Kiss The Future with Bill Carter 56:48

Hey everyone, it's Reid. Before we get started, I think it's important for us to understand exactly why there is an expression, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Guys, so much of our trouble, yes, it's political. Yes, it's personal. Some of it's economic. But really, it all comes down to two things, I think. A lack of imagination and a lack of will. Guys, we must have the imagination to understand what American democracy failing means, and we must have the will to say, not on our watch.

I want to say thank you to all of you who listen, all of you who work on a daily basis out in democracy, and all of those of you who will help us in the next seven months make sure that this great American experiment continues. And now, on with the show.

Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Galen. Today, I'm joined by author, filmmaker, and activist, Bill Carter. Bill is the author of three books, including Fool's Russian, Red Summer, and Boom Bust Boom.

all critically acclaimed journalistic memoirs. He's an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose own film of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, Miss Sarajevo, has won numerous awards and accolades, and both his memoir and the film have since led to the making of the Paramount film Kiss the Future, which just completed a very successful theater run and will be available to stream soon on Paramount+.

Today, he's coming to us from beautiful Sedona, Arizona. Bill, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's great. All right, so I watched the film, and I don't even know where to start because, Bill, I'll be egotistical here. We're all the stars of our own lives, right? There were so many threads that came together for me. First...

In high school, me and my friends were fanatical U2 fans. Absolutely fanatical. I started my sophomore year of high school in Dallas when we just moved there right as Ah-Tung Baby came out.

And I was the new kid, but the day it came out, everybody had a copy of the CD, right? The jewel case. And so I had to go out and get it and I hadn't really known it. But then, you know, you start working back through the catalog. Obviously, Joshua Tree is a masterpiece. And then you go back to, you know, war and boy and the unforgettable fire, you know, and so, you know, they were just they were integral to my teenagerhood, if that makes sense.

But also, I'm old enough to remember when the Berlin Wall fell.

And when all of this started, and I think sometimes we look back on those early 90s as a time of maybe, you know, Pax Americana, right? We'd beaten the Soviets. But the truth is, maybe everywhere but America, it was a very dynamic time in the world. Oh, 100%. I mean, there's a saying in the Balkans that the Berlin Wall fell and it fell in the Balkans.

When that happened, I actually was in that area at the time as a backpacker. And like you said, we kind of thought, well, hey, that's great. You know, it all worked. It finally is going to come down and it's going to change everything. Right. The good guys won. Yeah. Right. Kind of easy narrative, which we like. But it left a lot of countries unsure of how to navigate a future without this kind of

way they'd been gotten used to through communism. And Yugoslavia was kind of probably the most problematic because of the coasts.

And because of Tito, who he was, they had kind of a sweet spot. Everything was semi-free. You're not read the system. But they also made money on the coast. So they were kind of in this nice spot. And that caused a lot of nationalists to rise up and say, I want some of that. I want to take a piece of that. And I think we should go back and remind folks of the history of Yugoslavia and the Balkans. So the...

Soviets obviously march across Eastern Europe on their way to defeating Germany. But Tito, Josep Braz, had basically liberated what we thought of as Yugoslavia back then on his own, with his own partisans. So the Soviets didn't really have a handhold or a foothold in Yugoslavia or really the southern Balkans, Greece, etc.,

Albania has always been its own thing. And then he had a break with Stalin right before Stalin died. And so he was a communist, but he was out on his own. But he was also, you know, this leader who brought, you know, in Yugoslavia, you know, now it's what, four or five different countries with its own ethnicities, its own nationalities, its own languages in some case.

So it was really the personality and the system he put in place that held all this together anyway for the better part of, what, 50 or so years. Right. It was basically all based on him. Everybody loved him, but when he left, there's no roadmap of where to go, how to do this. And that began to unravel. And if you think about it, he died in 1981, I believe. Yeah.

And then they had the Olympics in 84 in Sarajevo. So that was a highlight. That was a big achieving moment, right? And then by 88 or 86, the Serbian nationalists and some in Slovenia as well started to get heated up.

And then you had the Berlin Wall. And then, you know, it was just a matter of time before the chaos created itself. Right. So last bit of history before we move into the conflict itself. So obviously, you've got Serbia, which was a big country, you know, always aligned with Russia.

There's always been trouble in the Balkans, right? The Balkans have always been sort of a tinderbox. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, World War I. Then you had Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is where Sarajevo is. You have Croatia, Kosovo. Is it Montenegro? Was Montenegro a piece of it? Montenegro, yeah, and Kosovo. Montenegro has traditionally been more Serbian. Croatia is its own group.

The power ministries.

Exactly. So when it cracked up, they were kind of in place. And remember, too, that there were, you know, just like we've seen in so many places, right? There's longstanding enmities between some of these people. We talked about Peter Moss in his book, Love Thy Neighbor, which is a brutal recounting of what happened. So the Serbs decide, OK, we want to be in charge.

And, you know, they're looking over at Bosnia and saying, OK, well, we want that, too. And Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia, a very cosmopolitan city. And I think that's one thing that's important to understand for our listeners to build just as a refresher is that, again, this is multi ethnic, multinational, multi religious. At one point was Sarajevo called the Jerusalem of the Balkans because you had Jews, you had Serbs.

You had, you know, Catholics or Eastern Orthodox. And in fact, in one neighborhood, you had a synagogue, a mosque and a church like all right next to each other, but also a lot of secular Muslims, secular Jews, secular Christians, intermarriage, interfaith marriages.

And so when this all went down, suddenly now all of these lines, whether or not it's geographic, religious, ethnic, start being split. And there at the top is a guy named Slobodan Milosevic. So it's a bit tricky. In some ways, you've got to think about this whole collapse as a bit of a real estate grab because you have Serbia and Milosevic, who was not a...

believer in the nationalist movement. He was a power player. It was a sure way to try to get there. He wanted to get to the coast, really. And that's Croatia. So they had their own war first, and they went around Bosnia to fight each other.

And then when it became kind of obvious to Milosevic and Tudjman, who was the president of Croatia, they kind of got together and made a secret pact. It's recorded. This is a recorded conversation of them basically agreeing to split up Bosnia. And that's when it all went down heavily, like bad in Bosnia, because basically they were being attacked from both sides, right?

Croatia had a proper army. Serbia had taken the Yugoslav army. And the Bosnians were me and you who, you know, hey, Reid's got a shotgun and Bill's got a hatchet. We didn't have anything. And then we had an embargo.

from the West on Bosnia and the Serbs had a pipeline to Russia. So it became a slaughter. I mean, I've been to Croatia before, which is a beautiful, gorgeous, breathtaking country, but you can't see in, you know, whether or not it's in split or some of the other cities, you can still see, you know, bullet holes in the concrete. Right.

And of course, you know, as loud, over smiling Americans, Bill, right? Of course, we think that's interesting, but we can't really imagine it. And so, you know, let's talk about the movie, because so much of what's happening, you know, with someone like a Milosevic, you know, he's coming and saying, we're right. They're coming to get us. This is our stuff.

There's this idea of like, you know, even Christiane Amanpour, who you interview, said this was the first time one is in a journalist that she felt unsafe. Right. Journalists were being killed. Snipers. Obviously, we remember so many of us remember that. But also, she said, you know, this was for her anyway, the onset of what we now call fake news. And so like so many things in history, maybe it doesn't echo, but it certainly rhymes. It's a little scary because.

In that time, like she said, and me, I was young, right? I was 26. Fake news was a new thing and the news didn't know how to quite handle it. I make an argument sometimes they don't know how to handle it now. Oh, they definitely don't know how to handle it because, oh, just because this person said this insanely crazy thing, we got to report it. And then we got to have a guy on to say, well, that's not right. Why not just say that's ridiculous out loud?

And that's what Christiane was kind of getting at is, you know, they had to kind of figure that out. For me, I was not a journalist. It was very easy. Like, this is just nonsense. I mean, we would sit there. Sometimes we'd have a little TV, occasionally electricity would work. And watching Serb media was mind boggling.

Just an example is when we would come into the city with our humanitarian loads, you had to go through Serb checkpoints, right? And you had to give them 40% of your load. That was the UN deal. And they would ask us, we're only two, three kilometers from the center of the city. And they would ask us, you know, are the Mujahideen taking over the city? I was in Syria for a year and a half of that war. I did not have one war.

religious conversation. Not one in a town that has a lot of religion, as you say, symbolically everywhere. And that kind of gives you an idea of how

This side was perceiving what was going on in there was not going on in there in any fashion. It was a very confusing thing. I want to ask two questions. The one is, why do you think, as you think back about your experience there, which I want to spend some time on, why did the Serbs decide to go so heavy, so brutal, so awful, so fast?

Was it just sort of yet another misunderstanding of like, we're going to go in and we're going to take what we want and there won't be any repercussions. This will be over. We'll roll over them. Like, why the necessity to, you know, snipe at civilians and, you know, to ethnically cleanse Muslims and cyber needs? So, like, why did they decide this was necessary?

Well, you have to remember, this started in a really interesting way. It started in eastern Bosnia, which is a very village-oriented area. It's very, you know, kind of forest. And at that time, this might ring a bell to you in a more recent way. At that time, what happened is the Serbs enlisted militias. They didn't yet use the Serbian army or the Yugoslav army. Little green men. Yeah, little green men. And they sent them across the border. And it's something like this. They went into a village who have Serbian and Bosnian Muslims living in it.

And they would quickly start to execute the Muslims. And if a Serbian were to come out and say, hey, what are you doing? He's my neighbor. He's dead. So they basically created an enormous amount of fear that that fear would spread by word village to village. And then you become more fearful that the Bosnian Muslims might do this or they're causing it. So it just started to become a menacing fear.

After that was done, then they went after the more, you know, let's call it the cities. They did think it was going to go quick because the Bosnians had no weapons. And so what happened is inside Sarajevo, when it went down in 1992, April 6th, that's when the war started in Sarajevo.

The Bosnians, there's a huge weapon factory and barracks in Sarajevo. They quickly took it over, the local police, and captured some Serbs in there. The Serbs wanted back, like soldier generals. So the deal was, we'll give you guys, but we're going to keep the place and the arms. That gave him a little buffer.

In terms of what they did, I would argue this. This is what I would know most people that spend time in Syria in the war. You asked the question about why they keep sniping them, why they keep killing them. Syria was a political grape.

So when they wanted something out of Geneva, they would really attack Sarajevo to get Geneva to kind of go, okay, okay, okay. What can we do here to pacify this a little bit? Then when they got what they wanted, they let Sarajevo go breathe a little bit. You know, so it was a negotiation tool. And unfortunately, the West fell for it over and over and over and over again.

The lesson we still cannot continue to learn, right? Yes. Even up to this day, you know, and that was one thing that I was looking at was even one of the subjects in your movie says, quote, we don't seem to learn, right? You didn't even believe that it was going on as it started. Yeah, Gino, Gino Banana, he's a great artist who started the... He did hair for a thousand days in Cerebral, which was phenomenal. He, in the movie, says...

Six months into the war, we still didn't believe the war was happening. There's a reason for that. It's one of the reasons that I stayed so long, is that the reason for that isn't that they're idiots. The reason for that is that they are so intermarried, they are so deeply intertwined, that the concept that someone is telling them that they have to divide and become nationalist Serbs, nationalist Bosnians, and nationalist Croats, it wasn't in their brain. They didn't have the imagination to imagine this tragedy.

So they kind of got caught off foot in kind of an innocent way. And they paid the price for not realizing that this evil can live out there. Right. So you said you're 26 years old. You had a beautiful head of hair, right? As I saw in the movie. How did you end up there?

One could say by mistake or maybe like a series of events that you don't always know that's happening to you, you know, especially at that age, kind of cascading. The trigger of it would have been, you know, a death of a woman I really loved, a young girl. And that sent me in two years into kind of a spiral. And at some point, it's going to kill you. I had to do something with this energy. And I had a friend from college that was working in the NGO space in Croatia in Split.

And I basically, I called him and I said, Hey, I know what's going on. I want to, I want to come over. He's the only person in my life that knew me and her.

And he knew, he was like, do not come here, Bill, because I know what you're doing. I said, okay, I'll be there a couple of weeks. So, you know, I had no money. I had a one-way ticket to Luxembourg, got a train to Croatia. And when I entered the war, about three weeks to a month later with the circus, I had 200 bucks in my boot and that's it. I had no way home and $200. And this, you know, stayed for quite a while and did a couple of things.

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So let's talk about a couple of things, and then I want to talk about how Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen Jr., the guys from U2 get involved, and the story about how you first met them was fabulous. But one of the subjects, I think maybe she'd been a newscaster. I can't recall her name, Bill. Bessna. Bessna. She really didn't like the idea that there were these war tourists that showed up that

They came with cameras and they were almost like, you know, this is an adventure for them. And I recall, Bill, just to show you like how ingrained my parents' TV habits were. I recalled a scene from MASH. Remember MASH? Alan Alda playing Hawkeye Pierce. And he said, I used to love Hemingway.

But Hemingway went to war on purpose, and I could never imagine why anybody would do that. He went to watch the war. I couldn't figure out why anybody would do that. And that's what stuck in my head is why would anybody, not you going as part of an NGO or trying to figure out what you can do when you get there, but someone who would simply go to take pictures, not as a journalist, just as someone who's like an adventure junkie. It just made no sense to me.

I met a lot of them and they always assume you're one of them. And that's brutal. They're very hard. And I ended up in the beginning, I was very put off by it. In the end, it's what drove me to do better because I respected that shield they had. They didn't have any time for your nonsense, right? Like, because what people do is, I know, because I saw it a lot. They would come, they'd be totally rattled as a human being. And they would say, well, I'm going to go back to split and I'm going to come back with A, B, C, D.

Now, do I blame someone going to split saying finally, when they sit down and have a beer for a couple nights and they're like, I'm out of here? No, I get it. But that promise is a killer. And they would rather you just say, I'm never coming back. And they're like, oh, okay, I get it. It's that promise. And I learned that over time. And so I became a kind of a slave to the idea that if I'm going to tell you I'm coming back, I'm going to come back no matter what.

And I took that very seriously. It took a while. It took a long time to break through the Vesnas and Alma and these people you see in the movie to make them realize I am going to come back.

And it also is what drove me to try to do more than just deliver food. Because after a while, delivering food is kind of, it's pretty depressing because you just know they're starving and they're dying and they're being shot at. And you're just, I mean, it's important. But what happened is for me, the thing that changed everything was once I started going to the clubs and the discos and art openings and hair and all this stuff that was all kind of underground.

Literally, literally. It's kind of like, you know, we all seek.

the essence of life in some way, right? Whether it's a starry night and you feel this moment. When you go into these places in that situation, you just feel like this is the essence of life, like at its core, like this is who we are. And it was overwhelming. It's like a drug. And that's what made me think what they really want. And they would tell me this, what they really want is not to be forgotten as cultural people, because that's very important to them. And

And that made me think, okay, let's do something that's kind of addressing that, getting that part of them heard, because that part was not being heard. Even Christiana, it was their four years, has said, I didn't know these clubs existed because she was busy running around doing the top line news, right? Like negotiations and whatnot. And that whole world was just living and trying to be

human. And there's a big part of this movie that's about art and culture. And I think sometimes people mistake that for the luxury good that the West thinks art is. You know, opera, the theater, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Concerts on the lawn with beer on a Saturday night in the summer. $200 tickets that you can't get to whoever. And I get that. But that's not what we're talking about here. There is art being made. But what really is important in a war, if you're trapped in there,

Is it your art? You, you all have art. We all have art in us. We just don't always know what it is. It doesn't have to be painting or book. It could be you're a great cook for your neighbors. You're a great storyteller to the children who need distraction. You're fill in the blank. That is the art that will show up in a war. You will become a

That or you'll become what you really are. If you're a murderer, you're going to become that guy. You know, everything becomes extreme. And everything becomes revelatory, right? This is a primal thing where all is revealed. All is revealed. And also you and I read, if you were both, if we were both there and you're a Bosnian, when we're sitting down to have that cup of tea for two hours, we both know this could be the last cup of tea that we both have.

With each other or with just ourselves? What kind of effect does that have on people? Because you could make an argument that like what you did or what so many of your subjects did, which is they chose to not go into the darkness and frankly into nihilism, but into light and art and music and community. But you could become a nihilist in a real hurry. None of it matters anyway. You know, tomorrow's promise to no one. I'm going to do whatever I want because society's broken down. And what difference does it make?

There was a little bit of that. There was people that were locked in holes of their own minds. And there also was a little bit of that party like it's 1999 because there's a side to that that can get a little wild. And that existed there. And I also met people. There's a story of a guy who was near a neighbor, a very dear friend of mine.

He was frightened. And this is very common. No one made fun of people like that. You're like, he's not going to leave. Not going to leave his building. He's not going to leave his apartment. So, you know, people just take care of him. Nobody like calls him out. They're like, okay, we're going to bring him food and water. And then there'd be like no shelling or sniping for like a week. And then on third day, you start to kind of go, okay, you still are careful, but you're a little bit slower and you're walking. You're a little bit, you're not running everywhere. And then this guy came out like the third year of the war.

Comes out and across the street was an empty, like an old laundry. So it was just an empty concrete shell with nothing in it. And he just went in there. So he went across from the apartment in there. Shell comes to the window and kills him. The first time he left his house in three years. It's like, and the thing about snipers in that place is that you kind of knew where they were because you got used to the angles, but the shelling didn't.

Right. It was indiscriminate and arbitrary. You don't know where that's coming from. It's random. I mean, you don't know what's going to happen. Okay. So you've got this, you've got musicals going on, you've got punk rock shows, you've got disco. Everybody's trying to live an approximate nightlife, for lack of a better way to put it, Bill. And that's not pejorative, but they are trying to find some

normalcy in a completely abnormal situation. So now let's talk about Bono, obviously longtime activists across the world. You know, this is the early nineties. As I said, you know, they've had enormous, like most bands could ever hope to have, you know, three songs in an album like Joshua tree, right? They had a whole album and then, you know, then they had rattle and hum and then they changed music in their own way with Octoon baby. Look,

Zoo Ropa, I know it's a bunch of leftovers, still one of my favorite albums. You're not going to change my mind. But how did that come to be? How did this relationship between you and the band and Bono and these people in Sarajevo like.

What was the genesis of that relationship? Kind of like you. I mean, I was, I wasn't a teenager. I'm a little older than you, I guess. But I grew up with you two as well, pretty much. And I mean, for me, it was Unfearable Fire. Probably still my favorite overall. Yeah, sonically. You know, I was in college when Joshua Tree came out. And so I was part of that soundscape. And you know, the thing about it is, is that

Back then, as you know, when you got an album, you read the liner notes. You read every lyric. You read everything. Nowadays, you download a song and I don't even know what they're saying. So I think that my friend was going to that show. I just didn't care. I was in Syria. I came out one time and he's like, well, we're going to go to that. I'm like, I don't give a crap. And this is in Italy, right? Yeah. But when I went back, I started to think, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

And then I saw them on MTV. And one day when I was down at the TV station, I'm like, okay, hold on a second. They're on tour. They're pretty cool. They're Irish, which means that you have to explain ethnic and religious nonsenses because they live in it. So that to me felt like home base, like they're going to get it. And so I just, I wrote them, you know, I just felt like I'm going to reach out to them and they have to say yes because they're

How do you say no from a message from inside this place? Because especially if you're European, you know that place is cut off. There's no in and out. I can get in and out as a body, my body, but there's no messaging going in and out. There's no phones, no electricity, there's nothing. And so again, it's not told in the movie, but it took like a week to get that fax out because I had to find someone with a fax. Right, and a phone line. Right.

And a phone line. And electricity. This was a three-tier problem, right? Yeah. And most of those were controlled by the government. And I didn't know the government. So luckily, my friend Jason, who the guy who I originally went there to visit, his friend ran the IRC, International Rescue Committee, in Sarajevo. And all the no's I'd gotten from the Red Cross and from everybody else said, no, no, no, no, we don't know who you are. This is crap.

And when I went to the IRC, John Fawcett, he's an old 60s guy. So he's like, what do you want to do? I said, well, I'm trying to reach you two to see if I can get them to do something and, you know, rock and roll. He's like, oh, totally. Put that in there. You know, so, you know, instantly the fax was gone and that kind of started the ball rolling, you know, and when they said yes.

I had to figure out how to get there, which was not easy. And then I had to figure out how to get into the stadium because I did not have tickets. And I did not know how to get into the stadium, which is kind of an interesting story in the movie. But eventually I got in.

You know, there was a special I can't remember. Maybe it was on Max. It was Bono and the Edge. And they were doing a little like sort of super stripped down thing, not the sphere. But this was, I think, in in Dublin or maybe Belfast. And Bono was joking that he was always saying yes to things that the rest of the band hadn't agreed. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They're like, it's a thing. We're going to go where you did what? Yeah.

Yeah. He's, this is the thing he does. Yeah. And so, you know, that first interview with you, you know, you could tell he's sort of, you show, you know, let's say four or five minutes of it, but you can tell that it's taking him a minute to sort of get it to take hold in his mind. Does that make sense? And then you can almost sort of see the light switch come on. He goes, wait, wait, wait, because he's not really looking at you.

Right. He's sort of thinking about he's being very Bono, you know, and then he starts looking at you. He turned literally his whole attention turns toward you. It's actually a visible physical thing when you see him click on. And for someone who's done, let's say any one week, he's done a hundred interviews right on a tour.

He kind of had probably a vague idea that I was somehow attached to a Bosnian crew, but he didn't know much else, probably. So when I got in there, he started his usual stick, right? The rock and roll Jim Morrison. Right. He's wearing like the patent leather suit because this was Zoo TV, which I want to get to. He's the fly with the big black sunglasses. Yeah. Yeah. And I have always said that.

It is one of the worst professional interviews you'll ever see, but it is an amazing conversation because my intent going there was not to become some journalist. My intent was to have a conversation and tell him what's happening. So I never lost that focus of my intent.

I mean, you know, look, if you watch it, I have a microphone in my hand with a baby diaper around it because the wires are crackly. So I had to tape baby diaper. And, you know, it's just in plain sight because I'm not there for the aesthetics. I'm there to have a conversation. And it turns out to be a conversation that one, you know, I've quickly learned who this man was, is that.

He's very genuine. And for someone to trigger off of their normal and tune into something that fast and hear something different, he's hearing something different right from me. It speaks volumes about who he is. And that 15 minute interview led to everything. I mean, I was doing satellite linkups in two weeks and I only met them that one night. I've always said that these linkups, which you can talk about is you only knew me for one night. I was live to a hundred thousand people in Rome.

I could have screamed. I could have pulled my pants down. But this is something that we just know about each other. There's a lot of trust.

And that trust, once it's created, you know, it's now 32 years on, it's a bond, you know, it doesn't go away. And he took something on faith, which I think, you know, some, a lot of times we don't do anymore. And I want to, so let, let me take a step back. First of all, great to see Adam Clayton being interviewed. You know, the rhythm section of U2 doesn't get enough attention for all the work they put in over the years. So it was great to see him. And I'm sorry for all the listeners I'm nerding out on, on U2 stuff, but yeah,

So it was the Zoo TV tour, you know, and if you think about it, Bill, not to put too fine a point on it, the Zoo TV tour predicted what our life was going to be 30 years before it happened, right? Like it was constant overload video, you know, just garish things, you know, I mean, Bono's playing the part of, you know, an overdone revivalist. And so like so much of what they said, the world,

had become or was going to become really started on those stages in, what, 93, 94? They were ahead of their time. I mean, they were, you know, the 24-hour news cycle just started. The televisions are 90 feet. You can go to any topic you want, just like we do now. And the irony is we were kind of at the very cusp, at the end of that technology that we were using, satellites, compared to today. It's like in Ukraine, you know, everybody's got Telegram, right? So they can literally...

live stream what's happening. There's no hiding it from us. Whereas then you could still hide and it would cost a lot of money to do satellite links. They were at the beginning of the vocalizing what's going to happen, but at the end of that technology being outdated.

Let's talk a little bit about that. So the guys in the band take it on board, you know, and so now it's you and a couple of your friends and compatriots in Sarajevo. In a couple of instances, there's very poignant, you know, girlfriend, a boyfriend are in the crowd. They're saying hello in English and in, I don't even know what language they speak in. Is it Bosnian? Bosnian. Bosnian. But then it comes to a point where...

it jumps the shark. Like you get this feeling, wait a second. Yes, people are listening, but are we doing it for ourselves? Are we doing it, you know, for the good of these people in Sarajevo and Bosnia, right? Are we doing it for the guys, the band? And it's very interesting to see how quickly you lose the thread on it. Yeah. It's two different stories though. One is the bands and the management and, you know, the team over there, what they're going through. Like we had an earpiece yesterday,

But we never saw these satellites. We didn't have any sort of anything. You know, there's a dark room, a light went on, light went off, dark room. So me, I just wanted to keep the attempt to try to create impact. But if you're on the outside world, I think you kind of started to feel the repetitiveness or like it's just not working. And maybe attendees at one show, you

Some really moved, but some weren't. And they started complaining to the next city for, you know, I don't know, you know, things like that can happen. And so, you know, that's when they decided to, they think it ran its course. For me, I was more devastated because I just, I wanted it to work. It did work in its way, you know? And some of that would come, I wouldn't learn that till later. One great story is I was, I never went to the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo because it was where the media was. And I kind of,

anti-guy it was that time but I was starving I had no food for a week and a half and so I had some money in my pocket so I went in there and you could get like canned stew but it's all journalists the whole and all the journalists you would know like famous people in there right so I'm in there and I'm just eating and the guy's like hey are you doing those satellites with you too I said yeah yeah

And man, it started to debate at that table, which of course they were like, you know, it was, you know, some guys were like, that's bullshit. They're just doing it for themselves. Higher. I ride into their horses. And another guy's like, no rock and roll can change the world, man. It can happen. So, you know, you had this battle happening. And to me, I was like,

We're winning. If this battle is happening, you know, this is what I wanted personally. And anyway, so I was kind of at least that was that's the only piece of outside that I had was that conversation. So I didn't really have that feeling, but I knew when it was time, it was time they were running the show out there. Right. I was just running around trying to find people. It was depressing. I was really like bummed out, but they brought me out pretty soon after that.

So let's talk about what was in the context of the Yugoslav war.

Was it Srebrenica, the massacre there? What was the moment? And you related in the film, but I want, you know, I'd love for the listeners to hear because I had to be reminded. What was the pivotal moment when the West got involved, when NATO engaged and suddenly, you know, there's airstrikes and, you know, quickly the Serbs collapse, right? Like they're bad guys. They got artillery, but they do not have modern Western military hardware.

And as soon as they come up against it, just...

And you could say that this is the hardest part of this story is that the West knew what the Serbs were doing. They had rape camps. They were killing and raping people constantly. So when Srebrenica happened, it basically became, let's call it, the last final straw. And literally that was the word. The word was, okay, this is it. If you do one more, anything, anything, we're coming after you.

And, you know, of course, if you're in Bosnia, you're like, one more? You need one more Srebrenica? They just killed 8,000 men and boys in 24 hours. By the way, people don't realize that is very, very, very hard to do. You have to have buses. You have to have enough armor. You have to have tractors. You have to have bulldozers. And you have to do it fast. So you have to have wires. Everybody's wrists were tied. That's a lot of process.

A lot of thinking of how to execute 8,000 people. The logistics of death. The logistics of death in 24 hours because they wanted to cover it and not be seen. And they slipped a little bit. That's what they got caught on. But the actual moment...

that triggered NATO was a moment that actually happened. I was there, it was in Sarajevo at a marketplace and that was horrific and I just happened to be in the area. Right, so they mortared a marketplace. Yeah, killed, you know, 60 or 70 people and then... So was this, I mean, was this a real live, you happened to just be walking that way just after this happened and you happened to come upon it? I was in a Land Rover filming the head of AP.

It was mentally unstable. And he'd been in too many wars. And the bombs had just hit. He opened the back door and started screaming in Sniper's Alley. I'm like, okay, I'm filming this. This is crazy. And the driver stops. We run into the marketplace and it's just, you know, it's horrendous. And I can tell you when I knew the war was over. I can tell you that.

It wasn't then. I mean, I just, I was putting people in cars and I got to the hospital in one of those cars with a person, you know, dying. And I can tell you what I knew. Outside that hospital were hardcore journalists that, you know, I knew who they were. They'd been there a long time. They were seasoned and they were sitting like on, you know, the grass or the curb. And they were like, you could tell by the way they were staring, they were done.

Like they were done. Whatever happens here, I just felt like these people are all going to leave. They're just done. They can't take anymore. And within 24 hours, the NATO bomb started. You know, and it's interesting, too. I think sometimes I think a lot of times nowadays we underestimate the power or the effect that that kind of media can have. I mean, go back 25 years prior to that, Bill, Walter Cronkite.

Was it LBJ said when we'd lost Walter Cronkite, we'd lost the war. Right. Yeah, totally. And no, this is part of why Christiana is so good at what she does. And because she's honest and there was other people, there was a really good journalist. When I say I just my I was in a different place, but journalists there were very important to keeping that voice alive. Without them, man, the service would have killed that place a lot earlier.

But let me ask you this, as you're looking back now on this, whether or not it's, you know, fighting for place or fighting for power or fighting for money. It was a Bono who said, you know, the heart is greedy, right? The human heart is greedy. But we seem destined or doomed is, you know, sometimes if I'm a little bit tired to just keep repeating it.

And, you know, it'll be a different country. It'll be a different language. It'll be different people. But, Bill, it seems to happen again and again. And the people who can and should be the first to step up and say, don't do it, are the ones who too often say, don't do it again. Don't do it again. Don't do it again. And then only when they feel like they have no other choice do they finally do the right thing.

Yeah, I came of age in this thing and it hasn't stopped and it's exhausting. I mean, I never lose hope, but like we were making this film in the middle of when Ukraine started, right? And we had to pause going over there.

Because the Bosnians had a lot of PTSD suddenly freaking out because they're so close. And, you know, I mean, Putin is a pretty easy, you can see through what he's done. It's not complicated when he starts calling Ukrainians all Nazis. You're like, okay, here comes Milosevic's misinformation package just being unloaded in a more complicated way.

and the green men and the false flag, you know, blob and a terror. Terror is important. It's the same playbook. I mean, it is literally the same playbook to a boring kind of degree. As Hannah Arendt called it, the banality of evil, right? Yeah, it's just exactly. That's exactly what it is. And we know what the people in the White House know it. This is the same old thing. But, you know, Russia is a different game because they have nuclear weapons and you got to play some weird game, right? But we know what they're going to do. And we know, as Christiane said,

You know, when NATO struck, there was so much editorials written on the Serbs are like a badger in a cave, man. And you'll be in a thousand year war with these people. Right. Because everybody thinks about Afghanistan. Everybody's putting everything in the context of, let's say, Afghanistan or Vietnam. And also, yes. And also the Serbs beat back Hitler.

right they were the partisans so whoever's writing these editorials in new york have not been at the checkpoints they're out of it it's like this is not an army that you need to be completely afraid of unless you have no arms and as soon as nato hit that was over it was over like literally it was literally over in 48 hours but it took you know some negotiations but the fighting was over

And I don't know what's going to, you know, this we're talking about Ukraine now, but it's the same playbook. And the way you do it is so simple that it's tragic, meaning blame other people, the other. The key to all this is creating an other. You got to have an other. And those others are taking away from you something that you want. Right. And it was one of the people in your movie said, demonize the other and promise to get rid of them. Yeah. And then you're my champion.

You know, parallels that are going on in our country are enormous. So it's the same playbook in it. This is the complicated part. There's only one complicated thing for me. Is it the grievances or the pain that is being felt by the people who want you to blame the other can't actually be real.

Meaning they feel isolated. They don't feel heard. They don't feel part of anything. You know, whatever you don't fill in the blank. That actually can be real. It just makes them vulnerable to believe in the nonsense others. And so the other becomes an easy enemy. And then it becomes a rabid bonfire, you know, and you can't stop it. And it is, as Christian said, you know, the easiest way to power is just make people the other. And, you know, here we go. And I wish we could...

I don't know if it's an education problem or... No, I think it's a lack of imagination. Yeah, a lack of imagination. And listen, I say this too, is everything that we're seeing here at home or in Ukraine or in Gaza or anywhere where there's ugliness going on, none of this is new in human history, right? None of it. The difference is that there's a reason why people who forget history are doomed to repeat it because we keep repeating it, right? Because we're like, oh, it can't happen here because...

whether or not it's you know russia is an empire with ukraine and it's not one without it or it's milosevic saying the serbs are the biggest bullies on the block and we want to own everything you know we fought a draw with the croatians and now we're going to dismantle the bosnians or it's you know donald trump saying you know these people ruined america you're a bunch of suckers for letting them do it whatever it is the inputs are always different but the outputs are

often end up in the same place because there's only so many outputs there's infinite inputs but only so many outputs the problem is is that they are all terrible for human beings right and economies and whatever else you care about and then there's always the weird thing which is when that personality the most milosevic or whoever you want to put in that spot goes away

There's a weirdness because like, oh, because none of them, you know, and this is what we've seen throughout history, too, with the exception of monarchies, is these people never have succession plans. Right. Because the idea, first of all, they all think they're going to live forever. And second, the idea of even anointing someone else as your successor immediately means that

That maybe if somebody likes them better, that they get rid of you. Right. So there can't be a succession plan. Right. That is right to the end. And then they just go away. Yeah. Well, it's not that at that point, it's not their problem. All right. So take us forward 30 years, Bill, where are your friends now?

Where is Sarajevo? Where is Bosnia? As I said, I've been to Croatia. That seems to be a pretty thriving tourist stop now. But where is Bosnia? Bosnia is in a weird place because all the other countries, like Croatia is thriving as they should with the coast and it's gorgeous. And Slovenia has always been fine. Serbia is a little bit, well, Belgrade is a more bigger city, so they got a lot going on.

I mean, Bosnia is in a weird place because of the Dayton Peace Accord. And Dayton Peace Accord was built to end a war, was not built to govern. And it ended the war, so that you kind of go, okay, that's okay. But if you have to change the presidency every two years, and at least a third of that cycle is canceled.

nationalist freaks, it's a problem. And also the second problem is that it takes two years to start to figure out how to take the garbage out. Right, to turn the lights on. Right, yeah. No one does anything governmentable. You know, they don't do anything because they're just waiting for that two years or they have to spend six months fighting against the other two factions to get the electricity. It's just stupid. And so...

And it also breeds corruption because they're going to be gone soon enough. They're going to be gone. They got to get a little peace. And also the Bosnians, like a lot of Yugoslavia, because of the beginning stuff we talked about, they don't have a history of voting in a way that's meaningful because they didn't really vote.

So it's kind of a, they're like, ah, that Knicks guy is the same as the other guy. And so there's a little bit of lack of- Civic belief, yeah. Civic belief. And I've always been kind of at that under here, but it doesn't really work. There's good people there. There's good people that want to lead, but it's tough for them to make traction. And has Sarajevo rebuilt at all? Oh, Sarajevo is gorgeous, rebuilt. It's a fabulous city to go to. It's magic. We did the film festival there.

And that was, of course, that was the ultimate jewel of what we were trying to do is to have it be shown there. And the story is very well known to Bosnians. So we did 7,000 people. It was like two or three outdoor venues all at one time. It was incredible. And we should not sleep on the fact that Bono and you two actually did come to Sarajevo, played a concert of 50,000 people. And he made the promise that they'd go. And one interesting thing, and I think this is why sometimes...

you know, we shouldn't sleep on the people that are not singing on stage, but the guys that build the stage that one of U2's crew leaders or, you know, tour leaders said, we told anybody who didn't want to go, you don't have to go and you won't be, you know, no one to look down for you. You won't be penalized for it. And he said, everybody went, everybody went. You know, that show is, it's a really interesting thing about this film is that

That show has been hidden in the archive, right? And no one's really ever seen it. And there's a reason because as, you know, the voice, the voice problem, he lost his voice and because of nerves, because of emotion, right?

But in the context of this movie, that makes that losing of the voice even more powerful, more real, more emotional, more intensely unifying with the people that are watching it. And that was an incredible moment in history in Cerevo to have these 50,000 people who weren't, you know,

No one's asking anybody's last names, but they're all mixing in there. And you don't quite know who's in there. And, you know, as was reported at the end of the night, the ambassador who was in the movie, Satcheby, asked to the police, like, was there any incidents there?

And it was like two drunk guys. That's it. So it was an incredible moment and it was so beautiful. And it was, you know, listen, you two is, they always see themselves as just a character in the story and a vehicle for trying to mix, you know, putting a light on something, right? That's what artists do. But,

Not all artists carry through that far. And that speaks volumes by the way.

You know, Paul didn't tell us everything we wanted to hear, but at least he was honest. This is a guy I can work with. And it was interesting to hear him as a guy who's done so much and affected so many and has led so many, you know, humanitarian and other efforts that like, you know, even for him, he was like, at least the guy was honest with me. Right. This is a guy I can work with because he's not bullshitting me.

Yeah, I mean, honest brokers are very important. You know where you are. I think that's very true of who he is. All right, well, Bill, so the movie will be out streaming on Paramount Plus soon. Everybody, if you have Paramount Plus, watch it when it comes out. Look for it. We'll make sure to make sure that as soon as it's announced when it's going to run, we'll tell everybody. If you don't have Paramount Plus, get it.

But Bill, before we let you go, where can we find you and where can we find your work? And what else are you working on that everybody should be on the lookout for? Well, me, I mean, I have a website, www.billcarter.cc. You know, I'm always busy with new projects. I'm trying to do a documentary in Africa. That's a phenomenally interesting topic that I made a short thing on last spring. So I'm working with one of the producers from this one.

just the future. And I should note that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are two of the producers on this movie as well. Yeah. I mean, there's a minor note. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, listen to me, Matt and Ben produced it, you know, and then add chicken shine is the director. I'm, I'm the writer and connector of people, but you know, and Sarah Anthony is an amazing producer. Drew Benton works for Matt and Ben incredible guy. So pivotal and all the YouTube people that were so great in this thing. And, um,

I mean, I'm busy with new docs. I work at, I do a lot of short docs for MIT. I, I write, I'm writing a script. So, you know, I'm kind of always trying to chase what's now interesting to me. But part of me is also spending a lot of time with people like you, because I believe that we are in a pivotal time to be active in the democratic space for the next six months. And this movie is,

You know, people walk out of this movie, sometimes they're crying, but people, they're not crying because they're sad. They're crying because they feel humanity. That's the most powerful emotion you can have. When you feel humanity, you just want to cry. And you know what I mean? And this movie makes you feel it deeply. And that's a really great thing to be reminded by. And so I want people to remind themselves, don't fool around with what you got because it's good.

You know, democracy is a, we've gotten a little lazy. We have a 250 year old ish democracy and we think I had to survive anything perhaps, but it can also really, really be easy to dismantle if you're not paying attention.

Whether or not it's what these folks in Sarajevo went through 30 years ago, what they put on the line to do the things, what you put on the line to do. We've seen with, you know, Alexei Navalny, right? He gave his life for the cause. And guys out there, we're not asking you to go to the barricades. We're not asking you to run across Sniper's Alley. We're asking you to do your part as Americans, because I promise you,

I promise you guys, the alternative that Bill is describing is one that none of us, one, can imagine, and two, one, is to have to realize. And if we don't take it seriously now, Bill, as you know, the rebuilding process does not start on day one.

789. We don't know when, when, and if it might restart. And when we do, all we know is that it will be worse than what we have now because the ugliness and the destruction, whether or not that's physical, emotional, political, financial, economic, whatever it is, will far outweigh the idea that you got off your couch, you got out of your house, you knocked on a door, you sent a text message, you cast a ballot guys.

What we're being asked to do is easy compared to the kinds of people that Bill, first you are Bill, but second, the kinds of people that you've documented in this film. And all I can say to you is thank you for that. I also want to say something. Sometimes there's a lot of issues and sometimes they can get a lot of passion. But in this particular situation, we need to just simplify it.

If there's someone that's going to protect the democracy model, go there. If there's someone that's going to destroy the democracy model, don't go there. And a lot of other issues, we're not always happy with everything, but if you can just focus on that,

It might make it a little bit easier to do. Right. And everybody say it with me. You've heard it. You've heard me say it a million times. I'm going to say it again. We don't have to agree on everything, Bill. We have to agree on one thing. All right, Bill, thank you so much for joining me as always getting, you can find me on Twitter and Tik TOK at Reed Galen on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen USA.

new handle and over on excuse me over on Substack at the home front Bill Carter thanks for joining me thank you so much for having me appreciate it and everybody else we'll see you next time thanks again to everyone for listening be sure to follow and subscribe to the Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts Spotify Google or however you listen don't forget to leave a five-star review

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