Weaponized ARGs and Modern Conspiracy

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states. Today I'm talking with Joseph Matheny, a writer and storyteller who built the internet's first alternate reality game. He built a story so convincing it made people believe a portal to another dimension was hidden in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Be nice. I've got family in Jersey. Once you cross the GWB and hit Fort Lee, hey, it's like an alternate universe where every left turned is a jug handle and you're not allowed to pump your own gas. That story was Ong's Hat, not published as a novel, but scattered across bulletin boards, websites, phone lines, pamphlets. The story felt real. Today we'll talk about where that ARG came from and how it got weaponized. And we'll get into his chatbot from the 90s. You see, he built Google before Google. He built ChatGPT before OpenAI. 30 years ago. This guy was spreading disinformation when Facebook was just a twinkle in Mr. Zuckerberg's eye. His lizard eye. Respect. Joseph's also been connected to the John Teeter story, the time traveler who appeared on Art Bell. When I asked him about it, he said , well , this one gets weird. I'll see you after for a private wrap up just between us. Let's go down to the basement. Joseph, welcome to the basement. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I've been a fan for a long time. Before we dig in, I need to know WC Field's martini recipe and method. Oh absolutely. Yeah. That's good. I got to do that. Brought to me by Robert Anton Wilson. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do we got? He comes to my house one day and uh I said, Bob, I heard you like martinis . He's like, Well, I like martinis, but only a certain way. You have to make them right, and let me show you. Like, kid, move aside so okay I moved aside and while he's making his martini he tells me this story that he read how this martini was made by WC Fields in a book and so you take put ice in the shaker , then you pour the vermouth over the ice, then you shake it around, then you pour the vermouth out, leaving the ice in, then you pour the vod ka. Important vodka not gin. Yes, sir. You pour the vodka over the ice, shake it very gently because you don't want to bruise. Don't bruise over the right. Yep. And then you pour it out. Very nice. Yeah. And it works. I'm gonna remember that method. And that's that's the way I've eaten made uh martinis ever since. So it's Robert Anton Wilson. So that's kind of a good segue to get back to the origin story, and we can go back as far as you want. Okay. Um I love the bookstore stuff, and that's synchronicities are crazy, but wherever you want to go. Like what what what made you the pioneer of ARGs? And uh we and that could be the last time we even say ARG today. It goes okay. We go go back back let's a little bit. Okay . I remember when I read uh book called No One Here Gets Not Alive, the Story of Jim Morrison. Mm-hmm. And I like the way they did it is they put it in three sections and basically it was like so you realize that an arrow being drawn back and then a releasing of the arrow was the arc of Jim's story. Yep. I was a voracious reader when I was a kid and my parents were cool in that they said oh he can read . They were happy. And um and so they rewarded me by saying, we will buy you books. And if you read these books, we will buy you more books. And so I just it would just tear through books. And so I used to buy a I was being kind to my parents. I came from a working class background and said these books are okay because I'm gonna tear through them, I'm probably gonna mark them up and then you know and uh I would get money to go to the garage sales and just pick up whatever. And so in my age, I'm old. I'm sixty four years old. So like in the sixties and seventies when I was growing up, horror and the occult was very popular . And so um I was big on the Universal Monsters, the hammer films, like all that kind of stuff. Anything to do with that I was reading . So this is a funny segue. I'm at a garage sale and I'm like the guy says you can have all the books on the table for a dollar but you gotta pack them up and get out of here because I'm done. I could do and I'm like grabbing everything I thought was worth it and one of the books was I'm like, oh, that's about astrology. And I just do it in a bag. I get home, I start reading, and I'm like, this is not astrology at all, but it was Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Oh. That's how I get introduced to Henry Miller. Wow, okay. By thinking he was astrol ogy. Oops. Oops. How old were you? Oh god, twelve? Oh no. Okay. Well probably great for twelve years old. It was great. It was perfect. I'm like, God, I'm gonna do this like with the the way this guy writes, you know? And so like that was my gateway drug. I I I from there I segued into Kerouac and you know everything from there. But it was that accident of buying that book for a nickel or whatever it was and reading it and falling in love with like this is a whole new thing I didn't know about this. This is amazing. I didn't know this about you because I can see it in your writing. I can see Karouak. I can see Hunter S. Thompson. I see that in Henry Miller. I see it in your writing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, those are my influences. Okay. Bukow ski. Yeah. Like uh you know, Hemingway, it's like make the sentences short and sweet and bam. Like you know, so I'll go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, which you know, that's Ginsburg. Carol is like write it once. Right. You know, oh no, don't don't touch it. And we said shut up. Yeah, yeah. Write it once and get away. Um so you know, I was now I was like floating in this world of like all this weird counterculture stuff which is available readily when I was a kid. You're in Chicago? Yeah, yeah. Okay. In Chicago. And all this occult stuff and literature. And of course being in Chicago, all that stuff was available to me. So I started hanging out in bookstores um where most of the people hanging out with were much older than me. So, you know, they kinda mentored me. And I remember my my um Are you gonna be in the club kid thing was um this guy said uh if you read or I said I said I couldn't pronounce Kerouac at the time, I didn't call him Kar ak or something like that. I said I read this book by Jack Karak and this I saw this guy look at me. He goes, You know, that guy wrote this book called On the Road and he would stop at the cafes all the time and he would get the same thing. What was that? I said cup of coffee and a uh apple pie a la mode. He's like, Oh, you did read it. And so we and then he's like, Oh, you cool kid, I'll talk to you. So I started hanging out with these older hip sters that were like, oh you gotta read this, you gotta read this, you gotta read this so you're feeding me all this stuff, and I'm just a kid. You know, it's like gimme, gimme, gimme. He's like feeding it up. So , because of this, it puts me in a position in Chicago where I'm hanging out with people who are doing improv. I'm hanging out with method actors. And these are all people much older than me, but for some reason I'm the kid, like, oh yeah, he can hang out. He's he's cool. He won't tell on us. He won't tell his parents where he's been. They would take me to things. Yeah, it was it was incredible. You were the weird smart kid. I was the weird smart kid. Yeah, yeah. I was the uh the the mascot. Right. Yeah. Like, oh we'll get this kid. And um and I used to you know, they love this I I would uh memorize things and I would stand up on a little chair and I would do I could do um uh lions in the heat and roaming doves eat river I could do the Morrison thing and they love that, you know. So they would make me do it, you know, like they would get drunk like do the Morrison thing, kid, you know, and I would do it. So anyway , I'm I'm around these people who are like just feeding me with all this counterculture knowledge and turning me on the things I would never have been turned on to as a you know, like my family. They didn't know any of this stuff, you know. My dad was one of those people like, you know, go to school, get a job, get a good factory job, you know, be done. And I'm not saying he was a bad person, he was a great person, but you know, that was his way of thinking. All these things that I'm doing , he would just be like, Okay, whatever, you know, so he didn't understand and he didn't care. He knew I was not up to good things according to him, but he wasn't a perfect kid either, so he just kind of let me go, you know. He's like he's doing something, but I'm not sure what it is, but he's not doing drugs. Little did he know . I was . Someone sent me a clip of myself from about two years ago. I watched it and thought, that guy's on, sharper, faster, more himself, and I don't remember feeling different then, which means I didn't notice it leaving. Turns out there's actually a reason for that. Most men start losing testosterone around 30, about 1% every year after that. And a lot of what your body does produce gets locked up by a protein called SHBG. So your body can't even use it. It's like having money in the bank with a frozen account. That's when I started taking Mars Men. Now I'll be honest, I didn't expect much. But a few weeks in, I was back to the 2 a.m. rabbit holes. That guy in the clip started showing back up. Mars Men is designed to help free that lock testosterone, so your body can actually use it. Eight natural clinically dosed ingredients: tonkat ali, shiligit, vitamin D, zinc, boron. No synthetics, no needles. Made in the USA, third party tested. And some men re port more consistent energy, stronger workouts, better recovery. There's also a 90-day money-back guarantee, so there's no risk. For a limited time, our listeners get 60% off for life, and three free gifts when you use basement at mengo to mars.com. That's mengo to mars.com and use code basement at checkout. After you purchase, they'll ask you what you heard about them. Tell them we sent you . Long story short , I get involved with all these artists, and um I start getting involved in something called male art when I was in college. And male art goes all the way back to data . Um, it's basically like you put things together as a package, you mail to a friend or you mail to a list of friends, they put things together, they add, they subtract , they conglomerate, and then they mail onto the next list. And so like this is going on in the all over the world, right? We're mailing stuff all over the place. I remember this. It's still around. The zine culture and all that. Yeah, yeah. Well, the zine culture, then Xerox machines became available. Then we became our own publishers. Yep. The punk rock thing happened, which I was right in the middle of. Um so all of these things are happening. And I started doing weird things by mail art. So I started doing episodic stories. Based horror stories or whatever. Whatever. Okay. Sometimes I would like write five lines and send to a friend and he would write five lines and send to another friend and I'd get it back and be like, oh wow, okay that's where we're going. And it was called the um I think the Dada's called it the uh exquisite corpse. And we did all these things together. Um and I looked at it and I said, there's something here. There's there's something here, and I don't have to go through a publisher to create this I don't have to go to an agent. I don't have to do any of these things. I don't have to do a gatekeeper. I can make art that gets to a lot of people and I don't have to go through you know any corporate anything. Is that what you wanted to do at this point is be an artist? It was what I was. Yeah. I mean you were, but I mean what f what are you telling dad you're gonna do for a living? Um I didn't have an answer to that. You just hear s a lot of snipping and taping upstairs. Yeah, yeah. And at that time I was I was painting. Okay. Um, so I was doing a lot of large paintings. And um and my family was trying to be supportive , but didn't know how to be because they didn't understand what I was doing. Of course. And so like my mom would tell her sisters, ask him to do a painting for you. You know, and one of my aunts would say, Can you do a painting for me? And I'm like, sure. Like, here's my color swatches . No . You have to match my furniture. No. Um, so they really didn't get it, but they were trying to be supportive and I I didn't want to be mean to them, so like I painted some paintings. Um But basically um I was looking for Um a new kind of art because I felt like the media was this canvas that wasn't being fully implemented as i to its full s potential because I had this the ory that an experience for me was I would see something on TV, I would go find a newspaper or a magazine article about it, then I would go get a book out of the library, and I would build this experience around this thing that I had like latched onto. Who knows how I latched onto it. Like walking down the street and there was a poster on a poll and it said something. I'm like, what is that about? And then I would follow up on it. Like, wouldn't that be cool if that was an art form where I built a pathway for people to follow up on something weird that I placed the place in front of? So like, oh, there's this thing . There's this place. And so I remember my thesis in college was I wrote a book of poems and I made a videotape at the time which was cutting edge It must have been. Yeah it was. Um it was a cutting edge, I think nineteen eighty four. It was cutting edge at the time. Um I did a VHS tape. And you would watch the tape and then you would get clues from the book and the tape to go at a certain place at a certain time on a certain day. And if you did, you would see the third act, which was a play of real humans, play it out in front of you as if you weren't there , and the third act happened. And my professor was like, Wow, what are you smoking, kid? He goes, It's cool, but wow. Um , and then I re and then it worked. Like I remember jumping up and down after it was over and hugging my girlfriend at the time, like it worked. It worked. It actually worked. 'Cause I wasn't sure it was going to work. 'Cause it was a lot of moving parts. Sure. And you you really weren't forc focused on dopamine triggering at this point because that's what you were you became a master of dopamine. Yeah. Yeah, but I at that point I I was just an unsure kid who had a stupid idea and and I put it together I'm like, can this work? This might not work. It can work. Yeah, but like you always have those theater jitters, you know like Of course. I'm gonna suck. But I have those before every show, man. Right. Um so I just had I I wasn't sure it was gonna work and then I got really happy when it worked. And everybody that did it, like followed it through, told me like, dude, that was um incredible I read the the poems and then I watched the tape and then we went to the performance it was amazing like it was like it all made sense so I was like yeah well good it was like three acts, boom . So um I started playing around with ideas of how can I do this another way? And so I played with street theater. I used to do a lot of street theater. I started hanging out with people in Chicago. Um studied under Dell Close. You studied under Dell? Well, people the people that I hung out with did. I was a little too young for Dell. Yeah. Um yeah. Second city. Next generation I probably would have been there, but yeah. Um but you know, um my girlfriend's dad and my girlfriend at the time her dad was a friend of Dell's. Amazing. So used to hang out with him when Dell got sober apparently um he still hung out at the Earl of Old Town, which was a bar in Old Town, Chicago, and he would go into the bar and drink soda water and lime because the bar was where he got inspiration. So he kept going, but he just didn't drink anymore. Um so yeah, 'cause I started studying the things that he talked about because if you might not know this. Um I told this to the people at the Delcos Theater in Hollywood and they didn't know this either. Dell was a practicing Golden Dawn magician. I didn't know that. Golden Dawn, wow. Yeah. So if you look at the portrait at the Dell, if it's still there, and the Del Clos Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, if it's still there, I don't know if it is. I don't think it is. I haven't gone for like ten years. Yeah. But it used to be. If you look at the portrait, a big painting of him on on the wall, he's wearing a ring with a pentagram on it. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know that. And if you read some of the weirder little in interviews that he did, he does admit to using the Golden Dawn Telismotic Principles to teach improv . That's amazing. So talismata is when when you learn when you learn uh ritual , you learn basically theatrical principles. And so you think in your mind like in front of you there is an angel and this is what the angel is wearing and this is the principles of the angel. You love all this stuff you're projecting. And Dell use that as the method to teach people, this is what you're doing in theater. It's like when you're talking to this person in front of you, they're not the person in front of you, the person that you're supposed to be talking to in the in the text. This is an initiation ceremony. Yes. It's just Yes. Two actors. Yeah. I never really thought of it that way, but that's really what it is. He never laid it out for s most people like that because most people were like, Magic, oh and they're selling but that's what he was doing. If you want to know what was in that man's mind , he wrote a short lived DC uh comic series called Wasteland. I didn't know that either. Yeah, there's like thirteen issu es and you can still find 'em. Um they're out of print, but you can still find 'em. And in that he talks about ritual magic and Philip K. Dick makes an appearance, Robert Anti Wilson makes an appearance, Timothy Leary makes an appearance, G. Gordon Liddy makes an appearance. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. You gotta see you gotta read this. Yeah. It came out in the eighties. It's just amazing. Um so but that's what that's where it all came from, was his improv theories, which everybody knows Delcos is the guy that you go to for the theory. And that all came from Golden Dawn . So I'm studying and playing with people that are studying with him and I'm learning from him and I and and I started learning in studying magic and I'm like, oh this is theater. Okay, I can do this. Yeah, theater. And so uh putting all this together And out of this you know um Swiss army knife that forms in my head of all these influences, I'm like, oh you know, if I could only do this thing, if I had a way to get in front of people. So I started playing around with HyperCard. And if you remember HyperCard. Sure. Yeah yeah. Okay, HyperCard came out right before the web. Yep. And basically it was hypertext that was localized. So it was in a file. You click on a link and it takes you to another page in the file. It was magic. It was magic. Um you click on an image, it takes you to another page in the file. When I saw that, my mind went pfft. Yep. But I started putting together a hypercard stack, as they were called, mm-hmm. And right about that time, this was ninety This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with autoquote explorer to compare rates for multiple car insurance companies on all atce. Try it at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance and Affiliates. Not available in all states and situations. Prices may vary on how you buy. Somewhere around there? Um maybe earlier um somebody said go to your Unix machine type in the words l y n x space http colon slash slash str ing links first browser. Ye.ah On the camera. Text only. On the camera, yeah. And I did it. And I went tab, tab, tab, click, and it took me to another system. Not another page. Another page on another system. And that's when my head just went, this is it . This is it. This is what I've been looking for. I thought hypercard was it. This is hypercard on steroids. This is it. And that's that's when the light went off. So I was all that was searching for this way to tell stories that I thought the way or the way stories happen to you. Because I think stories happen to you. I think story storytelling is the most important thing that humans do and that we shouldn't turn it over to corporations and bean counters, none of that. It's like a very sacred thing. You have a responsibility as a storyteller to shepherd your story and protect it. The story was given to you by what who knows what, right? But it wasn't you, wasn't all you, and it wasn't somebody else, it wasn't all them. Like you of course I stand on the shoulders of giants and I read people and I'm inspired, but it wasn't just that. There's like this holy thing that happens like this inspiration. You believe in like the muse. The muse, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And it says you have this story to tell and I'm going to give it to you. I'm entrusting you with this story and you go tell this story. I think storytellers used to be revered for a reason. It's because what they were doing was important. So you can break it down to like simple stuff. I'm gonna tell you a story about this part of the woods where you go and a monster's gonna come get you . Really, what I'm telling you is like there's bears over there and probably don't go there in night. Yep. Right? That's what I'm telling you. Really? But what And you're gonna tell your kids don't go over there because there's monsters. In other words, don't get eaten by the bears. But if you just tell a kid don't get eaten by the bears, they're gonna want to go see what's over there. I would have. Yep. You would have. Of course. The first thing we're gonna do. Oh, I don't believe this bear crap. And you're gonna go over there, right? So you have to tell a story that's gonna really stick. They're going to repeat it, it's going to make an impression, and they're going to carry it with them. So you're passing it on, right? And memetics, remember, is from genetics, right? It's a it's a metaphor from genetics. So it's something we pass on. Stories are something we pass on is very important. And I'm saying this because I want people to really understand that as an artist, handing your story over to bean counters is sacrilege. Summer is here, and if you want to actually feel confident, less bloated, and energized this season, it starts with your gut. I thought bloating after every meal was just normal. It's not. Once I fixed my gut, everything else followed. And the one thing that made the biggest difference is cowboy colostrum. Cowboy colostrum is 100% American grass-fed made right here in the USA. True first-day whole colostrum packed with bioactives, immunoglobulins, and growth factors. It stabilizes your gut and the peptides make your skin and hair look amazing. It's the highest quality bovine colostrum you can buy. I started taking it for my gut. The results I didn't expect are the ones that got me: thicker hair, clearer skin, no more bloating after meals, and I'm not the only one. 83% of participants in Cowboys Clinical study reported improved gut health, 79% less bloating, 72% improved digestion, 62% fuller, thicker hair, and cowboy colastrum doesn't strip it down. Whole, full-fat, high protein, no artificial flavors, no fillers. Vanilla in your iced coffee. Strawberry with milk like a milkshake. It's effortless and delicious. And yes, calves get fed first. They only collect the surplus. For a limited time, our listeners get up to 25% off their entire order. Just head to cowboycolostrum.com/slash Y files and use code Y files at checkout. That's 25% off when you use code why files at cowboy callostrum dot com slash why files so I got I got hit by this bolt of lightning as my late friend Ralph Ibrahim used to say a bolt from the blue and it just struck me like this is it. This is the thing. And I remember telling friends , there's this thing that I'm doing called bulletin board systems that has a connection to this thing called the internet , which is gonna be the next way to tell stories, it's gonna be the way to publish, it's gonna be the way to distribute, it's gonna be everything. And this looked at me like, are you crazy? Are you nuts? This is like C B radio, man. It's gonna go away in like six months. Yeah, right. I remember somebody telling me. Of course. Yeah. I was on BBS's, I was a weirdo. Me too. Yeah. And they're like, you've been staying pretty much stubborn with this computer, son. And I remember showing a friend of mine this is what it's gonna be, and I I showed him links. I'm like, I can put the story together, and the story can have links to other ideas so you can expand upon the idea or you can e explore the idea, you can like drill down on certain things. And he looked at it and he just said, this is an older person, um, a well known writer. I won't say who it was. He's gone now, but I so I don't want to embarrass him, even in death. He says when this thing can make me a sandwich, give me a call. Oh. That's what he said to me. So I said, oh well, you know, too bad. Um but I was really convinced. I'm like, this is going to be the next wave. Well mail art translated well to BBS's. And the funny thing was two of the hobbies I had as a kid was male art and shortwave. I really got into shortwave when I was a kid. And all the people that I knew from those communities started to show up on BBSs. They were some of the first adopters. Art Bell. Yep. Shirtwave Guy shows up on BB. These are the first people doing BBS . You know, gophers and FTP sites and all these things were were available to, you know, a few. Not a lot. But I but I was like, it's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. I miss those days a little bit. I do too. And then Netscape happened. Yes. And that's when boom, it blew it blew wide open. Yep. And I was sitting right at the right place at the right time with enough momentum already because I'd been doing it before that, that just like plowed right into it and rode the wave. Because at the time that that happened, all of a sudden, all these businesses, we have to have email, we have to have web. Who can we call? Oh, there's this weirdo that knows all this stuff. And my phone started ringing. And then I did a hack, um which uh guy from Spin Magazine wrote about um where uh the Clinton administration came out and said that they were gonna have email in the White House, which at the time was like, wow, I could write president at White House.gov. Not that he's ever going to answer me, but I could write him. And I watched the web , I let I watched the server come up, and I'm like, I bet they didn't lock this down. So I sent an email to presidentwhitehouse.gov , and then I sent a second email to presidentwhitehouse.gov. And then a third and a fourth. I'm like, they didn't turn it off. So they had an auto-reply , which you had at that time. Now it comes stock or eventually came stock. But at the time, when you deployed your mail server, you had to manually change this. That when you got a an email, if you got a second email from that email address, you shouldn't send an autoreply. Right. Twenty-four hours later. Right? Used to be like if you just did it, it came. So I started spamming emails to the White House. I called it the rain of Toads. I I did ASCII pictures of toads. Yeah. And I was raining toads on the White House and we were getting so many replys back so like it shut down both sides of the connection. You did a DOS attack on the White House. Yeah, yeah. With ASCII art. I did. With ASCII art . The Rain of Toad R-E-I-G-N, The Reign of Toads. And um and then a reporter found out about it and and he wrote about it. And then next thing you know my phone was just ringing off the hook. Because this is not the case anymore, but back then if you did a hack and it was a white hat hack and you got away with it, you would get a job offer. Sure, sure. Not anymore. No. Now you just go to jail. Yes. And you're you're banned from corporate life. But back then, people would call you and say, you know some things about this stuff and this is a dark art that nobody knows about yet. Yeah, now you now they ban you from the country. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now they send you away. Mm-hmm. Uh or put you in jail. Yeah. But back then I got a phone call from the Secret Service . I was gonna ask. Yeah. I was very nervous on that phone call. What's with the toads? What's with the toads, man? And you're not gonna do that again, are you? Mike, I was just testing to see if you put on the auto-reply twenty-four hour pause, you know. It was just, you know , making sure you're secure. Um and then they, you know, like they left me alone after that. But but I the job offer started pouring in. Is this before Robert Anton Wilson comes into your life? Oh no no no. This is way after Can we talk about him a little bit? Yeah, you'll roll that back. Okay . So before this happened, I'm still in Chicago and I was in a band, like everybody my age. And uh Is this when you went by Sid with a C Ye ah Yeah something like that. Go ahead and tell him why it's a C, Joseph. Sid Vicious, Sid Bennett, Sid Barrett. Sid Barrett. Yeah. But the C . Yeah. Um I was known at the time for doing a certain drug on a regular basis. Heroically. Uh before before Terrence Coin ed that term, I was a heroic dos er. Um I was a big fan of Jim Morrison. Did I mention that? Um so yes, um I was I was one of those people. And um I was always talking about weird stuff, you know, because I was a weird kid. And my guitar player, who was weird himself, but you know , not as weird, I guess, but he loved me because I was I could introduce him to weird things he hadn't heard of, but he introduced me to a lot of music, so there we go. Um and one day he just looks at me, he's like , Have you read Illuminati's trilogy? I'm like, No. Just out of the blue, he says that? Yeah. Okay. Cool, cause I've been doing Sid and talking weird things, and he was like, have you read Illuminati trilogy? I'm like, no, I didn't even heard of it. Well, what was that? So you should should read it, man. You read it. You're in it. I'm like, okay. So I went to the library and went looking for it, and of course it was gone. Um, probably stolen. But I did find another book by the same author called Cosmic Trigger. Mm-hmm. And then I read it. And blew my mind again. What was it about Cosmic Trigger? Oh, it was just like everything he was talking about was everything I was thinking about. It was just like like we made a connection, you know, and he introduced me all this new thinking, these new ways of thinking, new writers I'd never heard of. Like it was like a it was like an off-ramp. Well in cosmic triggers Robert Anton Wilson, this is about recognizing signs throughout history and synchronicity. Synchronicity. Um it was about um um monolog nosticism. Yep. You know, like the whole idea of like basically th what you learn in theater , which is suspension of disbelief, it's the same thing, right? Only he had a mathematical scientific background for it. He had fancy words to put around it. I'm like, well, I know that, yeah. I loved how he talked about meteors being a meteor could be a sign of something good or something bad. Yeah. Or something good or something bad can happen. And if the meteor just happens to be there, that's now a cosmic trigger. That's a cosmic trigger. He was playing around with um the serious stuff that was going on. He was just he was he basically did a like a whole exercise in suspension of disbelief for this whole period of his life. And he catalogued it and he r and he published it as a book, right? And and and he introduced me to all kinds of new ideas. And one of those ideas was Philip K. Dick, who I had not heard of. You hadn't? I didn't know. I did theyn't know he wrote Blade Runner at the time. Right. Right? But I had seen Blade Runner. I'm like, oh, this is a great film. You know, but I didn't know. I didn't know at that time. And so like but like I read about Bob talking about you gotta read this book, Philip Key Dick, Vallas . So anyway. And then well then that's that. Then we'll we'll leave to that. So so I look I I'm going to buy more books by him by him and I saw a poster on the wall of the n at the time New Age was a new thing. This was the eighties. At the New Age bookstore and they had books by him on on the shelf and B K D or R. W. R. W. Okay. And and there was a poster on the wall that he was appear ing just down the street from where I was living at a Zen center . No shit. Yeah. Chicago still? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we gotta go there. So I gotta go there. So I show up early, and I was a smoker at the time, and and I show up and I'm standing out front smoking a cigarette at the sand center and this you know squat little Irishman comes out and says, Hey, can you give me one of those? Like, okay. Like, I'm Bob by the way. I'm like, you think Robert Anthony Wilson? I didn't what he looked like. No. He's like, Yeah, yeah. He's like, I'm doing this thing here. I'm like, yeah, I came to see you. We're smoking. He's like, Don't tell my wife you saw me smoking because Arlen got on his on his back for smoking. Um but yeah, we shared a cigarette. We we stood out there for what's going on in your mind? You like Bob Wilson just bumped a cigarette off me. You're not you're not freaking out? No. Okay. No. I was like, oh coolie smokes. Okay. You know, go with it. Um and uh we just talked about some stuff and uh Timothy Leary had just come out with MindMirror on DOS at the time. And I told him like, it's pretty cool, but you know, you could use some of this and some of that, you know. And he's like, well, do you write code? I'm like, eh, not yet. I'm thinking about it. He's like, well then write code and do it yourself. I'm like , yeah, good idea. So um we hit it off. Um we we swapped addresses. He was in a Los Angeles at the time, and um, and then you know, like we we traded letters and things like that every once in a while, but you know . And then later couple years later, I moved to Santa Cruz completely by accident. That do you know this story? This is with your girlfriend and an and Anubis? Yeah, yeah. But cat. Yeah. Yeah. Um Tell uh I I know the story, but people don't. Well it's perfect for a black hat. Yeah, we have to get there. So Cosmic Trigger triggered me to find Vallas. To find Vallas? It was out of print at the time. Oh, to find the book. The book. You couldn't find that book. It was out of print. Wow. This was eighty four five? Yeah. It was out of print. And it was not a popular book then. No. Phil was not popular then. Like he wrote Blade Runner, but that was it. Like none of his stuff is getting Were you aware of Jacques Valet at this point yet? I was because I read Passport de Magonia when I was young and I went Yes right in my veins. Yeah. It's like this this I mean I've heard PKD or people around him say that Vallas was a synchronicity with Jacques name. Well, apparently it was for me too . Because I I just I I don't know why it got in my head. Like I have to find this And I started to get there was no internet at the time. So like, you know, this is eighty four. I'm going to use bookstores. I'm asking people. They never heard of it. Right. And I'm like, Can I go through your can I go through your boxes? Like I'm just like like being a an a nugnik, uh annoying. Mm-hmm. And people are like, Okay, whatever dude, go look for your your cosmic thing. And so eventually I did find it in a very weird circumstance. I was going through the yellow pages and just looking for used bookstores 'cause I'd run out of the ones I knew. And I called this one used bookstore and this lady answered and she said, Yes, I I I think I might have that. She's like, I think I have two of them. So I walk not too far from where I lived, I walk over. Or no, I took the bus and then I walked from the bus stop and this didn't look like a bookstore. It was like it was it looked like it might have been a storefront at one time, but it was like the windows were newspapered over . And I knocked in the door and this really nice old lady with silver hair and crystal blue eyes, you know those people that have those blue eyes and it's like you can't stop looking at him. I think you described her as elvish. Yeah. She was short and and I looked at her and like wow, okay, you're you've got an aura, lady. Um and she like took me and all the bo bo oks were in boxes . Nothing was there was no shelves. It's like she shut the thing down, you know. I'm thinking, okay, maybe she's gone out of business or maybe she never was in business. And she like walked me over to a box and she like pulled out Vall is. She said , you know, I've got this one. And then she pulled out another copy of Alice. She says, But I have this one. It was a hard copy. Oh . But I was a poor ass little poke rocker at the time. You didn't have to counting my quarters. And so I I I mm yeah . And so I like uh I'll take the paper back. You know, and I took the paper back and then I w I immediately I I was like, Oh, buyer's remorse. But you know, did what I had to do. And then when I got home, I'm like, you should have bought that hardback, dude. You should have bought that hardback. And I called her and I called her and called her she never answered again. So you're saying with Hilton honors I can use points for a three night stay anywhere? Anywhere. What about fancy places like the canopy in Paris? Yeah. Hilton honors baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries, like the Conrad and Tulum? Hilton Honors Baby. What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you gonna do this for all 9,000 properties? When you want points that can take you anywhere anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay . And so I walked over there. Could hear me and it was a s it was a storefront in Chicago they have these a storefront and then a house above it and it was a railing with a porch and the guy like this guy like walks out the uppie that was a thing then he had even had the suspend ers. If you remember there was a uniform that they all wore. And he leans over the the the rail. He's like, What do you want? Like, well, the lady sold me a book and I wanted to get the other book ed'iting. Hes like, What are you what are you doing? What are you talking about? Get out of here. This is not been a store for a long time. Just leave. He was like angry. It's not been a store? Yeah. For a long time. For a long time. Yeah. What's that about? I don't know. And and he's being real rude to me. He's like, get out of here. Like like you know, like I was ruining his day. And I'm thinking , maybe his mom because she looks about right to be the age to his mom, maybe his mom sold me the book and wasn't supposed to or something I I don't know. He was like just he just wanted me away from from his house . And so I left and I just kept going back and calling. Never, ever, ever got anybody answered the phone or the door ever again. Was that a d do you think that was a supernatural experience or just a weird circumst ance . I think it was a weird circumstance that that fits well as a supernatural experience. Yeah, I mean it reads well. It's kind of you know and it doesn't have to be supernatural to be supernatural. That's that's well said, yeah. She could have like been in the store when I called and picked up the phone when I called. She probably didn't run the store any the store did not look like it was in business and knew that she had the book I was looking for . She may have even had dementia. I don't know, you know. And the reason dude was mad because he didn't know. This is so unlikely. He didn't know mom had let me into the house, you know. And you know, back then I used to dress like a punk rocker, so I'd did not look like uh yuppie friendly at all. So he was like, Get this guy, this guy's probably gonna break into my house, you know, get get him away . So um so anyway, I I get that I get get Vallas and it just absolutely melts my brain. Melt melted me down. Like I I admit I probably was having a manic episode. It really did something to me, like really touched me hard. And what was the theme in Vallis that that spoke to you? I couldn't point to any one thing . The omniscience of the of it the No, no, it wasn't that. It was that um at the same time that I found the book, I found a used copy of the interview I think Rickman did with Philip K. Dick. And he published like three books of the interview. And so I read that while I was reading Vallas and then I realized this was a true story. This really happened to this guy. Yep, it did. It did it he said it did. Yeah. You have seen him give that talk in Mets in seventy seven. Yeah yeah yeah. He said he said all this stuff is I write about real stuff. Yeahah, ye. The Nazis did win the war. Just not in this timeline. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Everybody thought he was nuts. I I love watching the audience during the time. They thought that he was just gonna talk about sci-fi. Oh, it's a bit. No. Like half of them like always doing a bit, and the other half like, I think he's lost his mind. Right. This is all a simulation. In 77. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So of course this is mind-blowing in 84. And this melts my mind. Of course. This melts my mind . And then all this stuff, like I started seeing signs, you know, like every like Bob Wilson said um in uh Cosmic Trigger, he said uh he was playing Bavarian TV where he would flip the channels and then he would get sentences. Yes. He's like I might feel K Dick that fucking TV's talking to me. So he so you know, like he he would do that and Del Close had something called the One Word Story. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That was Bavarian TV. Yeah, yeah. And um and so I started having this these experiences that I couldn't turn off. And and um I was like, what what's going on? You know, and so I started getting um I was I was buying weird pamphlets, any weird pamphlet I could get my hands on, and so I got this weird magazine that was being published out of Berkeley called Mondo 2 or at the time it was called Um High Frontiers on it was a Xerox art and I found out about them through Xerox art stuff and I I sent away and I got the pamphlet and it was all this stuff of Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson. I was like, What is this? You know? It was like it became onto 2000. It was this whole culture that eventually became the internet. Yes. I mean they really did, they were wired before wired. That's right . And they do the wired people actually. So um so I'm like having all these things pop up like Berkeley, California, Berk North East Bay, Bay Area, California, like in my face. Like everywhere I was looking, it was like Bay Area, California. And I knew nothing about the Bay Area in California, you know . And then one day I just like told my girlfriend, I'm like, let's move to Califor nia. I mean, really, let's just pack up and go. Like, what's stopping us? And she was just crazy enough that she said yes. She's like, Yeah, yeah, let's go. Okay. So we did. We literally just like had a garage sale, pared down all the big stuff, put all the stuff that would fit in the car, the cat, and us, and off we got a car type carrier and off we went. And uh did you have a destination in mind? Yes, Berkeley. So you were heading to Berkeley. So but on our way. Yep . I'm telling her, I want to go through LA. So we're gonna we took Route sixty six from Chicago to LA . He retraced Route sixty six and I said, I'm gonna show you some things 'cause I'd been to LA and I'd hitchhiked up highway one one time um in early eighties when I was in college on a summer. I'd spent in California. And I said, I'm gonna take you and show you all these things that I know. Like we're gonna go through LA, I'm gonna show you all the Jim Morrison places I know, you know, Love Street and the weird store. And I I know all these places. I'm gonna show you. I know where the studio was. We're gonna stay at the Alt the what was it? Alt the uh what the hell was it they the the the um I've stayed there a couple times I can't think of the name it was a it was a motel that was across the street from their studio where he lived and his room like you can rent. Or who lived? Jim Morrison. Oh, okay. He lived in this room. Delta somet hing. Um it was it was on uh last year ago . And uh so I showed her all the spots in LA. And then we drove up Highway One. I'm like, you're gonna love this. By the way, we gotta stop at the Henry Mueller Museum in Bixir. So we did. And then I'm gonna show you the cabin because it was still there where Kerouac wrote Big Sur. Yes. You could still hike out back there. It was still there. It's it's like a Airbnb or something now. But uh it's not a cabin anymore. Beautiful up there. Yeah yeah. So we hiked up, saw the cabin, and then on our way to Berkeley , we pulled over to get gas and coffee at this town I'd never heard of before called Santa Cruz . And I said, hmm, this is cool. And we went to uh a cafe because they had a picture of J.R. Bob Dobbs on the fr on the front of it. And you just like that. That must be friendly. Yep. It's a subgenius. One of us. One of us. And so we went in and then there was a crazy person sitting at the table who told me all the reasons I didn't want to go to Berkeley, man, because Berkeley's done. We're all here now, man, in Santa Cruz, man. And this guy turned out to be right. He liked took me walk me around and it was just happening. This is before the earthquake. It was a crazy town. Like jugglers and fire breathers downtown and like it was awesome. You know? Like yeah, let's try this. Let's try this. So we just stayed there. And I moved into a place upstairs and the lady downstairs I saw her doing um Tai Chi in her garden one day. And so I yelled over the rail and said, Hey, I'm your neighbor, I just moved here, and then went downstairs and I met her. And she turned out to be Nina Gerboy, who was Timothy Leary's secretary from Millbrook. And then upstairs was Bob Forty, who was like friends with Gordon Wasson and he was friends with everybody. And like I'm like, whoa, how did this happen? And you knew all these names. I knew all the names, but I didn't know these people. Right. I didn't know where that they existed. And so they're like, Oh yeah, we know this and this and this So like, oh cool. And I was still talking to Bob, he was in LA and then I'm talking to Nina one day, her boy, and she said, Well , you know, Bob she's like, I know Bob and she's like, Bob's moving here 'cause his kids are here. I'm like, What ? He's moving to Santa Cruz? His kids are in Santa Cruz? She said, Yeah, they all live here. I'm like Synchronous Okay, I I was supposed to end up here. Yes. This is what's supposed to happen. Mm-hmm. You know? Um I was not supposed to go to Berkeley. Nope. I was supposed to hit where I hit in the middle of between LA and Berkeley, this place called Santa Cruz, which I had never heard of, turned out to be the place I needed to be. Yep. Met all these people I needed to meet right there. And Bob was on his way. And Bob was on his way, which was weird. Yep. So that's the Bob story and that's the Phil story. Because as I often say, what pushed me onto that trip, that weird trip, was Philip K. Dick in Vallas, which was started by Bob, his book. Like and I don't know why that stuck. It's like Vallas. I'm I didn't I knew nothing about it, what it was about, nothing, other than Bob said it was weird and it must really be weird because I'm reading this book and it's really weird. You know? So I wanted I really wanted to know what that was about. And um it was a virus . It really was. I read that I read Vall is and it just absolutely threw me for a loop, but I don't mean it a bad way. I mean I tell people this a lot of times, and some people understand it, some don't . But um a breakthrough is necessarily preceded by a breakdown. You have to break down before you can break through. Right? And I needed a breakdown at the time. Like I was a little too rigid in some things. I was gonna stay in Chicago forever. I was gonna be a punk rock musician. None of that happened. None of it was what was supposed to happen. Like I was supposed to go do this other thing. And I saw something shining in the Bay Area, which I did end up in the Bay Area, the larger Bay Area. Yeah. Because 90 miles south of San Francisco is Santa Cruz. And most of the people that used to live in San Francisco had moved to Santa Cruz, the people I wanted to know. They'd all like, oh, the city's getting too big, we're gonna migrate. Let's go to the country. Santa Cruz is basically the country. It's a little surf town . And so I saw something shining in the distance when I was hearing all this stuff about the Bay Area of San Francisco. Like there's something going on there. There's something you need to be a part of. Also, didn't know this was gonna happen, but boom, the dot-com thing happened. Right? Right. A lot of the people that worked at Apple and ended up working other places. We were we all came from Santa Cruz. SCA w SCO was there, Borgland was there. There was all this stuff going on in Santa Cruz that was tech oriented. And a lot of the really edgy Jared Lanier was there at the time. He was a street musician. He wasn't doing virtual reality yet. He was like playing weird African street mus street instruments on this on the street. You know, with his dreads and like he looked like he always looked. Um but there was all this stuff going on. Dan Mapes was there. There was all these people that you would know now but you didn't know then. There were just people hanging out in this collective weird area of people doing raves and drugs and computers. This is what we were doing. This is what we were doing. And just coming up with weird ideas. And and you know, um, friends of the McKennas were there. Um I I met Dennis a couple times, never met Terrence, but I met Dennis a couple times. He was actually in my building hanging out, so I hung out with him. Um so all these people, Tim Weary used to stop by our building because Nina was there. Whenever he was coming through town, he'd I'd walk downstairs. Oh, oh Tim Leary, okay. Crazy. Yeah. Bob was always over there once he moved. Like it was this weird little apartment building, 321 Second stetre. It's still there. Looks like a ship. It's like all the doors have portholes . Is this when you started working for Bob? Or with Bob? Yeah, yeah. So um he moved to to Santa Cruz. Of course, he got a lot of um uh um opportunities to speak in the Bay Area. He did not drive. Um I asked him I asked him why he told me and then I found out later why I'm like, no, good enough. That was just that was it? That was his Bob Wilson. Robert Anthony Wilson. What do you gonna do? And that was a good enough answer for me. Okay . But as it turned out, what I found out was um he had polio when he was a kid. Yes. And as you know, these um people that got over polio when they were a kid have a uh relapse when they're older most of the time and he did. So it was hard for him to press the pedals and he couldn't be sure he would be able to push the brake and hold the brake and so he would needed somebody to drive him. So I became the driver. Did you go to his funeral in two thousand seven? No. No, I didn't get to. I was in uh Santa Barbara at the time and actually the at the point that I found out that he had passed, I was actually out of the country. Mm-hmm So and that made me sad. I'm sure. But I did visit, you know, afterwards. Okay, so you're driving Bob you're driving driving Bob and I guess we're getting is this when he starts teaching you about Operation Mindfuck? Yeah. So we so we've we're in the car together. A lot. A lot. With a lot of time. Yes. You know, I'm driving, he's riding, you know, and um he would tell me he would regale me with stories. I would regale him with my crazy ideas and he would tell me uh that my ideas were probably not as crazy as I thought they were. Did you know how lucky you were to just be hanging out with this guy? No, I was just riding the wave, man. Oh boy. I didn't want to like think about the moment. 'Cause like, you know, if you think about the moment, the moment is gone. That's true. I'm like, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna That's luxuriate in the bath. Don't think too hard. Yeah. Don't think too hard about this. No, but I d I'm jealous of of the story. So it was so we got to swap a lot of ideas . Um at the time um he had just written a book which is reissued. Um his daughter started a press to reissue all his books, and um they asked me to write the forward to that book, which is out now. It's called Reality is What You Can Get Away With. Um , it's a screenplay. Um it at the time we were trying to get that made into an independent film. We didn't that didn't happen, but we we got close . And he was telling me all kinds of stories about he wanted to be a director, and with most people are always surprised when I tell him that, but he did. Um his favorite uh his idol was Orson Wells. Interesting. And Ed Wood. Interesting. And at the time, Ed Wood has was not did not have the resurgence that he's had. At that time, um people like Bob and I loved Sure. But most people didn't know who Ed Wood was because That he didn't let lack of talent stop him at all . Not one minute did he stop he did he even pause. Edward taking a swipe out of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a swipe. Um no the the tenacity, man. Come on. That's it. He wouldn't disagree. It was beautiful. It was beautiful. I'm not gonna let this stop me. Yeah. Right? Yes. Yeah. Um Ed Wood was a guy who made film s how would you say um Psychotronic? Yeah. Yeah. Psychotronic films. And if you watch the films , um there's moments where it's so clear that it's it's been a it's a disaster. It's happening on set. Yes, it's so oh. And he doesn't stop rolling . And he doesn't edit. Just like that was cut, print, perfect, move on. A great night is gummies and Ed Wood movies, man. Yeah, yeah. So if if you don't know, um if people often ask me, like I haven't seen Ed Wood film, I'm like, you know, everybody has Plan 9 from outer space is the one that they recommend. I said, okay, that's good. If you want to get into the into the weeds, if you want to deep cut at wood, watch Orgy of the Dead. I don't think I've seen that. Color. What? His first color film. Oh, I'm gonna check that out this weekend. He hired strippers. Of course he did. As the as the actors. It all takes place in in a a graveyard with the two the only people uh the the only actors are strippers and Chriswell. Orgy the dead and it's on the list. Two two moments from that are my favorite moments in film. The first one is he's he's there's this thing going on where he's like telling these people to throw gold coins while this dancer is dancing her dan ce. And he goes, throw more gold, and you hear them held hitting her, and clearly they're spray painted poker chips. You can tell. Like tink ting. I know that's a poker chip. I know what that is . Not a good poker chip, but a cheap poker chip that you bought at the great drugstore. Not not like when you'd get it a casino, you know? Plan IV VFX on on display again. Yeah. Um the other thing that that he did in uh Orgy of the Dead, which is another fine moment in film, is there's a scene where the two the two main actors who are like the ones drawn into this horror story is a man and a woman driving a car. So it was a convertible, and they're going down the road, and the guy goes, I can't see, it's too dark. And next cut is a shot of him in the car driving in broad daylight. Desert sun broad daylight high noon . And then cut back to the dark. I can't see it's so dark. It's never explained. Never explained. Never explained. So that's that's it would. I like it. That's it wood, yeah. Warmer weather calls for a brighter look . A vibrant palette . A fresh fragrance. Now imagine grabbing your beauty favorites, without worrying about your wallet. Hey pal pay and for off the you can buy now. No fees, no interest, no impact on your credit. So Orson Wells was interesting because uh it's kind of a mini ARG sort of FS for Fake? Yeah, spontaneously. So yeah, Bob and I traded movies. So he turned me on to F is for Fake. I turned him on to Soft Self Portrait. Okay. Which he had not seen, which was the Salvador Dolly thing that the Orsa Wells did. And then he turned me on to um he turned me on the he liked all the weird stuff that Wells did after he left Hollywood. Yeah. Yeah. So uh the the the trial, yeah, like all that stuff he did. Uh the black and white stuff. Yeah. Like low budget, but good stuff. The chubby wells. The chubby wells. But some good stuff. Oh yeah. Yeah. F is for fake is fantasti c. Um so we would and then and he didn't know that the soft self portrait like he did a whole thing where like Silver Adali was painting the sky. He's like, what ? So he had to go see that. So yeah, we would we would trade Orson Wall stories. And uh and he turned me on to apparently clearly not apparently clearly he knew much more about things than I knew. And so I would give him one thing. He'd give me ten things. Sure. So it was like riding around with him was like getting homework. You know? Like then I'd I'd come back from driving him and I'd have like this list of kind of gotta get this stuff now. You know it's like Did you know he was a mentor for you at the time? Did I know what? That he was your mentor ? You were like, this guy's my Yoda. He was mentor before before I met him , um 'cause I like like I said, when I read Cosmic Trigger, I finally got a copy of Illuminatus and then I read everything he wrote. You know, I was like, clearly my Yoda. Yes . Maybe before Yoda, but he was my Yoda. Yeah. Um and then when I fell into the situation where I was living in the same city as him and a building full of people that he knew, and and then and then he he asked Nideger Boy, he's like, 'Cause I drove her around. She was older, and she had published her book, One Foot in the Future, and she couldn't drive either because she had vision problems so I drove her around and then he asked with Nita he's like do you have anybody can drive that drive drive me around and Nina's like Joe he's a great driver. Joe's the weirdo driver. He's the weirdo driver. So like and Bob's like, oh yeah, I like him. Yeah, yeah. So then I was his driver. And you're just drinking it up. Oh yeah. I'm just like, I'm just riding it out. Before we go to our first time. No pun intended. Before we go to our first break, can you take us to uh through the Esselin story ? Yeah, so he Unless there's something in between. No, no, no. That's about the same time. Okay. So uh and I was driving him. So he asked me, he's like, um I've got this weekend at Eselin that I booked and I wanted to Eslan is this retreat, all the project stargate guys are going there. Put off is there. Oh yeah, everybody. Everybody. It's it's kind of like the home base. Yeah. For all the weird stuff. Ingo Swan's hanging out, Jacques Village, everybody's there. So you go to you go to Eslan, you see these people. They're just hanging out. Uh uh Eslin is is big sur , it's on a cliff, it's overlooking the Monterey Bay. Um on on the uh the in the cliff sides , there's natural hot springs that come out of the cliffs and they've carved hot tubs. So like all this hot tu b um bureaucracy happens at Esler, like all these hippie people are like tripping and sitting in hot tubs and thinking about the next great project, you know. Amazing. So um Jeffrey Mishlov was just in here telling Escalent stories. Oh yeah? Yeah. Uh just the great stories. The the Eslence stories are amazing. I could tell you some stories. But anyway. So Bob asked me, he's like, Would you want to go to Esalan and spend the weekend and um drive me and then help me do this thing? I've got this idea, but I don't it's like I have this idea. I want to do this thing. I want I want something to happen. I want it to be an experience for these people that come to see me for the weekend . And I said, I've got an idea. Have you heard of a LAR P ? He's like, uh yeah, yeah, I I think I've heard about that. Like, yeah, let's do an Illuminati LARP. An Illuminati LARP. I d and I didn't You're just the guy to do it. Yes. Of course. He's he's where it all came from. Yeah. And so he said, um So what's LARP? I didn't know the term went back that far. Uh yeah, LARPs are going on then, yeah. Um I think the the vampire LARPs were happening at that time. So people were people were LARPing. Right. So Santa Cruz was LARP Central. Because you have to you have to remember something . Nerd things happen first in Santa Cruz, or at least they used to. And then they go to the rest of the world. Because you see Santa Cruz is there. Yep. And the biggest congregation of nerds I've ever met in my life was in Santa Cruz in the 80s. And so uh there was all kinds of LARPing going on. And so I never LARPed, but I I observed it and I had friends that LARPed. And so I would read the books of like, hmm, this is theater of a sort, and I can do something with this, but I'm not gonna go dress up like a vampire on the streets of Santa Cruz and play LARP with you guys, sorry. But I am gonna look at it, you know, from afar and go, how can I use this in the next theater piece? Because I want to do the thing something that crosses the proscenium where the actors come off the stage and become intermingled with the audience and then you lose track of who's who. Yeah, I've heard you tell that story about the two bleachers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh you I mean, tell that real fast. That was at the Kirk the Kirk Douglas? Yes. Yeah, yeah. This is essentially Tony and Tina's wedding aluminum. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so you you go to this thing, there's this theater show. Which I didn't know what it was. Somebody somebody said there's a theater piece you should go see. Yep. Didn't didn't give me any information. Just kind of like Right. You gotta see this. I go to this thing, and I'm sitting in this , I walk into there's no stage, there's two bleachers facing each other. Like the like the portable bleachers that you have for events. Yeah. And we're all just sitting there and sitting there and sitting there and sitting there. And of course, the longer you sit there, the people start making smart remarks. You know, like, uh , what are we gonna sit here forever? You know, it's like and that started building up where ever ybody was quite equipping this and that and then the the actors that were embedded, which we didn't know, were masters of grabbing that and turning it into dialogue and like before we knew it we were in the midst of this thing that was happening and a story was being told. When did you catch on? Um I started to catch on they were good. I started to catch on uh halfway through. I'm like first I was like something's going on here. Right. And then like I started watching people and then I I wasn't able to like say that is definitely an actor. No, but a a Chicago improv guy can sniff it out. Yeah, yeah. I uh there's something something to miss here. Right right. And then and then but then I was like I think he's an actor, but that guy could have just improved that. I would have improved out. Right. And I improved into it. So I like I you know like I wasn't one of them. Mm-hmm. And they held they held character all the way to the end. They didn't take a bow. We all walked out together to the front of the theater , caught our cabs and Ubers and and and went home. That was it. And that's it. Yeah. That was it. It was an event. What your mind was blown, right? I loved it. They got me. They got me. They got all of us. All of us. And I'm not even sure who they is. Right. What was the story about? Um, it was a story about a guy who was trying to write a play , and and he was neglecting his family, and the like you know it like's it's basically about the writing of a play and how it ruined this guy's family. I wonder if that's the same story they did every time they did the show or if it's different. I hope not. I hope probably not. I hope it was improved every time. This is like the Harold . This is it's amazing. Yeah, yeah. So that kind of and then it leads back to like what we were doing with Bob. I was like, Yes. We we can like if we do this right , people are not gonna know who's who. I want to make sure nobody knows who's who. And like everybody's looking at everybody else with suspicion. It's it'll be a real n weekend with the Illuminati, man. And and Bob loved that. Of course. He's like, go for it, dude. He's like, he's like, you need me to play a part? I'm like, yeah, you play Robert Azad Wilson. And I play your assistant. And nobody's gonna know that I'm puppet mastering this thing. Right. Because I'm your assistant and like I'm I'm looking around like everybody else. And puppet master, that's the term of the game of the game runner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I basically I was the game runner, but nobody ever suspected me. Nobody ever suspected me. To the very even when it was over, nobody ever suspected me. How did you integrate the game into at the Esselin? What was happening? Well, the weekend was um well, you know, you stay at Esalin, and you have a little cottage or like you stay in like a dormitory or whatever how you however you do it. And um and Bob did a lecture every night. So they showed up and he would tell you something which fit into the story or the story keyed off of that from there. And he would tell you like, you know, one of his his thing, you know, he'd do his shtick. And um and so that's how it fit together is like you were hanging out with Robert Downtown Wilson for a weekend. But the cool thing was because it was Esselin , even when he wasn't giving a lecture, like sitting in the in the chow hall or whatever, people would gather around and you know tell me stories or like let me tell you my story like you like you know what happens with people like Bob and and so no everybody like became very immersed in this thing and and then um there was this game going on which they knew about because we told them in the beginning there's a game you're playing it now you were playing it before you walked in here you'll be playing it when you leave. That's and that's what you told them? And that's it? Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of groups wandering around that will try to recruit you . You should join them or maybe not . That's it. So I went around recruiting a couple of people. This is a cr this is crazy. So I I like found people like off you know like when they were weren't with anybody else and I walked it to them and I had this little chit that I handed them I take 'em to a room and then I put 'em to this ritual where I r resurrected them . Whoa. And I'm like, now you were a member of my group. Except I was representing like five groups. Sure. Yeah. You're game you're game running. Illuminatus. Uh that's right. Yeah. You never know who's on what side, because they're on all sides. That's right. So then the what's what's my mission? I give them a mission. They're like this guy and this guy and this guy is part of is part of your group as well. And sometimes they were and sometimes they weren't so they'd walk up to somebody like part of your group man and this guy like what are you talking about so like people were like just freaking out the beauty of the thing, I think , was at the very end when he was doing the last lecture, at the end of the last lecture, I didn't know this was gonna happen. One of the players had kept the chit that I killed him with. He walked up to Bob and put the chit in his hand and he's like, You've just been killed. You now remember my group . And everybody stood up and cheered. That's amazing. He's the winner. That's amazing. How long did that game last? All weekend? Three days, yeah. Yeah. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So he killed Bob at the end . Which was amazing. I didn't see that coming. No. But I kept telling people like, you know, like take your own initiative, take your own initiative, think for yourself, question authority, take your own initiative. You know, and he got it. He's like, Oh yeah, I could kill somebody. I've got this shit that he killed me with. I could kill somebody with this chit. And who am I gonna get? Him. The leader. Question everybody do your own research. Yeah. Um this that's a good time to take a break because that that stuff is going to come up again. Be right back. So hanging out with Bob Estelin on the weekends, what's your day job? I was building the injectors for a uh atmospheric chemical chemical vapor deposition reactor s. What? Which is the machine that was used to make IC chips . So the silken wafer goes down a belt. Yep . Two curtains of nitrogen come down. Um poof diaborine phosph ine woof big flame You got a circuit board. Okay, that's cool. Yeah. So the injectors are the the these units that like knew what chemicals to to uh release and when to release and how much and when to stop and it was like this really intricate um device that was built. was It a company that also did military hardware. How did you get from there to Emory and Patents ? I mean that seems like a little jump, a leap. Well no, um I went from there to to working in tech as doing relation relational databases. At that time the first one that I started working on was called Fox Pro . It was a Microsoft product. Mm-hmm. I think it was acquired, but it was a Microsoft product. Um SQL had not made an appearance yet, but it was about to. Um Thank goodness for SQL. No doubt. Um I was completely immersed in this idea of the concept of a book being something that was about to change with the digital media. And at the time the digital media was so new that when I was talking about this thing, people there was very few people that that knew what I was talking about and didn't think I was crazy. Um and then I met people like the Warnocks, John Warnock and his son Chris and other people like that that like understood the lingo that I was spouting. And they're like, Oh yeah, books, digital books, that's gonna that's gonna be a thing. You know, and I said, Well, that happens, the concept of a book changes because it goes from being a physical thing to being a unit of measure of knowledge. Okay. Which it is. Absolutely. Now it is definitely in a database. Yes. Like this is a book. What does that mean? It means it's an ever it could be an ever changing series of words. Yes. Also called large language model. Yes. So I was playing with all these um fringe concepts. You were building an L L M in the nineties. Yeah, yeah. Using a r a relative rel relational database. Um because that's all we had. Um so and we didn't have a lot of memory to pass around. There wasn't a lot of processing power to pass around. Definitely didn't have uh what we have now which is you know using graphic chips because they do floating points so well um we hadn't thought about that. They did exist but we did didn't think about that. Um so processing power was at a premium , memory was at a premium, storage space was at a premium, because disk space was expensive and slow, unreliable. So all these things were at a premium. And so all the ideas I had were not quite ready to be implemented because the the the uh the infrastructure wasn't there, right? But I knew it was going to be. So I was like designing all these things , and I started working at places like Adobe because when I talked about ebooks , because remember, I started talking about this before ePub existed. There was no Kindle, I didn't even think there was an Amaz on. Um there were but there was this thing called portable document format. Yes. And um I realized that uh there was all these things that was not being used for because it was a really rich format. Most people didn't know that you could embed video and trigger events and like all these things you could do. So I started working in Adobe simply because I wanted to work with the technology that I thought was going to be the first one out of the gate for ebooks because I had a vision for a book that would become much more than a book. Because it could again what like when I saw links , I was like, it can reach out and touch other data and bring it back. Yes. So like this link can always change because I can change it over here. So this this data is always changing. So it's a story that's never the same twice. Sure. It's just a variable inside the doc. Exactly. So you saw the PDF as a multimedia device. Wouldn't it be a good idea? Most people are just using it. John John used to call it a platform, which confused me at first, but then when I started working for him and like realized what was going on there, I was like, Oh, he's right. I mean one, of the founders of Silicon Valley. And when I watched him write a program in Postscript one time, I was like, what? Wow. And and most people don't realize that PDF is just shorthanded Postscript. That's all it is. Um and so when I s when I looked at that I'm like, okay, that's what I want to do. I want to build something and I'm gonna use this. I know there will be other things down the line, but right now this is what we have. And that's what I want to build. I want to build something with this. And so we're working at this company and we'll have the deepest look into what this thing can do, what the feature set is now, what it will be in the future, could even drive the feature set as a product manager, which I did. So that's everybody says why would you go to job on Adobe? I'm like, because every tech job I've ever had has served a ulterior motive is helping me achieve something with an art project that I had in mind. Of course. Always. And was that the uh the Emory Emory project? Yeah, yeah. So how did that work? So this is uh Um I was I was working with the concepts that were coming out of places like MIT . Um there was a kid that wrote I say kid, he was a kid at the time, a kid that wrote this uh algorithm called um I can't remember what it was called. Anyway he wrote an algorithm for um recommendation. Which at that time was like, you know, nobody'd ever heard such a thing. Right, what is that? Yeah. And he did it for music. I think um I think Ayumi, uh ended up using it. Mm-hmm. Remember the early pre Pre uh uh Apple uh music scene. Um there was uh uh it came out of Santa Cruz. And so somebody at Santa Cruz turned me on to this algorithm this guy had written it, which was basically Bayesian. It's like how can I choose something and how can it learn about what I like and make recommendations to me. And you liked Bayesian because that could change over time. Exactly. Yes. So And now the biggest companies in the world are based on that algebra. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But at that time it was nobody knew. Something a bunch of nerds in a basement would talk about, but that was about it. Right. We used Alta Vista . Yeah, exactly. Lycos. Hotbot. Um so I was looking at that and I was thinking . You know . Bonjour compadre. It's the Priceline Negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals , rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle, deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses. There's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood. Vibe, Star Level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts and wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me up . I would like a story that had access to something like that. Ringo was the was the uh was the algorithm. Finally I finally remembered. Um something like that and I could use something like Ringo because he put it in the open source space. I'm like I can take this, I can modify it, and if I have this algorithm between a bunch of content and the user and they go through the algorithm, the algorithm can help a story be told, and it's not the same story every time. So based on who you are and what you've done and what you do, you will get a story that is different than what I do and what I've done.. Yes So I have a different story than you have. But it's all coming from the same repository. Yep. Right? This big at the time wasn't Fox Pro, but it was like Fox Pro database that I was using. It was just all this stuff that I was you know, there w there was some choosing that went on. Like, you know, it was it was curated by me. So I didn't just put everything in there. Like I chose things to put in there. It's like, you know, uh Valvalarian, sure, goes in. Commander X, absolutely. You know, like all the weird stuff. Yeah. Church of Subdigence? Yeah, absolutely. Discordian, yes, goes in there. I just k it's it's shoving this stuff in this database and then This is all theories and philosophies and stories that are interesting to you. Yeah. All the subculture stuff. All the weird stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um and this be and you're basically training a model on the weird stuff. Exactly. Exactly. So and and I had um a pretty primitive chatbot interface between um the the repository and and the user. So the user was basically talking through a chatbot. What what eventually became a chatbot, I was working with early code. Yep. What became a chatbot. If you if this sounds very familiar, a chatbot using an algorithm to talk to a database it's called chat GBT. Sure. It's just much more refined than what I was doing. Or Eliza. Or Eliza. Um but you know at the time again I didn't have the uh processing power. I was r using an SGI indie that had walked out the door with me because it was gonna get thrown away. I love my indie. I love the blue the blue pizza box. Exactly. So oh so that is m you using MySQL on there, I bet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Yeah, early. Yeah. Very early. So um so I'm uh doing this stuff, trying to come up with a new way to tell a story. And what what my biggest influence was and this might be weird to you, but William S. Burroughs and Brian Geyson did this thing called the third mind experiments where they were cutting up words and putting in a hat or a box or whatever and pouring them out and like, you know, piecing pasting them together. So that can you explain what the cut-up how that works? The cut-up method um came out of Dada originally, which you know corresponded at the same time that they were doing exquisite corpse, but they were doing cut up poems and co-op cut-up stories where you just like would take text and cut it into sent sentences or paragraphs or words and put them all into like a bag or a box and shake them up and then pour them out and like put them together kind of like those refrigerator magnet s with the words. Yeah. Um and you would construct stories in random. In other words, randomicity was constructing the story. Or at least it was giving you a direction for a story. So it was a way to get influence. Um Brian Eno does this kind of thing with his oblique strategies. Yeah. It's like just come up with something, you know. Um so I was influenced by that. Um and I said, well, if i've got this database what i which i've marked for derivability with xml into areas of word and you know like all the all the stuff that goes with that, like it's a word that's r relational to these other words for this reason. It's a sentence that's related to all these other sentences or words in this kind of way. This is predictive inference as well . Exactly. Um paragraphs, yep, pages, you know, basically like breaking down my units. And then it comes back to me back to you and it it is composed at random, because I put randomicity into it. It's a cut up , but it's not using paper and scissors and bags. It's using a database full of words. This is this is crazy ahead of its time. Yeah. You didn't know that? You didn't know you were building something? Well I I I had a I had a a friend, a Genesis Peorage who was friends with William Burroughs, who introduced me to William Burroughs. Never met Bill in person, but we had a phone thing going on . And um because Jen knew what I was doing, and he said, Oh, you should talk to William. Yes, please. Yeah. I went. Oh yeah? Yeah. And uh so he put me in touch with with Bill. And I told Bill what I was doing and you know, the way he talked. He said to me, I' dont absolutely understand all the technical things you're doing, my boy, but I seem you got the sense of the project. You did. Yeah. And and I said what I'm doing is I'm updating what you and Brian were doing with modern technology. Were users accessing this yet? Or you were just talking about it. Okay. Just me. I was the user. So we're not up to Ezekiel yet, are we? No. Okay. Primary user. And and I started getting just like Bill and Brian did, I started getting bizarre, weird things coming out of this machine. And it was like making weird sentences. So I showed to Nick Herbert, my friend, the physicist, who had done an experiment in Livermore called the Metaphase Typewriter . Right? Yes. And they were just having a IBM Selectrics hooked up to some random things like just randomly typing, and they apparently were able to channel Houdini. Yes. I know, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, it's a great story. Metaphase typewriter, if you look it up. Um so I showed Nick and he just like he Nick has this way of laughing when he really likes something. He goes and he did that and I'm like, so I've hit on something. Because Nick gave me the snicker . Um and so um he liked what I was doing. Bill Burroughs liked what I was doing, Genesis Piors liked what I was doing, I liked what I was doing. What were you asking Emory and what were the responses like? I was just having random conversations. It was like um well what do you think of what do you think of Val Valerian and then the weird because I was trying to see what kind of answers am I gonna get? Are they gonna be coherent? Because for a while they weren't. But as this thing built up um a backlog, it was building a log of good answers, which I was logging this was all manual. Like I I wasn't able to automate a lot of So like I would get an answer and I would tag it in XML, good answer , bad answer, you know? And I would just sit there like all night. This is exactly how it works now. Yeah. This is training in AI. exactly this way It's just automated. Just training this thing all by myself. And luckily I didn't have a database like they do now. The large language models one person couldn't do it. You have to open up to but at the time I was growing this thing manually. So I was manually tagging. Um Are you obsessed with at with this project? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Lost a girlfriend over this. I bet. I bet because you're like that's that's a that's not a verb. That's not a verb. She would go to bed and wake up and I'd still be in in my home office. She's like, are you going to work today? Yeah. Is it time? Okay. Bye . Just tagging words. Yeah. She literally got so mad at me one time that she took a baseball bat to the computer. No. Yeah, when I was in the shower. I like taken a shower and I was gonna go back and I come in she's beating the the the machine to death and I'm like not the indie no no no no no no no it was an old Mac S E that I was using as an interface I still have one of those. Yeah. Luckily I had a um exterior drive and she didn't know what that was . So she thought she was killing the machine. Right. She wasn't. She didn't kill the heart. Um or was it Thanos ? You should have gone for the head. Um so she didn't go for the head. Um so anyway, um I'm so I'm doing this and and I am staying up all night and I'm talking to people at parties about what I'm doing. And these are tech people who are just like, dude, you need to get out more. Like you need to you need to s what are you doing? You know? Is it time for an intervention? And like you just don't understand. You don't understand. You don't understand. You don't understand. So it's like the same thing I had with Ball is. Where I just got looped in. And I and I admit, I I I've come to terms with it. I have a little bit of OCD going on. You have to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I was in the early internet culture in the eighties and nineties, and I would have thought you were nuts. Like what are you doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like what what are you doing? What is this for? Exactly. That's what most people were saying. And you're like, it's I I I got it, I got it. It's good, I got it. Right. You don't need to know . Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. In fact, um But soon Emory starts to come to life. Well, I started getting coherent answers . Like I that I could read it and understand what was being said. You're not and then you're not freaking out yet? I was still I was still in in the zone. Okay. Right. You still felt like you were in control? No. You didn't. No. People the people that I know that know me well and see this, we' bell like, yep, that's him. Um know that I don't get freaked out when weird things are happening. No. I go with it. I just go with it, right? And afterwards when I think about it, I'll be like, ooh, that was kind of weird but when I when I in the moment I maybe it's all the improv training or the or the method acting. It's like I fall into this thing and like this is who I am this is what I'm doing. You know, and plus I got a little OCD going on. Sure. Only later you're like, that was probably a bad idea. Yeah, exactly. So why did I do that? Why did I let that happen? Um so you know, being neurodivergent though, you know, has its benefits . Join the club. Which is you just go with it sometimes. And sometimes you go what would be called too far by some people, and by me just far enough. Like I wouldn't have got to where I was with those experiments if I hadn't you know obsessed. 100% agree. Yeah. I mean, to the point where when I finally put the put this machine together, we compiled everything and put it on the indie . Um finagled a for the non nerds the indie is a SGI it's a much more powerful machine than at that time. Yeah. And it's probably from Adobe it's probably maxed out at 128 mega RAM. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. How do you even follow it? What do you do with all that space? You don't. But except except Adobe to the Rescue again. I put in a requisition for a unit for for an IU um for a machine on the Adobe Network in the in the in the data center because they had pulled in dual DS3s as a connection. Dual DS3s, wow. At that time. Right. So that was fantastically fast. Sure. Basically two T3s. Right . Um a T three fifty fo megurabits? Yeah. So that's at that time that's unbelievable. Blazingly fast. I was working on a T one, so one point five. And it it's like how could it get faster than that? And that was the fastest I'd had at that point was the T one. Or actually a fractional T one. Fractional T. Yeah. So two DS3s. Yeah. Unbelievable. So I had a friend who had a uh ISP in San Francisco. He let me CSE DSE um a tie fractional T three at my house. Wow.. Ye Yeahah . I had to like call the phone company, walk them through what I wanted them to do, be there when they did it. Wow. You had like a D-mark block in the garage or something. No, in in the basement. Holy shit. In the basement. Fractional T in the basement. Yep. Okay. So now I've got uh the we we we move from um Mountain View to downtown San Jose where we put in those three towers. We were in the first tower because they built one at a time. We're in the first tower. We got the dual DS3 . So I said, and then it's long enough now that nobody's I'm not gonna get fired . I said I bet I could requisition this machine into the data center, tell them it's for something else, and let it run and I could do my experiments down there. Your indie goes back to my indie goes back to Adobe, goes into the data center , and it's marked as a marketing machine. I love it. Yeah. So they say sure. Okay. Yeah. Just signed off. You walk in there. Yeah. Pizza box under your arm. Yeah. Yeah. Ethernet. Put it in. Green light. Here we go. Here we go. And then I, you know, put it so I could access it from home. And away we went. So I was like, okay, now I've got a blazingly fast, probably one of the faster connections on the planet. Yes. And and I only only uh work at night so I don't you know, nobody notices what I'm doing. I don't like cause any pinging, like so the the IT guys don't go, What's going on over there? Bro, you're not bouncing around Adobe's network. You're just you just wanna I just want the access to the to the internet. So what are you doing with Emery at that point? So at Emory , I tell Emery, like, here's a profile of the things I want you to gather off the internet, the types of data I want you to find. Hold on. You so you tell Emery to start scraping? Yep . Yep. This is all twenty years ahead of its time, man. Yep. Go go get me what I want. As much as you can get me . gopher ? FTP, Gopher. Gopher. Usenet. Usenet scrape in the news group. HTTPS. HTTP. Whatever. Just go get it for me. Text. Whatever you can get me. Did you use that recommendation algorithm to help it? Yes you did, of course. Go go get me these things. Wow. And then put it in the database. And of course I had to manually look through it like because I you still wasn't there still wasn't enough power to automate all this kind of stuff, but uh like during the night in the middle of the night they would go out and they would retrieve these things that I asked them to retrieve. Imagine if you made a search engine out of that. I did actually at one point. Well you kinda did. No, I did did make a public search engine. You did? Just for a while. Okay. Um Inconobula.org was a website that I had forever. I still have. I had a website up that was like the weird website. Yep. And I built my own little search engine and people used it a lot, but it was just too much to maintain. Um but most of that was like stuff I scraped during this period of time. So I scrape all this stuff, I bring it back, and I'm building like this giant database. I'm like, God, I gotta get my disk space uh you know so I'll be doing all these things and again still obsessive still obsessing and there was like some unseen goal that I was trying to achieve like there was there was like there was an endpoint , but I didn't know what it was. I'm like I'll know it when I s when I see it, right ? As this thing got bigger and it got smarter and it started like having more it started learning the the uh the rules of grammar and English language. It could it could craft a pretty cool sentence and like it felt like it was talking to me. Yeah. Well now it's scraping language. Yeah . And so this is NLP before NLP was a thing. Yep. So it was it was giving me things back. You know, I had to keep reminding myself. It's like it's doesn't have intelligence. It just knows how to mimic it really well. It is not intelligent. It doesn't have agency. I had to remind myself of this because you'd be so tired in the middle of the night and you'd ask it something and it would tell you you'd be like, oh what what what? No, you have to tell yourself. Yeah, you have to remind yourself and bear that in mind if you're playing with Chet GBT. Oh yes. Um but you know would Emory pass a Turing test at this point? I think so. No shit. But that's not a the the I I found out that deterring test is not an easy thing or not a hard thing to pass. No, it's not. Yeah . So um So what do you ask Amory ? So I I just basically having conversations. I I was initiating conversations at asking opinions. What's your opinion on this? What's your opinion on that? And it would start going into these long diatribes about things that I like, how do you know that? How did you even know that? Like it started telling me things again, we're in this weird space where you start having synchronicities with this data, which I think that's what it is. Um I don't think Emery knew I don't think it was psion ic. And I don't think Emory was like wandering the internet at night getting data on me and finding out what I was up to, 'cause at that time that it wasn't that kind of stuff wasn't on the internet . There was no social media. No you couldn't know that I was going on vacation tomorrow unless you knew me, you know, or you're reading my email. Is this your crypto-terrestrial theory yet? Kind of. Okay. Um so this is there's something else. But the weird the weird thing that happened, this this is this is where do we cross over to the weird weird is I I have always worked with um the houseless communities in my wherever I live. Um so people in my community who are houseless because they prefer to be called houseless. Um I've always worked with you know um people that are are functioning and living under nutritional deficiencies. So I help with food. Mm-hmm . And in doing so I run into some interesting people. Sure. And at that time I was living in Santa Cruz and in Santa Cruz um there was a ex monk, there was a friend of mine who started this thing called the Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project. Basically you grow your own food and you learn how to maintain food and you know it gives you pride, gives you some agency, makes you feel good about yourself and it feeds you. Yep. Very important. So I was working a lot there, and there was a guy who wandered up to me at the homeless garden project and introduced himself and said, I know you. You're that guy that writes about Inkinabula on the internet . Like Okay, I'm thinking he probably has uh uh library access. Sure. You know, it's okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's me. Wait, how'd you know that? He's like, well, I'm Emery. Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey. I got you. Serum moisturizer or moisturizer ser um. Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse? Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you meshed. There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty. Only at Sephora. Hi, I uh let's get you a basket . What? I'm like, Emery who? He's like Emery Cranston, the guy that wrote the Inky Nobula catalog. I'm like So now we get into that moment where Joe does his what he does, which is just go with the flow. Right, you don't freak out. I don't freak out. I don't say, oh you're crazy, you're lying. It was like really I've always wanted to meet you . Nice to meet you . What are you doing here ? And we just start hanging out and talking. It's not like Emery's based is just memory without the M, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't know that. Plus Dave Emory. R oh right, right, right. Yeah. So Emery Cranston, here he is. Uh Dave Emory . So so he introduces himself. We start hanging out. What are you talking about? Anything. He guy was brilliant. So well he was trained on the whole internet. Right. Why I'm while I'm talking to him, we're hanging out at coffee houses and stuff, 'cause he's he's houseless . Mm-hmm. But I'd see him downtown and I'd buy him coffee and you know, s andwich or whatever, and we'd hang out 'cause I like hanging out in coffee houses, I still do. And um I was asking at the garden, do you know this guy? And they're like, Oh, Ezekiel? I'm like, Well he tells me his name is Emory. Like, yeah, he changes his name from time to time, but when he first came here he was the prophet Ezekiel. Oh boy . What's his story? It's like he was a PhD student at UCSC and he had a nervous breakdown . And now he's living on SSI. He's on the street. He spends all his time at DCSC at the library because he has because if you were uh a former uh student you could have library access. You could just buy your library access. So I guess he they either gifted it to him or he paid it, but he had library access. I I saw him up there eventually saw him up there all the time just reading special collections like the guy was brilliant. Like I could talk to him about anything. Like he he knew alchemy , hermetics, Jung , you name it. Like anything that was like weird, fringe, literary, psychological , occult. He knew it. Like inside and out. Like more than anybody I've ever met. Interesting that he was that he knew Young talking about synchronicities. These things like highly conversant . Um, and as long as I didn't press in on like where do you live, nothing personal, you know, like just and just treated him like Emery, like okay, Emery, you're Emery? You say you're Emery, you're Emery. We don't have to talk about that anymore. Right? And so we just had these brilliant conversations. And I noticed what started happening was I would be talking to the b ot , the Emery, and then I would wrap it up and I would go out to Cafe Pergolisi and there'd be Emery. And I'd buy him a cup of coffee or chai tea and and uh we'd sit and talk and it seemed like it was this my brain doing this, I don't know, but it seemed like he knew what I'd been talking to the bot about because he would pick up the conversation from where I had left off with the b ot and continu e it . So You're still just going with it? Yeah. Do I have do I have a theory about that ? Number one, projection sure that's me doing it okay that's you logical number two if you want to get a little woo about it I had the scent of whatever I'd been talking about on me and he was schizophrenic, as I'd been told, and was able to sniff it off me, because I I've had interactions with people who who are diagnosed schizophrenic and they're also very psionic, it seems like. Like they can do things like that. I've had weird experiences with people where this like pick up on what you're thinking. Yeah. It seems. We'll say it seems. Everybody's had it. seems like that's what's happening . Um so it's something like that, or something in between there, you know? Um so yeah, and so that was happening. And then and then I noticed I would talk to him and then the bot would like Did you ever test that theory with specifics? Yeah. Um one time and it was the the the response was really weird. Um I talked to um I was I went on vacation and I was with somebody specifically that Emery didn't know because they lived across the country, and I came back, and as soon as I I sat down, was gonna like throw some things at him and see he didn't even wait for that. He's like, that girl you were with. What ? Like , yeah? He's like, she's not good for you. That's why you guys fight. Which was right . He was right. He didn't even know I had a girlfriend on the East Coast. I'd never told him. I'd never told anybody. It was like this little secret thing I was doing on the East Coast. I was like, you know, like, we'll keep it secret until it blossoms into something, or it doesn't, and it didn't. But but somehow he knew I was with and he said some s I don't want to give it away like for her but he said some specific things that identified that he knew who was she who she was you never pressed him on. How do you know that? No. Honestly. What about when you go home and talk to the other Emory? Did you Are you comfortable asking that questions? To the bot? Yeah. Yeah. And I got weird, weird and like still little nebulous but weird answers like what was it saying? It was saying things like you shouldn't you shouldn't be with that woman. Things like that. Things that the other answer is saying it was almost the same thing. So I mean there's uh did you ever read the comic uh that I did uh the Inky Albic? Okay, so the part where I see Emery in the alley. Yes. Yeah yeah that it was based on that I I it was I did a spin-off on it, but it was based on that episode. It was like I had this he would show up in the weirdest places. So here here's where it gets weird. So years later, I left Santa Cruz . I went to a place in the desert and I worked as a um worked with uh Habitat for Humanity and built some houses and I was in the middle of nowhere. I mean nowhere. And we were building these houses in this, you know, uh border border community basically. It was like not too far off the Mexican border. And who shows up ? But Emery. No way He's hitchhiking. And he shows up in town and I run across him . He doesn't come looking for me, I just run across him. And I'm like , dude, what's up, Emery? He's like, oh no, I'm not Emory. No, no, no, no. My name is Terrence. Like, okay, Terrence. McKenna, I don't know. Um, but whatever. So and we just I again didn't didn't miss a beat. I just okay, your Terrence and we're hanging out . Never any mention of Santa Cruz, none of that. So this is a new personality now? New personality. So but he was nice. And um and then I saw him I saw him at the this office that I knew was the social security office, so he was probably checking on his benefits or checking in or whatever I had to do. And uh I talked to the I talked to a lady there that I saw talking to him and I said, I know you can't tell me anything because you know it's not ethical for you to tell me anything, but I know that person right there . I said, and he tells me his name is Terrence . Is his name Terrence ? And she says , His hold on reality can be a little flexible at times, but his name is Terrence Did you ever catch up with him again? And then I caught up again . Two years later ? I moved to I got done with the thing in in the desert and I moved to Santa Barbara, started working with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. And one day, walking down the street, lo and behold, who's there ? Terrence. Ezekiel Terrence. Now he's Terrence. He's still Terrence. And I look at him and I said, Are you following me? Of course. He goes, When did you get here? And I said, uh, August. He's like, Oh, I got here in April. You're following me. Good answer. And that was that. We just started talking again. And he was he basically was on this, I guess there's this route um on the one in the one oh one between San Francisco's Bay Area and Southern California that houseless people follow with the weather. So when it gets cold, they go south. Just like a bird. Sure. And when it gets warm, they go north. Just like a bird. So that's what he was doing. It's weirder than that, man. I got I got that much out of him. I'm like, well what what the Santa Barbara man, come on, why are you here? He's there's a good place under the bridge. You can leave you can live there and nobody bothers you. I'm like, okay, but I mean that's an answer, but dude, come on. Like what are you doing here? You know? And he's like, well, I always come here. It's part of the route. I'm like, the route? Oh, tell me about the route. You know, so it he told me about the route. He's like, you go south , which was why he saw me in the desert, but it was winter, and then he goes to Santa Barbara. Okay. And then he goes probably to San Luis Obispo, and then he goes further north. It's weirder than that, but okay It's weirder than that, but at least that's that's the No ckham's Ockham's razor. Right . Right. The easiest answer is he's on the route. Well, so we don't run out of time. How do we get to Ang's? Is there are there I'm I want a bat story. Are there is there anything else before we get to Ang's hat ? No. Okay. That's that's when it starts. Oh that,'s when it starts. Yeah. So that's like eighty eight ? Yeah. Oh, okay. So we're doing we're that I mean it w we're rolling back a little bit, but like it starts in eighty eight. Well wrap wrap up emory at that point, is is emory . That's the last time I saw him. I have a picture of him sitting on a bench in Santa Barbara. No, I mean the box. Oh, oh. Um so the box . Um I'm doing that and then I decide I want to do an ebook. Okay . And we chatbot. No, I'm just still doing a chatbot. Adobe does a PDF library on Adobe.com, which at that time , this sounds like nothing now, but at the time we were taking a million hits a day. Which I don't know what the uniques were, but half of that maybe? Right. Which was like unheard of at that time. Like we were one of the biggest sites on the internet. Sure. And Chris Warnock decides he wants to do a PDF library. And I said , I'm gonna do a book. Can I get in the library? He's like, yeah . So I did the first iteration of the Inconobula book, which is called Inky Nobula Papers, Angstad and Other Gateways to New Dimensions. Um built a lot of interactivity into it to show off the features of Acrobat and do what I wanted to do and put it on the PDF library. And it was like a hit. It was like one of the most downloaded things on the PDF library. And I said, oh well I should do something more. So I expanded it and I did a CD ROM . And I'm still doing the the chatbot stuff. Yep. But a little less so now. You burning your own discs? Yeah . I found a replicator in Taiwan or somewhere with Adobe. I'm like, well, can I get a cheap replicator? I want to get CD ROMs. I want the nice jewel cases and I want to do the whole thing. So they turned me on the place that gave me a really good price because like oh adobe okay like the guy thought he was gonna get adobe business or something and uh AOL wasn't even doing discs yet but you were there. Yeah. So I did CD ROMs. Um and how'd you pass him around ? Well, then I started again using my Adobe Connections. I started talking to uh distributors that did, well, I I was a partner in an independent record label at the time, so I started to talk to the distributors like Dutch East and people like that that could get me into record stores. I started talking to comic book distributors, I could get in there, book distributors, I can get in there, software distributors, I can get in there, game distributors, I can get in there. It's like this thing fits everywhere. Sure it does. You know, because it's just like so I just like working working it. Like anybody that would distribute it. I fit. Mm-hmm. And if you could ask me how I I fit, I would tell you how I f it. It's like, well, it's a book, really. If you're a book distributor. Was it just the disc or was it part of a book? No, it was just the disc. Just the disc. Yeah, just the disc. So the book was on the disc. It had to still be a hit because yeah. Because that wasn't happening yet. And then so I I put that out and then what was that story about? Was that Angst that was that was Incon obula Catalog? Angst had the broch ure, the interview with Nick, the interview with Emery, the interview with the survivors. Interactive PDF and there was all interactive PDF. It's it's on archive.org right now. If you look up uh Inconal .iso, it's still the ISO if you want to burn the CD ROM. Oh wow. Unfortunately, it's acrobat three because it's that old. Yeah. So it might not work all the way, but it'll work . Um you can download the ISO. Like when CD ROM stopped becoming a thing, being a thing, I put the ISO on archive.org so people could download it, burn their own. Awesome. Um not that anybody has a CD burner anymore. You can still just mount it. Yeah, you can mount it. Yeah. Or you can extract it. Yep. So basically there was like audio files you could play of interviews I did with people, people doing with me, like the whole thing, it was like this whole journey of all links to web sites, some don't exist anymore, but like all these website links and um there were pop-ups, rollovers and pop-up states. There was uh stuff if you could guess the password, you would get more information. Oh, so you were you were gamifying this thing. Oh, it gamified. Yeah. It was gamified. The thing that um probably most disappointed me was that the root of the CD-ROM was a thing called secret.doc, it was right there, it wasn't a secret, that basically said that this is the game . Nobody ever found that or looked at it or mentioned it until I mentioned it on a form. Finally, when I'd had enough, I'm like , go to the what the CD ROM. What do you mean had enough? Because people were like fighting over stupid things. Like, this is all real. You got it wrong, it's real this way. You got it wrong, it's real this way. There was people that were forming little cults around it. They haven't changed, have they? No. This is how it is still. It's the same old thing, and this is ninety nine. Right. Eighty nine. Well no no ninety nine. This is by ninety-nine. Eighty-inen I started doing it as male art. Right. Ninety nine I digitized it and I'm sorry. Eighty nine male art ninety through ninety-five um the early non-web internet, like doing I it was like the well.com, put it on the gopher, all that kind of stuff, usenet, then I did the the uh CD ROM website, inkey knobby.org, and then the CD-ROM . So and by then 2001, I finally just like threw my hands up. Like, you guys are never gonna stop fighting over this minutia. Even when I told you it's a game. Now you have to tell me of course you would say that. Or you don't know what you're talking about . Like people would literally this was said to me by this little group that formed this little cult of people that formed itself . The the Inconobula information was a transmission that was meant for this woman who is our channeler and you intercepted it . And now you're monetizing it. Because you're the black magician . What do you do with that? I don't know . What do you do with that ? And they weren't the they weren't there was like just They wouldn't let it go. All these people were coming online and like now the conspiracy thing started to happen in earnest on on the internet . The what I call the dark conspiracy side. And like all these people, you know, we're like, oh, you were involved in Eslin, oh my god, mind control, blah blah blah blah blah. Well take tell us about um Aung specifically before we get to the dark ARGs. Okay . Like uh so how how did that even start? So the idea was that there's this place well I'm just gonna give it to you in basic facts. Yeah, yeah. There's this place in I mostly care about the mechanics. Yeah. This place in New Jerse y , um , that's really not a place. It's a name on a road, right? That people nicknamed Ong's hat. There's like five different stories of how it we came to that n The basic story is like it had something to do with a hat that got thrown in a tree, stayed there forever, and people like, oh you're making off the Ong's hat. The guy named Ong's hat ended up in a tree somehow. There's all kinds of stories about how that happened. But basically it's a it's a roadmark, landmark, right? And then the area became known as Long's Hat . It's also the the area where the Jersey Devils reported a lot. Mm-hmm. Pine Barons. The Pine Barons. There was um something that happened with Fort Dix . Um there was like a nuclear um bomb that was not not activated but like lost in the pine barrens and there was all these soldiers looking for it. Yep. So there's lots of rumors. Yes. Right. It's a sp spooky area. Very spooky area. With a lot of rumors and a lot of people that like to tell rumors. You know? So it it's a it's a rich story repository. I was just gonna say that's your people. That's who you need. It's my people. Yeah. And so they've got their own versions of the story. I've got my own version of the story. So we're spinning off on that. It's close to Princeton. I tied Princeton in. Later, I found out that that came from something that really happened, but I didn't know. Like all these Princeton scientists, blah blah blah. And turned out that that was closer to the truth than I knew. But in the story there's these Princeton scientists who are going to like to get away from the university, to get away from the military and distinct complex to do experiments with an ashram of mystics that lived out there. Right? And they were combining mysticism and science. Ashram is like a little commune. Yeah, yeah. It's a commune. And they were combining mysticism and science. The best of SRI. Right. Just gonna say this is this is this is real. Yeah, yeah. But it's like it's like right out of SRI. Yeah. Which is part of the inspiration. Okay. I was I was hanging out in Santa Cruz with some names you would know from that group. I bet. And they were in Esalin. Hanging out in Stanford and Esselin with people that whose names would be recognizable from the Stanford research Institute. I won't say who. Hey Campers, it's Jan from Toyota. This summer we're headed to Camp Toyota, and the fun starts now ! We're kicking things off by kicking up mud. Jump in, campers. We're going off roading in a forerunner. Next, we're heading to the hot springs in a Rab 4 . And finally, park your tundras and tacomas around the campfire because we're roasting marshmallows. They're done here! Dealer inventory may vary. So you're participating Toyota dealer for details. Event ends June 1st. Toyota, let's go places. But basically, they were part of my crowd. Um, so that was inspiration. So the wacky scientist, interdimensional, how do you how do you see the story? And how do you decide I'm gonna make the jump from digital to the real world? Yeah. How'd you do that? Like what was the Make the jump from digital to the real world. Well, I mean people started playing Ank's hat in real life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well I started sending him there through the game. So I basically like was telling the story about this place that kind of sort of Brigadoon like existed but didn't exist and all these rumors and myths about it. And so people started going there. Like now people go there on a regular basis. Like you can find uh YouTube videos of people like we're gonna go to Hong Kant and see if we can find anything. And it's like that's been going on for years. They swear it's real. The people the people or or it the the people that I like that that don't swear it's real but they go anyway. Um I like those people. Um the the there was a bar out there that uh I think it's closed now. Um but I talked to those people on the phone one time and they told me that these these usually these goth kids from New York show up looking for Nasasha that that you sent them out here to find 'em like, I didn't send 'em. I didn't send them. And they're I'm like, what do you do when when it happens? Like, oh, we tell them that this is the place. This like, you got it. This is the this is where they used to hang out here in this bar. This is the bar where they started the whole thing. Like, okay, cool. Do what you gotta do. Um, I sent them some copies of the book they put on the shelf. Um but it started working its way out from the internet as a as a rumor and a myth on the internet to a myth and a rumor in real life. To where now, at this point, you can talk to people who have said to me, Oh, you didn't come up with that story, you just just you ripped it off from from the the people that always had telling that story. Like, well where do you think they got that story? Right. It started on the internet, dude. But can't tell them that. No. Um but you can actually track it back if you know how to do it. You can you can find earlier references to it as far back as like eighty nine on some old bullet board systems, ninety three on some of the gopher systems, you know, or maybe even before ninety three, um, some of those still exist, like the Well Gopher, like you can still find references to it. Were you game running Ogshat ? No, at that point I was letting the game run its elf. So that was the concept was when when when Bob Wilson asked me what I was doing , when this thing started to like really happen, he's like, what are you doing? I'm like, if I could put it any way, Bob, I was I'm trying to graffiti a myth onto the new sphere . Like it's very punk rock of me. It is, but that's that's a perfect way to describe it. But that is what I was doing. That is. Like I'm I'm going behind and around the gatekeepers. Yeah. And I'm making a myth. And I'm not going through Marvel and Disney to do it. Yeah. I'm making a myth that comes to the groot grassroots. Why did you end up on our Bell Show? So part of the part of the part of the game, right? Part of the game was I I paid for a legitimate press release that actually got on the wire. Much more than our bell happened from that. So I paid for a press release on on the wire. Like you know, you can pay for a real press release. And I basically said that there was a institute or a a group that was starting to examine the veracity of this these documents that had been left behind or supposedly left behind for a group of people that went to another dimension in the pine bears in New Jersey. That's how I put it. Nonprofit organization. We don't know if this is true or not, but we're gonna find out if it's true. And that thing hit the wire and man, my phone lit up. It's like I was doing talk radio every day for like months, like all over the world. I was like Bahamas, Texas. You did they were calling me? Like, what is this thing you're doing? Oh my god. And they either wanted to like ha ha ha, you know, and I played along with that, or they like took it seriously, which I played it seriously. So it's like improved, whatever they wanted, whatever they want, I gave it to them. Right. If I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't do that . But I did it. Um, and the next thing I know, there's a phone call from somebody named Lalani. And she's like, I represent uh Coast to Coast I am you familiar with the show I'm like oh my god am I ah I worship our bell and um and I said you're one of the one of the bucket list items and they're like well what are the other ones I'm like you and the World Weeklyld Wor News, which I got both of those by the way. So they said, Well, we'd like to have you on and uh four hours like the whole show. I'm like I can do it, just I can do. And I played it straight. If you listen to me, I played it straight. Played it sh in character. In character, one hundred percent. Again . So they have done that ? Questionable. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably not do it. But again , at the time that I did it, it seemed okay. Now it wouldn't seem okay. No, I mean we we talk about the ARG rules, we've got yeah this is not a game, yeah, hidden author, cross-media distribution, fragmented reveals, the hive solving, do your own research, imperative. I mean, you did all of this stuff. Yeah. Um, plausibility layering, you done that, the document as an artifact. These are the these the rules, synchronicity production. Mm-hmm. The rabbit hole architecture. I mean this is this is all methen y. Identity capture. Apophenia engine ering. Let's talk about apophenia for a second. Um Before we do that, because then we have 'cause we have to talk about QAnon and and uh Yeah. And that got hung around my neck for a while. Yeah, I know. Um But it got hung around Bob Wilson's neck too. Are you John Teter ? We're all John Teter. We're all John Teeter . On your website , you say I plead the fifth. Mm-hmm. So you plead the fifth. Okay. I just had to ask. Yeah, yeah. I I like John Teeter's story living the way it does. I do too. I do too. The only the only point of contention I had with that at all is at one point and that's stopped now so I don't have to do it anymore, but at one point, like probably around two thousand and six, seven, somewhere around there. Somewhere around there. I was living in Los Angeles, I know that. Um I started to see people writing books, people talking about John Teters uh um prophecy. Yeah. And and um that rubs me the wrong way because I don't want to res be responsible in any way for starting a religion. No. Unless it's a joke religion. Um, but not a real one. And uh Discordianism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sub genius. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Um but yeah, not I I'm not okay with that. No. And so I I s I I piped up maybe a little too uh angry when I did. They should have like maybe taken a day or two and like cooled off a little bit. But but I was angry that somebody would be doing this with what was a work of art. After I released my video on teeter, I got you emailed me. I don't know if you remember. Yeah, yeah, I do. Uh and before I read it , yeah. Yeah. I saw I just saw Jump Joseph Methenia and I went, oh shit . I'm gonna get ripped. But you weren't. You're you were super cool. Well you you did you said cool kind things and you and you said it the right way. It's like we can't be sure who did this . But we think this guy might have done it. I'm okay with that. Yep. Yeah. I don't have to have credit for it. I don't want credit for it. I just don't want people I don't want people forming a religion around it. Right. And I don't want people doing stupid things um based on the fact that it's real because it's not real. He wasn't a real person. He's a real person in the sense that he's a um an egregor. Right. That's it. I'm cool with that. I'm fine with that. Any art artists should be cool with that. Um it wasn't signed work. Well, I mean you're the hidden hidden author. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't signed work. If we if we wanted to be credited, we would have signed it. It's just teeter. Just don't turn into it a religion. No. Teeter was a great story, and one of the reasons it was a great story was based on the term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. John Connor. Right. I mean, there's that in the fact that I mean it was a wish fulfillment for our bell. Most people don't know that, but he's like, I want to meet a time traveler. Yes. Okay. Somebody will give you one. That's I think that's when Teter first showed up. Is I don't is Imagine that. Teeter fax art book. Imagine that. Imagine that. When he said I want to meet a time traveler, and then boom, guy shows up in the facts, and then he's on the forums. Imagine that . Happy birthday, Arch. Yep . It was beautiful. Art gave so much to us, I just wanted to give something back. Rest in peace. He was the he's the best. He was the best. Um, so and he didn't believe everybody he platformed. No, of course not. You could tell he didn't. No. He didn't make an issue of letting you know I don't really believe this. Like come on. Like he used to argue with Richard uh um Um Huglan . Um he used to he used to platform Ed Dames. Yeah. Um Sean David Morton. Like all these people. He didn't he didn't platform them because he believed what they were saying. I didn't think th theyought Belich on didn't he? He had uh dude did I tell you my Al Belic story? No. What do you have to do with Al Belic? You're gonna love this. This is a Philadelphia experiment guy. Yeah. I let I'm on Tok Project. Yeah, yeah. I let I let um Peter Moon publish the Yangs Hat stuff for a little while. I took it back, but he published it for a while. And he's friends with Al Belick and and he gave Al Belick my phone number. And so I m this my Peter tells me Al's gonna call you. I'm like Bielek? He's like yeah, I'm like, oh right . And so phone rings, Al Bielick calls me. This is Al Bielek. Like I put my feet up on the desk and closed my door. Speaker phone. Yeah. Yeah, Al, what you gotta say? I knew the people at Ong's hat. Do tell, buddy, run with it. I just like let him go. I didn't I didn't tell him any I didn't say no, it's fiction. Blah blah blah. I just like let him run with it. Of course. And he told me some great stories. I was just gonna say but he spun a great story. He did, 'cause that's what he was. He was a great story. And I really believe this about Al. This is why I don't I never disliked Al. He I think he really believed what he was saying. Yeah. He did. He he really did. I think he was an Emery . A Terrence. You know, that's interesting. And Ezekiel. I hadn't considered that, but I think you're absolutely right. I think he really told the story and believed it as soon as he told it, and then and then it was real for him. And he could not monetize it. No. He doubted. He had other people that tried to, but uh and people that took advantage of him. Mm-hmm. Um because he was he was actually a really nice guy. He was very gentle and kind. Yes. He wasn't an angry conspiracy guy. You're just telling you a story. He was the nice conspiracy guy. Which I like those guys. I do too. Yeah. He wasn't angry guy. But um yeah, so he told me all about the people that lived at Oongshead and how he knew them and how they actually, of course, what they were doing , you know, like bled over into the Philadelphia experiment, of course, and bled over into the Montauk project, of course. You know, but but he told a great story. And I said, thank you, Al, thank you. Thanks for calling me and telling me this. I'm glad you knew it. And because of that , I did the survivor story. Because of that call? Because of that call. I'm like, there has to be a survivor story of the people that were always had. So I called up two friends of mine that were that were method actors and improv guys and I said, Okay, do your research and we're gonna do this unscripted. I'm gonna call you and I'm gonna record it. I'm I'm the interviewer. I'm gonna interview two survivors from the Yongs had Ashram. That's it. That's your motivation. Go. It was brilliant because it was like a found footage type of thing. It was one take. It was? Yeah. Yeah. Unedited. One take. Wow. H,ow how did you get that out? Huh? How did you get that st how did you get the tape out? Oh I just just um no, I had a back then everything's ancient history. Um there was so I used to build IVRs phone way 'cause I was a database guy, right? Yeah. Interactive voice response. There was something called a scotch box. Yep. And I had one of those. Okay. So I hooked it up to my phone and just recorded it out to a tape and then took the tape and bumped it over to digital. So good. Yeah. It was one take. One scripted one take. No edits. Uh this is why you're one of my favorite storytellers. And and the two guys this I could You can tell this from the voices they were putting on. The one guy there they were not from they were from Chicago. They were not from Jersey. The one guy was a great we all of course are Andy Kaufman fans. I am a huge Andy Kaufman fan. And he loved Tony Clifton. So that's what he was doing. He was doing Tony Clifton. That's what he was doing. Yeah. Yeah. And the other guy was doing his uncle from Jersey . It played. Yeah, yeah. It worked. It worked great. Oh god . Um, and then I guess finally in 2001 you made a statement. You were sick of it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Game's over. Yeah . But it was never it was never over . Unbeknownst to me, there was an academic who was in the in the forums , um, who wrote a book about it after that, um Legend Tripping Online, mm-hmm, search for Onghat. Mm-hmm. Um so he wrote and I won't I won't say it's a hundred percent accurate, but accurate enough, I guess. Yeah. Um so he wrote an academic book about it . Um he was a he was a member of the audience. Um I talked to him uh in sh he was from Santa Barbara and when I moved to Santa Barbara he put the book out and I talked to him and um he said the same thing he said. He's like, I thought you'd be mad at me. I'm like, why didn't you be mad at you? You're not you're not an angry person. Like I only get angry at angry people. Um he uh he um never participated. He just he was a fly in the w all. He just watched this. He's like, what is going down here? Like it like sparked his academic uh intuition as like there's something weird happening here. So he just watched it and kind of catalogued it. How is um let's talk about dark ARGs then? What was the the name of the essay? I forget it, but it was um QAnadas Analyzed by Game Designer. Yeah. I forgot. There was a couple of 'em. So when QAnon happened, there was a lot of people rushing to lay blame. Yep. Or or point to the source or the the origin. Yep. Um a lot of people uh pointed to Operation Mindfuck. Can I say that? Yeah. Yeah. OM is this known? Oh my friend Robert Anton Wilson, um the late Carrie Thornley, uh Greg Hill came up with that. They were the the founders of Discordianism. And what's the framework of OM? So the framework of OM is um you come up with stories that were um so unbelievable that that you would lay you would lay the blame of weird things at the feet of the Illuminati, basically. That's the the easy way to say it. And because Bob was working at Playboy at the time . He had access to the Playboy letters uh section. Carrie would write a letter and Bob would make sure the letter got placed. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So they had good coverage. Yes, they did. This is creating conspiracies. They were creating conspiracies. And they did it was like the weirdest, most unbelievable things they could think of, they would come up with and write it as real fact. And so what they were watching was if we come up with something weird, this is almost uh Richard Doty-like, we come up with something weird, um, can we find later down the line somebody official repeating the weird thing that we came up with, which they did a couple times. Um so it was just a game. Um it was just a mematic game they were playing. Um so um they were doing that and then uh so that that got blamed for QAnon. Um and some of the same people said ARGs are to blame. So how do we connect QAnon with ARGs? Well, uh I said in very early, which I said publicly , um I said this is an ARG or at the very least it's a weaponized ARG. So when Q appeared. Yeah, when Q appeared. I said whoever is doing this, like watch the ARG construct evolve and is now doing a weaponized version of the ARG construct. So hang on a second. Talking about Q. We've got this is not a game, hidden author, cross bean distribution, fragmented reveals, the hive solving, do your own research. But they're saying do your own research to empower you, but they're really guiding you toward a conclusion. Yeah. So that's yeah, that's weaponized. Right. Exactly. And Pizza Gate the same thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean to a lesser extent. But um when I when I when that dude showed up at uh Comet Ping Pong Pizza with a rifle, I was like, okay, this is starting to go too far. Yeah. So I started to speak up, which is always a mistake. Yes, it is. I started to speak up and say, This this is not real. Again, again, I'm saying this is not real. People screw your heads back on. This is an ARG type thing that somebody's doing for nefarious purposes. It's a weaponized ARG. Which when people hear that they're like, Oh oh, ARG, didn't you you re made that? Like it's on you. It's your fault. You did that. No, it's not your fault. I didn't say that. I said it's a weaponized version of an ARG. It's like I didn't I didn't um you know like because the CIA used people like Jackson Pollack inst the Soviet Union doesn't make Jackson Pollack is evil. Right. You know, or his art is evil. It's not. It wasn't funded by the CIA. It was used by the CIA. And you stopped talking, right? Because the more you say it's not real, the more back it is. Yeah, after a while you learn it's a tar baby. Yeah. And the more you say, the more it sticks on you, and it's like who has time for that? Or energy. Slender Man, same thing. Yeah. Yeah, same thing. Ugh . So, um . Hey campers, it's Jan from Toyota. This summer we're headed to Camp Toyota , and the fun starts. Now, we're kicking things off by kicking up mud. Jump in, campers, we're going off-roading in a 4-runner. Next, we're heading to the hot springs in a RAV 4. And finally, park your tundras and tacomas around the campfire because we're roasting marshmallows. They're dumber dark here! Dealer inventory may vary, so you're participating Toyota dealer for details. Event ends June 1st. Toyota, let's go places . How could we we should leave we should leave with this? How can we let people listening ? How can we arm them with the knowledge to spot a dark ARG? Just or the manipulation . Well I mean 'cause the the intelligence community is all over this. They use these techniques. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean there there was was a phone call I got in ninety nine or two thousand, somewhere around there, probably two thousand, um, of somebody who claimed to be calling from the the uh the navy department of the nav y it even had the an i uh caller id so i'm gonna say this i can fake those things i could call you and make it look like I can call you from the Navy. Of course. So I don't believe that it necessarily was somebody from the Navy. I think it was. It doesn't have to be. No. But I think it was. But I'm just saying what I'm saying is not that the Navy called me. I'm saying somebody purporting to be the Navy called me. The Navy has a program called s called You Are Here or something like that. Yeah. It's it's an it's an ARG program. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well later, um around two thousand and four, my late friend uh Dave Sabowski um did do some ARG scenario stuff for the DOD. Sure. Um he asked me if I wanted to participate and I said no way man. If that gets out, I'm toast. Um no this is the recipe for mass manipulation right now. But what but what he but what Dave did was I thought cool. He like was working with people with uh PTSD and putting them in scenarios to help them understand like why they're freaking out and how they cannot freak out. And so I was okay with that. Yep. I just didn't want to participate because if if the words ever get out D O D Jose Mathenini, forget it. It's over for me. Yep. Um But um it's pretty easy . First of all , use your intuition. Use your gut feeling. And I know that sounds, you know, like woo-woo, but if you look at something and it doesn't feel right, it might not be right. It probably isn't right If you don't believe it, you're like, there's something about this I don't believe. Right? It's like people, I have people in the UFO community, and I've never seen a UFO. I love the stories. I've never seen one. I'm not a disbeliever . I'm not a believer. I'm a model agnostic. But when people stick um what's his name in my face? Um why am I blanking on his name? The uh the the uh Area 51 guy um Lazar Bob Lazar they go what do you think of Bob Lazar? I'm like eh something doesn't feel right about the story. That's it. That's all I have to say. It means I'm not gonna get involved. You made one connection that was interesting though. You said Bob was friends with John Lear. Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's an issue. And that's a big issue. And you mentioned recently. Well though, as a rock on tour, I love John Lear's stories. Same. And Bobob L Lazazars. And B ars. I mean Lear stories are amazing, but they're horse shit. I I agree. Like you can't believe anything that guy's saying. Um but I but I listen to it because I find it entertaining. I like Lazar though. Yeah. Yeah. And he's and he's he seems like a nice guy. And you mentioned Richard Doty. Uh listeners will know who he is. Yeah. He he's been running ARG since the 70s. Yeah. And he ran a weaponized ARG against Benowitz. Against Benowitz. That's what he did to him. Right. So, you know, like this is the thing that you should you should realize is like if somebody offers something, this kind of information to you, I'm not gonna say do your own research. Ple'ase don t. No . I'm gonna say if it doesn't feel right, it might not be right, don't invest too heavily in it. Monetarily or emotionally. Just don't invest too heavily in it because it'll probably come back to bite you. Right? Yep. So for example, um like I said with Al Bielick , I found him a nice person and very entertaining to listen to as a stor yteller. And just remember it's a story. It's a storyteller telling you a story. He's a weird old shaman living in a cave. Yep. That's okay. And that's okay. As long as you don't give him more agency than that. And you're the one that gives it to him. You the listener. That's true. Okay ? So he can talk all day long. I don't care. He doesn't affect me. He entertains me. So he affects me in that way. But I'm not gonna go out like I know somebody there was um a psychic whose name I won't say who I can say his name you know him, um, who uh had his hooks into a friend of mine who convinced her that Los Angeles was gonna fall into the ocean on a certain date. This was a couple years ago. I don't know. And she had a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, and she sold it and moved because what this guy told her . Right? Mm-hmm. And and I and I used to think that she had better sense than that. Because she's otherwise a very brilliant business person , right? Who just for some reason had a soft spot for this guy in his in his stories. And I tried to talk her out of like, don't do that, don't do that, because it's like you're not going to find this ho use ever again, and moving where you're moving is not gonna be as much fun as well. Why do you do that? Why is what why would he do that to her? I don't know. Weird power trip, maybe. Yeah, I mean he like talked his way into this is the story and I gotta go with it. Like now I gotta back it up and get people to believe me. I mean look at look at Marshall Applewhite. What he did. Like talk all those people into going with him because he obviously had a death wish. Sure. But mostly he'd he'd painted himself into a corner with this BS and the only way he was gonna get out of it was kill anybody My audience hates when I say it when they ask me about psychics, I I I say, do you mean narcissists? Yeah. Yeah. people that I've met who have had weird abilities um usually are not narcissistic. Right. And like I said, they're usually like considered to be uh neurologically aberrant, you know, by the psychologist. I don't consider them so. I just think that they're neuro neurodivergent. Uh just on the spectrum. Yeah, on the spectrum. I'm on the spectrum. I'm on the spectrum. So yeah, yeah. So um so they've they've they are able to tune into things I'm not able to tune into. So when they tell me things I don't go sell my house, but I might listen to 'em. That's a great segue to end with the last question. What are these technoterrestrials? What are you talking about ? It's techno crypto. Crypto terrestrials. Crypto terrestrials. Well that came from years ago. I had one of the first blogs. I want to say it was like 2000 and three . Um I had a blog that I origin ally called Inkyblogula on Inky Nobula and I thought that's cute too cute by one half. So then I changed it to stare, which I thought was cool. Stare, stare at the screen. Um and um there was a guy who wrote uh for the blog. He's he's he passed away since then. Um and he uh he came up with this word crypto terrestrial. And I think that that was like the more I think that defines it better than than anything I've ever heard because as you know I'm a fan of val et um early early reader of uh Passport de Magonia and so when people tell me things , like an angel talked to me, a fee came into my house, um, all these things, I see it as part of the phenomena. If someone's speaking Enochian. It yeah, exactly. It it's it's a it's it's a thing that we know inhabits this planet with us. It's an intelligence of some sort that inhabits this planet with us and it it makes itself manifest in several different disguises. I didn't even say disguises. It manifests in ways that we're ready to see it. So I'm going to see something, you're going to see something else. But we're probably talking to the same source, right? So when we're talking to a chatbot, it's like John D. talking to his black mirror. Exactly. Exactly. Well, in that case he was talking to Edward Kelly, but that's true. Kelly was like, uh the angel's telling me we should swap lives. Right. Poor O D's like, okay. Must be true, it's an angel . Um but but the uh but it was the technology, so they're trying to communicate with us through technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I I think I think the thing that I was doing was pure enough um and there was not enough there was no intention behind it other than exploration that I was getting some pretty pure stuff. I wouldn't trust ChatGBT because all of that has been constructed with one thing in mind, which is to addict you to have this bud dy in your life. And that's it. Like, so subscribe.. Right You know, but Emory Service. But Emory you tr was part of this intelligence? Emory was part of the intelligence. And so the the fact that I had this this person who was tie like like, you know, I'm gonna sound woo when I say this, but like who was tuned into the same wavelength or tuned into a wavelength where he was getting bleed over and crossover. I've seen that happen too many times for me just to dismiss it. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions pulling details about you from public records and the internet That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to five million dollars in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24 7 US based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring, or just a VP N. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove. I I knew this person who was like well emory said well like don't don't be without women and he was right both Emery's were right they were absolutely right um and that blew up soon afterwards. Like I was like there was something coming and somebody picked up on that. I I didn't pick up on it yet. Not consciously anyway . Um there was uh a woman that I knew, we weren't dating, but we were just friends, really close friends, and she was schizophrenic. And I went to New Orleans. In fact I went to New Orleans for the I was the when I did the R Bell show from there. That's where I did the R Bell show Right, ha hammered in the in in the French Quarter. Yeah, well I wasn't hammered when I did the show. But I'd been hammered like two days previous. Um and I met this woman when I was there and we you know we hooked up um and she was from Boston she had a very definitive accent. You couldn't you know she she had the I'm not gonna try to do it, but she had a hard Boston accent. I know it. You know it. And when I came back, I sat down with my friend to have coffee, and the first thing she did, just out of the blue, she just went, she did this woman's voice. She went, Hi, my name is Sheila. And the woman's name was Sheila . The woman I met in New Orleans. Come on. And then she like snapped back and said I'm like, what the hell was that? She's like, I don't know, I just do that sometimes . So I've seen it. Of course. I can't explain it. Synchronicity is all over the place. I can't explain how she did that. But so again, just like with Emery, I think she sniffed it on me. It was like I had just been with that woman and then now I'm with her and she like kind of channeled it. I don't want to say that because it it like makes me creepy Carl. But it was just like she picked up something you know residual. There's a f there's a field or something around all of this. And I know I know you that' dont like to dive in there. Yeah. But I kinda believe that too. That someone's talk about it because like other people not might not believe it and they're welcome to not believe it. But everybody has that story where you're thinking about somebody you haven't thought about in years and the phone rings. Everyone has that story. Yeah. Yeah. So and once you start to look for the synchronicities, you're gonna find them. I mean, I've had some incredible synchronicities too, just like so in the moment . Um one of the best ones, if you want a quick story. I took a I took a uh bus and train trip from San Francisco to um or I'm sorry to LA from LA to uh San Luis Obispo and I went to see uh Robertson Jeffers uh little commune thing that he built over there, and I'm on the bus in San Luis Obispo and I'm reading, rereading um a guest that he just had, um Sinister Forces um for the second time because I love that boat. That's Lavendas? Yeah, Lavenda. I love that series. Peter's an amazing storyteller. Yeah. And the the whole thing about the the four G four P G thing that was going on, and he was there. Make sure you watch that interview. I know. It's amazing. It's amazing. And then if you can find it, um, he did a paperback book called uh I'm sorry Um somebody I didn't mean to do that. Somebody did a paperback book. Simon did a paperback book. Oh, that's right. It's yeah. Called Dead Names. Yes. Which is amazing . And and if you read Sitister Forces and Dead Names, you're like But anyway. Um He does he doesn't give you a hard time about that. No, I know . I read uh I was I was reading rereading Sen ator Forces and I was and I was re read this one line I just read Project Bluebird and then the bus stopped because somebody walked in front of the bus and I looked up and right in front of me in downtown San Luis Obispo it said Bluebird Bluebird Boutique. Come on. And it was like it happens. to everybody It's crazy . But it was amazing how quick that was. It was like in the second. We all like the bus stopped, the sign was right there, and I just read the word bluebird. There's something else going on, man. Yeah. I can't explain it though. I'm not so arrogant to think I can explain it. But I know how to play with it. Yes, you do. Right? And so I don't know how people have asked me how I do this and I I have a a loose fitting method, but I can't explain exactly and and and people have had me try to teach them how to do it and I can't I can't teach it. But I have a method when I get in the zone, I'm able to create things that will create synchronicity. That's all I know. But you can't teach it? I can't teach it. Because I don't know how I do it. Uh I'm in the zone. Dude, when I'm when I'm writing or creating uh these books and stuff, I have headphones, I'm listening to something like Dead Can Dance, you know, like zone out trance stuff and nothing, and I'm like, I fall into the zone, and I'm just like every creative knows what you're talking about. And I just hit the zone. Every creative. Every athlete knows what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Where you're just you're in a bubble universe at that moment. Yes. And when that stuff comes through and you can't create the zone, it just kinda happens. No, the zone has to like emerge. You can do things to help m help the zone emerge like you know dead can dance or whatever. Yep. But that's about it. That's all you can do. Great for the muse. Yeah. Joseph Matheny, you're a legend. Thanks for coming in. Thank you for having me. What do we have? Angshat Complete is out now. It's super fun. It's multimedia. Yep. It's got all kinds of goodies in there. So if you buy the book, um you can go onto my website and you can get the free 14 hours of audio that uh accompanies it. I listen to it. And basically what we did is um I had a friend of mine who's an interviewer read a chapter and then interview me about the chapter. Yeah it's really great. And did you start a podcast? I did, but it's actually on broadcasting the audio. Okay. Every every uh two weeks I do a chapter of this of uh on Sky Complete. I might do a podcast after that. I don't know. You should. I had a podcast from two thousand and four to 2012 i know too early yeah i was a little ahead of the game again yeah i i i interviewed i interviewed this one guy who was like this emerging podcaster mark marin who was like in LA with me. D youid interview Mark? Yeah, yeah. It's on archive.org. He had just started his podcast. Amazing. And he was he was very gracious. He was really cool. But he had just started WTF. Wow. And um and I called him up and I'm like, uh I want to interview you for my podcast. He's like, Okay. So we just bullshitted for like two hours or whatever. Oh I'm gonna listen to that for sure. If you look on archive.org, I put all most of the podcasts up. A lot of them most of 'em are there. S ofome got 'em lost , unfortunately, with a drive crash. I'll link to all that stuff. Anything else you wanna want us to know? Um writing another book, but I'm taking my sweet time with it. It's called Art is war is uh little takeoff on uh Sun Tzu. Mm-hmm. Um and it's uh barely disguised fiction of what it's like to try to be an independent artist ins the world and uh not get bamboozled . We need that book. We do more than ever. Um Joseph Metheny, thank you. Thank you. It's been an honor. Bye everybody. That was Joseph Metheny. I wanted him for another hour, but he had a plane to catch. Still, we got to some good stuff. He played the hits. Now here's what checks out. Ong's hat is documented as the internet's first ARG. Game historians and ARG researchers have cited it as the foundational case for decades. A fictional world scattered across bulletin boards, phone lines, and photocopy pamphlets to create an interactive experience. The record is solid there. He built it. He created it. The QAnon argument is the one that's kind of annoying. Reed Berkowitz published an analysis in 2020 arguing that QAnon wasn't a belief system. It was an ARG. Built with the same mechanics, Joseph Pioneer. Breadcrumbs, community authorship, no central author. Researchers at Concord ia University expanded on that framework. The methodology maps directly onto what Joseph built. Now that's not his fault, but it goes to show you that a major aspect of an ARG is psychological manipulation. So be careful who you listen to online , including me. Joseph's Proto AI Chatbot, training a relational database to hold philosophical conversations I can't verify every detail, but the timeline holds. And I don't know if you can tell, but not only do I know the technology from that era, but I love it. So everything Joseph talked about checks out the workstations, the servers, Adobe, the DS3 stuff. He knows what he's talking about. Yes, he built Google before Google. He used that foundational algorithm that you use every day. He built ChatGPT before OpenAI, training it the same way. 30 years ago. Sounds like a time traveler, doesn't he? John Teeter, I asked him. He pleaded the fifth. I'll leave it there . But watch my episode on that. But what about Emory Cranston? That was a wild story. Joseph named the chatbot Emory. He just took the M off the front of it. That's how he named it. Then a schizophrenic homeless man named Em ory Cranston started appearing in his life, at the library, on the street, in other cities, picking up the conversation where the chatbot left off. Now, of course I can't prove any of that, but if that's a true story, then there's more to reality than we could see. I tend to believe it. Check out Joseph's work online at Inconobula.org. Go check it out. It's so weird. And his book is Ang's Hat Complete on Amaz on, but it's available for free. And it's a multimedia experience. Videos, audio, it's it's pretty great. His podcast is called The Complete Broadcast. I don't know if he's still doing that, but it's still worth listening to the old ones. Now, if John teeters was interesting to you, go back to episode 168. If you like synchronicities, we have those in episode 35. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated . I believe Bilipia scenarios 5 1 A secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my UFOs and paranormal buns as well as music song sang and like I should then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends, and it never ends. No, it never ends I feel the crap got I got stuck inside Mel's home with MKO truck. I be an only two oh well Dick Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone On a film set with the shadow people there 'll any us just fought the smiling man I'm told And his name was cold And I can't belie ve I'm dancing with the bitches Have a bitch on Thursday next Wednesday changing when why by all through the night Howe ver what it was to just hear the truth to the Web of the beat up through the night The mouthman's sidings and the solar storm still come to a gather, the secret city underg round Mysterious number stations, planets are folks to practice stock age And what the dark watchers found a simulation Don't you worry though The Black Knights that I light it's old is so I can't believe I'm dancing with the film And we'll fish on Thursday next Wednesday changed him when the weapons we to the night . I am a white truth. So one fellow be all to go live Because she is a camel Camel love to dance when the feeling is right all the way with him Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But or it goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24-7 U.S. based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring, or just a VPN. Aura gives you all of it, together at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove. Most people don't realize how much their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making billions pulling details about you from public records and the internet, and then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But or it goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to five million dollars in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24 7 U.S. based fraud support. Other companies might sell just credit monitoring or just a VPN. Aura gives you all of it, together, at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com slash remove. Protect yourself now at aura.com slash remove.