Robert Anton Wilson and Carrie Thornley anchor this deep dive into Illuminati conspiracy theories, contrasting Wilson's advocacy for "reality tunnels" against Thornley's tragic descent into paranoid schizophrenia. After surviving polio and facing the Black Panthers, Thornley's delusions escalated to believing he orchestrated JFK's assassination and harbored mind-control devices, culminating in a disturbing attempt to molest a child in Atlanta. While Wilson sought to prevent stone paranoia, Thornley's isolation in Atlanta's Little Five Points led to homelessness, illustrating the dangerous gap between ideological consistency and reality. Ultimately, the episode suggests that unchecked conspiracy theories can destroy lives, rendering historical lessons impossible to learn when paranoia overrides reason. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Bob Wilson and the Placebo Effect00:15:22
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul 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.
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.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selny and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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.
There's an economic component to community thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
What's Elon My Musks?
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast that I'm pretty sure Elon Musk is listening to because within minutes, well, like an hour of us starting to record the last two parts of our series on the Illuminati, he posted a very boomer Illuminati meme.
Extremely funny.
The timing was incredible.
There's no other explanation but that we have influenced his mind on a deep and possibly occult level.
You know, I think what's probably to blame for this is last night I ate a huge quantity of room temperature shrimp covered in Thousand Island dressing, and then I vomited on the hood of an old Tesla.
This was my amitomancy that I was practicing.
And I believe it has allowed me to infect Elon's mind with a...
Why are you like this?
Why did you have to describe the shrimp?
Why?
Why?
Because otherwise, if people don't smell the shrimp, they're not going to believe the rest of the story, Sophie.
All right.
I didn't know that.
If you're going to lie to people, you need details.
Oh, gross.
Anyways, Margaret Kilboy and Garrison Davis are here.
I'll add that anecdote to my growing grimoire of a vomit-related magic.
I thought you were going to say you're adding it to the list of things that you tell your therapist about work, but you know, actually, a lot of crossover between my grimoire and things I tell my therapist.
You know, using vomit magic one time, I was able to turn a Ukrainian couple's wedding dinner into a bunch of vomit on a Ukrainian couple's wedding dinner.
What an amazing feat of alchemy.
That transmutation is just simply mind-blowing.
I use it as a spell to be slightly less drunk.
See, limitless power is available when you embrace the sacred truths of emitomancy.
Good times actually would be a pretty fun class to make in like a in like a Pathfinder type setting.
Um, you could do a lot of fun with this, you just be the human fly, and that's like how you attack and devour.
Oh, that's kind of based, actually.
Like, yeah, uh, digesting your opponents as you hit them with a sword or something.
Yeah, very cool.
That's what everyone is listening to this podcast to hear about.
You know what else is cool?
The Illuminati.
The Illuminati was mid, but the guy that we're going to start our episode today talking about, Robert Anton Wilson, was pretty dope.
Now, we're talking mostly about Carrie Thornley in this series for good reason.
Number one, I think he and Greg Hill were the, I mean, they certainly were the initial primary drivers behind Discordianism.
Carrie is also, as we'll get to, the guy who kind of makes the most sense to cover in detail on Behind the Bastards.
But my, my entry into like being interested in the not just like conspiracy culture in America, particularly as it existed in the 80s and 90s, but into the Discordians, into all of this stuff was through the work of a guy named Robert Anton Wilson.
And Margaret, are you that familiar with Bob Wilson's stuff?
Okay, so here's where I lose all of my cred.
I am very aware of the Illuminatus trilogy, and I have not read it.
Yeah, we'll be talking about the Illuminatus trilogy a little later.
This is his essay.
It's quite relevant.
Yeah, he's written a lot of essays.
He's, if you really want a sense for the guy, he made a documentary right before he died called Maybe Logic that is available for free on YouTube and whatever.
It's the first thing I watched the first time I ever took hallucinogens.
So he had a big impact on me.
And he's a legitimately, a really interesting guy.
Kind of, he comes out of Flatbush, Brooklyn, and he grew up as a little kid in what he called like New York's Irish Catholic ghetto.
He did not have a lot of, or so he spent, he's, yeah, Garretson Beach is the actual neighborhood that he grew up in, which is kind of like out in the middle of nowhere.
So there's not a lot of money.
He is abused pretty profoundly by the nuns who run his school as a kid.
He is like beaten and mentally like tormented by these nuns.
And he also has two bouts of polio as a little kid that he survives.
He has this guy of all the people we're talking about, Bob Wilson is the most mentally healthy and also has like the roughest life.
He has a very hard life.
And he, yeah, it's interesting.
One of the things that is kind of a key moment in this guy's life is that the thing that saves his life from polio is a treatment called the Sister Kinney method, which is like alternative medicine today and was kind of at the time in the 30s considered like quackery.
And I'm not competent to like weigh in on this, but he credits the Sister Kinney method with saving him from his polio.
And the fact that like this thing that people called quack medicine is what saved him as a child is going to have a really big influence on just sort of the degree of weight that he gives authority.
I did not know that, but that makes so much sense for the rest of his life is so much about like how much value we put into what we believe and how much what we believe kind of creates the reality around us.
And that is such an interesting thing.
I'm sure Bob Wilson later on has like talked about like the placebo effect and all that kind of stuff as that comes up in like in like Chaos Magic a lot.
And he was a member of the biggest Chaos Magic Order.
But that's such an interesting story.
And I was unaware that he dealt with polio nor that it was kind of quote unquote word using this like crank method.
What's the method?
I'm imagining you go into this like convent and Sister Kearney, Kearney, whatever.
Kenny, yeah.
Kenny just hits you with a cane.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's basically like a bunch of hot compresses and like kind of passive movement, some of which seems like it's, it's sort of similar to like massages to reduce like some of the spasms that are caused by polio.
And yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting.
Again, I'm not like a like an expert on any of this, but it does seem she's pretty well regarded within like physical therapy and considered to be something of a pioneer in the field.
So I think it's one of those situations where he receives this treatment that people call bullshit as a kid and it helps him.
And later on, she's kind of to at least some extent vindicated.
And yeah, so this is a big impact on Bob.
The other thing that has a big impact on Bob is that just like three years after he, or a couple of years after his, like while he's sort of in the middle of this polio shit, the War of the Worlds comes on the radio.
And so Orson Welles is a huge influence on this guy.
As a young adult, he starts working at Playboy and he hooks up and gets married to a woman named Arlen.
And they are both, in addition to being, because we're talking about these guys kind of in their like intellectual weirdo prankster thing.
He and Arlen are both also very committed physical activists.
They are both involved with the Black Panthers.
So these are not, again, these are not just people who like talk about shit.
Like they're taking on real risk.
And in fact, at one point, while he's at Playboy, one of the editors there, an executive, comes up to him and says that, like, tells him his name has been added to the Chicago PD's Red Squad.
Or sorry, they're in Chicago, not LA.
And which is like a list of radicals that the authorities had under surveillance.
And the Red Squad existed.
We don't actually know if Bob was on it or not.
And basically, this guy tells Bob, like, it's because they think you're a gun runner for the Black Panthers.
And Bob is like, well, no, we're just part of the free breakfast program.
I'm going to tell you right now, there's a non-zero chance Bob Wilson ran guns.
That's not an impossibility.
I'm not going to say that's 100% no.
Full support, I love it.
Yeah.
And he's, he also, again, for kind of to talk about like how rough this guy's life is, he has several kids with Arlen.
His youngest daughter, when she is 15, is beaten to death in a robbery, gone bad.
Oh, God.
And she becomes the first person, one of the very first people in the world, and the first person from at least in the Bay Area to have her brain put in a in cryogenic, whatever, stasis.
That's a thing Bob Wilson is into very early on.
That is normally, I have very little sympathy as a general rule for the life extension people, but I obviously can't blame a grieving father for doing something like that.
Like that's a perfectly understandable series of actions, especially in the 70s.
Yeah, that's different than I want to be an immortal mage who rules the world.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Hey, hey, hey, come on.
So while Thornley and Hill kind of provided the initial impetus behind Discordianism, Bob Wilson becomes one of the chief drivers.
And it probably is the most influential of them because he is still to this day probably like one of the number one voices out of the psychedelic movement and the counterculture movement in the late 60s and 70s.
Bob Wilson wrote a bit about this in the late 70s in a book he put out called Cosmic Trigger.
It's actually a series of books.
And this is him kind of describing the changes that occur in the American psyche during the time that the Discordians are starting out their activism.
When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was blown apart by Oswald and/or persons unknown, something died in the American psyche, as Jules Pfeffer, among others, has noticed.
Kennedy was not a universally beloved president, of course.
Nobody ever has been, not even Washington.
But he was young or youngish, handsome, cultured, brave.
Everybody knows the PT109 story, and virile.
There was a commotion of primitive terrors loosed upon the national psyche by the Dealey Plaza bullets.
Camelot died.
The divine king had been sacrificed.
We were caught suddenly in the middle of a Frasier Freud reenactment of archetypal anthropological ritual.
The national psyche veered dizzily towards chapel perilous.
Now, chapel perilous, is this a term y'all are familiar with?
No, I have no idea.
It's a psychological term.
I know you know this gears because we've talked about this so much.
This is like a core, a core part of my personal psychology.
Yes.
In researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions called chapel perilous in the trade.
You come out the other side, either a stone paranoid or an agnostic.
There is no third way.
I came out an agnostic.
And that's, I still think, is one of the more useful, especially in the era of the internet.
Because a big thing for, and all of the early Discordians break in different ways.
They all react differently to Chapel Perilus.
And actually, one thing I'll quibble with Wilson here is: I think there is a third way to react to this, and we'll talk about that later.
But I think Wilson's attitude is going to be because he is a pan-agnostic.
Pan-agnosticism is kind of like the ideology that guides him the rest of his life in increasing ways.
And that's kind of, if you listen to like best practices from any of these people who work for traditional journalist outfits and disinfo, like they don't phrase it in as artful or attractive a way as Bob Wilson says, but that's what everybody's trying to urge people towards, right?
What is agnosticism?
Not taking anything as gospel or perfect truth.
Not getting, it's not allowing.
One of the things Wilson would talk about is the concept of a reality tunnel, right?
And so when you start to believe things about the world, that kind of changes how you perceive the world.
It changes effectively the world that you live in.
And you're going to continue to make more choices that help you bore deeper into that reality tunnel, which veers you away from everybody else, right?
What we've got with QAnon is a huge chunk of people who have bored a reality tunnel so deep outside of kind of the consensus reality that a lot of most of the other people live in that they can't be reached in a lot of cases.
This is what happens in those people will like murder their family or whatever, or set off a bomb because they've fallen so deep down this tunnel.
And one of the things Wilson is, he doesn't want people to close their minds, but he doesn't want anyone to get like to bury themselves too deep in a tunnel that leads them, you know, that they can't get out from, right?
Like that's the benefit of pan-agnosticism.
I mean, I think another really succinct way of thinking about it is it's the same name as his documentary, maybe logic, as in like maybe this thing is the thing.
Like a big he has these speeches where he's trying, he tries to explain why we should remove the word is from the English vocabulary because we say, this thing is this thing.
You're now collapsing reality down into this succinct statement that is probably going to cause problems when you create that, like, um, when you create that sense of equalness.
Real Stalking vs Conspiracy Theories00:08:14
Um, so think of everything as like, maybe this is the thing, or maybe this is the thing.
Like, try to if you're using the word is a few times there, yeah.
I mean, you end up using the word because of because of like linguistics, but thinking thinking of the world in that maybe framework is just a safer way to approach a lot of these things that try to like mess with your psyche.
Okay, when it makes for worse writing, metaphors are generally conceived as stronger than similes.
So true.
That's true.
And Bob Wilson will be at war most of his life with the fact that he recognizes playing with this stuff can be dangerous, and also it's very fun to do.
But as a young man writing for Playboy, he is not as mature as he will later be.
And so starting from the position of these beliefs in kind of the value of pan-agnosticism, he decides that his goal should be to bring as many people as possible to Chapel Perilus, right?
That is, in Wilson's eyes, the goal of Operation Mindfuck is to put stuff out here that causes as many people as possible to hit this decision point where they either become a stone paranoid or they kind of back away and gain this ability to look at things from a more objective standpoint.
And a big part of like the basic goal here is in order to stop people from kind of going too far in these particular, like the John Birch directions, he wants to create art that causes people to confront the fact that reality is not fixed and emerge from that experience questioning their old assumptions.
You know, that's what Wilson sees as the actual like moral good behind Operation Mindfuck.
So Wilson and his editor, fellow editor Shay, they start sitting down with Thornley and the other Discordians.
And it's from these conversations that they actually come up with a name for Operation Mindfuck.
Because this is just something they're doing for a couple of years, right?
They're sending off these letters.
They're putting out these different conspiracy theories in different magazines.
But they haven't really named it yet.
And I'm going to read a quote from the New Yorker about how that goes down.
Through every means available, Wilson explained in a memo laying out the plan, the mindfuckers intended to attribute all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies to the Illuminati and other hidden hands.
So they planted stories about the Illuminati in the underground press.
They slipped mysterious classified ads into the libertarian journal Innovator and the new left newspaper Roger Spark.
They cooked up a letter about the Illuminati that Wilson then ran in the Playboy Advisor.
When a New Orleans jury refused to convict one of the men who the conspiracy hunting district attorney Jim Garrison blamed for the JFK killing, Garrison's booster, Art Kunken, of the Los Angeles Free Press, got a note revealing that the jurors were all Illuminati initiates.
The telltale sign, none of them had a left nipple.
What if there really is an Illuminati? Wilson asked Thornley one pot-fogged night in 1968.
Maybe they'll find out about us and be pissed.
I doubt if there is, Thornley answered.
And if there by some chance is, they'd probably be very happy to have wild-ass fools like us covering up for them by spreading bizarre theories.
I really love this idea that probably at some point they like checked someone for it.
And then they're like, no, no, it's not a left nipple and a right nipple.
It's two right nipples.
Just one of them's on the other side.
Yeah, yeah, they doubled the right nipples.
So obviously, none of what they're doing helps this cloud of suspicion that's fallen down on Kerry that he's deeply involved in the Kennedy assassination.
And by this point, JFK conspiracy theorists have become aware of the Discordians and Thornley's involvement and have decided the Discordians are a CIA front, which, in fairness, is something the Discordians claimed too.
So this doesn't come out of nowhere.
Oh, boy.
So this is the one line I wouldn't cross in any of this.
I'm not going to fedjack it myself.
They do that immediately.
So Thornley becomes the constant victim of stalking by groups of men in suits.
And it's like he is legitimately under investigation by the government.
Some of these guys are probably feds.
Some of them are probably conspiracy theorists.
Also, Kerry is a paranoid schizophrenic who's taking LSD and marijuana nearly every single day.
So a lot's going on in his head here, right?
But like part of what's going to make this so much more damaging to him is that like some of the stalking is real, which makes the stuff that's not real a lot harder for him to doubt.
He also, because you know, this is Garrison, you may not know this, people's phone numbers used to just be like listed in a book that you could pick up.
So folks like who are into the conspiracy get phone books for wherever he's living and they start like calling him.
And some of them will leave like cryptic messages.
And these are, some of these are probably Discordiants fucking with Carrie, right?
Where they're like continuing the conspiracy by pretending to be a part of it to mess with his head.
Some of them are just dead air.
You know, they may just be people actually stalking him.
And yeah, it's impossible to say entirely what's happening.
But as we turn over to the 70s, Carrie increasingly finds himself acting as a stone paranoid.
Now, mental illness does run in his family.
His younger brother Dick suffered from schizophrenic auditory hallucinations.
And in this period, Carrie increasingly suffers from them as well.
He is eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
This is not like podcast diagnosis hour with Robert Evans here.
Carrie Thornley was diagnosed.
And he also starts escalating his drug use, which this is a 40 during that.
Do you know?
God, in the 70s?
When is he born?
There's like what decade is he?
I think like 40s.
He's probably, he's starting his 30s right now, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, he's like 30s, 40s.
I'm under the impression that's like one of the time, early 30s is like one of the times that late 20s, early 30s is when people often have schizophrenic breaks.
And it can be, I've had this happen to a couple of friends of mine.
I used to live with a young woman who was in her mid-20s, had just finished college, was like going through whatever program you go to to become like a park ranger, and then just kind of one day loses it, you know?
And I'm not going to give like details, but like it was, it's, it can come on very suddenly.
And we know, one thing we do know is that both LSD and marijuana can trigger schizophrenic episodes.
I'm under the emotion for those two, but I'm not sure.
I think basically any seriously mind-altering drug can have the effect of, because I've heard that like cocaine can do it too.
Like it's, it's not like it's creating this in you.
It's these are people who at some point would have started to experience these symptoms, but it can bring it on earlier.
It can make it, you know, a lot worse.
It kind of like knocks over the first domino.
Yeah.
But the domino would have probably fallen over eventually anyway.
Yes.
And with Carrie.
Shout out to my schizophrenic friends who are still awesome.
Just yeah, yeah.
I mean, obviously, this is just like a thing he would have had to deal with.
Yeah, no, totally.
I don't think anyone.
I just want to make sure everyone listening knows that.
It's just a thing.
It's just a thing.
And this is a thing he would have had to deal with either way.
I will say the fact that he is basically never not tripping on acid or smoking pot does not help him manage this.
And his friends will note that like sometimes he'll come in and he'll be like fairly like calm and normal.
And once he hits a joint, he won't be able to stop talking about this conspiracy to kill Kennedy and how he's wrapped up in it and the different things that he started to believe about it.
And he's kind of so aggressive about it that people, a lot of people can't spend time around him anymore because it's just like this thing that when he gets into it, he's incapable of like even seeing the people around him.
And Carrie goes further and further kind of off the deep end over the next couple of years through the 70s.
He convinces himself that Oswald was really set up.
He starts to believe that he may have in fact been Oswald's body double or otherwise involved in the conspiracy to kill JFK and had simply forgotten about it due to CIA mind control radios implanted in his head.
And one of the problems is that like he has a lot of friends like Greg Hill and Robert Anton Wilson.
Aggressive Promotion Ruins Relationships00:04:05
Robert The CIA is cutting off your microphone, Robert.
Oh, no.
This isn't the first time that you've mentioned that and then your microphone starts cutting out.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's that's how the CIA works.
But you know how else the CIA works by planting people with LSD so they trip and they don't know it.
That's one way it works.
So that they're more susceptible to advertising.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Garrison, in an earlier time with less sophisticated ads, they had to use LSD.
Now, the quality ads on this podcast are much more mind-altering than any fucking chemical that some Danish man cooked up in a lab.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
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 see all these people come up to me for pictures, 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.
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.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista 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.
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.
Ah, we're back.
I hope you all enjoyed the 12 hours of hallucinations that come with every Behind the Bastards ad break.
It's really ruined a lot of people's lives, but it helps us financially lucrative for us.
I mean, exactly.
Helps promote good things.
A Decade of Mental Collapse00:14:38
I got nothing.
Okay.
Yeah, it helps promote good things.
What this podcast is about.
Good things.
The good things cast.
So what a boring show that would be, am I right?
Yeah.
Here's the problem.
Kerry is, I mean, he's losing his mind.
He is increasingly unable to tell what's real.
He's increasingly convinced. that the government tried to have or someone tried to make him murder the president, that he may have helped murder the president, that he's being stalked by government agents.
And periodically, he will go to his friends, Robert Anton Wilson, Bob Shea, Greg Hill, and he'll try to talk to them about this.
And they don't really notice that he's serious because the language they all communicate with is like making up conspiracy theories.
So it takes them a while to realize like, oh no, Kerry's actually in some distress here.
Like there's a problem with our friend.
What are the odds that he actually was involved in the assassination of JFK?
He was living basically next to this guy who he claimed not to have ever seen again.
I mean, for one thing, he wasn't in Dallas when it happened.
But for the other thing, like Kerry Thornley was actually incapable of like hiding anything ever.
Like when he comes to believe that he killed Kennedy, he tells everybody that he killed Kennedy.
And so when he doesn't believe, like, I just don't think he would ever have been capable of being part of a plot.
He's not very good at like, yeah, he's, we'll talk about it.
Like, okay.
There's a, we're going to watch a little video with him later.
But yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting.
You can believe whatever you want about actually the Kerry's Carrie's complicity in the Kennedy assassination.
Literally, I've never cared about most conspiracy shit.
It has never occurred to me to care who shot JFK.
I do not care.
I mean, wow.
Margaret, this is how the reality tunnel starts.
You are already on the path.
You already asked the question.
Took a shuffle load of dirt out of a tunnel.
Cool.
I hope there's some, I hope it's like D and D when you get into the tunnels.
Sometimes, sometimes.
Filled with gold and manliker Kakano rifles.
Yeah.
That's how I play D ⁇ D. All of Kerry's kind of mental, I don't know, collapse isn't quite the right word, but this process of him sort of falling to his mental demons occurs over the course of about a decade.
And while this is going on, he remains pretty intensely involved in radical politics.
He has another ideological shift from the kind of individualist anarchism that had led him to Discordianism towards a belief system that is, I mean, this is not like a huge movement, like, this is not like a huge pivot from individualist anarchism, but he comes to like describe his political ideology as supporting sex, drugs, and treason.
He briefly considers, yeah, that's fine.
He briefly considers slipping LSD into the water supply of a city.
But eventually his acid trips convince him to drop out of society and integrate himself into what he calls a sexually swinging psychedelic tribe.
And this tribe is one of the 1960s mini-acid cults called the Karista.
Kerry takes over their newspaper and he writes several influential articles.
And these guys are like, again, this is like an acid sex cult.
It's also pretty like their publication is reasonably prominent within the radical community at this time.
So Kerry's articles wind up having, Margaret, you might be surprised by the influence this has, actually.
But he writes an article that includes this line.
Carista is a religion and the mood of Carista is one of holiness.
Do not, however, look for profusion of rituals, dogmas, doctrines, and scriptures.
Carista is too sacred for that.
It is more akin to the religions of the East and also the so-called pagan religions of the pre-Christian West.
So what's interesting, like that may not seem like much, but what's interesting is that that is, and in this article, includes basically the first, probably the first recorded use of people using the word pagan to refer to both a past practice and ongoing modern religious practices.
That had not actually happened until, yeah.
And this is, I'm not the one making this claim.
This is a claim made by Margot Adler, who is a Wiccan priestess and an NPR correspondent.
In her book, Drawing Down the Moon, she claims that Kerry's writings helped spark the actual beginning of the neo-pagan movement.
And she is the one who credits him as the first person to use the word pagan to describe both past and present religions.
This guy is everywhere.
Yeah, he's really influential.
It's wild.
Because he personally killed the president or two.
I'm not sure how many.
And also started.
I don't know.
It's just impressive.
You know what?
That is my head canon now.
I'm blaming the Kennedy assassin or crediting it to him.
I think they secreted him away, actually, JFK.
I actually don't know the conspiracy theories from JFK.
Oh, so you're a Bubba Hotep believer.
Oh, God.
No, I don't think so.
I've changed my side.
You should watch.
Everyone should watch the movie Bubba Hotep by Don Coscarelli.
The premise of the film, starring Bruce Campbell, is that Elvis gives his life to an Elvis impersonator and then winds up in an old folks' home as an old man.
And his best friend is a black man who claims to be JFK, who the CIA like changed his skin in order to hide him to fake his death.
And they have to fight a mummy.
It's an incredible film.
Okay, I'm back to believing it.
Yep.
All right.
Bubba Hotep, an excellent piece of art.
So Kerry, again, it's interesting.
He is a very functional person in a lot of ways.
He's deeply influential.
He writes a huge amount.
It's good writing as a general rule.
But he's also in, like, he's also an unmedicated and increasingly kind of falling into these increasingly complex conspiratorial holes.
And he'll just drop off the map for periods of time.
He spends a decent chunk, particularly in the late 70s, early 80s, kind of living as a transient, but never when he doesn't want to, right?
One of the things his friends will say is that like, no matter how kind of far out he got, when he wanted to, he would find ways to make money and keep a roof over his head.
So he always had this kind of degree of control over his life.
It's more like he couldn't control his relationships with other people because he starts to wrap them into these conspiracies that he's spending all of his time thinking about.
Now, probably, I think the first, as far as I've read, the first of his friends to realize something is deeply wrong is Robert Anton Wilson.
And Wilson, you know, would kind of very politely, when Kerry would start getting wrapped up in these claims, would be like, well, that I don't really, you know, I understand what you're saying and I understand that you believe that, but I want you to consider that maybe like that's not as true as you think it is.
And like maybe there's alternate explanations for why you think somebody's following you or this or that.
Kerry decides that this means that Bob is his CIA handler and he's trying to trick him to manipulate him into, yeah, this is like a not an uncommon story, unfortunately.
And variants of this kind of happen with some of his other friends.
Now, so kind of the side effect of this is that, especially kind of at the end of the 70s, Kerry is increasingly like isolated.
A lot of his old friends he doesn't talk to anymore.
Greg Hill kind of gets very depressed at this point in time.
His wife divorces him and he starts drinking more and more.
And so he kind of reduces his contact.
And so Kerry does not have a lot of the moderating influences that he'd had earlier in his life.
And his personal beliefs continue to evolve.
And again, he's kind of gotten really into free love in this period.
That has sort of become the center of his political identity.
And the next set of beliefs that he takes on, because he is a guy who periodically will just take on beliefs very strongly, is that the only way to create a utopia is to build a world free of sexual hang-ups.
Now, this is where things take a really dark turn.
Bonus.
Carrie believes all people are sexual beings.
Sex is fundamentally a good.
It's something that should form the center of human relationships.
And if all people are sexual beings and all children are people, then sex with children can't be all that bad.
So one of the real black Peter Lamborn Wilson energy.
Yeah.
I was wondering if they were communicating at this time because that is very, very similar types of logic.
And they were both probably very active in like the early pagan community.
I haven't seen that they were communicating directly, but they were certainly writing in some of the same magazines and in some of the same places.
And the thing Carrie convinces himself is basically he's not committed to sexual liberation if he does not try to have sex with a child.
So this did not come out until 2003, or I think 2002, something like that.
The book came out in 2003.
When Grace, when Adam Go Rightly, who's written the book, The Prankster in the Conspiracy, which is the best book about Carrie, he is looking into Carrie's life.
He's talking to all of his old friends.
And one of his old friends, Carrie would claim that they dated.
She claims they just were friends who had sex one time and then she wanted some space.
This is another thing with Carrie.
But this woman, Grace Kaplinger, she sends Adam a letter.
And this is what it says.
There was an incident in Atlanta when Carrie and Kara and Craig were living across the street from me.
Kara's wife living across the street from me and my family.
He took my daughter Marion when she was around seven or eight into a room at the home of a family, close friends of mine who lived around the corner.
He closed the door and began trying to fondle Marion.
This was stopped by my friend, Jane, coming to the door and demanding that it be opened.
She told me about it, as did Marion at the time.
And I know that I did not deal with this properly.
Part of me was simply unable to understand the gravity, even the total reality of it, but it did happen.
Fuck.
And I have no reason to disbelieve that.
It is.
I want to be really clear here because we've talked in other episodes, like when we talked about John Hinckley Jr., about mental illness and when it does and does not have an impact on someone's complicity in a crime.
And I don't think that has any impact on what Carrie has done here.
I think his decision to try to molest this girl is completely consistent with decades of how this guy functions.
And what I mean by that is that when Kerry comes across deep poverty, you know, overseas in Southeast Asia and reads Marx, he becomes a committed Marxist.
When he reads Atlas Shrugged and falls in love with objectivism, he describes himself as like a capitalist insurgent terrorist.
When he finds anarchism, he devotes himself to causing as much chaos as possible.
He is the kind of person who, when he finds something attractive in an ideology, jumps into it with both feet and is immediately ready to give everything for it.
And I think actually I have, there's a degree to which I have more condemnation and find him more unsettling than someone who is a pedophile in the sense of someone who is attracted to children and seeks them out.
Because we have no evidence this ever happened again.
And I don't think this is the result of attraction.
I think this is the result of Carrie believing he is not living his ideology if he doesn't try to do this.
Yeah.
Like, and I think a person who can do that is so much scarier than almost any other kind of person in the world.
Yeah.
It's fucked up.
No, and there's so much there about the history of, oh, it's terrible.
The history of pedophilia that runs through so many different subcultures and ideologies on all sides of the spectrum and is like very rarely tackled head on because it's usually talked about in very bad faith.
You know, like everyone calling trans people groomers or whatever, right?
Or people don't want to talk about it because it's not a fucking nice thing to talk about.
And it's complicated, but people need to know that, yeah, that's just like what echo chambers can make you believe is reasonable.
You know, I guess the kind of thing that they probably would call reality tunnels, right?
Like, yeah.
Like when you're like, you have these like self-reinforcing beliefs and you get a small group of people who are like, yeah, and then this thing and then this thing, you know, and it is a thing that like people have a problem with.
And it allows you to come up with horrific conclusions, such as this one.
And this is why Robert Anton Wilson was such an advocate of pan-agnosticism, right?
He's watching Carrie.
I don't think he's aware of this when it happens, but he does write the foreword to the biography that this is in.
He does become aware of it at some point.
Because that was only published a few years before Wilson died.
It was right around, because I think he died in 2003 or four.
Yeah, yeah.
But so yeah, this is, I mean, that's unsettling.
And it's interesting just to kind of make that point further.
Go rightly also talks to one of Thorney's longtime friends or Thornley's longtime friends, Lois Lacey, to try and understand why this happened.
And Lacey's explanation is that Kerry really started to, like his behavior started to change for the worse, for the toxic, for the abusive, when he dropped his personal mantra that he had like kept with him most of his life, which was just the word no.
And I'm going to read a quote from the book here because I think this is interesting.
As Luis explained, Carrie was fiercely anti-authoritarian.
And prior to his bouts of paranoia, he had always stood up to whatever monolithic force stood in his way, continually saying no, whether it was to the government, Jim Garrison, or anyone else.
Anarchism When Your Head Talks Back00:02:33
This was Carrie's way of dealing with people who tried to tell him what to do.
And this was the simple wisdom he'd imparted to Lois many years before.
Just learn to say no, and people won't know how to react or what to do.
And in most cases, would leave you the fuck alone.
At some point, Carrie apparently quit saying no and in essence, stopped evolving, while his friends, who in many instances had followed Kerry over the years, now began eclipsing him as they continued growing, exploring, and entertaining new ideas and forms of expression.
Carrie, Lois contends, became locked in this delusory world of conspiracies, which impeded his evolution.
One time, Carrie explained his struggles to her in the following manner.
It's hard to be an anarchist when your head is talking to you.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's the complicated thing to parse.
It is a complicated thing.
Because in a lot of ways, like the path that he got set down, he did lay out the own stones for the path.
Like he was encouraging himself along so much of this development and then he just got lost along the way.
But he was also just like, he was always capable of doing this, right?
Because he did it as a person.
So it's one of those things.
Yeah, it's same thing with like, same thing with like the Kanye West stuff.
Same thing with whenever we talk about like, which degree does like your mental health or, you know, whatever diagnosis you might have like contribute to the actions that you take.
Yeah, and I think it's a matter of like whether or not you understand the like the reality of what you're doing in a very like basic way.
Like, for example, if Kerry had become convinced that a random person was stalking him and just shot that person, believing he was defending himself from the CIA, you're not morally like culable to that, right?
Like that's fundamentally a decision you make because you believe you're in danger.
Yeah.
And like, I can't morally blame somebody for that.
But yeah, like the decision to rape a child is based on like reinforcing your own personal sense of ideology.
Yeah.
It's just a weirdly fucked up thing to do.
And that that matters more than, for example, the consent of the child or the ability.
Like obviously children cannot consent, but like the like it's the centering of his own need to be consistent with this thing he's convinced himself is his politics.
Yeah.
That is like that's a bad thing to do.
Well, this is depressing.
You know what's not bad?
Financial Literacy for Thriving Communities00:02:22
Gold?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Buy some gold, everybody.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
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.
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Zines, Squats, and Intellectual Giants00:15:19
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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.
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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 iTartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ah, we're back.
We're just having a good time, having a good time.
Never want to stop at all.
So, Carrie gets divorced.
He kind of loses his ability over time to function in mainstream society whatsoever.
He becomes something of a wandering bum, hitchhiking across the country, crashing with friends or on the street.
Those who'd known him a long time learned that trying to help him inevitably brought allegations that they too were part of the CIA conspiracy.
One of his brothers, his kind of middle brother, not Dick, later writes this, which I think does a good enough job of kind of summarizing how Kerry is treating people in this period.
The last time I saw Carrie was in the early 1980s.
It was the last time our nuclear family was all together at the same time in years, and it was Christmas.
After the Warren Commission testimony, Carrie gradually morphed from a fascinating, very charismatic, merry prankster, beaten it, kind of idiot-savant intellectual giant into a full-blown paranoid schizophrenic.
That Christmas, we got together at my mom and dad's, the Nazi spy's house.
Carrie was intent on proving to me that he was being followed and watched, and that he had thought mind control devices planted, got mind control devices planted in his head.
So he asked me to drive him to a local bus stop to prove his point.
To put this in perspective, I had long hair.
Carrie had long hair, a full beard, and a bright orange sailor's hat on and was carrying a white purse.
As we sat at the bus stop in this very conservative Palos Verdez neighborhood, Carrie began to point out how almost everyone who drove by was looking at us.
So they were most likely spying on him.
And in fact, some had been following him for days.
That was such a shock to me to realize what a fine line it is between being an intellectual giant and a very smart paranoid schizophrenic.
I never saw him again after that day.
His whole story is so dark and tragic.
Yeah, it's like, but you can see like all this gets like, you know, there's, there's the his stuff that he was doing in school to prank his friends as like a precursor to all this, how he would put up posters talking about killing the president as like this, this thing that in the end has such a negative impact on your life, but is seemingly like an inconsequential joke.
And then in the end, it leads to this devastating train of things that just kind of shatters your mental grasp of reality.
And it's, I think, one, like what Wilson would say is it's the result of saying yes too many times, right?
It's the result of being too convinced.
And I think part of what, and I think this is part of where you need kind of some of his brother's words here to help make sense of it, because the fact that what he says there at the end there, the difference between the thin line between being an intellectual giant, which Carrie objectively was, his influence on the culture was massive, and a very smart paranoid schizophrenic.
I think Carrie's conception of his own intelligence is a big part of why things go so badly for him, right?
He thought he was smart enough that he was like catching these people.
And he was fucking with them.
And I'm the one like, I'm the one who has like the control and the agency here, right?
And I'm like, and on like the maybe logic side of things, it's like, you know, people looking at me at this bus stop, that is proof that they're following me.
It's using that notion of like is, and as opposed to thinking like, oh, they're looking at you, or maybe it's because you have long hair and you're sitting next to someone else with long hair with a person.
You just look like weird hippies.
We'll see him in a little bit, but I should note here, Carrie never didn't look like a wizard.
Like the whole period from the Dyscorian point on, he's got like this long beard and these, he has wizard, resting wizard face is how I would describe the way Kerry Thorley looked.
He did eventually find some sort of rough equilibrium.
He wound up kind of making a place for himself in Atlanta's little five points neighborhood.
Now, at this point, that was the center of all things weird in the deep south.
And it was ignored enough by authorities that it drew in traveling punk kids who wanted nothing more than to squat in old buildings and publish weird shit for other grungy leftists.
What era are we in now?
We're talking the late 70s and the 80s.
All through the Reagan years, basically.
This is kind of what he's doing.
And he finds a sketchy living situation where he's basically, I think it's like a backhouse kind of thing that it's not entirely legal.
Over the course of the time he's there, he fills it with exactly 13 cats.
And because space in his house is so small, he had to build what he called a cat condo out of scrap wood and trash, creating a system of tunnels, ladders, and platforms on the walls for his cats.
I've lived in punk houses where you have like the resident wizard where everyone's like 25.
And then there's just the like 70-year-old anarchist who's like, fucking in this last period of his life.
And his cat condo, by the way, the health department eventually makes him tear it down.
That's fucked up.
I know.
Let the man have his cat condown.
I know.
I mostly feel sad for the 14th cat that just hangs out outside and is like, come on, you're a crazy cat wizard.
Let us know.
No more space.
Come on.
So without the internet, the L5P community, Little Five Points community keeps in touch through a series of underground papers.
And in the mid-70s, late 70s, really mostly, Kerry has another one of his great ideas.
So he starts by posting what he calls wall newspapers all around Little Five Points.
These are one-paged Xerox rants.
And he puts them up in strategic locations around town, around like the punk bars and stuff that people hang out in.
So folks like find these.
They see them on like bathroom walls and stuff and they read them and they talk about them to their friends who are all hanging out in the same area.
And gradually like Kerry starts to become known around town for these wall newspapers that he's posting up.
And he starts publishing more and more of these little Xerox rants and like arguments and like letters to the editor.
People start passing them out to their friends or leaving them out at bars.
This is the start of the zine revolution.
Because one of the things Kerry is doing while he's doing this in Little Five Points, he's also part of the time living this sort of transient existence where he's like hitchhiking throughout the South, putting up these little like wall newspapers and stuff and like spreading.
So sometimes people will like write notes and letters and stuff in Atlanta and he'll like print them up and then he'll travel down to Orlando and he'll put them up in places and stuff.
And this is like other people start to see this and realize like, oh, this is actually a really cool way to like communicate and share information.
And yeah, this is like kind of how the zine revolution kicks off.
And that really starts in the 1980s.
Thornley publications included Kocha, K-U-L-C-H-A, which focused on art, sex, and religion.
And this is my favorite one, The Decadent Worker, which was a gossip column of like different like drama that in the leftist community and little five points.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
This is just like Twitter getting circulated in a little five points.
Okay, so when I lived in the squat scene in the Netherlands in Amsterdam, there was this zine that had been going on for like 10 or 15 years, maybe longer.
That was just the gossip of who's fucking who in the squat scene in Amsterdam.
And it was like terrifying.
It was terrifying to me because I like, I didn't read Dutch.
And it was one of the, I don't know, but just the fact that there's this zine that gets distributed about like who is new in town, who's fucking who.
It's fucking scary.
Yeah.
And it's one of the, I should note here, just because people will get angry online otherwise.
This is not one of the, this is one of those things where like it's not like Kerry runs into a room full of punks and anarchists and says, I have invented the zine.
This is actually a little bit more like that situation we were talking about in episode one with like the creation of or the discovery of calculus, right?
Where he is doing this and a couple other people are doing similar things and it all runs together.
But he is, since he's so influential and so skilled at getting his view of things out to people, he definitely has a massive, he's one of a handful of people who starts the zine revolution.
And yeah, he also lays out, he also puts together a wall newspaper called the Cactus Flower Gazette, where he lays out the basics of what's going to be his final ideology.
He calls it Zen anarchism.
Now, here's what he wrote about his contribution to the zine revolution.
I like to think that over two and a half years of such activity, it's raised the vibes in my immediate surroundings considerably.
Beyond the satisfaction of refuting a few of the lies the intelligence community spreads to counter my claims to bring light about my light data about my belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK murder and such related matters as the premeditated escalation of the Indochina War and German breeding experiments right here in the U.S. There is no other prophet involved.
And that's really interesting, the fact that he's like, my belatedly discovered involvement in the JFK murder, because he's only now realized that he had a hand in killing JFK.
He also posts advertising.
Anarchist got two of the presidents.
Yeah, no, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Yeah, actually, I'm not sure.
Debatably, Margaret, he may still have been an objectivist back then.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm not sure.
I remember they can have that one.
They can have this one, Margaret.
That's like that's fine.
He wanted JFK dead for Randian reasons.
Oh, it's very funny.
Yeah.
So we will continue to talk about Kerry Thornley and give sort of the last stages of his life in the final part of this epic series.
And we will also talk about what happens after the original Discordians and how their ideas get taken and changed and turned eventually into the sundry fascist manipulation campaigns that have had such an influence on our last couple of presidential elections and last, I don't know, dozen-ish public mass murders.
But before we do that, Margaret Garrison hasn't been implicated in any mass murders.
Us?
Us.
As far as I know, we did a background check on you, both of you.
Well, I drove past the police department building and screamed, has Garrison committed any crimes?
And no one called me back.
That's good.
That's good.
And you also went and found that Dutch zine and got someone to translate it from Dutch and found out that I had not done anything wrong.
That's right.
That's right.
That's all the zine focuses on these days is your lack of complicity in various crimes.
Yeah.
I don't know.
If you have any old copies of Carrie Thorndley wall newspapers from Little Five Points in the 1980s, hit us the fuck up because I want to see some of that shit.
I want to read Culture.
Yeah, what do you guys got to plug?
Well, if you want to try to find, if you have any of those weird zines from Little Five Points or the wall newspapers, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at Hungry Bowtie.
Speaking of Atlanta, just finished up a four-part series on the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, Georgia.
The week of action should be either ongoing or about to happen by the time this episode airs.
So yeah.
Excellent.
I have a podcast.
I have two podcasts.
I have a podcast called Live Like the World is Dying that is individual and community preparedness.
And I have a podcast on this very network.
And it's called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff.
And yeah, you can listen to it every Monday and Wednesday.
And I have a book called Escape from Incel Island.
I have a bunch of books, but the most recent one is called Escape from Incel Island.
And you can read it.
It came out.
You can get it wherever you steal wherever you books.
Buy it, steal it, steal, you know, just go steal something, everybody.
That's an idea.
Steal the Principia Discordia.
Yeah.
Steal the Principia Discordia from a bookstore that has the temerity to sell it.
And I don't know.
So what kind of crimes are we allowed to advocate our listeners commit?
Go back in time and shoot JFK.
Go do it.
Chris, just bleep me talking right now.
Yeah.
Wow, Sophie.
I mean, yeah, I don't know if I could be that much.
I think that much thermite would take out the structural supports, but I don't know if a controlled demolition like that is going to lead to as fast a collapse as you expect.
I think we'll have to check this by legal before we air this before we air this episode.
Well, we'll get back to you all on that.
But wow, Sophie, surprisingly intricate plan.
And if any of it was bleeped out, it was actually the CIA who bleeped it out.
Yeah, we don't do that.
We'll just cut this whole section.
But if this section runs, but part of it's bleeped out, it means that the CIA has altered this episode as part of an influence operation.
And you can't trust anything that we say in this because as good as the technology has gotten for deepfakes right now, there's no way to know if we actually said this or this is something that our CIA handlers are putting out using our voices.
We may not even be alive anymore.
You have no way of telling.
I love that we haven't learned from the actual thing we're describing.
We haven't learned from the history that we are in the process of describing.
I was just going to tell our editor to do that thing where like a TV program gets pulled live on air that's just like, I mean, look, Margaret, the chief lesson of this show is that it is impossible to learn things from history.
And we live that message every day.
CIA Bleeps and Influence Operations00:01:48
Yeah.
All right.
End of stop recording.
Bye.
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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.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
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On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul 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.
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