Speaker 1: This is a clip from Raised by Giants. You can
Speaker 1: access the entire episode now on our website and all
Speaker 1: podcast platforms.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, in the Freemason Bible, it says when
Speaker 2: a sacrifice is made, the sacrifice has to be made
Speaker 2: inside of a pentagon, and a pentagon is the pentagram.
Speaker 2: So if you look at a lot of these, maybe
Speaker 2: some of these public executions or some of these sacrifices
Speaker 2: like you were talking about with Freddie Mercury, you could
Speaker 2: probably go back and there would be some kind of
Speaker 2: symbolism surrounding that. That's like a pentagon if you looked
Speaker 2: at it from above.
Speaker 1: What's crazy about the Queen story is I've researched this
Speaker 1: because I've done a live presentation on it. I did
Speaker 1: it at Halloween last year, actually, and part of that
Speaker 1: involves breaking down the lyrical content of Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen's
Speaker 1: most famous song. And it's another thing that was staring
Speaker 1: us all right there in plain sight, but so many
Speaker 1: probably didn't see it. That song has been endlessly scrutinized
Speaker 1: by music critics for decades and they're like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: so ambiguous, nobody really knows what it means. But it's
Speaker 1: fairly clear when you look at it from this perspective
Speaker 1: that the song is talking about a Faustian bargain, a
Speaker 1: deal that's being made by the protagonist in the song
Speaker 1: in exchange for great fame and fortune. This goes back
Speaker 1: to the original German legend of Faust, who was this
Speaker 1: sort of accomplished, wealthy individual who had gained great worldly
Speaker 1: pleasure and acquisition, but felt like he was lacking knowledge,
Speaker 1: spiritual knowledge, and holistic knowledge, and so he makes a
Speaker 1: deal metaphorically with the devil and sells his soul, offers
Speaker 1: up his mortal soul in exchange for this great worldly knowledge.
Speaker 1: And a common trope that's run throughout the music industry
Speaker 1: for decades, going all the way back to Robert Johnson,
Speaker 1: the blues musician in the nineteen thirties who said to
Speaker 1: have made a deal at the crossroads with the devil
Speaker 1: in exchange for great musical proficiency. Is this idea of
Speaker 1: musicians trading their souls for engineered fame and fortune, and that,
Speaker 1: when you look at it, is what the Freddie Mercury
Speaker 1: character is talking about in Bohemian Rhapsody, And when he says,
Speaker 1: Mama just killed a man. He's talking about a metaphorical killing,
Speaker 1: which is the killing of his old self or his ego,
Speaker 1: if you like, because now he's become somebody or something
Speaker 1: else else because of the deal that he's made. And
Speaker 1: then the middle section of that song, where it goes
Speaker 1: all operatic, is a battle in the heavens between the
Speaker 1: forces of good and evil. It's angels and demons. They
Speaker 1: sound like choirs, and they're doing battle in the spiritual
Speaker 1: realm for Freddy's soul to determine, you know, which side
Speaker 1: is going to get freddy soul. And then evidently in
Speaker 1: the song, the forces of good the angels win out
Speaker 1: and they claim back Freddy's soul. And that's why at
Speaker 1: the end of the song it goes very calm the
Speaker 1: coder at the end, because Freddy's been through all this
Speaker 1: and he's reflecting on what's happened to him. And that
Speaker 1: song was written by Freddie Mercury himself for Route Bulsara,
Speaker 1: and I wonder whether it chronicles his own induction into
Speaker 1: the music business. So it's autobiographical. Freddy is basically telling
Speaker 1: in allegorical form through this very old ratic song, how
Speaker 1: he himself came to become famous, and unfortunately, an aspect
Speaker 1: of selling your soul that often occurs is the devil,
Speaker 1: to use that term, sometimes wants it back or sometimes
Speaker 1: wants more from you. It's payback time, you know. So
Speaker 1: you've had the fame and the fortune and the great
Speaker 1: wealth and the riches, and there comes a point where
Speaker 1: now you've got to pay the price for that. And
Speaker 1: you know, I wonder whether Freddy's ultimate demise could have
Speaker 1: been connected to some kind of deal that he made
Speaker 1: early on. Another piece of footage that I show in
Speaker 1: that talk is Freddy at a very early queen concert
Speaker 1: from the early seventies, and he's holding up some nails,
Speaker 1: artificial nails on his hands, and he says, do you
Speaker 1: like my clause? And he goes, they're a present from
Speaker 1: the devil himself, and then the audience starts laughing, and
Speaker 1: he goes, they're laughing, they're laughing. They don't believe me.
Speaker 1: They don't believe me. So you've got to wonder how
Speaker 1: much truth was getting conveyed there. You know, all of
Speaker 1: this stuff just makes you wonder when you approach all
Speaker 1: these things with a fresh pair of eyes and a
Speaker 1: new mind, coming from a renewed perspective. It does tend
Speaker 1: to put a different slant on so many things that
Speaker 1: you've been familiar with, possibly for decades.
Speaker 2: What if the selling of the soul is also metaphorical
Speaker 2: and allegorical, meaning that once you take the money from
Speaker 2: these people, you can't go against these people, right, they
Speaker 2: are funding you, They're funding your career, and you cannot
Speaker 2: back out of the deal or else your career is
Speaker 2: then over. You're then destroyed, and worst case scenario, you
Speaker 2: are killed. I mean, when you look at some of
Speaker 2: the most popular musicians you know since the fifties and
Speaker 2: beyond have all died in some weird and strange way,
Speaker 2: the most popular people, I mean, Elvis, John Lennon, Michael Jackson,
Speaker 2: you know, all of these people. At Prince, you know,
Speaker 2: Regret Prince was later on in life, but still he
Speaker 2: was doing a lot of things that was going against
Speaker 2: the music industry. He was trying to get the rights
Speaker 2: back to all of his music, and he wasn't letting
Speaker 2: that music being distributed out. He didn't want it on streaming.
Speaker 2: And then two years after he gets the rights back
Speaker 2: to all of his music, he's dead.
Speaker 1: So if you think about nineteen fifties icons, and you
Speaker 1: mentioned these earlier, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley if you accept
Speaker 1: that he did die in nineteen seventy seven, and James Dean,
Speaker 1: I mean, what the chance is James Dean dead at
Speaker 1: twenty four, was dead at thirty six, And then you've
Speaker 1: got people up river Phoenix who was dead at I
Speaker 1: don't know, twenty something, I guess, and many other actors
Speaker 1: who die young after becoming iconic. And what are the
Speaker 1: chances of that happening as an accidental sort of thing?
Speaker 1: I mean, I called my last book, No One's Dad's
Speaker 1: a Plumber to emphasize the observation that when it comes
Speaker 1: to famous rock musicians, you're very hard pressed to find
Speaker 1: many fathers of the real household, name a listers who
Speaker 1: had regular working class jobs like a plumber. Instead, they
Speaker 1: were all lieutenant colonels or governors or you know, lord
Speaker 1: mayors or whatever. And I've often wondered what would happen
Speaker 1: if the same number of plumbers turned up dead as
Speaker 1: do rock musicians and actors. So, you know, news breaks
Speaker 1: that oh, Michael Jackson's died, and people are like, oh, dear,
Speaker 1: that's terrible. When youe Houston's died in a bathtub. Oh dear,
Speaker 1: that's terrible. Now Prince has died in an elevation to
Speaker 1: oh dear, that's terrible. And it's all chalked up as well.
Speaker 1: You know, that's the music game for you. These rock stars,
Speaker 1: they do drugs and they live these crazy lives and
Speaker 1: it's no wonder so many of them wash up dead.
Speaker 1: You know. But if new started coming through that. Today
Speaker 1: a plumber died in you know, Buffalo, New York, and
Speaker 1: a plumber died today in Orlando, Florida, and a plumber
Speaker 1: died today in Manchester, England, Eventually, wouldn't people start asking
Speaker 1: what is it? What's going on? Why is plumbing such
Speaker 1: a dangerous profession? What did they all drown in bathroom floods?
Speaker 1: Why are all these plumbers turning up dead? But because
Speaker 1: it's musicians and rock stars, they just get away with it.
Speaker 1: So I think that's why there's such a high body count.
Speaker 1: The controllers can knock many of these individuals off if
Speaker 1: that's what's happening, and I think it personally is. And
Speaker 1: the public don't demand full inquiries, they don't demand full answers.
Speaker 1: They just accept what they're told in the mainstream that
Speaker 1: it's an unfortunate byproduct of these industries. Folks, that's fame
Speaker 1: and fortune, and you know, these crazy lives lived in
Speaker 1: the public spotlight for you getting away with it.
Speaker 2: Well, they're also probably like, well, they were rich and famous,
Speaker 2: they had their five minutes of family, had all this money.
Speaker 2: You know, who really cares, So you know, they were
Speaker 2: way better off than me. So what they died young?
Speaker 2: I mean Amy Winehouse Sames scenario. There's so many of
Speaker 2: them that it's like it's almost like we've been desensitized
Speaker 2: to it in a lot of ways. I mean Kirk
Speaker 2: Coban as well. Have you seen the information that's been
Speaker 2: coming out about Kirk Coban.
Speaker 1: Well, it's been coming out for years. It's pretty much
Speaker 1: on the public record now that he was murdered. You know,
Speaker 1: I think the idea that he committed suicide, very few
Speaker 1: people accept that anymore. But information has been leaking out
Speaker 1: for years pointing to the fact that he was murdered,
Speaker 1: but still no perpetrators brought to justice. Whoever it was
Speaker 1: still walking around out there.
Speaker 2: That's the problem with a lot of this stuff is
Speaker 2: that it seems like we just kind of keep rolling
Speaker 2: on like nobody really cares us on to the next thing.
Speaker 2: A couple of weeks ago, it was the epsteam files,
Speaker 2: then it was the UFO files, and now it's war
Speaker 2: with Iran. When we didn't get any answers or any
Speaker 2: conclusions really to the first thing that happened just a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks ago. But people have already forgotten about that,
Speaker 2: and they've already moved on with their lives. It's almost
Speaker 2: exactly like with COVID. I feel like everyone has just
Speaker 2: kind of forgotten about COVID, and I've recently gone back
Speaker 2: and gotten reasonably pissed off about nine to eleven, and
Speaker 2: I'm thinking to myself, how did we let this happen?
Speaker 2: How do we let this happen with absolutely no investigation.
Speaker 2: You're telling me that nobody in high up government said
Speaker 2: this is freaking weird. Why did these buildings collapse like this?
Speaker 2: What hit the Pentagon? Why was there absolutely no plane
Speaker 2: wreckage in Pennsylvania where the plane supposedly went down that
Speaker 2: just made a crater And oh, I got balloons. I
Speaker 2: did the air quotes where the plane supposedly went down,
Speaker 2: There's just a crater there, there's no airplane wreckage, hardly
Speaker 2: zero airplane wreckage at the Pentagon, Like, did no one
Speaker 2: think that? I mean, it makes me kind of disappointed.
Speaker 2: I was too young to do anything about it at
Speaker 2: that point. I was like eight years old when the
Speaker 2: planes hit the towers. I was too young to do
Speaker 2: anything about it. But I'm pretty disappointed in the adults
Speaker 2: of that time because literally every single news station said
Speaker 2: that there were bombs. They all said that there were bombs.
Speaker 2: The firefighters said that there were bombs. People that were
Speaker 2: in the buildings that I witnesses said that there were bombs.
Speaker 2: There was even warnings of people to get out of
Speaker 2: the building because they knew that the building was going
Speaker 2: to collapse. I maybe getting off on a tangentier, but
Speaker 2: it's just kind of something that's resurfaced within me that
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that I was that pissed off about
Speaker 2: until again, until recently that I've been kind of harboring
Speaker 2: these feelings about nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: Well, we should be pissed off, and with me. I've
Speaker 1: been reliving the madness of COVID recently because I've just
Speaker 1: completed my third truth fiction novel, The Tragedy and the Triumph,
Speaker 1: which is set in those times. So this is the
Speaker 1: third piece of fiction that I've written. The first one
Speaker 1: I wrote in twenty nineteen, prior to all the COVID madness,
Speaker 1: and this one was the cause of the cure. It
Speaker 1: was set in the early nineties, nineteen ninety and ninety one,
Speaker 1: based on my recollections of those times before your time
Speaker 1: for the sounds of it, youngster, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Nineteen yeah, yeh ninety three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great, great times in so many ways. So then
Speaker 1: the second story I set in two thousand and one
Speaker 1: with the events of nine to eleven as the backdrop,
Speaker 1: and it's the same characters from the first story, but
Speaker 1: eleven years on, and I've got all the very real
Speaker 1: events of those times as a backdrop to the narrative
Speaker 1: as a subplot. And this latest story I've got the
Speaker 1: same characters again, but this one is set in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: so it's a thirty years on from the original, and
Speaker 1: the characters have aged thirty years, have been through a
Speaker 1: whole lord of shit in their personal lives and stuff,
Speaker 1: and they've evolved and changed as individuals as we do
Speaker 1: over time. But in researching this one, to get the
Speaker 1: background detail or I had to relive twenty twenty and
Speaker 1: twenty one again, which in many ways was horrific because
Speaker 1: I found myself wallowing in all the emotions and all
Speaker 1: the trauma of those times. It was bad enough bloody
Speaker 1: living through it the first time without having to wallow
Speaker 1: in it again. And part of the reason for that
Speaker 1: is because I'm producing a soundtrack like a movie style soundtrack.
Speaker 1: I think my novels are the only books that come
Speaker 1: with their own movie style soundtracks. So I take audio
Speaker 1: footage from the time, like little snippets of news clips,
Speaker 1: and combine it with the music that was around at
Speaker 1: the time. So the one from nineteen ninety was great
Speaker 1: because the music that was around in the early nineties
Speaker 1: was incredible, and I've put it with bits of audio
Speaker 1: from things like the Gulf War, or the invasion of
Speaker 1: Kuwait by Iraq by Saddam Hussein in nineteen ninety, and
Speaker 1: the last days of Margaret Thatcher