Glenn Beck and filmmakers Zachary Tritz and Christian Hansen dissect the Netflix documentary American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, investigating journalist Danny Castellero's death amid allegations of CIA operations, stolen elections, and Inslaw software theft. They detail the psychological toll of piecing together a matrix linking Philip Arthur Thompson, William Casey, and Robert Booth Nichols to the Iran-Contra affair, while distinguishing legal conspiracies from theories fueled by negativity bias. Ultimately, the discussion frames the investigation not as a quest for definitive answers, but as an exploration of an ambiguous ecosystem where truth remains elusive amidst overlapping criminal and political circles. [Automatically generated summary]
What if I were to tell you a story about a man investigating a computer scandal?
And then he ended up dead in a hotel room.
Half think it was suicide.
The other half are sure that he's murdered.
What if I were to tell you that this computer software scandal led a journalist down a rabbit hole filled with government corruption, stolen elections, millions of dollars of cartel money, drugs, guns, operated by the mafia under the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency on an Indian reservation which had its own sovereignty?
What if I were to tell you that this all involved presidents, military coordination, local law enforcement, drug chemists, actors, computer geeks, and operators with no oversight or no consequences calling the shots?
This story is so crazy.
It's 30 years old.
And the people I'm going to introduce you to have spent 10 years just trying to shape the story.
So you might, unless you've seen their documentary, you're going to be a little lost.
But believe me, it's worth it.
You have to watch the documentary.
And everybody I know said to me for weeks, Glenn, you got to watch this documentary.
You're going to love this documentary.
I don't know how I feel about this documentary.
Because there are times over a four-hour period, I watched it over four days.
There are times when you're like, oh, I know exactly what's going on.
Other times, you have no idea whether to believe it or not believe it.
But it is a sign of our times right now.
This is a story that's 30 years old, but it speaks to us.
And I'm not sure what it says.
Can you pick out the lies?
The half-truths?
Is it true?
All of it?
Is all of it garbage?
Is the appeal of conspiracy so tempting that we start putting pieces together that just don't fit?
What is in us that does this?
And what is in our government that might encourage it?
My guests today have pulled America down a rabbit hole that is either the mother of all conspiracy theories or a cautionary tale about what happens when curiosity becomes an obsession.
I don't say I want to thank these guys for doing what they did over a number of years, risking their lives.
I think.
I think.
The filmmakers of Netflix Smash Hit American Conspiracy, The Octopus Murders.
It's Zachary Tritz and Christian Hansen.
But first, before we get there, I want to talk to you about pre-born.
People talking back and forth about abortion and what should do with laws and everything else.
I really think we're missing the point.
And people say, oh, well, conservatives, they don't care about the moms.
They only care about the babies.
I care about the moms too.
And I don't like shouting at people or anything.
I think information and then help changes the world.
And the Ministry of Pre-Born, that's what they do every single day.
They first, because of people like you, they pay for a free ultrasound.
So a mom coming in, not sure what she's going to do, but leaning towards abortion, if you show her the ultrasound of the baby, she hears the arts of the heartbeat, it doubles the chances she's going to choose life.
But what people don't talk about is about 60% of these women come in and they don't necessarily want to have an abortion.
They just feel completely alone.
They don't have the resources.
Everybody in their life is saying, get rid of this.
So they do.
Well, the reason why Pre-Born has rescued almost 300,000 babies is because of love, compassion, the free ultrasounds.
But they also tell and mean it and back it up that they're going to be there for the mom two years after that baby is born.
Clothing, books, counseling, whatever they need.
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Let's change the hearts of people.
One ultrasound is $28.
Donate securely.
Just dial pound250.
Say the keyword baby.
That's pound250.
keyword baby, or go to preborn.com slash Glenn.
Christian, thanks for coming in.
Five Days of Bizarre Emotions00:06:26
I've just spent five days of my life watching the documentary, fascinated by it.
I don't know what the hell I just watched, though.
I don't know why.
I know it was wild, but I went through so many different emotions.
So many times I'm like, oh, yeah.
And then, well, maybe not.
And I don't, you've spent 10 years of your life.
I feel like I don't know what I did with those five days and if it was important or not.
Was this important for you?
Yeah, it was.
Well, I'm just, I was only laughing because I was trying to picture whether you were watching it on repeat for five days or so.
No, you know, watching the five episodes.
And, you know, there were times there were four episodes.
Is it four episodes?
We went and just went back and forth, back and forth.
And it just got more and more bizarre.
Yeah.
I mean, even when I would watch cuts as new cuts came out and, you know, I found my, I know the story so well, but I would be rewinding the wait, wait, what?
Did that really happen?
No, I told the editors and the director that this is what happened, but then just seeing it in the film with the music is just mind-blowing.
It is, I understood that you thought 51% chance he didn't kill himself, Danny, right?
At the beginning.
Default mode is to be a little bit more skeptical of those.
And you were 51%.
This is when you started 51% he did.
Yeah, I mean, by the time I kind of settled into my whatever gallop pace, you know, there were, I went through a lot of emotions going through this process of investigating this story.
And sometimes I was 100% certain, you know.
But then once I'd kind of like matured into it and settled into the investigation and I joined up with Zach, who was sort of a ballast for me, he took 51% suicide.
So I went ahead and settled into 51%.
Where are you now?
I think, yeah, so.
So after a multi-year process of investigating and making a film at the same time, which is, I'd say, unadvisable for most people to do both at the same time.
Sure.
Usually you want to kind of be done with the investigation.
But the process kind of took us, you know, we would vacillate widely between, you know, even hour by hour, just talking about the evidence and finding new things as we would go along.
And we would kind of debate back and forth.
So many times, you know, I'd be just certain that Danny had been murdered.
And sometimes I'd be absolutely certain, you know, hours later that it wasn't, that that wasn't the case.
So I would say that essentially the official story of what happened to Danny Castellero that I found pretty compelling when I first read the Department of Justice and FBI report, it says that, you know, Danny was kind of misled and fell into these world of con artists who were essentially just pulling his leg and then he wound up broke and alone,
having realized that he had basically been led astray at the end of this year-long investigation.
And their report was very detailed and pretty, you know, seemed pretty accurate to me at the time.
But that overall conclusion, I think, I feel like is ultimately very misleading.
So that idea that like, oh, he was just dealing with con artists, it's like, I think you see over the course of the four episodes that we made that he was dealing with extremely dangerous people who the authorities investigating his death, I think, knew were dangerous people or knew that they were criminals.
It's clear that they're criminals.
And why they didn't take those people more seriously is an open debate.
And so, you know, just going from the official story, I do not believe the official story.
He was the same place.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that's where I ended up, but I don't know what is true.
I will tell you that the, what's his name?
Michael Michael.
Or Conasciuto.
Yeah.
I mean, he, when he first came on camera, I'm like, that guy's the penguin.
I mean, Danny DeVito's penguin.
The guy is so clearly, you know, not right.
And he's an interesting guy.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's a very interesting guy.
But I never, he seemed to me to be the character that was the most misleading or playing a game.
But at the same time, the trajectory of his life, the things that he did experience are uncanny and, you know, and very real.
You know, having the sort of relationship with the mysterious Dr. John Philip Nichols, actually being out of the Cabazon reservation with the weapons research, having his partner brutally murdered and tortured and having, you know, whose assets were stolen by a, you know, serial killer and serial rapist with a relationship with the FBI and possibly the CIA.
I mean, that, okay, that is all stuff that actually happened to this man.
And then, you know, so he tells a few other funky stories that we can't verify, but that alone is, you know, unlike anybody else.
It was in, I think it was the last episode when he calls.
You're kind of done.
Yeah.
And he calls up and he's like, people are being killed.
I got to meet with you.
And then the camera is rolling when you meet with him and he says, I'll tell you after you finish the documentary.
Yeah.
And that's what, I mean, that just must have been like, I'm going to punch the guy in the face.
The One Key Scene00:11:25
So frustrating.
Yeah.
Did he ever tell you anything after the cameras?
Yeah.
We still talk and he still has things to say, but I don't know if it's like, I don't know if he'll be able to tell me any sort of anything of such grand scale.
You know, I think like he's a human.
He did have a lot of extraordinary experiences, but he's got his, I'm interested in his POV, what he actually knows.
You know, less what he might have.
I'm not going to have the key, the single key that unlocks the, and that's the problem with this story.
And I think that that scene, regardless of.
And Michael, if you do have the single key, you know, unlock the door.
Yeah, but it's you're driving America out of its mind.
That scene, I think, is emblematic of dealing with Michael, but dealing with a lot of people in this story, which is the feeling of, if I just had this one more piece of information, I'll finally have the journalist, the female that said, you know, you got to make a choice to get in or out.
Oh, Sherry, you know, because I thought that was brilliant.
You either have a life of this or you just say, I can't, because it'll always be the next thing, right?
Yeah.
Is that barbecues and ball games?
Is this the lesson?
What is the lesson of this?
I mean, I think what we tried to show ultimately is a very subjective rather than like objective.
We know everything.
We do not know everything.
But a very subjective view.
I think it was really well done, by the way.
I appreciate it.
And I like the way, I know you hated it on the, you know, doing it at the same time.
Oh, that's right.
But the fact that the phone rings and you could see the look on your face and you're like, oh, crap.
You just, it is, it's compelling because it was done at the same time.
I mean, no, it was exciting doing the investigation.
It's just hard.
It's just nice to know exactly where you're going before you when you call Netflix and say, we want to do this thing.
And they're like, great, how's it in?
And you're like, I have no idea.
And it was amazing for me because I was funded.
Netflix was paying for us to make a film, a show, but Zach let me continue investigating it throughout the post-production process.
So I basically had like a fully funded investigation that I was working on for years.
And that's very rare in any country.
Right.
Yeah.
But so what I was saying is just what we wanted to say, what we wanted to do was make a very subjective view of what it feels like to go into this hall of mirrors that is a portrait of the sort of governmental intelligence world, the official one, private intelligence world and the criminal world and where those three circles overlap.
And the feeling and and i think it's i think we show this by the fourth episode the intentional in my mind feeling of helplessness and madness that you you grasp with when everybody is slippery every truth is like hard is hard to pin down and that's i think an intentional thing oh yeah and i think doug vaughn one of the journalists that we talked to he says it really well when he says that um confusion leads to paralysis right and so Yeah,
I mean, you could say it's a really frustrating thing.
I mean, I think that we maybe don't give ourselves enough credit in the show for the things that we did nail down or did expose for the first time.
I mean, you made huge progress.
I just don't, you know, I was just so struck by the honesty that you had on, I gotta, you gotta have a choice.
Maybe I have to just go back to my life and just never know.
Right.
And, and, and, you know, I'd like you to expand a little bit on, you said, uh, um, I don't look at things the same way.
Well, watching the documentary, I don't look at things the same way either, but I'm, I'm not sure how I look at them yet.
I mean, I just experienced, you know, in four hours what you experienced over 10 years of your life.
So, but I'm not sure what I'm left with.
I mean, so just to expand on your last question about sort of what, what's the theme.
Right.
And I'm not really very good at packaging things into themes, but one, what I wanted to say was that at least three individuals whose loved ones, siblings or,
or parents, or, and, or, and also a grandparent were taken out in hits by nebulous intelligence agencies have reached out to us.
They stumbled on the show and watched it and they thanked us for having given them a way to talk about their family history.
I mean, we didn't investigate those stories, but we are aware of those stories.
You would feel absolutely crazy.
I mean, you're by design.
You are meant to feel crazy.
And I've found this in just some of the things that we've investigated, where it just gets so intentionally complex that it makes it almost insane to try to explain it because you're like, no, I mean, I saw your board where you're like, you know, your tinfoil on your window is away from being crazy.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
The one guy that, well, let me go back to Danny's death.
I haven't seen a lot of suicide scenes, but I was never really addressed.
There were bloody handprints all over.
The guy cut his wrist to the tendons.
So, A, how are you cutting the other wrist?
But then, I mean, is the story that he got up and he was like, hey, I need a towel.
I mean, I've never seen any of that.
Yeah, I mean, we don't go into deeply into the forensics of the crime scene because we only had a certain amount of time, you know, in the story.
And it was so complicated to tell the story that Danny was telling.
But, you know, and it would have kind of been a totally different show, really.
And we're just not like forensic pathologists.
So, but, but just to explain it further, you know, since we did look through the autopsy and we read the report, they sent that report to a Connecticut forensics lab run by Dr. Lee.
Dr. Lee Henry.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's a very famous guy.
He's recently come under some criticism for potentially having made up something else in a trial that a couple people went to jail for a long time over.
But that's not good.
Kind of hurt your credibility a bit.
But, you know, he was famous for being at the OJ trial.
He was at that show, The Staircase.
He's a little part of that.
Anyway, and we called him actually, and he was, maybe this is too in the weeds, but it was pretty amazing if you're aware of him, like calling him and I started telling him about the case.
And this is 30 years after he's done tens of thousands of autopsies and crime scenes.
And I started describing it.
And he's like, oh, in the bathtub.
And there was a razor sitting on it.
And it was like he could picture the entire crime scene.
It was unbelievable.
But yes, his analysis of it was that Danny had stood up at some point and hit the wall or brushed the wall.
But it's, yeah, I mean, you look at the, you look at the, I don't, I, I, to me, that doesn't necessarily mean that he was alone or not.
I mean, somebody can stand up for a variety of reasons.
Yeah, yeah.
And so it's hard to kind of what did he say about cutting the tendons and how did he cut the other arm?
Well, we, we had, um, we actually sent that to another medical examiner later on.
A non-partial family friend.
Okay.
Yeah, who had nothing to do with the case.
And, and he, he was like, well, it's a suicide.
And we're like, oh, okay.
Like, tell us about that.
He's like, well, Dr. Frost, who did the autopsy, didn't do you any favors.
And we're like, what?
He's like, there's just not a lot of detail in this report.
And we're like, well, that is not a lot of favor.
Like, how can you be so certain that this was?
And so he claimed that the depth of the cuts in the autopsy is not specific enough to know one way or another.
So, you know, the...
But then there are also photos.
There's photos, but there's also the paramedic that we talked to, Don, who we interview in the show.
And he talks about his, that's why we had to include his story, really, is because he was the one who had the experience of having tried to pick up the wrist.
And he says.
Yeah, I thought he was compelling.
He's now actually, we don't mention this.
He was a paramedic at the time.
He's now a medical examiner himself.
So it almost lends him more credibility in my mind.
But yeah, so the official documents do not give us quite enough to know the depth of the cut on the ligaments.
So we just had to go by Don's.
And then the woman who's at the end, who her mother was an eyewitness, said she saw two people.
Right.
And, you know, the drawing's pretty remarkable.
You know, you saw the drawing, you're like, oh, I've seen him in episode, you know, one and two.
Why was that never pursued, do you think?
I couldn't say.
We tried to talk to every detective still alive that was part of the Martinsburg Police Department.
And we tried to talk to that FBI agent who re-investigated the case, and no one wanted to talk to us.
So we would just be speculating as to the question of why.
We know that they had the information.
But my logical guess as to why is because, you know, look at me.
I spent 10 years trying to say what happened.
It was much easier.
You know, I didn't accept the suicide conclusion.
I wanted more answers, and that led me down this wild path.
But to just say suicide, it's just a lot easier.
You can finish the investigation.
Have a nice summer.
Maybe go on vacation.
The Wild Path Beyond Suicide00:15:54
Yeah.
So as I'm watching this, because everybody's saying, you got to watch this.
You got to watch this.
And I didn't know what to expect.
I didn't know what I was walking into.
That's a good way to go.
Yeah.
Do you remember the case from the 90s?
Do you remember it at all?
No, you know, I was in broadcast at the time.
I don't, it doesn't ring a bell.
It doesn't mean I don't remember it, but not off the top of my head.
I don't.
Was Bill O'Reilly still in it?
Yeah.
He covered it for Inside Edition.
Yeah.
Peralto covered the Cabazon portion.
It was interesting to see there's a lot of older legacy media.
Leslie Stahl covered the Inslaw case.
Right.
So this started out as a computer software story, which I mean, it's as banal as possible.
Yeah, but no, but I mean, it makes sense that if you are in an agency, it makes sense that's exactly what they would do and are needed at the time and probably still doing stuff like that.
I would assume.
Yeah.
I mean, you would be remiss.
Our tax dollars wouldn't be properly spent if you weren't doing that kind of activity.
That's what these agencies are supposed to do, but not necessarily in the way they were doing it.
We're not supposed to steal intellectual property if that's what happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You believe that that is what happened?
Well, I'm just being careful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
It seems like it.
Yeah, it does.
But if you're watching it, you know, you never know.
Yeah.
So, okay, so then that's happening during the Reagan administration, and that fits right with Iran-Contra.
Yeah.
And then, you know, also the Indian reservation fits.
You'd be making weapons used by the all of this stuff fits.
If I'm looking for a place where, you know, I don't think the government actually cares about the Constitution anymore, but at the time when they at least pretended to, perfect place to do it is in a separate nation inside our own country.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's something that I would love to see people, you know, a little more scholarship on or books or whatever, investigations of, you know, this idea of using sovereign land for projects that are not allowed to take place in the United States because of whatever laws, you know.
That didn't even occur to me.
And when you guys showed it, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's brilliant.
Of course, it's brilliant.
It's brilliant.
John Nichols, the guy who was the tribal leader, tribal, sorry, the administrator there, whose backstory is, as we show in this show, pretty strange and seemingly connected.
Seemingly he's in all of the right places and all the right times before anti-leftist coups happen in South America.
He shows up at this Native American Reservation and has this, you know, we explained, this idea of sovereignty that they can do whatever they want on this Indian reservation in Southern California.
And I think it's just the, I don't want to say sinister, but it's kind of brilliant in its own way.
And it just makes me wonder, of course, like, yeah, what else were they doing?
Was this the only place?
I'm not really.
Oh, I can't imagine it is.
I mean, you know, there's there is brilliance and evil.
You know, there's a lot of things that are happening now and in the past.
You have to look back and go, this was really quite brilliant, the way this was the 1980 election.
Yeah, so tell me about that because that would just kind of seem to be brushed over.
Well, we have to cover a lot of ground.
Yeah, I know.
We're just like having a lot of money.
There's like a documentary on every single piece.
It's a whole series.
It's a whole series.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there is basically on each part.
A lot of people's complaint about crime documentaries is that they drag on for too long.
But ours is like, we just packed so much.
Oh, I know.
You'll just be like, it's, you know, the 1980 election.
And you're like, wait, what?
Wait, what?
Yeah.
Well, so there's really like with what's called the October Surprise, there's two, I think, main stories that I'd like to put out there, which is that there's our, the one that appears in our show is Michael Rocanosciuto's version of what happened, which is he says that the promise software, which we've talked about, is a lot of people.
It's brilliant software, made to tie all of the court cases and all of the files together.
To the Justice Department.
Right.
So that you can search them and find relationships.
Right.
And so then it was used.
It was supposedly taken and used covertly for what purpose?
We're spying on our, you know, the United States enemies and then friends and their own spy agencies so that you can collect the data that whatever their spy agencies are.
One of the things, a smaller story that came out in the Snowden revelations was that the app, the cell phone app, Angry Birds, the game, had a back door in it.
So basically the idea is that you give a software to somebody.
In one case, it could be Angry Birds.
In another case, it could be their intelligence agency's database software.
And it has a back door into it.
And so whoever knows about the back door can go in and siphon out, you know, whatever information they want out of the back.
So since it was stolen for whatever reason, I'm sure Bill Hamilton would have been amenable to licensing this whatever.
Just who invented the software.
But it had to be, I guess, sold through third parties to other countries.
I guess that makes sense because if he was the official licensee to the U.S. government, then you're trying to sell it to Canada with the back door.
You'd want to sort of not have that change.
Generally wouldn't go, oh, well, I'm sure the United States is clean.
Yeah.
Here, Saddam.
What are you thinking about like this software?
So going from that idea of this powerful, valuable piece of software, and the October surprise part of that from Michael's perspective is that that valuable piece of software and that valuable off-the-book, off-label contract where you could sell it around the world is given to this guy, Earl Bryan, who was a friend of Ronald Reagan's, was in his cabinet when he was governor of California.
And by the 80s, Reagan is president.
And that this contract, this piece of software, the source code for it is given to him as payment.
I mean, this is where it gets crazy.
Payment for the work that he did getting Reagan elected.
And this is Michael's allegation.
Michael's the guy who says, I am the one who installed the back door.
I programmed the thing.
And I was over in October.
And absolutely believable.
The kid, I mean, when he was a kid, he was a brilliant scientist.
He's a brilliant scientist.
So he's over in Iran.
Yeah, the idea that he's over in Iran with O'Brien.
They're giving $40 million to the Ayatollah to hold the hostages that are being held in the U.S. Embassy.
That's his version of the story.
I just want to say.
We've never seen any passports from Michael that shows that he's in Iran.
We've never seen any photos with him and O'Brien.
We have no evidence that he was there in Iran.
But there's a lot of stories and evidence about what generally the October surprise, which I would say, let's call that Michael's October surprise.
And then there's this sort of more mainstream October surprise that people like Bob Perry, Robert Perry, who broke the Iran, big part of the Iran-Contra story at AP, and Gary Sick, these guys who are more mainstream of the conspiracy and the October surprise.
You know, talking about William Casey.
If you're talking about the logic of a guy named William Casey, who's kind of a background boogeyman for the entire octopus conspiracy, really, throughout Danny's investigation, the journalist Danny, who Christian was looking into the murder of, or, you know, strange death of.
William Casey's a guy, I just think he's a prism through which you can see all of this.
And the October surprise is a really important part of that, is you have a guy who starts out in the OSS.
He's a lawyer who starts out in the OSS, which is the predecessor to the CIA in World War II.
He then is involved with various companies.
And he was an amazing OSS agent.
He did what was believed could not be done, which was to get agents into Hitler's inner circle.
Right.
Which was like, you know, no one thought it could be done.
Right.
An incredible spy.
Incredible spy.
And he was also, we don't even mention this, outside counsel for this company called Wackenhut, which was the joint venture at the Native American reservation that we've already talked about.
They were in partnership with...
It's like Blackwater, except worse.
You know what Blackwater does.
But now here's the stuff that you don't know they might be doing, right?
It was the predecessor to that, a private security company.
And they also were the first private prison in America.
They invented that concept for an immigration detention center.
But so you have William Casey, and then he becomes the campaign manager of Reagan for his presidential election.
And then he becomes CIA director.
And then the day he's supposed to show up for his hearings in Iran-Contra, he conveniently dies.
Let's not go there.
Just keep throwing logs on the fire.
I'm just throwing logs on the fire.
But I'm just saying that Reagan was surrounded by intelligence people.
His vice president was the former head of the director of intelligence.
That's scary as well.
George H.W. Bush.
Watch what we say here in Texas.
And you've got William Casey, who is his campaign manager.
It's not outside of the realm of William Casey's area of expertise to manipulate world events for outcomes that he wants to happen and have the capability to do that.
Also, Bob Perry, the journalist, who he wrote a book called Trick or Treason?
Trick or Treason.
It came out in 1993.
He was able to basically prove the October surprise down to the point of finding Bill Casey's passport.
And, you know, he was an international businessman and super spy chief.
He traveled a lot.
So he had a lot of passport books.
And the only one that he didn't have in his archive was that one.
And if he had been able to, that passport will tell you definitively whether he Wires Madrid.
Yeah.
So let me go to, we've already gone so far afield.
Sorry.
I know, that's all right.
I mean, that's the whole thing.
I know, but I mean, that's what this whole thing is.
You can just take, you know, roads off of any of this and just go, and you don't know where reality begins and ends.
It's crazy.
Well, we tried to at least, I mean, we tried to do it in a way that is not as, hopefully not as crazy as how we're making it sound, which is we tried to do it step by step and back it up with as much evidence as you did a great job as we could.
Thank you.
And where we don't have evidence to be very clear that we're being subjective or hearing somebody's perspective on what you're seeing, right?
But it does very quickly get into realms of, I mean, I think that some of the most damning or strange or mystifying things for me going through this experience were the things that were actually reported widely in the news.
And just when you see them, how Danny saw them, which is that they're interconnected based on the people who were involved.
Things like Iran Contra, BCCI, this bank that was working with terrorists and drug dealers and intelligence agencies, the savings and loan crisis, which was allegedly tied up with CIA operations, all these banks, these assassins, rogue spies.
Many of those things were reported on in the 80s and up until Danny's death, but Danny was one of the few people kind of ties in.
They're all the same people involved with all these things.
And that's what the octopus is, right?
Well, not the savings alone.
There was not a Bush involved in that.
Let me go to Robert Booth Nichols.
You guys talked to some scary people.
This guy chilled me to the bone.
Yeah.
He seemed like he just seemed very confident that things happen and nobody's going to question me.
And, okay, maybe I've killed people.
Maybe I, I mean, he just, he had that air about him of stone cold killer in a business suit.
Is that what you guys think?
I'm like, which door is he going to come out of?
Yeah.
Because he may or may not still be alive.
Do you believe he is?
I think he might still be alive.
There's a chance.
I think.
He would be 80, right?
Yeah, he'd be 80.
So he's still spooky at 80 if he's alive.
He's still spooky.
That guy.
Who is the scariest person that you encountered?
Well, okay.
Bob allegedly died in 2009?
Yeah.
And we didn't meet him, but we have a lot of documents and things like that.
We met him.
We met him.
I saw enough.
We talked to a lot of people who did know him and Sherry, who we interviewed, has an amazing story about going to his apartment, which I think is, you know.
Tell the story.
Yeah.
So Sherry Seymour investigated mainly the West Coast portion of The Octopus or this story, this Danny story.
And she met with, she started working on it about three months after Danny died.
And she was calling all of his sources, much like Christian did.
But this is in 1991 and 1992.
And Robert Booth Nichols is one of, is a guy who Danny talked to extensively on the phone and met in person and was, you know, I would say a suspect in Danny's death.
And at least for us.
And so she went over to his apartment to ask him about these things.
And amazingly, he agreed and he was there with his wife.
And at the end of that meeting, he shows her this tape, puts on this tape, which I think they were talking about sort of the manipulatability of reality and perception and in the media and things like that.
The Manipulated JFK Tape00:07:38
And it's the Zapruder film, the JFK assassination film.
And he is playing it.
And then it's not the one that you've seen before.
It's the one where the driver turns around and shoots JFK in the head.
And then she's like, wait, what?
And this is 1992.
When the Zapruder film isn't, you couldn't just go on the internet and watch it immediately.
And it wasn't easy to make fake films.
And then he shows her another tape.
And that tape, he says, is the one that everybody's seen on the media.
And he pauses it, and there's a half of a tree missing.
And he says, this is the one everybody's seen has actually been manipulated.
I showed you the real one.
This one is the one that everybody's seen and it's been manipulated.
And when I heard that story, I went to the internet immediately.
I was like, wait, is there a tree missing in this thing?
And no, there's no tree missing.
And I think that Sherry's conclusion from that story is similar to the one that I take, which is that he's showing her two manipulated tapes.
He's showing her one where the driver is shooting him.
That's been doctored.
He's showing her one where the tree has been cut off.
That's been doctored.
And it's in order to make it so that if she tells the story of meeting Robert with Nichols and what he told her and all the things that he said, then she tells that story and somebody's like, uh-huh, uh-huh.
And what else?
And there was a, and the driver killed him, and you're crazy.
Okay.
You know, just to make discredit her.
So I think it's a very powerful portrait of Bob and who he was and his ability to kind of manipulate people and manipulate reality and the world around him.
And it just makes him endlessly fascinating.
But I think it does a good job of making him seem just like a little crazy and a little weird.
But I think he was a lot more than that.
Yeah, I didn't think he was crazy.
I didn't think he was a little weird.
He was the one that didn't come off.
To me, he didn't come off crazy.
He came off like, no, we had a deal.
This is what the deal was.
And you need somebody killed?
Okay.
We actually have his voice in the show, which I think is like anybody who had heard these stories would be like, oh, this guy sounds like he's a JFK conspiracy theorist or something like that.
But hearing him talk and of what happened in 2008 with him, he's chilling.
I mean, yeah.
You asked who the most dangerous person that we encountered, you know, not necessarily met, but encountered in this.
I would have to give that prize to Philip Arthur Thompson, though.
Yeah.
Really?
Who's the serial killer in San Francisco?
He's got to be the person I would never want to meet.
Right.
Yeah.
Tell his story.
So he, Philip Arthur Thompson, he shows up in episode three.
He's the one that like hogties Michael Orcanoshuto's partner in such a way that his legs are choking him.
And so he's like slowly dying.
The gravity of holding up your legs, you eventually just can't do it anymore.
The way Jesus died of suffocation on the ground.
He couldn't hold himself up.
If that story is true, too, who knows?
But yeah, so Philip Arthur Thompson was a serial, well, a career criminal.
And one of the things that he liked to do was to rape and murder women.
And he also was kind of like a major thief.
He would rob antique stores, jewelry stores.
Mainly in California.
Mainly in California, all up and down the coast of California.
And he loved robbing drug dealers and stealing their guns and drugs.
Yeah.
He was a prolific criminal.
He was also a protected FBI informant.
What exactly he was helping the FBI out with, that was so valuable that he should be allowed to unleashed onto the world, I don't know.
I think a lot of jewelry store owners would be very resentful of that.
No, I mean, also just all kinds of people.
Yeah, I mean, the jewelry store.
You know, okay, I'm the federal government.
He's got something big to help us on jewelry store.
Okay.
The rape and murder.
There was original.
He usually would murder the women after he'd raped them.
But one of them, I think he was working with a guy, Mark Masterson, or convinced him not to.
And I've tracked that lady down, and she was 16 at the time.
And I tried to find her because I'm continuing my investigation of Philip Arthur Thompson.
And she drank herself to death.
And I have to assume that those two events are connected.
At 58, she drank herself to death.
But yeah, so he was somebody who, when he would get arrested, would almost always find himself out of jail almost immediately on major charges, murder, you know.
You showed the newspapers saying, you know, and then his rap sheet that shows that you're just like in, out, in, out.
Yeah.
And it's like you have somebody who's he's going on trial for murder or something else.
And then, you know, the lead witness dies.
And it's just like, well, the lead witness was murdered before he was testifying.
Like, could these events be more possibly interrelated?
And so, yeah, he stayed out committing all kinds of crimes for years until he eventually went to jail for life because it was just, I think the evidence was just absolutely overwhelming.
And it was a DNA case.
And I think that when he was committing these crimes, DNA evidence didn't exist, right?
So it was hard for them to argue against that.
So he wasn't hedging against that possibility.
But hey, when you could just get away with whatever.
Yeah, you get away with murder and just walk away.
But it really is a scary sort of open question about what he was exactly doing with the various federal agencies, not just the FBI.
And we made a little bit of headway into that.
And I don't want to speculate too much on what it was, but it seemed to be beyond just kind of local street crimes.
It seemed to be there was around him, there was the idea that he was helping the federal government with larger political, you know, geopolitical things like getting raising money and gun running and things like that.
So anyway, you got to pick your business partners wisely.
And I would not choose Philip Arthur Thompson.
And we knocked on the FBI agent store that was running Philip Thompson, and that was also terrifying.
Walking Away From Pain00:06:40
So, I mean, he's terrified.
Tell me about that.
We can't really talk too much about that, but hopefully more on that, you know, in the future.
Zach was super scared that night.
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I couldn't paint.
I'm kind of a prolific painter now.
I can paint a room in one.
No, I began to get my life back.
Now I take it every day and I have my hands back.
I have that pain gone.
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How much time did you guys spend?
I mean, the whole series opens up with a phone call.
You're going to get yourself killed.
I don't know.
When you started it, you were, you know, in your 20s.
I think you're in 26.
Yeah.
You're in a little invincible.
How many times did you look at each other and go, we should not be doing this?
What are we doing?
A lot.
A fair amount.
Yeah.
But there's also over our head was that like we had to finish.
Because of Netflix?
Partially.
And for our own reasons.
I don't think that's fair.
No.
No.
They pull the plug and you're going to be like, oh, I got walking.
It's worth dying.
No.
But we, no, but we, no, we did have to finish.
Like, cause we started it and we weren't going to like get, we weren't going to back down.
Right.
Like we had to finish also.
Was there, what was the closest moment where you were like, if I, if I live in a country where you can get killed as like kind of a, I'm a pretty non-threatening guy investigating a case from 30 years ago.
Like just, just take me out then.
Yeah.
You know, just make it quick because this is, that would be absurd.
You know, this is America.
It's a free country.
We're allowed to investigate things.
I think said an invitation.
Careful what you wish for.
I'm not wishing for it.
I'm just saying like, no, I know.
Like, let's.
Yeah.
No one would hope that you could do an investigation like this without.
And that was our experience.
We had a lot of people tell us that we would suffer dire consequences.
And to whatever credit, we have not suffered those consequences.
The show has come out and what it is, is what it is.
I mean, we're grateful for that.
The best place to survive is in the spotlight.
That's how we looked at it.
Yeah.
What is what was there a time where you thought you were this close to walking away?
What was that point, if there was?
I don't think walking away, but there were some moments where you can.
Or at least walking away from this line.
Well, there were just not worth dying.
There were times when I said to Christian, I was just like, this story or this part of the story is simply not worth dying for.
You know, it's just like, no, nobody is going to, you know, benefit so greatly from us uncovering this thing that it was worth our lives.
You know, especially when Phil Thompson drugs and Phil Thompson, who we're just talking about, he, I was like, Zach, we got to do the Phil Thompson.
We got to get Phil Thompson in here, you know, the serial murderer rapist punk from San Francisco.
How old is he now?
He died.
He died like two years ago while we were editing.
And so then it was like, all right.
So Zach, because he could have, he was a state prisoner in California, which has the most lax parole system.
And he could have at any point paroled out.
And if he didn't like the show, wreaked havoc upon our lives.
But then he died of a heart attack in prison.
And so then we were like, Zach was like, okay, fine.
We're putting him in the show.
Wow.
Yeah.
And that was a cool thing about having a kind of ever-evolving long project, you know, that morphed and evolved and changed.
And 30 years old.
And 30 years old.
30 years old.
Yeah.
Other people died.
There was a legendary spy from Israel named Rafaitan, who is involved in different ways in this story, allegedly, with the promise software.
And we got his cell phone number from a friend of mine in Israel.
And we obviously wanted to do our, we wanted to get our research like under way, you know, like really know what we wanted to ask him before we called him.
We felt like if he even picked up, we'd only have one shot.
And then within a month of getting that cell phone number, he died.
You know, he was old, you know, and people, that's kind of like, I mean, he had a, you know, he captured Adolph Eichmann and something.
Rafi the stinker.
That's what he was called.
So it didn't improve my feeling of trust in really anything.
You know, because it all seems so real and plausible.
It all seems, I mean, when you look at it as an octopus and it's all connected, it seems overwhelming that that could be true.
But as you take it like you did, one piece at a time, every piece you're like, yeah, that works.
Paddling Out to the Buoy00:11:14
Yeah, that's how we wanted it to feel was you were sort of like paddling out and you kind of go to this buoy and you're like, I can still see land.
Like I'm fine out here.
And then we go to the next buoy and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's a little further away.
And then a few of those later, you're like, I'm in the middle of the ocean and I have no bearings anymore, which I think is what we wanted to capture of how we felt like Danny, who spent a year doing this and Christian spent 12 years doing this and me spending several years doing this.
That's the general feeling that you get when you go through this and you're just like, what is real anymore?
Did your families have, I mean, 12 years.
Your family or any of your friends or anybody just go, dude, you are, you're gone.
In like the first, like 2015 was my worst year of this, like emotionally, physically, mentally.
And explain that to me.
I mean, I was just like, I'd like withdrawn.
I'd had a relationship with a business relationship with a literary agent.
And my background is as a photojournalist.
And my first book was going to be this insanely complicated nonfiction investigation about this, at that point, 26-year-old case.
And I was way in over my head, but I wanted to complete this.
I wanted to get it out.
And I was like, just like really like, and I was just alone and just struggling, not sleeping a lot, like trying to like, if I just stay up a little longer, I'll figure it out.
And, you know, I was like kind of miserable, I think, and lonely.
And I, you know, was broke and my other career as a photojournalist was suffering.
I wasn't taking good care of myself.
I mean, you, I mean, I, I kind of block a lot of that stuff out, but you were there.
Yeah, we go over to Christian's house and he's like been sitting in the same position for two days straight.
It's like, did you sleep?
And it's like, like a couple of days ago, that kind of thing.
And it was just, it was just bleak.
And his sisters and I and our friends all talked about it.
It was just like, you know, is it time to intervene?
And like, how do we get Christian?
There's, you know, the stages of grief.
There's also like the stages of conspiracy.
And I think one of the stages where you go to a dinner party or a barbecue and you try, you pick, you know, anybody from the crowd and you try to convince them of this thing that you've been studying, you know, because if you can convince someone at the dinner party and they believe you, then it will help you believe you because you're like struggling with this like complex, untangible.
And doesn't really work out well, does it?
No, it doesn't.
Especially for the guests at the dinner party.
I know I'd be like, all right, I'm just going to go to this barbecue and I'm not going to talk about the case.
Okay.
I'm just going to go.
I'm just going to be normal.
And then like, I'd, you know, that would like, it was a process I, you know, kept repeating.
And I referred to it earlier in the show.
Like I've sort of matured into this and I can talk about other things too now, you know, I think.
Can you?
But it's all con, but it is all consuming and it changes your worldview enough to where you even our editors that worked on it.
Sorry to keep interrupting you, Glenn, but like our, our, all the editors that we worked with, you know, they're just like, they're guys that they cut, they cut movies and shows.
Right.
And they all became like, you know, very suspicious.
They changed their worldview of like geopolitics.
And you can't unsee things.
Yeah.
You know, and so when, and, you know, when it's, you know, there's also, there's so many conspiracy theories out there that are just so much bullcrap.
But there are a few.
The really well-designed ones, I think, are you, they, they have certain hallmarks and it is the same like 25 people, you know, or 10 people that are just like, wait, wait, wait.
This connects here because of that one person.
And once you start seeing that matrix, it's hard because you feel either alone or you feel like you're seeing something that nobody else is seeing and it's right there.
Yeah.
Does that make sense to you?
Yeah.
And that's usually when your friends go.
Maybe you should stop talking about this.
Maybe you should stop.
Before you were like, let's roll up our sleeves and go, did you, was there talk about, let's get him off this?
Yeah, I mean, we did.
And it was a years-long process.
I mean, I didn't start making this.
Christian started talking about this back in 2012 or whenever we started.
We've been friends since before.
We were friends for, you know, we grew up together.
And so it was mainly a process for me of like.
Oh, that's an interesting story.
And then just worried about Christian for like his own mental health.
And then when he's telling me more about the people that he was reaching out to, and then it was like worry for his physical safety.
It's like, these people don't seem like they might have your best interest at heart that you're talking to.
And then the problem is that you kind of hear enough about this story to where it grabs onto you.
It puts its little hooks in you.
And then you're like, well, that is kind of weird.
What happened with like family?
I think you even said this.
It's got to feel like if I just get this.
We just get this.
Yeah.
And it just opens up another door of craziness.
I think that what we tried to do, though, was try to put some blinders on and that we didn't make a movie that's about conspiracy theories or about the, you know, the social history of conspiracy theories or anything that's really past 1992 or three.
You know, Danny died in 1991.
We didn't graft this story onto the present.
And there's conspiracy, conspiracy theories have become this boogeyman that is in the popular culture incessantly now.
And why isn't that?
I don't know for sure, but 1991, the year that Danny died, is such a significant year for conspiracy theories.
It's the year that the movie JFK by Oliver Stone came out.
It's the year that, do you know who David Icke is?
He's like a British conspiracy theorist.
He talks about lizard people.
He was a BBC sports announcer who goes on the Wogan show in 1991 and says that he's the reincarnation of Jesus.
Danny Castellero dies.
I mean, Behold a Pale Horse.
This book, Behold a Pale Horse.
Major Conspiracy.
It was just like, I think they called that summer, 1991, the summer of conspiracies because it was right at the end of Iran-Contra.
And there was an October surprise investigation going on.
The Inslaw case was.
All these conspiracies were bubbling up in Washington.
But, you know, I don't exactly know why conspiracy theories are such a topic to du jour now.
I do know the feeling of what they do to your brain.
And we don't really talk about this in the show very much.
But my theory is that in the absence of knowledge of information, the human brain makes up the worst possible fills in the gaps with the worst possible possibilities, right?
And so you're pre-programmed to see the negative.
I'm losing my hearing badly.
And what happens is your brain fills in what you can't hear and it just it just takes bits and pieces.
And it like I've heard my wife say in just crazy things.
You know what I mean?
And I go, what did you just say?
What?
It makes no sense that she would say something.
And it's just the brain filling in what it thought it heard by grabbing just a little bit.
And I think that's, I think conspiracy theories or the idea of like the government is doing this or, you know, these people are doing this or whatever group you don't like is doing this.
I think it's a very natural mental process.
I think it's based on psychological concepts like negativity bias and things like that.
We won't go into it.
But what I'm trying to really get back to is for us, we really tried to put blinders on and just focus on this story.
And it's a very complicated story.
But just saying like, what can we actually, what is a conspiracy theory and what's an actual conspiracy?
Which has a legal definition where, you know, multiple people get together and do a crime.
There's a difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy fact.
Right.
You know, that's where conspiracies.
And it's gotten so muddled.
Some people refer to, some people call it conspiracy theories.
They just say conspiracy.
I don't believe in conspiracies.
Like in our show, when we called the FBI agent, Scott Erskine, he says, oh, you know, Danny Casolero, he was, well, you know, he was talking to a lot of people who were who believed in conspiracies and were involved in conspiracies.
And we're like, okay.
But he means to say conspiracy theory.
Give him the benefit of the consciousness.
No, I'm just saying.
I just think that that is an example of how people are so muddled.
So because I drew some things to today that maybe you didn't intend at all.
And that would be, I guess, a good thing.
Or is it what you want me to believe?
But I drew, you know, in times where things, where you just don't have good answers.
Like, you know, the Titanic, we're going way too fast.
What the hell are we doing going, you know, in around the icebergs at this speed?
Well, they didn't want to tell you that there was an out-of-control fire, you know, in the burners.
It wasn't going to burn everything to the ground.
They just could not control it.
So just open it up and let it run.
When you don't have the facts, you look at things and go, well, I'm not getting the truth.
And so you're more open.
And the way to stop all this stuff is to just have some transparency.
Danny's Medals and the Truth00:03:36
But I don't even know what's transparent anymore because the internet has made things.
You can find whatever.
And now with deep fakes, it's going to get much worse.
Because you'll be able to make that Zapruder film.
You know what I mean?
There's an Unsolved Mysteries episode about the Danny Castellero case that came out in 1993.
And at the end of it, they talk about this event that occurred at Danny's funeral where a man in a military uniform puts a medal on Danny's casket.
And then, you know, Ann Clink, who's in our show, and different friends and family of Danny were like, who was that guy?
And why did he do that?
And what does it mean?
And the way that the Unsolved Mysteries episode is, it's a recreation.
The guy looks like Colin Powell kind of.
And like he's, you know, and with the music and the editing, you're like, well, what was Danny like actually like a spy?
Like, why would he do that?
Like, what was he doing?
And then so it was very significant to me that Danny wrote about computers at a time when not many people did.
And then that led him to the story about computers that led him to all of the rest of it, you know, the promised software story.
So when I was working on research for the book in the early days, I was calling people that he worked with at this computer industry trade publication called Computer Age.
And there were a few names on the masthead of the publications that I was able to track down.
And they introduced me to other people that worked there.
And they introduced me to other people that worked there.
And I met, I called this guy that worked in the print shop.
All I knew was his name.
I called him and I said, hi, my name is Christian.
I'm writing a book about Danny Castellero.
And he was like, I've been waiting 25 years for this call.
And I was like, wow.
Okay.
And he was like, have you ever seen the Unsolved Mystery show about this case?
And I was like, yeah, I have.
He's like, I'm the guy.
And I was like, what guy?
Which guy?
He's like, I'm the guy.
I'm the guy.
I'm like, what guy?
And he's like, I'm the guy that put the medal on Danny's casket.
And I was like, wait, you were?
And he's like, yeah.
And I was like, well, first of all, tell me the story and then tell me why you didn't come forward.
You know that there's this big question about who this person is.
And he said, well, you know, me and Danny, we were friends at work.
We were work friends.
And after work, we'd sometimes have a beer in the parking lot of the office building where their publication was based.
And Danny used to say that he'd wished that he'd gone to war because he wished he'd gotten a medal.
And this guy was like a highly decorated soldier from Vietnam.
He was in deep, heavy, horrible combat.
And, you know, he's like, Danny, you're good.
You don't want the medal.
And Danny's like, no, I wish I had the medal.
And this guy, you know, had been through hell and he had a bunch of medals to show for it.
And so he thought about that conversation the day that he was going to the funeral and he decided to put on his military uniform, like his formal attire and put the medal on, give Danny his best medal.
Wow.
And that was just something he did for himself.
He just, and it was something, a private moment between him and his late friend that, you know, so then I was like, well, why did you wait?
The Power of Friendship00:06:30
Like, why are you not, you know, why, why did you let this mystery surround it?
And he said, look, man, if they can't figure out who I was, they're not going to figure out what happened to Danny.
So, you know, you found me and I want you to figure out what happened to Danny.
Something like that.
But so like you're saying with the conspiracy theories, you do, you, you know, your mind goes everywhere.
Who's the guy that put the medal in the casket?
Who was that?
You know, and it's just a guy, you know?
In my job, I've had people come up to me and say, I know what you were saying about such and such.
You're like, what the hell was I saying?
Well, I know what you said, but I heard you.
No, I didn't.
No.
You know, there are people out there that do want to go into this space.
I don't know why, but they do want to go into that space and connect everything together.
And connect everything to everything.
You know, some things are connected.
Some things are not.
You know?
Yeah.
Right.
I think that that was our main issue, right?
And we knew we knew in the office that people on the internet would say that the show was a limited hangout, which is a term that means that, you know, an intelligence agency admits to part of a larger thing in order to like distract and obfuscate the larger crime.
Sacrificial lamb for the larger.
And then sure enough, you know, yeah, it's on the internet that this show is supposedly a limited hangout.
But no, we did the best we could.
So you're not CIA spies or we honestly, like it would make our lives so much easier.
No, I know.
If the recruiters are out there, probably be a lot happier, too.
Me?
No, I mean, if you were a, if you were a spy and you had the answer, you would assume you'd get more access.
Yeah, you'd have access.
Right.
I wouldn't want to do any like wet work, though.
I'm screamish about blood.
Yeah.
Yeah, the wet work part would be.
I've got morality.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have morality.
So final final thought.
What do you walk away with or hope that the audience walks away?
Because I'm not sure.
And those are usually the best things.
You'll go to a movie or you'll read something and you're like, I don't know.
I know that affected me.
I know that may have changed me, but I'm not sure how yet.
I think, and that's very rare that that happens.
And I think you captured that.
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we can't inherently solve every mystery that is that's brought up by the octopus, right?
But I almost, and I, and, but I, we also, I don't think are leaving it with like a, oh, like, just wait for season two or like, this is a completely ambiguous ending and nobody knows anything.
It's like, I think that we bring people on a journey and show for the first time often new information and new facts and draw conclusions about the relationships between all these people and these string of murders and crimes.
But I do think that there is, if you could say it's ambiguous, it's like, I look at it like we're making almost like a nature documentary.
Like we're studying an ecosystem and there's no real beginning and end to an ecosystem.
You, you know, you make a nature show and you see the hunt and you see the aftermath and you see the relationships between all the different animals and character, you know, treat them as characters.
That's a little bit what we're doing with the, some of these conspiracies or political scandals or intelligence operations.
Like we're, we're showing our view, our experience of how they relate and they work as, you know, people who have done the research or whatever, done a lot of research.
And so I think taking away from that feeling that you can get tangible answers, but you have to be comfortable in a certain level of ambiguity.
You have to be comfortable floating just a little bit and never coming to grips with the feeling of, okay, I can walk away because I know at least this much information or I can keep on living my life because, I mean, for the moral for me was you could do this forever, but it's nice to have like other things going on in your life.
Like friendship, I think was a big part of it.
And being able to walk away and not have to know every answer to every single thing.
Correct.
And that's actually important on a personal level.
If that makes sense.
That was a huge, that was a really blessing, I thought, message in there.
Yeah, I think it's tragic that, you know, Danny was doing this in 1990 and 1991 alone, largely.
And I think that is sad to think about somebody, you know, kind of traveling through this world on their own.
He had to bounce his ideas off of Robert Booth Nichols.
I had Zach.
You had a better partner.
Yeah.
Final thought from you?
I intend to keep investigating this.
This, well, this constellation, this ecosystem.
And, you know, I'd love to eventually make my way into the modern era.
I don't know.
Because I only know when I've investigated something, what I think about it.
So, no, I don't know.
It's been amazing to have Zach help me out with this.
I mean, I was pretty lost until he joined me.
It's great.
It's too big of a thing to come up with any sort of little final thought, I think.
No, but I like the idea that it's more satisfying to think of this as a study on the ecosystem.
Because something like this just doesn't appear and then go away for whatever.
Especially when nobody gets in trouble.
Yeah.
And people are clearly making money.
I mean, it's worthwhile to people to be involved in that.