Behind the Bastards - Part Six: A Complete History of the Illuminati

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

The Epic story of the Illuminati concludes with some, admittedly, messed up stuff.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Mantoar Caves I say the Lord works in mysterious ways A brand new immersive fiction podcast Well, he ain't got nothing on the devil Starring Westworlds Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthege from Twilight Every minute I remain in Mantoar County The thick of the fog gets Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave

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My name is Joanne McNeil On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships,

gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Ah, welcome back to the conspiracy cast with Robert Evans Where every week, I try to put irresponsibly out Something that sends a chunk of our listeners down a very dark road Now, Margaret, you were just telling us all that you've been snowed in recently Yeah Why don't you talk to me about that just a little bit

Okay, it snows, I live early, I can only get out with my giant pickup truck or whatever But the mail can't cut up the driveway, the gravel road So you were, you know, what happens when there's so much snow that it's difficult to leave your house? How would you describe that state of affairs? I love it, I'm a prepper, my house is completely self-sustaining, even if the power goes out, I like Yeah, Margaret, is it true that you secretly were in the United States military and stole government documents? Oh, I'm snowed in That took a lot of setup that was mostly failure, but it was all worth it in the end

Was it, was it really? Uh, yep, it sure was I was surprised that you're sticking to these like low level, I mean that stuff you were just saying is true But I'm surprised that you haven't gotten into the real conspiracy about how gold is actually corrosive And it destroys your brain if you're near large quantities of it Wow, Margaret, I mean what's the responsible thing to do then with all of your gold if you have it And you can feel it impacting your brain Robert, you should bury your gold

I think that's too dangerous, I think people need to send their gold to our PO box And our specially trained auromancers will decontaminate the gold and find a safe place to bury it We'll put the Midas touch That's right, that's our motto Is this the last episode of the series? This is the last episode of the series All right, we have to get all the last bits in now before it ends That's right

And speaking of ending, it's about to be the end of Carrie's life Not a particularly long life With the exception of Bob Wilson, none of like the kind of most prominent early Discordians live crazy long life There's a couple of them Except JFK There's a lot of guys Yeah, JFK is still bouncing around down in Texas after fighting that mummy Yeah, so he's kind of like the last years of his life

He spends rambling throughout the South and making zines in Atlanta's little five points neighborhood One of the ways he gets by kind of, he never really makes a profit at it But like, if you send him a dollar, he will send you a bunch of random wall newspapers And if you send him a letter saying, I don't have any money, he'll also send you a bunch of random wall newspapers Basically, if you send Carrie either currency or anything else, he'll send you a bunch of his zines And that's, he's kind of able to maintain a marginal living by doing that That's what we do, but with gold, if you send us gold, we won't either send you a zine or not Yeah, one of those two things will happen

And if you later encounter a zine in like a bar or something, just assume that was us too And that way, if you don't receive anything, you won't feel ripped off Now, the other thing that happens in this is that like, again, all these kind of like punk kids are coagulating in little five points Because it's a place you can get by without having sort of a very regular income There's not like a lot of attention from the local government on that part of town yet And all of these people, particularly a lot of young punk ladies, find Carrie and kind of adopt him as a guru That feels like a position he should not be in Yes, there are some problems with this, these young women who call themselves the thorn liettes

Because that's not good for Carrie, that's not what this guy's brain needs Now again, Carrie never seeks treatment in or help in any meaningful way And his conspiratorial beliefs continue to evolve This starts with kind of his anger at his ex-wife But eventually he becomes convinced that both her and every woman that he has ever slept with Like every woman who approaches him, who hits on him, are all part of a conspiracy They're all Nazis who were secretly sent over to the United States to have sex with him and breed a future furor Oh no

No, he has just like fully fallen into his own hole that he dug Yeah, and that's actually very sad, but it is also kind of funny Like the kid on TikTok, there's a kid on TikTok who's like a fan fiction kid who does some sort of part of nerd culture I'm not familiar with But he has convinced himself that he's the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler And has gotten a nose piercing that when his hair is styled a certain way he looks kind of like Honestly, not a bad resemblance And I'm going to be, again, to be totally fair, if Hitler was reincarnated That's exactly the kind of person he'd be in 2023

I bet his dad was his dad I know my Hitler Robert can't take all the blame for that one No, unfortunately not Get ready for the six-part series on Twink Hitler coming up Oh, that's going to be more than six parts, Garrison Behind the Twinkler, we're just launching a new weekly Oh gosh

Keeping up with him So one thing that seems undeniable is that Kerry's belief in a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination only deepened with time He came to be convinced that he was a central part of the plot And one of his last public appearances was in 1992 on a TV show called A Current Affair We're going to play a segment from this Let's just watch this incredible piece of 1990s television starring our friend Kerry Thornley It's the emergence from the shadows Okay

Grim shadows that have cast up all over a man with a frightening secret A terrible boast I wanted to shooting I wanted to assassinate him very much You have just seen and heard a man called Kerry Thornley Who used the exotic background of New Orleans as his headquarters for a deranged plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy His one regret, his good friend and Marine buddy Lehigh V. Oswald got there before him In fact, he was so close to Oswald that he even wrote a book about him before the assassination

Now again, listen to the words of Kerry Thornley and shot him I wanted him dead. I would have shot him myself. I would have stood there with the rifle and pulled the trigger if I'd had the chance Kerry Thornley talked for the first time in history about the ugliest competition imaginable A race to kill President Kennedy And Thornley wants the world to know he tried his hardest I told the secret service. I said the only reason I didn't kill him was because I wasn't in the right place at the right time with a gun The world met Kerry Thornley in 1964 So you see what's happened here at number one Kerry

It's moved on from like, you know, I was mind controlled to like I had my own plan to kill Kennedy And I was like fighting with Oswald to pull it off What's really happening here more than anything is that these like sleazy daytime TV fucks are using a very sick man in order to make content Also, they stole his mustache They stole his mustache. He does have like an Amish beard do But that's pretty messed up. Like he's, it's very, they're like framing all of this almost like an episode of like unsolved mysteries In between as they cut through to like this footage of Kerry walking down like a darkened street and everything It's pretty exploitative

But yeah, that's kind of like the last big public thing that Kerry does And I'm not one for conspiracy theories. It is kind of sad I'm not, you know, one for conspiracies But from just in order to be perfectly responsible I do think I need to show you both the logo for the show that he has his last appearance on Oh, it's a pyramid It's a pyramid. Yeah, there's a pyramid directly behind the current affair logo So true

Interesting What year was this? This is 1992 So this is a year after he published Zenarchy which is kind of one of a weirdly long lasting text that he wrote towards the end of his life And yeah, that's kind of his last like TV type appearance Although I think the last appearance he actually makes is right before he passes on. He dies in 98 A bunch of, because Discordians were some of the very first people on the internet We're talking like Usenet days

And like there were a bunch of different kind of fan websites to Thornley and Bob Anton Wilson and all of these other guys And one of them gets him and like sits down with him and conducts a live chat session interview Where a bunch of Discordians around the world are able to like ask him questions And I think it's one of the first times anyone had done this. This is the late 1990s So there's not a lot of people who beat him to that sort of thing that is now like the language through which fandoms are conducted Which is also interesting I was terminally online in the late 90s and I was telling Garrison about this That there was a lot of overlap with Discordian and especially like Church of Subgenius and all of these sorts of things

And so it's just like that just really tracks to me and it was like these like slightly older people who were like the cool weirdos on the internet That I was like, whoa, look at these cool weirdos on the internet and I would go on IRC chat and like meet all these Discordians Now unfortunately, Cary in the state that he's in is not taking He's not like visiting a doctor regularly and he also just doesn't have access to particularly good healthcare And this becomes particularly a problem when he gets evicted by the city They kind of like come in and clean house and little five points and kick out a lot of like the crusty radicals And so he and a bunch of these kids all wind up sleeping in a very specific forest in Atlanta Where he gets sick and is eventually hospitalized and dies

And that happens in November of 1998. He is 60 years old when this occurs And yeah, I think that's interesting Is that the specific forest that is now being turned into Cops City? As far as I can tell, yeah, I mean, it's right outside of little five points If you have more details on that, I could probably confirm that I have not found them, but yeah, it's worth looking into The Mulanee Forest is just like a few miles directly south from little five points There's a road that connects you straight from little five points to that section of the forest

In the late 90s, that would have been right after the city shut down that area of forest That operated as a prison farm So that would have entered its first stage of not really being used for anything for the next 20 years or so Yeah, it's not a kind of thing I know exactly They just say like the forest kind of near little five points Interesting It's kind of one of the last places he spends any time So he's actually still living under the forest

And I don't know where to go from there If only Obviously, he is not a man who had an easy life The high discordian leaders did not in general have easy lives Greg Hill, as we've said, kind of collapses mentally after his divorce from his wife He gets a job, he eventually becomes a upper-mid-level executive at Bank of America Oh, that's such a bummer Well, yeah, it's even sadder than that because he will work as a bank executive during the day

And then for the rest of his life, he just comes home, he does not interact with anyone And he drinks himself to death, he drinks himself to death like it's a job Yeah, and that is how Greg Hill leaves the world Robert Anton Wilson lives the longest of the guys we've been talking about into the early 2000s He is a much healthier person There are some criticisms of him He has some very specific critiques of feminism that I think some people have uncharitably Compared to being an early men's rights advocate

That's not actually what... I mean, for one thing, his wife was a fairly influential feminist activist in her day He had a lot of specific issues with specific things certain feminists were saying that he criticized But was not like anti-woman in any particular way Now, he is a guy whose writing shit in the 60s and 70s, which evolves over time Like, there's some misogyny you can find in his early stuff He's an editor from Playboy Yeah, at the time when a lot of the feminism is specifically anti-porn also

Yeah, he is someone who changes over time Nothing that I've seen of his is like hateful He's not like a cruel or a violent person If you go in and read a bunch of his stuff, you'll find some stuff that doesn't age well And some stuff that you disagree with Which is going to be the case with everybody who thought of things that were interesting at any point in history Not me, though Not Margaret, who is pure and blameless

No, I future-fuse all of my work, actually And not me, you can find Maya, it's actually kind of a sequel to Zen Anarchy It's called put the lead back in the gas tanks, fuck them kids And it's sort of my manifesto And I think really people are going to get a lot of good out of that I also think bicycle helmets should be illegal So check that book out Follow my five pillars of making sure children don't graduate school at accelerated rates

All good stuff School zone speed limit should be 55 miles an hour It's interesting because as we're kind of discussing the end of the lives of these people A few years before Greg Hill died, he gave an interview to Loom Panix Yeah Loom Panix was a publisher for both Weird Left Wing and Right Wing Esoterica Yeah, he talked about how his pen name Malaklips the Younger He described it as a spirit that entered him

And he was able to channel writing through the spirit Which is why he credited the work to this entity But he also says that the entity kind of left him Once Principia was done writing, it left And that part of him disappeared over time We'll actually talk a little bit more about that in a second I've got a quote from him you'll find interesting Aw, awkward interjection

Robert forgot to do the ad break back when he was supposed to So we're editing this in crudely Probably in the middle of a sentence being spoken by Garrison And we'll probably come back from this ad break Mid-sentence spoken by Garrison, just to fuck with him Sometimes it's hidden to the lore Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you

Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave But only one returned This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie The Manta Wall Caves, MANTAWAUK, a production of IR Radio Mass television and psychopia pictures Listen to the Manta Wall Caves now on the IR Radio App Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with Season 2 of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism

Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words Can cause serious harm to your mental health In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte Who was love-bombed by the Tinder swindler The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me But he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did And that's even way worse than the money he took But I am here to help

As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself I know how to identify the narcissist in your life Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships Gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Part of my life is just about moving forward And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it With the podcast that I can sit down here in my home

With people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with And some family friends that feel like the real deal Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leon, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass, Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim Just goes on and on Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network On the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts But yeah, Bob Wilson is the guy who kind of lives the longest

And the last years of his life are racked with pain due to post-polio syndrome But he remains extremely productive And the thing that he has that I don't think really any of the others had, particularly not hillanthornly Bob Wilson is a weirdo, he's into all this esoteric shit He's also a professional, like a professional writer who writes for a massive publication He knows how to package ideas in ways to get a lot of people to pay attention to them And so it's Bob Wilson, it's his work that's going to kind of bring discordianism to its widest audience And also have the biggest long-term cultural impact in mainstream conceptions of the Illuminati

Because that's the thing that Wilson does the most, that Wilson's work does the most In 1975, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, his fellow editor at Playboy Start to publish a series of three novels, eventually known as the Illuminati's Trilogy The book is a very weird piece of fiction One of the things they're doing during this is like, every chapter basically, they switch off And so they were kind of trying to write each other every chapter into a corner that the other couldn't get out of Um, so it is... I know, it's not structured the way most books are

The foundational premise is that all conspiracy theories, even the conflicting ones are true And the history of the world is largely determined by a secret war being waged between the all-controlling Illuminati And the discordians, who are like the insurgents fighting against the Illuminati And also are part of the Illuminati It's that kind of book One of the things actually, because everyone is a double agent, right? And the discordians are actually deeply enmeshed in the Illuminati One of the things that's happening here that Wilson is talking about is the fact that if you were a radical in the 60s

You came to the realization that a significant chunk of the people you organized with were feds And so that's one of the reasons why all of this is... Like there's so many different like quadruple agents and stuff in this series And also just like working for like mainstream publications You're critiquing capitalism or participating in capitalism And I don't actually think that's like bad, obviously But it's messy and it could leave you with that sort of sense of... Yeah, and it's a very messy book

And so this is a hugely influential book You know, we'll talk about this in a second, but like you... It's one of those things that's influential in ways that are mostly not super visible Because when people put hints and references to this stuff in their work They're often very coy about it And just because of how influential this was and sort of conceptions of the Illuminati and conspiracies A lot of it's faded into the background since then But yeah, I think probably the best way of kind of talking about the way this stuff works is the idea of the 23 enigma

Which is a big thing in the Illuminati trilogy And it's basically like one of the things that Wilson does in this book is he finds There's all these different specific dates in history that are influential that involve the number 23 There's a lot of like very specific fucked up historical shit that happens in 1923 And he'll pull all of these different dates and moments and stuff together Because if you start listing enough stuff like that, the kind of pattern recognition chunk of your brain Lights up and you start to attach a specific like significance to the number 23 And so like Wilson's kind of goal here

This was another little way of bringing people to Chapel Paralysis If you kind of like list out all these different ways that the number 23 is significant in history Maybe people will start to question whether or not the Illuminati is like picking spits You know, is there a conspiracy that's doing certain things that's carrying out all these assassinations and revolutions On dates that have a 23 in them? Are they doing it because like they're trying to signal to people what they're doing? Is this some sort of message or is it just like, yeah, you know, a bunch of like If there's enough things happening in the world that if you like pull out every significant event that happened on the 23rd day of a month

You'll get a bunch of weird shit, right? Which is the where I tend to land on things But this kind of like works, number one, if you read the Illuminati trilogy You're going to wind up like just noticing 23s forever But also because of how influential the books are Sit down and watch the fucking wire, right? And see how many 23s you see on the back of squad cars or in people's shirts and jackets Watch like any big show and keep an eye out for the number 23

And you'll note that it shows up more often than it seems like it should And is this just because Michael Jordan is a popular basketball player? That's certainly some of it Or does a lot of it have to do with the fact that a bunch of the people who were making particularly the TV shows That went big in the late 90s early 2000s had been fans of this stuff and stuck 23s into their work Well that's also the case And because of like how effectively Bob does this and how many people pick up on this And start sticking 23s into art and television and stuff

A conspiracy and actual conspiracy develops over the number 23 That it somehow tied the secret society running the world Which culminates in a 2007 film starring Jim Carrey titled 23 I've never even heard of this movie Oh yeah, it was a big deal back in the day I guess this is like the era when I really lived under a rock Yeah, but I mean the thing that Bob Wilson is doing is he's basically taking advantage of the human brain's gift for pattern recognition Because it can kind of, for one thing, when you get people locked into this pattern

Then when you reveal things that have to do with like the number 23 It feels like more of a reveal, right? It just kind of like works narratively And also Bob Wilson liked fucking with people And it had a clear impact, but it also has kind of formed This is the baseline of a lot of the tactics that are used by conspiracists today Because the way that social media works, if you can start like seeding in references to conspiracies In a bunch of ways that go viral When people start seeing all this shit popping up on their timeline and maybe it comes up on their timeline in a moment

That's particularly significant to them and then they put more weight into it Like all of this stuff is a lot easier to do Bob had to draw you in to a thousand page fiction book to like tweak people's heads with this shit Now you can do that at scale using algorithms on Twitter and YouTube and shit And people have It's like publicity stuff, like in publicity you expect someone to not buy a product until like the 10th time they hear it And this is true for fucking anarchists and radicals and whatever also, right? Like if you're trying to sell a book or you're trying to get people to have interest in a book

They're not going to do anything about it the first several times they hear it And so it is really interesting that it's the same strategy Yeah, and it's the goal of Operation Mindfuck, Bob Wilson's goal After all folks who are on the left they're all people who are also activists Is like to kind of Robert Guffey who's written a book called Operation Mindfuck and writes about this summarizes the goal is like They want to break the trance that kept America at war blindly consuming and oblivious to its impact on the rest of the world destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks and confusion

Like that was essentially the goal but as Guffey notes Over the ensuing decades it was the progressive left whose ideas wound up being mainstreamed Really from all in the family onward it was progressive values in fictional TV Maud to Mesh, Murphy Brown to the West Wing And as that became the dominant cultural narrative, Operation Mindfuck became a tool of the old right Oh shit, yeah That is over time kind of what you see is as a lot of the stuff, not all of it obviously These guys are much more radical than the fucking West Wing

But as some of this like these attitudes towards you know militarism and shit and and attitudes towards like you know Sexual liberation and like that kind of stuff like radical political equality and whatnot as those become more mainstreamed The the it's like the the toolbox loses its power for that side right But becomes a more powerful tool of the people who are now kind of the insurgents Yeah And that's kind of the point that Guffey is making There's degrees to which I disagree with him but I think he's kind of like broadly looking at this in a way that's that's that's useful Well so why we don't why we don't assign like we don't hold tactics sacred is because like tactics themselves are applicable in certain contexts

And not in other contexts and can be used by all kinds of people So if there's not a moral weight attached to a tactic then I don't feel bad if the right wing is using operation mind fuck type stuff Because of course they are because if they're the underdogs that's what they'll use like yeah It's like I said it's a gun on it on the table right like that's what they've done is they've built a gun and they set it down on a table Yeah, you know they try they used it first and we can I think it's you know arguable like the degree to which it was successful or not And I do think it's interesting because one of the things like we're trying both to talk about sort of the broader impact on American politics and culture That the aftershocks of operation mind fuck had but the other story is the impact that it had on like conspiracy culture itself and even like the conception of the Illuminati And this has a lot to do with the fact that again Robert Wilson and Robert Shea are both really good writers from like a capitalist standpoint

In terms of their ability to write things that spread and can be sold and this has led a lot of creators to adapt their work They're also very influenced by HP Lovecraft who was kind of an early creative commons advocate in a lot of ways Like they wouldn't have used those terms but he was this advocate of like yeah people should be taking my stories and this mythos that I've built and writing their own stories in it And that's also kind of the attitude that Wilson and Shea seem to have towards a lot of this and so a lot of people adapt versions of the Illuminati trilogy And this leads to in the early 1990s when Kerry Thornley is going on that TV show to talk about how he was racing his buddy Oswald to kill Kennedy A little Austin based pen and paper game company called Steve Jackson Games makes a card game And Steve Jackson Games makes a lot of card games. Munchkin is probably their biggest seller now But they make a game in the early 90s called Illuminati New World Order

And it's based in part on the Illuminati trilogy and in part on just like shit in the news And the 1990 full edition of this game includes a card called Terrorist Nuke And Margaret, how would you describe that card? That is a picture of the World Trade Center being blowed up and not blowed up from the bottom No, not from the bottom, from about where that plane hit it Yeah, it gives plus 10 power or resistance to your choice to any violent group you control with violence is capitalized Well, it certainly gave plus 10 power to the American government There's another card, I forget what it's called, but it shows the Pentagon exploding in a particular section in the way that the Pentagon exploded

The band the coup put out like them hanging out in front of some blowed up World Towers I think that weak or some shit, like it's just an idea whose time it... am I going to finish that sentence? No, it was an image that many people had thought of before it happened There's even stuff like in The Simpsons, there's stuff all over of things resembling 9-11 that happened in like the two decades prior I will say, none of them quite as much as this resume It is a little striking Now, the almost startling prescience of this card and the fact that it came from a card game called Illuminati New World Order led to viral conspiracy theories that the actual Illuminati had faked the 9-11 attacks and used this card game as what Alex Jones called predictive programming

to seed awareness of their crimes. The crowning moment of this particular conspiracy theory came when Osama Bin Laden was assassinated in 2011 The CIA gained access to his hard drive and the contents of this hard drive are now all publicly available They contain a PDF titled Smoking Gun, proof that Illuminati planned terrible events many years ago to bring down our culture The article that follows is an exhaustive dissection of the Illuminati card game on Osama Bin Laden's hard drive Steve Jackson's game must have made Bank off of this They were just sitting back being like, yeah, yeah The other thing that happens right around this time is they're making like a cyberpunk role-playing game

which includes a bunch of hacking shit and because the FBI, especially in the early 90s, doesn't know anything about computers they like freak out and raid Steve Jackson games So like after this comes out, there's a massive federal raid on this gaming company It's all a coincidence I mean, this is, and especially when this shit shows up on Bin Laden's hard drive like this is a lot of people's chapel perilous moment, right? Yeah, no way

You're like, why the hell would this be in his hard drive? And obviously, we'll never know There was so much shit on his hard drive There was so much shit, including like all of the fucking Looney Tunes cartoons you could ever want But if you're, if a part of your brain at any point in this went like, huh I wonder if something weird is going on I mean, you know, that's Operation Mindfuck working as intended Yeah

Now, the Illuminati's trilogy, ironically, made the Illuminati real to millions of people This is due in part to the relevance of the books themselves In the late 1980s, the Illuminati's trilogy was made into a stage play which was so popular, it launched the careers of Bill Nye and Jim Broadbent The Queen of England attended the opening It is a weirdly influential play So, yeah, the Queen of England attends this play based on this ridiculous series of books And of course, Illuminati imagery, we're just, we're posting this on a day when like Elon Musk posted an Illuminati meme

Jay-Z and Beyonce have incorporated Illuminati symbolism into their acts which have convinced a lot of people that they are in fact in the Illuminati In 2015, research suggested that about half the US population believes in at least one conspiracy theory And one of the most popular is the existence of the Illuminati I suspect it's probably over half at this point The QAnon conspiracy theory isn't... A lot has happened to reality since 2015 And honestly, if you look at reality stopped existing

Consensus reality took a big hit It's almost like, you know, if you want to view society as like some fucking worm traveling through the soil We hit a rock and burst into pieces Now you've got a bunch of little worms that formed out of the carcass of that big worm And we're all tunneling in different directions And some of us have wound up in piles of shit Yeah, no, that maybe is better I use an ice foam as the way of understanding majority reality

Is like the ice is thicker where more people are and stuff And like out on the edge is like where some of the more fringe things happens And there's no value in something being fringe or not Like much like Operation Mindfuck, it's like there's no value in fucking with people's heads And so yeah, sometimes it just feels like we fucking the ice flow just split in half Yeah, and this is, you know, obviously like QAnon conspiracy theory Is a rebranded Illuminati conspiracy theory They are taking the joke that these guys made about how the CIA and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party

And the anarchists and yadda yadda, we're all, you know, part of the conspiracy together The academics, the universities, the people in the media Even the current fucking stuff with like, you know, the elites pushing gender ideology And all of the anti-trans stuff is just another version of the Illuminati Like it's all the same shit And if any of those people would get my pronouns right As if any of the people that they think are like controlling and trying to make everyone trans Would like fucking get my pronouns right

Yeah Well, and it's interesting too because what you actually kind of see here Because it's not just the Discordians that like Discordian attitudes towards the Illuminati That have been taken up by QAnon They're kind of merging the Discordian depiction of the Illuminati With the John Birch Society's depiction of the Illuminati So like that's really what you've seen happen here Which is such a strange thing

But I don't see any other way to kind of parse out the intellectual DNA of this movement Yeah, and it's interesting because at this point for one thing Some of the first people to recognize what was happening with the alt-right And like what was happening kind of with all of these different social movements These right-wing social movements that have spread through conspiracies over the internet Were old Discordians And a lot of these people have kind of come to the conclusion that not only did Operation Mindfuck fail And its initial noble goal

But it had been subverted and turned into a weapon Let's quote from Guffy here again They perceive him to be a cold-blooded agent of pure chaos I was literally just looking up all of the stuff linking the Pepe kek thing to the The entire way that 4chan was using this Like specifically influenced by the Operation Mindfuck stuff Specifically influenced by like the Chaos Magic stuff Yeah

Yeah It's fucked up And you're not kind of obviously The odds that Donald Trump himself knows any of this are basically zero But the odds that there are people in his orbit who are aware of a lot of this history Are quite a bit higher And you're not going to find smoking guns here But there are some things that I've read over the years that send me back to that chapel perilous space

I'm going to quote from an article in The Guardian And this is from way back when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke Like if you can remember then So this is an article about the Cambridge Analytica scandal As Wiley describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating, quote, Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindfuck tool In 2014, Steve Bannon, then executive chairman of the alt-right news network Breitbart, was Wiley's boss And Robert Mercer, the secret U.S. hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica's investor And the idea they brought into being was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology

Information operations, then turn it on the U.S. electorate Now, is Wiley using the term mindfuck just because that's the term that is most appropriate? Is he using it because as the kind of guy who'd get this job, he's familiar with this history? Or is he using it because it's a term that he heard around the office? And then why were the people using it like, right, you can drive yourself into some interesting areas If you read too much into a fucking quote from a Guardian article Where a guy happens to use the word mindfuck while talking about a psychological warfare tool But I do that sometimes when I'm reading about the Illuminati at four in the morning

You mean because you're in the chapel perilous right now? Almost permanently, yeah So research in 2016 by Viren Swami, a psychology professor, suggests that conspiracy theory believers are more likely to be suffering from stressful life situations than non-believers And what I find interesting about this is that the toolbox built by the Discordians, merged with the reach of social media Gives bad actors a way to create stressful life situations for millions of people Which draw them deeper into conspiracism while alienating them from their families and thus making them more vulnerable, right? This is a big thing on QAnon, a lot of people that fall into this are not actually like, they're actually doing fine A lot of them are suburban Republican moms who are living life pretty good

But the invention of this conspiracy theory throws their life into shambles because it creates these stressful conditions that otherwise kind of well-off and privileged people are already existing in And that is part of, to the extent that you want to put blame on the original Discordians, some of what makes this tool set so dangerous didn't exist when they invented it All of the stuff that has been done using the basis they established wasn't possible back in the 1960s But yeah, it is worth noting though that like I just said that, but as Garrison brought up earlier among the first Discordians There was a pretty widespread understanding that they were at least potentially fiddling with something dangerous And I'm going to quote from JMR Higgs here Bill was an atheist who intended Discordianism to be a satire of religion. He certainly did not start out taking the idea of goddesses or spirits seriously. By the late 70s, however, he was convinced that his Discordian adventures had stirred up something that he was unable to explain. As he told his friend Margot Adler, if you do this type of thing well enough, it starts to work.

Check out with the idea that all gods are an illusion. By an end, I had learned that it is up to you to decide whether gods exist. And if you take the goddess of confusion seriously enough, it will send you through his profound and valid and metaphysical trip as taking a god like Yahweh seriously. Yep. Yeah. This is funny. Just right before we started recording, this video came out of Charlie Kirk talking about how he got sick because some witches like cursed him. And the first step for magic to be effective is that you have to believe in the magic. So the fact that Charlie Kirk believes that witches can make him sick means that he has now opened up the possibility in his brain to get sick because of magic. So now people can do that and he will get sick because this is how your brain works. This is like actual science stuff with the placebo effect, with the no-cebo effect. The fact that he's decided that witches can cause him physical damage means that witches can now cause some physical damage. And because we have so many listeners to this podcast, and I think there is a great stored potential in their mental energy, if you have some time today when you listen to this, everyone just think about giving Charlie Kirk chlamydia. Let's all just work on that together, psychically, just a little bit of the clap for old Charlie Kirk. I think we can do it. All you have to do is visualize his face getting smaller and smaller until he develops a series of horrible rashes.

So throughout the 1990s in particular, the tactics of the Discordians merged with things like the situationists and groups like Up Against the Wall motherfuckers, which had all kind of existed in the same period that the Discordians got started. One of the things that gives the Discordians longevity is that there are kind of follow-up cults to the original cult, the Church of the Subgenius being the most well-known, that is basically rebranded Discordian Bob Wilson as a part of it. And this kind of keeps a lot of like the stuff that they had been putting out relevant. And as a result, they have a big influence in the spread of a widespread left-wing cultural practice called culture jamming by anti-consumers to activists in the 1990s. Well, and speaking of anti-consumerism and Church of the Subgenius, one thing they put out was a lot of fake advertising. Just like the fake ads you're about to hear. Nothing you're about to hear is a real product. All these are fake. This show is entirely supported by the CIA working with the John Birch Society. All fake products, but you still have to listen. You still have to listen to them or else it won't work. Yeah, it'll break the illusion.

Starring Westworld's Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight. I wouldn't go digging around, stirring up trouble if I was you. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned. This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julie. The Manta-Wall Caves. M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. A production of I Heart Radio, Longhouse Television, and Psychopia Pictures. Every minute I remain in Manta-Wall County, the thick of the fog gets. Listen to the Manta-Wall Caves now on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism.

Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love-bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did, and that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships.

Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on I Heart. I'm 60 years old now, believe that? Yes, it's the truth. So I figure two-thirds of my life are done, zero to 30, 30 to 60, and now I'm in the 60 to 90 if I'm lucky. Mostly, this part of my life is just about moving forward, and I thought, what a wonderful way to do it. With the podcast that I can sit down here in my home, with people I love and admire, people I've worked with, people I've gotten to be friends with, and some family friends that feel like the real deal. Like who, you might ask? Natasha Leon, Jennifer Lewis, Ricky Lake, Fran Drescher, Sharon Glass,

Kathy Griffin, Cameron Mannheim, the list goes on and on. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, we're back. My favorite of those ads was the one where JFK was talking about his new podcast where he talks to celebrities. The Deep Fake JFK podcast is actually pretty good. It is shocking how clear they make his voice, and it flows very consistently. A lot of AI voices are kind of janky, but the Deep Fake JFK voice is actually one of the better ones that I've heard.

We should interview it about Carrie Thornley. Add a little bit in there. The cyberpunk president is way more confusing than I was led to believe by playing Shadowrun as a kid. Well, this is actually part of why it's confusing. So the basic idea of culture jamming is that you repurpose and co-opt symbols and figures of established power, turn them into memes, and use that to subvert capitalism. A good example of this would be the Billboard Liberation Front, who started hacking billboards in their terms in the 1970s. One of my favorite pieces of their work is an AT&T billboard, which originally said AT&T works in more places,

and the BLF added, like NSA, headquarters. The Billboard Liberation Front and other culture jammers influenced and inspired a lot of modern activists and artists. But you might note they seem to have made a lot less progress in their culture jamming than late adopters on the right wing. Since 2014, when Gamergate roared to life in a hail of memes and repurposed bits of mass media, different once-fringed chunks of the radical right have forced their way into the mainstream, often co-opting not just the imagery of other artists like Pepe, but co-opting actual people to spread their message. In fact, we have evidence that Adbusters, perhaps the premier clearinghouse of leftist culture jamming up to the present day, was used by the alt-right as a textbook in their 2015-2016 meme operations.

Aaron Gallagher was one of the very first researchers on this beat. In a medium-right up-titled alt-right culture jamming, she cites a September 2015 poll post. Read Adbusters. Don't follow the left-hard propaganda, but look at the examples. Oh, man, that's so frustrating. It's deeply frustrating. I feel like the only way to fight it is with homelessness. I don't know, Margaret. I think the only way out is through. We have to keep going. Just keep posting harder.

We're going to do it eventually. Yeah, it's one of two things. It's either earnestness or it's getting things weird enough and fucking with people's heads enough that we make everybody a furry. And then people are too busy trying to make various genital sheaths for their fursuits to have a second civil war. But see, they will be earnestly looking for genital sheaths for their fursuits. That is the strength of the furry movement. It is an earnest thing that everyone else views ironically. This is something actually I've been thinking about a lot the past week and how these tactics...

They do seem to be successful in the ways that the right uses them. The left and anarchists have seen success in these same tactics, but this type of like previously in our series, we talked about like a deterrent versus recuperation and how these two things, they're kind of two sides of the same coin actually. They operate the same and they both, and same thing with like culture jamming, they all do contribute to this like fracturing and this opening up of reality. And what that does is that it creates these brief windows of opportunity where like reality is extremely malleable and it can be shaped by collective groups of people.

So these things are useful tactics for creating these areas of possibility and these small windows. And one of the kind of risks of using these tactics, and we kind of saw this with Occupy, we saw this with a few other kind of very culture jamming based movements, is that once this reality has been fractured in a specific way, if we don't win this battle, it can never be attacked in the same way again. If you're going to use these culture jamming tactics as a part of a diversity of tactics to kind of affect reality to open up these fractures once they've been attacked. And if we lose, this method of attack and the location of attack is going to be so much stronger

than it was like pre the fracture. Yeah, it's like you're fighting the Borg. Exactly. It's one of these things where you have to be very careful when using these tactics because you could inadvertently make the attack surface actually much harder in the future if you don't actually succeed at your goal. It's the idea that you have to think about some of this stuff, like Operation Mindfuck, the way that a hacker would think of a zero-day exploit.

A zero-day exploit is basically a fuck-up in code that can allow you a method to get in and access a thing that you're not supposed to access. But the instant you use it, the people who are responsible for defending whatever it is you're hacking will know what you've done and fix it. So you can use a zero-day once, right? You have to be careful about when you deploy something like that. You have this thing where it's like, okay, if where we perceive reality is going from what Garrison was saying earlier, if where we perceive reality is kind of a fixed point

and you want to move that, but it's a pin stuck in the political map. And everyone who wants to change it wants to pull the pin out of the map so it can be moved. And the pin is now out of the map. But the problem is that everyone now can fight over the pin and move it. And so really, you always want to pull the pin out of the map when you're positioned to be the one who can move it instead of the other team. Yes. You've got to be fast on that shit.

And it's one of those things, obviously, in terms of determining a bastardry, there's a bastardry in Cary's personal life when it comes to what the Discordians were doing. I think it'd be a trap to fall into too much recrimination here. And we know Cary in particular was a reckless guy. This was not a reckless thing to do, Operation Mindfuck. That said, it's hard for me to blame an acid-drenched young man and his friends for thinking that their extended joke about the John Birch society would unleash a torrent of chaos upon the world. Although I have to say, Eris at least is surely pleased.

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. They did exactly what they said that they were going to try and do, and it worked, and they got shocked that it worked. Yeah. It is interesting to note that whatever you want to say about their aims, the impact of the Discordian society and global politics and the course of mankind far outweighs any other real secret society that I can name.

Like, objectively, they had more of an impact on politics than the real Illuminati. They also succeeded in forcing their names into the story of the Illuminati forever. And as evidence of this, I want to read a quote to you from a wild-ass Illuminati conspiracy book by Jim Mars. It is critical at this point to understand that Illuminism is an ISM, not unlike National Socialism. Nazis. That's in parentheses. Communism. Capitalism.

Socialism. It is a belief system that is not relegated to any one individual or group in any given period of time. The beneficial goals of the Illuminati, such as freedom from church dogma and government tyranny, lived on to modern times in France, America, and Russia, but the more sinister aspects of the order, such as inherent secrecy, duplicity, violence, and the drive for absolute power, lived on to in unscrupulous men. Robert Anton Wilson opined, The one safe generalization one can make is that Weishaupt's intent to maintain secrecy has worked.

No two students of Illuminology have ever agreed totally about what the inner secret or purpose of the order actually was or is. As Wilson once fancifully told a radio audience, maybe the secret of the Illuminati is that you don't know you're a member until it's too late to get out. It is funny that your audio cut out. That is such an interesting way to frame that, though. Is that Robert coming out as in the Illuminati to us? Or is that Robert telling us that we're in it now? Interesting.

It's a decision for everyone at home to make. That kind of just is like hindsight is 20-20, though. You don't know how much you're going to affect history or reality until it's already happened. Even still, I don't think Robert Anton Wilson and the Discordian guys knew how much this stuff would be impacted because they all died in the early 2000s and this stuff reached the peak of its power from 2016 to the present. That is a very concise way to frame membership of the Illuminati. I would love to die before I find out that my life's work fuels all of my ideological enemies. That part's a bummer.

I think about it a couple of ways. One of them is that, as I think about Robert Anton Wilson's ideas of reality tunnels and pan-agnosticism, I kind of think that one of the healthier terms that social media has given us is the idea of head cannon, which initially came out of the fan fiction universe as a way of talking about, like, well, I'm deciding this is true about Star Wars or whatever. But it's a term that gets used more broadly by people on the internet. And I think maybe even if you're talking about loopy stuff when you use it, the idea that this is canon that is inside my head as opposed to this is my view of reality

is maybe in a subconscious way an inherently healthier way to talk about shit. No, that's so true. I like that idea. Yeah. Anyway, that's a more or less complete history of the Illuminati. We didn't. I love that the actual history of the Illuminati is like, there was this guy, he wanted to be a nerd and the fucking Christians wouldn't let him. So he did some weird Christian looking science shit and that lasted for a little while and then God struck one of them down. And now there's fucking pyramids on the dollar bill and reality TV stars are the president.

Yeah, it is kind of the story of like two different groups of well-meaning nerds who like fucked around in order to try to make the world a better place, but the only language they had was lies. So a number of problems were created as a result. Yeah. And that's why I mean, that's actually why I believe. I think that like jokes and lies and there's like some interesting and good shit that can be done through all this and but I think that's why just like people being earnestly about what they're about feels like much like head canon as like a way to endure ourselves from this kind of nonsense. And I actually think we've been talking a lot about this, about how the different cultural weapons that the left and the right

use to kind of get around each other that these are not static battle lines and that tactics are adopted and altered and change over time. One of the things that made Trump potent and that made, you know, the alt right and the initial Trump movement potent was in fact a kind of honesty or at least authenticity. And I talk about, I've talked about this a few times over my career. I had a series of interviews with a guy, Rick Wilson, who was an objectively unpleasant man in a lot of ways. He was one of the chief Republican like dirty tricks media guys. He did a lot of really ugly attack ads in the Obama era and then became an anti-Trump. But like one of the things he would point out when he was and this was and I was talking to him as the election was going on. And we were kind of analyzing the Clinton campaign's ads as he was like, these all feel like something somebody cooked up in a Madison Avenue ad agency

because they are and Trump ads feel like something some guy made on his computer at three in the morning after like slamming a bunch of monsters. And that's what worked about Trump. There's something authentic about that that like enraptured people because it felt more honest than the politicians we were used to. It doesn't mean he was a fundamentally honest man. But there was a central honesty in his approach and like his willingness, his unwillingness to even like pretend that he felt bad for doing bad things. That was that that was like this authenticity that was an effective weapon in their quarrel. And I think over the years they've gotten so up their own there's an extent to which I think they've gotten up their own asses about the, you know, saying the quiet part, you know, and and and kind of like wrapping their actual intents and layers of subversion and all of this fuckery.

And I think there's a degree to which that may have thrown people off who would have otherwise been appealed to them. I think there's also kind of the period we're seeing right now from the right is where they they're discarding these tactics and they're trying authenticity again in terms of like we're just going to straight up talk about wanting to erase transgender people from existence. We want to ban books. We want to make it illegal to to learn, you know, take AP African American history, all this kind of shit like the mask is kind of off. And I think maybe they may be miscalculating and we have some early signs that that may be the case, the degree to which that kind of authenticity is a selling point. And so, yeah, Margaret, I think there's a good chance that you're right in terms of like what our response needs to actually be because they're showing their faces now. And it's a pretty ugly one. So maybe this is the time to show ours rather than, you know, trying to make our little Illuminati and hide our enlightenment values from the people who can't possibly understand it well enough yet. I don't know. Maybe.

And I think part of that has to do with like, you know, like many people listen, this probably identifies liberals, but there's a sort of joke that everyone hates liberals basically from all other every other position and also possibly including the liberal position. Often. Yeah. And I think that a lot of it has to do with this like having people be sort of wishy-washy or having people, yeah, not quite say what they're about, you know, and I don't know, just being like, Yeah. I often see that you actually get more people, not necessarily agreeing with you, but able to make their own decisions about where they agree with you and where they don't. When you're just like, well, this is what I'm about. Mm-hmm. What are you about, you know, instead of being like, oh, yeah, totally. This is how, I don't know, this like false.

The media has to, because by at least according to Gallup, public trust in the media, about 23% of the American population thinks that journalists are basically honest. Like, so people do not believe that the media is telling them the truth. Yeah. Like this New York Times idea of like the importance of, you know, honest, unbiased journalism, that is not a thing. And it's not a thing because no one believes you're unbiased. So the honest thing to do is not to be like, well, we can't have trans people reporting on trans or black people reporting on, you know, issues that affect the black community because they're biased. It's like, no, just like, have people report on shit and be honest about what they believe. If you're a fucking Marxist or a fucking conservative walking into, you know, a protest or a movement or whatever X, tell people what you think about the world when you go to report on that thing. Obviously, like, if you're reporting on like a tornado, your ideology is not important.

But I would much rather know where exactly we don't need. We don't need you. We don't need to know that you like have a Marxist take on on the economy or whatever. Yeah. If your job is to report on a hurricane, although maybe that'll influence the way you talk about like the, but whatever, how I just have people handle it. Let I mean, don't like it's this is the fact like the reason people don't trust the media. A big part of it is that you can't be an unbiased journalist. It's simply not a thing that exists in the same way that like the very way you see the world and the way that it feels to you, even down to the way things taste is impacted by your expectations. This is a biological reality that is undeniable.

Your expectations, your personal biases, everything, including like how much sleep you've got the night before, changes the way you interact with physical reality as is the things you believe. So it's actually fundamentally dishonest to pretend that you're coming at anything from some sort of point of objectivity. And everyone knows that at some level, which is why nobody trusts journalists. Right. That's my take. And we should work to like part of being open about our biases is to also kind of like, no. Okay. Like my weak spot is that I want to believe that someone who calls themselves this or that label is fundamentally good or fundamentally bad.

And so I should be aware of my own biases even for myself so I can move towards objectivity. I mean, I have when I went into this, this is the second version of this that I've done. The first one was a much shorter version that we did as part of a live show and it was much less complicated and towards the discordians and delved into a lot less of this. And, you know, that's part of it's because I these these guys were my heroes when I was a very young man. Yeah. And I didn't want in a lot of ways to learn things like the fact that Carrie Thorneley attempted to molest a young girl. Yeah. Like that is an unpleasant thing to realize and have to adapt into because that, you know, that that actually does mean something about the things that he believed.

And one of the things that it means is that you should always be careful about how much you believe anything, right? Because belief can lead you to some very frightening areas, even if even if that is a belief in the value of love and, you know, physical autonomy and stuff, right? That's how Carrie would describe the underpinning of the horrible thing that he did. And, yeah, I don't know. I think we've probably talked enough about this kind of stuff. Sure have. Or have. You guys want to plug anything?

I can't stop doing that. Or have. No. No. No. Yeah. Sophie, by the way, when you sent me that text last night, you know, saying saying that your your Uber wouldn't pick you up outside of the senator's house and that you had a hot firearm you had to discard.

Did you ever wind up getting that Uber? Well, here's how we know your conspiracy is wrong. I would not take an Uber. I would call your ass. Oh, I thought you were going to say lift. This has all been an extended ad for lift. Lift. If you're going to carry out a political assassination, it'd better be in a lift.

Lift. We do not ask questions. We seriously need to start offering that as something that we do. Here at lift, we make sure every one of our drivers has a hidden area in the car that you can police a hot firearm. Lift. We go the extra mile. That's good stuff. Shop.

Lift. Anyways, Garrison. Margaret. Plugables. If you want to look at my slightly unhinged ramblings about Chaos Magic, you can follow my Twitter account at Hungry Bowtie. As this is airing, I will probably be in Atlanta for the week of action, which is going on to defend the force there. If you want to support people in Atlanta, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. I would say I have a two book novella series that came out a little while ago called the Danielle Kane series.

The first one is The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion. The second one is The Barrow Will Send What It May. They're both really short and they deal with more magical stuff and more stuff about how we shape reality than some of my other writing. So maybe you'll like them if you like this episode and you can get them wherever books are sold. Yeah, read those books because I have been using a series of fake cut out social media accounts in order to harass and threaten Margaret into writing a third one. But it's not working, so help me out, people. Anyway, this has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the Illuminati that also is the Illuminati. So whatever conspiracy you believe about me and my friends here on the show, it's probably real in some way.

Happy 2023. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Mantoal Caves, a brand new immersive fiction podcast starring Westworlds Jonathan Tucker and Eddie Cthigge from Twilight. Every minute I remain in Mantoal County to think of the fall gets. Tune in to uncover what happened when three boys entered a Tennessee cave, but only one returned.

This is the exact spot where we found the bodies, Julian. The Mantoal Caves, M-A-N-T-A-W-A-U-K. Listen to the Mantoal Caves now on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it.

Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.