Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 325: It Writes Itself

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

Alex takes Mike, Jesse and all of you into the world of fictional characters made real and the authors who met them. Support us! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD CashApp HeroForge The Molecule Mindset - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro THE PHILIP EXPERIMENT https://www.liveabout.com/how-to-create-a-ghost-2594058 https://web.archive.org/web/20180526025931/http://livinglibraryblog.com/the-skippy-experiment/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2lGPT2J1cc THE SHADOW'S GHOST https://archive.org/details/yankeeghosts0000hans https://archive.org/details/Duende_v01n02_Odyssey_1976 TULPAS https://web.archive.org/web/20170315081818/http://orig04.deviantart.net/4cb5/f/2017/074/5/4/tracking_the_tulpa_by_nobillis-db2d2iw.pdf FICTIONAL CHARACTERS WITH AGENCY https://pages.uoregon.edu/hodgeslab/files/Download/Taylor%20Hodges%20Kohanyi_2003.pdf  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810019304155  https://journalnews.com.ph/bizarre-cases-of-fictional-characters-who-stepped-off-the-page-into-reality/  https://archive.org/details/frenchlieutenant0000john_d1w0/page/n5/mode/2up DOUG MOENCH AND BRUTUS THE APE https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5892347.html  DAVE MCKEAN AND DEATH OF THE ENDLESS https://www.cbr.com/sdcc-gaiman-looks-back-for-the-sandman-25th-anniversary/  CONSTANTINE IS REAL https://archive.org/details/wizardmagazine027/page/n47/mode/2up https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/a-disease-of-language-alan-moore/4039331?ean=9780861661718&next=t&affiliate=243  https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/declare-yourself-a-magician-the-last-war-in-albion-part-62-john-constantine  https://www.tabula-rasa.info/AusComics/Hellblazers.html  https://www.vulture.com/2014/10/secret-history-of-john-constantine.html  https://x.com/mypauljenkins/status/1651025335813566470?s=20  https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fcomic-excerpt-constantine-raises-a-pint-to-alan-moore-on-v0-qfe4ki3y5baf1.jpg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D4c5ea26b304c4d5a3f05416a0ddb3df4f9415416  SLENDERMAN https://www.discountmags.com/au/magazine/fortean-times-april-28-2016-digital?srsltid=AfmBOop2naOe95dZXCbmU6hVvlFZWvAa9KopiQAk4dJL8-C9kY6hBNk1 http://anomalyinfo.com/Stories/2012-november-ca-disquieting-encounter  HERNANDO DAVANZATI https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/when-a-writer-meets-his-fictional-character-in-real-life/amp/  PHILIP K DICK https://hex.ooo/library/how_to_build.html  FURTHER READING https://sophieinwonderland.tumblr.com/studiesandresearch 

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chaluminati podcast, episode 200, no, wait, 325. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined today by literally who else, who else? did you expect it's jesse and Alex i like i like a nice square i like a nice square number like i didn't expect us you didn't you thought you weren't going to be here today i was yeah i was counting on nothing happening today maybe you might feel like that after sitting through this episode i'll tell you that much yeah but i don't that's not promising to any of us no no this is good i like this episode i want to go on the record today's episode i'm running with it first of all patreon dot com slash chilminati pod What a website, right? Before we even get started.

We wouldn't even be here without it. No, that is actually literally true without Patreon. We wouldn't be doing this like we are able to. If you want to support us, go over there. I'm going to be able to at this point talk about way more stuff that's going to be on the Patreon soon. We're going to be kind of doing a little nice little coat of paint on the Patreon. Nothing's really like major going to be different.

Nothing's being like taken away or anything. It's just going to feel good. and that's that's what i'm excited about so go over there get get get what that fucking means go over to patreon and it's just going to feel good go over there almost threatening yeah it's going to be just what the doctor it's going to feel so good when you're over there it's so nice so good no uh go there check that out uh there's nothing else to promote right now uh you can still i think go buy the stickers uh top secret stickers guys we support artists 50 50 split we pay them for their time and then we split the profits. That's what it should be when you're an artist. Imagine that. Go there,

get it, buy it. It's secret stickers from the episode of the author's choice, the, you know, the creator's choice. And it's a great sort of tangible way that the ideas that we write here on this show can become real. And speaking of that, today is amazing because I did not plan it this way. But the topic of today's episode has for some time been a topic that I've wanted to cover ever since shortly after we started the show and I started to realize like exactly how weird the shit that we cover here could be we cover looking at you andrew wk looking at you but originally I was going to do JFK part four today which was going to be like my best guess never getting it listener the twist the twist of it this time around though since now that I've

told that horrible story of JFK's assassination like to tens of thousands of people multiple times, uh, I was going to write it as like prose fiction. That was like going to be the plan. I was going to like write like a story that was like completely pros and I was going to have us like read it. Uh, but and you know, the whole point of it was going to be, it was going to be clever because like without really saying it, I was going to be kind of saying that even though the event of his assassination is not fictional, any retelling of it kind of fundamentally is fictional because there's like so many... Now you're spoiling the whole thing.

Well, it's so many conflicting versions of the story create a fictional version. And so for all intents and purposes, the fictional versions of the story that have been written have kind of replaced the factual version, especially when lots of lots of people read it, like the movie JFK, which I spent a lot of time discrediting earlier. But then the reality of writing a one hour long short story about Lee Harvey Oswald kind of settled into my brain felt pretty daunting, especially. after I wrote that entire Victorian thing, which I feel like that was a that that felt like I wrote like a short story.

That was like a really long process longer than I normally take to write an episode. And then I also realized that the iconic American novelist Don DeLillo's own fictionalized book on the subject of the JFK assassination, which is called Libra, already made the point basically that I was making. I've even quoted it before in the JFK. episodes and he did it way better than I could hope to the dude wrote white noise um and uh so i threw out Kennedy with the bathwater at least for now i might come back to it in some other form later uh but i decided to focus only him is missing brain skull piece it's done he's

dead we've we already know we're not going to get it figured out there's been like three different presidents that were like i'm going to tell everybody everything and then they like don't like it's fucked like fuck it the the fucking thing everybody everybody he was like, oh, new JFK stuff, literally nothing happened. Literally nothing happened. There were no more juices to squeeze, dude. The best theory so far is the one where the dude on the other car shot him. That's the best I can say.

That's the one that feels the most. No one said brainworm yet, and I feel like that is a possibility. Same brainworm, two different genetics. Generational, you're just saying, generational yurks. Yeah, that brainworm has been taking out Kennedys for 60 years. Almost like animorphs became real, right? make RFK the hero because he's he's still technically alive? No,

that's no, that's not going to say that. No, I won't say that. Anyway, speaking of throwing out Kennedy, I throw out Kennedy with the bathwater and I'm not focusing on Kennedy anymore, but I am still going to focus on the part about the relationship between reality and fiction, which is how

I came to the Philip experiment, which as Mathis briefly explained last week, was a study about whether or not your own thoughts can create reality, right? The thing is, though, what I thought was weird was, I don't think I told anyone I was doing an episode involving the Philip experiment. No. And so you brought it up completely randomly. If you're listening to this show in order, as close as possible to this, to me talking about it right now,

you, the last thing that you talked about in the episode, which I had to cut you off literally to, yeah, was the Philip experiment. So what is the Philip experiment? May I tangent momentarily? Yeah. And just say, like, the reason. that even got into the Philip experiment is because the past two episodes of the alien abduction episodes, like, I, you know, if I just kind of went on this research tangent of like, if you were to take it at face value and say it happened, regardless of whether it's tangible or not, what would be the logical reason, like, they have totally different personal experiences with very similar looking creatures at a time where it wasn't, like, in some similar thing. And the Philip experiment

end up coming through that way because of that research and that's how I got there. And I wanted to bring it up with you on a phone call we had that Monday. And I was just like, you know what? It's like totally off topic. I'll not worry about it now. I'll bring it up in the episode because that's where I wanted to wrap the episode. And the fact that you're like, that's next week blew my mind. I was like, it's very surprised.

It's very much like a Roshaman type thing. You know what I mean? Like that idea of the same story being told by five different people and it's like got a different tone and a different art style and a different, all that. Like, it's the same, it's the same thing. Uh, but anyway, this episode's called Chaluminati, it writes itself. Thank you so much to Cash App for sponsoring today's episode. And let me tell you, if you're looking for a really easy and fast way to be able to send

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Trust me, it's going to love you. You're going to love it. Basically, back in the 70s, as a way of trying to explain hauntings and poltergeists and the weird sounds and things that happen at seances and stuff like that. Researchers from the Toronto Society for Psychical Research under this guy, Dr. A. R.G. Owen, which I realize is a hilarious and slightly confusing name for a real man. Especially in an episode that I wrote, whether this is a real story or Alex made up one. Yeah.

You mean like A period R period? Yes. Dr. A.R. Owen. Yeah. Not like ARG. His name is A.R.G.

You prefer as ARG, which is, this is not an ARG. He is just a man called A.R.G. He decided they were going to get a group of eight people together. No psychics, no mediums, just normies. And have them create the story of a fake person who is completely just made up for the experiment. Like a, the act of creation happens during the study. So they're going to do that and then just see after that if they could figure out some way to make actual contact with that person, that fake person. So that's crazy, but that is what they set out to do.

The group included Dr. Owen's wife, Miss Argy Owen, who was a former Mensa chair, if that means anything to you, but also other people from all different walks of life, from a student to a housewife, to a career industrial designer. And on top of that, there was also this guy, a psychologist, Dr. Joel Witten, who was also there to, like, observe and make sure that it was like not just like some weird ghost hunter gassing people up or something. And yeah, it's literally exactly what I said. It's literally it went down exactly how I said. They all got together. They wrote the biography of some fully fictional dude that they invented. His name was Philip Aylesford. they sketched him, like, got like an idea of how he looked and became intimately as familiar

with his story as possible. And now Jesse is going to read you the bio of this man. Philip was an aristocratic Englishman living in the middle of 1600s at the time of Oliver Cromwell. He had been a supporter of the king and was a Catholic. He was married to a beautiful but cold and frigid wife. Do we know, am I making assumptions about poor Dorothea here. This is all fake. This is a fake guy. They just made all this shit up. You know, all right. This is more about the storytellers than it does about Dorothea. Oh, no, no. This is the exact same vibe. Now that I'm remembering that this is all made up. And it has the same vibe is, remember that like when Chuck Schumer was like, I made up a family that lives in.

Yes, yes. Same vibe. Voting Democratic family. Yes. And it's like, what are you talking about, you madman? Same thing here. It's like, ah, the wealthy shore do have a lot of free time. Beautiful, but cold and frigid. That's like a porn character. Let's be like, like, yeah. His wife was cold and frigid, Dorothea, the daughter of a neighboring nobleman.

One day, went out riding on the boundaries of his estate. Philip came across a gypsy encampment and saw there a beautiful dark-eyed girl, Ravenhead Gypsy Margo. and fell instantly in love with her. He brought her back secretly to live in the gatehouse near the stables of Dittington Manor. Dude, that's his family home. You never want to go to Dittington Manor. Dittleton Manor.

Fillington Square. Yes. For some time, he kept his love nest secret, but eventually, Dorthia realizing he was keeping someone else there, found Margo, and accused her of witchcraft and Steve. stealing her husband. Philip was too scared of losing his reputation and his possessions to protest at the trial of Margo, and she was convicted of witchcraft and burned the stake. Philip was subsequently stricken with remorse that he had not tried to defend Margot and used the pace of battlements of Dittington in despair. He used to pace the battlements.

Ah, used to. Finally, one morning, his body was found at the bottom of the battlements, whence he had cast himself in a fit of agony and remorse. Look. Yeah. Those dark care girls of trouble. Those dark hair. She got the little like, oh, she did the dance. I've seen as Morella, dude. That man

was willing to burn in hell for her. He was like, I'm old, and I'm with the church and I don't give a shit. I want some of that. Fire. I get it. Fire. The neighboring noble. France was like, damn, I get it.

It's brutal. But yeah, they, if it feels built out, that's because it was. Right. Because starting in September of 1972, they just started having these like sittings where they would just like sit around and talk about Philip and affirm things about him and kind of spin little tales of things he would do and be like and talk about how he looks and they would like reflect on other things they talked about with him and just I've never been in one of these but are you would you like say like a writer's room almost of like it's like a writer's room

but like even more like everything it's like it's almost like a writer's room for like a for like a eulogy or something like you're really talking about him his life like let's talk about philip again like where were we at oh yeah his like his job okay like let's go back like why did he want this job you know they just like kind of built him up yeah over time Um, and, uh, they refer to him as some sort of quote, some, yeah, Philip building and some sort of quote, because it's not a world. It's just Philip, right? Uh, and, and, and on purpose, a lot of the facts contradict history, um, because

that helps them verify that the answers to the questions that they ask him about his life are coming from him. You know what I mean? Because if he says specific wrong things, but I can't remember if it's them that do the experiment after or if it's other people that don't. It's them. It's them. It's them.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. But we'll get into it. We'll get into it. So they start having these sittings. They call it a quote, collective hallucination. They're fleshing out. They're encouraging him.

And when I say collective hallucination, I meant that this went on for years until all these people knew Philip that they made up intimately and extremely well. Like it was like a hobby of theirs just thinking about this guy, Philip, that isn't real. And sometimes in these sittings. they would almost feel like he was near, like he was somewhere around. But they never approached anything resembling like communication with a fictional character, if you know what I'm saying. So eventually, as like a Hail Mary pass, they decided to try like an actual straight-up

candlelit seance. And they dim the lights and they like put up pictures. If you remember when we were talking about Grant Morrison, and how they put up John Lennon and listen to John Lennon music is very reminiscent of that. Like, put up pictures. Visibles as well. Yeah, pictures that reminded them of Philip's castle

and of Philip little objects that Philip might have around Dittleton, sang songs from the period that Philip was from. And eventually, one night, after watching something that they couldn't see, slide the table around the room on a carpeted floor, they all agreed that they were now, to directly communicate with Philip through a sort of like knock once for yes, knock twice for no system on that table.

They actually talked to him enough that they started to feel like he was actually responding to them in a way that made sense to them. The not real person, Philly, correct, like a ghost, yes. The whole time, keep in mind, this is not a real person. They made him up. Yes. Actively made him up for years. But he's dead-ish in their story.

he's long dead he's lost in their story yeah and and it's a seance so they asked him if he's philip he says yes i'm philip they asked him about his life his preferences they even said he could knock like hesitantly or aggressively with emotion to like be like yes yes or like he got to that point and to nature knocks for me ghost yes and uh it gave it gave them a sense of something like his personality in what was happening and he would happily answer questions a lot. And here is a quote for Mathis to read from Stephen Wagner at Liveabout.com about how those sessions went. Okay. Yeah. So here we go. That Philip was a creation of the group's collective imagination was evident in his limitations. Although we could

accurately answer questions about events and people of his time period, it did not appear to be information that the group was unaware of. In other words, Philip's responses were coming from their subconscious, their own minds. Some members thought they were heard whispers in response to questions, but no voice was ever captured on tape. Phillips' psychokinetic powers, however, were amazing and completely unexplained. If the group asked Philip to dim the lights, they would dim instantly. When asked to restore the lights, he would oblige.

The table around which the group sat was almost always the focal point of peculiar phenomena. After feeling a cool breeze blow across the table, they asked Philip if he could, if he, if he, They asked Philip if he could cause it to start and stop at will. He could and he did. The group noticed the table itself felt different to the touch whenever Philip was present, having a subtle electric or, quote unquote, alive quality. On a few occasions, a fine miss formed over the center of the table. Most astonishing, the group reported that the table would sometimes be so animated that it would

rush over to meet late comers to the session or even trap members in the corner of the room. The climax of the experiment was a seance conducted before a live audience of 50 people. The session was also filmed as part of a television documentary. Fortunately, Philip was not stayed shy and performed above expectations. Besides table wrappings, other noises around the room and making lights blink off and on, the group actually attained a full levitation of the table. It rose only a half inch above the floor, but this incredible feat was witnessed by the group and the film crew.

Unfortunately, the dim lighting prevented the levitation from being captured on the film. Although the Philip experiment gave the Owen group far more than they ever imagined possible, it was never able to attain one of their original goals to have the spirit of Philip actually materialize. Yes. And did I find that television broadcast? Yes, I did. It's there. It's in the show notes for you if you want to look at it. Yeah, we'll pop it in the notes. Yeah. And obviously, the results were so satisfying and confounding to them that they tried this same idea a few more times. They made a French-Canadian spy that they called Lilith, which again, rich people do get up to some stuff. And another time with the medieval alchemist Sebastian. And one time, even Axel,

man of the future appeared and communicated directly with the group. So first things first. question for the group what could possibly be the cause of this like is it our subconscious mind is it somebody straight up lying is it somebody being messed with both right like like some people was saying the thing I noticed about the TV show yeah is it has camera edits it has cuts it's like very much produced so there's plenty of opportunity to fuck around with it and there's plenty of ghost hunting shows that have supposedly never done it been caught doing you know funky shit in in edit or what I've seen you so

So it's very easy to say it's a lie. And even I'm not even saying that to be like, oh, if you think it's a lie, it's not true. I think it's probably like faked, like for the most part. Like I don't know. I'm trying to think what the reason would be, but they got to be on TV. Like so that might, you know, that alone could have been like their driving factor for just faking. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, this is, they can be D&Ding it, you know.

It's almost D&D. Yeah, it's almost D&E. But I love this because it. also has the hallmarks of like whatever you believe you can imprint on this. So you could say, oh, the collective combined powers of their consciousness have unlocked something that created a per or you can say a demon is using this as a way to get to like, no matter like you believe the demon could be pretending to be them. Yeah.

Yeah. And this is very interesting. It's not where I thought we were going. Or I like it. It could even be something along the lines of like the idiom. effect of like when you do Ouija board, you don't feel like you're moving it, but the ideometer effect is your subconscious is moving it. You look at any other weird situation, a poltergeist that seems to have no motive,

or even Jeff the mongoose, you look at him, is, if this is to take out of face value, real, the imprinting of consciousness warping or like reacting or subtly changing itself to be real, quote, unquote, in a way, even if it's not real in history, is fascinating. It's the collective unconscious and manipulation of reality on an information level. It was maybe Jeff the Mungoose was only Jeff the Mungoose because that's what they thought they were dealing with him. So it slowly became that. Or maybe that's why the aliens themselves are always a weird personal kind of trippy experience for these people. Exactly.

It's all kind of you can throw it all under the. Maybe that's why people see if you look it, but there's no evidence of Bigfoot because we're the collective unconscious believes enough that it's enough to show up. But there's never like there enough because they're not really, really. I mean, you did take it a direction I was not going, but yes, if you to take it as real, right? Like, if you were to take the perspective of- Just look at Mathis's last two episodes through this lens, and you can start to see how it applies to those things, you know what I mean? Yeah. You can start to see how the alien is interpreted as like a God-type Christian-type thing,

and then it's, you know, and then it becomes something else. And the simple fact of why aliens' physical forms and abduction and counter scenarios change over time. In early on, before they were little gray men, they were like weird, hairy, monkey people in space suits. And they slowly changed. Exactly. And they used to, I remember I was listening to, like, a bunch of, like, alien-themed

stuff because I was putting together that hokey Halloween song playlist. And, like, a big part of Martian lore back in the day seems to be that they talked, like, absolute, like, gibberish, like, like, like, uh, yeah yeah yeah exactly and like that's just like not part of it anymore but it like was it's like interesting i don't know really weird it's a lot so much it's it's a it's a rabbit hole that doesn't end is the issue well we're gonna see how far down it we can go today so don't worry don't you worry this is not the end of where we're going with this um but that's that's that's why i'm asking the second question now which is do you think this has ever happened elsewhere outside of a lab

Like, if we're going to talk about fictional stuff appearing in real life, it can't all just be in a controlled lab type setting, right? Like, if you believe this is true, right? So to answer that question, we need to talk about another paranormal researcher besides Mr. ARG Owen called Hans Holzer. So nominal name. Yeah. So, like, before BuzzFeed Unsolved or Zach Begans or Tapps. Yeah. Or is my OG.

That's what I originally. Because they were from fucking Rhode Island, dude. They were from my tiny ass day. Yeah, everyone kind of remembers taps back in the day. Yeah. Mine was most haunted with Derek Akora and Evette Fielding. But before all of them, there was this guy in the 60s and 70s called Hans Holzer. And reality shows weren't really a thing yet.

And I'm not trying to get too far into the evolution of TV-based ghost hunting and stuff like that. I feel like that could be an episode in and of itself. But instead of that, the vibe was more like he wrote books. and claim to have psychic abilities and would go on, like, the news or like a late night show or a variety show, talk show type thing, and do, like, tricks, like, appearances and, like, little, you can imagine exactly what I'm talking about.

But really, I think if you look into him further, which one of us probably will do at some point, he's like the OG ghost hunter in the way that we see them now, you'll see a lot of the imagery and the aesthetic and the style and the flavor that ghost hunting has as a hobby today can be traced back to Hans. Holzer and him being the guy that first got the word out by like writing books and going on TV about that this thing exists. He took it from being like a hobby that some people had to being

like a thing that was ready to be a reality show in like a couple years, like in 20 years, you know what I mean? Which is pretty crazy. But it doesn't have that much to do with what we're talking about him today. The real reason that we're talking about him today has to do with a specific case that he was investigating in May of 1963 in New York City in a three-story Greenwich Village brick building located at number 12 gay street. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Where he and his, yeah, oh, my God, it's called the street. You don't want to know what the name of this street is, guys.

Oh, but, you know, you're gonna be so, you're gonna be so messed up when you're here. Where he and his favorite, he, uh, so Hans Holzer and Betty Ritter, who is his, like, psychic assistant, like researcher person, uh, we're listening to, um, Frank and Ted, uh, who are the two puppeteers that live in this building and put on professional quality puppet shows in the basement theater that they have on the premises. Franken Ted were telling Hans and a couple friends that they had invited over that they'd been noticing strange little things here and there for the past seven years that they'd lived there, that they'd perform their puppet shows there, but only recently had things gotten

completely bizarre. So here's a quote about it for Jesse to read for a book by Hans Holzer, which has the best name of any book I've ever heard. It's called Yankee Ghosts. Here you go. I walked over to where the gray-haired little lady sat who had been introduced to me as Miss Hall. Oh, there is a ghost here all right, she volunteered. It was in February, 1963, and I happened to be in the house since the boys and I are good friends. I was sitting there, sitting here, in this very spot relaxing and casually looking toward the entrance door through which you just came, the one that leads the hallway and the stairs.

There was a man there, wearing evening clothes and an Inverness cape. I saw him quite plainly. I guess Inverness. It's like this very specific type of cape. Sure. If you look it up, you'll be like, oh, those motherfuckers. Yeah, dark hair. It was dusk, and there was still some light outside.

What did you do? I turned my head to tell Frank Paris about the stranger. And that instant, he was gone like a puff of smoke. Paris broke in. Oh, no, Paris broke in. I questioned her about this since I didn't really believe it. But a week later, at dawn this time, I saw the ghost myself, exactly as Alice described him.

That was Alice who was voicing before. great. Miss Hill, yeah. Wear an evening clothes, a cape hat, and his face somewhat obscured by the shadows of the hallway. Both Alice and I sure am I sure

and I are sure he was a youngish man and had sparkling eyes. What's more, our dog also saw the intruder. He went up to the ghost-friendly lack as if to greet him. These are the facts

of the case. So yeah, this apparition and a bunch of other weird stuff these guys experienced, and the fact that Hans Holzer had written up this story in his book as a piece called The Ghost of Gay Street in Yankee Ghosts, kind of led to the house getting a reputation for being like a famous haunted house, and Betty Ritter, the psychic, was able to connect some of the names and events that she'd gotten from her psychic impressions of the place, two figures from the house's actual history. But this strange, youngish man with sparkling eyes and evening clothes in an Inverness cape remained a total mystery until almost 10 years later in 1975 when Will Murray,

who was writing for one of the two issues of his pulp fanzine Duende, which is real, you can look it up, links in the description, was hanging out at a comic convention in New York, and he scored an interview with none other than Walter B. Gibson. who is a writer who wrote the brunt of the stories published under the pen name Maxwell Grant, which was used by the authors of The Shadow, Pulp Magazine Stories from the 1930s to the late 1960s. Do you guys know what that is, The Shadow? Oh, no. Shadow knows. Yeah. Didn't they make a horrible movie based on that? Alibaldon, yeah, from the 90s. Yeah, it's not terrible. Okay, maybe. It's one they had the shadow and

And then he had the other one that was, uh, yeah, Rocketeer, all that. Yeah, who was the trying to bring it back? Yeah. Neil, like, Nielsen played the bandaged guy in Dick Tracy. Was it, no, wasn't it a superhero movie as well that he played? No, you're thinking of dark man. Dark man. Oh, yeah, that's what I was like a dark city, right?

Dark man. I don't know. I'm, I'm so messed up. It doesn't matter. You know what the shadow is. He's like, he's kind of like Batman, uh, but he's not really a full superhero. He wears a, he has like a, he has like a mask. His eyes kind of sparkle.

he's not really a superhero though he just is like a guy even though in like the movies and the radio shit he kind of is a superhero like he can like use the force pretty much do all the train in the himalayas yeah he can like he can like change people's minds and shit and like read their minds um but for him yeah so that's the shit yeah good for him and he has a millionaire alter ego just like Bruce Wayne of course and uh here's we're going to see that that that fashion of like rich man buys his way to superherodom ever go away? Yeah, I do. Actually, I think that people are really going to be fucking pissed at rich people for the

next 10 to 15 years. I can't imagine why. I wonder how they're going to deal with Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne is chill, man. He's not actually like, he like all those criticisms of the of him are valid from like the 70s, but he's, you know, he's like a real guy. Anyway, here is the quote from William Walter B. Gibson, uh, that was captured at a New York comic.

con by this fanzine. This is a quote for Mathis. I remember talking with Ed Berkholder. He and I had an apartment together down in the village for a couple of years. That's the apartment that's supposed to be haunted now. 12 gay street. I don't know why I said it like an incomplete sentence. 12 gay street. Hans Holder said it's haunted. People see a man in evening clothes moving in and out. But that was where I wrote the last shadow. And what they're seeing is a Lamont Cranston. They're seeing what we call an after image psychic projection, not a good. Ghost. Yeah. So Lamont Cranston is in the movie, I think, in the radio, that's really who the shadow is. Is he just like Bruce Wayne? But in the stories, Lamont Cranston is like,

yet another of the shadows, alter egos. Gotcha. But one of them is a millionaire. So Gibson also said he did not believe in ghosts, but that he did believe in psychic abilities. And that's when he read how Holzer had described the figure in his story. And he realized he literally recognized it, as his own mental image of Lamont Cranston. And now, and, yeah, the Inverness cape, the look, it's like, it's, if you look up what an Inverness cape is, it's like, oh, yeah, of course. It's like, it's like a rich boy cape. It's cute.

Yeah, but here's another quote for Mathis, from the same art. That's a rich man's cape. That's like, it's like, it's almost like you want to call it a Sherlock Holmes. I was literally going to say it's what you would think of Sherlock's wearing during like a winter night outside. It's like what the movie version would wear in like an inaccurate. Like, I put it across my face to God from the wind. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. So here's another quote for Mathis from Will Murray again, the guy who did the interview. After he went looking into Gibson's term that he used after image projection, and which is also going to act as a perfect bridge for us to this next segment. So here we go. Thank you so much to today's sponsor, Hero Forge. I love these guys so much. I love working with these guys so much.

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and use code chill pod at the end. Thank you again to HeroForge for sponsoring today's episode. In the lore of Tibet, this type of manifestation is called a Tulpa. Reputedly, a Tulpa is an unintentional byproduct of a powerfully conceived idea. Whether or not this fantasy, Cranston could be termed a tukua by the time that Walter Gibson had written that last

shadow novel, The Whispering Eyes, summer 1949, he had put it in over 16 nearly continuous years writing the shadow, certainly ample time to generate a tulpa if the human mind were capable of such a feat. Even Lester Dent, creator of Pulp Scientist Adventure, Doc Savage, is supposed to have claimed that he actually saw his characters walking around after a particularly intense period of writing. Who knows? Right. I find that fascinating because I think you're probably, I don't know if you're talking about it. I assume you will, but the idea of Constantine. Oh, we're getting into it. Yeah. So, in fact, Tulpa's are not from the lore of Tibet,

really, as Mr. Murray puts it. And also, you don't have to capitalize Tulpa like I keep doing because I keep thinking it's Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is like fucking me up every single time. But it is a Tibetan term. And it's basically been. applied to more Western concepts that are more like, more like theosophical metaphysics type stuff. And if that doesn't make sense, here's Jesse with a quote from a research note from Natasha L. Michaels and Joseph P. Laycock, which is a great last name, called Tracking the Tulpa, which is from volume 19 of Nova Religio, the Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. Here we go. Since the 1970s, topas have been a feature of Western paranormal.

lore. Contemporary paranormal, in contemporary paranormal discourse, a talpa is a being that begins in the imagination, but acquires a tangible reality and sentience. Tulpas are created either through a deliberate act of individual will or unintentionally from the thoughts of numerous people. The top was first described by Alexandra David Neal in his 1929 book, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, and is still regarded as Tibetan concept. However, the idea of the Tulpa is more indebted to theosophy than Tibetan Buddhism. Philological and archival evidence suggests that the encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and theosophi. I'm never going to be able to say that right.

Involving both Western Orientalists and their Asian informants and translator shifted the meaning of certain Buddhist terms and concepts. As a result, concepts of emanations found in Mayana Buddhism came to resemble theosophical metaphysics as well as Western tropes of creations run amok found in such stories as Golem Legend and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It appears that many of the core features of the Tulpa are like Slender Man, the product of Western paranormal folklore. Thank God that's what that said in the end, because I'm one of those people who's like Tulpa sounds like made up bullshit.

But I love the idea of what like the cross-contamination of ideas from languages and it leads to something that's fascinating. The idea is that there is something similar-ish to what we think of as a tulpa in Tibetan, like lore, as he called it. But Theosophy, which, by the way, is like stuff like Annie Besant's thought forms from 1905. And I know Mathis still wants to do it to Blavatsky episode later. So let's just say, let's just say the main rub of it all can sort of be oversimplified into the simple but like interesting phrase, thoughts are things, which in this book literally means things, which are produced by a specific thinker and which take on various color forms and sharpnesses and stuff based on abstract things like the quality of a thought or the nature of a thought and which can take the form of the thinker themselves, like me, imagine. imagining myself doing something or something, material objects, or most frighteningly, forms all their own. But that's as far as I'm going to get into that, because let's just say that thanks to actual experts who've looked into it, most people talking about Topas are talking about the kind

you're probably more familiar with. And we've talked about the show on the show before several times, which is just like, you think about something enough that it becomes real. And it's hard. It becomes real in some way. It's kind of like we heard about the Tibetan thing and like smoozed it into something more like the theosophical thing and kind of also made it into pop culture, which is kind of interesting. But yeah.

So here's Jesse with another quote from that same research note, this time about Tulpa's in more modern times to kind of show you what I mean about how these ideas can evolve. Here we go. The concept of the Topa continues to evolve and adopt other influences.

An online community of Topamancers has emerged among individuals, who feel they have relationships with topas they have created. In his online study of 166 topomancers, far too many topamancers, located mostly in the U.S. and Western Europe, psychiatrist Samuel Vesier. I'll take it. Vesire.

Vesire. Phycerre. Phycerre. Vicerre concluded that most are male, 1734 years old, really need a girlfriend and decide to make their own. I mean, who score high on psychological indices of shyness. The tulpas and the study functioned, much like imaginary friends providing their creators with companionship and a significant subset of the tulp-mancers also identified as

bro-g, god-dammit, bronies, male fans of My Little Pony, reporting that their tulpas appeared to them as anthropomorphic ponies. I learned about tulpies. I learned about tulipas. of all, 2001, 2002, from a forum, shout out RPG Palace, RPGP, where it was like that shit, where it was like 13 or 14 year old boys who are lonely talking about like creating tulpas of like, yeah, a lot of bronies at that time, but just like whatever, like, I can't even think of anything specific because yeah, I didn't have the patience. It's kind of like an imaginary friend that you design, if you want to think about that.

And then eventually supposedly takes on a will of its own and. Yeah, because they love me to you. Yeah, and then they love me forever. So if topamancers are to be understood as people who interact with tulpahs, they've created, if topamancers are to be understood as people who interact with tulpas that they've created in their own mind, like imaginary friends, but what are you doing your time off? I'm a tulpomancer. You wouldn't understand.

Yeah, I know. But if topamancers can theoretically make them so real without even trying to sometimes that other people can see them, then let me ask you this. If those people Hans Holzer spoke to really did see Lamont Cranston in that apartment because Walter Gibson generated a topa of him in his mind when he wrote the last shadow novel, does that really sound all that different from the way writers talk about characters in their own heads, like normally and all the time? If this is real, it would be more, it would be partly because that's where he wrote about it,

but partly because it's been in the public mind in how many years of him publishing about of course the subconscious in that area or whatever would know about it yeah no it's not that different i just tell them answers i hate the name it's so so stupid i don't write that much like straight up fiction in my life right i have but you know i don't do it that often but i do kind of recognize this feeling that that people talk about of characters writing themselves that some writers say they have and i've definitely heard and read of other writers talking about that personally, right? Have you guys ever had anything like that? Or you, you guys have heard like writers talking about how the characters sometimes take on a mind of their own for sure, right?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not, I was kind of like, as I'm writing, right? I'm thinking, what will this character do? And then I'm surprised that, oh, the character I've created would definitely, like, in my mind, I'm not thinking it's like a movie where the person's sitting there and then they look up and their character's like, well, I would never do that. And you're like, what a fun movie. Like, that's what this sounds like. I think I have, I've active, do that in like vampire. Like a lot of the time, like, whatever NPC, especially if a players are going to make

an important one that was meant to be there, there's a lot just on the fly that I'm like, well, this character's kind of taking the steering wheel for right now. Here's the basic outline. Let my brain just run on autopilot of whatever this character may or may not do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I have a quote here from the novelist John Fowles. book, The French Lieutenant's Woman. It's like a really famous book, which, by the way,

happens to be a book pretending to be sent in the 19th century to illustrate exactly what I mean. Here's a quote. I'm going to read it. You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work so that the future predicted by Chapter 1 is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter 13. We novelists know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator. A planned world, a world that fully reveals its planning, is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lynn Regis,

but he did not. He gratuitously turned and went down to the dairy. Oh, but you say, come on, what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind, as I wrote that it might be more clever to have him stop and drink milk and meet Sarah again. That is certainly one explanation of what happened, but I can only report, and I am the most reliable witness that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself. I resonate with that super, super. It's very much like David Lynch, I think is on this edit, where it feels like fishing,

reaching into a river and fishing for an idea where you fish. Yeah, your brainfish. Yeah, you brainfish. But with like saying it like the world becomes its own, I say it all the time talking to Jess or whoever, especially with the vampire world in my head, it very much feels like I just kind of turn my vision over to look at the world and watch what happens. And I just kind of narrate what the NPCs are doing. It's more like I'm observing. It doesn't feel like work in that way.

And it kind of feels like cheating a lot of the time because it really does feel like a living thing that I just kind of like look at and then turn into and I just narrate what I'm seeing to the best of my ability. Right. Exactly. And the reason I bring this up is that a bunch of actual researchers, not like paranormal researchers, but like Durham University, you know, like not unaccredited. We're paranormal researchers at this point in our lives, you know?

Like, look, technically anyone can be. So it's not that cool. My point is that the Philip experiment was carried out under less than ideal circumstances where if it was in a lab group or any of that. In a college, it would probably be better, right? But in this case, I'm talking about Durham University, a Durham, collaborated with the Edinburgh International Book Festival to conduct a survey of as many of the hundreds of writers who were there of various backgrounds and levels of professional success as writers, you know, people who write

as a hobby, people who are very, very published and read as part of a study on the idea of characters taking on a life of their own in a writer's head. And they ended up with some pretty interesting stats about how various writers experienced this feeling across all kinds of different criteria, but today we're going to focus specifically on the notion of fictional characters exhibiting their own agency in writers' minds. You know what agency is, listener, the general you? It means being able to like do things yourself. That's what agency means. Do things, you know, do your own things. That's what agency means. For example, 61% of the writers in their sample reported their characters actually literally exhibiting their own agency.

And as you might expect, 26% of that 61% said that that only happened past a certain point in the writing process where it's like been developed. And 22% said it happened only sometimes and not always when they wrote their characters. Like it wasn't like, you know, once you pass a threshold, it's there. It's just like something that happens to them sometimes. Here's some anonymous quotes from two different participants in the study for math to read, which I thought were kind of interesting to that effect? First one.

To begin with they feel, to begin with, they feel under my control. And then at that certain point, when they feel completely real, it becomes a matter of me following them, hoping to steer. Which is an imagery that you literally just used the second ago, which is crazy. It's just how it's wild to actually like read other quotes like this, because like, I don't write books, but I do, I do a lot of active narration and world building and stuff. And it is to a point where just becomes a point of, it becomes a point of, It self-derives, and I don't have to do anything, and it's bizarre.

Right. The other quote is, I nowadays just plan my books halfway, as I know that in the middle of the writing process, the characters will take over the story, so my planning will become useless anyway. Yeah, I fucking feel that, too. Like, that's a big lesson I learned between my first campaign and the second one was like, the ending it went nowhere originally how I had first wanted to plan it. And I couldn't have asked for a better ending within the way it went, because there's no way

I could build a better ending than what the players and stuff we all create. But it is, I love it. I love that my brain is like that. It's often a superpower that I feel like I forget that I, you can just have that imagination that just drives itself, given enough attention and care. Yeah. Pretty fucking amazing stuff. Like the stuff, like the kind of processing power, like the, the environment that

your brain can sustain that's so different from reality is very crazy. Comes at the cost of everything else. Yeah. Also something I thought was kind of neat was that it didn't really seem based off the responses from the people, the people who said it happened infrequently, it didn't seem like the development of the character or the story was necessary for agency to manifest. Like, it wasn't something that they ever felt in control of as it happened or while it was happening and it wasn't all the time or whatever.

It was kind of like organic, you know, like what life is like, like life finds a way, right? So here's Jesse with two more quotes about all that from the first one. I'd love to pick at like George R. Martin's brain to see if he has, is he have the ghosts of the characters he's written like George R. Martin if he like has shit like this happen to him. I bet you they have. I mean, I think most authors write from a place of, I have it all plan. Like they don't plan it like that.

They have a thing they want to do. And then their character is a good writer will let their character be, you know, you put yourself in the character and you just go. You land. You land differently than you intend. It's like a gym routine is how I think. think about it. It's like, you know what you're going to do. Like, you know, like, what the story is, usually when you start writing a story, there's a reason why you wrote it. But it, it never fully

resembles, I mean, any piece of art or even cooking. Like, you can't control everything that happens when you cook. Anyway, yeah, go ahead. My characters can often swing the story in an unpredictable direction. Depending on the story, I can either rein them in or let them run with it. I love it when my characters go off script. It's one of my favorite parts of being a writer. And often these unexpected plot twists are the best of all. Yeah, pretty crazy. And of course, for that least common type of people who did feel like their characters had full agency at all times with no variability, which was the not at all small when

you think about it number of 13% of the people that they interviewed, often suggested that while the situations and settings and the style of the writing and things like that were never out of their own hands, the character themselves literally never was in their hands. And here's Mathis with another anonymous quote from that study about that specific topic. My characters need to feel separate for me to hear their voices, which also means that when I'm trying to put words in their mouth, instead of listening, they often talk back. And then we discuss things until I find out what they would say. If I'm really stuck on the emotional transitions in the story, then listening to what the characters want to say is extremely important. I write in a way

that's equivalent to method acting. I have to be the character before I know what to write. And before I can listen to them as separate people in my head, they definitely act of their own accord. And it's usually best to let them. Plotting for me is as much about finding out how my book people get from A to B as deciding what I want the story to be about at the level of X happens and then why. This is where a lot of surprises in my work come from.

It's almost like a movie where I look up and I ask the character if they do it and they say yes or no. Yes, it's literally like, It's the way I build characters at this point, too, where I'll just build them with core values and, like, a general history of why they are the way they are. Right. And then that's it. I don't script anymore. Even if they have to give them a monologue or I want to be like, you know, that shit is just in the moment, completely on the emotions of them and how the players are interacting with them and causing emotional recoil.

But of course, that's not to say there weren't outliers. So for the sake of transparency and completeness, here's Jesse with one last set of course. quotes that probably embodies the thing a lot of you skeptics out there are probably screaming at the speakers right now. So here we go. The characters are frames, sets of priorities and emotions with, if you like, narrative vectors. Those vectors and collision with external events and other characters will, must be engineered to, produce the story I want to tell. Sometimes the emergent pattern will take precedence over the plan. Other times, I will, we, will rework characters to push the narrative in the right direction.

I find the whole thing of my character just took over a bit cringy, to be honest. But then I am more of a plotter, so I like to know where I'm going with the character. However, you can intend one thing, then find when you actually create the scene or circumstance that your greater knowledge of the character suggests something better, more in keeping. Yeah. Interesting two quotes, because the first one just says, I don't believe in it. Here's what I do. It's the same thing.

And they just worded it in a way where it's just you see different brains. They can create differently. They just do differently. And that right there is my little piece on fictional characters and how they might also in some sense might be real. And of course, again, this is only get, it gets easier when you allow the idea that creating things and doing magic are just two ways of describing the same thing, you know? But what if it were literally real too, right?

That's what you want me to talk about, you listener, right? You want me to talk about real fictional character, real accounts of fictional characters walking around in the real world and not just in the movies, not just in the, like, in the movie version where you look up in your imagination and they're in there telling you what to do. Real, real, real, real. Because, of course, as we in the Chaluminati know, ideas are one thing, but there is no better evidence.

There is no better way to convince. Indeed, there is no better source than what? That's right, a somewhat credible primary source. So your boy grabbed his fountain pen, loaded up his pneumatic tube, and I put in a request for some examples of anything like this that we have kicking around in our agency archives. And the best part is, I just heard back from them yesterday. So, ladies and gentlemen and anyone else I may have missed, please let me introduce to the second half of today's program, which I received in a binder called Notable Cases of Possible Incursion from the archives of the Chulamini Department of True Curse. creation, which I did not know existed. I did not know. I did not know. I did not know that existed before this. And this is the first time I'm having a look at this live on air with you guys.

But oh my gosh, look. There's a note attached. Oh my gosh. There's a note attached from, oh my gosh, it's from fucking A. Whitney Brown. Remember him? No, you will. It's okay. Crenor read a bunch of things as him. A lot of things Crenor does. I forget. Just for Mathis. Okay. Fuck you, Agent Fassiani. Told you I was right about. all this make a mups shit here i saw your request in the system have some of this shit to read to everybody i'm not at story group anymore i've been enlightened and now it's been a while let's just say i have a higher clearance and leave it there okay see you never thanks for doing that on's hat thing i wanted though looking forward to it shit and piss we're all one thing kid agent brown

that guy is weird anyway it looks like there's a bunch of cases here that he's got for us and weirdly, I think he, like, labeled which one of us should read each of these little accounts here. So I guess this first one is for Jesse, and it's called Doug Munch and Brutus the ape. Kind of weird, kind of interesting. Here we go. Oh, wait, wait, wait. There's like a little bit more. It's like a slight.

When it says, should you give? It's just this last little sentence here. Here you go. Okay. It appears that the paranormal often needs the pop culture form to appear at all. The truth needs the trick, the fact, the fantasy. It is almost as if the left brain will not let the right brain speak, which it can't anyway, since language is generally a left brain function,

so the right brain turns to image and story to say what it has to say, without saying it. Consider how back in the late 1970s, the prolific comic book writer Doug Munch. Mench. Mench. What a munch. Found himself writing out the real in a work of fantasy a few seconds before it became the real, in fact. I sat down with Doug in spring of 20, uh, I'm going to say 20, 2009, 2009, 2009, oh, no, dude. The aughts.

aught nine. Here's the story he told me. Mench had just finished writing a scene for Planet of the Apes comic book about a black-hitted gorilla named Brutus. The scene involved Brutus invading the human hero's home, where he grabbed the man's mate by the neck and held a gun to her head in order to manipulate the hero. Just as Doug finished his scene, he heard his wife call for him in an odd sort of way from the living room across the house.

He got up, walked the left. of the house and entered the living room only to encounter a man and a black hood with one arm around his wife's neck and the other holding a gun to her head. It was exactly what I had written. It was so, so immediate in relation to the writing and such an exact duplicate of what I had written that it had become an instant altered state. The air in the room congealed, became almost fog-like, and yet, paradoxically, I could see with greater clarity. I could see the individual threads of his black hood. Doug's emotional response to this series of events was a very understandable and natural one.

He became obsessed with the black-hooded intruder from months, then years. More immediately, he found it very difficult to write. So terrified was he of that, eerie connection between what he might write, and what might happen it really does make you wonder are you seeing the future are you creating a reality should you give up writing forever

after something like this happens I don't know a little piece of paper fell out while you were reading that that's actually from mutants and mystics by Jeffrey J. Cripple science fiction superhero comics and the paranormal

little book from the University of Chicago Press really good pretty fucking crazy story right yeah like can you imagine can you imagine how that would how he said an instant altered state can you imagine how fucking weird that would be i i would feel like i might be like react like the writer would where i would be afraid to write for a while even if it was entire coincidence like which very well could be like even if that's the case i would still be afraid to write because

the odds of that be are so fucking low of like that happening that it humans grasp for patterns and meaning, right, even if there isn't any. And that would be, I'd be like, I don't want to write. I don't know what it's going to do. Fucking nuts. Up next, we have a story about Dave McKean. Do you guys know who that is? Dave McKean sounds like a familiar name, but.

He's a comic book artist. He's really, like, kind of prolific and famous he did the art for Grant Morrison's comic book, Arcombe Asylum, a series house on the series Earth. And he's famous mostly for being the cover artist, very unique cover artist for Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's like very almost like physical photography based covers. I don't know what I'm talking. They're really trippy looking. He did like almost every cover of, I think, the whole series. But what I have here for you, it looks like from from Agent Brown is a transcript from CBR.com of a moment from the 25th anniversary panel for Sandman that Dave McKean was on,

which was the last time that he saw Neil Gaiman, by the way, which was in 2014, just so you guys know. And he was on with legendary comic book writer who recently disgraced for some heinous acts, Neil Gaiman. It was about Sandman. And like I said, in that book, Sandman is a member of the endless, which is like a sort of like immortal group of concepts personified that represent things in our lives. Like despair and yeah. Sandman is dreams. And he's dream of the endless and then there's death of the endless who is this like cute punky goth girl version of death um and here's a quote from that for mathis to read here you go mckeen then recalled flying to san diego years ago when someone dies on his plane and as they were waiting to board the plane

again he's he say a girl dressed as death walked by him off the plane the difference between you and i is i would have gone maybe question mark geiman said uh the fundamental difference mckeen dead panned as the room cracked up. I don't know if I understand what's that point there. So Neil Gaiman is saying the difference between you and me, Dave, is that when I go on a plane when somebody dies and I see somebody walking off the plane who looks exactly like my character, Death, who I wrote, the difference between you and I is that I would go, maybe that is death.

Oh, got you gotcha. He's like, yeah, that's the big difference between you and I. And I do think McKin is kind of right about that in the sense that sometimes it does feel like you have to buy into it if you want to witness a Topa, right? especially if your mind is really squarely locked in the mode of science-based, empirical, rational thought, you know, as like your main baseline, like, pretty, pretty obvious that witnessing a Topa might need you to require some information. Even the Philip experiment says that it's the information keeping the subconscious of the people,

right? But what about in cases where you're not looking for anything specific at all? Like, even Lamont Cranston, the shadow, only showed up because people already thought that 12 Gay Street was haunted because of, Frank and whatever they they had experienced all kinds of haunting type stuff and not all of it was Lamont Cranston so when they brought somebody there and they started to become this haunted place that's when they start to see this Tulpa that was already there theoretically right um so i made extra sure to request evidence of specific scenarios okay where people would not look for anything

specific yeah so agent brown came through and anyway here's the story like okay Yeah, good job. He's exciting. Wow. I like to do my homework. I like to put them through their. I like to put the Chulminati through their paces. Yeah.

What are you talking about? Chulimani are real? Yeah, no. Here's the story of like, yeah, okay. Here's the story of like six different writers of the iconic long running

vertigo comic book Hellblazer running into the story's main character, John Constantine. Sorry. I didn't realize I pronounced it wrong all these years. Listen, I'm also definitely going to mess this up today, but it is Constantine and not Constantine. I know. It's not how Keanu Reeves said it. I know they say it other ways in stuff an awful lot, but it is true.

It is Constantine. Alan Moore says so, and he made him up in Swamp Things. I'm sorry. Alex, where we continue? Keanu Reeves, perfect casting, or would you have somebody else play him? I would start with a fucking British person. How about that? Jenna Coleman is like 10 times the Constantin.

He wants to make another one. So I say let him. I don't care. I like that movie, but it's not like a good adaptation of Constantine. Whoa. Of Hellblazing. you're telling me a lot of five teams

yeah yeah the buff was in it too yeah and by the way and he yeah when he lands on the car

right at the beginning anyway speaking of allan Moore here is an account from Alan Moore uh in 1993

from Wizard magazine uh for Jesse to read I don't know if you're going to try an Alan Moore voice I will not no

you shouldn't yeah good call that's a very good call this is going to come in two pieces because it's a little big but it's here here we go

I'm going to give you the second one, then you're off to the races. Basically, when I take over something as a writer, I always try to work as closely as I can with the artists on the book. So I immediately did my best to strike up a friendship with Stephen Bessett and John Tottenabut. I asked them what they would like to do in Swamp Thing. They both sent me reams of material, things they had always wanted to do in Swamp Thing,

but never thought they would get away with. I incorporated this into my scheme of things and tried to pin it all together. One of those early notes was they both wanted to do a character that looked like Sting. I think D.C. is terrified of Sting, that Sting will sue them, although Sting has seen the character and commented in Rolling Stone that he thought it was great. He was very flattered to have a comic character who looked like him, but D.C. gets nervous about these things. they start to eradicate all traces of references to the introductions of early Swamp Thing books to John Constantine's resemblance to Sting.

But I can state categorically that the character only exists because Steve and John wanted to do a character that looked like Sting. Having been given the challenge, how could I fit Sting into Swamp Thing? I have an idea that most of the mystics and comics are generally older people, very austere, very proper, very middle class in a lot of ways. They're not all functional on the street. Struck me that it might be interesting for ones to do an almost blue-collar warlock, somebody who was streetwise working class and from a different background than the standard run of comic book mystics. Constantine started to grow out of that.

One interesting anecdote, whoa, that all just... One interesting anecdote, I should point out, is that one day I was in Westminster in London. this was after we had introduced the character, and I was sitting in a sandwich bar. All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine. It wasn't Sting. It was John Constantine. He was wearing the trench coat, a short cut. He looked, no, he didn't even look exactly like Sting.

He looked exactly like John Constantine. He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorily, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar. I sat there and thought I should go around that corner and see if he's really there. Or should I just eat my sandwich and leave? I opted for the latter. I thought it was the safest. I'm not making any claims anything.

I'm just saying that it happened. Strange little story. Yeah. So he saw him at a sandwich shop in Westminster, and he knew it was him. And there's more from Alan Moore. because he meet him twice. He meet him twice. He needed him to time.

He meted him twice. And so I have a account of his second meeting from 2001, which was written as part of a performance piece called Snakes and Ladders. I'll read that for you right now. The written page becomes too frail a barrier. Things start to tear their way through from the other side, almost as if the realms of waking substance and of fantasy were not two separate worlds at all,

but were instead gradations on a smooth continuum, a single stream that trickles in the crystal-littered gutters of Baghdad. The dreams start answering back. Miss Lally waves to Mackin from a T-shop window. Elsewhere, in Connecticut, a ghostly form in cloak and hat is seen in the abandoned house once owned by stage magician Walter Gibson, who, as Maxwell Grant, spent several million words there writing the adventures of Pulp Mystery Man, the shadow with his cloak, with his slouch hat.

Sat at a sandwich bar in Westminster, I meet the Sharp South London Wide Boy, Occultist, that I'd created some years previously for a U.S. comic book. He looks at me. He nods and smiles and walks away. Years later, in another place, he steps out from the dark and speaks to me. He whispers, I'll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it. And there is one last account by Alan Moore of meeting John Constantine,

where he kind of expands upon the second siding a little bit. And he had been practicing, he'd been doing a magic ritual upstairs with his, like, the people he practices magic with. And this is what happened. Class of people. Yeah. Am I reading this? Yes. I just stepped out of the room and popped downstairs to make some tea.

And I was just passing through the kitchen when all of a sudden in the darkness on the left side of my head, it's very difficult to describe this. But it was clearly that somebody had struck a match in the darkness. And this lit up the face of John Constantine in the sudden. halo of the match flare. And he, in a typically amusing way, told me the ultimate secret of magic very memorably in one very short five-word sentence and then blew the match out and vanished. Yeah. So that's Alan Moore's interactions with John Constantine.

Also, Grant Morrison's lesson in magic is that it's easy. Anybody can do it. Stop being a bitch. Yes, that's exactly right. This, there's also Jamie Delano, who was like the first writer of Hellblazer, kind of like made Hellblazer a popular comic book. This is him from 1997. He was interviewed by Australian horror magazine Blood Songs in Issue 8.

So this is a quote from Jimmy Delano for Jesse to read. I started writing it and he gradually came. Well, he quickly came to life and started walking and talking, saying a lot of things I would have been saying at the time or thinking at the time. And it was set in the real 1980s environment. We had the real prime minister, the real elections going on, real shit that was happening in the country, trying to capture all those moods. When Alan Moore was writing John Constantine, he met him, saw him in the cafe in Westminster. When I was writing him, I walked past him outside the British Museum in Bloomsbury.

I didn't realize I'd walked past him until I'd gone 50 yards down the road. I looked around, and he was just vanishing around the corner. So, yeah. It was all very real and immediate, and the stuff I was trying to make stories out of was real and immediate. We had demons and shit like that, but they were mainly allegorical, comic book convention type stuff to a certain degree. Lately, I've moved away a lot more from that.

Yeah. So, Jamie Delano sees him in the street, also a sort of just strange sense that you saw him and then you look and it's him and he's gone, right? Yeah. Uh, also, I have an account from Peter Milligan and Brian Azarello, uh, meeting, uh, meeting Constantine, uh, as told to Abraham Reisman for Volcher magazine in 2014, uh, this for Mathis to read. Peter Milligan saw Constantine at a party around 2009 and rushed after him, only to find he

disappeared. Brian Azarello saw him at a Chicago bar in the early aughts, but avoided him. The thing is about John is the last thing you'd want to be is his friend, he told me. That's true. All of John's friends die. Paul Jenkins, also another writer of John Constantine, tweeted in reply to a screencap of the in real life section of John Constantine's, John Constantine's Wikipedia page.

He wrote this tweet. You're missing two people. Yeah, this is what either one. You're missing two people. Myself and Rick Veik, I ran into him on the platform at East Croydon Station on my way to a palace match. Yeah. So also, also. So Paul Jenkins and Rick Feech have seen him.

All people who've worked on Constantine all have seen Constantine in real life. Not every single person that's worked on it, but a lot of them. And for this last one, just to mess with everybody's heads a little bit for fun, here's John Constantine with an account of meeting Alan Moore in a pub in 1997 from Hellblazer number 120, the 10th anniversary issue by Paul Jenkins. And we'll have Jesse Lewis. That's funny. God damn you.

Oh, mommy, me, me, me, me, me. Oh, look, I realize it's a bit na feeling sorry for yourself after a few points. But it's the place, eh? Sometimes I feel like I live in here. You see him over there? Old mate of mine from before I was even a player. I didn't introduce me to a lot of people he did back when I was nobody. but him he was full of clever bloody ideas he got me involved a lot of mad shit next thing i know him knee-deep and sod and cabbage club my life's been a bloody mess ever since ah well those were the days eh we've dropped out a touch a bit since then i mean we run into each other from time to time like but nothing much a consequence still you know

Jesus, man. And strangely, like, if you look in Hellblazer 120, there's actually footage of them meeting, and it's illustrated in full color. It's pretty crazy. You can actually see them. That's cute. That's fun. For yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's a story of John Constantine in real life. But the Chiluvanati were not yet content because it is not only comic books that we are here to talk about today. And if Tulpas really are tangible things that are literally out there and not just various writers and magicians and interpretations. of their respective creative or ritualistic processes.

Logically, there should also be accounts of these things occurring in places where their creators have never been to people who don't even know about them, right? So Agent Brown found me one of those two. This comes from Monique Jones from Staffordshire, recounting an event that occurred to her in 2012 in a letter, which was published in the May 2016 issue of 40 in Times. That's number 340. And Jesse, I'm going to have you read this one also.

This one is a little long, so let me see where it stops, then I'll give you the rest. Around 4 p.m. 1 November afternoon, I was taking me dog Bryn for his walk. I live in a semi-rural location, so I was surrounded by fields with winding pass. About halfway down when I was past, my little dog became agitated and pulled on his lead. It was almost dark by this time, very misty and quiet. As I carried on along the path, I became increasingly uncomfortable. and still why not alone? I began to look around and listen for any other walker.

Lots of people walked their dogs along this path, but I couldn't see or hear anyone. I began to feel uneasy and wanted to stop back when suddenly, standing across the path, was a very tall bald man, dressed in all black with long arms dangling at his side, and no facial features. Bray became quiet.

and start pulling, I remember thinking his arms looked far too long for a person. Apart from the head, he looked as if he were dressed in a wet suit. I just stood there watching him as he watched me. Then he started to spin, and as he did, his arms rose up. I couldn't believe what I was saying. But I knew I had to get away. I turned around and started to run, pulling brim beside me. He was barking loudly now, and he didn't.

want to come with me. I stopped briefly and turned around to check what was happening behind me. The man had vanished. He couldn't have run away as I would have seen him somewhere in the field, but he was nowhere in sight. I carried on running up the path and suddenly at the field gate and stopped at the field gate and looked behind again. No sign of anyone or anything. I carried on home, which only one minute from. the field, closed the door behind me, and stood and dipped a leaf in the hallway. What on earth did I just witness out there? Later that same evening, I spoke to my daughter Natalie, who was living in Japan at the time.

As we were chatting, I mentioned my experience. It was praying heavily on my mind. She told me to check out Slender Man on the internet, a character I'd never heard of. When I did. I was shocked as Slender Man looked. just like the figure I'd see in the field. I know it's supposed to be a myth. And what I saw that afternoon was real and solid and right in front of me.

It's now four years later since that happened. I'm still wary of that path that I really have walked down it. James Corden, everybody. Thank you. So, yeah, she saw Slender Man before knowing who he was. And to expand on that idea a little bit, Here's an excerpt for my favorite new website, AnomilyInfo.com, about the letter, which was published in July 2019 and reads, The Internet Legend of the Slender Man was first created in June 2009, and within just a few days,

the group started to promote the character as if real, an effort that was supported in a number of ways until June 2014, when two girls in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, tried to murder a third girl in an attempt to summon the Slender Man, after which the main creators of the legend had to make full statements regarding the fictional nature of the character. Realistically, there was plenty of evidence and statements about the character not being real all along, but some people just wanted to believe. As reported, Jones' strange encounter would have occurred in the period between the character's creation and the eventual public expose.

And because she didn't report the matter until well after June 2014, the creators of the legend during the active period of its promotion would not have known, of her strange encounter with their fictional character. Had Jones heard of the encounter, then we could blame her imagination. And while a person could have dressed up as the Slender Man to frighten her, this doesn't explain how such a person could appear or vanish so completely with no cover in a field. Of course, it's also possible that Jones's story is just another late attempt to convince people that the Slender Man has become real.

But then why not report it as a more recent encounter, if so? Simply put, if Jones is telling the truth, then however it happened, her experience was quite unique. But emphasis is on the word if. So, yeah, like, if she was trying to make a fake story, she could have changed some details and made it more believable, but she didn't. And she may have seen a slender man, Topa, somewhere. where she didn't know what Slender Man was or that it existed, right? That's kind of interesting.

And then beyond just Tulpa's appearing to random strangers, what about cases of random strangers not realizing that they themselves were Tulpas, like the way in which Colombian author, Hector Abad Fatsio Lince, finally met his character, Bernardo Davanzadi. This one is for Mathis to read, and I'm going to have to give it to him in two pieces. You tended to change your email account over the years. Hotmail, Yahoo, or Un here in Columbia, until Gmail absorbed it all and you forget some of the stories left behind in the old addresses. They become like the locations of former homes falling into decay over the years or decades before they disappear. Indeed, they become inaccessible and prevented reconstruction with bits of the past that exist either exactly in the correspondence or vaguely and transformed in one's memory.

It is for these email changes that I cannot precisely rebuild the start of my story with a compatriot who has been living in Copenhagen for nearly 50 years now without ever returning home to Colombia and who sent me an email at the start of the millennium to state something like, quote, you do not know it, but Devanzadi exists. I am Bernardo Devonzati. Devinzotti is the protagonist of one of my novels, Asura, published in Spain in 2000. Its main character is an old man who wrote a couple of the books nobody read, and who now lives alone and writes compulsively, though for nobody, as he tosses out everything he writes. I've often received emails from a female reader saying something like I really identified with the book or another one thanks me by saying your novel clearly states something I have long believed. But it is rare to receive a message by an unknown person who insists they are one of my characters.

And that happened to me more than 15 years ago with a message sent by the most unusual of correspondence actually named Hernando Cardona. As best as I recall, I was initially cordial and discreet with him though I imagine almost certainly reticent. There are too many crazes in the world, and you cannot correspond with every deranged individual who sends you an email. There is something in this work that attracts the attention

of the disturbed, the way church spires, attract lightning. But this Davanzati doppelganger wrote very well, and he gradually gave me arguments and autobiographical data to confirm his extraordinary resemblance to my fictional character. My sense of curiosity and bemusement peaked

when Cardona informed me that as his daily language was Danish, he had translated Basura into that language so some of his female friends could read his life story, not as fragments revealed in conversations, but just as it was. About 10 years ago, Hernando Davenzadi let me know that, let me know he had finished translating Basura and many of his friends had duly read his life story, which made him feel better. Now there is something in the lives of certain characters that even their authors do not entirely know. In the life of Davenzati, there are certain secrets that are difficult for me to disentangle, obscure episodes from his professional

past, drug trafficking, or corruption, or guerrilla activity, question mark, unspeakable events of his private life, a spurned child or a devastating love affair, and many dispersed writings impossible to find, which is why I dreamed for years of going to Copenhagen to seek out Cardona. I wanted to meet Bernardo Devonsotti, yet every time I suggested it, Cardona discouraged me. Was it all a lie then? His existence similarity in the translation? Ten years ago, without telling him, I went to Copenhagen for another reason. The first thing I did after arriving was go to the address I had for Cordona. I rang the bell and then I had no doubt it was him. And he recognized me. We went to visit the tomb of Hans Christian Anderson and then had lunch. Now I know

my character's secret past. Bernardo Devonsotti exists in reality and cannot be anyone other than Hernando Cardona. Imagine how weird that would fucking be. So it's like the dude lived the same life. He just had a different name. Yeah. Enough that he actually translated the entire book. And it looks exactly like him apparently, according to the author.

And is him. He recognized him and was him. It's crazy. And he found him by reading the book and realizing, holy shit, this guy wrote a book about me. Pretty interesting stuff. I don't know. It's interesting.

Yeah. I'm trying to come at this concept from, a lot of different ways so that I activate it for everybody's, everybody's brain possible, if you know what I'm saying. Yeah, you're trying to frame this in different perspectives to that people understand what you're getting at. Yeah. Yeah.

And so finally for you today, I have a piece that I'm going to read myself from another Philip, Philip K. Dick, the author of so many crazy influential science fiction stories like, do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, which was adapted into Blade Runner and a scanner darkly, which was a movie, an Ubik, I think, which was adapted into Vanilla Sky, and we can remember it for you wholesale, which was adapted into total recall, and fucking the minority report, which was adapted into minority report. And that's not even like half of them, actually. He's actually crazy, but he also kind of went nuts by the end of his life.

But this piece comes from a speech. He wrote in 1978. He went to my college and was, like, friends with all the English staff there, like a lot before I went there. And so all his works are at my college. So I've always felt very fascinated by this guy, but this piece comes from a speech he wrote in 1978 called How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later. It's not the whole speech, but this is just a piece from it. The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel, 1984. But another way to control the minds of people. is to control their perceptions.

If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception. How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent, pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast.

Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour, the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion.

In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention. Literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen.

Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams. The blanks are filled in retrospectively and falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom. And, and I say this as a professional fiction writer, the producers, script writers, and directors who create these video audio worlds

do not know how much of their content is true. In other words, they are victims of their own product along with us. Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true or which parts, if any, are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur.

In all probability, it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem. You cannot legislate an author into correctly labeling his product like a can of pudding whose ingredients are listed on the label. You cannot compel him to declare what part is true and what isn't if he himself does not know. It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel believing it is pure fiction and to learn later on, perhaps years later, that it is true. I would like to give you an example.

It is something that I do not understand. Perhaps you can come up with a theory. I can't. In 1970, I wrote a novel called Flow My Tears, the policeman said. One of the characters is a 19-year-old girl named Kathy. Her husband's name is Jack. Kathy appears to work for the criminal underground, but later, as we read deep into the novel, we discover that actually she's working for the police. She has a relationship

going on with a police inspector. The character is pure fiction. Or at least I thought it was. Anyway, on Christmas Day of 1970, I met a girl named Kathy. This was after I'd finished the novel, you understand. She was 19 years old. Her boyfriend was named Jack. I soon learned that Kathy was a drug dealer. I spent months trying to get her to give up dealing drugs. I kept warning her, again and again that she would get caught. Then, one evening, as we were entering a restaurant together, Kathy stopped short and said, I can't go in.

Seated in the restaurant was a police inspector whom I knew. I have to tell you the truth, Kathy said. I have a relationship with him. Certainly, these are odd coincidences. Perhaps I have precognition. But the mystery becomes even more perplexing. The next stage totally baffles me. It has for four years.

In 1974, the novel was published by Doubleday. One afternoon, I was talking to my priest. I am an Episcopalian, and I happened to mention to him an important scene near the end of the novel in which the character Felix Buckman meets a black stranger at an all-night gas station, and they begin to talk. As I described the scene in more and more detail, my priest became progressively more agitated. At last, he said, that is a scene from the book of Acts from the Bible. In Acts, the person who meets the black man on

the road is named Philip, your name. Father Rosh was so upset by the resemblance that he could not even locate the scene in the Bible. Read Acts, he instructed me, and you'll agree. It's the same down to specific details. I went home and read the scene in Axe. Yes, Father Rash was right. The scene in my novel was an obvious retelling of the scene in Axe, and I had never read Ax, I must admit. But again, the puzzle became deeper. In Axe, the high Roman official who arrests and interrogates St. Paul is named Felix, the same name as my character, and my character, Felix Buckman, is a high-ranking police general. In fact, in my novel, he holds the same office as Felix in the Book of Acts, the final authority. There is a conversation in my novel which very closely resembles a

conversation between Felix and Paul. Well, I decided to try for any further resemblances. The main character in my novel is named Jason. I got an index to the Bible and looked to see if anyone named Jason appears anywhere in the Bible. I couldn't remember any. Well, a man named Jason appears once and only once in the Bible, and it is in the book of acts. And, as if to plague me further with coincidences, in my novel, Jason is fleeing from the authorities and takes refuge in a person's house. And in Axe, the man named Jason shelters a fugitive from the law in his house. An exact inversion of the situation in my novel, as if the mysterious spirit responsible for all this was having a sort of laugh about the whole thing. Felix, Jason, and the

meeting on the road with the black man who was a complete stranger. In Axe, the disciple Philip baptizes the man, who then goes away rejoicing. In my novel, Felix Buckman reaches out to the black stranger for emotional support because Felix Buckman's sister has just died and he's falling apart psychologically. The black man stirs up Buckman's spirits and although Buckman does not go away rejoicing, at least his tears have stopped falling. He had been flying home, weeping over the death of his sister and had to reach out to someone, anyone, even a total stranger. It is an encounter between two strangers on the road which changes the life of one of them, both in my novel and in acts. And one final quirk by the mysterious spirit at work. The name Felix is the Latin word

for happy, which I did not know when I wrote the novel. Careful study of my novel shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain, I had managed to retail several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible and even had the right names. What could explain this? That was four years ago that I discovered all this. For four years, I've tried to come up with the theory and I have not. I doubt if I ever will. But the mystery had not ended there as I had imagined. Two months ago, I was walking up to the mailbox late at night to mail off a letter and also to enjoy the site of St. Joseph Church, which sits opposite my apartment building. I noticed a man loitering suspiciously by a parked car. It looked as if he was attempting to steal

the car or maybe something from it as I returned to the mailbox the man hid behind a tree. On impulse, I walked out to and asked, Is anything the matter? I'm out of gas, the man said, and I have no money. Incredibly, because I have never done this before, I got out my wallet, took all the money from it, and handed the money to him. He then shook hands with me and asked where I lived

so that he could later pay the money back. I returned to my apartment, and then I realized that the money would do him no good since there was no gas station within walking distance, so I returned in my car. The man had a metal gas can in the trunk of his car, and together we drove in my car to an all-night gas station. Soon we were standing there, two strangers, as the pump jockey filled the metal gas can.

Suddenly, I realized that this was the scene in my novel, the novel written eight years before. The all-night gas station was exactly as I had envisioned it in my inner eye when I wrote the scene, the glaring white light, the pump jockey. And now I saw something which I had not seen before, which I editorially doubt. The stranger, who I was helping, was black. We drove back to his stalled car with the gas, shook hands, and then I returned to my apartment building. I never saw him again. He could not pay me back because I had not told him which of the many apartments was mine or what my name was.

I was terribly shaken up by this experience. I had literally lived out a scene completely as it appeared in my novel, which is to say I had lived out a sort of replica of the scene in Acts where Philip encounters the black man on the road. explain all this? The answer I've come up with may or may not be correct, but it is the only answer I have. It has to do with me. My theory is this. In some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it to be or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude, and still have, that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change, and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible. It specifically is the period immediately following the death

and resurrection of Christ. It is, in other words, the time period of the book of Acts. Parmenides would be proud of me. I have gazed at a constantly changing world and declared that underneath it lies the eternal, the unchanging, the absolutely real. But how has this come about? If the real time is circa AD 50, then why do we see AD1978? And if we really are living in the Roman Empire somewhere in Syria, why do we see the United States? During the Middle Ages, a curious theory arose, which I will now present to you for what it is worth. It is the theory that the evil one, Satan, is the ape of God, that he creates spirit

Curious imitations of creation, of God's authentic creation, and then interpolates them for that authentic creation. Does this odd theory help explain my experience? Are we to believe that we are occluded, that we are deceived, that it is not 1978, but AD 50, and Satan has spun a counterfeit reality to wither our faith in the return of Christ? What do you guys think about that. He was so close. He was so close. When he was saying time isn't real, I'm like, yeah, there's something there about the, you know, everything happens in the now of now and there's only now we just perceive linear time and maybe just patterns on an information level reveal themselves over and over again. That's where I thought he was going. But then he was like,

God, devil, Satan, trickery. I figured it out. Admittedly, but he, great idea for like a novel or a series of stories or something where it's like, like, hey, hey, hi, religious authors. Less left behind, more of this. I like the idea of like the devil is messing with. Humanity has not actually left like 80, 50. We are all still there and everything has been a delusion since like that. Do that. That's great.

That's fascinating. It's no accident that he drew a line between Satan and the television, right? I mean, Jim Carrey did that in the Batman. movie. So, like, you know. Yeah. No, exactly. That's why that movie is a masterpiece. But I think, I think, I think what he says is the most accurate to like what, like, other than the part where he like left turns like straight into like literal religious interpretation, like, I think he's right about like the idea that all the stuff is just kind of like not real anyway. Like, if we're talking about, let's just take Satan out of the equation, right? We're talking about

consensus reality, right? Which is like a Venn diagram that everybody's part of, but like not, it's not a circle. Yeah. You know, like, I don't know, whether or not it's meant to be deceitful, I will leave to somebody other than me to explain. But, you know, I do think that there's something about that shape that really explains a lot of what we feel about making things come out of our minds into reality as people and humans and what that means for us.

but yeah for further reading on for further reading on tulpas there's a great tumbler called sophy in wonderland which you can follow from the description to see a nice varied collection of viewpoints on the topic by various different experts and eyewitnesses from all different angles where you're not even talking about tulpa sometimes and you're talking about it from science it's just a great resource um and also i must admit i have some optional but really awesome homework for you out there listening to try uh and it's very simple also very open-ended I like that. And it's just this.

Please write poems, short stories, and comics about our own little Tulpa, the Boston Baked Bean Boy, for the next couple months. Again, the Boston Baked Bean Boy is a little bean boy who loves weed, but he only smokes legal weed. Okay. Yeah. He's just a little tiny bean. He's just a little bit of bean. Yeah. Post him on the Reddit.

Collaborate. And we'll see if thanks to our overwhelming numbers and you guys reading each. other stuff on the Reddit. We can get a real tangible thought form of the little guys. Are you trying to create a real bean boy? Yes. Yes. All right. All right. By the way, hey, heads up,

everyone. Little Beanboy won't ask you to do crazy stuff. No, only buy him legal nugs. That's it. He wants nothing else. He won't take a deceitful creature. No. He's a, I can't see him out here. He's a lot abiding, mean boy. Little Biting Bean. Yeah. Yeah. And with that, I believe I'm going declare that this month's long specifically intertextual miniseries on chaos magic that almost came into existence on its own without us really planning it or fully meaning to has finally

come to an end and you know what the only thing i have left to say about it is guess the spell worked get us out of here mathis thank you so much for listening we'll have to do a minisode at patreon.com slash illuminatic pod where jessey has something he's fucking thrilled to me that so i can't wait it's going to be cool i can't wait uh we'll see you there thank you guys so much again we'll see you next week. Good-bye. Blamontana. Anyway, me and my wife are sitting outside indulging on our porch one night enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom, so I stepped back inside and after a few moments I hear my wife know, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dashed back outside. She's looking

up in the sky and fall. I look up to you, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. Thank you. Thank you.