They Live is a documentary, not science fiction

The case, in one place

Two things are pinned to this board, and they are the same thing. The first is a real video: a 1960s television sign-off, uploaded to YouTube in 2007, that hides commands inside its subtitles. The second is a movie: John Carpenter's They Live, in which a drifter finds sunglasses that reveal the same kind of commands buried in everyday media. Watch the video once and you will call it a hoax. Look closer and the hoax stops holding up. And once it stops holding up, Carpenter's line stops sounding like a joke: it's a documentary, it's not science fiction.

The sign-off plays the National Anthem over patriotic stills, and buried in the subtitle wipes, two characters at a flash, are the words OBEY, CONSUME, TRUST THE US GOVERNMENT, REBELLION WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. The easy answer is that the uploader painted them in later. But that forgery would have to match a decaying film reel's exact font and its exact faded color, and it would have to have been cut from a print wider than any "original" anyone has ever produced to debunk it. That is not how forgeries behave. That is how originals behave.

They Live is the other half of the proof. Carpenter, one of the exact rich, powerful directors who theorists say would have been asked to plant messages in his films, answered by making a film about messages being planted in films. He wrote his own name into the aliens' mouths. He told an interviewer, straight-faced, that the whole thing was a documentary. And the words his sunglasses expose, OBEY, CONSUME, THIS IS YOUR GOD, are the words in that sign-off reel, near enough to identical. You do not need the aliens to be real. You only need the messages to be. They sit on two strips of film shot decades apart.

The evidence

Episode transcript

All right. Welcome back to The Popcorn Isn't Real with me, your host, Torvald, and your other host, Leif Ehrich. Hello. I'm really excited because we're going to do something a little different today. I mean, this is media related and we will be talking about a movie. We're going to talk about They Live. But first, we're going to cover an actual conspiracy theory. Let's just get right into it. So this theory has to do with television sign-offs, which basically, if you don't know what it is, back in like the 40s, 50s, 60s, I mean, even up to like the 90s, television studios would, they would have broadcasting hours. And at the beginning of the broadcast day, they would sign on, and at the end, they would sign off. And during sign on and sign off, they would follow a special list of steps, which would usually include like the playing of the national anthem and maybe a video and maybe some announcements.

And then the very last thing would be like a test pattern and a test tone. The idea here, the theory here is that some or maybe most of these TV sign off videos that played the like the national anthem part included subliminal messages, hidden messages designed to brainwash or influence people. Right. OK, well, I'll give you some background so you can find this sign off video on YouTube. All you have to do, I mean, we'll probably include a link in the description, but otherwise you can just search for a 1960s sign-off subliminal messages and you'll find it. This video, basically, it's just a normal acoustic national anthem. It's a Star-Spangled Banner. Music plays over some, like, scenes and stills. For example, you'll see a flag when they play, oh, say, can you see? And you'll see a sunrise when they say the dawn's early light. Statue of Liberty, Capitol building. you know, lots of patriotic scenes. But unlike other nice normal videos, this one is full

of subliminal messages. And it's not even like, it's very in your face. Interestingly enough, the messages in this video are not in the lyrics, you know, the song's acoustic, so no one's singing or anything. They're not in the images or videos that you're seeing. The messages are in the subtitles that show the song text and I thought that was really interesting because when I looked it up like I first heard of this video just like I was listening to some random other podcasts and someone just talked about it like it was a thing like they're just like yeah you know subliminal messages and sign-off videos and I was like what I gotta look that up because if that's just a thing that people know about then I want to know about it and I was expecting to see like flashes of images right no yeah it's not that well i mean i'm sure we'll get into this but just to credit we are talking about a very specific video posted on youtube by a user named naomi 1963 1963

and i'm going to refer to this user as a her because naomi is a female name but i don't know what their actual gender is but so the subtitles to the song to the star spangled banner they appear like as a wipe if you know like film transitions it's a wipe from left to right first they appear as a wipe and then they disappear as a wipe from left to right and during that transition when they first appear for like a split split split second you have to really slow it down to even see it um they are not the lyrics the star spangled banner absolutely not but as soon as they are on screen they are like they immediately change to be the lyrics and do you have a list of all the different uh messages oh boy i do all right uh we can read through some of those i just want to say you don't see the full messages ever like you see max two characters of text that are changed at a time right right so it is very subliminal it's not something anyone

would ever see and think oh this is sending me messages unless they slowed it down all right so these messages are like they're patriotic and consumeristic and religious and demanding obedience and equating God to the government it's really interesting so I have each message mapped to a line from the song but I'll probably not say the line from the song because I haven't found any correspondence from the lines to the song that get mapped to different messages yeah I don't think there is okay so there are several messages and some of them repeat I'm just going to read the unique ones okay so there is a trust the u.s government god is real god is watching believe in government god rebellion will not be tolerated yeah that's a good one obey consume obey consume that one's pretty good this is uh there's do not question government worship consume believe obey yeah and then the last one i this isn't the last one in the video

but i i wanted to say it last because i think it's the most interesting there's by ultra by naomi right like by like b-u-y not b-y-e yeah yeah yeah so did you have any thoughts on on what the messages might mean or to me it's pretty straightforward but what do you think yeah i mean i think it's fairly self-explanatory the only one that's not is by ultra by now me so great so what do you think that is i know you you probably actually know a little more about this area of conspiracy theory than yeah well i mean so i of course have researched the mk ultra of course why of course well i mean any good conspiracy theorist knows about mk ultra because it is a it's it's not a conspiracy theory right is it is a it is a confirmed thing a series of experiments and tests and things that the cia did yes uh-huh yeah and so but because it is one of the few things that's confirmed it often gets used in all other conspiracy theories that aren't confirmed

right um yes and so that's why i looked into it now i will say i looked into it a while ago and so a lot of my memory on details is going to be fuzzy so i might not remember everything quite the way it is but anyway so there are a lot of uh cia programs that start with the letters mk followed by the program mk ultra now of course there were other mk experiments mk delta mk naomi mk often um and then there were other projects to me that was like the moth project or something often associated with these mk mk ultra mk naomi um are projects like project bluebird and project artichoke these are confirmed projects that the cia did um and all of them kind of deal with the same sort of things right there there are similar things going across all these projects and all these mk things uh so i'm just gonna kind of refer to all of them more or less together but basically it was just the cia after world war ii um it was a scary time and everyone was paranoid and they

felt like they were falling behind in the arms race and russia was doing more research than them and they had a lot of you know nazi scientists that they had brought over um who had done a lot of strange experiments that were unethical and they were like well we need to continue this research right and so all of these things basically are how to control humans um how to get them to do what you want how to interrogate them um how to in some cases make them into unwilling assassins um and specifically mk ultra as far as i understand is like purely dealing with mind control is that right that is the stuff that is most uh popular but they were researching lots of different things and like across the spectrum of all these different projects which like i said they're all interrelated like nk naomi was more for testing like biological weapons it sort of grew out of the project bluebird and project artichoke which

those were specifically um can someone be made an assassin against their will using things like drugs lsd they even looked into like can people be controlled using like viruses or illnesses that affect the brain well i was just gonna say i looked into mk naomi because i hadn't heard of that one before um like i'd heard of mk ultra and some of the others but i'd never heard of mk naomi and seeing it referenced in these subliminal messages piqued my interest i guess it was like a joint department of defense cia research program uh it was active from the 50s through the 70s and is generally thought to be a successor to the mk ultra program and it was focusing on like you said biological projects and including biological warfare agents and specifically storing materials that could incapacitate or kill a subject yeah um and also developing devices to use these materials right yeah i thought that was interesting like this isn't mind control this is like

straight biological warfare. Well, one of the things they also focused on other than biological warfare was, uh, how to use these biological weapons to like interrogate people or otherwise hurt people. But a lot of it was focused on things like interrogation. So still some amount of mind control, right? Like getting people to say and do what you want. Well, one thing I thought was interesting was that, um, I guess on November 25th, 1969, president Richard Nixon abolished military practices involving bioweapons right right so project mk naomi was dissolved and then february 14th 1970 presidential order was given to outlaw stockpiles of bacteriological weapons and non-living toxins so they had to not only they dissolved the project but then they had to dispose of everything and apparently a caa scientist was able to acquire 11 grams of deadly shellfish toxin from mk naomi and just kind of stored them in a cia lab for five years like

what was with that like yeah he was like hmm these will be useful i guess it shows maybe why people think these projects are a little odd because uh the scientists involved in them seem to be kind of just doing their own thing even when given a presidential order to dispose of this stuff they're just like maybe i'll move it to another lab so yes so mk ultra was started in 1953 in 1963 10 years later it was still going now in 1964 was when they kind of started scaling back and doing smaller experiments um but they were still doing them um and then 10 years later in 1973 during the watergate scandal and everything a man named richard helms at the cia ordered that most of the records about MKUltra be destroyed. And then later on, there were other records that were discovered or records that weren't destroyed that were declassified. And that's why we know about MKUltra now, because otherwise we wouldn't know about it. Right, right, right. So those are

some of the programs. Do you want to talk about any of the projects or do you think they fit in? I've already talked about Project Bluebird and Artichoke. Those were precursors to Project naomi interestingly enough mk often was another similar sort of test that was dealing more with like drug test stuff but we don't know much about it but some people think that it branched into the occult like how to use like witchcraft and stuff now that is kind of conspiracy theory that's not confirmed but some people think that it went that direction but there is a confirmed cia project called project stargate which was the cia testing psychics like testing if things like clairvoyance and being able to see the future were real so like the cia is certainly not above going into the zone of the paranormal right and at least testing i mean testing psychics so that's all interesting stuff now what you had asked was uh was there another project now there's a project

that is complete conspiracy theory. So Project Bluebird and Artichoke, right, Projects Bluebird and Artichoke are confirmed. Now there's one called Project Monarch that gets mentioned a lot in various conspiracy theories, but it is completely unconfirmed. A woman named Kathy O'Brien, she's a conspiracy theorist who wrote a book about being a victim of MKUltra in a specific project called Project Monarch. And according to her, both herself and her daughter were basically sexually abused by an international pedophile ring, drug barons, Satanists, and people who used a form of trauma-based mind-control programming to make them into sex slaves. And this forms the basis of modern day illuminati conspiracy theories which i don't know if we're gonna get into this but the q anon conspiracy theories if you look at them they are literally just the illuminati it is exactly all of the illuminati theories they're just been rebranded that's it i don't

know if this is correct but the the feeling i get is illuminati stuff is geared towards accusing like rich people and conservatives whereas q anon took it and geared it towards rich people and liberals yeah we'll see but that's not really the case at least on the various illuminati sites i have gone to pretty much anything that is not conservative any anything that seems liberal in their minds is illuminati right and and of course i'm not saying there's not some a lot of interesting evidence and a lot of recurring symbols in the media that you can point to to say illuminati confirmed but okay um it does seem like to me it's an excuse for more conservative-minded people to just say this thing that i don't like is evil okay and you think that of both illuminati theories and q anon theories you think they're the same they are the same but i will say because we were talking about project monarch i will say on the website

vigilant citizen the vigilant citizen who runs this website that's it that's what he calls himself i think he also has a podcast uh he's a illuminati conspiracy theorist now he says and he has a source on this though i wasn't able to track down the source so i can't confirm it myself he says the most incriminating statement to date made by a government official as to the possible existence of project monarch was extracted by antonio chaitkin a writer for the publication The New Federalist. When former CIA director William Colby was asked directly, what about Project Monarch? He angrily replied, we stopped that between the late 1960s and the 1970s. Oh, wow. That's like a Simpsons bit. That is literally the only thing I found on the internet that even remotely confirms the existence of Project Monarch. And like I said, he does have an actual source on there. i just haven't been able to track down that source so that's just a strange thing to say

it's like if someone asked me do you like lucky charm cereal and i'm like i haven't eaten that since between the 1980s and 1990s like i don't know it's just it's weird to give a time range for something oh that's weird but i think the most interesting thing about the q anon theory is because i don't think they're that interesting from what i've read i think the illuminati stuff was actually better i think q anon just seems like worse it's more yeah it's like more in your face fear-mongering is really all it is right exactly and the most interesting theory about it is the theory of where did it come from and it's in my opinion pretty much confirmed that all the q anon stuff just originated on 4chan and that the guy who is pretty much running q anon probably is the guy who made 4chan right because I and there's there's a lot to back this up which I unfortunately don't have in front of me but basically some of it is just that QAnon has

been basically given like special chat sorry special status on 4chan and like they get their own like uh administrative privileges where they can like make changes to the website and to the actual forum itself and no one else can do that except for the actual owners of the site yeah so who do you think they are right and that kind of seems like some powerful elite is backing them not the other way around exactly and probably you know but anyway yeah i mean probably the the guy who is doing this is just being given money to you know forward some people's political agenda right But also, the people who are in charge of QAnon, for positing that they want to increase awareness of a certain thing, they have completely confined all of their information to 4chan-hosted websites. Oh, you'd think if this was about dissemination of information, what you would want to do is reach far and wide. No, it's not that 4chan is their sponsor or anything.

You can't trust anywhere else. Like, what a sad word would that be if the only place we can trust is 4chan? Well, and the weirdest thing is that the QAnon stuff seems to be like mostly like uptight conservative people that buy into it. And these are the exact people who wouldn't like 4chan. Right. I'm like guys do you not even research what you're looking at no they don't then why do you believe it they hear it and it matches the beliefs they already have and so it becomes true they don't need to look it up they don't need to know where it came from but yeah yeah I mean I don't care if it matches what you already believe and if you buy into it you should at least know where it came from yeah come on but that's the thing is if if it was true or at least if it was pure like if it didn't have an agenda then they would be disseminating it across everything right like they would be setting up hosting websites all over like they would be doing it everywhere and

making sure to get their message out and they would also probably you know right let people know who they are and then maybe run for office right but anyway yeah i mean it just doesn't make sense trying to change the world by confining yourself to one little area that you control completely and then manipulating the people who come to you that sounds more like business and politics right it doesn't sound like generating awareness but anyway right yeah like it's like but you know like i will grant them that like the wealthy elite certainly do try to control a lot of different things that's oh yeah i mean there's parts of any conspiracy theory that are true but like we could do an entire podcast on just the illuminati or just q anon so let's get back to the this obey consume subliminal messaging sign off okay so the subliminal messages in this sign off video are pretty in your face it's easy to find them if you know where to look for them and they're

pretty uh i don't know scary or creepy or weird like i thought it was great when i first watched it i guess we can start talking about like uh the origin of this video and maybe the validity of this video yeah let's talk about naomi site naomi 1963 so like you said three yes it was posted by naomi 1963 1963 and it was way back in 2007 and the description of this video which has never been changed was i salvaged this reel of film from a tv station that used sorry that used to sign off with it during the 1960s that's it there was no mention of subliminal messages no other videos posted ever until just recently in 2017. Nothing about this video was geared towards gaining traction or attention to these subliminal messages. People seem to have discovered them on their own, which I find kind of interesting. It was just a random video someone uploaded who watched it and looked for subliminal messages in it and then started spreading it. I guess you

might say maybe naomi did it under a different account i don't know she could maybe knowing the origin of this video and knowing what happens in this video and the connections to maybe mk ultra and mk naomi what do you think like do you buy into it do you think it's valid do you think it's real if i just watched it which i did and then didn't look into it any further i think i would actually buy into it right if someone showed that to me legit and told me that this was just a just a sign-off video that people watched all the time in the 60s right like and I watched it and then they pointed out the thing I'd be like whoa like dude and then if I never looked into it again that's what I would think it's like man because you know it's very believable like in the 60s to 70s uh the government was doing really strange experiments MKL to MK Naomi well not just the government like sorry um companies were really into uh subliminal messaging and advertising

advertising just like exploded around that time yeah like that then was like data science now like that was the big thing to sell right right so yeah i would totally buy it if i didn't look into it any further well what's the problem uh okay so well you pointed it out yourself what's the weirdest thing about this video other than the subliminal messaging what's the weirdest thing about this video well to me the weirdest thing about this video i don't know if this is what you're fishing for but the weirdest thing about this video is if i want to brainwash someone if i want to get my subliminal messages out there why would i put them in a sign-off the one part of the tv program of the day that literally nobody watches as you've said this subliminal messaging is kind of over the top maybe they had far more subliminal less noticeable messaging in the mainstream programming and then they kept their really

in-your-face stuff till the very end where not a lot of people would see it because you know than people might notice right it's possible um like are you saying that maybe this wasn't a message for the people but was a message for like their bosses like are you saying they're trying to like signal their bosses to like give them a thumbs up like we did it we put in the messages so that relates back to the illuminati the one eye symbol if you wink one eye or put a circle around your eye or really emphasize an eye in any way in any form of media illuminati conspiracy theorists will tell you that the reason these media companies put those in is just messaging winking to their illuminati overlords saying like you know hail hydra like we are we are submissive to you yeah it's an act of submission like it's it's their way it's a power game right it's their way of saying you have the power we did it right yeah so it could be that the one

thing i have in defense of this is just that the whole sign off and sign on process is actually heavily regulated from the announcements that they read to the test pattern and the beep tone you hear all of that is actually regulated by the government like they say how to do a sign-on and a sign-off these uh sign-off videos like the national anthems and stuff were often provided by the government this is like the one part of the program they have full control over so maybe they just didn't have any other chance to insert like their own subliminal messages maybe this is the part they could do it in so they did it here right okay so i said though like uh what is the weirdest thing about this this uh video aside from the subliminal messaging yeah like i think the weirdest part of this video have you ever listened to a song with no lyrics and there were captions of the lyrics that go to that song but those lyrics are not being sung so you think that that discounts the

whole video you think the captions were added by naomi and then they upload the video right like i said when i first saw this i would totally buy it right if i didn't look into it any further but i did look into it a little further so i downloaded the video and i was looking through it frame by frame and i was thinking okay so i just took it at face value to begin with that these subtitles were already on the sign-off video and naomi yeah if if she did something added the subliminal messaging but then i was looking through it and as an editor i noticed some things like that just would be very difficult to do is if you were taking footage from like 1960s the subliminal messaging has the exact same font as the normal subtitles now it does either the subliminal messaging and the captions were always there or both were added by naomi right so not only is the font the same but the captions originally would have been yellow and are now faded to a yellowish

white and this is because it was an actual film reel and those age and all the colors in this video have faded and there are even specific spots in the video that are more faded than others right yeah so the the color of the font has faded and the color of the subliminal messaging font matches the faded color of the original font, which to me proves that it's real, right? Right. That would be absolutely impossible to fake. Right. But the thing that disproves that it's real is, can you find the original version of this thing? This is an interesting note. There are other versions of this exact sign-off video, and these are often used to try and debunk it. So there's one that has been found. It's an actual archived film reel owned by the Museum of Classic Chicago Television. This is a broadcast film reel. Like it has been broadcast. And the last time it was broadcast was in the late 80s. So this is as close as we can get to a true copy of this, right?

Okay. Now, this one does not have the subliminal messages, but it does have subtitles. So that's interesting, right? That is interesting. Now, another archived copy is available on, it's a website called FuzzyMemories.tv. It also doesn't have the subliminal messages, but it does have subtitles. And another thing about this is the Museum of Classic Chicago Television and the Fuzzy Memories one, both of them have more vivid colors than Naomi's version. And you can actually see the yellow in the subtitles on those ones. But like I said, Naomi's subtitles have basically faded to like a yellowish off-white. so this would actually imply that naomi added the subliminal messages and that's what most people say and they consider it to be case closed but like you said the problem with this is as an editor is it even possible to add subtitles just before other subtitles that perfectly match the ancient archived subtitles that you're trying to match like that seems like an impossible task to

me well it is possible but like as i was looking at it it would be difficult i mean anything's incredibly difficult no it would be difficult okay let's say you an editor and archivist leif eric you are editing a video and you only have the cropped raw video that aired can you somehow because you want to make a remaster of this can you somehow add more footage to expand the frame to widescreen if you have a lot of money and post-processing facilities right well i couldn't but like yes a person could do that theoretically but it would take a lot of time and money so you have a video of a scene and it's cropped that's all can you turn it into a widescreen video yes but it is not practical and it would take a very long time and it would take a lot of resources and probably a lot of people working on it and a lot of post-processing. Right. How are you going to get video of the stuff that is off camera?

You create it digitally. On the other hand, if you have a widescreen video, can you turn it into a letterbox video? Yeah, easily. Yeah, very easily. Okay. So the thing here is that Naomi's video is actually a wider frame than either of these other two copies. You can see in the cityscape they show, you can see more buildings in Naomi's video than in the other two copies which are the only other two copies anyone's ever found of this video and this to me implies that Naomi's is actually the original or at least more original than the others because what people are saying is that Naomi somehow dug up one of these other copies and added subtitle like subliminal messages to it but that cannot be because if Naomi did that if Naomi used one of these other two copies which are the only other two copies we know about then Naomi also added a tiny little bit of extra frame to the side of the video.

And why would they do that? I feel like Naomi probably is not lying about being some sort of archivist because she certainly has a high attention to detail. How in the 60s could it possibly have said, by Ultra, by Naomi, when these things were not known back then, right? And I would assume that people making it wouldn't want to put even like, even if it is subliminal, no one notices, like, just on the off chance that someone would notice, like, why put those words in there, you know, to me, that seems like she posted this video, she picked a specific name, she did not give any explanation, but she did want people to figure it out, right? That this, this is what I'm talking about, you know, I'm talking about MKUltra, right? one of the things that totalitarian governments and fascist governments like to do they announce themselves instead of doing things quietly like when they want to do something bad or illegal

they make a big deal out of it to normalize it my overall impression of this movie is that when you first watch it seems totally real you look into it and it seems totally fake yeah like this can't be real that's stupid also if this is real how come naomi is the only one with the version that has subliminal messages in it but then on even deeper inspection I see a video with subliminal messages that match perfectly the font and faded coloring of the original text I also see that that original text is in other versions of this video just without the subliminal messages and also the other versions of this video which people claim Naomi took and then doctored to add the subliminal messages to, they are clearly not the same. Right, they're not the same transfer. And all of those things to me imply that Naomi's not lying. As someone who I worked as an archivist and I have transferred film to digital formats,

you can zoom in or out on the film itself. And so like, so based on client requests, a lot of times I would zoom in enough that it crops out the sides so you're just seeing the image but some people like to have the sides like to have a little more in there um and when you do zoom in enough to crop out the sides sometimes you're losing a little picture on the edges right and so some people like to have it zoomed out enough that you can actually even see like the little like sprocket holes on the side and so it's possible that naomi works as an archivist and she did a transfer and hers is less zoomed in than the broadcast versions which of course would be more zoomed in because you wouldn't want to see any of the frame on the side or anything like that but either way either way this does imply that naomi definitely had a copy of original film okay so here's one small piece of evidence that i feel like gives a little more credence to this being not real is the fact that

it says obey consume obey consume which you know i feel the opposite no matter how you look at it That is a reference to They Live, to John Carpenter's They Live, right? Or was They Live a reference to original subliminal messages? All right, maybe. Let's talk about it. Okay, it's a John Carpenter film from 1988 starring Rowdy Roddy Piper. And basically, he's just an everyman. He's just a dude who, you know, he's an all-American man who believes in the rules and he thinks his chance is going to come someday, right? But in the meantime, he's doing manual labor and drifting from town to town. I mean, the point about his character is that he's nobody, right? That's why his last name is Nada. So, yeah, he's just a guy trying to make his way in the world. And he stumbles upon a big old conspiracy theory, basically, that there's camouflaged aliens trying to take over the world and working with the rich and elite and also kind of replacing the rich and elite and repressing the middle and lower class.

And also destroying the middle class. Yeah, and they're also destroying the middle class. They don't want the middle class. They only want the lower class. He finds a pair of sunglasses that allows him to see these aliens and also to see subliminal messages placed in different advertisements and forms of media throughout the world. He sees subliminal messages in magazines, billboards, you name it. He sees them everywhere. He then pretty much makes a friend. I think his name is Frank, and they kind of go on a rampage. Frank Armitage. busting up yes and they end up busting up these alien plans and i think they both die that's about it yes they do yeah and i don't even know how thoroughly they busted up the aliens plans they might have just broke a satellite dish so yeah very famous movie uh some might say ahead of its time dude i would i love it i love this movie i mean And I saw it a few years ago and I liked it a lot, but that was just for the campiness, right? Like I thought it was a fun, campy, silly horror. But watching it again, I'm like, oh, this is great. Like this is so ahead of its time.

No, it's so good. Do you have any background on this movie? Because I know you're a big fan of John Carpenter. Like, is there anything you know about the making of this movie or any people involved that you want to talk about? Because I was an archivist, I have listened to John Carpenter tell his entire life story and go through each movie one by one, which is amazing. I love John Carpenter. But I don't exactly remember all the details of everything he said about They Live, other than he has said many times that They Live is about unchecked capitalism. That's all it's about. It's a warning film about unchecked capitalism. But John Carpenter himself, even though he is a bit more on the left side in terms of politics, he said that even though he made this movie, he is not anti-capitalist. He has said, OK, capitalism has been very good to me, which it has because he has been very wealthy. Just for our viewers, in case they don't know, what are some of John Carpenter's other noteworthy films?

Because he's made a lot of movies. yeah well of course you know his very first film and arguably his most famous no not famous dark star no oh no dark star we'll talk about that one in a different episode dude i i think i really love john carpenter he makes good movies he is amazing um 1981 or was it no 1979's halloween is one of his most famous films um he also made the one i thought you were gonna say yeah that was a joke yeah he also made the thing uh which of course was a remake of the thing from another planet many people consider it to be one of the greatest sci-fi horrors of all time like i know you talked a little bit about john carpenter's political leanings do you think his viewpoints bleed into his movies often or does he usually take an impartial role while directing like just trying to tell the story in its purest form yeah i think most of the time john carpenter is very impartial in everything he does he is the least right because i i think so too he did

escape from new york right yeah he did yeah and that's that's pretty in your face as far as like trying to give some world views no it's true so is uh so is the the one we're talking about they live i mean john carpenter has the ability to neutral right he's an auteur who can control how he directs and what he directs and he can be very detached politically speaking or if that's the point of the movie he can be super attached to whatever his political message is but yeah john carpenter himself is the most like down-to-earth matter-of-fact guy you will ever meet but he also has like just a very dry sense of humor so like right he'll be cracking jokes but like say the interviewer in the archival footage i was watching like wouldn't even get the jokes right so that's too bad he's also a composer in fact he's probably done more composing in his career than he has actually done directing and he created arguably one of the most well-known

horror scores of all time which is you know halloween the right and so like i was listening to an interview with him once and it's really well known yeah i was listening to this archival interview of him once and the they wanted him to talk about like because this is the greatest score ever you know from a horror film and they wanted to talk about it and they even had a little piano next to him that he could play and he was like oh yeah well it's just a normal beat that you would find that you do normally do on a drum and like any song and i just played it on the piano that's it and then he reaches over and he plays it so that's his personality just very matter of fact he doesn't he doesn't see himself as like this big famous awesome dude or anything but we most of us do you're painting a picture of a man where what you see is what you get so i don't think we need to dig deeper and they live i think

anything you see is what you get with they live like he's not trying to say anything deeper than what you see but i will say i want to say so they live was written by frank armitage who is the name of the best that's the name of his best friend yeah oh that's interesting and was also a reference to um lovecraft a character in h.p lovecraft stories um and also was the screenwriter for this movie now the real screenwriter was john carpenter but he called himself frank armatage so okay but i will say that this movie they live is actually based on a short story written by ray nelson now unfortunately i didn't have time to read the short story but i do know that it was published in 1963 hmm where have we heard that okay that year before dude that's naomi 1963 1963 wow what a connection that's pretty cool okay yeah i don't know that definitely paints a little bit more of a connection between naomi's youtube video and right she says obey consume obey consume and she's got this random

date in her name that corresponds with the publication date of the story that they live was based on i don't know but could be a coincidence and also could be a reverse connection right right like maybe naomi saw these subliminal messages and is like whoa john carpenter knew about these subliminal messages and i want to make that connection for people right yeah it could be i mean so near the beginning there's this preacher dude who's saying they are our masters they control us they control us they're all around you first of all this is not a very religious sermon he's leading no but second of all i think that this is definitely talking about the rich and powerful controlling everyone but also talking about subliminal messages right like yeah they control us they're all around you he's talking about these messages all around people controlling them so a popular conspiracy theory that you'll find people just kind of saying in the comments on like

youtube and stuff like that is that they live is real um that people think it's a movie but this is real right like i don't know john carpenter was trying to warn us or something um and i don't think these people think it's real in the sense that aliens are real i hope right that's what i was gonna ask but i mean a lot of people do believe like that there's lizard people there's like two different races of aliens and one of them's good and one of them's bad some of these people may believe that there are aliens or like lizard people who are the wealthy elite who are controlling the world but i think a lot of them are just saying like this is like a movie that knew about the new world order and uh you know now it's becoming more and more clear um and so there are a lot of things that will say john carpenter either predicted or knew about when he made this movie like the fact that there are militarized police who just show up and

take out a bunch of homeless people for no reason who are just chilling um the fact that there are drones right i mean we have drones now they certainly didn't back then um you know and so here is one telling remark from the movie nada and armitage break in to this like meeting of a bunch of wealthy elite people some of them are aliens but i think some of them aren't this guy is talking and he says by the year 2025 the entire planet will be under the protection and dominion of this power alliance vote for ourselves and for you the human power elite and possibly this could mean we only have five years left before the aliens take over or the wealthy elite or whatever i mean arguably they're already controlling everything like they were and in they live but i actually don't know why it was going to take the aliens that long i don't know either they seem to be doing pretty well but i don't have a ton of more evidence to support this theory really

Just that some people believe that they live was either prophetic or John Carpenter somehow knew about it. OK, so how would John Carpenter know about this? I mean, there's there's this theory that you're going over, which is that everything in this movie is literal. I kind of take it a different way, which is that it is literal, but John Carpenter specifically has been contacted or done dealings with Hollywood elite who were telling him to put subliminal messages in his movie. Yes. And his response to this was a very dry and straightforward response of making a movie about subliminal messages being in the movie, right? Yes. Like, that's how I take it, is that he's kind of trying to warn everyone while also following the directions of the people who are handling him, right? Like, he's saying outright, this is what's happening. There are subliminal messages everywhere. And what do they say?

They say, buy, consume, submit, obey, right? And if this is the case, his subliminal messages are very similar to the ones which actually were in these broadcasts if Naomi wasn't lying, right? Yeah. I mean, whether it be aliens or lizard people or Illuminati, you know, whatever boogeyman you think is controlling the world. Something's controlling the world. Right. And according to these theories. John Carpenter also did make a movie about a boogeyman. Well, he did.

They tend, especially with the Illuminati, the belief is that anyone who is powerful was put there by the Illuminati or by some powerful force. And everyone in the media industry, right? Every rich and powerful person in LA is part of it. Yes, specifically the media is like locked down. Yeah, that's one of the pillars of it or whatever. One could argue that because John Carpenter was a rich, powerful director who had made a lot of movies, that he was approached by some sort of shadowy organization to put strange messages. There's no arguing. Like he would have been approached if it was real, right? Like, he's one of the director writers who would have been asked to put messages in his movies. Yeah. There's no doubt. Yeah, absolutely. If it's real, then he would have been. And even if it's not real, I mean, no matter what, directors are actually asked to put things like product placement.

Right, like product placement. No, exactly. So, like I said, no matter how deeply you buy into this theory, I take it as fact that he's trying to tell people, hey, look, there are messages from rich people in your media. Like everything we've said now, you don't even need the Illuminati for it to be true or aliens or whatever, right? But if that's the case, though, then why also did they let John Carpenter release They Live? Honestly, that boggles my mind. Even if there is no specific Illuminati, like this movie is basically just trashing rich people and Hollywood execs, right? The people who funded it, right? I mean, it was pretty low budget. Massively shooting all the policemen. Like it's basically like the let's shoot police the movie, right? Yeah. So especially the scene where he just goes into the bank and starts shooting people up, I think hasn't exactly aged well because of, you know, current events. But I mean, maybe that's also him predicting the future. I don't know.

I don't know if you noticed this, but at the very end of the movie, when Rowdy Rowdy Piper breaks the satellite and they can see all the aliens finally, like everyone in the world can see the aliens for what they are. One of the aliens is on TV in a bar, like people at the bar are listening to it. And the alien on TV is talking about all the sex and violence on screen has gone too far for me. I'm fed up with it. Then he says, filmmakers like George Romero and John Carpenter have to show some restraint. And I thought, there's no other way to take this than he feels like Hollywood is controlling him, right? No, he is, totally. That's it. This is just saying it. He feels like the alien creatures in Hollywood are telling him what to do and forcing him to show restraint. Like you said, John Carpenter, he's a very straightforward kind of guy. What you see is what you get. I mean, the money in this movie says, this is your God.

This is your God, right? um another interesting thing that maybe kind of corresponds to this was uh roddy piper whenever he has the sunglasses on they have a weird effect on him like not only does he see things as they really are but he like acts a little crazier when he has them on yeah and when he takes them off he always clutches his head and like is tired right and at one point he says it's like a drug wearing these glasses makes you high but you come down hard and i think that's kind of john carpenter saying how it feels to wake up to the conspiracy that's going on around you right like when you are seeing it it's like a drug like you get sucked in and it's like it it gets your adrenaline pumping and it's almost kind of fun but then when you take off the glasses and you realize i'm living in this world you come down hard and it's depressing right i mean it's like it's like being fun to research conspiracy theories but if they're true oh man that sucks

another thing i want to mention is just dude that sunglasses fight scene oh it's amazing that's so good it just it just keeps getting better and better because he had his wrestler rowdy rowdy piper he's like their goal was to make the longest fight scene ever yeah it just kept going i love it because it keeps seeming like it's about to end and then he gets up again and does some more right not only that it's it's it's like one of the most brutal most hilarious most gritty and campy fight scenes ever in a way like realistic too right like they're fighting dirty they're just kneeing each other in the crotch kicking punching tackling fighting yeah this isn't a marvel choreographed fight you know they've got two by fours bottles accident i love when roddy piper accidentally breaks uh mr armitage's car window and then like apologizes to him like really sincerely it's got suplexes and pile drivers like what a fight scene dude and i love that the whole thing

is put on these sunglasses like it's such an innocuous request like of all the things that roddy could be asking frank to do it's not worth getting beat up if that guy told me to put on a pair of sunglasses i think i'd probably just put on the sunglasses right i mean this speaks to frank armitage's character because i love how aggressively careful he is like he is so committed to being a middle-of-the-road guy but he gets mad at roddy piper for following him when he invited him to follow him yeah he asked him to follow him john carpenter of course kind of says that the scene is basically a joke like we just want to make a really long fight scene but could it be something more because like if frank armitage is sleeping is this like how hard it is to wake someone up right right to make them see what they don't want to see right he's this moderate middle of the road guy who who won't see what's happening around him and that's the frustration that a lot of us

feel you know when you're talking to someone who has a maybe a different viewpoint than you well and throughout the movie frank keeps justifying his standpoint like every time he has like gets aggressive about being careful he then says something like i just gotta work and make my money or i'm competing with you and whoever works harder comes out on top that's how the world is or i've got a family to worry about don't drag me into this like it's like he knows there's something going on but he just doesn't want any part of it and that's kind of the way most people are when it comes to politics or anything right is right they know there's stuff going on but just live in their lives like they don't want to get dragged into it they don't want to have to make a difference they just want to support their family get their money and live happily right and i think that's kind of what frank represents but most of us aren't so stay out most of us aren't

so staunchly moderate that if roddy piper tried to get us to wear sunglasses we would beat the crap out of him right yeah well i mean like you said it comes down to what the sunglasses represent yeah it was such a good scene dude i love it i mean since we're talking about random scenes we do we we have to mention that this is the origin of the quote i'm here to kick ass and chew bubble gum and I'm all out of bubble gum and now from another John Carpenter interview uh he has said that um he got this line I guess Roddy Piper gave him a list of lines like just random things that he would say as a wrestler when he came into the ring and that was one of them and John Carpenter was like all right Roddy Piper's a genius that's a great line right so like when I first heard this line like I've heard this line in a ton of different movies it's not always bubble gum but right like and one odd thing when i when i when i showed this to brita was she had also heard this

line tons of times too and she was like so this is where it comes from but that might be the worst delivery of that line i've ever heard and it's true that roddy piper's way of delivering it is very just like not super in your face it's just an odd delivery well and it's kind of like it's weird for him to say that because like he's having a bit of a crisis just fought off two cops and then stumbles into this bank to kind of like get his bearings then he looks around and announces that he's about to kick everyone's ass like why like i mean i don't know maybe the glasses were drugging him up all right so i i think we've talked through they live we've talked through the sign-off um broadcast what do you think what's real well just like state for the viewers what what was the whole theory we were saying there well i think that naomi found this footage which contains subliminal messages and i think that john carpenter made a movie exposing subliminal

messages that he has grown up with and has been asked to put into his movies right now the there are some links between that movie and they live such as the phrases in the subliminal messages some of them are identical like obey and then also like you said the date that the original short story was published is in naomi's username so it's undeniable that there are some links between them now either naomi is a big fan of they live and included it in their unbelievably complicated and time-consuming um edit of this archive footage that they found and then uploaded with no fanfare like they put a lot of time and work into it and then didn't really even try to publicize it or John Carpenter had seen and knew about these messages and was warning us about them and the messages he was warning us about are the same messages that were appearing in this old footage from the 60s which was actually legitimately found and uploaded and I kind of

want to believe the second one because i think it makes sense right like i think it makes perfect sense that john carpenter would be warning us about these things because he's in the industry he's a higher up and also he does what he wants yeah i don't see any reason naomi would have bothered to edit this stuff if they weren't gonna try and publicize it or anything right like also it's just so dang it would be so dang difficult yeah so that's that's the way i see it no i mean you have valid points i i think it's a really good theory a really interesting theory and a good excuse to talk about they live i don't necessarily think i believe that i think i still think naomi edited this footage um and i think she's a huge fan of they live but what's the deciding factor for you why can't you buy it because it says obey consume obey i think she is just a big fan of they live i think that that's the conclusion i come to

but i do think that your version is more interesting and exciting consume obey into your movie and those are the messages they put in all their subliminal messages and also naomi found ancient subliminal messages right like of course it would be the same so it is possible it's possible i'm not saying i totally buy it but i i do think your version believing that version is certainly more exciting and interesting yeah but only until you realize you're living it and then it becomes depressing just like taking off the sunglasses just like the glasses all right well that was fun i had a good time talking about it i had a good time watching the movie so just a small thing to support your theory that perhaps john carpenter knew about this the whole time yeah is that uh he did a phone interview with yahoo movies and it was a very tongue-in-cheek sort of interview to the interviewer he said you have to understand something it's a documentary

it's not science fiction did he say it in that serious tone I mean he probably that's his only tone okay so this is like a written interview well it was a phone interview and like Yahoo movies they have the transcript but I haven't seen like the I don't know dude that's really good there you go theory proved I mean he was making a documentary about the future or about current events all right everyone stay stay woke don't submit don't conform put on the sunglasses thank you so much for listening to us on the popcorn isn't real we hope you enjoyed our theory we hope that you keep those sunglasses on and we will see you next time bye-bye thank you so much for listening opening music for this episode was provided by Christine. If you want to see how our theory holds up, we provide links in the episode description where you can enjoy the media we discuss. And if you like our podcast, don't forget to rate,

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