissonance in the in the troops at some point?

CJ Hopkins [00:32:14] I think it probably does. I don’t know. I’m not I’m not privy to their conversations. I think it probably does. I think it points to it points to an argument that I’ve been making. And it’s it’s a difference of perspective, whether one. Whether one looks at these individuals, looks at the individual powerful people who are guiding things and making decisions and implementing programs and what have you, or whether whether one focuses on the system itself or you just use the adequate. You know, a cancer cell does not have a consciousness. It doesn’t have a plan and a system doesn’t have a plan. It’s a machine. It does something. It functions. And my understanding is, you know, machines are wonderful things. And and I think capitalism is incredibly powerful machine. It’s an incredibly scary and destructive machine. If we take our hands off it and let it run everything right, that’s when it functions like a cancer. You know, capitalism, it it knows how to do things. It knows how to decode despotic values. It knows how to create market flows, what have you. It doesn’t know how to create societies. You know, I don’t have I don’t have the economic solution for humankind. Right. But one thing I think is that if we’re going to have capitalism, we probably need to use that machine inside of a strong society that has its own values. Right. And and which is willing to limit that machine and restrict that machine when necessary and use that machine for whatever, you know, wealth it can generate. But a society that is willing to place its values above the values of the machine. You know, for most of my life, I and I spent a lot of my life in the United States. I felt like I haven’t been living in a society, Chris. I’ve been living in a marketplace. Hmm. Right. I think I think the United States is is sort of the tip of the spear. It’s one of the reasons I think that I ended up in Europe is because we still have the vestiges of social democracy here, there. There’s a social safety net. There’s you know, there are parliaments rather than the U.S. system. And there is still it’s not perfect by any means, as we have seen. But there is still this this vestige of an understanding that that the market should not create our society, our society. We should create society, and we should use the market rather than serving it like slaves. Yeah, this is what it comes down to. It’s when I when I talk about global cap, you know, I’m not talking about the guy that runs the corner store, a guy with a little manufacturing business or, you know, it’s a lot of people have been buying and selling things and owning property and paying each other to do things since the dawn of human civilization. Well, when I’m talking about global cap, I’m not talking about that activity. I’m talking about this vast global hegemonic system, which, as you described it, as Abby described it, is is like a mindless cancer that is running amok unattended by us or or maybe maybe the the the maybe those fellows believe that they are running it. But I don’t believe they are. I believe it’s running now.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:36:25] I completely agree. And thank you for bringing this up. Very well said. Because so we turn now to the World Economic Forum, the WEF, the Davos crowd, Klaus Schwab, all of that. Right. And they’ve been very open and transparent, bless them. They put it right on their website. They put out PowerPoints. They’re very open and they put out this movie a little trailer in 2016, which was just eight slides and some music. And the first one caught a lot of people’s attention because it said, You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy, right? Maybe, maybe not. I’m sure they were positive about the first part, which is you’ll own nothing, because obviously they’re going to run that global cap system to print money, hand it to themselves and buy everything up while impoverishing everybody. So I think that’s fine. The one that caught me those is germane to what we’re talking about now was number eight, which was. Western values by 2030 will have been tested to the breaking point. And now I scan my newspapers. And apparently, you know, the most important thing ever in my country right now is transgender rights, putting up different colored flags to represent people’s sexual orientations and really focusing a lot of attention around that. And I’m over here looking at us, running out of resources worldwide and seeing this extraordinary battle shaping up for literally what I consider to be the survival of most humans. And it’s like my priorities aren’t even remotely on balance with what they’re talking about as being supposedly the most important thing that we have to be discussing as a culture. But this is actually really testing the bedrock of a culture, isn’t it? Right. You know, just to say, hey, let’s just reexamine what humans knew for thousands of years to be true, that there was male and female. Biology, right? We can’t even get biology right. So isn’t. Excuse me, but this feels intentional. As if somebody is intentionally trying to confuse us by making sure that this reality we have to live in. We don’t have a shared reality anymore. Like, I can talk to people. We no longer have a shared reality about what used to be pretty shared terra firma for a long time is now terra firma. Is this intentional or do you think this is just a the machine doing what it does?

CJ Hopkins [00:38:40] I think it’s the machine doing what it does, and I’m going to get in trouble talking about this. I try to avoid the topic. I’ll tell you the truth. Chris I try to avoid it as much as possible, but I’m going to go ahead and get in trouble and talk about it. And so before I do, I just want to state that, you know, I lived in San Francisco in the eighties before the dotcom boom, and I come from the theater world. You know, I had so many of my friends have been gay and I in San Francisco, I was using I was using pronouns, you know, in 1986 and 1987 and 1988, it was it was no problem. You know, it just you know, there was, you know, Sheila or whoever. And it was like, you know, sweetheart, I how are you doing? You know? And I was using pronouns. I had no problem using pronouns whatsoever until until groups of militant Maoist like activists started surrounding people and waving their fists in people’s faces and demanding that they, you know, display their ideological loyalty by using the pronouns or doing whatever. Here’s here’s where I get it. Here’s where I’m going to get in trouble with it. I don’t think it’s intentional. I think it’s systemic. I think it is an integral part of what I described as global capitalist inequality. If you if you understand global capitalism ideologically, again, not economically, not ideologically. What it does is it decodes despotic values, and I use the word despotic. For most people, that sounds really negative. You know, sounds like sort of a despot, you know. But not all despotic values are so negative. What what the word essentially means is these are values that we have because we want to have them, not because we have, you know, scientific data that proves that this is the way it is. It’s simply we want to live this way, learn a community gets together and decides these are our values. This is the way we want to live. This is how we want our society to function. Right. It’s those are despotic values. They’re not based on any, you know, scientific facts. They’re an expression of the will of the of the community, you know, or in the old days, an expression of the will of the despot. Right. What capitalism does, essentially, is it has to eliminate and decode all of those despotic values, because you can’t reduce everything to exchange value. You can’t reduce everything to a commodity, you know, and have this free flowing marketplace with all of these despotic values running around. Right. And so how far do you want to go? You know, religion, religious values, these are despotic values. You know, they don’t really function in the marketplace. Right? Yeah. You were getting into your gender ideology, right? Well, you know, it’s in the marketplace. In the marketplace. If if I say I’m a woman, I’m a woman. Who are you to say that I’m not a woman? There are no values. There aren’t. Our society doesn’t have any functioning values to preserve those distinctions. Right. If I can if I can market this idea, if I can dissolve these traditional, despotic, you know, values, understandings of what men and women were, what anybody can be, anything. Right. Anybody can be anything. What? What I believe we’re watching. What I believe we’re watching is the just the radical decoding of what is left of despotic values in the world to pull it away from the transition for a second. You know what? What’s the problem in the Middle East? What was the problem in the Middle East during the global war on terror? It’s certainly not a country like Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a theocracy, but they completely play ball with global capitalism. This is this is somewhat similar to, you know, the devout, fundamental, you know, fundamentalist Christian who goes to church every Sunday, reads the Bible every night and what have you, but functions according to the values of global capitalism on a day to day basis. Right. We are allowed we are allowed to have all of these ideologies as long as our primary ideology, the ideology that actually controls how we live and what our values are on a daily basis is global capitalist ideology and global capitalist ideology. There is I don’t know how to describe it other than to say, Chris, anything is anything. Anything can be anything. It. I don’t mean to get all philosophical on everybody, but what is a commodity? You know, what is what is exchange about? You know, it’s another thing that I used to drive my actors nuts with, you know, essentially, you know, the collected works of William Shakespeare and, you know, a 14 carat diamond and a plastic fork are all essentially the same. They have no inherent value. Their value is assigned to them by the marketplace on an ongoing the fluctuating basis. That’s where their value comes from, and that’s the world that we are increasingly living in. What I’m watching you’re talking about the transitions. What I’m watching is that machine that values decoding machine doing what it does. It just cranked up to 11.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:44:48] Yeah. And so let’s talk about why that’s at 11 right now. I have the sense of desperation in the air. Right. So maybe this is just what you have to do when you’re in your final stage. Clear and hold. It’s your equivalent of cultural shock in all. You just got to, you know, get the tanks to roll over the situation as fast as possible. But I have this other sense of I have this debate or discussion all the time with people in my inner circle is, what’s the ticking clock? Like, what’s the emergency? All right. You can all feel there’s some emergency. And, you know, Klaus Schwab said never let a good crisis go to waste. We only have this little window with this coronavirus. Let’s make the most of it to get our great reset going. But but where they want to reset us towards is this really bizarre world of highly mechanistic AI transhumanism. Basically, like humans are just going to take the Enlightenment and ram it all the way down to its illogical, hypermasculine conclusion of We can control all the all the billiard balls in the universe, or finally be under our control, and then we’ll finally get this sweet certainty on a life that has eluded humans forever and ever. But that leaves aside beauty, mystery, or all the feminine archetypes. It fundamentally, like, steamrolls itself to a conclusion that what if you’re not down for that ride? What if you believe that there’s some bell intrinsic, inherent value to things that we can only know through our humanness, not our reduction into the into a tiny collection of billiard balls with with known trajectories. Right. There’s something missing in their story for me that’s just not exciting at all. I’m not down with their plan. I’ve got to be honest. It feels cold and like Bladerunner to me.

CJ Hopkins [00:46:26] It’s there’s there’s quite a lot missing in their plan. And I’m smiling and laughing because you’re you’re playing my tune. You held up my my latest collection of essays, but I wrote a novel and I finished it in 2017, I think published publisher called Zone 23. And it’s it’s a satirical, dystopian vision of the future. And you were you were describing quite a lot of it at the at the core of it. At the core of it. And and and thank you. You’re giving me all philosophical and spiritual today. At the core of it, I think is is. Something that is. There’s really. Kind of insane and destructive. And at the core of it is this idea or is or is this approach to life that that looks at life, that looks at at people and history. And and, you know, people are amazing to me. You know, we are you know, we are beautiful, ugly, you know, kinda vicious, you know, genius, idiotic, you know, contradictory, messy creatures who have, you know, perpetrated incredible horrors and created amazing, you know, works of genius and beauty. And and and it’s this this mind looks at people and looks at life itself and says, oh, this is all screwed up, and we’re going to fix it. Mm hmm. We we monkeys. We little talking monkeys. We’re going to fix the universe. One thing. One thing is driving my wife crazy recently is. Is there’s this recent sort of development where people are are beginning to talk about death as, you know, a mistake or something that, you know, should be preventable. You know, people are approaching the idea of death as if it is some disease that, you know, that shouldn’t happen, should never have happened. How mad how how insane have we become? What I think what I think is essentially missing at the core of it, Chris, is is a humility. I go back to the Greeks and the Greek tragedian. So like I said, I come from the theater and and I believe my my reading of a lot of the Greek tragedies. They were they were rituals and they were ways of of reminding us to have humility, reminding us that we don’t run this place and we don’t understand everything. And, you know, we probably, you know, probably don’t need to fix everything because a lot of things probably aren’t broken. Right. What of what you were describing? What you’re describing is. Is is. I think absolutely accurate. And I think it’s it’s kind of at the core of the madness of our times.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:49:51] I would agree. We’re talking with C.J. Hopkins, author of this amazing book, The Rise of the New Normal. Right. And it is just a fabulous collection of essays. But we’re getting to the heart of something that’s really important to me, which is trying to. How do I put this? I feel like I’m caught in a in a very unusual period of history where we’re we’re coming to some sort of a denouement. Right. And I’m a resource guy, so I study resources. I study oil, neodymium, lithium. You know, I understand where we are in that story. I’m a biologist by training my Ph.D. in pathology. So life science. And I understand that that all of life is really the study of energy. Right. And so whether it’s hairs on an island that suddenly explode in population and then, you know, they they do the whole thing or it’s yeast in a vat of sugar or it’s humans who we came across this tasty, tasty stuff called oil. And I am walking oil because once you study it, you see that’s actually true how we conduct ourselves. So we’re at this amazing place, 8 billion people and we have no literally no plan B that I found yet C.J. That explains what this next 5000 years is going to look like. We’re down to this little tiny frame of reference, which is how does the next quarter, how does the next month, what’s the next election? We have this compressed view and every scientist I talk to is over here waving their hands with two red flags saying, you know, we got some some issues and we’ve lost that seven generation thought process that seemed to have existed in other cultures where you could actually look forward 100 years. Somebody responsible in grown up was in charge of thinking, where should this all be in 100 years? We’re not anywhere near that conversation. And I think that’s creating part of this panicky sense that’s in the air. We’re a herd species or the grasses run out in our valley. We have the sense we should wander to the next lush valley, but there’s no next valley. I don’t know what it is. You know, there’s something in the air that I can’t quite put my hands on. But for the people who study it, see, they kind of go, Oh, we should definitely have a plan. And I don’t think we have a plan besides global capitalism, which is in its plan, is we’re just going to keep doing this forever. And it just doesn’t line up. So I’m wondering about that herd instinct and whether we’re starting to feel into that, at least the empathic among us, maybe catching a vibe here.

CJ Hopkins [00:52:16] I think a lot of people are tuning into it, maybe not in the same way. I think it produces a lot of jagged, you know, aggressive energy in a lot of people as well. And others of us are tuning into it and just can’t see the way forward it. I have a much more knowledgeable about, you know, financial economic systems and biological systems. I think the the I have a pretty simplistic. Contribution. A pretty simplistic analogy when I when I think of forms developing in nature, what what I note is that often the ultimate expression of the development of a form. Just keep it simple. A flower, you know, a flower comes into its full expression, its full bloom. And then what happens?

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:53:16] Fades out.

CJ Hopkins [00:53:18] It collapses. It does. And it falls apart an often. And when I when I when I track and just as an artist also and someone who’s attuned to the development of forms, the cycles of creation and destruction. It it it feels to me like we are. And I think we’re just entering this historical period. But it feels to me like we we have entered a historical period where in the ultimate expression of the form of power that has developed and has succeeded in taking control of the entire planet, that the ultimate expression of this form of power is not here. It’s coming. And unfortunately, you know, for a lot of us, I think what accompanies that is collapse and destruction. And and when I look at nature, this is the process that I see. And then out of that collapse, out of that destruction, new forms are born. I think that a lot of us a lot of folks and naturally. Absolutely, you know, it’s a natural thing to do. A lot of us, I think, are trying to see how do we get. How do we get to the future without going through this period of catastrophe and destruction and and pain? And I just think of the old Mainers that I used to know who would say, you know, well, you can’t get there from here. You know, I don’t know if I don’t know if we can avoid that. It Chris, it feels to me it feels like both are coming.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:55:13] Yeah, well, coming.

CJ Hopkins [00:55:15] But I let me just make this one point and I’ll let you get a word in edgewise. When I talk about totalitarianism and I used the word a lot in the book and I and I want to thank.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:55:26] You I want to get to that.

CJ Hopkins [00:55:28] The book is titled You Know The Rise of the New Normal, right. You know, and I’m talking about totalitarianism. We’re talking about a different type of totalitarianism, not 20th century totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, to me is not an aberration. It is the logical conclusion of the development of a power system. If you if you if if you follow me and you say, okay, here’s an ideological power system that has hegemonic control over the entire planet, you know, what’s the next logical step? Well, totalitarian is the next logical step. There are no more external enemies. It’s about eliminating internal resistance, wiping out internal resistance and consolidating control. It becomes it becomes a very paranoid operation, you know, and I believe it is an operation that ultimately leads to the downfall of that system.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:56:22] I would agree. I think the system has the seeds of its own destruction. I don’t you know, the this the cycle of collapse, maybe it’s because of my age and I might have felt differently about this as a 20 year old man. But but at my age, I mean, I look at it and I don’t fear that that’s normal. I don’t fear death at this stage either. It’s just it’s it’s part of the deal. What I do fear is this totalitarianism, because it seems joyless, soulless, unfunny, uninteresting, non polarized. It’s kind of bland. I like I feel like these totalitarians like they want our comedians d tooth. They want our movies to all have an appropriate, you know, state approved message. It’s like it’s just it’s literally like George Orwell wrote about it’s just yeah, it’s fear is frankly it’s un interesting to me that’s its greatest sin. You know what the greatest sin of the totalitarianism seems to me is? They’re boring.

CJ Hopkins [00:57:11] Exactly. Exactly.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:57:13] Bores me. He is a boring. That’s his biggest sin. I hold him a little bit of contempt, but higher than that in my pantheon of sins is being boring.

CJ Hopkins [00:57:23] Look, if you go back and look at Hitler’s paintings, look at this. Look at what the Nazis thought of as, you know, the ideal expression, you know, artistic expression. It’s I’m laughing because you took the words right out of my mouth. It’s yes, it’s just crushingly dull or it’s the create, you know, when you create, you know, utter uniformity. You know, it’s it’s I think of the old talking head song. You know, heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. You know, everyone agrees with everyone. And and, you know, yes, we all share the same values and we don’t have to argue about anything. In my in my novel, in my novel, the this segment of society, they’re called the cleaners. You know, they’re they’re the cleaners. And, you know, they’re past all of all of our just basically all of the messy stuff that makes us interesting. You know, it makes us human.

Dr. Chris Martenson [00:58:23] Well, that’s anti-human, right? Because to me, my most growth moments in life were always painful. And I was involved with this group that was doing really creative things. But then the leadership change. And finally they made it to that. Ultimate moment where the new leader said, hey, we all have to do this training because we’re going to we want to be in a place where nobody’s ever triggered. Like, how is that possible? I don’t know what you grew up with or that, you know. You know, a loud noise went off when you were three and you’re scared of closing doors or, I don’t know, these things. So how can I possibly behave in a way that would never trigger you? And by the way, if you were never got triggered, how would you ever know to grow past that moment? So you could be a fuller expression? It felt it felt like they were just saying, we’re just going to freeze frame this whole thing and call that the best we can be. And I was like, I don’t even I don’t even know how to start with that seems. Ass backwards. But maybe I’ll take that wrong.

CJ Hopkins [00:59:18] Because I think it’s it’s anti-human and and it’s and it’s anti life. It’s, you know, I forgot the $10 word for that, but it’s it you know, life is messy. It’s it’s a big, messy, painful, beautiful, fun, horrible, scary ride that we get to have. Aren’t we lucky that we get to go on this ride? The spirit that we’re talking about and it’s really a spirit. It’s it’s it’s it’s a it’s a spirit that approaches the world and says, oh, my God, this is horrible. You know, this this life thing is terrible. It’s threatening, it’s scary, it’s insulting it, you know, and what we need to do is replace it. Replace it with this nice little smiley, you know, Disneyland world, this simulation of life where everything is safe and everyone is nice and we all agree. And that’s not life. That’s Disneyland. Yeah.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:00:24] It’s a book that really turned my head as Money in the Souls Desire by a man named Stephen Jenkinson. And he talked in there in particular about money and how it developed over time and in our relationship to it. But he decoded that phrase that money is the root of all evil to say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Money’s neutral. It’s a it’s a thing. But you have to take the whole phrase, which is for the love of money, is the root of all evil, which means it’s our relationship to it. And our relationship in this global capsid arrangement is it’s an abstraction. Humans do poorly at abstractions, but we’ve invested this abstraction with immense power. And we know this because, like with Arnold Schwarzenegger, I know that this money is a really powerful thing because this college dropout with a dad bod is now the global leader on vaccines. You know, I know this because I turn on the TV and we’re listening to a hedge fund manager because they must be seriously important because they have this thing called money. Right.

CJ Hopkins [01:01:23] And and a genius. And a genius.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:01:27] Yes. That’s how we know. And so I think maybe I’m wondering if it isn’t our relationship to money itself, that’s that’s really run astray. And, you know, I talk with with Christians and are like, oh, this is mammon, right? We can understand this through. This has happened to humans over and over again. That money comes and takes over and does something to us. If we’re not careful about that, if we don’t have a society, if we don’t have a culture that understands where, how to, how to put that tool into its place, and we let the tool become the system. That’s right. That’s right.

CJ Hopkins [01:02:00] That’s right. What? Because what I would the way I would describe it is it’s it’s not so much money. That’s the problem. It’s it’s the lack of any other values to put money and, you know, finances and anything else in context of if you if you go back and, you know, I don’t want to go back and and live in primitive societies or anything like that. It’s that doesn’t sound like fun to me. But if you go back and look at the history of social systems, the history of societies, for the most part, they they had values that were established one way or the other, through the community or through a despot or however they were established. And those values were passed on from generation to generation to generation. And those values were that those values were what kept money from becoming the thing that ruled people’s lives. Those values were the things that that prevented them from, you know, oh, let’s, you know, let’s rip down this entire forest and, you know, grow a monarch crop, you know, because we can make a few dollars, not because somebody said, well, no, because then we would destroy our whole forest and all the animals that lived there in the relationship. In other words, what I’m trying to say, I don’t think it’s the I don’t think money is the culprit. I think it’s the absence, the the absence of these social values, the absence of our of our values. It’s you know, I come from I come from the left and and I don’t even know what that means anymore. A lot of my readers are conservatives and people coming from the right. And I identify with them because a lot of these people, what they’re doing, a lot of this populist pushback, let’s push back against grow cut. These are people who are watching their traditional values being dissolved and stripped away and they’re trying to hold on to them and they’re saying, no, I don’t want to live in a world where anything is anything and everything is everything and nothing has any value and and what have you. We want to hold on to these values, not saying that I necessarily agree with all of them or what have you, but it is these social values, these human values, these community values that have, I think, a life on the planet that’s long. And somewhere along the line, you know, we lost it. And, you know, yeah, it’s we’re we’re we’re letting the machine, you know, run things rather than us running the machine. And here we are.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:04:58] Yeah. No, I really appreciate that. That thinking and. So I like this one. Last passage from your book, page 137 here. This is out in I can’t remember which essay this is and what’s out a bit. And you wrote in 2016, the American people are sick to the gills of global capitalism and its increasingly oppressive ideology. Now we can understand what that means elected an unauthorized narcissistic ass clown to the highest office in the land. They did this for a variety of reasons, but mostly it was just a big F-you to the establishment. It was an act of rebellion against the government, which they know is owned by unaccountable supranational corporations and supercilious oligarchs who openly detest them. So this rebellion, it was unauthorized, for sure. And and I think that was the sin that was watching that mighty Wurlitzer turn. People I knew and used to love. And I’ve lost friends because they went down this hole of absolutely absorbing in every fiber of their body that Donald Trump represented, something that was so unspeakably evil that we can all just agree that anything he touched or did or said was off limits. And you had to do the opposite of that. I was I was astonished by that because he did a lot of dumb things. He did a lot of non dumb things, just like every president in my entire life. No difference. No shades of gray between them, as far as I can tell. Right. But suddenly. And that was the last.

CJ Hopkins [01:06:30] Time I laughed. Chris, I’m sorry I got to jump in. But, you know, people forget we’ve for four years, you know, the papers of record and every, you know, legitimate news outlet was relentlessly telling us that Donald Trump okay, Donald Trump was both a Russian intelligence operative and literally, literally the resurrection of Hitler. You know, this Donald Treat, you know the former reality TV guy. This is a guy who puts his name on stakes. And and it was and he was certainly the arch, you know, demon of, you know, all eternity. It was absolutely, absolutely bizarre. Sorry.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:07:19] Yeah. No, that the swamp drainer who happened to surround himself with alligators from the swamp, you know, just bizarre. And but it really are that we’re now I’m caught in this really bizarre place where a lot of those same people who really just viciously hated him are now they got the Ukraine flags. And I try and talk to him about the Azov battalion and the very complicated history that goes back to the boundaries. And it’s like pretty complex territory when you go there. But these people are now openly supporting. Literal Nazis. And I find that without any intervening daylight or ability to that, that’s how comprehensive this ideology is. It’s got to be it’s really powerful. In fact, I have golf claps for the astonishing alacrity with which these very. They’re not even incoherent. They’re diametrically opposed. Thoughts can be held. It’s been a real eye opener for me. I’m sure you’ve probably experienced the same, but. But I do notice there are a lot of people waking up. And so as we close this out, I love to get on on a moment of hope here. What are you seeing in terms of people like these? Feel like the conversations we really always ought to have had. They’re starting to percolate up. That’s my experience. What’s yours?

CJ Hopkins [01:08:36] It’s also my experience because people are more and more people I’m connecting. I lost a lot of friends during the last two years. People just turned their backs on me and I’ve made so many new friends and so many new connections and connections from all over the political spectrum. And, you know, new alliances are forming. People are having these discussions. We are we are a minority. I was just talking to a guy the other day and he’s referring to I refer to the Milgram experiments in the in the book in the in the first chapter, if you remember, it was something like 65% of people were willing to just shock the subjects, you know, to death. And it was 30, 30, 35%. No, I don’t think so. And that’s basically my take on us as as a species. I think there’s about 35% of us who are not on board for where this is all going. Some of us more vocal than others. Some of us louder than others. What I’m what I’m what I think I’m watching now is more and more of that, 35% are starting to feel like they have permission. They’re allowed to start expressing their doubts and expressing their reservations and expressing their dissent. And the more active that that full 35% of us becomes, the better. It’s it’s enough of us. And I don’t know if it’s enough of us to stop anything. I don’t know if stopping anything is possible. I think it’s enough of us to play our part. You know, you talked about the we talked about the system developing in the seeds of destruction inside of it. And I think I think we’re a part of it. We’re an integral part of that. The people like us, the critics, the skeptics, the the the court jesters, you know, that’s probably what I am. You know, those of us those of us who who can see maybe a little bit down the road and start, you know, and maybe we start tearing and pulling at some threats. And I think we’re we are an essential part of that process of. Creation, culminating in destruction coming about and an end to new forms being born. Yeah, I think I like to think that the new forms that we can’t even articulate yet, they’re they’re already being born in ways that we don’t know and they’re being born among us, those of us who can maybe see or think that we see the death of this form coming and and are asking questions and and throwing out ideas and what have you. I can’t describe it altogether, but I do I do have an essential faith. I have I have faith in life. And I think I think we’re I think we’re part of it. I think we’re part of it. I think I think it’s just so important that the people realize that. I think the shock and awe phase of the new normal rollout is over. And I think people need to hear and realize that they have permission. You can you can ask those questions. You know, you can you can post that data. You can you can say, you know, hey, wow, it seems like a lot of people are, you know, having adverse reactions and maybe, you know, I don’t know what it means, but maybe we should, you know, look into it and and at least ask some questions about it. And, you know, it’s you’re allowed we’re allowed to do that. And and maybe it’ll only be 35% of us that are doing it. But I, I think the more of that 35%, the better.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:12:34] Yeah. I’ll send you an essay by a guy written in 1938 talking about the remnant within the context of of the Isaiah parable. But this idea that all through time there have always been a crew of people who weren’t quite down for the dominant story, but they had important roles to play because if you nature, nature in its infinite wisdom said we’re going to have real, actual diversity here. And for the most part, having people carrying that center mass story through is is the right thing. But when circumstances change, you need your you need your your other people are able to not get invested in that. And, you know, who are able to see things from the outside in, it’s just listen, if if nature coated it in, it had some sort of evolutionary basis. And so that’s how I see it. There’s a there’s a reason that people like us are out there and the people who are increasingly finding are out there. But like you, I found this COVID episode in particular. I’m coming from a science background. I found out who were the intellectual frauds and moral cowards, and I found their opposite still the giants and the people of high integrity. And now I know them. And I’ve made friends in the last couple of years who are who are. I put quotes around it because I’ve known people for decades who sloughed away and I’ve known people for a couple of years now who are are better friends than I think I have ever had before. We’re just we’ve been in the foxhole or I know where they stand in a really deep level and we don’t agree on everything, but I know who they are. And that that was actually the gold that came out of all this for me is finding that tribe has been very important to me. So and I know a lot of people listening to this are nodding their heads to saying, yep, look, this has been good and it’s been painful because we lost. Sometimes family, friends, colleagues, people we’ve known since childhood and we’ve gained, too. So it’s been a kind of a winnowing process here for a lot of us. That’s how I’ve experienced it.

CJ Hopkins [01:14:32] Same here.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:14:33] Yeah. Well, the book Rise of the New Normal, right? Author C.J. Hopkins. C.J., where else can people find you? I know you’ve got a substack. Maybe not that.

CJ Hopkins [01:14:44] Exciting, but I’ve kind of. Sorry. My, my. My main thing is probably my blog. It’s the consent factory. Talk of the concern factory being, you know, a shady neo liberal think tank that I have nothing to do with it. It also happens to be my blog. All my columns appear there. I’ve got a substack as well. I, I have just an author so website to C.J. Hopkins dot com which is mostly just artistic stuff and doesn’t get terribly political and I’m just easy to find. You could stick me in a search engine and and all of this all of those links will come up.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:15:26] Well, fantastic. So again, C.J. Hopkins can send factory dot org and check out a substack and as well as his website, but really get the book and it’s the price and it’s worth the introduction alone. But the essays, it’s amazing. It’s amazing what you knew, when you knew it and how quickly you unraveled all of this. So really just extraordinary work. Thank you for being on the program. Thank you for doing what you do. And I hope we’ll have another conversation in the future.

CJ Hopkins [01:15:53] Chris, thank you so much. It’s honestly a real pleasure to talk to you today. Thanks for having me on.

Dr. Chris Martenson [01:15:58] Thank you. And likewise.