The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Joseph Matheny | The Man Who Hacked Reality Before the Internet Existed

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com. Get 25% off Cowboy Colostrum with code WHYFILES at https://cowboycolostrum.com/WHYFILES. Joseph Matheny invented something in 1989 that nobody had a name for yet. He called it a story. The internet called it the first alternate reality game. The Navy called him to ask how he did it. He turned them down. Tonight he's in the basement explaining how he built an early AI, game-mastered Robert Anton Wilson at Esalen, and why QAnon looks so familiar to him. Some things are better understood when you know how the trick works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How can working at your local Tims take you further? Sure, you can level up your teamwork skills. You also get a chance to receive a Tim Hortons Scholarship Award. Ready for what's next? Apply today at careers.timhorans.ca. Today I'm talking with Joseph Methini, a writer and storyteller who built the Internet's first alternate reality game. He built a story so convincing

and made people believe a portal to another dimension was hidden in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. That whole state is another dimension. Be nice. I've got family in Jersey. Once you cross the GW and hit Fort Lee, it's like an alternate universe. Wherever you left turned is a jug handle, and you're not allowed to pump your own gas.

That story was Aung's hat, not published as a novel, but scattered across bulletin boards, websites, phone lines, pamphlets. The story felt real. Today we'll talk about where that ARG came from and how it got weaponized. And we'll get into his chatbot from the 90s.

You see, he built Google before Google. He built chat GPT before OpenAI, 30 years ago. This guy was spreading disinformation when Facebook was just a twinkle in Mr. Zuckerberg's eye. This lizard eye, respect. Joseph's also been connected to the John Teeter story, the time traveler who appeared on Art Bell. When I asked him about it, he said, well, this one gets weird. I'll see you after for a private wrap-up just between us. Let's go down to the basement.

Joseph, welcome to the basement. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I've been a fan for a long time. Before we dig in, I need to know WC. Fields' martini recipe and method. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Talk to me by Robert Anton Wilson.

Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do we got? He comes to my house one day and I said, Bob, I heard you like martinis. He'd say, well, I like martinis, but only a certain way. You have to make them right. Let me show you.

Like, kid, move aside. So, okay, I moved aside. And while he's making these martini, he tells me the story that he read how this martini was made by W.C. Fields in a book. And so you take, put ice in the shaker, then you pour the remove over the ice, then you shake it around, then you pour the vermouth out, leaving the ice in. Then you pour the vodka, an important vodka, not gin. Yes, sir. Pour the vodka over the ice, shake it very gently,

because you want to bruise the roof. Don't bruise the roof. Right. Yep. And then he pour it out. Very nice. Yeah. And it works. I'm going to remember that method. And that's the way I've eaten made martinis ever since.

So it's Robert Anton Wilson. So that's kind of a good segue to get back to the origin story. And we can go back as far as you want. Okay. I love the bookstore stuff. And that's synchronicities are crazy, but wherever you want to go. Like what made you the pioneer of ARGs? And that could be the last time we even say ARG today.

It goes, it's okay. We go back, let's go back a little bit. Okay. I remember when I read a book called No One Here Goes Out Alive, the story of Jim Morrison. And I like the way they did it is they put it in three sections. And basically it was like, so you realize that an arrow being drawn back

and then the releasing of the arrow was the arc of Jim's story. Yep. I was a voracious reader when I was a kid, and my parents were cool in that they said, oh, he can read. They were happy. And so they rewarded me by saying, we will buy you books.

And if you read these books, we will buy you more books. And so I would just tear through books. And so I used to buy a, I was being kind to my parents. I came from a working class background. I said, use books are okay. I'm going to tear through them. I'm probably going to mark them up. And I would get money to go to garage sales and just pick up whatever.

And so in my age, I'm old. I'm 64 years old. So like in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, horror and the occult was very popular. And so I was big on the universal monsters, the hammer films, like all that kind of stuff. anything to do with that I was reading. So this is a funny segue. I'm at a garage sale, and I'm like, the guy says, you can have all the books on the table for a dollar,

but you've got to pack them up and get out of here because I'm done. I'm like grabbing everything I thought was worth it. And one of the books was, like, oh, that's about astrology. I just doing a bag. I get home, I start reading it. I'm like, this is not astrology at all, but it was Tropical Cancer by Henry Miller. Oh.

That's how I get introduced to Henry Miller. Wow. Okay. By thinking it was astrology. Oops. How old were you? Oh, God. 12?

Oh, no. Okay. Well, probably great for 12 years. It was great. It was perfect. I'm like, God, I'm going to do this. Like, the way this guy writes, you know? And so, like, that was my gateway drug.

I, from there I segued into the Kerouac and, you know, everything from there. But it was that accident of buying that book for a nickel or whatever it was and reading it and falling in love with like this is a whole new thing I didn't know about this. This is amazing. I didn't know this about you because I could see it in your writing. I can see it in your writing. I see that in Henry Miller.

I see it in your writing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, those are my influences. Okay. Bukowski. Yeah.

Like, you know, Hemingway, it's like make the sentences short and sweet. Yes. Bam. Like, you know, so I'll go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, which, you know, that's Ginsburg. Caroleg was like, write at once. Right. You know, oh, no, don't touch it.

And anyway, I said, shut up. Yeah, yeah. Right at once and get away. So, you know, I was, now I was like floating in this world of like all this weird counterculture stuff, which is available readily when I was a kid. You're in Chicago? Yeah, yeah. In Chicago. And all this occult stuff and literature.

And, of course, being in Chicago, all that stuff was available to me. They started hanging out in bookstores where most of the people hanging out when were much older than me. So, you know, they kind of mentored me. And I remember my, are you going to be in the club kid thing? This guy said, if you read, I said, I couldn't pronounce Kerouac at the time. I didn't know how, and I called Karak or something like that.

I said, I read this book by Jack Karak. And I saw this guy look at me. He goes, you know, that guy wrote this book called on the road and he would stop at the cafes all the time and he would get the same thing. What was that? It's a cup of coffee and an apple pie out of mode. He's like, oh, you did read it. And so we, and then he's like, oh, you're cool, kid, I'll talk to you.

So I started hanging out these older hipsters that were like, oh, you got to read this, you got to read this, you got to read. So he's feeding me all this stuff. And I'm just a kid, you know, it's like, give me, give me, give me. He's like, feeding it up. So because of this, it puts me in a. position in Chicago where I'm hanging out with people who are doing improv. I'm hanging out with method actors. These are all people much older than me. But for some reason, I'm the kid. Like, oh, yeah, he can hang out. He's cool. He won't tell on us. He won't tell his parents where he's

been. They would take me the things. Yeah, it was incredible. You were the weird smart kid. I was the weird smart kid. Yeah. Yeah. I was the, uh, the mascot. Right. Right. Yeah. Like, oh, we got this kid. And, um, and I used to, you know, They love this. I would memorize things and I would stand up on a little chair and I would do, I could do Lions in the Heat and Roaming Doves and Eat right before. I could do the Morrison thing and they love that, you know. So they would make me do it.

You know, like they would get drunk like, do the Morrison thing, kid, you know, and I would do it. So anyway, I'm around these people who are like just feeding me with all this counterculture knowledge and turning me on the things I would never have been turned on to as a, you know, like my family. They didn't know any of this stuff. You know, my dad was one of those people like, you know, go to school, get a job, get a good factory job, you know, be done. And I'm not saying he was a bad person. He was a great person. But, you know, that was his way of thinking.

All these things that I'm doing, he would just be like, okay, whatever. You know, he didn't understand. And he didn't care. He knew I was not up to good things according to him, but he wasn't a perfect kid either. So he just kind of let me go, you know. He's like, he's doing something, but I'm not sure. what it is, but he's not doing drugs, little did you know. I was.

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in something called mail art when I was in college. And mail art goes all the way back to Dada. It's basically like you put things together as a package, you mail to a friend or you mail to a list of friends, they put things together, they add, they subtract, they conglomerate, and then they mail onto the next list. And so, like, this is going on all over the world, where we're mailing stuff all over the place. I remember this.

It's still around. The zine culture and all this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the zine culture, then Xerox machines became available. Then we became our own publishers. Yep. The punk rock thing happened, which I was right in the middle of. So all of these things are happening.

And I started doing weird things by mail art. So I started doing episodic stories. based horror stories or whatever whatever yeah sometimes i would like write five lines and sent to a friend and he would write five lines and sent to another friend and i'd get it back and like oh wow okay that's where we're going and it was called the um i think the dada's called it the uh exquisite corpse and we did all these things together um and i looked at it and i said there's something here there's something here and i don't have to go through a publisher to create this art. I don't have to go to an agent. I don't have to do any

of these things. I don't have to do a gatekeeper. I can make art. It gets to a lot of people. And I don't have to go through, you know, any corporate anything. Is that what you wanted to do at this point as being an artist? It was what I was. I mean, you were, but I mean, what are you telling dad you're going to do for a living? I didn't have an answer to that. You just hear a lot of snipping and taping upstairs. Yeah, yeah. And at that time, I was painting. Okay.

So I was doing a lot of large paintings. And my family was trying to be supportive, but didn't know how to be, because they didn't understand what I was doing. Of course. And so, like, my mom would tell her sisters, ask him to do a painting for you. You know, and one of my aunts would say, can you do a painting for me? I'm like, sure. Like, here's my color swatches.

No You have to match my furniture No So they really didn't get it But they were trying to be supportive And I didn't want to be mean to them So I painted some paintings But basically

I was looking for A new kind of arch Because I felt like the media Was this canvas That wasn't being fully Implemented to its full potential because I had this theory

that an experience for me was I would see something on TV I would go find a newspaper or a magazine article about it then I would go get a book out of the library and I would build this experience around this thing that I had like latched onto. Who knows how I latched onto it like walking down the street and there was a poster on a pole

and it said something. I'm like, what is that about? and that I would follow up on it. Like, would that be cool if there was an art form or I built the pathway for people to follow up on something weird that I placed the place it from? So like, oh, there's this thing. There's this place.

And so I remember my thesis in college was I wrote a book of poems and I made a videotape at the time which was cutting edge. It must have been. Yeah, it was. it was a cutting edge I think 1984 it was cutting edge

at the time that I did a VHS tape and you would watch the tape and then you would get clues from the book and the tape to go at a certain place at a certain time on a certain day and if you did

you would see the third act which was a play of real humans play it out in front of you as if you weren't there and the third act happened and my professor was like wow what do you smell kid.

Because it's cool, but wow. And then it worked. Like, I remember jumping up and down after it was over and hugging my girlfriend at the time, like, it worked, it worked, it actually worked. Because I wasn't sure it was going to work because it was a lot of moving parts. Sure. And you really weren't focused on dopamine triggering at this point because that's what, you became a master of dopamine.

Yeah. Yeah. But at that point, I was just an understanding. sure kid who had a stupid idea and I put it together. I'm like, can this work? This might not work. It can work. Yeah, but like you always have

those theater jitters, you know, like... Of course. I'm going to suck. I have those before every show, man. Right. So I just said, I wasn't sure it was good at work and then I got really happy when it worked. And everybody that did it, like followed it through

told me like, dude, that was incredible. I read the poems and then I watched the tape and then we went to the performance it was amazing like it was like it all made sense so I was like yeah well good it was like three acts boom

so I started playing around with ideas of how can I do this another way and so I played with street theater I used to do a lot of street theater I started hanging out with people in Chicago

studied under Del Close You studied under Dell? Well, the people that hung out with it. I was a little too young for Dell. Yeah. Yeah. Second City. Next generation, I probably would have been there, but yeah.

But, you know, my girlfriend's dad, and my girlfriend at the time her dad was a friend of Dells. Amazing. So he used to hang out with him. When Del got sober, apparently, he still hung out at the Earl of Old Town, which was a bar in Old Town, Chicago. And he would go into the bar and drink soda water and lime because the bar. bar was where he got inspiration. But he kept going, but he just didn't drink anymore. So, yeah, because I started studying the things that he talked about because you might

not know this. I told this to the people at the Delcoe Theater in Hollywood, and they didn't know this either. Dell was a practicing golden dawn magician. I didn't know that. Golden Dawn. Wow. Yeah.

So if you look at the portrait, if it's still there, the Delcoe Center on Hollywood Bobbard. If it's still there, I don't know if it is. I don't think it is. I've gone for like 10 years. But it used to be. If you look at the portrait, a big painting of him on the wall, he's wearing a ring with a pentagram on it. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know that. And if you read some of the weirder little

interviews that he did, he does admit to using the Golden Dawn Talismotic principles to teach improv. That's amazing. So telismata is when you learn ritual you learn basically theatrical principles

and so you think in your mind like in front of you there is an angel and this is what the angel is wearing and this is the principles of the angel you learn all this stuff you're projecting and they'll use that as the method to teach people this is what you're doing in theater

like when you're talking to this person in front of you they're not the person in front of you the person that you're supposed to be talking to you in the text. This is an initiation ceremony. Yes. It's just two actors. Yeah.

I never really thought of it that way, but that's really what it is. He never laid it out for most people like that because most people would be like, magic! Right. And they were wrong. Right. But that's what he was doing. If you want to know what was in that man's mind, he wrote a short-lived DC comic series

called Wasteland. I didn't know that either. Yeah, there's like 13 issues, and you can still find them. They're out of print, but you can still find them. And in that, he talks about ritual magic, and Philip K. Dick makes an appearance. Robert Antaugh-Wilson makes an appearance.

Timothy Leary makes an appearance. Gee, Gordon Liddy makes an appearance. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, you got to see, you got to read this. Yes. It came out in the 80s. It's just amazing.

But that's where it all came from, was his improv theories, which everybody knows, Delcos is the guy. Yes, he's the guy. That you go to for the theory. And it all came from Golden Dawn. So I'm studying and playing with people

that are studying with him, and I'm learning from him, and I started learning and studying magic. And I'm like, oh, this is theater. Okay, I can do this. Yeah, theater. And so I'm putting all this together, and out of this,

you know, Swiss Army knife that forms in my head of all these influences I'm like, oh, you know, if I could only do this thing, if I had a way to get it in front of people.

So I started playing around with HyperCard. And if you remember HyperCard. Sure. Yeah, yeah. You may have to catch people up. Okay, HyperCard came out right before the web. Yep. And basically it was hypertext

that was localized. So it was in a file. You click on a link and it takes you to another page in the file. It was magic. It was magic. You click on an image, you take you to another page in the file. When I saw that, my mind went, but I started putting together a hypercard stack, as they were called.

And right about that time, this was 93, somewhere around there, maybe earlier. somebody said go to your Unix machine type into words LYNX space HCTP colon slash slash string

Link's first browser Yeah Text only On the command line Yeah And I did it And I went Tab tab tab click

It took me to another system Not another page Another page on another system And that's when my head Just went This is it This is what I've been looking for I thought HyperCard was

it. This is Hypercard on steroids. This is it. And that's when the light went off. So all that was all that was searching for this way to tell stories that I thought the way stories happened to you. Because I think stories happen to you. I think storytelling is the most important thing that humans do. And we shouldn't turn it over to corporations and bean counters. None of that. It's like a very sacred thing. You have a responsibility to a storyteller to shepherd your story and protect it. The story was given to you by who knows what, right? But it wasn't you, it wasn't all you, and it wasn't somebody else, it wasn't all them. Like, of course, I stand on the shoulders of giants and I read people and I'm inspired, but it wasn't just that. There's like this holy thing that

happens, like this inspiration. You believe in like the muse. The muse, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. and it says you have this story to tell it. I'm going to give it to you. I'm entrusting you with this story. And you go tell this story. I think storytellers used to be revered for a reason because what they were doing was important. So you can break it down to like simple stuff.

I'm going to tell you a story about this part of the woods where you go and a monster's going to come get you. Really what I'm telling you is like there's bears over there and probably don't go there in night. Yep. Right? That's what I'm telling you, really. But what I'm telling you in a way that's entertaining, memetic, you remember it.

And you're going to tell your kids, don't go over there because there's monsters. In other words, don't get eaten by the bears. But if you just tell a kid, don't get eaten by the bears, they're going to want to go see what's over there. I would have. Yep. You would have. Of course. The first thing we're going to do, I don't believe this bear crap.

And you're going to go over there, right? So you have to tell a story that's going to really stick. They're going to repeat it. It's going to make an impression. and they're going to carry it with them. So you're passing it on, right? And memetics, remember, is from genetics, right? It's a metaphor from genetics.

So it's something we pass on. Stories are something we pass on is very important. And I'm saying this because I want people to really understand that as an artist, handing your story over to bean counters, is sacrilege. Don't do it. Summer is here. And if you want to actually feel confident, less bloated and energized this season,

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That's 25% off when you use code Y Files at cowboy colostrum.com slash Y Files. So I got hit by this bolt of lightning. As my late friend Ralph Ibrahim, he just said, a bolt from the blue. And it just struck me like, this is it. This is the thing. And I remember telling friends, there's this thing that I'm doing called bulletin board systems

that has a connection to this thing called the internet, which is going to be the next way to tell stories. It's going to be the way to publish. It's going to be the way to distribute. It's going to be everything. And this looked at me like, are you crazy? Are you nuts? This is like CB radio, man. It's going to go away in like six months.

Yeah, right. I remember somebody telling me that. Of course. Yeah. I was on BBSs. I was a weirdo. Me too. Yeah.

And they're like, you've been standing for many much time with this computer, son. And I remember showing a friend of mine, this is what it's going to be. And I showed him links. I'm like, I can put the story together. And the story can have links to other ideas so you can expand upon the idea. the idea or you can explore the idea you can like drill down on certain things and he looked at it and he just said this is an older person a well-known writer I won't say who it was he's gone now but I don't want to embarrass him even in death he says uh when this thing can make me a sandwich

give me a call oh that's what he said me so I said oh well you know too bad But I was really convinced. I'm like, this is going to be the next wave. Well, mail art translated well to BBSs. And the funny thing was, two of the hobbies I had as a kid was male art and shirtwave. I really got into shortwave when I was a kid. And all the people that I knew from those communities

started to show up on BBSs. They were some of the first adopters. Art Bell. Yep. Shirtwave guy shows up on BBS. These are the first people doing BBS. You know, gophers and FTP sites and all these things. I remember, man.

Were available to, you know, a few. Not a lot. But I was like, it's going to happen. It's going to happen. I missed those days a little bit. I do too. And then Nescape happened. Yes.

And that's when boom, it blew wide open. Yep. And I was sitting right at the right place at the right time with enough momentum already because I'd been doing it before that that it's like plowed right into it and rode the wave because at the time that that happened all of a sudden all these businesses

we have to have email, we have to have web who can we call? Oh there's this weirdo that knows all this stuff and my phone started ringing and then I did a hack which a guy from Spin Magazine wrote about where the Clinton administration came out and said

that they were going to have email in the White House, which at the time was like, wow, I could write president at whitehouse.gov. Not that he's ever going to answer me, but I could write him. And I watched the server come up, and I'm like, I bet they didn't lock this down. So I sent an email to president at whitehouse.gov, and then I sent a second email to President White House at the Gov

and then a third and a fourth I'm like, it didn't turn it off. So they had an auto reply which you had at that time now it comes stock or eventually came stock but at the time when you deployed your mail server

you had to manually change this that when you got an email if you got a second email from that email address you shouldn't send an auto reply right 24 hours later right

used to be like if you just did it it came so I started spamming emails in the white house I called it the reign of toads I did Asky pictures of toads yeah and I was reigning toads on the White House and we were getting so many replies back so like it shut down both sides of the connection you did a du S attack on the White House yeah yeah with Asky Art I did with Asky Art the reign of to the rei-g-N the reign of toads and and then a reporter found out about it and he wrote about it. And the next thing you know, my phone was just ringing off the hook because this is not the case anymore. But back then, if you did a hack and it was a white hat hack and you got away with it, you would get a job off.

Sure. Not anymore. No. Now you just go to jail. Yes. And you're banned from corporate life. But back then, people would call you and say, you know some things about this stuff. And this is a dark arch.

that nobody knows about yet. Yeah, now they ban you from the country. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Now they send you away. Mm-hmm. Or put you in jail. Yeah. But back then, I got a phone call from the Secret Service.

I was going to ask. Yeah. I was very nervous on that phone call. What's with the toads? What's with the toads, man? And you're not going to do that again, are you? Like, I was just testing to see if you put on the auto-reply, 24-hour pause, you know?

making sure you're secure and then they left me own after that but the job offer started pouring in Is this before Robert Anton Moulson comes into your life? Oh no no no this is way after Can we talk about him a little bit? Yeah you'll roll that back

Okay So before this happened I'm still in Chicago and I was in a band like everybody my age. Is this when you went by Sid with a C? Yeah. Yeah, something like that.

Go ahead and tell them why it's a C, Joseph. Sid Vicious, Sid Bennett, Sid Barrett. Sid Barrett. Yeah. But the C. Yeah. I was known at the time for doing a certain drug on a regular basis. Heroically.

Before Terrence coined that term, I was a heroic goser. I was a big fan of Jim Morrison. Did I mention that? So, yes, I was one of those people. And I was always talking about weird stuff, you know, because I was a weird kid.

And my guitar player, who was weird himself, but, you know, not as weird, I guess. But he loved me because I could introduce him to weird things he hadn't heard. of, but he introduced me to a lot of music, so there we go. And one day he just looks at me, he's like, if you read Aluminatis Trilogy, I'm like, no. Just out of the blue he says that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I was talking, cool, because I've been doing Sid and talking weird things. And he was like, if you read Aluminatstrily, I'm like, no, I haven't even heard of it. What was that? So you should read it, man, you should read it. You're in it. I'm like, okay. So I went to the library and went looking for it.

And of course, it was gone, probably stolen. But I did find another book by the same author called Cosmic Trigger. And then I read it and blew my mind again. What was it about cosmic trigger? Oh, it was just like everything he was talking about was everything I was thinking about. It was just like we made a connection, you know. And he introduced me all this new thinking, these new ways of thinking, new writers I'd never heard of. Like it was like an off-ramp.

Well, in cosmic triggers, Robert Anton Wilson, this is about recognizing signs throughout history and... Synchronicity. It was about monogynosticism. You know, like the whole idea of like, basically what you learn in theater, which is suspension of disbelief, is the same thing, right? Only he had a mathematical scientific background for it. He had fancy words to put around it. I'm like, well, I know that, yeah. I loved how he talked about meteor as being a meteor

could be a sign of something good or something bad or something good or something bad can happen and if the meteor just happens to be there that's now a cosmic trigger that's a cosmic trigger he was playing around with the serious stuff that was going on he was he basically did

a like a whole exercise in suspension of disbelief for this whole period of his life and he cataloged it and he published it as a book right and and you introduced me to all kinds of new ideas and one of those ideas was Philip K.

Dick who I had not heard of I didn't know I didn't know he wrote Blade Runner at the time right right but I'd seen Blade Runner I'm like oh this is great film you know but I didn't know I didn't know at that time and so like but like I read about Bob talking about you got to read

this book Philip Kie Dick Vass so anyway and then more than that's that then PKD forever. So I look, I'm going to buy more books by him by him. And I saw a poster on the wall of the, at the time New Age was a new thing. This was the 80s. At the New Age bookstore and they had books by him on the shelf.

By PKD or R-A-W? R-A-W. And there was a poster on the wall that he was appearing just down the street from where I was living at a Zen Center. No shit. Yeah. Chicago still? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we got to go there.

Yeah. So I got to go there. So I show up early and I was a smoker at the time. And I show up and I'm standing out front smoking a cigarette of the Zen Center. And this, you know, squalidal Irishman comes out and says, hey, can you give me one of those? Like, okay. I'm Bob, by the way. I'm like, you're Robert Antoine? Because I didn't know what he looked like. No. He's like, yeah, yeah. Like, I'm doing this thing here. I'm like, yeah, I came to see you. we're smoking. He's like, don't tell my wife you saw me smoking.

Because Arlin got on his back for smoking. But yeah, we shared a cigarette. We stood out there for... What's going on in your mind? You're like, Bob Wilson just bumped a cigarette off me. You're not freaking out? You're not freaking out? No. Okay. No. I was like, oh, coolly smokes. No amazed. Okay. You know, go with it.

And we just talked about some stuff. And Timothy Leary had just come out with Mind Mirror on Doss at the time. and I told him like, it's pretty cool, but, you know, he could use some of this and some of that, you know, and he's like, well, do you write code? I'm like, yeah, not yet. And I'm thinking about it. He's like, well, write code and do it yourself.

I'm like, good idea. So we hit it off. We swapped addresses. He was in Los Angeles at the time. And then, you know, like we traded letters and things like that every once in a while. But, you know. And then later, A couple years later, I moved to Santa Cruz completely by accident.

Do you know this story? This is with your girlfriend and Anubis? Yeah, yeah, my cat. Yeah, yeah. I know the story, but people don't. I love Anubis. Well, perfect name for a black cat. Yeah, we have to get there.

So, Cosmic Trigger triggered me to find Valas. To find Valas? It was out of print at the time. Oh, to find the book. The book. You couldn't find that book? It was out of print. Wow.

This was 804, 5? Yeah. It was out of print. And it was not a popular book then. No. Phil was not popular then. Like, he wrote Blade Runner, but that was it. Like, none of his stuff is getting made in the movies yet.

Were you aware of Jacques Valet at this point yet? I was because I read Passport to McGonio when I was young. I went, yeah. Yes, right in my veins. Yeah. It was like, this, this. I mean, I've heard PKK or people around him say that Val, was a synchronicity with Jacques's name.

Well, apparently it was for me too because I just, I don't know why it got on my head. Like, I have to find this book. I have to find this book. It became like an obsession. And I started to, there was no internet at the time. So like, you know, this is 84. I'm going to use bookstores.

I'm asking people, they never heard of it. Right. And I'm like, can I go through your, can I go through your boxes? Like, I'm just like, like, like being an nignic. annoying. And people are like, okay, whatever, dude, go look for your cosmic thing.

And so eventually I did find it in a very weird circumstance. I was going through the yellow pages and just looking for used bookstores because I'd run out of the ones I knew and I called this one used bookstore and this lady answered and she said, yes, I think I might have that.

I said, well, supposedly it's a trilogy. She's like, I think I have two of them. So I walk, not too far from where I lived, I walk over. No, I took the bus and then I walked from the bus stop and this didn't look like a bookstore. It was like it looked like it might have been a storefront at one time, but it was like the windows were newspapered over. And I knocked in the door and this really nice old lady with silver hair and crystal blue eyes. You know those people that have those blue eyes and it's like, can't stop looking at them? I think he described her as elvish.

Yeah. She was short and looked at her. I'm like, wow, okay. You've got an oral lady. And she like took me in all the books were in boxes. There was no shelves. Like she shut the thing down, you know. I'm thinking, okay, maybe she's going out of business or maybe she never was in business.

And she like walked me over to a box and she like pulled out Valis. She said, you know, I've got this one. And then she pulled out another copy of Valis. he says but I have this one it was a hard copy oh but I was a poor ass little poke rocker at the time

you didn't take the hard counting my quarters and so I and so I like I take the paper back you know and I took the paper back and then I was immediately I was like

oh buyer's remorse but you know did what I had to do and then when I got home I'm like you should have bought that hardback dude you should have bought that hard back and I called her and called her and called her she never answered again and so I walked over there and I banged on the door to see if she could hear me and it was a it was a storefront in Chicago they have these a storefront and then a house above it and it was a railing with a porch and the guy like this guy like walks out yuppie

that was a thing then he even had the suspenders if you remember there was a uniform that they all wore and he leans over the rail he's like what do you want like well the lady sold me a book and I wanted to get the other book I think he's like what do you what are you doing what are you talking about get out of here it's not been a store for a long time just leave he was like angry it's not been a store yeah for a long time for a long time yeah what's that about I don't know and he's being real rude to me he's like yeah get out of here like like you know like I was ruining his day

And I'm thinking Maybe his mom Because she looks about right To be the age to his mom Maybe his mom sold me the book And wasn't it supposed to? I don't know He was like just

He just wanted me away From his house And so I left And I just kept going back and calling Never ever, ever Got anybody answered the phone Or the door ever again Was that,

Do you think that was a supernatural experience Or just a weird circumstance. I think it was a weird circumstance that fits well as a supernatural experience. Yeah, I mean, it reads well. It reads well. Yeah. You know, and it doesn't have to be supernatural to be supernatural.

That's, that's well said, yeah. She could have, like, been in the store when I called and picked up the phone when I called. She probably didn't run the store. The store did not look like I was in business and knew that she had the book I was looking for. She may have even had dementia. I don't know, you know. And the reason dude was mad because he didn't know. This is so unlikely.

He didn't know mom had let me into the house, you know. And, you know, back then I used to dress like a punk rocker. So I did not look like yuppie friendly at all. So he was like, get this guy. He's probably going to break into my house, you know. Get him away. So, so anyway, I get that. I get Valis.

And it just absolutely. melts my brain. Melted me down. I admit, I probably was having a manic episode. It really did something to me. Like, really touched me hard. What was the theme in Valas that spoke to you?

I couldn't point to any one thing. The omniscience of it? No, no, it wasn't that. It was that at the same time that I found the book, I found a used copy of the interview I think Rickman did with Philip K. Dick. And he published like three books of the interview. And so I read that while I was reading Valles.

And then I realized this was a true story. This really happened to this guy. Yep, it did. He said it did. Yeah. Have you ever seen him give that talk in Mets in 77? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said all this stuff is, I read about real stuff.

Yeah, yeah. The Nazis did win the war. just not in this timeline. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Everybody thought he was nuts. I love watching the audience during the time. They thought he was just going to talk about sci-fi.

Oh, it's a bit. No. Like half of them, like, oh, he's doing a bit, and the other half-like, I think he's lost his mind. Right. This is all a simulation. It's 77. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, of course, this is mind-blowing in 84.

And this melts my mind. Of course. This melts my mind. And then all this stuff, like, I started seeing science. You know, like Bob Wilson said in Cosmic Trigger, he said he was playing Bavarian TV where he would flip the channels and then he would get sentences. Yes. He's like, I'm like Phil K. Dick, the fucking TV's talking to me.

So, you know, like he would do that. Del Close had something called a one word story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a Bavarian TV. Yeah, yeah. And so I started having these experiences that I couldn't turn off. And I was like, what's going on? And so I started getting, I was buying weird pamphlets,

any weird pamphlet I'd get my hands on. And so I got this weird magazine that was being published out of Berkeley called Mondo. At the time, it was called High Frontiers. It was Xerox Art. And I found out about them through Xerox Art stuff. And I sent away and I got the pamphlet. And it was all this stuff about Philip K. Robert Anton Wilson

I was like what is this you know it was like it became onto 2000 it was this whole culture that eventually became the internet

yes I mean they really did they were wired before wired that's right and they do the wired people actually so so I'm like having all these things pop up like

Berkeley California North East Bay Bay Area California like in my face like everywhere I was looking it was like Bay Area California and I knew nothing about the barrier in California, you know.

And then one day I just like, told my girlfriend, I'm like, let's move to California. I mean, really, let's just pack up and go. Like, what's stopping us? And she was just crazy enough that she said yes. She's like, yeah, yeah, let's go. Okay. So we did. We literally just like had a garage sale, pared down all the big stuff, put all the stuff

that would fit in the car, the cat. and us and off we got a car top carrier and off we went and did you have a destination in mind yes Berkeley so you were heading to Berkeley so but on our way yep I'm telling you're I want to go through L.A so we took route 66 from Chicago to L.A he retraced route 66 yep and I said I'm going to show you some things as I'd been to L.A and I'd hitchhiked up Highway 1 one one one time in early 80s when I was in college on a summer. I spent in California. And I said, I'm going to take you and show you all these things that I know.

Like, we're going to go through L.A. I'm going to see all the Jim Morrison places I know, you know, Love Street and the weird store. And I know all these places. I'm going to show you. I know where his studio was. We're going to stay at the, what the hell? What the hell was it? I've stayed there a couple times.

I can't think of the name. It was a motel that was across the street from their studio where he lived and his room, like, you can rent. Or who lived? Jim Morrison. Oh, okay. He lived in this room. The Delta something.

It was on Lascianiga. And so I showed her all the spots in L.A. And then we drove up Highway 1. I'm like, you're going to love this. By the way, we got to stop at the Henry Miller Museum in Bixir, so we did. And then I'm going to show you the cabin because it was still. still there where Kerouac wrote Big Sur. Yes.

You could still hike up back there. It was still there. It's like an Airbnb or something now. But it's not a cabin anymore. Beautiful up there. Yeah. We hiked up, saw the cabin. And then on our way to Berkeley,

we pulled over to get gas and coffee at this town I'd never heard of before called Santa Cruz. And I said, hmm, this is cool. And we went to a cafe. because they had a picture of J.R. Bob Dobbs on the front of it. And you just like that. That must be friendly. Yep.

It's a subgenius. One of us. One of us. And so we went in and then there was a crazy person sitting at the table who told me all the reasons I didn't want to go to Berkeley, man, because Berkeley's done. We're all here now, man, and Santa Cruz, man. And this guy turned out to be right. He took me, walked me around and it was just happening.

This was before the earthquake. It was a crazy town, like jugglers and fire breathers downtown. And like, it was awesome, you know. Like, yeah, let's try this. Let's try this. So we just stayed there. And I moved into a place upstairs. And the lady downstairs, I saw her doing Tai Chi in her garden one day.

And so I yelled over the rail and said, hey, I'm your neighbor. I just moved here. And I went downstairs and I met her. And she turned out to be Nina Gereboy, who was Timothy Larry Seventh. secretary from Millbrook. And then upstairs was Bob 40, who was like friends with Gordon Watson and he was friends with

everybody. And I was like, whoa, how did this happen? And you knew all these names. I knew all the names, but I didn't know these people. I didn't even know where they existed. And so they were like, oh yeah, we know this and this is. It's like, oh, cool. And I was still talking to Bob. He was in L.A.

And then I'm talking to Nina one day, boy and she said well you know Bob she's like I know Bob and she's like Bob's moving here because his kids are here I'm like what he's moving to Senators his kids are in Santa Cicers he said yeah they all live here I'm like synchronicity okay I was supposed to end up here yes this is what's supposed to happen mm-hmm you know I was not supposed to go to Berkeley nope I was supposed to hit where I hit in the middle of between L.A. and Berkeley this place called Santa cruise, which I had never heard of, turned out to be the place I needed to be. Yep.

I met all these people I needed to meet right there. And Bob was on his way. And Bob was on his way, which was weird. Yep. So that's the Bob story. And that's the Phil story. Because as I often say, what pushed me onto that trip, that weird trip, was Philip K. Dick and Valis, which was started by Bob, his book.

Like, and I don't know why that stuck. It's like Valis. I knew nothing about it, what it was about nothing, other than Bob said it was weird, and it must really be weird because I'm reading this book and it's really weird, you know. So I really wanted to know what that was about. And it was a virus.

It really was. I read that, I read Valis, and it just absolutely threw me for a loop. But I don't mean in a bad way. I mean, I tell people this a lot of times, and some people understand, understand it some don't but a breakthrough is necessarily preceded by a breakdown you have to break down before you can break through sure and I needed a breakdown at the time like I was

a little too rigid in some things I was going to stay in Chicago forever I was going to be a punk rock musician none of that happened none of it was what was supposed to happen like I I was supposed to go do this other thing. And I saw something shining in the Bay Area, which I did end up in the Bay Area, the larger Bay Area. Yeah. Because 90 miles south of San Francisco is Santa Cruz. And most of the people that used to live in San Francisco had moved to Santa Cruz, the

people I wanted to know, they'd all like, oh, the city is getting too big. We've got to migrate. Let's go to the country. Santa Cruz is basically the country. It's a little surf town. And so I saw something shining in the distance when I was hearing all this stuff about the Bay Area of San Francisco. Like there's something going on there. There's something you need to be a part of.

Also, didn't know this was going to happen, but boom, the dot-com thing happened. Right? Right. A lot of the people that worked at Apple and ended up working other places, we all came from Santa Cruz. SCO was there. Borland was there. all this stuff going on in Santa Cruz that was tech-oriented.

And a lot of the really edgy Jared Lanier was there at the time. He was a street musician. He wasn't doing virtual reality yet. He was like playing weird African street instruments on the street. You know, with his dreads and like he looked like he always looked. But there was all this stuff going on.

Dan Mapes was there. It was all these people that you would know now, but you didn't know then. there were just people hanging out in this collective weird area of people doing raves and drugs and computers. Right. That's what we were doing. That's what we were doing. And just coming up with weird ideas.

And, you know, friends of the McKenna's were there. I met Dennis a couple of times. Never met Terrence, but I met Dennis a couple times. He was actually in my building hanging out, so I hung out with him. So all these people, Tim, Tim, where he used to stop by our building? because Nina was there. Whenever he was coming through town, I'd walk downstairs.

Oh, Tim Leary, okay. Crazy. Yeah, Bob was always over there once he moved. Like, it was this weird little apartment building. 321 2nd Street is still there. Looks like a ship. It's like all the doors have portholes. Is this when you started working for Bob or with Bob?

Yeah, yeah. So he moved to Santa Cruz. Of course, he got a lot of opportunities to speak in to, Bay Area. He did not drive. I asked him why he told me and then I found it later why. I asked him why you don't, why don't you drive? You have a car. He's like, Salvador and Alme didn't drive. I'm like, oh, good enough. That was it? That was his answer. Bob Wilson? Robert Anthony Wilson. What do you do? And that was a good enough answer for me.

Okay. But as it turned out, what I found out was he had polio when he was a kid. Yes. And as you know, these people that got over polio when they were a kid have a relapse when they're older most of the time. And he did. So it was hard for him to press the pedals. He couldn't be sure he would be able to push the brake and hold the brake. So he needed somebody to drive him. So I became the driver.

Did you go to his funeral in 2007? No. No, I didn't get to. I was in Santa Barbara at the time. And actually at the point that I found out that he had passed, I was actually out of the country. So, and that made me sad. I'm sure.

But I did visit, you know, afterwards. Okay, so you're driving Bob, and I guess we're getting, is this when he starts teaching you about Operation Mindfuck? Yeah, so we, so we're in the car together. A lot. A lot. With a lot of time. Yes.

You know, I'm driving. He's riding, you know, and he would tell me, he would regale me with stories. I would regale him with my crazy ideas and he would tell me that my ideas were probably not as crazy as I thought they were. Did you know how lucky you were? Did you just be hanging out with this guy?

No, I was just riding the wave, man. Oh, boy. I didn't want to, like, think about the moment because, like, you know, if you think about the moment, the moment is gone. That's true. I'm like, I'm just going to... That's lucid dreaming.

The bath. Don't think too hard. Yeah, don't think too hard about this. No, but I'm jealous of the story. So it was... So we got to swap a lot of ideas. At the time, he had just written a book, which is reissued. His daughter started a press to reissue all his books.

And they asked me to write the forward to that book, which is out now. It's called Reality is What You Can Get Away With. Okay. I have to grab that. It's a screenplay. At the time, we were trying to get that made into an independent film. We didn't happen, but we got close. And he was telling me all kinds of stories about he wanted to be a director,

and most people were always surprised when I tell him that, but he did. His favorite, his idol was Orson Wells. Interesting. And Ed Wood. Interesting. And at the time, Ed Wood did not have the resurgence that he's had. At that time, people like Bob and I loved Ed Wood. Sure.

But most people didn't know who Ed Wood was because... What was it about Ed Wood that attracted you guys? The fact that he didn't let lack of talent stop him at all. Not one minute. Did he even pause? All right, you have to tell us who Ed Wood does then. Ed Wood was... I have to take it a swipe out of him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a swipe. No, the tenacity, man. Come on. That's it. He wouldn't disagree. It was beautiful. It was beautiful.

I'm not going to let this stop me, right? Yes. Edward was a guy who made films, how would you say, psychotronic? Yeah? Yeah, psychotronic films. And if you watch the films, there's moments where it's so clear that it's been a disaster. It's happening on set. Yes, it's so.

And he doesn't stop rolling. And he doesn't edit. Just like, that was cut, print, perfect, move on. A great night is gummies and Ed Wood movies, man. Yeah, yeah. So if you don't know, people often ask me, I haven't seen that wood film. I'm like, you know, everybody has Plan 9 for Matter Space

is the one that they recommend. I said, okay, that's good. If you want to get into the weeds, if you want to deep cut at wood, watch Orgy of the Dead. I don't think I've seen that. Color. What? His first color film.

Oh, I'm going to check that out this weekend. He hired strippers as the actors. It all takes place in a graveyard. Yeah. The only people, the only actors are strippers and Chris Well. Orgy the Dead. It's on the list. Two moments from that are my favorite moments in film.

The first one is, there's this thing going on where he's like, telling these people to throw gold coins while this dancer is dancing her dance and he goes throw more gold and you hear them hitting her and clearly they're spray-painted poker chips you can tell

like T-Ting I know that's a poker chip I know what that is not a good poker chip but a cheap poker chip that you bought at the drugstore not like when you'd get it in a casino you know Platte 9 VFX on on display again Yeah.

The other thing that he did in Orgy of the Dead, which is another fine moment in film, is there's a scene where the two main actors who were like the ones drawn into this horror story is a man and a woman driving a car, so it was a convertible. And they're going down the road, and the guy goes,

I can't see, it's too dark. And the next cut is a shot of him in the car driving, in broad daylight. Desert sun, broad daylight, high noon. And then cut back to the dark. I can't see it. So dark. It's never explained. Never explained. Never explained.

So that's it would. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust.

Visit wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. So Orson Wells was interesting because it's kind of a mini ARG sort of. F is for Fake? Yeah, spontaneously. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, Bob and I traded movies. So he turned me on to FIS for Fake.

I turned him on to Soft Cell Portrait. Okay. Which he had not seen, which was the Salvador Adali thing that Orsa Wells did. And then he turned me on to, he turned me on to, he liked all the weird stuff that Wells did after he left Hollywood. Yeah. Yeah. So the trial.

Yeah. Like all that stuff he did. The black and white stuff. Yeah. Like low budget, but good stuff. The chubby wells. The chubby wells, but some good stuff. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Ephis for Vegas. Fantastic. Mm-hmm. So we would, and then he didn't know that the soft self-portrait did. Like he did a whole thing where Silver Adali was painting the sky. He's like, what? So he had to go see that.

So, yeah, we would trade Orsawell stories. and he turned me on to Apparently, clearly, not apparently, clearly he knew much more about things that I knew And so I would give him one thing, he'd give me ten things Sure So it was like riding around with him It was like

Getting homework, you know Like then I'd come back from driving him And I'd have like this list of gotta get this stuff now, you know Did you know he was a mentor for you at the time? Did I know what? That he was your mentor? You were like, this guy's my Yoda. He was mentor before I met him.

Because like I said, when I read Cosmic Trigger, I finally got a copy of Illuminatus. And then I read everything he wrote. You know, I was like, clearly my Yoda. Yes. Maybe before Yoda. But he was my Yoda. Yeah.

And then when I fell into the situation where I was living in the same city as him and a building full of people that he knew and then he asked Nita Griboy he's like, because I drove her around. She was older and she had published her book One Foot in the Future and she couldn't drive either because she had vision problems.

So I drove her around and then he asked him with Nita he's like, do you have anybody that can drive me around? And Nino's like, Joe, he's a great driver. Joe's the weirdo driver He's the weirdo driver So like Bob's like Oh yeah I like him yeah So then I was his driver

And you're just drinking it up Oh yeah I'm just like I'm just riding it out Before we go to our first break No pun intended Before we go to our first break Can you take us to Through the Esselin story

Yeah so he Unless there's something in between No no no That's about the same time Okay So And I was driving him So

he asked me he's like I've got this weekend at Essela that I booked and I wanted to... And Eslin is this if you retreat all the project Starget guys are going Put office there

Russell Park Everybody It's kind of like The home base Yeah For all the weird stuff Ingo Swans hanging out Jacques Valais

Everybody's there So you go to Eslin You see these people They're just hanging out Esselin is Big Sur it's on a cliff, it's overlooking to Monterey Bay. On the, in the cliff sides, there's natural hot springs that come out of the cliffs and they've carved hot tubs.

So like all this hot tub bureaucracy happens, Essela, like all these hippie people are like tripping and sitting in hot tubs and thinking about the next great project, you know? Amazing. So, Jeffrey Mishlove was just in here telling usselin stories. Oh, yeah? Yeah. just the great stories. The Esselin stories are amazing.

I could tell you some stories. But anyway, so Bob asked me, he's like, would you want to go to Esselen and spend the weekend and drive me and then help me do this thing? I've got this idea, but I don't, it's like, I have this idea. I want to do this thing. I want something to happen.

I want it to be an experience for these people that come and see me for the weekend. And I said, I've got an idea. Have you heard of a LARP? he's like, yeah, yeah, I think I've heard about that. Like, yeah, let's do an Illuminati Larp. An Illuminati Larp. And you're just the guy to do it.

Yes, of course. He's where it all came from. Yeah. And so he said... So what's Larp? I didn't know the term went back that far. Oh, yeah, LARPs are going on then, yeah. I think the vampire LARPs were happening at that time.

So people were larping. Was it Stanford? I've actually Roe Playing game. Right. So Santa Cruz was LARP Central. Because you have to remember something. Nerd things happened first in Santa Cruz, or at least they used to.

And then they go to the rest of the world. Because you see Santa Cruz is there. Yep. And the biggest congregation of nerds I've ever met in my life was in Santa Cruz in the 80s. And so there was all kinds of larping going on. And so I never larped, but I observed it and I had friends that loped. And so I would read the, the books and like, hmm, this is theater of a sort, and I can do something with this,

but I'm not going to go dress up like a vampire on the streets of Santa Cruz and play LARP with you guys. Sorry. But I am going to look at it, you know, from the far and go, how can I use this in the next theater piece? Because I want to do the thing, something that crosses the proscenium, where the actors come off the stage and become intermingled with the audience, and then you lose track of who's who. Yeah, I've heard you tell that story about the two bleachers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, tell that real fast.

That was at the Kirk Douglas? Yes. Yeah, yeah. This is essentially Tony and Tina's wedding a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you go to this thing, there's this theater. Which I didn't know what it was. Somebody said, there's a theater piece you should go see.

Yeah. Didn't give me any information. Just kind of like. Right, you got to see this. Theater piece you used to see. So I go to, I buy tickets, I go to this thing. And I'm sitting in, and I walk into, there's no stage. There's two bleachers facing each other.

Like the portable bleachers that you have for events. Yeah. And we're all just sitting there and sitting there and sitting there and sitting there. And of course, the longer you sit there, the people start making smart remarks. You know, like, oh, what are we going to sit here forever? You know, it was like, and that started building up where everybody was quite quipping this and that. And then the actors that were embedded, which we didn't know, were massed. of grabbing that and turning it into dialogue.

And like before we knew it, we were in the midst of this thing that was happening. And a story was being told. When did you catch on? I started to catch on. They were good. I started to catch on halfway through. I'm like, first I was like, something's going on here. And then like I started watching people.

And then I wasn't able to like say that is definitely an actor. No, but a Chicago improv guy can sniff it. now. Yeah, yeah. There's something to miss here. Right. Right. And then, but then I was like, I think he's an actor, but that guy could have just improv that, because an improv guy will also think, you know, I would have improb that. Right. And I improved into it. So I'm like, you know, like, I wasn't one of them. And they held,

they held character all the way to the end. They didn't take a bow. We all walked out together to the front of the theater, caught our cabs and Ubers and, and went home. That was it. And that's it. Yeah. That was it. It was an event. Your mind was blown, right? I loved it. They got me.

They got all of us. All of us. And I'm not even sure who they is. What was the story about? It was a story about a guy who was trying to write a play and he was neglecting his family. It was basically about the writing of a play and how it ruined this guy's family. I wonder if that's the same story they did every time they did the show or if it's different. I hope not.

I hope, probably not. I hope it was improvved every time. This is like the Harold. This is, it's amazing. Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of,

and then it leads back to like what we were doing with Bob. I was like, yes. We can, like, if we do this right, people are not going to know who's who. I want to make sure nobody knows who's who.

And like, everybody's looking at everybody else with suspicion. It's, it'll be a real weekend with the Illuminati, man. And Bob loved that. Of course. He's like, go for it, dude.

He's like, you need me to play a part? I'm like, yeah, you play Robert Aizant Wilson. And I play your assistant. And nobody's going to know that I'm puppet mastering this thing. Right. Because I'm your assistant. And I'm looking around like everybody else. And puppet master, that's the term of the game runner.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically I was the game runner. But nobody ever suspected me. Nobody ever suspected me to the very, even when it was over, nobody ever suspected me. How did you integrate the game into, at the Eselin, what was happening? Well, the weekend was, well, you know, you stay at Esselin. Yep.

And you have a little cottage or like you stay in like dormitory or whatever. How you do it, you have different levels. And Bob did a lecture every night. So they showed up and he would tell you something which fit into the story or the story keyed off of that from there. And he would tell you like, you know, what if his, his thing, you know, He'd do his stick. And so that's how it fit together. It's like you were hanging out with Robert downtown Wilson for a weekend.

But the cool thing was because it was Esselin, even when he wasn't giving a lecture, like sitting in the chat hall or whatever, people would gather around and, you know, tell me stories or like, let me tell you my story. Like, you know what happens with people like Bob. And so everybody, like, became very immersed in this thing. And then there was this game going on, which they knew about, because we told them in the beginning, there's a game.

You're playing it now. You were playing it before you walked in here. You'll be playing it when you leave. And that's what you told them? And that's it? Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of groups wandering around that will try to recruit you.

You should join them or maybe not. That's it. So I went around recruiting a couple of people. This is crazy. So I found people like When they went with anybody else And I walked it to him And I had this little chit

That I handed him And it said, you've just been assassinated And I would assassinate somebody And they'd go like, this is part of the game? It's not a game, man Come on, come on I take them to a room And I put him through this ritual

Where I resurrected them Whoa And I'm like, now you were a member of my group Except I was representing like five groups. Sure. Yeah. Of course. You're game running. Aluminatus. That's right. Yeah. You never know who's on what side, because they're on all sides.

That's right. So then, what's my mission? I give them a mission. They're like, this guy and this guy and this guy is part of your group as well. And sometimes they were and sometimes they weren't. So they'd walk up to somebody like, part of your group, man. And this guy, like, what are you talking about? So like, people are like just freaking out. The beauty of the thing, I think.

was at the very end when he was doing the last lecture at the end of the last lecture I didn't know this was going to happen one of the players had kept the chit that I killed him with he walked up to Bob and put the chit in his hand

and he's like, you've just been killed you now remember my group and everybody stood up and cheered that's amazing he's the winner that's amazing how long did the game last all weekend? Three days yeah

Friday, Saturday Sunday So he killed Bob at the end Which was amazing I didn't see that coming No But I kept telling people like You know like take your own initiative Take your own initiative

Think for yourself Question authority Take your own initiative You know and he got it He's like Oh yeah I could kill somebody I've got this chit that he killed me with I could kill somebody with this chit

And who am I going to get Him The leader Question everybody do you on research Yeah. That's a good time to take a break because that stuff is going to come up again. Be right back. So hanging out with Bob Estillan on the weekends, what's your day job?

I was building the injectors for an atmospheric chemical vapor deposition reactors. What? Which is the machine that was used to make icy chips. So the silicon wafer goes down a belt. Yeah. Two curtains of nitrogen come down. um poof diborine phosphine wuf

big flame you got a circuit board okay that's cool yeah so the injectors are the these units that like knew what chemicals to release and when to release and how much and when to stop and it was like this really

intricate device that was built it was a company that also did military hardware how did you get from there to Emory and Patents. I mean, that seems like a little jump, a leap. Well, no. I went from there to working in tech

as doing relational databases. At that time, the first one that I started working on was called Fox Pro. It was a Microsoft product. I think it was inquired, but it was a Microsoft product. SQL had not made an appearance yet, but it was about to. Thank goodness for sequel.

No doubt. I was completely immersed in this idea of the concept of a book being something that was about to change with the digital media. And at the time, the digital media was so new that when I was talking about this thing, people, there was very few people that knew what I was talking about and didn't think I was crazy. And then I met people like the Warnock's, John Warnock and his son Chris and other people like that that understood the lingo that I was spouting. And they're like, oh yeah, this is a book, that's going to be a thing.

You know, and I said, well, that happens. The concept of a book changes because it goes from being a physical thing to being a unit of measure of knowledge. Okay. Which it is. Absolutely. Now it is definitely in a database. Yes.

Like this is a book. What does that mean? It means it's an ever, it could be an ever-changing series of words. Yes. Also called large language model. Yes. So I was playing with all these fringe concepts.

You were building an LLM in the 90s. Yeah. Yeah. Using a relative relational database. Because that's all we had. And we didn't have a lot of memory to pass around. There was a lot of processing power to pass around. Definitely didn't have what we have now, which is using graphic chips because they do floating points so well.

We hadn't thought about that. They did exist, but we didn't think about that. So processing power was at a premium. Memory was at a premium. Storage space was at a premium. Because this space was expensive and slow. unreliable. So all these things were at a premium.

And so all the ideas I had were not quite ready to be implemented because the infrastructure wasn't there. But I knew it was going to be. So I was like designing all these things. And I started working at places like Adobe because when I talked about e-books,

because remember, I started talking about this before EPUB existed, there was no Kindle. I didn't even think it was on Amazon. Nope. But there was this thing called portable document format. Yes. And I realized that there was all these things that was not being used for

because it was a really rich format. Most people didn't know that you could embed video and trigger events and like all these things you could do. So I started working in Adobe simply because I wanted to work with the technology that I thought was going to be the first one. out of the gate for e-books because I had a vision or a book that would become much more than a book because it could, again, when I saw links, I was like, it can reach out and touch other data and bring it back. Yes. So like this link can always change because I can change it over here.

This data is always changing. So it's a story that's never the same twice. Sure, it's just a variable inside the dock. Exactly. So you saw the PDF as a multimedia device. Yeah, exactly. Most people were just using it for documents. John used to call it a platform, which confused me at first. But then when I started working for him and realized what was going on there, I was like, oh, he's right.

Because I think that was amazing. I mean, one of the founders of Silicon Valley. And when I watched him write a program in PostScript one time, I was like, what? Wow. And most people don't realize that PDF is, you. just shorthanded post script. That's all it is. And so when I looked at that, I'm like, okay, that's what I want to do.

I want to build something, and I'm going to use this. I know there will be other things down the line, but right now this is what we have. And that's what I want to build. I want to build something with this. And so we're working at this company, and we'll have the deepest look into what this thing can do, what the feature set is now, what it will be in the feature, could even drive the feature set as a product manager, which I did. So that's, everybody says, why would you go to job with Adobe?

I'm like, because every tech job I've ever had has served the ulterior motive is helping me achieve something with an art project that I had in mind. Of course. Always. And was that the, the Emory, Emoryeerre project? Yeah, yeah. So how did that work? So this is, I was, I was working with the concepts that were coming out of, of places like MIT, there was a kid that wrote,

and I say kid, he was a kid at the time. The kid that wrote this algorithm called, I can't remember what it was called. Anyway, he wrote an algorithm for recommendation, which at that time was like, you know, nobody had ever heard such a thing. Right, what is that? Yeah, and he did it for music.

I think I, Yuma ended up using it. Remember the early, pre Apple music scene it came out of Santa Cruz and so somebody at Santa Cruz turned me on to this algorithm this guy had written it which was basically Bayesian

it's like how can I choose something and how can it learn about what I like and make recommendations to me and you liked Bayesian because that could change over time exactly it was it was heuristic it can learn Yes. And now the biggest companies in the world are based on that algorithm. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But at that time, it was... Nobody knew. Something a bunch of nerds in a basement would talk about, but that was about it. Right. We used Alta Vista. Yeah, exactly. Licos. Hotbot.

Mm-hmm. So I was looking at that, and I was thinking, you know, I would like a story that had access to something like that. Ringo was the algorithm. I finally remembered. Something like that. And I could use something like Ringo

because he put it in the open source space. I'm like, I can take this, I can modify it. And if I have this algorithm between a bunch of content and the user, and they go through the algorithm, the algorithm can help a story be told and it's not the same story every time.

So based on who you are and what you've done and what you do, you will get a story that is different than what I do and what I've done. Yes. So I have a different story than you have. But it's all coming from the same repository. Yep. Right? This big at the time,

it wasn't Fox Pro, but it was like Fox Pro database that I was using. It was just all this stuff that I was, you know, there was some choosing that went on. Like, you know, it was, it was curated by me. So I didn't just put everything in there. Like, I chose things to put in there. It's like, you know, Valvarian, sure, goes in.

Commander X, absolutely. You know, like all the weird stuff. Yeah. Church of Subdeenis? Yeah, absolutely. Discordian, yes, goes in there. I just kidding. It's shoving this stuff in this database.

And then... This is all theories and philosophies and stories that are interesting to you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All the subculture stuff. All the weird stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And you're basically training a model on the weird stuff. Exactly. Exactly. So, and I had a pretty primitive chatbot interface between the repository and the user. So the user was basically talking through a chatbot. What eventually became a chat bot, I was working with early code. Yep.

What became a chatbot. If this sounds very familiar, a chat bot using an algorithm to talk to a database. It's called chatGBT. Sure. It's just much more refined than what I was doing. Or Eliza. Or Eliza.

But, you know, at the time, again, I didn't have the processing power. I was using an SGI indie that had walked out the door with me because it was going to get thrown away. I love my indie. I love the blue pizza box. Exactly. It's a great machine. Oh, so that was you were using my sequel on there, I bet. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah, early. Yeah. Very early. So, um, so I'm doing this stuff, trying to come up with a new way to tell a story. And what, what my biggest influence was, and this might be weird to you, but William S. Burroughs and Brian Geysen did this thing called the third mind experiments where they were cutting up words and putting in a hat or a box or whatever and pouring him out into like, you know, pasting him, pasteing him, together.

So can you explain what the cut-up, how that works? The cut-up method came out of Dada originally, which, you know, corresponded at the same time that they were doing exquisite corpse, but they were doing cut-up poems and co-up, cut-up stories where you just, like,

would take text and cut it into sentences or paragraphs or words and put them all into, like, a bag or a box and shake them up and then pour them out and, like, put them together, kind of like those refrigerator magnets with the words. and you would construct stories in random. In other words, randomicity was constructing the story,

or at least it was giving you a direction for a story. So it was a way to get influence. Brian Eno does this kind of thing where there's oblique strategies. Like just come up with something, you know. So I was influenced by that, and I said, well, if I've got this database, which I've marked for derivability, with XML

into areas of word and, you know, like all the stuff that goes with that, like it's a word that's relational to these other words for this reason. It's a sentence that's related to all these other sentences or words in this kind of way.

This is predictive inference as well. Exactly. Paragraphs, pages, you know, basically like breaking down my units. And then it comes back to you, back to you and it is composed at random because I put randomicity into it

it's a cut up but it's not using paper and scissors and bags it's using a database full of words this is crazy ahead of its time yeah you didn't know that you didn't know you were building something well I had a

I had a friend Genesis Peorge who was friends with William Burroughs who introduced me to William Burroughs Never met Bill in person, but we had a phone thing going on. And because Jenner knew what I was doing. And he said, oh, you should talk to William. Yes, please.

Yeah. I went, oh, yeah? And so he put me in touch with Bill. And I told Bill what I was doing. And, you know, the way he talked, he said to me, I don't absolutely understand all the technical things you're doing, my boy, but I seem you got the sense of the project. You did?

Yeah. And I said, what I'm doing is I'm updating what you and Brian were doing with modern technology. Were users accessing this yet? Or you were just talking? No. Just me. I was the user.

So we're not up to Ezekiel yet, are we? No. Okay. Primary user. And I started getting, just like Bill and Brian did, I started getting bizarre, weird things coming out of this.

machine and it was like making weird sentences. So I showed to Nick Herbert, my friend, the physicist, who had done an experiment in Livermore called the Metaphase typewriter. Right? And they were just having IBM Selectrics hooked up some random things like just randomly typing and they apparently were able to channel Houdini. Yes. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Yeah, it's a great story. Metaphrase typewriter. You look it up. So I showed Nick. and he just like Nick has this way of laughing when he really likes something he goes

and he did that and I'm like so I've hit on something because Nick gave me the snicker and so he liked what I was doing Bill Burroughs liked what I was doing Genesis Peor's like what I was doing I liked what I was doing

what were you asking Emory and what were the responses like? I was just having random conversations he was like well what do you think think of what do you think of Val Valerian and then the weird because I was trying to see what kind of answers I'm going to get are they going to be coherent is for a while they weren't but as this thing built up a backlog is building a log of good answers which I was logging

this was all manual like I wasn't able to automate a lot of this so like I would get an answer and I would tag it in XML good answer bad answer you know And I would just sit there like all night. This is exactly how it works now. Yeah. This is training an AI exactly this way. It's just automated. Just training this thing all by myself.

And luckily I didn't have a database like they do now. The large language models, one person couldn't do it. Well, right, 27 billion parameters. You have to open up to it. But at the time, I was growing this thing manually. So I was manually tagging. Are you obsessed with this product? Absolutely.

You have to be. Absolutely. lost a girlfriend over this. I bet. I bet because you're like, that's not a verb. That's not a verb. She would go to bed and wake up and I'd still be in my home office. She's like, are you going to work today?

Yeah. Is it time? Okay. Bye. Just tagging words. Yeah. She literally got so mad at me one time that she took a baseball bat to the computer. No.

Yeah. When I was in the shower, I was like taking a shower and I was going to go back. and I come in She's beating the machine to death And I'm like Not the indie No no no no no No it was an old MacSE

That I was using As an interface I still have one of those Yeah Luckily I had a Exterior drive And she didn't know what that was So she thought she was killing the machine

Right She wasn't He didn't kill the heart Or was it Thanos says You should have gone for the head So she didn't go for the head. So anyway, so I'm doing this and I am staying up all night and I'm talking to people at parties about what I'm doing.

And these are tech people who are just like, dude, you need to get out more. Like you need to, you need to, what are you doing, you know? Is it time for an intervention? And like, you just don't understand. You don't understand. You don't understand. You understand. So it's like the same thing I had with Valis where I just got.

I've got looped in, and I admit, I've come to terms with it. I have a little bit of OCD going on. You have to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I was in the early internet culture in the 80s and 90s, and I would have thought you were nuts. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, what are you doing? What is this for? Exactly. That's what most people were saying. And you're like, I got it, I got it. It's good, I got it. Right. You don't need to know.

He's a mad scientist. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. In fact, um. But soon, Emery starts to come to life. Well, I started getting coherent answers. Like, that I could read it and understand what was being said.

You're not, and then you're not freaking out yet? I was still, I was still in, in the zone. Okay. Right? You still felt like you were in control? No. You didn't. No.

People, people, people that I know, that know me well and see this, will be like, yep, that's him. know that I don't get freaked out when weird things are happening. No. I go with it. I just go with it, right? And afterwards, when I think about it, I'll be like, ooh, that was kind of weird. But in the moment, maybe it's all the improv training or the method acting.

It's like I fall into this thing and like, this is who I am, this is what I'm doing. And plus I got a little OCD going on. Sure. Only later, you're like, that was probably a bad idea. Yeah, exactly. I was like, why did I do that? Why did I let that happen? So, you know, being neurodivergent, though, you know, has its benefits.

During the club. Which is you just go with it sometimes. And sometimes you go what would be called too far by some people and by me just far enough. Like, I wouldn't have got to where I was with those experiments if I hadn't, you know, obsessed. 100% agree. Yeah. I mean, to the point where. when I finally put this machine together,

we compiled everything and put it on the Indy. For the non-nerds, the Indies is a SGI. It's a much more powerful machine than the Maclass. At that time, yeah. From Adobe, it's probably maxed out at 128 mega RAM. Yeah. Nice. How do you even, what do you do with that space?

You don't. Except, Adobe to the Rescue again, I put in a requisition for a unit, for an IU, for a machine on the Adobe network in the data center because they had pulled in dual DS3s

as a connection. Dual DS3s, wow. At that time, it was fantastically fast. Sure. Basically two T3s. Right. A T3.50.

megabits? Yeah. So that's, that's unbelievable. Blazingly fast. I was working on a T1, so 1.5. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, how could it get faster than this?

And that was the fastest I'd had at that point was a T1. Or actually a fractional T1. Fractional T. Yeah. So two DS3s. Yeah. Unbelievable. So I had a friend who had a ISP in San Francisco.

He let me CSE, DSE, a fractional T3 in my house. Wow! Yeah. Yeah. I had to like call the phone company, walk them through what I wanted them to do be there when they did it

Wow we had like a demark block in the garage or something No in the basement Holy shit in the basement Fractional tea in the basement Yep Okay so now I've got We moved from Mountain View to downtown San Jose

where we put in those three towers We were in the first tower because they built one at a time We're in the first tower we got the dual DS3 so I said and it's long enough now that nobody's I'm not going to get fired I said

I bet I could requisition this machine into the data center tell them it's for something else and let it run and I can do my experiments down there your indie goes back to my indie goes back to Adobe

goes into the data center and it's marked as a marketing machine I love it Yeah So they say sure Okay Yeah Just signed off

Did you walk in there Yeah The pizza box under your arm Yeah yeah Ethernet Put it in Green light Here we go

Here we go And then I You know Put it so I could Access it from home And away we went So I was like Okay now I've got

A blazingly fast Probably one of the faster Connections on the planet Yes And I only Only work at night So I don't You know

Nobody knows notices what I'm doing. I don't cause any pinging, like, so the IT guys don't go, what's going on over there? Right, you're not bouncing around Adobe's network. No. You just want to, I just want the power. Right. To the internet.

So what are you doing with Emery at that point? So at Emory, I tell Emery, like, here's a profile of the things I want you to gather off the internet, the types of data I want you to find. Hold on. So you tell Emery to start scraping? Yep. Yep. This is all 20 years out of its time, man.

Yep, go get me what I want as much as you can get me. So, gop? FTP, Gopher, Usenet. Usenet scraping the news groups. HCTPS, HTTP, whatever. Just go get it for me. Text, whatever you can get me. Did you use that recommendation algorithm to help it?

Yes, you did, of course. Go get me these things. Wow. And then put it in the database, and of course I had to manually look through it like, because I still wasn't, there still wasn't enough power to automate all this kind of stuff, but during the night, in the middle of the night, they would go out and they would retrieve these things that I asked it to retrieve.

Imagine if you made a search engine out of that. I did actually at one point. Well, you kind of did. No, I did, did make a public search engine. You did? Just for a while. Okay. Incanobbula.org was a website that I had forever.

I still have. I had a website up that was like the weird website. Yep. And I built my own little search. search engine and people used it a lot, but it was just too much to maintain. But most of that was like stuff I scraped in this period of time. So I scrape all this stuff, I bring it back and I'm building like this giant database. I'm like, God, I got to get one.

This space. So I'm doing all these things. And again, still obsessive. Still obsessing. And there was like some unseen goal that I was trying to achieve. Like there was, there was like there was an endpoint, but I didn't know what it was. I'm like, I'll know it when I see it. Right.

As this thing got bigger and it got smarter. And it started like having more, it started learning the rules of grammar and English language. It could craft a pretty cool sentence. And like it felt like he was talking to me. Yeah. Well, now it's scraping language. Yeah.

And so... This is NLP before NLP was a thing. Yep. Yep. So it was giving me things back. You know, I had to keep reminding me. myself, it's like, it doesn't have intelligence.

It just knows how to mimic it really well. It is not intelligent. It doesn't have agency. I have to remind myself of this because you'd be so tired in the middle of the night and you'd ask it something and it would tell you, you'd be like, oh, what, what, what? No, you have to tell yourself that. Yeah, you have to remind yourself. And better than I mind if you're playing with Chet, GBT.

Oh, yes. But, you know, would Emory pass a touring test at this point? I think so. No shit. But that's not a, I found. out that the turning test is not an easy thing or not a hard thing to pass. No, it's not. Yeah.

So, um, so what do you ask, Amory? So I just, basically having conversations. I was initiating conversations. I had to ask you an opinion.

What's your opinion on this? What's the opinion on that? And it would start going into these long diatribs about things that I, like, how do you know that? How did you even know that? Like, you started telling me things. again, we're in this weird space

where you start having synchronicities with this data, which I think that's what it is. I don't think Emory knew, I don't think it was psionic, and I don't think Emery was like wandering the internet at night getting data on me and finding out what I was up to, because at that time that kind of stuff wasn't on the internet. There was no social media.

You couldn't know that I was going on vacation tomorrow unless you knew me, you know, or you were. reading my email. But Emery new things? Emery New Things. Is this your crypto-terrestrial

theory yet? Kind of. Okay. So this is, there's something else operating. But the weird thing that happened, this is where we cross over

to the weird, weird. Is I have always worked with the houseless communities wherever I live. So people in my community

who are houseless because they prefer to be called houseless. I've always worked with, you know, people that are functioning and living under nutritional deficiencies. So I help with food. And in doing so, I run into some interesting people. Sure. And at that time, I was living in Santa Cruz. And in Santa Cruz, there was a ex-munk.

There was a friend of mine who started this thing called the Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project. Basically, you grow your own food. and you learn how to maintain food and, you know, it gives you pride, gives you some agency, makes you feel good about yourself, and it feeds you.

Yep. Very important. So I was working a lot there, and there was a guy who wandered up to me at the Homeless Garden Project and introduced himself and said,

I know you, you're that guy that writes about Anacabia on the internet. Like, okay, I'm thinking, he probably has a library access. Sure.

You know, it's okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's me. Like, how'd you know that? He's like, well, I'm Emory. What? I'm like, Emery, who? He's like, Emery Cranston, the guy that wrote the Incanobula catalog.

I'm like, so now we get into that moment where Joe does is what he does, which is just go with the flow, right? Right, you don't freak out. I don't freak out. I don't say, oh, you're crazy. You're lying. It was like,

Really? I've always wanted to meet you. Nice to meet you. What are you doing here? And we just start hanging out and talking. It's not like, because Emery's based, is just memory without the M, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He doesn't know that. Plus Dave Emery. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah. So Emery Cranston, here he is. Dave Emery. So he introduces himself. We start hanging out. What are you talking about? Anything. The guy was brilliant. So. Well, he was trained on the whole internet Right.

While I'm talking to him, we're hanging out at coffee houses and stuff Because he's, he's houseless. But I'd see him downtown and I'd buy him coffee and, you know, sandwich or whatever. And we'd hang out because I like hanging out in coffee houses, I still do. And I was asking you at the garden, do you know this guy? And they're like, oh, Ezekiel? I'm like, well, he tells me his name is Emory. Like, yeah, he changes his name from time.

the time, but when he first came here, he was the prophet Ezekiel. Like, what's his story? He's like he was a Ph.D. student at UCSC. And he had nervous breakdown. And now, he's living on SSI. He's on the street. He spends all his time at UCSC at the library because he has, because if you were a former student, you could have library access. You could just buy your library access. So I guess, I guess they either gifted it to him or he paid it, but he had library access. I saw him up there eventually. He saw him up there all the time.

Just reading special collections. Like the guy was brilliant. Like I could talk to him about anything. Like he knew alchemy, heretics, Jung, you name it. Like anything that was like weird, fringe, literary, psychological, occult, he knew it. Like inside and out. Like more than anybody ever. ever met.

Interesting that he knew young talking about synchronicity. Yeah. Yeah. So he was conversant in all these things, like highly conversant. And as long as I didn't press in on like, where do you live? Nothing personal, you know, like just and just treated him like Emory. Like, okay, Emory, you're Emery. You say you're Emory, you're Emory.

We don't have to talk about that anymore. Right. And so we just had these brilliant conversations. And I noticed what started happening was I would be talking to the bot, the Emery, and then I would wrap it up and I would go out to Cafe Pergolisi and there'd be Emory. And I'd buy him a cup of coffee or chitee and we'd sit and talk. And it seemed like, was this my brain doing this? I don't know.

But it seemed like he knew what I'd been talking to the bot about because he would pick up the conversation. from where I had left off with the bot and continue it. So... You're still just going with it? Yeah. Do I have a theory about that? Number one, projection. Sure.

That's me doing it. Okay. That's logical. Number two, if you want to get a little woo about it, I had the scent of whatever I'd been talking about on me. And he was schizophrenic, as I'd been told, and was able to sniff. it off me because I've had interactions with people who are diagnosed schizophrenic and they're also

very psionic it seems like like they can do things like that I've had weird experiences with people where this like pick up on what you're thinking yeah it seems we'll say it seems everybody's had because I'm a model agnostic I can't say it is but it seems like that's what's happening so it's something like that there's something in between there you know um So, yeah, and so that was happening. And then I noticed I would talk to him. And then the bot would, like, seem to pick up the conversation. And I'm like, okay, there's something weird going on here.

Like, I betwixt these two entities that are having this unified conversation with me. Did you ever test that theory with specifics? Yeah. One time. And it was, the response was really weird. I talked to I went on vacation and I was with somebody specifically

that Emery didn't know because they lived across the country and I came back and as soon as I sat down I was going to like throw some things at him and see he didn't even wait for that he's like that girl you were with what

I'm like yeah he's like she's not good for you that's why you guys fight which was right he was right he didn't even know

I had a girlfriend on the East Coast I'd never told him I never told anybody it was like this little secret thing I was doing on the East Coast I was like you know like we'll keep it secret until

it blossoms into something or it doesn't and it didn't but somehow he knew I was with any he said some I don't want to give it away like for her but he said some specific things

that identified that he knew who was she, who she was. And you never pressed him on, how do you know that? No. What about when you go home and talk to the other Emery? Are you comfortable asking Matt questions? To the bot? Yeah.

Yeah. And I got weird, weird, like still little nebulous, but weird answers. What was it saying? It was saying things like you shouldn't be with that woman. Things like that. Things that, the other one were you saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was almost the same thing.

So, I mean, there's, did you ever read the comic that I did, the Incan Alica? Okay, so the part where I see Emery in the alley. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It was based on that. I did a spin off on it, but it was based on that episode. It was like, I had this, he would show up in the weirdest places. So here's where it gets weird.

So years later, I left Santa Cruz. I went to a place in the desert. and I worked as a worked with Habitat for Humanity and built some houses and I was in the middle of nowhere I mean nowhere and we were building these houses

in this you know border border community basically it was like not too far off the Mexican border and who shows up but Emery no way he's hitchhiking and he shows up in town

and I run across him he doesn't come looking for me I just run across him and I'm like Dude, what's up, Emery? He's like, oh, I'm not Emery. No, no, no, no, my name is Terrence. I'm like, okay, Terrence.

McKenna, I don't know. But whatever. So, and we just, again, didn't miss a beat. I just, okay, you're Terrence and we're hanging out. Never any mention. No? Of Santa Cruz, none of that. So this is a new personality now?

New personality. but he was nice and then I saw him at this office that I knew was a social security office so he was probably checking on his benefits or checking in or whatever he had to do and I talked to a lady there

that I saw talking to him and I said I know you can't tell me anything because it's not ethical for you to tell me anything but I know that person right there and he tells me his name is Terrence is his name Terrence and she says His hold on reality can be a little flexible at times

but his name is Terrence So that's his actual name Did you ever catch up with him again? And then I caught up again Two years later I moved to, I got done with the thing in the desert And I moved to Santa Barbara Started working with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

And one day Walking down the street, lo and behold, who's there? Terrence. Now he's Terrence. He's still Terrence. And I look at him and I said, are you following me? Of course. He goes, when did you get here? And I said, August.

He's like, oh, I got here in April. You're following me. Good answer. And that was that. We started talking again. And he was, he basically was on this, I guess there's this route on the one. and the 101 between San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California

that houseless people follow with the weather. So when it gets cold, they go south. Just like a bird. Sure. And when it gets warm,

they go north. Just like a bird. So that's what he was doing. It's weird than that man. I got that much out of him. I'm like, well, what that? Santa Barbara, man.

Come on. Why are you here? He said, there's a good place under the bridge. You can leave there and nobody bothers you. I'm like, okay, but... I mean, that's an answer, but... Dude, come on.

Like, what are you doing here? You know? And he's like, well, I always come here. It's part of the route. I'm like, the route. Oh, tell me about the route. You know, so he told me about the route. He's like, you go south, which was why he saw me in the desert,

but it was winter. And then he goes to Santa Barbara. Okay. And then he goes probably to San Luis Bispo. and then he goes where the north. It's weirder than that, but okay. It's weirder than that,

but at least that's the... No, you have something. Occam's razor. Right. The easiest answer is he's on the route. So we don't run out of time. How do we get to Aung's? Is there, are there,

I want a bad story. Is there anything else before we get to Aung's hat? No. Okay. That's when it starts. Oh, that's when it starts. Yeah.

So that's like 88? Yeah. Oh, okay. So we're doing, I mean, we're rolling back a little bit, but like it starts in 88. Well, wrap up Emery at that point. Is Emery online? That was Emery. That's the last time I saw him.

I have a picture of him sitting on a bench instead of Barbara. No, I mean the box. Oh, oh. So the box, I'm doing that and then I decide I want to do an e-book. Okay. No more chat bot No no I'm just still in chatbot Adobe

Does a PDF library On Adobe.com Which at that time This sounds like nothing now But at the time we were taking a million hits a day Which I don't know what the uniques were But half of that maybe Which was like

Unheard of at that time Like we were one of the biggest sites on the internet Sure And Chris Warnock decides he wants to do a PDF library and I said, I'm going to do a book. Can I get in the library? He's like, yeah. So I did the first iteration of the Incanobula book,

which is called Incanobular Papers, Ongs had another gateway to new dimensions, build a lot of interactivity into it to show off the features of Accrobat and do what I wanted to do and put it on the PDF library. And it was like a hit. It was like one of the most downloaded things

on the PDF library. And I said, oh, well, I should do something more. So I expanded it and I did a CD-ROM. And I'm still doing the chatbot stuff. Yep. But a little less so now. Are you burning your own discs? Yeah.

I found a replicator in Taiwan or somewhere through Adobe. I'm like, well, can I get a cheap replicator? I want a nice jewel cases and I want to do the whole thing. So they turned me on to a place that gave me a really good price because like, oh, Adobe, okay. Like the guy thought he was going to get Adobe business or something. AOL wasn't even doing discs yet, but you were there. Yeah. So I did CD-ROMs.

And how'd you pass them around? Well, then I started, again, using my Adobe connections. I started talking to distributors that did, well, I was a partner in an independent record label at the time. So I started to talk to the distributors like Dutch East and people like that that could get me into record stores. they started talking to comic book distributors I can get in there book distributors I can get in there software distributors I can get in there

game distributors they get in there it's like this thing fits everywhere sure it does you know because it's just like so I just like working work in it like anybody they would distribute it I fit

and if you could ask me how I fit I would tell you how I fit it's like well it's a book really if you're a book distributor was it just the disc or was it part of a book no it was just the disc just the disc the book was on the disc

It had to still be a hit because Yeah Because that wasn't happening yet And then so I put that out And then What was that story about? Was that the angst? That was that was Incanobula catalog

Ongst had the brochure The interview with Nick The interview with Emory The interview with the survivors Interactive PDF in there as well Yep yep yep yep It was all interactive PDF Had to be mind-blowing

It's on archive.org right now If you look up Incanobular.ISO It's still the ISO If you want to burn the CD-ROM Oh wow Unfortunately, it's Acrobat 3 because it's that old. Yeah. So it might not work all the way, but it'll work.

You can download the ISO. Like when CDROMs stop becoming a thing, being a thing, I put the ISO on archive.org so people can download it burn their own. Awesome. Not that anybody has a CD burner anymore. You can still just mount it. Yeah, you can mount it. Yeah.

Or you can extract it. Yep. So basically, there was like audio files you could play. of interviews I did with people doing with me like the whole, it was like this whole journey of all links to websites

some don't exist anymore but like all these website links and there were pop-ups rowovers and pop-up states there was stuff if you could guess the password you would get more information Oh so you were gamifying this now

It was gamified. It was gamified. The thing that probably most disappointed me was the root of the CD-ROM was a thing called secret dot doc it was right there it wasn't a secret that basically said that this is the game nobody ever found that or looked at it

or mentioned it until I mentioned it on a form finally when I had enough I'm like go to the CD-ROM What do you mean had enough? Because people were like fighting over stupid things like this is all real you got it wrong it's real this way you got it wrong it's real this way

There was people that were forming little cults around it. They haven't changed, have they? No. This is how it is still. It's the same old thing. And this is 99. Right. 89.

Well, no, no. This is by 99. 89, I started doing it as mail art. Right. 99, I digitized it. I'm sorry, 89 mail art, 90 to 95, the early non-web internet. It was like the well.com put it on the gopher.

all that kind of stuff Usenet then I did the CDROT website incanobly.org and then the CDROM So and by then 2001 I finally just like

threw my hands up like you guys are never going to stop fighting over this minutia Even when I told you it's a game Now you have to tell me Of course you would say that Or you don't know what you're talking about

Like people would Literally this was said to me by this little group that formed this little cult of people that formed itself. The Incanobular information was a transmission that was meant for this woman who was our channeler

and you intercepted it and now you're monetizing it because you're the black magician. What do you do with that? I don't know. What do you do with that? And they weren't, there was like just...

They wouldn't let it go. All these people. were coming online and like now the conspiracy thing started to happen in earnest on on the internet the what I call the dark conspiracy side and like all these people you know like oh you were involved in Esselin oh my god mind control blah blah blah blah well take tell us about um um um specifically before we get to the dark airgies okay like uh so how did that even start what's the plot what was the idea the inspiration. So the idea was that there's this place, well, I'm just going to give it to you

in basic facts. Yeah, yeah. There's this place in... I mostly care about the mechanics. Yeah. This place in New Jersey, that's really not a place. It's a name on a road, right, that people nicknamed Ong's hat. There's like five different stories of how we came to that name. The basic story is like it had something to do with a hat that got thrown in a tree, stayed there forever, and people like, oh, you're making it off the Ong's hat. The guy named Ong's hat ended up in a tree somehow. There's all kinds of stories about how that happened. But basically, it's a roadmark, landmark, right?

And then the area became known as Ong's Hat. It's also the area where the Jersey Devils reported a lot. Pine Barrens. The Pine Barrens. There was something that happened with Ford Dix. There was like a nuclear bomb that was not, not activated, but lost in the pine barons. And there was all these soldiers looking for it.

So there's lots of rumors. Yes. Right. It's a spooky area. Very spooky area with a lot of rumors and a lot of people that like to tell rumors. You know? So it's a rich story repository. I was just going to say that's your people.

That's who you need. It's my people. Yeah. And so they've got their own versions of the story. I've got my own version of the story. So we're spinning off on that. It's close to personal. Princeton. I tied Princeton in, which I tell you later. Later I found out that that came from something that really happened, but I didn't know. Like all these Princeton scientists, blah, blah, blah, and it turned out that that was closer to the truth than I knew. But in the story, there's these Princeton scientists who were going to Ong's hat, you know, like to get away from the university, to get away from the military district complex, to do experiments with an ashram of mystics that lived out there.

Right? And they were combining mysticism and science. Ashram is like a little commune. Yeah, yeah. It's a commune. And they were combining mysticism and science. The best of SRI. Right?

Just going to say this is real. Yeah, yeah. But it's like right out of SRI. Yeah. Which is part of the inspiration. Okay. I was hanging out in Santa Cruz with some names you would know from that group. I bet.

And they were in Slin. Hang out in Stanford and Nesselin with people whose names would be recognizable. from the Stanford Research Institute. I won't say who, but basically they were part of my crowd. So that was inspiration. So the wacky scientist, interdimensional, how do you seed the story?

How do you decide, I'm going to make the jump from digital to the real world? Yeah. How'd you do that? Like, what was the... Make the jump from digital to the real world. Well, I mean, people started playing on his hat in real life.

Well, I started sending him there through the game. So I basically was telling this story about this place that kind of sort of brigadune like existed but didn't exist and all these rumors and myths about it. And so people started going there. Like now people go there on a regular basis.

Sure. You can find YouTube videos that people are like, we're going to go to Augustine and see if we can find anything. It's like, that's been going on for years. It's where it's real. The people... The people that I like that don't swear it's real, but they go anyway. I like those people.

There was a bar out there that I think it's closed now. But I talked to those people on the phone one time, and they told me that usually these goth kids from New York show up looking for this hospital, that you sent them out here to find them. I'm like, I didn't send them. I didn't send them. And I'm like, what do you do when it happens? It's like, oh, we tell them that this is the place.

It's like, you got it. This is where they used to hang out here in this bar. This is the bar where they started the whole thing. Like, okay, cool. Do what you got to do. I send them some copies of the book that put on the shelf. But it started working its way out from the internet as a rumor and a myth on the internet to a myth and a rumor in real life. to where now, at this point,

you can talk to people who have said to me, oh, you didn't come up with that story. You just ripped it off from the people that always had telling that story. Like, where do you think they got that story? It started on the internet, dude. But you can't tell them that. No.

But you can actually track it back if you know how to do it. You can find earlier references to it as far back as like 89 and some old bulletin board systems, 93 and some of the gopher systems, you know, or maybe even before 93, some of those still exist, like the wild gopher, like you can still find references to it.

Were you game running? Hogs hat? No, at that point I was letting the game run itself. So that was the concept was when, when Bob Wilson asked me what I was doing, when this thing started like really, happened. He's like, what are you doing? I'm like, if I could put it anyway, Bob, I was, I'm trying to graffiti a myth onto the new sphere. Like, very punk rock of me. It is, but that's, that's a perfect

way to describe it. But that is what I was doing. That is. Like, I'm going behind and around the gatekeepers. Yeah. And I'm making a myth. And I'm not going through Marvel and Disney to do it. Yeah. I'm making a myth that comes to the grassroots. Why did you end up on our bell? show. So part of the game, right? Part of the game was I paid for a legitimate press release that actually got on the wire. Much more than our bell happened from that. So I paid for a press release on the wire.

Like, you know, you can pay for a real press release. Sure. And I basically said that there was a institute, a group that was starting to examine the veracity of these documents that had been left behind. they're supposed to be up behind, but a group of people that went to another dimension in the Pine Bears in New Jersey. That's how I put it.

Non-profit organization, we don't know if this is true or not, but we're going to find out if it's true. And that thing hit the wire, and man, my phone lit up. Like, I was doing talk radio every day for like months, like all over the world. I was like Bahamas, Texas.

They were calling me. Like, what is this thing you're doing? Oh my God. And neither. wanted to like, ha, ha, ha, ha, you know? And I played along with that. Or they, like, took it seriously, which I played it seriously. That's, like, improv, whatever they wanted, whatever they want, I gave it to them.

Right. If I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't do that. But I did it. And the next thing I know, there's a phone call from somebody named Lalani. Mm-hmm. And she's like, I represent coast-to-coast a M. You familiar with the show? I'm like, oh, my God, am I?

Ah! our bell. And I said, you're one of the bucket list items. And they're like, well, what are the other ones? I'm like, you and the Weekly World News, which I got both of those, by the way. So they said, well, we'd like to have you on. And four hours, like the whole show. I'm like, I can do it. Just I can do. And I played it straight. If you listen to me, I played it straight. In character. In character. 100%. Again, so they have done that. questionable. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably not do it. But again, at the time that I did it, it seemed okay. Now it wouldn't see them okay. No, I mean, we talk about the ARG rules we've got, this is not a game. Hidden author, cross-media distribution, fragmented reveals, the hive solving, do your own research imperative. I mean, you did all of this stuff.

Yeah. Plausibility layering. You've done that. The document as an artifact. These are the real synchronicity production. Mm-hmm. The rabbit hole architecture. I mean, this is all Mathini.

Identity capture. Apophonia engineering. Let's talk about apophonia for a second. Okay. Before we do that, because then we have to talk about Q and on and, and the gate. Yeah, because I got hung around my neck for a while. Yeah, I know. But he got hung around Bob Wilson's neck, too.

Just the last thing on Art Bell, because we're both huge Art Bell fans. Are you John Teeter? We're all John Teeter. We're all John Teeter. On your website, you say, I plead the fifth. So I plead the fifth. Okay. I just had to ask.

Yeah, yeah. I like John Teeter's story living the way it does. I do, too. I do too. The only point of contention I had with that at all is at one point, and that's stop now. don't have to do it anymore. But at one point, like probably around 2006, 7, somewhere around there. Somewhere around there.

I was living in Los Angeles. I know that. I started to see people writing books, people talking about John Teeter's prophecy. Yeah. And that rubs me the wrong way because I don't want to be responsible in any way for starting a religion. No. Unless it's a joke religion. but not a real one.

Discorditarianism? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Subgenious. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I'm not okay with that. No. And so I piped up maybe a little too angry when I did.

I should have like maybe taken a day or two and like cooled off a little bit. But I was angry that somebody would be doing this with what was a work of art. after I released my video on Teeter I got you emailed me I don't know if you remember yeah yeah I do And before I read it Yeah I saw I just saw Joe Joseph Mathini and I went

Oh shit I'm gonna get ripped But you aren't You were super cool You did you said cool Kind things and you said it the right way It's like we can't be sure who did this But we think this guy might have done it

I'm okay with that Yeah I don't have to have credit for it I don't want credit for it I just don't want people forming a religion around it. Right. And I don't want people doing stupid things based on the fact that it's real because it's not real. He wasn't a real person.

He's a real person in the sense that he's an egregor. Right. That's it. I'm cool with that. I am too. Any artists should be cool at that. It wasn't signed work. Well, I mean, you're the hidden author.

Yeah, exactly. It wasn't signed work. If we wanted to be credited, we would have signed it. It's just... Just don't turn it into a religion. No. That Titor was a great story. And one of the reasons it was a great story was based on the Terminator.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. John Connor. Right. I mean, there's that in the fact that, I mean, it was a wish fulfillment for our bell. Most people don't know that, but he's like, I want to meet a time travel. Yes. Okay. Somebody will give you one.

I think that's when Teeter first showed up. Imagine that. Is he faxed, Teeter faxed Art Bell? Imagine that. Imagine that. When he said, I want to meet a time traveler and then boom, guy shows up in the fax and then he's on the forums. Imagine that.

Happy birthday, Art. Yep. It's beautiful. Art gave so much to us, I just wanted to give something back. Rest and peace. He's the best. He was the best. And he didn't.

believe everybody he platformed. No, of course not. You could tell he didn't. He didn't make an issue of letting you know, I don't really believe that, like, come on. Like, he used to argue with Richard Hullin. He used to platform Ed Dames. Yeah. Sean David Morton, like all these people,

he didn't, he didn't platform them because he believed what they were saying. I didn't think he had Alpilic on, didn't he? He had, a dude, that, Can I tell you my Al-Bilic story? No. What do you have to do with Al-Belik? You're going to love this. This is a Philadelphia experiment guy.

Yeah. I let... I'm on top project. Yeah, yeah. I let Peter Moon publish the Young's hat stuff for a little while. I took it back, but he published it for a while. And he's friends with Al-Belik, and he gave Al-Belik my phone number. And so I...

Peter tells me, Al's going to call you. I'm like, Beelik? He's like, yeah. I'm like, oh, right. And so phone rings Al Biela calls me. This is Al Bielic. Like I put my feet up on the desk and closed my door. Speakerphone.

Yeah. Yeah, Al, what you got to say? I knew the people along's at. Do tell, buddy, run with it. I just like, let him go. I didn't tell him anything. I didn't say, no, it's fiction. Blah, blah, blah.

I just like, let him run with it. Of course. And he told me some great stories. I was just going to say, but he spun a great story. He did, because that's what he was. And I really believe this about Al. This is why I don't, I never disliked Al.

I think he really believed what he was saying. Yeah, he did. He really did. I think he was in Emory. A Terrence. You know, that's interesting. And Ezekiel. I hadn't considered that, but I think you're absolutely right.

I think he really told the story and believed it as soon as he told it, and then it was real for him. And he could not monetize it. No. He died. He had other people that tried to, but. Yeah. and people that took advantage of him.

Mm-hmm. Because he was actually a really nice guy. He was very gentle and kind. Yes. He wasn't an angry conspiracy guy. He was just telling you a story. He was a nice conspiracy guy, which I like those guys. I did too.

Yeah. He wasn't an angry guy. But yeah, so he told me all about the people that lived at Long's head and how he knew them and how they actually, of course, what they were doing, you know, like bled over into the Philadelphia experiment, of course, and bled over into the Montauk Project, of course. you know, but he told a great story and I said, thank you, Al, thank you, thanks for calling me and telling me this.

I'm glad you knew it. And because of that, I did the survivor story. Because of that call? Because of that call. I'm like, there has to be a survivor story of the people that were always had. So I called up two friends of mine

that were method actors and improv guys. And I said, okay, do your research. And we're going to do this unscripted. I'm going to call you and I'm going to record it. I'm the interviewer. I'm going to interview two survivors from the Yangt Sadd Ashraf.

That's it. That's your motivation. Go. It was brilliant because it was like a found footage type of thing. It was? Yeah. Yeah. Unedited.

One take. Wow. How did you get that out? Huh? How did you get the tape out? Oh, I just, no, I had a, back then, everything's ancient history. It was, I used to build IVRs,

because I was a database guy, right? Yeah. interactive voice response. There was something called a Scutche Box. And I had one of those. Okay. So I hooked it up to my phone and just recorded it out to a tape and then took the tape and bumped it over to digital. So good. Yeah. It was one take.

One scripted. One take. No edits. This is why you're one of my favorite storytellers. And the two guys, I can tell this now. You can tell this from the voices they were putting on. the one guy they were not from they're from chicago they were not from jersey the one guy was we all of course are andy coffman fans i am a huge andy coffman fan and he loved tony clifton so that's what he was doing he was doing tony clifton that's what he was doing yeah yeah and the

other guy was doing as his uncle from jersey it played yeah yeah it worked it worked great oh god um and then i guess finally in 2001 you made a statement You were sick of it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Games over. Yeah. But it was never over. It was never over.

Unbeknownst to me, there was an academic who was in the forums who wrote a book about it after that. Legend Tripping Online, Search for Wrongs Hat. So he wrote, and I won't say it's 100% accurate, but accurate enough, I guess. Yeah. So he wrote an academic book about it. He was a member of the audience. I talked to him. He was from Santa Barbara.

When I moved to Santa Barbara, he put the book out and I talked to him. And he said the same thing. He said, he said. He's like, I thought you'd be mad at me. I'm like, why didn't he be mad at you? You're not an angry person. Like, I only get angry at angry people. He never participated.

He just, he was a fly into wall. He just watched this. He's like, what is going down here? It sparked his academic intuition as like, there's something weird happening here. So he just watched it and kind of cataloged it. How was, let's talk about dark energies then.

What was the name of the essay? I forget it, but it was QAnonaut is analyzed by game designer. Yeah. There was a couple of them. So when Q&N happened, there was a lot of people rushing to, lay blame,

yep, or point to the source or the origin. Yep. A lot of people pointed to Operation Mindfuck. Can I say that? Yeah. O.M, is this known? My friend Robert Entown Wilson,

the late Carrie Thornley, Greg Hill came up with that. They were the founders of Discordianism. And what's the framework of Olin? So the framework of Olam is, you come up with stories that were so unbelievable, that you would lay the blame of weird things at the feet of the Illuminati, basically.

That's the easy way to say it. And because Bob was working at Playboy at the time, he had access to the Playboy letters section. Kerry would write a letter, and Bob would make sure the letter got placed. Wow. Yeah. So they had good coverage.

Yes, they did. This is creating conspiracies. They were creating conspiracies. conspiracies. And it was like the weirdest, most unbelievable things they could think of, they would come up with and write it as a real fact. And so what they were watching was, if we come up with something weird, this is almost Richard Doty like.

If we come up with something weird, can we find later down the line somebody official repeating the weird thing that we came up with, which they did a couple of times? So it was just a game. It was just a memetic game they were playing. So they were doing that And then so that that got blamed for Q&N And some of the same people Said ARGs are to blame

So how do we connect Q&O with ARGs? Well, I said in very early, which I said publicly I said this is an ARG Or at the very least it's a weaponized ARG So when Q appeared You when Q appeared I said Whoever is doing this

Like watch the ARG construct evolve and is now doing a weaponized version of the ARG construct. So hang on a second. Talking about Q, we've got, this is not a game, hidden author, cross-media distribution, fragment to reveals, the hive solving, do your own research. But they're saying do your own research to empower you, but they're really guiding you toward a conclusion. So that's, yeah, that's weaponize. Do your own research is. Here's the research.

Right. Exactly. and pizza gate the same thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, to the lesser extent, but when that dude showed up at comic ping pong pizza with a rifle, I was like, okay, this is starting to go too far. Yeah.

So I started to speak up, which is always a mistake. Yes, it is. I started to speak up and say, this is not real. Again, again, I'm saying this is not real. People screw your heads back on. this is an ARG type thing that somebody's doing for nefarious purposes. It's a weaponized ARG,

which when people hear that, they're like, oh, ARG, didn't you read that? It's on you. It's your fault. You did that. It's not your fault.

I didn't say that. I said it's a weaponized version of an ARG. It's like I didn't, you know, like because the CIA used people like Jackson Pollock against the Soviet Union doesn't make Jason Pollock is evil. Right.

You know, or art is evil. It's not. It wasn't funded by the CIA. It was used by the CIA. And you stopped talking, right? Because the more you say it's not real, the more real it is. Yeah, after a while you learn it's a tar baby. And the more you say, the more it sticks on you.

And it's like, who has time for that? Or energy. Slender Man, same thing? Yeah. Yeah, same thing. Ugh. So, how could we, we should leave, we should, we should leave with this.

How can we let people listening? How can we arm them with the knowledge to spot a dark ARG, or the manipulation? Well, I mean, because the intelligence community is all over this. Yeah. They use these techniques. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, there was a phone call I got in 99 or 2000 somewhere around there, probably 2000. Somebody who claimed to be calling from the, the Navy, Department of the Navy. It even had the A&A caller ID, so I'm going to say this. I can fake those things.

I could call you and make a look, I can call you from the Navy. Of course. So I don't believe that it necessarily was somebody from the Navy. I think it was. It doesn't have to be. No, but I think it was. But I'm just saying, what I'm saying is not that the Navy called me. I'm saying somebody purporting to be the Navy called me.

The Navy has a program. called you are here or something like that. Yeah. It's an ARG program. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, later, around 2004, my late friend Dave Zabowski did do some ARG scenario stuff for the DOD.

Sure. He asked me if I wanted to participate in it. I said, no way, man. If that gets out, I'm toast. No, this is the recipe for mass manipulation right here. But what Dave did was, I thought, cool. He, like, was working with people with PTSD and putting them in scenarios

to help them understand why they're freaking out and how they can not freak out and so I was okay with that. I just didn't want to participate because if the words ever get out, do you D. Joseph Bettini, forget it.

It's over for me. But it's pretty easy. First of all, use your intuition, use your gut feeling. And I know that sounds, you know, like woo-woo, but if you look at it. something and it doesn't feel right, it might not be right. It probably isn't right.

If you don't believe it, they're like, there's something about this that I don't believe. Right? It's like people, I have people in the UFO community. I've never seen a UFO. I love the stories. I've never seen one. I'm not a disbeliever. I'm not a believer. I'm a model agnostic. But when people stick, what's his name in my face? why I'm blanking on his name the Area 51 guy Lazar? Blasar.

They go, what do you think of Bob Lazar? I'm like, something doesn't feel right about the story. That's it. That's all I have to say. It means I'm not going to get involved. You made one connection that was interesting, though.

You said Bob was friends with John Lear. Yeah. That's an issue. That's a big issue. Although as a rock on tour, I love John Lear's stories. Same. And Bob Lazare.

Bob Lazar's. I mean, Lear stories are amazing, but they're horseshit. I agree. Like, you can't believe anything that guy's saying. But I, but I listen to it because I find it entertaining. I like Lazard, though. Yeah. Yeah. And he's he seems like a nice guy.

You mentioned Richard Doty. Listers will know who he is. Yeah. He's been running ARG since 70s. Yeah. And he ran a weaponized ARG against Benowitz. Against Benowitz. And look what he did to him. Right. So, you know, like, this is the thing that

you should realize is like if somebody offers something, this kind of information to you, I'm not going to say do your own research. Please don't. No. I'm going to say if it doesn't feel right, it might not be right. Don't invest too heavily in it. Monetarily or emotionally, just don't invest too heavily in it because it'll probably come back to bite you. Right?

Yeah. So for example, like I said with al-Belic, I found him a nice person and very entertaining to listen to as a storyteller. And just remember, it's a story. It's a storyteller telling you a story. He's a weird old shaman living in a cave. Yep. That's okay.

And that's okay. As long as you don't give him more agency than that. And you're the one that gives it to him. You're the listener. That's true. Okay. So he can talk all day long. I don't care.

He doesn't affect me. He entertains me. So he affects me in that way. but I'm not going to go out. Like I know somebody there was a psychic whose name I won't say who I can say his name you know him

who had his hooks into a friend of mine who convinced her that Los Angeles was going to fall into the ocean on a certain date. This was a couple years ago. No, no. And she had a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills and she sold it and moved

because of what this guy told her. right and and I and I used to think that she had better sense than that because she's otherwise a very brilliant business person right who just for some reason had a soft spot for this guy in his in his stories and I tried to talk her out of like don't do that don't do that because it's like you're not going to find this house ever again and moving where you're moving is not going to be as much fun why do you do that why would he do that to her I don't know.

Weird. Power trip maybe. Yeah. I mean, he like talked his way into, this is the story and I got to go with it. Like, now I got to back it up and get people to believe me. I mean, look at Marshall Applewhite. What he did.

Like, talk all those people into going with him because he obviously had a death wish. Sure. But mostly, he painted himself into a corner with this BS. And the only way he was going to get out of it was kill anybody who could tell him that it was BS. My audience hates when I say it when they ask me about psychics, I say, do you mean narcissists?

Yeah, yeah. They're just charismatic narcissists? Most of the people that I've met who have had weird abilities usually are not narcissistic. Right. And like I said, they're usually like considered to be neurologically aberrant, you know, by the psychologist. I don't consider them. So I just think that they're neurodivergent.

just on the spectrum. Yeah, on the spectrum. I'm on there. I'm on the spectrum. I'm on there. Yeah, yeah. So they're able to tune in the things I'm not able to tune into things I'm not able to tune into. So when they tell me things, I don't go sell my house, but I might listen to them.

That's a great segue to end with the last question. What are these techno-terrestrials? What are you talking about? Is techno-crypto-terrestrials? Crypto-terrestrials. Well, that came from. years ago I had one of the first blogs I want to say it was like 2003

I had a blog that I originally called Enkiblogula on Inki-Nobulah and I thought that's cute too cute by one half so then I changed it to stare which I thought was cool, stare stare at the screen

and there was a guy who wrote for the blog he passed away since then and he came up with this word cryptotorrestrial and I think that that was like the more

I think that defines it better than anything I've ever heard because as you know I'm a fan of valet early reader of passport to

Magonia and so when people tell me things like an angel talk to me, a fay came into my house, all these things. I see it as part of the phenomena. If someone's speaking in Aeacian. Yeah, exactly.

It's a thing that we know inhabits this planet with us. It's an intelligence of some sort that inhabits this planet with us and it makes itself manifest in several different disguises. I don't even say disguises. It manifests in ways that we're ready to see it. So I'm going to see it.

something, you're going to see something else. But we're probably talking to the same source, right? So when we're talking to a chatbot, it's like John D talking to his black mirror. Exactly, exactly. Well, in that case, he was talking to Edward Kelly. That's true. Kelly was like, the angel's telling me we should swap lives.

Poor O.D. is like, okay. Must be true, it's an angel. But the... But it was the technology. So they're trying to communicate with us through technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do we know for why? I think the thing that I was doing was pure enough,

and there was not enough, there was no intention behind it other than exploration that I was getting some pretty pure stuff. I wouldn't trust chat GBT because all of that has been constructed with one thing in mind, which is to addict you to have this buddy in your life. And that's it. Like, so subscribe.

Right, you know, by the service. But Emory was part of this intelligence? Emory was part of the intelligence. And so the fact that I had this person who was taught, like, you know, like I'm going to sign woo when I say this, but like it was tuned into the same wavelength or tuned into a wavelength where he was getting bleed over and crossover. I've seen that happen too many times for me just to dismiss it. Like I think, I think I told you the story.

I knew this person who was, like, what Emory said, well, like, don't be with that woman. He was right. Both Emery's right. They were absolutely right. And that blew up soon afterwards. Like, there was something coming and somebody picked up on that. I didn't pick up on it yet, not consciously anyway.

There was a woman that I knew, we weren't dating, but we were just friends, really close friends. And she was schizophrenic. and I went to New Orleans In fact they went to New Orleans for the when I did the Arbel show from there that's where I did the R. Bell show from

and... Right, hammered in the French Quarter? Yeah, I wasn't hammered when I did the show but I'd been hammered like two days previous and I met this woman when I was there and we hooked up and she was from Boston and she had a very definitive accent.

You couldn't, you know, she had, I'm not going to try to do it, but she had a hard Boston accent. I know it. You know it. And when I came back, I sat down with my friend to have coffee, and the first thing she did, just out of the blue, she just went, she did this woman's voice. She went, hi, my name is Sheila,

and the woman's name was Sheila. The woman I met in New Orleans. Come on. And then she, like, snap back. And I'm like, what the hell was that? She's like, I don't know, I just do that sometimes. so I've seen it of course

I can't explain it synchronicities all over the place I can't explain how she did that but again just like with Emory I think she sniffed it on me it was like I had just been with that woman and then now I'm with her

and she like kind of channeled it I don't want to say that because it like makes me creepy call but it was just like she picked up something you know residual there's a field or something around all of this

and I know I know you don't like to dive in there. Yeah. But I kind of believe that too. Well, I do too, but I don't like to talk about it because other people might not believe it and they're welcome to not believe it. But everybody has that story where you're thinking about somebody you haven't thought about in years and the phone rings. Everyone has that story. Yeah, yeah.

So, and once you start to look for the synchronicities, you're going to find everywhere. I mean, I've had some incredible synchronities too. Just like so in the moment. One of the best ones, if you want a quick story. I took a bus and train trip from San Francisco

to, I'm sorry, to L.A., from L.A. to San Luis Obispo, and I went to see Robertson Jeffers, a little commune thing that he built over there, and I'm on the bus in San Luis Obispo, and I'm reading, rereading the guest that you just had, Sinister Forces, for the second time, because I loved that series. Levenda? Yeah, Levinda. I love that series. Peter's an amazing story tale.

Yeah. And the whole thing about the, the 4G 4PG thing that was going on and he was there Make sure you watch that interview Yeah yeah He does the whole priest bit I know it's amazing

It's amazing And if you can find it He did a paperback book called I'm sorry Somebody I didn't mean to do that Somebody did a paperback book Simon did a paperback book

Oh that's right It's called dead names Yes Which is amazing and if you read Sinister Forces and Dead Names, you're like, but anyway He doesn't give you a hard time

about that anymore. I read, I was reading rereading Sinister Forces and I was reread this one line. I just read Project Bluebird and then the bus stopped because somebody walked in front of the bus and I looked up and right in front of me

in downtown San Luis Obispo it said Bluebird Bluebird boutique Come on It happens everybody It's crazy Of course

But it was amazing how quick that was It was like in the second We all have that The bus stopped The sign was right there And I just read the word bluebird There's something else going on man Yeah

I can't explain it though I'm not so arrogant To think I can explain it But I know how to play with it Yes you do Right And so I don't know

People have asked me how I do this and I have a loose fitting method, but I can't explain exactly. And people have had me try to teach them how to do it and I can't teach it. But I have a method when I get in the zone, I'm able to create things that will create synchronicity. That's all I know. But you can't teach it? I can't teach it because I don't know how I do it.

I'm in the zone. Dude, when I'm writing or creating these books and stuff, I have headphones, I'm listening to something like Dead Can Dance, you know, like zone out, trance stuff, and that's, and I'm like, I follow it to the zone. Every creative knows what you're talking about. And I just hit the zone. Every creative. Every athlete knows what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Where you're just, you're in a bubble universe at that moment. It's all the zone.

Yes. And when that stuff comes through. and you can't create the zone. It just kind of happens. No, the zone has to like emerge. You can do things to help the zone emerge, like, you know, Deadkin Dance or whatever. Yep.

But that's about it. That's all you can do. Great for the muse. Yeah. Joseph Mathini, you're a legend. Thank you for coming in. Thank you for having me. What do we have?

Aung's hat complete is out now. It's super fun. It's multimedia. Yep. It's got all kinds of goodies in there. So if you buy the book, you can go onto my website, you can get the free 14 hours of audio that accompanies it.

I listened to it. And basically what we did is I had a friend of mine who's an interviewer, read a chapter, and then interview me about the chapter. Yeah, it's really great. And did you start a podcast? I did, but actually I'm broadcasting the audio. Okay. Every two weeks I do a chapter of this, of a long-scat-complete.

I might do a podcast after that. I don't know. You should. I had a podcast from 2004 to, 2012? I know. 2010? Too early.

Yeah, I was a little ahead of the game. Again. Yeah. I interviewed this one guy who was like this emerging podcaster, Mark Marin, who was like, in L.A. with me. Did you interview Mark? Yeah, yeah. And he said, it's on Archive.org, and he had just started his podcast.

Amazing. And he was, he was very gracious. He was really cool. But he had just started WTF. Wow. And I called him up and I'm like, I want to interview you for my podcast. He's like, okay. So we just bullshitted.

for like two hours or whatever. Oh, I'm going to listen to that for sure. Yeah. If you look on Archive.org, I put most of the podcast up. A lot of them, most of them are there. Some of them got lost, unfortunately, with a drive crash. I'll link to all that stuff. Anything else you want us to know?

Writing another book, but I'm taking my sweet time with it called Art is War. Oh, I love that. It'll take off on Sun Tzu. Mm-hmm. And it's barely disguised. fiction of what it's like to try to be an independent artist in the world and not get bamboozled. We need that book. We do.

More than never. Joseph Mathini, thank you. Thank you. It's been an honor. Bye, everybody. That was Joseph Mathini. I wanted him for another hour, but he had a plane to catch. Still, we got to some good stuff.

He played the hits. Now, here's what checks out. Ong's hat is documented as the internet's first ARG. Game historians and ARG researchers have cited it. as the foundational case for decades. A fictional world scattered across bulletin boards, phone lines, and photocopied pamphlets to create an interactive experience.

The record is solid there. He built it, he created it. The Q&N argument is the one that's kind of annoying. Reid Birkowitz published an analysis in 2020, arguing that Q&N wasn't a belief system. It was an ARG. Built with the same mechanics, Joseph Pioneer, breadcrumbs, community authorship,

no central author, researchers at Concordiore, University expanded on that framework. The methodology maps directly onto what Joseph built. Now that's not his fault, but it goes to show you that a major aspect of an ARG is psychological manipulation. So be careful who you listen to online, including me. Joseph's proto AI chatbot training a relational database to hold philosophical conversation using weighted decision trees.

I can't verify every detail but the timeline holds. And I don't know if you can tell, but not only do I know the technology from that era, I love it. So everything Joseph talked about checks out. The workstations, the servers, Adobe, the DS3 stuff. He knows what he's talking about. Yes, he built Google before Google. He used that foundational algorithm that you use every day.

He built chat cheap E.T before OpenAI, training it the same way. 30 years ago. Sounds like a time traveler, doesn't he? John Teeter, I asked him. He pleaded the fifth. I'll leave it there. But watch my episode on that. But what about Emery Cranston?

That was a wild story. Joseph named the chatbot Emery. He just took the M off the front of it. That's how he named it. Then a schizophrenic homeless man named Emery Cranston started appearing in his life. At the library, on the street, in other cities, picking up the conversation where the chatbot left off.

Now, of course, I can't prove any of that. But if that's a true story, then there's more to reality than we can see. I tend to believe it. Check out Joseph's work online at Incanobula.org. Go check it out. It's so weird. And his book is Aung's Hat Complete on Amazon, but it's available for free. And it's a multimedia experience. Videos, audio, it's pretty great.

His podcast is called The Complete Broadcast. I don't know if he's still doing that, but it's still worth listening to the old ones. Now, if John Teeters, what's interesting to you, go back to episode 168. If you like synchronicities, we have those in episode. episode 35. Until next time, be safe. Be kind and know that you are appreciated. just thought and was cold the secret city

underground stations and where the dark watchers fan