Trillbilly Worker's Party - Bonus Episode: The Octopus Murders (w/ Special Guests: Christian Hansen & Zach Treitz)

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Tom sits down with Christian Hansen & Zach Treitz to discuss their new Netflix Docuseries "American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders"

I took Zach to Whitesburg and showed him around when he was doing research for a film. Do you remember that, Zach? Oh, yeah. I don't know if we want to talk about it or whatever. No, no. Listen, we're just, yeah, this is good. It was about, you know, snake handling preachers. I was doing a film and then there was i i just i think

i had just seen that movie the true meaning of pictures oh yeah shelby lee adams you know yeah and there's like other stuff around that stuff like the the appalachian stuff and you know we knew a lot of people in the in the string instrument community a lot of people who go to clifftop which is like the west virginia music festival but it's a lot of people who go to clifftop which is like the west virginia music festival but it's a lot of people from you know old old time music old time music all that stuff yeah there's just like a whole confluence of that this is the years and years ago and christian and i and our dear friend justin went out there on a trip and uh we were just like kind of just messing around all over all over that that area and meeting

really hilarious people went to someplace the brown derby where we met you know the brown derby is that in viper it was like a no it's not in viper it's it's i think it was in whitesburg it's a like the oldest lesbian bar in appalachia that's what they said is that i think it's over in perry county but yeah yeah yeah yeah but yeah and we met this guy named Big City and we're on a budget you know we didn't know where we were going to stay we figured we'd just camp somewhere but then you get down there and it's like

it's not like campgrounds it's like people's land and coal mines it's not like very obvious place to like camp for the night so this guy uh this is x sorry zach tells the story so well zach i want to throw i gotta throw it back to you i don't know but we were we were at this bar and this dude is like he's like oh you guys are interested and you want to find some some snakelers. All right, well, sure.

But I know where you can find a tortoise shell. It's as big as the hood of a car. And we were like, okay. That's not really what we're doing here. But he's like, I don't know. He gives us the directions. Just like, take a left here. And that's where we found out, I i think the most important thing for this whole story

the thing that i learned was what a 9-1-1 was which i didn't you know people just kept on saying like you see the 9-1-1 it says this and i kept like the address 9-1-1 what are they talking about and i was like what i'm sorry what is a 911 and this person's like it's a street sign i was like oh because it's the you know it's the vernacular for like the only time anybody uses it is when you call 911 and you need to address where you're going yeah before that it was just like u.s highway something something something but then not when 911 came in there then everybody had to get like a proper street name and all that kind of stuff yeah so i just love that you know uh so then so then he tells he tells us of this place that that uh we

could go uh where we could camp he's like there's this hill you know outside of town he points that to it tells us how to get there and you know we were going to go find the tortoise shell you know outside of town he points that to it tells us how to get there and you know we were going to go find the tortoiseshell you know the next day at this point the day was over and it was time to find a place to sleep and the arc my mazda protege and zach's old volvo station wagon simply could not make it up the road up to the top of this hill and then eventually we're just like let's just like camp by our cars here you know and we're just like trying to boulder up this mountain he's like yeah there's a campsite up there like go go go check it out you know and we're like like trying to get up this thing switching drivers you know all this stuff and then um at some point he shows up on a on a four-wheeler yeah we see this

just like almost like alien lights like coming down the mountain you know and it's like slowly creeping towards us and then we realize it's like he's changed into like full camo he's got like guns on every like side of him he's got a case of beer in front of the on the front of the atv and he's like i was watching you all struggle trying to get up that hill for about 20 minutes and we're just like well why didn't you tell it he's like this is the site right here we're like why didn't you just tell us that you enjoy the struggle you enjoy watching us it's like a hazing ritual for city dwellers you know what i mean like they just they mean well from mutual like he's from right outside of louisville and they call him oh okay

okay he's from shively so they call him big city oh okay it's like it's like it's yeah some sort of definitely a hazing ritual for us and it just got you know he was like time to party and we were just like it's time to sleep man man. He was all nicknames. And he started coming up. He wanted to make sure that if we were had, we were armed. And at that point, we were like, this dude's got a rifle or shotgun there and whatever. And we're like, yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's like, it's like, Momar Gaddafi can't say he doesn't have, you know, nuclear capabilities. We got tons of weapons. He's like like what do you got i was like um knives like not well you know i guess when the bear comes you just gotta use the knife and like our friend justin just started just like cracking up he was just like what i'm talking about man like what are you talking about man like what are you talking about well i take the knife i got you you're dead you're dead and we're like yeah just the the world between like sort of like

what is fun what is weird what is a threat what is like enjoyment here was very blurry you know yeah that's a great transition to the film we just made actually 15 years before we did this thing but a microcosm of our relationship oh my god i can't wait to get into it yeah let me give you proper introduction here folks welcome to this week's edition of the trail billies joining us today is mr christian h, a journalist and photographer originally from beautiful Louisville, Kentucky. And also, Mr. Zach, Zach, do you say your last name Trites or Treats?

Trites. Trites, okay. Mr. Zach Trites, a director and filmmaker of such films as Men Go to War, which netted him a win for Best New Director of the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015. Men Go to Battle.

I'm just going to do that little correction, just like the Trites thing. Men Go to Battle. I'm just going to do that little correction, just like the traits thing. Men Go to Battle. I'm so sorry. It's all good. Why did I put it in there as Men Go to War? Everybody does it. We should have just called it that.

Unfortunately, men do both. Yeah, that's true. Men do do both, so it's not strictly wrong, Zach. I'm going to push back a little bit. I love coming on Trillbillies. I love the idea. I was so happy that you had us because me and Zach are both born in Kentucky. And I love how much you guys talk about our beloved home state

and that you guys are both from Kentucky. It's really cool. I know. This is special for me. We all have Kentucky area codes, everyone in this room. That's right. I have a thing about, I've lived in Lexington the last five years, but I won't give up my 606.

It's just like a kind of a, you know, virtue signal kind of thing. So I appreciate that you guys, you know, won't give up the 502. You rocked the 502 pretty hard up in New York. Good, man. Well, listen, there's a lot here. There's a lot here. I want to kick this off with, and eventually I'm going to get to just popcorning some things

to try to just tease out this film without giving it away at all, or the series without giving it away at all or this the series without giving it away at all but first i want to start with this because when when when this thing kicked off and i'm seeing like uh you know the the shots of christian you know uh looking like the guy from it's always sunny you know piecing everything together i was like it reminded me of uh Tom O'Neill when he was writing the book Chaos and how it started out as like, I think, a Vanity Fair article that he had like sold in like the late 90s. Premier Magazine. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. The 20 years later becomes, you know, his treatise on like what really happened with the Manson murder. A magazine that may or may not have gone out of business because it continued funding his. So I want to kick it off with with that, like what's your relationship to conspiracy conspiracy theories, these type of things you're under like. The real Tom O'Neill thing, just because it's so funny you said that, know just i just want to shout it was a quick tom o'neill anecdote which was while we were driving across the country going up and down the various coasts uh making this thing we were listening to podcasts with tom o'neill interviews and tom o'neill's book and knocking on doors much the same way he did,

you know, when he was working on his 20 year odyssey, ours was like a, you know, for Christian, it's a 10 year odyssey. For me, it's a whatever,

five or six year odyssey. But, um, it was just inspirational, you know, to hear him have, you know, we're listening to the final product.

And it was like, well, he did it. Maybe we can do it. It's kind of like, yeah, like you're guiding light there. Yeah.

And then we were given, did it maybe we can't do it's kind of like you're yeah like you're guiding light there yeah and then we were given we were such super fans of tom while uh someone gave us bootleg chaos uh charles manson of the cia t-shirts that had emily allen who that had uh tom o'Neill's book jacket cover on a photo on the back. And someone, one of my friends tagged him in a photo of me wearing the shirt. And he replied like, where did you get that shirt? He wasn't mad. He was just curious. And so then I used that as an excuse to be like, oh, I'll be in L.A. soon.

Can I can I give you one of the can i give you the shirt and so i went and met him at a diner and gave him the shirt and he had no idea who i was or what i was up to we end up sitting there for three hours at this diner there's like overlapping connections connections between both of our research turns out we know the same some of the same people we've talked to some of the same people he's talked to people I wish I could have talked to because he's been working on this thing for 20 years that have since died. And it was this amazing meeting.

And he watched the series, finished it last night. We became friends. And I consider him a hero and a mentor. Oh, man. And so does Zach. Yeah. Also kind of funny that the underbelly community is so small that like you all ran into a lot of the same people in your own individual journey.

Yeah. To get back to you. Sorry for just basically pitching Tom O'Neill's chaos book for 20 minutes here. And we're supposed to talk about what we just made. But yeah, he's amazing. But yeah, it does speak to the smallness of some of the community and he talks about it um and so you know our relationship i'll just start with me and then kick it to christian because yeah yeah relationship to the conspiracy community besides

it was extremely casual five six seven eight ten years ago really when christian started telling me about this it you know to the point of i i just just didn't really register with me right but the reason that i became interested in the story was because my friend was interested in it and i think you see that a little bit in this movie is you know i don't have some predilection for like oh well i just got to find the next conspiracy theory to really dig my sink my teeth into here you know it's like yeah no christian was telling me about this thing and i became pretty fascinated with it and fascinated with his fascination with it and so christian started you know what so i was writing a a paper um at western kentucky university about the private prison industry

and um i so i started just looking into the history of the Wackenhut Corporation, which in episode two and three fares very large because it wasn't just a private prison company. It was a private security and espionage company throughout the 80s. And so Danny was looking into the Wackenhut Corporation, and that's how I discovered Danny. And so I was not fully approached this

research project without the intention of losing my mind, but I did lose my mind. So then I'm like, sorry, so who's this Danny Casolaro guy? Then it's like, oh, who's this Gary Webb guy who actually, I think, are we more

certain that he probably did gary webb did commit suicide but also kentucky connection right because gary webb was a nku alum right yeah yeah um and uh and in in this world of iran i didn't know or care about iran contra the october surprise or espionage or spies or any i didn't I didn't care before and then I just like slowly just became kind of enmeshed in the you know trying to figure out what happened to Danny and why and and what he was looking into I just got deeper inadvertently accidentally just because I'm a I don't know curious person and i found myself confronted with this huge question in in mesh in this thing and and an early piece of data that

really led me to it was that you know danny had a fear of blood like he hated getting his blood drawn and you know just didn't like hanging out with blood and neither do i like i really don't i don't like watching movies where people get the shoot up or give blood or i don't like giving blood i can't i can't donate blood i tried i passed out i hate it and the way he died is bloody uh and And that was one of many things that propelled me into this thing, just kind of empathizing with him and wanting to know more about who he was and what he was working on and what happened to him. Yeah, so to tee this up for folks, the Danny that Christian's referring to is Danny Casolaro, who was a writer, kind of a journalist, but not, I guess, by trade, but kind of fell into it from Martinsburg, West Virginia, D.C.

I guess Martinsburg's a commuter town, maybe like an hour and a half outside D.C. or something like that. maybe like an hour and a half outside dc or something like that just to just to put a finer point on it danny was a i think considered himself a kind of like a novelist and a poet and you know one of those guys he had sold some books right well yeah well yeah he had published some books but the his aspiration was like more like the hemingway thing right but just like a minor minor hemingway or something he would worked as a journalist uh to support himself and he worked for about 10 years as a trade at a trade publication called computer age so he knew about the computer world from writing about it more from a kind of in-depth technical level um you know technical not like he's a guy who wrote it on a typewriter right but he was a journalist and a trade journalist you know

when you think about it vanity fair uh vanity fair wrote this guy ron rosenbaum he wrote that danny was a dabbler in journalism or a fake journalist and that's what he's described as on his wikipedia but working for a trade publication is real journalism you have to break stories get scoops deal with sources it's you know but you're just his characterization as a journeyman is not accurate he was like a legit journalist then yeah he knew how to break stories and and sources yeah he would have rather been at the washington post or the new york times or something right but but you, I just think that you know, and we're not like sitting here standing up

for Danny or something, but it's just a correction. So it's like yeah, he was a journalist. He wrote about news for a living. For a journal. His death under mysterious circumstances is the subject

of American conspiracy. the octopus murders which you two have made and so i just wanted to tee that up before we get to get too far out there so thank you episode one y'all kick off with you know um the the ends law lawsuit and this character bill mitch and all this stuff so let me start there like what is ends law you know why was it created and who is this bill mitchell character christian you want to take that all right all right so um the uh inslaw is a computer software company. They developed this software called PROMIS, which stands for Prosecutor's Management Information System. Please don't turn this off. I can't talk as you speak from here.

It turns out that this is a – why we're talking about it is because basically this software gets misappropriated and ends up in all these other countries. um national security agency operative and or whatever i don't know what you'd call them operative or employee or whatever but he worked there developing software for the nsa and this was like a very advanced data tracking software that um after it was stolen and started showing up in all these countries around the world um he he yeah allegedly allegedly i mean it's very hard to like document and prove like we don't have receipts of like from Jordan about like them buying it from third party CIA

cutouts you know in 1984 we just don't this was the allegation that Bill Hamilton made to Danny in the early 90s this trade publication journalist who wrote about computers who was also fancied himself as like the next wanted to be the next you know woodward and bernstein kind of guy right yeah um wanted to make a name for himself bill hamilton had spent

the last 10 years fighting the justice department saying that they had taken his software and and repro stolen it and done something with it he didn't really know what and then around the time that he met danny was the time when a lot of new information started coming into him from sources um like you know of varying degrees of credibility and strangeness and and one of those sources was a guy named michael ricanos shudo right and so that's when that's what really starts off and maybe we shouldn't get too far ahead of ourselves if you really want to talk about episode one but but there was basically this the tension the central tension that was that was there was that a judge agreed with the inslaw side the hamilton side the promise side saying you know saying that the justice department had stolen promise and had and through trickery fraud and

deceit that was his words and that they owed Inslaw about $8 million, $8 to $10 million for that theft. And then that judgment gets thrown out and under just purely technical means, right? And they're sent back to square one. And the central question i guess there is like what is going on like what you know is the department of justice christian talks about this in the movie it's like the department of justice has so much money they are probably

spending more money fighting this thing than they are on what they would settle on you know that was the first thing that clicked to me i was like that seems like such a paltry sum to just to make this thing go away you know what i mean just to kind of be wash their hands of it also i just want a correction i know i i i meant uh i teed that up as bill mitchell not bill hamilton bill mitchell very different bill sorry i just wanted to make that yeah unfortunately a lot of names involved with this kind of twisted around and a lot of people

with three names too yeah so that's the central tension of the first episode and what kind of where Danny dropped into this story of like what is going on here just seems strange and they had they had very big name people helping them fight the justice department the elliot richardson

who was the former u.s attorney general who ran the justice department during then you know right up until watergate and when he resigned he's a legend of of dc because of his stance on on resigning instead of firing the special prosecutor against Nixon and Watergate. This kind of resolute figure of justice and righteousness is now taking up Inslaw's case. And he's saying, you know, you guys need to settle with this software company.

You stole his software. And the Justice Department's like, I'm sorry, who? Elliot, who? Like, they're just saying they have no time for him. You know, it's like i'm sorry who elliot who like they're just have no time for him you know what is going on here um and so that starts a what i think is a very twisted and strange path from there that does not go perhaps you know it does not stay in the software world for too long. No, no. And we're quickly,

I don't want to get too far away from it, but we're quickly introduced to this Michael Reconosciuto, who is like, just, I don't even know what to say. I'll kick it over to y'all. I just want to say one thing is like, and I hate to do this in front of you,

you know, in the podcast, but like, I think that this discussion would be best if somebody has already watched the show, one thing is like and i hate to do this in front of you you know in the podcast but like it i think that this this discussion would be best if somebody has already watched the show because we can really go in there you know and like and and dig deep so like you know yeah i i was gonna ask y'all about that because i felt like before we got in here like like i was like okay so how do I do this without giving away so much? And also, the way I feel about it too, it's like we could sit here and run through what the whole story is,

but we spent four years building this mosaic that takes the most complicated story ever told and simplifies it with beautiful music and amazing archival and it and just like it just sucks you right through this like crazy confusing story in a way that is very you know uh fast and and easy to watch so yeah uh it's so it makes more sense to talk about this with people that have already watched it right right you know because i'm sure they'll have questions we should just assume that people have kind of like watched it. Right, right. Because I'm sure they'll have questions. I don't know if we should just assume

that people have kind of watched it and just not worry about spoilers, I guess is my question. Yeah. We will put... Yeah, let's just do that. Well, let's do this. Let's do this.

Maybe we could just kind of go through and tease the characters and who they are and what they were up to without getting into their connections of how all this is sort of intertwined or whatever. Does that, does that make some sense? Sure. I mean,

Christian, do you want to just give a little intro to how much, how Danny found Michael? Okay. So basically Danny's at this point where he's, he was asked to come and meet Bill Hamilton, who needs, you know, what, you know, needs – Bill Hamilton at this point in the movie, he owes his attorneys so much money because they were working – Elliot Richardson and Charles Work, who's in the movie, were working with – Charles Work was the president of the DC bar.

Heavy, heavy legal talent, but they're working on a contingency basis. And they haven't won anything. Everything's being appealed. So they haven't actually gotten any money yet. And so what Danny is is a free investigator, right? He's a journalist. He's an investigative journalist. And so he can maybe, like, shake the tree a little bit. Maybe it'll help inslaw a little bit. And so they want to like shake the tree a little bit. Maybe it'll help in SLA a little bit.

And so they want to share their story with the journalist and see what maybe he'll come up with. And they pitched to Dan Moldea, you know, a D.C. journalist. Danny comes along. And and basically he's like takes it on. Basically, he's like, takes it on. data from other foreign investigative and intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world to kind of you know do kind of what an early version of what the snowden showed us is just common practice but this is like the 1980s that's what i was that's what i was going to ask version yeah that's what i was going to ask you guys is like how sophisticated what because i'm looking at that it kind of you know like uh

the shots you're showing it looks like the kind of computers we would have played like organ trail on when i was yeah the some of the people that built the software told us that it's uh basically a spreadsheet which is a way they use to dismiss it but actually like depending on what's on the spreadsheet like yeah if it's names of confidential intelligence sources and their safe houses locations and their phone number, it could be a very valuable. But what people that built the software told us that it is basically Excel.

Well, I feel like that's a little bit of an oversimplification it's also like it's running on just to set the scene a little bit it's running on computers that are like millions of dollars at the time right the these mini computers yeah um which are not many at all they're giant um and so it was developed in the 70s and through the 80s to take law take all the load of the justice department thousands of cases and go from a file-based literal manila folder envelope based system to a computer database that would be able to track the cases the people involved you'd be able to study and do research on it there was a lot of research done into the criminal justice system that was done by Inslaw when it was a nonprofit in the 70s, in the late 70s.

And you would find patterns. It was a data, you know, like you're saying, a spreadsheet, you can find patterns. But this is a database software where you find patterns. And I guess what they sold it as being unique was that it could integrate other databases and you could combine databases and get bigger and bigger and bigger and study large amounts of data and so the allegations surrounding it are about what are you doing with this large amount of data are you taking you know uh for an example are you taking um all of the water bills that are in um that are in uh damascus and are you finding out like oh this person has like a higher water bill there must be more people staying with them i wonder

who's staying with them using kind of unconventional or very rote pieces of data to create unconventional um theses right um which would be a form of you would do that if you were in the business of spycraft right so the allegation right you're taking massive amounts of data you're combining it together and you're're finding out what's going on. But not only that, with the backdoor, which Michael says he's built into this thing, you are spying on whatever anybody else is spying on. So you get everybody else's data,

and the U.S. intelligence community can then look at what their friends and foes know if you've sold this software around the world with the back door it's got and there's also simultaneously we didn't really get into the movie but there's a separate channel a Mossad channel of the software that also supposedly has a back door in it I mean I guess we allude to it a little bit in episode two yeah yeah um but that is i think more credible actually than the michael arcana shootover version but okay so he says that he uh did this work for the whack and hut corporation um you know did this software modification project for the

whack and hut corporation on this this Indian reservation in the Coachella Valley. And so okay, turns out near Palm Springs, actually in this town where the Coachella Music Festival takes place in Indio, California.

Not as John Philip Nichols would say, not in Indio, in the sovereign nation adjacent to Indio. So it turns out that there really was the Wackenhut Corporation really had formed a joint venture with this tribe of, I think, 23 uh or so members i think 18 of them of voting age or 10 of voting age a tiny tiny tribe um and uh i mean zach i mean do you want to like help me out here with this one black and i you know basically michael is telling danny that he did this this software modification out at this reservation um and the thing about it is that what we found was that michael really was out at this reservation and there really was a sort of intelligence at adjacent, if not full-on intelligence operation going on out there,

which simultaneously happens to involve how we have Native American casinos in America. We don't fully go into that. There's just so many parts of the story. But basically, the reason that we have Native American casinos, legal gambling in America, is because of a lawsuit that was started at this reservation. And this is where we get introduced to the Nichols family. And that's where the Nichols came from. So maybe we could talk about...

Yeah, it's like we're just going to see a stream of names, and we want everybody at home just to be really writing these down. Yeah, just, yeah, yeah, do your homework. Feel free to rewind, whatever you got to do to get through this we're gonna get through it together but i'll tell you this this is a lot but the pacing's fantastic and it is much more digestible than like we're making it sad that's the problem with the we even thought about doing we have so many tapes of the actual people who are involved in this story um and we you know our editors kept on being like hey you should just make a podcast at this point

you just had so much audio you know but ultimately seeing the names it actually makes it a little easier and we do a lot of visual seeing the faces we have like so many photographs and but this would be just to kind of like baby step it it's like you got the software you got the journalist looking into the software you got the source and the source is michael recano shudo and he says he did all this stuff all this work out at this reservation in the early 80s so essentially 10 years earlier than when danny is investigating this right right yeah it's like we not only have a lot of names we have a lot of different time periods um so in the early 80s there was a guy named john John Philip Nichols, Dr. John Philip Nichols.

The doctorate was his. Fake. He's not a real doctor. Questionable doctor. It's kind of like how TV preachers are, you know, doctor or whatever. It's like a $70 mail order. Yeah. Like a couple of different ideas that he would say where he got that

doctorate from anyway but he was a white dude from originally from milwaukee wisconsin who had a very odd path to why he was in this tiny band in this tiny reservation in Southern California in the early 1980s. And that path, which we kind of tease out in the show, which we researched and were helped with our research by several people, but, you know, who gave us archival documents and things like that, including his son, Bobby Moses Nichols, who appears as an interview in the show. Really sweet guy who happened to be out there with his dad and his whole family. He brought, this guy, John Philip Nichols,

brought his whole family from Florida in their late 70s to this tiny reservation. But I think what's more important for us is where was he before that turns out a lot of place turns out including lexington lexington kentucky oh yeah i really wanted to talk about that with here because it's you know this is a good forum for actually getting into the there's several connect kentucky connections to this and you know what better forum than talking with you know just going into it here but but so yeah he started in milwaukee he was in the he was a brewing business there um as many people are then he gets involved

with the unions and trucking he ends up in dc working with jimmy hoffa's's basically right hand man in the Teamsters and then he bounces around from there he gets in a little bit of trouble and he starts bouncing around the world going to Brazil a little bit of trouble he had a federal warrant for his arrest

we didn't really get into this in the show but like so I hesitate to even make it more confusing but yeah he did get arrested and then that arrest after he did some traveling abroad to several locations that as we show shortly after he was there

seemed to have anti-communist revolutions that happened that are that were supported by our federal government Chile is like a just a laundry list of uh yeah central and south american countries that that were supported by our intelligence apparatus to overthrow you know democratic elections that brought communists into power, right?

Or keep those communists out of power, right? So you have Allende in Chile. You've got the government of Brazil, which had a coup in the 50s. And he was in all these places. Just, you know, happens to be there right before these, all these world changing events, you know? And he's just hanging out as a selling Coca-Cola shirt.

He's just there as a bottling plant manager who also happens to be leading a religious movement. It's just no big deal. As it goes. Yeah, as we've all been in that shit. Classic situation. And he bounces around to places between south america central america sometimes europe um all essentially all the world asia whatever um and america and various

places in america and he he his pattern that he goes in is he kind of often comes in as a as a helper and he goes into these countries or in this case of new york city when he was here he in the 60s he started working at something called like the lower east side um like neighborhood association or something like that right and it's just like these little non-profits and in south america he would he he worked with a religious movement down there. Church World Service. World Service, which still exists. And he was bringing sort of evangelical Christianity to a largely Catholic country. Yeah. bring um when you bring all this money and organize organizing to these uh rural peasants

and try to convert them into this evangelical uh pentecostal snake antlers yeah there's almost pentecostal anyway i don't know about snake it is an evangelical movement and they they uh become a voting bloc right and so you're doing kind of like a soft power whether you believe he's working for an intelligence agency or not the effect is a soft power movement of people who are now going to vote how the group wants them to vote which is to say against communism right um and so he he just finds himself in these positions um over and over in life and uh i think that his entire history like i wish we had done you know an entire episode just about the everything leading up to him coming into cabazon because it's fascinating right um he's kind of this brilliant enigmatic guy

who has like a his resume is like a mile long because it's all these weird different things and he had spent time and i just want to throw this out there because of where we are here is like he spent time at the uh in lexington kentucky he moved his entire family there and later on at first we we always had tried it tried to tie it to the farm right the narcotic farm yeah the narcotics farm and in lexington and he to law enforcement later on hinted that he was the director of the narcotics farm and that he'd done at lsd work he served har. And sort of like, if you could wink that you're involved in MKUltra, you know, but without saying it, that's kind of how you say it.

When would they have been in Lexington? In the 80s, maybe? He was there in the 70s. In the 70s. I'm curious. I don't know if y'all, I mean, I think some of this is kind of teased out in that bluegrass conspiracy that was like the cocaine

bear thing it was based on but like have you heard about like how basically the Lexington PD whether wittingly or unwittingly basically had like a terrorist training camp for the Saudis here in the 80s that like Dodi Al-Fayed

the Khashoggi Al-Fayed. The Khashoggi Al-Fayed clan was basically sort of bankrolling for a while. Was that Andrew Thornton's training operation? I think so. I think so. It's like named after, it's like a triangle. The name is like a triangle. I can't remember all the details, but I'm curious if there was, you know, we talked about the insularity well there's there's a few there's definitely connections to the blue

grass conspiracy i mean danny had files you know in 1991 on andrew thornton the guy that fell out of the cocaine bear plane the cocaine bear guy um and he had uh obviously he'd read the bluegrass conspiracy um then he also was talking regularly with a guy named charles hayes who was a 606 area code he was a supposedly a computer salvage dealer who i mean god we don't even get into it in the film, but he's a lawyer, he's in the CIA, he also busted this gemstone operation in Brazil. According to himself, right? No, the gemstone operation, that's well documented. That was in the Herald Leader,

which is the leader of news in eastern Kentucky. No, that's totally real. Crazy, weird. I met him on his deathbed. You know, we had like several meetings. And then this guy, Ari Bin Menashe, who we introduced in episode two, like randomly ends up in Lexington, Kentucky.

And then also... Israeli intelligence operative so then then the the company it's like there's the lexington company it's like called just the company it's this like giant uh drug operation run by uh intelligence and military and former intelligence and cops um there's a fresno there's a fresno basically a fresno office and a lexington office and so like we our story deals with the fresno office um you know in in excess um so and it's the same company supposedly. It's just called the company it's just called the company I'm going to have to dig into this

y'all are giving me too much salacious bits here try googling it, just type in the company and see what you find it's very confusing so specific so I just wanted to bring this back just really quickly to finish

dr john philip nichols and his relationships with lexington which is that he was he was always alluding to him being working at the narcotics farm with narcotics farm in lexington kentucky is where uh various experiments happened on the effects of psychotropic drugs but mainly lsd funded by the cia right to as part of the mk ultra program which was a i'm sure you guys know or talk about this stuff but essentially you know in its most salacious form of mind control intelligence operation study research operation of using lsd on unwitting pain you know unwitting patients in massive doses sometimes to the you know to ill effect uh but the reality is that he while he was hinting at that he was really the head of the health and uh what's it called the mental retardation

board right christian which was yeah we could never i've always wanted to do this i mean this is why i bring it up it's like if anybody in who listens to this knows more about the about the mental retardation board it would be interesting to hear about any connections between those two operations or or entities right the narcotics farm and the Kentucky mental health health and look up the name but health and mental retardation board something because they seem to

you know share a lot of characteristics in terms of being having psychologists on board and John Philip Nichols did have connections to the central intelligence agency that we talk about um and so it's so it's just always been a sort of dangling fruit that we've always been wanting to kind of like grasp onto and try to understand but there's so much stuff that happens in our

story it's like you can't dig into just like what happened before our story essentially one one quick detour i want to bring up just and this is a tangent for sure and then we'll get back uh on the straight and narrow here but because a lot of your story kind of takes place in the bay area in san francisco figures kind of heavily did y'all come across anything in sort of examining those kentucky connections that maybe didn't make it off the cutting room floor about Augustus Owsley Stanley, the Grateful Dead roadie and in his distribution of Sandos acid, it may be connected to some of this stuff with the, with the,

with the farm in Lexington and stuff. Cause so I guess, right. He was the, he had not one, but two forebears that were Kentucky governors, governors right uh-huh yeah well owsley stanley um you know i guess there's some people that i don't i haven't shared their names but what there's a lot of lsd manufacturers that i've talked to in um my research on what was going on in the bay area part of the story yeah and um yeah owsley's names brought up all the time and he had the best stuff and he gave them or whatever i guess they got at various times his stuff it changed their lives it changed their minds uh yeah yeah he but uh but no i don't have any like real connective tissue there other

than just like i was interfacing with people that were moving his product just kind of a fun aside yeah okay yeah well to get us back on track here yeah i mean have we gone so far that people are just like what is this no no no no no no no. This is, I promise you, this is good. We've lost our minds. This is par for the Trillbillies course. No, no, yeah, long-time listeners will know this is... We're meandering at the right pace. Oh, yeah, we're so good. So I'm skipping ahead a little bit here,

but only just for the interest of not giving up so much in terms of the story here. But I'm going to basically ask you all about the eight tentacles of the octopus both uh the the people involved those the eight people but also sort of the eight you know and we already talked about cabazon a little bit which is one of those tentacles but uh i want to talk about uh well i'll just kick it off we'll just go down here and y'all just kind of touch on who these people are and yeah you know i really appreciate you asking about it because the sort of initial articles that are coming out are like

these two filmmakers still figure out there's eight people that control the world and i would love the opportunity to kind of clarify yeah okay for believe me if we figured out that the eight people who ran the world we wouldn't tell you guys we'd be partying with well i think you're i think i think uh when it's poppy bush involved i think you're absolutely correct i think that's just a matter of record now uh so let's start with some lesser notes i think i i just as an overall for me because like we're you know we're dealing with like text danny casalero's text and he is not here to explain it and so we're almost like um uh religious scholars who are you know going through this text this ancient text and trying to decipher its meaning um for me i think that when i look at the eight people i think it's a you know and danny is a novelist like he is a he's a, you know, and Danny is a novelist. Like he is a, he's a researcher and a novelist.

And at various times, this project, the Octopus Project was a novel. He had fake names for all the people. Michael Riccardo was Danger Man. There was another guy called Jimmy the Weasel. And, you know, but yeah, we have a, yeah, totally. We have a chart somewhere of like all of the danny's like novelized names that he assigned to the different characters okay so what i think of when i think of the eight people zach may have a different uh relationship with it is you know you you're

looking at this large secret world of intelligence and you're illustrating it through different stratification. You have like the rogue agent, Edward Wilson. You've got the really obscure kind of like freelance John Philip Nichols. That's kind of through telling the story of these people's relationship with the world of espionage and the secret world of intelligence, you're kind of like telling a larger story about, you know, what the secret history of your reality, which is, you know, how these people are affecting it. And you're putting a human face on it but i that's sort of that's how i think about it but i'm curious what you think about it zach i mean i think that's right i think there's a lot of different things to say about it and like for for just to start for a book called the octopus which is what danny landed on as the title of his book he was proposing right like christian said he never finished the book so we are much like christian said we're these talmudic scholars trying to decipher what he meant and as you know what's it's very subjective and we try to be honest with our subjectivity this is our perspective right um but i think

you know and and even when we list i mean we don't we don't dive into we don't sort of point this out too much we list nine people when we list the the people that he's talking about because he would kind of switch in you know depending on where he was at he would sometimes throw somebody else in there you know right i just want to like throw that it's like we're talking about a work in progress i don't want people to think that like danny had totally landed on this thing but but the eight people or sometimes nine people that he that he called the octopus really were extremely powerful in various ways uh and mostly intelligence operatives right and so that's who we're talking about we're talking about people like christian said at the lower tier and danny

danny actually has a diagram that he where he kind of like puts people on various tiers of importance and i think that the octopus like christian said is a way to it's a lens through which to see this this world it's a poetic way to describe the very network worky complicated world that he's trying to describe and that we're trying to describe but what it essentially is is like former intelligence operatives who are you know came up usually in the oss or cia the oss being the predecessor to the cia and had been often removed from the cia or left the cia a lot of times people who left uh with the carter administration coming in and were kicked out of the CIA, went private, did a bunch of private stuff.

That factors into mostly visible in Iran-Contra, where you see people who are former intelligence agents who are making money off of arms deals, things like that, and selling those things on behalf of the US government. It's this magical sort of privatization of the intelligence world and accumulating a ton of money and a ton of power along the way and the octopus itself as danny sees it is you know if you can kind of stretch it into a slightly poetic realm and not just be like there's eight people that run the world it's a lens through which to see how the privatization of of intelligence this is maybe there's like the soberest take and maybe it's a people around the world but for me as as as a slightly more sober reader it's a way to see

how this power structure worked of of what happens when you take people who have a lot of connections do a lot of secret business have through their connections through the intelligence world have had to work with criminals in the past because much of the activity that the cia often does in foreign operations you come in contact with the criminal world because you are in fact committing crimes along the way in in other countries on behalf of the u.s government you are by being a operative you're inherently a criminal in other countries right behalf of the u.s government you are by being a operative you're inherently a criminal in other countries right in a lot of cases if you're doing something big um so um you know so if you look at it through that lens you can kind of see how the what we describe as

the criminal world the intelligence world and the private intelligence world all kind of come together in this thing that's quasi-governmental, quasi-criminal, quasi-intelligence. And also, that's a really great explanation. And another thing that is lost to a lot of people that are interested in this story, because it's not on the Wikipedia or whatever, is that Danny grew up in mclean virginia which is basically where the cia is and when he was a kid james angleton who was this top uh counter uh counter espionage very controversial guy was his neighbor and he used to talk about that um and his he had friends that were in the NSA and you know he was he's from northern Virginia he's from DC Virginia he's like from there's like this inner connection to the CIA that I always find fast yeah the spy world spies they're everywhere yeah we had i always wonder you know when i'm in dc like

the other day like the day the trailer dropped i went for a run in dc like along the um along the river uh and there was this like large bluff like i was kind of in kind of entering into the woods this large bluff and this guy with sunglasses sunny out this guy with sunglasses like looks down at me like and then there's no one else around like running it just felt like a movie you know it's like you know the trailer dropped and now this like guy i'd never seen before is looking down at me from the top of a bluff with some guys sitting on a bench for the newspaper yeah and you know you know when you're whenever i've been dcm i was just like like soaking up like the power the excretions of power and espionage i sense when i'm when i'm there which is yeah part of the romance you know there is like a romance to this whole thing that we try

to show which is like danny was excited by this you know and that's almost the most important thing is like getting into this little conspiracy world that you know huge conspiracy world for this case uh it's we look at it i feel like it is a say it in christian as a drug and you you just once you learn a little bit you want a little bit more and you want a little more and there's all you're always one step away from feeling whole yeah and you're always one hit of this of this conspiracy drug away from the finding finding kind of the answer you know there's always one more little remaining and you know that can be frustrating for people but it's extremely exhilarating to go through that process and uh and and uh you know i don't whether it's unfulfilling or not i don't know we we tried

to find a balance there but uh but that is the process and that's what it feels know whether it's unfulfilling or not. I don't know. We, we tried to find a balance there, but, uh, but that is the process and that's what it feels like. And it's almost, it's almost like at a certain point, it doesn't matter what it's about. It's about the feeling of getting information, you know, what that, what that hit feels like. Yeah. And, you know, I guess to, you know, cause we're coming up on the hour here and I'll be mindful of y'all's time, but, uh, to kind of put a bow on it,

I got like two questions. One is like, and I asked you to kind of kick it off, what's your relationship to conspiracies and that kind of stuff was going in? You know, to me, it feels like sometimes people that are into conspiracies, I think like their general contours of their arguments

are kind of correct. It's just kind of the who, what, where, when that kind of gets off the rails a little bit. But I try not to be dismissive of those things because sometimes, as in the case of this, you see that a lot of times what you come across is correct. What was y'all's take on like conspiracy,

like community people sort of AF post after all this is over with. I got a, I got a text from one of Michael's Rikana Shudo's. He has all these handlers, you know, like, or not handlers, friends,

loyal friends, helpers. And, and basically one of them sent me uh this text yesterday and it was like this is the real netflix and it was like a it was like a tweet and and then i hope i opened the video up and it's got the bold Netflix logo. And then on top and then in the middle, it's just playing this video of basically how evil Sigmund Freud is. And I'm just like, I'm letting it play out. I don't know much about Sigmund Freud. I think it's interesting that he's the uncle of edward bernays the father of modern propaganda whatever i don't know i don't really care but like i mean whatever i care i don't

care but i just think it's interesting that you have this like like i guess people are so hypnotized if you just put the netflix logo up and say netflix is evil and then you play a video that's talking about how evil sigigmund Freud is, I'm like, at what point are they going to tie this up? I didn't watch the whole thing, but I don't know. To me, that's the quote-unquote conspiracy world, just kind of a hypnotized evil lurks everywhere. You're being like, you know what I'm saying?

And my relation to it now is like, what the answer can you figure it out for real like don't just hide from spies like knock on their doors and try to get them to tell you their secrets you know i yeah you know i don't like don't just be paranoid and assume you know anything right yeah what about you i think of it like i think the word conspiracy is thrown around like way too liberally i think the word you know truth is thrown around way too liberally it's just we just use these words and the word conspiracy it's almost like it's almost just like a a blanket that you can throw on anything that you isn't isn't almost like an insult or way to avoid things right and so it's like are there conspiracies out there yes i think that's there's a you can be

charged with criminal conspiracy that is a that is a plan to do something right there are conspiracies and some of them involve political actions and some of them involve things that we talk about in the show and then there's uh another thing that happens which is the in this really you know if you really want to start like your your little term paper or something on this like the era in which danny is writing this the same year the same era that like the x files is coming out same year that this that that uh behold a pale horse that that conspiracy book is coming out you know know, all this. Simu the JFK came out. It's in the air. It was in the air at the time and once

again, it's very much in the air now. And a lot of that stuff is luff and intentionally from some intent, intentionally weird and confusing and the people who are making it

sometimes i'm not talking about x files or gfk gfk is amazing it's an amazing movie but but a lot of the conspiracy literature i think you have to trace back and wonder like is this it seems like nonsense and some people think it seems like the truth but what's where who's manufacturing the nonsense are they just having fun or is it a way to do what i think happens in our story which is a way to take a little bit of truth take a little bit of fiction wed them together and make it so that the truth is no longer visible because it's got bullshit attached to it i mean you've got bullshit attached to it nobody at the standard-bearing journalistic efforts that we have in america are willing to go out on a limb and even mention this stuff right so for us it takes a couple of jokers like

the two of us who don't necessarily have to have the standards and practices of the new york time i mean christian used to work for the New York Times, I should say that. As a photographer, though, it's a lot different. You know, we allow ourselves to go out on some limbs that maybe other people won't go out on. And then we try to figure out what those limbs, you know, who put those limbs there. I don't want to continue this metaphor too far. put those limbs there i don't want to continue this metaphor too far but what i'm saying is that is that we're trying to unearth things that perhaps seem a little bit weird and see what's real and what's not and that's the excitement i had this speaking of sorry speaking of zach

talking about the new york times just remembered this thing that happened a long time ago before zach was like involved in this project i was still on my own and i was still working for the new york times um and that was kind of as a freelancer that's because that was how i was funding the early days of this research and i was at the new york times christmas party and i was introduced to a guy who was the bureau the dc bureau chief at the time that danny died and i was like oh do you remember this story about danny castellari who's a reporter who died and he's a drunk and i was like uh yeah well i've been researching this story for like three years now and he's he's a drunk he was a drunk that's all he was was a drunk like oh yeah well you know i

was you know i read the year i was reporting on it and i'd you know he was a drunk he was a drunk okay dude okay uh you recently you worked on it for what two weeks as an editor yeah yeah and you know i've got 10 years in this yeah yeah okay okay okay i'll walk away and i'll we'll both go and be drunks together separately at this Christmas party. But yeah, that was illuminating, you know, in some way, somehow. I'm not sure. Well, you know, and, you know, Zach kind of answered what my second question was there. The last episode, you had one of those gentlemen you'd interviewed that said that, you know, a classic tactic of the intelligence community is to just create all these myths.

And basically what you were saying was stacking bullshit on top of like little kernels of truth in there. And like, you know, as to prevent people from waiting too far, too far in there. And it feels like the same kind of thing that, that, you know, for whatever reason, say thing that that you know for whatever reason say anything about you know like Danny's death and that well if folks watch it but but the same thing that essentially cost Danny his life it feels like now like that whole sort of intelligent strategy has just been sort of put on us writ large

you know like to where like i don't know that you would get killed for investigating some sort of grand conspiracy now because people would just be like would not care that you knew those things you know what i mean kind of in this post-trump world and all that kind of stuff and it's interesting uh yeah i was i was having dinner the other night with a friend of mine who his actual parents next door neighbor is Robert Gates, who was a CIA director during a very significant part of the story. And, you know, we were talking about it and he was just like, I can't remember how it came up, but he was just,

it was just good branding for the CIA. You know, if people think they're bad-asses and get, and like get shit done, you know, like it's kind of, even though they look kind of bad, they still look bad. They look badass. Yeah. They've even got a whimsical Twitter account now where they're like,

oh, well, we're declassifying this thing. Yeah. I mean, you can't put it past the layers of thought that they're going to put into stuff and improvise and turn the, the even failures into successes. Right.

So it's like an amazing world to just kind of get fascinated with now, ultimately seeing it. You're just, it's a tantalizing to, to just wonder what's really going on in there. Are the things, you know, I think,

well, what's the new, what's the new plans you guys have for us? We just can't wait. We just can't wait for the next drop. Yeah. I'm on pans and needles over here, guys. What do you got? Yeah. I mean, we're kind of like pretty well versed in what they were up to in the seventies and eighties, but I'm excited to see if people who know,

have some idea I'm totally out of the loop about what's going on now in the world of espionage um maybe someone wants to hit me with some uh you know inside scoops maybe there's a trade magazine that i could take a look at yeah the parallel's too tight yeah yeah i think it's interesting also it's like you know we've been waiting this is just coming out and we have no idea what people think of this movie and and and nobody's really seen it um but we've been waiting this is just coming out and we have no idea what people think of this movie and and and nobody's really seen it um but we've been waiting for people to start looping us in you know it's like yeah yeah it's a sort of dreaded possibility of people being like oh you guys are are the problem you guys are part of this conspiracy too you know and it's like oh no don't do that to us

but i can see it happening it's it there there's a a focus level and and a strange um you know glomming on of things we're you know in the absence of information the mind goes wild right and and that's a human instinct and it's an instinct that i think that we see in our story the uh intelligence agencies criminal and and you know anybody who's doing something hidden right yeah uh uses to their advantage and it's uh it's wild to watch yeah well i think this i think this is fantastic guys there's a lot of like it kind of puts me in the mind of like y'all see mirage men in like those type of like just fantastic scary story just like sometimes i'm like what what is there another story that's

going on like why is that guy being so forthright about what he's saying anyway i don't mean to yeah no no no i don't mean gonna destroy myself here not to open that back up for anything but one of the movies that it's you know it's a doc it's a documentary but it's not like many other documentaries especially you have me like in it as the investigator but then also playing danny casolaro that i don't think has ever been done before and then just the amount of stuff that we were able to weave into it kind of like the documentary version of inherent vice you know that or that's some that or that's sort of like zach might be cringing really hard right now but that's like the i don't know even though ours is a documentary that's the movie i would

compare it most to close close out of documentaries and and uh fictionalized well it definitely has you know then you get into the Thomas Pynchon kind of influence over this world. And I feel like he did capture a lot of the feelings that we're talking about in his work. And let's just throw it out there. In Bleeding Edge, his novel, he mentions the promise software. So it all circles. Yeah. Full circle there

well the series the series is called american conspiracy the octopus murders and uh yeah is that christian thanks for being with us guys thank you so much it's such a pleasure and uh you know let us uh let us check in at some point when we get some more information for you guys yeah yeah and uh yeah y'all ever uh come back home as prodigal sons holler at me and we'll see you there love to hang out hell yeah all right stop