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

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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Ryan Broderick?

  I am ready to rock, I think. All right, Will. Um, what's like your favorite mystery?

• 0:36Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 0:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I have a simple one that I've been thinking about lately, which is literally just how a supermarket works. And like how they, how they know how to keep everything on lock? Because it kind of terrifies me to think about it too much.

• 0:52Ryan Broderick?

  I once had a buddy who was working for like a large shipping and logistics firm that dealt with supermarkets. And he was doing data for them. And he told me that he-

• 1:02Speaker 02

  That's exactly what I'm talking about that terrifies me.

• 1:04Ryan Broderick?

  He discovered something horrifying, which was that they don't have any data. Like, they actually didn't know. This was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but he was like, yeah, it was crazy. We, we assumed they would know like, oh yeah, this supermarket ordered 200 cartons of eggs and they received 200 cartons of eggs. And it's like, no, no, no. It's way crazier than that.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  I mean, because that's exactly where I'm coming from. It's like, I thought that was all, all on lock everywhere.

• 1:33Ryan Broderick?

  No, no one knows anything that's going on.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  My entire family owns supermarket chains and all of them are idiots. And this doesn't surprise me at all. And it's also why there was a bunch of supermarket scams. Because it's really easy to fudge inventory. So you should be worried.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  It's something that stresses me out when I think about it too much. Where I'm just like, from my personal perspective, being a person who's very like- ADHD locked into like having a lot of the same food a lot because it's kind of like a safety zone for me to not have to overthink cooking or anything like that. And so I buy a lot of one thing at one time and then I get stressed out that like, do they know that? Does the supermarket know that I just sold them out of whatever this thing is? And are they going to get it back soon enough for when I need it again?

• 2:40Ryan Broderick?

  There was that story about Targa that accidentally predicted a woman was pregnant before she knew, based on her shopping purchases, like her shopping history.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 2:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  That makes sense, but it's totally crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:54Ryan Broderick?

  From my understanding, a lot of that happens at like the rewards program level. That's where like the real data stuff is happening. Anyways, the reason I ask about your favorite mysteries, because today we're going to be talking about a mystery. We're going to be talking about, um, okay, I gotta be really careful. Uh, Grant and I did not have time to discuss this, but like, there's a section of our audience that if we say ARG, will be so blindly angry. And we have gotten like many, many comments begging us to stop using this term, ARG or alternate reality game. Because in fact, there was like a comment on an episode of ours recently that was like, listen to this for an hour and at no point did they explain how this was an ARG. And the first line in, in our

• 3:36Ryan Broderick?

  outline today, uh, is that this is an ARG and I'm going to say, I don't know if anyone listening has any differing thoughts about whether or not this counts as an ARG. I don't care and I don't want to hear it. And, and I, I don't ever want to hear about it ever again. So I'm going to use different euphemisms for ARG instead, but specifically what we're going to be talking about today is Cicada 3301. And who was behind this 4chan game? A secret organization, the Illuminati, the CIA, very organized teenagers. My name is Ryan Broderick. Joining me as always is our producer Grant Irving, who is playing in ARG. He's a big fan of ARGs. You can talk to him about ARGs. This is Panic World, a

• 4:17Ryan Broderick?

  show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And with us today is Will, better known as Baths. I have to say, I saw you at Babies All Right, uh, probably two years, two years ago now, it was unbelievable. Great, great show. I'm a big fan.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Thank you very much.

• 4:34Ryan Broderick?

  Grant was also there.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:36Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, Grant.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  And not because we hang out, we can't stand each other. We, we were like, oh, fuck, we're accidentally in a room together.

• 4:41Ryan Broderick?

  We bumped, we bumped into each other. We bumped, yeah. And I didn't really recognize him because like, I never see the lower half of his body. We only talk via Zoom. What is, who are you?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Like, what is this?

• 4:50Ryan Broderick?

  I was like, who is?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Why are you talking?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  I, I had to make a portrait around myself.

• 4:54Ryan Broderick?

  So I could be comfortable talking to him.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 4:56Ryan Broderick?

  Um, but Will, um, have you played any ARGs before?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  What I want to say is yes, because I am such a games person and I have tried so many different things that my brain is telling me I probably have, but I don't know what you're talking about. So I can't say it with full certainty.

• 5:17Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, well, I'm gonna show you something here, uh, and you can tell me if you have ever seen this before. This is sort of the beginning of our story today. This would be how most players encounter this. So it's a screenshot that reads, hello, we are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301. Have you ever seen this before?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I have never seen this before.

• 5:49Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Fun fact, I think I have seen this before and I completely forgot about it until it came time to put this episode together. But this was first posted on a website called 4chan.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I know about 4chan.

• 6:01Ryan Broderick?

  2020. So tell me, tell me about your experiences with 4chan.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  I have a very specific experience with 4chan that I don't think was the actual website. I think there was like a different alternate or fake version of it that was a different number, like 3chan or 2chan or something like that, that hosted.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Muscular gay illustration art.

• 6:25Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  As like a thread, as like a Reddit type thing.

• 6:28Ryan Broderick?

  Humans or like furries?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Both, all of it. Like it was like, it was subdivided into all the different categories or whatever. And so I never frequented the actual 4chan website. I frequented this thing that was like similar to it. And then I heard people, I think, associated with it, but it wasn't. It was just for like horny, horny illustrations.

• 6:52Ryan Broderick?

  I Googled muscular gay art 4chan and uh, nothing immediately came up that sounds like that.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's what I mean is it wasn't 4chan. It was a different site.

• 7:05Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  And whatever this website is that I was on, it was like somebody kind of, I think cheekily making something that was like, oh, let's put Chan in the title. So people like associate it.

• 7:15Ryan Broderick?

  I see. That makes sense. And I, yes, you are right. There was like a lot of these kind of like 4chan derivatives, 4chan variants, flying around in the 2000s. So Sagata 330 was written about by the Sydney Herald, who talked to someone who first saw the message. A guy named Joel Erickson, who was a Swedish computer analyst in his mid 30s. And the Herald writes, "A self-confessed IT security freak and a skilled cryptographer, Erickson's interest was immediately piqued. This was, he knew, an example of digital stenography, the concealment of secret information within a digital file. It is ultimately a battle of the brains, he says, and I have always had a hard time resisting the challenge." Is this some, like, do you know people like this? Is this something that you would sort of do?

• 7:59Ryan Broderick?

  Is this how you would react to kind of a weird thing you saw on the internet? Would you dig deeper?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  No, but I have a way of relating to this that's really specific, where it's like that type of shit, like that type of puzzle where it immediately is like, you need to be thinking so far outside of the box that it's next to impossible to solve it type of thing. I've never been good at that. I like puzzles, but I like where it's like contained within the puzzle format. I have friends who created uh,

• 8:30Speaker 02

  A lot of games as arcane kids, that was their name.

• 8:33Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  And they made this game a while ago that it was like a horny Sonic.

• 8:39Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Game, kind of like a dating sim, but it wasn't.

• 8:41Ryan Broderick?

  Was it Sonic Inflation Adventure?

• 8:44Speaker 02

  It might have been, like the really crazy one.

• 8:47Ryan Broderick?

  The one where like Shadow the Hedgehog goes to court?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 8:52Ryan Broderick?

  It was like a new, it was like a Newgrounds game?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:54Ryan Broderick?

  Or?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, no.

• 8:56Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Not Newgrounds.

• 8:57Ryan Broderick?

  Are you talking about the murder mystery on the train one they did for Sonic's anniversary? Like the official one?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  No.

• 9:03Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Way before that, and it was 3D and it was hyper indie.

• 9:06Ryan Broderick?

  3D.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  And it was like.

• 9:08Ryan Broderick?

  Hold on, let me do horny Sonic 3D game dating sim.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm mentioning this for a specific reason, though. I have to explain why I'm mentioning this because it's not even about all of that. It's about the fact that to solve certain things in it, to get like a hundred percent, you know, to get all the collectibles in it, there were aspects to playing that game that I couldn't even fathom, where there was a means of like, you had to quit the game, delete one file within the framework of all the files they had in the game, and then reset it and then reload the game, and then it gave you access to the final collectible.

• 9:44Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, like Doki Doki Literature Club.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Exactly, shit like that.

• 9:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  And so like, the first time I'd ever experienced the fact that like a puzzle can be like that in a computer, I was like, that's crazy. I never in a million years would have thought of that type of shit. And so you telling me about this, I'm kind of like, it seems like that tier of thing? And that's exactly the thing that I would never interact with, where I would be like, I see that no fucking way, because I can't think that hard.

• 10:11Ryan Broderick?

  Totally, totally.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  There was a moment of like, looking into Sonic's eyes for so long that they start to congeal and coalesce.

• 10:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  It was like the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

• 10:24Ryan Broderick?

  I just think he doesn't have the thing in the middle. He doesn't have like, his eyes are just one big eye.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:30Ryan Broderick?

  Except for in the live action movies where they gave him like proper eyes.

• 10:35Ryan Broderick?

  So back to our man Erickson here. He tries cracking this code and he realizes that it's a Caesarian cipher. Have you ever heard of this? I have never heard of this before. Okay.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  No, I know it's Caesarian section. That's all I know.

• 10:48Ryan Broderick?

  So I'm assuming it's something you gotta cut and go deeper, do it by hand. So it's based off Julius Caesar, who used it in private correspondence, actually. And you replace his characters by a letter, a certain number of positions down the alphabet. So Erickson needed to know about this technique and he needed to know a bit of history. He figures out that there's a web address buried in the image's code. And I'm gonna share my screen here and show you what the image looks like.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Whoops, just decoys this way. Looks like you can't guess how to get the message out. And it's a picture of a brown and yellow duck.

• 11:23Ryan Broderick?

  Um, so it's like a troll, basically. It's like you didn't, it's like that movie from, was it the snowman or whatever? Uh, Mr. Policeman? You know what I'm talking about?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  You couldn't find all the clues or whatever it was.

• 11:35Ryan Broderick?

  Or Zodiac or any. Yeah, it's, uh, it's that horrible movie, The Snowman that has a.

• 11:42Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, fast better. And it has a poster. It's Mr. Police. You could have saved her. I gave you all the clues, but in this case it's a duck.

• 11:49Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So Erickson is realizing that this is gonna be a pretty elaborate puzzle. And he and a bunch of other people across the internet are, you know, trying to solve it, try to figure out who's behind this elaborate project. And we're gonna get back to them in just a second. Because one thing that made this game different was that it wasn't viral marketing.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 12:10Ryan Broderick?

  In the 2000s, there were a lot of people who were realizing that they could use the internet to sort of tell stories and play games in ways that weren't possible before. We've, we've done previous episodes about like the Blair Witch Project and sort of how that spread online. But one of the earlier examples of this around that time was also the movie AI. Um, did you ever see Steven Spielberg's?

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 12:32Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's one of my favorites, actually.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  I love that movie to death.

• 12:36Ryan Broderick?

  I think the ending is like truly beautiful. It's like a great, it's a great movie. Um. So part of the promotion for that movie, the studio hired a team to create an elaborate cross-media mystery in 2000. Slate writes at the time, "In the trailer for the forthcoming Steven Spielberg Stanley Kubrick movie, if you look at the notches on the word 'summer 2001' at the end, they form a phone number. Call that number and you start down an enormous convoluted path of cross-references, puzzles, and red herrings. A science fiction murder mystery that involves email, faxes, voicemail messages, and at least 15 distinct websites." I don't know why you would do that for that movie.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  That's wild.

• 13:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I mean, I understand that kind of-

• 13:14Speaker 02

  You get a free ticket at the end, or like, what the fuck?

• 13:17Ryan Broderick?

  It would bring you to a rally for a fictitious anti-robot organization that were being held in New York, LA, and Chicago. Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Classic.

• 13:28Ryan Broderick?

  Pretty cool. I mean, I totally get why you would do that for a movie like Cloverfield. I don't totally get why you'd do that for a movie for, you know, AI. And they were fun. Like, they were sort of seen as, like, innocent and cheeky. A few years later, another one got dropped called I Love Bees for the new game Halo 2. Did you ever play any of the Halo games?

• 13:49Speaker 02

  I played a bit of them through a friend, but I never had an Xbox, and most of my friends didn't, so I just, it missed me. But I was talking about Marathon a second ago. That's the new game from Bungie.

• 13:59Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. I don't know how to explain this, but like, Xbox to me was like, too masculine of a, of, like, to own as a teenage boy. Like, I wasn't that kind of-

• 14:10Speaker 02

  I have one is masculine, not even the system itself.

• 14:13Ryan Broderick?

  Like, I wasn't, I wasn't the chain ball necklace kind of teen boy in the 2000s. And all of those guys, the guys who look like, um, like Tony Soprano's son. Like, I wasn't those kids, so I didn't have an Xbox. I had a GameCube, or I had a PlayStation 2, right?

• 14:31Speaker 02

  I was, I was PlayStation, we were a PlayStation household. Even from the first system, I never had an N64. We were PlayStation, and so like, my Mario was Spyro. Like, that's what I grew up on, you know what I mean?

• 14:42Ryan Broderick?

  I really liked Crock.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Crock was, have you been back to it?

• 14:46Ryan Broderick?

  It's, I just remember it being very hard, like, a very hard game.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  It is the worst controls that have ever existed in the history of video games. It's crazy.

• 14:54Ryan Broderick?

  I spent like, a year playing the first level of Crock, and that was, like, because it was just too hard to do.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Based off of the Sonic conversation, when you said it was very hard, I got concerned that you were being horny.

• 15:06Ryan Broderick?

  No. Very difficult.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Very difficult.

• 15:12Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, yeah. So for the I Love Bees Halo 2 promotion, there's a bunch of emphasis on like basically using the internet to like let people find in-location events. And they were like playing recordings from payphones, like pretty cool. I actually just saw like a viral marketing thing the other day about like a game that could be played via existing payphones. Like you could call. Yeah, I saw someone on like Twitter or something like talking about like, we're gonna set up this thing where you could call a toll-free number on a payphone and it would like capture the flag, but with like the payphones left in cities, which I thought was like a cool idea.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  That is cool.

• 15:48Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. In 2005, we get a non-promotional version of an ARG, Perplex City. It's conceived and run by The Beast player and Garbage Day reader Adrian Hahn, who will absolutely be messaging me about our inaccurate discussion of ARGs. He is the leader of the section of our audience that gets mad at us every single time. I think the only way to sort of rectify this is we'll eventually have to have Adrian on to talk to him about it because god, does he have a lot of points that we screw this up a lot. So, uh, funding comes from selling cards with puzzles on them. The winner who doesn't get to the end until 2007 gets $200,000. Not every, yeah, pretty good amount of money for that.

• 16:29Ryan Broderick?

  Not every puzzle was necessary to win, and some were so hard they weren't solved until 2020.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 16:35Ryan Broderick?

  We also, at this time period, start to see like Trent Reznor experimenting with ARGs, which of, you know, makes total sense. Like, there's like a leaked USB drive that he's like leaving in bathrooms that like people can find. I love this stuff. Like, I, I, I never did geocaching. Did you ever do geocaching?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  My entire experience with everything you're talking about is like to a boundary, like to a certain level that I know I was interested in. But then the tier of thinking that I think a lot of these took was like a barrier to entry for me, where like I got really into the viral campaign for the movie The Ring when it was happening, where there was like a bunch of weird cryptic messages online and you could From the website, kind of find secret routes through it, but it wasn't like a game like you're describing.

• 17:22Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  It didn't kind of expand outward beyond that. It was just kind of fun secrets. I like that. That's cool. I could put in minimal amount of like layperson effort and kind of find some secrets out. But when it started becoming really difficult, it was too much. Geocaching I did do for a little bit because again, there wasn't like a skill barrier.

• 17:42Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  An intelligence barrier to it. It was just like, go to this spot and then snoop around a little bit and you'll find something. And so that was really fun for me. But those things that you're talking about were like a little too, a little too smart for me, a little too nerve wracking and intense. So I'm really curious about it.

• 17:57Ryan Broderick?

  I loved reading about that stuff, but I sort of ignored most of it. And I feel like, you know, if we're talking about like the internet, sort of changing your behavior or making you do stuff in real life. I kind of came through it through like finding bands on the internet and then going to see them. Or going to comic conventions and like knowing what everyone's like costumes were.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:20Ryan Broderick?

  I, I feel like it wasn't until Pokemon Go that those two worlds for me collided. And I was like, cool. Like I could wrap my head around this.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:28Ryan Broderick?

  And you know.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  That was like the most public version of that ever. You know what I mean? That was like worldwide craziness.

• 18:35Ryan Broderick?

  I think there was like a brief thing where I, I did plank, I think.

• 18:42Ryan Broderick?

  And I did.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I plank, I plank twice.

• 18:45Ryan Broderick?

  Did you plank? You planked twice?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Twice.

• 18:46Ryan Broderick?

  I, um, fun, fun Ryan lore for everybody. I, um, I did a meme like planking at the time called hadukening. Where you would jump and look like you're doing a hadukin from Street Fighter.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:59Ryan Broderick?

  And it got.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Photo, like getting the photo of it.

• 19:02Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. You like you freeze frame, right?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:04Ryan Broderick?

  And I got, um, reached out to by a Japanese news agency.

• 19:10Ryan Broderick?

  That sent a team to New York to interview me about how I, as a gaigen, had heard about this meme. And then they sent me a CD-ROM that I have somewhere that has my interview on it. And I've been dubbed in Japanese. And they even have the like variety show thing where there's like an old Japanese guy in the corner of the screen going like.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Like commenting on you as you're doing it?

• 19:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:31Ryan Broderick?

  Making comments.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 19:33Ryan Broderick?

  And yeah, it's like one of my like my most precious moments like. And they just like couldn't wrap their heads around that like white people in America were doing this meme that was popular on Japanese social media.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:45Ryan Broderick?

  A simple time.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  All of that cross pollinates now where it's like any meme pops up anywhere in the world and it's like everybody sees it everywhere all at once.

• 19:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Different.

• 19:53Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, very different.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  I, I spuck a challenge, but I, I did that for personal reasons. I didn't film it.

• 19:58Ryan Broderick?

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

• 20:16Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 20:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we did a.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  That's waterboarding.

• 20:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they waterboard, they basically waterboard. Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  I got, I got really into the ice bucket challenge for a very, I, I, personal is not the right word, but like selfish reason that it was like getting a bunch of uncles wet, like all over the place. It was just like older dad type men.

• 20:37Ryan Broderick?

  You did the wet uncle challenge?

• 20:38Speaker 02

  No, basically just that it was like men that I find hot.

• 20:42Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I see.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Of a certain age and demographic who like run firehouses or printing supply companies, getting wet on camera.

• 20:50Ryan Broderick?

  Oh.

• 20:51Speaker 02

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

• 21:10Ryan Broderick?

  I had never, I had never considered, yes.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Gay brains go so far.

• 21:17Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Reaches of the universe.

• 21:18Ryan Broderick?

  That's amazing.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Something that I locked into. I was like, this is tight.

• 21:22Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Well, we're.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  I'm so happy for you.

• 21:25Ryan Broderick?

  We're gonna, we're gonna find a way to loop that back into the actual topic of today's episode. After a word from our sponsors, whoever is brave enough to put their ad on this episode.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Wet hot uncles.

• 21:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, wet hot uncles.

• 21:41Speaker 03

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• 22:20Speaker 03

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• 23:04Speaker 03

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• 23:46Speaker 03

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• 23:57Ryan Broderick?

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

• 24:26Speaker 03

  That is sort of what I suspected.

• 24:28Ryan Broderick?

  Did you?

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Sort of, yes. Just seeing it, I was like, this doesn't seem like a gate or like a brick wall. This seems like, like an entry point.

• 24:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So he runs the duck through a decryption software, which takes him to a Reddit link. And then he realizes that there's like a pattern here. Cicadas, the little bugs, they only emerge on every prime number of a year, right? So it's 13 or 17. And that's so they don't synchronize the life cycle of their predators. And that for Erickson was like a big clue.

• 25:03Speaker 03

  Sorry, that's a real world thing you just said to me?

• 25:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. Those noisy little bugs appear only on prime number, a year intervals.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  All right. So for Erickson, he, that was sort of a big breakthrough moment. Not the stupid shit I just said, but like his thing.

• 25:19Ryan Broderick?

  And so the basically the Sydney Morning Herald rides down telephone lines out to several physical locations around the globe and into uncharted areas of the dark net. So far, the hunt has required a knowledge of number theory, philosophy, and classical music, and interest in both cyberpunk literature and the Victorian occult. And it's all come in handy as well as an understanding of Mayan numerology. So this is what this game is starting to like incorporate. It's starting to pull all these different threads together.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  And he's the only one? He's the only one going through this now?

• 25:52Ryan Broderick?

  Or? There's people all over the world trying to crack it, you know, and just for narrative's sake, we're going to be following his journey. The Sydney Herald did a really good job of capturing it. And they talk about how the game just gets more and more elaborate as people play it. There is like a like a character that gets kind of introduced, a woman known as Wind from Michigan, and she starts popping up on message boards, putting out false clues.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 26:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  New roadblock.

• 26:24Ryan Broderick?

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

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, things used to be fun.

• 27:08Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, but this was all fun, actually.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Did it also like start to obfuscate? Like, was it so cluttered with like bad actors like that, like sort of changing things up and putting false clues in that the game itself kind of got worse to play?

• 27:22Ryan Broderick?

  It created more of a sense of community. And it's, and it starts taking over more and more of the players' lives, including Erickson.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 27:30Ryan Broderick?

  Who's deep in the game and discovered a phone number.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final dot JPEG image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Multiply all three of these numbers together and add a dot com on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Sick. Well, at least that one makes total sense to me about what the next step is. That's cool.

• 28:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it leads to a website that gives GPS coordinates. Uh, once you kind of put all those numbers together. And then there's a countdown clock. And once the countdown reached zero, it showed 14 GPS coordinates around the world with locations in Warsaw, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Arizona, California, New Orleans, Miami, Hawaii, and Sydney.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 28:29Ryan Broderick?

  This was huge. It was proof that like, it wasn't just someone in a basement messing with people, but like an actual, some kind of organization. And so they are trying to figure out the final clues. And there were a couple that, that are interesting here. So there's a, they found a, a new code that used, uh, William Gibson's Agrippa, A Book of the Dead as a cipher. It's a poem that, uh, do you know about this?

• 28:55Speaker 02

  No, but I know William S. Gibson.

• 28:56Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So, uh, Agrippa, A Book of the Dead. It's an infamous poem that was only meant to be read once and then destroy itself. Very Gibson, very Gibson.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  And that's the cipher? How the fuck?

• 29:09Ryan Broderick?

  So it was only published on a three and a half inch floppy disk and it was programmed to erase itself after you read it. Which by the way, like, that would be such cool merch.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:21Ryan Broderick?

  That would be so cool to like, do something like that.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Anything that is like, super temporary or transient or whatever, I've always thought is cool. Just where it's like, you're doing something specifically for one purpose only and then it disappears. Love that.

• 29:34Ryan Broderick?

  It would be cool, like, if, yeah, I am not a professional touring musician, but perhaps someone who is, it would be cool to make a shirt that you had to buy at the beginning of the show. And then as you sweat it during the show, it would destroy the shirt.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  That's like, like edible underwear.

• 29:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Like edible underwear, exactly.

• 29:55Ryan Broderick?

  Or you could just sell edible underwear.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Or maybe like a big bucket of cold water pours down.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Certain people in the audience.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Wet uncles.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Free for uncles.

• 30:05Ryan Broderick?

  Wet uncles, exactly. So.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Love that.

• 30:10Ryan Broderick?

  Gibson's idea for a totally fungible poem. Or non-fungible, I guess it would be totally non-fungible poem.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:19Ryan Broderick?

  Got kinda screwed up. Someone did, uh, did record it and, and it has been read live by Pendulett, obviously. Fucking sheriff, sheriff of the no fun police Pendulett.

• 30:36Ryan Broderick?

  So, uh, from here though, the cicada players, they start to find like QR codes on lamp posts, which send them to a Tor site. Are you familiar with Tor?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Like T O R?

• 30:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Why am I familiar with Tor?

• 30:53Ryan Broderick?

  So a Tor browser is how you access onion sites, which are what the dark web is. Are you familiar with any of this?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Like vaguely, like I think that's how I know about it is somebody mentioned it to me in passing like this.

• 31:05Ryan Broderick?

  So basically.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  I was just like, why is it sitting in the back of my head? Why do I know what that is?

• 31:08Ryan Broderick?

  I, I once used it to access the Silk Road to buy acid with Bitcoin for a Vice magazine article I was working on in the 2010s.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Incredibly specific reason and I love that.

• 31:19Ryan Broderick?

  Dear FBI listening, I never received my acid and I was refunded and.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Fungible.

• 31:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So a Tor browser is a VPN effect essentially, but it's made to access what are called dot onion sites. So instead of dot com, it would be dot onion and it's usually like a very encrypted address. And those websites are what you refer to as the dark web. So like, and there are like dark web onion versions of all kinds of popular services. We, for our listeners, we have a previous episode all about the dark web. You could go check out in our archive. So Erickson gets to the QR codes on the lamp posts, gets to the Tor site. And he finds a message that reads, we want the best, not the followers.

• 32:10Ryan Broderick?

  And only the first people, so Erickson was too late. Only the very first people to access the Tor site were emailed directly. Whoa.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:20Ryan Broderick?

  And so for

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Bummer for him.

• 32:22Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he called it an anti climax. Um, and he said that he was too late to register his email at the tour hidden service. And he said that if his sleep wake cycle had been different, I believe I would have been among the first. And so all the cicadas go underground again. And then they reemerge a year later and we will finish our story about what happens after they reemerge after a word from our sponsors. The Silk Road, a great place to buy drugs and guns and tinned food.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  This might be the only one that I don't know that we're going to get away with. We'll see.

• 33:01Ryan Broderick?

  This might The Silk Road. The creator of it was just released from prison finally.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 33:07Ryan Broderick?

  I think so, right? Let me just double check that. I want to make sure my, oh yeah. Is he still in jail? I think he's still in jail.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Is he, is he the new secretary of defense or whatever? Is he replacing Christine?

• 33:17Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. The Silk Road, whose creator Ross Ulbricht was pardoned by Donald Trump in January 2025. So he's out, baby. Justice for Ross. Um, I don't think he should have gone to jail for as long as he did.

• 33:34Speaker 00

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• 34:06Ryan Broderick?

  It emerged on, um, it first emerged in 2012. Grant?

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Wait. On 4chan, uh, yeah.

• 34:15Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, okay, okay. So, so now we're, we're a year later. It emerges again. It will emerge a third time in 2014, but we'll get there. So in 2013, um, a message is posted to B and X. So B is 4chan's random board. And X is their paranormal board. So that's like the spooky scary one.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 34:34Ryan Broderick?

  And the message reads, hello again. Our search for intelligent individuals now continues. The first clue is hidden within this image. Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301. And this puzzle was different. Um, we're not going to go super deep into it, but basically you had to do a lot more to kind of unpack what was in there. Um, and, uh, it, there was like a questionnaire, um, that came, like came along with it. Um, and the questions included, um, like, uh, questions like, there is no tru- like, they're not really even questions. I don't know how to describe this, really.

• 35:15Ryan Broderick?

  It's like, it's like really strange. It's stuff that reads like, there is no truth. What you are is more important than what you do. You cannot step into the same river twice. Observation changes the thing being observed. This sentence is false. They're, they're closer to like puzzles or riddles.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds like a strange, like another vetting process, like another thing that like you have to figure this out versus just asking.

• 35:35Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And then there were like essay questions involved as well, like one.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Boo.

• 35:42Ryan Broderick?

  I know. What is this? The new SATs?

• 35:48Ryan Broderick?

  Boo. Uh, one of the essay questions was, name similarities between the concept and reality of the news feed on Facebook.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ, okay.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  So not a game you want to play? This doesn't sound fun to you?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Like, that's, that's where I'm coming from philosophically with all this. It's just like, damn dude, no, I just want to have a good time.

• 36:05Ryan Broderick?

  This is, this is my problem with a lot of this stuff, though. I mean, I feel like Slenderman kind of ended up this way too. Like, a lot of these things are like, they're fun and they're interesting. And then everyone's like, we should keep doing it. And then it gets dumber and worse and weirder.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like hits like an academia ball or something like that, where it just becomes so much more about like. Are you a good writer versus like, are you having a good time? And are you solving puzzles and stuff? I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying, other than like, I know how much it doesn't appeal to me, which is why I'm super excited to hear where it ends up going.

• 36:40Ryan Broderick?

  Well, what ends up happening? The group goes kind of under again and resurfaces in 2014. There are a bunch of fakes on 4chan flying around, obviously. But this time, the puzzle starts with the Twitter account that was used for the 2013 puzzle.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:59Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's like a sign of the times that they're not on 4chan anymore by 2014.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:04Ryan Broderick?

  Like, things weren't really fun there anymore.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Happened on 4chan in 2014.

• 37:09Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it's interesting. This is, this is pre Gamergate. But I think people forget that even before Gamergate, by this point, 4chan was getting pretty gnarly. It was a, it was a pretty nasty place to be. So they're on Twitter this time, and the final puzzle gets some people an invitation to like a club, but everyone else gets a bunch of elaborately encrypted files called the Libra Primus. And a lot of these, yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Sorry, did it call itself the final puzzle? Or is this just sort of the last one that showed up?

• 37:39Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's just the last one that showed up. I don't think there was like any sort of like, this is over, this is gonna end.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:44Ryan Broderick?

  A lot of the encrypted puzzles that they released have not actually been solved even today, which is interesting.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Jeez.

• 37:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And then since the end of the 2014 puzzle, they've basically been totally dormant. There were messages in 2015. I guess the group behind it responded to news articles that blamed them for a hack of Planned Parenthood.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Whoa. I'm assuming they were like, it wasn't us.

• 38:10Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you think that they would ever be that direct about anything? I'm sure they're like, "Search your soul."

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. "Do you think the you in your head is the you in real life?"

• 38:24Speaker 03

  The explosive in the hand.

• 38:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  It's not the explosive on the duck.

• 38:27Ryan Broderick?

  So their official statement at the time to the LA Times was, "We've noticed quite a lot of attention has been diverted to a supposedly malicious organization known as Planned Parenthood. The actions of this federation are not seen as right in the eyes of the public. So here we are, the social justice warriors." Which like, I don't know.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  I don't make any sense, Ryan.

• 38:50Ryan Broderick?

  It's also kind of unclear like exactly how affiliated these guys were with all of this because like, it's a hacker group that goes by 3301 and they allegedly hacked into Planned Parenthood's website because it was extremely outdated and broken. And then they were all weird about why they did it. This is something that I think was happening a lot in the 2010s. And this, you could even argue happened with like WikiLeaks and QAnon, which is like, once you create a piece of internet culture, there's no one in charge of it and there's not really a good way to stop anyone from just taking it and doing whatever they want with it. Which is exciting, but it's also like extremely chaotic.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like deregulated or whatever to the point where like it becomes smoke and mirrors all the time. You never know what's happening, you know?

• 39:40Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sure I'll be told if I'm wrong about this, but I think especially in an ARG space,

• 39:46Ryan Broderick?

  you're working, you know, in such fuzzy spaces already. Like you're, you're sort of looking for clues and it's all very conspiratorial that like, I think it's very easy to get turned around or to have people take over a project and not realize it and that, you know, something has changed like, eh, there's a final message that is posted by the group in 2016. It's uploaded to a website made by the people who solved one of the old puzzles. The, the message reads, hello, the path lies empty, epiphany seeks the devoted. Libra primus is the way, its words are the map, their meaning is the road and their numbers are the direction. Seek and you will be found. Good luck. 3301.

• 40:29Ryan Broderick?

  I feel like these guys are like, this is like some steampunk shit. I feel like this is just like, like, this is just getting like, like,

• 40:37Speaker 02

  like off the top, like from the first message, nobody thought to themselves like, wait, are these guys cool?

• 40:44Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Or are they losers?

• 40:46Ryan Broderick?

  This is like the kind of thing that like, this is the kind of thing like a guy would say to you when you beat him at Magic the Gathering at like a hobby shop. He'd be like, Libra primus is the way. And it's like, oh boy.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  And then he's like, in his mind, like, I got that guy and everybody else in the room is like, man.

• 41:04Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  We're gonna go get lunch.

• 41:08Ryan Broderick?

  So who do you, based on, based on what you've heard today, like who do you think was, was, was behind all of this?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  I mean, like, the way I have been absorbing this story, I have not put a personage to anything. Like, it's so vague to me behind the veil, and that's how these always seem, so I have no clue. No clue. Well, William S. Gibson.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  You're right. Fuck. Well done, Will.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Wait. Shut up.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  I was like, no fucking way.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  You got me so excited.

• 41:44Ryan Broderick?

  No, it was actually, uh, done by, uh... I was gonna make a joke about, like, Deloitte, or like, some, like, marketing firm, but, um... Basically, uh, one of the most popular theories about who was behind it appeared immediately, and it was sort of the most, one of the most popular ones, which was that it was a headhunting exercise for the Secret Service.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 42:07Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, I can't imagine, like, any actual adult with a job would think that, but, like, a lot of people on 4chan thought that.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Headhunting for people who were good enough to figure it out, that they were like, oh, we have to get rid of these people?

• 42:20Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, no, I, I think 4chan thought that the Secret Service was doing, like, a last starfighter. You know, where it's like, if you can, like, solve the puzzle, you get to join the Secret Service.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 42:31Ryan Broderick?

  Which, like, there's easier ways to get people to join, like...

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:34Ryan Broderick?

  Like, you can just join the Secret Service.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  But then you don't get the sharpest minds who have your lives.

• 42:40Ryan Broderick?

  Also, my understanding is, like, it's fairly easy to join the Secret Service, actually. It's much harder to join, like, the CIA or something, but, like, you can just apply for the Secret Service.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Full, full, full disclosure, I don't really know the difference.

• 42:53Ryan Broderick?

  Between the CIA and the Secret Service?

• 42:57Ryan Broderick?

  Secret Service, you know...

• 42:59Speaker 02

  Are they the ones, like, on the ground? Are they boots on the ground, and then CIA?

• 43:02Ryan Broderick?

  They're the ones following the president around.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Okay, okay.

• 43:05Ryan Broderick?

  And then the CIA are the ones that are... Well, they're very busy right now, in Iran, and Venezuela, and Greenland, and Canada, and Cuba, and, yeah. Anyway, so, their idea, though, that this was a last starfighter for the Secret Service, isn't totally crazy, I should say, because in 1942, there was a crossword puzzle that appeared in the pages of the Daily Telegraph i- in the UK, and it was so complicated, and, like, people couldn't figure out, like, what it was. But

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Being like an early example of this sort of

• 43:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, so everyone who solved this crossword received invitations to work in the cryptography department of the great Alan Turing. Now, that's a that's possibly a progrful. I'm also not totally clear how you would let the newspaper know that you solved the crossword in 1942. I guess if you like mailed it in.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:57Ryan Broderick?

  I don't

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Carrier pigeon.

• 43:59Ryan Broderick?

  I, yeah, I don't, I guess, yeah, I'm like

• 44:01Speaker 02

  You have to build a computer and email them back.

• 44:04Ryan Broderick?

  It's a fun story. I'm not exactly sure how you would do that. I guess.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  I like that, though. Like, even if that's not true, love that shit. That's great.

• 44:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it is cool. It's like, it's cool. Also, DARPA in 2009 kind of did a similar thing where they deployed 10 weather balloons across the United States and they awarded the first team to correctly identify every location with a $40,000 prize. So, so like, these things have happened in the past.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:29Ryan Broderick?

  The main clue we have about who was behind this game comes from an email that was allegedly leaked to some of the winners. And the email reads, "We are an international group. We have no name. We have no symbol. We have no membership rosters. We do not have a public website. And we do not advertise ourselves. You are undoubtedly wondering what it is we do. We are much like a think tank in that our primary focus is on researching and developing techniques to aid the ideas we advocate: liberty, privacy, security. You've undoubtedly heard of a few of our past projects, and if you choose to accept membership, we are happy to have you on board to help with future projects."

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Cute. Okay.

• 45:05Ryan Broderick?

  Here's the thing. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because of Epstein and and other sort of, you know, nefarious organizations being leaked to the public.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 45:16Ryan Broderick?

  You could just start a group. That doesn't, that doesn't mean that your group matters.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:22Ryan Broderick?

  Like, you could just start a group. Like, we could do it right now.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:26Ryan Broderick?

  And we could be like, oh, you gotta do all this dumb bullshit to join our group.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  That was literally me saying, like, are they cool? Or are they like?

• 45:32Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Total wash. Like, at the start of it, like, it's kind of important, like, are they coming from something that's like actually gonna make a difference? Or is it like you're saying?

• 45:42Speaker 03

  You're actually right. It is just lame people who are in a think tank.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  You totally, you totally, you totally, you did actually nail it.

• 45:52Ryan Broderick?

  Like, that doesn't mean anything to be in a group. You could just, anyone could start a group.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:56Ryan Broderick?

  So, the other clue that we, we have multiple interviews with a teenage coder from the Bay Area, who is going by tech dot technology. Sick.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 46:07Ryan Broderick?

  Pretty good.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Does he make electronic music?

• 46:09Ryan Broderick?

  I, I mean, what a waste of a name if you didn't.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  That's like basement king if I've ever heard it. You know what I mean?

• 46:16Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Technology spoke to the press multiple times claiming he got into the group. Like, he got into 3301. And he did an interview with WNYC where they said, "Technology says the site consisted of part message board, part chatroom, with a private messaging feature as well. In the chatroom section of the site, Technology saw about 20 members. They wanted to make it seem like they were this network of people that had infiltrated, if that's the right word, various private and public organizations. I expressed interest in publishing a story. One of the leaders, I guess you could call it, he said, 'Hey, wait a bit. We have people at Wired. We can get that published for you.' He thinks it was too informal to be a front for any serious group. And one of the sources we've been using for this episode seems to confirm this.

• 47:01Ryan Broderick?

  Joel Erickson seems to have had some success eventually getting in. And he wrote in 2022, "There was never a prize for the Cicada 3301 puzzle. The goal was to find intelligent people to join their group and to develop tools and spread awareness regarding how to avoid censorship and enforce privacy and anonymity."

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Okay, before you go any further, that is the most, like, concise and comfortable philosophy I've heard from any of this, or from any of these people at all, where they're just like, "It would be nice if people who are up to this tier can make a difference," is basically what they're saying, which is like, without any of the other garbage, or like mumbo jumbo between it. So, I like that. That's the first one. I'm like, okay, I see you. You know what I mean?

• 47:46Ryan Broderick?

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

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Healthy skepticism and like...

• 47:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, like, you're talking about like, avoiding censorship and liberty, and, you know, enforcing privacy. And then I'm like, you know, guy in civil war with glasses, like, what kind of liberty?

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:08Ryan Broderick?

  Like, I just, you know, I always wonder, you know, the most evil organization on earth is gonna be called like the Best Friends Club.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly.

• 48:18Ryan Broderick?

  Chris, very good.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:20Ryan Broderick?

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

• 48:49Speaker 02

  You don't come under duress, whatever.

• 48:51Ryan Broderick?

  I haven't checked in on it in a long time. Um, I was invited into Lulinks.

• 48:58Ryan Broderick?

  Were you in Lulinks?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  All right. So Will's face, people who are listening to the audio version of this, Will lit up like a Christmas tree.

• 49:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Said nothing and gasped and then made a hand gesture.

• 49:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  That was that.

• 49:13Ryan Broderick?

  So were you in there? Were you in Lulinks?

• 49:14Speaker 02

  I was in there. I was the most cursory user of that website. I barely interacted with it. But I had had my album pop off, my music popped off partially because of posting it on that website.

• 49:31Ryan Broderick?

  That's how I heard about you to begin with, I think.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  That is very much how you probably heard about me.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  For, we're not invited to this club because we're offline. What is this?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  It was, without going way too deep into it, it was the simplest possible UI for a website you can possibly imagine. It was just threads. It was just text threads. Sometimes there were images. And some of them, like the idea being that you could post whatever you want and nobody would stop you. So some of them got grotesque and horrifying and a lot of them were way more normal. And the stuff that was way more normal is what ended up kind of mostly populating it.

• 50:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  I hope I'm not gonna get in trouble by giving.

• 50:08Ryan Broderick?

  I hope so. I hope so. I hope not either. I mean, there's a, there are, there's a subreddit for it.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:15Ryan Broderick?

  So like, I think we're okay.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  We're fine.

• 50:16Ryan Broderick?

  There was a code word that I can't remember. I think it was like you, you would say Tibet or Nepal. It had some connection to the llama guy mascot, but like.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:25Ryan Broderick?

  Basically, so Lulinks stood for, it's a, it's an acronym. It started as a game fax, a game FAQs board, and it spun out. And it's Life, the Universe and Everything.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:38Ryan Broderick?

  And it was, was a kind of like a 4chan-esque site, but it had a ton of piracy. I was sort of pitched it as like, you can download so much shit on this website.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:51Ryan Broderick?

  And so for a long time, I was getting a lot of, I was getting a lot of music. I was getting a lot of movies. And then from Lulinks, I got an invite to what.c d and Waffles, which were like the members only, like BitTorrent.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:05Ryan Broderick?

  Communities.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  And for me, so me saying I had a cursory relationship with it is because I never even interacted with that stuff. Cause I was literally so naive and too afraid.

• 51:14Ryan Broderick?

  Really?

• 51:15Speaker 02

  I was too afraid to interact with any piracy, anything. So I was barely in there because I was like, I don't want to get in trouble. But I will talk about video games and music. You know what I mean?

• 51:25Ryan Broderick?

  I, I, I downloaded so much. Like I downloaded so much. It's crazy.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 51:33Ryan Broderick?

  I, yeah, I had, I had, I went to college with hard drives full of, of stolen.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Hell, yeah.

• 51:39Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, my God. I think in one of those like giant Lou threads, it's how I ended up pressing play on an album that I would later discover was All Hail West Texas by The Mountain Goats. And like, literally like when Aang in Last Airbender gets like the knot in his back opened and you just see the, I was just like, ah. Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Um, that's how it goes.

• 51:58Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So anyways, all of that to say that, that I'm still kind of like floored about the Lulinks thing. That's amazing.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. I need, I need one person every four years who is on that website. You know what I mean?

• 52:09Speaker 03

  How did you both get invited?

• 52:10Ryan Broderick?

  I got invited through a friend of mine, Adam, at the time, and Adam got invited. Through someone, but then he got kind of high up in Lou links because a lot of the moderators were living in Massachusetts in the 2000s and where we were. And so he would go to like mod meetups for Lou links. I never did. And I eventually kind of tapped. I have a friend who's still in there, actually, or he was up until the very end.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I checked in on my account like fairly recently, like like within a year or something. And I'm gone. I have no access anymore. Yeah.

• 52:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I don't even know how to access it anymore because because that wasn't the URL. It was like.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Something else.

• 52:52Ryan Broderick?

  Something else. How did you get involved?

• 52:54Speaker 02

  I do think initially it was a music thing, or it was because I had a friend who was very tech savvy and just liked me and thought I had like decent opinions on stuff and was like, you should check this out. It's like fun and quirky and weird. There is probably a specific person I'm not remembering who I could point to as being the person who let me in, but I don't remember. I do know that I was utterly obsessed with The Matrix. And I feel like whoever was like also down with that, there was kind of this like awareness of each other. And I think through that I probably knew that person who let me in.

• 53:32Ryan Broderick?

  That's awesome. I mean, it's so funny to think about like 4chan, Something Awful, GameFacts, Lou links and a couple other websites.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:40Ryan Broderick?

  My live journal. Yeah, but but I mean, those those communities in particular, I thought of them as being so big. And what has become very clear to me over the years is that there was probably about 1000 people across all of them.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:54Ryan Broderick?

  And and they're like, you just meet people who were like, it's, it's very funny.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Very bizarre.

• 54:00Ryan Broderick?

  Wow.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  And now they've brought us to war.

• 54:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, no, that was the, I'm not about the first wave of people, not the second wave.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Now you're all bastions in media and music.

• 54:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, now we're all podcasters. We're all podcasters and DJs and electronic musicians now.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  I know. Like, to me, to me, to me, what all of that is, is it's just a subset of nerd culture where it's like nerd culture always culminates in the same thing of people. Being fans of stuff and wanting to share that and talk about it with other people. And when you get cooler, vibe your ways of doing that, that are outside of like prying eyes who like add nothing to the conversation, that's really exciting. And places like Lulinks and all these other places were cool because you could do that. But at the same time, as you grow older in spaces like that, the feedback loop of kind of constantly yes manning your opinions on all of that stuff becomes less exciting. And you want to hear from other people. You want to hear when people are like not into something

• 55:00Speaker 02

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

• 55:25Ryan Broderick?

  Many such cases.

• 55:26Speaker 02

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

• 55:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, obviously, like I had the social media with connection with people I knew in real life, you know, through A I M or MySpace or whatever.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:53Ryan Broderick?

  But talking to internet strangers, it was, I kind of went from the 4chan and the, and the Lulinks world to Tumblr around 2008. And that, that really replaced that for me. And I was like, oh, this is actually much better.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:05Ryan Broderick?

  Because there's women here.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. That was me with both Twitter, way more Twitter at first when it was really, really popping because it was the first place where I realized you could post stream of consciousness and nobody could stop you, which was incredible and very liberating. And then Vine, I was obsessed with Vine. I had a number of vines, not to brag, that exploded, that people still quote to this day. I don't know if around Christmas time, you ever hear people saying like, you better watch out, you better watch out, you better watch out over and over and over.

• 56:35Ryan Broderick?

  I do that every year.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  That was my Vine with my brother. We Gave that to the world.

• 56:42Ryan Broderick?

  That was you?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  That was me and my brother. The film of it is me looking at my brother in his bedroom. And it's both of us just going.

• 56:50Ryan Broderick?

  You better watch out. You better watch out. You better watch out. I'm watching it right now. That's amazing. That's incredible.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  So it's shit like that where it's like, that's where I was living, you know? Vine was amazing when it was.

• 57:04Ryan Broderick?

  I'm realizing the ARG is actually finding where you've been on the internet over the last 25 years.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  The pockets where iPod.

• 57:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, just find you. Yeah. So one last, one last thing here for our story before we can totally wrap. For our Patreon listeners, you can go over and listen to a conversation that Grant recorded with Guardian reporter Alex Hearn, who played the third iteration of Cicada 3301.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 57:35Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, can you tell us a little bit about what Alex told you?

• 57:40Speaker 02

  I'm so curious about this.

• 57:42Ryan Broderick?

  So also Alex is a Garbage Day reader and a close friend of mine. And I did not know that Grant reached out to him about this. So I'm curious. Yeah.

• 57:49Speaker 03

  I recorded that like eight months ago. I remember none of it besides that I saw it in the bottom of this outline. But I do like we, I, what I do remember, because it was in the notes of the outline, is that a big part of Cicada was not just the game, but who's behind the game and a lot of people theorizing. And that like, we have lost, the internet's too dangerous now to let a mystery like that be fun. Like now this is QAnon.

• 58:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  Now this is like, like.

• 58:23Ryan Broderick?

  Surveillance state nightmare shit.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's very easy to see how something like this leads us five years later to, you know, it's the worst version of it.

• 58:33Ryan Broderick?

  But I've been thinking about this actually, and I want to sort of end on this idea because, so like, you know, we spent a large chunk of today talking about the excitement of the internet when it was new. And I think it's very easy to sort of think about it that way. There were plenty of problems on the internet back then, like plenty. Uh, Lulix had like gore and torture porn on there and stuff. Yeah. And it was a mean place. It was a mean place.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:57Ryan Broderick?

  But I do think that there are these moments.

• 59:00Ryan Broderick?

  When you get a new technology, or a new media environment, or a new way of socializing, or a new sort of birth of culture, and you can do things that are like, they've maybe never been possible before, or there's, there's room to experiment, there's room to have fun, and it's not important yet. And I, I guess, like, Will, like, do you think that can happen again? Do you think it will happen again? Like, I'm kind of optimistic about it.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  Yes, but there's an exact formula that needs to exist that can barely perpetuate itself. It barely exists, if ever. And it's that same conceit that's always been around, where like, what is it, where it's like, ultimate power and ultimate corruption? What's the, what's the idiom about that? Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Ultimate power corrupts, absolutely.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  There it is. That. That basically, when you're talking about something like Discord, like TikTok, like whatever it is, the only way those things can exist is where the power at the center of it has no greed. And that is impossible. You know what I mean?

• 1:00:01Ryan Broderick?

  Ah, sure.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  But if something like that were to exist, where like, somebody creates Vine, and then never sells it, because they don't care about making money, that's the way something like that can exist in perpetuity, and expand, and blossom, and become something beautiful. But that never happens, because everybody always just wants to make money off of it, so it always turns into shit, and it gets sold off, or it expands into something that is completely outside of the philosophy of what the thing was in the first place. I have a lot of ire for the disappearance of Vine, because that is how it happened.

• 1:00:33Ryan Broderick?

  I loved it. I loved it so much.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  I loved it so much. I was, I was literally there from when it started, when the first three months of it were only porn, because people were just like, I can hold my dick for six seconds, and nobody's gonna stop me. It was insane.

• 1:00:47Ryan Broderick?

  No one can stop you.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  It was amazing and crazy. And then it turned into this beautiful thing that was like, highly social, highly like, integrated with people I had never met before, I was kind of becoming friends with. Like, it was amazing. But, it's that same conceit, where like, it won't exist unless there is the thing at the top existing greedlessly. And that is just an impossibility. You know what I mean? The closest thing we've come to something like that is maybe like...

• 1:01:18Speaker 02

  Ben and Jerry's sometimes, Arizona Tea sometimes, you know what I mean? And those are not social platforms. Those are just random products, but.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  True social thing.

• 1:01:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, okay, wait, so I don't disagree with you, but it's it's interesting. I hadn't I hadn't thought of it that way. I was actually coming at it from a different direction and I want your take on it, which is like I. And I don't disagree with you, but I I also wonder if it's about expectation. When the Internet was still considered to be this thing that like wasn't like TV. It might not like my like, it might not even exist in five years, like who only? Nobody gives a shit about it. You could kind of do whatever you wanted with it.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Ryan Broderick?

  And it's not that you can't now, like, that's the crazy thing is like, it's actually easier. I have a friend, he developer, we talk about this all the time, where he's like, it's actually crazy. It's easier to make a personal website now than it has ever been. It is so it is basically like zero money.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but nobody's doing that.

• 1:02:16Ryan Broderick?

  But nobody's doing it. And so it's it's not so much like the Internet itself is worse now. It's that the what people are really saying is if I go make a cool thing on the Internet, no one will see it. So why would I bother? I agree with you that there is this like massive, massive amount of money tied up in all of this now.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Ryan Broderick?

  But it's also the social expectations of.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Of what it is.

• 1:02:38Ryan Broderick?

  The fact that you and I were on the same members only invite only website in the 2000s means that there were not a lot of people on the Internet back then.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:02:48Ryan Broderick?

  Statistically, they would have to be not a lot of people.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Ryan Broderick?

  So I do wonder like, are we thinking about these things and and and kind of judging them by the standards of today unfairly? So it's it's not so much like.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  Very, very true, like literally visibility is everything. That's the only reason people engage with most things that are fun things on the Internet is like.

• 1:03:10Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  It's very, very real. And the idea of like, let's say, like coming from my world of things, a band is like, we made a website. We spent like four months on it. We're super proud of it. Come check it out. That's getting like infinitely less attention because it's not as comfortably shareable, it's not as comfortably summarizable.

• 1:03:31Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  You know, it's not dumbed down the way people need those things to be. It's also not in a media format that is accessible like a movie or a TV show or a, or an album or whatever it is. So I completely understand that. I think that's a super, super valid way of thinking about it too. Like, I think mine is coming from the unfortunate place of like, only considering.

• 1:03:51Ryan Broderick?

  I think yours explains why it's like that.

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's, it's, the money has moved and so the expectations have changed.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Ryan Broderick?

  And it's, yeah, it's a bummer.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  It's such a bummer.

• 1:04:00Ryan Broderick?

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

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  I don't, I'm trying so hard. I mean, I just, I think that there, there's a lot of innovations within formats. Like, there's a lot of music that I think is like, this is undeniably the most forward thinking thing I've ever heard, or games that kind of do that, or like play like unlike anything else I've ever played. So there's things like that, but like exactly what we're talking about right now, we'll start to talk about AI in that way, or like think that it's like this most revolutionary thing in the entire world. It is vehemently from me, not that. It is something that is so cooked and so not what people think it is. And can I say something that is so unrelated to this, even though it kind of is?

• 1:05:10Ryan Broderick?

  Of course.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  That is like, to me.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  The only way you get the things that you're talking about, like stuff that is like boundless and completely unprecedented is by having like a stable economy and funding for the arts. You know what I mean?

• 1:05:30Ryan Broderick?

  You segued perfectly into what I was gonna say, which was Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, bankrolled by Canadian taxpayers.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 1:05:39Ryan Broderick?

  Is the, I have been beaming for weeks since seeing it. Cause I was like, this is, and I don't think it's an accident that it's like old internet guys that sort of like went off and did side quests for 10 years and came back and did something where I was like, this is the breath of fresh air creatively that I have, I felt like I've been missing for a decade.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  And they have been so public about the circumstance of that movie existing, which is why it's the perfect segue, that it's, it's what you're saying. It's like the Canadian government bankrolled it. Also the laws around like censorship and the way that they did things in it are so much more lax and way, not outside of surveillance state, but just kind of like less than.

• 1:06:18Ryan Broderick?

  And messing with the surveillance state, like playing around with it. It's so cool.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:59Ryan Broderick?

  I lived in Sao Paulo for four years. Uh, I'm a huge connoisseur of Brazilian funk music.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  So I am not, I'm a, I am a tourist, but every time I hear it, I'm like, this is literally the most future shit I've ever heard in my entire life. I don't even know how, how that exists other than people just having the freedom to fuck around and do whatever they want with anything. And it's like, You'll see visuals of it of like that guy DJ Ramon's successor is like a he he's kind of one of the biggest figureheads of sort of that scene, but also was totally his own thing. Like me finding out about him was watching him DJ on like the shittiest piece of equipment in the world with the camera like shaking and

• 1:07:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I know the video.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Interrupting the music. It looks like it was like everything in the video costs like maybe 150 bucks or something like that. And it's the most forward thinking thing I've ever heard. That's what I'm talking about.

• 1:07:52Ryan Broderick?

  Have you ever heard of the the Brazilian genre, uh, Fajó?

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Fajó?

• 1:07:56Ryan Broderick?

  No, I don't know.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  I don't know anything. I'm a musician professionally. I know barely anything. So.

• 1:08:00Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I I I think that's what it's called here. I'm gonna get totally slammed by.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  I mean, just as a quick example, while you're looking like there was a song I heard that is literally like on alarm. The drop is on alarm. There's no kick drum. There's nothing else. It's people talking and then an alarm goes off and it's three minutes. And I was like, I, nobody in the West could fathom this.

• 1:08:24Ryan Broderick?

  It's it's awesome.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Cannot even possibly imagine something.

• 1:08:27Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so I double check because I don't want to get slammed. And then then we have to wrap this up because I can see Grant just sweating, thinking about editing this.

• 1:08:36Ryan Broderick?

  So Fajó is a like Brazilian version of like, almost like country music, like dance music. But a lot of DJs, what they're doing is they're taking the traditional folk beat of the the Fajó music. And then they'll slap on top of it like, like a phone recording of like Rihanna's umbrella. And they'll just like compress the two together. And it's the most insane fucking future shit you've ever heard.

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:09:00Ryan Broderick?

  Because they've they there's no question about like, does this make sense? Is this good?

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Ryan Broderick?

  It's just like.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:47Ryan Broderick?

  Stable economy.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Free art.

• 1:09:49Ryan Broderick?

  Free art and I can do this, I can do this.

• 1:09:54Ryan Broderick?

  The feeling of discovering a mystery, of sort of refreshing the page, of digging deeper and deeper, and being bombarded with new ideas, that can happen again when you decouple expression online from making a lot of money and the expectation that a lot of people have to see it for it to be successful.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  And if you. A round of applause for that segment.

• 1:10:15Ryan Broderick?

  If you remove those tooth pressures, it can happen again. And so Will.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  I gotta join Cicada.

• 1:10:22Ryan Broderick?

  That's what we gotta do. 301. Will, I want to thank you for coming on the show. This was great. I literally could do this for hours. If you want to follow you online, other than Vine, where can they follow you?

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  Vine is now dead, unfortunately, but I am fairly active, unfortunately, on Twitter still. Every, everything, everywhere is Baths music. B A T H S M U S I C. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, but that's just reposting. I would say Instagram or Twitter. Those are the main things.

• 1:10:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, do you have tour dates coming up?

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Yes, I don't know when this show is coming out, but towards the end of March and all through April and May, I'm doing a world tour surrounding the release of the reissue of my first record, Cerulean. So it's called Cerulean R. And I'm doing a bunch of tour dates for it. And there's five in the, or four in the US, one in Canada, two in Australia, one in Tokyo and one in London. And that's it. And it's like 10 shows.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  I cannot wait to see my excuse to travel live again.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Well, you're in luck. I'm gonna play it.

• 1:11:26Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fialsted is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Couga is their Director of Marketing, YouTube and Podcast Growth Marketer Samantha Hallows. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the

• 1:12:06Ryan Broderick?

  one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Be sure to check out the Panic World YouTube channel, which you can find at youtube.com/panicworldpod. And please, give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.