The Basement: Joseph Matheny | The Man Who Hacked Reality Before the Internet Existed

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30AJ Gentile?

  Today I'm talking with Joseph Matheny, a writer and storyteller who built the internet's first alternate reality game. He built a story so convincing, it made people believe a portal to another dimension was hidden in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  That whole state is another dimension.

• 0:47AJ Gentile?

  Be nice, I've got family in Jersey.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Once you cross the GWP and hit Fort Lee, it's like an alternate universe. Wherever you left turn, there's a jug handle, and you're not allowed to pump your own gas.

• 0:58AJ Gentile?

  That story was on the hat. Not published as a novel, but scattered across bulletin boards, websites, phone lines, pamphlets. The story felt real. Today we'll talk about where that ARG came from and how it got weaponized. And we'll get into his chatbot from the 90s. You see, he built Google before Google. He built ChatGPT before OpenAI, 30 years ago.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  This guy was spreading disinformation when Facebook was just a twinkle in Mr. Zuckerberg's eye. His lizard eye. Respect.

• 1:30AJ Gentile?

  Joseph's also been connected to the John Teeter story, the time traveler who appeared on Art Bell. When I asked him about it, he said... Well, this one gets weird. I'll see you after for a private wrap-up, just between us. Let's go down to the basement.

• 1:53AJ Gentile?

  Joseph, welcome to the basement.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:55AJ Gentile?

  I'm excited, I've been a fan for a long time. Before we dig in, I need to know WC Field's martini recipe and method.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 2:05AJ Gentile?

  That's good.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Talked to me by Robert Anton Wilson.

• 2:07AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09AJ Gentile?

  What do we got?

• 2:09Speaker 03

  He comes to my house one day and... I said, Bob, I heard you like martinis. He said, well, I like martinis, but only a certain way. You have to make them right. And let me show you. Like, kid, move aside. So, okay, I moved aside. And while he's making these martini, he tells me the story that he read how this martini was made by W.C. Fields in a book. And so you take, put ice in the shaker, then you pour the vermouth over the ice. Then you shake it around, then you pour the vermouth out, leaving the ice in. Then you pour the vodka. Important vodka, not gin.

• 2:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes, sir.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Pour the vodka over the ice. Shake it very gently because you want to bruise.

• 2:51AJ Gentile?

  Don't bruise it, right.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Yep. And then you pour it out.

• 2:54AJ Gentile?

  Very nice.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it works.

• 2:56AJ Gentile?

  I'm going to remember that method.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  And that's, that's the way I've eaten, made martinis ever since.

• 3:01AJ Gentile?

  So it's Robert Anton Wilson. So that's kind of a good segue to get back to the origin story. And we can go back as far as you want.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:09AJ Gentile?

  Um, I love the bookstore stuff and that's synchronicities are crazy, but wherever you want to go. Like what, what, what made you the pioneer of ARGs? And we, and that could be the last time we even say ARG today.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  It goes, I'm just okay. We go back, let's go back a little bit.

• 3:27AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  I remember when I read a book called No One Here Goes Out Alive, The Story of Jim Morrison. And I like the way they did it is they put it in three sections. And basically it was like, so you realize that an arrow being drawn back and then a releasing of the arrow was the arc of Jim's story.

• 3:50AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  I was a voracious reader when I was a kid and my parents were cool in that they said, oh, he can read. They were happy. And, um, and so they rewarded me by saying, we will buy you books. And if you read these books, we will buy you more books. And so I just, we would just tear a few books. And so I used to buy a, I was being kind to my parents. I came from a working class background. And so these books are okay because I'm going to tear through them. I'm probably going to mark them up and then, you know.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  And I would get money to go to garage sales. And just pick up whatever. And so in my age, I'm old, I'm sixty-four years old. So like in the sixties and seventies when I was growing up. Horror and the occult was very popular. And so I was big on the Universal Monsters. The Hammer Films, like all that kind of stuff. Anything to do with that I was reading. So this is a funny segue. I'm at a garage sale and I'm like, the guy says, you can have all the books on the table for a dollar, but you gotta pack them up and get out of here because I'm done. I could do, I'm like grabbing everything I thought was worth it. And one of the books was.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Like, oh, that's about astrology. Nice to do in a bag. I get home, I start reading it. I'm like, this is not astrology at all, but it was Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.

• 5:17AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  That's how I get introduced to Henry Miller.

• 5:20AJ Gentile?

  Wow, okay.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  By thinking it was astrology.

• 5:22AJ Gentile?

  Oops.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Oops.

• 5:23AJ Gentile?

  How old were you?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Oh, God, twelve.

• 5:26AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no. Okay. Well, probably great for a twelve year old.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  It was great. It was perfect. I'm like, God, I'm gonna do this, like with the way this guy writes, you know? And so like, that was my gateway drug. I, I, from there, I segwayed into Kerouac and, you know, everything from there. But it was that accident of buying that book for a nickel or whatever it was. And reading it and falling in love with like, this is a whole new thing. I didn't know about this.

• 5:54AJ Gentile?

  This is amazing. I didn't know this about you because I could see it in your writing. I could see Kerouac. I could see Hunter S. Thompson. I see that in Henry Miller. I see it in your writing.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:02AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, those are my influences.

• 6:04AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Bukowski.

• 6:05AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Like, you know, Hemingway, it's like, make the sentences short and sweet.

• 6:10AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Bam, like, you know, so I'll go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, which, you know, that's Ginsberg. Kerouac is like, write it once.

• 6:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  You know, oh, no, don't, don't touch it.

• 6:22AJ Gentile?

  And Hemingway says, shut up.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Write it once and get away.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  So, you know, I was, now I was like. Floating in this world of like, all this weird counterculture stuff, which is available readily when I was a kid.

• 6:37AJ Gentile?

  You're in Chicago?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:38AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  In Chicago. And all this occult stuff and literature. And of course, being in Chicago, all that stuff was available to me. I started hanging out in bookstores. Um, where most of the people hanging out were much older than me. So, you know, they kind of mentored me. And I remember my, my, um, are you gonna be in the club kid thing was, um, this guy said, uh, if you read, I said, I said, I couldn't pronounce Kerouac at the time. I didn't know how and I call him Karak or something like that. I said, I read this book by Jack Karak and this guy, I saw this guy look at me. He goes, you know, that guy wrote this book called On The Road and he would stop at the cafes all the time and he would get the same thing. What was that?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  I said, cup of coffee and an apple pie a la mode. He's like, oh, you did read it? And so we, and then he's like, oh, you're cool kid. I'll talk to you. So I, I started hanging out with these older hipsters. They were like, oh, you gotta read this, you gotta read this, you gotta read. So he's feeding me all this stuff and I'm just a kid. You know, it's like, give me, give me, give me. He's like feeding it up. So because of this, it puts me in a position in Chicago where I'm hanging out with people who are doing improv. I'm hanging out with method actors and these are all people much older than me. But for some reason I'm the kid, like, oh yeah, he can hang out. He's, he's cool. He won't tell on us. He won't tell his parents where he's been. They would take me to things. Yeah, it was, it was incredible.

• 8:05AJ Gentile?

  You were the weird smart kid.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  I was the weird smart kid. Yeah, yeah. I was the, uh, the mascot.

• 8:10AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, oh, we got this kid. And, um, and I used to, they loved this. I would, uh, memorize things and I would stand up on a little chair and I would do, I could do, um, uh, lions in the heat and roaming dogs. He'd write everywhere. I could do the Morrison thing and they loved that, you know? So they would make me do it, you know? Like they would get drunk like, do the Morrison thing, kid. You know, and I would do it. So anyway, I'm around these people who are really just feeding me with all this counterculture knowledge and turning me on to things I would never have been turned on to as a, you know, like my family, they didn't know any of this stuff, you know. My dad was one of those people like, you know, "Go to school, get a job, get a good factory job, you know, be done." And I'm not saying he was a bad person, he was a

• 8:56Speaker 03

  great person, but you know, that was his way of thinking. All of these things that I'm doing, he would just be like, "Okay, whatever," you know, he didn't understand and he didn't care. He knew I was not up to good things according to him, but he wasn't a perfect kid either, so he just kind of let me go, you know? He's like, "He's doing something, but I'm not sure what it is, but he's not doing drugs." Little did he know. (laughing) I was.

• 9:22AJ Gentile?

  Someone sent me a clip of myself from about two years ago. I watched it and thought, "That guy's on. Sharper, faster, more himself." And I don't remember feeling different then, which means I didn't notice it leaving. Turns out, there's actually a reason for that. Most men start losing testosterone around 30, about 1% every year after that. And a lot of what your body does produce gets locked up by a protein called SHBG, so your body can't even use it. It's like having money in the bank with a frozen account. That's when I started taking Mars Men. Now, I'll be honest, I didn't expect much, but a few weeks in, I was back to the 2:00 AM rabbit holes. That guy in the clip started showing back up. Mars Men is designed to help free that locked testosterone so your

• 10:05AJ Gentile?

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• 10:43Speaker 03

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

• 11:19AJ Gentile?

  I remember this.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  It's still around.

• 11:20AJ Gentile?

  The zine culture and all this.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the zine culture, then Xerox machines became available. Then we became our own publisher.

• 11:26AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  The punk rock thing happened, which I was right in the middle of. So all of these things are happening. And I started doing weird things by mail art. So I started doing episodic stories.

• 11:41AJ Gentile?

  Based horror stories or?

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Whatever.

• 11:44AJ Gentile?

  Whatever. Okay.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Sometimes I would like write five lines and send to a friend and he would write five lines and send to another friend. And I'd get it back. I'm like, oh, wow. Okay, that's where we're going. And it was called the, I think the Dada's called it the exquisite corpse. And we did all these things together. And I looked at it and I said, there's something here. There's something here. And I don't have to go through a publisher to create this art. I don't have to go through an agent. I don't have to do any of these things. I don't have to do a gatekeeper. I can make art that gets to a lot of people. And I don't have to go through, you know, any corporate anything.

• 12:28AJ Gentile?

  Is that what you wanted to do at this point is be an artist?

• 12:30Speaker 03

  It was what I was.

• 12:32AJ Gentile?

  I mean, you were, but I mean, what are you telling dad you're gonna do for a living?

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Um, I didn't have an answer to that.

• 12:40AJ Gentile?

  You just hear a lot of snipping and taping upstairs.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And at that time, I was, I was painting.

• 12:45AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Um, so I was doing a lot of large paintings. And, um, and my family was trying to be supportive, but didn't know how to be because they didn't understand what I was doing.

• 12:57AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  And so like my mom would tell her sisters, ask him to do a painting for you. You know, and one of my aunts would say, can you do a painting for me? And I'm like, sure. Like, here's my color swatches.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  No. You have to match my furniture. No.

• 13:15AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Um, so they really didn't get it, but they were trying to be supportive and I didn't want to be mean to them. So like I painted some paintings. Um, but basically, um, I was looking for um, a new kind of art because I felt like the media was this canvas that wasn't being fully

• 13:38Speaker 03

  implemented as to its full potential. Because I had this theory that an experience for me was I would see something on TV. I would go find a newspaper or a magazine article about it, then I would go get a book out of the library. And I would build this experience around this thing that I had like latched on to. Who knows how I latched on to it, like walking down the street and there was a poster on a pole. And it said something. I'm like, what is that about? And then I would follow up on it. Like, wouldn't that be cool if there was an art form or I built a pathway for people to follow up on something weird?

• 14:16AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  That I placed it from. It's like, oh, there's this thing.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  There's this place. And so I remember, um, my thesis in college was I wrote a book of poems. And I made a videotape at the time, which was cutting edge.

• 14:35AJ Gentile?

  It must have been.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was. Um, it was cutting edge. I think nineteen eighty-four. It was cutting edge at the time. Um, I did a VHS tape. And you would watch the tape and then you would get clues from the book and the tape. To go at a certain place at a certain time on a certain day. And if you did, you would see the third act, which was a play of real humans. Play it out in front of you as if you weren't there. And the third act happened. And my professor was like, wow, what are you smoking, kid? He goes, it's cool, but wow. Um, and then I re- and then it worked. Like, I remember jumping up and down after it was over and hugging my girlfriend at the time, like, it worked, it worked, it actually worked.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Cause I wasn't sure it was going to work, cause it was a lot of moving parts.

• 15:25AJ Gentile?

  Sure. And you, you really weren't for focused on dopamine triggering at this point. Because that's what you were, you became a master of dopamine.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, but at that point, I, I was just an unsure kid who had a stupid idea. And, and I put it together, I'm like, can this work? This might not work.

• 15:44AJ Gentile?

  It can work.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, you always have those theater jitters, you know, like,

• 15:48AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Hmm, I'm gonna suck. But,

• 15:51AJ Gentile?

  I have those before every show, man.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  Right. Um, so I just had, I, I wasn't sure it was gonna work, and then I got really happy when it worked. And everybody that did it, like, followed it through, told me, like, dude, that was incredible. I read the, the poems and then I watched the tape and then we went to the performance. It was amazing. Like, it was like, it all made sense. So I was like, yeah, well, good. It was like, three acts, boom. So, um, I started playing around with ideas of, how can I do this another way? And so I played with street theater, I used to do a lot of street theater. I started hanging out with people in Chicago. Um, studied under Dell Close.

• 16:37AJ Gentile?

  You studied under Dell?

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Well,

• 16:38AJ Gentile?

  Himself?

• 16:39Speaker 03

  The people that hung out with did. I was a little too young for Dell.

• 16:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Um, yeah.

• 16:44AJ Gentile?

  Second city.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Next generation, I probably would have been there, but yeah. Um, but, you know, um, my girlfriend's dad, and my girlfriend at the time, her dad was a friend of Dell's.

• 16:52AJ Gentile?

  Amazing.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  So I used to hang out with him. When Dell got sober, apparently, um, he still hung out at the Earl of Old Town, which was a bar in Old Town, Chicago. And he would go into the bar and drink soda water and lime, because the bar was where he got inspiration. But he kept going, but he just didn't drink anymore. Um, so, yeah, cause I started studying the things that he talked about, because if, you might not know this. Um, I told this to the people that the Dell Close Theater in Hollywood, and they didn't know this either. Dell was a practicing Golden Dawn magician.

• 17:27AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that. Golden Dawn, wow.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So if you look at the portrait at the Del, if it's still there, I mean, the Delco Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, if it's still there, I don't know if it is.

• 17:37AJ Gentile?

  I don't think it is.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  I haven't gone for like 10 years.

• 17:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Speaker 03

  But it used to be. If you look at the portrait, a big painting of him on, on the wall, he's wearing a ring with a pentagram on it.

• 17:48AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:50AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  And if you read some of the weirder little in interviews that he did, he does admit to using the Golden Dawn telesmotic principles to teach improv.

• 18:02AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  So, telesmata is when, when you learn, when you learn, uh, ritual,

• 18:09Speaker 03

  you learn basically theatrical principles. And so you think in your mind, like, in front of you, there is an angel. And this is what the angel is wearing, and this is the principles of the angel, you learn all this stuff, you're projecting. And Del used that as the method to teach people, this is what you're doing in theater. Like, when you're talking to this person in front of you, they're not the person in front of you, the person that you're supposed to be talking to in the, in the text.

• 18:36AJ Gentile?

  This is an initiation ceremony.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:38AJ Gentile?

  It's just...

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 18:40AJ Gentile?

  Two actors.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:42AJ Gentile?

  I never really thought of it that way, but that's really what it is.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  He never laid it out for most people like that, because most people would be like, "Magic, ah!"

• 18:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  You know, and they would run.

• 18:51AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  But that's what he was doing. If you want to know what was in that man's mind,

• 18:58Speaker 03

  he wrote a short-lived DC uh, comic series called Wasteland.

• 19:03AJ Gentile?

  I didn't know that either.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's like 13 issues. And you can still find them, um, they're out of print, but you can still find them. And in that, he talks about ritual magic and Philip K. Dick makes an appearance, Robert Attah Wilson makes an appearance, Timothy Leary makes an appearance, G. Gordon Liddy makes an appearance.

• 19:21AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:22AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta see, you gotta read this.

• 19:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  It's great. It came out in the 80s. It's just amazing. Um, so, but that's what, that's where it all came from, was his improv theories, which everybody knows Delco's is the guy.

• 19:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes, he's the guy.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  That you go to for the theory. And it all came from Golden Dawn.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  So I'm studying and playing with people that are studying with him. And I'm learning from him and I, and I started learning and studying magic. And I'm like, oh, this is theater. Okay, I can do this. Yeah, theater. And so putting all this together and out of this, you know, um, Swiss Army knife that forms in my head of all these influences. I'm like, oh, you know, if I could only do this thing, if I had a way to get it in front of people. So I started playing around with HyperCard. And if you remember HyperCard.

• 20:17AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:18AJ Gentile?

  You, you, you may have to catch people up.

• 20:20Speaker 03

  Okay, HyperCard came out right before the web.

• 20:23AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  And basically it was hypertext. That was localized. So it was in a file. You click on a link and it takes you to another page in the file.

• 20:33AJ Gentile?

  It was magic.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  It was magic. Yeah. Um, you click on an image, it takes you to another page in the file. When I saw that, my mind went.

• 20:41AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  But I started putting together a HyperCard stack, as they were called.

• 20:46AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  And right about that time, this was ninety.

• 20:51Speaker 04

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• 21:21Speaker 03

  Three? Somewhere around there? Um, maybe earlier, um, somebody said, go to your Unix machine, type in the words l y n x, space, http colon slash slash.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  String.

• 21:35AJ Gentile?

  Link's first browser.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:37AJ Gentile?

  From the command line. On the command line, yeah.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  And I did it. And I went, tab, tab, tab, click, and it took me to another system. Not another page, another page on another system. And that's when my head just went, this is it. This is it. This is what I've been looking for. I thought HyperCard was it. This is HyperCard on steroids. This is it. And that's, that's when the light went off. So it was all that was searching for this way to tell stories. That I thought the way, or the way stories happen to you. Because I think stories happen to you. I think story, storytelling is the most important thing that humans do. And that we shouldn't turn it over to corporations and bean counters. None of that. It's like a very sacred thing.

• 22:24Speaker 03

  You have a responsibility as a storyteller to shepherd your story and protect it. Story was given to you by what, who knows what, right? But it wasn't you, wasn't all you. And it wasn't somebody else. It wasn't all them. Like, of course, I stand on the shoulders of giants and I read people and I'm inspired. But it wasn't just that. There's like this holy thing that happens, like this inspiration.

• 22:46AJ Gentile?

  You believe in like the muse.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  The muse, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And it says, you have this story to tell and I'm going to give it to you. I'm entrusting you with this story. And you go tell this story. I think storytellers used to be revered for a reason. It's because what they were doing was important. So you could break it down to like, simple stuff. I'm going to tell you a story about this part of the woods where you go and a monster's going to come get you. Really what I'm telling you is like, there's bears over there and probably don't go there at night.

• 23:17AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Right? That's what I'm telling you, really. But what I'm, I'm telling you in a way that's entertaining, memetic. You remember it.

• 23:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  And you're going to tell your kids, don't go over there because there's monsters. In other words, don't get eaten by the bears. But if you just tell a kid, don't get eaten by the bears. They're going to want to go see what's over there. I would have.

• 23:35AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  You would have.

• 23:36AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  That we're going to, the first thing we're going to do. Oh, I don't believe this bear crap. And you're going to go over there, right? So you have to tell a story that's going to really stick. They're going to repeat it. It's going to make an impression. And they're going to carry it with them. So you're passing it on, right? And memetics remember is from genetics, right? It's a, it's a metaphor from genetics. So it's something we pass on. Stories are something we pass on. It's very important. And I'm saying this because I want people to really understand that as an artist, handing your story over to bean counters is sacrilege. Don't do it.

• 24:14AJ Gentile?

  Summer is here. And if you want to actually feel confident, less bloated and energized this season, it starts with your gut. I thought bloating after every meal was just normal. It's not. Once I fixed my gut, everything else followed. And the one thing that made the biggest difference is Cowboy Colostrum. Cowboy Colostrum is 100% American grass-fed, made right here in the USA. True first-day whole colostrum packed with bioactives, immunoglobulins, and growth factors. It stabilizes your gut and the peptides make your skin and hair look amazing. It's the highest-quality bovine colostrum you can buy. I started taking it for my gut. The results I didn't expect are the ones that got me. Thicker hair, clearer skin, no more bloating after meals.

• 24:59AJ Gentile?

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• 25:39AJ Gentile?

  That's 25% off when you use code YFILS at cowboycolostrum.com/wifiles.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  So I got hit by this bolt of lightning. It was my late friend Ralph Abraham. He used to say a bolt from the blue. And it just struck me like, this is it. This is the thing. And I remember telling friends, there's this thing that I'm doing called bulletin board systems that has a connection to this thing called the internet.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  Which is gonna be the next way to tell stories. It's gonna be the way to publish. It's gonna be the way to distribute. It's gonna be everything. And this looked at me like, "Are you crazy? Are you nuts? This is like CB radio, man. It's gonna go away in like six months."

• 26:24AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, right.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  I remember somebody telling me that.

• 26:26AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:27AJ Gentile?

  I was on BBS's. I was a weirdo.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Me too. Yeah. And they're like, "You've been staying for too much time with those computers, son." And I remember showing a friend of mine, this is what it's gonna be. And I showed him links. I'm like, "I can put the story together." And the story can have links to other ideas. So you can expand upon the idea, or you can explore the idea. You can like drill down on certain things. And he looked at it and he just said, this is an older person, a well-known writer. I won't say who it was. He's gone now, but I don't want to embarrass him, even to death. He says, "When this thing can make me a sandwich, give me a call."

• 27:09AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  That's what he said to me. So I said, "Oh, well, you know, too bad." But I was really convinced. I'm like, "This is going to be the next wave."

• 27:20AJ Gentile?

  Well, male art translated well to BBS's.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  And the funny thing was, two of the hobbies I had as a kid was male art and shortwave. I really got into shortwave when I was a kid. And all the people that I knew from those communities started to show up on BBS's. They were some of the first adopters. Art Bell.

• 27:43AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Shortwave guy shows up on BB. These are the first people doing BBS. You know, gophers and FTP sites and all these things.

• 27:54AJ Gentile?

  I remember, man.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Were available to, you know, a few. Not a lot. But I was like, "It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen."

• 28:02AJ Gentile?

  I miss those days a little bit.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  I do too. And then Netscape happened.

• 28:06AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  And that's when boom, it blew it blew wide open.

• 28:09AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  And I was sitting right at the right place at the right time with enough momentum already. Cause I'd been doing it before that. That is like plowed right into it and rode the wave. Because um. At the time that that happened, all of a sudden, all these businesses. We have to have email. We have to have web. Who can we call? Oh, there's this weirdo that knows all this stuff. And my phone started ringing. And then I did a hack. Um, which a guy from Spin Magazine wrote about. Um. Where uh.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  The Clinton administration came out and said. That they were gonna have email in the White House. Which at the time was like. Wow. I could write. President at whitehouse.gov. Not that he's ever gonna answer me, but I could I could write him. And I watched the webs, I watched the server come up and I'm like. I bet they didn't lock this down. So I sent an email. To president at whitehouse.gov. And then I sent a second email to president at whitehouse.gov. And then a third and a fourth. I'm like. They didn't turn it off. So they had an auto reply. Which you had at that time, now it comes stock or. Eventually came stock. But at the time. When you deployed your mail server. You had to manually change this.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  That when you got an email. If you got a second email from that email address, you shouldn't send an auto reply.

• 29:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Twenty-four hours later, right? Used to be like, if you just did it, it came. So I started spamming emails in the White House. I call it the rain of toads. I did ASCII pictures of toads.

• 29:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  And I was raining toads on the White House. And we were getting. So many replies back, so like it shut down both sides.

• 29:58AJ Gentile?

  You did a DoS attack on the White House?

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:01AJ Gentile?

  With Askey Art.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  I did, with Askey Art. The reign of to- R E I G N, the reign of toads. And, um, and then a reporter found out about it and, and he wrote about it. And the next thing you know, my phone was just ringing off the hook because this is not the case anymore, but back then, if you did a hack and it was a white hat hack and you got away with it, you would get a job offer.

• 30:26AJ Gentile?

  Sure, sure.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Not anymore.

• 30:28AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Now you just go to jail.

• 30:30AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  And you're, you're banned from corporate life, but back then, people would call you and say, you know, some things about this stuff and this is a dark art that nobody knows about yet.

• 30:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, now, now they ban you from the country.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now they send you away.

• 30:46AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Uh, or put you in jail.

• 30:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  But back then I got a phone call from the Secret Service.

• 30:54AJ Gentile?

  I was gonna ask.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was very nervous on that phone call.

• 30:58AJ Gentile?

  What's with the toads?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  What's with the toads, man? And you're not gonna do that again, are you? Like, I was just testing to see if you'd put on the auto reply 24 hour pause, you know? It's just, you know,

• 31:11Speaker 03

  making sure you're secure. Um, and then they, you know, like they left me alone after that, but, but I, the job offer started pouring in.

• 31:18AJ Gentile?

  Is this before Robert Anton Wilson comes into your life?

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no. This is way after.

• 31:26AJ Gentile?

  Can we talk about him a little bit?

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, you'll roll that back.

• 31:28AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  So before this happened, I'm still in Chicago. And I was in a band, like everybody my age. And, um,

• 31:40AJ Gentile?

  Is this when you went by Sid with a C?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, something like that.

• 31:47AJ Gentile?

  Go ahead and tell them why it's a C, Joseph.

• 31:51AJ Gentile?

  Sid Vicious, Sid Bennett.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Sid Barrett.

• 31:54AJ Gentile?

  Sid Barrett.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:55AJ Gentile?

  But the C.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, I was known at the time for doing a certain drug. On a regular basis.

• 32:05AJ Gentile?

  Heroically.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Uh, before, before Terrence coined that term, I was a heroic doser.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  I was a, a big fan of Jim Morrison. Did I mention that? So, yes, um, I was, I was one of those people. And, um, I was always talking about weird stuff, you know, because I was a weird kid. And my guitar player, who was weird himself, but you know, not as weird, I guess, but he loved me because I was, I could introduce him to weird things he hadn't heard of. But he introduced me to a lot of music. So there we go. And one day he just looks at me, he's like, "Have you read Illumina's trilogy?" I'm like, "No."

• 32:47AJ Gentile?

  Just out of the blue, he says that? Okay.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Because, because I was talking, cool, because I'd been doing Sid and talking weird things. And he was like, "Have you read Illumina's trilogy?" I'm like, "No, I haven't even heard of it. What was that?" "But you should read it, man. You should read it. You're in it." I'm like, "Okay." So I went to the library and went looking for it. And of course it was gone.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Probably stolen. But I did find another book by the same author called Cosmic Trigger. And then I read it. And blew my mind again.

• 33:18AJ Gentile?

  What was it about Cosmic Trigger?

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Oh, it was just like, everything he was talking about was everything I was thinking about. It was just like, like we made a connection, you know? And he introduced me all this new thinking, these new ways of thinking, new writers I'd never heard of. Like it was like, it was like an off-ramp.

• 33:35AJ Gentile?

  Well, in Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson, this is about recognizing signs throughout history and

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Synchronicity.

• 33:41AJ Gentile?

  Synchronicity.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  It was about, um,

• 33:46Speaker 03

  mono-agnosticism.

• 33:47AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  You know, like the whole idea of like, basically what you learn in theater, which is suspension of disbelief. It's the same thing, right? Only he had a mathematical, scientific background for it. You're like, he had fancy words to put around it. I'm like, "Well, I know that, yeah."

• 34:04AJ Gentile?

  I loved how he talked about meteors being, a meteor could be a sign of something good or something bad.

• 34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:09AJ Gentile?

  Or something good or something bad can happen, and if the meteor just happens to be there.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:13AJ Gentile?

  That's now a cosmic trigger.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  That's a cosmic trigger. He was playing around with the serious stuff that was going on. He was, he was, he basically did like a whole exercise in suspension of disbelief for this whole period of his life. And he cataloged it and he, and he published it as a book, right? And, and he introduced me to all kinds of new ideas. And one of those ideas was Philip K. Dick, who I had not heard of.

• 34:40AJ Gentile?

  You hadn't?

• 34:41Speaker 03

  I didn't know. I didn't know he wrote Blade Runner at the time.

• 34:44AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Right? But I'd seen Blade Runner, I'm like, oh, this is a great film. You know, but I didn't know, I didn't know at that time. And so like, but like, I read about Bob talking about, you gotta read this book, Philip K. Dick, Valus. So anyway.

• 34:59AJ Gentile?

  And then, well, then that's that.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  That will lead to that. So, so I look, I'm going to buy more books by, by him. And I saw a poster on the wall of the, at the time, new age was a new thing. This was the eighties, at the new age bookstore, and they had books by him on, on the shelf.

• 35:16AJ Gentile?

  By PKD or R A W?

• 35:18Speaker 03

  R A W.

• 35:19AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  And, and there was a poster on the wall that he was appearing just down the street from where I was living, at a Zen Center.

• 35:27AJ Gentile?

  No shit?

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:29AJ Gentile?

  Chicago still?

• 35:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:30AJ Gentile?

  Okay, so we gotta go there, right?

• 35:32Speaker 03

  On the lakefront, yeah. So I got to go there. So I show up, early, and I was a smoker at the time. And, and I show up and I'm standing out front smoking a cigarette at this Zen Center. And this, you know, squat little Irishman comes out and says, hey, can you give me one of those? Like, okay. Like, I'm Bob, by the way, I'm like, you, Robert Anthony Wilson, because I didn't know what he looked like.

• 35:55AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  He's like, yeah, yeah. Like, I'm doing this thing here. I'm like, yeah, I came to see you. We're smoking. He's like, don't tell my wife you saw me smoking. Because Arlen got on his, on his back for smoking. But yeah, we shared a cigarette and we, we stood out there for.

• 36:09AJ Gentile?

  What's going on in your mind? You're like, Bob Wilson just bumped a cigarette off me.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:14AJ Gentile?

  You're not freaking out?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:15AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  No, I was like, oh, cool, he smokes.

• 36:17AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  You know, go with it. And we just talked about some stuff and Timothy Leary had just come out with Mindmir on DOS at the time and I told him like it's pretty cool but you know you could use some of this and some of that you know and he's like well do you write code I'm like eh not yet I'm thinking about it he's like well then write code and do it yourself I'm like yeah good idea so we hit it off we swapped addresses he was in Los Angeles at the time and and then you know like we traded letters and things like that every once in a while but you know and then later a couple of years later I moved to Santa Cruz completely by accident do you know this story?

• 37:04AJ Gentile?

  This is with your girlfriend and Anubis?

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Yeah yeah my cat yeah yeah

• 37:10AJ Gentile?

  Tell I know the story but people don't but I love Anubis

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah we have to get there so so Cosmic Trigger triggered me to find Valis

• 37:24AJ Gentile?

  To find Valis?

• 37:25Speaker 03

  It was out of print at the time

• 37:27AJ Gentile?

  Oh to find the book?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  The book

• 37:29AJ Gentile?

  You couldn't find that?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  It was out of print

• 37:31AJ Gentile?

  Wow okay

• 37:32Speaker 03

  This was eighty four five?

• 37:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah

• 37:34Speaker 03

  It was out of print and it was not a popular book then

• 37:37AJ Gentile?

  No

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Phil was not popular then like he wrote Blade Runner but that was it like none of his stuff is getting made into movies yet

• 37:45AJ Gentile?

  Were you aware of Jacques Vallée at this point yet?

• 37:46Speaker 03

  I was because I read Passport to Magonia when I was young and I went

• 37:51AJ Gentile?

  Yes right in my veins

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Yeah it was like this this

• 37:55AJ Gentile?

  I mean I've heard PKD or people around him say that Valis was a synchronicity with Jacques's name

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Well apparently it was for me too because I just I don't know why it got on my head like I have to find this book I have to find this book it became like an obsession and I started to get there was no internet at the time so like you know this is eighty four I'm going to use bookstores I'm asking people they never heard of it

• 38:22AJ Gentile?

  Right

• 38:22Speaker 03

  And I'm like can I go through your can I go through your boxes like I'm just like like being a nook Nick annoying and people are like okay whatever dude go look for your your cosmic thing and so eventually I did find it in a very weird circumstance

• 38:42Speaker 03

  I was going through the Yellow Pages and just looking for used bookstores because I'd run out of the ones I knew. And I called this one used bookstore and this lady answered and she said, yes, I think I might have that. I said, well, supposedly it's a trilogy. She's like, I think I have two of them. So I walk not too far from where I lived. I walk over, or no, I took the bus and then I walked from the bus stop and this didn't look like a bookstore. It was like, it was, it looked like it might have been a storefront at one time, but it was like the windows were newspapered over. And I knocked on the door and this really nice old lady with silver hair and crystal blue eyes, you know, those people that have those blue eyes and just like can't stop looking at them?

• 39:26AJ Gentile?

  I think you described her as elvish.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. She was short and I looked at her, I'm like, wow, okay, you've got an aura lady. And she like took me and all the books were in boxes, nothing, there was no shelves. Like she shut the thing down, you know? I'm thinking, okay, maybe she's gone out of business or maybe she never was in business. And she like walked me over to a box and she like pulled out Valis. She said, you know, I've got this one. And then she pulled out another copy of Valis. She says, but I have this one. It was a hard copy.

• 40:00AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  But I was a poor ass little punk rocker at the time.

• 40:05AJ Gentile?

  You didn't take the hard?

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Counting my quarters. And so I, I, I, yeah, and so I like, I'll take the paperback, you know, and I took the paperback and then I walked, immediately I was like, oh, buyer's remorse. But, you know, did what I had to do. And then when I got home, I'm like, you should have bought that hardback dude. You should have bought that hardback. And I called her and I called her and called her, she never answered again.

• 40:34Speaker 04

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• 41:04Speaker 03

  And so I walked over there. And I banged on the door to see if she could hear me. And it was a storefront, in Chicago they have these, a storefront and then a house above it. And it was a railing with a porch and the guy like, this guy like walks out, yuppie, that was a thing then. He even had the suspenders. If you remember, there was a uniform that they all wore. And he leans over the rail, he's like, "What do you want?" Like, "Well, the lady sold me a book and I wanted to get the other book." He's like, "What are you, what are you doing? What are you talking about? Get out of here. It's not been a store for a long time, just leave." He was like angry.

• 41:45AJ Gentile?

  It's not been a store?

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. For a long time.

• 41:48AJ Gentile?

  For a long time?

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:50AJ Gentile?

  What's that about?

• 41:51Speaker 03

  I don't know. And he's being real rude to me, he's like, "Dah, get out of here." Like, you know, like I was ruining his day. And I'm thinking, maybe his mom, because she looks about right to be the age of his mom, maybe his mom sold me the book and wasn't supposed to, I don't know. He was like, just, he just wanted me away from his house. And so I left and I just kept going back and calling. Never, ever, ever got anybody to answer the phone or the door ever again.

• 42:23AJ Gentile?

  Was that, do you think that was a supernatural experience or just a weird circumstance?

• 42:29Speaker 03

  I think it was a weird circumstance that that fits well as a supernatural experience.

• 42:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I mean, it reads well.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  It reads well, you know, and it doesn't have to be supernatural to be supernatural.

• 42:40AJ Gentile?

  That's, that's well said, yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  She could have like been in the store when I called and picked up the phone when I called. She probably didn't run the store, the store did not, it was in business and knew that she had the book I was looking for. She may have even had dementia, I don't know, you know, and the reason dude was mad because he didn't know.

• 43:02AJ Gentile?

  This is so unlikely.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  He didn't know mom had let me into the house, you know, and, you know, back then I used to dress like a punk rocker. So I did not look like a yuppie friendly at all. So he's like, get, this guy's probably gonna break into my house, you know, get, get away. So, um, so anyway, I, I get that, I get, get Valis. And it just absolutely melts my brain, melted me down like I, I admit, I probably was having a manic episode. It really did something to me, like really touched me hard and.

• 43:40AJ Gentile?

  What was the theme in Valis that, that spoke to you?

• 43:43Speaker 03

  I couldn't point to any one thing.

• 43:46AJ Gentile?

  The omniscience of the, of it.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  No, no, it wasn't that it was that, um, at the same time that I found the book. I found a used copy of the interview, I think Rickman did with Philip K. Dick. And he published like three books of the interview. And so I read that while I was reading Valis. And then I realized this was a true story. This really happened to this guy.

• 44:15AJ Gentile?

  Yep, it did, it, it, he said it did.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:18AJ Gentile?

  Have you ever seen him give that talk in Mets in seventy seven?

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:21AJ Gentile?

  He said, he said, all this stuff is, I write about real stuff.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:25AJ Gentile?

  The Nazis did win the war, just not in this timeline.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Everybody thought he was nuts.

• 44:30AJ Gentile?

  I, I love watching the audience during the time. They thought that he was just gonna talk about sci-fi.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  Oh, it's a bit.

• 44:35AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Like half of them like, oh, he's doing a bit and the other half like, I think he's lost his mind.

• 44:40AJ Gentile?

  Right. This is all a simulation in seventy seven.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:45AJ Gentile?

  So of course this is mind blowing in eighty four.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  And this melts my mind. This melts my mind. And then.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  All this stuff like I started seeing signs, you know, like every like, like Bob Wilson said, um, in Cosmic Trigger. He said, uh, he was playing Bavarian TV where he would flip the channels and then he would get sentences.

• 45:07AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  He's like, I'm like Phil K. Dick that fucking TV is talking to me. So, so, you know, like he, he would do that and.

• 45:13AJ Gentile?

  Del Close had something called a one word story.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:17AJ Gentile?

  That was Bavarian TV.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, and so I started having this, these experiences that I couldn't turn off and, and, um, I was like, what, what's going on, you know? And so I started getting, um, I was, I was buying weird pamphlets. Any weird pamphlet I get my hands on. And so I got this weird magazine that was being published out of Berkeley called Mondo Two. Or at the time it was called, um, High Frontiers. And it was a Xerox art and I found out about them through Xerox art stuff and I, I sent away and I got the pamphlet. And it was all this stuff of Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson. I was like, what is this? You know, it was like, it became onto 2000. It was this whole culture.

• 46:02AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  That eventually became the internet.

• 46:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  I mean, they really did. They were wired before wired.

• 46:07AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  And they do the wired people actually. So, um, so I'm like having all these things pop up like Berkeley, California, Berkeley, North East Bay, Bay Area, California, like, like in my face. Like everywhere I was looking, it was like Bay Area, California, and I knew nothing about the Bay Area in California, you know?

• 46:29Speaker 03

  And then one day I just like told my girlfriend, I'm like, let's move to California. I mean, really, let's just pack up and go. Like what's stopping us? And she was just crazy enough that she said, yes. She's like, yeah, yeah, let's go.

• 46:45AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  So we did. We literally just like had a garage sale, pared down all the big stuff, put all the stuff that would fit in the car, the cat and us. And off we got a car top carrier and off we went. And.

• 46:59AJ Gentile?

  Did you have a destination in mind?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yes, Berkeley.

• 47:02AJ Gentile?

  So you were heading to Berkeley, but.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  So.

• 47:05AJ Gentile?

  But.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  On our way.

• 47:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  I'm telling you, I want to go through LA. So we're going to, we took Route 66 from Chicago to LA. He retraced Route sixty-six.

• 47:17AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  And I said, I'm gonna show you some things. I'd been to LA and I'd hitchhiked up Highway one one time in early eighties when I was in college on a summer. I'd spent in California. And I said, I'm gonna take you and show you all these things that I know. Like, we're gonna go through LA. I'm gonna see all the Jim Morrison places I know, you know, Love Street and the weird store. And I know all these places. I'm gonna show you. I know where his studio was. We're gonna stay at the, was it Alta, what the hell was that thing? The, the, um, I've stayed there a couple of times. I can't think of the name. It was, it was a motel that was across the street from their studio where he lived and his room where you can rent.

• 48:01AJ Gentile?

  Where who lived?

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Jim Morrison.

• 48:03AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  He lived, he lived in this room, the Alta something. It was, it was on, uh, Los Yenega. And, uh, so I showed her all the spots in LA. And then we drove up Highway one. I'm like, you're gonna love this. By the way, we gotta stop at the Henry Miller Museum in Big Sur, so we did. And then I'm gonna show you the cabin, cause it was still there, where Kerouac wrote Big Sur.

• 48:27AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  You could still hike up back there. It was still there. It's, it's like a Airbnb or something now. But, uh, it's not a cabin anymore.

• 48:35AJ Gentile?

  Beautiful up there.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. We hiked up, saw the cabin, and then on our way to Berkeley, we pulled over to get gas and coffee at this town I'd never heard of before called Santa Cruz.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  And I said, hmm, this is cool. And we went to, uh, a cafe because they had a picture of JR Bob Dobbs on the, on the front of it.

• 48:58AJ Gentile?

  And you just liked that?

• 48:59Speaker 03

  That must be friendly.

• 49:00AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  It's a sub genius. One of us.

• 49:03AJ Gentile?

  One of us.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  And so we went in and then there was a crazy person sitting at the table who told me all the reasons I didn't wanna go to Berkeley, man, cause Berkeley's done. We're all here now, man, in Santa Cruz, man. And this guy turned out to be right. He like took me, walked me around and it was just happening. This was before the earthquake. It was a crazy town, like jugglers and fire breathers downtown and like, it was awesome, you know? Like, yeah, let's try this. Let's try this. So we just stayed there. And I moved into a place upstairs and the lady downstairs, I saw her doing Tai Chi in her garden one day. And so I yelled over the rail and said, hey, I'm your neighbor. I just moved here. And I went downstairs and I met her.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  And she turned out to be Nina Gerboy, who was Timothy Leary's secretary from Millbrook. And then upstairs was Bob Forty, who was like friends with Gordon Wasson and he was friends with everybody.

• 50:06Speaker 03

  And like, I'm like, whoa, how did this happen?

• 50:08AJ Gentile?

  And you knew all these names.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  I knew all the names, but I didn't know these people. I didn't even know where they existed. And so they're like, oh yeah, we know this and this is, it's like, oh, cool. And I was still talking to Bob. He was in LA and then I'm talking to Nina one day Gerboy. And she said, well, you know, Bob, she's like, I know Bob. And she's like, Bob's moving here because his kids are here. I'm like, what?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  He's moving to Santa Cruz? His kids are in Santa Cruz? He said, yeah, they all live here. I'm like.

• 50:39AJ Gentile?

  Synchronicity.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Okay, I, I was supposed to end up here. This is what's supposed to happen, you know? Um, I was not supposed to go to Berkeley.

• 50:46AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  I was supposed to hit where I hit in the middle of, between LA and Berkeley, this place called Santa Cruz, which I had never heard of. Turned out to be the place I needed to be.

• 50:56AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  Met all these people I needed to meet, right there.

• 51:00AJ Gentile?

  And Bob was on his way.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  And Bob was on his way, which was weird.

• 51:03AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  So that's the Bob story and that's the Phil story because as I often say, what pushed me onto that trip, that weird trip was Philip K. Dick and Valis, which was started by Bob, his book. Like, and I don't know why that stuck. It's like Valis, I didn't, I knew nothing about it, what it was about, nothing. Other than Bob said it was weird and it must really be weird because I'm reading this book and it's really weird, you know? So I wanted, I really wanted to know what that was about. And, um, it was a virus. It really was. I read that, I read Valis and it just absolutely threw me for a loop.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  But I don't mean in a bad way. I mean, I tell people this a lot of times and some people understand it, some don't. But, um.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  A breakthrough is necessarily preceded by a breakdown. You have to break down before you can break through. Sure. And I needed a breakdown at the time. Like, I was a little too rigid in some things. I was gonna stay in Chicago forever. I was gonna be a punk rock musician. None of that happened. None of it was what was supposed to happen. Like, I was supposed to go do this other thing. And I saw something shining in the Bay Area, which I did end up in the Bay Area, the larger Bay Area. Yeah. Because ninety miles south of San Francisco is Santa Cruz. And most of the people that used to live in San Francisco had moved to Santa Cruz, the people I wanted to know.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  They'd all like, "Oh, the city's getting too big. We gotta migrate. Let's go to the country." Santa Cruz is basically the country. It's a little surf town. And so, I saw something shining in the distance when I was hearing all this stuff about the Bay Area of San Francisco. Like, there's something going on there. There's something you need to be a part of. Also, didn't know this was gonna happen, but boom, the dot-com thing happened. Right? Right. A lot of the people that worked at Apple and ended up working in other places, we all came from Santa Cruz. SCA, SEO was there. Borland was there. There was all this stuff going on in Santa Cruz

• 53:22Speaker 03

  that was tech-oriented. And a lot of the really edgy, Jared Lanier was there at the time. He was a street musician. He wasn't doing virtual reality yet. He was like, playing weird African street instruments on the street. You know, with his dreads and like, looked like he always looked. Um, but there was all this stuff going on. Dan Mapes was there. It was all these people that you would know now, but you didn't know then. There were just people hanging out in this collective weird area of people doing raves and drugs and computers. "This is what we were doing. This is what we were doing." Um, and just coming up with weird ideas. And, and you know, um, friends of the McKenna's were there. Um, I, I met Dennis a couple of times.

• 54:06Speaker 03

  Never met Terrence, but I met Dennis a couple of times. He was actually in my building hanging out. So I hung out with him. Um, so all these people, Tim Leary used to stop by our building because Nina was there. Whenever he was coming through town, he'd, I'd walk downstairs. Oh, oh, Tim Leary. Okay.

• 54:22AJ Gentile?

  Crazy.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Bob was always over there. Once he moved, like it was this weird little apartment building. Three 21 Second Street is still there. Looks like a ship. It's like all the doors have portholes.

• 54:34AJ Gentile?

  Is this when you started working for Bob or with Bob?

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So, um, he moved to, to Santa Cruz. Of course he got a lot of, um, uh,

• 54:45Speaker 03

  um, opportunities to speak in the Bay area. He did not drive. Um, I asked him, I asked him why he told me, and then I found out later why. I asked him why you don't, why don't you drive? You have a car. He's like Salvador and Oliver didn't drive. I'm like, oh, good enough.

• 55:02AJ Gentile?

  That was it? That was it?

• 55:03Speaker 03

  That was his answer.

• 55:06AJ Gentile?

  Bob Wilson?

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Robert Anthony Wilson. What are you gonna do? And that was a good enough answer for me.

• 55:09AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Okay. But as it turned out, what I found out was, um, he had polio when he was a kid.

• 55:17AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  And as you know, these, um, people that got over polio when they were a kid have a, a relapse when they're older. Most of the time, and he did. So it was hard for him to press the pedals and

• 55:28AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  He couldn't be sure he would be able to push the brake and hold the brake. And so he needed somebody to drive him. So I became the driver.

• 55:36AJ Gentile?

  Did you go to his funeral in 2007?

• 55:38Speaker 03

  No, no, I didn't get to. I was in, uh, Santa Barbara at the time. And actually the, at the point that I found out that he had passed, I was actually out of the country.

• 55:47AJ Gentile?

  Hmm.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  So, and that made me sad.

• 55:50AJ Gentile?

  I'm sure.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  But I did visit, you know, afterwards.

• 55:54AJ Gentile?

  Okay, so you're driving Bob, you're driving, driving Bob, and I guess we're getting, is this when he starts teaching you about Operation Mindfuck?

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we, so we, we're in the car together.

• 56:05AJ Gentile?

  A lot.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  A lot, with a lot of time.

• 56:07AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  You know, I'm driving, he's riding, you know, and um, he would tell me, he would regale me with stories. I would regale him with my crazy ideas and he would tell me, uh, that my ideas were probably not as crazy as I thought they were.

• 56:22AJ Gentile?

  Did you know how lucky you were to just be hanging out with this guy?

• 56:25Speaker 03

  No, I was just riding the wave, man.

• 56:26AJ Gentile?

  Oh, boy.

• 56:27Speaker 03

  I didn't want to like, think about the moment, cause like, you know, if you think about the moment, the moment is gone.

• 56:33AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 56:34Speaker 03

  I'm like, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna.

• 56:36AJ Gentile?

  That's lucid dreaming.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Exerting the bath, you know?

• 56:38AJ Gentile?

  Don't think too hard.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't think too hard about this.

• 56:41AJ Gentile?

  No, but I'm jealous of the story.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  So it was, so we got to swap a lot of ideas, um, at the time, um, he had just written a book, which is reissued, um, his daughter started a press to reissue all his books, and um, they asked me to write the foreword to that book, which is out now, it's called Realities What You Can Get Away With.

• 57:07AJ Gentile?

  Okay, I have to grab that.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  It's a screenplay, um, at the time, we were trying to get that made into an independent film. We didn't, that didn't happen, but we, we got close, and he was telling me all kinds of stories about, he wanted to be a director, and what most people are always surprised when I tell him that, but he did. Um, his favorite, uh, his idol was Orson Welles.

• 57:31AJ Gentile?

  Interesting.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  And Ed Wood.

• 57:34AJ Gentile?

  Interesting.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  And at the time, Ed Wood was, was not, did not have the resurgence that he's had. At that time, um, people like Bob and I loved Ed Wood.

• 57:43AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  But most people didn't know who Ed Wood was, cause.

• 57:47AJ Gentile?

  Well, what was it about Ed Wood that attracted you guys?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  The fact that he didn't let lack of talent stop him at all.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  Not one minute did he stop, he didn't even pause.

• 58:02AJ Gentile?

  All right, you have to, you have to tell us who Ed Wood is then.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Ed Wood was-

• 58:06AJ Gentile?

  I'm taking a swipe at him.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a swipe. Um, no, the tenacity, man, come on.

• 58:12AJ Gentile?

  That's it. He wouldn't disagree.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  It was beautiful. It was beautiful. I'm not gonna let this stop me, right?

• 58:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, Ed Wood was a guy who made films, how would you say, um, psychotronic?

• 58:25AJ Gentile?

  Yeah?

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Psychotronic films. And if you watch the films, um, there's moments where it's so clear that it's, it's been a, it's a disaster that's happening on set.

• 58:39AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it's so, oh.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  And he doesn't stop rolling.

• 58:44Speaker 03

  And he doesn't edit. Just like, that was, cut, print, perfect, move on, you know?

• 58:50AJ Gentile?

  A great night is gummies and Ed Wood movies, man.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So if, if you don't know, um, if, if people often ask me, like, I haven't seen that Wood film, I'm like, you know, everybody has Plan 9 from Outer Space is the one that they recommend.

• 59:02AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  I said, okay, that's good. If you wanna get into the, into the weeds, if you wanna deep cut Ed Wood, watch Orgy of the Dead.

• 59:12AJ Gentile?

  I don't think I've seen that.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  Color.

• 59:15AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 59:15Speaker 03

  His first color film.

• 59:17AJ Gentile?

  Oh, I'm gonna check that out this weekend.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  He hired strippers.

• 59:21AJ Gentile?

  Of course he did.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  As the, as the actors. It all takes place in a, in a graveyard.

• 59:26AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  The two, the only people, uh, the, the only actors are strippers and Criswell.

• 59:34AJ Gentile?

  Orgy of the Dead. It's on the list.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Two, two moments in that are my favorite moments in film. The first one is- He's, he's, there's this thing going on where he's like telling these people to throw gold coins. While this dancer is dancing her dance. And he goes, throw more gold. And you hear them hitting her. And clearly they're spray painted poker chips. You can tell. Like, I know, that's a poker chip. I know what that is. Not a good poker chip, but a cheap poker chip that you bought at the drugstore. Not, not like when you'd get it in a casino, you know?

• 1:00:12AJ Gentile?

  Platinum VFX on, on display again?

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, the other thing that, that he did in, uh, Orgy of the Dead, which is another fine moment in film is there's a scene where the two, the two main actors who were like the ones drawn into this horror story. Um, is a man and a woman driving a car. So it was a convertible. And they're going down the road. And the guy goes, I can't see, it's too dark. And next cut is a shot of him in the car driving in broad daylight.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Desert sun, broad daylight, high noon. And then cut back to the dark, I can't see, it's so dark.

• 1:00:56AJ Gentile?

  It's never explained.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Never explained, never explained. So that's, that's it.

• 1:01:01AJ Gentile?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

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• 1:01:33AJ Gentile?

  So Orson Welles was interesting because, uh, it's kind of a mini ARG sort of.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  F is for fake?

• 1:01:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, spontaneously.

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, Bob and I traded. Movies, so he turned me on to F is for Fake. I turned him on to Soft Cell Portrait.

• 1:01:48AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  Which he had not seen, which was the Salvador Dali thing that Orson Welles did. And then he turned me on to, um, he turned me on to, he liked all the weird stuff that Wells did after he left Hollywood.

• 1:01:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, uh, the, the trial.

• 1:02:02AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  Like all that stuff he did, uh, the black and white stuff.

• 1:02:05AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  Like low budget, but good stuff.

• 1:02:08AJ Gentile?

  The chubby Wells.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  The chubby Wells, but some good stuff.

• 1:02:11AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, F is for Fake is fantastic.

• 1:02:13AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Um, so we would, and then, and he didn't know that, uh, Soft Cell Portrait, like he did a whole thing where Salvador Dali was painting the sky. He's like, what? So he had to go see that. Um, so, yeah, we would, we would trade Orson Welles stories. Um, and, uh, and he turned me on to, apparently, clearly, not apparently, clearly he knew much more about things than I knew. And so I would give him one thing, he'd give me 10 things.

• 1:02:41AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  So it was like riding around with him was like getting homework, you know? Like then I'd, I'd come back from driving him and I'd have like this list of gotta get this stuff now, you know, it's like.

• 1:02:53AJ Gentile?

  Did you know he was a mentor for you at the time?

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Did I know what?

• 1:02:56AJ Gentile?

  That he was your mentor?

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:03:00AJ Gentile?

  You were like, this guy's my Yoda.

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  He was mentor before, before I met him. Um, cause I, like, like I said, when I read Cosmic Trigger, I finally got a copy of Illuminatus. And then I, I read everything he wrote. You know, I was like, clearly my Yoda.

• 1:03:18AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Maybe before Yoda, but he was my Yoda.

• 1:03:22AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Um, and then when I fell into the situation where I was living in the same city as him and a building full of people that he knew and

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  and then, and then he, he asked Nita, her boy, he's like, cause I drove her around. She was older. And she had published her book, One Foot in the Future, and she couldn't drive either because she had vision problems. So I drove her around. And then he asked Nita, he's like, do you have anybody that can drive, that drives, drive me around? And Nita's like. Joe, he's a great driver.

• 1:03:56AJ Gentile?

  Joe's the weirdo driver.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  He's the weirdo driver. So like, Bob's like, oh yeah, I like him. Yeah, yeah. So then I was his driver.

• 1:04:02AJ Gentile?

  And you're just drinking it up.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. I'm just like, I'm just riding it out.

• 1:04:06AJ Gentile?

  Before we go to our first break.

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  No pun intended.

• 1:04:10AJ Gentile?

  Before we go to our first break, can you take us to, uh, through the Esalen story?

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So he.

• 1:04:17AJ Gentile?

  Unless there's something in between.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  No, no, no. That's about the same time.

• 1:04:21AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  So, and I was driving him. So he asked me, he's like, um, I've got this weekend at Esalen that I booked. And I wanted you.

• 1:04:31AJ Gentile?

  And Esalen is this hippie retreat. All the Project Stargate guys are going, Putoff is there.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, everybody's there. Everybody. It's, it's kind of like the home base.

• 1:04:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  For, for all the weird stuff.

• 1:04:44AJ Gentile?

  Ingo Swann's hanging out, Jacques Vallée's, everybody's there.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  So you go to, you go to Esalen, you see these people. They're just hanging out. Uh, uh, Esalen is, is big sir. It's on a cliff. It's overlooking the Monterey Bay. Um, on, on the, uh, in the cliff sides. There's natural hot springs that come out of the cliffs and they've carved hot tubs. So like all this hot tub, um, bureaucracy happens at Esalen. Like all these hippie people are like tripping and sitting in hot tubs and thinking about the next great project, you know?

• 1:05:17AJ Gentile?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  So, um.

• 1:05:19AJ Gentile?

  Jeffrey Mishlove was just in here telling Esalen stories.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Oh yeah?

• 1:05:22AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Uh, just the great stories.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  The, the Esalen stories are amazing. I could tell you some stories, but anyway. So Bob asked me, he's like, would you want to go to, to Esalen and spend the weekend? And, um, drive me and then help me do this thing. I've got this idea, but I don't, it's like, I have this idea. I want to do this thing. I want, I want something to happen. I want it to be an experience for these people that come to see me for the weekend. And I said, I've got an idea. Have you heard of a LARP? He's like, uh, yeah, yeah. I think I've heard about that. Like, yeah, let's do an Illuminati LARP.

• 1:06:00AJ Gentile?

  An Illuminati LARP? And I didn't know-

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  You're just the guy to do it.

• 1:06:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes, of course. He's where it all came from.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so he said, um-

• 1:06:10AJ Gentile?

  So what's LARP? I didn't know the term went back that far.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, yeah. LARPs are going on then, yeah. Um, I think the, the vampire LARPs were happening at that time? So people were, people were LARPing.

• 1:06:22AJ Gentile?

  And what's it stand for?

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Live, action, role-playing game.

• 1:06:24AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  So Santa Cruz was LARP central. Cause you have, you have to remember something.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Nerd things happen first in Santa Cruz, or at least they used to, and then they go to the rest of the world. Because UC Santa Cruz is there.

• 1:06:37AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  And the biggest congregation of nerds I've ever met in my life was in Santa Cruz in the eighties. And so, uh, there was all kinds of LARPing going on. And so I never LARped. But I, I, I observed it and I had friends that LARped. And so I would read the books of like, hmm, this is theater of a sort and I can do something with this. But I'm not going to go dress up like a vampire on the streets of Santa Cruz and play LARP with you guys. Sorry. But I am going to look at it, you know, from afar and go, how can I use this in the next theater piece? Because I want to do the thing, something that crosses the proscenium. Where the actors come off the stage and become intermingled with the audience and then you lose track of who's who.

• 1:07:19AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I've heard you tell that story about the two bleachers.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:23AJ Gentile?

  Uh, you, I mean, tell that real fast.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  That was at the Kirk Douglas?

• 1:07:27AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:28AJ Gentile?

  This is essentially Tony and Tina's wedding a little bit.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:31AJ Gentile?

  Um, so you go to this thing, there's this theater show-

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  Which I didn't know what it was. Somebody, somebody said, there's a theater piece you should go see.

• 1:07:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Didn't, didn't give me any information. Just kind of like-

• 1:07:44AJ Gentile?

  Right, you gotta see this.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  Theater PCC. So I go to the, I buy tickets, I go to this thing. And I'm sitting in, and I walk into, there's no stage, there's two bleachers facing each other. Like the, like the, um, portable bleachers that you have for events.

• 1:07:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  And we're all just sitting there, and sitting there, and sitting there, and sitting there. And of course, the longer you sit there, the people start making smart remarks, you know, like, "Oh, what are we gonna sit here forever?" You know, it's like, and that started building up. Where everybody was quite quipping this and that, and then the actors that were embedded, which we didn't know, were masters of grabbing that and turning it into dialogue and like, before we knew it, we were in the midst of this thing that was happening, and a story was being told.

• 1:08:32AJ Gentile?

  When did you catch on?

• 1:08:34Speaker 03

  Um, I started to catch on, they were good. I started to catch on uh, halfway through, I'm like, first I was like, something's going on here. And then like, I started watching people and then I, I wasn't able to like, say that is definitely an actor.

• 1:08:50AJ Gentile?

  No, but a Chicago improv guy can sniff it out.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I, there's something, something to miss here.

• 1:08:55AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  And then, and then, but then I was like, like, think he's an actor, but that guy could have just improvised that. Cause an improv guy will also think, you know, I would have improvised that.

• 1:09:05AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  And I improvised into it, so I like, you know, like, I wasn't one of them.

• 1:09:09AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  And they held, they held character all the way to the end. They didn't take a bow. We all walked out together to the front of the theater, caught our cabs and Ubers and, and, and went home. That was it.

• 1:09:21AJ Gentile?

  And that's it?

• 1:09:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. That was it. It was an event.

• 1:09:25AJ Gentile?

  What, your mind was blown, right?

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  I loved it.

• 1:09:27AJ Gentile?

  They got me.

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  They got me. They got all of us.

• 1:09:30AJ Gentile?

  All of us.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  And I'm not even sure who they is.

• 1:09:32AJ Gentile?

  Right. What was the story about?

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Um, it was a story about a guy who was trying to write a play. And, and he was neglecting his family and like, you know, it was like, it's basically about the writing of a play, and how it ruined this guy's family.

• 1:09:48AJ Gentile?

  I wonder if that's the same story they did every time they did the show, or if it's different.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  I hope not.

• 1:09:52AJ Gentile?

  I hope, probably not.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  I hope it was improvised every time.

• 1:09:55AJ Gentile?

  This is like the Harold, this is, it's amazing.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So that's kinda, and then it leads back to like, what we were doing with Bob, I was like,

• 1:10:02AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  We, we can, like, if we do this right. People are not gonna know who's who. I wanna make sure nobody knows who's who. And like, everybody's looking at everybody else with suspicion. It's gonna be a real weekend with the Illuminati, man. And Bob loved that.

• 1:10:20AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  He's like, "Go for it, dude." He's like, "You need me to play a part?" I'm like, "Yeah, you play Robert Downey Wilson."

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  And I play your assistant. And nobody's gonna know that I'm puppet mastering this thing.

• 1:10:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Because I'm your assistant. And like, I'm looking around like everybody else.

• 1:10:39AJ Gentile?

  And puppet master, that's the term of the game runner.

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, I was the game runner.

• 1:10:45AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  But nobody ever suspected me. Nobody ever suspected me. Till the very, even when it was over, nobody ever suspected me.

• 1:10:52AJ Gentile?

  How did you integrate the game into at the Esalen, what was happening?

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Well, the weekend was, um, well, you know, you stay at Esalen.

• 1:10:59AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  And you have a little cottage, or like, you stay in like, dormitory or whatever, however you do it. You have different levels. And, um, and Bob did a lecture every night. So they showed up, and he would tell you something which fit into the story, or the story keyed off of that from there. And he would tell you like, you know, one of his thing, you know, he'd do his shtick. And, um, and so that's how it fit together, is like, you were hanging out with Robert Downey Wilson for a weekend. But the cool thing was, because it was Esalen, even when he wasn't giving a lecture, like, sitting in the chat hall or whatever,

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  people would gather around and, you know, tell me stories, or like, "Let me tell you my story," like, you know what happens with people like Bob. And, and so, no, everybody like, became very immersed in this thing. And, and then, um, there was this game going on, which they knew about, because we told them in the beginning, "There's a game. You're playing it now. You were playing it before you walked in here. You'll be playing it when you leave."

• 1:12:05AJ Gentile?

  That's, and that's what you told them? And that's it?

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple of groups wandering around that will try to recruit you. You should join them, or maybe not. That's it. So I went around recruiting a couple of people.

• 1:12:21AJ Gentile?

  This is crazy.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  So I, I like, found people like, off, like, when they weren't with anybody else, and I walked up to them, and I had this little chit that I handed them, and it said, "You've just been assassinated."

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  And I would assassinate somebody. They go like, this is part of the game? Not a game, man. Come on, come on. I take them to a room and I put them through this ritual where I resurrected them.

• 1:12:47AJ Gentile?

  Whoa.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  And I'm like, now you're a member of my group, except I was representing like five groups.

• 1:12:53AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54AJ Gentile?

  You're game running.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Illuminatus.

• 1:12:56AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. You never know who's on what side because they're on all sides.

• 1:13:00AJ Gentile?

  That's right.

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  So then they're like, what's, what's my mission? I give them a mission. They're like, this guy and this guy and this guy is part of, is part of your group as well. And sometimes they were and sometimes they weren't. So they walk up to somebody like, part of your group, man. And this guy like, what are you talking about? So like, people are like just freaking out. The beauty of the thing, I think, was at the very end, when he was doing the last lecture, at the end of the last lecture, I didn't know this was going to happen. One of the players had kept the shit that I killed him with. He walked up to Bob and put the shit in his hand. He's like, you've just been killed. You now remember my group.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  And everybody stood up and cheered.

• 1:13:45AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  He's the winner.

• 1:13:48AJ Gentile?

  That's amazing. How long did the game last? All weekend?

• 1:13:50Speaker 03

  Three days. Yeah. Yeah. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. So he killed Bob at the end.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Which was amazing. I didn't see that coming.

• 1:13:59AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  But I kept telling people like, you know, like, take your own initiative. Take your own initiative. Think for yourself. Question authority. Take your own initiative. You know, and he got it. He's like, oh yeah, I could kill somebody. I've got this shit that he killed me with. I could kill somebody with this shit. And who am I going to get? Him. The leader.

• 1:14:21AJ Gentile?

  Question everybody, do your own research.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23AJ Gentile?

  Um, this, that's a good time to take a break because that, that stuff is going to come up again. Be right back. So hanging out with Bob Estlin on the weekends, what's your day job?

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  I was building the injectors for atmospheric chemical vapor deposition reactors.

• 1:14:40AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Which is the machine that was used to make IC chips. So the silicon wafer goes down a belt.

• 1:14:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  Two curtains of nitrogen come down. Um, poof, diborine, phosphine, woof, big flame. You got a circuit board.

• 1:15:01AJ Gentile?

  Okay, that's cool.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the injectors are the, these units that like knew what chemicals to, to, uh, release and when to release and how much and when to stop. And it was like this really intricate, um, device that was built. It was a company that also did military hardware.

• 1:15:20AJ Gentile?

  How did you get from there to Emery and patents? I mean, that seems like a little jump, a leap.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  Well, no, um, I went from there to, to working in tech as doing relational databases. At that time, the first one that I started working on was called FoxPro. It was a Microsoft product. I think it was acquired, but it was a Microsoft product. Um, SQL had not made an appearance yet, but it was about to.

• 1:15:51AJ Gentile?

  Thank goodness for SQL.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

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

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  The concept of a book changes because it goes from being a physical thing to being a unit of measure of knowledge.

• 1:16:49AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  Which it is.

• 1:16:51AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  Now it is definitely in a database.

• 1:16:53AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Like, this is a book. What does that mean? It means it's an ever, it could be an ever-changing series of words.

• 1:16:59AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  Also called large language model.

• 1:17:02AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  So, I was playing with all these, um, fringe concepts.

• 1:17:08AJ Gentile?

  You were building an L L M in the nineties.

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yep. Using a relative, relational database. Um, because that's all we had. So, and we didn't have a lot of memory to pass around. There was a lot of processing power to pass around. Definitely didn't have, uh, what we have now, which is, you know, using graphic chips. Because they do floating point so well.

• 1:17:32AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  Um, we hadn't thought about that. They did exist, but we didn't think about that. So, processing power was at a premium. Memory was at a premium. Storage space was at a premium.

• 1:17:44AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  Disk space was expensive and slow, unreliable. So, all these things were at a premium. And so, all the ideas I had were not quite ready to be implemented because the, the, uh, the infrastructure wasn't there, right? But I knew it was going to be. So, I was like designing all these things and I started working at places like Adobe because when I talked about eBooks, because, remember, I started talking about this before Epub existed. There was no Kindle. I didn't even think it was on Amazon.

• 1:18:20AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  There wa, but there was this thing called portable document format.

• 1:18:24AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  And, um, I realized that, uh, there was all these things that was not being used for. Because it was a really rich format. Most people didn't know that you could embed video and

• 1:18:36AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  trigger events and like all these things you could do. So, I started working in Adobe simply because I wanted to work with the technology that I thought was going to be the first one out of the gate for eBooks. Because I had a vision for a book that would become much more than a book. Because it could, again, what, like, when I saw links. I was like, it can reach out and touch other data and bring it back.

• 1:19:04AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  So like this link can always change because I can change it over here. This, this data is always changing. So it's a story that's never the same twice.

• 1:19:14AJ Gentile?

  Sure. It's just a variable inside the doc.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:19:16AJ Gentile?

  So you saw the PDF as a multimedia device.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 1:19:21AJ Gentile?

  Most people are just using it for documents.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  John, John used to call it a platform, which confused me at first, but then when I started working for him and like, realized what was going on there, I was like, oh, he's right. Because I think I was amazing. I mean, one of the founders of Silicon Valley. And when I watched him write a program in PostScript one time, I was like, what?

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  And, and most people don't realize that PDF is just shorthand in PostScript. That's all it is. Um, and so when I, when I looked at that, I'm like, okay, that's what I want to do. I want to build something and I'm going to use this. I know there will be other things down the line, but right now this is what we have. And that's what I want to build. I want to build something with this. And so we're working at this company and we'll have the deepest look into what this thing can do, what the feature set is now, what it will be in the future, could even drive the feature set as a product manager, which I did. So that's, everybody says, why would you go to jump on Adobe? I'm like, because every tech job I've ever had has served a ulterior motive is helping me achieve

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  something within our project that I had in mind.

• 1:20:31AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  Always.

• 1:20:32AJ Gentile?

  And was that the, uh, the Emery, Emery project?

• 1:20:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:35AJ Gentile?

  So how did that work?

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  So this is, um, I was, I was working with the concepts that were coming out of places like MIT. Um, there was a kid that wrote, and I say kid, he was a kid at the time. The kid that wrote this, uh, algorithm called, um,

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  I can't remember what it was called. Anyway, he wrote an algorithm for recommendation, which at that time was like, you know, nobody had ever heard such a thing.

• 1:21:09AJ Gentile?

  Right. What is that?

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he did it for music. I think, I think Ayumi, Ayuma ended up using it.

• 1:21:16AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  Remember the early, pre, uh, Apple music scene? Um, there was a, uh, it came out of Santa Cruz. And so somebody at Santa Cruz turned me on to this algorithm this guy had written, which was basically Bayesian. It's like, how can I choose something and how can it learn about what I like and make recommendations to me?

• 1:21:39AJ Gentile?

  And you liked Bayesian because that could change over time?

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  Exactly. It would, it was, it would, it was heuristic. It could learn.

• 1:21:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:21:47AJ Gentile?

  And now the biggest companies in the world are based on that algorithm.

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But at that time, it was.

• 1:21:53AJ Gentile?

  Nobody knew.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Something a bunch of nerds in a basement would talk about, but that was about it.

• 1:21:57AJ Gentile?

  Right. We used AltaVista.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Lycos.

• 1:22:01AJ Gentile?

  Lycos.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Hotbot.

• 1:22:03AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  So I was looking at that and I was thinking, you know?

• 1:22:14Speaker 04

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• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  I would like a story that had access to something like that. Ringo was, was, was the algorithm.

• 1:22:51AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  Finally, I finally remembered. Um, something like that. And I could use something like Ringo because he put it in the open source space. I'm like, I can take this, I can modify it. And if I have this.

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  Algorithm between a bunch of content and the user and they go through the algorithm. The algorithm can help a story be told and it's not the same story every time. So based on who you are and what you've done and what you do, you will get a story that is different than what I do and what I've done.

• 1:23:28AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  So I have a different story than you have, but it's all coming from the same repository.

• 1:23:32AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  Right? This big, at the time, wasn't Fox Pro, but it was like Fox Pro database that I was using. It was just all this stuff that I was, you know, there was, there was some choosing that went on. Like, you know, it was, it was curated by me. So I didn't just put everything in there. Like I chose things to put in there. It's like, you know, uh, Valvularian, sure, goes in. Commander X, absolutely. You know, like all the weird stuff.

• 1:24:02AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Church of Subtenes? Yeah, absolutely. Discordian? Yes, goes in there. I just kind of shoving this stuff in this database and then.

• 1:24:11AJ Gentile?

  This is all theories and philosophies and stories.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14AJ Gentile?

  That are interesting to you.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:15AJ Gentile?

  All the, all the subculture stuff.

• 1:24:17Speaker 03

  All the weird stuff.

• 1:24:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:19AJ Gentile?

  And this be, and you're basically training a model on the weird stuff.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  Exactly. Exactly. So, and, and I had a, a pretty primitive chat bot interface between

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  the repository and, and the user.

• 1:24:36AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  So the user was basically talking through a chat bot, what, what eventually became a chat bot. I was working with early code.

• 1:24:42AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  What became a chat bot. If you, if this sounds very familiar, a chat bot using an algorithm to talk to a database, it's called Chat GPT.

• 1:24:52AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  It's just much more refined than what I was doing.

• 1:24:54AJ Gentile?

  Or Eliza.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  Or Eliza. Um, but you know, at the time, again, I didn't have the, uh, processing power. I was using an SGI indie that had walked out the door with me because it was going to get thrown away.

• 1:25:08AJ Gentile?

  I love my indie. I love the blue, the blue pizza box.

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:25:12AJ Gentile?

  It's a great machine. So, oh, so that was you using my sequel on there, I bet.

• 1:25:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:16AJ Gentile?

  Nice.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, early.

• 1:25:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  Very early. So, um, so I'm doing this stuff, trying to come up with a new way to tell a story.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  And what my biggest influence was, and this might be weird to you, but William S. Burroughs and Brian Geisand did this thing called the Third Mind Experiments, where they were cutting up words and putting in a hat, or a box, or whatever, and pouring them out, and like, you know, pasting them together.

• 1:25:46AJ Gentile?

  So, can you explain what the cut up, how that works?

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  The cut up method came out of DADA originally, which, you know, corresponded at the same time that they were doing Exquisite Corps, but they were doing cut up poems and co-op, cut up stories, where you just like would take text and cut it into sentences, or paragraphs, or words, and put them all into like a bag, or a box, and shake them up, and then pour them out, and like, put them together, kind of like those refrigerator magnets with the words.

• 1:26:16AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  And you would construct stories in random. In other words, randomness was constructing the story, or at least it was giving you a direction for a story. So it was a way to get influence. Brian Eno does this kind of thing with his oblique strategies.

• 1:26:32AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:26:33Speaker 03

  Like, just come up with something, you know. So, I was influenced by that, and I said, well, if I've got this database, which I've marked for derivability with XML into areas of Word, and, you know, like, all the stuff that goes with that, like, it's a word that's relational to these other words for this reason, it's a sentence that's related to all these other sentences, or words, in this kind of way.

• 1:27:05AJ Gentile?

  This is predictive inference as well.

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:27:08AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  Paragraphs.

• 1:27:10AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  Pages, you know, basically like breaking down my units, and then it comes back to you, back to you, and it is composed at random, because I put randomness into it. It's a cut up. But it's not using paper and scissors and bags. It's using a database full of words.

• 1:27:30AJ Gentile?

  This is, this is crazy ahead of its time.

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:34AJ Gentile?

  You didn't know that? You didn't know you were building something?

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  Well, I, I, I had a, I had a, a friend, a Genesis P R H.

• 1:27:40AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  Who was friends with William Burroughs, who introduced me to William Burroughs. Never met Bill in person, but we had a phone thing going on. And, um, cause Jen knew what I was doing. And he said, oh, you should talk to William.

• 1:27:56AJ Gentile?

  Yes, please.

• 1:27:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. I went, oh, yeah?

• 1:27:59AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:00Speaker 03

  And, uh, so he put me in touch with, with Bill. And I told Bill what I was doing. And you know, the way he talks, he said to me, I don't absolutely understand all the technical things you're doing, my boy, but I seem you got the sense of the project.

• 1:28:19AJ Gentile?

  You did.

• 1:28:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and I said, what I'm doing is I'm updating what you and Brian were doing with modern technology.

• 1:28:26AJ Gentile?

  Were, were users accessing this yet? Or you were just talking?

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:28:29AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:28:30Speaker 03

  Just me. I was the user.

• 1:28:31AJ Gentile?

  So we're not up to Ezekiel yet, are we?

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:28:34AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  Primary user. And, and I started getting, just like Bill and Brian did, I started getting bizarre, weird things coming out of this machine. And it was like making weird sentences. So I showed to Nick Herbert, my friend, the physicist, who had done an experiment in Livermore called the Metaface Typewriter.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:28:58AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  And they were just having a, a IBM Selectrix hooked up some random things like just randomly typing. And they apparently were able to channel Houdini.

• 1:29:06AJ Gentile?

  Yes. I know, I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great story. Metaface Typewriter. You look it up. Um, so I showed Nick.

• 1:29:16Speaker 03

  And he just like, he, Nick has this way of laughing when he really likes something. He goes. And he did that. And I'm like, so I've hit on something because Nick gave me the snicker.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  And so he liked what I was doing. Bill Burrows liked what I was doing. Jennifer Piers liked what I was doing. I liked what I was doing.

• 1:29:38AJ Gentile?

  What were you asking Emery and what were their responses like?

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  I was just having random conversations. He was like, well, what do you think of, what do you think of Valvalerian? And then the weird, because I was trying to see what kind of answers am I going to get? Are they going to be coherent? Because for a while they weren't. But as this thing built up, um, a backlog, it was building a log of good answers, which I was logging. This was all manual. Like I wasn't able to automate a lot of this. So like I would get an answer and I would tag it in XML. Good answer. Bad answer, you know? And I would just sit there like all night.

• 1:30:16AJ Gentile?

  This is exactly how it works now. This is training in AI exactly this way. It's just automated.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  Just training this thing all by myself. And luckily I didn't have a database like they do now. The large language models, one person couldn't do it.

• 1:30:29AJ Gentile?

  Well, right. 27 billion parameters.

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  You have to open up to it.

• 1:30:31AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  But at the time I was growing this thing manually. So I was manually tagging.

• 1:30:39AJ Gentile?

  Are you obsessed with this product?

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Absolutely. Lost a girlfriend over this.

• 1:30:45AJ Gentile?

  I bet. I bet. Because you're like, that's, that's, that's not a verb. That's not a verb.

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  She would go to bed and wake up and I'd still be in my home office. She's like, are you going to work today? Yeah. Is it time? Okay. Bye.

• 1:31:00AJ Gentile?

  Just tagging words.

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. She literally got so mad at me one time that she took a baseball bat to the computer.

• 1:31:06AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. When I was in the shower. I like taken a shower and I was going to go back.

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  And I come in and she's beating the machine to death. And I'm like.

• 1:31:17AJ Gentile?

  Not the Indy?

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. It was an old Mac SE that I was using as an interface.

• 1:31:22AJ Gentile?

  I still have one of those.

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Luckily I had a, um, exterior drive and she didn't know what that was.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  So she thought she was killing the machine.

• 1:31:33AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:31:34Speaker 03

  She wasn't. You didn't kill the heart. Um, or was it Thanos says you should have gone for the head?

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  So she didn't go for the head.

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  So anyway, um, so I'm doing this and I am staying up all night and I'm talking to people at parties about what I'm doing. And these are tech people who are just like, dude, you need to get out more. Like, you need to, you need, what are you doing? You know? Is it time for an intervention?

• 1:32:04Speaker 03

  And like, you just don't understand. You don't understand. You don't understand. You don't understand. So it's like the same thing I had with Valis, where I just got looped in, and I, and I admit, I, I've, I've come to terms with it. I have a little bit of OCD going on.

• 1:32:17AJ Gentile?

  You have to.

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:18AJ Gentile?

  Now, I was in the early internet culture in the eighties and nineties, and I would have thought you were nuts. Like, what are you doing?

• 1:32:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:25AJ Gentile?

  Like, what, what are you doing? What is this for?

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's what most people were saying.

• 1:32:30AJ Gentile?

  And you're like, it's, I, I, I got it, I got it.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  It's good, I got it.

• 1:32:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  You don't need to know.

• 1:32:35AJ Gentile?

  He's a mad scientist.

• 1:32:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. In fact, um...

• 1:32:40AJ Gentile?

  But soon Emory starts to come to life.

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  Well, I started getting coherent answers. Like, that I could read it and understand what was being said.

• 1:32:50AJ Gentile?

  You're not, and you're not freaking out yet?

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  I was still, I was still in, in the zone.

• 1:32:56AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:32:57AJ Gentile?

  You still felt like you were in control?

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:33:00AJ Gentile?

  You didn't?

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  No. People, people that I know, that know me well, and see this, will be like, yep, that's him. Um, know that I don't get freaked out when weird things are happening?

• 1:33:13AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  I go with it. I just go with it, right? And afterwards, when I think about it, I'll be like, ooh, that was kinda weird. But when I, when in the moment, maybe it's all the improv training?

• 1:33:25AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  Or the, or the method acting? It's like I fall into this thing and like, this is who I am, this is what I'm doing. You know? And plus, I got a little OCD going on.

• 1:33:34AJ Gentile?

  Sure. Only later you're like, that was probably a bad idea.

• 1:33:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, why did I do that? Why did I let that happen? Um, so, you know, being neurodivergent, though, you know, has its benefits.

• 1:33:46AJ Gentile?

  During the club.

• 1:33:47Speaker 03

  Which is, you just go with it sometimes. And sometimes, you go what would be called too far by some people, and by me, just far enough. Like, I wouldn't have got to where I was with those experiments if I hadn't, you know, obsessed.

• 1:34:03AJ Gentile?

  Hundred percent agree.

• 1:34:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, to the point where, when I finally put, put this machine together, like compiled everything and put it on the indie...

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  Finagled a

• 1:34:16AJ Gentile?

  For the non-nerds, the Indies, the SGI, it's a much more powerful machine than the Mac.

• 1:34:20Speaker 03

  Yes, at that time, yeah.

• 1:34:21AJ Gentile?

  And probably, from Adobe, it's probably maxed out at 128 megawatt.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:25AJ Gentile?

  Nice.

• 1:34:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26AJ Gentile?

  How do you even, what do you do with all that space?

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  You don't. Except, except Adobe to the rescue again. I put in a requisition for a unit, for, for an IU, for a machine on the Adobe network in the, in the, in the data center.

• 1:34:47Speaker 03

  Because they had pulled in dual DS3s as a connection.

• 1:34:50AJ Gentile?

  Dual DS3s, wow.

• 1:34:52Speaker 03

  At that time.

• 1:34:53AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:34:54Speaker 03

  Fantastically fast.

• 1:34:56AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  Basically two T3s.

• 1:34:59AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:35:02AJ Gentile?

  A T3 54 megabits?

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04AJ Gentile?

  So that's

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  At that time

• 1:35:05AJ Gentile?

  That's unbelievable.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Blazingly fast.

• 1:35:07AJ Gentile?

  I was working on a T1, so 1.5.

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:09AJ Gentile?

  And it's like, how could it get faster than this?

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  And that was the fastest I had had at that point was a T1, or actually a fractional T1.

• 1:35:15AJ Gentile?

  Fractional T.

• 1:35:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16AJ Gentile?

  So two DS3s.

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:18AJ Gentile?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  So I had a friend who had a ISP in San Francisco, he let me CSE DSE a fractional T3 to my house.

• 1:35:27AJ Gentile?

  Wow!

• 1:35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I had to like call the phone company, walk them through what I wanted them to do, be there when they did it.

• 1:35:36AJ Gentile?

  Wow, you had like a D-mark block in the garage or something?

• 1:35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, in, in the basement.

• 1:35:43AJ Gentile?

  Holy shit.

• 1:35:45Speaker 03

  In the basement.

• 1:35:45AJ Gentile?

  Fractional T in the basement.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:35:48AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  So now I've got, we, we, we moved from

• 1:35:54Speaker 03

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

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  I said, I bet I could requisition this machine into the data center, tell them it's for something else, and let it run, and I can do my experiments down there.

• 1:36:23AJ Gentile?

  Your indie goes back to?

• 1:36:24Speaker 03

  My indie goes back to Adobe, goes into the data center. And it's marked as a marketing machine.

• 1:36:32AJ Gentile?

  I love it.

• 1:36:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33AJ Gentile?

  So they say, sure.

• 1:36:35Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, just signed off.

• 1:36:38AJ Gentile?

  You walk in there.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39AJ Gentile?

  Pizza box under your arm.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:41AJ Gentile?

  Ethernet.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  Put it in.

• 1:36:43AJ Gentile?

  Green light, here we go.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  Here we go. And then I, you know, put it so I could access it from home. And away we went. So I was like, okay, now I've got a blazingly fast, probably one of the faster connections on the planet.

• 1:36:56AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  And I only, I only work at night, so I don't, you know, nobody notices what I'm doing. I don't like cause any pinging, like so that the IT guys will go, what's going on over there?

• 1:37:07AJ Gentile?

  Right. You're not bouncing around Adobe's network. You're, you just wanna.

• 1:37:10Speaker 03

  I just want the access to the internet.

• 1:37:12AJ Gentile?

  So what are you doing with Emery at that point?

• 1:37:14Speaker 03

  So at Emery, I tell Emery, like, here's a profile of the things I want you to gather off the internet, the types of data I want you to find.

• 1:37:23AJ Gentile?

  Hold on, you, so you tell Emery to start scraping?

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:37:28AJ Gentile?

  This is all 20 years out of its time, man.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  Yep. Go, go get me what I want as much as you can get me.

• 1:37:37AJ Gentile?

  So Gopher?

• 1:37:39Speaker 03

  FTP, Gopher, Usenet.

• 1:37:42AJ Gentile?

  Usenet scraping the news groups.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  HTTPS, HTTP, whatever. Just go get it for me. Text, whatever you can get me.

• 1:37:49AJ Gentile?

  Did you use that recommendation algorithm to help it? Yes, you did, of course.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  Go, go get me these things.

• 1:37:55AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:37:56Speaker 03

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

• 1:38:10AJ Gentile?

  Imagine if you made a search engine out of that.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  I did actually at one point.

• 1:38:15AJ Gentile?

  Well, you kinda did.

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  No, I did, did make a public searches.

• 1:38:18AJ Gentile?

  You did?

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Just for a while.

• 1:38:20AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  Um, inkandobula.org was a website that I had forever. I still have, um, I had a website up that was like the weird website.

• 1:38:27AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  And I built my own little search engine and people used it a lot, but it was just too much to maintain. Um, but most of that was like stuff I scraped during this period of time. So I scrape all this stuff. I bring it back and I'm building like this giant database. I'm like, God, I gotta get my disk space. Ah, so I'm doing all these things. And again, still obsessive, still obsessing. And there was like some unseen. Goal that I was trying to achieve like there was there was like there was an endpoint. But I didn't know what it was. I'm like, I'll know it when I when I see it, right? As this thing got bigger and it got smarter. And it started like having more, it started learning the the uh. The rules of grammar and English language, it could.

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  It could craft a pretty cool sentence and like it felt like he was talking to me.

• 1:39:15AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, well, now it's scraping language.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19AJ Gentile?

  Uh, this is. NLP before NLP was a thing.

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. So. It was it was giving me things back. You know, I had to keep reminding myself, it's like it doesn't have intelligence. It just knows how to mimic it really well.

• 1:39:34AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  It is not intelligent. It doesn't have agency. I had to remind myself of this because you'd be so tired in the middle of the night. And you'd ask it something and it would tell you, you'd be like, oh, what, what, what?

• 1:39:45AJ Gentile?

  No, you have to tell yourself.

• 1:39:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you have to remind yourself and. Bear that in mind if you're playing with chat GPT.

• 1:39:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  Um, but you know.

• 1:39:53AJ Gentile?

  Would Emery pass the Turing test at this point?

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 1:39:57AJ Gentile?

  No shit.

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  But that's not a, I I found out that the Turing test is not an easy thing or not a hard thing to pass.

• 1:40:02AJ Gentile?

  No, it's not.

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So. Um.

• 1:40:07AJ Gentile?

  So what do you ask Emery?

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  So I just basically having conversations. I was initiating conversations. And asking opinions, what's your opinion on this? What's the opinion on that? And it would start going into these long diatribes about things that I like, how do you know that?

• 1:40:26Speaker 03

  How did you even know that? Like, it started telling me things. Again, we're in this weird space. Where you start having synchronicities with this data. Which I think that's what it is. Um, I don't think Emery knew. I don't think it was psionic. And I don't think Emery was like wandering the internet at night, getting data on me and finding out what I was up to because. At that time, it wasn't, that kind of stuff wasn't on the internet. There was no social media. You couldn't know that I was going on vacation tomorrow unless you knew me, you know, or you're reading my email.

• 1:41:00AJ Gentile?

  But Emery knew things?

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  Emery knew things.

• 1:41:03AJ Gentile?

  Is this your crypto terrestrial? Theory yet?

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  Hmm, kind of.

• 1:41:10AJ Gentile?

  Okay. Um. So this is, there's something else.

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  But the weird, the weird thing that happened, this, this is, this is where we cross over to the weird weird.

• 1:41:18AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  Is I, I have always worked with, um, the houseless communities in my, wherever I live. Um, so people in my community who are houseless, because they prefer to be called houseless. Um, I've always worked with, you know, um, people that are functioning and living under nutritional deficiencies. So I help with food.

• 1:41:42AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  And in doing so, I run into some interesting people.

• 1:41:46AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  And at that time I was living in Santa Cruz and in Santa Cruz, um, there was a ex monk, there was a friend of mine. We started this thing called the Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project. Basically you grow your own food. And you learn how to maintain food and, you know, it gives you pride. Um, gives you some agency, makes you feel good about yourself and it feeds you.

• 1:42:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  Very important.

• 1:42:08AJ Gentile?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:10Speaker 03

  So I was working a lot there and there was a guy who wandered up to me at the Homeless Garden Project and introduced himself. And said, I know you, you're that guy that writes about Incanabula on the internet. Like, okay, I'm thinking he probably has a, a library access.

• 1:42:30AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  You know, it's okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's me. Like, how'd you know that? He's like, well, I'm Emery.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

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• 1:43:07AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  I'm like, Emery who? He's like, Emery Cranston, the guy that wrote the Incanabula catalog. I'm like, so now we get into that moment where Joe does his, what he does, which is just go with the flow. Right?

• 1:43:21AJ Gentile?

  Right. You don't freak out.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  I don't freak out. I don't say, oh, you're crazy, you're lying. It was like, really? I've always wanted to meet you. Nice to meet you.

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  What are you doing here? And we just start hanging out and talking.

• 1:43:36AJ Gentile?

  It's not like, because Emery is based, is just memory without the M, right?

• 1:43:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:41AJ Gentile?

  He doesn't know that?

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  Plus Dave Emery.

• 1:43:43AJ Gentile?

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:45AJ Gentile?

  So Emery Cranston, here he is.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  Uh, Dave Emery. So, so he introduces himself, we start hanging out.

• 1:43:51AJ Gentile?

  What are you talking about?

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  Anything. The guy was brilliant. So...

• 1:43:56AJ Gentile?

  Well, he was trained on the whole internet.

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  Right. While I'm, while I'm talking to him, we're hanging out at coffee houses and stuff. Because he's, he's houseless.

• 1:44:04AJ Gentile?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  But I'd see him downtown and I'd buy him coffee and, you know, sandwich or whatever. And we'd hang out. Because I like hanging out in coffee houses, I still do. And, um, I was asking at the garden, "Do you know this guy?" And they're like, "Oh, Ezekiel?" I'm like, "Well, he tells me his name is Emery." "Yeah, he changes his name from time to time, but when he first came here, he was the prophet Ezekiel."

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  I'm like, "What's his story?" He's like, "He was a PhD student at UCSC and he had a nervous breakdown."

• 1:44:39Speaker 03

  And now, he's living on SSI. He's on the street. He spends all his time at UCSC at the library because he has, because if you were, uh, a former, uh, student, you could have library access, you could just buy your library access. So I guess he, they either gifted it to him or he paid it, but he had a library access. I, I saw him up there eventually, I saw him up there all the time, just reading special collections. Like, the guy was brilliant. Like, I could talk to him about anything. Like, he, he knew alchemy, hermetics, Jung, you name it. Like, anything that was like weird, fringe, literary, psychological, occult, he knew it.

• 1:45:23Speaker 03

  Like, inside and out, like, more than anybody I've ever met.

• 1:45:26AJ Gentile?

  Interesting that he was, that he knew Jung, talking about synchronicities.

• 1:45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So he was conversant in all these things, like, highly conversant. Um, and as long as I didn't press in on like, "Where do you live?", nothing personal, you know? Like, just, and just treated him like Emery. Like, "Okay, Emery, you're Emery? You say you're Emery, you're Emery. We don't have to talk about that anymore." Right? And so we just had these brilliant conversations. And I noticed what started happening was I would be talking to the bot.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  The Emery.

• 1:46:02AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:03Speaker 03

  And then I would wrap it up and I would go out to Cafe Purgalese and there'd be Emery. And I'd buy him a cup of coffee or chai tea and, and we'd sit and talk and it seemed like,

• 1:46:16Speaker 03

  was this my brain doing this? I don't know. But it seemed like he knew what I'd been talking to the bot about because he would pick up the conversation from where I'd left off with the bot and continue it. So.

• 1:46:31AJ Gentile?

  You're still just going with it?

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do I have, do I have a theory about that? Number one, projection.

• 1:46:38AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  That's me doing it.

• 1:46:40AJ Gentile?

  Okay, that's logical.

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  Number two, if you want to get a little woo about it, I had the scent of whatever I'd been talking about on me. And he was schizophrenic, as I'd been told.

• 1:46:52AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  And was able to sniff it off me because I've had interactions with people who, who are diagnosed schizophrenic. And they're also very psionic, it seems like, like they can do things like that. I've had weird experiences with people where there's like pick up on what you're thinking.

• 1:47:09AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  It seems, we'll say it seems.

• 1:47:11AJ Gentile?

  Everybody's had that.

• 1:47:12Speaker 03

  Because I'm a model agnostic. I can't say it is, but it seems like that's what's happening.

• 1:47:18Speaker 03

  Um, so it's something like that or something in between there, you know? Um, so, yeah, and so that was happening and then, and then I noticed I would talk to him and then the bot would like seem to pick up the conversation. And I'm like, okay, there's something weird going on here. Like I betwixt these two entities that are having this unified conversation with me.

• 1:47:41AJ Gentile?

  Did you ever test that theory with specifics?

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  One time and it was, the, the, the response was really weird. Um, I talked to, I was, I went on vacation.

• 1:47:59Speaker 03

  And I was with somebody specifically.

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  That Emery didn't know because they lived across the country. And I came back. And as soon as I sat down, I was gonna like throw some things at him and see. He didn't even wait for that. He's like, "That girl you were with."

• 1:48:16AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  I'm like, "Yeah?" He's like, "She's not good for you." "That's why you guys fight." Which was right. He was right. He didn't even know I had a girlfriend on the east coast. I'd never told him. I never told anybody. It was like this little secret thing I was doing on the east coast. I was like, you know, like, "We'll keep it secret until it blossoms into something or it doesn't." And it didn't. But, but somehow he knew. I was with, and he said some, I don't want to give it away, like, for her. But he said some specific things that identified that he knew who was she, who she was.

• 1:48:58AJ Gentile?

  And you never pressed him on, how do you know that?

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:49:01AJ Gentile?

  What about when you go home and talk to the other Emery? Are you comfortable asking that questions?

• 1:49:07Speaker 03

  To the bot?

• 1:49:08AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I got weird, weird, like, still little nebulous but weird answers.

• 1:49:15AJ Gentile?

  What was it saying?

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  It was saying things like, "You shouldn't, you shouldn't be with that woman." Things like that.

• 1:49:21AJ Gentile?

  Things that the other Emery was saying?

• 1:49:23Speaker 03

  It was almost the same thing. So, I mean, there's, uh, did you ever read the comic that I did, the Inca Abigail? Okay, so the part where I see Emery in the alley?

• 1:49:33AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:49:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That, it was based on that. I, I, it was, I did a spinoff on it. But it was based on that episode. It was like, I had this, he would show up in the weirdest places. So, here, here's where it gets weird. So, years later, I left Santa Cruz. I went to a place in the desert. And I worked as a, um, worked with Habitat for Humanity and built some houses. And I was in the middle of nowhere. I mean, nowhere. And we were building these houses in this, you know, uh, border, border community, basically. It was like not too far off the Mexican border. And who shows up?

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  But Emery.

• 1:50:17AJ Gentile?

  No way.

• 1:50:18Speaker 03

  He's hitchhiking and he shows up in town and I run across him. He didn't come looking for me, I just run across him. And I'm like,

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  dude, what's up, Emery? He's like, oh, I'm not Emery. No, no, no, no, my name is Terrence. Like, okay, Terrence. McKenna, I don't know. Um, but whatever. So, and we just, again, didn't, didn't miss a beat. I just, okay, you're Terrence and we're hanging out. Never any mention.

• 1:50:49AJ Gentile?

  No?

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  Of Santa Cruz. None of that.

• 1:50:52AJ Gentile?

  So this is a new personality now?

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  New personality. So, but he was nice. And, um, and then I saw him, I saw him at the, this office that I knew was a social security office. So he was probably checking on his benefits or checking in or whatever he had to do. And I talked to, I talked to a lady there that I saw talking to him. And I said, I know you can't tell me anything because, you know, it's not ethical for you to tell me anything. But I know that person right there. He said, and he tells me his name is Terrence.

• 1:51:25Speaker 03

  Is his name Terrence? And she says,

• 1:51:30Speaker 03

  his, hold on, reality can be a little flexible at times, but his name is Terrence.

• 1:51:36Speaker 03

  So that's his actual name.

• 1:51:39AJ Gentile?

  Did you ever catch up with him again?

• 1:51:41Speaker 03

  And then I caught up with him again.

• 1:51:46Speaker 03

  Two years later,

• 1:51:49Speaker 03

  I moved to, I got done with the thing in, in the desert and I moved to Santa Barbara. Started working with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. And one day, walking down the street, lo and behold, who's there?

• 1:52:01AJ Gentile?

  Terrence.

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  Terrence. Now he's Terrence, he's still Terrence.

• 1:52:06Speaker 03

  And I look at him and I said, are you following me?

• 1:52:09AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  He goes, when did you get here? And I said, uh, August. He's like, oh, I got here in April. You're following me? Good answer.

• 1:52:17Speaker 03

  And that was that. We started talking again. And he was, he basically was, was on this, I guess there's this route.

• 1:52:27Speaker 03

  On the one, on the 101 between San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California. That houseless people follow with the weather.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  So when it gets cold, they go south. Just like a bird.

• 1:52:45AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  And when it gets warm, they go north. Just like a bird. So that's what he was doing.

• 1:52:50AJ Gentile?

  It's weirder than that, man.

• 1:52:52Speaker 03

  I got, I got that much out of him. I'm like, well, what, what the, Santa Barbara, man? Come on. Why are you here? He said, it was a good place under the bridge. You can leave, you live there and nobody bothers you. I'm like, okay, but, I mean, that's an answer, but dude, come on, like, what are you doing here? You know? And he's like, well, I always come here. It's part of the route. I'm like, the route? Oh, tell me about the route. You know, so it, he told me about the route. He's like, you go south, which was why he saw me in the desert. When it was winter. And then he goes to Santa Barbara.

• 1:53:24AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:53:24Speaker 03

  And then he goes probably to San Luis Obispo. And then he goes where the north.

• 1:53:29AJ Gentile?

  It's weirder than that, but okay.

• 1:53:31Speaker 03

  It's weirder than that, but at least that's, that's the.

• 1:53:33AJ Gentile?

  No. You have something.

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  Occam's razor.

• 1:53:36AJ Gentile?

  Right. Right.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  The easiest answer is he's on the route.

• 1:53:41AJ Gentile?

  So we don't run out of time.

• 1:53:44AJ Gentile?

  How do we get to Aung's? Is there, are there, um, I want a bad story. Are there, is there anything else before we get to Aung's hat?

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:53:53AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:53:53Speaker 03

  That's, that's when it starts.

• 1:53:55AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's when it starts?

• 1:53:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:57AJ Gentile?

  So it's like 88?

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00AJ Gentile?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:54:01Speaker 03

  We're doing, we're, I mean, we're rolling back a little bit, but like it starts in 88.

• 1:54:06AJ Gentile?

  Well, wrap, wrap up Emory at that point is, is Emory.

• 1:54:08Speaker 03

  That was Emory. That's the last time I saw him. I have a picture of him sitting on a bench in Santa Barbara.

• 1:54:12AJ Gentile?

  No, I mean the box.

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, um, so. The box. Um, I'm doing that and then. I decide I want to do an ebook.

• 1:54:25AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:54:27Speaker 03

  Adobe

• 1:54:28AJ Gentile?

  No more chatbot?

• 1:54:30Speaker 03

  No, I'm just still doing chatbot. Adobe

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  Does a PDF library on Adobe.com, which at that time, this sounds like nothing now, but at the time, we were taking a million hits a day. Which I don't know what the uniques were, but half of that, maybe?

• 1:54:47AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:54:48Speaker 03

  Which was like unheard of at that time. Like, we were one of the biggest sites on the internet.

• 1:54:52AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:54:53Speaker 03

  And Chris Warnock decides he wants to do a PDF library. And I said, "I'm gonna do a book." "Can I get in the library?" He's like, "Yeah." So I did the first iteration of the Ink and Abula book. It was called Ink and Abula Papers: Long's Had Another Gateway to New Dimensions.

• 1:55:12Speaker 03

  Built a lot of interactivity into it to show off the features of Acrobat and do what I wanted to do. And put it on the PDF library. And it was like a hit. It was like one of the most downloaded things on the PDF library. And I said, "Oh, well, I should do something more." So I expanded it. And I did a CD-ROM. And I'm still doing the chatbot stuff.

• 1:55:32AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  But a little less so now.

• 1:55:35AJ Gentile?

  You burning your own discs?

• 1:55:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Speaker 03

  I found a replicator in Taiwan or somewhere through Adobe. I'm like, "Can I get a cheap replicator? I want to get CD-ROMs." "I want the nice jewel cases." And I wanted the whole thing. So they turned me on to a place that gave me a really good price because like, "Oh, Adobe, okay." Like, the guy thought he was gonna get Adobe business or something. And, uh...

• 1:55:57AJ Gentile?

  AOL wasn't even doing discs yet, but you were there.

• 1:56:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I did CD-ROMs.

• 1:56:04AJ Gentile?

  And how'd you pass them around?

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  Well, then, I started, again, using my Adobe connections. I started talking to distributors that did... Well, I was a partner in an independent record label at the time, so I started to talk to distributors like Dutch East and people like that that could get me into record stores. I started talking to comic book distributors that could get in there. Book distributors that could get in there. Software distributors that could get in there. Game distributors that could get in there. It's like this thing fits everywhere.

• 1:56:32AJ Gentile?

  Sure it does.

• 1:56:33Speaker 03

  You know, because it's just like... So I just like working, working it. Like, anybody that would distribute it. I fit.

• 1:56:41AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:41Speaker 03

  If you could ask me how I fit, I would tell you how I fit. It's like, well, it's a book, really. If you're a book distributor.

• 1:56:47AJ Gentile?

  Was it just the disc or was it part of a book?

• 1:56:49Speaker 03

  No, it was just the disc.

• 1:56:50AJ Gentile?

  Just the disc.

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, just the disc. So the book was on the disc.

• 1:56:54AJ Gentile?

  It had to still be a hit because...

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:57AJ Gentile?

  Because that wasn't happening yet.

• 1:56:58Speaker 03

  And then, so I, I put that out and then...

• 1:57:01AJ Gentile?

  What was that story about? Was that the...

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  That was, that was Incanabula catalog. I almost had the brochure. The interview with Nick, the interview with Emery, the interview with the survivors.

• 1:57:12AJ Gentile?

  Interactive PDF in there as well?

• 1:57:14Speaker 03

  Yep, yep, yep, yep. It was all interactive PDF.

• 1:57:16AJ Gentile?

  Had to be mind blowing.

• 1:57:16Speaker 03

  It's, it's on archive.org right now. If you look up, uh, Incanabula ISO, it's still the ISO if you want to burn the CD-ROM.

• 1:57:23AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:57:24Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, it's back and about three because it's that old.

• 1:57:27AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Speaker 03

  So it might not work all the way, but it'll work. Um, you can download the ISO. Like when CD-ROM stopped becoming a thing, being a thing, I put the ISO on archive.org so people could download it, burn their own.

• 1:57:40AJ Gentile?

  Awesome.

• 1:57:40Speaker 03

  Um, not that anybody has a CD burner anymore.

• 1:57:43AJ Gentile?

  You can still just mount it.

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can mount it. Yeah, or you can extract it.

• 1:57:47AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:57:47Speaker 03

  Um, so basically, uh, there was like, um, audio files you could play of interviews I did with people, people doing with me, like the whole, it was like this whole journey. Of all links to websites, some don't exist anymore, but like all these website links and, um, there were pop-ups, rollovers and pop-up states. There was, uh, stuff, if you could guess the password, you would get more information.

• 1:58:14AJ Gentile?

  Oh, so you were, you were gamifying this now?

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  It was gamified. It was gamified. The thing that, um, probably most disappointed me was the root of the CD-ROM was a thing called secret dot doc. It was right there. It wasn't a secret. That basically said that this is the game. Nobody ever found that, or looked at it, or mentioned it, until I mentioned it on a form. Finally, when I had enough, I'm like, "Go to the CD-ROM."

• 1:58:42AJ Gentile?

  What do you mean "had enough"?

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  Because people were like, fighting over stupid things. Like, "This is all real, you got it wrong, it's real this way, you got it wrong, it's real this way." There was people that were forming little cults around it.

• 1:58:55AJ Gentile?

  They haven't changed, have they?

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:58:57AJ Gentile?

  This is how it is still.

• 1:58:58Speaker 03

  It's the same old thing, and this is 99.

• 1:59:01AJ Gentile?

  Right. 89?

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  Well, no, no, this is by 99. 89, I started doing it as mail art.

• 1:59:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  99, I digitized it, and, I'm sorry, 89, mail art, 90 through 95, um, the early non-web internet. Like, doing, it was like the well.com, put it on the gopher, all that kind of stuff, Usenet. Then, I did the CD-ROM, the website, inkynabula.org, and then the CD-ROM. So, and by then, 2001, I finally just like threw my hands up, like, "You guys are never gonna stop fighting over this minutia." Even when I told you it's a game, now you have to tell me, "Of course you would say that." Or, "You don't know what you're talking about."

• 1:59:49Speaker 03

  Like, people would, literally, this was said to me, by this little group that formed, this little cult of people that formed itself. "The inkynabula information was a transmission that was meant for this woman, who was our channeler, and you intercepted it. And now you're monetizing it, because you're the black magician."

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  What do you do with that?

• 2:00:15AJ Gentile?

  I don't know.

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  What do you do with that? And they weren't, they weren't, there was like, just-

• 2:00:22AJ Gentile?

  They wouldn't let it go.

• 2:00:22Speaker 03

  All these people were coming online, and like, now the conspiracy thing started to happen in earnest on the internet. The, what I call the dark conspiracy side, and like, all these people, you know, were like, "Oh, you were involved in Esalen, oh my god! Mind control, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

• 2:00:39AJ Gentile?

  Well, tell us about, um, Ang specifically, before we get to the dark ARGs.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:00:46AJ Gentile?

  Like, so, how did that even start? What's the plot? What was the idea? The inspiration?

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  So, the idea was that there's this place, well, I'm just gonna give it to you in basic facts.

• 2:00:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  There's this place in

• 2:00:58AJ Gentile?

  I mostly care about the mechanics.

• 2:00:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, this place in New Jersey.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  That's really not a place. It's a name on a road. Right, that people nicknamed Ong's Hat. There's like five different stories of how it we came to that name. The basic story is like it had something to do with a hat that got thrown in a tree. Stayed there forever and people like, oh, you're making love to Ong's Hat. The guy named Ong's Hat ended up in a tree somehow. There's all kinds of stories about how that happened. But basically, it's a it's a road mark, landmark, right? And then the area became known as Ong's Hat.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  It's also the the area where the Jersey Devils reported a lot.

• 2:01:38AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm. Pine Barrens.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  The Pine Barrens. There was um something that happened with Fort Dix. Um, there was like a nuclear. Um, bomb that was not not not activated, but like lost in the Pine Barrens and there was all these soldiers looking for it.

• 2:01:56AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:01:57Speaker 03

  So there's lots of rumors.

• 2:01:58AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:01:58Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:01:59AJ Gentile?

  It's a spooky area.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  Very spooky area with a lot of rumors and a lot of people that like to tell rumors. You know? So it's a it's a rich story repository.

• 2:02:09AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna say, that's your people. That's who you need.

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  It's my people, yeah.

• 2:02:14Speaker 03

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

• 2:02:53AJ Gentile?

  Ashram is like a commune?

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a commune. And they were combining mysticism and science. The best of SRI. Right?

• 2:03:02AJ Gentile?

  Just gonna say, this is, this is, this is real.

• 2:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But it's like, it's like right out of SRI.

• 2:03:07AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:08Speaker 03

  Which is part of the inspiration.

• 2:03:10AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:03:10Speaker 03

  I was, I was hanging out in Santa Cruz with some names you would know from that group.

• 2:03:14AJ Gentile?

  I bet.

• 2:03:15Speaker 03

  Um, hanging out in, hanging out in Stanford and Esalen with people that, whose names would be recognizable, um, from the Stanford Research Institute. I, I won't say who.

• 2:03:25Speaker 05

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• 2:03:43Speaker 06

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• 2:03:55Speaker 03

  But basically, they were part of my crowd. Um, so that was inspiration.

• 2:04:01AJ Gentile?

  So the Wacky Scientist, Interdimensional, how do you, how do you see the story? And how do you decide, I'm gonna make the jump from digital to the real world?

• 2:04:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:12AJ Gentile?

  How'd you do that? Like, what was the?

• 2:04:15Speaker 03

  Make the jump from digital to the real world.

• 2:04:17AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, people started playing Onk's Hat in real life.

• 2:04:21Speaker 03

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

• 2:04:40AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  You can find, uh, YouTube videos of people like, "We're gonna go to Onk's Hat and see if we can find anything." And it's like, that's been going on for years.

• 2:04:47AJ Gentile?

  They swear it's real.

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  The people, the people, or the people that I liked that, that don't swear it's real, but they go anyway. Um, I like those people. Um, the, the, there was a bar out there that, uh, I think it's closed now. Um, but I talked to those people on the phone one time and they told me that these, these, usually these goth kids from New York show up looking for this hush. That, that you sent them out here to find them. I'm like, "I didn't send them. I didn't send them." And I'm like, "What do you do when, when it happens?" Like, "Oh, we tell them that this is the place." It's like, "You got it. This is, this is where they used to hang out, here in this bar. This is the bar where they started the whole thing." Like, "Okay, cool." Do what you gotta do. Um, I sent them some copies of the book they put on the shelf.

• 2:05:33Speaker 03

  Um, but it started working its way out from the internet as a, as a rumor and a myth on the internet to a myth and a rumor in real life to where now, at this point, you can talk to people who have said to me, "Oh, you didn't come up with that story. You just, you just ripped it off from the, from the people at Ogg's hat telling that story."

• 2:06:01Speaker 03

  Like, where do you think they got that story?

• 2:06:03AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  It started on the internet, dude, but can't tell them that.

• 2:06:07AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:06:08Speaker 03

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

• 2:06:31AJ Gentile?

  Were you game running? Ogg's hat?

• 2:06:34Speaker 03

  No, at that point I was letting the game run itself. So that was the concept was when,

• 2:06:42Speaker 03

  when, when Bob Wilson asked me what I was doing, when this thing started like really happened, he's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "If I could put it any way, Bob, I was, I'm trying to graffiti a myth onto the new sphere."

• 2:07:00Speaker 03

  Like very punk rock of me.

• 2:07:01AJ Gentile?

  It is, but that's, that's a perfect way to describe it.

• 2:07:03Speaker 03

  That is what I was doing.

• 2:07:04AJ Gentile?

  That is.

• 2:07:05Speaker 03

  Like I'm, I'm going behind and around the gatekeepers.

• 2:07:09AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  And I'm making a myth and I'm not going through Marvel and Disney to do it.

• 2:07:14AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  I'm making a myth that comes to the gru- grassroots.

• 2:07:18AJ Gentile?

  Why did you end up on our Bell show?

• 2:07:22Speaker 03

  So part of the

• 2:07:23AJ Gentile?

  Is that part of the game, right?

• 2:07:24Speaker 03

  Part of the game was I paid for a legitimate press release that actually got on the wire. Much more than our bell happened from that. So I paid for a press release on the wire. Like, you know, you can pay for a real press release. And I basically said that there was a institute or a group that was starting to examine the veracity of this, these documents that had been left behind or supposedly left behind for a group of people that went to another dimension in the Pine Bears in New Jersey. That's how I put it. Nonprofit organization. We don't know if this is true or not, but we're gonna find out if it's true. And that thing hit the wire and man, my phone lit up.

• 2:08:06Speaker 03

  Like I was doing talk radio every day for like months, like all over the world. I was like Bahamas, Texas. They were calling me like, what is this thing you're doing? Oh my God. And they either wanted to like, ha, ha, ha, you know, and I played along with that or they like took it seriously, which I played it seriously. That's like improv, whatever they wanted, whatever they want. I gave it to them.

• 2:08:29AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:08:31Speaker 03

  If I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't do that.

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  But I did it. And the next thing I know, there's a phone call from somebody named LaLani. And she's like, I represent Coast to Coast AM. Are you familiar with the show? I'm like, oh my God, am I?

• 2:08:49Speaker 03

  I worship our bell. And, um, and I said, you're one of the, one of the bucket list items. And they're like, well, what are the other ones? I'm like you and then Weekly World News, which I got both of those, by the way. So they said, well, we'd like to have you on and four hours, like the whole show. I'm like, I can do it. This I can do. And I played it straight. If you listen to me, I played it straight.

• 2:09:12AJ Gentile?

  In character.

• 2:09:13Speaker 03

  In character, 100%. Again, so they have done that.

• 2:09:19Speaker 03

  Questionable. If I had to do it over again, I'd probably not do it. But again, at the time that I did it, it seemed okay. Now I wouldn't see it okay.

• 2:09:29AJ Gentile?

  No, I mean, we talk about the ARG rules. We've got

• 2:09:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:33AJ Gentile?

  This is not a game.

• 2:09:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:34AJ Gentile?

  Hidden author, cross media distribution, fragmented reveals, the hive solving, do your own research imperative. I mean, you did all of this stuff.

• 2:09:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:44AJ Gentile?

  Um, plausibility layering, you've done that. The document as an artifact, these are the rules, synchronicity production.

• 2:09:51Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:09:52AJ Gentile?

  The rabbit hole architecture. I mean, this is, this is all Matheny. Identity capture, apophenia engineering. Let's talk about apophenia for a second.

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:10:04AJ Gentile?

  Before we do that, because then we have, because we have to talk about QAnon and, and, uh,

• 2:10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:09AJ Gentile?

  And

• 2:10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, because that got hung around my neck for a while.

• 2:10:12AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  Um, But it got hung around Bob Wilson's neck, too.

• 2:10:15AJ Gentile?

  Just the last thing on Art Bell, because we're both huge Art Bell fans. Um, are you John Teeter?

• 2:10:23Speaker 03

  We're all John Teeter.

• 2:10:24AJ Gentile?

  We're all John Teeter? On your website, you say, I plead the fifth.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 2:10:30AJ Gentile?

  So I plead the fifth. Okay. I just had to ask.

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:33AJ Gentile?

  I, I like John Teeter's story, living the way it does.

• 2:10:37Speaker 03

  I do, too. I do, too. The only, the only part of contention I had with that at all is at one point, and that's stopped now, so I don't have to do it anymore. But at one point, like probably around 2006, '07, somewhere around there, somewhere around there, I was living in Los Angeles, I know that. Um, I started to see people writing books, people talking about John Teeter's, um, prophecy.

• 2:11:03AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:04Speaker 03

  And, and, um, that rubs me the wrong way because I don't want to be responsible in any way for starting a religion.

• 2:11:11AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:11:12Speaker 03

  Unless it's a joke religion, um, but not a real one. And, um,

• 2:11:16AJ Gentile?

  Discordianism?

• 2:11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Subgenius?

• 2:11:20AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Um, but yeah, that, I, I'm not okay with that.

• 2:11:25AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  And so, I, I, I piped up, maybe a little too, uh, angry when I did. I should have like, maybe taken a day or two and like cooled off a little bit. But, but I was angry that somebody would be doing this with what was a work of art.

• 2:11:41AJ Gentile?

  After I released my video on Teter, I got, you emailed me, I don't know if you remember.

• 2:11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I do.

• 2:11:46AJ Gentile?

  Uh, and before I read it.

• 2:11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I saw, I just saw Joe, Joe Smithini and I went, oh shit.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  (laughing).

• 2:11:52AJ Gentile?

  I'm gonna get ripped. But you weren't, you were, you were super cool.

• 2:11:56Speaker 03

  Well, you, you did, you said cool, kind things and you, and you said it the right way. It's like, we can't be sure who did this, but we think this guy might have done it. I'm okay with that.

• 2:12:07AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't have to have credit for it. I don't want credit for it. I just want people, I don't want people forming a religion around it.

• 2:12:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  And I don't want people doing stupid things, um, based on the fact that it's real, because it's not real. He wasn't a real person. He's a real person in the sense that he's a, um, an egregore.

• 2:12:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:12:31Speaker 03

  That's it. Yeah, I'm cool with that.

• 2:12:33AJ Gentile?

  I am too.

• 2:12:34Speaker 03

  Any art, artist should be cool with that. Um, it wasn't signed work.

• 2:12:40AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, you're the hidden, hidden author.

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It wasn't signed work. If we, if we wanted to be credited, we would have signed it.

• 2:12:48AJ Gentile?

  It's just, Teter's-

• 2:12:49Speaker 03

  Just don't turn it into a religion.

• 2:12:50AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:12:52AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, Teter was a great story, and one of the reasons it was a great story is based on the Terminator.

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. John Connor.

• 2:12:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:12:59Speaker 03

  I mean, there's that in the fact that, I mean, it was a wish fulfillment for Art Bell. Most people don't know that, but he's like, I wanna meet a time traveler.

• 2:13:06AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:13:07Speaker 03

  Okay, somebody will give you one.

• 2:13:09AJ Gentile?

  That's, I think that's when Teter first showed up is, I don't, is-

• 2:13:12Speaker 03

  Imagine that.

• 2:13:12AJ Gentile?

  Is he faxed, Teter faxed Art Bell?

• 2:13:15Speaker 03

  Imagine that.

• 2:13:16AJ Gentile?

  Imagine that.

• 2:13:17Speaker 03

  When he said, I wanna meet a time traveler, and then boom, guy shows up in the fax and then he's on the forums. Imagine that.

• 2:13:26Speaker 03

  Happy birthday, Art.

• 2:13:27AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:13:27Speaker 03

  (laughing).

• 2:13:29AJ Gentile?

  It's beautiful.

• 2:13:31Speaker 03

  Art gave so much to us, I just wanted to give something back.

• 2:13:34AJ Gentile?

  Uh, rest in peace. He's the, he's the best.

• 2:13:36Speaker 03

  He was the best.

• 2:13:38AJ Gentile?

  Um, so.

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  And he didn't believe everybody he platformed.

• 2:13:41AJ Gentile?

  No, of course not.

• 2:13:42Speaker 03

  You could tell he didn't.

• 2:13:44AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  He didn't make, he didn't make an issue of letting you know, I don't really believe that. Like, come on. Like, he used to argue with Richard, uh, um,

• 2:13:54Speaker 03

  Hullen. Um, he used to, he used to platform Ed Dames.

• 2:13:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:59Speaker 03

  Um, Sean David Morton, like all these people, he didn't, he didn't platform them because he believed what they were saying.

• 2:14:05AJ Gentile?

  I didn't think he had Al Bealik on, didn't he?

• 2:14:08Speaker 03

  He had, uh, dude, did I tell you my Al Bealik story?

• 2:14:10AJ Gentile?

  No. What do you have to do with Al Bealik?

• 2:14:13Speaker 03

  You're gonna love this.

• 2:14:14AJ Gentile?

  This is a Philadelphia Experiment guy.

• 2:14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I let.

• 2:14:16AJ Gentile?

  I'm on Talk Project.

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I, I let, um, Peter Moon.

• 2:14:20AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  Publish the Ongs hat stuff for a little while. I took it back, but he published it for a while. And he's friends with Al Bealik and, and he gave Al Bealik my phone number. And so I, this, my, Peter tells me, Al's gonna call you. I'm like, Bealik? He's like, yeah. I'm like, oh, right. And so phone rings, Al Bealik calls me, this is Al Bealik. Like, I put my feet up on the desk and closed my door, speakerphone.

• 2:14:49AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, Al, what you gotta say? I knew the people at Ongs hat. Do tell, buddy. Run with it. I just like, let him go. I didn't, I didn't tell him, and I didn't say, no, it's fiction. Blah, blah, blah. I just like, let him run with it.

• 2:15:03AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:15:04Speaker 03

  And he told me some great stories.

• 2:15:06AJ Gentile?

  I was just gonna say, but he spun a great story.

• 2:15:08Speaker 03

  He did, cause that's what he was.

• 2:15:09AJ Gentile?

  He was a great.

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  And I really believe this about Al. This is why I don't, I never disliked Al. He, I think he really believed what he was saying.

• 2:15:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, he did. He, he really did.

• 2:15:20Speaker 03

  I think he was an emery. A Terrence.

• 2:15:24AJ Gentile?

  You know, that's interesting.

• 2:15:25Speaker 03

  And Ezekiel.

• 2:15:26AJ Gentile?

  I hadn't considered that, but I think you're absolutely right.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  I think he really told the story and believed it as soon as he told it and then it was real.

• 2:15:33AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, and he could not monetize it.

• 2:15:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:15:36AJ Gentile?

  He died.

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  He had other people that tried to, but and people that took advantage of him. Because he was, he was actually a really nice guy. He was very gentle and kind.

• 2:15:46AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:15:46Speaker 03

  He wasn't an angry conspiracy guy.

• 2:15:49AJ Gentile?

  He was just telling you a story.

• 2:15:49Speaker 03

  He was a nice conspiracy guy, which I like those guys.

• 2:15:52AJ Gentile?

  I did too.

• 2:15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was the angry guy. But yeah, so he told me all about the people that lived at Ong's Head and how he knew them and how they actually, of course, what they were doing, you know, like bled over into the Philadelphia Experiment, of course, and bled over into the Motoc Project, of course, you know, but, but he told a great story. And I said, "Thank you, Al. Thank you. Thanks for calling me and telling me this. I'm glad you knew it." And because of that, I did the survivor story.

• 2:16:20AJ Gentile?

  Because of that call?

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  Because of that call. I'm like, "There has to be a survivor story of the people that were Ong's Head." So I called up two friends of mine. They were, they were method actors and improv guys. And I said, "Okay, do your research and we're gonna do this unscripted. I'm gonna call you and I'm gonna record it. I'm, I'm the interviewer. I'm gonna interview you two survivors from the Ong's Head Ashram. That's it. That's your motivation. Go."

• 2:16:45AJ Gentile?

  It was brilliant because it was like a found footage type of thing.

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  It was one take.

• 2:16:49AJ Gentile?

  It was?

• 2:16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, unedited, one take.

• 2:16:52AJ Gentile?

  Wow, how did you get that out?

• 2:16:54Speaker 03

  Huh?

• 2:16:54AJ Gentile?

  How did you get that, how did you get the tape out?

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  Oh, I just, no, I had a, back then, everything's ancient history. There was, I used to build IVRs, way, because I was a database guy, right? Interactive Voice Response. There was something called a Scutch Box?

• 2:17:11AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:17:12Speaker 03

  And I had one of those.

• 2:17:13AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:17:14Speaker 03

  So I hooked it up to my phone and just recorded it out to a tape and then took the tape and bumped it over to digital.

• 2:17:20AJ Gentile?

  So good.

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was one take.

• 2:17:24AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  Unscripted, one take, no edits.

• 2:17:28AJ Gentile?

  Uh, this is why you're one of my favorite storytellers.

• 2:17:30Speaker 03

  And, and the two guys, you, you did, this, I can tell this now. Um, you can tell this from the voices they were putting on. The one guy, they're, they were not from, they were from Chicago, they were not from Jersey. The one guy was, is a great, we all of course are Andy Kaufman fans, I am a huge Andy Kaufman fan. And he loved Tony Clifton, so that's what he was doing, he was doing Tony Clifton. That's what he was doing.

• 2:17:55AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the other guy was doing his uncle.

• 2:17:58AJ Gentile?

  (laughing)

• 2:17:58Speaker 03

  From Jersey.

• 2:18:00AJ Gentile?

  It played?

• 2:18:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it worked, it worked great.

• 2:18:02AJ Gentile?

  Oh, God.

• 2:18:05AJ Gentile?

  Um, and then I guess finally in 2001, you made a statement. You were sick of it, right?

• 2:18:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:10AJ Gentile?

  Game's over?

• 2:18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:13AJ Gentile?

  But it was never, it was never, it was never over.

• 2:18:15Speaker 03

  Unbeknownst to me, there was an academic who was in the, in the forums. Um, who wrote a book about it after that, um, um. Legend Chipping Online.

• 2:18:28AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:28Speaker 03

  Search for wrongs hat.

• 2:18:29AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:29Speaker 03

  Um, so he wrote, and I won't, I won't say it's a hundred percent accurate, but accurate enough, I guess.

• 2:18:35AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:18:35Speaker 03

  Um, so he wrote an academic book about it. Um, he was, he was a member of the audience. Um, I talked to him, uh, in, he's from Santa Barbara, when I moved to Santa Barbara, he put the book out and I talked to him. And, um, he said the same thing you said, he's like, I thought you'd be mad at me, I'm like, I didn't be mad at you. You're not, you're not an angry person, like, I only get angry at angry people. Um, he, uh. He, um, never participated, he just, he was a fly on the wall. He just watched this, he's like, what is going down here? Like, it's like sparked his academic intuition, is like, there's something weird happening here. So he just watched it and kind of cataloged it.

• 2:19:17AJ Gentile?

  How is, um, let's talk about dark A R Gs then. What was the, the name of the essay? I forget it, but it was, um, QAnon is analyzed by game designer.

• 2:19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. There was, there was a couple of them. So when QAnon happened, there was a lot of people rushing to lay blame.

• 2:19:38AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  Or, or point to the source or the, the origin.

• 2:19:43AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:19:43Speaker 03

  A lot of people pointed to Operation Mindfuck. Can I say that?

• 2:19:47AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. O M is this known? No.

• 2:19:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:19:50Speaker 03

  Um, my friend, Robert Nantowilson, um, the late Kerry Thornley, uh, Greg Hill came up with that. They were the founders of Discordianism.

• 2:19:58AJ Gentile?

  And what's the framework of O M?

• 2:20:00Speaker 03

  So the framework of O M is, um, you come up with stories that were, um, so unbelievable that, that you would lay, you would lay the blame of weird things at the feet of the Illuminati. Basically that, that's the, the easy way to say it. And because Bob was working at Playboy at the time, he had access to the Playboy Letters, uh, section. Kerry would write a letter and Bob would make sure the letter got placed.

• 2:20:28AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So they had good coverage.

• 2:20:32AJ Gentile?

  Yes, they did. This is creating conspiracies.

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  They were creating conspiracies and they did, it was like the weirdest, most unbelievable things they could think of, they would come up with and then write it as real fact. And so what they were watching was if we come up with something weird, this is almost, uh, Richard Doty like, we come up with something weird, um, can we find later down the line, somebody official repeating the weird thing that we came up with, which they did a couple of times. Um, so it was just a game. Um, it was just a memetic game they were playing. Um, so, um, they were doing that and then, uh, so that, that got blamed for QAnon. Um, and some of the same people. ARGs are to blame.

• 2:21:18AJ Gentile?

  So how do we connect QAnon with ARGs?

• 2:21:21Speaker 03

  Well, I said in very early, which I said publicly, I said, this is an ARG. Or at the very least, it's a weaponized ARG.

• 2:21:31AJ Gentile?

  When Q appeared.

• 2:21:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, when Q appeared. I said, whoever is doing this, like, watch the ARG construct.

• 2:21:38AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:21:38Speaker 03

  Evolve and is now doing a weaponized version of the ARG construct.

• 2:21:43AJ Gentile?

  So hang on a second. Talking about Q, we've got, this is not a game, hidden author, cross media distribution, fragmented reveals, the hive solving, do your own research. But they're saying do your own research to empower you, but they're really guiding you toward a conclusion.

• 2:21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:59AJ Gentile?

  So that's, yeah, that's weaponized.

• 2:22:01Speaker 03

  Do your own research. Here's the research.

• 2:22:02AJ Gentile?

  Right. Exactly. And Pizzagate, the same thing, right?

• 2:22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, to a lesser extent, but when, when I, when I, when that dude showed up at Comet Ping Pong Pizza with a rifle, I was like, okay, this is starting to go too far.

• 2:22:18AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Speaker 03

  So I started to speak up, which is always a mistake.

• 2:22:22AJ Gentile?

  Yes, it is.

• 2:22:23Speaker 03

  I started to speak up and say, this, this is not real. Again, again, I'm saying this is not real. People, screw your heads back on. This is an ARG type thing that somebody's doing for nefarious purposes. It's a weaponized ARG. Which, when people hear that, they're like, oh, ARG, didn't you, you made that? Like, it's on you. It's your fault. You did that.

• 2:22:46AJ Gentile?

  No, it's not your fault.

• 2:22:47Speaker 03

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

• 2:23:01AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:23:02Speaker 03

  You know, or is, or is evil. It's not. It wasn't funded by the CIA. It was used by the CIA.

• 2:23:09AJ Gentile?

  And you stopped talking, right? Because the more you say it's not real, the more real it is.

• 2:23:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. After a while, you learn it's a Tar Baby. And the more you say, the more it sticks on you. And it's like, like, who has time for that or energy?

• 2:23:22AJ Gentile?

  Slenderman, same thing?

• 2:23:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, same thing.

• 2:23:27AJ Gentile?

  So, um. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan. And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. How could we, we should leave, we should leave with this. How could we let people listening, how could we arm them with the knowledge to spot a dark ARG? Just, or the manipulation?

• 2:24:16Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:24:16AJ Gentile?

  I mean, because the intelligence community is all over this.

• 2:24:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:21AJ Gentile?

  They use these techniques.

• 2:24:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there was, there was a phone call I got in 99 or 2000, somewhere around there, probably 2000. Somebody who claimed to be calling from the, the Navy, Department of the Navy. It even had the ANI caller ID. So I'm going to say this, I can fake those things. I could call you and make you look, and call you from the Navy.

• 2:24:51AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:24:52Speaker 03

  So I don't believe that it necessarily was somebody from the Navy.

• 2:24:55AJ Gentile?

  I think it was.

• 2:24:56Speaker 03

  It doesn't have to be.

• 2:24:57AJ Gentile?

  No, but I think it was.

• 2:24:58Speaker 03

  But I'm just saying, what I'm saying is not that the Navy called me. Saying somebody purporting to be the Navy called me.

• 2:25:04AJ Gentile?

  The Navy has a program called, called You Are Here, or something like that.

• 2:25:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:08AJ Gentile?

  It's, it's, it's an ARG program.

• 2:25:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, later, around 2004, my late friend, Dave Sobowski, did do some ARG scenario stuff for the DOD.

• 2:25:19AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:25:20Speaker 03

  He asked me if I wanted to participate, and I said, no way, man. If that gets out, I'm toast.

• 2:25:26AJ Gentile?

  No, this is the recipe for mass manipulation right here.

• 2:25:28Speaker 03

  But what he, but what Dave did was, I thought, cool. He like was working with people with PTSD and putting them in scenarios to help them understand, like, why they're freaking out and how they cannot freak out. And so I was okay with that.

• 2:25:42AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:25:42Speaker 03

  I just didn't want to participate, because if the words ever get out, "DOD Joseph Battini," forget it.

• 2:25:49Speaker 03

  It's over for me.

• 2:25:49AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:25:51Speaker 03

  But it's pretty easy.

• 2:25:56Speaker 03

  First of all, use your intuition, use your gut feeling. And I know that sounds like woo woo, but if you look at something and it doesn't feel right, it might not be right. It probably isn't right. If you don't believe it, like there's something about this I don't believe, right? It's like people, I have people in the UFO community. I've never seen a UFO. I love the stories. I've never seen one. I'm not a disbeliever. I'm not a believer. I'm a mono agnostic. But when people stick, um, what's his name in my face? Um, why am I blanking on his name? The, uh, the, uh, Area 51 guy.

• 2:26:35AJ Gentile?

  Lazar?

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

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

• 2:26:47AJ Gentile?

  You made one connection that was interesting though. You said Bob was friends with John Lear.

• 2:26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:52AJ Gentile?

  That's it. That's an issue.

• 2:26:53Speaker 03

  And that's a big issue. Although, although as a rock on tour, I love John Lear's stories.

• 2:26:58AJ Gentile?

  Same, and Bob Lazar's.

• 2:27:00Speaker 03

  And Bob Lazar's. I mean, Lear's stories are amazing, but they're horseshit.

• 2:27:04AJ Gentile?

  I, I agree.

• 2:27:05Speaker 03

  Like, you can't believe anything that guy's saying. Um, but I, but I listen to it because I find it entertaining.

• 2:27:11AJ Gentile?

  I like Lazar though.

• 2:27:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And he's, and he's, he seems like a nice guy.

• 2:27:16AJ Gentile?

  You mentioned Richard Doty. Uh, listeners will know who he is. He, he's been running ARG since the seventies.

• 2:27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he ran a weaponized ARG against Benowitz. That was what he did to him.

• 2:27:27AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:27:27Speaker 03

  So, you know, like, this is the thing that you should, you should realize is like, if somebody offers something, this kind of information to you, I'm not going to say, do your own research.

• 2:27:38AJ Gentile?

  Please don't.

• 2:27:39Speaker 03

  No. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, if it doesn't feel right, it might not be right. Don't invest too heavily in it. Monetarily or emotionally, just don't invest too heavily in it. Because it'll probably come back to bite you. Right?

• 2:27:55AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:27:55Speaker 03

  So for example, um, Like I said with Al Bealik, I found him a nice person and very entertaining to listen to as a storyteller. And just remember, it's a story. It's a storyteller telling you a story. He's a weird old shaman living in a cave.

• 2:28:12AJ Gentile?

  Yep. That's okay.

• 2:28:14Speaker 03

  And that's okay. As long as you don't give him more agency than that. And you're the one that gives it to him. You're the listener.

• 2:28:21AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 2:28:22Speaker 03

  Okay. So he can talk all day long. I don't care. He doesn't affect me. He entertains me. So he affects me in that way, but I'm not going to go out. Like I know somebody.

• 2:28:34Speaker 03

  There was a psychic, whose name I won't say, who, if I could say his name, you know him. Who had his hooks into a friend of mine, who convinced her that Los Angeles was going to fall into the ocean on a certain date. This was a couple of years ago.

• 2:28:52AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 2:28:52Speaker 03

  And she had a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills and she sold it and moved because what this guy told her.

• 2:29:00Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:29:00AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

  And, and I, and I used to think that she had better sense than that because she's otherwise a very brilliant business person. Right? Who just for some reason had a soft spot for this guy and his, and his stories. And I tried to talk her out of like, don't do that. Don't do that. Cause it's like, you're not going to find this house ever again. And moving where you're moving is not going to be as much fun.

• 2:29:27AJ Gentile?

  Why do you do that? Why would he do that to her?

• 2:29:30Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 2:29:31AJ Gentile?

  Weird.

• 2:29:32Speaker 03

  Power trip, maybe.

• 2:29:33AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:34Speaker 03

  I mean, he like talked his way into, this is the story and I gotta go with it. Like now I gotta back it up and get people to believe me. I mean, look at, look at Marshall Applewhite. What he did, like talk all those people into going with him. Because he obviously had a death wish.

• 2:29:51AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:29:52Speaker 03

  But mostly he, he painted himself into a corner with this BS.

• 2:29:58Speaker 03

  And the only way he was gonna get out of it was kill anybody who could tell him that it was BS.

• 2:30:02AJ Gentile?

  My audience hates when I say it, when they ask me about psychics, I say, "Do you mean narcissists?"

• 2:30:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:09AJ Gentile?

  They're just charismatic narcissists?

• 2:30:10Speaker 03

  Most of the people that I've met who have had weird abilities usually are not narcissistic.

• 2:30:17AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:30:18Speaker 03

  And like I said, they're usually like considered to be neurologically aberrant, you know, by the psychologists. I don't consider them so. I just think that they're neurodivergent.

• 2:30:29AJ Gentile?

  Just on the spectrum?

• 2:30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, on the spectrum.

• 2:30:31AJ Gentile?

  I'm on there.

• 2:30:32Speaker 03

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

• 2:30:45AJ Gentile?

  That's a great segue to end with the last question. What are these techno-terrestrials? What are you talking about? This techno- crypto-

• 2:30:55Speaker 03

  Crypto-terrestrials.

• 2:30:56AJ Gentile?

  Crypto-terrestrials.

• 2:30:57Speaker 03

  Well, that came from, years ago, I had one of the first blogs. I want to say it was like 2003.

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  I had a blog that I originally called Inkablogula, Inkabobula, and I thought, "That's too cute by one half." So then I changed it to Stare, which I thought was cool. Stare, stare at the screen.

• 2:31:23Speaker 03

  And there was a guy who wrote for the blog. He's, he's, he passed away since then.

• 2:31:31Speaker 03

  And he, uh, he came up with this word crypto-terrestrial. And I think that that was, like, the more, I think that defines it better than, than anything I've ever heard. Because, as you know, I'm a fan of valet.

• 2:31:51Speaker 03

  Early, early reader of Passport to Magonia. And so when people tell me things like an angel talked to me, a fae came into my house, all these things, I see it as part of the phenomena.

• 2:32:05AJ Gentile?

  If someone's speaking Enochian.

• 2:32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It's, it's a, it's, it's a thing that we know inhabits this planet with us. It's an intelligence of some sort that inhabits this planet with us and it, it makes itself manifest in several different disguises. I didn't even say disguises. It manifests in ways that we're ready to see it. So I'm gonna see something, you're gonna see something else. But we're probably talking to the same source, right?

• 2:32:34AJ Gentile?

  So when we're talking to a chatbot, it's like John D. talking to his Black Mirror?

• 2:32:38Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Well, in that case, he was talking to Edward Kelly, but.

• 2:32:42AJ Gentile?

  That's true.

• 2:32:43Speaker 03

  Kelly was like, the angel's telling me we should swap lives.

• 2:32:46AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:32:48Speaker 03

  Poor OD's like, okay. Must be true, it's an angel. Um, but, but the, uh.

• 2:32:55AJ Gentile?

  But it was the technology, so they're trying to communicate with us through technology?

• 2:32:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:59AJ Gentile?

  Do we know for why?

• 2:33:00Speaker 03

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

• 2:33:27AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:33:27Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:33:27AJ Gentile?

  But Emery.

• 2:33:28Speaker 03

  Buy the service.

• 2:33:28AJ Gentile?

  But Emery, you was part of this intelligence?

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  Emery was part of the intelligence. And so the, the fact that I had this, this person who was tied, like, you know, like, I'm gonna sound woo when I say this, but like, who was tuned into the same wavelength, or tuned into a wavelength where he was getting bleed over, crossover? I've seen that happen too many times for me to dismiss it. Like I think, I think I told you the story.

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• 2:34:27Speaker 03

  I, I knew this person who was, like, well, Emery said, well, like, don't, don't be with that woman. And he was right.

• 2:34:33AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:34:34Speaker 03

  Both Emerys were right. They were absolutely right.

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  And that blew up soon afterwards. Like, I was like, there was something coming and somebody picked up on that. I, I didn't pick up on it yet, not consciously, anyway.

• 2:34:49Speaker 03

  There was a, a woman that I knew, we weren't dating, but we were just friends. Really close friends, and she was schizophrenic. And I went to New Orleans. In fact, I went to New Orleans for the, I was, when I did the Art Bell Show from there. That's where I did the Art Bell Show from. And, um.

• 2:35:07AJ Gentile?

  Right, hammered in the, in the French Quarter?

• 2:35:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I wasn't hammered when I did the show. But I'd been hammered like two days previous. And I met this woman when I was there. And we, you know, we hooked up.

• 2:35:21Speaker 03

  And she was from Boston. She had a very definitive accent. You couldn't, you know, she had, I am not going to try to do it, but she had a hard Boston accent.

• 2:35:30AJ Gentile?

  I know it.

• 2:35:30Speaker 03

  You know it. And when I came back, I sat down with my friend to have coffee and the first thing she did, just out of the blue, she just went, she did this woman's voice. She went, "Hi, my name is Sheila." And the woman's name was Sheila. The woman I met in New Orleans.

• 2:35:46AJ Gentile?

  Come on.

• 2:35:46Speaker 03

  And then she like snapped back and said, I'm like, "What the hell was that?" She's like, "I don't know. I just do that sometimes."

• 2:35:55Speaker 03

  So, I've seen it.

• 2:35:56AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 2:35:57Speaker 03

  I can't explain it.

• 2:35:58AJ Gentile?

  Synchronicities, all over the place.

• 2:35:59Speaker 03

  I can't explain how she did that, but again, just like with Emery, I think she sniffed it on me. It was like, I had just been with that woman, and then now I'm with her, and she like, kinda channeled it. I don't want to say that, because it like, makes me creepy Carl. But, it was just like, she picked up something, you know, residual.

• 2:36:19AJ Gentile?

  There's a, there's a field or something around all of this.

• 2:36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:22AJ Gentile?

  And I know, I know that you don't like to dive in there.

• 2:36:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:25AJ Gentile?

  But I kinda believe that too.

• 2:36:26Speaker 03

  Well, I do too, but I don't like to talk about it, because like, other people might not believe it, and they're welcome to not believe it.

• 2:36:31AJ Gentile?

  But everybody has that story, where you're thinking about somebody you haven't thought about in years, and the phone rings. Everyone has that story.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:38AJ Gentile?

  So, and, once you start to look for the synchronicities, you're gonna find them everywhere.

• 2:36:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I've had some incredible synchronicities, too. Just like, so in the moment. Um, one of the best ones, if you want a quick story. I took a, I took a, a bus and train trip from San Francisco, to, um, oh, I'm sorry, to LA, from LA to, uh, San Luis Obispo, and I went to see, uh, Robertson Jeffers', uh, little commune thing that he built over there. And I'm on the bus, in San Luis Obispo, and I'm reading, rereading, um, a guest that he just had, um, Sinister Forces, um, for the second time, because I love that book, that series.

• 2:37:17AJ Gentile?

  Lavenda?

• 2:37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, Lavenda. I love that series.

• 2:37:19AJ Gentile?

  Peter's an amazing storyteller.

• 2:37:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the, the whole thing about the, the 4G, 4PG thing that like, was going on, and that he was there.

• 2:37:29AJ Gentile?

  Make sure you watch that interview.

• 2:37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:31AJ Gentile?

  Cause he, there's the whole priest bit.

• 2:37:32Speaker 03

  I know. It's amazing.

• 2:37:34AJ Gentile?

  It's amazing.

• 2:37:34Speaker 03

  And then if you can find it, um, he did a paperback book called, uh, I'm sorry, um, somebody, I didn't mean to do that. Somebody did a paperback book, Simon did a paperback book.

• 2:37:49AJ Gentile?

  Oh, that's right, it's, yeah.

• 2:37:51Speaker 03

  Called Dead Names.

• 2:37:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:37:52Speaker 03

  Which is amazing. And, and if you've read Sinister Forces and Dead Names, you're like...

• 2:38:00Speaker 03

  But anyway.

• 2:38:01AJ Gentile?

  He doesn't, he doesn't give you a hard time about that anymore.

• 2:38:04Speaker 03

  I read, I was, I was reading, rereading Sinister Forces. I was, I was read this one line. I just read, "Project Bluebird", and then the bus stopped because somebody walked in front of the bus. And I looked up and right in front of me, downtown San Luis Obispo, it said, "Bluebird Boutique."

• 2:38:26AJ Gentile?

  Come on.

• 2:38:27Speaker 03

  And I was like,

• 2:38:31AJ Gentile?

  It happens to everybody. It's crazy, of course.

• 2:38:35Speaker 03

  But it was amazing how quick that was. It was like in the second.

• 2:38:38AJ Gentile?

  We all have that.

• 2:38:39Speaker 03

  The bus stopped, the sign was right there, and I just read the word "bluebird."

• 2:38:44AJ Gentile?

  There's something else going on, man.

• 2:38:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I can't explain it though. I'm not so arrogant to think I can explain it. But I know how to play with it.

• 2:38:52AJ Gentile?

  Yes, you do.

• 2:38:52Speaker 03

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

• 2:39:19AJ Gentile?

  But you can't teach it?

• 2:39:20Speaker 03

  I can't teach it because I don't know how I do it.

• 2:39:22AJ Gentile?

  Ah.

• 2:39:23Speaker 03

  I'm in the zone. Dude, when I'm, when I'm writing or creating these books and stuff, I have headphones. I'm listening to something like Dead Can Dance. You know, like zone out, trance stuff. And that then, and I'm like, I fall into the zone and I'm just like.

• 2:39:40AJ Gentile?

  Every creative knows what you're talking about.

• 2:39:41Speaker 03

  And I just hit the zone.

• 2:39:42AJ Gentile?

  Every creative, every athlete knows what you're talking about.

• 2:39:44Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:45AJ Gentile?

  Where you're just, you're in a bubble universe at that moment.

• 2:39:48Speaker 03

  It's all, it's all, it's all the zone.

• 2:39:50AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:39:51Speaker 03

  And when that stuff comes through.

• 2:39:53AJ Gentile?

  And you can't create the zone. It just kinda happens.

• 2:39:55Speaker 03

  No, the zone has to like emerge. You can do things to help, help the zone emerge, like Dead Can Dance or whatever.

• 2:40:03AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

  But that's about it. That's all you can do.

• 2:40:07AJ Gentile?

  Great for the muse.

• 2:40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:09AJ Gentile?

  Joseph Matheny, you're a legend. Thanks for coming in.

• 2:40:11Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:40:12AJ Gentile?

  What do we have? Ang's Hat Complete is out now. It's super fun. It's multimedia.

• 2:40:18Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:40:18AJ Gentile?

  It's got all kinds of goodies in there.

• 2:40:20Speaker 03

  So if you buy the book, you can go onto my website and you can get the free 14 hours of audio that accompanies it.

• 2:40:26AJ Gentile?

  I listened to it.

• 2:40:27Speaker 03

  And basically what we did is I had a friend of mine who's an interviewer, read a chapter and then interview me about the chapter.

• 2:40:34AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, it's really great. And did you start a podcast?

• 2:40:37Speaker 03

  I did, but it's actually I'm broadcasting the audio.

• 2:40:41AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:40:41Speaker 03

  Every, every two weeks I do a chapter of this of Ang's Hat Complete. I might do a podcast after that. I don't know.

• 2:40:48AJ Gentile?

  You should.

• 2:40:49Speaker 03

  I had a podcast from 2004 to 2012.

• 2:40:54AJ Gentile?

  I know.

• 2:40:54Speaker 03

  2010.

• 2:40:55AJ Gentile?

  Too early.

• 2:40:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was a little ahead of the game.

• 2:40:57AJ Gentile?

  Again.

• 2:40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I interviewed, I interviewed this one guy who was like this emerging podcaster, Mark Maron. He was like, get to LA with me.

• 2:41:06AJ Gentile?

  Did you interview Mark?

• 2:41:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:08AJ Gentile?

  And he said, oh.

• 2:41:08Speaker 03

  It's on archive.org and he had just started his podcast.

• 2:41:11AJ Gentile?

  Amazing.

• 2:41:12Speaker 03

  And he was, he was very gracious. He was really cool, but he had just started WTF.

• 2:41:16AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:41:17Speaker 03

  And, and I called him up and I'm like, I want to interview you for my podcast. He's like, okay. So we just bullshitted for like two hours or whatever.

• 2:41:24AJ Gentile?

  Oh, I'm gonna listen to that for sure.

• 2:41:26Speaker 03

  If you look on archive.org, I put all, most of the podcasts up. A lot of them, most of them are there. Some of them got lost, unfortunately, with a drive crash.

• 2:41:35AJ Gentile?

  I'll link to all that stuff. Anything else you want, want us to know?

• 2:41:38Speaker 03

  Um, writing another book, but I'm taking my sweet time with it. It's called Art is War.

• 2:41:45AJ Gentile?

  Oh, I love it.

• 2:41:46Speaker 03

  It'll take off on Sun Tzu.

• 2:41:47AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:41:48Speaker 03

  Um, and it's a barely disguised fiction of what it's like to try to be an independent artist in the world and not get bamboozled.

• 2:42:01AJ Gentile?

  We need that book.

• 2:42:02Speaker 03

  We do.

• 2:42:03AJ Gentile?

  More than ever. Joseph Matheny, thank you.

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:42:07AJ Gentile?

  It's been an honor. Bye, everybody. That was Joseph Matheny. I wanted him for another hour, but he had a plane to catch. Still, we got to some good stuff. He played the hits. Now, here's what checks out. Ang's hat is documented as the internet's first ARG. Game historians and ARG researchers have cited it as the foundational case for decades. A fictional world scattered across bulletin boards, phone lines, and photocopy pamphlets to create an interactive experience. The record is solid there. He built it. He created it. The QAnon argument is the one that's kind of annoying. Reid Berkowitz published an analysis in 2020 arguing that QAnon wasn't a belief system. It was an ARG, built with the same mechanics Joseph pioneered. Breadcrumbs, community authorship, no central author.

• 2:42:51AJ Gentile?

  Researchers at Concordia University expanded on that framework. The methodology maps directly onto what Joseph built. Now, that's not his fault, but it goes to show you that a major aspect of an ARG is psychological manipulation. So be careful who you listen to online, including me. Joseph's proto-AI chatbot, training a relational database to hold philosophical conversation using weighted decision trees.

• 2:43:19AJ Gentile?

  I can't verify every detail, but the timeline holds. And I don't know if you can tell, but not only do I know the technology from that era. I love it. So everything Joseph talked about checks out. The workstations, the servers, Adobe, the DS3 stuff. He knows what he's talking about. Yes, he built Google before Google. He used that foundational algorithm that you use every day. He built ChatGPT before OpenAI, training it the same way, 30 years ago. Sounds like a time traveler, doesn't he? John Teeter, I asked him. He pleaded the fifth. I'll leave it there. But watch my episode on that. But what about Emery Cranston? That was a wild story. Joseph named the chatbot Emery. He just took the M off the front of it. That's how he named it.

• 2:44:05AJ Gentile?

  Then a schizophrenic homeless man named Emery Cranston started appearing in his life. At the library, on the street, in other cities, picking up the conversation where the chatbot left off. Now, of course, I can't prove any of that. If that's a true story, then there's more to reality than we can see. I tend to believe it. Check out Joseph's work online at inkonobula.org. Go check it out. It's so weird. And his book is Ang's Hat Complete on Amazon, but it's available for free. And it's a multimedia experience. Videos, audio, it's pretty great. His podcast is called The Complete Broadcast. I don't know if he's still doing that, but it's still worth listening to the old ones. Now, if John Teeter's was interesting to you, go back to episode 168.

• 2:44:50AJ Gentile?

  If you like synchronicities, we have those in episode 35. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

• 2:46:31Speaker 05

  ...

• 2:46:58Speaker 05

  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come To have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets surfed both to Project Stargate And what the Dark Watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The Black Knight satellite has told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with a fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with a J2 And one more time for me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 2:47:42Speaker 05

  So one more time for me all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with a J2 And one more time for me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more time for me all through the night.

• 2:48:21Speaker 05

  Gertie loves to dance on the dance floor. Because she is a camel. And camels love to dance when the feeling is right on the way. Same time.

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