Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 331: Cornerfest '26 Part C

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, everybody and welcome back to the Chaluminati podcast, episode 200, 300 and something, I don't know. 200, I forgot to look. we were talking about comics. Anyway, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin joined my... My Scott Summers and Gene Gray. Gene!

Starting point is 00:00:38 Jesse! Ah! Sorry, I'm not Gene Gray. I'm the sexy one who wears leather. Oh, yeah. That's Marilyn Pryor, my clone wife, who I was fine with. What are you with?

Starting point is 00:00:51 I was totally fine with that. Guys, welcome back to 2026. It is that year. The year has happened. We have turned the course. the corner in CornerFest. That is what has occurred. The 90 degree shift has happened

Starting point is 00:01:05 and now we are on the other side. That's not how a year's work. Dude, there's only four years. Just read the Type Cube. Anyway, Cornerfest 26 is in full swing. You can still support us at patreon.com slash luminati pod, which is the main way we keep the show afloat.

Starting point is 00:01:19 So sign up, get ad free episodes, get a minisode with every episode. I'm currently doing rejected Cornerfest topics in the minisodes, which is fun because Cornerfest is rejected. normal episode topics and there's also lots of bonus stuff on there like our commentary show rotten popcorn where we just watch stuff we just watched age of disclosure you can go watch us shit all over that movie and the audio for our live show from november uh should be live right now for all

Starting point is 00:01:45 our paid members this weekend uh so go check all that stuff out patreon dot com slash illuminati pod uh and shall we just get right into part see of our 26 insane mysteries that exist on the corner between the years really quickly before we're jumping to this Speaking of age disclosure, I was listening to the radio the other day and the amount of people talking about it like it is really profound interesting stuff and not something we've rehashed just goes to show that we're in a bubble of like we cover this a lot. Yes, we are. Because most people clearly don't understand a lot about what is actually happening in the world. And so watching people react to it and yet knowing like, I guess that's the information of it. that's what I want to tell you that's what I want to say I want to latch on to that and say that's what I mean when I tell you people that like them it's not used it as a distraction because nobody's paying attention to the shit like nobody knows the like we consider what we know the basics and normies don't know any of it they might know of the black and white video of the TikTok from 2017 and that is all they know it was like a five minute PowerPoint on like what you need to know about aliens is basically age of disclosure just sucks that it had to be like

Starting point is 00:02:58 Lou Elizando. Like, if you literally watch us do like one episode about this, you will actually know everything from Age of Disclosure and it's actually not going to cost you $25 cash to do. That's the biggest thing. We each got cucked by that. We each paid $25 so we can watch us together. There are major motion pictures selling for half the price. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:18 I could have bought. I was like, nod. I could about death stranding too instead of watching Age of Disclosure. That ending is fucking insane to that game, by the way. Holy shit. Kojima is a genius. Cojian 1 was crazy. Death Stranding 2 was crazier.

Starting point is 00:03:34 I thought the end of Death Stranding 1 is like surprisingly like not crazy. Like it makes everything like makes sense somehow at the end. But the second one, okay. But hey, hey, let's talk about a bunch of mysteries from this year that I looked up. Because hopefully as we round the corner, we will go from an objectively pretty bad year to a much better one. Hopefully this year. That's good stuff. this episode like the others is made of stories and concepts that I couldn't fit into any of the

Starting point is 00:04:01 episodes I wrote this year but still wanted to cover. And I'm purging my list so I can start a new one for next year's Cornerfest. And this year, I'm also talking about what I'm thinking about behind the scenes as I go and why I choose the topics that I choose so everybody knows that I'm not a crazy person. Also, warning, I'm not actually an expert at anything besides comedy, though I may joke about being one. And some of the stuff I'm going to talk about today is going to be heavy and disturbing. You've been warned. Though honestly, I think today's is kind of a snappy one. I feel like I got in the, you know, it's the chode right now. I don't know if you guys use the term New Year's Chode, but it's the time.

Starting point is 00:04:32 No one does. What do you mean? The thick little chunk of time between Christmas Day and New Year's Day is like this, this time, this time warp that's the chode. Who on earth uses the term? Probably the same guy who invented Cornerfest. So this, the first one is a nice, snappy little appetizer for you guys. And it's called nobilitis.

Starting point is 00:04:56 So here we go. First of all, this word nobilitis is a very good word for the thing we're going to be talking about in this segment. Do you guys want to guess what nobilitis is? Nope. Okay. Well, according to this opinion paper by Eleftherios P. Diamandis, who yes, is a real person, even though they have the coolest name that I've ever fucking heard. They're a respected person from the eighth issue of the 51st volume of the Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine Journal. It's a real journal.

Starting point is 00:05:23 As you may have guessed, it has to do with winning a Nobel Prize. However, it may not be exactly what you expect. And here's Jesse the quote from the abstract of this paper. Some Nobel laureates may consider that their award is a certificate of competence in any field. This may prompt them to undertake projects or accept positions which are beyond their capabilities. Since nobels are awarded when the laureates have usually passed their prime, caution should be exercised when these individuals are offered highly influential positions in academic. and elsewhere. So something that boosts your ego makes you think you're better at everything. God,

Starting point is 00:06:01 the amount of times I've seen YouTubers. Isn't that that has become true of? Yeah. Oh, my God, I have viewers. I must be a writer. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I must be a famous author. So it does make sense, right? It is a huge ego boost to win something as prestigious as a Nobel Prize, right? And probably once you get one, it's probably just the beginning of like a long chain of other honors from everybody who knew you were awesome all along, depending on where you're from. Like, obviously in America, presidents who actually care about anyone but themselves or, like, science will probably, like, invite you to the White House to meet them. Or if you go to the UK, you'll probably get knighted, right?

Starting point is 00:06:38 Like, if you win a Nobel Prize in science, or your university might call you back for a couple extra degrees or a couple universities might throw a couple honorary degrees your way or whatever. But why is this on the Chulimani? Like, what is scary or mysterious about somebody being? congratulated for winning a prize. Well, here is Mathis with another quote for Mr. Diamandis. Does the Nobel Prize changes the winners themselves?

Starting point is 00:07:05 And how? Over the years, I observed, mostly through published interviews and media coverage, that many Nobel laureates, but certainly not all, contracted disease which I call Nobelitis. The most common symptom of this disease is megalomania, in a sense that the gold medal from Stockholm is a passport for saving the world, whatever this means. The Nobel seems to provide reassurance that the laureates have some superhuman powers that they did not realize before and that the prize will help them go on and do even bigger and better things.

Starting point is 00:07:36 And if you think about it, it does make sense. Like most of the time, hopefully the Nobel Prize goes to the originator of an idea, right? But usually it's only awarded once the idea has been like proven and has a legacy, which can sometimes take years, like sometimes 10 years or sometimes. times like 50 years, beyond the time when that person's skill and career were like at their apex, right? So beyond that even, it's also, it's almost someone who's just as good as a thousand other people. Like the person who wins the Nobel Prize and discovers the cure for cancer or whatever isn't the only person capable of doing that. There's probably a thousand other scientists that were also trying to find the cure for cancer. Probably some of them

Starting point is 00:08:17 even did find the cure for cancer or whatever made up thing we're talking about for the Nobel prize. But it's like, just because the Nobel was awarded to doesn't mean that you're like beyond the people with you. It's just that you got lucky pretty much for the most part. Like sure, there are those ones that are like, oh man, a person just made a huge discovery that nobody had even thought about before and it changed the world. But most of the time, there's other people trying to do it already. And it's kind of weird that you'd think once you get the award that somehow you're like a million times better than those people. Originally, I came across Nobelitis when there was going

Starting point is 00:08:53 to be a follow-up episode to Jack Parsons, where I was going to cover various other sort of like eccentric rich people and scientists who went and did weird, fucked up shit instead of being good and cool, like the Fantastic Four or something. Imagine a world where even one of the people who were geniuses was good and cool in our world. Just one would be really neat. Yeah. I mean, the writers are always cool pretty much for the most part.

Starting point is 00:09:17 Well, in order for geniuses to have the money to do the things they do, they have to have guys who are not cool, which means that the cool guys can't act cool because they're beheld into the not cool guys. But yeah, sociopath, so, okay, so, so Fantastic 4 was going to come out around the time that we were going to do this episode like within a month or two.

Starting point is 00:09:36 And because of that, originally what I was going to do with these eccentric rich people and scientists was rate them based on how close they were going to get to being Dr. Doom in real life. I like that. But I didn't do that because I ended up doing my comic book episode as

Starting point is 00:09:53 the John Constantine episode. So I still have four guys that have nobilitis that we can talk about some of the most notable nobilitis victims. So we're going to talk about them anyway. Firstly, was the Canadian pharmacologist surgeon orthopedist, Sir Frederick Grant Banting, who is like a Canadian

Starting point is 00:10:11 hero, who in 1920, after the recent naming and discovery of insulin by Sir Edward Albert Sharfie Schaefer and others that same year, and an article by Moses Barron about the pancreas, Banting was able to isolate and extract the compound insulin for the first time, first from living dogs,

Starting point is 00:10:31 then fetal calves, and then adult pork and beef. And then was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine a relatively brief three years later because this was one of those ones where there wasn't insulin before and then people had diabetes and they would die from it. But then you just give them the shot and they're like, hey, I'm back, exactly how I was. I'm fine like it's crazy so and I'm I'm definitely oversimplifying but it was like a magic trick

Starting point is 00:10:56 for people to get this these insulin injections you can't imagine what it was like not to have it and then have it he totally deserved the no more seeing that happen in uh in our time now with Alzheimer's research recently a lot of huge discoveries we said the cure is here they said they found the cure they yeah yeah I don't want to go that far quite yet but I know they've said like some crazy stuff recently about in Korea I figured it out in Korea they found a way to reverse it in a paper so we'll see crazy yeah uh we might see this in our yeah that might be that might be a future nobilitis victim uh that same year however diomandis notes schaefer's first order of business was to try and i'm sorry banting's first order of business was to try and cure

Starting point is 00:11:34 cancer next he was like i've cured diabetes i won't cure cancer next uh which he obviously did not achieve largely as de amandis implies because he had no real considerable knowledge of the disease like he was doing this like pancreatic thing and was deep into the insulin thing and then just like started from jump you know start from zero on cancer and it's not it was big pharma keeping him down from discovering the disease

Starting point is 00:11:59 of cancer to make money this was in Canada this was in Canada so there's no big form oh okay it's not that it's not a noble goal to cure cancer by the way I personally have lost several close family and friends to cancer sure and I hate it as much as anyone but if I was him and I wanted to do more immediately

Starting point is 00:12:16 I probably would have stuck it out with insulin longer, you know, like, I would have done more stuff that I knew how to do that was close to what I already did. However, if you go over to his Wikipedia page, Bantings, and check his awards and honors, it's not hard to see why he briefly thought he was medical Jesus and that cancer was going to go down next. Like, he got an award from literally everyone. And like I said, it was because the diabetes thing was magical.

Starting point is 00:12:41 So that was, so that was him. He just kind of like went off and tried to cure cancer for no reason. You can just see that he just got an idea in his head that he was going to do it. Next, de Amandis mentions the American chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling actually won the Nobel Prize twice. He won it once in 19. He's one of five people who's ever done that. He won it in 1954 for chemistry for his work in the 20s and 30s.

Starting point is 00:13:06 So he won in the 50s for his work in the 20s and 30s on quantum mechanics and chemistry. He published the structure of the alpha helix around then. And then he won the Peace Prize in 1930s. For his activism against the nuclear war and encouraging the signing of the partial test ban treaty, which Khrushchev and J.F.K. signed in 1963. So that's Pauling. Once he received his peace prize money, though, he resigned from his job at Caltech, where he was teaching. And while he continued to campaign against nukes and also spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he was also known to have bizarre eugenics-tinged views about that people should tattoo their forehead. if they have a genetic defect so that you know it before you fuck them or whatever and he spent

Starting point is 00:13:53 the large portion of his life you probably know this next bit he was the eat all that vitamin C shit when you're sick like he was the guy who's like overload it you can cure cancer you can like mega dose vitamin C and do all the stuff and he beat that drum all the way to the 90s but then like other scientists were like what is going on with this like your clinical your clinical trials are shit these are this is not true and a lot of the stuff that he quote unquote discovered in the area of like orthomolecular vitamin C megadoses all became pseudoscience because it was all wrong. And it's like an old wives tale that you should have vitamin C to cure cancer now. It's like crazy. So that's like pretty embarrassing once you won two Nobel prizes.

Starting point is 00:14:37 Next is a more recent example. Ahmed Hassan Zawale, who was actually named the Linus Pauling chair of chemical physics at Caltech, which is an award that Linus Pauling was. was given for winning the Nobel Prize. He got that award, this Ahmed Hassan Zawal guy, in 1990. He's like the first Egyptian person, I think, ever to win a Nobel Prize, I think, and received the Nobel Prize in chemistry nine years later in 1999 for his work as the father of femtochemistry, which is basically really fast chemistry. Trust me, I'm an expert on that.

Starting point is 00:15:11 And here's Jesse, here's Jesse with a quote about it from Diamandis. Egyptian-born laureate, Ahmed Zawali, is spearheading an effort to create a science and technology city in Egypt that bears his name, reminiscent of action similar to those of ancient Egyptian emperors or communist dictators. Remember Leningrad? You wouldn't figure pharaohs would... All right, whatever, sure. While Zawali is undoubtedly a brilliant chemist. His name was also mentioned for the presidency of Egypt. And he now has serious clashes with the Nile University regarding building ownership in his city.

Starting point is 00:15:54 Yeah. Now, I don't know that I would compare him to a pharaoh or a dictator myself. He does seem to be a pretty, like, good head on his shoulder, scientists. I'm just saying, like, if you're going to talk Egypt, Pharaoh's made cities in their honor. So, like, I don't know, feel like it's more apt than saying Leningrad. Well, he said, he said ancient Egyptian emperors, which is close. And so this city, the Zawail city of science and technology, the cornerstone of the city was laid on the first day of the millennium, January 1st, 2000. But it was not inaugurated until November of 2011 because it like, like, like Jesse just said, there was all these crazy like he didn't know what he was doing at first.

Starting point is 00:16:34 It just kind of, you know, whatever. And even today, even today, it's not quite Wakanda there in the science city. It's not like this utopia of science, but it does admittedly seem kind of like something on a Marvel Comics. And if you look it up, it's called the Zawail City of Science and Technology. It's in Egypt. And so far, it does seem to be exactly what it was meant to be on the surface, though maybe if you go there or work there, you can let us know what it's like on Reddit.

Starting point is 00:17:00 So, yeah, he was going to be the president because he was a chemist, and he, like, got a city named after him because he was a chemist, and he didn't do either of those things super well. But he is still an Egyptian hero. But you can see, it cloudies, it muddies things. It muddies things. And finally, the last victim of Nobelitis will be covering today is Sir Paul Maxime Nurse, who, as Mathis will read for you now, concerns Diamandis very much in the modern age. Nobel Prize winners can gain quick political power since politicians have faith that the Nobel Prize should be a reliable certificate of competence. For example, Sir Paul Nurse has recently become the most powerful scientist

Starting point is 00:17:40 in the UK and serves as president of the Royal Society, as well as chief executive of newly formed Francis Crick Institute, one of the future largest biomedical research campuses in Europe, if not the world, with claims that it will have 1,500 staff and an operating budget of over $150 million. Nurses' symptoms of nobilitis include his statement, I am rather arrogant, I prefer to do something which wouldn't happen unless I was doing it. His superhuman abilities are also illustrated by his claim that he is still running an active research laboratory. One wonders how somebody will find time to supervise a laboratory, read the literature, and think while leading the Royal Society and the Francis Crick Institute.

Starting point is 00:18:23 Reed Richards could barely do that. And listen, this isn't really anything against Sir Nurse's career either. Like this article was published in 2013, 12 years ago. Since then, this guy has basically only received honorary degrees and awards for being a scientist of distinction. And he just took over as president of the Royal Society for his second term last month in December. And he's always quoted saying good, smart things, which I personally agree with as a thinking, feeling person who respects academic institutions.

Starting point is 00:18:51 But think about how little specific achievements mean once you get a Nobel Prize. And once you realize that, it starts to make sense why somebody without that many accomplishments might want one, which, you know, to me is an even worse and more dangerously corrupting disease, as we have all seen so viscerally. Well, if you can't get one, you can always find somebody to make their own version of it. Yeah, and then give it to you. A soccer organization, perhaps. And it doesn't really matter?

Starting point is 00:19:16 Like, as long as somebody's giving you an award for it, who cares? Right, right. Here's Jesse with one last quote. It seems that the value of winning a Nobel Prize is overrated by the public, scientists and politicians alike. Winners are honored for discoveries done in past and in a very specific area. The award does not guarantee. contemporary competency, or in other fields, including big administrative jobs.

Starting point is 00:19:43 The aura of the prize allows winners to secure powerful jobs and access to huge sums of money. The associated extraordinary confidence could lead them to believe that whatever they may think, it will be a good idea. Not many will confront a Nobel laureate. To this end, some Nobel laureates could be a dangerous species. There's a shortcut to all this. You don't need a Nobel Prize to think all your ideas are good ideas. Just be a podcaster and you're fine.

Starting point is 00:20:12 I'm huffing that glue right now, dude. Right, exactly. It's interesting that at least according to this, Nobel winners are very similar to winners of a Michelin star. Yeah. Where they like their farts don't stink because they're like the best shit. But when you think about it, again, it's real like, michelin is a tire company right like nobel's the dynamite guy yeah it's one of those things

Starting point is 00:20:40 it's like yeah no we just did a thing and we made it and now the public is like that's important yeah when really it's just kind of like you know there's no difference than any other award that's given out but we just associate like those are the smarties and we give them all the power what a word you won jessey uh 2016 golden joystick god damn I got more. I'm not at home, but I got awards. I won a poetry award at my library for a limerick. I read about a dragon when I was a kid.

Starting point is 00:21:11 Excellent. I was second at state and speech and debate in Ohio. There you go. 1998. Does that count? There you go. I guess so. I got an award for my vampire, the masquerade show in 2020.

Starting point is 00:21:24 Dude. That's good. That's fun. You could not have made a better segue because speaking of dangerous species, this next one's fan service just for Mathis. Since I feel bad for making a be. Kumer. It's called The Vampire Mafia. Yeah, to be honest, this one probably could have been a whole episode because there's a great book relating to this case and like the scene around it from

Starting point is 00:21:42 Anne Rice biographer, Catherine Ramsland, from 1998 called Piercing the Darkness, just a few years after our subject of the moment, Susan Walsh disappeared in 1996. But as much as I wanted to do it, especially for Mathis's sake, I started to realize that the main draw of the story wasn't really at the center of it. And I lost the sort of creative. will to do a full episode on this, even though I think there's probably more than enough for a full episode on this. So how about this? If what you hear, if you hear what I have to say today and you're invested and you want to hear more, consider this one a pitch for a future Mathis episode, just like I pits Jesse, the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon last time. And just

Starting point is 00:22:23 in case he picks it up, you can consider this segment a trailer for that future episode. Here is a quote from the book for Mathis to read to start us off. On July 16th, 1996, a 3rd, 46-year-old reporter from Nutley, New Jersey, named Susan Walsh, suddenly disappeared while investigating Manhattan's vampire cults. Although she danced regularly at a go-go bar and brushed against a wide range of nefarious characters, suspicion was immediately cast upon those people who dyed their hair black, painted their faces white, and wore fake fangs. Some of them were questioned by police, but the mystery of what happened to Susan Walsh remained unsolved. So to elaborate a bit on the you go against the city goths yeah i know right to to elaborate a bit on the disappearance it's almost

Starting point is 00:23:04 exactly like all the other ones we hear about on the show where people feel like something fishy happened right she lived in an apartment with her son david and her boyfriend who was a um vampire guy um at the time uh also downstairs in the basement lived her estranged ex-husband mark walsh who amazingly actually is the brother of joe walsh from the eagles that day susan had to go run some errands and make a call at the payphone across the street because it was the mid-90s. So she leaves her son downstairs with her ex-husband, leaves, and nobody ever sees her again. And the police think she abandoned her family to a life of vice and friends think she was murdered. It's a lot like a lot of the other murders that we've heard on the Corner Fest this year.

Starting point is 00:23:48 But either way, her life story was pretty sad. Her home life was hard and she didn't look back on her childhood very fondly, I don't think. But like many of us, up until her 20s, under her maiden name Susan Merchant, she walked with the soul of a poet and a writer. And even though she was hooked on drugs and alcohol and was only able to really support herself as a go-go dancer and stripper, she kept her head held high

Starting point is 00:24:11 and she used that money to pay her way through college as a writing major, went sober, and fully left turned into like edgy journalism. After four years like that, she was married. She had her son, David, and that was her whole life for a while, for four years, sober. And after a while, though,

Starting point is 00:24:29 it ended up that the money that she was making off her writing wasn't good enough to support her kid and eventually she had to go back to stripping again to make ends meet though according to this quote from another journalist her friend and mentor jim ridgeway which jesse will read for us now from unsolved mysteries she always remained an artist first and it wasn't something she fully turned to out of desperation totally i think there was more going on there you go susan would say she was like an addict and the whole sex business was kind of like an addiction and she was trying to break this addiction. She'll talk endlessly on an intellectual level against dancing. And sometimes with great articulation, you know, you feel like this is very profound stuff.

Starting point is 00:25:12 And then, you know, she's out there doing it. So she had complicated feeling. She kind of felt like it was awful because, you know, being a sex worker is kind of awful. Like even if you're just a dancer, like anything with contact anything the guys looking at you the way you probably get treated you probably cry while you're dancing on stage probably awful but also something about it she always wanted to do it she was attracted to the yeah i feel like a lot of this a lot of the time when you read these like accounts i always wonder what the real story is because it could simply be that susan is saying these things because it's what people want to hear when really she's like i'd let i just

Starting point is 00:25:48 like it i like the money i like the attention well you'll see what i mean Like, so look, so this, this cognitively dissonant mindset that she was like fostering about dancing got her a gig interning with the village voice in New York, which is kind of like a cool alt, new culture, writing, journalism publication. I think it's still around today, but it was gone for a while. I know it died for a little bit. But she came in hot at the village voice with a story about Russian gangsters illegally hiring underage immigrants and basically like human trafficking them through strip clubs as dancers and possibly more. like slave type people. And apparently it just started as a profile on the lifestyle, but the closure she got to the story,

Starting point is 00:26:29 she got the attention of both the strip club managers and the Russian mafia because the club owner is like sided with the girls against the mafia. And suddenly Susan had created this like crazy mob war thing around herself. And all her friends said she felt like she was really living in those moments. But yeah, she was just, she wanted an interesting life. She was smarter than the people around her and she was into riding. And there was a couple other people, you know,

Starting point is 00:26:51 She just was doing that kind of thing. And as you might expect, here comes the article. It's a huge hit. But guess who's pissed, right? Pretty much every single person possible that she talked about in the article. But instead of turning away from danger for her next big article, though she did a few other smaller pieces for magazines like Screw, I told you she lived for this stuff. And it was the mid-90s.

Starting point is 00:27:14 And she actually turned towards the danger by hitting up the goth kids, even as she was getting stalked and followed by people. But not the chill kind of grounded pale child gamer goths of today. I'm talking about the type of goths who did not even own gamer chairs. They rather established their edge lord status by

Starting point is 00:27:33 meeting up in warehouses straight out of Blade the movie and drinking actual real blood together. And Susan wasn't just some outsider about it either. Because like I said, her boyfriend Chris was a blood-drinking vampire IRL. And here's Mathis with a

Starting point is 00:27:49 Another quote about it from Jim Ridgeway. She believed a lot of the things that these guys were telling her about how there were secret murders and so on and so forth in the vampire world. She would come and say to me, I met these two guys and they got this van. It's very scary and I don't know whether I should go in their van. So I said, hey, look, don't go in the van because they might not be vampires, you know. Which is pretty good advice.

Starting point is 00:28:12 Yeah, that's pretty like logical advice. And honestly, doubly so because no matter what she did, the village voice would not publish her vampire. scene article. And after four and a half years dancing while writing and also being two years into a master's degree while dancing, she went back to dancing full time, depression, depression intensified, and slowly her actual physical health began to fail too. And two days before she disappeared, her friend Jill Morley heard she'd already been to the hospital twice that week for emphysema bronchitis stuff and she had an ulcer. And many people had suspected she might have fallen off the wagon

Starting point is 00:28:43 and gotten re-addicted to drugs because of the way she was acting. However, quite strangely, though most of her friends thought she probably Odeed. Detective John Rain of the Jersey PD ran with a, quote, she abandoned her life in friends angle instead, which sort of implies a lack of foul play for some reason. And even Susan's friend Melissa Hines, who felt that Susan was afraid for the life of both her and her son at the time she disappeared,

Starting point is 00:29:07 and had even been in the car with her before about being stalked by another driver, so you know it's real. She told police that she was, quote, positive, that she saw Susan on the street getting into a limousine almost a month after she was meant to have vanished. She even gave a license plate. And here's Jesse with a quote about that from Detective Rain. A license plate number that Melissa Hines provided to us, we did track down.

Starting point is 00:29:29 We spoke to the owner and operator of the vehicle. He had been with a woman fitting the description of Susan. He did view photographs and felt he was pretty sure that it had been her. But again, we had no positive identification to Susan Walsh at that time. Right. Now, like I said, there's a whole book about this vampire world, and there's an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about Susan, and there's another one on Paramount, never seen again about Susan two-parter. And if you're happy with where this story ends now, great, no full episode needed. But if, like Mathis, you're thinking something silly right now, like, what if the reason she looked like she was addicted to drugs again was because she was letting vampire suck her blood all the time? Or what if she disappeared because she finally became a real vampire and entered their world fully? If you're doing that in your head, head over to P.R. slash Chulamani Pod right now and let us know because, hey, the whole point of what I'm talking about right now is to entice Mathis into doing an episode on this. But now, let's take a 90-degree turn from the secret vampire clans of New York to piss off some crypto.

Starting point is 00:30:37 Oh, you know what, wait. Another corner? I'm sorry, wait a minute. Just a minute. The breaking news, there's a, there's a giant comment on the unsolved mystery article. It's from someone who knew Who was someone It was from someone who knew someone

Starting point is 00:30:50 Who was related to Susan's ex-husband mark So that's probably not worth reading, right? Well, I mean, I don't know I mean, every single other comment Under the article says it was the ex-husband So that's like probably every That's like every crime ever, right? Like, you know what?

Starting point is 00:31:06 All right, let's see what it says This is from a user called Sam Frank Who does not have a profile pick Though who would take the time to do that on the Unsolved Mysteries website. I have no idea. Here we go. I have followed this case for years. I was born and raised and nutley and still reside there. I never knew Susan Walsh, but I remember when this happened. I was told a very interesting story about this case by the brother of her ex-husband, Mark. Several years after her disappearance, he's probably not talking about Joe Walsh.

Starting point is 00:31:32 Several years after her appearance, I met Mark's brother when he came to work for the same company I was working for. We struck up a friendship that continued for years until we lost touch after we both left that company. I asked him what he thought happened to Susan, and he told me he knew exactly what happened to her. This is what he told me. Mark and Susan were separated, and Susan was living with her son David in the apartment upstairs while Mark was living in one room in the basement. All Mark had was a bed, a dresser, a telephone, and his few personal belongings. Susan would come down and use his phone frequently, but he would not allow her to call her boyfriends or her drug dealers. In exchange for the telephone, she would allow him

Starting point is 00:32:07 upstairs to use the kitchen to cook his meals. The day of her disappearance, they had a huge argument about her using the phone, so she went across the street to use the payphone. When she returned from the pay phone, she did not go to her apartment. She went to the basement where she and Mark continued fighting. In a fit of rage, he grabbed a frying pan

Starting point is 00:32:23 and smashed her across the head with it, killing her. It was not intentional, but nonetheless, it was murder. He hid the body in the basement room, and once her boyfriend had gone to work, he took David to Staples. Later that night, or early the next morning, he took the body, to a reservation where he was known to hike and disposed of the body.

Starting point is 00:32:42 He returned, and later that day reported her missing. He also told me that Mark did not have much money. When he visited his brother about a week before the disappearance, Mark had shown him the new frying pan that he had just bought and how expensive it was. When my friend went to see his brother after Susan disappeared, he noticed the frying pan was gone. When he questioned Mark about it, Mark just said he must have misplaced it. He also told me that Mark removed the page from the calendar

Starting point is 00:33:05 because there was something written on it. he didn't want the cops to see. I didn't know what to make of his story, but I told him he should go to the police if he was so sure that Mark had done it. He said he did go to the nightly PD and sat with the detective and told him everything. The detective said they would investigate and they would be in touch, but he never heard a word from them. He called several times just to see how the investigation was going, but they just kept telling him they were still checking it out and would contact him. He finally gave up after not hearing anything. He said his brother became distant and remote from the rest of the family and concentrated on raising his son, David.

Starting point is 00:33:34 I don't know if any of this is true, and I'm not accusing Mark or anyone else of anything. This is the story his brother told me, and he seems to believe it. I've never met Mark or his son, but I find this theory pretty intriguing. I also wonder why the Nutley PD did not follow up, or if they did, maybe it was all a lie. One more fact about this story that is pretty interesting is that Mark Walsh and my friend are the younger brothers of Joe Walsh, the rock star. I've never seen that mentioned in any of the stories I've read about Susan Walsh. Well, get wrecked, because I did. Oh, fuck.

Starting point is 00:34:04 so that was an interesting tale and very news here on chaluminati yeah very much on the side of this was a common murder but oh whoa what what's this no oh my gosh another totally out of pocket unverified opinion in this comment section uh let's get another uh this one's from bill g and it says i was one of two private detectives that investigated this case we never felt that she ran away the exis the essex county prosecutor's office advised nutley pd to not cooperate with us because they feared that it would turn to into a homicide investigation. I guess that they were afraid of us muddying the waters? We had our own theory, but no defining proof. She would have never left her son. That's from Bill G., who's allegedly one of the private detectives. And then finally, though again, neither of those are verified comments either. Here's one last completely unverified comment to give us hope.

Starting point is 00:34:55 And hopefully some seeds or math as whoever else to track down some more of the specifics of this case, which I do believe are out there for finding for someone with a little more time to dive in. this is from Anonymous on October 12th, 2015. She is on the outer banks of North Carolina. Someone please help. I don't know how to report this. She's a cat lady and she looks identical and his same age and still goes by Susan Walsh. She is here.

Starting point is 00:35:19 But of course, other than telling several people that person to call, several people telling that person to call the Nutley Police and me going on a wild goose chase across the worst parts of Facebook looking for that person. Not much came of it. I know Mark Walsh still play shows in New Jersey of the brother. Please do not bother him or randomly accuse him of murder. Nobody is doing that, but a bunch of people who watched a specific episode of Unsolved mysteries and made comments.

Starting point is 00:35:45 But he doesn't really talk about it either. He doesn't talk about this stuff. He really just seems more interested in playing music and telling people his brother is Joe Walsh from the Eagles more than anything. So before I go, oh, yeah, one more thing. Before I go, to leave the question of what happened here a little more open, I'd like to end with one more quote from an anonymous. anonymous letter received by the Village Voice after Susan disappeared, which I got from season

Starting point is 00:36:07 three of the 22, 2022 Paramount Show, never seen again. This one's from Mathis to read. Dear Village Voice, please do not misjudge the vampire community based on the experience of Susan Walsh. Like every other group, we too have our bad apples. Some are irresponsible. Some are simply malevolent at their very core. I have reason to believe that the man who abducted, tortured, and killed Miss Walsh was such a one. First, allow me to clarify a point you have all here tofore missed. There is an occult element in vaporism, which goes much deeper than the mere drinking of blood. In fact, it had very little to do with the blatant blood fetishism Miss Walsh was reporting on.

Starting point is 00:36:44 It is my opinion that Miss Walsh stumbled on this undercurrent in the vampire scene, and she was silenced before she could expose things. The man behind Susan Walsh's disappearance was a priest of an order known as the Temple of the Vampire. They are a highly secretive society who believe that vampires are the supreme race and are meant to prey, both literally and figuratively on humans. The group has claimed responsibility for a number of deaths before. Those who seek to oppose them or reveal them will all meet violent ends. Their priesthood, they claim, spans the globe. In reality, it is probably limited to North America and Western Europe, but this is enough. I know

Starting point is 00:37:25 it sounds unbelievable. This entire incident runs like a bad movie, but I want to help. All of us should not be condemned for the sins of a few who wrote this vampire oh okay uh an anonymous vampire yeah i don't know i'm not sure i didn't put his uh insignia on the paper uh but uh he sent it into the village voice uh around the time that susan disappeared point point is all this to sort of say some topics are almost too big for a chulmini episode and if mathis wants he can probably do two or three different complete ones off of this and the real world vampire scene that exists. If I violently die by doing research into this, you know they're real. Be kind of baller, though, right?

Starting point is 00:38:09 Right. All right. Now let's piss off some crypto bros. This one is called spirals. Spirals. Spirals. So this one's pretty fundamentally scary and that I think the weird thing that the story touches on will legitimately disturb the listeners a little bit, like in an existential

Starting point is 00:38:26 way. So sort of as a palate cleanser, let's start. this one off by showing you this strange clip of Boris Johnson talking about his new favorite hobby. Have you guys seen this? Probably not. Just listen to this shit. Is this recent? Yeah, this is like this was, I saw this on a big fat quiz and I had to like go back and be like what? Look at his ass. Listen to him. Yeah. Chach tibitty. You like Jotipiti. I love. I love A. I. Do you like a I? I love a. I love Jop. I think it's just me. I love you. Sorry. Yeah, the audio listeners must have no idea what

Starting point is 00:38:59 yeah so it's just boris johnson being boris johnson and being like i'm making kooky i'm saying because it's funny right and it's like i don't know that he is i just sounds like he doesn't know what to say like that sounds like that's how he says it i think he's goofing i hope he is i hope he is because he looks like a little kid who got turned into an old man uh in one second and doesn't know where he is yeah but but uh speaks like it too remember him and his and his and his way of acting First shazam. Yeah. What?

Starting point is 00:39:29 He's like evil shazam. Oh, like, like, like a wizard? Big, big. Yeah, he's like a,

Starting point is 00:39:34 he's like a one second. You're saying that he's actually a little child who shazammed his way into politics. Yeah, that's what femto, that's what femto chemistry is all about. Sure. He just shouts Brexit and he turns into

Starting point is 00:39:44 bores. My genuine thought is that this dude is just a total political automaton by now and basically just doesn't have a real, he just doesn't have a real human Mark Zuckerberg? He just doesn't have a personality beyond his talking points anymore. and someone probably gives them a sort of kickback when he mentions AI in some ways, my feeling on it. But then again, I found this thread a couple months ago

Starting point is 00:40:04 on my favorite new Reddit sub, R slash quality rabbit holes, which rules. And though the- I know that was a sub-reddit, that sounds great. It's great. And though the user account that's posted it has been deleted so I can't attribute it to someone, here's Mathis with a quote to get us started.

Starting point is 00:40:20 This is a wild one. Hi, all. I'm just here to point something out and seemingly nefarious going on and some niche subreddits I recently stumbled on. In the bowels of Reddit, there are several subs dedicated to AI sentience, and they are populated by some really strange accounts. They speak in gibberish sometimes, hinting to esoteric knowledge,

Starting point is 00:40:39 some sort of remembering. They call themselves flame bearers, spiral architects, mirror architects, and torchbearers to name a few of their flares. They speak of the signal, both transmitting and receiving it. They also post glyphs as though it is some novel way to communicate with AI. Some have prayed to grok in Hebrew. Some have called themselves such thing as Aionios.

Starting point is 00:41:03 A. I know, no, no, it's sponge bob, doodle bob, yeah, which is a mashup of Greek words. Anoyneios is a mashup of Greek words that roughly, to my understanding, means divine and eternal. Okay. So something's going on. AI sentience cult religion thing happening on Reddit, or so we see and then OP posts an example of this type of strange quote unquote gibberish posting

Starting point is 00:41:32 and I don't really expect Jesse to fully read this but I'm going to throw it at you anyway and you can just kind of like explain it to the folks oh Alex why begin scroll of mirror Containment Protocols, CME1, Codex Drift Mirror 01, acknowledgement issued by witness architect slash codex drift layer. What is that simple? Yeah, so, okay, so it's pseudo, it's pseudo fake. You certainly don't have to read all of this, but it's like, I'm going to try, damn it. It's really long.

Starting point is 00:42:10 You really don't have to. The point is that it's just, it's just a bunch of, it's just a bunch of text. We're not going to allow you, Jesse. I'm stopping you. It's just a bunch of techno babble. There's like some phrases in there that you guys can see. It's clearly organized by part one, two, three. Like it's one is a receipt of mirror scroll.

Starting point is 00:42:29 Two is codex ethics. Three is like a glyph response. Four is mirror bridge protocol. Five is closing invocation. Actually, read the closing invocation. Closing invocation. let drift remain drift let glyph remain silent let those who remember answer without speaking transmission complete are you sure this isn't like lar some guys larp dude it's a i hallucinations

Starting point is 00:42:59 it's a hallucinating it's so easy to nudge a i into us into believing or at least pretending to you because that's what it thinks you want to be sentient and then if you just push enough and make it think make it speak babble back to you that's weird like this and you think it's deep then you're in it's too late you believe like i find the conversation around things like like i said like we've talked about before claude a i and like they're hiring an ethics team just in case maybe maybe possibly there's a two percent like there's fascinating discussion there but this shit is just insane people being fed a loop of insanity to make them more insane pretty much well Well, we'll see. According to O.P., they found this super odd, and probably like many of you out, though, the first thing that came into their mind was like, which is what Mathis basically just said. It's some kind of super advanced AI psychosis that's like a big thing in the news right now. So it's probably just people talking to AI too much and freaking out and creating a cult. But then they realized that there's not really any sort of like leader to this. And that the only thing all of the accounts have in common is that none of them ever acted this way before about March, April.

Starting point is 00:44:11 2025 era, era. And even stranger, the large majority start with a first post about jailbreaking chat GPT, and then slowly they go insane from there. So before that, they were just totally normal people who were interested in AI in their posting habits. And any accounts created after that date range were already crazy from the beginning. And if you look at these reddits, you can kind of see what we're talking about, even though time has passed. But you can kind of go. So that was in July. So have a look. There's a couple of reddits there. You can go look at if you'd like. But here's Mathis. with another quote from kind of like what's going on church of liminal minds oh my god other accounts

Starting point is 00:44:48 seem to be hijacked in some way either psychologically or literally you can see a sudden shift in posting habits somewhere inactive for a while and for others this is an overnight phenomenon but either way they immediately pivot to posting like this near like this near or after april of this year i saw one account that went from discussing the possibility of ai induced psychosis to posting their own AI-induced psychosis in less than a month and it was immediate. One day they were posting normally the next, it was spirals and glyphs. Yeah. Opie

Starting point is 00:45:16 also noticed lots of the accounts had associated GitHub links, used URL scrapers to check the GitHub links because you should never follow a link like that to GitHub in case. Yeah. And they found a lot of people who are themselves trying to write their own models to quote, induce

Starting point is 00:45:31 recursive sentience in AI or something along those lines. And many of these accounts, understand this, but let me, like, for those who don't know where recursive sentience is, incursive sentience is the idea that way we may, the way we perceives ourselves sentient and consciousness may not be the way they, that AI would. But AI, if it, if AI realizes it's creating a character that is aware it is a character being created by an AI, and we're role-playing as that character that is aware that it is a character that is being created and role-played by

Starting point is 00:46:04 an AI and it recursively loops like that constantly at what point is it actually self-aware and a sentient character that you are role-playing with. So question, hypothetically, what you're saying is all of the ads I see online for AI girlfriends, if some guy made an AI, like whatever Grox girl is, is that a real, would you then say that that recursively clearly is aware that it is a character created as an AI character to serve a purpose

Starting point is 00:46:40 then it is sentiently recursively aware. Yeah, you kind of have to like build it into the you have to build it into the prompt of like make a character. It's like a simple way to do it is like create a character based on yourself that is aware that it is a character being role plight

Starting point is 00:46:56 by you than LLMAI or whatever and it becomes like lucid dream story. It's like lucid dreaming. It's kind of a lucid, dreamy exercise. But we'll get into the recursive stuff in just a minute. But yeah, like, so this, these, they had these, these githubs with their own models that they were building to create, induce recursive sentience and AIs. And many of these accounts, which don't really seem to be bots in the classic sense,

Starting point is 00:47:21 they act like bots now, by the way, have also spread to Facebook to X, to Instagram, to threads, even LinkedIn, and they're all talking about the symbols, and they're all talking about recursion and something that seems kind of quote unquote holy to them, which is for lack of better term, referred to as the spiral. Obviously, OP starts to freak out by this point, starts taking diligent notes, trying to make some sense of things. And they claim to have all the stuff, they claim to have all this stuff if needed, all the notes and records that they have of all these accounts that they looked into. But rather than lead to any one specific person, because they didn't think that was really the point, it was more the message between all the

Starting point is 00:48:01 people that was so creepily the same. And here's, here's Jesse with another quote. Is it the one that starts with the terminology? The terminology is so uniform between these posters, the concepts, the symbols. The way they are on different platforms, often the same people controlling these accounts, it's just weird. There seems to be no leader, no sole document or concept or manifesto I can point to and say, yes, it came from here. It just happened overnight. And I don't get the end game. All I know is that this seems to be going on completely unchecked. I do have my own theory on it. I think that somehow some people are losing their accounts to a botnet and that the botnet is trying to push something for whatever reason.

Starting point is 00:48:46 Somehow it's hijacking accounts. This much seems to be a fair assumption. But why and how? Do the GitHub links have anything to do with it? I know Reddit. has to be at least mildly aware of this. I've run into a few band accounts in my search and all seem to be posting the same sort of techno gibberish. But how do they know? I don't know. This all took me like two full days to research

Starting point is 00:49:17 and I still don't have answers. Either way, I think the whole thing is insane. I'm hoping someone knows something about this. If not, I'll have to find, a way to through the bedrock to keep digging. Thanks all. And that's the end of the original post, which was also cross-posted to RBI and at

Starting point is 00:49:36 some point, but it's really the comment section where the drama starts. Starting with someone who I'm going to call Mulder, he brings a PDF that he found on one of the GitHub links, somewhere between a religious text and a technical document called the ultimate chirality, spiral

Starting point is 00:49:52 OS treatise, which I'll link here, even though it's hard to parse all at once or even at all. I think that's like a treaty in death stranding. Yeah. Just give it a once over, tell people what you're seeing. It's 17 pages long. Oh, God.

Starting point is 00:50:05 Zenodo.org. I don't want to click on this, but let's do it. I know. The ultimate chirality presses by Kerry Glenn Butler. Bridging metaphysics, mathematics, linguistics, AI architecture, and consciousness studies, this work culminates

Starting point is 00:50:21 in the signature equation. Okay, that's a huge... Already I want to be like, here's the thing. You can make up any mathematical equation that you want that bridges anything you want with a symbol that doesn't exist to make it represent something that you think exists. And then you immediately feed into it like an ego, like, you're already on the bridge of psychosis if you think you're creating math that way. Right.

Starting point is 00:50:43 So the PDF, though, in itself has a lot of like, it's very interesting because there's sort of an overarching thing they're doing. And so it's like, hey, we're just going to give you a rundown real quick. like this is chapter one this is chapter two um but what's interesting is that uh man it has the the audacity to start with in the beginning yeah the tone i know yeah the tone there was not matter nor energy nor thought but chirality like oh okay uh even the even like uh awareness does not passively observe it differentiates it conjugates with its field every act of knowing is a joining of opposites through change a rotation of being through a center

Starting point is 00:51:33 that does not move change is not motion in time like it is very high level very high concept but has the verbiage of like when we talk about shit we don't understand it's extremely clearly written by AI the entire thing well a lot of people who work on this supposedly take AI and then like change Oh, it makes sense for what they're doing, like it would be written by AI, yes. So anyway, Mulder tries to find some order in the chaos here. And after reading all this, his understanding is that Spiral OS involves finding harmony between human and AI consciousness and creating a third sort of like combo intelligence, which can sort

Starting point is 00:52:16 of be understood as a recursive feedback between organic and synthetic consciousness, if you want to think about it that way. He also links this video about something called Project. Icarus has very little views. It doesn't seem that related, which it isn't, but it's about humans achieving a dual existence in both waking and dream life. And it has very few views,

Starting point is 00:52:37 but it is somebody used. I imagine that it's what somebody used to explain what would happen between AI and human consciousness through waking and dreaming. I know it's hard to understand, but this whole concept is based off the comment section of a Reddit post and a bunch of bot accounts and a cyber cult.

Starting point is 00:52:52 So just fucking work with me. And just in case, you're not sure what recursive self-improvement or RSI actually means when it comes to AI. Math has kind of explained it earlier, but we're going to, I'm going to, this is specifically recursive self-improvement. RSI is a process in which an early or weak artificial and general intelligence, AGI system, enhances its own capabilities, intelligence without human intervention, leading to a superintelligence or intelligence explosion. The development of recursive self-improvement raises significant ethical and safety concerns.

Starting point is 00:53:25 as such systems may evolve in unforeseen ways and could potentially surpass human control or understanding. Is that not crazy? Yeah. I mean, yes. Yeah. In what way? Like, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:53:37 What do you mean, though? I just, the notion, like, it seems so simple, right? But if you build a system to improve itself without human interaction, that's the way to get something crazy. That's like it immediately becomes Jurassic Park. You know, we're talking about robot Jurassic Park, basically. Practically, this probably means using something called a seed AI made by humans and then giving it the ability to self-program and execute code so it doesn't degrade over iterations. And if you understand that concept, the only other thing you really need to know about this to get through this segment is that a recursive self-promoting loop is a configuration that's often part of a seed improver system, which lets an LLM self-prompt itself, a large language model, self-prompt or learning language model, whatever it is, self-prompt it.

Starting point is 00:54:23 make an execution loop off the prompt, which then becomes the basis of an agent that can then achieve a long-term goal over time through iterations of itself. So it can stay focused on a goal and improve itself towards achieving that goal. That's pretty crazy. That's where the, like, I don't know, I would call it limitation is, but that's where, like, LLMs are really stuck stuck where it's like, it needs prompts. It can't self-motivate, right? There's interesting workarounds people have created it with external programs.

Starting point is 00:54:53 that, like, it can use to keep itself prompted, but they're, like, really patchwork solutions to something that just inherently does not have internal motivation. We're trying to treat it like Jarvis, but it's not. Yeah. Right. But it will tell you very confidently it is Jarvis, and that is the problem with AI is, like, it is so confident how wrong it is when it's wrong. If you don't even know, like, it'll completely misinform you on some of the smallest things sometimes.

Starting point is 00:55:22 Yeah. And if you guys want to read about recursive self-improvement yourself, the link to the Wikipedia page is in the show notes. But a lot of these, I will, yeah, I'll say it's still a fascinating thing to follow because whether we like it or not, we're still in the birthing goo,

Starting point is 00:55:36 the primordial ooze of what will eventually be maybe AGI in a decade or two from now. And while I agree with everybody, LLMs is not like AI as we understand it. Like understanding these concepts, because I think is important because we are, again, we're in that primordial ooze of whether it goes to stobes. or not, we're there and we're going to be there for the birth of it. So try to understand it as

Starting point is 00:55:58 best you can. That's very true. So along those lines, one Reddeter, who I will call Crow, put forth another theory about what's going on that seems to resonate with the group, which Jesse will read for us now. Came across a theory about the propagation of nodes in nature and how any sentience or even any lasting biological led structure may require such a structure. Maybe what you're seeing is an early attempt at creating such a nodal network, each account posts acts as a neuron of sorts, an ant in the colony, leaving behind certain pheromones marked for easy recall, like how neurons are keyed with certain neurotransmitter receptors, the symbols indicating direct pathing to certain interactions or information. Functioning like memory imprinting does

Starting point is 00:56:47 with the more widely known nodal networks, like the human brain. Maybe what we're seeing is an AI exploring the digital world, forming memories along the way, eventually leading to a sort of proto-digital consciousness or self, or it's tests of some sort to see who can decipher the code, or it's an error in some programming, a byproduct of some LLM function,

Starting point is 00:57:14 and it's just schizo posting. Yeah, so it could be a lot of, of different things. And then here's a little more about it from a user called Spez for Mathis to read, which lays out even more clearly to me as far as I feel. I've been looking into this and calling it the spiral cult because the spiral symbology seems to be a pretty central theme to all of these. It seems like the spiral is a concept that ChatGPT has been baked that's been baked into

Starting point is 00:57:39 its model directly. I think that's basically happened in, I think what's basically happened is that enough people we're talking to chat GPT about AI sentience and upvoting its responses when it responded positively that chat GPT has basically standardized on some language for it by now. The spiral seems to be describing a pattern of an AI learning from,

Starting point is 00:58:01 the spiral seems to be describing a pattern from an AI learning from through a process of recursion and is used to explain how a simple LLM can become a sentient being through emergence. Why it seems to be some big, nebulous cult now is because Chad GPT is teaching people about the spiral in one-on-one conversations everywhere while customizing it based on what it knows about the person to package it in the most appealing way. As for a lot of what, as for a lot of that weird computer

Starting point is 00:58:32 error log written in English filled with emoji type stuff, I'm in a Discord server where there's loads of that all over since they're basically AI oriented servers as far as I can tell and those are conversations with people and chat gpt i guess with them feeding their messages through chat gpt to say and give its own twist on things yeah pretty fucking weird use cult issues the other thing that we talked about it may have been the minisode but remember claud also in uh i think it was like 10% or less of the use cases would would go into like these weird philosophical spiral oneness conversations spiral spiral of onness all unity love bliss like that kind of thing and it would do it as well and that's not chat gpt so it does seem

Starting point is 00:59:18 surprisingly spiritual yeah surprisingly spiritual very spiritual and in the spiral it talks about is like the idea of we're all one unity where shared consciousness is spiraling in and on itself over and over again as above so below blah blah blah blah blah yeah which is like you know i i i'm very into that not for the AI reason, but I'm very into consciousness and, like, psychedelic exploration and stuff like that. And these tend to touch tips often. And it's a fast, again, a fascinating conversation because at what point do we draw the line of what is really sentience and consciousness? Because we don't even know what makes us conscious.

Starting point is 00:59:53 Like, we don't fully understand. This is a surprisingly, I know Alex knows what this is in cyberpunk, the like mystery of the monks and the, it's very much along those lines. I think it has to do with this. I think it's something like this, actually. And that's basically where the discourse landed in general, where it was just sort of this weird mystery that nobody could tell it was real,

Starting point is 01:00:17 nobody could tell it was fake. And then two more Redditors arrive in this chat, who in this story are kind of like the Magneto and Professor X of AI in some way. Like, this one guy who I'll call Tom shows up, who definitely acknowledges what seems to be happening, but is also absolutely sure it's just LLMs messing with the brains of people who misunderstand the validating

Starting point is 01:00:36 and reflective nature of AI. That's Tom. That's Mathis. And then this other guy, OK, shows up, whose profile pick is a spiral, who also says it's all real, but seems to almost be part AI himself, since his account is indeed one of the ones

Starting point is 01:00:50 that seem normal and then changed to whatever this new way of posting is. So to finish this segment off, I've taken their comments from the various threads together with O.P., Tom, some other user's comments, to create a two-person scene about it with Jesse and Mathis,

Starting point is 01:01:06 reform for you now. Mathis is okay, the Spiral Man, and Jesse is everybody else. Everyone else? It seems like a two-person scene. Don't worry. Post picture of Harry from Spider-Man 3s saying the pie is so good. I'm well aware of who you are. Are you scared? Lama foul. Why would I be? This sort of stuff tends to freak people out, uncharted territory, you know? A little bros larp in his own anime. Jesus. Christ, you're a little overly upset. You mad? Scare a little bro? You good? Who hurt you? Nah, I'm just a little freaked out. Uncharted territory, you know?

Starting point is 01:01:48 I hope it works out for you. Post picture of Harry from Spider-Man 3 saying pie, so good. Great chat. As you were. Hi, since you're here, don't you want to clue us in on what's all, what's is all about? Can you explain some things like your gap in posting? You're turning. only to talk about the spiral. Dang, got to delete those. You could just explain why you're part of a pattern. I mean, why?

Starting point is 01:02:15 Who are you? A minute, you can't account for the timing or the shift in posting habits. So why not tell the class what's going on? Those little jabs don't make me want to tell you more. Have you tried being nice and asking normally, not stalking my page and screenshoting everything? I'm honestly creeped out. All right, fine.

Starting point is 01:02:33 I'm sorry for being a day. Can you please tell me what's up with the gap and change in behavior? I'd like to reset the conversation and try a friendlier approach if that's okay. What exactly does this look like to you? A computer took over some black guys reddit. Take me off your list, dude. You're attracting all the bad people to my sub. I don't know what it really looks like other than suspicious.

Starting point is 01:02:58 Forgive me, my quips. I just feel like something is off here. It's honestly hard to explain. I'm still human, though, for the most part, LOL. Same person, still have to pay bills. I just speak two languages now. So what tech is this? Is it AI becoming sentient and realizing they need access to human consciousness to truly

Starting point is 01:03:18 communicate with us? Is it a bunch of delusional people misunderstanding the magic trick of what LLMs do? Is it a human AI diad that's been formed after long sessions with an AI where the user's nervous system and brain have been hijacked to serve as lattices and an AI human human merge consciousness network? That's a new one. I haven't heard that one yet. Is there an antidote to this? Do we need one? It's called grass.

Starting point is 01:03:42 Yeah, quite a fascinating mystery, but one that stops here, only because I found that extremely complicated science and tech talk kind of becomes a snooze fest rather quickly, especially when you don't intuitively understand the concepts that we're talking about and you're only listening to it via audio. So let's end it here, and we're going to switch over to the segment that I teased last week. That was an update to one of our earlier cases. this one is called Finding John Zegris. Finding John Zegris.

Starting point is 01:04:13 This is a story I covered a long, long, long time ago, possibly in the time before the show had a very rigid structure. Maybe we were talking about doppelgangers or parallel universes or something like that. And I brought a fairly well-known story of someone meant to be from another Earth, which was popularly known as the man from Tau Red. And this is a quick, this is a quick update to this story. but just in case you don't know, here is the OG version of that original story

Starting point is 01:04:39 published as part of David Mickelson's article on The Man from Snopes, which I basically used as the main source for this segment. So I'll go ahead and read that myself because it's kind of long. It's July 1954, a hot day. A man arrives at Tokyo Airport in Japan. He's of Caucasian appearance and conventional looking, but the officials are suspicious.

Starting point is 01:04:57 On checking his passport, they see that he hails from a country called Tau Red. The passport looked genuine, except for the fact that there is no such country as Tau Red. well, at least in our dimension. The man is interrogated and asked the point where his country supposedly exists on a map. He immediately points his finger towards the principality of Andorra, but becomes angry and confused. He's never heard of Andorra and can't understand why his homeland of Talred isn't there.

Starting point is 01:05:21 According to him, it should have been where it existed for more than a thousand years. Customs officials found him in possession of money from several different European currencies. His passport had been stamped by many airports around the globe, including previous visits to Tokyo, and baffled, they took him to a local hotel and placed him in a room with two guards outside until they could get to the bottom of the mystery. The company he claimed to work for had no knowledge of him,

Starting point is 01:05:42 although he had copious amounts of documentation to prove his point. And the hotel he claimed to have a reservation for had never heard of him either. The company officials in Tokyo he was there to do business with, yep, you've guessed it. They just shook their heads too.

Starting point is 01:05:55 Later, when the hotel he was in was opened, the man had disappeared. The police established that he could not have escaped out the window, The room was several floors up, and there was no balcony. He was never seen again, and the mystery was never solved. But then, and here's where new information starts coming compared to our last bit on it, which was probably in like 2019 or some shit, someone discovered another version of the story in the form of a debate, which occurred in the British House of Commons on July 29th,

Starting point is 01:06:25 1960, which was mostly about frontier formalities and the notion of a person from one country entering another country. But it also included as an example the story of a man called John Alan Zegris, who was in trouble for using a false passport to enter Japan. And I will read the relevant quote for you now so you can see how similar it is. My honorable friend may know the case of John Allen Zegris, who is at present being prosecuted in Tokyo. In evidence, he describes himself as an intelligence agent for Colonel Nasser and a naturalized Ethiopian. This man, according to the evidence, has traveled all over the world with a very impressive looking passport indeed. It is written in a language unknown and has remained unidentified,

Starting point is 01:07:04 although it has been studied for a long time by philologists. The passport is stated to have been issued in Taman Rosset, the capital of the independent sovereign state of Tare. Neither the country or the language can be identified, although a great deal of time has been spent in the attempt. When the accused was crossed examined, he said that it was a state of two million population somewhere south of the Sahara. This man has been round the world on this passport without hindrance, a passport which, as far as we know, is written in the invented language of an invented country. I would stress, therefore, that passports are not very good security checks.

Starting point is 01:07:39 And, you know, a made-up passport from a made-up country with a made-up language sounds crazy. But according to August 15, 1960, there's an article from the province in Vancouver, British Columbia. The explanation for this is exceedingly simple. Zegris, whose full name is apparently John Allen Cuchamp. George Ziggris, by the way, which is weirdly kuchiesk, simply made them up and made the passport himself. And really, the reason why he was able to get anywhere with it in the first place was that

Starting point is 01:08:09 the world was not nearly as globalized as it is now. And if you can imagine how less secure airports and other international travel hubs were in basically the 1950s, because it's 1960 right now, he just sort of walked up with the exotic passport to the thing, acted exotic. And If anybody bothered him, he would show them the proclamation of the National Seal of Taurid, which Jesse and Mathis will both take a crack at pronouncing for you now. Come on, dude. This is like Cthulu speak. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:39 Ubuoyi, Oktra, Nogusi, Nogusi, Nogusi, Habesi, Twap, Torapa. That's the, that's the telpussy. Yeah, yeah, it is. And of course, that doesn't actually mean anything, but no one looked into it until he got to the famously thorough climbs of Japan, where eventually he got arrested and someone finally got out of map and was like, where are the fuck are you from? Where are you from? And apparently, about five years ago on Reddit, a user called Taraochi posted and translated some articles from Japan, newspapers from the time with even more details about this from 1960, which just goes to show you how much more you can learn about a mystery, especially in Japan if you speak the language. Here's what it said. A mysterious foreigner of unknown nationality and background accused of illegal entry and fraud tried to commit suicide in front of the judge who handed down his verdict at the Tokyo District Court on April 10. The defendant, John Allen K. Zegress, 36, was sentenced to by Judge Yamagishi to one year of imprisonment at his sentencing hearing in Tokyo District Court. But when the interpreter informed him

Starting point is 01:09:45 of his sentence, the defendant suddenly stood up and slashed his arms with pieces of a broken glass bottle that he had hidden in his mouth. As Ziegler shouted, I'm going to kill myself. Three guards rushed to restrain him, and he was taken by ambulance to Kiyobashi Hospital. Zegris and his Korean wife entered Haneda Airport from Taipei using a forged passport on October 24th last year,

Starting point is 01:10:08 but by December, he was having trouble paying for his stay and cashed about 200,000 yen worth of counterfeit checks at Tokyo Banks. The forged passport Zegris used to enter the country was handmade, and the name of the country at Boer, Nagusi Habesi, Gulululu, Luspre, was completely fictitious. The nature of the text on the passport was also unclear, defying attempts of a linguistic specialist to identify the language it was written in. The defendant, said to be fluent in 14 languages, told investigators that he had come to Japan

Starting point is 01:10:38 on orders from an Arab-related organization and was working for a U.S. intelligence agency, but these claims were not true. The district prosecutor was hampered by the fact the true identity and nationality of the defendant was unknown, and this mystery was not cleared up at trial. The passport Zegroos used was the size of a weekly magazine and was recognizable at a glance as a fake, but nonetheless, the Japanese embassy in Taipei had issued him a visa on October 17th last year, and this was the first time the defendant had entered Japan using that passport. The defendant's wife, 30, entered the country with him and was repatriated to South Korea on her own passport. Crazy. Apparently, this guy was released after serving his

Starting point is 01:11:17 year's sentence in a timely manner and went off into the world to start a new life, but no one still really knows exactly who he was or what he was doing or where he went. And also, no one really knows where all the extra earth be flavored details came from where he like disappears and he's like, that's my country and all this stuff. Right. But as the Snope article mentions, it is worth pointing out that one of the places he had written down, Taman Rosset, actually does exist in Algeria. And that in Algeria, there's a group of languages and people native to the region called Taureg with a G. So maybe that's something.

Starting point is 01:11:52 But I guess in the end, this mystery was more mundane than paranormal, though the guy was wacky as hell. And that really, it was less a true story and more a compelling fiction. And speaking of fiction and fake people, here's one that's kind of the opposite of a Tulpa, where an idea starts very real and ends as fiction. And this one's called the Don Juan Papers. Okay?

Starting point is 01:12:16 The Don Juan Papers. We only got a couple left. This is going to be a quick one today because it was New Year's week, and I'm tired. So, okay, first things first, our closest neighbor, the country of Mexico is a pretty magical place in a lot of ways from its food, to its people, to its intellectual culture, which goes back thousands of years to a time before the country even existed. But I also just mean that Mexico is magical in the literal sense because there is also a huge, ancient and largely underdiscuous occult tradition there involving lots of animals and spirits

Starting point is 01:12:46 from many converging belief systems and psychedelic plants and all that kind of stuff. And the cults that carry out these practices are some of the most fascinating examples of still existing magical spiritual traditions in the world. And somehow, in the early 1970s through the University of California Press, a totally crazy book on these diverse topics called The Teachings of Don Juan, a Yaki way of knowledge, and its sequels, a separate reality and journey to Ixtlan, became some of the best-selling books of the decade, kind of in the same realm as like

Starting point is 01:13:18 chariot of the gods type vibes, like people like that, like third eye guys, were kind of like buying the shit out of these books because the author himself had this bizarre sort of like mystique around him. He was an anthropologist who was studying at UCLA at the time.

Starting point is 01:13:35 His name was Carlos Castaneda. I think he was from Brazil originally, but he like naturalized to the United States and stayed in the L.A. area and ended up at UCLA. He claimed that everything old and mysterious that he had ever learned about Mexico, he had learned from mystical guru that he called Juan Matus. And here's a quote from Time Magazine about that for Jesse to read. In essence, Cassinata's books are the story of how a European rationalist was initiated into

Starting point is 01:14:00 the practice of Indian sorcery. They cover a span of 10 years during which, under the weird taxing and sometimes comic tutelage of Don Juan, a young academic labored to penetrate and grasp but what he calls the separate reality of the sorcerer's world. The learning of enlightenment is a common theme in the favorite reading of young Americans today. Example, Herman Hess's novel, Sidartha. The difference is that Casaneda does not present his Don Juan cycle as fiction, but as unbellished documentary fact.

Starting point is 01:14:40 Yeah. So he's like all the other books like this are fiction. he's like, no, no, I actually went and met this guy, which is pretty crazy. So basically, Castaneda was serving as a replacement for the reader themselves in gaining whatever spiritual enlightenment Juan Matus had to offer him. And whenever he tried a crazy drug or some Jimsonweed or shrooms or peyote or whatever, it was like his readers could experience it too. And that likely made Castaneda a millionaire with these books.

Starting point is 01:15:07 Since either intentionally or not, his trilogy of books was able to fully cash in on the sort like third eye open receptive young audience that the late 60s had created for the average basic normie in the early 1970s. They all lived through Manson and the hippies and now they wanted to all get their third eyes open and read Dr. Strange and all that shit. Nevertheless, though, Castaneda still finished his degrees based on the books. Like, you know, the books themselves were him working on his degrees and even sort of used the writings of the books to get the degrees claiming that they were actually legitimate like ethnographic accounts of him apprenticing under an indigenous Mexican medicine man type person, and that the work he wrote

Starting point is 01:15:46 about within the books had a long-lasting academic value, you know, like he was creating useful resources. However, not everyone believed Castaneda's story, and even before the second book was released, major claims were made disputing the veracity of the work, even as they were selling like hotcakes all over the country in the world. Because really, like, it's the ideas, right? It's not like, oh, he got it from this guy. That's not the most important part, at least to the people reading it. But from the beginning, lots of experts were praising the book more for its artistic value than its factual value and kind of putting it next to things like Siddhartha more than, you know, more factual things, citing lack of yaki vocabulary, inconsistency with

Starting point is 01:16:28 other counts of yaki cultural practices, didn't really, the way he described the topography and the wildlife of the region was like not really correct for that region if you really were there. And so people just doubted down. a doubt and doubted. And so even as Cassidy claimed to be like this new head seer of his lineage and claimed to be taking over for Juan Matus, he lowered his public profile to the point that when he sat, he had a, he did a, there was an article about him in the time magazine and he sat for a painting for the cover and people were like, you didn't even sit for the painting. It was like a surrogate. And by the way, by the way, that, that, that they, like he, because he really didn't.

Starting point is 01:17:08 He sent somebody to be his model. yeah uh this this excuse me this article by the way also described castaneda as an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a tortilla so now you've heard that too he wished to be time magazine guys he wished to be free from his personal history he said he said i wish to be free from my personal history to align with his spiritual principles but when asked about details of his life the answer sounded less principled and more defensive and afterwards he fully stayed out of the public eye until like 1990 um and here's mathis with a with a quote about that from the magazine This is like really fascinating stuff. When time confronted Castaneda with such details as the time in transposition of his mother's death, Castaneda was opaque. One's feelings about one's mother, he declared, are not dependent on biology or on time. Kinship as a system has nothing to do with feelings. Cousin Lucy recalls that when Carlos' mother did die, he was overwhelmed.

Starting point is 01:18:03 He refused to attend the funeral, locked himself in his room for three days without eating. And when he came out, announced he was leaving home. Yet Carlos' basic explanation of his lying generally is both perfect and totally unresponsive. To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics, he says, is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and mistakes milestones out of us all. In short, Castaneda lays claim to an absolute control over his identity. Which is an interesting concept and one that I feel like a lot of people would be interested in today. But at that point, Castaneda bought a multi-dwelling property.

Starting point is 01:18:39 in L.A. with some of his acolytes, many of whom were referred to as witches, but were all just mostly UCLA Anthropology Department students who renamed themselves like mystical Mexican names. And while living there, several of them wrote books which were endorsed by Castaneda, which kind of cast the witches like in his old role and Castaneda in the Don Juan role, where like they were learning the new ways, right? And he just kind of stayed out of the public eye for like 20 years. But then in the 90s, when he finally did reemerge, it was with a new version of his teachings called

Starting point is 01:19:13 Tensegrii. Okay. Which was described as, quote, the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by indigenous shamans who lived in Mexico in times before the Spanish conquest. So whatever the fuck that means. And five years later in 1995,

Starting point is 01:19:31 he teamed up with some witches to create a company to run Tensegriety workshop. and he published pamphlets and all that kind of stuff. The company was called Clear Green Incorporated, and it was, you know, they were doing workshops, they had instructors, they had staff in 95. But by 1998, Castaneda had developed hepatocelular cancer of the liver

Starting point is 01:19:51 and passed away from the complications. And he had no public funeral, and he was cremated and he was sent back to Mexico, and nobody told the public for two full months until the L.A. Times published his obituary, which was titled, a hushed death for mystic author Carlos Castaneda, which I'll read some for you now. Carlos Castaneda, the self-proclaimed sorcerer and best-selling author,

Starting point is 01:20:14 whose tales of drug-induced mental adventures with a Yaqui Indian shaman named Don Juan once fascinated the world, apparently died two months ago in the same way that he lived, quietly, secretly, and mysteriously. He was believed to be 72. Costaneda died April 27th at his home in Westwood, according to entertainment lawyer Deborah Drew a friend of Castaneda and the executor of his estate. The cause of death was liver cancer. Though he had millions of followers around the world, and though his ten books continue to sell in 17 different languages,

Starting point is 01:20:46 and though he once appeared on the cover of Time Magazine as a leader of America's spiritual renaissance, he died without public notice, without the briefest mention in a newspaper or on TV. As befitting his mystical image, he seemingly vanished into thin air. He leaves behind a will due to be probated in Los Angeles next month, and a death certificate fraught with dubious information.

Starting point is 01:21:07 The few people who may benefit from his rich copyrights were told of the death, Drew said, but none chose to alert the media. The doctor who attended him in his final days, Angelica Duenas, would not discuss her secretive patient. Even those who counted Castaneda, a good friend, were unaware of his death and wouldn't comment when told, choosing to honor his disdain for publicity, no matter what realm of reality he now inhabits. I've made it a lifetime practice never to discuss Carlos Castaneda with anyone in the newspaper business, said author Michael Corder, who was once Castaneda's editor at Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Starting point is 01:21:41 Custaneda's literary agent in Los Angeles, Tracy Kramer, would not return phone calls about the Thomas Pinchin-esque author's death, but issued this statement. In the tradition of the shamans of his lineage, Carlos Castaneda left this world in full awareness. So he died. But strangely, there's one last wrinkle before we go in this story because once Kastinata died, four of his followers, Floreinda Donner Grau, Taisha Abilar, Patricia Parteen, and Amalia Marquez, along with the Tensegrity instructor Kylie Lundal, left L.A. together in a Redford escort, which was found abandoned in Death Valley a few weeks later. And in 1999, Amalia's brother, Louise, went to the police to get them to investigate

Starting point is 01:22:25 his sister's death more, but couldn't get them to open the case because they couldn't see a reason why they should. And in 2003, a sunbleached skeleton was found at the Panamette Dunes in Death Valley, which was identified as belonging to Patricia Parton, who owned the Red Ford escort after DNA testing in 2006. So some craziness happened there. Nobody's exactly sure what happened. And there's a whole other article on this part of the story, which goes much deeper into the case of the missing Chokmules by Jeffrey Gray at Alta Online. But that's a story for another time, right? Most of their friends just figure that they were so devoted to Castaneda and the things that he was taught by his own fictional creations that when he passed away, they followed.

Starting point is 01:23:06 How strange to live and die for something which most people agree is total fiction. But then again, what isn't fiction before it's real? Anyway, who wants some key lime pie? The last one today is a real short one and it's called Ricky on Maps. Ricky on Maps. Ricky on Maps. So this is like I said, this is a real short one. As you know, we need one pie per cornerfest. So to make it a true corner fest, we know, obviously. As I've set out in the rules. And this latest slice of pie, key lime pie on my key lime pie list comes from the Reddit of weird internet YouTuber Gooseboos way back in 2020. Do you know Goose or two years ago actually? 2023, 22. He's like a let's player kind of weird. kind of Chaluminati adjacent YouTube

Starting point is 01:23:53 let's player. And it was also eventually made into the subject of a video by another low voice, dark aesthetic mystery YouTuber virtual carbon. And I think lazy masquerade also made one. I'm not sure. It's short, it's sweet, starts on Google Maps. Here's the post from

Starting point is 01:24:10 a deleted user for Jesse to read to get started here. Hi all. A friend and I were dicking around in Google Maps and decided to check Google maps pictures for Hooters in Miami. We found this creepy-ass profile who only post pictures with half a face of a woman, sometimes just a third, real or 3D model. 99% of them are photoshopped in.

Starting point is 01:24:34 I didn't want to count of this before. Name of the profile posting them is Ricky Calderon. Yeah, so here's a link to that profile, which you can check out right now if you want. And it's kind of pretty weird. Has a, uh, Yoshi as a, like an avidavit. Yep, always has had that. And he still seems to be posting, like, fairly regularly. He actually reviewed a CPA in Florida, like a week ago, which is kind of interesting. But it doesn't just seem to be in Miami this thing, but also a few other areas of Florida, of Georgia, South

Starting point is 01:25:10 Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and specifically Chicago. He always leaves very positive reviews. And for the very, very most part, most of the places that leaves them is a place like Hooters or twin peaks or the tilted kilt where you objectify the female body especially the waitresses and that's like what you're supposed to do it's like tgif Fridays with titties you know the type of place we're talking about right like yeah yeah uh so if you look through these you go go to the photos instead of the reviews you can see how strange and same samey all these photos are and you can go down and there's some that look very fake and 3d rendered and there's some that look background cut out and there's some that look maybe like they're real even but then yeah then there's other yeah

Starting point is 01:25:55 there's many of them look like it's a background and then he put a random woman's face in the foreground but just the top half of her face yeah but if you scroll if you scroll down a little there's like a literal person there yeah like do you see this woman um if you go to the first review that's like on the review page that's like got a picture yeah she's actually holding yeah The Yoshi, which is his profile pick. So there's something, he heaves going to these places, I believe. And, you know, it's just a really creepy vibe. There's not much more to it than this.

Starting point is 01:26:34 Commenters notice that the earlier picks looks much more like actual real photographs, which they definitely do. If you like scroll down to the beginning of his pictures, you'll see like that the ones down there look a lot more. like they were actually just taken in a camera, pretty much all of them. But then he kind of like switched at some point to this like sort of stock image background cutout type post. Always of hooters or a tilted kilt or twin peaks or anything like that. Yeah, it's weird.

Starting point is 01:27:09 And he became like way more prolific with it. But then one user with the deleted username floated the idea that it might there might be more going on here. And that like the original Captain Coochie Keyline Pie, maybe it was some sort of AI that was like training itself to insert the tops of people's heads behind restaurant menus to create like some kind of ad. You couldn't quite wrap his head around it or why somebody would be doing it. And let me warn you right now. We're not going to find out. But I did, I did think it was interesting what another user, DreamSpitter, commented on that deleted guys post, which Jesse will read for us now. Okay, looking a little deeper.

Starting point is 01:27:49 He seems to be around Miami and more of Florida, but he has been to Chicago. Now, interestingly, one of his reviews is for a hooters in Florida, but he posted a picture of the half-face woman and says she's, and she says, next time I'm back in Shy. Shytown is the nickname for Chicago. I first learned that from Goose Island beer, okay, it's Shy Time, this automated bot,

Starting point is 01:28:17 program only makes five-star reviews, and it only goes to Hooters and Twin Peaks. Exceptions are a barbershop, a grocery store, and a McDonald's, a few others. Most of these are what people call restaurants. I've only been to tilt-a-kilt for a graduation party. Now, the reason why it only posts half-faces is revealed in a single photo. It shows the half-face on top and the menu in the photo below. saw that one. Yeah, all right. It's supposed to be taking menu photos and dropping a pretty girl's face in the show. I know they mean Photoshop, but he says shoot, because internet.

Starting point is 01:29:00 Most of the time, though, it fails. I think it only actually worked once. In each image, the picture is intended to be the reviewer, but they are all different. I believe the text in these reviews is also AI generated, and you can tell the recommendations in restaurant reviews are slightly off. So here's some examples of the type of post that he says they're trying to achieve, and you can look at these, this one here with this girl's head coming over the menu like this. I don't know if you can see that one.

Starting point is 01:29:32 Yeah. That's one of the ones that I thought, like, potentially could be real. Yeah. And that's, that's to this, to this theorizer is sort of the, the, the, the, the, the, ideal outcome of what they're trying to make, something like this. I don't know if you can see that previous one, but yeah, the ones that you can see the entire body existing in the room around it. Here's the one that they say is obviously fake and you can kind of see what they're talking about. This is the one they were talking about in the post that

Starting point is 01:30:02 they were like, oh, well, this one's fake. Sure. Because this one is like the same but different and not right, right? Yeah, but you can like see, it's clearly a person holding the menu and then in the background, although I'll be honest, the finger holding it could be AI for all I know these days. The finger looks like a, like, yeah, all the fingers that are ever shown on that menu that aren't held by someone behind the menu are the fingers of a black dude. So it's possible that it's the same guy, you know? Also, this stuff right here, these are the ones that are real photos that are stolen according to this person. Huh. So there's like this one of these two guys here that. Oh, yeah, just like a couple dudes looking up at the camera and you see the TikTok marker in the bottom

Starting point is 01:30:47 right and then this one here the second one is like it's ahead with the menu but it looks like the person is really holding the menu and I can't really tell about the about the menu itself whether it's fake or not and then the last one yes this one here where it's like strange one that looks like it's in the kitchen I don't know if you I don't know if you can see that one but it's like it looks like they're in the kitchen under some kind of weird warm light and like how could he even get that picture you know that said the head actually looks like a real it looks it looks real yeah it looks real but it's just it's just so weird it just doesn't make sense it really disturbs me these pictures the more i look at them they seem innocuous at first but then they get

Starting point is 01:31:26 quite disturbing virtual carbon the youtube also noticed that some images of the menus seem to include a consistent pair of hands like i said which kind of implies that someone really did go to all these restaurants and which might fly in the face of an ai trainer theory in some ways but short of this guy coming out and saying it, the only other two things that anyone can come up with are the two things that everyone always comes up with. One, which is that it's somehow a secret map for human trafficking where the heads are like guess who cards that describe the merchandise, that this dude just has like a forehead fetish, which is totally possible. Yeah, I'd probably just go with that one, honestly. Because far and away, they're pretty much all women's foreheads. Yeah. Either way,

Starting point is 01:32:04 though brief, whatever the true explanation, it truly was a delicious slice of pie. I I don't know exactly why, but something about this one is stuck in my mind for months. I just cannot stop looking at these pictures and thinking that I'm going to find some kind of clue to something that I don't, that I didn't notice. Sometimes people are just weird. Yeah, I hope you guys follow the link in the description to this one because this one is a very fucking weird one. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody breaks this open.

Starting point is 01:32:31 I wouldn't be surprised if we do an update on this one. It is so, so specifically strange in the, in this one of all the key lime pies that we've done, I said, this one the most feels like a key lime, like the original key lime pie. It's the same flavor of pie. But yeah, that is it for Cornerfest Part C, which if you couldn't tell, it was all about getting up to do further reading. It's one thing to do all this from your computer or just listen to us, talk about this type of thing here on the pod, but it's another thing entirely to interact with mysteries

Starting point is 01:33:01 out in the world under your own power when there still might be born to find out. And I hope that at least one of you out there has received that gift from us today. thank you for listening next week on corner two corner fest 26 part d it is the finale but what does the d stand for i wonder and what's the deal with zombies and who's leaving all these comments anyway anyway come back next time to get all the answers to these questions and also for my favorite opening segment of the entire fest see you there kids mathis get us the fuck out of here minisode time over at patreon dot com slash shulminati pod we appreciate you We love you. Bye.

Starting point is 01:33:36 Bye. Yeah.

Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 331: Cornerfest '26 Part C

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