You. Chilly Effect is sponsored by Wall Street Window dot com and listeners like
you Yeah now y April twenty six, twenty twenty three, allegedly according to
that thing we call a calendar, and this indeed is the show you were
looking for. How do I know that? Because you're hearing me say what
I'm saying. Anyway, Woden's Day, Wednesday, middle of the week.
Allegedly again here it is live on Ocelli dot com. I've gone to air
about twelve almost thirteen minutes late. So if you're on the live stream,
you're pissed at me or you left already. But podcasters and pod catch her
to your your fondal slab of choice, your applicable application. You don't give
a damn because you play it on demand. Anyway, Well, we do
this live, so please do enjoy and catch us on all the wonderful radio
apps if you can. I never mentioned that. Do I know? We're
available on Apple Radio, We're available on tune in, Roddy, various things
online. No longer with FM or AM affiliates with stay tuned because by the
end of the year we will be back there again, I hope. Anyhow,
back to it, and this is being video recorded. So yeah,
if you're looking at my face made for radio, then you're probably watching us
on Rock Finn or possibly Rumble. Not sure if we're gonna put this one
on Rumble, but definitely going to Rock Finn. So that's where we're at.
And we do have channels on every one of those video platforms out there,
pretty much except YouTube. Anyhow, am I gonna am I gonna talk
about the the bud Light Cans tonight? No, I'm not. Am I
gonna talk about things in the news. I might, I don't know,
because it's really up to the guest. And the guest tonight is Guard Goldsmith.
Now you have, if you're in the circle of interesting podcasters that well,
you know, seems to be getting collected by our good friend Chris Graves,
you have definitely encountered Guard Goldsmith. Okay, if not, this ought
to be an interesting introduction, and I'm going to talk to him about something
that I don't know if everybody talks to him about it, I'm not sure,
but it's a curious piece of his history, and he's got an interesting
history. So also, you're you're you're on Rockvin too, aren't you Guard.
Yeah, I am just started up a few months ago, really started
the year, and we're building nicely. I like the guys. They're real
nice people, and you know, the people who are creators. Big thumbs
up to everybody. Great people. Oh absolutely, look a lot of great
stuff on Rock Fin. A lot of great people on rockfn uh. By
the way, Ricky Randez will be coming up on the show soon, Ripple
Effect, you know, that's his main thing, but also the Union of
the Unwanted. Wait a minute, I think I've seen you on there,
too, haven't. I haven't been on Union of the Unwanted yet, but
I know Billy Ray is off and over there, and I've done stuff with
Billy Ray on his own thing on the Infinite Fringe. Infinite Fringe. Yeah,
we did the Friends a couple of weeks ago. That was great.
You know. I just recently did that for the first time too, and
it was strange because Billy Ray and I it's kind of weird that we hadn't
run into each other earlier and done something together. But yeah, so I
don't even know if he put that out yet. The well, anyway,
whatever it is, what it is, you're out there in a lot of
places, though, So let's get straight to it. Tell people what they
can find, where they can find it before I delve into the thing that
I want to pick your brain about. Because there's a lot of stuff you
do out there. I see a lot of interesting conversations. You're also active
on Twitter, and I notice that you and I do retweet some of the
same people and things. So, you know, tell people where they can
find you, where they can reach you. Thanks a lot, Chucks.
This is a blast. I'm so psyched that I get to hang out with
you. This is really cool. It's like being at a big liberty minded
convention and spying this dude that you've always heard about in your friends, like,
oh you gotta Meeta and saw So, and then you go and get
to hang out outside for a while, having some marshmallows or something over at
the fire, you know. But yeah, thanks man, I appreciate it.
Um. Yeah. People, if they're interested and they want to find
what I've been doing over at ROCKFN, we'll start with that. Since January
started up Liberty Conspiracy at ROCKFN that broadcasts always free Monday through Friday at six
o'clock on ROCKFIN. They can look up Gardner Goldsmith or Liberty Conspiracy. Also
we have a bit shoot channel, We have a Rumble channel, we have
a YouTube channel, and we have an Odyssey channel. But the YouTube channel,
I'm very selective, haven't gone live over there yet. The Rumble channel
we stream live over there, while we stream at ROCKFN and bit Shoot.
I put stuff out over there as well. And if people are interested,
they can find my writings at my substack, which amazingly is Gardner Goldsmith substack
and it's GRD yeah, gr D n R. And it's like Gardner Massachusetts.
It's like an old family name. They came over in the Mayflower something.
They actually founded Salem. They were one of the five families that founded
Salem, mass where the witch Hunts went else. I might have talking about
the Satanist convention that's going on up in Massachusetts pretty soon. Oh man good,
you know, yeah yeah. And and I do occasional films for David
Knight and he's just been fantastic. And I also do work for MRCTV.
MRCTV is the media research center founded by Brunk Bozell. They just went through
their fifty thirty fifth year fifty three that would have been even better, but
thirty fifth year and I worked with a great team of people over there,
and it's been really cool to be able to, you know, sort of
take the sort of paleo conservative audience and introduce them more to some of my
much more hardcore libertarian arguments and discussions about voluntarism, about real hardcore free market
economics and things like. You know, some definitely definitely framed as conspiracy theories
that are not theories, they're facts. And I also planned to to sort
of touch on what you were discussing earlier about Star Trek and sort of the
theme for some of the things you want to discuss, Chuck. I also
spend time obviously in script departments at television series, and I have novels and
novellas. Currently novella's out, but I've got three novels that are going to
be coming out, and so I'm going to start up a YouTube channel that
I think will not be censored called Former Star Trek Writing Fellow and that way.
Yeah, like the same way Nerd Rotic and people like Razorfist and folks
like geeks and gamers and those guys have been so successful on YouTube talking about
quality entertainment from a more pro freedom viewpoint. That's what I want to do,
bringing in my experience as a writer, tips about writing, analysis,
critiques, stuff like that, so that'll be kind of cool. So right
now it's Gardener GOSM substack, check out Liberty Conspiracy on Rockfan, and then
I'm at Guard Goldsmith on the Twitch. Uh. That's why I keep saying
Guard Goldsmith instead of Gardener Goldsmith because I see you on Twitter all the time.
Okay, now I got it. You know, I got these weird
mental cues that I come up with. Uh, and that's one of them
is that you know, if your Twitter name is in front of me all
the time, that's what I'll call you. Unfortunately for some people, uh,
you know, you're talking on a Q ball right now, so they
we're good. Hey, it's all good. Uh. And and I gotta
say it's a diverse area of things that you're into here. And also somebody
who's a creative writer, uh, not every libertarian as a creative writer.
I think it's it's fascinating when these guys do a lot of stuff about like
say their life story, like h Murray Sabran. I don't know if you're
familiar with him. The only libertarian guy to ever run for governor in New
Jersey I ever saw, so, you know, interesting guys. He was
a professor and all this kind of stuff, has a lot of interesting things
to say. I don't know if you've ever seen him before, but he's
a good writer, but not a guy who's creative. He's he writes his
own life story and he writes other narratives, but they have to be based
in something that has a three D sort of structure. Right. It's a
different it's a different process mentally when you've got to generate things and you've got
to, you know, create a believable character that exists in a world.
Oh, by the way, you might have to create that world, depending
on what it is you're dealing with. And one of the fascinating things is
Star Trek. Okay, Yeah, and look, we can bounce around all
different topics you want. But I had to get to this with you because
I'm a big Star Trek fan. And here's the funny thing. You participated
in some way with the Voyager series. Now, back at the time Voyager
was a new thing. There wasn't as many series as there are today.
The universe was a little smaller. You didn't have a separate Kelvin timeline and
all this other stuff. Honestly, if you saw a light back here,
you'd see one of those big old Trek bibles back there that gives you the
whole universe and all that you know, and it's outdated. But but anyway,
how did you get involved with that? I mean, let's let's get
the whole story here. You didn't just show up one day and go,
hey, I want to write for this. And oh, by the way,
who even knew it was coming out? Because Voyager dropped on upn where
I was kind of almost as a surprise. It was sort of announced the
week before and boom, there it was. I didn't read about it a
lot in advance or anything. It just sort of showed up. Now,
it could be that, you know, because I'm just not that interested in
entertainment magazines, that I missed it. But it was definitely a different sort
of series, and frankly became one of my least favorite and there's a reason
for it, and I bet I can't blame you, but we'll get there.
Tell me about how you got involved with that in the first place.
Like, you know, hey, I was doing this and I ran into
or I networked with give me an idea. Yeah, well, you know,
it's it's funny. You should bring it up. Check because there are
a couple prongs that will sort of jump out that the audience can sort of
hold on to after they, you know, listen to this. They hear
us chatting and stuff like that, and get the conversation back and forth from
my side of the story, which is that a crazy thing? So I
grew up loving television, you know, and in a way, as you
start to look back at it, you realize that you were actually participating in
almost a mass hypnosis, mass propaganda type thing with the diffusion of television,
with that box in front of you. If I, and I've mentioned this
to a friends of mine, if I had not had television, if we
hadn't had radio or anything like that, and we just lived in an area
in southern New Hampshire where we had farms around us, and I remember watching
a blacksmith do his thing when I was like eight years old. We went
to watch a blacksmith. I would have been more of a local guy,
and I would have learned a trade. I would have learned some skills.
I was interested in astrophysics. I almost went to Cornell for astrophysics. I
would have learned something that I just you know, pretty much stayed local,
right, Okay, But yeah, because I was exposed to this phenomenon in
you know, from beyond my birth, you know, television starting in the
forties, I just took it as read that what I saw on TV,
I could just go and do it. Okay, So contexts wait a minute,
context though, because the television experience would have been different in different decades.
Now, I'm I just turned fifty one. So for me, the
introduction to television was the nineteen seventies, and that is a decidedly different time
than say the earlier the inception the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties. It's a
different time period. By then. In the seventies, you had syndication,
you had the repeats, you had different formulas, and also in a major
market area, having you know, growing up in New Jersey, which man
I had access to New York and quite frankly, if you moved just a
little bit over in the state, you had Philadelphia's media market, and this
might have been a different landscape than maybe the whole country got later as it
was homogenized and cable was in existence, but it wasn't as fashionable. So
let's talk about that for a second. How old are you. Were you
sitting down in front of the big box TV like I did at my grandma's
right and dealing with this thing in the seventies or was it later? Give
me an idea. You know, I'm five years older than you, so
I had the same experience as you. We got to see the reruns,
you know, we were watching reruns a Rat Patrol, the Riflemen, Dilligan's
Island, you know, falling in love with Mary Anne and Star Trek,
and that was one of the things. You know, Star Trek had been
off the air. It's the seventies. There's no hint that there's going to
be more Star Trek, but it's a show that I love, you know.
So I'm thinking, You've got this world of fiction that's in front of
you. And I loved fiction, you know, my parents reading stories.
We'd read Wald Doll, we'd read Robin Hood, twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea out loud, just great, great stuff. As a kid, I
got audiobooks. I used to listen to audio shows. And my brother actually
what he did was a big impetus for me because he used to record TV
themes and so he had real to reels, not cassettes, but real to
reels of like all these amazing TV themes and I still I can I have
them in my head. There were like little pieces of amazing orchestration, so
many of them done by some of the best, you know, John Williams
and other people liked Lalo Schiffrin, and so you think yourself, wow,
you know, we got some great samples. As I get older, I
loved television, so I would record television shows on audio. So that started
to give me an ear for dialogue because I would play them over and over
and over and over again. Cole Chack, the Night Stalker, you know,
I would, I had those on tape. I would sneak into movie
theaters and record movies right. And just to let you know, man,
when I was a kid, will this will tell you how strange it is.
When I was a kid, I had a dream that I was on
the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Okay, yeah, I dreamt that I
was at a Chinese restaurant and I was with my brother and one of these
like almost like carnival ride type, like you know those little train things where
you're sitting and sit in the box seat and it takes you up like a
roller coaster type thing. It goes click click click click. Yeah. So
we used to go to this place where there was this haunted house place that
had that at a carnival place, and it was really cool and the doors
would go from couldn't you go flying through? And you know, all the
kings would be there, yeah, the monsters and stuff. So I dreamt
that we were sitting in the booth at this restaurant and that this carnival thing
came up next to us and we got in it. It took us through
the double doors to where the kitchen would be, where Grover went back and
forth on Sesame Street with the soup, like, hey, Charlie, you
know going back and forth in that skid on Sesame Street. And I ended
up. It didn't take us to the kitchen. It took us to the
Bridge of the Enterprise. And I was on the Bridge of the Enterprise,
and the Bridge of the Enterprise wasn't like the original Star Trek bridge. It
was this weird it was. It was laid out very softly, sort of
the same design, but it was plush and it had like it was like
raspberry Sherbet color. Well. Strangely enough, I also had another dream that
I was at a place called the Bedford Mall in New Hampshire, and on
the Bedford Mall, inside the mall before you got to the movie theater entrance,
on the wall at the end of it, there was this giant screen
and the ship of the Enterprise was flying through space and I was like,
whoa, man, wouldn't it be cool if there was a Star Trek movie.
Wow, that'd be great, you know. Well, so it turns
out a few years later there's a Star Trek movie I actually like about yeah
exactly, And I still have my little pin that I bought at the movie
theater and stuff. So I'm in the movie theater watching what I dreamed,
you know, like ten years before, like, whoa, this is so
cool. And then the other thing is finally due to various circumstances that allowed
me to get over at Star Trek, which I can describe um when I
when we went in for the story meeting, the first story meeting for the
for the writers, and I was a new guy in the block under this
term called the Writers Guild. Fellow. We went into Jerry Taylor, she's
an executive producer. She and Brandon braga Um and I said, I walk
in and her office it's not shaped like the bridge, but the furniture was
was was plush and it was all decked out as that raspberry Sherbet color.
That's what it was. And I'm like, and I even told Jared's like,
Jerry, this is really weird. She's like what. And I was
like, like, when I was a kid, I dreamed that I was
on the start I was at I was on the enterprise and it was decked
out. It was it was you know, however they call that dressing the
couch and all that stuff. It was like that well and that during that
time period, there was a kind of a design of furniture that contained this
sort of like wooden base and then they would put in those kind of colored
pillows and that would be in a nicer office. To be honest, that's
exactly what it was. Like. Okay, yeah, all right, that's
wild, because that's just that's a period thing. You'll never see that again.
I don't think, yeah, I don't think anybody's you know, going
to retrofit anything like that anymore. But that's really cool. Um and Okay,
so you sit down you're like, hey, this is sort of like
my dream and uh, that's pretty wild. Okay, Yeah, I remember.
I even told my brother, and my brother was like, hey,
I remember when you dreamt that you were going to be on on the Enterprise.
I was like, well, I wasn't on the Enterprise, but I
got close, you know, I got need unclosed. So it was it
was a neat, neat thing. And there were some great people there,
really nice people, and Jerry Taylor was just such a nice lady. She
retired at the end of that year. And there were some other people,
you know, you kind of have a hard time with whatever. Brandon Braga
was great. I had to dinner with Brandon a few years ago, and
he's a pro liberty guy obviously. I mean, he created the Borg and
I mentioned this on my show before, but I sort of gave him the
sly wink. I was like, yeah, the Borger based on the Cybermen,
aren't they And he's sort of like nodded, like, yeah, you
know, of course they're based on the Cybermen. Yeah. So, um
anyway, and it was a it was a wonderful experience because you know,
you're constantly searching for stories to tell that have some sort of resiliency and some
sort of can make some sort of moral connection as well as telling the plot,
you know, and I think that that that really has been destroyed by
Wolcism, which is one of the reasons why I want to start up that
entertainment channel. You know. Well, and it's an interesting thing because the
like I say, the incarnation that you got involved in is different from the
rest of the universe. Why because look, let's just go with the template
as it existed, Okay, nineteen sixties. These guys they go out there,
they're on an adventure, they're explorers. They get into different, you
know, interesting situations. You know, what did they describe it as or
what was it described as at one point the wagon train to the stars kind
of deal, you know, and all that. Gene Roddenberry, of course,
I know the story about him developing it and being a sickly kid and
all that stuff. And people have had a lot of arguments about Gene Roddenberry
over the years. You know, was he somebody was tapped into things about
the future or was he just somebody who you know, had just a brilliant
vision that was really large because he didn't you know, imagine a universe there
that has maintained itself. I mean, you have a very consistent, very
interesting, interlocking universe here that has come together. And even when they've done
it at different times with different technologies, it all has come together. The
cannon is very nicely fitting together, at least in my opinion. Others you
argue about it online and whatnot, but you know, continuity here was a
huge thing. Voyager was weird because it starts out first of all with this
thing called the Caretaker, which was the I think it was a two part
introductory, like two hour long you know, pilot, and when they put
it out, now you have, Yeah, they're going out to be explorers
like all the other ships do, and that's typical. But they get flung
into an area's space and they end up in a conundrum where they can go
home but it'll screw things over, or they can do the right thing and
not be able to get home necessarily in their lifetime, and it's a weird
sort of stranded kind of issue, which we've never seen in that universe before
and really is not the most common open sci fi. Usually there's a resolution,
there's an achievable goal. This was left sort of open ended, and
uh, you know, lent itself to that, and then I think there
was there was trouble there. And this is why I want to ask you
about it, because I think there was a problem here because being in that
position meant that it was going to be difficult to tie it in to the
rest of the universe, and so it makes it a unique problem for the
writer. And I'm wondering if you could talk about that a little bit,
because not just because I'm going full on nerd here, but believe it or
not, there's a method to my madness on this. I want to get
into it because yes, indeed, there's a whole lot of things that if
you read into it, you can certainly see that the board clearly represents the
transhumanist agenda, what is that like with a totalitarian twist on it? And
that evolved over the years and so on and so forth. We have the
different representations of the various global geopolitical global structures being played out depending on the
time period a lot of people used to say the Klingons represented the Soviet Union,
so on and so forth, and they clearly brought in modern to us
anyway, modern historical ideas regarding say, World War two and what was going
on, different conflicts, civil rights, and that wasn't wokeism. That was
a representation of the time when they did something on racism there like Original Series.
You know, apologies again, but you know, Original Series, and
I don't remember what it was. I think was Frank Gorshen was half black
and half white, and battlefield there you go, and these two guys are
struggling and everybody else looking at him, going, you guys are the same
and they go, no, no, we're not. I'm black on the
left side, he's black on the right side, and everybody goes you know,
and clearly that was a metaphoric statement, and those kind of things persisted
in you know, despite the fact that we get dealt you know, Spock's
Brain and nonsense. Later. A lot of that stuff was significant, well
thought out, very cerebral. But now you're stuck in this unique position in
this expansive universe that again has continued to evolve, and by the way,
I'm one of those weirdos who actually likes Discovery. I'm not thrilled with some
of the wocism in there, but I don't think they've overdone it just yet.
They've come to the edge of it, but not quite, you know.
And still it does represent the time period though. It represents this time
period pretty well, even though they've now gone into the future and they were
part of the past and so on. You know. Anyway, a lot
of things to break down here, but let's begin with Voyager itself in that
unique position you're in. Were you part of the inception of the show or
when did you come in? No? I came in after the third season,
and it was they had just introduced seven of nine and so she had
been around I think for a year and um so what was interesting, So
these the themes were already established, But what was interesting about it was the
way that I got in there was I proposed a story that was a two
part story that had um um uh Tom Paris get Remember how Tom Paris was
was in Federation prison and the Janeway gave him a second shot and brought him
out of prison. Oh yeah, that was part of his backstory that he
was the rehabilitated, sort of revisited again in Discovery. But anyway, Yeah,
so I had a two part story that never got produced, and I
wanted to pitch it. I only got to pitch part of it, which
was the first part, and the first part ended up getting translated into a
slightly different story by a different writer. Um And originally my idea was that
Tuvok was going to go through Pond Far and he would be the only one
left aboard the ship because he was comatose and every other sentient being was beamed
away by some malevolent aliens, so he had to helm the ship himself and
work with the hologrammatic doctor and all these different types of things. And then
the b story to that would have been Tom Paris getting injured in the head,
and the next episode would have seen Tom Paris getting these weird flashbacks to
Federation prison and a Vulcan who had been in Federation prison. And what you
find out is that the Vulcan had he had been working with some very nefarious
characters within the Federation, and it's actually something that they started to sort of
develop on Deep Space nine. Upstairs we were on the first floor, they
were on the second floor, and they were just they just did it independently
about this idea that you know, within certain elements of the Federation, they
were incredibly corrupt. Because I'm like, if you've got a central government,
it's gonna be corrupt. It's gonna be massively corrupt, already beyond the concept
of government itself being an imposition on people and not allowing people to be free
from the government. So I thought, okay, I want to I want
to slam the Federation a little bit, right. So I wanted to make
it that the entire concept of Voyager being put out there by the caretaker was
actually not the truth. I wanted to revise it so that in the end
you found out Paris, while he was in Federation prison, had encountered this
vulcan who had all this knowledge, who was killed at that Federation prison.
But before he died, Paris went to try to help him, and a
guy implanted all this knowledge about these conspirators and cabalists from within the Federation in
his head. So when Janeway pulled Paris onto the Voyager, I wanted to
make it that they had they had an assassin, and this woman has actually
been with them the whole time, but she had changed her mind. She
was supposed to kill Paris, and when she didn't do it, they said,
we got to do something. Let's get rid of the whole ship.
We'll send him to the Delta Quadrant. They'll survive, but they'll never come
back. And so I wanted that to lead towards the final end of the
series. But of course Brandon did a really good job at the end of
the series, you know, sort of tying everything up. And I want
to mention also to bring it back to current day Star Trek. As you
mentioned, you know, the mythology is so big that in order to keep
things correct according to the mythology, to have any sort of consistency, it's
very hard. But I think you've probably been hearing a lot of praise about
the most recent episodes of Piccard, and I yes, and I knew that
that's what was going to happen because Terry Mattalus was selected to take over Picard.
And Terry Matalus had been Brandon bragas assistant for quite a while on Terra
Nova and then he left. He was on Enterprise with Brandon. When Brandon
was on Enterprise, then he went over to you m Terra Nova. He
was an assistant to Brandon there and then he became executive producer and showrunner for
twelve Monkeys, And anybody who's seen twelve Monkeys knows that that plot was one
of the most complex, most intellectually satisfying plots. They didn't let any string
hang. It was beautifully put together. And even even as I watched it,
My sister has a PhD in um biology from Harvard, and we'd be
watching stuff it should be like, well, wait a minute, how can
they say that? And they literally in the next line they would answer your
possible skepticism was some way that they had found it. So Terry has taken
over Picard and I think that is a really good sign. You know what
that explains to me, Well, they have they have wrapped their final season
allegedly so that that third season, though absolutely redeemed any issues that were had
with the other Uh, it really was well done. I mean, this
is just I have no reason to praise the guy you're talking, but apparently
this is the guy I have to thank for it because it was. Yeah,
he's so clear on trying to make sure continuity works. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it was absolutely. Uh you know, I I thought it
would be ridiculous to read to to to sort of reccon data into existing again.
I thought that would be a bad idea, but it ended up being
well done. Uh you know, the whole thing was remarkably still cerebral,
but contained those more intense like action adventure elements that you know, ended up
getting lost a lot with Next Generation quite frankly, and even during some of
the really the first the early stumbling season of Enterprise where it just kind of
dragged on because it just it was nice to set the table, but it
was missing certain elements. And there are just certain writers that have gotten a
hold of things and been able to make it work all the way around.
Oh yeah, yeah, and R Terry is one of those guys. He's
a very nice guy, really really nice dude. I havn't communicated with Terry
for a while, but I met him when I saw Brandon. When I
had dinner with Brandon, he asked me if I wanted to stop out of
the Terry Nova studios, and that was only on for a brief period,
but I went over there and then that's where I met Terry Metalis and then
communicated with Terry. I was actually supposed to go over to LA for twelve
Monkeys thing that they were doing at the Pailey Center of all Things, but
I gave my ticket to someone because I couldn't make it out, and she
actually went over to Terry and told told Terry like, oh, I got
my ticket from gardener goals and He's like, oh hey, cool. So
that was a nice little thing for that fan to be able to go talk
to Terry and stuff. And you know, it's it's funny you should bring
up because as far as continuity goes, if you look at you look at
some of the recent Star Trek stuff, that's been one of the most frustrating
things I think for a lot of people. Where you got the Kelp and
timeline, are they gonna make it work? They're just rehashing old stories and
things like that. And I, you know, I don't mind these shows
taking chances are possibly going a little bit woke if they've got a plot,
because I imagine think of it this way. You know, I was thinking
about this, Chuck because when I was a kid, I never really noticed,
like when they had the guys who were half black half white thing,
I didn't think of that. I was so small, Like I didn't think
of that as like a racial thing. I was just thinking, like these
two guys that don't get along, Like, oh, that's definitely why don't
they get along? Right? And like a lot of racist racial stuff by
that time, like in the seventies, especially for us growing up, Like
I never thought about any of that stuff like at all, not at all.
You know. It's like whether I was watching Samford's Son or Cheeko on
the Man or I didn't care, you know whatever, No, but it
was there. See. That's the thing. It can be present and not
dominate the entirety of the presentation. See. That's the thing is it survives
even if you don't need to make those statements the things served vibe sow if
you hinge the entire story on that statement, I'm sorry, that's a mistake.
That keep wondering. I keep wondering if I were like older when the
original Star Trek was on, were you know and uh and I saw you
know, Roddenberry's take off of the un Insignia, um, you know the
star thing, which is very Saturnalia type stuff. Um, you know,
and then I saw, you know, the enterprise being populated with all the
different races and stuff like that, and you know, all that stuff.
I keep wondering, like, would I have been less interested in watching the
show because I thought, oh jeez, this, I'm really seeing the boardroom
here? Or would I have just gone along with it? You know?
Um, that's something I can't really well judged now, you know, watching
the show, it's interesting because of the demographics. And I've talked to people
about this, um, you know, separately, uh, you know,
and not not even on my radio show or anything, just in general,
people that were a little older to me, What was it like seeing this
stuff when it first aired and so on, you know, And and they
the way that they viewed it is different than the way I see it.
If you were in your you know, if you were like twenty years old
and you were sort of idealistic and you saw that there were things that needed
to change, you embraced that. Um. But there would be other friends
they had that didn't need to embrace it, that just enjoyed it because it
was action. It was well, that's interesting. How does that work?
You know? What? What what happened all of a sudden We're in a
mirror universe? Which they've gone back to in every incarnation pretty much. Uh,
you know, the mirror universe the other yeah right, yeah, um,
and I think yeah, I think memory search. I think even Voyager
had to do it at some point, um, which which is weird because
they did some other weird stuff that if you think about it now looking back,
could be statements about other things like, you know, tampering with genetics
and exactly like crisper technology and all that kind of stuff that we were talking
about just a few years ago. Well, that sort of stuff was being
presented in Voyager because they had that whole thing where there was an entire copy
of the ship and all that, you know what I'm talking about. I
mean, yeah, you know. It also occurs to me that an uninitiated
listener might not appreciate who Brandon Bragga is. Okay, would you mind doing
me very like Okay, let's just say you're a casual viewer of Star Trek
and you're not an idiot like me to analyze this stuff and you just enjoy
it. How responsible is Brandon Bragga for I don't know, Star Trek as
of m the nineteen eighties, Um, you know, give us a thumbnail
on. Yeah, so we'll look at Okay, so you got you got
Star Trek running through its sixties run, and then they do the cartoon series,
which is excellent, great, great series, and then Alan Dean Foster
does the novelizations of those. So we we as kids get to watch some
Star Trek on reruns, we get to watch the Star Trek cartoons show.
A lot of those were actually scripts that they had designed for the next season
Star Trek. They just used those in the cartoon thing two. Great stuff,
Yeah, yep. And then there's this period, this sort of fallow
period that thankfully sees this popularity of Star Wars, and then all of a
sudden, paramount is like, okay, we need a Star Space based vehicle
to get things rolling here. What are we going to do? And Gene
Roddenberry had been pushing to try to get Star Trek back, They had been
talking about doing a TV series again, what are they going to do?
They let you, Gene Roddenberry do it. And just as an aside,
I'll mention that, um, well, we'll get into we'll talk about like
any speculation about you know, how much was Gene Roddenberry clued into the future
how much did he get from CIA, you know, any of that stuff
in a little bit. But as far as this, you know, this
little history run and Brandon's influenced in particular, so you know, Brandon Brandon
was brought in by Gene and Jerry Taylor was brought in. Jerry had worked
on shows like Quincy. She'd been very involved with shows like that. She
had quite an extensive background and episodic television for things like Universal and stuff like
that. So so Star Trek the Next Generation is not in the in the
works yet, I should get you know, we have the movies, the
move. The first movie is mildly successful, sort of allows for the next
movie to come around. But the next movie they got to make sure it's
going to be really, really good. So in that case, for the
next movie, they got Nicholas Meyer. And Nicholas Meyer of course had written
The seven Percent Solution, a very successful scriptwriter, novelist, very creative guy.
Really really did a fantastic job. I feel I feel like Trump really
great job with well, look quick aside, just because again I'm a fan
and even as a child, I was totally thrilled and excited to go see
you know, I saw Star Wars on a drive in movie screen. I
went to go see Star Trek in a theater, and as a kid,
I was happy with it and all that. However, over time that movie
does not stand up so well because you know, it sort of drags on
and this and that. So when you're talking about when they go to do
Star Trek two, which is The Wrath of Khan almost indisputably one of the
best sci fi major motion pictures a of its era, but be some people
would say of all time, because it contains so many great elements. And
look, there's a little cheese in there. I mean, it's Star Trek
man, You're gonna get some cheese. It's just the way it goes,
right, you know. And how many times are we gonna quote Shakespeare in
these movies and things? Okay, and you got to read it in its
original cling on anyway, that's later. But it gets interesting here because there
is the way that people embraced it, and the idea was that it was
still a successful property as something that was independently being syndicated, different than the
way the networks would syndicate their shows, and they would hang on to them.
Star Trek was running on all these independent channels very cheaply, but so
often that it was a seriously profitable thing. So when Wars is super successful,
somebody said, we got to be able to do that. We got
a big ship we can put out there, Well let's do it. And
there was enough of a groundswell for a return of Star Trek that it made
sense. But then again, like I said, not as flashy and great
as it probably could have been, so on and so forth. Okay,
and I'm not trying to bash stuff. Believe me, I love this stuff.
But no, it's a realistic assessment, one hundred percent, and it
is exactly what it was. You know, when Nicholas Meyer came out with
Star Trek, rat the Khan people were like, whoa, Now this is
Star Trek. That just kicked all doors open. And you know, the
acting in it was phenomenal. Scenes were great that the special effects and the
music by Jerry Goldsmith just incredible music. It was just it was amazing.
The whole thing was amazing, and that, of course, more success after
that was searched for Spock and Voyage Home Undiscovered Country. So they're building the
franchise, so it's a natural outgrowth to say Okay, Roden Murray goes back
and says, let's do the next generation. He's got the template, wants
to do it. And that's where guy's like as you you know, you
mentioned Brandon Braga get brought in as an early writer. They so they have
this mix of young and older writers. And one of the things that they
did at Star Trek, which is a really really admirable thing, is they
if they had writers who were around the area or any anything like that,
or they had interns who showed promise with those within those offices. And Brandon
was one of the people who really took this on because he had been sort
of fostered along by some of the higher ups who had more experience. He
recognized what they had done for him and he tried to do it for other
people. So, for example, if you look at a guy like Naren
Shankar Narrain, I knew Narrain up at Outer Limits. He's he's the producer
of um um uh, what's that show on Amazon um and dropping the name
now um based on yeah, the Expanse. He's the producer the Expanse.
And so all these people have branched out. You got Brian Fuller. Brian
Fuller was brought in. He became producers so many types of types of things,
American gods, um, pushing daisies, all sorts of good stuff at
Hannibal Um. Then you got Um one of the other people at Star Trek
Voyager. He went on to produce Um Elementary for CBS. So they've given
a lot of chances to people who were sort of upstart people, and that
was one of the things that really admired because Brandon first he was sort of
not you know, he wasn't one of the executive producer, but he was
under a writer under under Jean mister Rodberry. And I never met mister Roddenberry.
Oh but you know, yeah I didn't. He had passed away by
the time I got there. But it was weird because when I would proposed
certain things, like I remember I pitched a story to Jerry Taylor one time
and I said, Jerry, you know this story has to do with they
need to get something for their their dilithium crystals and they need you know,
they need to get some money for it. They need to and she goes,
oh, Guard, I gotta stop you there, and I was like,
oh, what is it, she goes, Well, before he died,
Jean stipulated that man would have risen tota such a level that they wouldn't
need money anymore. Oh, you still had to work with Roddenberry's rules.
Yeah, and it was really weird. And so I had this weird mixed
feeling because it was interesting to have grown up having watched his creation on this
little screen and now on there in a professional capacity, using my mind with
other people using their minds to try to perpetuate what he created, playing in
his sandbox, making new toys to put into the sandbox, and he's got
the rules for how it operates. So now the rules are affecting my life.
Yeah. But see, but it wasn't universal because there ends up being
a texture here, like you know, the Ferenghi, on the other hand,
Yeah, they're completely motivated by what gold. Everything's latinum and sheets of
latinum and so on and stuff. I mean, and that's you know,
clearly. I mean, I've had people tell me that's, you know,
just like an anti Semitic thing and whatever. I'm like, okay, maybe,
but at the same time, it's still there, Okay, the yeah,
you know, and their whole society is based on the rules of acquisition.
I think they call it. Look well that yeah, that was one
of the things I mentioned that Jerry. I said, well, Jerry,
that's really stupid. He goes, I know, so that I don't want
it. She says, you have I'll quote, you have no idea the
headaches that that has brought us. I was like, so you've got to
twenty third century civilization and they have to barter. It's like, yeah,
like that's insane. And that was one of the cool things when when um,
when I ra Bear decided that he was gonna you know, was he
got to go ahead to do Deep Space nine. That was really cool because
that was a way that he could get around since it's a space station and
there's all this constant interplay, you can have those races, and you can
have a race that deals with they're the trading guys, and you can start
to incorporate that. So that was that was a great way. He was
able to make things darker and do a lot of things that regular if you're
on a federation ship, they just couldn't do. You know, well,
very very much metaphoric. Uh you know what, what what will we call
that um pre you know, when when you have foreshadowing of nine to eleven
actually on a deep space nine. But let's leave that alone because that wasn't
the show you were writing on. They were upstairs, right, uh so,
I and I'm look, I could do this with you all day,
but I know we got to crunch it down a little bit. So let's
let's get back to the voyage your story, because that that's something that involves
you even more. And I want to go into that some more because to
me, it's an interesting like corner that they sort of had you painted into
before you even walked in the door. You're you're stuck in this situation where
you're out there. They still want you to drag in some of the recognizable
things for continuity. They want you to keep the universe together. Eventually these
people are on their way home, but there's these other elements coming in.
I had a hard time with Jane Way as a captain. I don't know
what it was about her, but it's just I just had a hard time
whether as the captain. I thought it was interesting they brought the marquis in
and all that. So you have this sort of you know, an ad
hoc sort of situation regarding command. But but I'm sure that people have asked
you about mentioned many times about what about all of this stuff that seems to
be almost celebrating or embracing the new world order or so to speak in the
Star tr Now. I don't know if you were thinking about it back then,
but looking back on it, you know, how do you feel about
it? And how do you feel about your participation in it? To me,
I don't know, I don't I don't get upset about it. I
see the you know, the one world idea. There's a way that the
world can come together and it doesn't have to be slavery, okay. Uh
And and believe me, they opted into all sorts of narratives regarding slavery many
times. The darkest one really on enterprise, where oh, we're going to
take some of your people in exchange for the repairs. Uh, you know,
and that's it. They're now you know, cattle um really direct,
really in your face. But as Voyager is in a place where they have
no support, they've got nobody who's supposed to be their ally outside of the
fact that they ended up you know, having a copy and they end up
encountering the board, which we already covered. I mean, it's a weird
corner to be painted into, so that like as a writer, I mean,
I hear your joy, I see your joy, and I'm involved in
this thing that is part of the icon of my youth. And I've watched
this thing evolved from Afar and I'm so glad to be involved in it.
At least that's what I'm getting from you. But you're kind of painted into
a corner creatively between Roddenberry's rules, the constraints of the script, the constraints
of well, you know, you're not you're not the executive producer, so
you're not making primal decisions. You're offering up ideas, you're pitching stories.
I mean, give me an overview of what that was like for you,
you know again, because even though if you weren't fully engaged in your liberty
mindset as you are today, you had to be on your way at that
point, so something, you know, just give me, give me a
sketch on that real quick before we move further in that definitely. So by
the time I got to Star Trek, I was already a hardcore libertarian,
anarchist and In fact, it was interesting because when I had dinner with Brandon
a few years ago, Brandon, of course becoming an executive producer a Voyager
after gene Ronburry passes away, and he had become a producer at Star Trek
Next Generation and was one of the integral guys and helping those last few years
really pick up steam at next Gen. And it was it was a lot
of what Brandon did and introducing the board, creating the board. But there
was one day when I was at the Voyager offices and I had a Reason
magazine t shirt on under a button down shirt and you could sort of see
it through that and one of the other writers when we were in the writing
room and the other writers like, what's down on here? What's that shirt
you got under? Under there? And Brandon. So, Brandon and I
had we're having dinner a few years a few years ago, and he's like,
yeah, man, so I was reading about your stuff. You know,
you're really doing the political stuff libertarian. I was like yeah, And
I was like, you're a libertarian too, and he goes, how'd you
know that? I was like, because there was that day when I had
the Reason magazine shirt on and somebody asked what the shirt was and you said,
oh, it's a Reason magazine, it's libertarian magazine. I was like,
only somebody who read Reason Magazine at that time would know what liberty Reason
Magazine was. So what you're saying, So, what you're saying, in
short, is that not all of Hollywood is run by liberal Satanist spirit cookers.
Definitely not. And again, you know the sort of give Gene Roddenberry
a little bit of a little bit of some some soft touch here. Um.
You know, I disagreed a lot with Gene Roddenberry's concepts about the Federation,
about whether that would be workable about you know, getting rid of money.
I wrote an article for Foundation for Economic Education about that interplay that I
had with Terry Taylor, and I may I turn it into an economics lesson
for like a teenager to understand that money is an outgrowth of human interaction,
division of labor and surplus, you know. And uh so it was.
It actually turned out to be kind of a neat thing that I couldn't do
the story, you know, because I was able to make an economics lesson
for kids out of it. But what was interesting is you look at these
guys. And I've mentioned this about Rod Sterling as well. Um, they
came out of the World War two era. Whether they were hoodwinked into thinking
this or they it was just a natural outgrowth whatever. You know, they
probably thought that if there was some rurled government, then it would stop all
this international World War stuff between the Nation States. Rod Sterling definitely thought that.
He did a film in the late sixties promoting the United Nations. I
don't know if he got paid or if he just did it, but yeah,
and I think like George de kay was in it, like it was
it was it was just some you know, some short film that he did.
So, you know, because they they you know, he Rod Murray
was in the military, was in the army, I think and uh and
uh Rod Sterling was a paratrooper. The first jump down, his buddy lands
right behind him. They sent the crates down wrong. His buddy got his
head lopped off by one of the crates, I mean instantly, the first
first jump in World War two. And he was seventeen like he got in
early. So's the shock of what those guys must have gone through I can't
even imagine, right, So you can kind of see how they'd be pulled
into this if they weren't wary of the tendency of if they a weren't already
opposed to government on a moral level the way I am as a libertarian voluntariist,
and b if they thought, well, we need something to stop the
Nation States from fighting, because look at what we just saw, you know,
that sort of thing. And I think a lot of the people,
the rocket Fellers, they clearly understood how they could use that and they could
promote that. They could promote that across a lot of spectra. So whether
Rodenbury was a willing participant or it was just his natural outcome, I don't
know. But it is interesting because you get people like Dry might have been
also influenced by a lot of the political rhetoric of progressives at the time,
because the idea that cooperation as opposed to competition might be more sensible because we
are actually unified in the fact that we're all on I don't even want to
go into flat earth and whatever, but you know, we're all on the
same rock. Right, Let's call it a rock for argument's sake. We're
all here on the same rock. We're all going to share the air.
We're all sharing the planet, so we are actually together on a ship of
sorts, right, So if we cooperated, we might get a lot more
done as opposed to competing with one another and you know, slaughtering each other
over resources. I could see how that's sensible, and I feel that way
myself, you know, yeah, cooperation, I think, Chuck, I
think this is part of the thing between the idealists who don't recognize that all
forms of the polis are forced. That's the essential definition of it. Otherwise
it's a voluntary, contractual arrangement between willing participants. In order to have the
state the polis, somebody's got to be forced. Otherwise it's just a club
of people getting together doing what they want, right, And that their idealism
and their notions of everybody cooperating are actually hiding the fact that when it's done
through world government or any nation state or anything like that, even down to
the small level, but at least decentralization, you can escape the smaller government
and go someplace else. Right. But the larger it is, I was
just talking about this on my show, the larger the sphere of control,
the more tendency there is going to be for mistakes to be made, for
corruption to happen, and for more people to be affected by bad decisions,
and the harder it is to escape it. So these people were sort of
fed the idea of cooperation, and of course we saw that manifested probably to
its apex at places like Woodstock, as all these people are rolling around in
the mud saying like, oh, yeah, you know, world peace and
all this stuff. Well, how are you going to get the world peace?
Are you going to force it on people through government or not? Because
that's not peaceful. So I think there was this weird, you know,
this weird bifurcated thinking where the two bipolar sides never really connected with a lot
of these idealists. At the same time, I think organizations like the Tavistocktitude,
the Rockefellers, a lot of the people behind the UN, the EU,
you know, they had long term plans and they knew that a lot
of very honest, idealistic people who wanted peace could be used to portray things
as well. We're moving towards peace. How are we doing it? Oh,
we're establishing the United States military bases over here or over here or over
here Oh, we're going to establish a world tax. We're gonna do this,
We're gonna do that. I mean, the WHL is trying to do
that with you know, for viruses. Now they're doing it with the climate.
Mcguffin, as David Knight would say, So there's always this sort of
you know, large percentage of people who are idealistic, and they can be
pulled into this stuff if they don't recognize that it is immral to try to
achieve their idealistic notions of cooperation through the force of the state. And I
think that that's, yeah, I think that's one of the major problems.
And these guys practically speaking, I don't think they recognize that the larger the
state, the worst to be. You know. Well, but one could
say that if you have an evolved state, there's a whole lot less reason
for force because you don't you're not any longer struggling over you know. It's
it's a it's an interesting exercise because if you remove force from the equation completely,
okay, and you talk about only unifying to utilize force to defend the
collective, and that's it. That's literally not such a bad principle. But
you know again it's it's a much larger issue, but I get Look,
if you lived through World War Two, though, you might see it this
way. Uh, and especially because well here here's a question I have for
you actually about about Voyager. Again, sorry to go back to it,
but uh, you know, did did you feel bad that you didn't have
use to Section thirty one very much through Voyager because a lot of people Okay,
so the casual Star Trek person might not know, but uh, they
kind of have the CIA there in the One World Government, which is really
funny. They have Section thirty one, which all kinds of chicanery goes on
with top secret weaponry and stuff that's supposed to be like absolutely against the different
conventions, and it's the CIA and the Star Trek universe. Yeah, and
out in the Delta Quadrant, you don't really have as much a need for
a Section thirty one necessarily, So, I mean, you know, I
thought it was great when they introduced it as early as the Enterprise series,
which initially was not called Star Trek Enterprise was actually just called Enterprise. But
anyhow, it h it's interesting to me that that was I mean, did
you ever get get to even play with any of those story ideas related to
them, or you know that idea that I had that would have wrapped up
the Star Trek Voyager series as they came back to the Alpha Quadrant and exposed
these bad guys. It sort of was a precursor to thirty one, Okay,
and I didn't you know so and Enterprise, and you brought up Enterprise,
how you know you were sort of disappointed with a little bit of Enterprise.
I was too, And by that time I had come back home and
I was out here with in New England with my family and stuff like that.
What was really getting me about that was I thought the Enterprise concept showed
amazing promise because to me, yeah, as a guy who you know,
was interested in space travel and almost went to Cornell to study astronomy and stuff
like that, I was just just I was hoping that Enterprise was going to
be the most bare bones concept of interstellar travel, where if you make the
most minute mathematical error, you could be launched off into a star, you
know, sort of like what Han Solo says when they're going in a hyper
hyper drive, you know you end up. So the first episode of Enterprise,
I was hoping that what they would do is have it that they make
a calculation error as they're trying to use the warp drive and it screws them
up and they literally have no power and they're like dying. They're gonna either
freeze to death or they're not going to have enough oxygen. And that's the
story, like an Apollo thirteen type thing. So it's the adventure is brought
back the actual area around them that the the the world, the universe around
them, the space, the environment is the threat. So you recognize how
dangerous space travel is because I thought by that time Voyager, even even next
generation, it was very comfortable. You know, it was like, you
know, oh, we got carpeted, carpeted bridge here, let's make it
metal, Let's make it that. Yeah, we could have a leak,
we might run out of air. How are we gonna where's our food gonna
come from? What are we gonna do? And then I wanted to have
another episode that I thought it would be really really cool, which would be
that they don't have they don't have a teleportation yet and on over the course
of the course of like the next two or three episodes, I wanted to
have it that the folks on Earth are encountering. There's a number of people
who are dying, and they're like high profile Federation politicians or whatever, you
know, and they want to connect with the Balkans who have given them warp
drive. They want you know, they want more space exploration, and they're
dying, and it turns out they're like they're getting hemorrhages and stuff like that.
Turns out somebody finds that there's an energy signal that every one of these
people encountered. Somebody backtracks it right, somebody you know, with the Enterprise
Team or whatever back on Earth, and they realize what is this? And
they find some piece of tech that shows them that a portion of the Vulcan
population that doesn't want contact with the human beings is assassinating people with teleportation,
beaming air bubbles into people's heads, so their brains just explode, and there's
basically no record of it. And now they're wondering what's going to happen next.
Could they actually teleport a virus into people? Could they make a plague
start? You know, so that would have been that episode, and then
they have to work it all out, you know, ahead of your time,
because they didn't get into all this kind of thing until Picardy. Yeah,
And it's really it's so wild because you know, like I wrote a
story. You might have heard me. I talked without a couple of people
about this, like Tony Harterburn and I were talking about it. I wrote
a story like probably eight years ago now called Whitechapel. It was a short
story that was in an anthology, and it was about a pandemic and I
had the six foot distancing thing, and I had the shops being shut down
and all that stuff out there, you know, like color codings and the
passes, you know, to make sure. So people could have looked at
me and said, oh, you know, that's revelation of the method.
That guy had inner knowledge, you know, the same way they might have
looked at Gene Roddenberry. And I can tell you from from my experience with
the writers at Outer Limits and at Voyager, I never met one person who
was privy, just some sort of I've been handed knowledge sort of a situation.
But I know it happens, well, it does happen. It does
happen. And here's the thing. Look from an esoteric standpoint, and I
don't usually go into these areas on my show, But what the hell,
let's do it. The idea that someone has written something in fiction, though
it's not as simple as that, is separate from reality. Once it is
imagined and it's been fleshed out like that, it becomes part of the reality,
whether it is physically manifested right away or not. From an esoteric point
of view, it has been created. So the idea that someone physically manifests
it later like old thing with the cell phones and all that kind of stuff,
you know, with ron Berry and the tablets and look that that's collective
effort and the idea that people were able to draw upon that. That tells
you a little something about how I just think the creative mind in its normal
natural state reaches into these things that indeed do uh you know, telepathy telepathically
reach into the future. One and two are informed by that. So I
think that there there there is something there that is not fully measurable. You
can't put it on a scale, you can't necessarily scientifically replicated for me.
But quite often many fictional writers create things and some people become inspired to then
bring them into the you know, three D world and on the other hand,
there's something else at play here, and I'm not saying that I fully
understand it, but there is something to the idea that once the thought has
been manifested, it does exist. Now it doesn't exist in the three D
world yet, not necessarily, but it's on its way, you know.
And that's kind of a yeah, you know, you know, it's funny,
Chuck, because you bring up something that only recently have I started,
because you know, we've been faced by so many and you brought this up
too. We've been faced by so many contemporary real world things happening that have
required our attention, required our devotion to exposing our communication with fellow Kindred travelers,
and then we meet these people like you, and it's like, yeah,
oh this is awesome, you know. And you know, brothers Kindred
spirits. And so my fictional output actually got delayed a lot. So I've
got like a bunch of novels, a bunch of books, but I have
put off writing new stuff for the time because I've been writing so much nonfiction
and doing more video stuff because the battle is upon us, you know,
It's always sort of been there. So, like you asked about, when
I was working at Voyager. When I was at Voyager, what I would
do is try to subtly get in questions about large spheres of control, about
large government, to say, you know, it's not all it's not all
roses here. Let's let's look at some of the corruption and stuff. And
I thought that that would be a good way to do it. I put
in themes about the drug war. I put in a lot of different themes
that I thought would be useful to say, no, individual liberty is key.
You know, I always, I always trended in that direction, and
I think you can find those teams a lot with what Brandon had to write
as well. But what's interesting to me is now that I've gotten older,
and you know, I can't watch a show now without knowing that I'm looking
at it from the perspective of the camera guys and the lighting piece. Yeah,
you just spoiled. You just spoiled My last question, you know,
which is can you enjoy anything anymore without deconstructing it, not only as a
professional who worked in the industry, but now as somebody who, by the
way, is enlightened by knowing how some of these things work. On the
other hand, and I'm wondering if you can actually enjoy any of it anymore.
That was my next question. I'm so glad, brother, because that's
a really for the longest time, I was very difficult to handle. I
think there's been about a ten year period where after I came back, I
started writing prose fiction much more. I wanted to exercise my abilities with that,
and I wasn't doing scriptwriting because there really wasn't any use. You can't
pitch stories from New Hampshire in LA You've got to be like amongst the people
going to meetings. Yeah, So what was interesting about that was I couldn't
really do that. I couldn't really enjoy just what you're saying, you know,
because I had seen I had been on the set, you know,
I knew that it was wood behind that, you know, and so but
there was something that came along that I started to recognize that it's actually almost
a greater appreciation. And that is as we've encountered these problems with the pandemic,
and as I started to see that real metaphysical evil does exist. And
there have been various things in my life that have confirmed to me that,
you know, like those dreams I had about Star Trek and stuff like that.
I met Richard Mathison's son, Richard Christian Mathison one time and we were
talking about predictive dreams and just out of the blues, like, did you
did you start getting predictive dreams after your car accident? I'm like, how
did you know? I was in a car accident and you can see I
got the scar on the side of my head. When I was eighteen,
a lady ran a light and smashed into my car and sent my head through
the windshield and all this stuff, and I do get these predictive dreams.
It's very, very strange. And you know, Michael Crichton looked into this
stuff with his book Travels, where he started to see, you know,
these claims of the sus Sayers, he learned the tricks and then he,
you know, he decided in the end, now there are definitely there's something
going on beyond the veil. And then I started to realize as I started
to teach philosophy, of course the physical can't come from the physical. The
physical has to come, by definition, from something meta physical. And that
led me on the course of exploring Christianity. So now what I think is
interesting is I've gotten almost beyond that sort of frustration that you mentioned, like
can you watch a show? Now? I think I've got a greater appreciation,
which I wish I had gotten sooner, because remember how we talked about
like growing up watching television. It's almost like you're hypnotized and the thinking you
can just go do that. You know, oh, I could just go
to La. A million other people want to just go to La. Right,
It's not like working on the farmstand five miles from my house, which
I did as a teenager. I could have continued to do that and married,
had a nice life of kids and stuff like that. Right, You
think you can do these things when you don't realize that there are impediments that
are real world impediments out there. So some people can do it, some
people can't. I did it for a little while, came back here.
That sort of stuff gave up a lot of stuff, but I'm glad I
did. Right. So what's interesting is in being exposed to that, I
thought, oh, gee, you know, it sort of spoils it for
me, the magic of storytelling. I used to love it so much.
I get to spend a lot of time with my niece. We would tell
stories that would be these eight week long epic stories with characters from Red Dwarf
Doctor who back in time to meet Sherlock Holmes. Then we would do Sonic
the Hedgehog stories, all these amazing tales that were it was amazing, It
was great, and she got to see it the same way I did.
She got to see these things that were just in her imagination. Even as
the world around us was there and you could see it, she was seeing
other stuff. And I'll give you a quick example, real quick. We're
down at disney World and we were telling a Sonic the Hedgehog story in which
Sonic had ended up finding this secret underwater base beneath a fake lake and he
stops doctor robot Nick and um, robot not not not robot Nickum, who's
the robot Nick or was that the creator? I can't remember anyway. Um,
So Sonic ends up looks like he's dying. He saves the bunny girl
that like loves him, and um, and he's purged through this water thing.
And then we stopped it and we continued the story while we were eating
dinner at Universal Studios in this like a little burger joint. The sun was
setting outside. I'll never forget it that. The image of it is so
stark in my mind. It was beautiful. I translated that sunset into the
scene where we picked up the story and the girl Amy, the character who
loves Sonic, and he's sort of, you know, uh, I'm a
I'm a I'm a teenage I'm a I'm a little boy. You know.
He has that little boy's mindset, like stay await me, cooties, you
know, kind of thing. And he's like, I'm not interested, but
you know, he really does love her, and so Sonic. She's out
there and she's crying to Sonic has been lost and he rescued her. And
she's at the shore of this lake and she sees something rippling in the water
through this through the sunset that's just at the edge of the horizon. The
sun is reflecting off the water. It's this beautiful orange sunset and I described
it in a certain way, and it's Sonic and he's he's floating in the
water. So she goes out to save him. She gives a mouth to
mouth. It's very embarrassed seeing and stuff, and it's cute and we're just
making up the story, right so years later I said to my niece,
I said, Bree, you know that story, what we imagined in our
minds, is still as clear to me as the actual sunset that we had
outside that window of the Burger place. And she said, yeah, me
too. And that's an amazing gift to be able to do that. And
that is what led me to connect it to Christianity, because especially listening to
David Knight, who's done just remarkable things and helping me understand Christianity better reading
more of the Bible, I was already sort of there, and then I
got much closer. And what I think is interesting is when they say that
we are made in God's image, there is the idea of imagination that there
is an image. So if we can recognize that every thing around us that
we see physically, we can see this physically. If we can just use
our imagination and imagine that the physical has to come from something we can't see
from the metaphysical, there's this connection there to storytelling. So now I look
at storytelling in two ways. I can still suspend disbelief, which is awesome.
I can still dig a story, I can still dig a plotline.
But I also take with me. In the end, I come back to
reality and say, those were people that actor Kevin sorbel doing good stuff,
William Shatner, you know, whoever the people might be, they're people making
their living. God bless them. And they've gotten up on the stage for
a little while. Now they've stepped aside. We'll let somebody else come in
do his thing, and they're going to tell these stories that hopefully they'll give
us moral lessons. And that's what I take from it. Everybody is given
this opportunity to hopefully offer us something that will give us value and let us
recognize that we're all human beings that have been created by God, and we're
telling stories that remind us imagination. We're all based on the image of God.
So that's sort of the way that I look at it now. And
I'm you know, hoping to write more stories and things like that, but
I'm kind of glad I'm not in LA because I would never achieve these these
thoughts, you know, about my life, my soul. I don't think
I would have. You know, well, there you have it. And
normally I give a little a little outro here for the discussion. But I
think Gardner Goldsmith did it much better than I could have, so we'll leave
it at that for tonight. Thank you Gardner Goldsmith for joining me, and
thank you guys for listening. I am merely o'celly. All of you are
indeed the effect. Take care,