A Geek History of Time - Episode 72 - Smuggling in SciFi Part II

Episode Date: September 12, 2020

BELLS Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere. You are destroying the Constitution of the United States may God have mercy on your souls. Good day. Yes. It's a very sad word. We could be sad if we just elected the right white man to power. That's creepy but that's a different category of creepy. Zizuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz and find out what fucking truth that man was trying to get at. Like with most episodes I can bring him back to wrestling. Oh right, well he's got other people who work for him who also do things.

And they can use mutate, cut, human size into smaller worlds after all. Fuck you. I still don't give a shit about getting fake property in a fantasy game. This is a key history of time. Where we connect to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock. I am a world history teacher here in Northern California. And I am also, you may notice, while we are recording, I am the caretaker parent, whatever you want to call it, of three cats who, as we record this evening, are having quite the case of the zoomies in the background. So I want to apologize ahead of

time if you hear thudding and the scrabbling of claws on hardwood as they try to reenact the Brickyard Indianapolis 500 on my living room floor. So if you hear that, that's who they are. Also, if you hear them complaining, understand we do feed them whatever they might try to tell you. So please don't fall off of their bullshit. And who are you? I'm Damien Harmony. I am a Latin teacher up here in Northern California and I have a 13-year-old pug who snores while he's awake. And I also have a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old. But interesting, since you brought up pets, my dog is clearly on his way out. He just is. That's a fact of nature.

A couple things that are kind of fun about that weirdly. I know. One, my dog will just start barking out of nowhere and he's deaf. So you can't tell him to stop. So my son has taken to like any time he hears that happening. He immediately stops whatever he's doing. He says, oh, he just needs some attention. And he goes over and sits down next to him and just starts talking to him and petting him and stuff like that. It's really sweet. That is. Yeah. Two, I went and bought dog food recently, a big ol' 50 pound bag of dog food. And I went

to the feed store and they said, hey, what's your name? I was like, Harmony. They type it into their computer. And they're like, you're not in our system. I was like, no, why would I be? I just buy dog food from you. And they're like, oh, well, you know, if you buy 12 of these, you get the 13th one free. And I just looked at her. I'm like, this bag is a lottery bag.

Like, the first 20 pounds are food, the last 30 are hope. Like, I ain't gonna make it to get a free 30. The first 20 pounds are food the last 30 are hope like I ain't gonna make it to get in a free 13th bag with this dog like that's not happening And so yeah, that's that's me. I have a weird relationship with death. So Yeah, so yeah, so last time we left off with the Carter administration almost getting decriminalization on the books. A majority of Americans were in favor of decriminalization, even in Mississippi, but the leadership of the country was not. And Carter actually ended up having to punt that football because his boy, Peter Bourne, who actually had a very legitimate and reasonable approach to drugs,

kind of got busted, got caught, holding the bag as it were. And it was an embarrassment to Carter and he didn't have the political capital to carry that through. Kind of the inverse relationship of Johnson, in that Carter was saving up his capital to do something foreign that is bringing peace between Israel and Egypt.

And so he couldn't afford to lose that much capital domestically as a result. Whereas Johnson had to keep bombing the shit out of Southeast Asia, so he had enough political capital to continue with the great society. So just, and I'm paying with real broad brushes there to save a lot of time. But I did find that to be an interesting thing.

Like he couldn't do something good for Americans because he was trying to do something good for the world. Whereas Johnson couldn't do something good for the world because he was trying to do something good for Americans. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just gonna have to sit with that one for a minute because the Holy crap. Whereas Nixon was doing something terrible for the world and awful for Americans and and and got reelected in a landslide Yeah, well, yeah Because you know they say you know you will you will never go broke betting on the on the foolishness or stupidity of the American people yeah

I'm going to amend that and say it is going to be very hard for you not to get reelected if you bet on the fear of the American people. Yeah, I was going to say cruelty, but you're absolutely right, fear. Yeah. You know, Eastland, the guy that I talked about last time from Mississippi. He also had said that he really hated black troops during World War II. He downplayed all of their heroism. He downplayed all of their heroism and he definitely minimized their contributions. But he also said that the white boys from America were fighting Nazis for the cause of white supremacy. Did that motherfucker like listen to himself? Like, how? See, this is somebody who clearly didn't have friends.

Like, real meaningful, like, okay, you need to sit down, because we need to have a talk, like friends. You know, because when something like this is how we know that our current president doesn't actually have any friends, it's like when something that fucking stupid comes out of your mouth, real friends are going to be be like okay. I need you to stop. Mm-hmm I need you to back up 15 seconds And I need you to say that again

Quietly because I don't want to hear it, but I need you to say that again to yourself Slowly mm-hmm And once you've done that maybe you'll understand why you sound like a fucking moron. Yeah, you know, there's there's a comedian who said that it's underrated getting an ass whooping from your peers. And I'm not a big fan of getting an ass whooping from anybody because you know, I most of my living is made from above my eyebrows and I'm I'm kind of afraid of brain damage. So I'm not a fan of getting an ass whooping, but I can't argue with his logic that if more of these people who've been

gaslit by their own privilege their whole life had gotten an ass whooping earlier on, they might have thought maybe I shouldn't say that part out loud at least. Yeah. Maybe. And, you know, there are plenty of people who are gonna say, well, violence begets violence, and I would say they're right to a point, but also, sometimes you need to give someone an ass-woping. And I think Jim Eastland should have had a few more ass-woping.

Wow. And some handfuls just need to be fucking dropped, man. On somebody's head, head like yeah. Yeah So yeah, I left off last time with with the the efforts toward decriminalization not happening and with posmuggling still happening because if it's not decriminalized You're gonna make a lot of money. Yeah, you've incentivized a black market. So parent groups in the 1970s get really, really moving in Atlanta of 1976. So decriminalization also ran a new huge roadblock at that point as well. And that kind of combination of things definitely killed it.

And here's why. It was by Centennial Summer. There's a woman named Marsha Keith. Her name is spelled, well, I'm not going to say spelled weird, because that's how her name is spelled. SCHUCHARD. Schuchard? Schuchard? Schuchard? Yeah, probably. She had a birthday party for her 13-year-A-R-D. Shoeshard? Shoeshard?

Shoeshard, yeah, probably. She had a birthday party for her 13 year old daughter in suburban Atlanta. She noticed at the party that a bunch of kids were high and then she came to find out that kids all over the place were getting high. Okay. And they could buy rolling papers at the corner store.

Okay. And they could buy rolling papers at the corner store. Okay. Well, so then she did what the wheny parent would do, she called the school. Are you aware that kids are doing this? And the schools were like, yeah, no, it's a thing that happens. And on occasion we have to suspend a kid for getting high on campus. But it's just kind of part of the American experience at this point that kids are going to experiment with us. 40% of kids are doing it.

Yeah. So we know it's, we know. Yeah. We're not overly concerned about it. It's part of, part of growing up right now. That's, that's just how it is. And so because schools didn't overreact in the way that she wanted, then she,

no. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, you know, we are facing something similar in, well, not now that COVID, but prior, like in the last year,

the amount of concern that went into vaping was I was like, y'all are getting kind of hysterical about this. And it's like, well, we can't, you know, like a teacher can close or can turn his back. And a kid can take a hit off a vape thing and a vape thing, because I'm that, I'm that hip. You're that hip. Yeah, more hip than Bo Jackson, but But they can take a hit off the vape thing and By the time the teacher turns around it is vaporized like you you might not even smell it

Yeah, so and that's entirely true and there's all kinds of devices that are marketed toward kids and and we had a Training on it and all that and part of me was like, okay, so we lost that fight too. Okay, like I'm still, and the problem is that they're now getting THC into it, so kids are able to get high off of it and stuff like that. And like, you know, we'll bust what we can and stuff like that, but I regularly would tell my students, I'm like, I don't understand your friends

who get caught smoking pot in the bathroom because it's not like we're going to actually look differently at them taking an edible. Like I'm not gonna look at a kid with a brownie going, oh I bet you that's, it's like, oh that's his dessert, cool, whatever. Like put it in edible form and no one gets caught. But, you know, I'm a practical man.

But so, yeah, schools knew about it, and but they just accepted it. And parents, however, had linked pot to pregnancy because they remembered 1972. Oh, okay. Remember acid and abortions? Oh, Jesus. Right. So they're like, well, if kids are doing pot, then they're getting pregnant. It's like, oh, Jesus. Right. So they're like, well, kids are doing pot, then they're

getting pregnant. It's like, no, they're fucking. That's why they're getting pregnant. Um, but also, at this point, it's starting and you're starting to see the growth of the religious right. You're starting to see that block and they're absolutely rolling right along with these. And she started what's called the nosy parents council. So also in 1978 up in smoke came out by Cheechachong. So there's this overall groundswell of pot culture. In fact, if you look at laughin, for instance, and if you look at the smothers' brothers, there were pot jokes as far back as the 1960s on TV. And they were, you know, a wink and a nod,

but then you've got Saturday and at live, and it's not winking or nodding or anything. It's like straight up, you know, making pot jokes. And again, just to reset from 1972 to 1977, the amount of adults who admitted to using pot went from 11 to 24% and then by 1985, that increased to 33%. Oh wow.

Yeah, okay. So in 10 years, you know, well, in what is 72 to 85, so that's what, a 13 year year period it had gone up triple. Jim, any Christmas? Um, for kids in 75 it was just under 40 by 80 it was 50% interestingly by 85 it had dipped to 40% again. Huh. So that just say no movement the war on drugs and all that brought it back down to 1975

levels. I'm not going to call that any kind of success because you dropped it by 10% and you dropped it to levels that existed 10 years prior. But the reaction was that the Nosey Parents Association, it's what she called it, gave rise to something called the National Parents Resource Institute for Drug Education. Pride. Oh, God.

All right. Yeah, this thing quickly grew. They're ended up being 4,000 chapters nationwide. Now, I think that once they got the be out of their bonnet about drugs, once their kids are graduated and they passed the torch on to other parents Who wanted to be panicked and wanted to show how good a parents they were by how scared they were? I think that there's a strong overlap between the membership of this group and the membership of the parents who instituted the

Satanic panic of the 80s and I would love if you did an episode on that Okay, D&D panic of the 80s. And I would love if you did an episode on that. Because D&D. Well, yeah. Yeah. And because I mean, I was because I referenced that one of our bumpers. Yeah. So, but here's what here's what pride did. They barged their way into the National Institute of Drug Abuse. And because they were like, we're parents, and we're really worried. And they started publishing all kinds of ridiculous pseudoscience, panicky pamphlets that were legitimized because they were part of the NIDA now.

Like they worked, they insisted on having a, it's kind of like if a union and a district are arguing with each other, that's negotiations, that happens. And then a parent group, self-appoints itself, and says we should have a seat at the table too. And it says though they were listened to and allowed to, it's like, wait a minute, who invited the self-appointed

non-experts? Well, we have all these things from Google you see. And it's like, no, you could take them somewhere else then. These parents did this successfully. They infiltrated the National Institute of, what did I call it, the National Institute of... And Ida. Yeah, I lost my spot, of drug abuse. Drug abuse. Institute of yeah, I lost my spot of drug abuse drug abuse and They start again like I said publishing

Ridiculous pseudoscience. There was an 80 page pamphlet that they published and it had the legitimacy of the N.I.D.A That they wore like Buffalo bill war of women like as skin and they're just like see we're official That's a hell of an analogy. Yeah, well so of women, like as skin, and they're just like, see, we're official. That's a hell of an analogy. Yeah, well, so. That's true. Okay, so. So, so, so when you say it was full of pseudoscience, what, what, what, what kind of bullshit,

were they peddling it? That's where you start to get into things like, it affects testosterone production, pot does, and it affects, it makes people at once more impudent and more sex crazed. It, like whatever scary shit that you could use, there you go, like a lot of dare education comes out of this. Okay, and were you, were you,

when I mentioned gateway drug. Yeah, this is where you start to. This is, okay, yep, absolutely. Cause you said bicentennial summer. Yep, okay. So this parent group pride starts getting the NIDA to go hard after high times because this is marketing to kids.

And we're panicked about kids and kids and kids and kids will someone think of the children. And what I've found is, as soon as somebody does that, they gain a level of moral legitimacy that if you attack it, you're the monster. Oh, well, yeah. And so then, not surprisingly, they then start attacking the,

quote, permissive liberalism of the culture at the time. And the liberalism of the culture at the time in 1976. Mm-hmm. Well, by this point, it's 78 or so. But yes, it's right in that, in that it's hanging in the air there. Okay, it's getting a lot of traction. So, they're children. And they were demonizing disco

in the midst of doing this weren't they? Yes. Something that people of color, gay folk, or queer folk enjoyed quite a bit. And that was quickly tied to cocaine because it absolutely was tied to cocaine. But yes, they're doing that. So yeah, it's yeah. So their children are being seduced by the devil's lettuce. And decriminalization? Hell no. Like, we're going to run the other way, especially under Reagan, hence comes the war on drugs.

Yeah. Now before I get to the war on drugs, and I'm not going to spend that much time on it, to be honest, I want to go to the other coast. So we've left the East Coast behind. I want to talk about Humboldt County. Because even though it wasn't about smuggling, it still was about sliding in under the radar. It still was about delegitimizing the government's efforts.

And it still was the authority versus generally decent people who want to just make a little extra money and they're not doing that much harm. Okay. So in Humboldt County, there was a huge agricultural approach to pot farming. Okay. The growing season in Humboldt County was six months long and the climate was perfect for it. So that helped. And POT was used to sustain micro economies in Northern California because lumber had disappeared. That market had dried up because of the housing boom of the baby boomers. The growth of suburbs was built largely

on the lumber from the Pacific Northwest. And so those places are stripped out. So now, what can you make money doing? Well, you can grow six plants of pot. And literally just six plants will get you $4,000 or $5,000. That's pretty good. So if you plant five acres of this stuff. Well, yeah. And that's the latifundia people like again

You've got two groups here. You've got people who are doing just a little bit their anti-authorian on some level And they just want to be left alone and they're gonna make a little bit of extra money And then you've got other people who are like, oh, this is how I'm gonna make my windfall of cash And I will protect it with guns and booby traps and everything. Okay. So it was kind of a back to the land vibe that's going on as well. Mixing with that hipster outlaw romance, okay, which also is mixing with commercial capitalism in a black market.

So, so this is this is pot smoking hippies as business majors. Yeah, this is the, okay, the people who are radicals who fought against Reagan when he was the governor are often the exact same people who finished getting their degrees and then decided to leave the rat race or decided to live their ideology, and the money that they would get by growing pot to sell would enable them to do that, and live a pretty chill life and just grow a little.

There's other people who are much more type A about it, and I have to make all the money, but a lot of these people are just small farmers. The equivalent would be like, you have a small kiosk at a farmer's market every month. Okay. You have just enough. It's more you do it because you've got some surplus, but you like what you grew, you know? Yeah.

So, and again, there's these towns that are just everywhere that have fallen and this pot growth kind of helps rejuvenate them. And the idea is a Jeffersonian ideal of like small farmers. Okay, yeah. Living on essentially frontiers where the law doesn't really come out there. Okay, so you mentioned when your folks were looking to start a farm, that the vibe they got

in Carolina was a Mendocino County vibe. Yes. Is this kind of a group of people that you're talking about? Yeah. So there's two types. Again, there's the person who's just like, yeah, you know, whatever. And they maybe, they live a pretty solitary life and they do their thing and they just take care of it.

There's another group that is absolutely about making the money and they're very suspicious and on and on and on. The second group is what you saw a lot more of. And my mom actually, she told me when I was very young, she brought me up there to cut buds for the growers and make some extra money. But that was the vibe that she got from the people that she was working with her for was that there was a lot of suspicion where their ought not have been.

So it was unsettling. Because if you're small enough at it, you're doing your own cutting and you're doing your own drawing. But if you're big enough at it where you're hiring people, you are banking on this. And now it's your livelihood. So, but yeah, you've got, by the way, you still have people smuggling.

And I would like to point out, notice who's doing a smuggling. Mostly it's ex-military men who learned how to fly. Okay. And I just bring that up as kind of an echo point. So, by and large, you have independent farmers, private commerce, distrust of central government, the outlaw frontier, rugged individualism, all kinds of fun ways to hide the process from the law up to and including renting hotel rooms for weeks on end and just turning up the heat

and drying the pot in the hotel rooms. And the hotel owners absolutely knew and had no problem with it because you're renting their rooms for four or five weeks at a time or two or three weeks at a time, which is way better than they would have had otherwise. There was a former forest ranger who was a Vietnam vet that I found his explanation of what was going on. He used pot to supplement his income as a forest ranger. And he said, quote, to a certain extent, I liked the outlaw aspect of it. And during the early 1980s, when the first Reagan recession

came along, here I was in a cash economy, not affected by all this bullshit. People going nuts in the cities and worrying about their decreasing standard of living, hey, mine was actually increasing and without having to pay taxes. I didn't care what the law said. I knew it was not morally objectionable.

The prices were so exorbitant, what kids could afford it anyway. All right. So now when you find prosperity like this, and that brings all types, and in the 1980s, it brings up the Gordon Gecko model. Great. Yeah. And in the early 80s, there were armed guards walking around, willing to shoot people. There were explosive booby traps. There were pungy stick booby traps. There was all kinds of like paranoid, you stay off my land to kind of Latifundia pot plantations that were protected by people who were willing to kill to keep it going.

Which is why when I have students who go up to Humboldt County, I tell them flat out, if you go hiking, that's great. If you see these things, and I start listing different signs, to let you know, I said, you stop where you are and you go home. You get off that land as quick as you can because you just walked into someone's, you know, illicit. Grow operations. Yeah, and they will kill you.

You know, or keep, then that can happen. What, what, what are the signs in question? The one that I remember, like it's been a while since I've had a kid who's gone up to Humboldt County for college, but if you see plastic bags nailed up on the eye line on a tree plastic bags and you see multiple that's a that's a boundary Okay, and so back it up, you know, and because after that, there's buoy traps and there's people with guns.

There's also towers that people set up, observation towers to shoot at people to keep them away. Like it? Yeah, it got. Again, when you have a black market, you're going to have a couple different kinds of people. And one of the kinds of people you're going to get is just standard, happy go look, he folk who are looking to, you know, sneak a little something get one over on the government. And then there's others, right? Yeah.

Now in 1982, Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs. He said, quote, we're making no excuses for drugs, hard software otherwise. Drugs are bad and we're going after them. As I've said before, we're taking downugs are bad and we're going after them. As I've said before, we're taking down the surrender flag and running up the battle flag. We're going to win the war on drugs. So like again, like with Eastland, here's a thousand things that you can pick apart with just those two sentences.

There's a ton here where you're just like, oh my god, the amount of energy it's going to take to unpack and prove wrong what you said You you can't actually be involved in a war right against a Thing right Because that's that's not how does it set for peace? That's that's a flawed analogy. It is that's Yeah, you know and and you know, it's interesting. Now, in our current events, you know, we've talked about, you know, when people start bringing

out the warm metaphors and the hero metaphors, you know that somebody has been, been, or is about to become expendable. Mm-hmm. So in the war on drugs, who is expendable? Well, the war on drugs is really war on drugs. It's a war on people of color and the poor. There you go. Yeah.

So, it's a war on the marginalized. It's a way of tugging at that heartstring that works in large swaths of our country where they had it coming because they were doing something illegal. It's like, well, it shouldn't have been illegal, maybe. Nope, it was illegal because it was against the law. You know, like, oh god damn it. So they began something called the campaign against marijuana planting. and I also saw it was called the campaign against marijuana Production and and so the the pee gets switched around but it's called camp

And it starts in 1984 and it's essentially an effort to Vietnamize the pot growers Like straight up like you come in on helicopters and you attack them and you burn their shit out, you treat them like the Viet Cong. Which really sucks for a lot of these people who were actual veterans of that war. Yeah. And here's where it gets really interesting, I was talking to my parents about this. I was like, these people who went up here were some of the same people who were part of the sds who are part of the people that Reagan attacked his radicals in the 60s and now they've grown up by 20 years and the same god damn guy is attacking them again. Yeah. Shit, you know, and and and he's using the government again to crack down on them and he and here's a quote, he felt absolutely,

he was absolutely morally right and he was going to do this regardless of law or people's rights. And if he couldn't, he would just change the laws. Camp from the beginning made no observance of any constitutional restrictions on law enforcement. And so that's how people in Humboldt saw what was going on. And so and and by the by this point, they had elected sheriffs who didn't give a shit or who looked the other way.

Well, yeah, Reagan's bringing in the federal government because you know, states, right? Yeah, this, this, this from a guy who, you know, there are multiple surviving campaign photos of him, you know, standing next to Confederate flags. Yes. Like states rights. Well, it was in his inauguration speech. Yeah, I know.

I know. Like, like, yeah. Yeah. And like, like with, you like with everybody of that ideological ilk, it states, right, well, until we're the ones in power, at which point we're going to do what we fucking want. Oh, yeah. It really is that. And this veteran called it out, like he saw it for what it is. Now the government used U2 spy planes.

Yeah, and prior to camp, the first year of their war on drugs in 1983, so this is prior to camp, the federal government reduced pop production in Humboldt County by a whopping 10%. And what they did was they took out most of the Latifundia farmers that they could find, but the small growers were way more savvy. So in 1984, the DEA, along with camp, they came out of helicopters onto people's land with assault rifles and a bunch of officers and agents who were down in Southern California

being pumped full of stories of insurgent ponte growers using punji sticks and all kinds of like booby traps and stuff like that. Like straight up, like, you know, the Viet Cong handbook, and they're like, that's what these people are doing. So you have these young men who are well armed, poorly informed, and badly trained, pointing guns at civilians for growing pot on their own land,

and coming out of helicopters to do so. Wow. So that's a dynamic that's happening, and people in Humboldt County genuinely felt colonized There's a DEA field agent whose name kept popping up a William Rooza mentee and he said That quote there were boards of supervisors that thought that way that you should just look the other way This is not a big deal There were sheriffs that thought that way that that it's again, find a look away because

it's good for local economy and you're not doing much harm. Continuous. Those people are dinosaurs. They're not around anymore. And I think you're going to find the marijuana grower is a dinosaur. He is not long for this world either. It's really hard not to feel colonized when a guy saying that. Well, one, it's really hard not to feel colonized. And two, you know, looking back on that from 2020, there's a

certain urge to point and laugh. Go on. Well, you know, like clear for everyone, because, you know, the, the, the, because, you know, well, you know, poker or as your dinosaurs, you're not going to see their, their, you know, you're not going to see them anymore. My, my best friend from college works for a security company. And he, he is a designer of large scalescale security systems, camera, integrated, cameras, monitoring systems, that kind of stuff. And one of the big, big, big jobs that he wound up getting sent out on to do engineering for was in Colorado back before the plague to develop the security system for the growing and packaging operation for a privatized legalized pot farming operation of Herculean scale.

Like I cannot begin to describe to you just exactly like an entire industrial warehouse Yeah, that had been converted to to have grow lights and and be the the growing operation. Yeah, it's it's astounding. you have growlites and be the growing operation. Yeah, it's astounding. Yeah, no, I mean, the amount of money that people are starting to make legally off of this now

is mind-boggling. And that's in states that states write. States that have said, yeah, no, you know what? It's not that big a deal. Right. We're legalizing it. It started with medical marijuana. And now it's gone fully to, seriously, if you want to smoke a joint, If you wanna use the stuff recreationally, we're gonna treat it like, don't drive a vehicle when you're under the influence of a substance. Right.

And you can't be busted for possession, you can be busted for use in public, same as you can for drinking alcohol in public. Exactly. But that's it. And on the federal books, it's still oh my god, restricted class, whatever substance. And it's like you kind of want to find this field agent guy and be like, so who's a dinosaur? Yeah, I see what you're saying now. Yeah. So who's a dinosaur? Yeah, I see what you're saying now, yeah.

Yeah. You know, because it was all of this, oh my God, demonizing the people that were doing this, and it was so much time and effort and money and blood and treasure spent trying to stamp this stuff out. Oh yeah. And you know, I mean, it grew like a weed. You know, yeah. And, and, you know, in the end, who won? Like, well, who won were white corporations, not people. Yeah, that's, that's, and so,

one was about to, what was about to go around to was the people unfortunately who are now the ones making all the money are, you know, white boys, you're in my age and, you know, younger. Yeah. Who who, you know, have have reaped the, uh, reaped the benefit of of the price that was paid by a whole lot of marginalized people and a whole lot of these independent growers that you're talking about. Yeah. So, did I mention that there were no warrants because that should bear mention. Did I mention that there were roadblocks where they would have illegal searches of vehicles.

And did I mention the pulling out of families of their cars at Gunpoint? Did I mention the town of Denny in Trinity County where a group of DEA agents marched through the town, information chanting war on drugs, war on drugs like a conquering army? Did I mention that? I feel like I should have mentioned that. You're fucking kidding, really on drugs, like a conquering army. Did I mention that? I feel like I should have mentioned that. You're fucking kidding, really? Yeah, that happened. That was a thing. Wow. That's crazy. Because, you know, what could that possibly establish any kind of precedent for when you have civilian law enforcement behaving in a paramilitary fashion without you know any kind of any kind of attention being

paid to people's constitutional rights. Well, and then citizens next, next they'll be showing up to protests and dragging people off the street in unmarked vans, unmarked vehicles. Yeah. Like, oh my God. I mean, thankfully nothing like that will ever happen because our democratic institutions are too strong. Yeah, and we've learned our lesson too. Yeah, I mean, totally. So, yeah.

Well, and so here's where the lines get drawn because citizens start creating observation groups. There are civil liberties monitors with videotape capabilities. Because it was the age of the camcorder, right? Yes, it's true. So then Reagan signed the crime bill in 1984 that allowed land seizures. And now you get forfeiture auctions. And the best part was they would file that before storming onto your land. And as a result you had to prove that you

weren't growing pot on your land instead of the government having a warrant proving probable cause that you were in fact growing pot on your land and in one instance the government actually filed a lien against a veteran's property at eight in the morning. I want to say it was sometime in the morning and it was one hour before they stormed his house and tore through it, complete with automatic assault rifles. And I remember reading his interview about it. And he says, Oh, it's nice because they actually found some shit that I had lost and couldn't find. Like, they found the deed to my house that I lost six months ago. They found these peyote buttons that I'd forgotten that I had for

15 years. They found these peyote buttons that I'd forgotten that I had for 15 years. They found... Kenneth and unfortunately, the time for those to get discovered. Well, and they found like four baggies of pot from the previous year. And then they found a time magazine article about like pot pipes or something, and they laid it out as kind of like a fuck you to him. Now the result of this was that people found newer and more clever ways to avoid detection. Quote, there's a whole mystique about beating camp. All these minute details and techniques like hollowing out the top of an oak tree for a single plant. Every plant they grew

and harvested became, every plant they grow and harvest becomes a victory for them. became, every plant they grow and harvest becomes a victory for them. Yeah. So you've got this, this, and the DEA, by the way, for its part, shifted away from using you two spy planes and just started looking at why people's electric bills were so high. Well, yeah, because, you know, you got to wonder about, about the mind set of people who were like, well, we're going to use the spy planes. And that was their, that was their go-to.

Their go-to is we're going to take, we're going to take this literally military hardware that has been, you know, utilized to try to keep an eye on where the Russians are moving their missiles. Right. And we're going to repurpose this to try to spot Bud. Right. We're going to spy on our own citizens. Well, well, I mean, okay, but over and above the moral yich that's involved in that. Just the like, I almost want to say that like they must have been doing coke in the meeting where they came up with that idea. That's entirely possible too. Because it's like, okay, no, stop. How much money does it cost? How many man hours does it take to maintain that airplane to to

Fuel the aircraft for every hour of the aircraft is in the sky. How much does it cost to operate the aircraft? And then and then for for all of the hours in between while it's being fixed up between flights You know how like the the dollar cost involved there as opposed to, well, you know, number one, you know, we have helicopters. Right. Like if we want to do aerial survey, we've got helicopters and, you know, we have, well, they buzzed over super low just to terrorize the farmers with the helicopters. Well, yeah. That was a tactic as well. Well, yeah, because I mean, why wouldn't you? Right.

Obviously. But then, there's other tools. Like cheaper, easier, other tools. Well, and then they started using those too. Like that's, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But that wasn't the go-to. No. The go-to was, but that wasn't the go to. No, the go to was we're going to use this biplane. Yeah. Like, honestly, what are you smoking? And do you have any left? No, well, if not,

they can grab it from, yeah. So all of that is, of course, background for what I'm really here to talk to you about. I'm really going to be talking to you about sci-fi movies with pirates and smugglers. I'm just going to give you a short list of characters from movies. Okay. Movies that dealt with drugs, smuggling, or piracy. Because all of those are essentially the same thing in terms of the legitimacy of the authority and in terms of what legitimacy of the authority and in terms of what harm are we really doing. I'm not saying that pirates are good guys by any stretch,

but in the movies of sci-fi movies, they absolutely were. They were the plucky. Yeah, the plucky underdog. With no order in mind, either. Ice pirates, you had the character of Jason. Yep. Dune, Dune focused on spice. And protecting that cartel. Okay. Alien, even, kind of because it talks about, you know, human beings as a mule for something that's harmful.

And I think those are kind of more peripheral, but I also think that they're pulling on something there. There's a movie called Battle Beyond the Stars with George Pappard plays a character named cowboy. And it's essentially a sci-fi remake of Seven Samurai, but he specifically is a guy who's shipping laser handguns and he gets attacked. The movie Cocoon. Okay. You're transporting the

cocoons and smuggling them by boat. Okay. Okay. Rebo man. God I'm a I love okay. I watch that will be way too young. You won't like to see what's in the back of the car. Well, the guy who played Malik in Conan the Destroyer was in repo man. John Wayne's and then he uses the F word for gay people. The hell you ate. But repo man, they find something in the back of the trunk of a Chevy Malibu. Okay. And it's essentially the same thing that's in the suitcase that Marcellus Wallace

wants them to pick up in Pulp Fiction. Starman. There's a movie called Starman. I don't know if you know that one. There's Jeff Bridges. And he's basically an alien who asks a woman to transport him from Wisconsin to Arizona. And the authorities are on their tail the whole time.

Okay, all right, yeah. ET. Elliot smuggled ET out of that really nightmare inducing, like, clear plastic place. Yeah, stark crash. That movie speaking of movies that you saw too young, I should not have seen that at the age I was at. So weird too, because it was absolutely a kids movie, but it just touched on such an existential terror of abandonment.

Yeah. So Starcraft, which is a total shitty crash, cash in movie on Star Wars is success. But, and it stars David Hasselhoff and Christopher Plummer. And Christopher Plummer said the only reason he took the job Is because it was all being shot in Rome. So it was a free trip to Rome He even said I would have done porno to get to Rome Which I would watch Christopher Plummer porno if that meant I got to go to Rome But fair. Yeah fair

But smugglers are trying to escape an Imperial police force. Outland, which is a movie about a federal officer on the mining colony of Jail of Jupiter's Moon, uncovering a drug smuggling conspiracy. And then there were three movies between 1975 and 1985 that starred a plucky daring-do kind of fellow who is a smuggler Who had his own vehicle to do it and it was called Star Wars You're being intentionally up to yeah quite so yeah, so Han Solo baby So most of these characters are absolutely protagonists, but they were doing bad things, but they were doing bad things

against a worse government. And smuggling for each of them was a strike out against the authority, a way to make a little more money and a way to have to answer to nobody. Okay. And that absolutely struck George Lucas the right way. George Lucas has described Han Solo as, quote, a free enterprise small businessman. Okay. And he later said, quote, the way my father brought me up gave me a lot of common,

a lot of the common sense that I used to get me through the business world. So George Lucas from a very young age appreciates the efforts of small businessmen. He has that kind of Jeffersonian commercial instead of farming kind of. I was gonna say, if we're being strictly literal here, Jefferson hated the merchant class, but yes, I get what

you're saying. Yeah. Um, he, you combine that with him saying this, I've always had a basic dislike of authority figures, a fear and resentment of grownups. It's little wonder that he writes Han Solo as a smuggler who owns his own ship. When George Lucas was 15, he, his dad caved and bought him his own car and he loved like souping that thing up. He wrapped it around a telephone pole and ended up in the ICU for weeks and it was a very

defining moment in his life. But the idea of having his own vehicle, I mean that's the whole thing behind American graffiti, you know, just the freedom of all that. Now, for a second, I want to dip into THX1138. Oh, okay. It's a dystopian movie where sex and procreation are specifically outlawed, which, this is all written by George Lucas. Now, that means he read 1984.

Yes. Also, people have to take drugs determined by the government as mandatory for controlling everyone. This tells me he also read Brave New World. Everyone wore the same white clothes, stormtroopers, and had their heads shaven. Everyone performs dangerous jobs for the government satisfaction and mandatory drugs absolutely help that to happen. Romance is outlawed, family, and emotions are taboo topics.

This was released in 1971. Yes. Now, back to Nixon, 1971. Nixon is absolutely scaring the living shit out of Americans about heroin and drugs. American GIs are coming back from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Up to 51% of American GIs by 1971 had tried pot. Now that's by 1971. 51% of soldiers had done something that only 11% of Americans had tried to do at home. Well, okay, when you take a 19 year old and you separate him from his entire

emotional social support structure and you send him through, I'm gonna say, somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 weeks of training and then give him a gun and send him into a foreign country where people are constantly trying to fucking kill him. Yes. Then you really shouldn't be that surprised are constantly trying to fucking kill him. Yes. Then you really shouldn't be that surprised that he develops bad habits as coping mechanisms. Yeah, I was going to say he's self-medicating.

Yeah. I mean, you know, the experience of a conscript army being sent into that kind of conflict was unprecedented. It really was. Now 31% of the, oh, gone. Well, yeah, and so, you know, the army that fought World War II

was also a conscript army, but the, it was a different war. It was what they were trained to fight when they went through basic training. It was okay, this is where the enemy is gonna be. This is how you're gonna move, this is what you're gonna do. Here's the front line do Here's the front line Yeah, here's the front line and then I got to Vietnam and it was like well, okay, there's no front line

There is no front line Your entire job when you go out on combat patrol is gonna you know is to go out and you know try to try to get them to shoot at you Yep, so you can use superior firepower to to you know End them right Yep. So you can use superior firepower to, you know, uh, uh, uh, end them. Right. Uh, because, you know, the, the leadership of the other side in this particular war has figured out they, they have to use Fabian tactics or we're just gonna, we're gonna steamroll our them. And, you know, and so like there is no, there is not any way, or there was not at the time, anyway, to prepare those young men for that.

Yeah, like they were, they were on top of everything, everything else about that war. The kids that we were sending over to fight it were utterly unprepared. They were utterly untrained. All of the learning they had to do was in the field. And so, I mean, the stress level involved is ridiculous. So of course, they were smoking weed. Like, well, 31% of them had also tried acid or some other hallucinogen.

28% had tried heroin or cocaine. Now, 23% of troops were black. 25% of the total number of troops were drafted. However, the spectra of the draft caused plenty to volunteer so they'd had some say as to where they'd go. The lottery had started under Nixon in 1969, the lottery draft. The existential fear of draft without privilege, which had a high correlation to drug experimentation,

and a visibly higher percentage of black soldiers coming back addicted or having used, allowed Nixon to use that to scare the shit out of people about drugs, which caused white folks to clutch their pearls and be completely okay with the dog whistle that was about racism. Now here's that quote by John Erlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, he said quote, the Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying. We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt

those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. Now that's all happening in the soup of George Lucas going to film school. Now, by the way, felony drug sentencing, which disproportionately fell on people of color, disqualifies folks from voting. Currently, one in one 13th, one in 13 black people of voting age cannot vote due to this disqualification. That is currently as of today.

That's 2.3 million later. Yeah. Yeah. 2.3 million of the 30.8 million black people over 18 cannot vote. Anyway, his first movie was THX 1138 and it comes out at that time and look into his view on drugs. Famously, his whole class of fellow directors did all the drugs ever. Well, yeah. And he mostly abstained. And he was very focused on keeping as much of his movie's profits to himself.

He's thinking differently than all the other guys. He's not there to enjoy as much as he's there to make his own thing. He doesn't want studios to get the money. He doesn't want authorities over him to get the money. He says, quote, normally you just sign a standard contract with a studio, but we wanted merchandising sequels, all those things. I didn't ask for another million, just the merchandising rights. And Fox thought that was a fair trade. He didn't like other people telling him

what to do. This goes all the way back, all the way back. And so in the 1970s, when he's creating this movie, he's got Han Solo in there. So THX 1138 was absolutely informed by the cultural preoccupation with drugs, an overbearing government, the enforcement of conformity, et cetera, and George Lucas, a film student who struggled against authority anyway, wrote and directed this not very successful film.

Yeah, but really I want to focus on Han Solo here because of course I do. so he is George Lucas's ideal reacting to the 1970s dominant culture. He's a smuggler. He is an American smuggler. Let's be honest He has his own ship. He lives by his own rules. He flouts Imperial authority at every turn. He's former military He lies low. He brags loud. And he has a past prior to picking up the oddest passengers available. That involves smuggling spice, which Lucas later on pointed out. Oh, that's space drugs. He's he's he's swindled his ship from Lando, or at least there's room left to question that, he's got a best friend and a ship.

He is a lovable scoundrel. Yes, Han Solo embodies everything about the Romantic hipster, the Romantic hipster outlaw that was flying just on the corner of society's drug culture's eyes. Han Solo represents pluck, but also refusal to adhere to the rules. He shows them as flawed and oppressive rules. He's smart, he's funny, he's fast, but he's also vain greedy and makes really dumb choices. Yes. He's basically a good person trying to find his way in a really big and complicated universe

without having to answer to anybody. Now, even more so, smugglers have a certain set of skills that are cinematically dramatic and compelling. They're usually good at some sort of vehicle, so you can get chase scenes. They're good at hiding, so you get that tension scene. They're good at getting away, so you can have the Dan and Wah be escape. They're good at getting away, so you can have the Dan and Wobby escape. All sort of tension, all sort of peril and all sort of pluck exist within those dynamics. Okay, yeah, no, they're great.

They're great fodder for any kind of storytelling, yeah. Yeah. So, Hansel is all those things, right? But he's also some other things that are similar to what we saw in the 1970s, drug smuggling culture, especially the pot smuggling. Not so much the cocaine smuggling because those fuckers were prone to horrible, horrible violence. Those murders that I told you about in the last episode in Miami, they included plenty

of mutilations. They included taking chainsaws to people who are still alive to send a message, like awful, awful torture. Oh, horrible like awful, awful towards horrible. Well, okay. So, pop guys didn't do that. Yeah, no, no. Pop guys didn't do that. No, I got to, I got to at this point, unfortunately, I have to bring up Tiger King.

Okay. Which you haven't seen. No. And history's proved me right that seeing it is unimportant. Yeah, well, yeah. But one of the stories that comes out over the course of that mini series is that one of the people in the exotic big cat breeding private ownership business is possibly the guy that you mentioned Scorsese was having that conversation with who

got up on the street. Yeah, all of her style. Yeah. And it was in large part, his whole operation was actually a big part of the factual inspiration for Scarface. And he did time for all this stuff. And as you mentioned, the crime that he insists was all his business partner, not him. He didn't do any of that kind of stuff. But involved, somebody being taken apart with a circular saw. You know, no, in that case, I don't believe it was while they were still alive, but still

it's taking a circular saw to a human being. Right. So, yeah, those guys were bonkers, crazy violent nuts. And that's mostly cocaine. Yes. And then later on, the harder drugs as well, but that's most of the cocaine smugglers, not the pot smugglers. No, no, pot guys, it's interesting that that is kind of the distinction because you know, think about what does pot do to one, talked about this last episode.

That's a good point. Yeah. And whereas cocaine, you become, the level of danger to self and others involved with cocaine is higher than with marijuana. It's how to make sense that the guys that are smuggling the one are going to be, you know, crazy, scary, and the other ones are going to be like, you know, crazy, scary, and the other ones are gonna be like, you know, I just, I really don't wanna deal with this right now. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

So. Well, I would also say that Pot Smugglers, you know, there was a fair degree of paranoia amongst them as well, and it's not like they didn't get into violence, they absolutely did. You know, just like Han Solo, when didn't get into violence they absolutely did. Just like Han Solo, when we first see him, he shoots first. He shoots Grito, kills him dead, done. And then he moves on.

It's not, I'm gonna torture you over the next three hours and then send your penis to your family. Like, it's not that. There is a difference in the type of violence when they do engage in violence. Because again, we saw in Humboldt County, you had people willing to shoot people. You did have that. But ultimately, you know, it's it's a different thing. Han Solo is all the things that we mentioned. But he's he's flouting the law. But he's not doing so maliciously.

he's flouting the law, but he's not doing so maliciously. He harkens back to this ethical, not lawful, good person. And most of the people in Humboldt County, and most of the Pot Smugglers, most not all, were people who chafed against authority, but didn't really want to hurt anybody. They wanted to shove their thumb in the eye of people in charge. Most of the guys flying planes and kicking out the bails of pot over farms in the Carolinas were former military men who, again, chafed against authority but really didn't want to hurt anyone. And both groups on both coasts got to make some fairly easy money. And they'd live according to their own rules and not have to answer to anyone. Yeah.

That's on solo. And even if they worked for some awful people like say, Jabba the Hut, they could still maintain their own self-image of being their own man. And they're not tied to that organization. They just move stuff from time to time. And since they're mostly not doing the killing

unless, you know, some are, they're mostly just escaping. They're similarly attractive to people who saw the romance of what Pot Smugglers were doing, and that was something that was in the zeitgeist in the 1970s. So ultimately, Han Solo and the Pot Smugglers of the 1970s were accidental heroes and incidental criminals, which in the 70s are protagonists. Okay. And the ubiquity of that type of character throughout the genre during that stretch of time

is absolutely an embodiment of accidental hero incidental criminal. Well, yeah. And it's not just in science fiction. I mean, the lifestyle of that was glorified at any number of kind of movies or dramatized, milked for drama at least, if not glorified, in any number of kinds of movies. In popular music, there's a legacy of that. The two examples immediately jump into my mind when you're talking about this. I actually had to look them up to figure out

when they were recorded. It turns out both of the songs that occurred to me, well, one of them was in the time period that you're talking about. Smugglers Blues, by the way, Frye, was recorded in, I don't have it in front of me right now, but I want to say it was 83. Okay. And it is a song, an eagle's-esque,

let fry song, from the point of view of a drug runner, it painted in a sympathetic light. And then there's another song that I now have to look back up, Treetop Flyer, which, honestly, it's Crosby Stills, you may be saying it, Stephen Stillss my bad, on his own, Stephen stills, that is, it came out in 91, so it's a long time after the time period we're talking about, but it could be the memoir of one of these guys from that time period, you know, talking about, you know, I learned how to fly low and fast from, you know, Uncle Sam taught me how to do this. So, so I don't get, so, you know, the VC won't won't be able to shoot you down. Right. You know, and, you know, it talks about,

you know, there it wasn't the airport approach by by guys said, hey, man, you want to make some fast cash. And, you know, and so there it is, even even that long after the time period, we still see this sympathetic view of The guys that are doing this because you know, I mean who doesn't who isn't attracted to to a a romantic rogue right kind of fake like that and There's a little bit of Robin Hood going on there you know And so yeah, no, I mean I definitely see know. And so yeah, no, I mean, I definitely see, I definitely see the the power of the archetype in light like during that time period and since that time period.

Yeah, well, so that's that's it. Hans Solo is because people were smuggling pot in the 1970s. And he is so beloved because he embodied those values. And those are an eternally American set of values. If you really think about the very reason that Americans went to war with the British, it surrounded taxation on goods that were being shipped. How did John Hancock make his money jerking off chickens? Yeah. Yes. Yes. No.

No. No. He was a rum runner. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. He's smuggler. Yeah, the multiple members of the Continental Congress made their money. This is in the Northeast mind you.

The Bostonians and the New Yorkers and all of those guys, they made an additional, I mean, they had legitimate businesses, but they made additional money off the top by sneaking molasses in, you know, that wasn't on their bill of sale. Right. You know, turning it into rum and then turning around and selling it for a profit, that they didn't have to pay taxes on. And the British knew it was going on. The British went, all right, well, I we're going to cut down on that

Well, and partly because those taxes were paying for the protection of soldiers on the frontier Because the American colonists couldn't be trusted to not antagonize the Indians even further. Yes Yes, there was also like Americans during the revolution were the shittiest There was also like Americans during the revolution were the shittiest college students Who are upset that their parents are paying for things, but don't want to turn off the spigot of money Yeah, no, you're not I mean yeah, that's that's certainly one one Way of explaining it. Yeah, uh, you know Well, we we want to we want to expand into the Ohio Valley You can't expect we've talked about this. You can't expand into the Ohio Valley because we signed a treaty with those

tribes that help us fight off the bloody French. Right. Well, but we want to expand into the Ohio do you not look, asked and answered, you continental, colonial, twit. Yeah. You know, and, and like, but it doesn't compute. We need to get into the Ohio Valley. And while we're at it, why are you charging all these taxes? Because we have to have bloody red coats. Because you tip going into the Ohio Valley.

Going to Ohio fucking Valley. red coats because you keep going into the high of alley going to high oh fucking alley you know um yeah and while I don't look that and so we have and here we have you know well and like you said in the previous in the previous episode NASCAR got it start it's start as rum runners yeah i'm gonna use that you know use that bootleggers showing off their fastest vehicles to each other and started racing the stock cars. Smuggling is such an American institution. I find it more interesting that smugglers didn't make it into sci-fi prior to the pot smugglers. And I think it has to do with airplane smuggling. Small, independently-owned airplane smuggling, really,

no pun intended, took off in the 70s. Okay. And prior to that, it was a different, it was a different it was it was boats and it was you know cars and stuff like that Yeah, there's something about the flight of it that captured the imagination and of course, Han Solo's a good guy Yeah, you know, and so yeah, I I really yeah, so there's my thesis statement. Okay, yeah Don't write that works. So do you go on? No, no go ahead Yeah, don't write that works. So that's then, yeah. Go on. No, no, go ahead.

As I say, do you have any books that you want to recommend to the audience tonight? Or this morning, who knows when we're recording? Who knows when they'll, yeah. We've kept it so timeless. Yes, so very, very, no we haven't. I do not at present have anything in particular that I'm reading to recommend,

because when I am not working on getting ready to go back to school, I have my head buried in the 40 now, 42nd millennium of man getting trying to figure out about, getting back into worry or 40,000, because God help me, I love that universe more than it probably deserves. So how about you though? You're a much bigger, more prolific reader,

most of the time that I am. So what do you, I would disagree with that. the time that I am. I said, what do you do? I would disagree with that. I had that discussion with a friend of mine actually. I was pointing out that you are much more broadly read and the depths that you have on certain things are like just way different than mine and so that I'm much more specialized

than most of my reading. But speaking of specialized in my reading, I'm going to recommend AC Crispin. She has since passed, but she was a phenomenal author wrote one of my favorite trilogy of books, The Han Solo trilogy. It starts with the Paradise Snare. It goes on to the Rebel Dawn and then finally to the Gambit. And it is, if you wanna know about Han Solo and his smuggling past, these books are amazing. Like just such rich and vibrant and wonderful characters. And AC Crispin absolutely captured

the essence of Han Solo. So I strongly recommend that trilogy of books for people. It's been a long time since I read them, but I have to agree with you there. They are by far some of the best extended universe now legends. Stuff that's out there that was ever part of Canon. So much so that the movie Solo borrowed very liberally from these books. Oh yeah. That's why I haven't really minded Disney like calling it legends.

I'm like, okay, well, it's going to be cool to see what cool things they take from the books now. And they absolutely took them from this, from this series. And, and you know, in the moments that we have left, I just want to put in my own little note here. You mentioned the movie solo. I think the movie did make one major mistake in that it tried to explain too many things all at once.

Aside from that, I literally was like squeaking. I was so happy about so many things in that film, the whole time. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was a great Han Solo story. And I hope, probably against hope, that they're going to do something else with Aaron Reich as Han Solo, because it was awesome. Yeah, his characterization was really good.

He looked nothing like Harrison Ford, but he absolutely acted like Harrison Ford's Han Solo. Yeah. Just the striking of the poses that he struck was absolutely, and like the little smirks that he would do, his smirk looks nothing like Harrison Ford's smirk, but it absolutely looked like, oh, that's an affect that Han Solo has.

Yeah, it's good, yeah, it really did. So, well, if people want to disagree with you about Solo, where can they find you? They can come fight me over that as Mr. Blalock on Instagram or you can find me on TikTok, even though I've only put up one video so far and it's teachers union related. You should do a dance on that thing.

Like did you know, we should on Tinder or whatever? No Lord. Oh no, no No, not yeah, no And then if you want to try to find me on the Twitter machine. I am eH. Blaylock on the Twitter's We on the Twitter's, we collectively are on the Twitter as Geek History Time. And if they want to find you, where can they shout at you to point out that, you know, Smuggler's existed in science fiction long before on SoLo oh my god you're completely wrong where would

they go to do that? Well I think that they should find me at at the harmony both on the insta and the twitter there's two h's in the middle there and if they just want to laugh at my puns and my jokes and all the fun that I can do comedically for them they should look to twitch.tv-capitalpuns because we are Sacramento's number one premier underground pun tournament and we've been going for over four years now. So why are there any others? We are the number one of them all. So are there any other and in all of California, we are also Sacramento's premier number one underground pun tournament. Shut the fuck off. We're special. Session asked the dancer. I was I was draw the question. Sure. Well, I'll put it this way. I've

seen some that have flashed up and then disappeared. That's is true. We have sustainability. So there's that. There's that. So yeah. All right. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm Ed Blalock and until the next time and until next time, keep rolling 20s. Keep rolling 20s.