Trillbilly Worker's Party - [Year Zero 5] Uncanny Alley: 9/11 at the Bleeding Edge (feat. Jimmy Falun Gong & Dimitri)

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

For the latest installment of our Year Zero series, we finally tackle the big one: 9/11. Specifically, the 9/11 that is presented to us by author Thomas Pynchon in his 2013 book, Bleeding Edge. To help us do it, we've enlisted the help of Jimmy Falun Gong (@JimmyFalunGong on Twitter) of the podcast Programmed to Chill (@p2chillPodcast), and Dimitri (@drposhlost) of the Subliminal Jihad podcast (@subliminaljihad). Because it's Pynchon, we cover a wide range of topics: Silicon Alley and the 2000 dotcom crash; the PROMIS software; Stuart Brand and the Whole Earth Network; Josh Harris and We Live In Public; the Montauk Project; MKUltra; TWA Flight 800; the Digital Entertainment Network; and much much more. Please check out Jimmy's podcast, Programmed to Chill, wherever you get your podcasts, and on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ProgrammedToChill And check out Dimitri's podcast, Subliminal Jihad, wherever you get your podcasts, and on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/subliminaljihad/

Thank you for watching! Welcome to the show, everybody. I am your host for today, Terrence, obviously. Joined by two friends of the show. We've got Dimitri from Subliminal Jihad, one of my favorite shows, as well as Mr. Jimmy Falun Gong from Program to Chill. How's it going, guys? Pretty good. Hey.

Pumped to be here. Good, good. Well, I mean, I don't know about you guys. I know that I've done quite a bit of prep for this episode. It's like when you're talking pension, it's like you pull one thread and it's like you pull 2 000 others you know and you just keep going but like really the place where i started for this episode was sort of obsessively watching multiple hours of there's a really great youtube channel called enhanced wtc videos and it's got like all the primo cuts every single video recording of 9-11 of the world trade centers that's amazing

that's amazing i'm glad there's a resource like that out there yeah it's a it's a great resource i mean it's got like um because you know one of the great i hesitate to use the word great we'll get into it one of the interesting things about 9-11 is it occurred right at this cusp right before everybody had a video recorder in their pocket but people were still recording things quite often um that will be a theme in the book that we're going to talk about today. But in these videos on this YouTube page, you've got people filming it from their windows, filming it from across the river, filming it from just various angles. And one of the, honestly, like one of the craziest things, one of the craziest videos in the catalog

is one, I think it was the, was it the South Tower that fell first? I always get it mixed up. It's horrible. The North Tower was hit first. I think it might have collapsed first. I think it was opposite. I think the North Tower was hit first

and then collapsed second. South Tower was hit first and then collapsed second. South Tower was hit second and collapsed first. There is an insane video on there of people standing pretty close to it. And as this thing starts falling, you kind of get this... You can feel it through the video camera. This collective just like, holy shit shit this thing's coming down and like you can feel the adrenaline in the fear in the video it's I mean it's just one of the craziest things I've ever seen yeah yeah I was going back and watching a few

of those over the last few weeks because you know the big anniversary is coming up right there was one I don't know if you saw it of like the nyu girls in their dorm and they're like kind of getting drunk in the morning and they're like laughing like woo hi mom and then they turn around and like the building's collapsing and she just shrieks like that was a memorable one and i was actually looking up i i forgot it's interesting you mentioned like not everybody had phones yet because I guess the hitting of the first plane hitting was only I think captured by two people. And it was like a Czech immigrant who I think was on the BQE and just like randomly filming. And he didn't even realize he caught it for the first one.

He caught the second one. And then there was like I think some like NYU film graduates were making a documentary about a, like a fire station downtown. And they were like embedded with a, yeah, like a fire brigade that, so they happened to be filming when they heard the sound of her head. So, I mean, I mean, we'll, we'll definitely get into so many aspects of, like, paranoia around it, but it still was in that early era where, yeah, I think there were only two angles of the first plane. A lot of people caught the second one, you know, from video cameras and stuff. Right. But, yeah, it's still, like, a relatively small amount of sources to work with.

Yeah, it is. I've seen that video that you were talking about, the, you know, the frat girl. amount of sources to work with. Yeah, it is. I'm, I've seen that video that you were talking about the, um, you know, the, the frat girl or they're like partying in their room and they look up. Um, there was,

there's an also, there's also another good one on enhanced WTC videos. That's like two people that look like they just finished. They sound like they just finished having sex and they're sitting there and they're watching it and one of them's like like they're watching it while right as the second plane hits and one of them's like i'm getting the fuck out of here i'm getting my clothes on i'm getting the fuck out of here and the guy is like the guy's like no come let's take your shower like he's not treating i don't know it's just it's just it's just it's just interesting kind of like piecing all this together you kind of see how this was an event that was embedded into people's lives.

And I think that that is kind of what maybe we'll be talking a little bit about today. So yeah, so like without further ado, the reason we're talking about this isn't just that the 20th anniversary of 9-11 is coming up, although that is the kind of big impetus for this. The big reason is because I wanted to talk about a sort of specific rendering of this event. One that I think is a pretty unique take on it. It's a pretty unique perspective on it, an interesting angle. There's a lot of writers that have tried to tackle 9-11. Like there was the Don DeLillo book, Falling Man.

You know, there's, I don't know, I think maybe even Jonathan Lethem may have written a book about it. Yeah, there's a novel called Atta, I think I want to see, by like Jarrett Kovac. Right. Which I have, but I never read. But yeah, there have been a few.

Yeah, a lot of these novels especially like Don DeLillo's kind of gets in you know he kind of tries to get into 9-11 as like a mediated event but the book that we're going to be talking about today kind of

I don't know it's different from all of those it's a kind of historical document it kind of, I don't know, it's different from all of those. It's a kind of historical document. It kind of almost treats it as historical fiction in a way. It is also at the same time kind of a hard-boiled detective book that happens at the time as well. And so, yeah, the book I'm talking about is Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon. It is his most recent book and hope or I hope it won't be, but it may be wind up being his last book. He's getting

pretty, pretty up there in his year. So who knows? But if it is his last book, I think it's kind of a fitting in to his kind of catalog of work, especially like we'll get into it, but like some of the messages he's trying to like convey towards the end of the book are, it kind of feels like he's speaking to us as sort of an elder kind of saying like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. Yeah, it's interesting because my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Thomas Pynchon lives in New York City. And I believe he was living there, you know, through the events of 9-11. He was. Yeah, he was. Yeah, I think he lives in the Upper West Side where Maxine, the main character, lives. Right, he does um yeah and so you can tell that this was a event that you know

kind of rattled him in a way i mean obviously but you can tell that this event means a lot to him and that he himself is trying to understand um one of the ways that he tries to understand it is by coupling it with something else that was happening in the economy and political economy at the time, which was the dot-com bubble and the collapse of that bubble. And like I said a minute ago, I think this is an interesting take because like we don't really think of those two events as connected. We don't think of them in tandem or as like even maybe historically contemporary. And I don't really know why that is the case. Maybe it is because we live in the tech, you know, world that these people envisioned. And so we don't really think of it as

being something that ended. And also maybe that dot-com collapse has been eclipsed by the big one in 2008 as well. But it is an interesting event that has not received a lot of maybe critical attention. I don't know. What do you guys think? Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And I think maybe it's very weird because the first.com boom was so heavily tied up in like the Y2K hysteria, which had all of these apocalyptic like fin de ciclo like dimensions to it that didn't pan out. And then, you know, basically right after, you know, I think in April 2000, it all collapsed. And then in 2001, like the real disaster kind of showed up, but we still don't attach them. Maybe that's also because the dotcom boom is so heavily identified with Silicon Valley and the West Coast that we don't think about the impact that it was having in the heart of the financial system and in downtown Manhattan in that era. And so I think it's really interesting that he draws attention to basically these two currents kind of going on simultaneously yeah and like i think a lot of people uh don't even know that much about silicon alley in the first place which is like the new york sector of the

tech industry and i feel like all the reporting and like even the business press or popular histories of the first tech boom are all deeply warped and not showing the real picture of what was going on with these companies. Definitely. Chicanery. I mean, a lot of people know or there's probably the perception that a lot of the companies were stupid and like didn't really do anything, but it was a lot more the companies were stupid and like didn't really do anything but it was a lot more complicated than that yeah yeah the one thing that really jumped out at me and you know I read this book over the last like five days when you guys told me you're doing an episode on it which I really appreciate it's been sitting on my desk forever and I'd seen people talk about it like

on Twitter and was kind of aware okay there, there's an internet-y dimension. But I don't know if you guys heard like one of the earliest episodes we did on Sybil Mojahad was about Josh Harris and the documentary about him, We Live in Public, which I think came out in like 2010. And that's something I saw when it came out and thought it was interesting. But in 2020, I went back and watched it when the pandemic began. And it hit so different. It was so creepily prescient of the world that we ended up kind of living in, like on lockdown and our little kind of pods with our screens all like interacting with each other.

Because he set up this whole art installation around Y2K. And that's like literally what he did. around y2k and that that's like literally what he did and uh you know it kind of it turned into a kind of like you know orgiastic bedlam but really really a kind of dystopian uh thing that that had this really bizarre like techno-fascist undercurrent to it that he was kind of like both warning people about but also kind of getting off on on. And so that he's kind of the most interesting window, I think, into that Silicon Alley culture. You know, he ran this company called Pseudo, which, you know, kind of, you know, it existed before like video streaming was really a thing. And so he didn't like make money off of it, but it was kind of very culturally influential in the moment.

And I think even in a lot of the press coverage of Josh Harris, there is a kind of tendency to be like, what a wacky guy. What a dumb, wacky, crazy. It was so easy to make money. You sent me that video, what was it, like Razorfish? Of like, what do you guys actually do? And it's like, we recontextualize outcomes for businesses. It's like, yeah, but what do you do? You know, and it's like, there definitely is

an amount of like, grifting, I think, going on to that kind of culture. But also, there's things that I noticed researching Josh Harris that are maybe a little more pension-esque and like, darker, like his dad was a career CIA officer that served in Ethiopia, and that he had like a CIA psychiatrist as it shows in the documentary I think Harold Kaufman was his name that was like advising them on how to do like kind of very MK ultra-ish kind of like like or even you could say enhanced interrogations like prefiguring the war on terror and um I mean if you want to I should also say he also has a connection to 9-11 which I feel like Thomas Pynchon has to be like somewhat, I would put at least even odds that he's aware of because he was involved in this Austrian art collective called Gelatin that apparently rented a space in the World Trade Center in 2000 and took out a pane of glass and built a kind of inward like balcony.

and built a kind of inward, like, balcony. And then, according to various rumors and legends, either Josh Harris rented a penthouse at the Millennium Hotel and filmed from there, like, watching this stunt at, like, 3 in the morning, or he rented a helicopter and flew around and filmed it. But that happened, like, a year before 9-11, and then afterwards he claims he started getting harassed by the FBI who were wanting to know what was up with this like art group and what were you up to and he like went on the run he went off to Ethiopia where his CIA dad you know used to work so it's

like he and of course I mean I'm sure we'll get into it but I think uh that it seems like the main antagonist in this novel Gabriel Ice seems to be heavily drawn from the personality of Josh Harris, even up to the point of he has these shady government kind of connections that like the kind of goofy, I'm lovey the clown kind of bullshit is almost masking a much more interesting kind of relationship between like the national security apparatus and all of these like darker subterranean things so yeah yeah so i'm i'm very excited basically is what i'm saying

the internet is like this new human experience at first everybody's gonna like it but there will be a fundamental change in the human condition one day we're all gonna wake up and realize that we're just servants it's captured us. It was genius because nobody had done it yet. He was saying this is the way it's going to be and he was right. I mean he was right. He was selling companies for a couple million dollars while we were all a bunch of kids getting paid $10 an hour to try and figure out HTML. Josh was one of these incredible new idols everybody suddenly wanted to be. I'm in a race to take CBS out of business.

He was always trying to advance the inevitable. This is going to happen. Let's try it now. It seems like a lot of the themes Pynchon is working with here are a lot of the themes present in that documentary. And I will say that there is, and I don't know if you guys picked up on this, but there's a quote from Gabriel Ice to where he says something of the effect of like, there's no scenario here in which I die. I don't die. I don't die. And Josh Harris actually says something almost identical when he's in, when they're about to get raided by the NYPD

at the Quiet We Live in Public thing. He says something like, I won't get caught. There's no scenario where I get caught. I believe he says I won't get caught. I've spoken with the NYPD and I'm convinced that I will not get caught before it is my time. I think he says. Yeah, before it is my time.

That was the thing where I was like, convinced that I will not get caught before it is my time. I think he says, yeah. Before it is my time. Before it is my time. That's, that's, that was the thing where I was like, dude, there is, there, Pynchon has to be aware of this, you know, it seems. Yeah. And he name drops it once in the novel, right? He does. Yeah. At one of the parties.

He says like, he says something of the effect of like, Gabriel Ice seems like he was in a retro pissing contest with Josh, the parties of josh harris or something like that yeah yeah um but yeah no um so yeah that's why i wanted i wanted to um to kind of tease some of those things out and to kind of throw them in the blender with 9-11 um because it seems like in this you know before we get into the plot of this book, um, we can talk a little, I want to talk a little bit about Pynchon. I'm sure people are probably aware of him. Um, but just in case, you know, you aren't like, he is a, uh, a novelist.

He's a writer who is kind of like, you know, renowned for his like aversion to, uh, media really. Um, he wrote something in the eighties I thought was kind of interesting for the New York Times for his like aversion to media, really. He wrote something in the 80s I thought was kind of interesting for the New York Times called Is It Okay to Be a Luddite? Have either of you read that? Yeah.

I haven't actually. What is he saying? I mean, basically, it's interesting. He is basically kind of saying, yeah, it's okay to be a Luddite. But more than that, he's saying that one of the tools be a Luddite. But more than that, he's saying that one of the tools in the Luddites toolkit is writing and the exploration, using fiction to explore this act of

what he calls denying the machine. So he kind of calls Mary Shelley and, you know, Frankenstein, like one of the first you know he talks about it as a gothic novel but he also sort of claims it as like sort of the Luddite tradition and so I think in like that is kind of something else that is pertinent to this book because I think at one point one of the characters Heidi says something like 9-11 killed fictional representation you know know, it is now, that's why there's so much reality TV now. Like, there can be no fiction anymore. Yeah, one thing I liked from that essay, too,

was that, I mean, I think in the popular conception, if anybody knows anything about Luddites, it's just maybe they think Unabomber, and then they think, like, maybe people who smashed up machines, and they're just anti-technology doing air quotes anti but what pinchon does in the essay is he links it to actual specific political struggles that these workers were engaged in right they were basically doing like

sort of like a strike and they were trying to preserve their working conditions and it was in this whole context where they were getting squeezed and squeezed so it's not so much like a knee-jerk anti-technology position as like a very specific thing right and that's sort of like in a broader sense that's what pension is about in general i think for sure For sure. Pynchon is a... In my opinion, I mean, there is a reading of Pynchon that... There are several different readings of Pynchon's, I guess. I did see someone say online, like,

is Pynchon an op? Which is possible. I mean, he definitely, you know, sort of traveled around in some of the circles. He's from an old blue-blooded American family. He is. He's a high wasp, basically. Right.

Yeah. Absolutely. Ivy League, Cornell, you know. Right. Navy veteran. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

He even worked in the defense industry for Boeing at one point. So, I mean, it is entirely possible. But I don't, you know, and I could be wrong. Maybe he is, and maybe this whole exercise is useless. But it seems to me, reading his body of work, I've not read all of his books, but I've read all of them except Vineland and Against the Day. It seems to me that throughout all of his books, there is a recurrent theme of political

struggle and of trying to make sense of the world and in a way that can channel that into something that could change it. It seems like he is very preoccupied with, you know, and if you're going to read any other book with Bleeding Edge, it has to be Inherent Vice. I was just telling Jimmy right before you got on, Dimitri, that, like, it seems like these two books, you have to read them in tandem. Like, Inherent Vice begins the cycle that kind of comes to, you know,

conclusion in Bleeding Edge. Definitely. Structurally very similar, too. They are. Yeah, even the kind of denouement at the end like very a lot of a similarity but it's like hey if if it ain't broke don't you know don't fix it like i feel like he really found his stride i know the new york times review which is very like praising with a lot of like urms like basically you know worked in was like it is so frustrating

that thomas pinchin has not developed a late style but i suppose we can forget him it's like okay yeah the cold bleeding edge i think pinching light i think i saw wow okay yeah i mean well yeah i think sometimes the way he's been able to get through the literary establishment and i guess i'll say up front i'm sympathetic to the idea that he's not an op, that he is somebody from the inside that is using literature as almost a kind of cryptography to get out a certain message in a way where he can't just come out and say like what he's thinking, but it's really more of like a method of investigation and like coming to terms with like his place in this world and the reality of it and the forces that the kind of invisible

forces that are running it that i think runs through almost like every single novel that he's written like if you go back to yeah i i think the earliest one i've read is the crying of lot 49 which is also a good i think companion piece of this because it's got a kind of similar female protagonist it takes place in like orange county and it's pretty short and like pretty i would always recommend it maybe for like a first pension book that or inherent vice i think are the maybe the most accessible but you you get things in that in like 1965 talking about like defense contractors like weird mk ultra scientists that are actually nazi war criminals like real estate scams and like and right-wing vigilance groups and like all these

other things that and things going back to like european secret societies like tristoro and stuff like that and you realize like he has the same obsessions and he was calling out things like years before they even entered like the countercultural mainstream, much less like the main mainstream. So I get the sense that like he was an observant person that saw some things happening, like maybe particularly when he moved out to California in like the mid 60s. And he was in Manhattan Beach working for, yeah, what was it, Boeing, I think. Yeah. And hanging out with kind of beats and hippies and stuff like he he was able to call out like the susness of like the tim leary counterculture

kind of almost literally before anybody else and he's just like a novelist so i i take a lot of like uh value and like encouragement from his approach to like these topics and his like relentless fixation on them and kind of telling this like meta narrative mystery full of clues. Like I don't I think a lot of times he gets like pegged as being like, oh, he's so obtuse and like mysterious and whimsical that he's just having fun with all of this stuff. And, you know, I think it's a way that like people on the Upper West Side can kind of reconcile themselves with enjoying his novels without feeling like he's attacking them or something. Like he's saying something ontologically uncomfortable. But I think he is kind of saying something ontologically uncomfortable in his own way. Yeah, like when I was a teenager, I got into Pinchon from the straight literary side. None of the political stuff. And I read most of his novels from that perspective. And then as I got into more of the

political analysis, more of the conspiracies, Pynchon grew with me and I was realizing he was talking about it the whole time. And so you can do a completely like apolitical reading of Pinchon and have a good time. It's just you will also miss so much. Yeah, I noticed that, Jimmy, you posted the other day like David Foster Wallace's like reading of Gravity's Rainbow, which I thought was fascinating because David Foster Wallace is not a political writer. He never was. David Foster Wallace is not a political writer. He never was. And it's just weird to me to think people reading him from an angle of pure aesthetics or something. You know what I mean? It's like he seems like a very political, he know, the upper classes can choose to ignore Pynchon's, those dimensions of Pynchon. was responding to solipsism through paranoia and was therefore basically creating paranoia and that it was a sort of satanic transcendence and that david foster wallace was no longer interested in it and he was trying to do like an angelic transcendence which is like sincere the new sincerity the new sincerity right and it's one of the most spectacular examples of projection i've ever seen that's what david

foster wallace is doing thomas pinchin is deadly serious in all of his joking he's deadly serious about who's committed the crimes in this country and who deserves you know justice yeah absolutely and you know i guess that's i mean even the the kind of the gen x affect i think he kind of parodies very skillfully in this novel and i guess david foster wallace wasn't with us long enough to to read bleeding edge i don't i think he had died by the time it came out. But that seems so typical of that kind of literary pose that was popular in the 90s and the 2000s. That, I don't know, that's just psychologizing, psychopathologizing everything that a writer, I don't know. Someone in my comments compared David Foster Wallace to Jordan Peterson, actually. And I don't think that it's actually that crazy

because this yeah it's not a leap I honestly think I was just gonna ask when you guys were talking about him I was I was I wanted to blur it out like if he was a live day you think he'd be like going on Joe Rogan and like being funded by like have like a Peter Thiel podcast or something like and talk about cancel culture all the time Infinite Jest is just literally like an a thousand word propaganda piece for 12-step programs which like 12-step programs are what they are i mean i've had a very love-hate relationship with them but it's just i mean there's a lot of fucking problems with them and it's like i just don't understand the point i don't know it's just a weird non-ideological position to take you know what i mean like he points out

individualism and consumerism and addiction and all these things and then in the end it's just like well get help through 12 through jordan peterson type shit yeah clean your room it makes sense for the 90s it makes sense for gen x end of history types it's just that's wrong history didn't end and everything is political. That's why Thomas Pynchon, who, by the way, was a beatnik, he went through one of the first waves of this, like, ironic posturing that came back in the 90s. He saw it before, so.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. congratulations hippie scum welcome to a world of inconvenience so yeah that actually tees this up pretty nicely because um there are so like we were, there are some fixations that Pynchon kind of hones in on. I think that like a narrative thing that he likes to do a lot is he likes to dial in on a sort of, I hate this word because it's in common use right now, but I don't have any other way to describe it. It kind of like liminal space in historical um you know in a historical time um in inherent vice it was the kind of winding down of the counterculture in the 60s like before the rise of um you know networked computers before the neoliberal turn this kind of ignorant interregnum between then um he does it in gravity's rainbow which i think is fascinating because like how many books in the american canon do you see written about not world war ii but the period right after world

war ii it's just fast you know like before the marshall plan but after the war ended but before the marshall plan this kind of weird interregnum um he does it with mason and dixon which is my personally my favorite um you know it's it's again he doesn't he's not interested in what happens after the the revolution in 1776 but like what was going on in the colonies before then in the mapping out of the states against the day is like basically the end of the Old West. Right. Where struggles were still happening, but the expansion... People were pretty much out in the Old West, and then what did they do right around getting there, basically?

And in Bleeding Edge, that period is right after the collapse of the dot com bubble but before 9-11 this very strange you know you've got about a year and a half a year worth of time there it's just a very interesting period and I think that something that's even more interesting about this

and it seems like this might be kind of what he's getting towards and I guess we can dig into it a little bit more once we start talking about the plot, but it definitely feels like maybe kind of what he's saying and why he focuses so much on Silicon Alley, Flatiron District of Manhattan at this time, is that this was the kind of last, I don't know,

history had ended, the Soviet Union had fallen, America was ascendant, and if there was any better instantiation of that, manifestation of that, it was the tech industry and innovation, and it just fell apart, it completely crashed, I mean, you had all these, you know, pets.com, fucking pseudo, like the Din Network, which you guys have talked about on your show. Very similar to pseudo and maybe Gabriel Ice in a certain way. Right. Yes, there does seem to be some parallels there, too. But it was this realization, like, this is all nothing. It's all just hot air.

So what has to happen? what has to happen from a narrative point of view well if if this narrative we tell ourselves about america isn't true that we can't lead the world in innovation and that this whole tech thing is just hot air well then we need to blow it all to pixels as maxine says at the end of this book, and rebuild it on new terms, which is, you know, fascist. Repurpose all of the tools of the dot-com tech industry into surveillance. Use them to control us through other means. And I think this is why this book has to be read with inherent vice, because inherent vice actually ends, like, literally the second-to-last scene is, like, Doc, like, looking at a computer

trying to understand ARPANET. Yeah. And, you know, and it's, like, I don't know. And so, like, you fast-forward 30 years, and, you know, you're sitting in Silicon Alley, and you're looking at, like, what's kind of come back around. I don't know. It kind of has come full circle

because I think the use of ARPANET, probably the one chief sinpanet probably the the one chief sin of omission in the pt anderson movie was that it like it cut the arpanet subplot which sucks but we were just talking about yeah i think um adrian prussia the kind of like the the baseball bat hitman that kind of does dirty work for the lapd like he sort of uses it to track people that like the the cops or the establishment the crocker fenway establishment kind of wants to take out so it's like already being used as a counter insurgency tool in 1970 and then with 9-11 it comes back it's like it goes public and civilian

and then comes back full circle and then everybody's like kind of sucked into it at that point because like it reminds me of a couple things like for instance ibm one of the first i mean their first major contract of course was the censuses the u.s census and their second major contract was with nazi germany doing the holocaust yeah then ibm i'm pretty sure it's ibm helped basically during the uh man during the manhunt for the badr meinhof gang they were able to use big data to look at people's apartment water usage levels and figure out who had more people staying with them than was on the lease wow and then they caught them in the 70s doing that so pretty much like big data surveillance state it's like it's been with us the entire time it's just

obfuscated you know what i mean yeah well I mean, again, I don't know how many times I can say, we'll get into it before I actually start getting into it. But yeah, like Promise Software was another example of using sort of data aggregation to track things. And I think that this is another thing that Pynchon is getting at here. And then i think it's interesting like people call this like a cyberpunk novel or whatever um but to the extent that that label is useful it actually is useful to compare this book to neuromancer because because when you actually think about what they're laying out like pension's view of the internet is way more like cynical and pessimistic than gibson's in neuromancer because like pension isn't what gibson is saying

is that there is an interface a sort of biological um biotechnical interface between the internet you know you plug in like the matrix pension is saying that no your your integration with these systems was way more seamless it's like you won't notice it before before you know it you will be integrated into it and it will control you and because this is a big thing that he's getting at over the course of his career he is trying to show how this system will control you. And I think that that goes back to his essay in the New York Times. Like, why is it okay to be a Luddite? Like, well, do you want to be controlled without your knowing it? Like, I don't know.

It's something interesting to think about. Yeah, I mean, I think that when people think cyberpunk, they think now basically matrix aesthetics and nothing else. But, like, going off of the paranoia and the realistic assessment of these control and command systems controlling us and then people who are rebels and are hacking and getting around it yeah it's entirely in the spirit of the original cyberpunk vibe totally yeah totally yeah it's definitely a critique of cyber utopianism as well which i feel like as much as um gibson um kind of might have played around with those ideas wasn't he ultimately just like really buddy buddy with like the eff and like john perry barlow and

like that whole that whole uh the well people as he he says at one point on page 73, when he says, you're not well people, are you? I think that's a reference to like the Grateful Dead, like the deadhead cyber network. I want to talk about that a little bit, actually, like Stuart Brand and everything. Exactly. But so, yeah, no, you're right.

There are connections there. But so, yeah, no, you're right. There are connections there. So, all right. So let's get into the plot a little bit. I was, like, trying to plan this out. I was like, is there a way to do this without spoilers? But I kind of just gave up.

The thing, too, is if we were to say all the spoilers, like, they wouldn't make sense if you don't know the plot. And then once you read the like the plot's so convoluted that like spoilers don't really make sense yeah right right um well then like we'll let's let's just or wait okay then let's uh let's give it a shot i think i just muted myself on accident can you hear me yes okay cool sorry all right so i'm gonna try to give it a shot. I think I just muted myself on accident. Can you hear me? Yes. Cool. Sorry. All right. I'm going to try to give it a shot here, and then we'll kind of just, as we go through it, just kind of start peeling things back a little bit. As I wrote here in the notes, we open up on Manhattan. It's a beautiful spring day in 2001.

It's a beautiful spring day in 2001. The main character is this woman named Maxine Tarnow. Or Tarnow, I guess it's depending on how you want to pronounce it. She's dropping off her two kids, Otis and Ziggy, off at the kind of probably a pinch-in-the-nest joke, Otto Kugelblitz School. I didn't know anything about this, but I guess Operation K Kugelblitz was a anti-communist, like Nazi offensive in World War II. So it's like, I don't know, it's probably him saying school is fascist or something. But, you know, like Max, like as a protagonist, I think Maxine is pretty interesting. You know, like, as a protagonist, I think Maxine is pretty interesting. She, you know, as you pointed out earlier, Dimitri, like, Crying of Lot 49 has a female protagonist.

And there are kind of some similarities here. But I don't know. I just, what do you guys think about Maxine as a protagonist? Because, like, we'll get into it. But she's, I don't know. I really liked her. There's a lot of zingers here. I think, as you pointed out, Jimmy, there's like 20 jokes a page.

It's very dense in terms of jokes. And I would just say, in terms of all the Thomas Pynchon novels, I think Maxine's my favorite protagonist for a bunch of reasons, some of which are professional for me. She's very funny. She's both like a streetwise accountant and a certified fraud examiner, but she's also streetwise enough to actually get into gunplay,

which happens in the novel, but she's also just a nice Jewish mom. Right. It's one of the best depictions of accountants in fiction which you know fiction doesn't depict accountants that often and then fraud is just a really good way to meet a wide range of people from all sectors of society and it plays like she's investigating fraud the way doc sportello is a like a private investigator and inherent vice and it's just a good functional narrative tool i really like it totally yeah um i agree she's uh very funny um and uh you know i don't know some of the reviews i saw were like some of the reviews i

saw were like mad that he jokes so like there's so many like zingers and jokes in this um but i don't know i mean like he was in his 70s when he wrote this i mean it's like it's kind of impressive he is a new yorker he could write a book is it because it's 9-11 that he's not supposed to joke about it or maybe that might be plus like he's always been zany like every novel he's ever written has like jokes that like sometimes i don't even think are funny i'm just like same right like more so in like gravity's rainbow maybe because it's like the 1940s kind of like old-timey like the kenosha kid like all those songs i'm like okay pinchin i get it you like writing novelty songs like he loves those songs he loves it every novel is like full but i do kind of like how he really dives into like whatever the era the genre is and uses it

like as like a greek chorus device in all this book so it's like i'll allow it i'll allow it i can't be too mad some of the songs um i mean's, I mean, I guess I'm not always crazy about them. But there is a song in this book by, like, one of the, by the Driscoll Padgett character. Yeah. Where she, like, has a song about, like, the dot-com Silicon Alley scene, which I thought was really funny. You know what I mean? So there's some really good. You know what I think it is I think it's cause

he's a wasp like there's nothing wasps from like Ivy League's love more than singing stupid songs with their bros yeah like fight songs yeah whatever supper club or secret society they're in exactly that's true good point it's all Yankee Doodle Dandy all the way down

so we can't hold that against them totally yeah so as you pointed out Jimmy she's like a delicensed fraud investigator she's recently been separated from her husband he's this like schlubby

commodities trader named Horst Loffler like one review I saw said that Horst was obviously the pension stand in here and i didn't i mean i guess i could see it but i thought like her dad was more of the pension stand like i said earlier it kind of felt like he was talking to us as a sort of elder like yeah yeah definitely and to a lesser extent march uh the the mom web the conspiracy web blogger the old unreconstructed lefty i think he speaks through a few of those characters.

Between the two. Not really hoarse. Not hoarse so much. Right, I didn't think that either. I would say Maxine more, even though he's not a Jewish mother. He has aspects of Maxine as well. Any one of the central protagonist investigator characters, I think in any of his novels is like definitely i mean definitely primarily i would feel like a vessel

for him though he does there are those like kind of soapbox moments which i mean i appreciate because it lets him kind of really it's some of those moments yeah again that's another thing i don't really understand with stand with the whole labeling him as post-modern like pension is a really he's very ideological and he's also very wholesome like he's got a very like sometimes even downright cringe like and i don't think it's him being ironic like he really can get extremely like sort of wholesome and sentimental about well i mean you remember in the novel v the uh main motto or slogan or like central message of the novel was keep cool but care right like he was never he never really allowed himself to be that sincere like in a

clear way ever again but that is fundamentally like his ethos i guess he's a care lord i think he does care i think he does i don't think he's just being like a deconstructionalist and just like having fun with like them deconstructing the medium i i don't think that that i just don't like in my gut feel like that's what he's driving at though i guess many people my gut feel like that's what he's driving at though i guess many people have taken that away with you same i think it kind of feeds out to like the uh i don't know cia founded mfa industrial complex of like writing and i i went through a little bit of that like writing programs in college and i feel like i never was like given pension i've even i've read i think it was francis uh stoner saunders's book like they

would somebody actually brought out like pinching it as an example of how you should not write because you know all these conspiracies and facts and all the no describe to me like how a snowflake falls perfectly on like a winter day it's literally kind of that shit where i feel like they nudge you reading that shit i know and look where literature is now. It's like, it's dead. It's unreadable now. Yeah, there's nothing interesting, and I feel like this book is like a breath of fresh air because he's actually dealing with,

it's not just like navel-gazing, like internalized, like me, my internal monologue and everything. He's dealing with the world, which I feel like is modern, not post, or I don't know what it is, but it's not post-modern i don't think right pension is the opposite of a like a solipsist like he's intensely fascinated with the world he doesn't talk about himself i mean totally there you go

he's realized yeah or the books yeah that's true um okay so so yeah so like the the sort of the beginning of the whole um i guess i don't know maybe with pensions beginnings and endings are hard to pin down but narratively speaking where this all starts to um sort of of hone in on the conspiracy here or on 9-11 or whatever is when this filmmaker comes into her office. It's this guy named Reg Despard, and he's been hired by a shady.com company called Hash Slingers to make a movie about Hash Slingers. Hash Slingers is one of the few tech companies to have survived the dot-com bubble collapse didn't you know not a not a real company obviously um but uh i'm sure there

are analogs um i don't i'm not that well versed in the dot-com bubble collapse but i'm sure there were you know earlier i sent you guys that clip from Razorfish. Razorfish was a startup that, that did survive the dot-com bubble collapse, but eventually got bought by Microsoft in like 2008. I think Amazon almost went under, but got kind of saved by the skin of its teeth and a couple of PayPal probably. Which this novel has so many interesting things to say about that. I know we're not quite there yet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so Hashlingers is owned by this guy named Gabriel Eyes.

And as you pointed out, Dimitri, earlier, he is kind of modeled on Josh Harris. It also seems like he is modeled on, I mean, again, I don't really know much about uh you know the specifics of silicon alley but if anything he is the opposite of bill gates at least in outward appearance and everything i feel like when i was growing up whenever you heard bill gates name you were almost indoctrinated to think like the good billionaire you know what i mean like the nice one you know but it is funny how this book he reads books look at him yeah exactly i i have like the fuzziest memories of like the 1990s like before that was like fully the case remember when he got like a pie thrown in his face and he had the antitrust lawsuit from the feds and he was kind of seen as being like a rapacious little nerd that was just gobbling

up the entire computer industry and then by the 2000s i think he realized oh i have to i need to start this foundation and now he controls all the farmland uh in the united states so it's totally cool worked out uh but yeah i know i think that yeah i don't know i think gabriel ice might be i wonder if elon musk was on pinchin's mind at all because this came out you know in like 2013 and now musk is kind of like almost like a hyper gabriel ice who's like this rock star like that he is still kind of the anti bill gates in a way of like not being like this sweater wearing doofus who reads books and like hangs out with oprah he's like the rock star badass like you know rocketing to the future and all that shit but he also is a he's like the rock star badass like you know rocketing to the future

and all that shit but he also is a person's like you point out his entire rise like has been you know he's made a lot of money off of like pentagon contracts to like launch satellites into space and things like that so i i wonder i'm not i can't say i'm 100% sold, but somebody like that. I got kind of a read of almost like the Google guys. Like, what was it? Eric Schmidt and the other guy. Because I think that in the novel, I think he goes to school initially in California. And there's some scenes where Gabriel Ice's wife is describing him in college. And I think there's, well, there's some really interesting stuff there.

Oh, you know what? They went to Carnegie Mellon, actually. That's right. Yeah. But she describes him as being very zoned out in front of a bunch of different screens. And basically, she describes having conversations when they were dating where he's just like zoned out and saying really weird stuff and it's like and that's

the guy who was chosen somebody who could dissociate yeah yeah no it it does kind of imply that he was chosen from an early age perhaps which you know earlier i said i wanted to talk about like kind of like um stewart brand and you know the kind of like some of the people behind the art the construction and naturalization of the internet but i mean like people wasn't stewart brand basically he was experimented on with LSD at Menlo Park I mean like yes I think he was yeah he was with the same crew with uh Leary and Ginsberg and Ken Kesey and all those people yeah um and the thing too is when they mention uh Gabriel Ice's wife two different times they mentioned butterflies like she's wearing butterfly earrings one of the

time yeah there was something else and i i'm not joking there are other mk ultra like little tip of the hat especially in relation to her and gabriel eyes yeah there is even outright mention you know multiple mentions of mk uh yeah just like straight up throughout the the book as well but it does yeah you're right it feels like he is picked which again i think is pinching kind of like you know he is introducing this notion early on in the book of people pulling strings um on these forces that appear naturalized. You know what I'm saying? Because one of the Russian mobsters mentions that Gabriel Ice has a tracking implant. Yeah.

Which is just like, oh. Every employee at Hashlingers has one. I mean, you know, folks. It's pretty sketchy. Hashlinger's a great name for a mean it's got the z at the end yeah and it's not like capitalized yeah yeah it's always like it's always it's italics at the time first.com boom where all the companies had the stupid stupidest sounding names well and like one of them in here is fucking hilarious. It's literally unpronounceable. It's like

or something like that. It's like HWHWGG HWHWG.net or something like that. It stands for, hey, we've got awesome and hip web graphics here. Yeah, and the party they go to that gets compared to josh harris's pseudo parties is similarly like it's like two uh zones is with like two z's like it's utterly unpronounceable it makes no sense

yeah it's interesting yeah yeah um which is not really an exaggeration on pension's part like it really was like that well i mean and it's like that again kind of like with the uber stuff you know what I mean it's happening again or the cryptocurrency like all the like ridiculous like you know alt coins like floating around out there well you know when you and me when we research stuff Dimitri we keep finding names of people who are just like the most Pynch and ass sounding name possible including mentioned in this novel bernie madoff yeah made off with made off bernie made out of the ponzi scheme like you can't like reality is just so bullshit i know or elon musk like how how is it that he has the

name of the like when verner von braun wrote his mars novel in 1953 he said that the future mars colonies would be governed by an elon and it's like what the fuck is happening yeah you know and i don't know musk just has like i don't know musk of like death i don't know it's like gross you know no offense to south africans out there but no you're right that is really funny um um but yeah no so like yeah so gabriel eyes um bad dude his um his wife i don't really know how to say her name it's like talus i guess talus his mom is you mentioned her earlier um dimitri this woman named march keller and she has a web blog it's called like tabloid of the damned um she's great um you know pretty pretty funny like she's got like uh you know i just like you know kind of fast forwarding a little bit but

as soon as 9-11 happens she's like it's right stuff, you know what I mean? They're doing it! Right away. Which is, like, the only logical, you know, like, reaction to that, seriously. The way the novel sets it up, like, it has this, like, I mean, we say it all the time and someone taught it, but, like, this dracularity,

this immense dracularity to it of, like, things were constellating in such of like people you know he mentions that people were like planning to go out of town the weekend before 9-11 because they just felt something was off and like the vibe was fucked and like something was gonna happen well that's that's another big thing here and and pta actually points this out in inherent vice i don't think this is mentioned in inherent viceent Vice, but the issue of time and time travel is a huge question in this book, because he almost seems to be, like, you know, this is kind of, like, put in this dialectic of, like, real world and virtual

world, but he almost seems to be kind of, like, saying, like, can you predict certain events? Well, yeah, like like we have the evidence we should be able to see this is coming and um and it feels like there are even kind of time blips in this in this novel where like characters will know information before they know information you know what i'm saying so there's an interesting thing with Vice. I don't know if you guys have heard about the... It's like there's a lost day in Inherent Vice because they offhandedly mention a basketball game in almost every day of the novel.

And if you look up the dates, they're real basketball games. Oh, that's true. Yeah, he does this with weather in Mason and Dixon. He has the exact weather observations down, like, historically. Wow. And then, so, in Inherent Vice, basically the time when he's drugged, and then

he escapes from Adrian Prussia, there is a missing day where, like, basically, he makes this puzzle that's really hard to even know that there's a puzzle in the novel and then some people have you know speculated it means this or that but like you're absolutely right he does these insane games like within the novel like there's probably something in this that i completely missed i don't know yeah well i mean he does something like he um imbues objects with

like personalities and souls like objects can change it's like the ship in inherent vice you know it was preserved and then it became the golden fang it was a communist birch dodger was what you know a communist and then he came back the golden fang and he's like a reactionary like planning the bay of pigs you know what i mean like things can kind of uh change and so it's like if i don't know it kind of fucks with our idea of continuity word i'm hearing it i make you wolfman might not be as missing as we think like gone and are gone so yeah so you know back to the plot here. The more that Maxine looks in the hash slingers,

she kind of, like, she notices that they, that they're, as she puts it, like, starbursting money out into all these various different places, one of which is the Middle East. And it looks like, you know, Gabriel Ice even has a hand, I mean, like, he's obviously in the pocket of U.S. intelligence communities in the defense industries and is even funding both. I couldn't really tell. It sounds like he's funding both jihadist groups and CIA backed anti jihadist groups. So it's kind of like the Golden Fang, too, in Inherent Vice,

where they're getting them coming and going. Go ahead. Well, and then, so, I don't know. So there is that dynamic, and all the people kind of sucked into this part of the story. But then there's this other part of the story that I think is a very important thing that we need to talk about and that is deep archer so and you know the deep web in general but in this book

there is something called deep archer and what it is is you know they they go to great lengths to tell you the the makers of this game two guys named justin and Lucas. They want to make it clear it is not a game. It's not a game. It's a sanctuary from the world and all of its problems and everything else. But it is like, it's kind of like, I never played

that game Second Life, but I kind of felt like it was a little, yeah, it kind of felt like Second Life a little bit. But then also you mix in one of those walking simulators where it's just meant to be beautiful. Right. You get some of that as well. Yeah, and if there is any gamified aspect of it,

it's just that you click. You just click everywhere to try to find a link, and it will then crossfade you into another part of the digital realm in this um in this you know virtual world um at times it feels like it's kind of the sort of virtual manifestation of the deep web yeah like when when characters say they're going to meet in the deep web it kind of feels like this is where they're meeting um but it's uh it's it's interesting um because over the course of the novel um maxine starts meeting people in deep archer she's in that's a obviously it's a pun on the word

departure um but she starts meeting people from her real life in deep archer some of which are dead and it's it's kind of interesting dead. And it's kind of interesting. First of all, it's kind of like on Gravity's Rainbow where people are, you know, communing with people on the astral plane. You know what I mean? There's like an afterlife element to Departure. Like, I think that they say that

sometimes they'll see the faces of real people or sometimes people who have died in the course of the novel will appear in deep Archer. Totally. Even nine 11 victims, which he says like, Oh, they might be created as almost like memorials for like people that died.

But then also like there's, there's kind of a liminality of maybe this is like where the souls of. We're like a collective unconsciousness. Yeah. With the numbers thing, which, yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it becomes, so yeah, it kind of becomes an afterlife. It kind of becomes an escapist thing. Like a frontier, kind of.

It's a frontier, too, exactly. And one of the things I thought was interesting about it, like, when they talk about building it, so it was made by these two guys, Justin and Lucas, and they mention in the plot, like, Justin's input here was that he wanted to see sunny California, you know, like, that was his creative vision in this. And this is actually an interesting dialectic in this book as well,

between East and West Coast and like what California represents and what the East Coast represents. But then Lucas's vision was this like he wanted something darker. You know, he wanted something like more apocalyptic is what it says. And it's just, again, it's this kind of interesting thing. I know you guys have pointed it out on the show, Dimitri, but it's interesting that Pyn that pension was also pointing this out even before adam curtis pointed it out which is that like there were multiple people not just in media and in movies and stuff

but these tech people as well their idea of fun was apocalypse yeah like burning man it was like that's what fun is if the world is a fire. A big towering icon on fire. Just like that tarot card. Yeah. Yeah. What is fun about this? I mean, and he throws in a few, like, mentions throughout of kind of, like, that arcade in the midwest and there's some kind of apocalyptic like a jet ski game where they're like jet skiing around a submerged like bombed out

manhattan hydro thunder yeah hydro thunder and the towers are leaning precariously to the side and they were you know just like excitedly like jet skiing around manhattan being like hey we i think she they say to maxine like we should really get a raft for like you know the apartment just in case so it's like everybody is just waiting for destruction uh in a kind of bizarre way uh that yeah he picks up on it what's interesting too is that between the two creators they both can't decide what they should do, whether they should go open source and just give away Deep Archer or sell it in some form. And that is also kind of a recurring theme in other novels,

like especially Inherent Vice, where the real estate developer has a mental break and he wants to give away, he wants to build something that's for free. And then the forces of repression, a mental break and he wants to give away he wants to build something that's for free and then like the forces of repression like the fbi like convince him not to right and so it's very similar to this where it's just this concern this almost more like less socialism and more like biblical sense that you have to give away your wealth to save your own soul totally and it also feels like i i feel like

part of the reason why pinchin likes to point these periods out in history is he's kind of trying to say that while there are cynical forces that either cause these things or then take advantage of them they they do present opportunities for you know challenges from like i don't know the left like i think he's saying that like there is there was a sort of like i don't want to use the word emancipatory but maybe maybe did people did and okay i know for a fact that people did conceive of the internet in those terms at one point in time that like there was a kind of promise in you know the moment right after world war ii you know you've got a communist organizing in italy you know in greece and stuff you know like there's like these are moments that are pregnant with opportunity i guess is what he's maybe saying. That's the thing.

Like, I just did this whole series on, like, basically, like, World War II and this period right after World War II. And some people, maybe they look at, like, oh, how did Nazis end up running NATO and end up in charge of West Germany? But it never had to be that bad. And it could have been worse or it could have been better. At every one of these like crucial historical junctures, there are opportunities for things to become better or worse, right? Then it's never foregone conclusion. I think that's right. I think he's saying it's not inevitable that things have to end up this way.

And if you even look at 9-11 it is the same i think that they're i mean i watched this documentary um the other day it's you know 9-11 press for truth which is about like the jersey girls and everything and like how they you know and even one of the characters in the book said i think it's eric the eric character says like 9-11 should have been a big reset for real estate and for all the sort of mechanisms of power or whatever but instead they you know retrenched double reform doubled down on it yeah yeah and you see that as a recurring theme i think throughout you know like the what was it you know the oldm Emanuel cliche, never let a crisis go to waste. Like, I think you saw that after the 2008 collapse.

I think you're even seeing it today with like the great, like Davos has this great plan for how we're going to do a great reset on it. And it just seems like, I don't know, like more of an introduction to like some kind of techno neo-surfdom where nobody owns anything.

Like how convenient. But yeah, no, I think that there are these moments of rupture. I think he, it seems like Pynchon wants to hold on to a little bit of kind of optimism. But I think, and you might have written this somewhere in your notes, Jimmy, that confronting history and grappling with history in a real way, I think is something that pinchin believes

in uh kind of deeply and i it's something i certainly believe in deeply but it's like if you don't understand if you don't have some kind of apprehension in the real history of like what this country is and the forces that are at play you're going to end up like everybody like somebody says in the novel after 9-11 like everybody everybody's regressing into children. What the hell is going on? Like, this is like, instead of being a reset button to, you know, give people kind of a fresh chance or something like that, it actually like stunts everybody and everyone just starts watching reality TV and the same old hustles just keep on going. You know, so yeah, it's a, without kind of, like, it does matter, right? I mean, I think, like, I'm a hard believer in, like, explaining history to people can be radicalizing.

Totally. And I think to the extent that he's stitched together these different things that people otherwise, like, myself included, maybe wouldn't have thought are related does have a kind of like radicalizing and like i don't know positive effect um you know if you know yeah because thomas pinchon he will bring up the wobblies he'll bring up the reds in hollywood he'll bring up different labor struggles he'll bring up you know all throughout american history because he's mainly you know concerned with america and so he will bring up the most disparate like forces trying to change society for the better and he will link them in ways some of which are fictional and some of which are just historical fact and seeing these different struggles all linked into one great tradition of rebellion is just very inspiring.

And that's why I, like you guys, get that read that Pynchon is fundamentally a good force. Yeah, I agree. But he does write quite a bit about the bad forces. For example, I think one of the, like, the sort of embodiment of evil, really. Well, obviously there's Gabriel Ice, but he kind of feels like sleazy evil. Yeah. He's surface level evil. He's surface level evil.

But then we get this character like Nicholas Windust, who, again, great name, Windust. I don't know. nicholas windust who again great name windust i don't know um who who feels like i mean he's he's evil from like a historical you know angle like he's got there's multiple mentions to like you know his karmic debt like how many bodies he has on him like how much like just torture that he's done you know the uh just awful things he's done in the world um i mean i think like maybe a me personally um jimmy in the notes that you wrote that he might have worked for the yeah world league for freedom and democracy he kind of has that like vibe i kind of thought he's like a john perkins type yeah economic hitman yeah yeah definitely like

it's definitely implied that he was like a like a rabid anti-communist neoliberal so it's sort of implied that he's a cia or cia adjacent but like he was in the field in like guatemala doing heinous shit right yeah he was one of the foot soldiers Guatemala doing heinous shit. Right. Yeah. He was one of the foot soldiers and then he sort of rose to middle management of the same heinous forces that. Yeah. Yeah.

I think Pynchon mentions that Windus, one of his first assignments was he was on the ground, like spotting for airstrikes in the Chilean coup in 1973. September 11th. Yeah. September 11th, the first 9-11 interesting um and then later i think he taught at the school of america's like he said he was

in guatemala and also he worked for something called the a think tank called tango which is another one of these kind of like sketchy things that i thought that was interesting because that's spanish for i have as in like give me that it's mine like that was maybe the joke that maybe he was going for there but yeah one of these like shadowy kind of like neoliberal neocon like security state you know kind of orgs that uh that does horrible awful things uh in you know central and south america so yeah they talk they talk about his financial holdings, where he has little slices of basically all over the world when things would get privatized, he would buy into them. So yeah, he has a huge fortune made up of like, you know,

shares in this oil rig. And then, you know, like, and yeah, yeah it's like very he's seen working with israeli and taiwanese commandos in guatemala which is historically like accurate that's who was doing the killing and then there would be a couple americans like overseeing it and that's all like just historical record really and if we we believe Alex Jones, his uncle, who he called the Oliver Stone of Guatemala. Literally. But who knows about that?

Well, one of the weird things about Windust and this is a recurring theme in Pynchon's book and it does mostly occur between men and women, but in Gravity's Rainbow there is you know men and men in which this dynamic occurs but one of the interesting things is that Maxine starts to feel attracted to them like she has this you know attraction that um she can't quite explain she's kind of disgusted by it in herself um and again like i don't feel like this

really service that much in inherent vice this didn't really feel like this big of a theme in inherent vice as it is in this book well no it is because doc sportello's girlfriend left him and she's like with a um a real estate magnate. And it's implied that she's also maybe an informant too. So it does actually. And his other squeeze is like an assistant DA. So even though I think maybe it doesn't get read the same way, there is a kind of sleeping with the enemy a little bit. Yeah.

It is an inversion kind of in a way of the Windust Maxine thing in a way. Because, yeah, she does, Penny does have power over him to an extent. Yeah, so, like, what are we to make of that? Because I think one way that I read it, and, again, this kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier, I think Pynchon is, he can become kind of micro-focused on the sort of things that the ways that power is expressed. Power and balances and the way they become expressed in the world.

One of those is sex. I mean, it's hard to read Gravity's Rainbow and not walk away with that impression. I mean, like, so much of Gravity's Rainbow is just sex. And a lot of it is like uh all kinds yeah all kinds of sex yeah um bad a lot of bad kinds uh um but you know i don't know it's just i don't know it's an interesting thing like what what are we to to make of that you had to do the notes jimmy what do you what do you think yeah so this is a thing that i have been noticing for a while and then i've listened to like a pension podcast i've read

a lot of essays and i don't see it picked up that much but basically like you were saying there's this recurring theme of women especially leftist women lusting after right-wing authoritarian and or fascist men right right it's especially prominent in vineland against the day and bleeding edge these have novel these are novels where female characters on the left or you know just to some degree they engage in degrading and often violent sex often in the form of adultery too with these right-wing men who are often in positions of law enforcement or criminals or some mixture of them right right now when i first picked up on this like you know this wavelength i thought that pinchin was like into like he had like a cuck

fetish or something right and then when i sort of didn't like there's too many other types of sex for that like i thought that maybe pinchin is being sexist you know he's just like oh the women just want the authoritarian man you know like i thought maybe it was like a almost a misogynistic reading and for a while i thought that too but it it's in rereading Bleeding Edge where it became more apparent to me that I think this is quasi-metaphorical. I mean, it happens in real life, but I think it's kind of like a biblically inspired thing. Because in the Bible, there's a recurring metaphor, like in Ezekiel, you know, the prophet Ezekiel compares Jerusalem to a harlot who has gone astray from God. Right. And basically, if she repented and, you know, cleaved more to God, then, you know, that's like reunifying or whatever.

And then in the New Testament, there's like Christ, the bridegroom, and the church is the bride. Like, it's a whole recurring, you know, theme, right? And I think we could question, you know, whether this is sex positive or sex worker inclusive or, you know, how in good taste this metaphor is. But thinking about it as a metaphor, I think it hard to disagree that america has many times like committed adultery against itself in the sense that america it says that it's trying to be for freedom and equality and all of these lofty goals and basically every generation there are america is just basically betraying its itself you know what i'm saying yeah america has these instincts to be good but then instead it basically lets the worst greediest people take over yeah it's yeah it's like the scene in the movie, it's fucking hilarious, but where Coy Harlingen is trying to explain how America's addicted to sending soldiers overseas to die in Vietnam.

And Doc's like, is it addictive? Yeah. That's a funny scene. Yeah, it's a personification. Yeah, yeah, you're right so yeah so maxine basically has sex with nicholas windust and it's like consensual but it's ugly and violent still and she's both repelled and attracted to him and then she has in her mind that she's still even though this guy has like a astronomical body count of like heinous sins and people he's tortured and killed,

she still kind of wants to redeem him in some way. Yeah, I can save him. Yeah, literally, I can save him. I can fix him. It's interesting, but another interesting thing about that scene, and this occurs several times over in the book, and this is a huge theme in the book.

I don't know if I put it in the notes that much but she it kind of compares her to like a video game control her controller in that scene and there are multiple other parts of the book where she says you know her you know eyeball humidity uh moisturizer app is running or something like there are multiple um references made to people operating like machines yeah and and i think it's like he he again there's this question of like post-humanism or like transhumanism which was like big with these people you know with the silicon alley type people and I think it's another example of, and I think this is a huge part in We Live in Public, what happens when you interface with these systems and turn over a part of yourself to systems that are completely unaccountable, driven by profit?

You don't have, I mean, you're turning over a part of your own control to them. I don't know. I think it's, I just think it's an interesting question um there's i don't know there's like a katherine hill book about like post-humanism and stuff like that i think that this book or this yeah this book kind of like digs into that question like is this something we really want yeah do we want to i don't know do we want to transcend our humanity or become, like Stuart Brand said, like gods? I don't know if I want that. I don't know if I want it either, but you see people that are still on top of Silicon Valley today seem to want it.

They seem to be very interested in that. I think Jeffrey Epstein and his science buddies were very interested in that. Everyone wants to be like a sus AI god in a nanite cloud floating around in the ether forever. like a sus ai god and like a nanite cloud like floating around in the ether forever and uh it reminds me of this interesting uh german documentary about the unabomber from 2003 i believe it's called the net and i forget who said it it was like some stewart brand adjacent person might have been stewart brand himself but he had some interesting quote about technology and he said like we create machines then mold ourselves to the uses of them and that's what you know i think uh what you said is spot on like we mold ourselves to the uses of

these tools that are controlled by forces that are in some way like occulted or sometimes they're out in the open but it's been so normalized that we don't even think we somehow think that like hyper capitalism and like personal liberty and freedom is just something that naturally these things naturally go together but if you look at the history of like every frontier at every stage of american history it's been the same recurring kind of tragedy every single time where the rich men as don henley says in the last resort some rich men came and raped the land nobody caught him um and you know like the the land frauds like settling the west and the monopolization of like mineral resources

and oil and the the vertical integration the cartelization of like you know like building economies of scale to just control everything with like trusts and that that kind of system like the the little person like the yeoman farmer the pioneer the homesteader the internet like cyber freak like cyberpunk guy yeah the coder the code monkey like they all got screwed over at a certain point um the the space gets colonized and that's basically what happens to deep archer in the novel right yeah they specifically compare deep archer to claim jumping like yeah it's it's overt in the novel it's so wonderful like pinching nose about that history i bet he read like the declaration of cyberspace by john perry barlow which like literally makes that like he says i want it to be like a jeffersonian utopian frontier blah blah blah so it was like very much in the the minds of even the people that were like creating this worldwide web culture was

that it was the new frontier and i don't know i guess hasn't that been i don't know if you guys would fully agree but that's been like a a powerful anxiety um in like american culture and political economy since like you you know, 1890 or 1900, the closing off of the frontier. Right. And this country that was always like built upon, like having some kind of like open land of resources to steal basically, to like buy yourself another year, another decade, and just keep going and going.

And I think you could see the logic of like U.S. imperialism, like extending that to a global scale but then the internet is like once you've kind of dominated the world at the end of the cold war what's next well the frontier inside of all of our minds i guess it's the the cyber frontier is the last one uh kind of dark look at the lineage of these people in Silicon Alley and where they started, I mean, I think the you can track it with these two books, with Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, because it does feel like

well, it doesn't even feel like this is literally what happened. The people that came out of the new communalist movement, like the commune movement of the 60s and 70s became the people like the Silicon Alley, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, Stuart Brand being one of them in the whole earth network. But that was the point. Like I think that like I mentioned earlier in the opening of one of those whole earth catalogs, Stuart Brand has a quote that that's like we are like gods or we have become gods we better get you good at it and what he means is like we you know aggregating information having it at the tip of your fingers um and and then over time this becomes uh you know a deeply

embedded part of political economy i mean but there's a lineage here and you know and and i don't know it's just i don't know it's just interesting that one of the main parts of that lineage stewart brand was this guy that yeah was mk'd with well it really makes me wonder like who's we who exactly is we whether he's talking about here you know right like it doesn't i don't think it means all of us i think there's going to be gods and there's going to be not gods and uh yeah that's the thing too like uh in talking about basically the hippies became these you know tech nerds the thing is there's a part of the book uh bleeding edge where they talk about the nerds versus the jocks as like a funny metaphor and they basically say that the jocks which they can one of the characters compares to wall street

uh basically in the long run the jocks are more in sync with the deep market rhythms and that always beats nerditude no matter how smart the nerds are that's really interesting and it's like that's what happened with each tech boom it's just whoever already has the money yeah just consistently stays rich yeah totally um on a funny side note there's like a jacobin podcast called the dig oh yeah which is like i've heard of it like this i will i listened to this episode yesterday with this guy fred turner who wrote this book called from cyber culture from counterculture to cyber culture and him and the host were like and then stewart brand and ken kesey were experimented this was wacky anyway it's back to the relevant stuff it's just like

what the fuck how to see this how do you gloss over that yeah it's like it's an integral part of the story you're telling you know i mean and that's the cool thing about pinch on is he basically has more than one novel that depicts like these 60s communes and different things and then how they get corrupted and then the lies and self-denials people go through and then the the human detritus that comes afterwards like he's old enough to have seen multiple waves of this shit yeah and oh it just happens to fail every time and then get reabsorbed like okay but isn't life made possible by not knowing everything?

I don't know where you got that from. It's not that living in public is going to be imposed on us. We're going to be conditioned to ask for it. Fourth quarter 2004, I'll roll out the consumerized version of We Live in Public. And I'll charge them for the platform, and I'll charge them for recording their lives to disc. Now you can have it too.

What I'm starting to see is that there's a direct parallel between running an apple orchard and living in public. They're taking little pieces of you continuously. The collection of them is greater than little me. I'm just a product. I'm a product to be harvested. Harvesting you? Yeah. They're harvesting my psyche in order to feed themselves.

harvesting my psyche in order to feed themselves. Well, so, okay. So I think that covers basically the whole plot. The characters, the kind of themes and everything we're hitting at. It only took us an hour and a half to get there. So then I think the next part of this like i wanted to pivot to 9-11 um because like this is a 9-11 book uh it not only takes place during 9-11 during the time leading up to it but it is also very interested in the immediate aftermath um it's interested in how it changed things like i said earlier it almost kind of feels like a

historical fiction rendering of it i found like one academic article that said that it may be one of the first to to treat it as an actual historical event in a um sort of like american canon you know uh type account rather than as a mediated event or something like that so i don't know who the fuck knows if that's true or not but it's interesting to think about um so i mean i wanted to talk a little bit about it so like throughout the book there's like several like references that like something's coming yeah i think there is uh there is a scene right before it happens where maxine meets with this man named chler Platt, I think is his name. Where the dude basically is just like, yeah, we're about to do 9-11.

And what was fascinating about that scene is that Maxine is so blown away by this that she, the only, I don't know if you guys noticed this, the only way she knows how to decompress from it is she goes out and shops. She's just like, I have to go shop. Isn't that exactly what George W. Bush told Americans to do right after 9-11? Exactly what he told them. Yeah, exactly. And that was at the law firm of Hanover Fisk, which I thought was interesting. I wonder if that's a reference to Fisk, the partner of Jay Gould,

one of the most rapacious robber barons of like or uh Civil War era hand over fist oh hand over Fisk and yeah Chandler Platt it doesn't get much waspier than that so I think that it's like she checks in with the wasps and they all know 9-11 is coming which honestly I kind of feel like that's the side that we don't ever i mean people say oh bush did it but like when you think about the class that like the bushes kind of like represent in government that and yeah you know i was just reading the other week how there are all these like insurance drills i think in the month or two before 9-11 to like uh test out for all the insurance companies um you know what would

happen if a huge disaster i think it was a hurricane so it was a little bit like removed but what would happen if new york just got totally attacked and all the i don't know just uh there definitely uh are intimations there's all they also mentioned something that is very true so i know that pinchin is like familiar with his 9-11 conspiracy theories for lack of a better term of the insider trading that occurred in the days uh immediately leading up to 9-11 if united and american airlines which is real i think snopes tried to debunk it but i think they tried in the funniest way possible yeah in the lamest way possible i think they eventually just said uh like there is just like an innocent explanation for this.

No, they said that there's no conceivable way that Al-Qaeda could have been trading on the stock market, which every person's obviously like, yeah, no, duh. Like it wasn't Al-Qaeda that did it. Nothing to see here. They're in caves, folks. They didn't have computers. My God, yeah. So that's never gotten to the bottom of.

Also, the consciousness project at Stanford. The Princeton Global Consciousness. Yes, now that's a real thing, right? Yeah. And I believe I saw it in a Stephen Greer UFO documentary. I remember just like a passing reference to it about the random number generator. Because that's also something that pinchon brings up which kind of sounds like it's something that maybe he would have made up like this is

i'm pretty sure that stephen greer says that directly preceding 9-11 the number generator started spitting out like non-random sequences of numbers i i'd have to maybe double check that i can't say 100 but that that sounds because you know stephen greer of course. I'd have to maybe double check that. I can't say 100%, but that sounds like, because, you know, Stephen Greer, of course, he was using it to make some point about, like, you know, the collective consciousness and, like, contacting ETs or some bullshit. But, like, I think that is a thing that's reported to have happened. Who knows? Maybe that's a sign. I don't know. But, yeah, yeah. So there's that as well. But the insider trading is Yeah, yeah, so there's that as well. But the insider trading is definitely verifiably true.

There was insider trading for sure. There was also, like, you know, like the, what was it, like the E10 stations that, like, Mossad operates. Like, apparently traffic was going fucking crazy the day before. But the global consciousness thing in the narrative is interesting because not only, I tried to research it. Um, I could, it was inconclusive. It sounded like there was one website that had something about it, but I couldn't tell if it was like legit, whatever that means.

Um, the global consciousness project is real. I mean, they did have these random number generators, but in the narrative, it's interesting because it links that with Deep Archer. Like, Deep Archer's source code is, like, woven into the random number generators. And so, as 9-11 approaches, the random number generator becomes more non-random, which opens up the door for people to hack through the code of deep archery into into it um so it's this weird it's this interesting link up between like you know what happens quote unquote in the real world again you have this sort of like dialectic which i kind of want to dive into a little bit later but you have this kind of interesting link up between these two things and again that's another interesting thing.

And again, this is in all pension books, but this one is just beating you over the head with it, that their surface world and then subterranean world. And you don't get a better sort of illustration of that than like the deep web. But like there's, you know,

pension is constantly trying to, you know, tease out the sort of, you know, the edges, the bleeding edges between those two things. And it's why he's so fascinated with lines. Mason and Dixon is the perfect example.

And light, too. Maxine, she's a regular diver into certain depths through looking at fraud. She knows how the sausage is made she knows the normal levels of like subterranean and then she dives deeper and sees some even crazier stuff like in the course of the novel yeah and actually so so yeah so we're

talking about 9-11 um and that's fascinating you pointed that out, Dimitri, because I literally wrote that in the side note going back to Chandler Platt. The conspiracy that Pynchon lays out isn't that Bush did 9-11. It is basically that the entire WASP network apparatus, GOP, everything, they did 9-11, which I was sort of stoned last night and laughing about which I was just like like it's a hilarious thing like granted I'm sure Democrats were in on 9-11 but if it would be funny though it's just funny to think about like John Kerry running in 2004 not being able to be like my opponent did 9-11 but because he took that skull and bones oath and laid in a coffin and got pooped on and like had to like i don't know lick geronimo's skull

or whatever the fuck uh he can't say it forever so you know they said that one up good um exactly i love by the i wrote this down in the notes that i feel like there's another pinch in reference again he's like tying these things back further back in history during Maxine's conversation with Chandler Platt uh he he mentioned I forget what he mentions but she said you people tend to be man liquor cardano types which I think is referencing the rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used to shoot JFK and he says Jackie and I were dear friends and I'm not sure I oughtn't to resent that this is a really funny novel he's implying that he's at least through Maxine implying that

you motherfuckers killed JFK too I know that that's the thing if you were to read it maybe if from just a literary reading there's so much israeli shit that you might think that pension's going with the israelis but they're right there if you really i think plot it out they're peripheral the entire time they're not doing it yeah and like i think that no okay, you know how Nicholas Windust gets whacked in the course of the novel?

I think that he was killed because they found proof through the video that he was maybe planning to undermine 9-11 with the Stinger missile. Interesting. Because why else would he be killed? I think that and before 9-11 nicholas windust is tracking down things that are leading towards 9-11 and almost like he's trying to stop it yeah he did undermine things in guatemala yeah so it's not necessarily that he's not evil but that maybe he's this amount of evil,

but not full evil. Totally. And they killed him for it. You know, that actually reminds me, I hadn't thought about him in relation to a real life character, but I just happened to watch, just because I was curious

about kind of the limited hangout potential, but I watched the whole Looming Tower miniseries last week, which is on Hulu, which is produced by in my opinion somewhat uh sus alex gibney and lawrence wright from the new yorker totally sus man yeah like he gets every single like hot pinchiness topic to make a documentary he makes like three documentaries a year it's like oh theranos enron wiki leaks like like literally everything and but but actually i mean it was kind of again it was like it was totally a

limited hangout but like if you read between the lines you could kind of like see things happening that kind of like for me i feel like a normal person watched it they would kind of be like oh this like bureaucratic infighting like cause 9-11 what a tragic idiotic mistake but i was looking at it like reading between the lines of it being like, oh, there's literally a scene where Prince Bandar like tells his wife to write a check in her name. And the next scene is like the terrorist handler, like picking up a check at Western Union. They don't say it. They don't like literally say it. And meanwhile, the wife is like, oh, are we going to Crawford this weekend?

I just talked to Laura. And he's like, yeah. this weekend? I just talked to Laura and he's like, yeah. And so it's like, they're kind of hinting, but I think Windust kind of reminds me of John O'Neill who's played by Jeff Daniels in this, who is like kind of like a hard drinking asshole, like Irish Catholic FBI counterterrorism guy who, you know, was, was really hot on the trail, but kept getting roadblocked by the CIA and even people like within the agency. He was eventually forced out under kind of like sketchy circumstances, like he lost his briefcase at like a seminar somewhere and like it was stolen. And then he

was like forced into retirement. And then he got a job offer from Larry Silverstein at the World Trade Center. And he got a job as the head of security at the World Trade Center in like the last week of August in 2001. And then he died in 9-11. And so he was one that was like very obsessed with like, there's going to be an attack coming. There's going to be an attack coming.

And just got absolutely kind of cock-blocked at every thing. And it's like, it doesn't even portray him. And I'm sure he will. It's not like, oh, this guy's like like a hero he's like a perfect person or whatever but i do have to believe that in this whole like you know world of like government agents and counterterrorism and stuff it's hard for me to believe that like there weren't people sincerely trying to stop this and that we're being and i think if there was a kind of conspiratorial thing going on

there would have had to be roadblocks put up to, like, prevent intelligence from getting around, to prevent the normal operation. Because a lot of these guys were, like, floating around the country pretty flagrantly. It's not like they were hiding particularly well. They were, like, going to strip clubs and, like, going to flight schools and all these other things. So I think that maybe Windust was like on the level of like a kind of like a John O'Neill who like maybe he was willing to do horrible things in like Central and South America and like train death squads. But killing like 3000 Americans in downtown Manhattan. I feel like that would be like there's a small group of people for whom their consciences are twisted around enough to where they say well this is for the greater good but for most like mortal human beings i think even if you're like a psychotic anti-communist war criminal who's worked for the cia that would be considered like a bridge to like you just

wouldn't do that and you wouldn't think anybody in the government would kind of but but windust is maybe i wonder if john o'neill like i wonder if these thoughts went through his head that somebody is like in the government is trying to stop me you know i mean the the tv series obviously doesn't like go there but you do have to wonder um if like how how woke as it were you know some of these like government officials were, or were they, I don't know, like civil service pilled and just like didn't, were unable to conceive of that. I don't know.

But yeah, Pynchon, I don't know. Maybe he's playing with that as an idea of like there were people even within the security agencies that aren't like, like they didn't want to bring the chickens home to roost necessarily like this yeah that would be a more kind of holistic sort of portrait of the conspiracy you know what i'm saying that that to me would make it mean would make it make more sense yeah so i don't know it's like it's a good reading i hadn't even considered, I mean, it's just in keeping with the whole Shiomara, the Guatemalan that he saved, like that whole subplot,

that he's basically evil, but that he has a good side. Doesn't negate the evil, but, you know, he was, and then it's like, why else was he killed then? So, yeah. There are multiple pinching characters like that especially in gravity's rainbow who are like bad but then it's just like well because that is how the world

works too it's just like there there are so many different levels of bad you know when people have their own arbitrarily drawn lines it's it's it's and again it's that pension theme of lines like who where do you draw your line and why? And how many Pynchon novels where the sidekick or the best friend is a cop? I mean, it happens more than once. Vineland and Inherent Vice, the main character's best friend is law enforcement. And basically, Pynchon doesn't refuse humanity or good intentions to some law enforcement that's true you almost kind of end up like feeling like some kind of warmth towards like bigfoot bjornson even though he's

a huge asshole at the end because at least he's like not on the level of it's like he buys into the the the fiction he buys into the meta narrative about like America, even though there's so many ugly sides to it that he he still would find something repulsive about like this level of fraud and corruption and domination and control. Like it would it would burst the narrative for him. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think he opens up a little space for that, which I think is interesting. Yeah. Yeah, he does that theme is also so earlier you were saying jimmy that in some way structurally and thematically we are in the same terrain as inherent vice because that

like cop dialectic is very very present in this book too and bleeding edge because like there's multiple times in inherent vice where doc is like am i a cop am i a fascist like what's going on here but then like maxine also kind of has this um experience too and like one of the best scenes in the book is when she's talking to her dad and he's like i tried not you know i tried to not let you guys watch those cop shows growing up. And she's like, well, it wouldn't even matter now because now we've got the internet. And her dad's like, are you insane? Like, it's worse now. Yeah.

Because, like, now you aren't even aware that you're entering the realm of propaganda. Now it's completely naturalized into your life. Now you have propaganda, you know know seamlessly interfacing with you at all times i don't know it's just it was it was one of those scenes where like i said earlier it felt like pension kind of talking down to you like look you you think that this can be good or that at best it's harmless whatever you're going to turn over all your privacy to mark zuckerberg whatever but i'm telling you it's not good and let me you know spend 450 pages telling you why in a nuance i mean he even goes he's pretty directed he says and just wait till these

phones everybody has have internet on them and it's all over everyone's going to be tracking themselves and they're going to beg for it and it's like you know i mean that was already starting to come a little bit true in like 2013 so it's not like he was like predicting the future but i think he's really driving that point home that like you need to stop thinking it's interesting this came out the same year as like the snowden leaks and like that was kind of the first turn towards oh maybe there's like a little bit of a dark side to like social media and the internet and all this stuff and maybe we should kind of think about it but there i mean it's just progressed like i think pension's right that like you know whatever level of vigilance we thought we were

having um even in the in those days uh is inadequate to like the level of control that they're trying to push on us through these devices and and we don't even know that's the thing it's like god that like tecto-optto optimism kind of like really rode all the way throughout the 2000s you know we thought that like what uh facebook was going to bring like democracy to like the middle east or something like remember all those narratives like the twitter revolution in iran right yeah like in egypt the arab spring is making and now i i even see if i want to like put my pension hat on like occupy wall street with all of its kind of tech hyper tech um kind of things and like i participated in like occupy

wall street and looking back on it now it's like oh my god like we were not nearly paranoid enough about the role we were playing and like how it got like i remember time magazine you know henry loose uh old about as waspy as it get and skull and bonesy as it gets you know they made like their person of the year and like the end of 2011 like the protester which you know it's like people at occl were like yeah the protester but it's like uh they're just like celebrating all these governments getting overthrown you know in like various operations like for whatever fucking reason but you know you can see how it got weaponized then yeah you know and they were like, various operations, like, for whatever fucking reason. But, you know, you could see how it got weaponized.

And, yeah, you know, and they were tracking everybody the whole time. It came out later. Like, you know, they were using it almost like a laboratory of, like, how do we deal with, like, a protest, you know, movement? And, like, you know, like, surveil them all while tricking them into thinking that they're not all being, like, minutely watched and fucked with on, like like a very granular level so i think we're still in that paradigm like we haven't exited it totally which can i uh

just read briefly ernie's uh little speech here please do i wanted to read it yeah please so okay well there's two parts to it um There's the part where Maxine, the main character, and Ernie, her father, who is, I would argue, one of the more pinch-on stand-ins. So Maxine says, Maybe TV back then was brainwashing, but it could never happen today. Nobody's in control of the internet. And Ernie says, You serious? Believe that while you still can, sunshine

you know where it all comes from, this online paradise of yours it started back during the Cold War when the think tanks were full of geniuses plotting nuclear scenarios attache cases and horn rims every appearance of scholarly sanity going into work every day to imagine all the ways the world was going to end your internet, back then the defense department called it DARPAnet Going into work every day to imagine all the ways the world was going to end. Your internet. Back then the Defense Department called it DARPAnet.

The real original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control during a nuclear exchange with the Soviets. Now, mind you, Pynchon wrote that in 2013, and Surveillance Valley came out in 2018, and there were some people on that wavelength but very few yeah um shout out to crypto cuttlefish who also was the one who exposed me to the idea that uh i think in their words uh thomas pinchin was like an undercover cat like revolutionary uh author like basically embedding like intelligence into his novels which is really what yeah like sparked my like more recent interest in uh in him but that insistence like you know the cookie monster is a psyop folks and it sounds ridiculous but then when you start to look at it it's like in a kind of way he's he's right like it's literally true i mean in a

certain kind of context of like putting the cookie monster on a computer to test like cathexis levels in children like looking at the computer as a friend basically yeah and before that it had been basically like the sage system it had been you know basically uh tracking like nuclear missiles and like it was all about military like air force command and control and um even you know okay the other thing i think we brought it up at the beginning but the promise software um i didn't realize this but i found a little i think i linked it to you guys earlier but i found some article um i forget the name of the guy right now but he pointed out that an early version of promise was used in the phoenix program in vietnam it was dude what's fucking crazy about that is that um bill ham says bill hamilton right that was his name um who yeah he worked as a contractor uh for the cia

in the phoenix program his wife nancy Nancy Hamilton, worked for Jack Ruby at his club. Oh, man. Come on. Oh, my God. I fucking not shit you not. And also, just the name of the software, Promise Software. I mean, what's more promising sounding than that? Like, come on.

A promise, yeah. It's just ridiculous. It's pretty crazy. Well, I mean, on that note, I think, you know, this is another interesting tension in Pynchon's work, like the idea of lineages and blood. So, like, in one way he's saying, like, you can't escape lineage. I don't think he's saying you can't escape it.

I think he's just saying that like... It's not fatalistic. Yeah, it's not fatalistic. Because like Pynchon's own life, his own biography would be an example of someone escaping that. And I think that that is why he has this emphasis on blood, especially in this book, like family and blood. But I think he is saying that you should be extremely wary of the lineage if the lineage was, yes, born in these contexts of command control, anti-communism. If it is, as we pointed out earlier, DARPA net and all that. And he's always tracing out these basically red families. These families of people rebelling in certain ways. I think in all of his novels, they have linkages there. And then I just wanted

to finish with the other really notable thing Ernie said, which was, the chief argument against conspiracy theories is always that it would take too many people in on it and somebody's sure to squeal. But look at the U.S. security apparatus. Those guys are wasps, Mormons, skull and bones, secretive by nature, trained sometimes since birth, never to run off at the mouth. If discipline exists anywhere, it's among them. So, of course course it's possible yeah absolutely on point as far as i know he's never like spelled it out that like explicitly and just well and so it's again if this is his last book it would make sense that this is his parting words

like look guys like i think i'm off for better worlds, but you should be aware. This is how this works. I don't know. It's just wisdom from the elders, I guess, is the way I interpret that. Absolutely. If you do a close reading of just about any period in history, you're not ever in danger of being too paranoid. You might be wrong some of the time.

But if you are paranoid about people's motives and assume sometimes the worst, not about human nature, but about individual actors and institutions, chances are you're not going to be that far off. I was just thinking about that before we recorded, about how all the most, like ernie and march the most paranoid lefty kind of a conspiracy theorist characters in this novel end up being incredibly more right and like spot on in their analysis of like what's about to happen regardless of whether or not 9-11 was like an inside job or not their paranoid heuristic allowed them to see what was coming down the pike.

Whereas everybody else was almost in like a, like some kind of stunned dissociated kind of space, a headspace of like not being able to make sense and just being basically powerless to like actually stand up and like oppose what was coming. So I feel like, like, i think that's very true across the board for kind of you know for people that say yeah but isn't it dangerous to believe in these like conspiracy theories that aren't true blah blah blah maybe it's more dangerous to not believe them sometimes in a sense because you're you're giving way too much credit to people who

do not deserve it like you know what i mean like we're not in a court of law. It's not beyond a reasonable doubt. We're in the court of public perceptions and vibes to a certain degree. So I think the evidentiary bar is a little bit lower, and I think some of these people weren't. I mean, you're talking about the Bush family, the people that managed Nazi assets

during World War II that flooded cocaine into the country in the 1980s, that maybe to be perfectly honest like george hw bush was skulking around dallas in 1963 after like probably being involved in like the bay of pigs invasion and uh has never had a straight story of where he was that morning i don't know but you know i think like things when you get dealing with people like that and then they get away with everything like they just just a ran contra like they got away with all of it.

And who knows what he did in regards to the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism. But I would venture to guess like with, you know, under the aegis of like William Casey or his vision, they did quite a bit to like necessitate that collapse um and it's interesting there's like some russian characters i guess you don't get too much out of it in this but it was fun to kind of see them uh kind of skulking about i guess libs uh blue check libs will be disappointed that it wasn't putin that did 9-11 uh spoiler alert you know it wasn't putin and donald trump like planning it out of trump tower but but you know trump's got connections too Should we talk about March's parable? Like, I think that sort of, like, connects right now.

Yeah, sure. Totally. We should totally. So do you want to read it, Jimmy, or do you want to just summarize it? Yeah, I'll probably summarize the parable but quote the end part. read it, Jimmy, or do you want to just summarize it? Yeah, I'll probably summarize the parable, but quote the end part. So this character, March Kelleher,

who is another quasi-pension stand-in, these two characters, Ernie and March, they are both the most paranoid. They're also the most, probably, politically active in terms of, like, Ernie opposed Nicaragua, all the shit that like Nicholas Windus was actually doing. He knew about like March, you know, she knows all about her son-in-law, Gabriel Ice.

She knows all about the intelligence stuff. So this is a speech that March Kelleher gives to a, I think the Kugelblitz, like the little school, the little graduation that they have. So she's giving a speech and she gives a parable about a ruler who rules this, you know, empire. And he would like to creep around in disguise and do secrets, just see how his subjects you know thought of him and anytime he would be caught or he would just basically be bribing people and he basically this ruler this king found an older lady and this older lady basically yeah she basically kept yeah exactly and so the this ruler basically realizes that she sees him for who he is and she knows it and so he tries to bribe this woman this like peasant woman and he offers her some coins and she throws it back at him and he he's asking her to forget that she saw him and she says forget i cannot and i must not forget

remembering is the essence of what i am the price of my forgetting great sir is more than you can imagine let alone pay and that is the parable she says to this graduating class of like middle schoolers she's like if you figure it out you can have a pizza on me right classic pension pizza but later on like in talking with maxine the main character march kelleher says in sort of referring to this, she's talking about the terminal truth about the U.S. government worse than anything you can imagine, which I think my read is just the truth about it

is that it would do 9-11 or has done any number of prior horrific things. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he makes a couple of references throughout the novel Has done any number of prior horrific things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he makes a couple of references throughout the novel, almost on a kind of a spiritual level. I think maybe March says after 9-11 that they were tithing back to the dark gods of capitalism and said, you have to like, you have to, you have to like spend money to make money or something like that. And I think earlier talks about like a dark force that is, let me see. Oh yeah.

What I, what I see is a lot of innocent people making these deals with the satanic forces for money, way out of scale to anything they're used to. And there's a point where it all rolls in on them and they go under and sometimes they don't come back up. And then I think, uh,

let me see. Oh yeah. Suppose the ruler isn't a person at all. I think this is referencing the parable. Suppose the ruler isn't a person at all, but a soulless force so powerful that, you know, blah, blah, blah, can basically operate unseen and, like, have its way. So, I mean, he's almost getting into, like, the real, I guess, bleeding edge of 9-11 conspiracy territory. S.K. Bane's the most dangerous book in the world. 9-11 conspiracy territory uh sk baines the most dangerous book in the world 9-11 is mass

ritual which like is a really interesting like analysis of the events of 9-11 i can't say that i literally like believe everything he says it's really like an amalgamation of these like coincidences but there is a kind of ritualistic element to that i feel like he's kind of gesturing at sometimes that this was kind of like a dark money ritual that uh like to bring down to inaugurate a new aeon basically the two towers become one and all that stuff that that's kind of what i was getting at the beginning of this which is that like if you have a theme of america that is suddenly it's it's hegemonic throughout the 90s we won this we won the cold war and now we're going to funnel all that back into tech profits and innovation and all this well it just goes bust it's not going to work well as a from a

narrative point of view in the same way that, like, narratively speaking, it made sense that Donald Trump would win the 2016 election, it was narratively proper that something like 9-11 would then happen, that it would have to happen, because all the myths and stories we told about ourselves were suddenly untrue. And that is the kind of space that the book takes place in. And so then 9-11 happens, and then you can reassemble all those same forces and deploy all of the tech and surveillance and everything

towards actually fascist ends. On new terms, war and, you know, et cetera, police states, everything we're seeing now I mean I don't know it just it makes narrative sense and yes as so as mass ritual would make sense and that kind of gets back to what I was saying at the very beginning of this like you watch those videos and it's just like if even if it wasn't literally mass ritual that is the effect that it had if you watch the video especially from the the one that i was referencing where they're down the building starts falling you can feel the adrenaline and the shock and awe from people as they're like oh my fucking god like

this is i mean it's it's just blew something about it was it blew everybody's mind if you watch this if you watch the video like the the fucking uh the hole in the in the the north tower just looks like an eye at points you know what i mean like it looks like just it looks like a face almost like as the fires start to like remember there was that smoke that people thought was like the face of the devil you know rising out of it and stuff and yeah it's demonic i mean yeah no there is such a vibe and also it was one of the first events where i know like other people have like mentioned this on twitter before about how like the mass ptsd that was delivered to everybody watching it on television in america at least which is like millions of people you know basically throughout that day a lot of them

watching live as this these buildings came down that everybody was like probably got like a form of ptsd from it which you might kind of think like oh that can't be inflicted on a screen but i remember reading uh researching about drone operators in the air force years ago and they actually had the highest rates of ptsd in the entire military higher than combat troops on the ground because of the intimacy of having to kill people and then fly around and like zoom in on them and do like an after action report and but or like or like, or not just flying like, you know, like by the seat of your pants,

like over and dropping some bomb and flying away, but hovering over like a house for weeks and watching a guy play with his family. And then one day you get a call that you got to blow them up or something like that. And so the, the idea that PTSD can be inflicted via a screen is actually very real. And I think 9-11 is one of those experiences that affected pretty much most people that were alive that day, that experienced it.

So this kind of psychic aftershock and consequences of that um were tremendous and now we see it with all kinds of little events that happen whether it's like i don't know like uh any kind of video it's funny they tend not to show like atrocity footage like that anymore but you know you can well i don't know for people like people that are nancy pelosi fans like january 6th was literally as traumatic you're right and they play that shit just like the tower's collapsing like for a year they play it on repeat if you go on cnn or msnbc they talk about like the big lie the big lie and they just show like the same footage of like a bunch of like q anon guys like stumbling over each other to go yeah so that's that's the thing that's the thing

like i remember reading a whole bunch about the the weather underground you know the sort of new left adventurous terrorist organization right and basically when they wanted it to stop they just got every media outlet to just stop reporting on bombings because they were doing like a bombing a week for like years and every bombing would get all this press and then they just suddenly stopped reporting on it and then not very long after the group folded because they had nothing to work with nothing right and so they know how these images actually work with people and the choice to show the towers being hit and collapsing over and over for months and months was an intentional choice they wanted to traumatize people because they

chose not to do it at other times it's weird they even point that out in the book like maxine mentions that like she mentions the fact that they keep playing it over and over. And then her sister Brooke, like, accuses her of being, like, a traitor. Yeah, yeah. Just by mentioning the fact. It's just, it's this interesting, like, kind of glimpse into the psychology of Americans. Where it's just, like, I want to be hurt as much as possible. Like, I need to be traumatized.

That's so true. That was so the vibe, like, back then. It was like, what the fuck do you mean they shouldn't show it like we need to see what they did i remember when like bill maher had like the temerity to say that like the hijackers weren't cowards and like his show got immediately canceled and like i mean shit was real back then by the way just fun little fact do you know who the president of cnn was on 9-11 and after 9-11 it was the uh former disney tv uh head of tv uh sorry the disney channel and the former head of the digital entertainment network david newman was the

head of cnn on 9-11 you should probably remind people what the digital entertainment network okay well it kind of ties into this world of like the first dot com boom um we did an episode on it way back i i stumbled into this like story of this group years ago because they're still kind of with us. But basically it was a like web TV startup in L.A. in the late 90s by this – mainly by this kind of shadowy early dot-com millionaire named Mark Collins Rector and a teenage child actor named Brock Pierce who is still very much around. He's a Bitcoin billionaire nowadays. But basically ran for president.

Very sus individual. And so him and also another young guy that was like Mark Collins Rector's boyfriend, Chad Shackley. No relation to Ted Shackley as far as I know. But you never know. no relation to Ted Shackley as far as I know, but you never know. They started this like big network, very much like Josh Harris's pseudo in New York,

where it was basically going to be kind of like this MTV, but like online. And it was going to have, they produce all their own content kind of in the house. And they, it was a similar thing to why pseudo didn't make money. Is it like the, they came too early and the bandwidth wasn't there to actually broadcast shows like you would on YouTube. But they managed to raise, I think, over $100 million from investors, including people like Michael Huffington, David Geffen, a lot of big hollywood people but then it came out closer to the the dot-com bust that at their

mansion in encino they were having like pubescent aged boys come over for these parties where they would be like drugged or plied with drugs like cocaine ecstasy alcohol and then they would be sexually abused by mark collins rector and his wealthy investor friends uh most of whom like have not never been named like explicitly but there was a lawsuit from one guy i think daniel egan in 2014 he's in the documentary open secret which is like the only thing that kind of covers this story it's been kind of memory hold but he sued david newman the guy who is this the the president of den and then became the president of cnn in early 2001 he sued him as one of the molesters now that case got like blown out of court and there was all kinds of bullshit and like

you know the la news and they ended up kind of like exposing, quote unquote, exposing him as like a liar, just trying to grift for money. But, you know, another person he accused who was like involved with Den was Gary Goddard, who also denied it and was, quote, cleared. But then a few years later, Anthony Edwards, Goose from Top Gun, like penned a big article about how he was molested by Gary Goddard as a kid. And so now that guy's kind of canceled. But so I would lean on the side of like, there was some real dark shit going on at Den, basically. And then, you know, Brock Pierce, like that he and Mark Collins Rector, like fled to Marbella, Spain, where they were arrested by Interpol in 2003

with a stash full of guns and child porn. And then miraculously, Brock Pierce kind of got let off the hook mark holland's rector had to go to jail for a couple years for a child sex trafficking charge he caught in the u.s and and then he went on to be a navy contractor building underwater drones in florida for the u.s navy after he got out of jail for being a pedophile con man billionaire uh and uh marbella links to a bunch of european pedophile networks as well yeah and organized crime as well a lot of saudi a lot of saudis up there and it's really you could go in a million different directions then brock pierce became the head of the bitcoin foundation in 2014 that's when i kind of got turned on to

him and i was like why is this guy being made the face of Bitcoin? Like, what the fuck? And it was very eerie how, like, everyone was just like, oh, he said that wasn't a thing. And he wasn't involved in it. Like, it's not a big deal. He's cool. And like, he promotes Bitcoin. That was when I really got turned off by like the crypto community, like their inability to recognize like why Brockck pierce was sus like was just kind of mind-blowing and now he's gone on to be like this big guy he's in puerto rico which i remember a couple years ago he tried to found like a kind of crypto colony there called puertopia which means like you know in in latin means boy utopia like puer is boy sounds like boy town i mean boy yeah a real boy's town if you will i

think he eventually changed it after people got mad at him for like that that name but who knows what he's doing down there in puerto rico he's also a big burner he's obsessed with burning man and like ayahuasca and dmt and like all that kind of i mean you see it in like his presidential ads he's like he he's got this real hippie weird like California cult vibe and you know child actor he played first kid in a Disney movie so he I don't know that has like a White House kind of politics like connection to it and there's just so much like creeping it and there's been allegations that a lot of his moves in the business world like are basically still being controlled by Mark Collins Rector.

He's still out there. And, like, Brock Pierce is kind of his face for interviews. So, like, Mark Collins Rector is, like, such a man of mystery. Like, you don't really know what country he's in right now. Like, he's getting Navy contracts. It's very pension-esque, could say but yeah just i didn't know that there was a cnn 9-11 connection there i will say yeah that episode um very creepy parts of it especially like the tv show they made chad's world but i was fucking losing it about buffalo ja oh yeah yeah see that was i

found that i i didn't find it but like somebody on the bitcoin forums found it and i went and checked in i started looking into it and that was one of the creepiest things i found in my life and i to this day i'm like convinced that it like it was them it was them on like semi-private facebook accounts but i don't i can't make sense of it they were in marbella spain or mark rector was and uh they were just making these jokes about buffalo ja and and typing in spanish laughing like ja ja ja ja ja ja ja and just like lol lol lol like all all the weird accounts that like there was a version of Brock Pierce. There was a version of Chad Shackley.

There was like a CBS like business radio host in LA that was also like one of the accounts. There was like some kind of like actor guy that had like a green NGO that like interfaced with Hollywood. Like he looks kind of like a spy. with Hollywood, like, he looks kind of like a spy. Like, just, and then a couple guys that had, like, DEA, like, logos as their banner, or, like, Interpol, or, like, FBI kind of shit, and was like, didn't Interpol arrest you guys? Like, what the fuck is going on in Marbella right now?

It's dark. It's totally Pynchon-esque for multiple reasons, one of which is that, like, is that you have the virtual representation of them, which adds this very eerie aura. There are a few parts of this book we didn't even fucking get into, like the Montauk project, but there are parts of this book that are so

fucking eerie. And I think honestly one of the eeriest ones is her running into dead people in Deep Archer. And it's just just i don't know it's kind of this interesting thing it mentions it early on in the book but like the word avatar is um i think it's another word for incarnation and it's just you know i think this is another big pension. It's mentioned a lot in Inherent Vice, but zombies and the undead. So, I mean, there's always this issue.

Right, totally. With Beatlemania. It's linked to that. See, how did he know that? There's also TV connected to the zombies, the tube heads, and the idea that watching tv turns you into

a zombie like it sounds like such a stupid like high school level analysis until you like realize that there's like real science about like brain wave patterns with certain alpha beta waves yeah like you enter like a passive state when you're like watching television and you're more susceptible, more suggestible. Yeah, I mean, he's hinting that stuff. And the Montauk Project, I did not expect that to pop up in this. And it's like, I know he's like dabbled in like the wooauk project as like a category of conspiracy lore, like Adam Montauk, like these weird kind of like paranormal adjacent experiments.

And, you know, he says something kind of disturbing that like MK ultra is a cover story for what they're really doing, which is sending like abducting children who I guess have the right, you know, attributes and then subjecting them to basically like project monarch like ritual abuse to like break their personalities

and like give them DID and turn them into like the perfect like stone cold killer agents and then send them back in time to edit history in ways that are like beneficial to whatever this force is. Here's the thing.

Okay, he didn't invent that theory that theory is one of like the most fringe mk ultra theories is that it also involves time oh okay which means that thomas pinchin is familiar with not just like mk ultra according to like netflix he's also knows about candy Candy Jones because there's a Candy Jones connection but he also knows the freaking weird stuff he knows the far out crazy theories about MKUltra because he's talking about

them it's crazy yeah he talks about with Montauk he talks about if you were doing something in secret and didn't want the attention what better way to have it ridiculed and dismissed than in bringing in a few Californian elements yep right get that excellent crowd in there just woo it up and make it seem ridiculous yeah

shit code it I mean there's so much of that you know and I'm not saying I'm like getting on board with like the time travel but but i mean i do i do wonder about montauk it's also interesting that uh the montauk project was i remember there was a lawsuit a few years ago because everyone's favorite uh limited hangout mk show stranger things was allegedly according to a lawsuit based on somebody else's script called the montauk project and was supposed to take place on montauk and then the duffer brothers allegedly uh heard about like they he pitched it kind of to them at like a party and then they went off and like changed a few things set it to indiana and like went off and got rid of it yeah right which is sus in its own way

but uh but yeah i always remembered that that like, this show about like, you know, gifted children, kind of like government slaves that have psychic powers was really sourced out of like the Montauk lore more than anything else. So it's still with us in a very like pop culture sanitized kind of way. It's still out there the um they even mentioned um twa flight 800 which was like shot down yeah sort of close to montauk there right it was like shot down like over long east long island or something i've been meaning to look back into that i i'm hearing a lot i say people say i say shot down i'm hearing a lot of people say these days, I think I heard Ed Opperman talk about it recently. And, like, he's saying, like, there's no, like, it was shot down. Like, you know what I mean?

Like, it was shot down. Like, there's so much obvious evidence. But also it was happening at a time where Americans were kind of, like, checked out. And, like, I don't know, maybe the OJ trial or the Clinton-Lewinsky trial was more exciting to pay attention to. So it just kind of dropped. I don't know if they ever had a definitive report of how the plane blew up in the middle of the air, but there seems to be, I don't know, a lot of people seem to think, based on the evidence,

that it was a Stinger missile or something that shot the plane. I don't know by whom, though, or by what. Which, the stinger missile that ties into the wind dust stinger missile subplot the um that's actually an interesting thing um the so a big part of the plot in this book is a video sent to maxine that reg supposedly films i don't think he ever even actually admits to it or not, but that was a recurring question in my mind. Like, is Reg in on this, or does he know he's in on it?

Is he being put up to, sort of in the same way that Doc was, like, put up by Bigfoot into, like, going through this whole thing? Like, is Reg also being played? But, like, so ostens he he shoots a video on top of this very creepy building that deseret um and uh which is an interesting building and word in and of itself but like it's a scheme basically uh it's got two men with like a stinger missile and um someone with a sniper rifle and I didn't even think about this.

But as I was reading it, I was like, I wonder if there's, is this based in anything real? Is this based in any kind of lore about 9-11 or what? And I couldn't come up with anything really specific. But one of the things latched onto by the Jersey Girls in that 9-11 Press for Truth documentary is that the night before 9-11 press for truth documentary is the night before 9-11 when bush was in sarasota florida they had like upped the security detail on him and on top

of the roof of the building he was in they put sniper rifles and men with stinger missiles um so i don't know if that's pensions kind of like nod to that if it's him sort of like you know i don't know being a thing also weird thaton's kind of like nod to that, if it's him sort of like, you know, I don't know. I vaguely remember that being a thing. Also weird that he was in Sarasota, right, where like all the hijackers like trained to be pilots. Where they trained, yeah. Okay.

And like, I do think there's a through line to like maybe implying that, you know, TWA was shot down by a Stinger missile. Right. Maybe Windust was going to do that again or that someone, you know, TWA was shot down by a stinger missile. Right. Maybe Windust was going to do that again, or that someone, you know, like... Yeah, it seems like, I mean, it ends up being played in the novel, basically, that, well, this video is kind of like

a misdirection of sorts. Like, it's getting them to think that this is what's going to happen soon, is that somebody's going to shoot down a stinger missile. But then I almost got a little confused in the topsy-turvy explanation of what really was supposed to happen. I think Windust

kind of explains it, but wasn't it supposed to be like if the hijackers lost their nerve or something, they were ordered to shoot down the plane, and as an insurance policy, they had a sniper on another rooftop ready to kill them if if they lost their if they lost their nerve to shoot down which almost begs the question like if you shoot

them then who's gonna shoot the stinger missile like like you gotta have like an alternate there or something but uh but like yeah it just proves that something was going on in New York City before 9-11. Like, why on earth is there a Stinger missile on a roof? Yeah. Like, at a minimum, it shows something, and it gets Maxine on this whole, you know, voyage, really. Yeah. Yeah, but it ends up kind of like, yeah, it's like the nature of the threat that emerges is like slightly different. Or, I don't know, maybe they stood down

or they weren't there. I'm not sure, but... And I think they say that the video is what got Windust killed. And then you can have to like interpret why that would get him killed. And you have to like, I don't know, I could be... Maxine speculates that it's because,

if I remember correctly, she speculates that it's because if i remember correctly she speculates that it's because he was supposed to be running security and the video was proof that he let someone um buy like someone got through his net of security to film this when they shouldn't have and so he was killed for that but i i i there's so many questions there that I like your interpretation better, Jimmy. I think it makes more sense that he was going after the various, maybe trying to stop this. There was a struggle within the elite here, within the power structure of people trying to, I don't know. Not for valorous reasons or anything not because they're heroes or anything but like we established earlier they have their own arbitrarily designed or drawn lines beyond which they don't want to cross um even though they are

just as implicated in evil in other ways yeah yeah absolutely um you know you could say that about a lot of the people that i don't know there's certain people like in that looming tower miniseries like michael schuer my favorite uh q anon podcaster um who is uh portrayed by peter sarsgaard in that um you know he's kind of portrayed as being like a little bit of a psycho, but kind of sincere in his desire to like kill Osama bin Laden, like now, like just go blow him up, like just kill him. Like, what are you doing? And, and then, you know, his, the woman who had become his wife, Alfreda Bukowski, who was also like the inspiration for Zero Dark Thirty, that wonderful propaganda film, you know, she's portrayed a little more negatively because she's the one that withheld all the information from the fbi so and it kind of hints that they were maybe trying to turn these

al-qaeda people into like cia assets and that's why they didn't want that the fbi like stomping in and arresting them but i don't quite like buy at a certain point like they're hanging out in san diego like they're renting a place from from an FBI informant who also rented out a mansion to the Heaven's Gate cult when they killed themselves and they're getting wired money from Prince Bandar's wife like at what point like I I think that so I think maybe there was some of the some of the FBI people embedded in that office maybe John O'Neill were like to some degree sincerely whatever else their politics or whatever maybe it's just their their old-fashioned cop code or whatever you know or maybe it was their own just like sense of like

i want to catch the bad guy like you know this is uh this is my identity this is who i am like i i make the big i make the big bust or whatever and they were prevented from doing so and then at least one of them i'm willing to put even odds on, like, the fact that John O'Neill was set up to be potentially murdered by, like, giving him that job in the World Trade Center a week before. So, again, like, not a direct parallel to Windust, but kind of. He also, like, cheats on his wife and fucks a lot in Looming Tower. That was another thing that, like, jumped out at me.

Like, there's a lot of shots of of shots of Jeff Daniels' ass. So there's a certain synchronicity with that as well. Nobody in our government, at least, and I don't think the prior government could envision flying airplanes into buildings. and clearly something yesterday took place in new york that was not foreseen that we had no specific for specific information about no specific threat involving really domestic operation involving what happened obviously the city's airl, and so forth. There were no warning signs that I'm aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country. What is their feeling? Are the people who lost loved ones at 9-11

like the families of guys who were lost in Vietnam? They just can't get over it? Sometimes people try to become crusaders because they can't deal with reality. The families, I think, have to understand that it's virtually impossible to conceive of any way in which these attacks could have been stopped, even had the best things happened. Mr. President, why are you and the Vice President insisting on appearing together before the 9-11 Commission?

Because the 9-11 Commission wants to ask us questions. That's why we're meeting, and I look forward to meeting with them and answering their questions. Why you're appearing together rather than separately, which was their request? Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9-11 Commission is looking forward to asking us, and I'm looking forward to answering them. Let's see. So, all right. Well, I think we can probably start wrapping up.

You know, I think I pretty much covered all the things that I had on my list. I did want to say that, like, it does seem like in the last 30 or 40 pages, there kind of arises this question of like, what's real and what's not. And like Maxine kind of says that this is, it seems like it's partially a result of nine 11, but it's also a result of spending so much time in deep Archer. And she has this,

what she calls virtuality creep in which she's not entirely sure what is the real world and what's not. And there are a few examples. She sees, like, you know, like a lid on a cup rolling down the, you know what I mean? Like, it just seems like things are programmed into her life. And I think, I don't know, it's an interesting kind of distinction. don't know it's an interesting kind of distinction um it feels like uh you know one of the things that was going around a lot like five years ago even recently is like three or four years ago people would be like twitter's not real life like you know internet's not real life and all this but i it kind of feels like pension is asking a larger question which which is like, isn't it kind of interesting that we have this whole distinction

in general now? Do you think 200 or 300 years ago people were asking, is this real life? You know what I'm saying? I don't know. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't. It just feels like kind of a recent thing where all of us are like, what's real and what's not?

I don't know. So I don't know. What do what's not? I don't know. So I don't know. What do you guys think? I don't know. I don't know what epistemologies people were working with 300 years ago. I think you're probably right that people 300 years ago, or maybe they were talking about it in different terms. I don't know.

I think maybe they thought about this life being kind of this consciousness, this world being stable, and perhaps you moved on to the next one when you died. It's weird. The belief in an afterlife was more pervasive. I mean, it's still strong in a lot of ways today, but somewhat less so in the secular West. But now it's like we have this afterlife, but now overlaid on top of our life that we can kind of jump back and forth across a line, but then that line gets blurry.

It's also interesting. Have you guys read anything about like the metaverse that they're talking about all of a sudden? I guess like Facebook and all the social media companies are getting really jazzed. It might be just another like bullshit hustle idea. Is it the virtual reality thing? It's kind of a virtual reality. It's kind of like, it sounds so much like when I was reading about Deep Archer in the novel. It sounds so much like how they're

describing like the metaverse now where it is going to kind of be like this graphical like 3D immersive representation. Like a real kind of immersive second life or Deep Archer where you can go in and interact with people and kind of... Was Zuckerberg talking about it recently? I think he was. I think he was. Yeah, I think I saw that. They did sort of a rollout of it or a press conference about it.

Yeah, I think it's still very much in beta. But this is a dream that I think people... And people were already saying, oh, they just want to shuttle us into their virtual prison. But also, it seems like they were kind of using it in a way to maybe even fire people through it or hire people through it and conduct interviews. So basically, yeah. You see the creep, right? I mean, that's some creep right there to the point where, I mean, we're already in kind of a beta mode of that where we've normalized like throughout the course of the pandemic like again there's just like a vague

dracularity of like the like the the direction of technological progress like wanted this deeply to happen something that would get us inside so that we all had to meet like completely interact through screens that like make offices like a thing of the past and all these other things like everything's mediated by like the device the black obsidian mirror is you know uh we're all sucked in closer to it now but now i mean i don't know i guess maybe it's like dialectical you think about it going and going both ways like is the cyber prison like extending out into our meat space you know and taking uh colonizing everything one way or another it seems to be colonizing more and more of our lives and our consciousness so

yeah i don't know i think it's an interesting thing he plays with like this ain't gonna stop it even presents itself in inherent vice anyways uh i think it's fritz he says like you know the computer arpanET is like psychedelics and like Stuart Brand and these people said that too and John Perry Barlow and everyone they frequently compared the internet and information technology and communications technology to psychedelics to this idea of being able to share information and cybernetics you know we're all linked in a way and that people can be controlled and explained by their behaviors and that like some there's some emergent property that can kind of like lead to a better you know human good or something like that

but it's it's actually controlling um and i think that's kind of what benjamin's saying what were you gonna say jimmy so another theme that I think ties to this is that there's a bar in the novel called Eternal September. Right, yeah. And Eternal September in, like, nerd culture was, like, when the only people on the Internet were on campuses, every year new college students would show up in like August. And by September they were on the internet and they were being obnoxious. And so September was like the month and by October things would normalize. And then it was for a couple of years, it was like that. And then after a certain point, I think people say when AOL got rolled out, they said it was just eternal September forever. It was nothing but noobs and obnoxious people.

And the internet was basically gentrified. And in Deep Archer, after 9-11, partially because of the random numbers thing, basically Deep Archer got filled with just normal people, also just like ads it became garish ugly yeah and basically like pinchon's drawing a through line to colonization and gentrification are really just the similar phenomenon just manifesting in different ways totally and i think that the internet like itself it ends up being a form of colonization like that like it theoretically could have been emancipatory but it definitely isn't yeah totally because yeah i think i think you wrote that in your notes because like if the same people that are building it are the same people that have built all the

past systems that they've monopolized and privatized how could you expect any different outcome of like this is only going to go in one direction it's not going to like violate the laws of uh i guess you know capitalist dynamics as we uh know them i'd say the only thing that's maybe too optimistic in this novel though i think it's appropriate for the characters and the time is that he he often references late capitalism and like my pessimistic belief is that unfortunately it's not as late as maybe people in the late 90s like thought it was like it's got some more dark steam in the engine and it's uh it's got some notions for us. Yeah. Yep. Well, it does seem like one of the things about reading this book is that over the course of the book, you know 9-11 is coming.

But it's just one of the books that, like, it makes so much sense when it does come. I just wanted to point this out, and we can close out here in just a second. But did you guys pick up on the Benford's law thing? Yeah. Oh, remind me what that was. I do remember. He mentions it right at the very beginning. And then,

I mean, he might mention it maybe one other time, but like he kind of just drops it, but it's fascinating. And I think he's kind of trying to, um, so I'll just read what Benford's law is. And it's fucking crazy that he puts it in

a book about 9-11 but like your sirens go off immediately um it's called the newcomb bin also called the newcomb binford law the law of anomalous numbers or the first digit law is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits in many real life sets of numerical data the law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to be small. In sets that obey the number, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time.

If the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1 percent of the time so you've got uh 9 11 right there 11 so 9 is the least common uh 1 is the most 9 is the least do you think that has something to do with the fact that he keeps writing september 11th as 11 september the way a european would almost putting the one-1 first as if, like, this is, I don't know, like, has something to do with that law of, I don't know. Yeah. Well, and I think he's also, like,

I think he's also trying to point out the kind of, like, I mean, Pynchon, like, his numerology, like, sometimes he'll get into it, I feel like, but this is a kind of interesting numerology where there is a kind of, of like statistical or mathematical thing behind it where he's basically saying that like all things considered the most likely time for 9-11 would have been like january but like what are the fucking odds that it's 9-11 and also it's this number that is you know 9-1-1 and all these other i know and also you know you have 9-11, and also it's this number that is, you know, 9-1-1.

9-1-1. And all these other numbers are logical. I know, and also, you know, you have 9-11 in Chile, and as Dave Lemery loves to point out, because he kind of sees the underground Reich behind everything, that actually if you read 9-11 the way Pynchon writes it, 11 September, 11-9, I believe is the anniversary of the Nazi beer hall push. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. 9 I believe is the anniversary of the Nazi beer hall push oh wow you know and then so if you think about

then in the western hemisphere there are these two 9-11's that maybe had some like Nazi some deep Nazi connections to overthrow Allende and then do 9-11 but if you read it from a European side it's like hiding in plain sight you know 11-9 but if you read it from a European side, it's like hiding in plain sight.

Totally. It's the 11-9. Right. Well, and I think he's pointing that out, like that it is there in plain sight the whole time. It feels like it anyways. And like the characters themselves don't really notice it. But again, that's kind of another interesting thing he's done here is just like dropped it right down in the middle of these characters' lives.

And like this happens in all of his books, like especially, you know, I mean, I'm thinking of Inherent Vice. But like, you know, people that are just some of them are, you know, smoking weed all the time. But just like how the fuck do you make sense of any of this? Sometimes you don't and things just push you along till like you're forced to make sense of it. Yeah. He seems to have a habit of, I mean, I haven't read all of his novels, but of like giving his kind of main protagonist like some small kind of consolation or peace that, like we said earlier, of like a kind of confirmation of like the good side of humanity, like a tiny victory. like a tiny victory and then an acknowledgement, usually from confronting like some kind of evil,

waspy Crocker Fenway character that like they're never going to, it will destroy them if they relentlessly pursue this any further. And so they learn to kind of accept with like more knowledge than they started out with and more awareness of like more, almost like gnosis, if you will, of how the world actually works, but being somewhat at peace to like not go on that like quixotic uh death uh you know suicide mission which you know right no one person basically uh i think which is realistic i think in a way it's

like and i in a way it was kind of like mirrors his role as a novelist that like look man like i can't write a novel that's gonna like 9-11 pill everybody about like the ruling class and make them realize like capitalism is evil. It's a death cult and that you should overthrow it and all this other stuff. But I can leave these clues for you. It's like that's as much as I can do. And a lot of his characters kind of have that, too. It's like, all right, I'm going to get Coy Harlingen out.

I'm going to reunite like Taliesin talus and march you know mother and daughter and which like like leaving those leaving like really profound truths hidden in a puzzle that's something that vladimir novikov did and pinchin took a class from vladimir novikov really Cornell. Oh, I didn't know that. And their literature, although arguably pretty dissimilar in terms of politics, is very artistically similar, I would argue, in

that particular respect. Yeah, Novikov, wasn't his whole family, were they driven out in the Bolshevik Revolution? Yep. Novikov was a bitter wasn't his whole family were they driven out in the bolshevik revolution yep a bitter bastard came here for freedom yeah yeah freedom just like the gangsters uh in it you know bleeding edge uh you know the old mafia types like finally got their day in the sun you know out in brighton beach and elsewhere yeah yeah um well um so I don't know any closing

thoughts guys I mean I feel like we've pretty thoroughly uh you know poured over this book um I don't know it's been it's been very helpful for me anyways and um like i like we were saying earlier there there are some like sort of there's consolation to take here i mean like he's a novelist so it's like yeah you're right he can't give you the the full you know the full manual on everything tell you how to live your lives how to change the world like all the information on everything but like point you in the right direction and that like you yourself will change in the process of discovering these things. And that's what I think that's ultimately what he's working with here. He's not under any illusions that like I'm just going to tell you something

and you're just going to believe it. It's like, no, like if you work for something, if you actually like, you know, embed yourself, not just in the story, but in other the lives of other people and their journey towards finding truth, then that's how we kind of come to a collective sort of awakening and maybe can try to change things. I don't know. That's my own optimistic reading on his work and maybe the next book he puts out will just completely prove me wrong and you know maybe it'll be just completely you know be everything opposite of what I just said but that to me seems like a kind of I don't know summary of of the materials he's working with

in the larger agenda he's pushing towards yeah I'll just double down on your optimism for Pynchon and say that like he's one of the very few authors that you know is still with us or in contemporary times that uh gives me a kind of like hope for um literature and art in general and its ability to shape consciousness in a way that is like productive and illuminating to people uh and not just basically like lead them down like i don't know either be cheap entertainment or like psyop you and all these like subtle ways into you know i don't know just having like a uh normie mindset about uh about our own history and also that you can like you can use i't know, both the techniques of like literary fiction,

and also historical research and combine them in ways that are both like entertaining. And I don't know, yeah, teach you something about the sort of subterranean realities, the world that we live in. And also, you know, I think for the kind of the shitting and shit coding of like conspiracy theory in general, I think that Pynchon is a true champion of like the right to speculate about conspiracies and how it can be absolutely compatible with like a left wing orientation and politics. And in fact, I don't know if he would go this far, but I would, that it may be actually like absolutely essential to a certain extent.

You know, like, I mean, I was just looking at like a week or two ago, I was reading about how on in 2007, Fidel Castro went on Cuban state television and announced that it was now his conviction that a cruise missile hit the Pentagon and that everything about the nine 11 story was like a fucking lie. i don't think he was like a no-planer but he basically said they were brought

down by controlled demo and he was very like nice to america after 9-11 like this is a horrible attack we'll send nurses to new york to help you and but but after a few years and watching how it all played out the old critical paranoid master himself the commandante uh he saw that shit and you know like so i don't know if all these and constant vigilance paid off constant isn't it interesting that like all these people that actually manage to like kick out the capitalists and have their own country at least for a while all seem to be pretty damn paranoid by like normal liberal standards like maybe there's a reason for that like maybe you know when Che Guevara was in Guatemala and saw like Alan Dulles like overthrow the reformist government for United Fruit like with the you know you would buy the CIA like maybe that made him a little bit paranoid I don't know

you know maybe people that saw Operation Condor or you know people in America that saw all this cocaine show up in the 80s you know it's like if people in the 80s said you know the CIA is bringing in all the crack like even if they don't have the exact details of it down they would have been more or less correct and starting from that assumption would have been a much better place to start than like I just don't know why all this like crack is falling all over our neighborhood and every city around the country all at once so yeah i think that like he's i stand strong with his like counter mfa tradition of like writing about history is cool and important and like being interested about the world is cool and uh you know i think it's a lot cooler than the gen x pose that david foster wallace was trying to affect you know and i think it'll be with us a lot longer i think people will get things out of like pensions novels like for decades to come and it's trying to seek clarity

about the cold war era and this like y2k era and stuff so yeah i that's maybe it's optimistic but you got to have some faith somewhere yeah yeah and i would just probably add to that like there's especially the characters ernie and march uh both of them i resonate on a spiritual level like to you know just what march said like remembering is the essence of what i am the price of my forgetting is more than you can imagine like for anyone on the left i think like we all we have all we have at the end of the day is a very long history a long history of mostly betrayals and failures and some brief moments of victory and happiness right and i don't know about the rest of you but like i got into left left-wing politics through being into history and anyone who

seriously grapples with u.s history and isn't rich anyone who grapples with u.s history and is not in the upper class flirts with the same conclusions that pension is referring to here pension might be one of the few rich people who, you know, dropped out, but regardless, the thing is, remembering the past is central to fighting and continuing. And like Stephen Dedalus says in the novel Ulysses, history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. The only way we can escape this nightmare is to learn our history. awake. The only way we can escape this nightmare is to learn our history. And Pynchon, you know, is a strong defense of that. And that's, that's my piece. Beautifully put. Very beautifully put. Fellas, I really appreciate both of you coming on and to help me with this. I would ask that you please humbly plug your own podcasts.

And I would ask that everybody go check them out, because they're both very good. After you, Jimmy. Okay, well, I have the show programmed to chill. And I do a lot of history, a lot of business, a lot of espionage. I cover a lot of those topics. a lot of business, a lot of espionage. I cover a lot of those topics. And for instance, I did a pretty long series on who financed Hitler

that I think teases out a lot of very interesting threads. I have another one coming up on the German steel industry that goes in some interesting places. So basically, check it out. It's pretty cool. Yeah, definitely. basically check it out it's pretty cool yeah definitely definitely check it out um as for myself um most of what you can find is uh is on twitter but uh if you look up subliminal jihad is uh the podcast with my friend colin and uh uh, we cover a lot of, uh, deep politics, kind of a cult history, like history of intelligence activities, um, also arts and culture and how this stuff kind of

intersects and influences, um, you know, like political economy and, uh, and what could be, you know, denigratingly called conspiracy theory, but from a critical paranoid perspective. So, yeah, you can find us on, we have a Patreon and we're also on SoundCloud, Apple and Spotify, etc. And, yeah, we got some interviews coming up this month. Love to have both of you guys on, you know, back on in Jimmy's case at some point. But we should be having some good JFK and RFK researchers and authors coming on soon to talk about, you know, Sirhan, talk about Program to Kill, right? And, you know, getting paroled and some JFK stuff.

We're also going to talk about Jonestown this coming month. So, yeah, yeah, check that out if you're into it. And, yeah, thanks for having us on, Terrence. This is fun. Very great. Yeah. Well, we'd love to do it again. I'll try to find another topic for us to dig in.

But once again, thanks, everybody. And definitely go check out the book, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon. And go check us out on Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash Trillbilly Workers Party. And if that's everything, I guess we'll see you on the other side of the 20th anniversary of 9-11. Hopefully no one does any uh anything weird

at your um i'm going to a wedding on 9-11 um so i'm like really worried that maybe like one of the parents is going to be like my god like that beautiful day 20 years ago or whatever I don't know Inshallah they'll be too drunk at that point hopefully well anyways thanks for listening everybody and we will see you next time peace it's here that Jeff and Craig launched Razorfish which is now worth 4 billion dollars

one of the most successful companies on the web. Successful at what? Good question. We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business. We've recontextualized what it is to be a services business. You know there are people out there such as myself who have trouble with the word recontextualize. Tell me what you do in English. We provide services to companies to help them win. So do trucking firms. Absolutely, absolutely. That's right, absolutely. What is it you do?

And our talent is to do a certain thing, whereas a trucking firm... But what is it you do? We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them. Thank you.