All Episodes
Dec. 11, 2023 - ParaNaughtica
02:11:41
Episode 47. Synchronicities and Corruption with Travis Mateer

CONTACT US: Email:      paranaughtica@gmail.com  Twitter:      @paranaughtica  Facebook:     The Paranaughtica PodcastHello to all our lovely listeners! Today we have something special going on. We’ve got a guest on, Travis Mateer, an on-the-ground researcher and journalist doing the work any mainstream media puppet is afraid to do. Travis will be covering a number of topics and he’s been eager to get these things out to the peoples. Synchronicity is a language we tend to ignore. Let’s pay attention.Now, velcro your socks up nice-and-tight, squeeze your ear-lobes, jump and click your heals......and let’s get into this. ***If you’d like to help us out with a donation and you’re currently listening on Spotify, you can simply scroll down on our page and you’ll see a button to help us out with either a one-time donation or you can set up a monthly recurring donation.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Out of the air is unfit to breathe, our phone is unfit to wait.
We sit watching our TVs while some local newscasts take no feed today.
We ask 50 homicides in 60s, we find our price.
Our defense the way it's supposed to be.
We don't think the bad, worse than bad.
It's like everything everywhere is going crazy.
We don't want anymore.
We stand out so we're going to the world.
We're getting smaller.
We say please, please, please, please.
We don't want to be a man.
These are my TV, my steam, my radio, my voice.
It doesn't even go out.
Well, I'm not going to be a man.
I want you to get mad.
I want you to come next time.
I want you to ride.
I want you to ride to your congressman.
I'm afraid I don't want you to ride.
I know he's the first.
Got to get mad.
I'm a human being.
God damn it.
My life has vanished.
I wish the water.
Too much coffee this morning.
Gotta do it sometimes.
Hello and welcome to another incredible episode of the Paranautica Podcast.
I am Coop, and with me as always is the man and the legend who gives the word legend the meaning we've come to know.
Our very own Scott.
Yeah, they actually recently updated the Britannica.
You know, I'm in there now.
It says legend.
Just kidding, guys.
Scott, happy to be here with you.
And with us is a special guest.
We'll let him introduce himself right now.
I think I'm a legend, but that might just be in my own head at this point.
You're a legend.
You're a legend.
Well, thank you guys for reaching out.
My name is Travis Mateer, and I've just been actually waiting and waiting and waiting for a contact like you guys reaching out to be like, hey, you were on these podcasts a couple years ago.
What's going on?
And I was like, a lot.
And so I kind of jumped pretty quickly at this opportunity.
So I thank you for inviting me.
Hey, you're welcome, man.
Thank you for coming on.
And I didn't think you'd reach out or respond to me as soon as you did.
Really quick question.
When I talked to you on the phone a few days ago, you sounded like you were on the run.
Are you running away from anyone?
Is someone chasing you?
I'm going to be relocating and I'm trying to frame it as an opportunity because...
Some of the things that are happening recently in my life are not necessarily of my chosen timeline, but I think this opportunity that I have, the ideas that I've been sitting on for a while, I'm going to actually get a chance to act on them.
So, kind of like Gordon White, I think that's his name, the guy that does Room Soup, he was talking about, in a recent podcast, how some unexpected challenges led to what he was kind of hoping for in the end, in terms of what his 2023...
Sometimes you don't know what things are going to force you to do what you need to do.
I'm just going to frame it in that way.
I'm kind of running a little bit.
Sometimes you have to.
Sometimes you've got to get that change.
You're huge in synchronicity.
You mentioned synchronicity as the basis of your work and your research.
How does that all tie in?
For a while, I've considered synchronicity as this weird, almost like...
Sort of language that we can't necessarily put our finger on.
One of the easy ways to think about it is a meaningful coincidence.
That's what Carl Jung defined it as.
But people like to say, well, it's meaning that you're on the right path and everything's coming into alignment.
In some ways, especially recently, synchronicities have meant warnings for me.
The name Lisa, for example, told me not to go to Spokane.
So I'm not going to go to Spokane.
But synchronicities are still very important.
I see a lot of the synchromistics out there.
Michael Wan, Christopher Knowles, Mark Reeves, who does the booking for Sam Tripoli, was the reason you guys reached out to me, because you heard me on Sam Tripoli two years ago.
I was on two years ago.
And, uh, I I've since maybe gotten such a huge head because of this insane, crazy synchronicity that I thought was going to be easier to bring out from Missoula, Montana, but there's been the weirdest of blocks.
And part, part of my goal today is to talk about some of the challenges in a, not like, you know, butt hurt kind of, you know, ego, ego hurt kind of way.
But to say like, it wasn't the right time.
And I'm trying to understand what the timing of the synchronicity stuff is because, um,
I was just going to say, that's totally fair.
mean the there's a lot of stories out there where these roadblocks not only become formative moments but lead to that pushing through so that you know by the end of the process you're exactly where you want to be so yeah
so
It's just a journey in progress, right?
Right. And I'll really quickly kind of say where I came to Missoula, Montana from.
I'll try and do a quick sort of introduction.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because in 2000, I was a pretty young person and I moved here with my girlfriend.
She then became my wife.
She's now my ex-wife.
So a lot of things can happen in 23 years.
When I moved here in Missoula, Montana, there was a Hell's Angel kind of showdown in the streets, which ended up just being locals getting drunk and having a little riot.
And there was fires in the Bitterroot Valley.
This was sort of after the WTO riots in Seattle, so the region was kind of like amped up.
And so Missoula, Montana was the place I was going to finish college, and I went to the University of Montana for creative writing.
When I graduated in 2003, did what a lot of people do, worked in the food industry with my college degree for a couple years.
I got married and started to kind of take myself more seriously as like having to do something in this town instead of like serve burritos to hungover college kids at Food for Thought.
I decided I should probably do something, so I did an AmeriCorps VISTA where I was like the non-trad.
I was like the older person where it's doing a year of service where you're placed at a certain location, and my location was the Pavarello Center.
At the time, it was 2008, so Barack Obama was elected.
I teared up having seen him in the arena.
I feel like an idiot.
Oh, man.
I know!
You know, hey, I was a true believer.
I believed in all this stuff like housing.
I think we all were at the time.
I mean, you're not the only one that was swept up by the energy and the promises.
And as happens, you know, when you start to understand a little bit more of those things.
And yeah, I'm sensing we all kind of had the same reaction in the end.
Well, little did I know, Montana Democrats were very, they were taking their role in Montana very seriously.
Although they weren't very effective in winning races outside of Missoula, but they decided.
As I was evolving my political beliefs, I crossed quite a few Montana Democrats.
I started blogging in 2010 under the name Lizard, and then I started under the name William Skink.
Skink is a type of lizard.
It's all very clever.
I had a blog called Reptile Dysfunction, but then I said that out loud to too many ladies, and they're looking at me like, I'm clever when you can read it on the head banner thing.
2010, I started at the 420 Blackbirds.
We got some notoriety because J-Girl, Jackson Hole, Wyoming girl, caught some content from Kirsten Pabst.
And Kirsten Pabst is still our county attorney.
She's been notorious because of her role in John Krakauer's book talking about rape culture in Missoula.
So John Krakauer, who did Into the Wild and all kinds of stuff.
And so we had a little taste of...
We're archiving what is happening locally.
And fast forward to, I think it was 2016, 2015, 2016, this guy named Bernie Sanders was trying to galvanize support.
And I was so cynical at that point, I was calling him a sheepdog.
And I think I trolled the owner of 4and20 on Twitter, Jay Stevens, and he realized that I was outside of the pen on local politics, and so he shut me out.
It was very frustrating.
The Missoula Independent wrote something about the local blogosphere and they never reached out to me.
So once again, my big ego is getting butt hurt left and right.
But I'm very persistent and started the Reptile Dysfunction blog.
Renamed it when I decided three years ago to kind of...
Do this full-time self-finance style, hoping to get money along the way, but we'll talk about that.
That's difficult.
That's difficult.
Yeah, yeah.
No, but it was interesting.
I've learned a lot in trying to take an information war, sort of counterinsurgency style, against the local infrastructure.
I didn't know at the time, like I was at the Zootown Arts Community Center in 2020, I didn't know that the building had sort of been purchased with the help of...
Nick Chakota, who is a local oligarch who moved from Wisconsin and bought up the Wilma building, a lot of music venues.
He owns Logjam Presents, and he recently did a big deal with Live Nation.
I think it's Live Nation.
The big one.
The international one.
So there's a lot of crazy power dynamics, and I decided to go up against it with really no institutional backing and no funding other than my own resources.
And no real support on your side either.
I'm reading your blogs.
Some of the comments are like, holy crap, these guys don't like this guy.
Well, so one of my analogies, and I don't want to get too far ahead, but one of my analogies, my kids used to play this game called Smashy Road on the iPad, and it's really a simple pixel game where you're running into vehicles and the sirens are coming and you get a couple sirens and then the SWAT and then...
The helicopters and the tanks.
I'm at level 4 where the helicopters are coming at me.
I've pissed off everyone at this point.
Even my parents' church.
It's been interesting.
I'm showing what not to do in terms of taking it to the local infrastructure.
I hear all these national podcasts still talk about we have to get to know who our sheriff is and we have to get to know city council and go to these meetings.
I'm like...
I've done that for a couple years now, and would you like to know what's happened to me?
Exactly. I have the local newspaper literally associating my name with extremist speech and white supremacy.
That's what the Missoulian has done.
I have Martin Kidston, who created the Missoula Current after being a Montana Democrat spokesperson.
He misreported that I yelled at city council when it was the person behind me that actually yelled.
Of course, Martin likes to watch via Zoom, so he's not in the actual chambers.
And so I had to learn the hard way by talking to a lawyer that I am too famous to sue any of these people or institutions or organizations.
I'm what's called a limited purpose public figure, which is pretty awesome.
That sounds awesome.
So even if I had money.
No, I'm not famous actually at all.
No one really knows me.
I'm infamous.
I'm probably on some list.
Maybe all of them.
Hey, we're bringing her name out right here, though.
This is going to put you on a couple of levels.
Yeah, it'll be the not-so-limited anymore.
There was a woman who was gaslighting you, saying that you were off your medication.
She was slandering you.
This is a state representative.
She was slandering you.
Yes, yes, yes.
I definitely will try and appear coherent as I'm trying to talk about all this stuff.
I want to talk about my...
Okay, okay.
She's been married a couple different times.
And so she was the director of the Pavarello Center, and she used the Pavarello Center from my perspective to launch her political career.
She was brought in by Susan Hay Patrick, the executive director of United Way.
Both of these people are very unhappy with me now and consider me very threatening.
And I've heard they're actually pretty scary.
I've shown up on public streets with my bullhorn.
I guess I've been videotaped.
I freak people out.
Getting some Alex Jones style.
Truly. I want to become a performance artist and make it funny.
Not everyone's laughing here in Missoula, Montana.
But Ellie, I found out behind the scenes, was telling people that I was off medications.
I got off alcohol three and a half years ago, and that's been awesome.
And I also heard from a reporter who has since left the state.
You know, that the stuff I was looking into with Blue Line Development and its public-private partnerships and the homeless industrial complex, that's what really freaked them out because I've not only shown how their tax increment financing schemes benefit the select few in this town amidst our housing crisis,
which is now totally out of control, but I've shown how they're connected very incestuously oftentimes with the private sector.
And it's just getting crazier and crazier.
It's been fun to expose this stuff to some degree, but now I'm going to relocate and take my library on the road.
Yeah, it sounds like you're at the point where that's absolutely necessary.
To speak to something you brought up earlier with these people who are saying, oh, we're needing to get to know these public entities and whatnot.
That works up until the moment you offer a dissenting opinion.
And then suddenly they don't give a shit about what you have to say anymore.
The doors close.
You get written off.
They do their best to undermine you.
In your case, oh, medication.
How easy is it for someone with a public platform to come out and say something like that one time and everybody's like, oh, that guy's crazy.
He's on medication.
Especially when the media is controlling.
So frustrating.
It's been funny, though, because I've been so difficult for them to handle because of my seven years working at the homeless shelter, and I know a lot of law enforcement.
I have a history of actually saying we need to support law enforcement in ways that's very counterintuitive to my long, hippie-looking hair because I see what happens when they're under-resourced.
They are more seduced by black market revenue streams when they're not getting properly funded themselves.
They're dealing with the non-prosecution that's not getting the media attention of county attorneys and city attorneys.
And so I actually still have a soft spot in my heart for law enforcement.
And that comes through when I talk to them directly.
And so even though I'm doing weird, crazy things like talking to the Shoshone County Sheriff's Office about Mineral County throwing them under the bus when there was a shootout in St. Regis, they tend to tell me things they probably shouldn't just because I'm like, hey, guys.
It's fucking crazy out there.
And I know that you guys know in ways that the rest of the public has no clue.
And then I give them enough on-the-ground reality checks that they're like, oh, this guy knows the shit.
I'm like, yeah, I've seen the shit.
What was the shooting in St. Regis?
This is a fun one.
There was a robbery.
It happened in eastern Washington.
For people that aren't familiar with the Pacific Northwest, I-90 is our drug human trafficking thoroughfare.
It's a fun place where the Tri-Cities, Yakima area, there's all kinds of drug stuff happening.
Sometimes people freak out and they want to rob some shit and steal some shit.
Then they get in a car and they drive fast on the interstate.
Up at Lookout Pass, You have Mineral County, which is the...
Superior Montana is the seat of Mineral County, and so they have a lot of highway to navigate.
But what happened is these guys in a vehicle, they ended up going and take...
One guy took a hostage inside the travel center in St. Regis.
And what people don't know, what I've been telling some folks behind the scenes, and what your audience will hear now probably for the first time, because I don't think I've written specifically about some of this stuff, but...
Before the shootout, there was a female suspect taken into custody by the Mineral County Sheriff's Office, and she was released without the Mineral County Attorney's Office being notified that she was even in custody.
And so there's a really weird sort of fissure between Mineral County, the Sheriff's Office, and the County Attorney's Office.
I've been watching this play out in something called the writ of mandamus.
It's a legal proceeding that happens obscurely.
When law enforcement and attorneys can't follow the law themselves, it's been the most bizarre shit in the world.
I really can't tell you how much of a David Lynch movie this is, and I will talk some serious shit on David Lynch later, but Mineral County has to protect us if we're in that part of Montana.
And the people at the travel center got to see some people get shot or one guy get shot lethally.
And so when I went in person with a person I was collaborating with at the time to the school gymnasium...
Where the sheriff had called for a grieving meeting or something.
He forgot to invite specifically the county commissioners and the attorney's office.
And so it turned out to be this weird law enforcement.
You guys are like awesome Wild West.
Shoot them dead.
And the important people in that meeting were Sanders County, the new sheriff.
He's a constitutional sheriff.
And then Highway Patrol.
So when you want to think about people lured by trafficking money because they're not getting paid enough to deal with that bullshit.
Think about those guys showing up in the gymnasium that day.
Yeah, who's showing up?
Here's where the new Sheriff Ryan Funk made kind of a little mistake.
He said that there was a miscommunication across the border with Idaho.
And so I'm like, miscommunication?
I like communication.
I'm a journalist.
That's what I call myself.
I like communicating with all kinds of people.
My mouth just really does this all of the time.
And so I do that with the Shoshone County Sheriff's Office.
And I'm like, hey.
FYI, Mineral County threw you under the bus.
You guys should know this.
Also, this female, she was taken into custody.
She was cut loose.
The county attorney's office didn't know about it.
You guys should know about it.
The captain said, I will let the sheriff know about it.
I said, cool.
This is how stuff rolls.
I should tell you about the cows and the cannabis next, maybe.
Yeah, let's just go into that.
That sounds great.
I was going to ask you about...
Well, let's get into that first, then I'll ask you about the Sean Stevenson.
Okay, yeah, yeah.
So, Monroe County has Wally Congdon, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Wally, and this is where Incest Town, I call Missoula Zoom Town, but I've kind of transitioned to calling it Incest Town, because Wally goes to my parents' church.
It's crazy.
He runs, or he has a manager that runs Highlander Cows in Clinton, Montana, which is east of Missoula.
And this is going to be kind of touched on in my article that's posting tomorrow that's got me just a...
It's a...
Yeah, it's going to be an interesting article.
So, Wally in court was accused by the sheriff, Ryan Funk, in this writ of mandamus hearing of loading 200 pounds of cannabis with the help of a maintenance guy into his personal vehicle to feed his cows.
Whoa. He's feeding his cows weed?
Yes. I want to eat some of those cows.
Well, that brings up a good question because I like to be diligent as a journalist.
It took me a while to find the number of the guy that's kind of a veterinarian for the state.
Wally's actually known around the state for developing some standards around meat, which is ironic because I talked to this guy and I'm like, hey, cannabis, commercial beef.
Is there an issue with just feeding the cows weed?
And he's like, who are you?
What are you talking about?
I'm like, I'm a journalist.
I ruined his Monday.
It was like 8.30 in the morning.
He did not expect to be talking about Wally and weed and cows.
I mean, if you look at these Highlanders, they look stone already, so it's pretty funny shit.
But nothing happens.
When you're the law and you're kind of like in this weird lynchian world, apparently you just feed the cows weed and nothing happens.
Another part before we get to Sean.
When I was on Wally's trail, I wrote a song about him.
I do a lot of musical stuff now with the ukulele, but this time I had a guitar.
Cool. I'm trying to have some fun as I'm doing this shit and putting a big mark on my back.
I was at the fair taking a little video clip and these 4-H girls approached me because they hear me talk about Wally.
I thought I was about to get reprimanded because I wasn't taking the cows and the livestock seriously by these serious girls.
And they're like, were you talking about Wally Congdon?
I was like, yeah.
And they're like, we know that he's not feeding his cows and he's abusing his cows and we have, you know, basically reported him and nothing happens to him.
I'm just like, whoa, girls.
Our parents are upset because, you know, I'm just like, you know, good for you for reporting it.
You don't mess with the 4-H girls, man.
Yeah. I'm sorry that nothing happened, girls, but...
It's just, it's like that here in Missoula.
That's crazy.
I still, I love the real world reinforcement, though.
Like, you come to a place where if anybody's gonna know, it's these people up and coming in the world, right?
And they've heard about this thing that you're getting told, like, this is crazy, son.
And then you have these young people who are like, uh, yeah, we're talking about this and nothing's happening.
I think that's great.
One of my beliefs, and I think reporters have stopped doing this, is you go physically to the places in person, and you talk to people on the ground.
I don't know if most media is now...
I think it's all social media, but they go to some of these trials, because I've been in person to some trials, but yeah, it's weird.
It's weird.
Yeah, what they'll do is they'll go, they'll set up a tripod, they'll get a live shot with an intro, 30 seconds, they pack it up.
They get back in the car, they head out.
You know what I mean?
And they've been hollowed out.
These newsrooms have been hollowed out.
I try and remind myself.
True. Yeah.
So Sean Stevenson, do you want me to touch on that?
Yeah, let's get into Sean Stevenson because this is just really, really interesting.
Well... How did his involvement...
How did he get involved with Johnny Perry?
So I sent you a link.
I sent you two links.
Actually, and it's kind of like two links to articles that represent my master links in a lot of ways up to that point whenever they were posted.
Yeah, those are on zoomcron.com, by the way.
Yes, thank you.
Zoomcron.com is where I've been posting all my articles.
And so I spent a lot of time actually compiling all of the links on Sean's case because that is the sort of defining reason for how I've spent the last three years.
I credit Sean even with why I don't drink alcohol anymore.
I mentioned the numbers 1-3-20 and this is significant because January 3rd, 2020 is when Sean was assaulted inside the Pavarello Center.
It's when I put in my notice to leave Missoula Aging Services and so I was ready to leave the non-profit sector.
It was a Friday.
That was the day that I put in my notice to HR saying adios.
And I found out later, January 3rd is also the day in 2006 that our mayor, John Engen, first took power in Missoula.
So John Engen, he's since passed away from cancer, but he won five terms.
And won five terms.
I mean, this guy was the longest running mayor of Missoula, Montana.
I mean, it was a generation.
And I actually talked to Johnny Lee Perry for the first time on the day that John Engen announced his last bid to be mayor.
And it was right across the street from the Pavarillo Center in Silver Park.
And so there's a lot of just crazy stuff in how all of this has kind of played itself out.
But January 3rd, 2020, for Sean, is when he was assaulted.
And to kind of back up...
The way that I have come to understand some information on Sean's case and to get to know his family has been a very slow burn.
And so I mentioned a road trip that I took when I was facing some crazy stuff in August and needing to really change my perspective significantly.
And I was starting to get some initial money from a divorce settlement that allowed me to do all of this traveling.
One of the reasons I had this guy claiming I'm a Fed or accusing me of being a Fed is probably because I've been traveling around like a rock star going to New York City, finishing a book, kicking some ass, and he's probably like, Fed.
And I'm like, no!
Crazy, sad, divorced dad driving around America trying to figure out what the hell's going on.
And so it was really during that trip that I understood that Sean's family, the Stevenson family, is like black royalty, okay?
Sean was born in Pittsburgh.
He's around my age, so in his mid-40s when he died.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is a place like Missoula, Montana that has three rivers that kind of come in.
Water has played a huge part of my inquiry in the last four or five months, which is funny because it's snowing very hard all day today.
And so Sean in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was a place where Negro –
Baseball leagues were owned by black Americans.
The Pittsburgh Courier was a nationally well-known black-owned newspaper.
Roberto Clemente, the Harris brothers, famous photographers, one of them, Teeny Harris, I think was his name.
Just all kinds of culture that I had no idea about and that the Shawn Stevenson family, very, very involved in.
This is part of their heritage.
And so it kind of blew me away that, and when you know Sean's dad, Dr. Kenneth Stevenson, his pedigree, which I won't get into yet because sometimes I put too much information out there, but when you start slowly understanding who these people are,
you start really wondering how could they not find a lawyer in Montana to at least...
Get them more officially able to ask questions and not relying just on a blogger like me that may at certain points actually detract in how I carry out my inquiries from the serious nature of the fact that Sean was assaulted inside the Pavarello Center.
He was taken to the St. Pat's Hospital and he was removed from life support and his family was told after the fact.
When I say he was euthanized by the Missoula County Sheriff's Office, which I've said publicly at City Council, and they get upset, it's because the sheriff is also the coroner, and the law enforcement was in that room when Sean was removed from life support, and the family had no fucking clue it was happening.
I don't understand how a sheriff can be the coroner.
Isn't there a conflict of interest in this?
You know, when I was in Texas...
Because they're going to make the final decision.
Yeah, it's funny.
When I was in Texas, I think I was in Travis County, actually.
Synchronicity. Names and synchronicities and numbers.
It all plays into driving me insane.
But I was rollerblading around on my fruit boots, which is what Owen Benjamin calls rollerblades.
But I'm a child of the 90s.
And so to cover ground, I rollerblade.
And so I was hot.
It was Texas.
It was summer.
And I knock on the door of a funeral home.
like, "Hey, can you tell me some shit about sheriffs and coroners and stuff?" And in Texas, the large counties absolutely have separate coroner medical examiner services, but in
Okay. It just seems like such a huge oversight,
you know?
I mean, no one's blowing the whistle on it.
I mean, until you, of course.
But it just doesn't seem right.
And the Barsati case is another part of this that we'll kind of get to.
Because in that case, you know, whether or not Rebecca is declared dead via accident because she was found dead in the river, that means whether or not an insurance company pays out $250,000.
And so if you're the sheriff and you write accident on the death certificate, Where's the money?
Cha-ching!
So, yeah, it's kind of important to be able to define terms of death, the manner in which, manner and cause, which can be sort of a separate thing, but Sean was taken off life support, and one of the reasons, or one of the things that people ask is,
like, how can that happen, right?
When I'm giving my five-minute elevator pitch, and I'm like, well...
Without family consent, because you have to have family consent, right?
And here's the thing, so I...
I talked to St. Pat's Hospital.
I was able to get a risk assessment person on the phone to talk to me.
She was nice.
She was a nice lady.
She said I would have to subpoena them for just their protocol, for what it takes to take someone off life support.
Just to get their rules, I would have to subpoena them.
I would have to get a lawyer.
I'm not going to pay a lawyer to do that.
The family couldn't find a lawyer.
Around that time, this was maybe...
Yeah, around this time, I was trying to feel out the situation that would place the coroner or the sheriff in that room, okay?
And I talked to this guy that I ran into, I think it was at a bagel shop, and he had been kicked out of the sheriff's office and now worked for the county attorney's office as an investigator.
And so I kind of asked him, I'm like, hey, generally, how would this work out?
And he's like, well, have you talked to Kirsten Papps, the county attorney?
I'm like, no.
He's like, well, have you talked to the sheriff?
I'm like, no.
He's like, you should.
And so I'm like, okay, this guy is serious about chain of custody stuff.
And so I immediately called the sheriff's office and talked to the coroner before he had a chance to give him a heads up.
And I was able to ask, generally without referencing Sean's case, why law enforcement would be potentially in the room to help or to be in the room as someone was being taken off of life support.
And the response was, well, if they're an organ donor, then we would just, you know, want to help with the paperwork.
There's so much paperwork, you know, and we're just, we're helpful.
You know, he didn't laugh.
But the idea was, okay, so there would be a potential reason for them to have more direct involvement with hospital staff as someone was being taken off life support.
Well, I mean, Sean wasn't an organ donor, so that doesn't make sense in that situation.
It's really hard to understand how it could happen, and I've really, in three years, had to expand my sense of what corruption in a small town can possibly mean, because I think it actually connects to some weird, crazy stuff.
I agree.
Big, crazy stuff.
Yeah, it's not always the headline, embezzlement, $40 million that disappear.
It's not always that.
Corruption starts small.
It has to start small.
There's a movie with Dwayne, The Rock, whatever, and he goes to that town.
It's based on a true story, and the sheriff is super corrupt, and the whole town is corrupt.
Yeah, it's called Walking Tall.
No, it's not.
Is it Walking Tall?
I don't know, but...
It's based on a true story.
Using movies is very important for me as a guide.
And in part because one of my current theories is we're all now susceptible to LARP thinking.
We're all actually becoming more in a live-action role-play situation.
Absolutely. It's like real life is live-action role-playing, man.
And law enforcement wants to be performing for cameras, not with risky meth...
You know, tweaked out homeless, cartel-connected meth dealers.
So Sheriff Mike Toth, the former sheriff of Mineral County, he had like a walk-in on a movie.
So he was a cop in Seattle for a while.
And I think it was Legends of the Fall.
It was some Tom Cruise movie.
And we also have a situation in which Missoula County Sheriff's Office was part of Live PD.
They wanted to perform.
They wanted to perform for the cameras.
And part of my article tomorrow is including this conversation I had with the devil recently.
That's kind of a nickname I give Jim Terry.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I was going to ask you about that, yeah.
I hope that doesn't rile him up.
He is a hard person to have a conversation with, but I did so.
I don't think anybody cares about being called Satan.
Oh, man.
I think he relishes it, but I did so because I wanted to understand if he knew Mike Toth, the former sheriff of Mineral County, before Rebecca Barsotti went missing.
Part of his response that I cover tomorrow is that, well, I knew of Mike Toth because we both were PIs and we both had ambitions to be in reality TV.
That's why Jim Terry has since been written about by the Rolling Stone is because of how he has used family's grief for creative content for his YouTube channel.
My article tomorrow is about how no one wins when it's the grief industry.
Or something to that effect.
But when you don't have a criminal justice system or law enforcement, the stuff that starts happening, whether it's on social media or armchair investigators, citizen journalists like me, it's not always great.
I could probably use an editor and some guidance from time to time.
You know, it's not an ideal situation, I think, for me to have taken on so much of exposing stuff.
But our local media is...
As I said recently on the phone to city council, because I have to talk on the phone right now because of the legal situation.
But I said they're terrible, terrible, terrible, no good, very bad members of local media.
And that's because they're eight months too late in something I reported back in March about a city council candidate and his criminal history.
And I'm just like, am I even here?
Yeah, they just don't even listen.
They don't even listen, man.
But it's hilarious at this point.
It's very funny, actually.
So there's some weird details about Shawn Stevenson.
So he was allegedly, what, armbar chokehold, whatever, and went to a coma.
But he had scratches, cuts, and bruises all over his body.
The magic chokehold.
So how does that, what happened there?
Well, one of the unfortunate comparisons I'm eventually going to have to kind of set up is like the dead black man and the dead white woman.
And sort of what happened in both situations, you know, in Rebecca's situation.
Her family had some money to hire a bunch of private people, so private search and rescue to look at the river, private medical examiner to look at the body.
Sean's family wasn't as able to motivate some of those resources, although Sean's family knows Cyril Wett.
Cyril Wett is a famous medical examiner.
Famous as in the first guy to call bullshit on the magic bullet theory.
This was insane to me to even know this.
And then to actually talk to Cyril Wecht on the phone when I was in Pittsburgh, I talked to this 92-year-old man on the phone.
And I'm like, hey, Dr. Wecht, thank you for answering the phone.
I had to pester his secretary to get his phone number.
But all I asked him was, you know, can a chokehold produce bruising over someone's entire body?
He's like, no, that's...
That's ridiculous.
I'm like, yeah, my seven-year-old daughter knows that shit.
Common sense.
Thanks, doctor.
Dr. Wex.
I was going to ask you about that phone call.
That whole situation.
How you were able to even get a hold of him.
That was pretty intense.
Well, I was sleeping in my van the night before.
Because I rented a camper as I was driving around Pennsylvania.
And I name dropped like a motherfucker.
And one of the things I do is I show Sean's picture with a very attractive Selma Hayek.
I've seen that.
We'll get into the synchronicity of why Pittsburgh and all this stuff.
But Cyril Wecht, I don't know how...
His role is interesting to me, but ultimately what I wanted was the name recognition and just the direct conversation.
The fact that I could say that I chatted with him for like five minutes.
Because the whole situation with Sean, if anyone pays 10-15 minutes into some of the basics, the questions that come up are crazy.
Because Johnny is a very skinny, scrawny black dude.
Sean is pretty built.
Even if Sean was very drunk, which he was reportedly under the influence of alcohol that evening, he still physically was pretty big compared to Johnny.
But the situation in the Pavarello Center, which is located on West Broadway in Missoula, Montana, is interesting because I'm very familiar with the facility, with the men's dorm, and I have contacts in the first responder community that gave me the perspective about response times and why it took over five minutes for first responders to get to Sean in the first place.
So, I mean, but the situation is, and this is where...
Some of my former perspective on the use of drugs and alcohol inside a facility is very handy.
Harm reduction is something that, in theory, maybe can be done with the proper training, with staff.
You have to really be careful.
At the old Pavarillo Center, we tried to do it.
In one of my interviews back when I was trying to do a podcast myself, one of my interviews was with my former staff member, Patrick Dugans.
We talked about trying to do a weather policy harm reduction approach, allowing people to be under the influence at the old Pavarello Center, and it was a disaster.
We're lucky more people weren't hurt, you know, but we were reluctant to even take booze away because we didn't want someone having seizures and going through DTs because they needed alcohol.
Man, that's a tricky situation there.
It's very tricky.
That's crazy.
And because at the new location, at this particular time, the Pavarillo Center was back in a, you know, let you responsibly use, but they didn't have the staffing or the eyes on all parts of the building to actually, you know, be effective.
And so I know from my sources that there was a conversation at the high level of fire chief, police chief, you know, these people talking about...
Basically, the fire guys were not going to have discretion.
So the captains of the fire trucks are the serious motherfuckers that go in, and they have the highest level of critical care response.
And the EMT ambulance guys, gals, you know, non-biote, whatever, they oftentimes are a little bit lower skilled and don't have the same level of ability to...
To respond to serious situations.
And so the captains of the different firehouses used to have the ability to say, we're going to go in and we're going to be sort of more aggressive in our response.
But the fire chief said, those captains no longer have that discretion with the Pavarillo Center.
They all have to wait until law enforcement secures the scene.
And so that guaranteed when there was a 911 call and there was multiple 911 calls the evening that Sean was assaulted.
That law enforcement had to secure the scene first, and the first responders would be the ones that waited.
So that partly explains the response time.
The strangest thing is that law enforcement, and I think the scene was sort of run by the sheriff's office, but with city police also involved, the first responders were asked what their names were.
Very aggressively by law enforcement as they were working on Sean.
This is something that the family heard.
The first responders were asked.
Not witnesses that were standing around watching the action.
The first responders were asked very aggressively.
And this was like a strange thing that didn't make much sense for the family.
I'm trying not to get too mired in details, but this is actually important because...
One of the broad things that I'm interested in is narrative control.
And how can you control a narrative?
How can this narrative be so controlled?
Well, I talked to an ambulance driver who was new to his position, and I talked to a 25-year veteran of the fire department.
The 25-year veteran of the fire department, when I asked, have you ever had your name and sort of like, you know, have you ever had this experience?
He's like, no, why?
They know who we are.
We're responding to the same stuff.
Why would they want to know that information, especially if we're working on someone?
Makes no sense.
It makes no sense to the guy spending 25 years of his life doing serious work.
The new guy, nine months on the truck at the time, and this was a while back when I was asking, yes, Travis, that happened to me twice.
Okay, what situations?
Did that happen?
Okay, well, it was a student suicide at the new Rome, new at the time, Rome building downtown.
And it was a violent assault against a person working in the Dakota place, I think it was, which is a crisis center, crisis house, right?
So students, homeless potential population, because the guy was probably mentally ill on drugs, I'm assuming.
I don't know that to be the fact.
But I'm assuming that these are the kind of situations...
A new police chief would be sensitive to information getting to the media.
And so if you're wanting to control narratives, you want to know who the EMTs and the fire people are because they're the ones that might be talking to the media.
And that's something that if you're doing like OPSEC, you know, so our police chief at the time who has since left, what was his name?
Jason, I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but he came from Highway Patrol in California.
And there was some weird Reddit thread that I documented where he had to divest from something called the Iron Cross Ranch before coming to Missoula and becoming our police chief.
I don't know.
Sounds like a cool place to hang out in Northern California.
So there was a lot of weird stuff.
This guy on the ambulance said that the student's suicide, he was coming out of the elevator to respond to this and had his name.
They were like, who are you and what's your name?
Obviously, they knew who they were.
They were EMTs.
But, you know, had his name asked for.
And the same situation when he was responding to this Dakota Place assault.
And so it's a strange little detail, but it's one that if you're trying to actually understand what's happening in your town, which I am desperately trying to understand now with multiple cases that make no sense, unless you start understanding how corrupt things are.
And the power in things not happening.
That's one of the articles I wrote, is there's immense power in stuff that just doesn't happen.
And it's hard to track that, because it's not happening.
Yeah, man.
And man, the corruption like that, it's everywhere.
At the local level, at the highest level you can think of, it's everywhere, man.
But where I'm getting that, if a cop is asking EMT their name or whatever to control their narrative, to me that's like either they want that information as a threat, like you're the father of the narrative because now we know who you are, we have your address.
Either follow the game book that we're laying down or you will face some problems.
That's what I'm getting out of that.
It's not threatening until you start understanding things that aren't happening.
I don't know how many people in the first response world might be connecting the dots.
I know that there's police and first responders reading my blog.
When I was getting fingerprinted recently...
I'll have to reference that obliquely because I can't necessarily get into some of the details because I don't want you guys to have to deal with legal stuff like I am.
I hope nothing comes legally on us because of this.
I'm trying to be cautious because, again, I have an opportunity now to do some stuff.
And so everyone, even as I've been contentious in my interactions locally, it's all led to some good things that I hope to have come out of this.
But I was getting fingerprinted and the law enforcement officer was like, Did you decide to go to Spokane?
And I was like, I'm reading your blog.
I'm staying in touch.
And I was like, thanks.
No, I'm not going to Spokane.
He's like, well, where are you going?
I was like, somewhere else.
I'm not going to make it that easy for you guys.
Go to your tracking apps.
I want to make them work for it a little bit.
Absolutely. You're like, hey, read my content.
You'll find out where I'm going.
Law enforcement needs some level of support.
If you want some kind of response when you call 911, if we're moving into a public-private situation with law enforcement, and we are, we're moving to more and more private security being used, and it's going to be used selectively.
It'll be used in green zone type situations set up in our 15-minute city futures.
This is the public-private future that's happening, and Missoula is one of these little pilot program communities that has enough useful idiot local officials going with it because they're well-intentioned.
But that takes us to hell.
Man, so that brings up a point.
So what's the refugee relocation program like?
What's going on with that?
Oh, man.
What's going on there, man?
If I hadn't worked at a homeless shelter for seven years, my whiteness and my penis, which I definitely have, would be much more of a problem.
Because having a white penis in Missoula, Montana, especially if you're going to start criticizing the refugee resettlement program.
But I've been doing that since 2015 or 16, back when I was like, hey!
We are having difficulty with the local homeless population.
We have a 3-5% vacancy rate in the rental market.
We have a shitty Medicaid system statewide.
And then I start reading Missoulian articles about the state, the director that restarted the office having come from New York and they had refugees coming by plane and they couldn't find any rentals because they didn't have credit and they didn't have anyone to co-sign.
Oh my god!
And I'm just like...
Did you talk to any non-profits that were doing work with homeless people?
Because you may have learned something.
But the resettlement office was open because a suburban mom who was white herself saw a sad picture of a dead toddler and wanted to do something.
And so now, you know, we have people that are coming.
And, you know, Missoula's actually got a history of having Hamong relocate here because they were palsies, I think, with CIA assets.
And we also have some Belarusians, some interesting Russian elements that are here.
And nothing to rag on actual communities that are here.
I've been doing some research into my own heritage with Pennsylvania Dutch heritage and Sean's family and have been finding some amazing connections.
But when it starts moving into criminal networks and...
And the inability to vet people that are coming and the inability to have support services to actually do the help.
And so, you know, that's resulted in one refugee committing a rape, allegedly.
And that was about a year and a half ago, I think.
But it just, it's a challenge when now we have, I mean, I call Missoula Zoom Town because during the pandemic, obviously, people could work remotely.
Missoula is one of these places with deep...
Crazy connections to powerful people.
And so Missoula became one of these places where more and more people with deep pockets wanted to move to.
And our housing is completely insane as it relates to what wages are locally.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
You made a comment on Sam Tripoli's show about...
And I love Sam Tripoli.
Shout out to Sam.
Shout out to Sam.
He's great.
Yeah, he is great.
You mentioned...
How the motels in and around Missoula and probably everywhere are being used in like a system of trafficking for meth and also for the trafficking of children.
So can you get into that?
Okay, this is perfect because this highlights going physically to a location and asking questions.
It's amazing.
I so consistently make the Missoulian, our local newspaper, run by Lee Enterprises.
I make them look so terrible, and it's so easy to me.
I spend more time doing research.
Is that satisfying?
Yeah, it is.
I mean, 15 minutes on the toilet.
I'm sitting 15 minutes on the toilet finding connections and getting ready to make my next post for the day.
But we had a situation where there was a SWAT response to the Red Lions Inn.
So the Red Lions Inn is located Broadway and Orange Street, pretty close to the highway, pretty close to the Pavarillo Center.
And, you know, it's just run down.
There used to be a Chinese restaurant called the Triple Dragon that I liked, but that restaurant's been empty for a long time.
And so the Red Lion Inn is kind of a weird inn.
And part of my work...
I went to a lot of these different motels and I'm not being racist when I talk about the Patel cartel.
It's a thing.
A lot of motels around America and this for decades have been run by East Indian families.
What is it called?
What's the name of it?
Patel is kind of like a general name from my understanding in Indian culture.
So like Smith in English culture is a general last name.
The Patel cartel was sort of a, I don't know if it's a pejorative, I'm not trying to use it as one, but it's a fact that a lot of Eastern Indian families run motels across America.
It's not easy work.
I mean, you're seeing and cleaning up stuff.
And I know because I've scraped homeless people off the ground from motels on like, you know, benzo, borderline OD situations where they've crapped their pants and stuff.
I've helped, in a visceral way, some of these motel managers.
And because of that, they like to talk to me.
So I have a perspective.
And this was maybe not last summer, maybe the summer before.
It all kind of blurs together sometimes.
But we had a situation in which I was out and about downtown, and I actually saw this SWAT response to the...
It was supposed to be some kind of situation at the Red Lion's Inn, but it turned out to be a false alarm.
And some woman was injured on her bike, and all of these SWAT people ended up attending to this woman on her bike.
That's what was reported in the Missouli.
So, false alarm.
Interesting. Weird, crazy SWAT response.
I mean, I'm watching them get the big SWAT truck ready at the city downtown spot for the cops.
And so I kind of watched, and they were closing streets all around.
The vicinity, the perimeter.
Around Red Lion?
Around the Red Lion Inn.
But multiple streets were closed down.
Or at least they had stationed law enforcement there.
So it was very bizarre to me, enough to the point where I decided the next day to go to the Red Lion Inn, and I walked in the door, and I talked to the lady at the front desk.
The lady at the front desk was new.
She'd only been there for a couple days.
They brought her from some other state.
So she probably didn't know not to talk to me, but she talked to me.
And she told me that it was actually a training.
I'm like, huh?
Yeah, it was a training.
And she was annoyed because the cops had the keys to the room where the two fake hostage people or the two people were in.
And so she was annoyed that they kicked the door because she had given keys to a cop.
Earlier in the day.
And so she gave me the number.
I went and took a picture of the footmarks on the door, you know, and I sent an email to Lydia Arnold.
She was the public information officer at the time and happened to be a volunteer with me at one point when I was the homeless outreach coordinator, because this is incest town.
And I'm just like, so, Lydia, police training.
No, Travis, that wasn't a training.
Okay. Sure.
So that was odd.
I believe the receptionist at the front desk over the public information officer.
And that same summer, there was also something that happened at the eyeglass center sort of on the southern part of Missoula.
And this was just, again, neighbors were weirded out by this heavy police response in the neighborhood.
And I went and asked this eye center.
We all need training.
I wish law enforcement especially in the Missoula County Sheriff's Office we get crisis intervention training because we can talk about the state sanctioned execution of Johnny Lee Perry next but there's good training that can happen
I've been involved in some of this good training.
And maybe before talking shit on law enforcement, I should say something really good really quickly.
Because cops don't have people telling good stories about them.
And in my role, one of my favorite stories is that I had law enforcement reach out to me.
This was years ago, but they were about to...
Tell everyone parked behind Walmart that they had to finally leave.
All these people had been talked to.
They had been ticketed.
The sign posted publicly says you can't live here in your shitbag campers, so you have to move along, right?
The cop asked if I could be present that day.
So pretty big police presence.
I'm talking to people sort of down the street as the cops are going door to door, knocking, reminding people they had to leave.
And I hear yelling down the street, and this guy is coming out of his camper angry, yelling at the cops.
So I kind of make my way close, but not too close.
And the lead officer was obviously, I would hope he was trained with crisis intervention training because he maintained his calm.
He kept his voice low so he didn't rise in the escalation cycle.
And he was able to actually point to me and say, hey, sir.
Because this guy was like, I'm here to help these people.
I came off the mountain.
I'm a veteran.
Fuck you, cops.
I'm actually helping them.
You're here to fuck with them.
And part of this police officer's argument was like, no, we want to help too.
This guy is from the Pavarello Center and we brought him here today to help.
So the guy...
Saw that.
It actually helped calm him down.
And I talked to this dude later.
He was well-armed.
He was a veteran.
He was off a mountain to help those people.
And that could have gone bad.
So thank you, law enforcement, you know, for inviting me to be a part of your technique of de-escalation where it needed.
Because in that situation, it was needed.
But that was Missoula PD.
So that was city police.
The Sheriff's Office is involved in executing Johnny.
Woo! The Sheriff's Office is involved with the execution of Johnny Perry.
And again, Johnny Perry was the killer of Shawn Stevenson at the Pavarello.
I looked into Johnny Perry a little bit, so I want you to tell us exactly who this guy was.
I would like to know more about Johnny Lee Perry because I had one opportunity.
To talk with him in a non-escalated situation and I had a second opportunity to interact with him that I documented on camera and I really unfortunately think that's what led to him being shot and killed.
But Johnny Lee Perry, and Sean's family knows so much more about this.
I mean, I still, even though I've seen a lot of the, I've seen some documentation now that some of the work they've done, I've heard some interviews that police did with Johnny Lee Perry, and that's what actually alarmed me the most recently is listening to Detective Mitch Lang interview Johnny Lee Perry.
But, you know, Johnny Lee Perry was from Oakland, California, and he came here.
I had heard he potentially had a girlfriend at some point.
Potentially was in St. Regis, which is kind of weird because that's a very small, very white conservative kind of part of Montana.
So he would stick out as a young black dude.
And Johnny was actually pretty well liked by a lot of people on the street.
I talked to a lot of people that liked him, even though he was really quick to use the N-word.
Would get pretty hyped up on meth from time to time.
And was kicked out of the Pavarella Center.
After this assault.
But he never was really...
Oh man, it's been a while for the details.
He was arrested, but I think the county attorney's office chose not to officially charge him with felony assault.
It was very odd.
And that's where I was trying to understand with Josh Pagnauer, however you say his last name, and Ben, the young man that was stabbed to death.
I was trying to understand how the county attorney's office was looking at extreme violence and not charging.
Because it was really inexplicable to me at the time.
Because Johnny, I think, was arrested once or twice after Sean died.
And the whole thing was just so bizarre to me.
And when I finally got a chance to talk to Sean, again, this was April.
Our mayor, John Ingen, had just announced for his fifth run.
I crossed the California Street Bridge to go by the Pavarillo Center, and I see Johnny.
Johnny, you know, pretty kind of scrawny still, and I yell out to him, like, Johnny!
And he's like, what?
And I decided to go and approach him.
I was pretty nervous, but I told him who I was and that I talked to Sean's family and that I didn't think he was involved to the extent that he was accused in killing Sean.
And so we ended up walking away from his friends toward this...
It became like a taco stand for a bit, but it's really close to the Pobrillo Center, just like a half block to the east on Broadway.
And Johnny sat down and talked to me for a bit about the situation.
When I told him about the bruising, because I had heard about the bruising on Sean's body, I hadn't actually seen the pictures yet.
What Johnny told me is very interesting.
Johnny told me that he was told by law enforcement Sean was dropped off the gurney as they were loading him into the ambulance.
Wow. So, Johnny had an explanation given to him by law enforcement that explained the bruising.
When I talked to my fire guy source, he said, Travis, with insurance forcing ambulance trucks to update their equipment and the gurneys they have in service at that time, he's like, no way would a body have been dropped off that gurney.
He's like, I just don't see that happening.
And so, you know, Johnny was pretty, like, meek at the time.
I didn't get a sense of, like, being in physical danger by him.
One of his buddies came over after I talked to him for a while just to kind of check and see if Johnny was okay, I think.
Because who was this white dude rolling up wanting to ask questions?
But one of the things that Johnny talked about that freaks me out still, and it's a subject that, you know, I don't like at all, is TIs, being a targeted individual.
He wanted to show me video YouTube clips on my phone, and I'm like, don't touch my phone!
And so that, for a long time, that's bugged me out that he mentioned T.I.'s.
But Johnny, I think it was later that year in August, I saw Johnny in the same area by the Pavarello Center, but he was escalated.
He had his arms up in the air, walking on the sidewalk on Broadway, so his fingers were pointed up like guns.
I parked by the casino, positioned my camera to film, and approached him.
Different person, to some extent.
I don't know what he was necessarily on at that time, but I asked him about Sean.
He claimed to have killed Sean at that point.
Said he choked him out.
Then he said that he was the CIA.
He was like, I'm the new CIA.
And, you know, lowered his hand and sort of made bang sounds and said he was going to, like, go after law enforcement.
I mean, the video footage, you know, details what he said.
But it was concerning to me.
I cut off the contact with him and went and called 911.
And it's something that still to this day really bothers me because I talk to Sean's family about whether or not to put that video footage out.
The 911 response was shit.
I've since come to expect that, you know, generally.
But I demanded to talk to law enforcement.
And a couple days after that 911 call, I did talk to a police officer who was like, you know, Travis, do you know where Johnny was before you saw him?
I'm like, no.
You know, tell me.
Where was Johnny?
Well, he was in my car.
Talking to me.
He was just stoned.
Interesting. He'd been smoking cannabis.
I'm like, okay.
And he was all upset, Travis.
This is the cop talking to me.
He's all upset because we had just impounded his car and he was sleeping in his car.
So that's why he was upset.
Okay, fair enough.
That reaction doesn't sound like someone just high on marijuana.
No, and it's the whole thing.
I talked to a lot of people that knew Johnny and Johnny was led to believe he contributed to Sean's death.
So I think when he was talking about...
Killing Sean, he internalized that he thought he was directly responsible for Sean's death.
And so I think he believed it, and he died believing it.
But he died because he was taken out to the woods by an ex-con named Jackie Maxville.
And this happened about two weeks and a few days after I posted the video footage.
I posted it.
I talked to NBC Montana to see if they wanted to do anything with it, but local media are a bunch of fucking pussies!
That's a direct quote.
That's CNN for sure, I agree.
Yeah, it makes my job more difficult when they're a bunch of fucking pussies, but some of the kick-ass ones actually had to leave the state.
So NBC Montana had a kick-ass person working, and she had to leave.
So they didn't want to do anything with this footage.
I put it out.
And what happened is that there was an ex-con named Jackie Maxville.
And I know all this because I sat and watched the coroner's inquest.
So I was in a courtroom with law enforcement in numbers, sitting there, talking, not talking, but sitting there just, I mean, the presence was intimidating.
And the coroner's inquest, we can maybe get into that.
It's a very weird process.
But it's guaranteed to let law enforcement off the hook, essentially.
By creating such a high standard of finding them criminally liable, it's never going to happen.
A county attorney is never going to even try their best.
So it's literally performance.
It's just a performance art piece for pretend sake.
That's what I see.
That's what I see nationally.
I just see everything as an act.
They all just say these candy-cutting phrases to keep the people at bay.
They tell the people what they want to hear.
The boom, we're done.
The outcome's already predetermined, right?
So, I mean, there's no real heart in any of it.
You listen to the people talk.
It doesn't sound like impassioned people trying to get to the bottom of whatever it is.
It just sounds like people that already know where the chips are going to fall, so they want to move on to the next proceeding.
You know what I mean?
And that's it.
That's where I like to show what a local guy with zero fucks can accomplish.
And to warn people that this is what happens, because I don't think too many people would necessarily do what I've done.
In Johnny's situation, what I've done is I've made fun of the sheriff's office.
And the way I've made fun of them is by saying, I saw how you guys developed your strategy of killing Johnny because I watched the 32 minutes of your fucking video footage body cam.
So when I make fun of you for being afraid of the tweakers...
It's because I heard you guys talk.
And so Justin White was the lead coward in developing the strategy, and he's involved in SWAT.
So, you know, okay, here's him talking.
And this is what happens, okay?
So Jackie Maxville takes Johnny out to the Deep Creek south side of Missoula, okay?
I suspect there's some meth that's used at some point.
I don't know if Johnny had the money to buy the meth.
Maybe Jackie Maxwell gave him the meth.
I don't know.
Maybe. There was a machete, a long knife.
Machetes were really hot that summer.
It was a really nice accessory for the poor victims in the homeless community that liked their drugs.
So machetes were cool, and Johnny was in possession of a machete potentially given to him by Jackie, Maxwell, Jack, or maybe he already had it.
Who knows?
But they went out to the woods.
And at some point, Jack gets kind of scared.
So scared that does he call 911 himself?
No, he calls his daughter.
And his daughter calls 911.
That's fucking weird.
So the sheriff's office, they respond.
There's lots of them.
And there are Jackie Maxfield, Johnny Lee Perry, and there's two other people that were sick.
One of them is a really kick-ass chick who I think has risked a lot by talking to me.
And so, but they were out there watching what ended up happening.
And so, Johnny was playing with his machete.
The cops were like 50 yards away.
They spent a half an hour, you know, basically watching Johnny just swing it around.
You know, just swing it around.
I mean, he wasn't making any lunges.
He wasn't saying anything.
They used their megaphone to basically say, Johnny, put the knife down.
Put the knife down, Johnny.
But they were developing their strategy at the time.
So Justin was like, okay, here's what we're going to do.
Are we going to bring dogs in?
No, we're not going to bring dogs in.
We're going to use the non-lethal rounds.
And if that doesn't immobilize Johnny and he makes a move to one of the meth shacks, we're going to assume he might have some meth friends with guns just waiting to go crazy and start bing, bing, bing, bing.
That's always what happens.
Yeah, that's where I think their fear comes in.
I have to be like, well, they were afraid of what they didn't know in those little mess shacks.
So clearly, when they enact their plan, which they did after half an hour, they got bored, I think, of pretending to tell Johnny forcefully what was going to happen if he didn't, you know.
And so they move in.
I can't remember who shoots with the non-lethal, but four rounds were used.
Johnny was not deterred.
He ended up running, taking off.
And then I think it was Sean Evans, Sheriff Deputy Sean Evans, shot him twice in the back.
And he bled out.
They hung out there for a while.
He was flown by helicopter and he died.
So what Johnny may or may not have known about what happened the night that Sean was assaulted, you know, dies with him.
And it just is disgusting to me because, you know, sitting in that courtroom watching the charade that is a coroner's inquest.
When I tell people don't come to Montana, I'm serious.
It is not a safe state.
There is no functioning criminal justice system.
Unless you want to hire all your own private everything to try and get answers, then it's Yellowstone.
It's the train station.
People are taken out, and it can happen.
And you can literally know specific information, and the sheriff's office just won't call you back.
That hurts my feelings.
Oh, man.
Sheriff's office.
Call him back.
I helped him catch a killer.
Kevin Lino was a murderer.
Oh, dude.
Let's talk about that, man.
I want to hear about freaking Kevin Lino, dude.
First of all, so there were witnesses at the Johnny Perry murder.
What happened to them?
What happened to Jackie?
I mean, no witnesses came forward to say anything?
He was in and out of jail again.
And I mean, it's the ultimate outcome of a coroner's inquest is that the jury, because there's a jury, they can ask questions, but they found Sean Evans not criminally.
So he didn't commit a crime.
For shooting this guy in the back as he's running away.
That goes against protocol, doesn't it?
Who knows?
I'd have to subpoena them, I'm sure.
With guts.
But they were able to just basically rationalize the risk to themselves were they not to use lethal force against Johnny.
And so the coroner's inquest, the outcome was baked into the cake.
It's definitely...
We know how this stuff is going to play out, but it's very difficult to actually sit there and watch that stuff.
It was not easy.
I don't get too using the N-word myself, but I ran into a former city council in between.
There was a break, and I unfortunately said how I thought black people were being treated in Missoula, and his eyes kind of got widened.
Not my best moment, but it was...
Ryan Vaughn, rocket scientist, will definitely remember that burrito that he was ordering.
Oh, man.
Yeah, a burrito with a little side of reality check there.
Yeah. Again, I had already helped law enforcement catch killers and stuff at this point, so I can get kind of cocky, a little arrogant, a little aggressive.
When people want to be polite, they say I'm passionate.
I've realized that's a code word for like, we're kind of like a little worried that you're going to not stop talking to us.
So you're passionate.
That's the polite way of trying to chill me out, I think.
I don't know.
For me, just before we get into the next segment, I mean, for me, it's refreshing because, you know, if you were to sit there and you absorb...
What the media is actually putting out, you start to feel like a crazy person because you're like, no, there's no way.
It goes against all your logic.
Yes. You're like, there has to be more to the story.
And unfortunately, Montana is a place where people largely, you know, they pick up the paper, they read it online and like, oh, that's what happened.
Cool. Right on.
Got it.
Well, yeah.
And before we get to the next one, the thing that I'm hoping to do is actually take a look at what I've been doing and create a bit of a model to have multiple lenses and looking at your own backyard so that people can do a bit of this.
I wouldn't recommend doing a public blog and kind of going after people for being corrupt in the way that I've done it.
But a lot of people don't have the insight and some of the connections that I've been able to work into.
Effort to do this.
But this is everywhere.
And one of the things with our new mayor is she went to Harvard recently in a post that I said she went to the place that taught Ted Kaczynski to be a people person, to learn how to be a globalist mayor because this 15-minute city shit, you know,
it's a Bloomberg Center for Cities or City Center, you know, one of these sort of like...
Organizations that literally are just giving them their marching orders at this point.
So this stuff is going everywhere.
And I've got a lot of interesting books that I'm going to be packing with me as I create a mobile library to sort of accessorize my effort to take it on the road and expose things on a different level.
So as you go on the road, are you going to stick with these stories as you go on the road?
Are you going to move to something else?
Once you get to another place, are you going to start going locally there?
Well, I want to design the transit truck, essentially.
I'm not going to leave Missoula.
I'm going to maintain an address here.
My family and my kids are here.
And I have some court stuff that I'll be definitely needing at some point to be in person for.
But in the meantime, I'm trying desperately to think of things differently.
Bricks and mortar as a place to actually have a business.
Currency is about to get out of control.
Inflation, all of that.
A hot war at some point.
Let me ask this real quick.
For the homelessness situation, when we become a cashless society, what are the homeless going to do?
Crypto. Here's a crypto coin.
I'm glad you asked that because one of the things I did want to touch on is how butthurt I can get and how butthurt many people in alternative media can get.
And so at some point I want to reconnect with some of the synchromistics that I read their content and continue to listen to a lot of podcasts.
But I was so...
Like a year and a half ago, I think I put off some people.
And so my attempts to get on some of these podcasts that I've been on has not been all that successful.
And it's interesting because I hear the effort of getting people more together on the same page.
But this is a roundabout way of answering your question.
Allison, is it McDowell?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Allison McDowell.
The way that her and Derek Rose had this falling out, very public, was very bizarre to me because I still think her content is amazing in anticipating the gamification of everything, of what's happening.
When I say that I think we're all getting sucked into a LARP, I think of Allison's work.
And so Allison McDowell is very important in putting it into context.
And I'm trying to keep, you know, sort of data and information separate from personalities because our personalities can get...
In the way of stuff.
I know mine can.
But it's interesting because a long time ago, years ago, it was the University of Wisconsin, I think.
They were doing some kind of app development and they wanted to get us homeless providers and service providers some insight.
And we were so desperate.
And this is what I talked to Allison at the time.
We were so desperate working with people with addiction.
We wanted anything.
To improve this.
And they're like, okay, so we're going to have this app and it's going to have support services like content that they can access whenever they want to stay sober.
We can plug in where they scored their drugs in town and it'll give a little notification warning if they get close to where they're scoring drugs.
We'll have their emergency contact so if they need to, they can hit the emergency button.
It sounds great when you're desperate and you want anything to improve something.
This is years and years and years ago, right?
Who knows what they've actually rolled out in some of these ways.
It got me thinking when Allison was starting to make the rounds of what my kids are being faced with.
I'm not going to be probably the most successful in getting through the narrative control through their heads because it's so challenging to wade through stuff.
There was one episode of Black Mirror I made my kids watch because they have to have a different understanding of risk because they've grown up in this.
It's like oxygen to them.
The homeless community will get sucked into having phones and having the help apps that will make it seem good, but the smart cities, the smart tech...
I had a homeless guy, an indigenous dude, who's since been in jail for quite a while.
He kicked a cop in the balls.
Oh, man.
Dino! Dino, you shouldn't have kicked the cop in the balls.
Dino walked away from support housing because he's like, Travis, I think there is cameras in the vents.
He's like, I don't like it.
He felt being watched.
He said he looked out and saw some drone hovering outside the housing unit at some point.
Who knows what's going on?
He didn't like it.
Problem reaction solution.
Is this the guy that ripped a panel off his car and found a hidden camera?
Yeah, he did.
That's right.
He took it out and said he found something that he thought was a camera.
It could just be a sensor, you know, let you know something is, a filter needs changing.
He's just taking a smoke sensor out.
I mean, who knows?
But, like, it's to the point, I think it's pretty safe to be paranoid to a certain extent.
I think so.
When you understand the listening devices we carry around with us, tailor advertising to us in ways that's just...
I do think there are going to be ways that homeless communities are used in rolling out some of this 15-minute smart city convenience.
But again, things sound good, and you have to step back sometimes from what sounds good.
Too good to be true, potentially.
But the idea that's been tried out in Paris and a few other places is just...
Looking at keeping everything you might need within a 15-minute walk, right?
And so part of this is to address global climate change.
They want you to be afraid, afraid, afraid, to give up rights.
Essentially, cars are going to be transitioned out of a lot of these cities.
And in Missoula, they love their transportation crap.
I mean, we have snow, just like it's snowing today.
A lot on the ground.
And it's been pointed out sometimes by locals, I think myself included, that your biking utopia, your multimodal utopia, because these buzzwords drive me insane.
I go to enough city council meetings and urban planning meetings where I hear all this mixed-use, multimodal bullshit, and it's like...
Watch out.
This is a way to slowly get you used to not going very far because they don't want you to go very far.
Driving on the interstate might be a thing in the past for people as individuals wanting to have a road trip.
Yeah, so the ultimate plan is to keep everybody in these small 50-minute cities and contained and there's no travel.
The big picture is insane.
Yeah. Fuck
Democrats and fuck conservatives and Republicans.
I mean, I have no patience for national politics at all.
I mean, that's how I go smashy road level four, by pissing everyone off.
But it sucks because as a former artist, well, not a former artist, because I sound like Prince.
I'm not using a symbol to talk to myself.
As an artist who formerly felt like he had a support community, and then a pandemic happened, right?
And I suddenly lost that community because their minds got hijacked by a mind parasite.
I went to a lot of churches and was in more direct relation to conservatives and then saw the sort of illness of QAnon and how that is the other sort of mind virus on that side.
And all of us getting sucked into LARPs so that we're not actually doing things on the ground.
If you're not talking to people on the ground and interacting in a more honest, visceral way, then you're just kind of...
You're doing stuff online that's not going to be very meaningful in the long run.
Yeah, it's interesting that you speak on that because I'm talking to people more and more, these professionals, right?
And the issue isn't with the money that they're getting from their job because they've been allowed to work and maintain their lifestyle from home.
It's the not going and meeting up.
It's removed the meaning from their job.
And they're voicing this, I just want to get back with people now.
Everything we do is this online meeting here.
I have a two-hour meeting, a two-hour phone call, or this and that.
So even these things that are quote-unquote important, right, just cease to have any meaning when they're from a distance because we're not going out there.
We're not just moving around.
I mean, I think people will find out quicker than they think they will.
Everyone thinks it sounds like a great idea.
Oh, you can work from home until you try it for a while, and you're like, oh, fuck, man, I don't know who I am anymore.
Even when you do?
Like, even when you do, maybe I'm just cursed to be curious, but even some of the groups that you might think are grassroots, I'll give an example, and this kind of, I don't think I actually wrote about this just because I don't want to pick fights with even, like, small-scale poets.
I mean, like, come on, who the fuck am I?
But Word Dog, as I pick a fight with poets, they're not going to hear this.
And if they do, I'm just going to be like, well, you know, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But Word Dog, the place I'm moving out of, today was my last day.
Technically, I need to be out by tomorrow, so I'll probably be moving Legos again later today.
But there's a suite two performance space kind of adjacent in the basement of this other building.
I think it's all owned by the same guy.
But Word Dog is a poetry slam thing.
They do, I think, every other Tuesday.
And I just went to their website, and I looked at the website, and I think they'd gotten some award.
But I looked at the website, and the funding went to this one place, and it was the Women's Center on campus.
And the Women's Center on campus got some money from the Blackstone launching pad.
And so it was like a couple steps removed, but when you find anything in local media, one of my approaches is just like, Looking at the organizations, going to their boards, finding other organizations they're involved with.
And it's all so incestuous at this point that if there's any kind of money or funding, it has a potential to be tied to some element that's going to have a subtle impact on the stories you can tell.
And so I'm looking at narrative control.
I'm looking at how I lost my lease at the Zootown Arts Community Center in part because I was criticizing the people that helped them purchase the building.
And if you're accepting money, you're accepting some form of limitation.
Jason Bermas even actually talked about this somewhat honestly on the Union of the Unwanted recently about Alan Dershowitz and how he had an opportunity to interview Alan Dershowitz on one of the places that's paying him money.
And he told him straight up, you don't want me being the one asking questions because I can't help myself.
And I know you guys have a brand that you need to be aware of.
And this is all very upfront.
He's very honest about it.
But part of how I have done what I have done is by self-financing and taking resources so that I don't have any limitation.
For good or ill, I get to really define what I'm writing about five, six times a week is the pace that I've been keeping my articles coming.
That's the best way to do it.
Yeah, exactly.
And the thing is, it's the trade-off, right?
And I was just going to say that the problem is you have to sacrifice one for the other, right?
Because the institutions have the institutional backing.
They have that security.
That's why they're so flippant about it to begin with.
Because they're like, ah, who's this guy?
We got the resources.
We got the people.
We can throw 10 or 11 or 15 people at this situation.
And by the 11th person, we'll probably get what we want.
But if you choose to give that up, it's more rewarding, I think.
Because you start to pull on these threads that...
Begin to unravel and you're like, I'm on to something.
I'm making these institutions push back on me.
It's the time frame because the power elite, they go on a very long time frame.
And so part of what I've been trying to think in terms of what I've done is I've invested in what will be a book.
You know, I've got a book that I've written as I drove around and so I'm trying to edit it now.
What's the call?
And so narrative control is very important and I have hard copies of books because I think we are quickly approaching a time where, well, you already can't really trust a lot of stuff online, but even books like Tracy Twyman's book, Genuflect.
There are copies with over 100 pages now that have been taken out.
And that book was already hard to find.
It's generally thought of a reason why she died.
So Tracy Twyman was an occultist researcher who outed a lot of insane stuff.
And she died around the time that Isaac Cappy did.
Oh shit, what's her name?
Tracy Twyman.
So she...
Tracy Twyman, when it comes to the TI topic, she...
Man, she freaked me out.
There's only a few people that were really trying to understand what happened to her.
There was a podcaster that doesn't do anything anymore.
A lot of people stay away from the TI topic because it gets too freaky.
I've run into locals here that claim to be TIs in ways where they're happy to have someone know that they're not crazy.
But Tracy Twyman made some pretty crazy claims before she supposedly hung herself.
And Jenny Flex, I've read the book, it is nuts.
Jenny Flex.
It is archons, some of the most graphic, sort of ritualistic explanation of the Royals and a Bloomberg-type character who is basically just doing some crazy shit.
Wow. To speak on Coop's earlier question, do you have a title for your book that you're writing?
We're just curious.
My Alphabet Ends With Zoom is the title so far.
My Alphabet Ends With Zoom.
Yeah. Okay, cool.
And, you know, movies and a lot of this stuff, like David Lynch, we'll definitely get to Kevin Lino, the killer, at some point, because he's a real killer.
But David Lynch is someone I just kind of want to mention quickly because he was born in St. Pat's, so the hospital where Sean was victimized.
Yeah, so...
Okay, because I've been watching Twin Peaks lately, man.
Have you?
Talk about synchronicities.
So he only spent a few months in Missoula.
His family, like his dad was involved in government work, and they went up to northern Idaho.
So I think they were up in the kind of, oh, Lake Ponderane area, potentially.
Some of the details are kind of slipping my mind, but it's very interesting because absolutely this idea of borders.
And jurisdiction is something that I'm very interested in, both as it plays out in reality and as it gets shown on film.
And so One-Eyed Jacks feels like it could be across a border in Canada of some kind.
You get into this Black Lodge kind of stuff and doppelgangers.
It's very much like this metaphysical realm called Chapel Perilous that Robert Anton Wilson would talk about, where you go into this metaphysical existential crisis of sorts.
And how you come out is how you sort of deal with it, either agnostic or cynical or crazy, I think is another option that Robert Anton Wilson talked about.
But some of the things that I was using in terms of narrative direction for this reality of what I was looking into with Sean is Jim Morrison.
So Jim Morrison is a big figure for me because I used him in a work of fiction in 2015 and 2016.
Dave McGowan's work is...
Hold on.
Are you going to say that his dad was a CIA agent?
Well, his dad was an admiral in the Navy and was involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Yes. Okay.
Dave McGowan's work is very interesting.
I ran across a book written by a guy in Great Falls.
It's a weird just work of like...
Fiction. Where he has Jim Morrison as being alive and working in a bar outside of Great Falls.
Great Falls, Montana.
And I talked to this guy on the phone because I'm like, hey, I wrote about Jim Morrison too.
You're fucking with some shit.
He's like, oh, it's all just fiction.
It's no big deal.
But you had him disappear in a rock, in a portal, as some kind of indigenous...
You know, it's very interesting the way that some of the synchronicities have been popping up.
So I use Jim Morrison, and there's a lot of content that I consumed as I was traveling around that helped inform what I was writing about.
So the TV show Yellow Jackets was very interesting to watch in Denver, Colorado, as I was looking into where Sean was living before coming to Montana.
So Sean was homeless in Denver and had a really nice subsidized housing unit set up.
And I actually didn't know until these last three or four months why Sean moved to Montana in the first place.
And part of what I've been looking into is both my role as a guy.
Going through a divorce brings up a lot of shit, especially when you're with the same person for 25 years.
And so I've been thinking about the divine masculine, the divine feminine, and then sort of the flip side of that, the dark masculine and dark feminine, right?
This will all, if you want to interject, feel free to, because I'm going to start rambling a bit.
But Jim Morrison's girlfriend, Pam Corson, came from Mount Shasta, the California area.
So that was one of the places I wanted to visit.
I went to LA for the first time and checked out where his last hotel was before he went to Paris.
And there were some other elements that I was kind of looking into as well, and David Lynch was one of them.
So part of my thinking, you go to these physical places where people make their claims.
David Lynch decided he wanted to go to Philadelphia back in the day to get his gritty urban experience.
And he claims in Philadelphia that's where he saw violence and people were shot close to where he was living.
That's probably true.
And I'm very skeptical now of David Lynch, and I'll tell you why.
For good reason in a second.
But I go to Philadelphia.
I spent some time in that city.
It's where my favorite boutique is where I buy all my kick-ass looking clothes so I look like a rock star.
Hell yeah.
Fake it till you make it.
Manifest. Manifest.
That's all you...
Philadelphia is intensely crazy.
Benjamin Franklin's presence in that city...
Ross Bend does a lot of amazing work on Philadelphia.
So that place is highly charged anyways.
I went to where David Lynch claimed that he was slumming it.
And it's very close to highly Masonic architecture, close to the Capitol.
And I'm just like, David, no, you're not fucking slumming it.
Maybe you were in a somewhat gritty urban environment, but you're not in some of the places where I mistakenly pulled off and was driving through Philadelphia feeling very white in a nice camper and being like, oh my god, get me out of here.
Part of my concern with David Lynch is Twin Peaks involves obviously the creepy murder of Laura Palmer.
And in my book collection, I've got a lot of Lynch books.
And one of the books I have is The Journal of Laura Palmer.
A journal?
The journal.
Do you know who wrote that journal?
Who? So David Lynch had his daughter write it.
No way.
Are you serious?
Yeah, because, I mean, I have a little girl.
I totally want her to get in the mindset of someone that was raped by her own father.
I'm sorry, Bob the Demon.
Why in the fuck would David Lynch want his daughter to get in the mindset of Laura Palmer to write a journal?
I almost feel dirty having possession of some of these books.
That's really fucking interesting.
Hold on, I need to interject this part because last night I was watching Twin Peaks.
There's a scene where, because he's the owner of that brothel thing, whatever, whoever that guy is.
And his daughter is in there, and she's like, oh, shit, because he doesn't know it's his daughter in this room.
And he's like, come on, baby.
And she has a mask on, and she's like, oh, my God, I got to get out of here.
And she's like, no, don't touch me.
And he's like, oh, you turned me on so much.
Come here, you sexy thing.
And that's his daughter, even though he doesn't know it because he can't see her face.
But that reflection, man.
A little lynching setup.
I don't have patience for some of this content anymore.
Maybe kids are maybe a bit softer, but Fire Walk With Me.
I actually stopped watching that movie because I re-watched it somewhat recently, and I had to stop watching it.
I'm like, no.
Fire Walk With Me?
Fire Walk With Me is a movie spinoff of the Laura Palmer narrative.
Oh, okay.
The reason why it's very interesting, when you start talking about some of this trauma-based, mind-control stuff, and you get into these realms, you have to start understanding how I think we're all being sucked into this with mass trauma events now.
And the brain really doesn't make distinctions between what it sees on screens and what's happening in reality.
And so in some ways, we really are exposing ourselves to some pretty crazy shit when we're watching some of this stuff.
And I've been telling my kids about Stranger Things and the Montauk background narrative that informs some of the stuff that they now enjoy, because they're going to watch it whether I want them to or not.
And so I want them to at least start thinking critically about it.
But with David Lynch and with some of this stuff, it has gotten to the point where I really wonder, because some of the things I'm looking into involve human trafficking.
And just recently, there was a commenter on my blog, Concern Troll.
I'd like to know who that person is at some point.
But Concern Troll put a link on this Vice just recently, within the last couple days, a link to a Vice article about this crazy guy that ran this anti-trafficking group.
He's like this Christian guy.
And it just smacks of some of the stuff I'm looking into locally.
And it really, it concerns me.
How people with money and ideologies that lead them to think they might be doing good are getting sucked into all kinds of fake fuckery, you know, all kinds of weird shit.
Yeah, so I want to ask you again about what...
Do you have any information on the child trafficking in Missoula, though?
Like, how are the motels being used in Missoula, specifically?
Is that occurring?
In Montana?
Everywhere. And it's just the way that it's occurring is that people are moved too quickly for law enforcement to ever catch up.
They're just constantly on the move.
Wow. Yeah, these motels are part of a circuit.
And people operate...
A lot of the homeless that I interacted with, a lot of them were locals, year-round homeless folks.
But I also understood different populations and there were the quote-unquote transients that would come through in the warmer months.
You would get a sense of some of the people that were potentially having girls that they were controlling.
I mean, you would see this stuff to a certain extent.
And young men and young boys as well.
There were some young indigenous guys that, you know, I would hear stories of them being picked up in limos from time to time.
And one of my worries is that some of these remote parts of Montana are being accessed by people with money more and more.
Glamping, so you can go up to like, you know, Paws Up Ranch and that's a nice like fancy place to go.
For celebrities, landing a small plane in a remote part of Montana is also becoming more popular for people with money.
What I get concerned about with human trafficking and what I know is that the Missoula County Sheriff's Office, they have a chaplain by the name of Lowell Hochalter.
His lifeguard group is family-run.
He just got $20,000 as a gift from the Gianforte From our governor, so part of his salary.
He got a half million dollars to buy this piece of property in the Bidroot called the Lighthouse at Crooked Tree Ranch.
And, you know, I don't know what these people are actually up to.
Whether or not victims are being helped, I don't know.
My sources tell me that they are not really doing much in terms of what they say they're doing and getting donations for.
What is this lifeguard thing?
What's that?
What's the purpose of him building that ranch or whatever?
So from my perspective, a lot of it's political cover for our governor.
So our governor, Greg Gianforte, he's an outsider.
He's not a Montanan.
He's a billionaire.
So whether or not...
Is he from New York?
New Jersey, I think.
Wright Technologies was the tech company he sold to get his money.
He also got physically aggressive with the reporter before he was elected.
And then Montana was like...
Yeah, he body slammed that guy.
Yeah, and Montana was like, fuck yeah, that's awesome.
We don't like the media.
They're a bunch of...
Violence! Let's bring this guy on.
Yeah, so we elected them.
It's hilarious.
But, you know, they partnered with Town Pump.
You know, Town Pump wanted to pretend like they were sort of like creating their drivers.
And then the Beer and Wine Association and all these guys delivering alcohol were like informally deputized to be like first reporters, you know.
So they go through this training to identify, you know, what human trafficking looks like.
And then they're going to be better positioned to, like, work with law enforcement.
So, it's like, I mean, you get donations, you have this, like, fake trade, and you get a bunch of well-meaning Christians thinking they're, like, being called by God to go save people.
I've heard that Lowell, like, back in the day, would go to, like, Super Bowl parking lots trying to, like, you know, find the sex trafficking victims and save them, you know?
So, it just, it's bizarre, but, like, the way it starts connecting to crazy shit is...
You start looking at missing persons, first responders, what happens, what doesn't happen, who people work with, who they don't, and it gets very bizarre.
So the lifeguard group did not really help to find Rebecca Barsati when she went missing, although they made some claims that they did.
Jermaine Sharlow, the indigenous woman that went missing and has never been found.
The lifeguard group got quickly involved looking for her.
Stolen is a podcast you can listen to by Connie Walker.
She's an outsider, and she came in, gave a detective a ride around, talked to some people.
Lowell Hochalter, the chaplain, again, was on that podcast, and he said stuff about how great Jermaine applied makeup.
It makes my skin crawl listening to this guy talk.
And he talks about information that he shouldn't be sharing.
Montana Code annotated.
Details confidential criminal justice information.
And so when Lowell claims that he was in the interview with the suspects and shares information with the reporter, he shouldn't be doing that.
That's technically against the law.
But when you're working with the law, you can do whatever the fuck you want, apparently.
Yeah, the Stolen Podcast is a joke.
You can listen to it.
I definitely recommend people listening to it.
You can hear how Detective Guy Baker, someone I'm very interested in, decides the FBI dogs or the dogs to go search the property of the ex-boyfriend instead of the Missoula County Sheriff's dogs.
Well, it took four months to get the FBI dogs out there.
When the sheriff dogs could have been out there a little bit quicker.
So when you find bloody clothes and it's been four months, it's inadmissible.
Unreal. Nice controlling of the timeline there, Detective Baker.
What a fucking idiot, man.
Idiot or something else.
I also sat in a murder trial.
So Lee Nelson is a well-known homeless man.
He was bludgeoned to death in broad daylight on November 20th, 2020.
And I spent the first two weeks of, was it this year?
I think it was this year, yeah, in the murder trial of Charles Covey.
And I watched the public defenders of Charles Covey essentially put Detective Guy Baker on the stand because he ran such a shitty investigation.
He directed it towards someone, but by doing that he directed it away from others.
And so, yeah, no, it's interesting what might be happening.
But with Missing Persons and Jermaine Sharlow, I actually have had some success in being a thorn in the side of people that just...
Do things, I think, to shut me up.
My kids' school, for example, Target Range, they used to play the Stolen podcast.
And kids, my oldest, I think he was in 6th or 7th grade.
I can't remember the specific grade, but listen to it.
And then you kind of get to figure out for yourself, ask some questions about it.
I think they even had Detective Guy Baker and or Lowell there as part of talking to the kids.
Uh, in previous, um, showing of the, or playing of the podcast.
And so I, I talked to some administrators and I said, Hey, um, if you guys do that again, cause I have some kids coming up and they're going to get to that grade.
I'm like, if you want to have a panel, you should have me alongside detective guy Baker and Lowell Hochalter.
And then we'll have a real fun conversation about the Jermaine Charlo case.
Exactly. We'll see what kind of awkward situations can be created.
They don't play that podcast anymore for the kids at Target Range.
And I've gone to the University of Montana.
I've chatted with the director of the Native American department.
I'm just like, listen to that podcast again and listen to how Lowell talks about makeup and Jermaine's face.
And tell me how you feel in your stomach.
And I just want to throw some statistics really quick.
So I was looking...
So currently in Montana, there are 170 missing people in Montana's missing persons database.
109 of them have been missing for longer than one year, 61 for less than a year, and 45 of them are indigenous people.
So I'm glad you mentioned that, actually.
Let me pop over to Sean's case really quickly because...
What I didn't know when I first started covering his case and looking into it, I mentioned I didn't know why he went to Montana.
He was following an indigenous woman, a girlfriend, and he didn't come to Missoula to be homeless.
He came to the Flathead area.
To enact what he wanted to do, which is because he had been taking some business classes, accounting classes.
He wanted to open a restaurant or work in the food industry somehow, a food truck maybe.
So he had a girlfriend who was indigenous.
The girlfriend had a young girl, I think, a daughter.
And Sean had a daughter in Denver who turned 18, graduated high school, and that's one of the reasons why he left is because now that she had graduated, he kind of was like, I'm going to do what I want to do.
And so when the family told me this, when I learned this for the first time this summer, I was like, okay.
My gut feeling was that Sean came to the Flathead, he was on the res, and he saw something.
Like, he saw something that was operating on the res level that impacted not just his girlfriend, but maybe that little girl.
And Sean was not the kind of person I've come to understand that would keep his mouth shut about it.
Like, he wouldn't turn his back on something.
And so he ended up at the homeless shelter, and he was working at Sun Mountain Sports.
They make golf bags.
I actually worked there briefly many, many years ago.
I went and talked to the manager who was quoted in some of the articles at the time, and he was telling me that Sean would get there on time, even if he was hungover.
I just got a sense of who Sean was as a person, and I'm firmly convinced that he knew or saw something and mouthed off or said something to the wrong person and made himself a target.
What's happening on the reservations in Montana is so fucking awful.
There was a Showtime documentary.
Cheryl Horn, I think, was one of the people interviewed in that.
If that's the person I was thinking of, she was given a job at the state level, and I think she may have left that job because they're so clever at narrative control.
You might get a job, and that might be how they actually lure you into something that will limit what you can do.
And so the situation in Montana is really awful.
It's deplorable.
And up in Flathead, so Flathead County, the sheriff's office or the county commissioners have pulled out of some kind of public funding of reservation courts, I believe.
There might be some things I'm slightly mistaken on, but when you look at western Montana, there's a lot of weird...
I mean, if you don't have investigators, you can't do much, right?
And people are smart.
They know what they can get away with.
One of the reasons I left my job at the Pavarello Center, and I left it way back in 2015, 2016.
It was like February of 2016, I think, is when I left.
It's because...
People on the streets, when I would have challenging interactions and I would need to potentially have law enforcement back me up, there were times where I would be like, you know, hey, if this keeps on happening by this business, they're going to call 911 or I might have to call 911.
And I increasingly got responses like, go ahead, Travis, they're not going to do anything.
The jail doesn't want us.
The ER doesn't want us.
And they were right.
I'm pretty sure I mentioned this on Sam's show, that this sense of anarchy was starting to develop back then.
The veneer on the surface of having a functioning criminal justice system is there for the tourists, and it's there for the college students, and it's there for people to think that it still exists.
But it doesn't exist.
You don't have to go very far now to scrape behind the scenes and see all this crazy...
And something you touched on in your articles and something I've been thinking is it's just like nature.
The predators are going to go in the areas where they can be the most successful.
And there's the exact same situation that's been building in Montana for a long time.
People are going to test and push boundaries.
You start to get a feel and a sense, if you were to come in as someone who wanted to be successful as a predator, that this is a good place to be.
This is a good place to set up shop.
There's a lot of workarounds.
There's a lot of space.
between areas where there's humans.
So there's a lot less oversight just in general.
And the oversight you do get is totally focused in the wrong direction because it's all focused on the business.
Corporate. The prison system is a joke.
And so, like, here I am thinking, well, yeah, more and more people are just going to be stacking up this region.
I went to city council.
Oh, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to point out, I went to city council recently, and this is part of my kind of legal issues, but I wanted to go in person so that I could show the book by John Costin called To Kill and Kill Again.
So back in the 70s, I think it's Wayne Nance was our serial killer.
And Wayne Nance was able to get away with stuff because...
Sheriff's offices were not sharing information.
So Hamilton or somewhere down in Ravalli County, I think, was a few of his kills.
And it ended up being a citizen, ended up killing Wayne Nance.
And so he was never caught.
He was killed.
And they were never able to figure out how many kills he actually had.
I was bringing the book, though, because I wanted to tell city council that we potentially had a similar situation where when I talked to some of my private security contacts, they're telling me they think there's a serial killer.
And there are multiple bodies that I haven't written about because I don't know if it's safe to.
But some of the people I'm talking to are like, and none of these are making headlines.
None of them are making headlines.
But one of the young men that went missing...
Yeah. Well, Joey Thompson went missing in April of this year, and then he showed up dead in Mineral County in the Clark Fork River.
So the same river where Rebecca Barsati was found dead.
Spooky. Joey Thompson has gotten the attention of the smiley face people that are...
Wow. The researchers.
So some of the researchers that are looking at the pattern of young men that go missing and then show up dead in water.
Joey Thompson kind of fit some of those pattern...
You know, check marks, right?
Was there a smiley face nearby?
Well, I've been looking at graffiti.
I've been taking pictures of graffiti.
I talked to law enforcement, asking him if he knew what panda eyes meant, and I'm like, well, are you ready for a stomach-turning description?
And he's like, eh.
But I'm like, I shouldn't be telling you this.
You should be aware of this shit, you know, because graffiti is language.
And I'm looking at this language, like symbolism, actual words, you know.
And so there was no smiley face found in the vicinity necessarily, but I don't know where Joey was actually found.
He was found by a private landowner somewhere in Mineral County.
I've walked the stretches of Clark Fork River where he supposedly was found between the Tarquio boat put in and I think...
Pine Grove or Pine something put in.
And I don't even know where he was actually found.
He went missing in Missoula County in the same area where Johnny Lee Perry was shot.
And that was April 11th.
And I pretty much...
And he was a homeless guy as well?
No, so Joey was 18. He was a young guy.
But I pretty much know...
I suspect I know how he died.
And I have both Missoula County and Mineral County refused to call me back.
It's tied to the homeless industrial complex.
There's the son of a woman who works in one of the homeless programs that may be involved.
I think he is.
There's also a young guy who's in his mid-20s who, after Joey went missing, shaved his head, deleted a bunch of Instagram posts, and then went to Superior, Montana.
And I have multiple sources that tell me he's selling guns to teenagers, including a woman who I'm friends with because of a higher-side chat meetup that I had.
So because of synchronicities, I met this great, great woman who has kids kind of my age, and we both went through a divorce.
But she has a 16-year-old kid, and before I went on my little road trip, I was talking to her, and she's like, Travis, my kid just bought a gun.
I'm like, what?
She's like, yeah, he's working at this fast food place with a bunch of ex-cons.
There's a homeless camp behind it, so he's probably scared.
What the fuck?
And so I gave her the name.
I'm like, ask him if it was this guy that did it.
And a few days later, she texted me.
She was like, Travis, his face went white.
You're on to something.
How did mom know that he told me the gun?
It's because people tell me stuff.
I've talked to multiple people that were like, Joey was drunk at the bonfire out at Deep Creek area, was going on a beer run with these two guys, didn't put money up.
There may have been a girl involved that he was getting friendly with.
You know, he was cold clocked or something, left out there.
These two guys go back to the bonfire for 10 minutes, disappear, but then they leave again.
Everyone hears gunshots, you know, like a few minutes after that, and he shows up in the river.
Of course, the cops are saying there was no bullet holes in him or anything, but...
It's completely insane.
It's so convenient when the coroner is the sheriff.
I'm not saying that's the situation.
He went disappearing in Missoula and then he showed up in Mineral County.
Ryan Funk, the sheriff, I talked to him in person about this case because I go to Mineral County every once in a while to do my little public comment thing for them.
Because I'm so much fun.
I just want to share the story.
But I talked to Ryan directly.
I'm just like, where was he found?
He's like, you need to talk to Missoula.
They're the jurisdiction investigating it.
I'm like, I've left messages and they won't call me back.
Was that even publicized in the newspapers at all?
Was that even reported on?
Joey's death, he went missing and then showing up dead was publicized and that's why some of the smiley face researchers caught wind of it.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, the whole smiley face thing, I'm kind of skeptical about.
I've done enough research with the occult, and I understand how in some ways symbols can be charged, like sigils and some of this magical working stuff that does have an impact because we have powerful consciousnesses and we can direct our will in certain ways.
So I believe that there is an impact when people are doing this stuff.
And now that media has charged...
The smiley face enough with, you know, comic books and all these things, it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon now.
And so it doesn't have to be directly part of a cell that might be operating in an area.
I think there are ritualistic killings associated with the smiley face cult, but it's become like its own thing now because there's even a fictional movie about it that I was trying to get William Ramsey to take more seriously, but he thinks it's not worth taking seriously.
Yeah, that's the problem when you're fictionalizing these things.
Making them a joke, really.
And this is the thing.
So, psychopaths, okay, when we think about the psychopath class and how they operate, I mean, it starts making a lot of sense because whether you believe they have to sort of, for karmic reasons, telegraph what they're going to do with predictive programming, they might just,
for the lulls, like to throw it in your face.
I mean, it might just be shits and giggles by psychopaths getting off on...
On telegraphing what they're doing.
But there's enough of it that's happening now and we are watching and consuming and potentially participating in some of the stuff if we're not aware of it.
And so, you know, my travels really opened up my eyes because I physically went to some of these places and, you know, the synchronicity has helped to direct some of the things that I was thinking about.
And the smiley face stuff, I'm convinced there is something that has to do with water and spiritually polluting water for some effect that's happening.
And water has been fucking with me for months now.
Well, we need to get to Kevin Lino.
I want to talk about Kevin Lino because you brought him up and we haven't finished out with him yet.
So let's talk about Kevin Lino.
Okay, yes.
So I'll kind of summarize this as quickly as I can because the role that I had was beneficial for law enforcement because I worked at the Pavarello Center and I knew the Reserve Street area.
I had actually had this guy that was...
I could talk forever about his particular situation, but God told him to go live out there, and he ended up having a medical situation and has a person who is his payee.
Who would give him his money on a consistent basis?
And so because she didn't want to go out to the homeless camps, I offered to hand deliver the money to this guy.
And so for me, it was a chance to get the money out to him and help him, but also I would go and talk to other people living out in that area.
And so on this day when a body was found in the river out in this area, I was trying to go to deliver the money.
And I ended up getting stopped by some people that were behind one of the stores along Mullen Road as you're kind of going towards Reserve Street.
And one of them was the girlfriend of Barry, Gilbert Barry.
I can't remember his full name.
Jack Gilbert.
Gilbert Barry.
Yeah. The person who had just been found.
And so the woman was able to give me specific information about, like, cigarettes being put out on him and something being carved into him.
Details that I took some notes on, wrote up a little report when I got back to the homeless shelter, and hand-delivered it to the sheriff.
And that helped them kind of confirm who this person was.
And the situation with that was just kind of insane because, you know, I worked...
Closely with law enforcement, and I knew enough people on the street that there were, I think, three different chances for them to catch Kevin Lino in Missoula, and they failed to catch him.
Like, the downtown police officer I spoke directly with had been told that this guy, Kevin Lino, was at Kiwanis Park beating one of his pit bulls, and he didn't want to do anything about it.
He thought it was just hearsay.
Another homeless guy knew the apartment that Kevin Lino's friend was letting him hide out in, and the cops didn't take him seriously, and the woman that worked at the bus station saw their vehicle before they hit the road.
And so this really kind of freaked me out a bit because I found out later as I was talking to the girlfriend that one of Kevin's friends, because he was sort of like...
He was the oldest guy with a bunch of street kids, almost like running this little street gang, right?
And so one of his little stay-behind street punks was listening to me, and I was worried that I had been identified as giving information to law enforcement.
And then he still had people in town, and I was already going on vacation, right, to Colorado Springs, which you could have your own episode on just that place.
But I decided to leave a few days earlier.
I found out from the director of the POV at the time, who had an FBI friend, that Kevin Lino took the same highway I did, 25, and he was ticketed in Castle Rock near Colorado Springs around the same time I was in that area.
Oh my gosh.
He was ticketed, but they didn't know who he had.
So he was traveling with Monty, who has also since gone missing and is presumed dead.
My God.
And Angela was the girl in the wheelchair and I think a second person.
I think there was three or four people, right?
But this crew ended up making it all the way to Louisiana before Kevin Lino was finally arrested.
He was convicted, and I think he's in a prison in Massachusetts now.
But that was one of several serious situations legally that I got involved with because the homeless shelters are potential pass-throughs for people that are on the run from other states.
Easily. There's definitely...
That kind of crazy stuff that happens.
So you spoke to the FBI directly about Kevin Lena?
No, no.
My director of the pod, her name is Erin.
She's now in a high-level city position because she knows when to say stuff and when not to say stuff, unlike me.
But Erin's friend, she knew the FBI agent in the region that was involved, and so that's how she was able to tell me, be careful.
Because she knew I was worried about it, and they had been ticketed.
You know, right there in that area.
And I actually, I talked to some people flying a sign out in, I think it was Manitou Springs.
And I asked them if the cop presence had been heavy.
And they said, oh yeah, there's police going tent to tent asking around about these people.
Damn, I would say that's a near miss.
You know what I mean?
I would go that far.
Dude, he was chasing you, man.
Yeah, well, now that we're going to get Jesus involved really quickly here at the end, it's okay because I think that I've got some spiritual protection, and that's in part because Jesus comes into this synchronicity, which I think is the biggest synchronicity ever.
Greg Carlwood at the Higher Side Chat, man, I am such an idiot sometimes.
I was a little too confident in trying to get his attention, and I was talking some shit on Christopher Knowles, I think, and so I ended up...
Losing that opportunity.
If you guys want to hear really quickly, I'll tell you about the synchronicity.
Sean was assaulted and put into a coma, essentially.
He was rendered unconscious.
He was still on life support when he was in the hospital.
I get a text message from Sean's sister.
It was probably maybe a year after Sean died.
They're like, Travis, watch the movie Dogma.
As soon as you can, watch the movie Dogma.
I'm like, okay, I'll try.
And I knew a little bit about the family's role in this movie.
So Sean's dad actually owned the church in Pittsburgh where Dogma had some scenes filmed.
And so that's why there's a picture of Sean and Selma Hayek and Sean and Janine Garofalo and stuff.
I was going to ask about that.
Yeah, yeah.
And so that's why there's some famous people next to this guy that became homeless in Montana and died up here.
But the reason why they watched the movie, Sean's family re-watched this movie, is because Chris Rock was slapped by Will Smith, okay?
And for some reason they're like, oh, we should watch the movie Dogma again, because, you know, mom and dad...
We're really involved when the movie was being filmed.
Kevin Smith had a hard time finding a church that would allow him to bring in Buddy Christ and George Carlin and all this stuff.
And so they decide to watch the movie.
And the synchronicity happens like 10 minutes in, right?
So in the church that's supposed to be in Chicago, but it's in Pittsburgh.
And this is after the opening of the movie where God incarnates as a homeless man and is put into a coma.
By three kids with the hockey sticks, okay?
So 10 minutes in, the pastor is talking about the situation where a homeless man is in a coma.
And as he is saying homeless man in a coma, the camera goes over people in the church and Sean's parents are in the pew, in the church, as the camera is like on their faces, okay?
As what happens to their child 20 years in the future is like foretold, okay?
In this fucking movie.
That's fucking weird.
And so, it's like, I think it's like the craziest, weirdest synchronicity, right?
The movie is about Jesus.
Sean's dad has a book about the Shroud of Turin.
Sean's dad has worked on the Shroud of Turin.
Jesus' blanket is like, you know.
Right. And so, like, the more that you know about, like, Sean's family and, like, what Sean's dad did to, like, literally, at one point, because after...
Almost dying in the skies over Vietnam when a missile locked onto his plane and then bounced off.
He had a private sector job with IBM and he took some fellow Christian guy up into the plane with him at one point and they were trying to sprinkle holy water in the mountains to take it back from Aleister Crowley because Sean's dad is familiar with Aleister Crowley.
At one point he told some Masons he wasn't going to use a Mason Bible to do shit in his church.
What the fuck?
And so, like, Sean's dad is, like, this badass.
Like, his whole family, like, are badasses.
And this synchronicity, I think, shows that Jesus is a little pissed off, that black men can be euthanized and executed in Missoula, Montana.
So, I'm just the, I'm the humble vessel, you know, that gets to be a part of telling the story.
Because really, like, when I realized at this level that, like, things were kind of swirling around, I'm just like, what is this?
What is this world that we're living in?
It's a crazy one, but it's one that synchronicities are a language, and I think a lot of people are experiencing more of them if you're waking up to some of this stuff.
I think people are having a lot of these types of experiences.
Welcome to Sean Sisters, my synchronicity budding.
We help keep each other balanced because...
She's having really crazy synchronicities, and that's a lot of what the book I wrote is focused on, is what these things are directing us and making us think about.
I often wonder, because Scott, I've told you, I see 58 everywhere.
I'll look at the clock, it'll be whatever, 58. I'll look at a license plate, 58. Man, it's crazy.
Synchronicities are everywhere.
When I'm doing research, I have something playing on TV, whatever, and I'll be typing a sentence.
And right when I say situation or whatever, I'm typing situation, someone on TV is saying situation at the same time.
It happens all the time.
And I'm like, what the hell is happening?
I went on Reddit and I was talking to numerologists.
I'm like, why do I see 58?
Why am I having all these synchronicities?
And they're telling me, well, 58. It's all five and eight.
They're both very holy numbers together.
You know, 13, I don't know.
They're telling me this is tech.
They're saying angels are trying to reach out because they're telling me you're on the right track.
You're doing something right.
Keep going in that direction or the spirits are trying to talk to you.
So listen.
And I'm like, you know what?
I have nothing else.
I firmly believe that.
I firmly believe what you're saying.
It's a language that most people don't listen to.
They don't see it.
They just ignore it.
Because I think throughout history, our government has controlled us to such a level that we don't even think about things other than what they're telling us.
That's what I was just going to say.
The issue is that people aren't thinking anymore.
They're going off of what they're being told.
They're doing the same role day after day after day.
Sort of like a rinse and repeat situation.
And I know it sounds cliche, but when you're thinking outside the box, you start making the connections and you start picking up signals from things that other people miss because they're so just eyes forward.
It's no joke, man.
I think we're getting pushed to like a goldfish memory.
Everything's like...
Three second clips on TikTok or whatever, you know, and people are using that and like, this is my entertainment and my education at the same time.
Exactly. So it's like these three second cycles and it's on to the next thing and on to the next thing.
Well, find a buddy, find a synchronicity buddy because synchronicities really can destabilize and disorient people.
I think it was Nick Hinton that kind of hinted at a period where stuff was like clustering and swarming with synchronicities and it can really spin you out.
And so...
I'm lucky enough to have some people that help me stay one foot not in crazy town because it really can make you question some stuff at a pretty serious level.
Yeah, man.
And you mentioned you don't know if they're warnings or if they're telling you something.
So that's the same for me.
When I see something these days like 58, I'm like...
Is this a fucking one?
Because I get anxiety.
And I'm like, what the hell, man?
Why am I getting anxiety about 58?
My kid, when he was about a year and a half or two years old, was obsessed with the number 44. I mean, we literally had to put tape on the oven clock because he would get so distracted waiting for it to get to 44 and then stand up in his little high chair and point and say 44 and 44. I mean,
it was very bizarre.
And I just went from my 44th year to my 45th.
And so I was always kind of like...
Before my September birthday, I'm like, I need to get to 45 because maybe this kid is foretelling my death year or some shit.
Yeah. That's what I'm always worried about.
That's what I'm always worried about.
Is 58 my death year?
Is that what they're telling me?
Like, hurry up, complete all your shit?
And I try not to...
I always interrogate my fear reactions because I really try and limit responding in fear.
Like, looking into 44...
I think it was Mark Twain had one of his last stories.
There was actually a character named 44. It was very weird.
And so people use synchronicities in really, I think, good ways to direct their personal development.
And for the most part, I hear positive feedback.
But I think there's a lot more work to be done to put some of those guardrails on for some because...
When they happen in a storm kind of sense where you're getting so many of them, I've been at points where I'm like, can I turn this off?
I want to actually turn this off for a while so I can just get a breather, catch my breath kind of stuff.
Well, I commend you on the sobriety in that sense.
Yes! Both of us are sober as well.
Yeah, it's like seven years.
Awesome. Yeah, eight years for me.
And I know that my life started going like this because I stopped blurring out my reality.
You know what I mean?
And it's allowed me the space to have other thoughts besides what's in front of me on my phone or what someone else is telling me.
And it leads to situations like this where we can get together and we can share these ideas.
And I think that's really important about what we're doing.
So on that note, thanks a lot for giving us your time and your expertise.
And I would love to have you back on in the future.
I think that'd be great.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, because even the way I became not a box wine guzzler has to do with sort of synchronicities.
And Sean struggled with alcohol and so did our mayor.
So one of the things that actually ties all three of us together is the role of alcohol.
I'm blessed that I've been able to step aside from being a just constant box wine guzzler, becoming that cliche of having to be the tortured artist.
I've been there.
The tortured artist, man.
I've been there.
I'm an artist, too.
And Scott, we're both musicians as well.
Awesome. Synchronicities.
Well, let's do this again sometime.
At an undisclosed location.
I might be in a bunker or something.
I'm willing to travel to a bunker.
I would love to do a show in a bunker.
That'd be awesome.
We'll reach out to you.
For our listeners, thanks a lot for tuning in.
This has been a different episode than what we normally do.
It's been a fantastic episode.
We're all sharing some truth.
Thank you to Travis for stopping by.
Make sure you like, share, and subscribe us wherever you consume your podcasts.
Feel free to email us at Paranautica at gmail.com.
And just make sure you're stopping by for these nuggets of reality because we'll be here to give you a dose from time to time.
Absolutely. And Travis Mateer, why don't you go ahead?
Where can people find you?
Yeah, so I'll still be updating Zoom Cron.
That's Z-O-O-M-C-H-R-O-N.
I'm old enough that I have a Yahoo email account, so I'm still Willskink, W-I-L-L-S-K-I-N-K at Yahoo.
And those are the quickest ways to check out my content and to get in contact with me.
Things might be changing a bit, though, as I get on the road, but I will still be having a presence online in some capacity.
Awesome. Travis, thank you so much, man.
Thanks a lot for being here.
Coop, as always, great job, man.
Thanks for being here.
And I'm going to go ahead and thank myself for being here as well.
Pat yourself on the back.
I'm going to pat myself on the back real quick.
But yeah, thank you guys.
And tune in next week for another episode of the Paranautica Podcast.
Thanks, everyone.
Export Selection