Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 332: Cornerfest ‘26 Part D

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Cornerfest is back, baby! Join Mathas and Jesse as Alex takes them on a journey through the corners of the internet in this final part of the yearly series.CHILLUMINATI is a weekly comedy podcast hosted by Mike Martin, Jesse Cox and Alex Faciane. Hold on to your tin-foil hats and traverse the realms of the mysterious, supernatural, spooky and sometimes truly horrible - and your third eye will never be the same!Subscribe to our Patreon to support us and for extra content like full video episodes, weekly Minisodes, exclusive art, and more at http://patreon.com/CHILLUMINATIPODThank you to our sponsors:Mike Martin - http://www.youtube.com/@themoleculemindset Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - https://www.youtube.com/@StarWarsOldCanonBookClub/Thanks to Factor: head to https://www.factormeals.com/chill50off!Editor: DeanCutty Producer: Hilde @ https://bsky.app/profile/heksen.bsky.social Show Art: Studio Melectro @ http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Logo Design: Shawn JPB @ https://twitter.com/JetpackBragginSHOWNOTESMAN OF WIND:https://www.instagram.com/jesusthelivingsun?igsh=ZDc3dGtjZmtrZDVs https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FMFYF8YQ?ref_=quick_view_ref_tag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7_F_AqeRqoTHE DEATH OF DR. KELLY:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/16/david-kelly-death-10-years-on https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-13716127 https://www.spyculture.com/clandestime-146-the-death-of-david-kelly/ https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jan/25/david-kelly-suicide-hutton-inquiryhttps://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2004/jan/27/guardianletters4EVEN DEADER INTERNET:https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5085878 https://gizmodo.com/dead-internet-theory-lives-one-out-of-three-of-you-is-a-bot-2000656924https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic?dateRange=52w#bot-vs-humanhttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Ah5VQrzvADATURA STRAMONIUMhttps://www.reddit.com/r/spookymysteries/comments/n16xl8/solvedish_clairvius_narcisse_a_real_life_zombie/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serpent_and_the_Rainbow_(book) https://www.biologyonline.com/articles/dead-man-walkinghttps://web.archive.org/web/20210228034502/http://isciencemag.co.uk/features/haitian-zombies/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNRnOcW5yqsPALANTIR REDDIT HEISThttps://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/s/mKUmT9YlR0 

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chulamini podcast episode, whatever number this episode is. As always, I'm one of your host, Mike Martin, joined today by the one and only Alex Fasiani and then the superstar flown out to DC for a special appearance at Magfest. I thought you're going to be like at the government. He was just thought out of Carbonite just now. He was in Los Angeles two minutes ago in his memory, and he's just woken up at Carbite at Magfest. There he is. Bang. There he is. Yeah, dude.

what's up? Are you guys so high in the rain? This is you this is your. This is still your baby. We don't know what's going on. We are here. Welcome to Part D, aka the end of Cornerfest 26. It has been an interesting month as episode writer because I feel like the reception

to this specific series has been like uncharacteristically positive for like the weird episodes. You know, like there's always the people who really like them. But everybody has been, you uniformly positive this time. There's been no...

When you say weird episodes, do you mean the Alex episodes? Yes, like, but the particularly eye-roly ones, I feel like I've got not nary a single rolled eye this time for some reason. I'm not... A singular eye roll. I'm not sure. Yeah. I'm not sure.

It's because it was not the culmination of a giant mystery this time that everybody was waiting for, or if people really just connected with me talking about where my head's at when I write this shit. But one other thing. that I think it could be is one of my favorite things to talk about so get ready but I call it saturation theory

okay saturation theory this is a kind of gross admittedly turn of phrase but I think it's a good term for what it is I'm describing which is pretty specific but also broad in another way

is this going to be a plug for Patreon is that what's happening right now? No no no it's not okay and And I think just that it would be valuable and understandable for the average listener if I can help you understand it. So I'm going to just try. It's, it's, it's, this is a heady one.

This is, this is a heady concept. Trademark. Trademark. Trademark. Heady concept. This is saturation theory. This is actually the perfect time to give like heady concept ideas to Jesse. When he's travel exhausted in a hotel room.

He has no choice but to be receptive. Yeah. Yeah, he has his brain. His defenses are down. Yeah. This is exactly correct. I had to buy rapid hydration. It's still working on him right now.

You've caught him out over there? Man, if I can almost come to tell a little bit. I will say the flight time was four hours, 20 minutes. I'm just saying that's crazy. It was meant to be. That's crazy. 420, dude. That's right now.

Actually, it's 7 p.m. Yeah. But 9 p.m. for me. So, firstly, we must agree that separate from whether someone's work is fundamentally good or bad, whatever that means. There is just some stuff out there that's accessible and immediately easy to take on board and some stuff that requires further thought or maybe needs to be experienced a few times before eventually it is understood.

I agree. I agree. The people who hate our episodes are the dumb ones. No. It's not about smart or dumb. It's just some stuff is easier to quickly comprehend and some concepts. require more engagement and also hopefully are appreciated in a more personal way per person because of that.

For me, I love our low IQ viewers. It's not about IQ. Just like the president. It's not about IQ. Anybody who critiques anything on our subreddit gets a flare that says dumb one. No. When I write a story about JFK, it's just about a guy climbing up in the building and shooting the dude. It's simple.

It's straightforward. forward. But when you're trying to do something more, when you're trying to explain a more complicated idea, the thing that you do to explain it inherently is just more complicated. That's all I'm saying. And personally, for me, not exactly sure how it happened. But my work on this show, I would say, falls into the second more complicated category more often. I know how it happened. You're trying to tell like an engaging, fun story with your subject that, could be very rote and like you're taking notes in high school, but you're trying to do a thing. And what happens is you have us go on like, time slices.

Yes. And everyone's like, what do you mean? There's a lot of conceptual tools, a lot of intertextual tools that I do when I overwrite these scripts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forget. I think sometimes you just forget we're an audio medium. Yes, that they aren't really meant to be full, but they aren't really meant to be fully

understood so much in the moment. We are three episodes into Cornerfest. fact you're saying this now is worried. This is just how I'm explaining to you what saturation theory is, okay? It's stuff that's not meant to be understood quickly. That's it. Okay. Okay.

They're meant to serve as hidden support beams for larger, slowly emerging, more complex thought structures, which sometimes can be a barrier for enjoyment when you, like so many of us these days, prefer to tune halfway out of what you're listening to, even if you're experiencing it for the first time. And, unfortunately, as someone who's been doing this sort of thing online for a while now, your audience sort of halfway tuning out really just... Why are you shaming the audience? I'm not just about what is happening. I'm not aggressive. I've ever seen Alex on the audience before. This is not aggressive. This is true. Started with this corner fest. We've seen some of the best comments, the nicest replies we've ever seen. Just so many nice people

And now I'm not sure what I think you're trying to think. This is saturation theory. Look, I don't know. What I'm saying is people, most people are looking for something that they can turn on passively and kind of have on from something like this, right? That's just true. Right?

We're making fun of this both for the same reason right now, which is that, yeah, like, this is a podcast. People want to like do, like, while they're driving to work, they want to listen to this. They don't want to engage with it on a high level, right? Like they need to do stuff like gaming or doom scrolling at the same time that they're listening to it. And it's not because they're dumb or assholes. It's just because that's what has happened to our brains by being lashed over and over again by technology and a lot of other things. It's changed the way we think.

And so a lot of the time when you go listen to a podcast and they're asking you to close your eyes and imagine a concept for five minutes before we get to the mysteries, you know, it becomes a barrier sometimes, right? and that probably describes a bunch of you listening and enjoying the show right now. And it's not good and it's not bad. It's just a fact of life. And honestly, I'm just grateful that you're still here after all this. That's what I'm saying. And though I do think that for a while as a writer, the thought of that was hard for me to accept and it made me sad personally. I then came up with saturation theory.

And to me, it's the ray of hope I was looking for as an interesting person in an uninterested world. right? And this, it's just this. It's simple. It's easier and faster to get instant feedback on your work and reach a bigger audience on a wide scale if you write to the demographic that you are targeting and you try your best to give them the thing that they want from you, right? That's easy. And that's because today, time is precious. Your attention is constantly in demand. You drive down the street. You see 50 advertisements. You don't even think about it. And day-to-day life is so shaky that it feels good when the content that you consume was made specifically with your stuff in mind. There is nothing wrong with stuff like this, especially when you're just trying to convey information.

But it even has value just for fun because sometimes you being able to relax and have a good time with the work that you consume is the main priority. And that's good. That's something that you should prioritize. But this is not how our understanding of the world beyond our sense. self grows. And for big ideas that you're not willing to compromise on, that you have some sort of vision about or you can't really dumb down. You can't explain everything simply, right? You're not just conveying information. You're conveying a different way of thinking that the person

listening doesn't know about. So rather than get hung up on how strangely something that you make might be received by the people listening to it, maybe try to remember that you already knew that was going to happen and focus on keeping that unique viewpoint and in a pure form and as strong as possible and serve it often because the stronger it gets, the more you will pour into it and the faster they will hit the saturation point, the listener, which I honestly believe everyone has a saturation point, no matter how clever they are or how dumb they think they are or whatever, where once you hit it, suddenly everything that felt weird and strange now makes sense and your horizons are expanded and permanently so. And maybe, maybe Cornerfest,

maybe CornerFest, maybe CornerFest 26 was just about turning the corner on Alex. You know what I mean? Maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe everybody'll understand, you know, maybe like, maybe I won't be the weird guy anymore, you know? Do you ever think about that? At the beginning of this episode, I definitely thought about that. But it, much like the audience you've turned it around to a point where I guarantee they're like nah still the weird one

yeah all right well yeah you can also just gray rocket let the algorithm drive whatever you guys want you can only lead a horse to water folks you can't force it to appreciate something that somebody else made or explore it for its own sake that's too much to ask of a horse thank you that was you saying thank you

it was me saying it was me saying it was me saying you just got to some things take longer to understand Oh my goodness. No, I'm saying I think to everybody who's weird out there,

some things take longer to understand. That's what I'm trying to say. Algebra was really difficult for me. I think that was, I think that was really important. Anyway, that's me. Now it's time for Cornerfest Part D where we learn about that 90D

turn that can go in either direction and that some boxes once opened cannot be closed. Please support your further self-saturation by becoming a member of our Patreon. at patreon.com slash to lunati pod. Patreon.com slash till 90 pod.

Patreon.com slash 79 pod where you get all kinds of new stuff, strange surprises, extra content and more for about the same price as 12 donuts every single month. Just in case you start to choose, in case this is your first time ever turning on the show. First of all, it's the fourth part of a four-part series. Last little number one.

What are you doing here? Go back to episode one. But if you have it, just remember this. Cornerfest 26 contains a pretty upsetting group of stories, rife with death, violence, cruelty, and plenty of other things with people with particularly powerful brains might find themselves overwhelmed by upon hearing about in their own imaginations. So please, proceed beyond this point with a nebulous,

yet appropriate amount of caution. You have been warned. This first one is something that I think Jesse will especially enjoy for some reason. It is called Man of Wind, Man of Wind. Now- Is it about farts, then yes. No. So this one's really fun because it represents a concept which I find endlessly fascinating and which will bookend both ends of today's episode in a way, actually. But don't worry about that

right now because all you need to know right now is that the concept that I'm talking about is where someone that you know really well sends you like a reel or a TikTok or a YouTube or a Reddit or whatever. And you quickly see something that is so powerful, some whatever the opposite of trauma is that is so powerful that it stays with you for years on the fringes of your memory and then one day you think about it again, you remember it again,

it resurfaces in your brain. And even though you don't know the name of it and you only have like 10 seconds of material to describe period, you would literally kill everyone in your family to see the clip one more time. You know this type of clip? The funny clips that you don't remember the name of, right?

Do you guys have anything like that? where you go like, what the fuck was the name of that video where the guy goes, he ha, he ha, you know, like something like that. Sure, I've had moments like that. I know what you're saying. I had, I had one recently where a memory resurfaced of me in my college dorm room like 17 years ago and I was dying laughing with my friends over a guy saying, a praying man this. And for years, I have been repeating the phrase praying mantis as like a vocal stim, not really remembering where it came from. All my close friends have probably heard me say that. thought it sounded funny without realizing what it was.

But the other day, suddenly, for no reason, out of nowhere, I could see the moment again clearly in my memory. And I remembered who was there. It was my buddies from my old band, The Squids. And I, a little bit more info about the video came. I remember he was a vlog. I remembered some stuff. I remember I texted some relatives.

We texted some friends of friends. We got it moving. We eventually discovered the original moment, which you can see if you start about two minutes into this video, which is 17 years old. by the way, even though this whole thing is pretty fucking funny to this day. Uploded by this OG first wave vlogger guy who has millions of views on his video's name is Mr. Shy City, which I did not know before picking the Dave Matthews story.

Again, weird synchronicity is happening at Cornerfest 26. And Mr. Shy City stopped uploading regularly maybe like a year after this video was posted. And so that's like 16 years. So, of course, it was impossible for us to find him without going back to the original source, which was a family member of one of my bandmates. He sent it to my bandmate's brother, sent it to my bandmate, showed it to me one day in 2008. Here we are. There's the video there you can watch.

Maybe if we're lucky, Dean, we'll edit in a bit for you guys to hear where he says praying Manthus. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your boy South City. I don't like bugs. I don't fuck with bugs. That motherfucker look like a spider and a praying mantis. Oh.

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FactorMeals.com slash Chill 50 off and code chill 50 off for 50% off your first factor box plus free breakfast for one year. year. Offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor. Past me is writing here hoping current me won't be too high to remember to message him about this. But either way, I will toss in the show notes for you. And anyway, it's not about that guy, but rather another clip, which someone sent me one day. Can't remember exactly who it was. Maybe it was Brett from Beard Bros. Maybe it was. Maybe it was. my buddy Sean Jetpack. Maybe it was Jesse.

Maybe it was Crendor. I don't know. Maybe Jesse will remember this. I'm not sure. But the point is it always stuck with me because from what was actually shown in the video, this person uploaded, there really wasn't a way to prove it wasn't footage of them creating and directing gusts of wind with their mind. Kind of like in the reminiscent style of like Avatar, the last airbender.

Was that you, Jesse, by the way? I definitely sent this. Yeah. Okay. So can you kind of picture it? You can kind of picture what I'm talking about. It's pretty much exactly what you think. But then a few months ago, while I was slowly working through Cornerfest research,

I was on Instagram for the Dave Matthews Mystery, came across a post incorrectly using the abbreviation, POV, which a lot of Instagram posts do. Happens all the time. It's so annoying. It reads, POV, you discovered your powers while leaving the grocery store. And it wasn't the same guy from before in the video, but it was the exact same phenomenon. And when I checked the account, something clicked, and I knew for sure it was the same account that I'd seen earlier when I'd read the username Jesus, the Living Son, spelled S-U-N.

So now here is the link for you guys to watch as Jesse reads the caption on the post for everybody listening at home. That's this right here. It's so epic when people are so caught up pretending they don't realize they're actually doing it. The same playfulness is what tends to trigger our powers. And, you know, I don't know, I looked through the account a little more, saw a few more clips like that one. And like, what is the clip? How would you describe it exactly? The guy in a parking lot with some like a little few leaves around him and he's got his arms outstretched

and he just does a couple quick spins and the leaves kind of spin around with him. Like do you? Does it feel to you like he's directing those gust of win? No, because the leaves move before he moves a lot of the time. Well, you know, sometimes people say that when you know how to do something really well, it's like it happens on its own. Yeah, like, Aang didn't even have to use his arms. He could just move the wind just by being in it, bro. Wind thinks faster. Wind thinks faster than brain, bro.

But I looked at the account a little more, saw a few more clips. Not every topic starts as something I'm going to bring up during Cornerfest and nowhere else. But this one was not ever going to be an episode. This was just only ever going to be a Cornerfest. And once I read just how many people in the comments wanted to learn how to control the wind with their minds too. Stop. I just knew we had that. I knew.

the fucking internet. Well, I knew he had to have a book, right? If everybody was asking, he had to have a book. And I wasn't disappointed. It's 24 pages long. So we're just going to go with the broad strokes. A.I. cover. Hopefully, it will be enough to get a couple of you started on your journey towards becoming a person of wind yourselves. Okay. So this is just the, this is just the cliff notes. But this book was just published this past year in 2025. It's called How to Use Your Aura, a Guide to Mastering Your kinetic abilities. It's free on Kindle, Unlemonel If you want a copy for your shelf at home, you can have one for the very reasonable price of $33.00 and zero cents. Damn.

For half, but 24 pages? It's, yeah, it's right. It's not even, it's not even $2 a page. And here's Jesse again. Jesus fucking Christ. Here's Jesse again as Jesus, the living son from the burb on the back cover. Here we go. S-U-N.

Yeah. These days, most people online associate the word aura with the word Riz, but becoming more attractive to others is just one side effect of having a refined aura. Inactually, in actually, in actually, in actually, $33.33. Inactually, guys, aura is the physical bioelectric field that all life forms emit. Ora is what makes the difference between a dry performance and an impressive one. The ability to incorporate your aura into any physical activity is what transforms it from a media from mediocre to masterful. So many books about magical powers are completely theoretical rather than hands on. And so here is a step-by-step handbook that will assist you in turning your little ember of an aura into a powerful yet controlled form of a bioelectric force. Anyway, here is a link to him the first time you ever made a leaf tornado.

You can see a leaf tornado. Is this his first? We have evidence of his leaf tornado? This is the first sign of his power. It's the very first post he made it with a leaf tornado. Pretty good stuff. As far as I can see right now, he's just waving his hand. Yeah.

And he's waving it. And then he pans his camera up. But then what happens? Then a leaf tornado forms. Yeah, this guy really does it. See, he does it before. And yeah, I'm not going to go into all the specifics of every step. For that, I think you should probably go by the book.

But step... The second part of the video, immediately the leaves are all. already moving before he's even like that's because it's residual that's because it's residual so step one of the windbending process is basically just find a chill spot with lots of plants and trees to help you sense the wind and meditate there a handful of times and lock it in time out really quick yeah my favorite comment is how much you charge the cleanup leaves from my yard that's like such a grandma comment i love it oh you can get some you get some leaves out of my yard with that little young man.

That's pretty good. That's good. Okay, so step one. The technical term, I think, is practice spot, but I like to describe it as a chill spot with lots of plants and trees to help you sense the wind, meditate there, handle of times, lock it in, just get familiar with coming to that same spot. He says, even after going this far, if it's a good spot, you'll start to feel the vibes and that you're already well on your way to being able to sort of like intuitively translate

your own bielectric field into direct you dust of wood. You know how you know it's a good spot. If you can feel the wind moving around a lot, good spot. Yes, exactly. You're getting it. He says after a while, you should be able to go move the plants at your practice spot in a way that is completely under your own control. And that once you tap into that power, you only need practice strengthening your aura to master it by doing by doing things like cultivating a personal passion for what you're doing. So that you can do it with love and enthusiasm and joy and doing research and repeatedly mimicking other people who.

who you think look cool during their movements to increase the wattage of your own bielectric feel. So here's a quote about it from Jessis, our own living son, right here. Some advice. If you practice 1,000 different kicks, punches, vocal runs, each day you may not master any of them. But if you practice one move 1,000 times,

then that move will speak for itself. Oh, my God. It's like the worst advice than training, by the way. So here's a close of him teaching his brother, Lil Ocean, some basics in hashtag aerokinesis. Little Ocean. He's teaching Little Ocean, hashtag aerokinesis. All right. Little Ocean's feeling it.

It's pretty good, man. He says, go hard. No, he can't do it. Yes, he can't. You got to have the Orican. Watch the little ocean, dude. He's going to do it. He's going to get it.

Well, you see a little ocean. He's going to, he's going to blow it off. He's going to blow it all the way. He's going to blow his mind with wind. God damn it, dude. Honestly, look. Despite this being absolutely insane. There's something very fun about the actual activity of watching this guy, like, you know,

tap into this kid's imagination and landed this kid kind of like, like, that's fun. Somewhere between Star Wars Kid and like genuine meditation. It's pretty like, yeah, it's not like $33.24 page book fun, but it's fun. I mean, I paid that much. Anyway. No, you did. And then from there. I can't even be mad.

You got to have the research. And then from there, you know, it's all about hard work. It's all about good vibes, cultivating. You think I wanted to own the book about like Charlie the white alien horse? No, for the bit. You got to do it. You have to do it. And you got to cultivate a unique sense of your own theatricality, which is from the book.

If you see what I'm saying, you know, it's recursive advice, which you can then tap into to help keep you focused in the, and in the moment enough that it potentially triggers a flow state, which the living son says is also an indicator that the four elements of your aura, which by the way are water for movement, fire for effort, error for freedom of expression, and earth for your own unique sense of self. That means if you're in the flow state, that means those things are in total balance. And here is Jesse with a quote from Jesus. Then the avatar vanished. The son. Jesus, the living son. Not the other one.

Can I ask you a question before I read this? What is the definition of vocal runs? Like, yeah, you know, like a, yeah. Like a, yeah. Well, you need that because that's how Avatar, the last airbender starts before guitar comes in and explains what happened. Yeah. The guy's like,

wipe out. Yep, exactly. Right. It took him a third. thousand times get that right. When we bring 100% of each element into our movement, we enter what many call flow state, though ancient cultures in Asia refer to it as mushin. And many anime fans refer to it as having ultra instinct.

Shut up, shut up. No, come on, man. That last term can be misleading, though, Mathis, because it suggests that the state is triggered unconsciously. But we must practice hard enough to get to a point where we can move efficiently without thinking about it at any given activity. And you got to know he's right because here is a clip of him physically bending all four elements.

All four. Yo, dude. Let's go. I bet you can guess what the soundtrack is. This is a lie. This is a lie. because every single video of him doing it is the wind causing it. Which is a good.

No, because the wind is the core of the aura, though. That's what you didn't. That's why you got to pay $33. Nope. This guy, Masterclass, join me this Saturday. Yeah, just check him out. And look, if you can do that, if you can do that, theoretically, you too can become a man of wind or possibly even more.

But this is where I leave it to you. I have two pieces of optional homework for those who are willing. willing to take their mystery searching to the next level. First, if you've ever had a praying Manthus of your own that you were able or not to track down, a clip that is just ringing in your head forever that you needed to recover after 15 years, please tell me about it. And ideally, please show me the link at R slash Chulimani Pod on Reddit. And secondly, while you are there, if you all leave behind some vids of you seriously applying

yourself like good little chaos musicians to this system. and getting the correct desired result or even an interesting undesired one, I'd love to just see one. So just remember to keep your post nice, high value by explaining yourself thoroughly, providing plenty of context and deliciously tidy links. Yoshi is going to eat me and turn me into an egg now. I love you. Remember everything I taught you.

This next one is completely serious and you can tell because it's called the death of Dr. Kelly. Okay? the death of Dr. Kelly. All right. This next one is this week's version of the man who was too close to something bigger than himself that he might have been killed for. I don't know what happened

that this was like one of the themes along with like a key lime pie every time and like weird period pieces that are compelling in a similar way. They've all organically become the themes of this year's Cornerfest completely separate from my own intent. Other than that like I said for a while there,

I was putting together an episode about people who seem like they might have secretly been killed. And I still think maybe that's a good idea for somebody to do that episode. I have a big interest in like scientists that have banished after supposedly discovering. Maybe it's just because I smoke too much pot, but I get scared of doing it as I do it because of what the topic is. And so it's hard for me to finish those types of things. But in little doses, I can do one here and there.

And so that's what I've been doing. But yeah, in this case, it feels weird saying I saved the best for last when it's the story of someone who most likely is probably just killed or killed themselves or whatever. But I will at least say that I personally think it's the most compelling story of this flavor that I presented thus far in Cornerfest 26. So much so that you might have heard of it already. So I figure I'll take this time right now to ask, have either of you ever heard of Dr. David Kelly?

Mm-mm. It's such a generic name that while it sounds familiar, I don't know. I'm sure somebody listening has, but just in case you haven't. Wikipedia has an amazing. amazingly good biography on the man. So I'm going to hit the important bullet points from that for you guys now. Does that sound good? You think we can do that?

So David Christopher Kelly was born in May of 1944 in South Wales to a school teacher and World War II signals officer, Thomas and Margaret, who divorced in 1951. This meant that David went to go live with his mother back in her parents' house in Ponti Prid Wales, where he excelled in school and was eventually accepted at the University of Leeds, where he got a bachelor of sciences and bacteriology. Though it was one year later than expected, as he took a year off to recover from his mother's likely suicidal overdose on prescription barbiturates, like intentional suicide. Damn.

The mystery is still out, but he personally believed it was a suicide. Then he got married to his wife, got a master's in virology at the University of Birmingham, got a doctorate in microbiology at Linneker College, did a bunch of postdoctorate research into insect viruses before finally joining the Ministry of Defense with a C, so you know it's British, in 1984, to head the Defense Microbiology Division, which at the time meant he was mostly just decontaminating an old weaponized anthrax facility from World War II on. Greenard Island in Scotland, but which by 1990, he had actually built up so well for biodefense research that they were actually able to provide like deployable biodefense capabilities during the Gulf War that actually helped save people. So that's actually crazy. After that, from 1991 to 1994, he spent a lot of time on an international UK-US inspection team which regularly visited specific civilian biotech facilities in Russia to make sure they weren't making something they weren't supposed to, especially ever since basically the entire world got

together and passed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention Disarmament Treaty, which specifically banned the production of chemical and biological weapons, like global, pretty much. Of course, Russia being Russia in the early 1990s, they weren't the most helpful that they could be in this regard to the rest of the Western world, especially for Dr. Kelly. And here's Mathis with an excerpt from Dr. Kelly himself, who wrote about the experience years after the fact in 2002. The visits did not go without incident. At Obelensk, access to parts of the main research facility, notably the dynamic aerosol test chambers in the plague research laboratories, was denied on the spurious grounds of quarantine

requirements. Skirmishes occurred over access to an explosive aerosol chamber because the officials knew that closer examination would reveal damning evidence of offensive bio-warfare activity. I'm imagining BDW stands for? At Coltsova Access was again... Buffalo Wing activities. Buffalo Wild Wing activity. At Coltslova, access was again difficult and problematic.

The most serious incident was when senior officials contradicted an admission by technical staff that research on smallpox was being conducted there. The officials were unable to properly account for the presence of smallpox and for the research being undertaken in a dynamic aerosol test chamber on orthopox virus, which was capable of explosive dispersal.

At the Institute of Ultra Pure Preparations in Leningrad, it's crazy. Paschonix former workplace, dynamic and explosive test chambers were passed off as being for agricultural projects containing milling machines were contained milling machines were described as being for the grinding of salt and studies on plague, especially productive of the agent were misrepresented. Candid and credible accounts of many of the activities at these facilities were not provided. So like literally he was like, hey, so what do you make here?

And they were like, smallpox. And they were like, he was like, what? And they were like, his leader like hit him. And he was like, nothing. We don't make anything here. Like that, that type of thing, right? Yeah, yeah. And he eventually determined that the whole inspection program had kind of failed

in its mission. And he mostly pinned it on bad relations between the countries. But speaking of countries with which the UK and the U.S. have had very bad relations, and this might be the second point where some listeners might remember who Dr. David Kelly is, especially if you're like an older millennial or Gen X. After the Gulf War, part of Iraq's surrender is that they will, quote, unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless under international supervision of all chemical and biological weapons. And guess who was appointed chief weapons inspector.

That is right. It is Dr. David Kelly, who did so under the banner of the United Nations Special Commission or UNSCOM or UNSCOM, who did 261 inspections in Iraq, 74 of which were for bioweapons, until 1998 when Saddam had gotten so frustrated with the inspections that he called out Kelly by name and had him expelled from the country, which Kelly left a convert to the Baha'i faith and was forever spiritually and culturally connected to the people of Iraq. We found beautiful and complex and interesting and like something that he felt connected to. And he had no problem separating them from the government overlords who ruled over them.

And then a couple years later, quickly, Bahai is the religion that's like all of them are right. It's like it's Christian based, but with some extra stuff. Because isn't it like, yeah, no, all the prophets were like, yeah, they're prophets of God. Isn't that kind of the vibe? I don't know it that well, but I find that it's a pretty chill and like open-minded form of Christianity in some ways that some people seem to like. I don't know if there's anything in there that I agree or disagree with or whatever. But the people that I know who are Baha'i seem quite chilled out. Yeah, I was just trying to find a base point for that if people had no clue what it was.

I think I know a little, but honestly, I might be one of those no clue. There's actually a temple pretty close by where I'm at. I should probably go. I should probably go check me out. You used to be close to the old maker offices. Oh, my God. I do live right very close to them. And then a couple years later, the United Nations Special Commission became the United Nations

Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission or Unmovic, which is not as good of a That's terrible. And he was right back in for 36 more inspection missions, even though he was thrown out. eventually discovering both an anthrax production facility and an entire bio-weapons research facility operating in the country along the way. So pretty crazy stuff. I'm sure you guys are now starting to become a little bit more familiar with this time period. In 2002, in the State of the Union address, President George W. Bush famously mentioned weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when he spoke in favor of a U.S.-backed force regime changed within the country. A couple months later,

British Prime Minister and U.S. Ally Tony Blair publishes the notorious September dossier, which cited the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee and announced findings that the Iraqi government was still actively producing both chemical and biological weapons, that they had plans to use them on their own people and that they were deployable within 45 minutes, and that Saddam Hussein himself decided where and when that happened. Okay, so that's what it said in this dossier. However, what the average person might not remember is that because he was such a respected authority on the topic. Before that memo went out to the public, it was shown to Dr. David Kelly, along with several other experts and authorities who made four pages of comments about the document, 12 of which

specifically came from Kelly. Also, it's worth mentioning that none of the comments had anything to say about the 45-minute deployment time claim, because that's going to become important in a minute. In the months after the dock went out, tensions with Iraq rose, demands were made. Saddam was not fully cooperating or even admitting he actually had all the stuff that basically everybody knew he had or was saying that he had. And just to see how high the stakes were, here's Jesse with a list of what was currently unaccounted for at the time. Just to see why everybody was being so grim and serious about it. 8,500 liters of anthrax VX, 2,1003,000, 3,000, 3,000, 60 kilograms of bacterial growth media, 360 tons of bulk chemical warfare agent, 6,500 chemical

bombs, and 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents, which remained unaccounted for from activities up to 1991. So that was just supposedly just floating around, and they're like, where is it? And he's like, where's what? A few months later, in February, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN about, about Iraq, having these like train and truck-based weapons labs that they'd found, which could rapidly build up their chemical and biological weapons stockpile. This claim was refuted a few months later by an anonymous British scientist and biological weapons expert source in the observer,

who basically said they really were just the hydrogen balloon filling gas trucks that Iraq said they were. In secret, that was also Dr. David Kelly, who was speaking off the record to the press anonymously, as he was often permitted to do by his superiors at the press officer, whatever, as long as he used his best judgment before just randomly speaking out about every little thing. It was sort of like an honor system thing, and it was well established that he did this all the time. He'd even published critical articles of the government in the past, which he'd written anonymously himself, and that he'd let people know that he wrote. However, by this point, it was too late to stop the momentum.

And in March of 2003, British and American troops came in and took Saddam down, and in a matter of a couple of weeks, never happens anymore. Like, and nothing like that happens today. And Bush, no foolishly declared victory. If you guys remember that on May 1st. Mission accomplished, baby. But David Kelly still had no problem telling the press what he thought.

So on May 7th, a couple months. It's so crazy how much this I remember and I was fucking in like 10th grade. I know, right? This was all, this was like the first time that I feel like I started caring about politics was I was around this age. The 9-11 era is like what I think of.

as the beginning of my adult brain, which sucks. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, no, it's correct. I think that feels it's probably very similar for a lot of people of our generation. Shout out to the millennials. We were supposed to live in a different world. On May 7th, Susan Watts from the BBC spoke with Kelly on the phone for 15 minutes or so,

walked away with the notion that putting the 45-minute claim in, that document had been a premature, regrettable mistake. It was something that was not solid enough to be, it was good intelligence. It was real intelligence, at least, but it was not solid or confirmed enough to have been included in the report. They spoke again on the 12th before Kelly tried to meet with the Iraq survey group on May 19th in Iraq before being turned away at the border and sent back to England from Kuwait once he discovered that no visa had been set up for him. Three days later, on May 22nd, Kelly met with a correspondent from today on BBC Radio 4, Andrew Gilligan, because Gilligan wanted to know why. more weapons of mass destruction hadn't been discovered by troops when they entered Iraq if they said that they were there, right?

Here's Mathis. They're definitely there. They're just a, they look harder. Right. They're like deep in the ground. They were still by that to the black stuff. They probably flushed them.

Hey, so it's just like, look at this little, oh, there's a tunnel here. Get it on camera. See? No, guys, we got to like drill. We got a drill for them. They're like deep underground. I've contacted X on. They're going to come in and help me find them.

Yeah, yeah. There might be liquid. They might be liquid. We'll get all of it, though. We'll get all of it to keep it. Yeah. Yeah, do you, do you, can you say you know what bacterial growth media actually looks like? Looks like this.

Look, it looks like a little bit like oil is what I'm saying. Ollipop. All right. We got to get it out of there. Yeah. That's what Ollipop is. That's a sciop, dude. No, here's, here's, here's up Mathis with Gilligan's notes from the 30 minute meeting that he had with Dr. Kelly.

Transformed week before publication to make it sexier. The classic was the 45 minutes. Most things in dossier were double source, but that was single source. One source said it. took four, that should be 45 minutes to set up a missile assembly that was misinterpreted. Most people in intelligence weren't happy with it because it didn't reflect the considered view they were putting forward. Then Campbell says, real information but unreliable, included against our wishes, not an original

draft. Dull, he asked if anything else could go in. Just to be clear, the word Campbell in there is not attributing that quote to Campbell. It's saying, Campbell, the point about Campbell is real information, but it's unreliable. I thought it was like a script of like, and then, Campbell is the head of the press office. A week later, Gilligan was on today, the show, the radio show, from May 29, 2003, talking to the host of the show, John Humphreys.

And here is a quote from Jesse from what he said on the show. And you can compare it to what he said in his notes, which math is just read. What we've been told by one of the senior officials in charge of drawing up that dossier was that actually the government probably knew that 45-minute figure was wrong. even before it decided to put it in. What this person says is that a week before the publication date of the dossier, it was actually rather a bland production. It didn't.

The draft prepared for Mr. Blair by the intelligence agencies actually didn't say very much more than what was public knowledge already. And Downing Street, our source says, ordered a week before publication, ordered it to be sexed up to be made more exciting and ordered more. more facts to be, to be discovered. Right. I do miss the days

when they really put in some effort to the propaganda they needed to feed us before we went in for the oil. Now, they used to be, they used to be able to read better than us,

but like now it's been so long that the people that work for them can't read anymore because they got, I'm like, my favorite look, I don't want to keep it current with what we're doing,

but my favorite current moment is the video clips of everyone trying to sell us going into Venezuela. It's like, we're doing it, deliberate the person. people and we're doing it because the drugs and the fentanyl and then Trump's just like and the oil

every time. He let the oil CEOs know before the fucking Democrats. He just always is like, we're going to get the oil and everyone's trying to sell it as like America. We're bringing democracy to the world. And he's like, no, no, no. We're taking oil from the world. It's like, yay.

Everything from everyone. It's really. Which is, again, what this was. When we did this in the 2000s, that's all it was. But there was a lot of people trying to like package this in a way where, and it worked back then. We were hungry for a retribution reinforcement of our own superiority that was over quickly because the only reason we were fine with going to war in the Gulf War was because we seemed so badass after we got our asses kicked in Vietnam and a couple other places. You know, like it, you know, it plays, it played well because we did so well. Yeah, and then 9-11 happened, and it was like, we have to punch someone.

Yeah. And so they went after Iraq again. We punched Saddam Hussein, yeah. Yeah, despite Iraq and having nothing to do with 9-11. Yeah, very, very little to do. Like, like, like tangential at best. Yeah. Now, in fact, we're very good friends still with fucking the people that are very much the reason 9-11 fucking happens.

You know why? Because they have the oil. It's crazy. Exactly. Now, according to today, producers, this was Gilles. again going off script, mentioning info that he didn't have confirmation for at 6.07 a.m. And by 7.32 a.m. Downing Street had officially issued a refutation, saying that, quote, not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies, which is a

fucking corkscrew of a sentence. But that's not, that's not actually an answer. Not one word of the dossier was not entirely the work of the intelligence agencies. Yeah. That's the most. But that did not stop Gilligan from also going to BBC 5 radio live breakfast and saying it again, attributing the info to a quote, senior official in charge of drawing up the document, which Dr. Kelly heard and which actually brought him relief because he had nothing to do with writing the document. He just commented on it afterwards, which convinced him that he wasn't the guy that Gilligan was talking about. And he even told Susan Watts that from the BBC when she called him about it the next day,

also pointing out that he wouldn't have laid it at the feet of Alastair Campbell at the press office, specifically because he never met the guy, claiming he only ever mentioned his name in the first place because he ran the office. And so he was just saying it because he knew the guy's name. He was like, oh, and over whatever Campbell was doing, he was just saying in that sense. And you know, this whole situation set off a sort of like friction between the BBC and Downing Street for a second. But basically, Dr. Kelly thought he'd said his piece, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned, until about a month later when as part of the drama,

Andrew Gilligan was called before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on June 19th and heard his account of his anonymous source, which then caused Kelly to write a letter about it, which Mathis will read an excerpt from now. I did not even consider that I was the source of Gilligan's information. The description of that meeting in small part matches my interaction with him, especially my personal evaluation of Iraq's capability, but the overall character is quite too.

different. With hindsight, I of course deeply regret talking to Andrew Gilligan, even though I am convinced that I am not his primary source of information. Yeah. Okay. Dr. Kelly was also subsequently interviewed twice by the government who concluded that though it's possible he was the source, if it was him, then Gilligan had probably exaggerated much of what he was told. So they also warned him when they told him that, which was good news, I think. They warned him that once his name went into the press, it was going to be crazy town. So get ready, buddy. The day after his last interview on July 8th, the government, under orders from Tony Blair

himself, issued a statement saying that the source had come forward and that it was somebody at the Ministry of Defense and that this person didn't have reliable information on Campbell or why any claims in the report were made because they weren't involved in writing it. By that same evening, reporters were guessing his name. name and Kelly got a call at home from his friend Nick Rufford at the Sunday Times who told him his name was going to be in tomorrow morning's paper and that he should probably leave home before all the reporters show up and offered up a room for him and his wife at the hotel on the paper's dime because they were like, listen, everybody's going to publish your name. We have to do it

as well. So let us put you in a hotel at least for your trouble, right? After a day or two, They ended up in Cornwall on July the 11th when Kelly got the devastating news that he had to appear before several select committees, including the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, where his appearance would be shown live on TV. And he really tried to get out of it, but couldn't. And eventually went before them on July 15th, terrified against the advice of Ministry of Defense Legal, who was overruled by the Secretary of State for Defense. So nobody really wanted to do this, but he had to go do it. Anybody else slowly realizing how little they know about how the government works in the UK right now, by the way? Because I do not know about any of the offices or any procedures happen. And I'm so, so sorry.

Anyway, he was so embarrassed to be there. And his speaking voice was so quiet that they literally had to turn off the fans in the room to hear him talk. But after an hour, he basically just denied saying the things that Gilligan had claimed his source had said. He'd been raked over the coals for saying similar stuff and recorded conversations with Susan Watts. and it sort of gotten bullied by a couple of the MPs, including the, quote, utter bastard Labor MP, Andrew McKinley, who will be played by Jesse Cox in this short exchange with Mathis as Kelly, which occurred towards the end of the session. Here we go.

I don't like the fact that it starts with I reckon because it goes against everything I think about when I'm trying to do a British accent. I reckon you are tough. You have been thrown up to the fair top proving. Have you ever felt? like a foe guy who been set up, have you not? That is not a question I can answer. But you feel that?

No, not at all. I accept the process that is going on. Yeah. So this guy was like trying to like get him to say like conspiracy shit. Um, next day, uh, on July 16th, 2003, he turned over all evidence he was asked for, uh, to the intelligence and security committee, which was way more chill because it was not on TV. And he even spoke in support of the September dossier in general terms in front of the panel. So, you know, he said some stuff that was like, you know, that stuff was not bad intel, that kind of thing. The next morning on July 17, 2003, he was home in Southmore, Oxfordshire, filling out some more paperwork and reading support and well wishes from his friends

while his wife was sick in bed. Here's Mathis with a quote from an email that he'd written to his friend, New York Times journalist Judith Miller. I will wait until the end of the week before judging many dark actors playing games. Thanks for your support. However, at around 3 p.m. that day, his wife briefly woke from a nap and saw Dr. Kelly in the middle of a heavy phone call, which seemed to change his mood. Within the next 10 to 20 minutes, his neighbor Ruth stopped him to chat on the street on his way out for a walk, and that was the last anyone ever saw him alive. His body was discovered the next morning, 1.6 miles away on nearby

Harrowdown Hill, lying on its back at the base of a tree. He was found with a blister pack, missing 29 doses of coproximal, and a deep cut made to his left wrist with a pruning knife that he also had had had on his person, which he'd owned since he was a kid, which had completely severed his ulnar artery. Officially, even though it was still awaiting the toxicology report, the post-mortem exam concluded that Kelly had died by bleeding to death from a self-inflicted cut to his wrist, which was made much worse by his taking of the pills and Kelly showing signs of coronary artery, atherosclerosis.

Almost immediately upon hearing news of his death, Tony Blair also ordered a judicial inquiry into Kelly's death, even before he was identified as the body. They were like, oh, it's him. But before he was formally identified,

the inquiry was already off. And that's why we know all this stuff that was happening behind the scenes is because of this inquiry, which started on August 1st of that year, and then Kelly was buried on the 6th. And during that inquiry, David Bruchere, or Broucher, something like that,

the UK's permanent representative to the conference on disarmament had told investigators that earlier in 2002 or 2003, when he asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq was invaded, Kelly said that, quote, I will probably be found dead in the woods. However, after 24 days of investigation

in which 74 witnesses were questioned and 10,000 pages of information were reviewed, the inquiry supported the findings of the post-mortem exam, and specifically went out of its way to mention that they felt no third party was present. It also found that Kelly was indeed the BBC's only source, but also that the September dossier was legit intelligence work and not an intentional exaggeration.

However, in the immediate wake of these findings, many people were left feeling pretty suss about things, including former conservative party leader Michael Howard and Lib Dem MP Norman Baker, who actually wrote a book about the case in 2007. also after the results were made public a bunch of doctors who had signed the letter written by one of their own the surgeon david halpin expressed doubt about the inquiry's findings and in 2009 they tried and failed to reopen the inquest but were turned down on the grounds that lord houghton who was the former chief justice of northern ireland who had carried out the inquiry had sealed all the records for 70 years for some reason and here's jesse with a quote from dr halpin's letter Man, I hate when they do this stuff. It's always very clearly like, well, I'll be dead, so I won't have to deal with all the things we did wrong.

Yes, exactly. Literally. I hate that shit. As specialist medical professionals, we do not consider the evidence given at the Hutton Inquiry as demonstrated by Dr. David Kelly committed suicide. Dr. Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton Inquiry, concluded that Dr. Kelly bled to death from a self-inflicted wound to his left wrist. We view this as highly improbable. Arteries in the wrist are of matchstick thickness and severing them does not lead to life-threatening blood loss. Dr. Hunt stated that the only artery that had been cut, the Ulnar artery, Ulner, yeah.

Had been Ulnar, I like that better. The Ulnar. The Star Trek artery, yeah. Had been completely transected. Complete transsection causes the artery to quick. retract and close down. And this promotes clotting of the blood. The ambulance team reported that the quantity of blood at the scene was minimal and surprisingly small.

It is extremely difficult to lose significant amount of blood at a pressure below 50 to 60 systolic. Stastolic in a subject who is compensating by vasco-constricting. Boy, oh boy. died from hemorrhage, Dr. Kelly would have had to lose about five pints of blood. It is unlikely that he would have lost more than a pint. Alexander Allen, the forensic toxicologist at the inquiry, considered the amount ingested of coproximal insufficient to have caused death. Allen could not show that Dr. Kelly had ingested the 29 tablets said to be missing from

the packets found. Only a fifth of one tablet was found in his stomach. Although levels of co-proximal in the blood were higher than therapeutic levels, Alan conceded the blood level of each of the drugs two components was less than a third of what would normally be found in a fatal overdose. We dispute that Dr. Kelly could have died from hemorrhage or from co-proximal ingestion or from both. And there's definitely been other doctors who've spoken out against these findings, right? But basically what they're saying is if he cut his veins, they would have gone up at his arms and he wouldn't have bled enough to die.

And he didn't take enough pills to thin his blood so much that it would have bled anyway. From 2010 to 2011, another review of the case was conducted, which found that all the evidence available pointed to suicide as the cause of Dr. Kelly's death and that the sealed records and the things written on them were consistent with these findings and only sealed to prevent Kelly's family from further scrutiny. However, then a few years ago in 2019, that same doctor who wrote that letter, David Halpin, randomly appeared on an episode of the Klendest Time podcast, which is a weird pun, clandest time, which focused on this story, where he elaborated even further on his thoughts, which Mathis will read an excerpt from for you now. I think it's highly likely that he went out for a walk, had a call beforehand, and I'd say it was a rendezvous. And this is me. This is imagination, deduction.

I would say he went out. He'd had a call just before he left the door of which the wife has spoken about and that a rendezvous was arranged. He was taken off in a car somewhere and that some hours were spent. And then later, he found his way to harrow downhill. People talk about helicopter activity during that night. And I think if he was supposed to be delivered down to Harrow downhill, he was probably delivered by helicopter. If you know what I mean.

He had bruises on his body, which were not easy to explain by someone who had walked through herbage, nettles, and sat down by a tree. And he had a, well, I can't remember now, but there was a bruise on his, above his eye and some on his knees. And there were other unexplained blemishes, actually, including one on his right thigh. It was a red mark which Dr. Hunt focused on and could not explain, but I could perhaps. So maybe he was dropped out of a helicopter, I guess. I was about to say, this is, I believe it's the season two plot of Reacher.

Dude. Yeah. There's a lot of actually like for some reason, the idea of what happened to Dr. Kelly has been adapted like many times by like British TV shows, American shows. Any kind of government thriller type show always has a case that's kind of of Dr. Kelly. We're like government dudes be dropping guys out of helicopter.

Tom York. Tom York from Radiohead. He wrote a song about it, Harrodown Hill. There's been paintings about it. There's been plays about it. There's been poems. And while I do think the mystery

was the reason his story was included here, I think it's best that we remember Dr. Kelly as somebody who was a tireless worker, a fearlessly honest scientist, and someone who over the years had likely saved countless lives of work. And that's more

important than whether or not he was dropped out of a helicopter. Why does everybody legit die early? Why is that? Why do they die early when they're legit? And I guess, you know, Alex? Yeah. As the old gospel hymn goes, only the good die young. Do do, do, do, do, do.

I guess, you know, this next segment asks, what are we placing the dead with? This is called even deader internet, even dead. even deader internet. Okay. You've talked about wanting to do dead internet theory for a while. I mean, we dabbled into it multiple times. There's no, there's not a real episode here. Look, so this one's kind of fun because it kind of requires some of the experience

we had last week talking about the spirals cult to fully understand the background of this one. Remember this AI thing that we were talking about last week? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And having gone through these topics now, again, there's probably an alternate version of 2025 where instead of going on a magic and a cultism tangent, we probably would have to be have done a scary AI tangent instead. But I wanted to get inspired rather than even more depressed last year. And I genuinely think there's probably better places to read about something as complicated

as AI than here. But I still wanted to skim the little bits of scary, exciting culture off the top and show it to you anyway. So here we go. Did Sam Altman light the AI fire that burned the library of Alexandria that was the old good, useful internet? Did that happen? Have you guys, have you guys heard of dead internet theory you have right yes yes the idea that well the dead internet theories it's mostly bots out there now and not humans really basically it's a notion that since 2016 is or so the internet has been mostly bots and that a lot of what we think of as the good old hustle and bustle of the living internet is actually the ghostly self-propagating algorithm driven echoes of a much deader much emptier place and the mystery i'm trying to get to the bottom of today has to do with

this statistic right here from Cloudflare, which shows exactly what percentage of internet traffic has been human versus bot in the past year worldwide. Before you look, what do you think that stats going to be? I would say human traffic 24%. It's not that bad, but have a look. 56. 56? This is a live stat, so I don't know exactly what the numbers are going to be. Come on 24. Okay, okay. It's at 70% human. 30% bot. Oh yeah. No. Yeah, no, I was talking bots. That's what I meant. Oh, yeah. So you were actually pretty close. So from the broadest possible angle, about 30% of what's going on out there is all bots. Yeah. And like it feels more appropriate. Yeah. And like you probably already know,

most of that stuff is not like posting and pretending to be humans, right? It's like behind the scenes stuff. Thank you so much to Hero Forge for sponsoring today's episode is 2026. I don't even know if they sent me a copy of like bullet points to read because, you know, they might have to. just as like thing you have to do when you do this stuff. But listen, I've been working with HeroForge for what? Over a year now and I've been using HeroForge for many years at this point. I'm just going to tell you what I personally know and love about these guys. And I think you should go check them out if you're into it.

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if you're going to get a physical, gray plastic, color plastic, bronze, all kinds of different choices. Or if you have a 3D printer at home, you can actually just buy the digital file for way cheaper and then just print it at home. Now, I've said it a million times. I'm a DM. I do D&D all the time.

I have been for over 20 years now, which is crazy. I have a collection of minis and Hero Forges is the reason my collection is so big and continues to grow. Thank you. also I hate you, HeroForge. So if you want to check this stuff out, just go ahead over toheroforge.com. And if you want to and end up buying something,

use our code, ChillPod at checkout for a little percentage off, supporting us, supporting the show, supporting yourself by saving some money, and, you know, giving HeroForge a little, thanks for like, you know, being there and making minis so easy to get. I love HeroForge.

I love them. I'm so glad we're continuing to working with them through 2026. HeroForge.com, promo code, chill pod. Thank you so much. I wonder how much of that is AI crawling through the internet now. Well, if you remember the way those people were talking in our spiral cult piece. And you listen to Jesse read these quotes from Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI.

Maybe some of it is pretending to be human. Here's what he said. I have had the strangest experience reading this. I assume it's all fake bots, even though in this case, I know Codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real. The net effect is somehow AI, Twitter, AI, Reddit feels very fake. In a way, it really didn't a year or two ago. I never took the dead internet theory that seriously, but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM run Twitter accounts now. I feel like, not how like Altman feels in particular, but the dead internet theory, I think,

was something that was just barely beginning. But with LLMs now, it's going to exponentially grow. There are absolutely areas of the internet that are pure LLM that are beyond sentient AI, just pure LLM. Facebook on AI like too much. You know, there are pockets of it now and it's only going to get worse. Well, there's, there's a, I don't want to call it a grift, but there's a, like, gold rush of people who are thinking, I don't need to learn.

do anything, I can create stuff that will earn me money in X different ways. Be it, I'm now an artist, air quotes, who I can charge someone a bunch of money for my AI artwork, even though you're lying to them saying that you're going to draw it. Really, what you're doing is, like, that kind of stuff, or you're creating farms that are content farms, or you're creating, you know, like outrage manufacture machines on social media to get clicks. Right. Like, it's all these ideas that people are having, trying to get in on.

this AI bubble before it definitely births. Right. And it definitely puts a magnifying glass on the kind of economy where now, where it's not about finding a passion or something to work on, it's about making as much money as fast as you can and the cheapest, quickest, least a work-heavy way

possible. They've turned us all into pump and numbers basically. Crypto. It reminds you a crypto or early crypto in a lot of ways. Yes. I've included the link to the post, which many people have said spawned this theory as a popular meme on the internet from Agora Rhodes, Macintosh Cafe user Illuminati Pirate if you want to go deep.

It's in the show notes. I don't know if you guys want to see it right there. That's it. But explanations for the dead internet have been put forward that claim everything from corporation obsession with optimized engagement, unintentionally destroying random unique culture through algorithms to the CIA investigating or investing in software technology, which helps them create narratives and influence the direction of the mass media like tomorrow never dies.

And crazy enough, regardless of what you think the cause is, in a post-chat GPT world, LLMs have made the problem exponentially worse. Like, be honest out there. How many of you knowingly listen to AI stuff instead of human-made stuff sometimes because it's more specific to your interests and you don't feel like working too hard while you relax not you huh are you sure what about when you put something on to go to bed nothing never no i i i not even a single thing okay can i all right no but here's the thing is so it is getting so it is so much harder to tell a i yes like written posts now oh my god yeah like it's so much

actually you can clock it still if you like listen but it's it's fucked yeah yeah there is so recently uh over on my youtube channel tool for this i did a video where I reacted to what is called the meme reset of 2026, where a bunch of TikTokers and stuff were trying to like, take it back to 2016, the memes are still funny. It's very weird, very strange. But the guy who started it is like some TikTok guy. And the entire time, as he's sitting there, he's moving about telling you, but the coffee in his hand is spilling.

He keeps doing like this, but it's not going over the edge. And it's really bizarre looking to the point that when Crenor did a react, he spent 50. About 15 minutes talking about whether it was AI or not. Because it's like the, he went online and said and saw that people were saying it wasn't, but then all the comments of the videos that he makes are like, this is AI. But everyone who is in the air quotes, no, is like, no, that's a dude. And he makes videos. But it just had an uncanny valley thing to it.

Even the way his mouth moved didn't look like he was actually talking. Yeah. It's just so bizarre. Well, that's what they're talking about where we're like fusing with the AI. We will never like this guy is one of those. things you're talking about. Yeah. I hate it.

Yeah, it sucks, dude. The fact that Mathis sent me one video where it's him meeting Jesus. Because I literally is like, if you're going to mess with AI, dude, you better make a Jesus thing. And he did. And it's, it's jarring. I don't like it. And I haven't opened that since then, right? That was, I messed with it because you can very quickly realize it's still very bad at a lot of the things.

And also, also it's like, it's not enjoyable like TikTok is in that way. It kills my soul. It kills my soul to think about. There is a brief moment. moment of entertainment where I was like, it's me walking into Jesus's house and realizing he's having the final supper

and I should probably tell him about Judas. Yeah, it's omnipotence. It's a power fantasy, right? And then I was like, all right now I'm bored. But look, regardless of whether you actually do consume AI content or not, and I'm not accusing any one person of anything, by the way. The fact that I personally recoil from AI like

it's battery acid for my eyes does nothing to change the fact that it's popular. Do I need to play... Do you like Chichibiti? I love J.C.B.I. But more importantly... GPD? This just happened today, and I think it's so funny

within hours of each other. One, Dell said it will no longer use AI computers. Because they... It's not going to use AI stuff. All right, that's quick. And at the exact same time, Razor released, an AI, like, bot assistant that is based on GROC,

that's like a little anime girl that will help you around your house. And I'm like, guys, this is what the next year's going to be. Do you want to see your friends titties, Daddy? And even worse, an article on Gizmodo by AJ Dellinger points out an even more depressing layer of the conspiracy, which is that as much as Sam Altman and the AI crowd are the cause of this thing and exacerbating it so much at this point and even seem to be slightly aware about it as they are uncaringly destroying all of the ways.

world's long credentialed cultural institutions, flagrant. That may be the, and shitification is all part of the plan, too, since Altman also has this other company called World that he keeps pitching that has some kind of eyeball-scanning crypto-bro-adjacent humanity verification system, who even as he's over here talking about how bad it's getting, is also over here making a deal with Reddit for proprietary user authentication tech. Who's on both sides of it, which is like. illegal.

Hey, yeah. Really quickly, by the way, just to give this an awesome shout out, Novara Media a month ago posted on YouTube, it's the thumbnail is why the internet is shit now, but the video title is the plan to make the internet worse forever. It's the insidification guy, and it's like a full hour breakdown, so it isn't just a short interview. It's depressing. Watch that, and you will be furious with the internet and the companies that run it.

You'll be outraged. Isn't Open AI, the company that's making AI agents specifically to browse the web in the same manner as humans? And wasn't it Sam Altman warning us that AI has, quote, fully defeated most security and untendication services? And now he's making one. It's like he's playing. I don't know. It's just, I don't know. What do you think about that?

Like, that's fun. It makes me depressed. Yeah. You know, like, oh, man. And what point am I trying to make by? saying all this, right? Well, a few weeks ago, in a wired tech support interview, video game ator Hideo Kojima sat to chat with strangers online about his career. He was seen these videos before, I'm sure. And he was asked this question, quote, AI control in the real world is becoming

a reality. Metal Gear Solid 2, which is one of Kojima's most popular games, by the way, touched on this back then. Did you predict this era would come? If so, why did you think that back then? And here's Mathis with what Hideo Kojima said in response to that question. Did you predict that? My dear friend Jeff Keely told me that I read. He said I was surefire going to win that award. I don't speak to my friend Jeff anymore.

We do not go to in and out anymore together. Metal Gear Solitude is often mistaken for a story about AI, but it's about digital society. Metal Gear Solid 1 was about DNA. What isn't left in DNA are memes? That's when I thought about the shift from analog to digital. In digital, everything remains, like social media today. Even graffiti remains without deteriorating. The internet connects everything, and opinions are exchanged directly everywhere.

MGS2 explored what human life would become then. It wasn't about AI, but interweaving digital data gaining a will of its own. That was the story. So, well, 24 years have passed. It has become somewhat of a reality. I didn't predict it, but rather a future I didn't desire. But unfortunately, we're heading there. And to go along with this reading of world events, I have this reading of dead internet theory of my own, which is simply mine. And it goes like this. I agree with Hideo-Kajima that the big difference between reality and digital reality is that digital reality has limitless space. And if you can think about how much bigger America is than other countries too in a lot of often that people compare us to and stuff like that, people who are from other countries thinking about what it would be like here, there's a lot more space. And in digital, it's unlimited.

If posts and web pages are just digital versions of the bars and cafes and clubs and face-to-face conversations we have in the real world, right? maybe what some people are seeing as the dead internet is really just husks and shells of our old lives that have been sort of cast away and forgotten instead of knocked down and replaced. And maybe instead of like in the real world where you slowly forget what happened before, maybe online is where you can go back and keep on living and revising whatever version of the past that you want to still exist and forget what happened already next. you can kind of imagine that the future hasn't been written.

I don't want to get too out of pocket here. But honestly, this is why I think boomers as an age group have earned the reputation they have for fucking up the world instead of leaving something behind for their kids. And the same reason why millennials are constantly confused about what happened to their future, that they were promised, quote unquote. It's because most people, to most people,

the internet means you don't have to pass anything on anymore. Right? And here is Jesse with a quote about passing things on from who else, but solid snake. Life isn't about just passing on your jeans. We can leave behind much more than just DNA through speech, music, literature, and movies. What we've seen, heard, felt, anger, joy and sorrow, these are the things I will pass on. That's what I live for. We need to pass the torch and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.

We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with. The human race will probably come to an end sometime, and new species may rule over the planet. Earth may not be forever, but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can, building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing. Yeah. So that's solid snake. I don't think he became Duke Nukem at the end there a little bit. Honestly, I was thinking more about Metal Gear Revengeant when he's like,

Nano machine, son. That is a hard boss. All right. Anyway, I don't think the internet died. I think it froze in place because people got so merged with it. and that Eldritch level addicting digital permanence that Kojima describes that you can always just go back

like nostalgia on the internet is crazy because you just can you can go back whereas you used to have to pass it on you used to have to pass on your experience of it he revisits this idea and death stranding too as well yes yes it's what's fascinating is this kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about this whole like weird meme reset thing that people were trying to do

where they were like let's go back to the memes of 2016 when it wasn't all AI trash and sleep But like, that's not what means are. Going back isn't the point. Like those memes were from a moment where everyone got them. And if you were there, you understood and you were in it. And now it's present memes. And we should, that's what it is.

It's like living in the moment, the zeitgeist of the moment, that's what the meme is. Like, as much as you want to go back and, you know, make a crappy Harambe in heaven image. That moment has passed. Yeah. Bring them back. They forgot. They forgot. People forgot.

They cannot control. reality in the random linear analog actual world. And we just pieced out from cause and effect and consequences and true earned rewards. And our brains died because we broke logic of why we're doing what we're doing. And if you don't believe that Metal Gear Solid 2 is coming true listener, here's a little preview for something you'll either see as a full episode this year or in next year's corner fest. Just Google the search terms, Dre, that's D-R-E-Y dossier. Drey Dossier White House Ballroom and see what you see.

Drey Dossier White House ballroom. But I digress. What do we think? Are rich people trying to take advantage of us in this new future? Yes. Yes. But they were already doing that before. Is AI at the center of what's going on?

Probably. Though I bet you probably already guessed that if you have a creative job. But most importantly, to my personal opinion on this, I don't think that any of that will save us if we are not each willing to make the individual choice to wake up ourselves, even if it's not as cool or as action-packed or confidence-building as it looks when they unplug you in the Matrix and you fly around. I'm about to say, if this doesn't, if this episode doesn't end with rage against the machine, I would be so upset.

I don't think we got that in the budget. Alex flies away. Unless it was raging as the machine who dumped that shit, I don't think we got the budget. And that, my friends, is what the Chulamini is all about, not being a zon. and actually living your life, not just surviving. Metal Gear Survive is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox 1 and Microsoft Windows today, and Kojima was right. It is not very good.

But speaking of actually being a literal zombie, that is what this next one is all about. And it is called Datora Stromonium. Okay. Oh. Okay. What? What were you going to say? Didn't we, isn't this one, didn't we watch this on a Hamilton's farmacopia?

Yes. Yes, we did. Okay. So this is the sort of period piece one this time. And I decided to put it here because I was finding this last episode to be pretty tech heavy. And I want to break it up the pacing with one of the craziest stories. With zombies. Yeah. Especially ones set so close to the border between spirituality and science. I think it's particularly exciting for everyone because it's got some pretty exciting romantic keywords in it. It's got zombie in there. It's got voodoo. It's got mind control plants. It's a good story. Say it louder for the algorithm. Basseoney zombie voodoo. Mind control plant. Weed, weed, weed, weed, edibles, THC9. Well, we lost the sponsors. Obviously, I've heard this story around since it was even loosely adapted into a West Craven movie. But this time it came around while I was browsing the R spooky mystery subreddit and came upon one of those giant text block posts from user Carpanum claiming to have solved the mystery of Clervius Narcisse. But before we get into the solution, let's quick. bone you guys up on the story. How about that? Does that sound good? Sure. Awesome. So first things first, let's talk about the likely larger than life story of Clarevius Narcisee.

He was born in 1922 in Lester, Haiti, and over the years, he didn't really cultivate the best reputation for himself. He had kids with women all over town, which has already kind of looked down on, but it was almost unthinkable that a man who knew he had kids around just simply refused to spend any of his money on anything they needed, especially in Haiti. So basically, everyone thought he was a dick in the entire town. And then to make it worse, apparently he also inherited his parents' land when they died. And even though he was one of the first people in town to be able to transform from his shitty thatched roof to a tin roof, he wouldn't let anyone, not even his brother or his

other struggling family members, at a time when things in Haiti were not so good. He wouldn't let them live with him. You wouldn't let them live in the much bigger, nicer house. He was just like, no, this is my spot. So after, I would say decades of becoming this like hated pariah, Ebenezer, Scrooge, asshole character for the whole village. In April of 1962, Clervius was admitted to the hospital with pains in his body. He was spitting up blood.

And after three days, he fucking died. No, go in spitting up blood. I feel like that is a logical outcome. Yep. and shortly thereafter he was seen buried by his brother and sister. But then, no, I'm just waiting from to then. Well, nobody was super sad. Nobody was super sad because he was dead.

Nobody was super hype because he was dead. And of course, as with all dead people, that's where you might expect a story like this to end, right? I don't know. I've seen Weekend at Bernie's one and two. So. However, after 18 fucking years, guess who strolls back into the village square looking much older? 18 years?

18 years with a huge scar across his face. But Clervius. who randomly approached his sister in a packed marketplace to the shock of literally everyone else who live there in town. But yeah, at this point, apparently the village, this happens sometimes. The village puts him through a fairly strenuous testing process according to their own metrics, after which it was decided that it was indeed Clervius, without a doubt. And later, when the BBC was brought in to make a documentary about him, short of digging up the grave to check, which wasn't done out of respect for their customs and culture,

they too concluded that Narcisse was exactly who was claiming to be. And when pressed, his family even admitted to putting a contract out on Clervius after he wouldn't share his parents' land. So to them, even the crazy parts of the story weren't a total surprise because in their minds, he was telling them that he was exactly where they expected him to be because they literally hired somebody to do it to him. He said that when they nailed the coffin shut, he figured he got the scar from the nail being hammered straight into his face

because a little while after that when he was dug up by what was called a Bokor or Voodoo priest, who he said proceeded to, quote unquote, raise him from the dead and zombofy him. He said that after that, the Bokor took him as a slave for two years, dulling his mind into a foggy dreamlike state and forcing him to do backbreaking manual labor on a plantation until the point when eventually the Bokor, who was getting on in years, died, and he just went free with a bunch of other slaves, wandering the countryside of Haiti for over 15 years until he found his way home, where after a while, once the commotion in the village was settled,

he was largely shunned from all social life for being a soulless zombie person until his alleged second death in 1994. Like of natural causes, like of old age? Yeah. What? So he's not a zombie if he's alive. Well, in the early 80s, shortly after this story broke, a Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist, Wade Davis,

Michael Davis actually went out to Lestere and met with Narcisse and turned his story into the bestselling book, The Serpent and the Rainbow, which again, West Craven made into a pretty awesome, if totally inaccurate movie adaptation. I don't know what Haitian people think about it, because it's probably fetishizing their culture quite a bit and shit. It's like voodoo and Bill Pullman's in there, and there's like people run around with paint on their faces and people are writhing around on tables and their eyes are glowing and shit. But if you want to watch the trailer like freaking avatar firing it yeah if you want to if you want to see the trailer it's in the show notes just to sit your curiosity that's fine so wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait

wait wait wait wait wait wait this guy dies of pukin up blood yep or something yep they bury him close the coffin maybe drive a nail into his face and then a guy comes back into a zombie slave makes him into a zombie slave. Guy dies. Other slaves on a zombie slave farm. And then he dies. And then all the zombie slaves are like, well, I guess that's it. We should leave.

So they all leave and wander the countryside. Like, Haiti's not that big. So like Moses, 40 years, they spent 15 years. Zambifying around the countryside of Haiti. And eventually he returns home. To see his sister in a marketplace is like, hey, girl, brains. She's like, I knew this was going to happen. We sent you to that fucking witch doctor.

I just. Yeah. And then everyone's like, we got to test him. They test him. He is who he says he is. And they're like, for being who you say you are, we shun you. And then he dies later again. Because you're a zombie.

Now, yes, that's 100% you are completely understanding. This is D&D. Lauren, he's bodies alive. He's what's known as a positive energy zombie, which is basically just like a normal kind of human, not human, but living sort of almost creature. Sort of, yeah. Well, we'll get into the minute. As to how something like this could possibly occur in reality, especially when it comes to cultural wisdom about balkhors and the sort of things they get up to, the most commonly discussed culprit and the one written about by Davis is the tetrodotoxin of the pufferfish, Fugu, which, when mixed with various skin-breaking, irritants and pieces of pulverized human remains

becomes a potent magical zomification powder, which not only delivers a debilitating poison through the holes it makes in your skin, but also supposedly, thanks to the human remains, takes away your soul as well, leaving you empty of spirit and your body temporarily paralyzed in a state meant to be mistaken for death. Okay, so that's part one.

Then, once it wears off, you're dug back up out of your grave, you're told that you're dead, and through a ceremony that lasts many days, that you're going to be a zombie now. And if you are in Haiti, if your own religious beliefs aren't enough already to make you complacent to this situation,

the next strategy, it's said, is to feed you or have you smoke something called zombie cucumbers, a.k.a. Devil's trumpet, a.k.a. Thornaple, aka. Datora. Stramonium. Which is said to provide those who consume it with bizarre psychedelic hell visions an unpleasant,

extremely long-lasting states of profound delirium, which can possibly culminate in death. I've heard Dutura is a heinous fucking drug to everything. That's why people aren't worried about it spreading is because it just is not tight. The same plant, by the way, is also known as Jimsonweed and was coincidentally, or not coincidentally, depending on what you believe,

also heavily used by fictional Mexican wizard Don Juan Matus to create more spiritually receptive mental states in his followers from our segment on Carlos Costaneda last week. Everything is everything. Clervius said that while he was quote, unquote, dead, he was still fully conscious and aware of everything happening around him. Like in that one movie, if you remember where hated Christensen doesn't fall asleep during surgery and he overhears the doctors and his wife are planning to kill him, God, that's a fucked up movie. He says he remembers the doctors covering his face with a sheet when he died, and then he was still pretty aware, even days later, and that he can remember his funeral in flashes, especially the sensation of being lowered into the ground. And strangely, though he claims he remembers being dug up and everyone in town as well as his own family who hated him, agree he really was who he was. says he was. There's no sign the heavy slab over his grave has ever been

disturbed, which is kind of strange. What the fuck is going on here? Do you what the fuck is really going on here? Do you think, and I this is, for those people who have never seen this movie, you know, you're going to want to watch it now, I guess. Do you think this is like a prestige situation?

Well, here we go. Okay. Roland Littlewood, an anthropologist from Britain, and Chavons Duillon, a doctor from Haiti, did three case studies on three other similar alleged zumbification cases in the country, where someone who died supposedly wandered back to town years later.

And in each case, the doctors found that the strange expressions and bizarre, repetitive behaviors exhibited by these zombies, quote unquote, which the villagers saw as sure signs of a recently administered zombie powder on the brain, were all also common signs of various types of learning disabilities, hadatonic schizophrenia, brain damage, which after professional medical and psych evals, all three of the supposed zombies were determined to have one of those things. And none of them had matching DNA to the families that claimed them either. So that's something interesting.

And then, you know, you think again about the story of Clavius Narcisse's. And how even though he supposedly found his way back to his family at home after almost 20 years, he was still shunned by everyone in town for a reason that for them was normal and obvious, and wheels start to turn. Maybe even though there is something to the power of those psychedelic plants and the mysteries of Haitian voodoo and the notion of a second life after death, maybe something much darker and more depressing is at hand in Haiti. I don't know if it's still true today, but according to a piece in the Imperial College of London's Eye Science

magazine back in the 90s. It wasn't that uncommon to find people wandering around the island with psychological issues and mental illnesses who had maybe been shunned for more earthly reasons and who had now also unfortunately become some other poor families living Tulpa of their grief. Yikes. Hey, how about an anarchist vegan murder cult that triggers things inside me beyond even white guilt that I have trouble even properly describing without taking a minute to talk it over with my therapist. How does that sound for the next one?

Okay. Yeah, this one's called anarchist vegan murder. Anarchist vegan murder. Okay. Okay. The reason I didn't do a whole true crime episode on this is because of the nature of the cult and what they believe, because there isn't that much of a mystery here. Even though there's a couple reveals, it's still going on. There's another thing about it that freaks me out sometimes. And because, frankly, I don't trust the general listening public to comprehend the way that one person whose beliefs in lifestyle are largely compatible with my own, right? And the majority of whose struggles I fully support could also be a bad guy in a story. Alex has always been pro-vegan, pro-murder.

I'm just saying, usually hand-in-hand. It's because several of the main characters of our story today are trans and most of them are vegans and most of them are anarchists, which are all movements which, though I I am not a part of. I have massive love and respect for. Those are all things that I am for, right? And they see AI as the most pressing threat to life on Earth, which I especially agree with. Yeah.

But yeah. Though I will mention these elements again, please know that any negative light I am asking you to see these people in has completely to do with the murders that occurred in their orbit and not anything else. Now, let's talk about... It's so messed up that that that's a preface. you have to make on the internet. I know.

Like, we're going to talk about a subject. And guys, the murders are what's important. All the other things, like, that's unimportant. But it's the, so if we say some bad things about these people, it's not because of X, Y, and Z. It's because they murder people. So please remember, it was the murders. Yeah.

That's really where I was coming from. No cap. Now, let's talk about the Zizzians. The Zizians are a sort of splinter spin-off group, of the rationalist movement that emerged out of the Bay Area Tech community, which values sound logical reasoning above all things, especially in its capacity as an antidote to unwelcome biases of the cognitive process. They're also largely transhumanist,

which is not what the word trans is short for, even though they use the same prefix, and effective altruists, which means that beyond logical reasoning, their only other guiding principle is the great, or good, which can be a double-edged sword, especially with regard to their nuanced opinion on the emergence of a true AI superintelligence as the result of a singularity. Can I ask you a question?

By the way, yeah. Sure, for sure. But can I ask both of you a question and the audience as well? Do you believe that altruism is in fact a real thing? Yes. Philosophically, yes. I don't think that it's possible achievable, but I do think that it is a worthwhile concept to it's like it's like communism where it's like there's a reason why on paper yeah there's a

reason why we talk about it and it helps us think about stuff in a good way but i don't really i don't really think it's worked out that well yeah yeah the idea of doing good for no reason yeah yeah just being good like it's always i'm always curious what people think because usually the act of doing something kind for others or or you know being in that sort of community of altruistic minds is you're doing it because it makes you feel good, which isn't altruism. Right. But this is effective altruism, which means it's all about the greater good.

It's the only reason you are motivated to do anything. And like I said, they have a very nuanced opinion on AI and a singularity. Basically, while they do think largely, it's obvious the ways in which AI might be instrumental in saving the environment someday, fixing society someday, and furthering the ability to have life on this planet someday. They also believe that many of the actual players in the AI space are not messing around with it in a safe way. And the fervor with which they believe that will lead to imminent death and destruction in most cases is enough that often affects their mental health. That's how scared they are about it. They believe this so much that they worry about it

always. But yeah, that's not the most elegant explanation of the rationalist mindset, but it is enough of a base to show how the Zizians, who identify as, quote, vegan anarcho-transhumanists diverge slightly in their enthusiasm for rationalist principles with an alternative to casual decision theory called timeless decision theory, where instead of just looking at your options and choosing the one you think will be the best, as in casual decision theory, that you must always choose in direct opposition to perceived moral wrongs, usually against themselves, which is timeless decision theory, which is really fucked up if you think about it. This has caused friction with other rationalists who they often judge harshly for what they see

as ineffective use of funding or often some types of anti-trans discrimination, which, by the way, living in Los Angeles and having a job in the field that I do, I'm not often confronted with what it's like to go through a court system where like 75% of the time you're getting dead named and misgendered and you know just having to experience it as a fly on the wall so often in researching this I live in a bubble it is fucking fucked up out there uh everybody should have more empathy for these people uh but even worse is the amount of people in transcripts who seem to like enjoy the friction that them being intolerant to the person has caused and if If that's you, go fuck yourself.

Because it's people like you that let people like this to find a demographic that I would largely describe as people that don't want anything from anyone except to be allowed to exist. So let go with them. Let go with them. They ain't trying to bother you. Zizians also have some bizarre theories about the brain

based around the idea that your brain's hemispheres can be different genders and have different moral alignments. And then it can be sort of like hacked and modded with concepts like debucketing people's brains of the chains that are imposed upon them by society that keep them from living up to their ideals. Can I ask the question really quick? Sure. All these people that are referring to the Zizians are, you said they were in San Francisco.

They're all essentially in the tech field. Yeah. Okay. The more you talk, the more I'm like, to me it doesn't, what you're saying doesn't ring as like vegan or trans. or any, it all has that tinge of like, tech bros think they know more than you. Yeah. Like the idea of like your hemisphere, the idea of like, oh yeah, I'm like taking ketamine and my brain's unlocked new hemisphere as the thought.

And one side of my brain is like, this is the female side of this is the male side. It's like tech bro, crypto bro does Roershack. It's like Elon. Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things where like it isn't the singular person. and who they are and what they identify as doesn't necessarily matter as much as the world they live in, which imprints this tech bro vibe on everyone. And you can tell and you're just like,

it doesn't matter where you come from. Tech bros are the worst. It's a lifestyle that completely highlights the prattfalls of trying to live with like superhero levels of morality all the time. It's like it's people who aren't emotionally strong enough or. confident enough in like, like society as a whole for various reasons coming together and deciding like, let's just change it. Let's just in a vacuum change it in a way that is like kind of naively simple and doesn't account for like the messiness of real life, right? It's a lot of we are the technocrats of the future.

Like I said, debunketing. Debucketing. It's about taking the change of society off your brain so you can be an idealist. It's about jailbreaking the brain with a method that they figured out where you can actually supposedly achieve unihemispheric sleep, like how birds and whales and dolphins can, where they sleep with one eye open, if you know what I mean. Sure. And the method, by the way, seems to mostly just be imagination and sleep deprivation,

by the way. And let me tell you, if thoughts about AI safety and the fate of the world were heavy for the regular rationalist's mental health, just imagine being Zizian, which, on top of your extreme, almost like doomsday cult, cyberpunk mad max level belief system, means you're also sleep deprived, totally poor because your beliefs only let you spend money on the cause. They have a thing called earn to give,

where they just are poor, but they make like the salary of like a CEO. So you're probably homeless. And you're probably, if you're in the Zizians, there's a large chance that you're transgender or non-binary in Trump's America, which is like being a rabbit and rabbit season 24-7, 365.

Though in another way, through their eyes, it probably also kind of felt like being the X-Men in days of future past thanks to a concept called Rokos Basilisk, which some of them believed in so much and feared so much that it drove them to take their own lives. Do you guys know what Rokos Basilisk is? Another extremely familiar thing to me, and I don't... Suddenly, I literally now feel like I actually am a Neil Stevenson character.

Anyway, is this? Just in case it's not getting through. Is this the machine, the AI thing? We're like, yes, it's the thought experiment. Yes, yes, yes. It already exists. Okay, okay, okay. Mathis, here is a quote from the Zizian's wired article that you can read.

That explains it perfectly. First posed on less wrong by a user named Roco in 2010 and named for a mythical reptile that can kill with its glance, the premise loosely stated is this. If and when super-intelligent AI emerges in the future, capable of dominating and subjugating humans, it will be inclined to punish those who tried to prevent it from coming into existence. Indeed, this superintelligence overlord may be inclined to punish even those who failed to spend their lives working to bring it into existence. If you knew that artificial superintelligence was possible, the thinking goes, yet still didn't devote yet,

let me try that again. If you knew that artificial superintelligence was possible, the thinking goes, yet still didn't devote your life to helping create it, it may subject you to unfathomable torture for that choice. Roco's basilisk contained within it two insidious and mind-bending premises. The first was that merely being aware of the thought experiment instantly made you its potential victim.

In the language of the rationalist community, it was an info hazard. The second was the implication that an entity from the future, one that didn't yet exist and perhaps never would, could somehow blackmail people in the present to help bring about its existence. Work for my benefit, the future AI would be telling us, or I will subject you to unimaginable pain.

So they're not fucking around. That's the reality that they live in day to day. And I guess, you know, if you wake up every day feeling like your life lacks direction, remember this scenario if you ever find a monkeys paw. But why the name, right? If these are the Zizians, where the fuck is Zizia? What is that?

So actually, to ape Thor, Zizia, is it a place? It's a people. Or actually, in this case, a single person named Ziz Lasota, who often just goes by Ziz like Madonna or Drake, who graduated with a bachelor's in computer engineering from U-Alaska Fairbranks in 2013, before packing up and moving to the Bay Area in NorCal to join her tribe

a fellow like-minded rationalists in some kind of strange echo of the energy which brought so many lost and disaffected college students at the same area 50 years earlier. However, back in the hippie days, houses in the Bay Area had not yet taken on the essence of cyber truck flaunting millionaires. And when Ziz arrived in town and saw how insanely expensive it was to live there, she did what anyone would do and tried to start an ocean-bound commune on a tugboat, which they sailed down from Alaska to the coast of San Mateo in Pillarport Harbor. And according to the San Francisco Chronicle, she targeted, quote, smart, mostly autistic-ish trans women

who were extremely vulnerable and isolated as potential roommates and fellow members of her Justice League. So even eventually, though I can't imagine why, she began to lose faith in rationalist leadership. who she constantly pelted with all kinds of hard-line moral accusations and claims of anti-trans discrimination, and who tried harder and more specifically to ban her and her followers from events, the more aggressive, strange, and threatening their presence in the community had become. So just to give you an idea of what I mean by aggressive, strange, and threatening, Ziz identifies as vegan Sith, because, quote, the Sith do what they want deep down.

They remove all obstructions to that. So that's why she's vegan Sith. And she even wore a black cape most of the time she was out and about. But also, she claimed that in a world where most people had a good and evil half to their brain, she was one of the rare people in which both sides of her brain were good. But yeah, no idea why she may have been slowly and uninvited to every rationalist barbecue in San Francisco. Cannot figure it out. But maybe it's the Sith Lord with two good things.

She was a Sith because only Sith deal in absolutes and have an absolute. Absolutely positive brain. Impossible. That's bad. Impossible. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, eventually by 2019, this kind of meant that the Zizians were seeing the Center for Applied Rationality or C-FAR as more of an enemy than a cousin. And in 2019, Ziz and a couple of her followers made headlines around the country when they invaded a C-Far retreat in Occidental California, which was actually quite close to Coconut Grove.

I mean, Bohemian Grove. which we talked about a bit when we had Davis on the show a while back. And they showed up to this retreat, wearing masks and robes and creating a general threatening aura. And eventually, some of the CFAR people were really feeling like they were in danger. And since there also happened to be a group of young kids nearby from a totally separate event, someone ended up calling 911 and somehow the cops got the idea that the Zizians were armed. And they were being treated poorly by the police.

And even though there was just four of them there, someone at the site saw a maintenance worker with a hatchet walking around at one point, and the SWAT team got called in on them because they thought it was a fifth guy who went running with an axe. And the whole thing just kind of comes across to me is this sort of like tragic super villain origin story for Zizz, even though she's already debatably driven one or two people to suicide by this point, just by being hardcore. But like how people always point to Trump in the modern era, the way he is now being born at

that one, like, White House Correspondence dinner where he got roasted, right? Yeah. Because in this moment when this happened and this went down, it forever drove a permanent wedge between C-Far and Ziz, and Ziz accused Seafar of purposely swatting them. The police treated them like absolute shit because they were trans. And then probably worst of all in some ways, and something that I am now callously participating in myself, the name Zizians was finally given to them almost in a mocking way. in a call-out post on the rationalist message boards,

which sounds silly, but also for sure, is what first started a conversation around them being some kind of actual dangerous cult with a name and a leader and ideals, even though that's not quite how the Zizians see it themselves. Also, they sued the cops, but the lawsuit was dismissed. Also, at this point, I should mention that the tugboat situation was not going well, and as the various people on the boat slowly abandoned it,

there was an old man nearby whose boat was also docked in San Mateo by the name of Curtis Lind, who was like, oh, hey, you know what? Actually, I have some converted box trucks and trailers that are on my land that you guys could live in for pretty cheap, if you want. And eventually, that's what they all did. They went and lived there. And somewhat strangely, maybe, for this show, the land was in nearby Vallejo, which, as you likely know by now, is also ground zero for the Zodiac Killer. Except Zizz herself was not to join them, because why, one night in August of 2022, the Coast Guard received a call from Zizz's sister on her boat, reporting that her brother, both misgendering and dead naming Ziz, even to the rescue crew,

had fallen overboard near the motor on their way into shore. And after an extensive search that went overnight, she was eventually determined to have been lost at sea. And a couple weeks later, her obituary was published in the Daily News Minor back in Fairbanks. And here's Jesse with a quote from it to give you a key. on the vibe here. Loving, adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games, and animals, you are missed.

Vegan Sith. And that's where that part of the story wraps up for a bit. But anyway, after a few months, like many of us in these troubled post-COVID times, the homeless trans tech hippie Sith lords were having trouble paying rent, except unlike most of us who are fairly chill, obviously, wink, wink. The Zizians responded by refusing to pay and putting locks on their trailers so that replacement tenants couldn't enter.

And eventually, Mr. Lind, who was an old man, had to start getting ugly and suing them for their rent. But things did not stop there. One time, they pulled a knife on him. And so from then on, he felt he needed to wear a pistol at all times. And eventually, in November of 2022, after calling him in to fix a water leak, the whole group of them jumped the then 80-year-old Mr. Lind,

hitting him and cutting him, stabbing him over 50 times with small sharp objects, including three times in one of his eyes, slicing his neck in a poor attempt at cutting off his head, and finally stabbing him through the chest with the thing that fully turns this into a cyberpunk 277 side quest. That is right. They stab him through the fucking chest with a samurai sword.

It was going to be that or like a dildo. Obviously, dude goes down. Somehow he does not die. And like I said, he always has a pistol on him. So once he's back and conscious again on the floor, good Lord. He immediately goes for it. He shoots with the wrong 80 year old man.

He shoots two of them. He shoots two of them. And somehow, even though he loses the eye, he lives. And thanks to California law, where Lynn's self-defense killing can become a murder charge against the attackers for causing the situation in the first place, that is exactly what happens. So they go, they get in trouble for that. Meanwhile, on January 2nd, 2023 in Pennsylvania, 70-year-old husband and wife, Richard and

Rita Zadjki, are found shot to death in their Chester hides home during a welfare check. And after checking the neighbor's ring camera, it was determined that they were actually killed a few days earlier on New Year's Eve and that their daughter, who was a Zizian, was named a POI in the case, which is a person of interest. And insanely, while searching a hotel room nearby for the murder weapon, who else did they stumble upon hiding in the bathroom than Ziz, who had actually faked her own fucking death and was immediately arrested for disorderly conduct, interfering with the police investigation, and for an outstanding warrant she had in California.

She appeared. She was a zombie, a deterring drug zombie. Basically, she appeared in court once. September, but disappeared again towards the end of December, 2003. And she didn't show up for a court date. About a year later, on January 17th, 2025, Curtis Lind was attacked again just outside his property in Vallejo. But this time, his throat gets slit and he stabbed to death.

And eventually, a 22-year-old data scientist is arrested for the murder, likely to stop Lynn from testifying at murder trial, resulting from the last shootout he was in. But also, the man used his 15 minutes of fame in the press to make a statement calling out the well-known rationalist leader, Elizer Yudkowski, who refused to dignify the statement that the guy made by reading it. Three days later, on January 20th of last year, another avowed rationalist extremist from Germany, Ophalia Bokholt, who had left her family behind in 2023 to go work as a quantitative trader in New York and associate with various CFAR members who lived there. was pulled over in Vermont near the Canadian border around 3.15 p.m. by Border Patrol agent, who apparently saw her license plate connected to an expired visa, even though in reality her visa was current. I also choose to mention at this time that Ophelia was also trans. Apparently, she and her fellow Zizian companion had been getting attention the past couple days

by people who felt unsafe as they saw them hanging around in all black clothes and tactical gear, complete with weapons during their stay at a hotel near Lindenville. When Homeland Security was called up to check on them, they refused to fully comply, though they did mention that they had traveled from the Airbnb that they were staying at in North Carolina and had come down in search of purchasable real estate. Five days after they'd checked out of the hotel, and one day before they were pulled over,

they were also seen in nearby Newport with a handgun. And again, early that morning, that same morning they got pulled over at a Walmart, buying more aluminum foil to wrap their cell phones in. Smart. Yeah. Keeps you from being tracked, supposedly. Anyway, this Border Patrol agent, David Mayland, is ex-Air Force, engaged to be married. He was at the Pentagon for 9-11.

And for 15 years, he specialized in canine handling and Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security. He pulls the car over to conduct his inspection. Suddenly, the person that Ophelia is with just whips their gun out and starts firing at him. Suddenly, Malins down, declared dead at the scene, and both Ophelia and her companion are also shot by another Border Patrol agent who ends up fatally wounding Ophelia as well. David Mayland is the first Border Patrol agent killed in the line of duty since 2014, and it's lucky he's the only one because in Ophelia's car, they also found magazines, ammo. targets, a helmet, night vision scope, tactical holsters, walkie-talkies, and cell phones wrapped in foil. And what's even crazier is, once all was said and done and the investigation did its business,

guess what? They found that the daughter of those two people killed in Pennsylvania had both purchased the weapons to kill David Mayland and had connections to the guy who slit Curtis Lynn's throat. Not a big group, Zizzians. Good Lord. Then, following February, while attempting to camp out on a property in rural Maryland, the owner recognizes Lesota from the news, calls the cops on her, and she's arrested, and is now being held without bail for obstructing an officer and transporting guns with her pre-trial release denied.

And in June, she was indicted again for being a fugitive on the run with guns in her possession. And in November, just like two months ago, she pled not guilty. And now here we are. We have arrived. But to close us out, here's Mathis with one last quote from the Wired article featuring some choice words from Ziz herself. One of the last things LaSota seems to have written for public consumption was a comment she left on her own blog in July 22, one month before she supposedly went overboard in San

Francisco Bay. status come threaten me to snitch whatever info I have on their latest missing persons, she wrote, seemingly referring to deaths by suicide that had already happened among those who'd embraced her ideas. Did I strike them down in a horrific act of bloody vengeance? Did I drive them to suicide by whistling comsusor Todd? A German phrase that translates as, come sweet death.

Maybe they died in a series of experimental brain surgeries that I performed without anesthetics since that's against my religion in an improvised medical facility. Below it was, below it was pasted a stock photo of two people wearing shirts that read, I can neither confirm nor deny. A few hours later, she offered up another thought. Don't trust anyone over 30, she wrote, with a kill count of zero.

That, I suppose, is why you don't mess with a vegan Sith Lord, huh? Was that not the craziest story you've ever fucking heard? Yeah. I want to just, oh, man, like that is the amount of absolutely bonkers seems like a mean word, but like the level of everything you said was like consistently would just continue to get worse and worse and worse. And I'm like, yeah, no one, not one Zizian is making a well thought out call. like no i don't know what's usually how it goes yeah exactly that is like just crazy fully insane people operating on this earth with money and privilege in a way that is unbelievable to me uh anyway it looks kind of gross after being in there for four weeks but that last slice of key lime pie is still

kind of calling my name hope it doesn't make me sick this one is called palenteer reddit heist heist heist heist uh and finally uh for the last uh normal mystery before I revealed that this has all been a set up for another JFK episode. Oh, did I say JFK? I meant JK. Gotcha. There is only a small reveal at the end of this, I promise, not a big one.

Just because I know you're expecting one. But before we get there, let's make everyone really mad and scared one more time. Yeah? Okay. My favorite. So a little while before doing LA month, while I was still heavily in the research phase, I was doing my due diligence,

hitting the digital streets, using my comically large digital magnifying glass on stuff, looking for clues. When I suddenly stumbled upon a strange Reddit sub called R-slash Greater Los Angeles, which is kind of like the much more popular R-slash-Los Angeles, except much in the fashion of dead internet theory, pretty much every single post is by one person. And anytime a real human wanders in there like a fly on the lip of a carnivorous picture plant and leaves a comet,

an AI with a very generic username, but a very specific viewpoint about LA replies. And, you know, as a lover of key lime pie, my spider sense was definitely a tingling, though I have to admit, in this case, it was less of a fun, delicious citrusy tingle, and more of a like, uh-oh, the pie is poison and made me depressed about the world kind of tingle. But nevertheless, I looked into it. And pretty soon, I found this post on R slash subreddit drama from a user I'll call Ninkum poop. which included R-slash Greater Los Angeles

in the list of strange cuckoo-bird Reddits, which perfectly and purposely deceptive and official-sounding generic names, like R-slash newsletter and R-slash-Tech underscore news that they noticed popping up sometime last June in 2025. But they were specifically concerned with the post they were seeing

on another brand-new sub called R-slash-World, which Jesse will read a quote about now. This is Ming-compoop wrote this? Yeah. You may have seen posts on R-slash-World appear in your popular feed this week, specifically pertaining to the Los Angeles protests. This is indeed a new sub-reddit. Many of the popular posts on R-slash-World that reach R-slash-all

are posted not only by the subreddit's moderators themselves, but are also explicitly designed to frame the protesters in a bad, light. All of these posts are examples of this. Yeah. And here is a list of posts that they list. They're all now deleted. Thankfully, they've all been archived. They're in the show notes, too, if you want to see them at home. But this set off a wave of armchair detective types. And pretty quickly, a user called Ghost of Beowulf discovered that many of the new subs shared several of the same mods and that one of them,

the one who actually requested control of our world through R slash Reddit request, had the screen name Palantir Admin. And here is that post archived as well, which is called, who else figured out this sub as a sciop? At first you might think it's just someone with a dumb Reddit name trying to be funny

with a name like Palantir admin. But then someone else noticed that another of the suspicious model, accounts, U-S. Virtual Information 3, was also a mod on R-slash Palantir, the real R-slash-Palentere. Then they noticed that all the posts on R-slash world were advertising R-slash newsletter as a satellite sub, even though it was filled only with posts from the two mods, just like R-slash-Greter Los Angeles, even though none of the posts were really getting any engagement, even though views on the viral L.A. protester clips were still reaching R-All all all the time.

Every single one of them was constructed in this sort of way. A couple hundred to a couple thousand members. Almost every single post in the sub is by the mods, all with similar politics and viewpoints across our world, our newsletter, our tech underscore news, are investing, except it's spelled with a cue as like a typo bait type thing, our cryptos instead of our crypto, our options trading, our venture underscore capital,

all in some sort of bizarre configuration, which kept leading back to the Palantir subreddit. And if you want to see them, again, they're all taken down now. But there's archive links in the show notes, which I'll show to Mathis and Jesse. If you guys want to check them out, you can see them. There's some notes. You can go see to some of the weird. These are like the home pages archived.

And they're like, you can see that it's like the same username all the way down with like very generic posts. Yeah, it's weird. Now, it's not lost on me that these are all like tech bro coded. topics and that this could just be like the mouse trap set for dumb crypto bros to get scammed on Reddit. But after looking at all the facts, our OP Ninkum poop has a slightly more sinister theory, which Mathis will share for you now. I believe what we are witnessing is a coordinated effort to subvert existing popular subredits and replace them with propagandized versions which are involved with Palantir. Perhaps this is a reach, but this really does not pass the smell test.

The good news is all the weird mods and a bunch of the weird subs have now been bad. and deleted once this whole thing was reported to Reddit and their suspicious activity and connections had a light shined on them for a second. The bad news is the spider that I've been looking at up on the wall this whole time has disappeared. What kind of spider was it, though? I don't know. It's pretty big.

Like big enough to be scary, but small enough to fit in your ear when you go to sleep. Perfect description of this. Good night, Alex. Perfect description of this spider. And yeah, the bad news is a few of those Reddit's. semi-caught-on and actual people have started posting on there among the clear propaganda and there's no telling how many more palatier cuckoo bird sciop body snatcher replacement reddit groups there are out there or where any of you are in one or whether any of you are in one right now and and that is the

palantier reddit heist that is what happened here that is a little crazy thing that happened it was a little small thing like yeah and does that makes sense that these people would do that Yeah. Very scary. Yeah. Did it fill you with as much existential dread as it did me? I think I'm filled to the brim at this point in my life. I think it kind of just spills over.

Yeah. I mean, at this point I expect major companies and all these crypto bros and all the people who are like, we're going to change the world. I expect them to do this kind of stuff because it's being done in the government right now. Literally tomorrow never does. I mentioned it earlier, but it literally, I don't know if you guys have seen that movie, but that movie hits different today.

That one, that one's the good one. That's the good Pierce one. That's the relevant Pierce James Bond movie if you want to go see one. But yeah, I mean, come on. I know we're all thinking it. And Leonardo DiCaprio agrees, but I'll just say it.

I like Captain Coochie's keyline pie way better than this one. Okay. Yeah. All right. All right. Finally. Where's this leading?

Finally, that. That was, if you've been counting, that was 25. The next one is 26. It's Cornerfest 26. This is the last one. And at the end of all this, we have the final segment, which, if you're keeping score with a master list from the poster, you must now know by process of elimination is called Ruta Senda's Treasure.

I told you there was not going to be a big reveal before we got started. And I was telling the truth about that. However, a small reveal was promised. So here it is. traditionally this segment is reserved for some type of trailer which teases something fun coming up in the next year and this year i'd like to continue that trend though i'd also like to give you one last mystery to chew on as well i was telling mathis before this i still can't believe that thing about the virgin mary in egypt was technically from the same episode we're in right now

but near the beginning of that episode during the segment about that haunted house i mentioned that it was a dream of mine to go boots on the ground and be a detective in my hometown, the LA neighborhood and its giant economy-supporting harbor, San Pedro, California. I'm here to tell you, first of all, that yes, that exact thing is going to happen in a couple months once I have a chance to spend a bunch more time there investigating. But I've already done one day of research there just for this one specific purpose, so get ready for that. And second, here's a little preview, which, if nothing else, I hope you find brings

this whole corner fest to a close. And whether you drew the box in your mind as open or closed, just remember that it's always going to take four 90-degree turns to draw it, whatever that means. Anyway, here we go. This one's dedicated to Agent A.W. Brown. Part one, the office above the sailing shop. So there I am, two weeks ago, on the night before the night before Christmas,

parked with the windows down and the radio on and reaching over and over again into a crumbled white baggy. So greasy it's clear on my passenger seat, pinching fries between my fingers and shoving them one after the other into my gnashing, chomping mouth, greedily breathing as I go through the same noisy hole, stopping only to take another drag from the tasty green jigarette I'm holding out the driver's side window or to soften everything up with a hit of cold, sweet Coke. And that sound of the good crushed ice in one of those nice soft foam cups with the Greek styling. Outside, the sounds of the harbor are outclassed by the constant rolling waves, which slap up against the concrete near where I put my car in the shadow of Warehouse One down by the tugboat Depot.

Warehouse One's made of concrete, too. They couldn't even knock it down when they wanted to. I like that. Reliable. I like to come here when I'm in town for two things, eating cheeseburgers and thinking. I smoke again and my eyes cruise across. And I'm all out of thinking. I'm all out of fucking thinking.

I can't think no more. I smoke again and my eyes cruise across. the gray and purple 5 p.m.C. looking for signs of life. It's about to be 2026. I think of 2020. Whoa. I think of 2021. Still not quite out of the sick when the world was still hiding on my phone where I couldn't quite reach it. I remember seeing the lighthouse, black and white, that sat out on the edge of the breakwater. In college, I used to fantasize about rigging myself up with a camera and live blogging myself walking out to it before anyone could seal out and stop me. I used to dream about it. A dark shape catches my attention as it breaks the surface of the water about halfway

between me and the old palm tree covered officers' buildings on the land across the harbor. The username caught my attention immediately, Ruta Sinda's buried treasure, and I tempered my expectations because buried treasure in San Pedro was more excited than anything had been for a while now. I suddenly remember about the Larry Burger down there, all wrapped up under the fries in the bag with its meaty, fat-drenched sauces all mushed up there, mixing into the bread and the shreddus. I sing without words. The shreddus.

A month later, I come across another post. It's a black and white photo of the extremely ugly but well-intentioned electronic sign they put up in front of my middle school in the quarter century or so since I graduated. I figured I'd let them have that one. But it was the quote that threw me. And for Dean, if you wouldn't mind for these things, I'm going to have them read just this one time, just edit them. reading the quote into the story with no setup.

Like I'll just say my bit and then it'll be a quote from Jesse. And if you want to like so it's one continuous story. And you can add atmosphere if you want to. Totally your call. I don't care if you do or don't. I'm just being really extra with the language here, Dean. So I'll take any extra help I can get. This first quote is for Jesse.

I'm going to stop a couple times and give you guys quotes to read. But yeah, they're just going to be edited into the final thing. March 27th, 2021. Rood Sopolda-Supolvada-Dodson Middle School. From the riddle and one of its theories, the gold treasure chest was found by using the center point of the three Dodson residents locations. For jewelry treasure chest, from the riddle, it is speculated the lighthouses and old St.

Peter's church locations have something to do with the location. I ash the grass out the window because it feels good, but after four seconds I get too nervous, open the door and stamp it out. Four seconds after I shut the door, the sea lion bird dolphin thing appears again in a small spray of white, slightly closer than it did before. All I knew about Ruta Sinda-Supovita-Dotson at the time was that she was one of the major benevolent founding forces which led to the town being as successive of us thing as it is today, and she owned a lot of the land which much of the town was built on, and she funneled money into all kinds of admirable causes, which is what they told us at school. The bond is,

smashed to one side against the rapper. And the burger is burnt in that perfect trashy way you get at a spot like Larry's, with a menu that has the letters you push into it by hand. In Southern California, the best diner burgers are meaty, but also refreshing like a salad. I think back. Okay, this next bit is for Mathis to read, but again, just flows right in. From the Sardine on Pacific, March 23rd, 2021. 593, West 11th Street.

One of the two treasure chests were found in the basement in the basement in the late 1980s, a large box with gold coins, bullion, ingots, bars. After spending a few years, he discovered this was the center point of the three Dodson residence locations when he observed some molding on the part of the house similar to the pattern to the Dodson residence. Coincidentally, once the treasure was found in the late 1980s, the house became haunted by not one but two ghosts, a murder to seaman who possibly helped J.G. Damon put the treasure there and Damon himself. The now A haunted house became known as the Hernandez house. After their haunting stopped and the basement was filled with concrete and dirt, the house remains

with a quaint and modest modern look. I wasn't sure who I imagined this person was, but I had to be sure they weren't just crazy or having fun before I followed the account. They knew too much of the same things as me. I think of the poor kid we found 10 years back who said he was the fastest dancer alive. Hundreds and hundreds of videos and no viewers. I mentioned him on my video game show and the strange way he took it was like the Federation breaking prime directive and being mistaken for some sort of God.

I saw the cracks in his mind. It was crushed by my own self-awareness. I swore I'd never do that to someone again. Pause story for the second. Hi, everyone. To say your curiosity just for a second, I'm going to show them a link to this guy's page. You can find him for yourself if you really want to,

but I don't care to make it particularly easy for anyone. So please don't say his name. But if you guys want to just have a look real quick and let the audience... I know who you're talking about. I know. I just want to give you. I'm aware of who this is. I just want to give you guys a sense.

I just want to give you guys a sense. Oh, man. You shouted this dude out? Yeah, I did. And then he heard it. What made you think that was the smart move? Youth. Naivete.

Also, you didn't notice that was the fucking ghost house from the first story that I told. Is where the treasure was located at the center of these three houses. So that's pretty crazy. Anyway, unpause the story. Sitting there in the car two weeks ago, I think I made the right choice starting with the haunted house angle. I think it'll pay off best that way when I reveal its part in the detective story. Inside my mouth, I enjoy the sensation of not being able to distinguish between pieces of lettuce

and pieces of onion. It's the mix of things that works for me. Now that I finish the soda, which always goes a little too fast for me, I can ash it over the ice, so I take another big long drag and blow it out across the increasingly scary, empty lot. My iPhone sends how much I feel by Ambrosia through the Bluetooth. In the ocean, I think I see a nose. Here is another quote for Jesse.

April 10, 2023. Does a church that has moved to four different locations in San Pedro have something to do with Rundsinda's buried treasure? Research the four locations they have been since... Excuse me. Research the four locations they have been since the church was built in 1883. The first was near Rudisnda's house. The third location near Rudisnda's burial mausoleum.

The fourth location of the church near the school named after her. Is that a connection? Does two years without a follow make me a stalker? What if he finds out I have a podcast before I want him to? I asked my sister to do a drive-by of the mausoleum last week because I'd heard rumors that it was close to the public temporarily. It isn't. For a moment, I dwell on whether or not,

fry thickness has any bearing on the rate at which you should plunge French fries into your still chewing burger-filled mouth to achieve maximum sensory pleasure. I think yes. Larry's fries are thick as fucking celery stalks. I make note of the church locations in my phone notes and in a moment of self-awareness, I feel like a crazy person, but no, I'm not crazy. Yeah, I think it's a sea lion, though I don't know that's weird for this hour. I'm not crazy.

It's the night that's crazy. It's the fucking mysteries that are crazy. weed again, weed again, cheeseburger, weed again. Here's another one for Mathis. July 30th, 2025. Routisinda's mystery, the lost San Pedro treasures. Coming August 2025,

are you ready to read the book about a wealthy Mexican-American philanthropist who helped develop the port town of San Pedro leaving not one, but two treasure chest behind? Routa Sopoldesenda, Florentia, Sipulveda, Dodson, 18, So there I am two weeks ago and the song's over and the burger's all done and I picked all the little bits off my steering wheel and my clutch and the Grinch sticks out and the Pelican thing's gone. And even though the sun's gone down and the seas gone black, I'm still just sitting here on the night before the night before Christmas parked with the windows down and the radio on.

And even if I turn out to be the world's shittiest detective who solves nothing and accidentally starts a small brief fire, at least I got to come down and have Larry's in my dirty little secret spot. I reached down and grabbed the surprisingly large black hardcover on the passenger seat, and I stick it down between the seats where I put my records when I don't want them bent. As I drive up out of the harbor and back onto 22nd Street to stop by the 7-Eleven by the Bike Palace on my way out of town, I see the apartment above the always closed sailing shop. When I was young and my brain was hurting, I'd drive around town to make myself feel better. I'd always come down this way last, and imagine that little spot was my detective office, and that I was down here being mysterious because I was always at least half,

on the case, chasing clues, connecting dots, and telling stories. Here's a last quote from Jesse. You can go. August 20th, 2025. The stranger told me at a wedding reception once when I was a teenager that the more people I told about the treasure, the more of a chance someone else would find it. I've been selective about who I talked to about it since. The end.

Anyway, that's it. After 10,000 years. Are you in treasure hunting? Yeah. After 10,000 years, Cornerfest, 26. is done. More on this storyline later. If you want to buy the book and search for Rudasind's lost treasure yourself, the link is in the show

notes. If you're a sick puppy who wants to drive far for a burger just as good as the one that is exactly like it right next to you, you know the kind I mean with Mexican food, fried zucchini, that type of thing. Larry's hamburgers, Yelp also in the show notes, which has a healthy balance of one star

and five star reviews in a way that genuinely brings me peace. Thank you for listening. Patreon.com slash shliminati pod. Patreon.com slashulminati pod. Patreon.com slash chumelipod. Mathis, my dude, take me out. That's it. That's everything. Thank you guys so much for listening. We'll be doing a Minnesota Patreon.com like you said, we'll see you guys next week with a brand new episode away from Cornerfestus. Alex takes a well-deserved break. Fantastic job, Alex. Four weeks

of hard work, finally done. I hope you get some rest. I'm to sleep for a thousand years. We'll see you next week. We'll see you next week, everybody. Goodbye. Bye.