Behind the Bastards - Part Six: A Complete History of the Illuminati
Aired: 2023-03-09
Duration: 01:12:26


=== Building The Business You Want (01:20) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[00:00:04]  Today's Financial Literacy Month.
[00:00:06]  We are talking about the one investment most people ignore: building a business around the life you actually want.
[00:00:11]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
[00:00:16]  On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kassam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risk, and while your dream might be the smartest move.
[00:00:24]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[00:00:26]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[00:00:30]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:00:34]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[00:00:41]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[00:00:48]  The entire season two is now available to bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
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[00:01:05]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
[00:01:10]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
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=== TikTok Hitler Reincarnation Kid (05:56) ===

[00:01:20]  Yes.
[00:01:21]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:01:23]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:01:24]  I got that wrong.
[00:01:25]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[00:01:26]  We're pretty close, though.
[00:01:28]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:36]  Ah, welcome back to the conspiracy cast with Robert Evans, where every week I try to put irresponsibly out something that sends a chunk of our listeners down a very dark road.
[00:01:52]  Now, Margaret, you were just telling us all that you've been snowed in recently.
[00:01:58]  Yeah.
[00:02:00]  Why don't you talk to me about that just a little bit?
[00:02:02]  Okay.
[00:02:03]  It snows.
[00:02:04]  I live rurally.
[00:02:05]  I can only get out with my, you know, giant pickup truck or whatever, but the mail can't come up the driveway, the gravel road.
[00:02:12]  So you, you, you were, you were, you know, what happens when there's so much snow that it's difficult to leave your house?
[00:02:20]  How would you describe that state of affairs?
[00:02:22]  I love it.
[00:02:23]  I'm a prepper.
[00:02:24]  My house is completely self-sustaining.
[00:02:25]  Even if the power goes out, I like.
[00:02:27]  Margaret, is it true that you secretly were in the United States military and stole government documents?
[00:02:37]  Oh, I'm snowed in.
[00:02:43]  That took a lot of setup that was mostly failure, but I had no idea.
[00:02:49]  It was all worth it in the end.
[00:02:53]  Was it really?
[00:02:57]  Yep.
[00:02:58]  It sure was.
[00:03:00]  I was surprised that you're sticking to these like low-level.
[00:03:03]  I mean, that stuff you were just saying is true, but I'm surprised that you haven't gotten into the real conspiracy about how gold is actually corrosive and it destroys your brain if you're near large quantities of it.
[00:03:19]  Wow, Margaret.
[00:03:20]  I mean, what's the responsible thing to do then with all of your gold if you have it and you can feel it impacting your brain?
[00:03:28]  Robert, you should bury your gold.
[00:03:30]  I think that's too dangerous.
[00:03:31]  I think people need to send their gold to RPO box and our specially trained auromancers will decontaminate the gold and find a safe place to bury it.
[00:03:44]  We'll put the Midas touch.
[00:03:46]  That's right.
[00:03:46]  That's our motto.
[00:03:48]  Is this the last episode of the series?
[00:03:50]  This is the last episode of the series.
[00:03:52]  All right.
[00:03:54]  We have to get all the last bits in now before it ends.
[00:03:58]  That's right.
[00:04:00]  And speaking of ending, it's about to be the end of Kerry's life.
[00:04:05]  Not a particularly long life.
[00:04:08]  With the exception of Bob Wilson, none of like the kind of most prominent early Discordians live crazy long lives.
[00:04:16]  There's a couple of them that there's a lot of guys.
[00:04:18]  Yeah, JFK is still bouncing around down in Texas after fighting that mummy.
[00:04:25]  Yeah, so he's he's kind of like the last years of his life.
[00:04:29]  He spends rambling throughout the South and making zines in Atlanta's little five points neighborhood.
[00:04:35]  One of the ways he gets by kind of, he never really makes a profit at it, but like if you if you send him a dollar, he will send you a bunch of random wall newspapers.
[00:04:46]  And if you send him a letter saying, I don't have any money, he'll also send you a bunch of random wall newspapers.
[00:04:51]  Basically, if you send Carrie either currency or anything else, he'll send you a bunch of his zines.
[00:04:56]  And that's, he just, he's kind of able to maintain a marginal like living by doing that.
[00:05:01]  That's like what we do, but with gold, if you send us gold, we will either send you a zine or not.
[00:05:07]  Yeah, one of those two things will happen.
[00:05:10]  And if you later encounter a zine in like a bar or something, just assume that was us too.
[00:05:17]  And that way, if you don't receive anything, you won't feel ripped off.
[00:05:20]  Now, the other thing that happens in this is that like, again, all these kind of like punk kids are coagulating in little five points because it's a place you can get by without having sort of a very regular income.
[00:05:31]  There's not like a lot of attention from the local government on that part of town yet.
[00:05:36]  And all of these people, particularly a lot of young punk ladies, find Kerry and kind of adopt him as a guru.
[00:05:44]  That feels like a position he should not.
[00:05:46]  He should not be in.
[00:05:47]  Yes.
[00:05:49]  There are some problems with this, these young women who call themselves the Thornliettes.
[00:05:55]  Yeah, no, that is not good for Carrie.
[00:05:58]  That's not what this guy's brain needs.
[00:06:02]  Now, again, Carrie never seeks treatment or help in any meaningful way.
[00:06:08]  And his conspiratorial beliefs continue to evolve.
[00:06:11]  This starts with kind of his anger at his ex-wife, but eventually he becomes convinced that both her and every woman that he has ever slept with, like every woman who approaches him, who hits on him, are all part of a conspiracy.
[00:06:23]  They're all Nazis who were secretly sent over to the United States to have sex with him and breed a future Fuhrer.
[00:06:30]  Oh, no.
[00:06:32]  No, he is, he has just like fully fallen into his own, his own hole that he dug.
[00:06:37]  Yeah.
[00:06:38]  Yeah.
[00:06:39]  And, you know, that's actually very sad, but it is also kind of funny.
[00:06:45]  Like the kid on TikTok.
[00:06:46]  There's a kid on TikTok who's like a fan fiction kid who like does, yeah, some sort of part of nerd culture I'm not familiar with, but he has convinced himself that he's the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler and has gotten a like nose piercing that when his hair is styled a certain way, he looks kind of like, honestly, not a bad resemblance.
[00:07:08]  And I'm going to be, again, to be totally fair, if Hitler was reincarnated, that's exactly the kind of person he'd be in 2023.

=== Falling Into His Own Hole (10:25) ===

[00:07:17]  I bet his daddy.
[00:07:18]  I know my Hitler.
[00:07:20]  Robert.
[00:07:26]  Robert can't take all the blame for that one.
[00:07:28]  No, no.
[00:07:32]  Get ready for the six-part series on Twink Hitler coming up.
[00:07:35]  Oh, that's going to be more than six parts, Garrison.
[00:07:40]  Behind the Twinkler.
[00:07:41]  We're just launching a new weekly.
[00:07:43]  Oh, God.
[00:07:44]  Keeping up with him.
[00:07:46]  So one thing that seems undeniable is that Kerry's belief in a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination only deepened with time.
[00:07:55]  He came to be convinced that he was a central part of the plot.
[00:07:59]  And one of his last public appearances was in 1992 on a TV show called A Current Affair.
[00:08:05]  We're going to play a segment from this.
[00:08:08]  Let's just watch this incredible piece of 1990s television starring our friend Kerry Thornley.
[00:08:19]  Grim shadows that have cast a pole over a man with a frightening secret.
[00:08:23]  A terrible boast.
[00:08:26]  I wanted to shoot him.
[00:08:28]  I wanted to assassinate him.
[00:08:30]  Very much.
[00:08:31]  You have just seen and heard a man called Kerry Thornley, who used the exotic background of New Orleans as his headquarters for a deranged plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
[00:08:42]  His one regret, his good friend and marine buddy Lehar V. Oswald got there before him.
[00:08:48]  In fact, he was so close to Oswald that he even wrote a book about him before the assassination.
[00:08:53]  Now again, listen to the words of Kerry Thornley and shut up.
[00:08:58]  I wanted him dead.
[00:09:00]  I would have shot him myself.
[00:09:01]  I would have stood there with a rifle and pulled the trigger if I'd had the chance.
[00:09:05]  Kerry Thornley talked for the first time in history about the ugliest competition imaginable.
[00:09:11]  A race to kill President Kennedy.
[00:09:14]  And Thornley wants the world to know he tried his hardest.
[00:09:18]  I told the Secret Service, I said the only reason I didn't kill him was because I wasn't in the right place at the right time with a gun.
[00:09:24]  The world met Kerry Thornley in 1964.
[00:09:27]  So you see what's happened here.
[00:09:30]  Number one, Kerry, it's moved on from like, you know, I was mind-controlled to like, I had my own plan to kill Kennedy and I was like fighting with Oswald to pull it off.
[00:09:40]  But what's really happening here more than anything is that these like sleazy daytime TV fucks are using a very sick man in order to make content.
[00:09:50]  And like they stole his mustache.
[00:09:51]  They stole his mustache.
[00:09:53]  He does have like an Amish beard do.
[00:09:57]  But that's pretty messed up.
[00:09:58]  Like he's they it's very they're like framing all of this almost like an episode of like unsolved mysteries in between as they cut through to like this footage of Kerry walking down like a darkened street and everything.
[00:10:10]  It's pretty exploitative.
[00:10:13]  But yeah, that's kind of like the last big public thing that Kerry does.
[00:10:17]  And I'm not one for conspiracy theories.
[00:10:20]  It is kind of sad.
[00:10:21]  I'm not, you know, one for conspiracies.
[00:10:24]  But from just in order to be perfectly responsible, I do think I need to show you both the logo for the show that he has his last appearance on.
[00:10:36]  Oh, it's a pyramid.
[00:10:38]  It's a pyramid.
[00:10:38]  Yeah.
[00:10:39]  There's a pyramid directly behind the current affair logo.
[00:10:42]  So true.
[00:10:42]  Interesting.
[00:10:43]  Interesting.
[00:10:44]  What year was this?
[00:10:46]  This is 1992.
[00:10:48]  So this is a year after he published Zenarchy, which is kind of one of the weirdly long-lasting texts that he wrote towards the end of his life.
[00:10:57]  Yeah.
[00:10:59]  And yeah, that's kind of his last TV type appearance.
[00:11:02]  Although I think the last appearance he actually makes is right before he passes on.
[00:11:06]  He dies in 98.
[00:11:08]  A bunch of, because Discordians were some of the very first people on the internet.
[00:11:12]  We're talking like Usenet days.
[00:11:14]  And like there were a bunch of different kind of fan websites to Thornley and Bob Anton Wilson and all of these other guys.
[00:11:22]  And one of them gets him and like sits down with him and conducts a live chat session interview where a bunch of Discordians around the world are able to like ask him questions.
[00:11:31]  And I think it's one of the first times anyone had done this.
[00:11:34]  This is the late 1990s.
[00:11:35]  So there's not a lot of people who beat him to that sort of thing that is now like the language through which fandoms are conducted.
[00:11:43]  Which is also interesting.
[00:11:45]  I was terminally online in the late 90s.
[00:11:50]  And I was telling Garrison about this.
[00:11:52]  A lot of overlap with Discordian and especially like Church of Sub-Genius and all of these sorts of things.
[00:11:59]  And so it's just like, that just really tracks to me.
[00:12:01]  And it was like these like slightly older people who were like the cool weirdos on the internet that I was like, whoa, look at these cool weirdos on the internet.
[00:12:09]  And I would go on IRC chat and like meet all these Discordians.
[00:12:15]  Now, unfortunately, Carrie, in the state that he's in, is not taking, he's not like visiting a doctor regularly.
[00:12:24]  And he also just doesn't have access to particularly good health care.
[00:12:29]  And this becomes particularly a problem when he gets evicted by the city.
[00:12:34]  They kind of like come in and clean house in Little Five Points and kick out a lot of like the crusty radicals.
[00:12:39]  And so he and a bunch of these kids all wind up sleeping in a very specific forest in Atlanta where he gets sick and is eventually hospitalized and dies.
[00:12:52]  Wow.
[00:12:52]  That happens in November of 1998.
[00:12:55]  He is 60 years old when this occurs.
[00:12:59]  And yeah, I think that's interesting.
[00:13:04]  Is that the specific forest that is now being turned into Cop City?
[00:13:08]  As far as I can tell, yeah.
[00:13:09]  I mean, it's right outside of Little Five Points.
[00:13:12]  If you have more details on that, I could probably confirm that.
[00:13:16]  I have not found them, but I, yeah, it's worth looking into.
[00:13:23]  The Milani Forest is just like a few miles directly south from Little Five Points.
[00:13:28]  There is a road that connects you straight from Little Five Points to that section of the forest.
[00:13:34]  In the late 80s, in the late 90s, that would have been right after the city shut down that area of forest that operated as a prison farm.
[00:13:44]  So that would have been, it would kind of entered its first stage of like not really being used for anything for the next like 20 years or so.
[00:13:53]  Yeah.
[00:13:54]  Yeah.
[00:13:54]  It's not a kind of thing I know exactly.
[00:13:56]  They just say like the forest kind of near little five points.
[00:14:00]  But interesting.
[00:14:00]  Yeah.
[00:14:01]  It's kind of one of the last places he spends any time.
[00:14:03]  So he's actually still living.
[00:14:05]  Sorry, this whole makeup conspiracy thing is too much fun.
[00:14:07]  So he's still living under the forest.
[00:14:09]  And I don't know where to go from there.
[00:14:12]  If only.
[00:14:13]  Obviously, he is not a man who had an easy life.
[00:14:17]  The high Discordian leaders did not in general have easy lives.
[00:14:22]  Greg Hill, as we've said, kind of collapses mentally after his divorce from his wife.
[00:14:28]  He gets a job.
[00:14:29]  He eventually becomes a upper mid-level executive at Bank of America.
[00:14:34]  Oh, that's such a bummer.
[00:14:36]  Well, yeah, it's even sadder than that because he will work as a bank executive during the day.
[00:14:41]  And then for the rest of his life, he just comes home.
[00:14:43]  He does not interact with anyone and he drinks himself to death.
[00:14:46]  He drinks himself to death like it's a job.
[00:14:49]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  And that is how Greg Hill leaves the world.
[00:14:54]  Robert Anton Wilson lives the longest of the guys we've been talking about into the early 2000s.
[00:15:01]  He is a much healthier person.
[00:15:04]  There are some criticisms of him.
[00:15:06]  He kind of he has some like very specific critiques of feminism that I think some people have uncharitably compared to being an early men's rights advocate.
[00:15:15]  That's not actually what, I mean, for one thing, his wife was a fairly influential feminist activist in her day.
[00:15:21]  He had a lot of specific issues with specific things certain feminists were saying that he criticized, but was not like anti-woman in any particular way.
[00:15:30]  Now, he is, he is a guy who's writing shit in the 60s and 70s, which evolves over time, right?
[00:15:37]  Like there's some misogyny you can find in his early stuff.
[00:15:40]  He also, yeah.
[00:15:42]  Yeah, at the time when a lot of the feminism is specifically anti-porn also.
[00:15:46]  Yeah.
[00:15:46]  Yeah.
[00:15:47]  He is someone who changes over time.
[00:15:49]  And nothing that I've seen of his is like, like hateful, you know, like he's not like a cruel or a violent person.
[00:15:55]  He's just, you know, if you go in and read a bunch of his stuff, you'll find some stuff that doesn't age well and some stuff that you disagree with, which is going to be the case with everybody who thought of things that were interesting at any point in history.
[00:16:07]  Not me, not, not, not Margaret.
[00:16:09]  My future for you.
[00:16:10]  You're following my work, actually.
[00:16:13]  Yeah, and not me.
[00:16:15]  You can find Maya.
[00:16:16]  It's actually kind of a sequel to Zen Anarchy.
[00:16:19]  It's called Put the Lead Back in the Gas Tanks, Fuck Them Kids.
[00:16:23]  And it's sort of my manifesto.
[00:16:26]  And I think really people are going to get a lot of good out of that.
[00:16:29]  I also think bicycle helmets should be illegal.
[00:16:31]  So, you know, check that book out.
[00:16:33]  Follow my five pillars of making sure children don't graduate school at accelerated rates.
[00:16:42]  All good stuff.
[00:16:43]  School zone speed limit should be 55 miles an hour.
[00:16:46]  It's interesting because as we're kind of discussing like the end of the lives of these people, a few years before, a few years before Greg Hill died, he gave an interview to Loom Panix.
[00:17:00]  Yeah.
[00:17:02]  Loom Panix is like a, was a publisher for both weird left-wing and right-wing esoterica.
[00:17:08]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:10]  He talked about how like his pen name, Maliklips the Younger, he like described it as like as like a spirit that like entered him.
[00:17:18]  And he was he was he's he was he's able to like channel writing through through the spirit, which is why he credited the work to to this to to this entity.
[00:17:27]  But he also says that like um that the entity kind of left him once once Principia was done writing, he kind of like it left and like that part of him was like, it like disappeared over time.

=== Channeling A Writing Entity (02:42) ===

[00:17:42]  We'll actually talk a little bit more about that in a second.
[00:17:45]  I've got a quote from him you'll find interesting.
[00:17:47]  Oh, awkward interjection.
[00:17:49]  Robert forgot to do the ad break back when he was supposed to.
[00:17:52]  So we're editing this in crudely, probably in the middle of a sentence being spoken by Garrison.
[00:17:57]  And we'll probably come back from this ad break mid-sentence spoken by Garrison just to fuck with him.
[00:18:08]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:18:13]  It's financial literacy month and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:18:21]  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.
[00:18:30]  If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:18:35]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:18:38]  They believe everything.
[00:18:39]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:18:43]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:18:46]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:18:50]  And what I mean by fellas, they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:18:52]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:18:53]  They do not have homes.
[00:18:54]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:18:58]  Listen to Eating Wildbrook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:19:07]  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.
[00:19:15]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:19:22]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:19:26]  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.
[00:19:37]  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.
[00:19:46]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:19:51]  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.
[00:20:00]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:20:08]  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.
[00:20:16]  Here at the Nick Dick and Pole show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:20:21]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique?

=== Number 23 Conspiracy Significance (15:51) ===

[00:20:24]  He's the writer director.
[00:20:26]  Who do you think he is?
[00:20:27]  I don't know.
[00:20:29]  You meet the president?
[00:20:30]  You think he goes to president?
[00:20:31]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:20:33]  You think China has a president?
[00:20:34]  La Vois Cruzette.
[00:20:37]  God, I love that thing.
[00:20:39]  I use it all the time.
[00:20:40]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it like.
[00:20:44]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:20:48]  Yep.
[00:20:48]  It was a good one.
[00:20:49]  I like that saying.
[00:20:50]  It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
[00:20:53]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:20:56]  Yes.
[00:20:57]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:20:59]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:21:00]  I got that wrong.
[00:21:01]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Pole Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:21:11]  But yeah, Bob Wilson is the guy who kind of lives the longest.
[00:21:14]  And he, you know, the last years of his life are racked with pain due to post-polio syndrome.
[00:21:19]  But he remains extremely productive.
[00:21:21]  And the thing that he has that I don't think really any of the others had, particularly not Hillen Thornley, Bob Wilson is a weirdo.
[00:21:28]  He's into all this esoteric shit.
[00:21:30]  He's also a professional, like a professional writer who writes for a massive publication.
[00:21:35]  He knows how to package ideas in ways to get a lot of people to pay attention to them.
[00:21:41]  And so it's Bob Wilson, it's his work that's going to kind of bring Discordianism to its widest audience and also have the biggest long-term cultural impact in mainstream conceptions of the Illuminati, because that's the thing that Wilson does the most, that Wilson's work does the most.
[00:21:58]  In 1975, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, his fellow editor at Playboy, start to publish a series of three novels, eventually known as the Illuminatus Trilogy.
[00:22:08]  The book is a very weird piece of fiction.
[00:22:11]  One of the things they're doing during this is like every chapter, basically, they switch off.
[00:22:15]  And so they were kind of trying to write each other, every chapter, into a corner that the other couldn't get out of.
[00:22:21]  So it's assholes.
[00:22:23]  I know.
[00:22:26]  It's not structured the way most books are.
[00:22:28]  The foundational premise is that all conspiracy theories, even the conflicting ones, are true.
[00:22:33]  And the history of the world is largely determined by a secret war being waged between the all-controlling Illuminati and the Discordians, who are like the insurgents fighting against the Illuminati and also are part of the Illuminati.
[00:22:45]  It's a very, it's that kind of book.
[00:22:48]  And again, one of the things actually, because like everyone is a double agent, right?
[00:22:52]  And like the Discordians are actually deeply enmeshed in the Illuminati, one of the things that's happening here that Wilson is talking about is the fact that if you were a radical in the 60s, you came to the realization that like a significant chunk of the people you organized with were feds.
[00:23:06]  And so like, that's one of the reasons why all of this is like that's such a like there's so many different like quadruple agents and stuff in this in this series.
[00:23:16]  It's also just like working for like mainstream publications.
[00:23:19]  Yeah.
[00:23:20]  You're critiquing capitalism or participating in capitalism.
[00:23:23]  And I don't actually think that's like bad, obviously, but it's it's messy and I could leave you with that sort of sense of, I don't know.
[00:23:31]  Yeah.
[00:23:31]  And it's a very messy book.
[00:23:34]  And so this is a hugely influential book.
[00:23:38]  You know, we'll talk about this in a second, but like you, it's one of those things that's influential in ways that are mostly not super visible because when people put hints and references to this stuff in their work, they're often very coy about it.
[00:23:52]  And just because of how influential this was and sort of conceptions of the Illuminati and conspiracies, a lot of it's faded into the background since then.
[00:24:02]  But yeah, I want to, I think probably a best way of kind of talking about the way this stuff works is the idea of the 23 Enigma, which is a big thing in the Illuminatus trilogy.
[00:24:13]  And it's, it's basically like one of the things that Wilson does in this book is he finds there's all these different specific dates in history that are influential that involve the number 23.
[00:24:26]  There's a lot of like very specific fucked up historical shit that happens in 1923.
[00:24:31]  And he'll pull all of these different dates and moments and stuff together.
[00:24:36]  Because if you start listing enough stuff like that, the kind of pattern recognition chunk of your brain lights up and you start to attach a specific like significance to the number 23.
[00:24:47]  And so like Wilson's kind of goal here, this was another little way of bringing people to Chapel Perilus, is if you kind of like list out all these different ways that the number 23 is significant in history, maybe people will start to question whether or not the Illuminati is like picking spits, you know, is there a conspiracy that's doing certain things, that's carrying out all these assassinations and revolutions on dates that have a 23 in them?
[00:25:11]  Are they doing it because like they're trying to signal to people what they're doing?
[00:25:14]  Is this some sort of message?
[00:25:15]  Or is it just like, yeah, you know, a bunch of like, like if there's enough things happening in the world that if you like pull out every significant event that happened on the 23rd day of a month, you'll get a bunch of weird shit, right?
[00:25:26]  Which is the where I tend to land on things.
[00:25:29]  But this kind of like works.
[00:25:31]  Number one, if you read the Illuminatus trilogy, you're going to wind up like just noticing 23s forever.
[00:25:37]  But also because of how influential the books are, sit down and watch the fucking wire, right?
[00:25:42]  And see how many 23s you see on the back of squad cars or in people's shirts and jackets.
[00:25:49]  Watch like any big show and keep an eye out for the number 23.
[00:25:53]  And you'll note that it shows up more often than it seems like it should.
[00:25:57]  And is this just because Michael Jordan is a popular basketball player?
[00:26:02]  That's certainly some of it.
[00:26:04]  Or does a lot of it have to do with the fact that a bunch of the people who were making particularly the TV shows that went big in the late 90s, early 2000s had been fans of this stuff and stuck 23s into their work?
[00:26:14]  Well, that's also the case.
[00:26:16]  And because of like how effectively Bob does this and how many people pick up on this and start sticking 23s into art and television and stuff, a conspiracy, an actual conspiracy develops over the number 23 that it somehow tied, you know, the secret society running the world, which culminates in a 2007 film starring Jim Carrey titled 23.
[00:26:38]  Wait, I've never even heard of this movie.
[00:26:39]  Oh, yeah, it was a big deal back in the day.
[00:26:43]  I guess this is like the era when I like really lived under a rock.
[00:26:46]  Yeah.
[00:26:47]  But I mean, the thing that Bob Wilson is doing is he's basically taking advantage of the human brain's gift for pattern recognition because it can kind of, for one thing, when you get people locked into this pattern, then when you reveal things that have to do with like the number 23, it feels like more of a reveal, right?
[00:27:05]  It just kind of like works narratively.
[00:27:07]  And also, Bob Wilson liked fucking with people.
[00:27:10]  And this like had a clear impact, but it also has kind of formed, this is the baseline of a lot of the tactics that are used by conspiracists today.
[00:27:20]  Because the way that social media works, if you can start like seeding in references to conspiracies in a bunch of ways that go viral, when people start seeing all this shit popping up on their timeline, and maybe it comes up on their timeline in a moment that's particularly significant to them, and then they put more weight into it.
[00:27:36]  Like all of this stuff is a lot easier to do.
[00:27:39]  Bob had to draw you in to a thousand-page fiction book to like tweak people's heads with this shit.
[00:27:45]  Now you can do that at scale using algorithms on Twitter and YouTube and shit.
[00:27:50]  And people have it's like publicity stuff.
[00:27:54]  It's like in publicity, you expect someone to not buy a product until like the 10th time they hear it.
[00:27:59]  And this is true for fucking anarchists and radicals and whatever also, right?
[00:28:03]  Like if you're trying to sell a book or you're trying to get people to have interest in a book, they're not going to do anything about it the first several times they hear it.
[00:28:12]  And so it is really interesting that it's the same strategy.
[00:28:16]  Yeah.
[00:28:16]  And it's, it's the goal of Operation Mindfuck, Bob Wilson's goal, and these guys are all folks who are on the left.
[00:28:23]  They're all people who are also activists, is like to kind of Robert Guffey, who's, who's written a book called Operation Mindfuck and writes about this, summarizes the goal as like, they want to break the trance that kept America at war, blindly consuming and oblivious to its impact on the rest of the world, destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks and confusion.
[00:28:43]  Like that was essentially the goal.
[00:28:45]  But as Guffey notes, over the ensuing decades, it was the progressive left whose ideas wound up being mainstreamed.
[00:28:51]  Really, from All in the Family Onward, it was progressive values in fictional TV, Maude to MASH, Murphy Brown to the West Wing.
[00:28:58]  And as that became the dominant cultural narrative, Operation Mindfuck became a tool of the alt-right.
[00:29:04]  And that is over time kind of what you see is as a lot of the stuff, not all of it, obviously, these guys are much more radical than the fucking West Wing.
[00:29:14]  But as some of this, like these attitudes towards, you know, militarism and shit and attitudes towards like, you know, sexual liberation and like that kind of stuff, like radical political equality and whatnot, as those become more mainstreamed, the it's like the toolbox loses its power for that side, right?
[00:29:37]  But becomes a more powerful tool of the people who are now kind of the insurgents.
[00:29:43]  And that's kind of the point that Guffey is making.
[00:29:45]  There's degrees to which I disagree with him, but I think he's kind of like broadly looking at this in a way that's that's that's useful.
[00:29:52]  Well, it's like why we don't assign like we don't hold tactics sacred is because like tactics themselves are applicable in certain contexts and not in other contexts and can be used by all kinds of people.
[00:30:05]  So if there's not a moral weight attached to a tactic, then I don't feel bad if the right wing is using Operation Mindfuck type stuff, because of course they are, because if they're the underdogs, that's what they'll use.
[00:30:16]  Yeah, it's like I said, it's a gun on it on the table, right?
[00:30:18]  Like that's what they've done is they've built a gun and they set it down on the table.
[00:30:24]  They used it first and we can, I think it's, you know, arguable, like the degree to which it was successful or not.
[00:30:30]  And I do think it's interesting because one of the things, like we're trying both to talk about sort of the broader impact on American politics and culture that the aftershocks of Operation Mindfuck had.
[00:30:43]  But the other story is the impact that it had on like conspiracy culture itself and even like the conception of the Illuminati.
[00:30:51]  And this has a lot to do with the fact that, again, Robert Wilson and Robert Shea are both really good writers from like a capitalist standpoint in terms of their ability to write things that spread and can be sold.
[00:31:05]  And this has led a lot of creators to adapt their work.
[00:31:08]  They're also very influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, who was kind of an early Creative Commons advocate in a lot of ways.
[00:31:17]  Like they wouldn't have used those terms, but he was this advocate of like, yeah, people should be taking my stories and this mythos that I've built and writing their own stories in it.
[00:31:26]  And that's also kind of the attitude that Wilson and Shea seem to have towards a lot of this.
[00:31:30]  And so a lot of people adapt versions of the Illuminatus trilogy.
[00:31:35]  And this leads to in the early 1990s, when uh Kerry Thornley is going on that TV show to talk about how he was racing his buddy Oswald to kill Kennedy, a little Austin-based pen and paper game company called Steve Jackson Games makes a card game.
[00:31:51]  And Steve Jackson Games makes a lot of card games.
[00:31:54]  Munchkin is probably their biggest seller now, but they make a game in the early 90s called Illuminati New World Order.
[00:32:00]  And it's based in part on the Illuminatus trilogy and in part on just like shit in the news.
[00:32:06]  And the 1994 edition of this game includes a card called Terrorist Nuke.
[00:32:12]  And Margaret, how would you describe that card?
[00:32:15]  That is a picture of the World Trade Centers being blown up.
[00:32:19]  And not blowed up from the bottom.
[00:32:22]  No, not from the bottom, from about where that plane hit it.
[00:32:28]  I have this card.
[00:32:29]  It gives plus 10 power or resistance, your choice to any violent group you control with violin is capitalized.
[00:32:35]  That's right.
[00:32:35]  Well, it certainly gave plus 10 power to the American government.
[00:32:39]  There's another card.
[00:32:41]  I forget what it's called, but it just shows the Pentagon exploding in a particular section and the way that the Pentagon exploded.
[00:32:48]  I mean, the band The Ku put out like them hanging out in front of some blowed up world towers.
[00:32:54]  Like, I think that week or some shit.
[00:32:56]  Like, it's just an idea whose time had.
[00:33:00]  I'm not even going to finish that sentence.
[00:33:02]  No, it certainly was an image that many people had thought of before it happened.
[00:33:08]  There's even stuff like in The Simpsons.
[00:33:11]  There's stuff all over things resembling 9-11 that happened in like the two decades prior.
[00:33:18]  I will say, none of them quite as much as this resembles it.
[00:33:22]  No, absolutely.
[00:33:23]  It is a little striking.
[00:33:25]  Yeah.
[00:33:26]  Now, the almost startling prescience of this card and the fact that it came from a card game called Illuminati New World Order led to viral conspiracy theories that the actual Illuminati had faked the 9-11 attacks and used this card game as what Alex Jones called predictive programming to seed awareness of their crimes.
[00:33:45]  The crowning moment of this particular conspiracy theory came when Osama bin Laden was assassinated in 2011.
[00:33:52]  The CIA gained access to his hard drive, and the contents of this hard drive are now all publicly available.
[00:33:58]  They contain a PDF titled Smoking Gun: Proof that Illuminati planned terrible events many years ago to bring down our culture.
[00:34:06]  The article that follows is an exhaustive dissection of the Illuminati card game on Osama bin Laden's hard drive.
[00:34:14]  Again, Steve Jackson's game must have made a bank off of this.
[00:34:18]  They were just sitting back being like, Yeah.
[00:34:20]  Yeah.
[00:34:21]  The other thing that happens right around this time is they're making like a cyberpunk role-playing game, which includes a bunch of hacking shit.
[00:34:28]  And because the FBI, especially in the early 90s, is not very doesn't know anything about computers, they like freak out and raid Steve Jackson games.
[00:34:38]  So, like, after this comes out, there's a massive federal raid on this gaming company.
[00:34:44]  It's all a coincidence.
[00:34:45]  I mean, this is, and especially when this shit shows up on Bin Laden's hard drive, like this is a lot of people's chapel perilous moment, right?
[00:34:52]  Yeah, you're like, why the hell would this be in his hard drive?
[00:34:55]  And obviously, there will never be a lot on his hard drive.
[00:34:59]  There was so much shit, including like all of the fucking Looney Tunes cartoons you could ever want.
[00:35:04]  Um, but if you're if a part of your brain at any point in this went, like, huh, I wonder if something weird is going on, I mean, that, you know, that's Operation Mindfuck working as intended.
[00:35:14]  Um, now, the Illuminatus trilogy, ironically, made the Illuminati real to millions of people.
[00:35:21]  This is due in part to the relevance of the books themselves.
[00:35:24]  Uh, in the late 1980s, the Illuminatus trilogy was made into a stage play, which was so popular, it launched the careers of Bill Naey and Jim Broadbent.
[00:35:34]  The Queen of England attended the opening.
[00:35:38]  It is a weirdly influential play.
[00:35:42]  So, yeah, The Queen of England attends this play based on this ridiculous series of books.
[00:35:49]  And of course, Illuminati imagery.
[00:35:52]  We're posting this on a day when Elon Musk posted an Illuminati meme.
[00:35:55]  Jay-Z and Beyonce have incorporated Illuminati symbolism into their acts, which have convinced a lot of people that they are, in fact, in the Illuminati.
[00:36:05]  In 2015, research suggested that about half the U.S. population believes in at least one conspiracy theory.
[00:36:12]  And one of the most popular is the existence of the Illuminati.

=== Half America Believes In Conspiracies (15:05) ===

[00:36:15]  I suspect it's probably over half at this point.
[00:36:18]  The QAnon conspiracy theory isn't.
[00:36:21]  A lot has happened to reality since 2015.
[00:36:25]  And honestly, it's...
[00:36:27]  Reality stopped existing.
[00:36:29]  Yeah.
[00:36:30]  Consensus reality took a big hit.
[00:36:33]  We all, there were, it's almost like, you know, if you want to view society as like some fucking like worm traveling through the soil, we hit a rock and burst into pieces.
[00:36:45]  And like, that's now you've got a bunch of little worms that formed out of the carcass of that big worm and we're all tunneling in different directions.
[00:36:53]  And some of us have wound up in piles of shit, huh?
[00:36:57]  Yeah, no, that maybe is better.
[00:36:58]  I use an idea as the like the way of understanding majority reality is like the ice is thicker where more people are and stuff.
[00:37:06]  And like out on the edge is like where some of the more fringe things happen and there's no value in something being fringe or not, right?
[00:37:13]  Like much like Operation Mindfuck.
[00:37:15]  It's like there's no value in fucking people's heads.
[00:37:18]  And so yeah, sometimes it just feels like we fucking the ice flow just split in half.
[00:37:23]  Yeah.
[00:37:23]  And this is, you know, obviously like QAnon conspiracy theory is a rebranded Illuminati conspiracy theory.
[00:37:32]  They are taking the joke that these guys made about how the CIA and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and the anarchists and yada yada, we're all, you know, part of the conspiracy together.
[00:37:41]  Like they're just taking universities, the people in the media, the anti-fungi.
[00:37:47]  Even the current fucking stuff with like, you know, the elites pushing gender ideology and all like the anti-trans stuff is just another version of the Illuminati.
[00:37:57]  Like it's all the same shit.
[00:37:58]  As if any of those people would get my pronouns right.
[00:38:01]  As if any of the people that they think are like controlling and trying to make everyone trans would like fucking get my pronouns right.
[00:38:08]  Yeah.
[00:38:09]  Well, and it's it's interesting too, because what you actually kind of see here, because it's not just the Discordians that like Discordian attitudes towards the Illuminati that have been taken up by QAnon.
[00:38:21]  They're kind of merging the Discordian depiction of the Illuminati with the John Birch Society's depiction of the Illuminati.
[00:38:27]  So like that's really what you've seen happen here, which is such a strange thing, but I don't see any other way to kind of parse out the intellectual DNA of this movement.
[00:38:36]  Yeah.
[00:38:37]  And it's interesting because at this point, for one thing, some of the first people to recognize what was happening with the alt-right and like what was happening kind of with all of these different social movements, these right-wing social movements that have spread through conspiracies over the internet were old Discordians.
[00:38:54]  And a lot of these people have kind of come to the conclusion that not only did Operation Mindfuck fail in its initial noble goal, but it had been subverted and turned into a weapon.
[00:39:02]  And I'm going to quote from Guffy here again.
[00:39:05]  The parallels between the Discordian goddess Eris and the Egyptian frog-headed god Keck should be obvious.
[00:39:10]  Both were created to represent the spirit of chaos, disruption, and anti-authoritarianism.
[00:39:14]  In many alt-right memes, Keck resembles Donald Trump with a frog-like face.
[00:39:18]  Oddly enough, depicting Trump as a half-human, half-reptilian hybrid is meant to be a compliment to the president.
[00:39:23]  In the 1990s, conspiracy theorist David Icke grew to fame by traveling around the world, accusing various world leaders of being shapeshifting reptilians in disguise.
[00:39:31]  Today, Trump supporters clothe him in a reptilian form as a tribute.
[00:39:35]  They perceive him to be a cold-blooded agent of pure chaos.
[00:39:38]  I was literally just looking up all of the stuff linking the Pepe thing to the entire way that 4chan was using this, like specifically influenced by the Operation Mindfuck stuff, specifically influenced by the Chaos Magic stuff.
[00:39:53]  Yeah.
[00:39:54]  Yeah.
[00:39:55]  It's fucked up.
[00:39:56]  And you're not going to obviously, the odds that... Donald Trump himself knows any of this are basically zero.
[00:40:02]  But the odds that there are people in his orbit who were aware of a lot of this history are quite a bit higher.
[00:40:06]  And you're not going to find smoking guns here.
[00:40:09]  But there are some things that I've read over the years that set, like, send me back to that chapel perilous space.
[00:40:17]  I'm going to quote from an article in The Guardian, and this is from way back when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, like if you can remember then.
[00:40:23]  So this is an article about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
[00:40:27]  As Wiley describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating, quote, Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindfuck tool.
[00:40:35]  In 2014, Steve Bannon, then executive chairman of the alt-right news network Breitbart, was Wiley's boss.
[00:40:41]  And Robert Mercer, the secret U.S. hedge fund billionaire and Republican donor, was Cambridge Analytica's investor.
[00:40:46]  And the idea they brought into being was to bring big data and social media to an established military methodology, information operations, then turn it on the U.S. electorate.
[00:40:56]  Now, is Wiley using the term mindfuck just because that's the term that is most appropriate?
[00:41:02]  Is he using it because as the kind of guy who'd get this job, he's familiar with this history?
[00:41:06]  Or is he using it because it's a term that he heard around the office?
[00:41:09]  And then why were the people using it?
[00:41:10]  Like, right, you can drive yourself into some interesting areas if you read too much into a fucking quote from a Guardian article where a guy happens to use the word mindfuck while talking about a psychological warfare tool.
[00:41:25]  But I do that sometimes when I'm reading about the Illuminati at four in the morning.
[00:41:29]  You mean because you're in the chapel perilous right now?
[00:41:32]  Almost permanently, yeah.
[00:41:34]  So research in 2016 by Viren Swamy, a psychology professor, suggests that conspiracy theory believers are more likely to be suffering from stressful life situations than non-believers.
[00:41:44]  And what I find interesting about this is that the toolbox built by the Discordians, merged with the reach of social media, gives bad actors a way to create stressful life situations for millions of people, which draw them deeper into conspiracism while alienating them from their families and thus making them more vulnerable, right?
[00:42:01]  This is a good big thing on QAnon.
[00:42:03]  A lot of people that fall into this are not actually like, they're actually doing fine.
[00:42:07]  Like a lot of them are like suburban Republican moms who like are living life pretty good, but the invention of this conspiracy theory throws their life into shambles because they now they like it it creates these stressful conditions that otherwise kind of well-off and privileged people are already existing in.
[00:42:28]  Yeah.
[00:42:28]  And it's it's that that is like part of, you know, to the extent that you want to throw, put blame on the original Discordians, some of what makes this tool set so dangerous didn't exist when they invented it, right?
[00:42:44]  Like all of the stuff that has been done using kind of the basis they established wasn't possible back in the 1960s.
[00:42:52]  But yeah, it is worth noting though that like I just said that, but as Garrison brought up earlier, among the first Discordians, there was a pretty widespread understanding that they were at least potentially fiddling with something dangerous.
[00:43:04]  And I'm going to quote from J.M.R. Higgs here.
[00:43:06]  Greg Hill was an atheist who intended Discordianism to be a satire of religion.
[00:43:10]  He certainly did not start out taking the idea of goddesses or spirits seriously.
[00:43:15]  By the late 70s, however, he was convinced that his Discordian adventures had stirred up something that he was unable to explain.
[00:43:20]  As he told his friend Margot Adler, if you do this type of thing well enough, it starts to work.
[00:43:25]  I started out with the idea that all gods are an illusion.
[00:43:28]  By an end, I had learned that it is up to you to decide whether gods exist.
[00:43:31]  And if you take the goddess of Confucian seriously enough, it will send you through as profound and valid a metaphysical trip as taking a god like Yahweh seriously.
[00:43:40]  Yep.
[00:43:40]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  I mean, this is funny.
[00:43:44]  Just right before we started recording, this video came out of Charlie Kirk talking about how he got sick because some witches cursed him.
[00:43:55]  And like the first step for magic to be effective is that you have to believe in the magic.
[00:44:00]  So the fact that Charlie Kirk believes that witches can make him sick means that he has now opened up the possibility in his brain to get sick because of magic.
[00:44:08]  So now people can do that and he will get sick because this is how your brain works.
[00:44:13]  Like this is like actual like science stuff with the placebo effect, with the nocebo effect.
[00:44:18]  The fact that he's decided that witches can cause him physical damage means that witches can now cause him physical damage.
[00:44:26]  And because we have so many listeners to this podcast and I think there is a great stored potential in their mental energy, if you have some time today when you listen to this, everyone just think about giving Charlie Kirk chlamydia.
[00:44:41]  Let's all just work on that together, psychically, just a little bit of the clap for old Charlie Kirk.
[00:44:46]  I think we can do it.
[00:44:47]  All you have to do is visualize his face getting smaller and smaller until he develops a series of horrible rashes.
[00:45:02]  So throughout the 1990s in particular, the tactics of the Discordians merged with things like the Situationists and groups like Up Against the Wall motherfuckers, which had all kind of existed in the same period that the Discordians got started.
[00:45:15]  One of the things that gives the Discordians longevity is that there are kind of follow-up cults to the original cult, the Church of the Sub-Genius being the most well-known, that is basically rebranded Discordian.
[00:45:27]  Bob Wilson is a part of it.
[00:45:29]  And this kind of keeps a lot of like the stuff that they had been putting out relevant.
[00:45:34]  And as a result, they have a big influence in the spread of a widespread left-wing cultural practice called culture jamming by anti-consumerist activists in the 1990s.
[00:45:45]  Well, and speaking of anti-consumerism and Church at the Sub-Genius, one thing they put out was a lot of fake advertising.
[00:45:52]  Just like the fake ads you're about to hear.
[00:45:58]  Nothing you're about to hear is a real product.
[00:46:00]  All these are fake.
[00:46:01]  This show is entirely supported by the CIA working with the John Birch Society.
[00:46:06]  All fake products work, but you still have to listen.
[00:46:08]  You still have to listen to them or else it won't work.
[00:46:11]  So yeah.
[00:46:11]  Yeah, it'll break the illusion.
[00:46:17]  I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
[00:46:22]  It's financial literacy month and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
[00:46:30]  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.
[00:46:39]  If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
[00:46:44]  Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
[00:46:47]  They believe everything.
[00:46:48]  But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
[00:46:52]  There's an economic component to communities thriving.
[00:46:55]  If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
[00:46:59]  And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
[00:47:02]  They cannot feed their kids.
[00:47:03]  They do not have homes.
[00:47:04]  Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
[00:47:07]  Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:47:16]  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.
[00:47:25]  Here at the Nick Dick and Paul Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
[00:47:29]  What Koogler did that I think was so unique?
[00:47:32]  He's the writer director.
[00:47:34]  Who do you think he is?
[00:47:35]  I don't know.
[00:47:37]  You meet the president?
[00:47:38]  You think Indo has the president?
[00:47:40]  You think Canada has a president?
[00:47:41]  You think China has a president?
[00:47:42]  The blah proves that.
[00:47:45]  God, I love that thing.
[00:47:47]  I use it all the time.
[00:47:48]  I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it at night.
[00:47:52]  It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
[00:47:56]  Yep.
[00:47:56]  It was a good one.
[00:47:57]  I like that saying.
[00:47:58]  It is an actual Polish thing.
[00:48:00]  It is an actual Polish saying.
[00:48:01]  It's a better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[00:48:04]  Yes.
[00:48:05]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[00:48:07]  I actually, I thought it was.
[00:48:08]  I got that wrong.
[00:48:10]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:48:17]  Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, 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.
[00:48:25]  Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
[00:48:32]  I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
[00:48:36]  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.
[00:48:47]  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.
[00:48:55]  Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
[00:49:01]  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.
[00:49:10]  Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:49:20]  All right, we're back.
[00:49:22]  My favorite of those ads was the one where JFK was talking about his new podcast where he talks to celebrities.
[00:49:28]  The Deep Fake JFK podcast is actually pretty good.
[00:49:31]  It is shocking how clear they make his voice and it flows very consistently.
[00:49:35]  A lot of AI voices are kind of janky, but the deepfake JFK voice is actually one of the better ones that I've heard.
[00:49:42]  Of course I've been doing it.
[00:49:43]  We should interview it about Carrie Thornley.
[00:49:46]  Add a little bit in there.
[00:49:49]  Cyberpunk we can find is way more confusing than I was led to believe by playing Shadow as a kid.
[00:49:55]  Well, this is actually part of why it's confusing.
[00:49:57]  So the basic idea of culture jamming is that you repurpose and co-opt symbols and figures of established power, turn them into memes, and use that to subvert capitalism.
[00:50:06]  A good example of this would be the Billboard Liberation Front, who started hacking billboards in their terms in the 1970s.
[00:50:12]  One of my favorite pieces of their work is an AT ⁇ T billboard, which originally said AT ⁇ T works in more places, and the BLF added, like NSA headquarters.
[00:50:22]  The Billboard Liberation Front and other culture jammers influenced and inspired a lot of modern activists and artists, but you might note they seem to have made a lot less progress in their culture jamming than late adopters on the right wing.
[00:50:35]  Since 2014, when Gamergate roared to life in a hail of memes and repurposed bits of mass media, different once-fringed chunks of the radical right have forced their way into the mainstream, often co-opting not just the imagery of other artists like Pepe, but co-opting actual people to spread their message.
[00:50:51]  In fact, we have evidence that AdBusters, perhaps the premier clearinghouse of leftist culture jamming up to the present day, was used by the alt-right as a textbook in their 2015-2016 meme operations.
[00:51:03]  Erin Gallagher was one of the very first researchers on this beat.
[00:51:06]  In a medium write-up titled Alt-Right Culture Jamming, she cites a September 2015 poll post.
[00:51:12]  Read AdBusters.
[00:51:13]  Don't follow the left-hard propaganda, but look at the examples.
[00:51:19]  Man, that's so frustrating.

=== Alt-Right Culture Jamming Tactics (15:33) ===

[00:51:21]  It's deeply frustrating.
[00:51:23]  I feel like the only earnestness.
[00:51:27]  I don't know, Margaret.
[00:51:28]  I think the only way out is through.
[00:51:31]  You have to keep going.
[00:51:33]  Just keep posting harder.
[00:51:35]  We're going to do it eventually.
[00:51:37]  Yeah, it's one of two things.
[00:51:38]  It's either earnestness or it's getting things weird enough and fucking with people's heads enough that we make everybody a furry.
[00:51:46]  And then people are too busy trying to make various genital sheaths for their fursuits to have a second civil war.
[00:51:53]  But see, they will be earnestly looking for genital sheaths for their fursuits.
[00:51:58]  That is the strength of the furry movement.
[00:52:00]  It is an earnest thing that everyone else views ironically.
[00:52:04]  No, but this is something actually I've been thinking about a lot the past week and how these tactics, they do seem to be successful in the ways that the right uses them.
[00:52:12]  The left and anarchists have seen success in these same tactics.
[00:52:15]  But this type of like in the last previously in our series, we talked about like a determent versus recuperation and how these two things, they're kind of two sides of the same coin, actually.
[00:52:27]  Like they're kind of, they operate, they operate the same.
[00:52:30]  And they both, and same thing with like culture jamming, they all do contribute to this like fracturing and this opening up of reality.
[00:52:38]  And what that does is that it creates these brief windows of opportunity where like reality is extremely malleable and it can be shaped by collective groups of people.
[00:52:48]  But so as these things are useful tactics for creating these areas of possibility and these small windows.
[00:52:57]  And one of the kind of risks of using these tactics, and we kind of saw this with Occupy, we saw this with a few other kind of very like very culture jamming based movements, is that once this reality has been fractured in a specific way, if we don't win this battle, it can never be attacked in the same way again.
[00:53:16]  So if you're going to use these culture jamming tactics as a part of a diversity of tactics to kind of affect reality, to open up these fractures, once they've been attacked, and if we lose, this method of attack and the location of attack is going to be so much stronger than it was like pre the pre the fracture.
[00:53:37]  And it's like they're fighting the Borg.
[00:53:40]  Exactly.
[00:53:41]  It's one of these things where you have to be very careful when using these tactics because you could inadvertently make the attack surface actually much harder in the future if you don't actually succeed at your goal.
[00:53:55]  It's the idea that you have to think about some of this stuff, like Operation Mindfuck, the way that a hacker would think of a zero-day exploit.
[00:54:03]  A zero-day exploit is basically a fuck-up in code that can allow you a method to get in and access a thing that you're not supposed to access.
[00:54:13]  But the instant you use it, the people who are responsible for defending whatever it is you're hacking will know what you've done and fix it.
[00:54:20]  So you can use a zero day once, right?
[00:54:23]  You have to be careful about when you deploy something like that.
[00:54:25]  And also, yeah, like you have this thing where it's like, okay, if where we perceive reality is going from what Garrison was saying earlier, if where we perceive reality is like kind of a fixed point and you want to move that, but it's a pin stuck in the political map.
[00:54:39]  The pin is stuck in the political map and everyone who wants to change it wants to pull the pin out of the map so it can be moved.
[00:54:46]  And the pin is now out of the map.
[00:54:49]  But the problem is that everyone now can fight over the pin and move it.
[00:54:53]  And so really, you always want to pull the pin out of the map when you're positioned to be the one who can move it instead of the other team.
[00:55:01]  Yes.
[00:55:02]  Be fast on that shit.
[00:55:04]  And it's one of those things, obviously, in terms of like determining bastardry.
[00:55:08]  There's bastardry in Carrie's personal life when it comes to what the Discordians were doing.
[00:55:13]  I think it'd be a trap to fall into too much recrimination here.
[00:55:16]  And we know Carrie in particular was a reckless guy.
[00:55:20]  This was not a reckless thing to do, Operation Mindfuck.
[00:55:25]  That said, it's hard for me to blame an acid-drenched young man and his friends for thinking that their extended joke about the John Birch Society would unleash a torrent of chaos upon the world.
[00:55:34]  Although I have to say, Aris at least is surely pleased.
[00:55:39]  Yeah, I mean, yeah, absolutely.
[00:55:41]  They did exactly what they said that they were going to try and do, and it worked and they got shocked that it worked.
[00:55:47]  Yeah.
[00:55:49]  It is interesting to note that whatever you want to say about their aims, the impact of the Discordian society on global politics and the course of mankind far outweighs any other real secret society that I can name.
[00:56:01]  Like, objectively, they had more of an impact on politics than the real Illuminati.
[00:56:07]  They also succeeded in forcing their names into the story of the Illuminati forever.
[00:56:13]  And as evidence of this, I want to read a quote to you from a wild ass Illuminati conspiracy book by Jim Mars.
[00:56:19]  It is critical at this point to understand that Illuminism is an ism, not unlike national socialism, Nazis.
[00:56:25]  That's in parentheses.
[00:56:27]  Communism, capitalism, and socialism.
[00:56:30]  It is a belief system that is not relegated to any one individual or group in any given period of time.
[00:56:36]  The beneficial goals of the Illuminati, such as freedom from church dogma and government tyranny, lived on to modern times in France, America, and Russia.
[00:56:43]  But the more sinister aspects of the order, such as inherent secrecy, duplicity, violence, and the drive for absolute power, lived on too in unscrupulous men.
[00:56:53]  Robert Anton Wilson opined: The one safe generalization one can make is that Weishaupt's intent to maintain secrecy has worked.
[00:57:01]  No two students of Illuminology have ever agreed totally about what the inner secret or purpose of the order actually was or is.
[00:57:08]  As Wilson once fancifully told a radio audience, maybe the secret of the Illuminati is that you don't know you're a member until it's too late to get out.
[00:57:19]  It is funnier that your audio cut out.
[00:57:24]  That is such an interesting way to frame that, though.
[00:57:27]  Yeah.
[00:57:28]  Is that Robert coming out in the Illuminati to us?
[00:57:31]  Or is that Robert telling us that we're in it now?
[00:57:35]  Interesting.
[00:57:37]  Interesting.
[00:57:39]  Well, it's a decision for everyone at home to make.
[00:57:42]  That kind of just is like hindsight is 2020, though.
[00:57:45]  Like, you don't know how much you're going to affect history or like reality until it's already happened.
[00:57:50]  And even still, I don't think Robert Anton Wilson and the Discordian guys knew how much this stuff would be impacted because they all died in the early 2000s.
[00:57:59]  And this stuff's like kind of reached the peak of its power from 2016 to the present.
[00:58:06]  And yeah, that is a very concise way to frame membership of the Illuminati.
[00:58:16]  I would love to die before I find out that my life's work fuels all of my ideological enemies.
[00:58:27]  Yeah, that part's a bummer.
[00:58:30]  I don't know.
[00:58:31]  I think about it a couple of ways.
[00:58:35]  One of them is that, like, as I think about Robert Anton Wilson's ideas of reality tunnels and pan-agnosticism, I kind of think that one of the healthier terms that social media has given us is the idea of head canon, right?
[00:58:50]  Which initially came out of like the fanfiction universe as a way of talking about, like, well, I'm deciding this is true about Star Wars or whatever.
[00:58:56]  But it's a term that gets used more broadly by people on the internet.
[00:59:00]  And I think maybe even if you're talking about loopy stuff when you use it, the idea that this is canon that is inside my head, as opposed to this is my view of reality, is maybe in a subconscious way an inherently healthier way to talk about shit.
[00:59:17]  No, that's so true.
[00:59:18]  I like that idea.
[00:59:22]  Yeah.
[00:59:22]  Anyway, that's a more or less complete history of the Illuminati.
[00:59:26]  We did it.
[00:59:27]  I love that the actual history of the Illuminati is like, there was this guy.
[00:59:32]  He wanted to be a nerd and the fucking Christians wouldn't let him.
[00:59:36]  So he did some weird Christian looking science shit.
[00:59:40]  And that lasted for a little while.
[00:59:42]  And then God struck one of them down.
[00:59:44]  And now there's fucking pyramids on the dollar bill.
[00:59:48]  And reality TV stars are the president.
[00:59:52]  Yeah, it is kind of the story of like two different groups of well-meaning nerds who like fucked around in order to try to make the world a better place, but the only language they had was lies.
[01:00:05]  And so a number of problems were created as a result.
[01:00:11]  Yeah.
[01:00:12]  And that's why I, I mean, that's actually why I believe, I think that like jokes and lies and there's like some interesting and good shit that can be done through all this.
[01:00:21]  And, but I think that's why just like people being earnestly about what they're about feels like much like head cannon as like a way to inure ourselves from this kind of nonsense.
[01:00:33]  And I actually think we've been talking a lot about this, about how the different cultural weapons that the left and the right use to kind of get around each other, that these are not static battle lines and that tactics are adopted and altered and change over time.
[01:00:50]  One of the things that made Trump potent and that made, you know, the alt-right and the initial Trump movement potent was in fact a kind of honesty or at least authenticity.
[01:01:01]  And I talk about that, I've talked about this a few times over my career.
[01:01:03]  I had a series of interviews with a guy, Rick Wilson, who was an objectively unpleasant man in a lot of ways.
[01:01:10]  He was one of the chief Republican, like dirty tricks media guys.
[01:01:16]  He did a lot of really ugly attack ads in the Obama era and then became an anti-Trumper.
[01:01:21]  But like one of the things he would point out when he was, and this was, I was talking to him as the election was going on, and we were kind of analyzing the Clinton campaign's ads as he was like, these all feel like something somebody cooked up in a Madison Avenue ad agency because they are.
[01:01:38]  And Trump ads feel like something some guy made on his computer at three in the morning after like slamming a bunch of monsters.
[01:01:44]  And that's what worked about Trump.
[01:01:47]  There's something authentic about that that like enraptured people because it felt more honest than the politicians we were used to.
[01:01:55]  It doesn't mean he was a fundamentally honest man, but there was a central honesty in his approach and like his willingness, his unwillingness to even like pretend that he felt bad for doing bad things that was that that was that was like this authenticity that was an effective weapon in their quarrel.
[01:02:11]  And I think over the years, they've gotten so up their own, there's an extent to which I think they've gotten up their own asses about the, you know, saying the quiet part, you know, and kind of like wrapping their actual intents and layers of subversion and all of this fuckery.
[01:02:30]  And I think there's a degree to which that may have thrown people off who would have otherwise been appealed to them.
[01:02:38]  And I think there's also kind of the period we're seeing right now from the right is where they've, they're discarding these tactics and they're trying authenticity again in terms of like, we're just going to straight up talk about wanting to erase transgender people from existence.
[01:02:52]  We want to ban books.
[01:02:53]  We want to make it illegal to learn, you know, take AP African American history, all this kind of shit.
[01:02:59]  Like the mask is kind of off.
[01:03:01]  And I think maybe they may be miscalculating.
[01:03:05]  And we have some early signs that that may be the case, the degree to which that kind of authenticity is a selling point.
[01:03:13]  And so, yeah, Margaret, I think there's a good chance that you're right in terms of like what our response needs to actually be because they're showing their faces now.
[01:03:23]  And it's a pretty ugly one.
[01:03:25]  So maybe this is the time to show ours rather than, you know, trying to make our little Illuminati and hide our enlightenment values from the people who can't possibly understand it well enough yet.
[01:03:39]  I don't know.
[01:03:40]  Maybe.
[01:03:42]  And I think part of that has to do with like, you know, like many people who listen to this probably identify as liberals, but there's a sort of joke that everyone hates liberals, basically from all other, every other position and also possibly including the liberal position.
[01:03:55]  Often, yeah.
[01:03:57]  And I think that a lot of it has to do with this like having people be sort of wishy-washy or having people, yeah, not quite say what they're about, you know, and I don't know, just being like, I often see that you actually get more people, not necessarily agreeing with you, but able to make their own decisions about where they agree with you and where they don't.
[01:04:19]  When you're just like, well, this is what I'm about.
[01:04:22]  What are you about?
[01:04:23]  You know, instead of being like, oh, yeah, totally.
[01:04:26]  This is how, I don't know, this like false problem the media has too, because by at least according to Gallup, public trust in the media, about 23% of the American population thinks that journalists are basically honest.
[01:04:43]  Like, so people do not believe that the media is telling them the truth.
[01:04:48]  Like this New York Times idea of like the importance of, you know, honest, unbiased journalism, that is not a thing.
[01:04:55]  And it's not a thing because no one believes you're unbiased.
[01:04:58]  So the honest thing to do is not to be like, well, we can't have trans people reporting on trans or black people reporting on, you know, issues that affect the black community because they're biased.
[01:05:06]  It's like, no, just like have people report on shit and be honest about what they believe.
[01:05:10]  If you're a fucking Marxist or a fucking conservative walking into, you know, a protest or a movement or whatever, X, tell people what you think about the world when you go to report on that thing.
[01:05:22]  Obviously, like if you're reporting on like a tornado, your ideology is not important.
[01:05:26]  But I would much rather know where I fucking think.
[01:05:29]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:05:30]  Yeah, we don't need, we don't need to, we don't need to know that you like have a Marxist take on the economy or whatever if your job is to report on a hurricane.
[01:05:39]  Although maybe that'll influence the way you talk about like the, but whatever.
[01:05:42]  How I just have people handle it.
[01:05:44]  Let, I mean, don't like, it's this, it's the fact, like the, the reason people don't trust the media, a big part of it is that you can't be an unbiased journalist.
[01:05:54]  It's simply not a thing that exists.
[01:05:57]  In the same way that like the very way you see the world and the way that it feels to you, even down to the way things taste, is impacted by your expectations.
[01:06:07]  This is a biological reality that is undeniable.
[01:06:10]  Your expectations, your personal biases, everything, including like how much sleep you've got the night before, changes the way you interact with physical reality as does the things you believe.
[01:06:22]  So it's actually fundamentally dishonest to pretend that you're coming at anything from some sort of point of objectivity.
[01:06:28]  And everyone knows that at some level, which is why nobody trusts journalists.
[01:06:33]  Right.
[01:06:33]  That's my take.
[01:06:35]  And we should work to like part of being open about our biases is to also kind of like know, okay, like my weak spot is that I want to believe that someone who calls themselves this or that label is fundamentally good or fundamentally bad.
[01:06:48]  And so I should be aware of my own biases, even for myself, so I can move towards objectivity.

=== Politically Assassinating In A Lyft (02:52) ===

[01:06:54]  I mean, I have, when I went into this, this is the second version of this that I've done.
[01:06:58]  The first one was a much shorter version that we did as part of a live show.
[01:07:02]  And it was much less complicated and towards the Discordians and delved into a lot less of this.
[01:07:09]  And, you know, that's part of it's because these guys were my heroes when I was a very young man.
[01:07:15]  Yeah.
[01:07:15]  And I didn't want in a lot of ways to learn things like the fact that Carrie Thornley attempted to molest a young girl.
[01:07:22]  Like that is an unpleasant thing to realize and have to adapt into, because that, you know, that actually does mean something about the things that he believed.
[01:07:35]  And one of the things that it means is that you should always be careful about how much you believe anything, right?
[01:07:40]  Because belief can lead you to some very frightening areas, even if that is a belief in the value of love and physical autonomy and stuff, right?
[01:07:51]  Because that's how Kerry would describe the underpinning of the horrible thing that he did.
[01:07:58]  And yeah, I don't know.
[01:07:59]  I think we've probably talked enough about this kind of stuff.
[01:08:03]  Sure have.
[01:08:04]  Or have.
[01:08:05]  You guys want to plug in?
[01:08:07]  I can't stop doing the or have.
[01:08:09]  No, no, no.
[01:08:11]  Yeah, Sophie.
[01:08:12]  By the way, when you sent me that text last night, you know, saying, saying that your Uber wouldn't pick you up outside of the senator's house and that you had a hot firearm you had to discard.
[01:08:24]  Did you ever wind up getting that Uber?
[01:08:27]  Well, here's how we know your conspiracy is wrong.
[01:08:30]  I would not take an Uber.
[01:08:31]  I would call your ass.
[01:08:33]  Oh, I thought you were languid.
[01:08:35]  I thought you were going to say, Lyft, this has all been an extended ad for Lyft.
[01:08:39]  Lyft, if you're going to carry out a political assassination, it had better be in a Lyft.
[01:08:45]  Lyft, we do not ask questions.
[01:08:48]  We seriously need to start offering that as something that we do.
[01:08:52]  Here at Lyft, we make sure every one of our drivers has a hidden area in the car that you can place a hot firearm.
[01:08:59]  Lyft, we go the extra mile.
[01:09:03]  Ridiculous.
[01:09:04]  This is a shop Lyft.
[01:09:06]  Anyways, Arison and Margaret, pluggables.
[01:09:10]  If you want to look at my slightly unhinged ramblings about Chaos Magic, you can follow my Twitter account at Hungry Bowtie.
[01:09:22]  As this is airing, I will probably be in Atlanta for the week of action, which is going on to Defend the Forest there.
[01:09:30]  So if you want to support people in Atlanta, you can donate to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.
[01:09:36]  I would say I have a two-book novella series that came out a little while ago.
[01:09:41]  They're called the Danielle Kane series.
[01:09:43]  The first one's The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion.
[01:09:45]  The second one is The Barrow Will Send What It May.

=== Behind The Bastards Podcast (02:39) ===

[01:09:47]  They're both really short and they deal with more stuff and more stuff about how we shape reality than some of my other writing.
[01:09:55]  So maybe you'll like them if you like this episode and you can get them wherever books are sold.
[01:10:01]  Yeah, read those books because I have been using a series of fake cutout social media accounts in order to harass and threaten Margaret into writing a third one.
[01:10:14]  But it's not working.
[01:10:16]  So help me out, people.
[01:10:19]  Anyway, this has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the Illuminati that also is the Illuminati.
[01:10:28]  So whatever conspiracy you believe about me and my friends here on the show, it's probably real in some way.
[01:10:35]  Happy 2023.
[01:10:36]  Bye.
[01:10:39]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:10:42]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:10:52]  Today's Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore, building a business around the life you actually want.
[01:10:59]  It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
[01:11:04]  On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amira Kazam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risks, and while your dream might be the smartest move.
[01:11:12]  At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
[01:11:14]  And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
[01:11:18]  Listen to those amigos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:11:22]  On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
[01:11:29]  On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
[01:11:36]  The entire season two is now available on the bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
[01:11:42]  I'm an alcoholic.
[01:11:44]  And without this probe, I'm a guy.
[01:11:46]  Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:11:53]  On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
[01:11:58]  We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
[01:12:05]  Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
[01:12:08]  Yes.
[01:12:09]  Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
[01:12:11]  I actually, I thought it was.
[01:12:12]  I got that wrong.
[01:12:13]  But hey, no one's perfect.
[01:12:14]  We're pretty close, though.
[01:12:16]  Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:12:23]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:12:25]  Guaranteed human.