Jamie Loftus and Ego Modem dissect the "Finders," a cult led by Marion David Petty that QAnon claims involved CIA child trafficking. They examine Petty's fabricated history, including his alleged enlistment at 13, a Phoenix tattoo, and secret meetings with Truman and Hoover in Washington D.C. The hosts critique the group's evolution from communal living to controlling bodily autonomy, noting how exaggerated military connections and shamanist influences fueled the narrative. Ultimately, the discussion reveals that while the "dirty children" lore lacks evidence of global trafficking, it successfully established a foundational myth for modern conspiracy theories. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fresh Bright New Year 202400:01:56
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media.
Stealing Bones and Grave Robbing00:11:06
Ah, welcome back, everybody, to Behind the Bastards in a fresh, bright new year, 2024.
Took me a second to remember which year it was, but I'm sure it's going to be a good one as long as there's nothing like a presidential election to cause chaos and horror across the land.
Anyway, I'm just going to continue not having read the news for the last seven years.
And welcome to the podcast, our guest, Jamie Loftus.
Welcome to the show, Jamie.
Thank you for having me back.
2024 is our year, I think.
I feel really optimistic.
I've been enjoying everyone's in and out lists.
I don't know what they're talking about most of the time.
A lot of the things that people want in, I feel may be signs of permanent brain damage from the last half decade.
It's like with the internet, this year is like that moment when you know that when you accept because you've hit 30 that like certain physical problems you've dealt with your whole life like, well, that's just one's never going to get better, right?
Like my back's never going to work the same way again.
The eczema's not clearing up, like something like that.
That's that's how we are.
That's how I feel about social media and what it's done to people's brains in 2024.
like, yeah, it's permanent.
We're good.
There's a whole generation of adults that will never quite be able to, you know, their critical reading skills were just like kind of demolished.
And that won't be a problem for anybody.
I feel optimistic.
I feel like it's a big, it's going to be a big, awesome year.
This time next year, I'm honestly trying to savor the beginning of 2024 because it's going to be so bad.
Oh, yeah.
No.
I'm just like, this is as good as it's going to get.
I'm going to cherish.
It's homies downhill from here, folks.
Yeah.
Ah, good times.
Well, you know what's not a good time?
whatever we're about to talk about for three hours, I'm assuming.
Yeah, a sex cult, a child sex cult.
Maybe.
Probably not, actually.
But the story of why, probably not, and what they probably were is still an interesting story of some people being real pieces of shit.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Exciting.
Jamie, have you ever heard of the Finders?
No, I haven't.
Okay.
Okay.
This is a big one.
This is a heavy hitter cult.
So this is the cult that is one of the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The 30,000 feet version of the story before we dig into it is that in the late 1980s, during the height of the satanic panic, a couple of dudes and some little kids in a van got called in by a busybody neighbor in Tallahassee, Florida, because she thought the kids looked dirty and that they were probably devil worshipers.
And the kids were indeed dirty.
And the men, only one of whom was a father to only one of the kids, were members of a group called the Finders that is either a CIA spying operation or just a bunch of weirdos playing games in a house they rented.
Impossible to say.
It's a little beside the point, but I am just like consistently like, wow, the nosy neighbor is never going to get it right in terms of what the real problem is.
Like, oh, it's actually probably the same.
God, the Satanic's panic sins are bottomless, but interesting.
Interesting.
No, I have taken that logic, Jamie, in my own life.
And so I will do nothing at all if I hear anything happening in my neighbor's house.
You know, if there's screams and bangs in the night, I don't call the police because I don't want to be part of the problem.
And sure, have I woken up next to a lot of like lines of police tape and houses with blood on the front door and shattered windows?
Of course.
Of course, that's going to happen when you refuse to take an interest in your neighbors.
But I will not continue the cycle of violence.
I would just ask that you stop sending me selfies of these crime scenes because it's been making my life really complicated.
Well, Jamie, you just never have an alibi for where you were when it happens.
That's one of the fun things about you.
It's because I don't leave my house.
There's no witnesses.
Yeah.
That's what I told the FBI.
There's no witnesses, none at all, to where Jamie was on the night those people were killed.
Those people were killed with the hammer that Jamie had purchased earlier that day.
It was bedazzled and everything.
It was damning.
It was damning what happened to me.
I was set up.
I already, this story is, you know, starting horrifically.
And it also feels like the beginning of a series of unfortunate events novel where a well-meaning neighbor swings and misses in a really horrific way.
Because it's the reality of what's happening to these kids, it's not great, but I wouldn't call it horrific.
It's like maybe slightly above a normal level of child neglect for the 1980s.
Like not massively, maybe a bit higher than average, but like if the things my Gen X like relatives bragged about when they were kids are true, this was not, these kids were not much worse off than a lot of kids in that period of time.
Maybe a bit in terms of parental neglect, but it's not a story of child molestation.
However, it is absolutely a story of child molestation because the satanic panic is again at its height.
And everyone in America immediately assumes these people are child trafficking children all over the world for a network of shadowy, wealthy individuals, right?
Like that's what this becomes, this massive cons, and it burns out because we don't have the internet.
It burns out in about a year, but people who are conspiracy kind of minded individuals never forget it.
And so a lot of what is in this story has formed some of the foundational lore for QAnon.
And there absolutely is some really shady shit going on here.
It's just not the QAnon side of things.
But we will be talking about our old friends, the CIA.
So don't worry.
Oh, good.
I am like, I mean, just right away, it sounds like, of course, QAnon would sort of glom onto a story like this because it's like taking something that there is a genuine cause for concern and blowing it out into a global conspiracy instead of like, let's get these individual children some resources, maybe, which, yeah, okay.
Yeah, even that's because again, this is happening in Florida.
So even that's complex.
Now, you ready to begin?
Is that not beginning?
Well, we have begun.
We already have some dirty kids in a van.
I assumed we had started.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we're actually going to start several decades earlier, many decades earlier, with Marion David Petty.
He's going to be the guy who starts this cult, The Finders.
And he was born in Culpeper, Virginia on December 12th, 1920.
Culpeper at the time was a somewhat sleepy town 70 miles from the capital.
It was conservative and I would probably say dull.
There was very little in Petty's family background to suggest he would become anything like what he winds up as.
His mother, Virginia, and his father, David, both have long lives.
They seem to have been like pretty comfortable, like middle class, maybe upper middle class.
The family's largely German.
Most of their ancestors were carpenters, although Marion's grandpa is a gravedigger.
Nice.
I don't know.
Flung swearish.
Probably good for your cardio.
Yeah.
As a little kid, there were signs that Marion was peculiar and possessed of a strange sort of charisma that made other kids want to follow him.
He organized a small gang of local children to go grave robbing at an abandoned cemetery near Arlington.
The initial, yeah, oh, they are stealing human remains very right out the bat.
Oh, yeah.
Why remain?
I thought they were stealing like, I don't know.
What else do you steal in a grave in the United States?
Well, when I was a kid, I would think about stealing stuff from grave sites sometimes because they would have toys.
Oh, just dead little children.
You were willing to steal a dead child's toys.
I do remember, I have a vivid memory of seeing like a Cinderella doll and being like, she's not using it, which is, but my dad was like, now, Jamie, you can't say these sorts of things.
I'm like, just in the utilitarian sense, I should have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
Well, no, they are not stealing dolls.
They are actually stealing bones from the graves.
No, Daniel, keep that in.
I want that there.
Grave robbing is one of those things, if an adult is grave robbing, right?
If you've got an adult stealing people's bones from a graveyard, that's immediately creepy.
If there's a little kid who's organizing his friends to steal bones, and to me, that's kind of dope.
I think that's kind of charming.
I'm kind of, and honestly, if I am a dead guy, I'm like, let them cook.
Like what do they ought to?
From the great beyond, I'm kind of like approving of this.
I like it.
I think it's interesting.
And already it's like, I don't know.
This is the first time I'm hearing of this man ever.
But it's, you know, a lot of weird kids come by the lower middle class unexpectedly.
It's, it's a real danger.
Yeah.
No, and it's also a danger that they will steal your skull after you have passed on.
Nice.
So the initial impetus for like all of this corpse desecration seems to have been that he's got this like club that he's formed with these kids.
It's like, you know, a child gang, right?
And he wants to have a human skull that he can sit in the middle of their meetings, right?
Their club is kind of, it's very Calvin and Hobbes type situation.
Like, um, they've got like a little secret society for kids, and these are, I think, mostly, you know, there's not a lot of media for nerdy kids in the uh in the 1920s, right?
In the early 2000s, you can understand why he had to steal a skull.
Yeah, yeah.
So, he and his friends are like these kind of nerdy kids, and they're they're probably reading pulp magazines, they're hanging out in the night, they're doing magic rituals, and they want a skull for their magic rituals.
This is kind of like the furthest, this is like the furthest limits of uh little stinker behavior.
I think we're really pushing the little stinker narrative here.
He's goonies maxing pretty hard right now.
So let's get to reel him in.
Yeah, so the primary difference between Marion and his friends and that skull and countless other groups of weird nerdy kids interested in the occult is that Marion had absolutely no problem breaking the law, right?
There's a lot more kids who would have done this if they had the chutzpah to rob a grave, but you know, that's that's Marion, and it says a lot that he's able to convince a lot of other little kids to go grave robbing with him.
Haggling Over a Skull Price00:04:24
The cadence of what you just said was very hustle culture.
Like, maybe if you got your ass up and went to the graveyard, you would be leading a cult.
I do periodically when I'm like running and listening to different like workout mixes, I'll get one that's like because I just want a bunch of random songs cut together to like a 4-4 beat or some shit.
But you'll catch one that's like they're they're putting the music to like some clearly, I don't know who it is, but some like real estate influencer yelling at you about never giving up how to how to achieve.
I went through a dark hour of the soul this summer, uh, and I was uh going to a lot of cycling classes in Maine, so just take that in.
There was at one of the classes there.
I forget if I told you about this, they were playing a techno remix of the Kavanaugh hearing.
You told me that's an inch.
I was just like, I have to fucking get out, I had to go home.
Like, I don't know what I'm doing here.
Now, Jamie, editorially in this techno remix, is it does it come down more pro or anti-Kavanaugh?
It's very vague.
I would say it is ambivalent.
And you're in that, like, I mean, to the credit of Portland, Maine, every person in the class was looking around, like, there's no way, there's no way that this is playing.
And then the woman in the, you know, the woman in the front is doing what all the cycling instructors do, which is like, God needs you to, you know, bike.
And it was, um, I think about it all the time.
That was a clear, I was like, I don't, I have to get out of here with all with leftovers.
I believe her response was, do I need to come get you?
Yeah, seven in the morning, coming in hot with the cabin.
Yeah, I, you know, I, I, I, I dabbled it.
I fucked around and I found out it really is just like all of the bad sketch comedy about spinning.
It's like showing up for a hot yoga session.
And right when it starts to get intense, they put on the Nixon tapes.
Yeah.
You're just hearing Haldeman mutter into your fucking ears.
You sweat.
It's making my chest tighten to even think about it.
Like it was just like brutal.
So I forget why that came up, but it felt good to get off my chest.
Yeah, nobody remembers, but Petty is stealing skulls, right?
He's got his kids.
They're doing their little occult rituals.
He says the skull is there specifically to remind his friends of their mortality, which is great.
Little kids need to know that they too will die more often.
I think we should always be telling children that.
I really, you know, never forget the first time you heard Memento Maury and it really hit.
Yeah, it really.
That is actually where this goes because in the interview where I found him talking about, or it's a book actually where I found him talking about this skull, he follows like introducing this concept with everybody would be better off if they did that every day.
Y'all ought to get a skull and put it up in the middle of the circle when you have a meeting.
So, Sophie, I want to go expense.
I know where I can get one in Paris.
I have met the guy.
So, I'm just going to need about $3,400 to get a human skull.
Is that the okay, first of all, the skull guy?
Yeah, you can find a lot of skulls in the catacombs.
And so, if you're already selling ketamine in Paris, you probably know the skulls.
You know, where to find them.
It's really good that you clarified because being like, hey, I know a guy who knows where to get the skulls.
He does know where to get.
He's shown me several.
He quoted the price.
I didn't buy it.
I don't buy human remains yet.
But I'm really not coming.
I really am like surprised that the price is that high.
Well, you know, I was a tourist in this situation.
He may have just been trying to like fleece me.
He may have just been sizing me up and being like, I bet I could get this.
I'm sure these are flexible prices, right?
That's the way it always is.
You could have talked him down.
Yeah, I probably could have if I'd wanted to buy human remains that day.
Yeah, if you wanted that on record, that you were haggling over the skull you were buying.
Shall we move on?
If information comes out later that I own human remains for recreational purposes, you're not allowed to judge me because I'm not saying I wouldn't do it.
I'm saying I didn't like to have in your house to look at.
Oh, well, I have taxidermy in my house.
Hedging Bets Like a Cult Leader00:10:17
Yeah, but that's a people because that's cool.
Look, let's just say I have taxidermy in my house.
So, oh boy.
It's a bird.
It's a bird.
Anyway.
She took a class.
Get over it.
It was very academic.
I'm a searcher.
I'm a hobbyist.
Uh-huh.
You're a finder.
Well, maybe not.
Okay.
So, Petty.
Yeah, that's his first, his first fun anecdote is he convinces some kids to desecrate human remains.
And this is going to be like a trend for him, right?
Where the first version you hear of what's happened, like as a young boy, he stole human remains.
It's like, well, that could be pretty fucking wild.
And then he's like, yeah, it was basically we were playing magic and it thought it would make the room look cooler.
And it's like, okay, well, I understand that.
Like the child logic there is not sinister.
You know, it's not something that's accessible to most children today, but it's like.
Yeah, if you're a kid interested in the occult and there's skulls around all of them.
Unfortunately, yeah, I see it.
I don't think it's necessarily a sign of evil quite yet.
No, no, it is a sign, though, that he's very good at talking other people into things.
Yes.
So like a lot of little kids in the 1940s, the Great Depression, Petty dropped out of school well before graduating.
He only makes it to the ninth grade, which is not uncommon for young men.
My grandpa only made it to like the eighth grade just because like the economy is so dire.
You have to go work or your family will starve.
Yeah.
But in Petty's case, at least he would claim, and nearly all of our sources on his childhood, basically 100% of it is him.
So take all of this, even the skull story, with a grain of salt.
But he would insist that I didn't, he didn't drop out because of hardship, but because he made a choice to not go to school anymore.
Quote, I consider my whole life an education and that all I do is work on my education.
I dropped out of school because it was interfering with my education.
So that's his claim decades later.
It's unclear.
He says he joined the army at 13 right after this.
And some of the interviews he's given, the timeline he gives makes it look more like he, the earliest he would have joined is like 16, which is not uncommon in world.
We're talking World War II.
A lot of 16-year-old Americans wound up in the army.
They're taking whomever.
Yeah, they are not discriminating hard here.
Yeah.
It is hard to prove exactly.
And this is, by the way, Petty is actually before because this would be like 33.
So he's World War II has not started for him yet.
It is hard to prove what he did.
He definitely served in the armed forces.
And it's not weird that in this, it's not, it is weird.
It's not impossible to have served as a 13-year-old in the U.S. Army at this period of time.
The youngest World War II era serviceman is believed to have been Calvin Graham, who enlisted from Houston after Pearl Harbor at the age of 12.
So somebody, he is not claiming to be the youngest person who joined the U.S. Army in this, roughly this period.
Yeah, that's a toss-up because it, like, I have no reason to not believe that the U.S. would accept soldiers that young.
And I also, it also feels very cult leader origin story parentheses made up.
And again, I hear there are like two distinct versions of his timeline you get.
And one of them pushes everything forward to like three or four years, which would mean like, yeah, he joined in the late 30s when he was like 16 or 17, which is not at all uncommon in this area.
That said, he claims 13.
And, you know, it's interesting because both because, as you said, this could be kind of a cult leader story.
But the thing that I think might say the most about him, whether or not it's true, is how he claims he convinced his parents to let him join the army, right?
At the age of 13, which is that he leaves a newspaper clipping on the dining room table so that they like find it when they come in for breakfast.
And it's a story about a little kid who like got angry at his parents for not giving him something.
And so he murdered his father.
And he was basically like, because I was such a good kid, when they saw this, they realized like how strongly I felt and let me leave.
But that's a pretty manipulative at the very, it's either manipulative or you want us to believe you were manipulative.
Either way.
Yeah, like there, I can see the 5D chess, but it also just, why would you say that?
Why would you say that?
Thoughts?
Yeah.
It's he has he has a real a lot invested.
He's one of these guys.
He's the most like wannabe chess master type dude of any cult leader I've seen.
Like he wants to be the 3D chess guy very badly.
Yeah.
And I think that's why he tells this story, whether or not it's true.
It also could be true because like he really likes to make elaborate weird threats to compel people's behavior.
And this is a lifelong thing that he does.
So, you know, maybe.
Maybe.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm hearing a lot of unhinged stories that are that are a hard maybe.
Yeah.
A lot of these stories come from a book called The Game Caller, which you'll understand that term later.
It's about Petty, and it's written by a former cult member who like left and had a big lawsuit with him.
But also they kind of were frenemies because he would all, whenever journalists would talk to me, be like, I actually like him a lot.
He's just fucking me on this.
So I got to sue him.
He writes a book after the guy dies.
I don't know whether or not we should trust this either, but it's simply the only source we have.
God, cult leaders are such motherfuckers to hang on.
Jamie, it's just like a whole myth-making game.
And it's, yeah, there's like so many sources that are like, okay, so, you know, of course, say what you will about his methods.
There's like an air of that to every to like a lot of people.
And with Petty, it is more credible than a lot of like L. Ron Hubbard.
His official version of his life is that at age like six, he was made a blood brother of the Blackfoot tribe for his many contributions to their people.
Which simply did, in part because the Blackfoot tribe do not have blood brothers.
That's like not a thing there.
It's like a thing he picked up from books later in his life.
And differently, Petty, everything he says, whether or not it's true, is totally possible.
Graves were a lot easier to break into back then.
People did join the U.S. Army that young around that time.
And children have threatened to murder their fathers.
So it could all be true is what I think.
Yeah, I feel like if he is playing a myth-making game here, he is like hedging his bets smarter than your average cult leader.
Yes, yes.
And I think he was actually.
So yeah, he decides, he joins the army very young, I think, in either case.
He definitely joins quite young and decides to make a career out of it.
He's going to stay in for more than 20 years.
And he is, you know, for as weird a guy as he's going to be later, he's extremely successful and serious in the army.
He's a non-commissioned officer.
And for those of you who don't know army stuff, the whole shebang is split, like the army is split between you've got your NCOs, which is like everything up to like all the sergeants, corporals, sergeants, all that good shit, right?
And then you've got officers, lieutenants, captains, colonels, majors, generals.
That was not in perfect order.
And so like, that's the way the army works.
I don't know how the Navy, the Air Force works, and I don't care.
Marion would eventually rise to the rank of master sergeant, which is pretty high up in the non-commissioned officer ladder, right?
Relative, pretty, a pretty small number of people who are in the military, who are enlisted, become master sergeants.
It's not the kind of thing you kind of like, you have to really want to make a career out of the army to hit there, right?
I'm not sure if he's like an or seven or an or eight, but like he's, he's, he, he does very well.
Um, he's a proficient soldier.
He worked well within the army.
And one of the things this suggests is like he was reasonably good at like kind of internal politics, right?
That you just getting along with people, doing favors for folks, understanding what people want out of you.
We know he gets a tattoo probably very early on in his military service.
He just says while he's a teenager.
So I don't know, there's like a five-year period there.
Well, yes, it's the same tattoo Ben Affleck has.
It's a giant fullback Phoenix piece.
Yes, indeed.
Yes, indeed.
Really cool.
That's why we know it.
He got the same tattoo Ben Affleck did.
Wow.
I can't believe that Ben Affleck didn't get called out for copying the leader of the Finders back tattoo.
This is the next plagiarism case that's going to shake this country, Jamie.
Now that that Harvard shit's done, we're going after Ben for his Phoenix tattoo.
That guy is, yeah, that guy is shameless.
He gets away with everything.
Uh-huh.
Not anymore, Jamie.
So one of my favorite things, one of the early sources where I eventually found out about this book by this cult leader was this like weird dude substack that like great place to start.
I don't want to be mean to him because I think he's a harmless weird dude.
But in this substack, which definitely buys into some conspiracy elements of it, he describes this as an occult tattoo.
And like, I don't know that it's an occult tattoo.
It might just be a phoenix.
I don't know that that dude with his substack knows what an occult tattoo is.
I don't know why this is important to me.
Is it a back tattoo?
Is it tattoo on his back?
Yeah, Jamie, of course.
I actually think it's a chest tattoo.
Either way.
Either way.
So I, man, I also, I mean, honestly, down the line, if someone were to justify my worst tattoos by saying that I was, that they were connected to the occult, I would be relieved.
Sure.
Yeah.
Because the truth is, it was just a bad week I was having.
It was a bad week, and you decided to sit down for 17 hours while somebody Since three foot long, I do not have a breed.
I too have been liberated from the constraints of my own sanity.
A Bear With a Gun Tattoo00:03:44
Yeah.
No, sure.
Yeah.
I have, I don't know.
I'll figure out what kind of tattoo to pretend I have when we come back from the sad break.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that!
Jeffrey Hood did.
I love you.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
I've got a bear with a gun.
A bear with a gun would be a good tattoo.
Chinese Martial Arts Connections00:07:17
I've got to wait.
Let me show you.
Oh, you've got a bear with a gun.
I've got a little militia bear.
Friend of the pod, Rory Blank, who's the great cartoonist Bone Jail.
Yeah.
You can find them on Twitter, did a stick and poke for me of a little pigeon with a switchblade.
Wow, they're cousins.
This is from a book called The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily.
Oh, nice.
They take over Sicily by force.
They could not do a worse job in Sicily than the Italian government.
So I think that seems like a real movie.
For Sicily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yeah, Petty, you know, joins the army.
He gets his Phoenix back tattoo.
He does his, he's, he's pre-afflecking.
And the same year he joins, he claims possibly at the same time when he gets his tattoo, he claims that he loses his virginity in a whorehouse.
He just like walks in as a 13-year-old.
He decides like, time for me to start having sex.
And he walks into a whorehouse.
Now, again, could be a lie.
Also, not hard to see this hat working out in the 30s.
Like, that does not seem impossible.
Depressing, no matter which way ends up being true.
Yeah.
Okay.
There's no way for this not to be gross, but this is him talking about himself as a 13-year-old.
He describes himself as having a vigorous libido and would decades later claim to have had since the age of 13 sex at least twice a week whenever possible, which actually for a cult leader is not high libido.
I was going to say twice a week is pretty conservative if you're like, I'm the king of fucking.
Well, not to be critical.
Yeah, we don't have to, whatever.
This is what, just what he says.
It's a gross story.
Yeah, it's a gross story.
He goes to Panama at, I guess, like 13 or 14.
He works as an army lifeguard.
He made voracious use of the library on base.
This is, he's a big reader, always, always, he loves reading encyclopedias too.
He's just like hoovering up trivia.
So some.
It made that sound so gross the way you said it.
Yeah, yeah, it sounded like a sex thing.
It did.
What?
Voraciously reading my encyclopedia.
Hey, okay.
Was he fucking the encyclopedia?
Yeah, we both had the same thought, which is cancel culture.
Okay.
This guy's keeping me on my toes.
I will say that.
I'm going to do the.
Yeah.
All right.
Whatever.
So sometimes when later talking about his time in the military, he would focus on what a great place it was for him to learn about human nature.
Other times he was more flippant, telling one follower, I drank and gambled and traveled around.
And again, not fun to think about like a little teenage boy getting like wasted Panama in the army.
Like that is kind of funny.
Yeah, generationally, it's all feasible, unfortunately.
Yes.
This could very well be accurate.
Yeah.
He realizes in the late 30s, World War II is probably going to happen.
And being a fairly smart guy is like, what I don't want to do is be anywhere near where people are getting shot at.
That doesn't seem very fun.
So he kind of social engineers his way into being a driver for a general in the army, a guy named Hap Arnold.
Now, very 30s name.
Very, this dude couldn't be more 30s and 40s.
And he is also like a very important person.
There's no Air Force at the time, right?
The late 30s, early 40s.
We don't have like an Air Force.
The air stuff that our military does is handled by the Army Air Corps.
And the Army Air Corps eventually gets kind of carved out of the Army and becomes the Air Force, right?
Hap is the guy.
He's an Army general, but he's going to end his career as an Air Force general.
He basically is the guy who like makes the Air Force.
He's one of the guys who creates the Air Force, right?
And he's actually like one of our earliest.
He's one of the first three rated pilots in the history of the Air Force.
So he is, he's like an old school pilot guy.
Petty would later claim that during the war, he becomes this guy's driver.
And so his job is he's chauffeuring not just HAP, but like all of these different people, politicians and generals and whatnot, meet with him and he chauffeurs them around too.
Okay.
So, you know, during this, when he's kind of in his off hours not working, he meets a Chinese man named Joe Chang, who had immigrated to the United States as a 14-year-old.
Petty claims in a lengthy interview to have learned martial arts from the man.
And when asked, well, what style of martial arts did he teach you?
This is the answer Petty gave.
It didn't have a name, but if you had to call it something, it would be Jiu-Jitsu.
Now, the basic idea is that you don't know what's going to be thrown at you.
So you want to be ready to respond appropriately to anything without thinking about it.
Chang was a natural.
There weren't many martial arts teachers back then.
And here's the thing: number one, I don't believe that.
That's made like that's very made up.
No, definitely not Jiji Johnson.
I'm not saying it's impossible that a kid from China would know jiu-jitsu, but is it not a Brazilian?
It's not, it's not Brazilian.
It is a Japanese.
There is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu is a thing, but jiu-jitsu is a Japanese martial art.
My only jujitsu is Brazilian.
Wow.
Either way, I don't believe, especially, especially having to walk back, like, well, it doesn't really have a name.
You're like, that's not a thing.
No, no, no.
I am sure.
One thing I know about martial arts guys, be they Brazilian, Chinese, or Japanese, is that they love giving names to the things that they're doing.
They're huge fans of that.
I've never, yeah, I've never heard someone into martial arts be like, there's no name for this.
I don't know what this is.
I'm just throwing people.
There's no technique.
There's no philosophy connected to it.
I'm just doing whatever.
Yeah, no.
If that were the case, no one would know the name of Terence Judo.
Anyway, that's.
We'll let it slide.
We'll let it slide.
So I don't believe this entirely.
It is true.
There are some Chinese martial arts that have similarities with jiu-jitsu, at least according to a random guy on Quora I read.
Maybe that's not accurate.
I'm not a martial arts guy.
Proverbs.
Not the Quora source for the first half hour of the episode.
He claims to have learned Japanese martial arts from this Chinese guy that he meets in DC while he's driving around famous people.
And this is worth mentioning because Joe Chang was a real person who was a kind of interesting background.
He was, you know, he immigrates into the United States as a kid, as a 14-year-old.
He's enrolled in a Jesuit academy where he studies journalism, and then he becomes a correspondent for a Chinese government-owned news service until Mao, well, one of the Chinese governments, because this is during their civil war.
And then, you know, he is not aligned with the side that wins, right?
With the communists.
One of the substackers I found describes him as a supposed Chinese agent operating under journalistic cover.
Hidden Secrets of Joe Chang00:10:43
I haven't found any real evidence that that's precisely the case.
That seems to be stating it.
I mean, it is like a government.
So to that extent, yeah, that makes it sound more like skullduggery and spying as opposed to like, well, this guy's an immigrant.
Sounds like he was offered a job by one of the sides in that war, like putting out information in the U.S.
And then that side lost and he continued his life until it ended.
I haven't found any evidence that this is as interesting as people think it is.
But it's through Marion studying with Chang that he would meet his wife, Isabel.
She was a regular attendee at the same YMCA where he took classes during the war.
She volunteered to be a hostess at the library that he was at one day.
What does that mean?
Like a tier librarian, I think.
Oh, that's fun.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It sounds nice.
And she sees him reading a book about Korea.
And, you know, this is the 40s.
And so she comes over and strikes up a conversation.
And he claims she immediately is like, do you want to go fuck?
I want someone to take my virginity.
Let's go back to your place.
Which could be true.
Like, they're definitely married.
I don't know how it happened.
You know?
Okay.
I just feel people were horny in the 40s too.
I know, but I just don't, I don't know.
I feel like people who are really genuinely having sex like that do not talk about it.
That's my theory.
I feel like if you really fucking, you're not.
I don't know.
Also, maybe that's just my naive world view.
The quote started with, he claims.
And then I went, yeah, he claims.
He claims they are, they are for sure married.
I don't know.
It is like maybe in the 1940s, if you're like, hey, I know how to read and I know what Korea is.
That does put you in like the top half a percentile in terms of education.
It sucks.
Like, yeah, where you have to keep like going back and being like, well, in context, because my grandparents met when my grandfather was cat calling her from the street, she was like pushing her baby sister around as a teenager in like a little carriage.
And my grandfather pulled over and said, hey, is that your baby?
My God.
And she said, no.
And he's like, let's go out tonight.
And then they were married for 5,000 years.
Yeah, that is, that does.
And it's like, so yeah, maybe she, maybe she proposed to like three other guys and they'd all screamed when they saw the condom because they thought it was some sort of devil.
And so she sees a man who can read and it's like, this is the one for me.
He'll know what a condom is.
Yeah.
He at least won't, he knows what, that rubber is a substance.
He won't immediately screech that I'm the devil.
Slim Pickens.
Really shitting on our 40s ancestors.
Yeah, well, I'm not claiming it's that much better.
No, I do actually believe that rubber is created by witches, but I just think that's why, you know, the witchcraft industrial complex is such a centerpiece of American prosperity.
Anyway, moving on.
One claim that is consistent across many years of interviews with Marion Petty and is also something that other people have brought up is that during and right after the war years, he kind of has, he gets lucky, right?
He has a great wartime experience, a great early Cold War experience.
He's just driving famous people around D.C.
He is he is also kind of an early swinger.
He maintains two apartments in DC and he's basically like anyone he meets that he he thinks sounds interesting, he's like, hey, you can stay in my apartment for free.
And so a lot of them kind of do.
Now, he says this was like a con kind of, because they would always offer money and there were so many people staying in his flop house that it worked out to be more than the cost of print.
God.
I don't know.
It's a weird situation.
I mean, it sounds, I feel like these kinds of like, I don't know, these, these kind of guys who are, who are just around, like they, they exist.
They get the best stories.
They do tend to live in houses with too many people in them.
That's for sure.
Now, he is having sex with some of these people, but not all of them.
In later interviews, he would describe this as an experimental living situation.
He was basically, he said, I was creating a college for myself.
Quote, the idea in my head was that they were going to teach me something about power, money, or sex, which those aren't the only three things people can teach you about, Marion.
Kind of weird to frame it that way.
Well, we've all lived in a punk house at some point.
This isn't sounding too.
He said he's going to teach me the drums.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
Again, he is kind of the prototype for a sort of guy we all lived with for at least six months back in the early 2000s.
Yeah, and many of them do end up believing in conspiracy theories on a long enough timeline.
Yeah, they are all people you don't want to like check in on on Facebook right now.
In conversations with a follower, later related in the book Game Caller, one gets the idea that this was, though, primarily about sex.
Quote, this is Marion.
Three girls lived on the floor above, and I also had the run of their place.
There was plenty of sex in those days.
During the war, everybody was sort of in a state of suspension.
Nobody knew what it was going to be like the next day.
So things were a lot freer, including sex.
And I don't know.
Thanks for a lot for your including sex.
I just would like, you know, I would just like a pull quote from the women upstairs.
Yeah.
What was their take on that?
I know no one ever asked them anything, but we really can't be, like, it's even from a modern perspective, you can't just be interviewing the guy who runs the house.
No.
Who is your friend and also who you sued for stealing a bunch of your money?
This is the one source for your book.
We have to like really, yeah, that's okay.
Yeah, no, but sure, the sex was awesome and everyone wanted it from him.
Absolutely.
Yes, that is certainly his version of his life.
Yeah, he also would claim later that during this period, he has regular contact with like very powerful men through his job as a chauffeur, which is maybe to some extent true.
He's also definitely lying.
And this is how it's related by one of his former cult members, a guy named Toby Terrell.
I didn't just drive Hap Arnold.
I was assigned to be Arnold's driver, but when he didn't need me, I was available to drive other bigwigs from the Pentagon and the White House and Capitol Hill.
When the generals wanted to go somewhere or to have somebody picked up, they would send me or one of the other drivers.
During the war, they had even more power than they do now.
I lived and worked down near Constitution Avenue until they finished the Pentagon in about 1943.
I drove all of the famous and the powerful.
Did you ever drive the president?
That's Terrell, I ask.
Not while he was the president, he says.
They've got their own drivers, but I drove Truman before he was the president and Eisenhower before he was the president and Lyndon Johnson, although he didn't like me.
Plenty of others too.
Marshall Patton, all of the other generals, J. Edgar Hoover, just about everybody in those days.
Why do you think Johnson didn't like you?
I ask.
We weren't in the same sort of consciousness.
I didn't like him either.
It's almost impossible to arrive at any kind of equality with a politician.
They always have some hidden agenda going on that they think will give them more power.
It was a great job.
You overhear a lot of stuff that you can learn from.
Did they confide in you?
I ask.
Not much, he says.
Arnold's wife did, but not the men.
I would hear stuff.
If I was driving more than one person, I could listen in on what they were talking about.
Then I would read about it in the papers later and get some perspective.
I heard what they were saying, and I understood the context.
Then I'd see the way the press wrote about it.
Quite often it was different.
Didn't they try to keep you from hearing it?
I ask.
No, never, he says.
They never hit anything.
They knew that it was safe to say whatever they wanted to in front of me.
Do you remember any of the stuff that you heard?
I ask.
It was mainly psychology, he says, figuring out how the human mind works.
They were all trying to get some power to hold on to it.
I had opted out of that game plenty of times.
They offered to make me an officer, but I always turned it down.
I wanted to keep my head clear for learning.
If you've got some big hidden agenda, like getting a promotion or being appointed to some big government job, you think different and talk different.
You filter everything through your hidden agenda so that what comes out is designed to make you look like a hero.
Okay.
That was a long quote, but there's a lot.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Where to begin?
The thing is, again, on its face, do I believe that people speak freely in front of service employees because they're fucking assholes and don't view service employees with the humanity they should?
Sure.
Do I believe that people, but that's not what he's saying.
He's like, They taught me lessons about life and told me secrets.
Yeah, they just could sense that I'm kind of that bitch.
And so they like, it's really the like, maybe I'm just too Tanya Hardy pilled.
He sounds so much like Jeff Gulu's friend who is like, yes.
The CIA hired me, blah, blah, blah.
Like he's just like a weird, cowardly guy who ended up adjacent to something important once, but made it like out to be this huge thing.
It's so like, ooh, it's embarrassing.
Well, and there's, he never gives you any details about like mostly psychologically learned.
Like what's really, this is as close as we get, right?
And actually, you know, I go back and forth on some of this because like some of it does seem more credible, right?
Like here's him talking.
He says the, yeah, here's him talking about Hap Arnold.
Arnold was a man's man.
He was awkward around women and just did what she told him, his wife.
All of the men liked him and followed his orders.
He knew how to run a big game, but he was afraid of women.
I never met any of the generals who weren't afraid of women.
I drove all their wives at one time or another.
They all knew me and liked me.
They could sense that I was on their side.
And like, I believe part of that, which is that like all of these guys are scared of their wives, maybe.
Again, I'm like, he's choosing his, like, if he is lying, which I feel he is, like, he's choosing, he's being pretty like plausible.
I mean, the fact being offered to be a general, like, and then even just the vagueness of like, you know, when you get into an Uber after a couple drinks and you start talking about the psychology of power and how to get more, like, it's all very that's all I talk about to my Uber drivers.
Arnold Afraid of Women00:11:50
Yeah.
How do you think?
Yeah.
And then, and then you offer them the chance to be a general in the water wars one day.
Yeah.
Like we all have that potential, Jamie, right now.
That's true.
It's true.
It's true.
Okay.
You know who else has the potential to be a power broker in the coming water wars?
Oh, whatever brutal Stanley Cup ad we're about to play.
Yeah, yeah.
I ideally got, God willing, an ad for Blue Apron.
You know, blue like the water that is nowhere around anymore because we have hired mercenaries to give it all to Nestle so that they can make poison.
Anyway.
You know, Island is a little different these days.
It's no longer suppressed.
It's no longer surrounded by water.
We can't do that.
We can't do the island thing anymore.
People blow.
Well, there's no more water.
This is why I was going to start this episode.
It's weird that we arrived organically at joking about serial killing because I was going to start it by like really elaborately denying that you were involved in like a series of murders in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
But then I was like, no, people might think that Jamie's involved in a series of murders outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, and you're not.
People are at just like high rates of media literacy off the charts.
Everyone's doing great.
Yeah.
So don't Google Jamie Loftus, Grand Rapids, Michigan, murders, comma hammer.
Don't do it.
Because nothing will come up, I swear.
Nothing will come up.
Although it would be pretty funny if a lot of people did that.
And then that became like the first thing when people type your name.
Jamie Loftus Raw Dog.
Jamie Loftus murders Grand Rapids.
That's a career maker right there.
Fuck with the Wikipedia page.
See if I care.
Here's ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
So when I think about this guy and his stories of all the secrets these generals for sure told him, I think about Bill Cooper.
Bill Cooper was like a right-wing conspiracy radio host in the 90s.
He dies in kind of a shootout with the police.
He is the proto-Alex Jones.
And he, during his time in the Army, around this time, he works briefly in the Pentagon, right?
And he spent the rest of his life being like, I saw this document that claims this insane thing or that insane thing when I was working in the Pentagon.
Petty kind of does the same thing, right?
And he will talk later about, like, I met all of the guys that were in the OSS before they became the CIA.
Like, I knew all those guys.
Yeah.
Some of that's probably true because his wife works for the CIA, Isabel.
She winds up being in the CIA.
And he's definitely driving officers.
Some of those guys would have wound up in the CIA.
So he does have some degree of very real CIA connections.
God, first of all, I'm mad at you for reminding me about Bill Cooper.
But Uncle Bill.
But, but no, so what is his, what is his wife doing in the CIA?
I mean, I think it's probably like desk work, clerical work.
I don't like, I don't think there were a lot of ladies who were HP.
So you don't think she could ruin the world?
I think she could.
No, Jamie, I believe there's tens of thousands of Latin American women and children and men and old people.
I believe she could kill cities worth of them if she put her mind to it.
I'm just not certain because I've never actually heard anything about what specifically she did for the agency.
It is the CIA.
Right.
But she's working there and he's still doing his.
This is like a very bizarre power couple situation.
Yeah, she's he's in the military, like, you know, for most of the 50s, the first two-thirds of it.
And she's in the CIA from like 52 to 61, right?
Okay.
And yeah, that's, that's kind of their period of overlaps, like four years where he's in the military.
She's in the CIA.
Because he joined so early, he finishes his career at some point in the 50s.
His son, who knows his dad is kind of full of shit, will say that he retired from the Air Force in 1956, which, if that's the case, then he would have joined the Army at like 16 because his chunk of the armor becomes the Air Force.
That's why he leaves a different service than he started in.
Anyway, whatever.
I think his son is probably accurate and he was pushing things.
Again, that's the kind of the kernel of truth.
He joins the army really young.
The lie, he joined at 13, right?
Right.
Where you're just like, what is this adding for your cult recruits?
Yes.
You're just jazzing it up a little bit, Jamie.
He's just putting a little bit of spin on it, you know?
Yeah.
Throwing some stank on it.
He's just putting some lagasse bam on it.
Remember him?
I miss him.
Oh, yeah.
I do miss Emerald.
I assume he was swallowed by the earth, like everyone else I remember from that period of time.
It's true.
He actually may have never existed.
It's a complicated conversation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There is now a parody of him on Futurama, and like two-thirds of the people who have seen it have no idea what he's based on.
Good stuff.
So I found an article in the Washington Post that interviews his son, George, and this is kind of blissfully.
And George doesn't talk about most of his dad's life, but whenever George comes in, I'm like, well, this is probably pretty close to truth.
George seems like he's got his head screwed on straight and he knows that his dad was full of crap.
And he told them this: quote, in the 1960s, he was a student of the world who would spend the whole day in the library near the family farm.
Then around 1971, he gathered his followers in the W Street house.
This was the beginning of a new life for him.
They found in their communal lifestyle a more adventurous life, right?
So he spends several years reading and then he's like, he's doing the same.
He's got a family farm.
It's like 90 acres at this point.
He's living there.
His wife is sometimes there, but she has a separate house.
It's whatever.
Do what works for you in a relationship.
Sure.
I'm like, you know, if I had the resources, why not?
Couldn't hurt.
Yeah, exactly.
Why not?
But yeah, they're the so he just starts inviting people to his farm kind of over the 60s.
And then in 1971, he gets a bunch of followers together at like a rented house and he's like, hey, guys, we're going to be a cult now.
We're all going to live together.
We're all going to pool our bank accounts.
I've got a great plan.
It's going to be cool.
And what a bummer house meeting.
You're just like, no, I knew it was too good to be true.
It says a lot about the early 70s that it seems like most of the people who are like around him are like, yeah, all right.
Well, I mean, honestly, for I've not done worse, but like I've, you know, for a good living situation, you'll really can see it quite a bit.
I had a place in like a beautiful, like I had my own bedroom.
It was like a three-person apartment in Boston, and it cost $400 a month.
And the landlord was like, the only caveat is that if the police come to the apartment, you have to say that you're my daughter.
And I was like, all right, you know, and they never showed.
And it was, and I lived in Bliss for no money for two years.
It was awesome.
Who knows what he did?
I'll never know.
We all just had to, there were three women who lived in that apartment and we all had to agree that we would say we were his daughter.
I think he murdered his daughter is what I think it is.
He just needed three Caucasian women in their 20s to three women who all looked close enough like his daughter around him.
We did the cops showed up.
We did all, you know, we were all kind of tall brunettes.
We just didn't talk about it.
Like anyway, sure, why not?
You'll agree to a lot when we're done and you look.
Look, if you're listening in right now, you'd do the same thing.
Next to MIT, are you joking?
It was like me and two MIT students that were like, well, he certainly did something.
Yeah.
But hard to say.
Anyways.
Yeah.
So he says, hey, guys, we're going to do a cult in 1971.
Castaneda Books Full of Lies00:04:22
And, you know, because of all the reading he's done, he's developed this real, this fascination with futurism.
Right.
And he's also, he's equally interested in like kind of pop occult shit, the stuff that's going to become new age, right?
This is kind of right at the birth of new age.
And so he is particularly obsessed with the writings of Carlos Castaneda.
Now, a lot of people are probably familiar with Carl, the Don Juan books, right?
So Carlos Castaneda, these are like 1960s.
They come out, chronicles of mystic self-exploration that are kind of one of the inciting incidents of the New Age movement.
Yeah.
Castaneda was, he's this Peruvian writer who comes to the United States and gets a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California.
And he writes three books starting with the teachings of Don Juan, which he claims are a faithful representation of his apprenticeship of a traditional shaman of the Yaqui people in northern Mexico, right?
That he goes and lives with this Yaquis shaman sorcerer fella, Don Juan, who like teaches him a bunch of mystical stuff, right?
And then as he does get a doctorate in anthropology, he's like writing about this experience he had as an anthropologist.
He actually writes these as part of his doctoral program at the University of California.
I hate that I knew where he went to school.
Yeah.
He went to UCLA.
Yeah, he sure did, baby.
He absolutely did.
Now, you would think if you're a real anthropology program at a real college, which we can all agree, UCLA is not, you would check the work of a doctoral student, one presumes, right?
I feel like that's part of the point.
You would think, you know, UCLA, will UCLA ever answer for his crimes?
Answer, no.
Half the camp, like their baseball stadium is on like veteran-owned land.
Whatever.
Okay, so wizards are real at UCLA.
Wizards are real.
Yes, more or less, Jamie.
And again, I'm not speaking anything about actual yucky beliefs because Castaneda is not either.
This is just a book that he writes.
It becomes immediately successful.
And it is beloved.
You get some interesting, depending on what year you're reading, people talking about these books, very different responses.
There are some respected academic figures who love Castaneda's work, but these are also all drug guys, right?
Their expertise is not anthropology or the yaki.
It is mushrooms in the case of Gordon Wasson, right?
He's like a guy who really likes his fucking mushrooms and he likes to be a little bit more of a drug.
And is there a more 70s thing to do than to make a best-selling book based off of an actual belief system that you've heard of?
No.
Like, yeah.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's fun.
Um, so yeah, these are, you know, kind of like our buddy Petty.
His, his lies, Castaneda's lies are not like super lazy.
Like there's usually degrees of real knowledge in them or like little pieces of it.
And then he just spins it to make kind of the Hollywood version.
But he's also a plagiarist.
He plagiarizes large chunks of this.
There's a bunch of inconsistencies in it.
All of this gets found out, but it does take a while.
It's harder to like spot this stuff back then.
There was no age farmer guy to fucking drop a nuclear bomb on Carlos Castaneda.
It's also worth noting that anthropologists who have spent time with ya people will note that the books contain absolutely no, there's no use of yuki vocabulary anywhere in there.
Like, yeah, he just does not use any of the words that they use, which is suspicious for a book of anthropology.
Nothing.
Yeah.
For your doctoral thesis.
What do you okay?
Okay.
I always love talking about Castaneda, but like my point is that these books that inspire Petty are full of shit, but he loves them and they inspire him to create all of these arcane rules and vaguely occult rituals for his hangers on.
And he's basically, the way he frames this is like, this is a learning community.
You're all coming here to like learn more about yourselves.
No Yuki Vocabulary Found00:10:20
And I'm here.
I'm not really even the leader.
I'm the student.
I'm going to learn from all of you.
You know, we're all going to like teach each other.
Right.
And he does a lot of kind of classic cult things.
He's at his farm.
It's like known as a place in the area.
You can get a free organic meal anytime you go there.
So like a lot of drifters pass through.
And like if he finds them interesting or if they'll do what he says, they kind of become part of the group.
Although, while those people, that is a factor, a weird number of his followers are like successful and educated.
There's like PhDs there.
There's Harvard graduates.
There's like businessmen who have like run successful oil companies who are all going to fall in with him.
Wow.
I'll explain what they're doing in a second here, but like it's, it's, yeah, it, it's, I can see why there was an appeal to it.
Um, he's basically saying that's a wide net to get folks in from.
Yeah, it is.
And it's, we're just going to start talking about like what exactly these people are doing because it's a little different.
Yeah.
I was like, how does he get guys who are in oil to move into his punk house?
Yeah.
Basically, this whole organization, the Finders, which he starts calling it in 1971, is organized around what he calls a game.
And everyone is playing the game who is in the cult.
And he, Marion, is the game caller, right?
He's basically a DM for their lives.
And so if you're a member at various points, sometimes you'll all live communally and like do like commie and stuff, grow food.
But periodically, he'll pick a number of people and he'll say, you need to go to Japan for six months.
Here is the name of a company.
I want you to spy on their operations and find out everything you can about them.
Or here is a political candidate.
I want you to go like research him.
Or I want you to go do this job for two.
I want you to start a company, your startup capital, build this company with these two other people.
This is the game that you're playing right now.
And I'll tell you when it's done.
And then you'll come back and you'll talk to us about what you learned doing it.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, because if anything bad happens, it's nothing bad happens.
It's just a game.
It's just an ARG that you're living in.
You can't be taken to court for things you were doing just for a fun game.
It's also like, it's such a, it's such an oddly specific thing, but I think the appeal to a lot of people is that like even a lot of educated, successful people is like, well, you don't have to make decisions about what you're going to do with your life.
This man will tell you what your next thing is.
And he seems pretty smart.
So maybe he knows that this is what I need to be doing with my time.
For his wife's part, you don't get great context on her, but she definitely starts living away from him during this period of time.
And her view of, according to their son, her view of his followers is like, these are a bunch of weirdos.
Like you're hanging out with a bunch of weirdos.
What is wrong with you?
I wish more people felt empowered to be like, no, too weird.
I'm out of here.
Sorry.
I'm out.
I'm out.
The CIA wasn't too weird for me, but you are, Mary.
Yeah, that's the next.
You're like, no, I'm going to, I'm going to return to the safe embrace of the CIA where everyone's normal.
Marion adopts a nickname at this point for himself, the stroller, because he takes, every day he'll spend like four or five hours walking and like taking notes on the neighborhood that he's in and like everything that happens around it.
But he just walks all the time, which is Keith Ranieri was the same thing where like that was his number one character trait other than being a sex criminal was that he would walk around all the time and just spew bullshit out of his mouth to whoever was forced to follow him.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Ranieri was huge on like wandering and like sleep deprivation, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
And the chief difference between them is that we have no evidence that Marion Petty was a sex criminal.
Although I'm certainly not ruling it out, Jamie.
Yeah.
Based on, okay, yeah, I think we would be unwise to rule it out.
So his wife, his wife leaves him, though.
Not really leaves him, but is not living with him and seems to be kind of frustrated with him.
She dies not all that long after this.
She doesn't live a super long life.
But yeah.
So the game, yeah, they're all playing this game and he starts calling his group the finders.
And the name was actually based on an old medieval like concept, the true band.
They're literally playing DD.
This is so they are, they are definitely playing DD.
Like 80% of this cult and 80% of Petty's life, given his like childhood activities, is like, oh, if this kid had had D ⁇ D. Right.
Like we could have really got him.
We got him on the straight and narrow early.
He would have just been a prolific DM.
He would have been going to the bottom.
He would have made $3.5 million from a DD podcast.
He'd be doing fine.
Raking it in on Patreon and it would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can go to the military when you're 13 in DD.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You can make a million against it.
Yeah.
It's always nice to introduce a liar to DD because you're just like, here, go nuts over here.
Enjoy yourself.
Have fun with this.
This is what you need to control yourself.
This is your riddling.
Yeah.
Someone's going to get angry about that.
Well, I don't claim that statement, Robert.
I just think that D ⁇ D is a fun place for liars.
That's what I'm going to say.
So I want to, to talk more about how this game works, I'm going to quote from an article in the City Paper by John Cohen.
RTGIAD, ready to go in any direction.
It's the salutation or closing found on almost every finder's report, and it's the essence of the group.
If you aren't RTGIAD, you can't play the game calls.
And with the Finders, everything is a game call.
Dress, diet, work, play, travel, marriage, divorce, pregnancy, child rearing, pranks, investigations, even calling games can be a game call.
And what that means is that like, he's not, as this evolves, he's not just saying, hey, I want you to go to this country and spy on this thing for me, or I want you to start a business.
He's saying like, you're only going to wear skirts, you know, from now on until I say, or you're only eating vegetables from now on until I say you can't cook any of your food for six weeks.
You have to marry this person.
You two should split up.
So it's like Simon says, but it's not.
Yeah, Simon says, Simon says, have a child with this other cult member and raise them this way.
Yeah.
Simon says, but for your bodily autonomy.
And a lot of the, and there are people who leave, but like, there's generally a few dozen adults who are like, yeah, why not?
Let's try.
What is the timeline on this escalation?
From like, hey, move into my punk house to.
Okay.
But like, but like, how quickly do we get from move into my punk house to like, Simon says that your body is mine?
Kind of starts in the late 60s.
The, hey, everyone, come crash with me.
And then by 71, they're like, hey, we're the finders.
And like by the mid-70s, it's like, hey, you should have a child now.
Okay.
Okay.
So it is like a slow-ish escalation.
Yeah.
That's, that's more as I understand it.
Yeah.
A former member, Robert Terrell, who wrote the book that I've been quoting from a bit, provided more detail in a 1991 interview.
Petty used the term pressure cooker.
The idea was to explore your own person and discover your own true nature.
You can't do that just by sitting at a desk or on a couch in a routine way.
You have to have some experiences.
So Petty was good at structuring experiences from which you could learn.
He called himself the game caller.
And what that meant is he'd call a game for you to do something where you'd gain experience.
Examples of past games include making followers work a temporary accounting job at a law firm or flying to other countries to spy on companies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would be so mad if I was the cult member that was like, you're going to work an accounting desk job.
I'm like, that guy got to go to fucking Japan for six months.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, you have to do people's taxes.
But it does split up like that.
It's interesting because so there are a couple of things going on.
Some of this is like very much mid-century, you know, 60s inspired.
Like we're somewhat politically radical and we're willing to, you know, look at, you know, very radical cultural ideas like completely changing child rearing or relationship free love kind of stuff.
They're exploring that.
That's a part of this.
But it's also like, hey, a lot of us are spending a lot of our time LARPing as spies.
We are spying on political movements in the area.
You know, we're going to meetings.
We're joining political organizations.
We're writing reports on it.
We're writing reports on companies around the world.
We're doing, and one version of the story is we are LARPing as spies, right?
This is a thing people want to feel important.
They want Petty doesn't even tell us why.
He just needs the info.
And the other version of this story.
So they're doing it with no, that was the other question I have was like, are they being led to believe that there is some sort of perceived end game or are they just doing shit?
As far as former members say, they were just interested in growing as people and like learning and continuing to play the game.
It was free trips to Japan.
Free trips to Japan.
Petty is like, this was all part of my learning process as a lifelong student of the world.
Now, as we'll talk about in part two, there are allegations, some of which are pretty credible, that like some of a lot of some of this spying, some degree of this spying absolutely wound up on the CIA's desk.
Now, did the CIA want it on their desk?
That is a question that we're going to talk about.
But there are connections there.
Like his wife is a CIA agent and he is running an amateur spy ring.
So I think you can see the direction things are going to go in in part two, to at least an extent.
But Jamie, that's part one.
We're done.
CoolZone and Heaven After Death00:05:07
Wow.
That actually didn't get as bad as I thought it would get.
It gets a lot worse in part two.
Oh, few.
Good.
I was hoping that something would happen.
Don't worry.
This is just set up, baby.
And now it's time for Robert to set you up to plug your pluggables.
Yeah.
Jamie, in addition to not even being in Grand Rapids when whatever happened to those people happened to them.
The green screen falls.
You can see.
You're just in Michigan.
You are also the author of the best-selling book, Rawdog.
You are a co-host of the Bechtelcast, and you are the future host.
And I actually found this out in a tarot reading I did last night of a podcast that Sophie, can we still not describe the podcast she's going to be doing for us?
You could describe it.
Oh, you can.
It's in a magazine now.
Jamie, you want to talk about it?
Yeah, it's called 15 Minutes.
It's on CoolZone.
It's on CoolZone Never Heard of It.
And it's a podcast that is going to be about the main characters of the internet, what happened and what happened to them.
And I will directly be telling you exactly how to feel about all of it each and every week, starting in March.
Now, Jamie, correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't it true that listening to your new podcast on CoolZone is the only way to receive the light of heaven after your death and be ushered into paradise?
That's what Sophie told me.
And I believe what Sophie tells me.
I was going to say, this is a Sophie says situation.
Yeah, this is a Sophie says.
Well, and also on my call, I have calls with the Pope every couple of weeks.
He really hit that.
He says he's the Pope.
He really emphasized that to me.
He's like, yes, that is, that is, I did my verification as a journalist.
A guy said he was the Pope, and I made sure his ID said Francis.
I'm not responsible for anything beyond that.
Everything else is from Hora.
I also want to plug We Be Unhoused.
It's a show that I'm lucky to be producing, but it's created and hosted by Theo Henderson, who is a formerly unhoused Angelino.
And every other Tuesday, he's covering issues from an unhoused perspective.
It's sort of hyper-local, but I think if you're unfamiliar with a lot of the issues affecting the unhoused, he's doing a lot of incredible episodes, including coming up like a whole roundtable discussion about philanthropy versus direct action.
And so yeah, check that out.
It's on IR radio, if you can believe.
Wow.
I can believe and I'm excited to listen.
And listeners, you should be excited to listen too.
And you should also, oh my God, turn the wheel.
Turn the wheel.
The car's coming right at you.
That was a mean way to end the episode.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Somebody tell me that.
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Those are shots.
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Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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