Transcription
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Hey deserving listeners, it's just me today. I saw an article last week, and it was calling Trump a Manchurian Candidate. It was in HuffPo, and it said, "Is Donald Trump the real Manchurian Candidate? You decide." I read the article, but I didn't really know what the authors were talking about. I tried to figure out their time out Manchuria in Canada, and I, I've heard of the movie, have never seen it. I know it's an old movie, and I tried to figure out what they were saying when they're saying, "Is Trump a Manchurian Candidate?"
So I did, I did a little more Googling and found out that many people have been labeled as Manchurian Candidates over the years. I found that John McCain was accused of being a Manchurian Candidate. People thought that John McCain, and I remember John McCain, but he was a prisoner of war, I think, during the Vietnam conflict. He was accused of being a Manchurian Candidate because they thought maybe he had been brainwashed while he was a prisoner of war.
In 2006, I found an article talking about George Bush. It says, "Quote, 'Like a sleeper agent or Lawrence Harvey's famed character Sergeant Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate, George W. Bush, the ultimate insider, is doing more to damage America than Osama bin Laden.'" Unquote. So there we have George W. Bush being accused of being a Manchurian Candidate.
Of course, Obama was accused of everything. So, 2014 Breitbart, quote, "My definition of a Manchurian Candidate is a person who hates everything America stands for and whose goal it is to win the presidency for the express purpose of destroying the greatest nation, the greatest economic system, and the greatest middle class in world history. That, my friends, describes A. I'm not basing it on rumors or innuendo. I'm basing it on the facts." Unquote.
Skipping forward here, of course, we have more of this sort of thing. Infowars, 2015, Alex Jones. Alex Jones, "Every president in the world is a Manchurian Candidate. Every president in the world is a Manchurian Candidate." Infowars, Alex Jones, quote, "The greatest conspiracy in world history is being carried out by the real-life Manchurian Candidate, President Barack Obama."
2016, Alex Jones again, "If anybody's a Manchurian Candidate, Hillary acts like somebody who's been programmed. I've told people privately that if anybody's a Manchurian Candidate, programmed by somebody, I think it's Hillary." Unquote.
Again, now that Donald Trump is president, he's being accused of being a Manchurian Candidate. What are all these people talking about? You know, what, what is this Manchurian Candidate thing all about, and what's the movie about? I did a previous deep dive, sort of a shallow dive, into the notion of gaslighting. I was hearing that term bandied about, and so I decided to watch the movie and figure out what that was all about. And similarly, I decided to do a shallow dive on The Manchurian Candidate, and also there's some psychology in the movie and the novel that I thought I would comment on.
So here we go. This is the Psychology in Seattle Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Kirk Honda. I'm a therapist, and I'm also a professor.
So I decided to watch the movie Manchurian Candidate. It's based on a 1959 novel by Richard Condon. It was made into a movie in 1962, starring Frank Sinatra, and it was later remade in 2004, starring Denzel Washington. So, the movie or the story in the novel is the original historic. It takes place in 1952 during the Korean War. An American army unit is captured, and they're brainwashed, and they spend three days of being brainwashed by the North Koreans, or, and the, and the North Koreans are in league with the Russians and the Chinese, according to this scenario.
So during the Korean War, you had the Americans fighting in South Korea to make Korea a, you know, Western-minded, capitalistic, democratic society. And, and then North Korea, we had, not a historian, but the little I understand is, you had North Koreans fighting alongside Chinese, and maybe with the help of Russians, trying to make the entire Korean Peninsula into one communist country. And in the end, the country was bifurcated in the north and south, and it has been since the end of the Korean War, ending in '59-ish, 1960, year, somewhere around there.
Anyway, so an American unit fighting in this war, like about 12 guys, was captured in this story by the North Koreans, by the Russians, and Chinese, and they brainwash these 12 guys over 12 days, over three days, sorry. And the opening scene is worth the price of admission in this movie. They explain a lot of things very subtly in this, in this opening scene to a movie. And they are, it's not the opening scene, it's the, it's the opening scene, I believe, is during the war. And then, but the main opening scene in which you see these 12 guys, and the rest of the movie, I'm just going to cut to the chase. I'm not a huge fan. I think for the time, it was considered to be amazing, right? A movie in 1962. When you think about other movies at the time, you got to, you got to see it in that context and know that The Manchurian Candidate was amazing the first time, particularly given the subject matter that it was so dark and in some ways anti-American. In some ways. But anyway, so that, there's that, there's an opening scene in which they show the 12 army guys, and they're just, they're on stage, and they're just sitting there, and they're really, they look really bored. They're very just kind of laying around on these chairs. And, and then the camera does this 360 pan, and you see that they're in a, like a, what do you call it? Like a greenhouse. One of those things, an arboretum or something, where it's a, like a nice ornate greenhouse with all these flowers and plants. And it's all old white women, and all these old white women are, you know, in these fancy hats and summer clothes, and they're talking about flowers and plants. And, and these, these twelve army guys, or some ten re guys, are sitting there just, just looking like they're bored out of their minds.
And then, as the camera is is panning, and as different shots come in and out, some people change. And then all of a sudden, you realize, oh, the ten army guys aren't in a flower party, but they're actually in front of a stage. They're, they're on stage, and they're in front of a bunch of generals and other, you know, kinds of people in the military for North Korea, China, and I believe Russia. I keep forgetting Russia. I'm pretty sure Russia was involved. I wasn't taking notes when I was watching it. But the enemy, as it was considered during the '50s. And you see that they are being brainwashed, and that the army guys don't realize that they're being watched by all these military people. But, and in fact, the, the army guys have been hypnotized or brain, what they view their word, brainwashed, but we might use the term today, hypnotized, because they believe that they are in a garden party kind of situation, and not, not in front of a bunch of military people. And this scene doesn't explain what you're looking at. It just, it shows you what you're looking at. And the dialogue dips in and out of the garden party situation to the military situation. And sometimes the garden party woman talks with the voice of the, of the enemy brainwashing guy. And some, you know, and then that, then all of a sudden, it's all black women at the garden party. And it's just so interesting. It's ridiculous because the notion of of people being brainwashed to that extent is not supported by science. But, but it's a compelling scene.
Apparently, this is a big fad at the time in the 1950s, early 1960s. People believed, you know, 100% that brainwashing was real. Or many people did. There was a lot of hypnotists for entertainment at the time. Hypnotism at parties was a big deal, which I had no idea until I started looking into this. That in the early '60s and during the '50s, people would hire hypnotists to hypnotize them. And as I've talked about in other episodes of the podcast, that sort of hypnotism is just, it's not supported by science. Even though we still have movies today and stories today that have that as part of the part of the plot, in which someone who knows how to hypnotize someone, hypnotizes someone to forget something happened or to make them do something that they wouldn't do otherwise. And this is just not supported. Hypnotism is a thing, but it's not that thing. It's, it's as if, you know, everyone understands that when you have a broken bone, you go to the physician, they diagnose you, they put a cast on your arm, and they set the bone, and then they put a cast on your arm, and over time, the your bone heals itself. So, you know, there's a thing called putting a cast on your arm. But it'd be as if in the popular media, they had all these movies and stories and TV shows in which someone put a cast on someone's arm and their arm turned to gold, because that's what casts do. You know, it, it's that absurd to me as someone who actually knows what hypnotism is. There's a thing called hypnotism that clinicians will use, but it doesn't make you do things you don't want to do, and it doesn't erase memories, and it doesn't brainwash you, and it doesn't program you. You know, it doesn't do any of those things.
Incidentally, people, you know, people always say, "How is that this one party once, and there was this hypnotism blah blah blah?" I'm just, you know, I'm not going to do a deep dive on this topic, maybe for another episode I will. But I've looked into this quite a bit myself because I don't want to just jump to any conclusions. But according to the evidence that, and from multiple sources, looking at this from multiple angles, those hypnotist parties where you have people on stage and you have a hypnotist that hypnotizes someone to cluck like a chicken, and then they forget where they were. The, the evidence makes me believe and understand that the participants in those activities know what they're doing. And that the only reason why they're clucking like a chicken is because they want attention. And now, it's not, they're not, you know, not like, let me give an example. Has anyone heard? I don't know why I'm asking this question like you can answer me. But the Magic Castle in LA, that gets specifically in Hollywood. There's a thing called a Magic Castle, and it is this, it is this, if you ever get a chance to go there, it is one of the most magical places on the planet. It is, it is super awesome. You have to be a member of the Magic Castle to get in, and it's, it's like a legit old, you know, ornate mansion-y kind of place with multiple different rooms and different restaurants and different bars. It's like a huge mansion. It's not creepy. It could be a little creepy, I suppose. But it's more just like, it feels like, and it feels like it was just pulled right out of the 1920s and plopped right down in LA. And you can only get in if a member lets you in. And the members are all paying, you know, members who are magicians. So it, I got in because I met someone through Yelp and, and he was, you know, a famous magician and, and let me in. And each, so you go in and you have dinner, and it's this really nice situation. There's valet parking, and there's a secret door, and you walk through, and you have some dinner, and you have some drinks. And then there's all these different shows that are happening at the same time. All these different magicians put on, I think they're practicing their shows in some ways, and they just need audience members to kind of help them refine their show. So in one night, you could see multiple magic shows. And that's what I did. And I went to a bunch of shows. And on one of the shows, actually, on three shows, I believe. And two of the shows, I got called up on stage. I was one of the few people that the magician just sort of pointed at me and said, "You got up on stage." And I realized that I must look like the sort of guy who will play along because, of course, as a magician, you don't want to pull someone up on stage who's going to obstruct your your act. And apparently, I look like a nice guy. And so I got pulled up on stage. And this once, and one of the times, it was sort of relevant. But another time, I got pulled down stage. The, I can't endure exactly what the trick was, but he's doing this trick, and he holds his hands up like he fan, I think you maybe fan some cards. And on one of his fingers, there was a tiny little number on on his finger. And he said, "You know, pick a number between one and ten." It was something like that. And on his, on his finger was this tiny little number that was right in front of my eyes that said like three. And in this split second, I realized what was happening. He was asking me to pick the number three out of, you know, from one to ten. And, and then I quickly realized that if I didn't pick three, if I said five, his whole magic act would have been screwed. And I didn't know what he was going to do. You know, if I said five, was he just going to go, "Okay, this trick's over. This guy has to get down. Let's bring someone else on stage. You know, get, pick a number between one and ten." The person's like, "Three." Or would he, would he look at me and go, like, "Dude, you know what? Don't be a dick." Or I didn't know what was going to happen. It was happening so fast that I just chose three. You know, it was, I was on stage. There's all these people. Everyone's dressed up. But, you know, it's this high tense kind of situation. And I see that, you know, he's picking over two, one to ten. And I see this number three. And it probably, in less than a second, I made all that mental calculation. And I just said, "Three." And it was then that I realized. And no one in the audience knew that that's what I saw. Right? I later told people I was with, "That's what I saw," including new people. But people in the audience thought that the trick was amazing, right? Because of course, he had a three planted somewhere, and it all worked out, and it was, you know, looked amazing. But from my standpoint, it was not amazing at all.
Now, the more of the story that I learned was that when you pull people on stage, most people, if not, you know, the vast majority of people, will want the show to go well because they're not dicks, and they want the audience to be entertained, and they don't want to ruin the situation for the performer. I mean, what kind of person would get up on stage and just be like, "Oh, I'm going to say six," and I'm just going to ruin this guy's day? That's a, you know, some people are going to do that. But that's a tough one, you know? It, I know that we like to think of humans as all cynical bastards. But I'm here to tell you, as a therapist who actually deals, you know, with actual human beings on a daily basis in a clinical setting, people are, most people really want things to go well for other people. Most people, if not the vast majority, have a lot of pro-social impulses towards other people. And magicians know that, and hypnotists do too. So when they pull people on the stage, one, when you call for volunteers from the audience, right? You're like, "Okay, who? I need volunteers to be hypnotized." Well, who do you think is going to volunteer? There's going to be a self-selecting group, right? There's going to be people who want to be on stage. So, so there's two kinds of people in the audience. You've got people who want to be on stage, and you've got people who do not want to be on stage. Well, the people who want to be on stage, do you think their personality is a little different? Absolutely. They're more comfortable on stage, they're extroverted, they like to experience things, they're probably used to embarrassing themselves because they don't mind being on stage. So that's a self-selecting group. Also, these events often involve alcohol, so it's another factor, right? Also, the hypnotist, through experience, probably can read people based on the way that they raise their hand, based on where they're sitting in the audience, because that's another thing. People who are extroverted and probably tend to sit closer to the stage, right? He probably knows that demographics play a role. That that maybe women are more likely to play along than men. That certain, the way people dress. I mean, over time, you just learn that there's a demographic and that there's a difference between this person and that person. So, you know, I bet you that yes, some gruff, some gruff guy with glasses is, you know, some kind of Ron Swanson looking guy is looking up at the stage, and he raises his hand. My guess is with him, it just looks that that Ron Swanson guy, and says, "No, that guy is going to be trouble because that guy isn't going to quote-unquote allow himself to be hypnotized." And so you bring people on up on stage, and then you proceed to quote-unquote hypnotize them. And then the people, you know, you say, "Cluck like a chicken," or "Act like you're having an orgasm," or something. Well, the people are having a blast because they're on stage, and they're, they're instant comedians because everyone's dying laughing, right? Well, then the hypnotist says, "One, two, three. You don't remember a single thing. You can leave the stage." You walk off the stage, you sit down. People look at you like, "What happened?" Well, you have, you have two options here. You can say, "I don't know what happened. What will you tell me?" And you can have a total additional laugh as everyone explains to you what they saw, and you're exonerated from anything that you did on stage because you can look at everyone that you came with and say, like, "Well, he hypnotized me. That's why I was, you know, having that orgasm in that really loud fashion. I, I didn't know what I was doing." Or you can admit what you did, which many people do. Many people say, "Oh, he didn't hypnotize me. I was just, I'm just playing along." And have people look at you like, you know, that you're some kind of faker or something, right? So there's all these reasons why these kinds of things exist. Plus, those people who actually say they were faking, how many of those people actually go on the internet and make up, you know, whole expose video about it? You know, not that many people. Whereas how many people will love to talk about the amazing feats of hypnotism that they've seen? There's just a certain love of this sort of thing. It's sort of like people who like, I was walking around in Seattle, and there were some flat earth people, of all things, walking around with these, with these um, you know, billboards trying to convince people that the earth is flat. And I thought, "These guys must be trolling." Because they looked like they were young men who knew better than that. But I was in this group of friends, we were backstage during, because I'm friends with one of the bands. Oh, I'm kind of cool because I'm friends with a band that was playing at Bumbershoot, or now if I were shoot, folk alive. Anyway, so for those of you don't know me, I'm being facetious about bragging. But anyway, that's where I was. And I was talking about, I was like, "Yeah, I saw some flat earth people." And then everyone was like, "Oh my god, flat earthers." And then one guy who I respect started talking about how he had watched these YouTube videos, and he was like, "Actually, you know, the flat earth thing, you know, they, those guys have some good evidence that the earth is flat." And I started laughing. I go, "For sure, this guy's joking, right?" But, but he goes on and on and on. He's, and he's being totally serious. And I'm just like, "Oh my god, like, what is going on here, people?" It, it just showed me that it's not hard for any kind of, I think, I think what it is, is people like to know things, and they like to know things that other people don't know. You know, when you know something that no one else knows, or very few people know, it feels good, right? You get an education. They teach you this secret about astrophysics, and you just feel like Cliff Clavin on Cheers, and you just want to tell people, you know, you just want to, you have stats and knowledge in your head that other people don't. You want to share. Well, when you are convinced by a YouTube video about hypnotism, or about a conspiracy theory, or about Flat Earth, or about the earth being 6,000 years old, or about, you know, whatever. There's, there's a compulsion or a sort of fantasy or a sort of a giddiness about wanting to then impart that knowledge to everyone else. And actually, it's not just conspiracy theories, it could be anything, or, you know, pseudoscience. It could be anything. It could be real science, you know, like you learn about how we're all made of stardust, of supernovae that have exploded, and that's where all of, you know, many of our, many of our the elements in our body come from that process. And you just, you know, you want to bother people with your stupid knowledge again. And so everyone's like that. And I think hypnotism is one of those things. I think that people become convinced that hypnotism is like it is depicted in a movie like The Manchurian Candidate, and they want to talk about it. It'll link listic programming is another thing that's closely related to this whole thing. How to detect lies, eye movements, and what that means when someone's communicating. It all feels like something that you're now knowing that no one else knows, and you suddenly want to tell everyone that you're right. And, and there are certain things kind of built into the premises that make it so that when someone like me comes along and says, "Actually, hypnotism is not that," it compels people to reject people like me. Things like, "Well, you're just saying that because you've never seen what I've seen," or "You're part of the conspiracy that's trying to make people not understand that hip, you know, hypnotism is real," or "You didn't go to this one, you know, you're, you're in the ivory tower of psychology and you don't really understand because, you know, there's this, there's this underground hypnotism movement that, you know, it's real, man. You just got to see it." You know, there's always these kinds of caveats that make it so that demonstrations of actual science can be refuted, you know, easily.
Anyway, so hypnotism, as it's depicted in the movie Manchurian Candidate, has, that's how it's depicted. Essentially, for three days, these army guys are, what they're saying, brainwashed. But we could sort of think of it as Semitism, because you know, brain. So there's hypnotism, which is like, you're going deeper, you're data, like in the movie Get Out, you know, that kind of stuff. Or we never see what they, what the communists did to these men. So if, so if we were to guess, it was not hypnotism. It could have been something like torture. So you can torture someone to end up saying certain things, right? If you torture someone, they will say certain things. But you can't torture someone to believe certain things. You can torture them to do certain things, but you can't torture them to believe certain things. And at the time, in the '50s and '60s, people were actually being kidnapped by the enemy and made to say things. I think even during World War II, Japanese would kidnap Americans and make them say things on camera or or otherwise. And from the outside, watching this, you're like, "Oh, they must have brainwashed or hypnotized those soldiers." But then the soldiers will come back and they're say, they'll say, "I was just saying that because they said they were going to shoot me in the head if I didn't say those things." And they, and there were other guys who didn't do that, and they did shoot him in the head. So, gosh darn it, I was going to say those things. I don't want to be shot in the head. So, it, so sometimes people thought it was brainwashing at the time, but in reality, it was, it was just people being smart about saving their own lives and their own skin.
So at the time when this movie came out, 1962, the notion that you could brainwash or hypnotize 10, 12 different American army guys within three days to make them believe a certain thing was, was very believable. And frankly, it's still believable today. So in the movie, the enemy hypnotizes these men. And what they do is, the enemy, I'm just saying enemy in quotes, by the way, the enemy finds one of the guys in the unit is a crack shot with a long range, he's a sniper, essentially. And so this guy becomes the the lead guy. And so they, they program him to go back to this. So you know, so they're like, "Okay, we're going to program these ten soldiers. And with one of them, we're going to program him to respond to certain cues in the environment, namely a queen of diamonds. When he sees a queen of diamonds, then his brain opens up to suggestion from the enemy. And then these other guys are going to be programmed to forget that they were hypnotized and brainwashed. And they're also going to talk about what happened during these few days. They're going to, everyone's going to have the same story that they went on this mission, they got away from, you know, HQ or whatever, and this one guy, the sniper guy, saved them all, and therefore deserves the Medal of Honor, and he is this super awesome guy."
So, uh, okay, my timer just went off, indicating I need to take a break. So let's do that. We get back, we'll continue with this talk.
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Okay, Manchurian Candidate. So as I was saying, the enemy captures these ten guys, ish, and brainwashes them. And they brainwash one of the guys in particular because he's a sniper. And they bring us the rest of them too. They're very much all of them to believe that they were on this particular mission, that they weren't captured by the enemy, and that the sniper guy was this great guy. So they all go back to the States. And back in the States, we realize that a few things are happening. So it's again, it's 1952, and it's during an election year. And I'm not sure on the details because again, I wasn't taking notes. But in a nutshell, the sniper guy, who was the main hypnotized guy, he is the son of a woman who is now married to a Republican candidate for senator, you know, senator. And this, this senator, this I think he's a stepdad of the sniper. This, this senator is kind of a goofball, and he, he follows his orders from his wife, which is the mother of this sniper guy. And in the book, incidentally, the sniper guy and his mom, played by Angela Lansbury, by the way, are, in the book, they're having sex. In the movie, they kind of touch on maybe they have a sexual relationship, but in the book, they're full-on having sex. But anyway, the father, the stepfather, the, he's sort of a McCarthy era or McCarthyism sort of guy, senator, meaning that McCarthy during this time, early 1950s, there was this what they called the Red Scare. I believe, again, our my historian, so correct me if I'm wrong on this, or you know, forgive me if I'm wrong in this guess. There was a time in American history, post-World War II, during, you know, the beginning of the Cold War, in which there was a tremendous amount of worry that there were enemy spies and agents and sympathizers living in the United States. And there was also a big, a big scare that many of people in Hollywood were actually communists. And many people in Hollywood were communists, or they were anti-capitalist, or they were anti-American government, or they were anti-imperialism, or they, and they might have been sympathetic to other nations and their interests. And so there was a lot of, you know, thought going on. And some of these communists in living in the United States were actual threats to the American Way of life, but many weren't. Those probably were not. And the government, McCarthy, I think he was a senator, was a key person in terms of drumming up a bunch of fear about these communists that were infiltrating our society. And middle America became afraid too, because of this guy. And then there was basically a witch hunt, which ended up putting people on, like a blacklist of some kind, like a red list of Communists people. And those people ended up being ostracized and harmed by, you know, it was, it was not a good time in American history. But this, this story, this stepfather senator is that guy, essentially. He's, he's they sell him at these different press conference, press meetings, and he's, he's talking about, "There's Russians in our midst," and, you know, "There's Soviets and communists. There's 200 of them that haven't, I have names of people who have infiltrated the American government." And everyone starts to get freaked out.
Well, eventually, this guy, through different machinations, becomes a candidate for vice president. And so again, this is an election year. And so he, and so they go to the Republican National Convention, and this, this, you know, goofball Senator McCarthy guy is now on the ticket for vice president. And then Joe Lansbury, the wife, is the real person behind. She's the puppet master of this guy. And she's also the puppet master of the sniper. We learn that the sniper, who has been hypnotized or brainwashed by the enemy, it is actually the, the enemy is in league with Angela Lansbury, the mother of the sniper. And so this, this wife of a senator is, is basically a communist spy or something. And I'm not exactly sure how this all works out because the plot doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense to me. Maybe someone else can help me understand this. But, but the bottom line is, is that we have this, this senator who is vice president, who is rising in power because he's fear-mongering. And then, and, and this senator is an infiltrator. He's a faker. He's not actually a real American, so to speak. And he doesn't have the, he doesn't have Americans' best interests at heart. He has the enemy's best interests at heart. But he's running for office, and everyone is looking at him thinking that he's a good American. And when in fact, he is basically an enemy spy. And so that's what a Manchurian Candidate is. Is that you have this, and I'm not even, maybe I should look up why they call it Manchurian Candidate. I should actually look that up. Hold on a second.
So, it's, I just looked it up. It's just a literal thing in that the men were being brainwashed in Manchuria. And the candidate is the candidate for presidency, I guess. Anyway, so the, this sniper guy is being told by his mom, who again works for the enemy, to shoot the president, or that the guy who's going to run for president. So that when, when the presidential candidate is shot, then this goofball senator, who is on the vice-president ticket, will move up to the president ticket. The sniper killing. So there, there, they programmed the sniper to shoot the presidential candidate during the Republican convention while he's on a stage. Instead, in this, you know, spoiler alert, the, the sniper kid shoots his own mother, and the vice president candidate is his goofball stepfather senator. So in the end, the sniper is, it goes against his his brainwashing programming and ends up killing the actual bad guys, which is his mother and the Vice President senator, McCarthyism kind of guy. And he shoots, the sniper shoots himself in the movie. Anyway, I don't know what that happens in the book.
So, so that's the story in the movie. I just want to say, there, there's a lot of little things to talk about. The enemy doctor in the, in the movie says that during the brainwashing scenes, the enemy doctor says that Americans are the only ones who feel guilt and fear. They're like, "We play, we prey on their guilt and their fear," which is, you know, solely an American feeling or something. Just think that's okay. It's like, you know, the two of the primary emotions of humankind, guilt and fear, only Americans feel that, apparently. And the reason why I point this out is because this is written and, you know, produced by Americans. And I think that they, the way that I think they see the enemy often involves them denying things like guilt and fear. But because when you see the enemy, you see them as this unemotional, zombified mass of people that are just doing all these, you know, they're just robots, you know, at the, the stormtroopers, that kind of thing. And I think that this quote kind of betrays that point of view that that the enemy denies emotion. And it's like, it's a funny way of, it's a funny prejudice and stereotype about the enemy. But anyway, I hope that makes sense.
Another funny thing about the movie is, one of the main character, one of the main evil guys is this Korean guy. He's a Korean character, but the guy who plays him is white. He doesn't look Korean at all. But they make him have this sort of ridiculous accent. And of course, he's, you know, awesome at kung fu. And they call it karate, you know. And it's just, for a while, I'm like, I'm like, "Oh, they have a white guy in there." And then over time, they're like, "Oh, they're referring to him as, oh, he's a Korean guy." And I just, I just had that find that just so funny. And it's, you know, of course, it's still happening today, as you'll hear me rant and rave about Emma Stone playing a half-Japanese person in that A Crow movie, Cameron Crowe movie about Hawaii, Aloha, I think it was called. Anyway, but yeah, that's a pretty funny thing.
Also, another thing about the movie is sort of weird, in that Frank Sinatra, as the main character, and he, he slowly starts coming to realize that this sniper guy, who was also in, so Frank Sinatra was one of the brainwashed guys. And Frank Sinatra is looking at the sniper guy and going like, "I think, I think we've all been brainwashed, and I think this sniper guy is being brainwashed." And in the movie, instead of, and Frank Sinatra goes to his superiors in the military. He's like, "I think, I think we've all been brainwashed, and I think this one guy is brainwashed." And instead of bringing in everybody and questioning them and trying to un-brainwash them, Frank Sinatra just is told to, even though he's just a regular military guy, he just says, "Yeah, Frank Sinatra has sent to the sniper guy." And they just have this conversation. And the sniper guy's like, "You know, give me some more time or something." Kind of happens. And then Frank Sinatra goes back to the feds, says like, "Well, I'm going to give them 48 more hours." Well, of course, in those 48 more hours is when the sniper guy goes to the Republican National Convention and almost kills one of the, you know, presidential nominees, an innocent guy. And so, if my point is, is that there were all these points where I was like, "When are they going to drag these people in?" You know, the feds, the feds knew there was something up, and they didn't do anything. And it's not like, it's just not realistic. If the feds had any inkling that 10 army guys had been brainwashed by the enemy, they would immediately round them up, right? And, and, and figure out what's happening, and not just let him roam around to do whatever, you know, they've been programmed to do.
Also, another part of this movie, as I was watching it, was that politics have not changed in 50 years. As I'm listening to this guy, because, and he's being, he's being betrayed, well, maybe six years being betrayed, that he's being portrayed because his story takes place in 1952. And you hear this politician, this fear-mongering politician, and you're just like, "My God, things have not changed at all." It does not take much for a politician to scare the masses into voting for him. It's crazy. As a politician, if you just, if you just scare enough people, even just slightly, and you say you have an answer, and you say the other candidate doesn't have an answer, you can get millions upon millions of people to vote for you, and you will have the power. It's that simple. You could be, you could be another candidate and, and speak more with more nuance, you could, you could have more compassion, you could be more realistic, you could, you know, try to lead in a good way, in a moral way, in an ethical way, and you won't win. That's, that's what this movie is showing. And it takes place in 1952. We've learned nothing. We're stupid. Humans are dumb. We're all dumb. And this movie reminds me of, we've always been dumb. Anyway.
Another detail about this, this story in this movie was that the movie came out in 1962, and JFK was shot in 1963. And Frank Sinatra was friends with JFK. And Frank Sinatra, so in this, you know, this movie shows an American sniper who has been hypnotized, brainwashed by the enemy, shooting a politician, a high-ranking politician. And just a year later, a sniper who had been to Russia, I think, if I remember my details about Oswald, he, you know, the year later, like a very similar thing happened. And there's, you know, thoughts that he was brainwashed and blah blah. So JFK, when he was alive, Frank Sinatra came to him and said, "You know, I was okay if I make this movie?" And because in Frank Sinatra thought that JFK was going to say no, and that this was back in the day when presidents could tell someone in Hollywood, "Don't make that movie," and they wouldn't do it. Apparently, because today it'd be like the perfect reason to make a movie. But anyway, there were conversations that are rumored to have happened between Frank Sinatra and JFK about this movie. And apparently, JFK actually liked the idea of the movie or something.
Also, there were worries at the time that this movie would alienate the Russians because just as JFK was trying to make relation, the relationship better between the Russians and the United States at the time. And there was a tremendous amount of worry that we were going to go to full-out war. Most people believed that a war between the United States and the Soviet, and the Soviet Union was inevitable. In the same way that in 1939, many Americans said that we're, you know, we're bound to have a war with Nazis eventually. We're not willing to go to war now because we're on the tail end of World War I. And but eventually, the Nazis and the United States is going to go to war, and we did eventually. Well, in, in 1950, in 1950s, early 1960s, people thought it was inevitable that the Soviets and the United States were going to go head to head at some point. It's just a matter of when and where. And it was also a matter of, are we going to use nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons run. And how is that going to play out? And, you know, we had the Bay of Pigs, and we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so this movie came out at a time when the, the fear about the enemy was extreme and palpable and real. And this world could have ended up being a very different place if politicians on both sides had acted differently. But they, they got us through it. The Soviet politicians and the American politicians, they got us through a very tense time that easily could have turned into war. That usually did turn into war, I should point out. World War I was a similar situation, which he just had this powder keg, but ready to explode, and the politicians didn't do to stop it. And I mean, they tried, but it didn't work. And World War II, same thing. There were efforts to stop this sort of thing from happening again, and it didn't work. So although it's a little different because it was basically just Nazi Germany deciding to be a dick. But in World War I, at least there, there were absolutely opportunities for that to have been avoided. And, and the politicians failed us. Well, during the Cold War, we could have easily had a full-out, you know, conventional war with the Soviets. We never did. We easily could have escalated things to the point where once I just said, "I don't think we have any other choice but to launch our nuclear weapons before they do." And they didn't do that. And I just think it's a wonderful testament to the political system of our time. And the fact that we have, you know, the industrialized nations of the world since World War II have basically avoided full-out war. There, there, there have been other wars, but on the scale of World War I, World War II, you know, we have, we haven't even come close to that. Millions upon millions of people died in World War II, just millions upon millions, particularly Soviets. Picture the Russians in World War II. And, and we've just, you know, we've avoided that. But anyway, at the time, it was, there's a lot of tension, and it was, you know, soon after World War II, and we're just like, "Well, you know, when's World War III going to happen?" Well, it's, you know. So this, this movie came out in that time, and it makes this movie so much more poignant, I guess, you know, when you think about what was at stake on a daily basis for these people.
Anyway, also another fact here is that Frank Sinatra, during the karate, they called it a karate fight, and he ran into Frank Sinatra fights the quote-unquote Korean guy, he broke his hand. And for the rest of his life, Frank Sinatra had kind of a screwed-up finger because he totally busted up his hand during this fight.
Also, if you've seen the movie, there's this really interesting scene in which Frank Sinatra is on this train, and there's this girl, I think played by Janet Leigh, if not mistaken. They start flirting with each other on this train. Well, when I was watching the scene, I'm like, "What in the world is happening here? This woman must be a spy." Because you have to watch this thing. It's probably on YouTube. You know, "Frank Sinatra Manchurian Candidate flirting on a train." You know, Google that. And you, this dialogue is so weird in it. And eventually, I was like, "Oh, I get it. This woman is a, is one of the enemy spies, and she's trying to use code language to kind of get into his hypnotist, you know, into his hypnotism situation." Or she works for the America, you know, it, she's talking in such a way where it sounds like coded language. Well, in the movie, eventually, this woman becomes Frank Sinatra's girlfriend or wife or something. And so in the end, you're like, "Oh, so that whole thing on the train was actual flirtation." That was some weird ass flirtation. So apparently, everyone asks his questions like, "What's going on with that conversation?" And no one really knows. Apparently, the scene was supposed to be ambiguous to kind of throw you off, you know, like, "Maybe, maybe she's a spy, maybe she's not." So there's that scene.
Also, it's interesting that this movie came out before the Vietnam War. Vietnam officially started to ramp up later in the '60s for the Americans. And this movie was about the VA, or was about the Korean conflict. And so it's just really interesting to see it because it predicted a lot of the things that would happen and the way we thought about things during the Vietnam War. But anyway, the movie also touches on PTSD a little bit. This is back when PTSD was barely understood, and it was mostly
Understood and just denied by everybody. But in the beginning of the movie, these military guys have, they have all these nightmares about the war. You know, they're back stateside and they're having all these nightmares about the war. And so as I was watching it, I thought it just, it seemed to be reminiscent of PTSD. And I was wondering if the authors of the book and, and the screenplay were knowledgeable because, you know, after World War II, there were a lot of GIs who came back who had what we have now called PTSD. And one of the symptoms might have been having nightmares about the war and waking up and having a hard time talking about it. And so that, and then as these guys start having nightmares, they start reaching out to each other and saying, like, are you having this nightmare? And, and it, if you look at it outside of the whole hypnotism, brainwashing thing, it has a feel of the way it might have been like for actual GIs coming back from the war, in which they would come back, have these nightmares, hat, you know, and then they would, they might call their, their old buddies in the army and be like, are you having these nightmares? And then, you know, talking about their PTSD symptoms.
Other things to talk about here is, at the time, there was this huge fad with Freudianism. Actually, you know, we tend to think about Freud as being big in the early part of the 20th century, but, but it, and it's hard for me to know because of course, I didn't live through these times, but from what I understand, in, in 1962, there was a lot of people just, you know, regular people now talking about Freud, about hypnosis, about, you know, the meaning of dreams, about an evil mother, you know, that the notion that an evil mother can destroy you, about an Oedipal complex. Because in this situation, you have this son having sex with his mom, and how crazy that is, and how demented it is. And, and so there's, there's all this Freudian theme, psychological theme that today we would just say like, oh yeah, that's, that's the way people think, you know, they, but back then, the notion is, from what I understand, were not commonplace. This notion that you could get inside someone's psyche, that you could be plagued with, you know, unconscious thoughts in your deck that emerged to your dreams. From what I understand, this was something that was becoming kind of a fad and during this time, and, and is portrayed in this movie, and at the time would have furthered that fad, I suppose.
Another thing here is that the, the movie touches on how populist fear-mongering politicians are dangerous. And this is something that, of course, we all know today. We, we all know that politicians can use fear to incite the masses to vote for him or her. But at the time, from what I understand, this was, this is a very new idea thing that, that wasn't fully understood yet. At the time, TV was just kind of getting going. Right before TV, you had to give radio speeches. And before radio, you just had to, you know, go from town to town and stand on a box and give a speech. Well, in the '50s and '60s, this is when media and Paul, and politics started to really get its roots into what we have today. And so the movie and the book are prescient in that way, and that it predicted this, this because the politician, the McCarthyism fear-mongering politician, he used TV really well. He knew how to look or on TV and how to make the TV watchers become afraid.
All right, some other details here. On Rotten Tomatoes, got 98%, which I find to be a little strange. I mean, of course, the movie is important, and at the time, the movie was probably, you know, extremely groundbreaking and super interesting, but compared to today's eyes, I would say the movie is not a 98%. But I think Rotten Tomatoes is based on like reviewers of any era. And so, anyway, American Film Institute gave this on its list of AFI's 100 Years, 100 Thrills, so maybe their top 100 most thrilling movies, it's number 17. It was directed by John Frankenheimer, who directed many big movies in the '60s and '70s, including Birdman of Alcatraz, '62, same year as as Manchurian Candidate. He also famously directed The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996, which is, which I've talked about in the episode on Marlon Brando, which is one of the most famous, you know, botched movies of all time. And that, and one of the most, I think Val Kilmer was in it too. The Island of Dr. Moreau was over-budgeted. Marlon Brando sort of torpedoed the entire project. And so the guy who directed The Manchurian Candidate also directed that. And the most recent movie that I've fully enjoyed by John Frankenheimer is Ronin, directed, made in 1998, directed by John Frankenheimer, starring Robert De Niro. Takes place in Paris, and it's about these mercenaries. And loved that movie. It's, it's, it predates a lot of those kinds of action movies like Bourne Legacy or, you know, Bourne Identity, all those kind of movies. Or I think it predates those movies. But anyway, it, it's a modern, it has a very modern feel to it, and in 1998, it was groundbreaking, and it still holds up today, in my opinion.
Screenplay by George Axelrod, and again, based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon. Stars Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey. Laurence Harvey plays the sniper. Janet Leigh. Yeah, that's right. She was in Psycho, if you remember Psycho. She was the first wife of Tony Curtis and the mother of Jamie Lee Curtis. So Janet Leigh wasn't there. Incidentally, I was in LA recently in which, uh, Universal Studios, and they still to this day have the Psycho set. And they, you can take you on a little tram and go to the set of Psycho, and it looks exactly the same as it did in the movie. It's crazy, you know, that hotel and then the house on the hill just behind the hotel. It's all still sitting there. You can walk up there, and they have an actor who acts like he's killing someone to scare everybody. Also stars Angela Lansbury. Angela Lansbury, for, for this role, apparently Frank Sinatra had considered Lucille Ball, but Angela Lansbury got the part. If Lucille Ball was this movie, that just would have been so weird. I mean, Lucille Ball is a beloved comedian, and to see her in this demented, you know, communist agent role, having sex with her son, that would have been very strange. Angela Lansbury has been in many movies and TV shows, but notably for this context, she was in the movie Gaslight, 1944, which I've talked about before in terms of that's the movie Gaslight is where the term gaslighting comes from. And her most famous role of all time was Murder, She Wrote, which was on for a staggering 12 years from 1984 to 1996. Also stars Henry Silva and James Gregory. Remade in 2004, directed by Jonathan Demme, starring Denzel Washington.
Okay, so what can we say in conclusion? Well, when you say someone is a Manchurian Candidate, so the fact that someone was calling John McCain, as I was saying earlier, a Manchurian Candidate, actually makes the most sense. It's not logical in that, and it's completely baseless, right? But it's the most accurate use of the term if you are going to use that term. Because John McCain was in fact a prisoner of war for a long time. It wasn't just a, you know, a few days. I think he was prisoner for years, if I'm not mistaken. And, you know, one could legitimately wonder, at least have a question mark, had he been brainwashed? Because in a, you know, a couple years of being in prison, it's possible that you could be brainwashed into believing certain things if you're tortured, if you're, bah-bah-bah, if you're made to feel afraid for your family, or whatever. And now, you know, if someone said, is John McCain a Manchurian Candidate? I would have been like, that's, you know, pretty silly, far-fetched, I guess is a better term. But, but in that instance, it's, it makes sense. To call someone like Donald Trump a Manchurian Candidate doesn't make any sense to me. Why not just call them bad for America? You know, why not just say it's similar to gaslighting? You know, people, as I was talking about that other episode, people talk about gaslighting. It's like, well, you know, Donald Trump is gaslighting. And it's like, no, he's not. The term gaslighting is when you screw with someone's reality to the point where they don't know what is real and what isn't real. You're basically trying to make it, you know, it's like if you're living with someone and every day you change the furniture around and they walk into the room and they're like, why did you change the furniture? Like, I don't really talk about furniture. It's like this for 10 years. And you just slowly mess with their head until they have no idea, you know, what's up and what's down. Well, the, you know, no politician can do that to us today because there are many other ways of finding out what's right and wrong. Plus, most people don't believe a single word that any politician says, even politicians that you agree with. But, you know, most Americans are extremely skeptical about what politicians say. It's like watching an advertisement. You know, no one watches an advertisement for a car and says, Oh, Chevy must be the best car in the world because it's won all these awards. Like, no one, no one does that. So we can't be gas-lit by politicians like Donald Trump. We can, Donald Trump could lie to us like any other politician, but he can't gaslight us because last I checked, I don't feel crazy. I feel like the politic world is kind of crazy, but I think they're crazy in some instances, but I don't think I'm crazy. And so, so there's a big difference between someone trying to trick you and lying to you and deceiving you and gaslighting you. In the same way, to call Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Obama a Manchurian Candidate is stupid. If you just want to call these politicians as bad for America and good for the enemy, then fine, say they're good for the enemy and, you know, bad for America. But to call them a Manchurian Candidate, you're, you're basically accusing the person of being brainwashed and hypnotized by the enemy somehow, which is just a ridiculous notion on its face. It's just not possible for the enemy to, to brainwash you. Now, kind of could the enemy be blackmailing you? Could the Russians be telling Trump, look, if you don't do what we say, we're going to kill your family, or we're going to reveal these pictures of you having sex with kids and getting urinated on or something? I mean, you know, can someone blackmail you? And can that make a politician into an agent of the enemy? Absolutely, that can happen. But that's not like The Manchurian Candidate like the movie. Because like we saw in the movie, you had this guy who was captured by the enemy, brainwashed, sent back to America, and because of his hypnotism, he is, he is now suggestible to do anything by the enemy. And the enemy can make him even shoot a politician because of that. So the concept of Manchurian Candidate, to me, it's just, it's silly. And, and I, I think that a lot of authors and pundits and people like Alex Jones like to throw it around because it makes them sound smart. It's known as, I think it's just like, what's Manchurian Candidate? Yeah, I remember it worked on me. When I read that article that Donald Trump was a Manchurian Candidate, I was like, I was like, oh, I kind of feel sort of dumb that I, I don't know what exactly what that means. But, you know, that's sort of a, an old '60s sort of black and white movie with those, you know, it brings up all these images of like, those cool suits, those Mad Men, you know, suits that they were around that time. Manchurian Candidate, you know, just sounds so cool and old-school and sophisticated and New England, Princeton, you know, Oxford kind of stuff. Those are my associations with the word Manchurian Candidate. Again, it, before I actually did this, you know, shallow dive into it, because now I'm like, oh, it's just, it's just a movie that was in 1962 and a novel in 1959, and it's not a great movie, and it's basically about a military guy who's hypnotized to shoot somebody in America. You know, it's, it's simple, you know, it's, it's not complicated, and it's not some sort of deep conspiracy. You know, because it now might someone like this exist? I don't, maybe.
But anyway, now, how is it being used in the media? How it's being used is, it's being used, you know, for Trump. It's being used as accusing people like Trump as being controlled by a foreign power, most notably the Russians, right? So people say, well, Trump's being controlled by the Russians, and he's a Manchurian Candidate. Which, it's like, but I, okay, if you think he's being controlled by the Russians, fine. But to take the leap to, he's a Manchurian Candidate and he's like involved in some sort of hypnotism situation? Huh. Also, people will use it more generally as just being controlled by an outside force. You know, this person is a Manchurian Candidate because they're being controlled by corporations or something. They will also use the term Manchurian Candidate to refer to people that they think are a secret weapon of the enemy. So Obama was apparently a secret, and a secret weapon of the enemy that was sent in perfectly designed, you know, a Muslim, winter, Manchurian Candidate or something, someone who could infiltrate America and act like an American and rise to power and then and then destroy America from within. So it's like, it's a secret weapon of the enemy. It's also used to refer to someone who is hiding in plain sight who will destroy America. You know, this person is hiding in plain sight. George W. Bush's, he's just, he's in plain sight, but he's hiding in that deep down, he actually is a Manchurian Candidate who wants to destroy America.
But honestly, what I would prefer to see Manchurian Candidate referred to more often is the following. In the movie, one of the main things that we see is a fear-mongering politician who uses media and gets, gets media, gets the press to pay attention to him because he's screaming all these random things. He's just making stuff up. Jesus, there's 50, no, there's a hundred communist infiltrators in the government, and I have their names, and I'm going to out them. And this is a legitimate thing that you could say can motivate action among the people and rise and help you rise to power. You don't need the magical power of hypnotism and brainwashing to manipulate people. You can use the media in all the ways that you see people using the media in an overt way to manipulate human beings. It's not hard. As I was saying earlier, all you got to do is, is just tap on in a repeatedly on that fear button. You just, you just keep making people afraid. And as a person in the public, like myself, I feel that I've, you know, my fear button is pushed by politicians. I hear them saying things and I'm like, oh, you know, that sounds kind of scary. Is that, does that mean that Mexicans are going to come across the border illegally and and rape my friends and family? Is that going to rape me? Is that going to happen to me? Are they going to shoot me? Or the terrorists coming here, they're going to kill me? And it takes a fair amount of effort to compartmentalize that or to understand and to see through what they're doing. And so I look back at the politician, I'm like, okay, they're trying to make me afraid. What, what are they trying to motivate me to do? You know, what, why are they, why are they talking about this? Exactly what's, what's their purpose? Because politicians don't care. They don't care about, you know, what happens. They, they have a billion other things in in mind regarding what they want. And caring about me is not necessarily one of them, right? And so, what, why are they saying these things? What is their purpose? Why do they make? That's, that's what we as the voting public have to be more critical about. Meaning, we have to evaluate the purpose and the meaning of these communications for politicians. And to be clear, I am not talking about Republicans only. I'm talking about all of them. Talking with all those, they all do it. They all know how to press their buttons. They all know how to trick us. And they all are constantly doing it. And we as a public have to be better about, you know, seeing through all that crap.
And honestly, one of the best ways we can do that, because you, at the time, right, who has, I pay attention and, and I know that I barely understand the political system. What we need to do is rely on nonpartisan experts to summarize it for us. And I'm not talking about like just one expert. I'm talking about like various different experts. And I'm not talking about people like InfoWars. I'm talking about like people who don't have an agenda, people who just want to disseminate what's happening. And honestly, the press is not doing that. I mean, I've tried to find, and if anyone knows about some kind of press outlet, one of the only people that I think is doing this that I respect is Dan Carlin. He has a podcast called The Dan Carlin Podcast or something. I don't know, it's on my phone. Dan Carlin, I think he lives nearby Seattle. He's important in Oregon, anyway. He's one of those people. He, he doesn't, he's nonpartisan. You can tell he's not a Republican or a Democrat. And he's probably more libertarian than anything else, but I don't think he's that all the time. He pays attention to politics a lot and he comments on it. So he's one of those people. Now, if I had nine other than nine other, you know, of these kinds of people, and they all came from different angles, then after listening to those podcasts every week, I feel like I wouldn't, I would have a much better understanding what's happening. But the fact is, we just don't do that. The media doesn't do that. The media, if you watch it, it's, it's just another, I don't know how to say it, just another mindless arm of what the politicians are doing. Because of course, the, the media, they, their job is not to disseminate information. Their job is not to make it understandable for the public. Their job is not to inform us. Their job is to make money. And how do they make money? They sell advertisements. And how they sell advertisements, they keep people watching. And how do they keep people watching? And it has nothing to do with information. If, if they were just going to give us information, no one would watch because no one's interested in that. Because we're stupid as human beings, and we pay attention to flashy lights and things that make us afraid. And it blinds us to what's really happening. And we're all idiots. And the politicians are always doing this, and they always manipulate us. And it will always be the same. And until our problems are, you know, directly smacking us in the face, we won't know they're coming. Things like climate change, until the water is lapping up against your front door, you are not going to change your behavior, right? Until I don't know, until you're out of a job and you have no healthcare and you're on the streets, you're not going to pay attention. You know, that's just, that's me, too. You know, I still drive a car. And I am a billion times, you know, percentage aware that doesn't make any mathematical sense, but I am a hundred percent aware of climate change and understand that every time I get in my car, even if it's an electric car, because electricity is produced somewhere that produces pollution. And all likelihood, I still drive a car. You know, and I still turn on my computer, and I don't always turn off my monitor, and I don't always put my computer in sleep mode. And I know that, you know, I waste electricity. And what's my point here? My point here is that The Manchurian Candidate, to me, the main point is it shows us the birthplace in some ways of how politicians can manipulate us through the media, through fear. And if we all are made more aware of the true meaning, or perhaps the true lesson of Manchurian Candidate, we might be able to react better in a way that might create a different politician. Which is maybe the last point I want to make. Again, I'm not a political scientist, so, you know, take, I'm just a lowly therapist and a person who teaches therapists. I really have no idea what I'm talking about. If I'm going to say one more thing about this, it's that the politicians in our lives, we created them. We rewarded every single thing that they did as a society. Maybe you didn't reward Trump, but a very large, millions of people rewarded Trump for what he did by not only voting for him, of course, but also by praising him, by clapping for him, by, you know, cheering for him, by buying his hats, by, you know, sending him love letters and wearing shirts that say, you can grab, you know, this person. And we create those people. So when you look at the politicians and you don't like the politician, what you're really pointing at are millions of people who created that politician. Particularly a guy like Donald Trump, because his politics have changed dramatically over the years. And so the dough is the real Donald Trump, I don't know. But I do know that when you win, you point at Trump. When you point at Obama, when you point at Hillary Clinton, when you point at Bernie Sanders, you're pointing at a slice of America. And the, the point is not to tear down the politician because another politician will just be created by that group. Or what we should be doing is going directly to those people and having a conversation with them, trying to bridge that gap. You know, walk up to those flat-earthers and have a conversation about like, how you see the world and what evidence you have, if you care about that kind of thing. But anyway, oh, very pessimistic. No time ending on this, this one, but that's fitting them because The Manchurian Candidate book and TV movie, TV movie, um, movie do not have a happy ending.
Camp. Well, that does it for that episode of Psychology in Seattle. Thanks for joining. About that. Me out there. Tell me what you think. You can email me at contact at psychologyinseattle.com. You can also go to psychologyinseattle.com and find an archive of our old episodes. I didn't realize this, but on iTunes, they only hold on a certain amount of episodes. We've had hundreds of episodes. So if you want to hear the early episodes, meaning ones that we released a few years ago and before that, you can go to psychologyinseattle.com and all of our episodes are up there, free to watch. So you can do that if you want. Also, I have another podcast called The Couple and Family Therapy Podcast. I, it's focused on my program at Antioch University Seattle, and I highlight instructors and students and that kind of stuff. And sometimes I rerun Psychology in Seattle episodes on it. Anyway, please take care of yourself because you deserve it. You really do. [Music] Or.