Name: Ep 536 - The Program (feat. James Fox)
Uploaded: 2024-12-17T19:41:38.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ep 536 - The Program (feat. James Fox)' from Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-12-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ep 536 - The Program (feat. James Fox)' from Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-12-17. Transcript available.

Ep 536 - The Program (feat. James Fox)

James Fox, welcome. Thank you so much for coming on, man.
Thanks for having me on.
You have your new documentary, The Program, I believe.
Yes, it dropped today.
Dude, that's great.
Dropping right now.
How about the timing, dude?
You couldn't have planned that better with the goddamn fucking drones flying.
I literally had an Air Force colonel text me and he goes,
so what's up with the promotion?
You managed to get a full-on alien invasion on the release of your film.
How did you coordinate that?
Hey, man, there's just larger forces at play.
So that's all that is.
Yeah, no, I welcome it.
I mean, you know, within reason.
Yeah, for sure.
I don't want people to panic.
Yeah, well, dude, so to be honest, I was watching the documentary last night
and I was just like on the way to a holiday party
and I just got really stoned from a vape pen.
I haven't been smoking like that.
And I was just like launched and I started watching your documentary
and I got like, I just started bugging out.
I started thinking about just the vastness of the cosmos
and just kind of the, you know, the inevitability of there's got to be
some other sort of consciousness or life form out there.
And it's like, I was bugging.
I was like with my wife and I was like, they turn it off.
I'm freaking out right now.
What point did you turn it off?
When we got to that, the NASA conference or before?
It was before that.
But we were, I just started thinking about it because there was all,
it was all these like, you know, there's these like Congress meetings
and all these people.
And it was like the line that, I don't know if it was from that
or someone said it, but it's like,
why would these people put their credibility at risk for no reason?
No.
Yeah.
No.
Come on.
There's a there there.
Yeah.
So it's like, and so, you know, just tell us a little bit about the documentary.
How did you get into all that?
And like, what did you, what kind of like launched you into identifying?
UAPs now, not UFOs.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So yeah, UFOs, unidentified flying objects.
And it went to UAP, unidentified aerial phenomenon.
And then it, because they're coming in and out of the oceans as well,
they changed it to unidentified anomalous phenomenon.
That's where we're at right now.
To me, it's like, they're just making it harder and harder to say to obscure
the truth.
That's what I'm coming.
It's like, you, you know, unidentified, a lot on a lot.
I can't even say it.
So I'm like, now I'm out of the race.
You know, and UFOs had a bit of baggage.
There was always sort of that knee jerk reaction.
When you mentioned UFOs.
So I think they wanted to kind of, you know, steer away from that.
Yeah, it was stoner stuff.
Yeah.
Get into the UAP stuff.
And it was really funny.
I think it was today or it was last night.
Senator Schumer, Senate Majority Leader Schumer is being like hammered in the
press.
I don't know if you've seen it yet or not.
And the guy's like, you don't know what it is.
Therefore, it's a UAP.
You wrote the legislation.
Don't you remember?
Like, he's like, well, we don't know what they are.
Therefore, it's a UAP.
He was probably so blazed when he wrote the legislation.
They want to say drones because UAP has people freaking out.
Charged, yeah.
And it's so funny, too, because they're going, well, we have absolutely no idea
what it is,
but everyone's fine.
Everything's safe.
There's nothing to worry about here.
Sure.
So there are just, like, tons of drones popping up and everyone's freaking out
because nobody knows whose they are?
I initially, you know, on first look, I was like, oh, it sounds, you know,
conventional because, you know, UAP demonstrated technology that sort of light
years advance for anything we have.
But then I started doing a little deeper dive and I'm hearing reports that they're
evading the military, radar, FLIR, they go dark, you know, they have a loiter
time of hours and hours and hours.
Then the Coast Guard reported being followed over the ocean.
I mean, it just, something weird is going on.
I don't know exactly what it is or who's behind it, but people are scratching
their heads.
That would be crazy if it truly was, like, an alien consciousness, but this was
their, like, mall kiosk of them, like, flying around holiday toys and being
like, check this out.
And everyone's freaking out.
Watch this freak out the humans.
Look at them run.
So just take us through, you don't have to obviously give the whole documentary
away, but it's like, how did you get into that and, like, how, like, to what
depth does this whole phenomenon go?
Because, like you said, when I grew up, it was just, like, aliens and you'd get
a poster with black lights of an alien being like, peace, man.
Right.
But, yeah, the more you hear about it, like, it just came out of nowhere.
Like, the government, I feel like, a couple years ago was like, oh, by the way,
aliens are probably real.
And everyone was just like, what the fuck?
What are you guys doing right now?
Yeah, well, I mean, so how that came about, I'll back up a little bit and tell
you how I got into it.
And I had a father who was a journalist.
He was a quadriplegic with MS.
And so at a very early age, I was traveling around the world with him because I
was his legs, I was his chauffeur, I was his nurse, his secretary.
You know, we just traveled together.
He was a mainstream journalist.
We interviewed people like Stephen Hawking and race car legend Dan Gurney and
just did a lot of cool stuff together.
And so I had a sneak preview into journalism pretty early on in my life through
my dad.
And then I had a high school buddy of mine that when we graduated, we were 18
and we flew to Europe and we bought a used car, Rene Harris, and we bought a
used car, drove it from London down to Portugal.
We were really close, man.
We were like brothers.
And then we parted ways for like a year or two as things done.
He had different things going on, whatever.
And then I, you know, reunited with him and he was suddenly into this whole UFO
thing.
And I was like, oh, God, Rene, man.
Like, I remember thinking I'm gonna have to cut my best friend loose.
Like, this is really unfortunate, you know.
And he was talking about Roswell and UFO crash and alien bodies.
And I honestly thought he'd lost his mind.
I mean, I really did.
Yeah.
What year was this roughly?
90, probably 93.
Yeah.
Maybe 94, 93.
You were looked at as crazy back then for it.
And so anyway, I go, I was, I was apprenticing at a video production company
and I went into work and I was telling my buddy, Richard Van Sickle, about it.
And I had really looked up to, he was 10 years my senior and really
professional, great guy.
And I was like, oh, man, my really good friend is like, suddenly got off on the
deep end.
He's into UFOs and aliens and UFOs and spaceships that crashed in Roswell.
And my buddy, Richard looks at me, he goes, you didn't know about Roswell?
I was like, how would I know about Roswell?
No, I don't know about Roswell.
How would I know about Roswell?
He goes, well, the government actually admitted that they did recover.
Really?
He goes, yeah, check it out.
Like, they actually admitted it.
And then the very people that were involved in the cover-up came forward on
camera before they died saying it was original.
The original press release was correct.
So I was like, oh, my gosh.
I started looking into it, went to a few conferences, met a few military guys,
and I was like, God, maybe there's something going on here.
And so I told my dad, I was like, you know, I was doing video production at the
time and I was doing PSAs and things of that sort.
And I was like, I think I'm going to do a documentary on UFOs.
And my dad was like, oh, my God, please, son, don't do that.
He literally said it's a dead-end street.
There's nothing to it.
You're wasting your life.
Please.
Not only did he was begging me, he had all of my other members, because I was
born in England, of the family, writing me letters saying, your dad is very
concerned about you.
Oh, you're getting like English letters about it.
Don't do it.
I don't know.
That'd be a tough.
It's like a scolding.
Just like, you know.
I'm reading Bertrand Russell's autobiography and there's a lot of like English
letters and they're pretty, yeah, they'll get you, man.
Anyway, so.
Stinging letter.
Yeah, my grandmother used to call me a rapscallion, you hooligan, you skiver,
franking into the house at all hours of the boarding.
Yeah, she was hilarious.
So your whole family's like, please, don't do it.
Please reconsider, your dad's very concerned, you know, and I just was like,
well, you know, I'm, of course, being a Taurus, I'm a bit stubborn.
And I just went all in and I think it took me about four years and I, and I was
at the end of it, I was like, I'm never doing another UFO doc ever again.
But I sold it to Discovery Channel, it aired on Learning Channel, and I kind of
got the last laugh.
And, and then I got invited to Russia and because I'd been, I got invited to
Russia, which I ended up going in the late 90s and meeting with generals and
cosmonaut Pavel Popovich.
And then I got an invitation to meet with Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper
because I've been trying to get interviews with him on my first doc.
And then all of a sudden I was like, well, I guess I'm doing another doc
because I got all these amazing interviews and I went to Russia and stuff.
And so I did another one and that one was called Out of the Blue and that took
me five years.
Okay.
And I finished that and I said, never again.
I remember, I remember my partner who was in a fetal position crying and his
wife's like, you're killing my husband.
Like, stop.
What was wrong with him?
We're pushing each other so hard, so hard to do a good doc, right?
It's like, you just get to the end of your, I mean, I'd been there myself.
I just, you're, you're broken.
Yeah.
And so I was like, well, I guess the documentary is done because I didn't
really feel like it was where it needed to be, but we were all out of steam.
We were out of money.
I pushed my, my partner to the brink of death and his wife was screaming at me
like, you know, so I was like, all right.
So then we sold that to NBC universal and it aired as a two hour special on the
sci-fi channel.
And then three years later, I own the rights again.
And I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to pick this back up and make it to the
film.
I always wanted it to be.
So I spent a couple more years on Out of the Blue and I released that as a
director's cut.
And in the process of that, I broke a big story with the governor of Arizona, Fife
Simonton, who there's a very famous Phoenix lights case.
It happened in February, sorry, March 13th, 1997, and the governor poo-pooed it
at the time.
And then 10 years later, I met up with him.
It's like, why did you poo-poo it?
You had one of your aides dressed up as an alien.
They came and mocked the whole thing and all your, you know, constituents were
upset.
And he admitted that he saw it too.
So then that happened and exploded in the headlines.
What did he see?
Oh, he saw the lights.
Oh, he saw a craft.
He saw a big, all connected boomerang shape.
He said it must've been a mile from wingtip to wing across because it was so
big.
Why did he, why did he poo-poo it though?
Uh, he, he said just, well, he said that, that there was overwhelming, uh, uh,
fear.
Like people were just freaking out.
He contacted the local air force, Luke air force base.
He contacted the Pentagon and they all shrugged their shoulders according to
him and said,
we don't know what the hell that thing was.
What?
So anyway, I broke that story.
And then I got, I got, I hope you don't mind.
I'm giving you a longer version of this.
I like it.
Yeah.
So, um, so I broke that story and it catapulted me into the limelight.
I mean, we were on all the talk shows, Larry King live with the governor.
And I thought, gosh, this would be a really good time to capitalize on this
attention because
media coverage is very fle