Robert Evans and Sophia Alexandra trace QAnon's roots to the 1990s Omega Trust scam, where Clyde Hood's impossible financial promises merged with Jay-Z Knight's Ramtha channeling and Shana Goodwin's "Dove of Oneness" newsletter. This convergence birthed the Nessera conspiracy, falsely claiming a secret law would replace taxes, a narrative that survived federal arrests by blaming the Illuminati for blocking payouts. Ultimately, this history reveals how disparate cultic elements coalesce into weaponized unreality, exploiting isolated individuals while shifting blame from predatory leaders to vulnerable victims. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money Memo and Roald Dahl00:02:03
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Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
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On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
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You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
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Was this before he wrote his stories?
Trusting the Wrong Banker00:15:31
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
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Robert Evans here, and I wanted to ask for your help.
There is a Portland area woman, Ruba Tamimi.
She's an Arabic interpreter and a Palestinian liberation activist, and she is trying to save her home at the moment.
She's got a GoFundMe.
If you go to Save Ruba's House, R-U-B-A on GoFundMe, you'll find it.
Save Ruba's House on GoFundMe.
If you've got a few bucks, she could really use it.
Again, Save Ruba's House, R-U-B-A, at GoFundMe.
Thanks.
What's killing my babies?
This is ah, shit.
That's a bad way to start this.
This is Behind the Bastards, a poorly introduced podcast by Robert Evans.
And as you might guess by our celebration of baby killing and the introduction, my guest this week, Sophia Alexandra.
Okay, oh, yeah, hell yeah.
The Jamaican air horns.
Let's do it.
No, no, no.
I just really got a call that I've been canceled for those sound effects.
So, oh, really?
Thanks for having me.
That's a shame.
Cancel culture strikes again.
First, Dr. Sois than you.
I'm being told it's Dr. Sois.
I don't believe it, but whatever.
I guess I have to move to Texas now.
You have to move to Texas, aka Cancelvania, where the coronavirus runs free as the white-tailed deer crossed the prairie.
Sophia, you and I have a bit of a history.
And that history is: I tell you stories about people who got a lot of babies killed.
You sure?
I value that part of our relationship.
It's special, you know?
There's not just anyone that you can sit down and really talk about some dead babies with.
But you and I have both had a rough year already, as have, I'm going to guess, around 320 million Americans.
So I decided to have a little bit lighter fare this week.
Instead of talking about a baby, talking about a conspiracy theory that in many ways was the genesis of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which is a conspiracy theory that revolves around satanic pedophiles killing babies.
Robert, you flatter me.
Oh my God.
Thank you so much for saving this for me.
Oh, yeah.
No, we're going to have a good time.
We're going to really, really get down and dirty with it.
Have you heard?
This is a second base for us, Robert.
This is.
This is.
This is a real step forward for us.
Have you heard of the Nessera conspiracy theory?
No.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, that is fine.
It's from the late 90s, early 2000s.
How do you spell that?
N-E-S-E-R-A.
I'll explain to you what it means in a little bit.
It started in like the late 90s, early 2000s.
It has been absorbed into QAnon, or at least segments of the QAnon conspiracy have absorbed this.
But in a lot of ways, the Nessera conspiracy theory, which kind of hit its height in the Bush years, is a prelude to QAnon.
A lot of you can see the groundwork being laid for QAnon in this conspiracy theory.
And that's why I think it's very interesting.
Some beautiful amusebouche.
Yeah.
Still all that conspiracy nonsense to come.
I'm very excited.
It's very exciting.
And it's being, it kind of faded out at the end of the Bush years, and it's being revived now.
So we'll get to talk about in our next episode, kind of the modern revival of the Nessera conspiracy theory.
But first, let's go back in time to the early 1990s, which was, I think, fair to say, a golden age of cartoons trying to sell children things mostly.
But compared to now, a golden age for sure.
Now, in the early 1990s, a Louisiana State University graduate in systems philosophy named Harvey Francis Bernard started looking at the U.S. economy and seeing some warning signs up ahead.
I don't think I need to explain what those warning signs were because we've all lived in a continual period of economic collapse and whatnot.
So Barnard is looking at like the Clinton era economy and the things that are getting passed and kind of the explosion of neoliberalism and going like this could be a problem.
And he decides to solve the problem.
Now, Bernard believed that personal debt was the number one factor holding back the U.S. economy and that compound interest was the number one cause of debt and just thus the chief moral evil facing the U.S. economy.
So over the course of several years, he put together a plan to fix this that he called the National Economic Security and Recovery Act or NESERA, you know, to acronym the shit out of it.
Gotcha.
And you're not going to get any analysis of how well this plan would have actually worked for me because I don't understand the economy.
This was his goal.
He thought that this would fix things.
I can't tell you if it would have or wouldn't.
The proposed law.
Did you say it was going to be a final solution?
No, I don't think he was a bad person.
I don't think there was any like, yeah, I don't get that hint because the conspiracy theory bears no resemblance to what he started.
And he's tried to fight against the theory.
This is just like a nerd who was who came up with what he thought might fix things and nobody did it.
So the proposed law would have replaced the income tax with a national sales tax, which I think is a bad idea.
That one I will comment on because it's kind of regressive against poor people as opposed to progressive.
He would abolish compound interest on most loans, which seems like a reasonable idea.
And it would have returned the U.S. to bimetallic currency, aka returning to using gold and silver as stores of value for our currency, which does seem dumb.
Bernard believed his plan would lead to 0% inflation and an economy devoid of recessions and depressions.
So it was a nice dream.
Again, doesn't seem to me like it would have worked, but I don't know anything about the economy.
And like every young man with a beautiful dream, Harvey decided that self-publishing was the best way to get his message out.
In 1996, he produced a book, Draining the Swamp, Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reform.
Remember that title?
God damn it.
Yeah.
So he sent copies of this book to every member of Congress.
And of course, nobody read them, right?
You send a copy of your homebrewed fiscal policy to Congress.
Nobody's going to read that.
Nobody was ever going to read that.
Nessera never went up for a vote.
It was never even discussed in Congress.
And Bernard's plan for economic reform remains untested to this day.
Frustrated, he published his book online under a new name, Draining a Swamp, The Nessera Story, Money and Fiscal Policy.
And for a few years, it mostly just existed on the internet as a bizarre monument to what might have been if the entire national government had decided to implement the plan that some dude who had enough spare cash to self-publish had sent them via the mail.
Nothing really happened with it.
No elected leaders or influential thinkers picked up on the work, but people did start to read it.
And one of the people who read it was Candace Goodwin, a woman from Washington state who was a unique mix of gullible and cunning.
Now, we're not going to talk about Candace for a little while yet, but remember, Candace Goodwin picks this book up, reads it in like the late 90s, early 2000s.
And while she's becoming interested in this, a completely separate thing is happening.
A scam is being born in Mattoon, Illinois to a man named Clyde Hood.
This is a little bit of a wandering story.
I just like all of the delightful names.
Yeah, Mattoon.
Come on, Illinois.
That's not a real town name, and you fuckers know it.
Fucking Illinois.
So Clyde Hood is a retired electrician who lives in Mattoon.
And in 1994, he decided he wanted to make more money than tended to be available to small town electricians.
He started what he called Omega Trust and Trading.
So Clyde told the people that he approached with his plan that he had a background in investment banking.
He'd done the job for 15 or 16 years.
He owned a foreign bank.
Not one that they'd heard of, but trust him, you know, this is a big deal.
This bank that he owns is a big deal.
As a Jew, I'm personally offended.
Yeah, these are all lies.
I own the banks.
I control the media.
Hello?
That is the new conspiracy that you're dropping today, which is that you control the global economy.
Not all the Jews, just me.
Just Sophia.
For the rest of them.
Protocols of Sophia.
Exactly.
I am an elder of Zion.
There weren't all of us.
It was just me.
It's always a good question.
It was a chill meeting.
I wrote a whole scroll.
I didn't know it was going to get popular.
Oh, boy.
The fan art that comes out of this is going to be really problematic in like five years.
So Clyde started telling people, again, who is his only background is as a small-town electrician.
Clyde starts saying, I've got 16, 15 years of experience as an investment banker.
I own a giant foreign bank.
I'm an expert in offshore trading.
And he would particularly claim to be an expert in European high-yield investment programs and prime banknotes.
Don't know what those are?
Don't worry.
Clyde didn't really either.
He'd just lie about what they were.
He would tell his marks that these were the kind of investments that are why rich people get richer.
So they're investments that are guaranteed to have a huge increase in like return of ROI or whatever, return over time.
And if you invest in them, you're automatically going to make more money.
There's no chance of them failing.
And the only reason you can't invest in that is that the rich people have set up restrictions so that little people like you can't get in these investments.
And so you can't get rich because you don't have enough capital up front to get in the door of these kinds of things.
So he would say.
Fucking rich people.
That's what Clyde would say.
And he would get these audiences of Midwestern churchgoers mostly.
And he would tell them there are these investments that are why rich people keep getting so rich and they're locking you out of them.
But because I'm in this system, because I'm a big part of this, I know how to get you all in the door.
I do, he would tell people, like, I do $250 million deals four times a week.
You know, it's totally routine for me.
I know how to make, I like, I can, I, I understand this business that they're trying to lock you out of, and I've got a way for you to get in with it.
He would tell his marks things like this: quote, I'm the only one with control.
I'm the only one with a collateral account.
I'm the one with the fiduciary bank.
There are only seven or eight people in the world that can do all this.
So basically, he sounds like a Fin Dom, doesn't he?
He totally does.
He's like, I'm the one that holds the money.
I got the only one that knows how this works.
Say it.
But he was, so what he was doing, though, this is where it gets kind of interesting.
So he would, he would start by pumping himself up as like, this is how big a deal I am.
This is the kind of money I work with.
This is the kind of scale I work at.
And I'm an integral part, one of seven or eight people who's a part of running these systems that are why the rich get richer, that you, the poor, are locked out of.
And then he would go into the second part of his spiel.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the News Tribune, a local Illinois paper explaining that spiel.
With a nod to his Christian audience, he said a vision from God came to him during a business trip in Hong Kong.
It told him to help the little people and to do a big trade for humanitarian causes.
For that, he had formed a company called Omega Trust and Trading, LTD.
He was offering hardworking people a chance to reap their share of the Lord's storehouse.
They could buy Omega units for $100 apiece.
Under Hood's supervision, each unit would roll for 275 days with a 50 to 1 return.
Investors could let it roll again for another 275 days, again at 50 to 1.
After that, they could do one more roll, but that was all.
For onlookers, the math wasn't too hard to figure.
In less than three years, $100 could become $12.5 million.
So you see what the scam is here?
I've got access.
I'm big in this system, the system that you're locked out of, but God told me to let you in.
So individually, you each can't be a part of this because you don't have enough money.
But if you all pool your money together, we can put you in this 50 to 1 investment.
And if you just give your money to me for three or four years, it'll be millions of dollars.
That's you know what I like about this scam?
Yeah.
Is that in the beginning, he says he's part of the problem.
He does.
You know what I mean?
He's like, I'm one of the eight people.
That's the problem.
You can trust me.
It's just such a blatant amount of honesty that I respect that hustle.
He was like, look, I am one of eight crooks that control the world.
Obviously, you can't be me, but do you want to trust me with all your money?
Yeah.
And it's one of those things where it's a very specific, who this grift could work on is very specific, right?
This is only ever going to function for, like, this is only ever going to function on a specific kind of conservative person, right?
Where they, you, you tell them, I am a part of this tiny system of wealth and privilege that you have no chance of getting access to, that is made to profit, to lock you out as the little people, but you don't hate me for that because you think you're still bought into that idea that having money infers some sort of moral high ground, right?
That you've done something to earn it.
So he's not, he's, he's really specifically grifting kind of conservative church-going Midwesterners by saying, Hey, um, I'm a part of this system, but I know you don't really hate the system.
You just hate that you don't have access to it.
And I, I will give you access to it because God told me to.
It's an interesting, interesting grift.
It's kind of, it's not completely different from what happened with the Wall Street bets thing, right?
With some of the way that was being framed to people of like these kind of investments, normally you can't get in.
It's just that the only hedge funds can do this thing, but we're going to crowdsource this thing that only hedge funds do and you'll make a bunch of money.
And some people did, but more people lost money.
You know, it's that kind of grift.
And it's, I mean, it's, it's kind of a nice cocktail, right?
Because you're like, you're bringing in like, yes, a few people control the world's finances.
You know, you're, you're mixing in a healthy dash of, oh, God chose me to help.
Yeah.
You know, and you're mixing in the fear, the underlying fear of people that the only reason they're not rich is because they lack access.
Yeah.
But not access in terms of like racism or systemic like, no, access in terms of literally one of the eight people being like, you're in now.
Yeah.
You just need to have the right rich friend and then everything will be fine for you.
Like, and then you can get rich.
And it is also another way in which I guess it does kind of like you can see some sort of similarity with Wall Street bets is you just have to put in a hundred bucks, right?
And obviously they're trying to get people to put in more, right?
Because if your hundred dollars can turn into 12.5 million, what if you put in a thousand?
You'll be super rich, you know?
Anyway, so I just have to say that me and my mom got suckered into Amway when we first moved here.
The Legitimate Grift Trap00:03:28
So yeah.
And imagine being like a new immigrant and someone is like, I know how I can prey on you.
Yeah.
It's really fucked up.
And it's called the American Way, which I just think is so shut up.
That's what Amway was designed to do, you know?
Like people come here with a little bit of cash in their pocket and this dream of America as a kind of opportunity.
That's what was fucked up.
Not a lot of cash.
Yeah.
Also, my mom has like the worst social skills.
So it was just really fun to have a woman that doesn't say goodbye before she hangs up the phone.
Selling Amway.
I'm not trying to sell anything to anyone.
I'm like, she doesn't know how to talk to her daughter.
She's going to befriend an American stranger.
Amazing.
Oh, classic.
So far, I think this is an interesting grift because I'm interested in grifts, but this is a pretty run-of-the-mill grift.
I think thousands of American con artists have made bank off of variations of the same idea.
There's nothing totally groundbreaking here.
Although, again, I think it is neat.
Clyde Hood did differentiate himself a bit with the kind of work that he put into his grift and what he did with the money.
In terms of the money, he used it to make his hometown Mattoon.
Like he poured it all back and a lot of it back into the community.
He would buy people houses and businesses.
And he did this to like launder the money, right?
Like he would give people interest-free loans and stuff, which is smart because it meant that everybody who lived around him supported him in his grift.
And it also meant that he had a way to launder money.
Now, he was also a kind of laborful guy.
He put the effort into making this look like official financial shit because, again, his clients were low-income Midwesterners who just, if the forms looked right, they would assume this was an actual investment.
He would send his investors official-looking legal documents called private party loan agreements, which are not a thing.
But the people he was scamming didn't know that.
And they got receipts that seemed very official.
So they assumed it was legitimate.
Clyde was also intelligent enough to portray his scam as not just another get-rich quick scheme.
He wasn't just offering people a sure-thing investment opportunity.
He was a crusader who had come from the murky waters of finance with special knowledge and a biblical command to free regular people from the bonds of debt slavery and paycheck to paycheck life.
Clyde claimed his new goal was to, quote, keep the Lord's warehouse full.
So he also told his marks that as a rich investment banker, he had access to a special investment system that was only available to the wealthy.
So again, he was like letting you into this thing.
Now, for the next few years, Omega spread by word of mouth all over North America.
Hood and four of his friends acted as the ringleaders, connecting a network of roobes via direct phone conversations.
Omega investors in 17 area codes would regularly receive calls with pre-recorded updates from Clyde on the status of their investment.
Most of these calls focused on why the promised payouts were constantly delayed.
For example, quote, Omega has been interrupted due to some unforeseen financial conflicts, he said in a June 3rd, 1996 phone message.
These situations or those situations should be completed on June 17th, 1996, and the banks will then continue to process your checks and credit cards.
So he's just saying, like, voice, like, it's not even like an actual voicemail.
High Hedge Fund Illusions00:05:24
It's like a recording.
Yeah, it's a pre-recorded voicemail to keep you up to date on your investment.
Hey, when you love enough to do the very least.
Yeah.
You know?
So grifty.
It's unreal.
Yeah, he's a solid grifter.
Now, this worked for a shockingly long time.
People accepted the delays just as just more evidence that Clyde was a real hero, right?
The system is trying to stop him from getting us our money.
Like, we're all in this together.
We're fighting the system.
And if we just keep holding out, eventually we'll break into the system.
Now, the reality, of course.
So similar and just way too similar to what's happened.
I know, I know.
It's the same thing, right?
It's just too much.
It's too on the nose.
It's very fun.
I do like to picture him practicing recording those voice messages.
Imagine being like, oh, no, I should have.
Yeah.
I got to invent a new thing.
Let's see, like a hedge fund, hedge fund.
Okay, what should we do?
Like a like high hedge fund VP?
Yeah.
So the high hedge fund VP has recently told us about some complications in your account.
Just pretty fun to imagine it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Robert, where'd you go?
Okay.
So I'm just, I'm just thinking about how this is going to keep happening forever.
You know what?
But you know what else is going to keep happening forever?
And it's also fun to imagine.
I had to put both products and services together.
It was so cohesive.
Yes, Robert.
Products and services.
Okay.
Well, products.
That's it.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for a pitch, it's just like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Brook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Paul Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it goes the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lozla proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
A better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
QAnon Cash Basis Cults00:12:53
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, we're back.
Well, okay.
So the reality, of course, of this con was that Clyde and his collaborators were making bank stealing from a bunch of people who didn't have a whole lot of money to steal.
He recruited salesmen who would pitch Omega to new communities, and his most successful pitch man brought in $60,000 to $100,000 per week.
So they are fleecing a lot of people for a lot of money.
Clyde avoided pitching to communities too close to his hometown in Illinois because again, you don't want to shit where you eat.
California and Texas were his biggest money-making states, which should not surprise anyone.
It's also nice choosing such big fucking states.
I mean, like, you don't want to grift in like South Dakota.
No.
You'll get shot.
Four people in town.
I've stolen all $8 in the community.
Yeah.
That's not even going to pay for my bus stick at home.
Yeah.
Washington State was his number three biggest mark.
And it was there in 1998 that Candace Goodwin, who we talked about earlier, big fan of Nessera, became an investor.
She lived near Yelm, Washington, which is also where most of Omega's Washington investors lived.
One resident whose mother gave $1,100 to Clyde later told reporters, quote, it proliferated throughout this entire town.
Another resident who donated or who invested and lost $4,500 recalled, it was just by word of mouth.
Some friends of ours told us, and then we turned around to talk to other people about it.
They already knew.
And of course, the way that things work in these kind of communities, small communities, you convince one person you're legit.
They'll tell their friends.
It's like, hey, we all have this opportunity to get super rich, you know, fighting the system.
Let's do it.
Let's, you know, whatever you've got, put in as much as you can, right?
Why not?
It's a sure thing.
Fighting the system always results in a huge fucking cash cow at the end.
That's the way fighting the system works.
That's why activism is so lucrative.
You're always seeing fucking union leaders and all the people protesting, just fucking rolling and cowing.
Union leaders do sometimes wind up rolling in cash, but that's because of the mop.
Well, I don't mean, I guess, leaders leaders.
I'm thinking of my friends who were.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not like there's a difference between most unions and like Atlantic City unions.
So the fact that this kind of proliferated through very savvy con artists and the network of savvy con artists reaching out to influential people in small communities and convincing them that they were the real thing.
That's probably part of why it took the Fed so long to realize that something was up.
The other part is that the internet wasn't really a thing at this point in the same way that it is now, right?
It existed, obviously, in the late 90s, but you were not going to reap small town people for a grift via the internet.
Omega was sold hand to hand and people were strung along over phone calls to their landlines, right?
The artisanal grift.
The artisanal grift, yeah.
The whole foods of grifting.
Please, it's the heirwan of gifting.
It's farm to table grifting.
It's, you know, grift local, I always say.
Support your local grifter.
That's merch.
I'm sorry.
That is merch.
Yeah.
So the fact that like Omega was sold this way also allowed Clyde and his fellows to trick very well-educated and accomplished people.
We're not talking about like a Nigerian prince email scam here where you shoot out a million emails and you hope you just kind of scam a couple of people, like, right?
You shoot out a bunch.
This is very targeted, very, there's a lot of effort going into this grift.
One of the biggest marks that they found was a Seattle-based tax attorney and a very successful tax attorney who gave Omega $280,000.
So people who should have known better got caught into this shit, right?
You expect a tax attorney would know this is all lies, but he didn't.
The local New Age movement was absolutely critical to allowing Omega to spread through most of these little communities.
In Washington, the vector of infection seems to have been Jay-Z Knight, a guru who claimed to channel Rampha, the soul of a 40,000-year-old warrior.
Many Omega donors had heard about the opportunity through Jay-Z or through Rampha, who again, Jay-Z, she channeled Ramtha, right?
And I'm going to quote again from the write-up in the news tribune here.
Omega was an open secret at Knight's Rampha School of Enlightenment, four former students say.
They asked not to be named, citing the fear of legal retaliation from Knight, who requires students to sign non-disclosure agreements.
That's how I became involved in it, was through the school, one student said.
I was involved in it, and practically everyone else I knew at the school was involved in it.
There were tons of people involved in this on just a cash basis.
People were sending in cash, cash with no paperwork, no receipt, no nothing.
People were promised their money was going to come in before the next snowfall.
The students say Knight never endorsed or promoted Omega.
Some recall her telling students to cultivate an abundance mentality if the promised fortunes ever came.
Which is again, very secret.
Is this like the secret?
Yeah, it is.
It is, right?
Jay-Z Knight, we'll do a story on her at some point, is a very skillful grifter, right?
So she's already got people believing I have other worldly wisdom that I'm channeling through the spirit of a 40,000-year-old dead warrior prince, right?
And if you'll believe that, you'll probably be in a mindset where you might believe, oh, hey, God told me to let you guys in on this rich people scam so that we can break the system, right?
It's not so much of a leap if you already believe Rampha exists.
But also, Jay-Z Knight isn't telling people to get involved in this because Jay-Z Knight, being a good grifter, knows this is going to come crashing down at some point, right?
So what she tells you is you have to cultivate an abundance mentality and then wealth will come to you.
And if she's telling you that while these people she's letting into her community are asking you to invest in this thing, you're going to pour all your money into it because that's the way people work.
Yeah.
I love the way cross-pollination works with grifts.
This whole story is the story of a bunch of different grifts and conspiracy theories all cross-pollinating with her within like sort of a cultic milieu to use that term again.
It's like essentially you're being fucked from two sides and you're getting fucking split like a roast turkey.
Except for that sounds rad and this sucks.
It's rad if you ask for it.
It's not rad if you thought you were coming over for dinner.
Yeah, I mean.
Depends on your personality, I guess.
But anyway, back to Nesser.
So Candace Goodwin, also known as Shiny Goodwin, S-H-A-I-N-I Goodwin, had attended classes at the Ramtha school in the late 1980s.
The school had opened in 1988, so Goodwin would have been one of the very first students.
She started calling herself a channeler in the early 1990s.
And when she got involved with Omega, she decided to do more than just invest money and wait for her return.
Goodwin listened to the pre-recorded regular messages Clyde sent out and thought, that's a pretty good idea.
You can really get people strung along on a grift if you send the messages this way, if you're in their ear all the time.
So she started putting out a newsletter called The Daily Dove and started calling herself the Dove of Oneness.
Now, the reports that she sent out in this newsletter were initially focused on providing people with information about their Omega investments.
And she was not directly affiliated with Omega.
This is like, she's like a Ramora.
She sees the successful grift and she attaches herself to it, right?
Which is another thing that starts to happen with the Omega grift and with, we'll talk, yeah.
There's a lot going on here.
So she called herself initially just another Omega investor waiting for her prosperity deliveries like everyone else.
She claimed to have direct dealings with Clyde and his other partners, but again, she was not a part of their actual organization.
She frequently alluded to secret information that she'd been privy to, making statements like, quote, two new pieces of info suggest that important strides forward are being made, she wrote on March 20th, 2000.
You are well advised to get ready.
I have personally been reprogramming my old ideas about prosperity so that I am ready to wisely steward this great abundance.
I want to pause here for a second and make a couple of comparisons.
Number one, she's saying kind of the same things that Ramptha is saying, and she's a student of Ramtha, both in terms of her spiritual beliefs and in terms of how she grifts people.
But what's happening here with Omega is a lot like what you see happening with QAnon, right?
With QAnon, you have the people who started it and who have been keeping it going, who obviously have some sort of grift going on, right?
They benefit in some way from this.
But then you have all these people like Praying Medic, who have like latched onto the grift and made money from it by doing like what she's doing, right?
They don't do newsletters so much anymore because that's not the grift, but they have Twitter accounts and YouTube channels that they monetize telling people about this, basically latching onto this overgrift and creating their own side grifts out of it.
And that's, that's, I'm not going to say that what's happening with Omega right now is the first time that this happens, but it's the first time that it happens that I'm aware of in a way that it really resembles what we see happening with QAnon.
I don't know if I'm going like, there's a lot happening here.
So I understand if this is kind of confusing.
You have any questions about like what's going on at this stage?
Oh my God, this gave me such a school flashback.
Do you have any questions before we move on?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is important because this is not always the way that grifts have worked in the United States.
The fact that this is a mix of a, you've got this financial con, right?
That's just about getting money from people, but the con wraps itself in this, God gave me this message and we're fighting the system thing.
And then it gets caught up in this, I'm channeling the spirits of dead warriors thing.
And you have individuals who are not a part of the original grift latch onto it and start making money by selling information about the overgrift.
That's all very QAnon.
That's very modern.
And it's starting to happen here for the first time that I'm aware of in a really organized way.
Well, I mean, the combo, yeah, but if you think about how, like, I mean, God and grifting just go together.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Like TV spirituality and grifting.
Yeah.
Televangelists have been doing this forever.
And even before that, in person, people were doing that forever.
Like, come to my tent and I'll fucking fleece you for everything you got.
And then I'm going to throw in some supernatural stuff, show you how I just made someone walk, and like boom, bam, boom, like I've gotten all your fucking money.
But yeah, combining it with all of this other stuff is what's like, yeah.
And combining it with this starts, the guy who's initially grifting is trying to get small town Christian Midwesterners to give him money.
So it's a very Christian grift.
Ramtha is not a Christian grift, right?
Like once you start channeling the spirits of dead and channeling aliens, all of this stuff comes into it.
You have these two different segments intermingling, which is what, again, you're seeing with QAnon.
There's people who are part of Q who, like the Q shaman, right?
That guy's not a traditional Christian grifter or whatever.
Like that guy believes some weird Norse pagan shit, but it all gets folded into the same overgrift.
It all gets to coexist within this space of unreality.
And that's why it's so, number one, it's why people who get pulled into that can be convinced of stuff like Nazism.
Because if you already accept all of this weird shit QAnon, you have to believe to be a part of the QAnon grift, you're more open to that stuff.
But it also, it means that people of all different people who you would normally think would be enemies, right?
This, the people who believe in this kind of, there are aliens and I'm channeling dead spirits and like, I've got like, there's these aspects of Hindu mythology, right?
You would expect those people wouldn't get along with the Pentecostal Christian grifting set, but they all can in this kind of cultic milieu.
And I think that's really interesting.
And this is the first time you really start to see that spin together in a, in a cohesive way.
And I think that's meaningful.
Apocalypse Teachings and Communism00:12:37
You're totally right.
And it also makes me think about the fact that like the things that it's really easy for people to like coalesce behind are like Our children are in danger.
Yep.
You know what I mean?
Which has been like the thing that's been pushing things like 2020 or any like any of those shows, even that are like the mild version of like, we're scaring you about your kids, so you watch the show.
Like, that's the mildest version of that con, but like QAnon and the Pizzagate shit is like the high version, but it's all the same thing of like, you have to be afraid for your children.
And then the other thing that people really can fucking get behind is money.
If someone promises you money and how to get rich and become wealthy, then a ton of people who don't otherwise like agree on much could totally get behind that idea.
Like, if we're all getting money, I'll stand next to a Nazi.
Fuck it.
That's like the mentality.
You know what I mean?
It's also, I think you're really onto something when you talk about these few things that everyone can get behind that makes it easier to get this wide variety to funnel people from a variety of sources.
And one of them is your children are in danger, right?
Yep.
Another of them is the system is fucking you and I have a way to beat it, right?
Yep.
And it's, it's, I think the key is that everyone who isn't super rich knows the system is fucked.
But a fairly small number of people are like, the system is fucked.
And so we shouldn't have a system, right?
Like, so, so this system shouldn't exist.
It's much easier to be like, the system is fucked, but hey, I got a way that we can, we can become winners in it, right?
Like, all we have to do is stop the barriers that are stopping people like us from winning in the system.
The problem isn't the system.
The problem is the barrier for me winning the system.
That's the Wall Street bet shit, right?
It's also communism.
It's literally also communism.
And it's like, and it's most cynical.
It's bad.
Yeah, but it's in the least cynical form.
It's like, the reason we've been getting fucked is workers have no rights.
The way to fuck the system is if workers all get together and the power of the working man will make the system fair.
So it's like, not that it's always coming from like a batshit, fucked up.
No, it's not.
Because that's a fairly reasonable, that might be the right way to fix society.
Definitely.
But that's hard and requires a kind of, that requires not being the kind of individualists that Americans are.
Because if you're telling, if you're telling these, these Midwesterners, like, well, you, if all of us get together and we all agitate for better conditions for everybody, that's what will actually fix the system.
That's a lot harder of a sell for Americans than, hey, the system is fucked because you're not able to win under it.
I have a way you can win.
And then you don't have to care about other people so much.
You know, that's doesn't say good things about us, but I think that's what's going on here, right?
I think that's why it is hard to get Americans on board with the system is fucked, so workers need to take over the means of production, and easy to get them to go, the system is fucked.
I got a way that we can fuck people under it, you know?
Anyway, so yeah, Shana Goodwin, the dove of oneness, starts side grifting off of this er grift that is the Omega investment opportunity thingamajig.
So Goodwin was deeply influenced, as I've said, with many aspects of the kind of cultic milieu that's forming in the United States at this time.
And I've used that term a couple of times this episode.
I used it in our lesson on the satanic panic.
In case you haven't listened, I want to grab a definition from a write-up by the American Institute for Economic Research that explains what the term cultic milieu means, because it's very important, both for this and for what we're dealing with.
Man, it sounds sexy.
It is hot as fuck, right?
Quote: This is a kind of subterranean world or counterculture with a whole range of ideas that are strongly opposed to conventional beliefs and knowledge.
These included highly heterodox and unusual religious systems such as neo-paganism or theosophy or Satanism, marginalized political ideologies such as neo-Nazism, conspiracy theories, and theories that rejected central elements of orthodox science, such as rejection of vaccination and modern medicine or flat and hollow earth ideas.
Ding, ding, ding.
And again, everything that makes up a cultic milieu doesn't have to be complete bullshit.
A lot of people get into this because they start learning about real shady conspiracies the CIA was involved in.
And because those things are actually really wild and nuts, they think anything is possible.
And they're able to buy into stuff that isn't true, right?
That there isn't documentation of.
And it's, you know, the failure of the mainstream media has a big part for why this is.
Anyway, that's a bigger, bigger story than we can talk about today.
But that's what Shana Goodwin is kind of...
She's bubbling up from, you know, the Omega cult starts kind of in this, as just a very simple Christian Midwestern grift.
She comes into it from more of a kooky West Coast counter quote, I believe in aliens, I believe in channeling thing.
But it all, they're all able to come together.
So Omega had started from a position that its founder had some sort of hidden knowledge and that the payouts were being halted by a shadowy enemy.
And this made it able to slot in perfectly with all sorts of other culti-American beliefs.
Goodwin's daily dove updates included references to the Ascended Masters, people who were once human but had cleared their karmic debt and achieved enlightenment, as well as the dreaded Illuminati who were stopping people from getting their Omega payouts.
Now, both of these concepts have been common in New Age circles before Omega, but they kind of get wrapped in and they also get sold to Christians in a big way.
Also, the master was in Buffy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, again, the same thing.
X-Files pulls from a lot of this stuff, right?
All of this is happening before Omega, but Omega is kind of where a lot of things start to boil together.
So Ramtha and his teachings obviously had a big impact on Goodwin.
And when you dig into Ramtha a bit, it's clear that she had a, well, he, I guess Ramtha is a he, Jay-Z Knight is a she, I think.
So it's messy.
Ramtha had a wide-ranging impact.
One 1986 article I found in the New York Times quoted a former owner of a string of Burger Kings who claimed Ramtha's teachings had convinced him to give up everything, move to Northern California and build a pyramid.
And I'm broadly supportive of that because it's probably better to build a pyramid in the woods than it is to own a bunch of Burger Kinks.
It doesn't hurt anyone, whereas Burger King for sure does.
Hurts a lot of people.
Burger King is much more harmful than Woods Pyramids.
Yeah.
So I'm going to quote from the New York Times here.
Among other things, Miss Knight's teachings include these precepts.
God is not a remote entity, but an integral part of everything in the universe.
Therefore, man himself is divine and as such is able to create his own reality and achieve anything he desires.
And in the absence of what Miss Knight calls a judgmental God you could never please, there is no sin and therefore no reason for human guilt.
Okay, I'm sorry.
She had me in the beginning.
And that is how this shit goes.
In the beginning, you're like, yeah, this makes sense.
And in the end, you're not.
Oh, wait, it's impossible to do bad things, so you should never feel guilty for hurting people?
Oh, I think you might be hurting.
Miss Knight contends that cataclysmic events, not nuclear wars, but earthquakes and other natural catastrophes, are likely to occur soon.
As Ramtha, she warns that people should find a safe place to live, stockpile a two-year food supply, and become self-sufficient by planting their own gardens.
Among the safest areas, he asserts, is the Northwest.
Because her followers do not live in a single community and seldom have met one another, no one has determined how many people have moved west at her behest.
But real estate agents and others who have observed the migration estimate a number at 500 to 1500 people, many of them middle-aged women.
So that's interesting to me.
And obviously, cards on the table here.
I moved to the Northwest because I'm afraid of a societal collapse and for other reasons.
I'm going to move there just so I can fuck all those cougars.
Yeah, there's a hell of a lot of past cougar time.
I mean, 500 to 1500, I'm just saying.
Yeah.
There you go.
Mama's going to eat tonight.
I think what they're saying about the fact that Ramtha is getting a bunch of these people to move to the Northwest because it's the safest place in the event of an apocalypse, this reinforces some of the things I'm saying about a cultic milieu because Ramtha's teachings about this, there's disaster.
There's an apocalypse coming.
This is the safe place.
So you have to move here and stockpile.
That can easily lead people towards Nazis because in this same period, the late 80s, early 90s, a lot of Nazis who don't have wildly divergent cultic beliefs sometimes are also saying you need to move to the Northwest because it's the whitest part of the country and because a nuclear war is coming.
And if we're all together, we can create a white ethnostate afterwards, right?
And I'm not just like making this up because I'm always scared of Nazis.
There's some evidence that Jay-Z Knight and thus the Ramtha cult have some kind of Nazi adjacent beliefs.
In 2014, videos surfaced of Jay-Z Knight saying this, quote, fuck God's chosen people.
I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamn gas chambers by now.
Ooh.
So, okay.
Okay, I am going to leave her cult.
Okay.
I did not come here to be disrespected.
Yeah.
I said good day.
Please send me my check.
You don't get checks from Ramtha.
The checks flow one way in the Ramptha cult.
Wait, but is she white?
Jesus, I don't even know.
I didn't even check.
Because in my head, I just picture Jay-Z every time you see her name.
Yeah, me too.
That would be.
Yeah, she's white as hell.
Yeah, absolutely.
She looks exactly like you'd expect.
She looks like a side character on One Life to Live.
Wow, that's a weird reference, Robert.
My mom listened to Google.
Are you a soped, man?
My mom was.
There was always soap.
Whenever I'd be sick at home, soaps would be on.
Oh, you're so sad.
You're like, Google Jay-Z Knight and tell me she does not look like a One Life to Live side.
Hey, Robert, are these the days of our lives?
I don't know.
We were a one life to live family.
You have allegiances.
You are a soaped.
But seriously, Google her.
Tell me I'm wrong.
I'm Googling her right now.
And it's a J-Z, the two letters, not how it's actually spelled.
She came right up.
She comes up as American teacher.
That seems misleading.
That seems misleading.
She does look like she.
She doesn't look like what I expected.
Far away, she looks like Paul Abdul.
She looks like Paul Abdulna, one of those housewives or one of the housewives merged together.
She's got major housewife face.
She's got the housewife, lip plump, and fuck you bangs.
Now, this doesn't directly tie in to what we're talking about today, but I should note for context that also in 2014, whistleblowers revealed that Jay-Z Knight had spent years urging her most devoted followers to drink lie.
Oh my God.
You can't make money off of them after they're dead, dummy.
You got to mix it with shit.
Then they don't quite die.
It's like the bleach.
Oh, my God.
I'm going to quote a write-up by Q13 Fox here, which is a local Fox affiliate.
Alluding to the teachings at Rampa, former follower Virginia Coverdale said, we're more powerful than we realize.
Our brain can do all sorts of things.
Quantum theory.
These things are what excited me and a lot of other people that got involved.
Coverdale said her family started following Knight more than three decades ago.
She said members were encouraged to drink a concoction of dead sea water mixed with red devil lie to enlighten themselves.
She said her mother and brother were among those who drank the lie concoction.
This wasn't just a one-time thing, Coverdale said.
They were taking it for five years, and Rampa at one point told them to chug it.
This was not just a teaspoon in the morning.
In the evening, people were losing their hair.
Oh my God.
It's so funny.
I would be so mad if I joined your cult and then I went bald.
Yeah, because of the poison you made me.
I was looking pissed.
See, this is why, in my cult, all we make you chug is Highland's all-natural baby killing pills.
Sovereign System Breakdowns00:11:22
No, we don't.
The only pills.
No, we don't.
No, we don't.
I make my followers butt chug them.
That's how I know they really love me.
See, when I say it, it's funny.
When you say it, it's funny if she doesn't like it.
No, it's funny when you say it because Robert's face goes, whoa.
Oh, I miss making Robert blush in person.
It was a delightful experience.
He's such a sweet baby.
Look at him.
Oh, shucks.
He's blushing again.
We veered off track in a couple of ways here.
And I hope this all hasn't been too confusing because there's a lot to get out.
And like late 90s, early 2000s conspiracy culture is one of the things that I love talking about the most.
But it's messy.
It's important, though, because it is now mainstream Republican politics and probably increasingly mainstream Democratic politics too, unfortunately.
So I know a lot of people are wondering right now, what does this all have to do with Nessera?
What we started talking about at the top of the episode, right?
We kind of lost that thread.
We're getting there.
Now, by 1999, it was obvious to Clyde and his fellows who had started Omega that the law was closing in.
His pre-recorded messages to his followers started filling with warnings of government interference from numerous individuals and entities who wanted to ensure his investments failed to pay out.
When his marks would complain online about the fact that years had gone by without a promised payment, he would accuse them of being part of the conspiracy against Omega or threaten them that by doubting him, they were hurting their chances of receiving their payout.
Most Omega investors stayed on board.
They kept putting in money right up to the end.
Many of them mailed it wrapped in aluminum foil to prevent their shadowy enemies from seeing it.
I know, that's some good shit, right?
That's the shit we all love.
Yeah.
So the millennium turned and the year 2000 came.
And for the last season.
I think if I wrap my vagina in foil, I will never get raped because my vagina will be invisible.
Well, you won't get raped by the globalists.
Yeah.
That doesn't seem worth it then.
You won't be.
According to Alex Jones, there's only about 6,000 of them.
So yeah, no, that's not really comprehensive protection.
You do better with a 38.
Nobody will put your vagina in a microwave, so.
No.
But don't worry, even without it, this shit's gonna blow up.
I'm sorry.
I'm not.
It's hilarious.
So by the year 2000, Clyde Hood and his lieutenants had spent about six years grifting millions of dollars from, you know, credulous people and putting it into their own bank accounts and into the small town of Mattoon, which was doing quite well as a result of this grift.
By 2000, they'd taken at least $12.5 million.
This is the point at which federal law enforcement finally caught up with them and arrested Clyde as well as 10 other people in Mattoon, including the deputy sheriff, a former police officer, a minister, and a lawyer.
Eight people who lived outside of the town were also arrested.
The trial almost immediately went off the rails.
When prosecutors asked Clyde what Fortune 500 companies he'd worked for, because he had told people he'd worked for several, Hood answered that he could not remember the names of the companies that he'd worked for, but stated that they were in the New York area or the Florida area, probably.
Which is an amazing response under oath.
So you told investors you worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies.
Which were they?
Oh, I don't know.
Probably they were in New York, maybe Florida.
It's incredible.
The New York Times chronicles just how bizarre the whole affair became.
Quote: In an especially odd aspect of the case, Mr. Hood and two of the other defendants have apparently tried to assert that the United States government does not exist.
As a grand jury was convened, they mailed papers to prosecutors, court clerks, Mattoon police officers, the county sheriff, and the United States Supreme Court stating that any judicial proceeding, determination, ruling, order, decree, entry, penalty, fine, or arrest warrants which issues from these courts is null and void.
Investigators also found identity cards with pictures and signatures of Mr. Hood and another defendant, Arlene Faust Diamond, a 63-year-old real estate and insurance agent from Los Angeles who solicited investments for Omega.
The cards identified Mr. Hood and Miss Diamond as ambassador and minister of justice for the free state of Eden.
Prosecutors said Miss Diamond tried to use her card to claim a kind of diplomatic immunity and get out of submitting handwritten and fingerprint samples to the grand jury.
Mr. Hood testified in court on Thursday that he signed the card as a joke.
How about the irony of not acknowledging the United States and then sending paperwork to the United States Supreme Court?
It is funny, right?
I acknowledge that you're trying to get me to do something, but I also don't acknowledge you, even though I'm sending you paperwork.
I mean, and it's the same in the same way that like sovereign citizen shit wasn't part of QAnon at first, but got absorbed into it.
And now a bunch of Q people will talk sovereign citizenship, just like a bunch of black Israelites will talk sovereign citizenship, right?
All of these things are infectious, no matter even though the original sovereign citizens were a lot of them were super racist and like not at all like very bigoted against black people.
Also, groups of like, like black Israelites, right?
This like fringe cult that believes that like black people are the real Jewish people and actual Jewish people are like it's some sort of like historic scam.
There was a shooting based around this a year or two ago.
And I think New Jersey.
A lot of those people get into sovereign citizen stuff because it doesn't matter how it started.
It matters that once you're in that kind of like cultic conspiratorial mind state, you'll just suck all of this stuff in.
It all seems more credible to you because nothing that's credible is credible.
It's a it's very frustrating.
It's a big problem that we have as a civilization that we're not going to solve.
Totally.
And it's also like the same shit as the as every shitty politician who's like, I am against big government while they're running for office.
I'm against government.
Okay, well, why are you trying to get a government position done?
You know, or like, oh, I'm going to get in.
I'm going to change it from the inside.
I'm different.
Yeah, you could even draw a line between what Clyde is doing, right?
I'm inside this big system, but I'm going to break it for you, the little people, to like what Trump was doing, where I'm going to run this big system to break it for you, you know?
It, God, people, come on.
So, Clyde eventually in court confessed to Omega being an elaborate con.
He was asked by a federal prosecutor in 2001, did you get a vision, an actual vision from the Lord?
And he said in court, no, I did not.
He was asked, did you ever work for a Fortune 500 company as a traitor?
He answered no.
And he was asked, what is Omega?
And he said, it is a scam.
So, you had finally, in the end of this court case, Clyde Hood admit that the whole thing was a con the entire time.
He admitted to being a liar in court.
He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
The feds confiscated money from him and property from him that he and his co-defendants had accumulated, and they did attempt to redistribute it to his victims.
Now, a number of people tried to like filed to receive restitution, stated what they donated, tried to get some money back from the feds.
But the more people the feds reached out to that Clyde had conned, the more they ran into a peculiar situation.
Many, if not too embarrassed, huh?
No, they didn't want their money back, not because they were embarrassed.
And this is where Shaney Goodwin, the dove of oneness, re-re-enters the story.
See, the arrest of everyone involved in Omega didn't stop her from sending out her newsletter, and it didn't destroy her faith in Omega either.
On the day of the arrests, she sent this out to her followers.
Tonight we were told by a very high intelligence agency source that this whole thing in Illinois has been staged to try to stop funding.
However, this case in Illinois totally lacks any ability to stop funding.
It is almost a comedy because the whole case will disappear instantly, very soon, in all caps.
She continued to assure people that their promised financial returns were still coming.
Clyde's arrest was yet another attempt by the evil people in power to stop thousands of real Americans from getting rich.
The feds who were reaching out to pay them back the money that they had lost were part of the conspiracy.
And if they accepted the repayment of their investment, they would never get the millions of dollars that they were actually owed.
Oh boy.
People are giving you a chance to not be a stupid idiot.
Just take the goddamn chance.
No, of course not.
This is the feds trying to trick me by giving me back my money.
I'm not going to fall for it.
Isn't that so good?
People only trick you to take your money.
No one ever tricks you to give you money.
Yeah.
That's literally leaving money in the FBI's hands.
Which is so fucking funny.
It's all amazing.
So the News Tribune summarizes the Dove of Oneness's messages immediately before and after the bus.
Quote: As dove, she cited information from unnamed sources and described secret struggles among the world's financial elites.
Beginning sentences with, I have been told, she said a major European bank had come to Omega's rescue, but a major U.S. bank was fighting the program with every trick and delay possible.
U.S. Supreme Court justices were on Omega's side.
An important judge from the East Coast was fighting on their behalf.
A group she called the White Knights was waging war against powerful enemies she began to call the dark agenda.
Between such ominous reports, she called for group prayers and positive thinking.
She wrote lengthy instructions that explained how to handle large sums of money when they arrived.
She talked about how she would spend her own money once she received it.
She would give large gifts to humanitarian causes.
So you see what's happening here, right?
This is QAnon shit.
There's the white knights, these good people inside the intelligence agencies, inside the banks.
They're trying to get your money to you.
They're fighting this, but there's the dark agenda is trying to fight them.
There's this epic battle occurring on your behalf at levels you don't know, but I have secret insight to, and that's why you need to subscribe to my newsletter and give me money.
It's cute shit.
Why the knights gotta be white, though?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think she anticipated what internet culture would do to the term white knight, but yeah.
It's about that time again.
You know who are white knights secretly fighting from within the immoral system on your behalf?
That's right.
That's right.
The ultimate white knights.
I don't like this phrasing at all.
I love phrasing.
Great.
And I love products and services.
They love you too, Robert.
They don't.
Kisses for ads.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
Bamboozled Love and Feds00:04:03
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pitches, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think it was the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lesla Cruzette.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying.
That is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
If you're watching the latest season of the Real House Wise of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Marcia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
I like the bougie style of Housewives Show.
I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Railhouse Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, and the T. Everybody's talking about.
As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
I understand the game.
As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ah, and we're back.
We're back, and we're all just having a grand time.
Nessera Conspiracy Documentary00:11:04
I love to be bamboozled.
I love it too.
So, yeah.
The feds were aware of the Dove of Oneness, right?
They were also aware that a lot of people with no affiliation with Omega had started selling investment opportunities using Omega's materials.
And this continued in some extent after a bunch of Omega people went to prison.
Jay-Z Knight slash Ramtha was very likely one of those people, but we don't really know if she or her cult profited directly by getting their members to invest.
And the feds opted not to even investigate this.
One prosecutor said, we knew that there were more people associated with her that apparently had invested in Omega, but that was not an angle we wanted to pursue because apparently it's very difficult to pursue that angle, which doesn't really mean anything other than you were scared that it was going to create too much of a backlash to go after all these weird culty organizations.
And so you let this thing fester, which is, you know, pretty on brand.
We're seeing it now with the Capital.
So when everyone at Omega went to prison, the Dove of Oneness was still out there, speaking to a growing audience of people who wanted to believe that vast riches were headed their way really any day now.
And those people wanted to believe in this, wanted to believe that a day was coming when they would be rich more than they actually wanted the money they'd invested back because that amount of money wouldn't make them rich, you know?
They wanted the hope.
That's really what the once Omega, the actual grift, collapses, the people like the Dove of Oneness who are latching onto it, that's what they keep selling these people is the idea that, no, no, no, you're still going to get rich.
You just have to be patient, trust the plan, and stay calm, and you'll get your money.
So at this point, get fucking fisted.
It's just not really a good plan.
No, it's a shame.
So now that they were untethered from Clyde, the Dove of Oneness took a scam that had already always relied on religious imagery and started building it into a holy war.
So she starts off as like, again, like a Ramora, a parasite leeching off of this scam.
But once the core scam collapses, she spins her side scam into a whole new thing.
And this is kind of where Nessera comes back into the story.
On July 17th, 2000, she wrote this in one of her newsletter updates.
I know that I am receiving information because the divine power behind getting Omega to us all wants the group prayers to continue.
So I have been given a message of passing on as much information as I can without jeopardizing the safety of the processes for our benefit.
She continued to assure her growing following that the payouts were imminent.
She told people that the prosperity deliveries were coming any day.
Over and over, she told Omega investors that prosperity deliveries would arrive any day.
She and others sometimes referred to Omega in a kind of typewritten code, mixing numbers and numerals, calling it O or the big O. On July 26th, 2000, she said.
No one's ever made anyone come in that group.
On July 26th, 2000, she said members of the big program with the O in program with a zero could expect deliveries by July 31st.
On August 4th, she said deliveries were imminent.
On August 7th, she said deliveries were scheduled for the end of the week.
And then, in 2001, the best thing ever happened.
Do you want to know what that was, Sophia?
9-11.
It was 9-11.
You're right.
That was the best thing ever for the Dove of Oneness and her cult.
I mean, I feel like you're setting me up for a trap there because now there's literally record of me saying that the best thing ever in 2001 was 9-11.
But just that audio line out.
Exactly.
But really, it's you, Robert.
Yeah.
I too am a cultic manipulator.
So 9-11 was a bad day for most people.
But if you were Al-Qaeda, a whale, or a new age conspiracy grifter, it was Money Christmas.
The Dove of Oneness immediately knew how to profit off of this tragedy, and she lost no time in blasting out a post-9-11 newsletter.
I'm going to quote now from a wonderful write-up in Logically, which discusses the history of Nesser and heavily cites Sean Robinson's 2004 article for the News Tribune, which we've used earlier as a source.
Quote, On September 11th, 2001, mere hours after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, Dove posted the message that made her a star.
The three targets today were all connected to Nessera and the banking changes.
I just learned that at 9 a.m. in New York this morning, there was an important banking activity set to be activated in the IMF International Banking Computer Center in the World Trade Center.
This was obviously why the World Trade Center was attacked today at just before and after 9 a.m.
The orders for those plate attacks came from U.S. citizens who are trying to stop our deliveries slash the funding of Nessera.
So what Goodwin does, she becomes aware of Nesser in the late 90s.
And while it had originally just been this one guy's plan for how to fix the economy, she turns it into, she ties it to Omega and says that like, Nessera is this plan to fix the economy for the little people that's tied in with Omega, and it was about to be instituted on September 11th.
And then the government flew planes into those towers to stop you people from getting your money.
And of course, as Robinson noted, Goodwin's legion of followers bought into her story and mas.
Prompted by Goodwin, they would go on to send letters, postcards, and emails to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Pentagon, Congress, to international justice organizations.
They would stand at protests, wave banners, pass out flyers, and hold demonstrations on three continents demanding the announcement of a secret law that did not exist.
See, the Duff of Oneness started telling people that not only, like, Nessera was not just some guy's plan for how to fix the economy.
It was a law that Congress had secretly voted to approve, and that the 9-11 attacks had been carried out in order to stop from being instituted.
And it's all very frustrating.
Yeah.
So during my research into this, I came across a very interesting 2005 documentary called Waiting for Nessera.
It covers a chunk of this, and it mostly focuses around a small group of Nessera believers in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The documentary is technically kind of rough.
The audio is particularly crude by modern standards, but I think it's a pretty priceless documentation of a lot of the problems currently tearing this nation apart when they were still in an embryonic stage.
Interviews with these Utah believers give insight into how most of the people influenced by the Dove of Oneness interpreted her newsletters.
By the time this was filmed, something like 315,000 people received her weekly newsletter updates talking about Nessera and Omega and the shadowy fight of the white knights to save, you know, the little people and get them their money and stuff.
Those motherfuckers just needed to get into Harry Potter or something.
Yeah, I mean, these were probably people who thought Harry Potter was demonic.
So one of the guys they interview in this documentary is a former Republican fringe congressional candidates.
And he states his belief that the Dove of Oneness is a former intelligence agency employee and has deep connections to the intelligence apparatus and is trying to like one of again, this is a good person in the intelligence system that's trying to bring us the truth.
Now, the white hats are interpreted by most believers in the documentary as being members of the military and the government fighting to save America from the evil conspiracy that has overtaken it.
So, again, it's all QAnon shit.
Like Q, many Nessera believers felt that it was part of a divine plan.
Most of the Utah believers felt the whole Omega plan had been initially cooked up by Saint Germain, who is like a Catholic saint who had died 250 years ago.
So this gets added to it, that like the money that is going to come to you started from an investment fund that this Catholic saint started 250 years ago, and that's going to make everyone in the world rich, but the powers that be don't want you to know about it.
And that's why 9-11 happened, right?
It all mutates and goes.
Oh my God, that was the most complicated sentence.
I know.
I know.
There's so much going on.
It's like with QAnon stuff, when you actually try to unravel all this, like everything gets so intermingled and just wild.
And all I keep thinking is that these people just like needed a hobby.
They needed that.
That's that's really where conspiracy starts.
It's a mix of people needing a hobby, having the free time for a hobby, and also having the understanding that everyone does that something is wrong, right?
And I mean, of course, they're not going to try to like fix their community by doing like, you know, acts of service and I don't know, volunteering somewhere.
No, that would be like an actual way you can literally improve the world around you.
Well, and doing that, you're not going to be the special hero, right?
If you're part of a huge group of people trying to agitate in the streets for societal change, if you're like actually doing the hard work of activism, it's a lot of people who are all willing to like work as part of a collective to try to improve the world.
And there's not really a lot of heroes in that, you know?
Like not a lot of like, it's heroic to do that, but it's not the same as feeling like I am one of a small number of people who has special knowledge.
And that makes me better than everyone who doesn't have that special knowledge, right?
It's again, this kind of cult of individualism.
Like that's why this is so much more appealing to so many more people than actually advocating for positive change.
What we really need is like some sort of a fake club, you know, like a mensa for these people where we can like just send them like trophies and certificates every month and just being like, oh my fucking God, you just broke a new record for being alive, Tom.
Yeah.
Or whatever.
Tell them that like they'll get millions of dollars for donating to this or for investing, but actually they're just funding a mutual aid soup kitchen.
They're going to get grifted either way.
They might as well buy food for poor people.
Exactly.
Like tell them the money's for something else and like they're only being asked for it because they're like part of an elite group of people.
And then just keep sending them different awards and trophies.
And it's like, I think if they each had a room full of awards and trophies, like that might really keep them off the streets.
That might really keep them off the streets.
Yeah.
We do like the Time magazine thing.
We send them each a magazine with their face on it when they donate, you know, the first thousand dollars to a soup kitchen or something.
That's a good idea.
That's a good idea.
Yes.
Time magazine covers.
Ooh, maybe we can like have them like cut ribbons with giant scissors at places that have already been open, but like they don't know.
Just like get to a park early, you know, in the morning and be like, you're opening this park.
This park's you because of all of the money you invested.
Exactly.
You're going to be a rich in 10 years.
Don't worry.
We really have something here.
I mean, we've always known we were going to be cult leaders.
Robert Mini.
This could be how we do it.
Yeah.
This could be how we do it.
White House Petition Laws00:08:58
So one of the reasons I find this waiting for Nessera documentary interesting is that it shows that like QAnon, Nessera was capable of drawing in people from across the political spectrum.
That former Republican presidential or congressional candidate who described himself as far right, but also celebrated that Nesser was going to force President George Bush out of office, stop the war in Iraq, and make Clinton the president again, which is also kind of evidence of how different politics were in those times.
I didn't see hatred against the left or Democrats or Republicans, really.
Instead, it seemed to be fueled by a gut feeling that the system was rigged and regular people deserved something like Nessera to save them from a fundamentally unjust system.
I know regular people are getting screwed because I'm one of them.
I want to believe that me and the other people like me are all going to get rich and not, you know, think that maybe the whole system is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways.
So, yeah, for about two years or so, Nesser was a big deal in the wackadoo world of New Age nonsense.
It got big enough that the actual mind behind the real Nassara, Harvey Barnard, found out about it and he did his best to push back against this tide of disinformation, publishing a note to the Nessero website that said, if you believe any of that, you might want to start looking for oceanfront property in Nebraska.
Now, the fact that the guy who had actually come up with Nassara was telling people, no, it's not what you think it is.
It's like an economic reform policy.
I'm not going to make everybody rich.
The fact that he was specifically saying they had it wrong meant nothing.
In fact, Nesser remained significant up through 2004 when dozens of followers were spotted in an anti-Iraq war protest waving signs with Nessera written on them.
It started to fall out of vogue after the invasion because in part, a lot of the like one of the ways that the Nesser conspiracy evolved is that the Iraq invasion is never going to happen.
The white hats are going to stop it.
Bush is going to be forced out of office.
The truth about 9-11 is going to be revealed and the real America is going to be saved by the monsters who ran things.
And then, of course, we invade Iraq and interest in Nessera falls off after that.
But Nessera limped along and it never quite died out entirely.
In 2011, someone started a We the People petition begging President Obama to institute Nessera.
Here's what the petition claimed it would do: Number one, zeroes out all credit card, mortgage, and other bank debt.
Number two, abolishes the income tax.
Number three, creates a 14% flat rate, non-essential new items only sales tax revenue for the government.
Number four, increases benefits to senior citizens.
Number five, returns constitutional law to all courts.
Number six, monitors elections and prevents illegal election activities of special interest groups.
And number seven, creates a new U.S. Treasury currency backed by gold, silver, and platinum precious metals.
The petition got 6,623 signatures, well above the 5,000 signature threshold necessary to earn a White House response.
A very polite White House aide wrote, Thank you for signing this petition.
We appreciate your participation in the We the People platform on whitehouse.gov.
The proposals in the National Economic Security and Reformation Act have not been introduced in Congress, and the Obama administration cannot implement a law that has not been passed.
Because again, the whole part of the conspiracy is that the law was passed secretly, and they can't tell you that.
And 9-11 was carried out to stop it from being enacted.
Anyway, I just love how gentle that White House aide was.
They were like, they were just so gently like, hey, it was like explaining something to a child.
It's like, hey, laws.
Okay.
The way laws work is...
They have to be passed.
Yeah, they have to exist first.
And it's sweet that they didn't like talk down to them, which is like, you know, they could have been like, if you have any understanding of the government whatsoever, you would know that this is fucking bullshit.
But they were like, no, sweetheart.
It was very silly.
No, honey.
No.
I'm sorry.
No.
Is something that gets passed.
And it was just not condescending.
And I really pretty much had to do it.
It wouldn't be fun if he'd included a link to the schoolhouse rock video on how a bill becomes alive.
Just like that.
I'm in, I'm in, meant to be.
But the sad thing about this is this beautiful White House aide is clearly a person who still falsely believes that the actual nature of reality matters at all.
And it doesn't.
It just doesn't anymore.
We all should accept that now, right?
Reality does not matter.
What matters is what you can convince people to believe as long as they have weapons.
All that matters is what the most people with weapons believe.
That's the way it is, and that's the way it's always worked.
This sweet, sweet, beautiful idiot thought that truth mattered.
And I'm sorry.
I mean, it did for a couple more years after that, but even then, by 2010, it was terminal.
The truth cancer had metastasized.
So, for a while, that petition seemed like the last gasp of a dying conspiracy theory.
But conspiracies never quite die all the way.
They just get folded into other conspiracies.
Nessera lay dormant until the Trump era, when a conspiracy theorist president and the burgeoning QAnon cult provided it with an opportunity to feed and grow again.
And now, the Nessera conspiracy, which started out as a Ramora on the Omega Grift and then turned into its own conspiracy, started attaching itself Ramora-like to the QAnon conspiracy.
It's an incredible ecosystem when you understand it.
Oh my God.
From Logically, quote, every few years, Nessera rears its ugly head, often coinciding with times of economic hardship, and often accompanied by its global counterpart, the Jessera Global Economic Security and Recovery Act.
In 2020, Nessera has managed to merge with other current conspiracy theories that revolve around the baseless and pro-Trump QAnon, where supporters have co-opted the global reset narrative to announce that a new era of debt forgiveness and monetary reform, while cash would be replaced with a gold-backed cryptocurrency, would be imminently ushered in by none other than Trump.
The fact that Barnard's book has the same name as Trump's 2016 electron mantra, Drain the Swamp, may be a coincidence, but to QAnon supporters, it reads like evidence.
Ugh, God.
Just because it's one of the most trite political phrases that's been used and overused for like decades.
Yeah.
It's like, if I was like, whoa, someone wrote a song about love, and so did I.
This means we're cosmically connected.
It's like, all the songs are about love, so probably not.
Every song's about love.
The only things people write songs about are love and whatever Holy Divers about.
So.
No, no, no.
And then there's that one about the dad and his sad one about the dad and his son.
Oh, yeah.
The sad one about the dad and his son.
Yeah.
That's kind of about.
The silver spoon or whatever.
Cats in the cradle and the silver spoon.
We'll be together soon.
Son, we'll be together soon.
This got really good really fast, guys.
So, yeah, Logically went to the trouble of analyzing the popularity, the change in popularity of Nessera and Jessera over the course of 2020.
Their analysis of posts using both terms on Facebook over the last 12 months of that year showed a significant bump in the number of interactions, peaking at 85,000.2 interactions by the end of May of 2020.
Early posts were from a curious mix of New Age mysticism, pro-Trump, Nessera groups, and UFology pages, pages that are now finding unlikely common ground under the QAnon banner.
Posts listed as having the most interactions from the last few months show just that.
QAnon groups, right-wing Christian ministries talking about Trump decreeing a move to a gold-backed currency, and a general error of QAnon theories permeating the aforementioned group.
What is astonishing is the global reach of the theory.
Posts in English, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Greek, and Malay are all present in the top 50 most influential Facebook posts on the topic.
Many of these posts have been shared thousands of times.
Analysis on Twitter told a similar story.
From mid-June this year, Nessera and Jessera was the top of 334,912 tweets coming from a pick and mix of starseeds, cryptocurrency gurus, and a smorgasbord of QAnon accounts at various levels of dedication, all tweeting with excitement about the inevitable global reset in a variety of languages.
The standard QAnon fair of reading into anything from the background of Trump's press releases is used as proof that debt forgiveness is on its way.
And that's kind of where we are now, Sophia.
We can't even get a fucking $1,400 check.
These motherfuckers talking debt forgiveness.
It's amazing.
They think that Congress is secretly passing all these laws to fix everything and that some shadowy cabal is hiding it from you.
But also the actual shady bastards who were in charge of the country can't even get you $1,400.
Blaming Vulnerable People00:03:21
Y'all dumb as fuck.
I mean, honestly.
It's so good.
It's very fun.
I am optimistic about the future.
How are you feeling?
I feel like it makes me feel like I'm a piece of shit because then I'm like, I feel like I can be a better cult leader and like better conspiracy theories than these other people.
And then I'm like, Sophia, why do you want to get in this game?
Yeah.
It's just like when you see really shitty people doing stand-up, like I've been doing stand-up for 10 years, and occasionally when I think of quitting, I just think about all the shitty people I know who still do it.
And I was like, Sophia, you can't quit when these fucking terribly unfunny people are still doing it.
And that's how I feel.
Yeah.
So I don't need to get involved in the conspiracy theory game, but every time I hear you talk about how dumb this is, I'm like, I need to do it better.
Yeah, I mean, we could, Sophia, we could be, we could be heroes.
And by heroes, we could steal a lot of money from dumb people.
I mean, if we could just control what kind of dumb people, then maybe I would do it.
Yeah, that's the problem is no matter what, you're going to wind up destroying the lives and livelihoods of people who are basically nice.
Just destroy sweet people.
Well, and it's just the problem is that, you know, I get angry at the people who buy into this stuff.
I want to, I want to mock them and insult them.
There's even a part of me that wants to, like people are doing, some liberals are doing with Texas right now, that wants to be like, you motherfuckers brought this on yourself by not just buying into this bullshit, but being like so arrogant about it and mocking anyone who told you that it was obviously a grift meant to take advantage of you.
But also, like, the level of unreality that permeates our society is so comprehensive.
It is such a thick and deadly fog.
I can't blame people who get caught in it, really.
No, I could be frustrated.
Like, it's just so powerful.
And to bring it.
What do you expect them to do?
To bring it back to the beginning.
Yeah, like my mom and I fell for Amway, you know?
I'm saying, like, you can't blame people.
Everybody has a grift that they're vulnerable to.
Yeah, you can't blame people for, I mean, you can blame them if they do reprehensible things that fucking hurt other people.
You should blame the cult leaders, the people like the Dove of Oneness who are profiting off of these grifts for sure.
And it's just like, I don't think we could have imagined that there, I mean, I couldn't have at what a huge problem there is now between people telling the difference between truth and reality and real news and quote unquote fake news.
If we had known it was going to be like this, I mean, I don't think, I don't think we could have prepared for it either way, but it just seems insane because at the very least, there used to be an idea of, oh, this is obviously bullshit and this isn't.
And now it's like, especially older people who get really isolated in their communities.
Buying Guns for Reality00:06:01
Yeah.
I mean, TV and shit just preys on them and YouTube.
And like, we've already, I was.
The home shopping network, you know.
Yeah.
Anyway.
Well, you have any pluggables, Soph.
You look sad, Robert.
I am.
Let me boop that little nose.
Boop, boop.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
Just remember that you're going to get a tattoo.
I am going to get a tattoo today.
Isn't that fun?
I am going to get a tattoo.
And I think I'm going to buy another big stupid gun.
I think I'm going to get a 50 cow.
Why not?
There it is.
That's the math that helps cheer you up.
Do you need another gun?
Yes.
It has been years since I've needed another gun.
So maybe, I don't know.
The gun maybe don't do for right now.
I need a bigger one.
I don't have one that big.
That's true.
God, you're really just setting Sophia up for so many jokes right now.
Like it's so reading about the explosion of conspiratorial thinking and weaponized unreality makes me think that I might actually wind up needing bigger guns than I presently have at some point.
You know, again, fair enough.
It's really hard to do this when I can't give you a hug because you clearly need a hug.
That is what I'm reading.
I'm going to take drugs and drink more Dr. Zevia.
Hug me again, podcast daddy.
Well, Sophia, after this, we're going to get into a book.
We're doing another book episode for the Thursday episode this week because spoiler alert, not a spoiler, really.
My mom has cancer and I have been in Texas helping the family with that.
And I don't have time to write a two-parter every week.
So we're just going to dig into a book that came out very recently called Nessera and the Mark of the Beast, which looks like it'll be a hoot, isn't super long, came out in September of 2020.
And I think will get us up to date on how the Nessera conspiracy theory has adopted to the world of QAnon.
Cool.
What a weird time to plug my things.
Plug away.
Plug, plug, plug it up.
You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at theSophia S-O-F-I-Y-A.
And I have a podcast about love and sex around the world called Private Parts Unknown.
You can follow that.
And another podcast about 90-day fiancé with Miles Gray called 420 Day Fiancé.
So check that.
And if you haven't bought her comedy album, what the fuck are you doing?
It's yeah, buy the fucking, what are you doing?
It's fucking assholes.
That's good.
Father's Day, you fucking assholes.
God damn it.
It comes on in the car when I'm on shuffle.
And every time, no matter what mood I'm in, it comes on.
And it's like, oh, Sophia.
Every time.
It's so enjoyable.
It's like, oh, here's some really sad bitch song I'm listening to.
And then all of a sudden, it's like you being like, hey, it's great.
Highly recommend.
I'm excited to listen to it on my long drive back from Texas through the great wilds of America.
Delightful.
It will make you feel delighted, Robert.
So, yeah, delight yourselves, you fucking rat bastards.
Anyway, thank you for listening to our podcast.
I love you all, dearly.
You rat bastards on paper.
The three hosts of the Nick Dick and Pole Show are geniuses.
We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajinista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple: make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
Readers, Katie's finalists, Publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m. Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm wild back to your wedding.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like, listen to Las Co Triistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.