Panic World - Cicada 3301: The internet puzzle that might’ve been a psyop

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

In 2012, a strange message appeared on 4chan: “We are looking for highly intelligent individuals….” What followed became one of the internet’s most mysterious puzzles: Cicada 3301. Players uncovered hidden codes, real-world locations, encrypted files, and even phone numbers across the globe. Some believed it was a secret society. Others thought it was a CIA recruitment tool. Maybe the Illuminati. Or at least, very organized teens. So what was Cicada 3301 really? And could something like this even exist on today’s internet? Baths joins us to try to get to the bottom of it. Our guest Baths is a musician. You can find his work and tour dates here, or on streaming services like Apple and Spotify.  Sponsors If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at https://www.mintmobile.com/courier Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our exclusive Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am ready to rock, I think. All right. Will. What's like your favorite mystery? Hmm. I mean, I have a simple one that I've been thinking about lately, which is literally just how a supermarket works. Fascinating.

How they know how to keep everything on lock, because it kind of terrifies me to think about it too much. I once had a buddy who was working for like a large shipping and logistics firm that dealt with supermarkets, and he was doing data for them. And he told me that he's exactly what I'm talking about that terrifies me. He discovered something horrifying, which was that they don't have any data. They actually didn't know.

This was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but he was like, yeah, it was crazy. We assumed they would know like, oh, yeah, this supermarket ordered 200 cartons of eggs, and they received 200 cartons of eggs. And it's like, no, no, no. It's way crazier than that. I mean, because that's exactly where I'm coming from. It's like, I thought that was all on lock everywhere. No.

No one knows anything that's going on. My entire family owned supermarket chains and all of them were idiots. And this doesn't surprise me at all. And it's also why there was a bunch of supermarket scans because it's really easy to fudge inventory. So you should be worried. It's something that stresses me out when I think about it too much where I'm just like, from my personal perspective, being a person who very like ADHD locked into like having a lot of the same food a lot because it's kind of like a safety zone for me to not have to overthink cooking or anything like that. And so I buy a lot

of one thing at one time and then I get stressed out that like do they know that? Does the supermarket know that I just sold them out of whatever this thing is and are they going to get it back soon enough for when I need it again? You know what I mean? There was that story about Target that accidentally predicted a woman was pregnant before she knew based on her shopping purchases like her shopping history that's crazy yeah that makes sense that can't happen totally crazy yeah yeah for my understanding a lot of that happens at like the rewards program level that's where like the real data stuff is happening anyways the reason i ask about your favorite mysteries because today we're going to be talking about a mystery we're going to be talking about um okay i got to be really careful uh grant and i did not have time to discuss

this but like there's a section of our audience that if we We say ARG will be so blindly angry. And we have gotten like many, many comments begging us to stop using this term, ARG or alternate reality game. In fact, there was like a comment on an episode of ours recently that was like, listen to this for an hour. And at no point did they explain how this was an ARG. And the first line in our outline today is that this is an ARG.

And I'm going to say, I don't know if anyone listening has. has any differing thoughts about whether or not this counts in energy. I don't care and I don't want to hear it. And I don't ever want to hear about it ever again. So I'm going to use different euphemisms for ARG instead. But specifically what we're going to be talking about today is Cicada 3301. And who was behind this 4chan game? A secret organization, the Illuminati, the CIA, very organized teenagers.

My name is Ryan Broderick, joining me as always. This is our producer Grant Irving, who is playing in ARG. He's a big fan of ARGs. You can talk to him about ARGs. This is Panic World and show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And with us today is Will, better known as Baths, I have to say, I saw you at Babies All Right, probably two years ago now. It was unbelievable. Great, great show.

I'm a big fan. Thank you very much. Grant was also there. Yeah. Grant. Yeah, yeah. And not because we hang out. We can't stand each other.

We were like, oh, fuck. We're accidentally in a room together. We bumped into each other. Yeah, and I didn't really recognize him because like I never see the lower half of his body. We only talk via Zoom. What is who are you? Like what is this? I was like, who is?

Why you talk to me? I had to make a portrait around myself. So I could be comfortable talking. Oh, right. But Will, um, have you played any ARGs before? What I want to say is yes, because I am such a games person and I have tried so many different things that my brain is telling me I probably have. but I don't know what you're talking about. So I can't say it with full certainty.

Okay, well, I'm going to show you something here. And you can tell me if you have ever seen this before. This is sort of the beginning of our story today. This would be how most players encounter this. So it's a screenshot that reads, hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals to find them. We have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image.

Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting. the few that will make it all the way through good luck 3301 have you ever seen this before i have never seen this before okay fun fact i think i have seen this before and i completely forgot about it until it came time to put this episode together but this was first posted on a website called 4chan uh in 2020 so tell me tell me about your experiences with 4chan i have a very specific experience with 4chan that i don't think was the actual website i think there was like a different alternate or fake version of it that was a different number like three chan or two chan or something

like that that hosted muscular gay illustration art okay as like a thread as like a reddit type thing and humans or like furries both all of it like it was like it was subdivided into all the different categories or whatever and so i never frequented the actual four chan website i frequented this thing that was like similar to it and that I heard people I think associated with it but it wasn't it was just for like horny horny illustrations i googled muscular gay art 4chan and uh nothing immediately came up uh that sounds like that but now i mean is it wasn't forchan it was a different site right and whatever this website is that i was on it was like somebody kind of i think cheekily making something that was like, oh, let's put Chan in the title so people like associate it.

I see. That makes sense. And yes, you are right. There was like a lot of these kind of like 4chan derivatives, 4chan variants flying around in the 2000s. So Cigata 330 was written about by the Sydney Herald who talked to someone who first saw the message. A guy named Joel Erickson, who was a Swedish computer analyst in his mid-30s. And the Harold writes, a self-confessed IT security freak and a skilled cryptographer. Erickson's interest was immediately peaked.

This was, he knew, an example of digital stenography, the concealment of secret information within a digital file. It is ultimately a battle of the brains, he says, and I have always had a hard time resisting the challenge. Is this something, like, do you know people like this? Is this something that you would sort of do? Is this how you would react to kind of a weird thing you saw on the internet? Would you dig deeper?

No, but I have a way of relating to this that's really specific, where it's like, that type of shit like that type of puzzle where it immediately is like you need to be thinking so far outside of the box that it's next to impossible to solve it type of thing i've never been good at that i like puzzles but i like where it's like contained within the puzzle format i have friends who created a lot of games as arcane kids that was their name okay and they made this game a while ago that it was like a horny sonic game kind of like a dating sim but it wasn't and there was a sonic inflation adventure it might have been like the really crazy one the one were like shadow the headshot goes to court i think so it was like a new it was like a new grounds game yeah yeah or no no no no no no new grounds are you talk about the murder mystery on the train one they did for sonics anniversary like the official one no okay way before that and it was 3d and it was hyper ind and it and it was like let me You horny Sonic 3D game dating sim.

I'm mentioning this for a specific reason, though. I have to explain why I'm mentioning this, because it's not even about all that. It's about the fact that to solve certain things in it, to get like 100%, you know, to get all the collectibles in it, there were aspects to playing that game that I couldn't even fath them, where there was a means of like you had to quit the game,

delete one file within the framework of all the files they had in the game, and then reset it and then reload the game. And then it gave you access to the final collectible. Oh, like dokie dokey literature club. Exactly. Shit like that. Yeah. So like the first time I'd ever experienced the fact that like a puzzle can be like that

in a computer, I was like, that's crazy. I never in a million years would have thought of that type of shit. And so you telling me about this, I'm kind of like, it seems like that tier of thing and that's exactly the thing that I would never interact with where I would be like, I see that, no fucking way because I can't think that hard. Totally. Totally. There was a moment of like looking into Sonic's eyes for so long that they start to congeal and coalesce.

Yeah. It was like the coolest thing I'd ever seen. He doesn't have the thing in the middle. He doesn't have like his eyes are just one big eye. Yes. Except for in the live action movies where they gave him like proper eyes. So back to our man Erickson here. He tries cracking this code.

and he realizes that it's a Caesarian cipher. Have you ever heard of this? I've never heard of this before. Okay. No. I know it's Cesarian section. That's all I know. I'm assuming it's something you've got to cut and go deeper, do it by hand.

So it's based off Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence, actually. And it replaces characters by a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. So Erickson needed to know about this technique and he needed to know a bit of history. He figures out that there's a web. address buried in the images code and I'm going to share my screen here and show you what the image looks like. Whoops, just decoys this way. It looks like you can't guess how to get the message out and it's a picture of a brown and yellow duck. So it's like a troll basically. It's like you didn't it's like that movie from was it the snowman or whatever, uh, Mr. Policeman. You know what I'm talking about?

You couldn't find all the clues or whatever it was. Or Zodiac or any. Yeah. It's that horrible movie The Snowman that has a fast bender. Yeah, fastbender. And it has a poster. It's Mr. Police. You could have saved her. I gave you all the clues.

But in this case, it's a duck. Yeah. So Erickson is realizing that this is going to be a pretty elaborate puzzle. And he and a bunch of other people across the internet are, you know, trying to solve it, try to figure out who's behind this elaborate project. And we're going to get back to them in just a second.

Because one thing that made this game different. was that it wasn't viral marketing. Sure. In the 2000s, there were a lot of people who were realizing that they could use the internet to sort of tell stories and play games and ways that weren't possible before. We've done previous episodes about like the Blair Witch Project and sort of how that spread online. But one of the earlier examples of this around that time was also the movie AI.

Did you ever see Stevens Spielberg? Hell yeah. I think it's one of my favorites, actually. I love that movie to death. I think the ending is like truly. beautiful. It's like a great, it's great movie. So part of the promotion for that movie, the studio hired a team to create an elaborate cross-media mystery in 2000. Slate writes at the time in the trailer for the forthcoming Steven Spielberg Stanley Kubrick movie.

If you look at the notches on the word summer 2001 at the end, they form a phone number. Call that number and you start down an enormous convoluted path of cross-references, puzzles, and red herrings. A science fiction murder mystery that involves email, faxes, voicemail messages, and at least 15 distinct websites. I don't know why you would do that for that movie. That's wild. Yeah. I mean, I understand that kind of... You get a free ticket at the end or like, what the fuck?

It would bring you to a rally for a fictitious anti-robot organization that were being held in New York, L.A. and Chicago. Yeah. Classic. Pretty cool. I mean, I totally get why you would do that for a movie like Cloverfield. I don't totally get why you do that for a movie for, you know, AI. and they were fun. Like they were sort of seen as like innocent and cheeky.

A few years later, another one got dropped called I Love Bees for the video game Halo 2. Did you ever play any of the Halo games? I played a bit of them through a friend, but I never had an Xbox and most of my friends didn't. So I just, it missed me. But I was talking about Marathon a second ago. That's the new game from Bungy. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

I don't know how to explain this, but like Xbox to me was like too masculine. of a of like to own as a teenage boy like I wasn't that kind of one is masculine not even the system like I wasn't I wasn't the chain ball necklace kind of teen boy in the 2000s and all of those guys the guys who look like like Tony Sopranos son like I wasn't those kids so I didn't have an Xbox I had a GameCube or I had a PlayStation 2 right I was I was placed we were a PlayStation household even from the first system I never had an N64 We were PlayStation. And so like my Mario was Spiro.

Like that's what I grew up on. You know what I mean? I really liked crock. Croc was, have you been back to it? I just remember being very hard. It is the worst controls that have ever existed in the history of video games. It's crazy. I spent like a year playing the first level of crock.

And that was like because it was just too hard to do. Based off of the sonic conversation when you said it was very hard, I got concerned that you. you are being horny. No. No. Very difficult. Very difficult.

Oh, yeah. So for the I Love Bees Halo 2 promotion, there's a bunch of emphasis on like basically using the internet to like let people find in location events. And they were like playing recordings from pay phones. Like pretty cool. I actually just saw like a viral marketing thing the other day about like a game that could be played via existing pay phones. Like you could call.

Yeah, I saw someone on like Twitter or something like talking about like, we're going to set up this thing where you could call a toll free number on a payphone and it would like capture the flag but with like the pay phones left in cities, which I thought was like a cool idea. That is cool. Yeah. In 2005, we get a non-promotional version of an ARG perplex city. It's conceived and run by the Beast player and Garbage Day reader Adrian Hahn who will absolutely be messaging me about our inaccurate discussion of ARGs. He is the leader of the section of our audience that gets bad at us every single time. I think the only way to sort of rectify this is it will eventually have to have Adrian on to talk to him about it because God, does he have a lot of points that we screw this up a lot. So funding comes from selling cards with puzzles on them, the winner who doesn't get to the end until 2007 gets $200,000.

Not every, yeah, pretty good amount of money for that. Not every puzzle was necessary to win. And some were so hard they weren't solved until 2020. Jesus Christ. We also at this time period start to see like Trent Rezner experimenting with ARGs, which you know, makes total sense. Like there's like a leaked USB drive that he's like leaving in bathrooms that like people can find.

I love this stuff. Like I, I never did geocaching. Did you ever do geocaching? My entire experience with everything you're talking about is like to a boundary, like to a certain level that I know I was interested in. But then the tier of thinking that I think a lot of these took was like a barrier to entry for me where like i got really into the viral campaign for the movie the ring when it was happening where there was like a bunch of weird cryptic messages online and you could on the website kind of

find secret roots through it but it wasn't like a game like you're describing it didn't kind of expand outward beyond that it was just kind of fun secrets i like that that's cool i could put in minimal amount of like layperson effort and kind of find some secrets out but when it started becoming really difficult. It was too much. Geocaching I did do for a little bit because, again, there wasn't like a skill barrier, an intelligence barrier to it. It was just like, go to this spot and then snoop around a little bit and you'll find something. And so that was really fun for me. But those things that you're talking about were like a little too, a little too smart for me, a little too nerve-wracking and intense. So I'm really curious about it.

I loved reading about that stuff, but I sort of ignored most of it. And I feel like, you know, If we're talking about the internet sort of changing your behavior or making you do stuff in real life, I kind of came through it through like finding bands on the internet and then going to see them or going to comic conventions and like knowing what everyone's like costumes were. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like it wasn't until Pokemon Go that those two worlds from me collided and I was like, cool, like I could wrap my head around this. Yeah. And that was like the most public version of that ever. You know what I mean? That was like worldwide craziness.

I think there was like a brief thing where I did plank, I think. I plank twice. Did you plank? You playing twice? I, um, fun, fun Ryan lore for everybody. I, um, I did a meme like planking at the time called hadukening, where you would jump and look like you're doing a hadukin from street fighter. Yeah.

And it got photo, like getting the photo. of it. Yeah, you like you freeze frame, right? Yeah. And I got, um, reached out to by a Japanese news agency that sent a team to New York to interview me about how I as a guyjin had heard about this meeting. And then they sent me a CD-ROM and I have somewhere that has my interview on it. And I've been dubbed in Japanese and they even have the like variety show thing where there's like an old Japanese guy in the corner of the screen going like like commenting on you as you do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. making comments. Oh my God.

Yeah, it's like one of my most precious moments. Like, and they just like couldn't wrap their heads around that like white people in America were doing this meme that was popular on Japanese social media. Yeah. Yeah. But all of that cross pollinates now where it's like any meme pops up anywhere in the world

and it's like everybody sees it everywhere all at once. Yeah. Different. Very different. I, I spent a challenge, but I did that for personal reasons. I didn't film it.

Oh. You just, okay, you just did it to do it. I did it. it. I ice bucket challenge, but I was in my office and we couldn't, it was all carpeting, so we couldn't do it that way. So they're like, how are we going to do it? And so I had two guys pick me up by my legs and dunk my head down. Oh my God. Yeah, we did a, I got, that's water

boarding. Yeah, they water board. They basically water water water. I got, I got really into the ice bucket challenge for a very, personal is not the right word, but like selfish reason that it was like, getting a bunch of uncles wet, like all over the place. It was just like older dad type men. You did the wet uncle challenge? No, basically just that it was like men that I find hot. Oh, I see. Of a certain age and demographic who like run firehouses or printing supply companies getting wet on camera.

Oh. And it was just like, this is hot. And they're doing it everywhere. And so I was like, I'm going to read into it. And I like looked into it. more and found videos with like a hundred views of like New Jersey uncles being like, I'm doing this for my son. And I was like, this is so hot and so weird that I'm like, really into this.

I had never, I had never considered. Yes. Gay brains go so far. Yeah. Reaches of the universe. That's amazing. That was something that I locked into. I was like, this is tight.

Okay. Well, we're, I'm so happy for you. We're going to, we're going to find a way to loop that back into the actual topic of today's episode after a word from our sponsors, whoever is brave enough to put their ad on this episode. Wet hot uncles. Yeah, wet hot uncles. Hi, Grant, podcast, this one you're listening to, other guy.

I was talking to my therapist. And don't worry, this is not an ad for a therapy app or anything like that. And I was describing that day to day now in my mid-30s, I'm much happier. My days are generally pretty pretty pretty. pleasant. I experience joy and I'm not debilitated by anxiety. But I don't have the same lust for life that I had when I was younger. Like all the excitement and life is about to start. And she said, what if we focus on like what does bring you joy now and what does give you a sense of excitement for the future? And I said, thinking about how much money my loved ones can save

using MintMobile just makes me feel like I'm 25 again. time I get to tell people stop overpaying for wireless just because that's how it's always been. Mint exists purely to fix that. I feel that lust for life return. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you with premium wires plans starting at 15 bucks a month. That's as much as I spend in New York on coffee and I'm only slightly exaggerating. All plans come with high speed data, an unlimited talk, and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. We love 5G here at Courier. Bring your own phone and number so that way everyone can still follow you and track all your movements. Activate with ESIM in minutes and start saving immediately.

No long-term contracts, no hassle. Ditch overpriced wireless and get three months a premium wireless service from MintMobil for 15 bucks a month. Wow. And my therapist said, thank you so much for telling me this, not because I particularly care about how that brings joy back to your life, but because I've been trying to get off big wireless carriers for forever. And she said, but grant,

Where do I go? And I said, if you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at Mintmobile.com slash courier. That's mintmobile.com slash courier. Offerun payments of $45 for three months, five gigabyte plans required equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first three months only than full price plans options available. Taxes and fees, see extra.

See MintMobile for details. Okay, so four years after sort of the, the peak of these kind of ARGs, we get Cicada 3301. And it doesn't tie into a movie. It doesn't really tie into any kind of mystery that people are aware of. And this guy Erickson thought he had cracked the code, but he receives a picture of a duck that's basically taunting him. He decides he's going to keep playing.

And he learns that the duck was another clue. That is sort of what I suspected. Did you? Sort of. Yes. Just seeing it, I was like, this doesn't seem like a gate or like a brick wall. This seems like an entry point. So he runs the duck through a decryption software, which takes him to a Reddit link. And then he realizes that there's like a pattern here.

Cicadas, the little bugs, they only emerge on every prime number of a year. So it's 13 or 17. And that's so they don't synchronize the life cycle of their predators. And that for Erickson was like a big clue. Sorry, that's a real world thing you just said to me. Yes. Those noisy little bugs appear only on prime number a year intervals. All right.

So for Erickson, that was sort of a big breakthrough moment, not the stupid shit I just said, but like his thing. And so basically the Sydney Morning Herald rides down telephone lines out to several physical locations around the globe. and into uncharted areas of the dark net. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy, and classical music, and interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult. And it's all come in handy as well as an understanding of my numeralogy. So this is what this game is starting to like incorporate. It's starting to pull all these different threads together.

And basically he's the only one. He's the only one going through this now or there's people all over the world trying to crack it. And just for narrative sake, we're going to be following his, journey. The Sydney Herald did a really good job of capturing it and they talk about how the game just gets more and more elaborate as people play it. There is like a character that gets kind of introduced, a woman known as Wind from Michigan and she starts popping up on message boards putting out false clues. Oh. Yeah. Okay. New roadblock. And then there's like a very big plot twist and all of this, which is that someone claims to be an ex-member of the group running this game.

And they are trying to like mess with people, but they're also like trying to tell people what's going on. And so basically, Cicada, this guy says, was a left-hand path religion that was disguising itself as like a scientific organization. And they were sort of building out this idea of like a shadowy government that was like, this is all part of the game. So this is like kind of confusing. to say, but basically like, there's sort of building out more and more lore. And this person is claiming that there's like a dangerous organization that's been running this whole thing. Feels very Q and on to me actually.

Yeah. Things used to be fun. Yeah. But this was all fun, actually. Did it also like start to obfuscate? Like, was it so cluttered with like bad actors like that? Like sort of changing things up and putting false clues in that the game itself kind of got worse to play?

It created more of a sense of community. And it starts taking. over more and more of the player's lives, including Erickson, who's deep in the game and discovered a phone number. Okay. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final dot JPEG image 3301. Is one of them?

You will have to find the other two. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye. Well, at least that one makes total sense to me about what the next step is. That's cool. Yeah, it leads to a website that gives GPS coordinates once you kind of put all those numbers together. And then there's a countdown clock.

And once the countdown reached zero, it showed 14 GPS coordinates around the world with locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii, and Sydney. Jesus Christ. This was huge. It was proof that it wasn't just someone in a basement messing with people, but like an actual, some kind of organization. And so they are trying to figure out the final clues. And there were a couple that are interesting here. So they found a new code that used William Gibson's Agrippa, a book of the dead as a cipher. It's a poem that, do you know about this?

No, but I know William S. Gibson. Yeah. So a grip, a book of the dead. it's an infamous poem that it was only meant to be read once and then destroy itself. Very Gibson. Right. And that's the cipher? How the fuck?

So it was only published on a three and a half inch floppy disk and it was programmed to erase itself after you read it. Which by the way, like, that would be such cool merch. Oh, yeah. That would be so cool to like do something like that. Anything that is like super temporary or transient or whatever I've always thought is cool. just where it's like you're doing something specifically for one purpose only and then it disappears. Yeah. It would be cool.

Like if, yeah, I am not a professional touring musician, but perhaps someone who is, it would be cool to make a shirt that you had to buy at the beginning of the show. And then as you sweat during the show, it would destroy the shirt. That's like, like edible underwear. Yeah. Like edible underwear, exactly. Or you could just sell edible underwear. Yeah.

Yeah. Or maybe like a big bucket of cold water pours down. Yeah. Yeah. And the audience free for uncles. Wet uncles. Exactly. So,

Love that. Gibson's idea for a totally fungible poem or non fungible, I guess it would be totally non fungible poem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got kind of screwed up. Someone did record it and it has been read live by Pend Gillette, obviously. fucking sheriff

of the no fun police pendulum um so uh from here though the uh cicada players they start to find like QR codes on lamp posts which send them to a tour site

are you familiar with tour like T-O-R? Yeah why am I familiar with tour? So a tour browser is how you access onion sites which are what the dark web is Are you familiar with any of this? Like vaguely.

Like I think that's how I know about it is somebody mentioned it to me in passing like this. So basically. I was just like, why is it sitting in the back of my head? Why do I know what that is? I once used it to access the Silk Road to buy acid with Bitcoin for a Vice Magazine article I was working on in the 2010. Incredibly specific reason. And I love that.

Dear FBI listening, I never received my acid and I was refunded. Fungible. Yeah. So a tour browser is. is a VPN effect essentially, but it's made to access what are called dot onion sites. So instead of dot com, it would be dot onion. And it's usually like a very encrypted address. And those websites are what you refer to as the dark web.

So like, and there are like dark web onion versions of all kinds of popular services. For our listeners, we have a previous episode all about the dark web. You can go check out in our archive. So Erickson gets to the QR codes on the Lampost, gets to the tour site, and he finds a message that reads, we want the best, not the followers. And only the first people. So Erickson was too late. Only the very first people to access the tour site were emailed directly.

Whoa. Yeah. And so for- Oh, bummer for him. Yeah. He called it an anti-climax. And he said that he was too late to register. his email at the tour, Hidden Service.

And he said that if his sleep-wake cycle had been different, I believe I would have been among the first. And so all the cicadas go underground again, and then they reemerge a year later. And we will finish our story about what happens after they reemerge. After a word from our sponsors, The Silk Road, a great place to buy drugs and guns and tinned food. This might be the only one that I don't know that we're going to get away with.

We'll see. The Silk Road. The creator of it was just released from prison, finally. Oh, my God. I think so, right? Let me just double check that. I want to make sure my... Oh, yeah.

Is he still in jail? I think he's still in jail. Is he new Secretary of Defense or whatever? Is he replacing Christine? Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. The Silk Road, whose creator, Ross Ulbric, was pardoned by Donald Trump in January, 2025. So he's out, baby.

Justice for Ross. I don't think you should have gone to jail for as long as he did. It emerged on, it first emerged in 2012, Grant. Wait. On 4chan, yeah. Oh, okay. So now we're a year later. It emerges again.

It will emerge a third time in 2014, but we'll get there. So in 2013, a message is posted to B and X. So B is 4chan's random board and X is their paranormal board. So that's like the spooky scary one. Cool. And the message reads, Hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues.

The first clue is hidden within this image. Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301. And this puzzle was different. We're not going to go super deep into it, but basically you had to do a lot more to kind of unpack what was in there.

And there was like a questionnaire that came along with it. And the questions included like questions like there is no true. Like they're not really even questions. I don't know how to describe this really. It's like it's like really strange. It's stuff that reads like there is no truth. What you are is more important than what you do. You cannot step into the same river twice.

Observation changes the thing being observed. This sentence is false. They're closer to like puzzles or riddles. Yeah, it sounds like a strange, like another vetting process, like another thing that like you have to figure this out versus just asking. Exactly. And then there were like essay questions involved as well. Like one. I know.

What is this? The new SATs. Boo. One of the essay questions was name similarities between the concept and reality of the news feed on Facebook. Jesus Christ. So not a game you want to play? This doesn't sound fun to you. That's where I'm coming from philosophically with all this.

It's just like, damn, dude, no, I just want to have a good time. This is my problem with a lot of this stuff, though. I mean, I feel like Slender Man kind of ended up this way too. Like, a lot of these things are like, they're fun and they're interesting. And then everyone's like, we should keep doing it. And then it gets dumber and worse and weirder. Yeah. And like hits like an academia ball or something like that where it just becomes so much more about like,

are you a good writer versus like are you having a good time and are you solving puzzles and stuff? I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying other than like I know how much it doesn't appeal to me, which is why I'm super excited to hear where it ends up going. Well, what ends up happening, the group goes kind of under again and resurfaces in 2014. There are a bunch of fakes on 4chan flying around, obviously. but this time the puzzle starts with the Twitter account that was used for the 2013 puzzle. Okay. I think it's like a sign of the times that they're not on 4chan anymore by 2014.

Yeah. Like things weren't really fun there anymore. Yeah. Happen on 4chan in 2014. Well, it's interesting. This is pre-Gamergate, but I think people forget that even before Gamergate, by this point, 4chan was getting pretty gnarly. It was a pretty nasty place to be.

So they're on Twitter this time and the final puzzle gets some people an invitation to like a club, but everyone else gets a bunch of elaborately encrypted files called the Liber Primus. And a lot of these, yeah. Sorry, did it call itself the final puzzle or is this just sort of the last one that showed up? I think it's just the last one that showed up. I don't think there was like any sort of like, this is over. This is going to end. A lot of the encrypted puzzles that they released have not actually been solved even today, which is interesting.

Yeah. And then since the end of the 2014 puzzle, they've basically been totally dormant. There were messages in 2015. I guess the group behind it responded to news articles that blamed them for a hack of Planned Parenthood. Whoa. I'm assuming they were like, it wasn't us. Oh, you think that they would ever be that direct about anything? I'm sure they're like, search your soul. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think the. you in your head is the you in real life. The explosive in the hand. It's not the explosive on the duck. So their official statement at the time to the LA Times was, we've noticed quite a lot of attention has been diverted to a supposedly malicious

organization known as Planned Parenthood. The actions of this federation are not seen as right in the eyes of the public. So here we are the social justice warriors, which like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know any sense, Ryan. It's also kind of unclear, like, exactly how affiliated these guys were with all of this. Because, like, it's a hacker group that goes by 3301, and they allegedly hacked into Planned Parenthood's website because it was extremely outdated and broken. And then they were all weird about why they did it.

This is something that I think was happening a lot in the 2010s. And this is, you could even argue, happened with, like, Wikilinks and QAnon, which is, like, once you create a piece of, internet culture, there's no one in charge of it and there's not really a good way to stop anyone from just taking it and doing whatever they want with it, which is exciting, but it's also like extremely chaotic. Yeah. It's like deregulated or whatever to the point where like it becomes smoking mirrors all the time. You never know what's happening, you know.

I'm sure I'll be told if I'm wrong about this. But I think especially in an ARG space, you're working, you know, in such fuzzy. spaces already. Like you're you're sort of looking for clues and it's all very conspiratorial that I think it's very easy to get turned around or to have people take over a project and not realize it and that, you know, something has changed. Like, there's a final message that is posted by the group in 2016. It's uploaded to a website made by the people who solved one of the old puzzles. The message reads, hello, the path lies empty. Epiphany seeks the devoted. Libra Primus is the way. Its words are the map. Their meaning is the road and their numbers are the direction. Seek and you will be found. Good luck. 3301.

I feel like these guys are like, this is like some steampunk shit. I feel like this is just like this is just getting like like off the top like from the first message nobody thought to themselves like wait. Are these guys cool? Right. This is like the kind of thing that like this is the kind of thing like a guy would say. say to you when you beat him at Magic the Gathering at like a hobby shop. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He'd be like, Libro Primus is the way. And he's like, oh, boy. And then he's like, in his mind, like, I got that guy and everybody else in the room is like, man, right. We're going to go get lunch.

So who do you, based on what you've heard today, like, who do you think was, was behind all of this? I mean, like, the way I have been absorbing this story, I have not put a person to, to anything. Like it's so vague to me behind the veil and that's how these always seem. So I have no clue. No clue. Well, William S. Gibson. Uh, you're right. Fuck. Well done well. Wait. Shut up. No. No. No. I was like no fucking wait. You got me so excited. No, it was actually done by uh, uh, I was gonna make a a joke about like Deloitte or like some of like marketing firm. But basically, uh, one of the most

popular theories about who was behind it appeared immediately. And it was sort of the most, one of the most popular ones. Okay. Which was that it was a headhunting exercise for the secret service. Whoa. I, I can't imagine like any actual adult with a job would think that. But like, a lot of people on 4chan thought that. The idea of being that was headhunting for people who were good enough to figure it out, that they were like, oh, we have to get rid of these people? I know. I think 4chan thought the Secret Service was doing like a last Starfighter, you know, where it's like if you can like solve the puzzle, you get to join the Secret Service.

Okay. Which like there's easier ways to get people to join. Yeah. You can just join the secret service. Yeah. But then you don't get the sharpest minds who have your lives. Also, my understanding is like it's fairly easy to join the Secret Service actually. It's much harder to join like the CIA or something.

But like you can just apply for the Secret Service. Full full disclosure. I don't really know the difference. Between the CIA and the Secret Service. Secret Service, you know. Are they the ones like on the ground? Are they boots on the ground? They're the ones following the president around.

Okay. And then the CIA are the ones that are, well, they're very busy right now. And Iran and Venezuela and Greenland and Canada and Cuba and yeah. Anyway. So their idea, though. that this was a last starfighter for the Secret Service isn't totally crazy, I should say, because in 1942, there was a crossword puzzle that appeared in the pages of the Daily Telegraph in the UK.

And it was so complicated. And, like, people couldn't figure out, like, what it was. But being, like, an early example of this sort of. Yeah. Well, so everyone who solved this crossword received invitations to work in the cryptography department of the great Allen Turing. Now, that's a, that's possibly a, a prokreful. I'm also not totally clear how you would let the newspaper know that you solve the crossword in 1942.

I guess if you like mailed it in. Yeah. Carrier pigeon. I don't. I guess. Yeah, I'm like to build a computer and email them back. It's a fun story. I'm not exactly sure how you would do that. I guess I like that though. Like even if that's not true, love that shit. That's great. Yeah. It is cool. It's like it's cool. Also DARPA in 2009 kind of did a similar thing. where they deployed 10 weather balloons across the United States, and they awarded the first team to correctly identify every location with a $40,000 prize. So like these things have happened in the past.

Yeah. The main clue we have about who was behind this game comes from an email that was allegedly leaked to some of the winners. And the email reads, we are an international group. We have no name, we have no symbol, we have no membership rosters, we do not have a public website,

and we do not advertise ourselves. You are undoubtedly wondering what it is we do. We are much like a thing think tank in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas we advocate liberty, privacy, security. You've undoubtedly heard of a few of our past projects. And if you choose to accept membership, we are happy to have you on board to help with future projects.

Cute. Okay. Here's the thing. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because of Epstein and other sort of, you know, nefarious organizations being leaked to the public. You can just start a group. that doesn't mean that your group matters yeah like you could just start a group like we could do it right now yeah and and we could be like oh you got to do all this dumb bullshit to join our group that was literally

me saying like are they cool or are they like yeah total watch like at the start of it like it's kind of important like are they coming from something that's like actually going to make a difference or is it like you're saying like you're actually right it is just lame people poor enough thing tank. You totally, you totally, you did actually nail it. Like that doesn't mean anything to be in a group. You could just, anyone can start a group. Yeah.

So the other clue that we, we have multiple interviews with a teenage coder from the Bay Area who was going by tech dotnology. So, amazing. That's very good. Does he make electronic music? I mean, what a waste of a name if you didn't. That's like basement. if I've ever heard it.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Technology spoke to the press multiple times claiming he got into the group. Like he got into 3301. And he did an interview with WNYC where they said, Technology says the site consisted

of part message board, part chat room with a private messaging feature as well in the chat room section of the site. Technology saw about 20 members. They wanted to make it seem like they were this network of people that had infiltrated, if that's the right word, various private and public organizations.

I expressed interest in publishing a story, one of the leaders, I guess you could call it. He said, hey, wait a bit. We have people at Wired. We can get that published for you. He thinks it was too informal to be a front for any serious group. And one of the sources we've been using for this episode seems to confirm this. Joel Erickson seems to have had some success eventually getting in. And he wrote in 2022, there was never a prize for the Cicada 3301 puzzle.

The goal was to find intelligent people to join their group and to develop tools. and spread awareness regarding how to avoid censorship and enforce privacy and anonymity. Okay, before you go any further, that is the most like concise and comfortable philosophy I've heard from any of this or from any of these people at all where they're just like, it would be nice if people who are up to this tier can make a difference is basically what they're saying,

which is like without any of the other garbage or like mumbo-jumbo between it. So I like that. That's the first one. I'm like, okay. I see you. You know what I mean? I'm,

I'm conflicted about it, where I'm like, it's kind of neat. It's kind of a neat, although, like, with everything, I'm always like, all right.

Healthy skepticism and, like. Yeah, like, you're talking about, like, avoiding censorship and liberty and, you know,

enforcing privacy. Mm-hmm. And then I'm like, you know, guy in Civil War with glasses, like, what kind of liberty, you know?

Like, like, like, Mary, I just, you know, I always wonder, you know,

the most evil organization on Earth is going to be called the best friends club. Exactly, exactly. Chris. Very good first. Yeah. But it's funny.

I was invited into a secret internet society in the 2000s, actually. Grant does not know this because I have never talked about it publicly. And I cannot actually name them. I don't want to name them. But you will sometimes see, you will sometimes see references to them, although I guess, I guess it's public now. I just Google to make sure that I'm not the first person it's not, but I'm not.

Okay. You don't come under duress, whatever. I haven't checked in on it in a long time. I was invited into Lulinks. Were you in Lulings? All right. So Will's face, people who are listening to the audio version of this,

Will lit up like a Christmas tree. Yeah. Had nothing and gasped and then made a hand gesture. Yes. That was that public. So were you in there? Were you in Lulings? Is it in there.

I was the most cursory user of that website. I barely interacted with it. But I had had my album pop off. My music popped off partially because of posting it on that website. That's how I heard about you to begin with, I think. That is very much how you probably heard about me. We're not invited to this club because we're offline. What is this?

Without going way too deep into it, it was the simplest possible UI. for a website you can possibly imagine it was just threads it was just text threads sometimes there were images and some of them like the idea being that you could post whatever you want and nobody would stop you so some of them got grotesque and horrifying and a lot of them were way more normal and the stuff that was way more normal is what ended up kind of mostly populating it yeah i hope i'm not going to get in trouble by giving i i hope so i hope so uh i hope not either i mean there's a there are there's a subreddit for it so like i think we're okay There was a code word that I can't remember.

I think it was like you would say Tibet or Nepal. It had some connection to the Lama guy mascot. But like, basically, so Lulings stood for, it's an acronym. It started as a game facts, a game FAQ's board. And it spun out. And it's life, the universe, and everything. Yes. And it was a kind of like a 4chan-esque site, but it had a ton of piracy.

I was sort of pitched it as like, you can download so much shit on this website. Yeah. And so for a long time, I was getting a lot of, I was getting a lot of music. I was getting a lot of movies. And then from Lulinks, I got an invite to what.cd and waffles, which were like the members only like bit torrent communities. And for me, so be saying I had a cursory relationship with it is because I never even interacted with that stuff because I was literally so naive and too afraid. I was really. I was too afraid to interact with any piracy, anything.

So I was barely in there because I was like, I don't want to get in trouble. But I will talk about video games and music. You know what I mean? I downloaded so much. Like I downloaded so much. It's crazy. I love it. I went to college with hard drives full of stolen.

Hell yeah. Oh, my God. I mean, I think in one of those like giant Lou threads, it's how I ended up pressing play on an album that I would later discover was all hail west Texas by the mountain goats and like literally like when ang and last airbender gets like the knot in his back opened and you just see the you I was just like ah yeah um that's how it goes yeah so anyways all of that to say that I'm still kind of like floored about the Luling thing that's amazing that's crazy that's crazy I need one person every four years who is on our website you know what I mean how did you both get invited I got invited

through a friend of mine, Adam at the time. And Adam got invited through someone. But then he got kind of high up in Lulinks because a lot of the moderators were living in Massachusetts in the 2000s where we were. And so he would go to like mod meetups for Lulinks. I never did. And I eventually kind of tapped.

I have a friend who's still in there, actually. Or he was up until the very end. Yeah. I checked in on my account like fairly recently. within the year or something and I'm gone. I have no access anymore. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't even know how to access it anymore because that wasn't the URL. It was like something else. Something else. How did you get involved? I do think initially it was a music thing or it was because I had a friend who was very tech savvy and just liked me and thought I had like decent opinions on stuff and was like, you should check this out. It's like fun and quirky and weird.

There is probably a specific person I'm not remembering who I could point to as being the person who let me in, but I don't remember. I do know that I was utterly obsessed with The Matrix, and I feel like whoever was like also down with that, there was kind of this like awareness of each other. And I think through that I probably knew that person who let me in. That's awesome. I mean, it's so funny to think about like 4chan something awful, game facts, loo links and a couple other websites. Yeah. My new live journal. Yeah, live.

But I mean, those communities in particular, I thought of them as being so big. And what has become very clear to me over the years is that there was probably about a thousand people across all of them. Yeah. And, and they're like, you just meet people who were, like, it's, it's very funny. It's very bizarre. Wow. And now they've brought us to war. Well, no, that was the, I'm not about the first wave of people.

Yeah. Not the second wave of people. Now you're all bastions and media and music. Yeah, now we're all podcasters. We're all podcasters and DJs and electronic musicians now. I know. Like to me, to me, to me what all of that is, is it's just a subset of nerd culture, where it's like nerd culture always culminates in the same thing of people being fans of stuff

and wanting to share that and talk about it with other people. And when you get cooler, vibe your ways of doing that that are outside of like prying eyes who like add nothing to the conversation, that's really exciting. And places like Lulinks and all these other places were cool because you can do that. But at the same time, as you grow older in spaces like that, the feedback loop of kind of constantly yes manning your opinions on all of that stuff becomes less exciting. And you want to hear from other people.

You want to hear when people are like not into something or not into it for the right reasons or whatever it is. And you realize that like it's better sometimes to talk about it with as many people as possible and get like a more varied perspective on things. And then sometimes it goes way too far into something like Twitter, which I was also obsessed with, where it's like you're posting something that you think is funny and then people think you're a horrible person and you don't even know them and you don't even know where they're coming from.

You know what I mean? Like it's many such cases. Yeah, many such cases, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's basically just me reconstructing my separation from something like Lulings, where it wasn't like dramatic. It was just sort of like, oh, I think I've moved beyond wanting. to only talk about these things with these people. I want to kind of like, you know, hear from people in real life and expand and whatever.

Yeah. Obviously, like I had the social media connection with people I knew in real life, you know, through AIM or MySpace or whatever. Yeah. But talking to Internet strangers, it was, I kind of went from the 4chan and the Lulink's world to Tumblr around 2008. And that really replaced that for me. And I was like, oh, this is actually much better.

Yeah. Because there's women here. Yeah. That was me with both Twitter, way more Twitter at first when it was really, really popping, because it was the first place where I realized you could post stream of consciousness and nobody could stop you, which was incredible and very liberating. And then Vine. I was obsessed with mine.

I had a number of vines, not to brag, that exploded, that people still quote to this day. I don't know if around Christmas time you ever hear people saying like, you better watch out, you better watch out, you better watch out over and over and over. I do that every year. That was my Vine with my brother. We gave that to the world. That was you? That was me and my brother. The film of it is me looking at my brother in his bedroom.

And it's both of us just going, you better watch up. You better watch out. I'm watching it right now. That's amazing. That's incredible. So it's shit like that where it's like that's where I was living. You know, Vine was amazing when it was. I'm realizing the ARG is actually.

finding where you've been on the internet over the last 25 years. The pockets where I pop up. Yeah, just find you. So one last thing here for our story before we can totally wrap. For our Patreon listeners, you can go over and listen

to a conversation that Grant recorded with Guardian reporter Alex Hearn who played the third iteration of Cicada 3301. Grant, can you tell us a little bit about what Alex told you. I'm so curious about this.

So also Alex is a Garbage Day reader and a close friend of mine. And I did not know that Grant reached out to him about this. So I'm curious. Yeah. I recorded that like eight months ago. I remember none of it besides that I saw in the bottom of this outline. But I do like we I, what I do remember because it was in the notes of the outline is that a big part of

Cicada was not just the game. but who's behind the game and a lot of people theorizing and that like we have lost the internet's too dangerous now to let a mystery like that be fun like you now this is Q and on yeah now this is like surveillance state nightmares shit yeah yeah yeah it's very easy to see how something like this leads us five years later to you know it's the worst version of it but I've been thinking about this actually and and I want to sort of end on this idea because so like you know we spent a large chunk of today talking about the excitement of the internet when it was new and I think it's very easy to sort of think about it that way there were plenty of problems on the internet back then like plenty uh Lou links had like gore and torture put on there and it was a mean place it was a mean place yeah but I do think that there are these moments when you get a new technology or a new media environment or a new way of socializing or a new sort of birth of culture.

And you can do things that are like they've maybe never been possible before or there's there's room to experiment, there's room to have fun and it's not important yet. And I guess like Will like do you think that can happen again? Do you think it will happen again? Like yeah, I'm kind of optimistic about it. Yes, but there's an exact formula that needs to exist that can barely perpetuate itself. It barely exists if ever. And it's that same conceit that's always been around where like, what is it where it's like ultimate power and ultimate corruption?

What's the what's the idiom about that? Do you know what I'm talking about? Ultimate power corrupts absolutely. There it is. That basically when you're talking about something like Discord, like TikTok, like whatever it is, the only way those things can exist is where the power at the center of it has no greed. And that is impossible. You know what I mean? But if something like that were to exist where like,

Like somebody creates Vine and then never sells it because they don't care about making money. That's the way something like that can exist in perpetuity and expand and blossom and become something beautiful. But that never happens because everybody always just wants to make money off of it. So it always turns into shit and it gets sold off or it expands into something that is completely outside of the philosophy of what the thing was in the first place. I have a lot of ire for the disappearance of Vine because that is how it happened. I loved it so much. I was I was literally there from when it started when the first three months of it were only porn because people were just like I can throw my dick for six seconds and nobody's going to stop me. It was no one can stop you. It was amazing and crazy. And then it turned into this beautiful thing that was like highly social, highly like integrated with people I had never met before I was kind of becoming friends with. Like it was amazing. But it's that same conceit where like it was.

won't exist unless there is the thing at the top existing greedlessly. And that is just an impossibility. You know what I mean? The closest thing we come to something like that is maybe like Ben and Jerry's sometimes Arizona tea sometimes. You know what I mean? And those are not social platforms. Those are just random products.

But true social thing. Yeah. Well, okay. Wait. So I don't disagree with you, but it's interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. I was actually coming at it from a different direction and I want your take on it,

which is like, I, and I don't disagree with you, but I also wonder if it's about expectation. When the internet was still considered to be this thing that like wasn't like TV, it might not like my, like it might not even exist in five years.

Like, nobody gives a shit about it. You could kind of do whatever you wanted with it. Yeah. And it's not that you can't now. Like that's the crazy thing. It's like, it's actually.

easier. I have a friend, a developer, we talk about this all the time where he's like, it's actually crazy. It's easier to make a personal website now than it has ever been. It is so, it is basically like zero money. Yeah, but nobody's doing that. But nobody's doing it. And so it's not so much like the internet itself is worse now. It's that the, what people are really saying is if I go make a cool thing on the internet, no one will see it. So why would I bother? I agree with you that there is this like massive, massive amount of money tied up and all of this now. Yeah.

But it's also the social expectations of, of what it is. The fact that you and I were on the same members only invite only website in the 2000s, means that there were not a lot of people on the internet back. Oh, exactly. Statistically, they would have to be not a lot of people. Yeah. So I do wonder, like, are we thinking about these things and, and kind of judging them by the standards of today unfairly?

So it's not so much like. I think it's very, very true. Like literally visibility is everything. That's the only reason people engage with most things that are fun things on the internet is like... Right. It's very, very real. And the idea of like, let's say, like coming from my world of things, a band is like, we made a website. We spent like four months on it.

We're super proud of it. Come check it out. That's getting like infinitely less attention because it's not as comfortably shareable. It's not as comfortably summarizable. Right. You know, it's not dumbed. down the way people need those things to be. It's also not in a media format that is accessible like a movie or a TV show or an album or

whatever it is. So I completely understand that. I think that's a super, super valid way of thinking about it too. Like I think mine is coming from the unfortunate place of like only considering. I think yours explains why it's like that. Yeah. I think it's the money has moved. And so the expectations have changed.

Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's a bummer. Such a bummer. And I don't want to end on a bummer. So I'll ask this question. What is like something like in the sort of world that we've been talking about, this sort of like people experimenting, doing weird things on the internet, doing weird things with technology. What's a new thing like this that you've seen recently that you're like, that's cool, that's neat?

Anything? Could be music, could be a cool website, could be whatever. I don't, I'm trying so hard. I mean, I just, I think that they're. there's a lot of innovations within formats. Like there's a lot of music that I think is like, this is undeniably the most forward thinking thing I've ever heard or games that kind of do that or like play like unlike anything else I've ever played.

So there's things like that, but like exactly what we're talking about right now, we'll start to talk about AI in that way or like think that it's like this most revolutionary thing in the entire world. It is vehemently from me, not that. It is something that is so, cooked and so not what people think it is. And can I say something that is so unrelated to this, even though it kind of is that it's like,

to me, the only way you get the things that you're talking about, like stuff that is like boundless and completely unprecedented is by having like a stable economy and funding for the arts. You know what I mean? You segued perfectly into what I mean. I was going to say, which was Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, bankrolled by Canadian taxpayers. Perfect. I have been beaming for weeks since seeing it because I was like, this is, and I don't

think it's an accident that it's like old internet guys that sort of like went off and did side quests for 10 years and came back and did something where I was like, this is the breath of fresh air creatively that I have, I felt like I've been missing for a decade. And they have been so public about the circumstance of that movie existing, which is why it's perfect segue that it's what you're saying it's like the Canadian government bankroll that also the laws around like censorship in the way that they did things in it are so much more lax and way not outside of surveillance state but just kind of like less than and messing with the surveillance state like playing around with it it's yeah it's amazing and so that's what I'm talking about where it's like

I just want that's what I'm always hoping for is that more of that world can exist in the world worldwide. Like not something that's just accessible to us, but then like internationally in much smaller countries, also in third world countries, somehow getting like more and more funding for people doing new, weird, innovative shit. And all the time we're hearing about, like, the small, it's not small, but it's, I guess like in my own listening, it's kind of like a smaller thing. But the wave of like Brazil funk music, I don't know if you know anything about this.

I lived in Sao Paulo for four years. I'm a huge connoisseur of Brazilian funk music. So I am not. I am a tourist, but every time I hear it, I'm like, this is literally the most future shit I've ever heard in my entire life. I don't even know how that exists other than people just having the freedom to fuck around and do whatever they want with anything. And it's like you'll see visuals of it of like that guy, DJ Ramon's success. He's kind of one of the biggest figureheads of sort of that scene, but also was totally his own thing. like me finding out about him was watching him DJ on like the shittiest piece of equipment in the world with the camera like shaking and almost yeah I know the video I know the music it looks like it was like everything in the video costs like maybe 150 bucks or something like that and it's the most forward thinking thing I've ever heard that's what I'm talking about have you ever heard of the the Brazilian genre Fajo Fajo no I don't know I don't know anything I'm a musician professionally I know

barely anything. Okay, I think that's what it's called here. I'm going to get totally slammed by. I mean, just as a quick example while you're looking, like there was a song I heard that is literally like an alarm. The drop is unalarm. There's no kick drum, there's nothing else. It's people talking, and then an alarm goes off,

and it's three minutes. And I was like, nobody in the West could fathom this. It's not even, you cannot even possibly imagine something. Okay, so I double check because I don't want to get slammed. Yeah, and then we have to wrap this because I can see Grant just sweating. Thinking about editing this. So Fahou is a Brazilian version of like almost like country music, like dance music. But a lot of DJs what they're doing is they're taking the traditional folk beat of the Fahoe music.

And then they'll slap on top of it like like a phone recording of like Rihanna's umbrella. And they'll just like compress the two together. And it's the most insane fucking future shit you've ever. Because there's no question about like, does this make sense? Is this good? Yeah. It's just like so unknowable and new. That is what I'm always seeking.

Like my art of arts in the world, all I want is to be in the unknown, to experience things that I have no context for no understanding of so that I'm shocked into that state of awe again and being like, I can't believe the world can do this. I can't believe human beings are capable of this. You know what I mean? Like that's my favorite feeling in the entire fucking world. And I get it every now and then. I get it like every couple years, there's something I hear or experience or see that I'm just like, that's what my entire life is all about is experiencing this kind of shit. And that comes from stable economies.

Stable economy. Free art. Free art. And I can do this. I can do this. The feeling of discovering a mystery of sort of refreshing the page of refreshing the page. of digging deeper and deeper and being bombarded with new ideas, that can happen again when you decouple expression online

from making a lot of money and the expectation that a lot of people have to see it for it to be successful. And if you... A round of applause for that segment. If you remove those two pressures, it can happen again. And so Will... That's why I got to join Cicado. That's what you got to 3.01.

Will, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was great. I literally could do this for hours. If you want to follow you online, other than Vine, where can they follow you? Vine is now dead, unfortunately, but I am fairly active, unfortunately, on Twitter still. Me too. Everything everywhere is Bath's Music, B-A-T-H-S-M-U-S-I-C, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, but that's just reposting. I would say Instagram or Twitter.

Those are the main things. Yeah, do you have tour dates coming out? Yes, I don't know when this show is coming out, but towards the end of March and all through April and May, I'm doing a world tour surrounding the release of the reissue of my first record, Serulian. So it's called Serulian R, and I'm doing a bunch of tour dates for it. And there's five in the, or four in the U.S., one in Canada, two in Australia, one in Tokyo, and one in London.

And that's it. And it's like 10 shows. I cannot wait to see my excuse to travel live again. Well, you're in luck. I'm going to play it. Panicroll is a production of. of Currier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas.

From Currier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Maroni, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing, YouTube, and Podcast. growth marketer Samantha Hollos. And Tracy Kaplan is the senior vice president of sales and distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at courier newsroom.com. Be sure to check up the Panicworld YouTube channel,

which you can find at YouTube.com slash at PanicWorld Pod. And please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.