Korey Rowe and Loose Change

Geopolitics & Empire, hosted by Hrvoje · Published: 4 September 2026 ·
Guest: Korey Rowe, US Army veteran, filmmaker and author ^[1]

Rowe is a husband, father, filmmaker, entrepreneur and US Army veteran based in Oneonta, New York; founder of Otsego Media and owner of DOSHA, the city's first licensed cannabis dispensary ^[1:1]^[2]. His memoir traces his journey "from soldier to fugitive to unlikely producer" of Loose Change, beginning with his enlistment just before 9/11 and two combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq ^[3]. Hrvoje read it overnight and called it a book with a "prodigal son-like arc".

Significant Points

Why he wrote the book

Years in the making, blocked by "hard scenes" (Iraq, Baghdad); a memoir-writing class unlocked it — the advice was "just write it for yourself".
He rediscovered his 2003 Iraq journals, using entries to "connect some of the early dots" and explain his decisions.
Finished at the end of last year and timed for the 25th anniversary of 9/11 so it could be "part of the conversation".

Soldiering and disillusionment

A high-school dropout who enlisted on 21 August 2001 — three weeks before 9/11. Shown the attacks on TV during processing, he was in Afghanistan 18 weeks later, pro-war and with no exposure to mainstream news.
Six months after returning, he was redeployed via Kuwait to invade Iraq, travelling from the southern border through Baghdad and Mosul to the Syrian border. His verdict: "what they had told the American people were straight up lies" — no WMDs, no chemical depots, no structured military; mostly people living on about a dollar a day, caught in the crossfire.
Hrvoje compared him to Pat Tillman and cited his own Geneva graduate-school professor, international lawyer Curtis Doebbler, who joined Saddam Hussein's defence team because — in Hrvoje's telling — the accusations failed under international law. Doebbler was indeed part of Saddam's multinational legal team ^[4].

AWOL and the federal warrant

Rowe says he served every day of his contract; when the army tried to send him back for a third tour, he went AWOL — the book opens with that decision — and spent the six years producing Loose Change on a federal warrant, "trying to expose the government that I was on the run for".
This is corroborated by press records: Rowe was arrested at his Oneonta home in July 2007 on a military warrant for alleged desertion, despite claiming an honourable discharge; the 101st Airborne listed him as a deserter ^[5]^[6].
On whether he could evade a warrant for six years today: "the negligence of the United States government cannot be understated" — he found it "strikingly weird" how easily he flew across the country.

Making Loose Change

Teamed with best friend Dylan Avery; their first cut mixed acted scenes with documentary segments, but audiences said "cut the acting... just make a documentary".
Distributed free via "social media 1.0" (Google Video, pre-YouTube) — the film is still free today. Vanity Fair dubbed it "the first internet blockbuster" in August 2006, by which point it had drawn at least 10 million viewings and hit No. 1 on Google Video's Top 100 ^[7].
Jason Bermas (met at a pizzeria) joined for the third edition. Rowe framed the successive cuts as an "encyclopedia" — each more scholarly and less sensational, adding credentialed voices — all aimed at one goal: a new 9/11 investigation, because the 9/11 Commission Report was "such a whitewash". The series ultimately ran to seven films (2005–2017), credited to Avery, Rowe, Bermas and Matthew Brown ^[8], with Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup released on 22 September 2009, narrated by Daniel Sunjata ^[9].

His verdict on 9/11 today

"9/11 was something that we absolutely knew was coming... we allowed it to happen" — then used to entrench two theatre wars that cost trillions, thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, destabilising the region for generations, with nobody held accountable.
He wants a new investigation "starting with World Trade Center Building 7", citing the University of Alaska Fairbanks structural re-evaluation, whose principal conclusion was that fire did not cause WTC 7's collapse — contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms ^[10].
"It's always about money": he criticised Dick Cheney's no-bid contracts to Halliburton/KBR, roughly $7,000 of war cost per American taxpayer, "$150 a bag of laundry" that came back dirtier, contaminated drinking water, sub-prison-grade food, soldiers shipped without proper camouflage or armour, and National Guard/retention squeezes.
He sees Bush-era corruption as "low-level" compared with today's "in-your-face bold corruption", and views the Epstein files and the drive toward war with Iran as a mirror of 2001–2003.
Hrvoje's own position: 9/11 was a false flag that built the police-state infrastructure (Patriot Act, NDAA, DHS — which he says had him banned from PayPal in 2022), citing declassified precedents: Operation Ajax (1953), the Gulf of Tonkin (declassified 2005) and Operation Northwoods.

Hollywood

Charlie Sheen — then television's biggest star on Two and a Half Men at roughly $1m an episode, per Rowe — wanted to narrate a theatrical version; talks with his camp and Mark Cuban's 2929 collapsed after Bill O'Reilly and Page Six of the New York Post reported the deal, prompting Cuban to pull out.
Two stumbling blocks: the multi-billion-dollar syndication of Two and a Half Men forced delays, and Sheen's team demanded the film rights — which Rowe refused, citing Hollywood "shelving" (buying a film's rights to bury it). "We're not going to give up the rights of our film." He remains grateful: they still control the film and he could write the book without anyone's permission.
Grifters demanded a 10% cut of the budget (not profits) while doing nothing; his verdict: "Los Angeles is exactly what everybody thinks it is... never trust Hollywood" (referencing a System of a Down song). His later seven years in LA and the veterans documentary Mile Marker (2018) ended the same way — "taken through the ringer... left holding nothing" ^[11].
On Sheen's 9/11-truth moment: Rowe recalled that 81% of Showbiz Tonight callers backed Sheen on the first night; contemporaneous reporting put a CNN/Showbiz Tonight poll at 84% "yes" from more than 40,000 respondents ^[12]. In hindsight he is glad Sheen wasn't attached — within about a year came Sheen's "tiger blood" episode on Alex Jones's show — and he believes the story "is not over yet".

Alex Jones

Jones was once "a scrappy guy... pirating airwaves" but "quickly saw the monetary value of conspiracy theories" — advertising, films for sale, survival kits and Berkey water filters — while Loose Change was given away free.
On Trump and Jones (Trump appeared on Jones's show during the 2015–16 campaign): Rowe calls Trump "the conspiracy president" and sees both as "two very dark individuals" who "used conspiracy theories to energise a base for personal gain and profit", with 80–90% of the country disagreeing while polls capture the "10% extremes".
Hrvoje's critique: Jones's 180-degree turn from anti-war anti-globalist to hosting a guest he described as a CIA agent promoting regime change in Venezuela and biometric blockchain digital ID.

Provocateurs and the movement's downfall

Suspicious repeat figures at screenings — notably a "Mark Roberts... who we've never been able to figure out", always with a handler off to the side.
The movement was destroyed "from the inside": provocateurs pushing nonsense (shape-shifting lizard people, "no planes", antisemitic claims) plus genuine cranks, with media gravitating to the most sensational voices and discrediting the science-based case.
Hrvoje agreed it is happening today "on steroids" (flat earth, contagion denial); he calls COVID "9/11 part two" but warns against "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" — the sensible evidence (nanothermite, demolition, WTC 7) is enough. He showed their Building 7 clip in his classes and has hosted Richard Gage of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Could Loose Change happen again?

Yes, in a different form: "influencers are the new documentaries, the new Loose Change". His example was Charlie Kirk — whose confrontational, challenge-anything campus style generated such reaction that someone assassinated him and split the world in two; Kirk was indeed shot dead at a Utah Valley University event on 10 September 2025 ^[13], with his tour continuing afterwards ^[14].
Predictions: a "very real possibility" the US stops operating as a country and devolves into "some form of corporation"; his greatest fear is the dollar losing reserve-currency status to China. Personally: "I pledge no allegiance to no flag... I am a businessman who's operating within a system of a business."
Hrvoje pointed to the "PayPal mafia", algorithm ghettos and digital surveillance — a Thiel/Musk-style tech oligarchy — with anecdotes from Mexico of phone lines cancelled pending biometric ID registration and cash eliminated for fuel purchases.

The prodigal-son arc: redemption and localism

After the spotlight faded, PTSD surfaced alongside undiagnosed, unmedicated bipolar disorder, spiralling into drug addiction and jail; it took roughly ten years to rebuild.
What worked: therapy, medication, identifying his passions, and reading — Stoicism (Marcus Aurelius), biographies, and Adlerian psychology's claim that "there is no such thing as trauma": "what I'm going to do five years from now is dependent on what I do today, not what happened five years ago."
Today he has financial independence and multiple ventures: Otsego Media, a service-disabled-veteran-owned production company in Oneonta ^[15]; DOSHA Farms — DOSHA opened in August 2023 as Oneonta's first legal cannabis dispensary ^[11:1] — plus a nonprofit film commission and real estate, all deliberately local to Otsego County. His message to others in hard times: read, and put the work in — "It's possible to pull yourself out."

Fact-Check Notes

Claim in the interview	External verification
Enlisted August 2001; served with the 101st Airborne in Afghanistan and Iraq	Confirmed: enlisted in the 101st Airborne in August 2001, left June 2005 ^[6:1]
AWOL/federal warrant during the Loose Change years	Arrested July 2007 in Oneonta on a military warrant for alleged desertion ^[5:1]
Vanity Fair coined it "the first internet blockbuster" (2006)	Vanity Fair, August 2006: "just might be the first Internet blockbuster"; 10m+ viewings ^[7:1]
Multiple editions, ending with American Coup	Seven films 2005–2017 ^[8:1]; American Coup released 22 September 2009 ^[9:1]
UAF study refutes the official WTC 7 account	UAF's principal conclusion: fire did not cause the collapse, contrary to NIST ^[10:1]
81% poll support for Sheen's 9/11 statements	Contemporaneous report: 84% of 40,000+ CNN poll respondents agreed the government covered up 9/11 ^[12:1]
Charlie Kirk assassination as an influencer-era parallel	Kirk shot dead at Utah Valley University, 10 September 2025 ^[13:1]
Hrvoje's professor defended Saddam	Curtis Doebbler was on Saddam's multinational defence team ^[4:1]
DOSHA, Oneonta's first licensed cannabis dispensary; Mile Marker	DOSHA opened August 2023; Mile Marker (2018) examined cannabis use by disabled veterans ^[11:2]

Where to find things: the book is available via Amazon and Rowe's website (links in the episode description); his daily work with Dylan Avery is at otsegomedia.com, and his cannabis business at doshafarms.com, both as given in the interview. Contact details are at the end of the book.

References