Welcome to the program, everyone. I am Dr. Chris Martinson here with a very exciting episode for you.

As you know, we've been working tirelessly, at least from my perspective, for years now, trying to figure out what's going on what is actually

happening out there in the world and looking for frames that will help us understand it now it's a

very complicated world a lot of different ways we could look at this we could look at it through an

energy lens or a financial lens or a political lens or a geopolitical lens and hopefully we're trying to assemble a view of what's happening in the world. Now, as you know, I'm a systems guy. I think if we understand the system that's involved, we have a better chance of understanding the outputs of that system rather than just trying to analyze the outputs and make sense of it. So what's the system? Today, really honored to have with us

CJ Hopkins award-winning playwright, novelist, author, and the author of this extraordinary book here,

which I'm going to recommend for everybody very highly. This is The Rise of the New Normal Reich.

It'll come like this, but without all the little post-its, because that's me marking up the book doing what I do, which is reading and taking notes. And this one, I had to take a lot of notes on. I was reading this book out loud to my fiancé over breakfast because passage after passage was really catching me. So before we dive into that, CJ, welcome to the program. It's so good to have you here.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, Chris. I appreciate it. So, extraordinary book,

and I want to start with what's extraordinary about it for me was, A, that I had only very

recently come across your writing, and as soon as I did, I couldn't

understand how I hadn't come across it before. I think we'll have a conversation about censorship

and about how certain authors' messages are limited. We'll get to that later, but what caught me

was this first chapter here, after the introduction, it's called the Great Chinese Bat Flu Panic of 2020.

And it's dated March of 2020 and already in March of 2020, you're beginning to call into question things that years later people are starting to finally get their head around.

So let's start there. How long was it before you'd heard about the great

Chinese flu before you started to wonder if maybe it was something different as then was being

presented? Well, it was right around then, actually. It was, you know, late February and

March of 2020. I'll tell you a story. I was

running scriptwriting workshops at the time here in Berlin. So, you know, international writers

from different places in Europe. And one of my writers was from Italy and she went home for

the holidays. This is, you know, 2019 Christmas holidays and New Year

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