True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 320: High Times and Misdemeanors
Aired: 2023-09-18
Duration: 01:25:37


=== Ganja God's Cold Open (10:01) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello, smokers, tokers, dopers, and dropouts.
[00:00:04]  It's me, the god of ganja, doobie Ruby McGangestra.
[00:00:11]  Bryce and Liz can't do the cold open today.
[00:00:14]  They're on a little trip with Mary Jane's crazy brother, Delta 8, and they're too busy blowing tea to talk to you.
[00:00:22]  They told me to tell you the episode today is a sticky, achy, skunk fest for the true herb fans only.
[00:00:29]  So pop out of that pre-roll, drop out of it.
[00:00:33]  Pop out of it, honey.
[00:00:35]  I know.
[00:00:36]  Honey, I know.
[00:00:38]  So pop out that pre-roll, light up that gravity bong, inhale that Thai stick and smoke up that knife, head.
[00:00:49]  Ladies and gentlemen, prepare to smoke on that true gon' genon.
[00:01:17]  Ladies and gentlemen, psych!
[00:01:20]  I would never smoke weed ever again.
[00:01:23]  I would rather die publicly in a horrible way.
[00:01:26]  I'd rather be on a little, I'd be on a fucking plane, right?
[00:01:30]  And there's guys get up and like, we're going to take this thing over.
[00:01:33]  We're crashing this into the Pentagon.
[00:01:36]  And I'd be like, I'd rather do this than smoke weed.
[00:01:39]  That's what I'd tell the hijackers.
[00:01:41]  Hello.
[00:01:41]  My name is Bryce Belden.
[00:01:42]  Hello, everyone.
[00:01:43]  I'm Liz.
[00:01:44]  Also not smoking weed.
[00:01:47]  She has an unlit dube in the corner of her mouth that kind of is like constantly in her, yeah, like a kind of 50s cigarette style that just like bobs up and down when she takes so it's both dry and wet.
[00:02:00]  I can like feel that.
[00:02:02]  You can.
[00:02:02]  Yeah.
[00:02:03]  I don't like it.
[00:02:03]  Little flakes are getting in your mouth.
[00:02:05]  Yeah, gross.
[00:02:05]  We're, of course, joined with the doubly stone by the doubly stoned young Chomsky.
[00:02:11]  And then thank you, Doobie Ruby McAllister, for letting some of your stoned voice work.
[00:02:19]  You smoke weed?
[00:02:21]  I'm actually starting to smoke weed again.
[00:02:24]  I've decided this fall I'm going to smoke weed twice a week.
[00:02:27]  Are you scheduling it?
[00:02:29]  Yeah, because I hate weed.
[00:02:31]  But I think this fall, what if I, honey, what if I smoke weed twice a week, read a book?
[00:02:37]  Hello.
[00:02:38]  Oh, yeah, hello.
[00:02:39]  It's called being an adult.
[00:02:40]  This little like punch and spice vibe.
[00:02:42]  Yeah, it's like just smoke a little giant, read a book, a great American novel.
[00:02:49]  Drives you.
[00:02:50]  Theodore drives you.
[00:02:55]  I will call the cops on you if I see you doing that.
[00:02:58]  Folks, this is a episode of True Ganjanan, a loose mini-series that we are starting.
[00:03:04]  In fact, actually, the show is going to be mostly about weed, the weed industry, what's going on in human.
[00:03:09]  It's telling you only vaguely about weed, too.
[00:03:12]  It's kind of about this episode.
[00:03:14]  It's not about weed.
[00:03:15]  It's not at all.
[00:03:15]  I'm also not interviewing Ruby.
[00:03:17]  She's just at our store.
[00:03:17]  We're just hanging out.
[00:03:18]  Sorry, guys.
[00:03:20]  I mean, we could.
[00:03:20]  Ruby, how's it going?
[00:03:22]  But she likes weed.
[00:03:22]  She already answered.
[00:03:23]  Oh, okay.
[00:03:25]  You are a criminal.
[00:03:27]  100%.
[00:03:28]  Or are you a cop?
[00:03:32]  That has more to do with our episode today.
[00:03:35]  Folks, we have yet another crazy paranoid author.
[00:03:41]  He's actually, he's the guy himself is not paranoid, but he's writing about a paranoid subject.
[00:03:45]  We are talking today with Sean Howe, the author of Agents of Chaos, a book about Tom Forsad, who was the founder of High Times Magazine.
[00:03:58]  Now, for people like Liz Ruby Young Chomsky, that was sort of, it functions as like a Playboy type magazine for them.
[00:04:06]  They open the center folds, they see the crystals on the kind bud.
[00:04:09]  They see the purple ganja.
[00:04:11]  They see the green ganja.
[00:04:12]  That's sort of like their different, like, oh, I'm into this race of people.
[00:04:15]  I'm into this race of people.
[00:04:16]  And then when mom walks in, we stuff them under the bed real quick.
[00:04:21]  Oh, I can't let her see.
[00:04:22]  I can't let her see.
[00:04:23]  And of course, the famous bong is the naked woman in real life for these potheads here.
[00:04:30]  The famous bong.
[00:04:34]  Last time any of you guys, I want to actually, honest question for everyone in the room.
[00:04:37]  Was the last time anyone here used a bong?
[00:04:41]  I don't know.
[00:04:42]  But I love how they look.
[00:04:43]  I love how.
[00:04:44]  I love how they look.
[00:04:45]  Do you?
[00:04:46]  Wouldn't you want like a gorgeous bong in the middle of the circle?
[00:04:50]  I did so much time on Hate Street in my 20s that I like cannot see a smoke shot.
[00:04:58]  I get, it's like I go into convulsions.
[00:05:00]  I can't see the shit.
[00:05:01]  Liz had, when we were younger, Liz had the craziest, you know, SpongeBob.
[00:05:07]  100%.
[00:05:07]  The square pants.
[00:05:09]  Liz had just this thing.
[00:05:10]  I've never seen it.
[00:05:11]  It was not a cylindrical style bong.
[00:05:13]  It was a full rectangular bong.
[00:05:16]  Full-size, life-size SpongeBob.
[00:05:19]  You smoked out of his nose.
[00:05:20]  Absolutely.
[00:05:21]  And Liz had would just build these little campfires underneath his, what would be his crotch if he was a human, and just put some kind bud in there and just she smoked saltwater bongs.
[00:05:30]  That's that was Liz was sort of famous.
[00:05:32]  This is babe.
[00:05:34]  It was Squidward.
[00:05:35]  It was Squidward.
[00:05:36]  Liz, of course, was our famous life-size Squidward bong.
[00:05:39]  Absolutely.
[00:05:41]  But we have a fantastic interview right now with the author of Agents of Chaos.
[00:06:14]  Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the icky, sticky, kush half hour.
[00:06:25]  Please lay down on my chaz.
[00:06:28]  Let me drape a little blanket over you.
[00:06:30]  Put on some, what's the fucking incense that they always have?
[00:06:33]  Nag champa.
[00:06:34]  Let me put some champa on, maybe all around.
[00:06:39]  And then point a gun at your head and ask if you work for the police.
[00:06:43]  Hello.
[00:06:43]  Today on True Anod, we have with us guest Sean Howe, author of Agents, or is it Agents of Chaos?
[00:06:51]  It's Agent of Chaos.
[00:06:52]  It's Agents, plural of chaos.
[00:06:55]  The story of Tom Forsade, who is the founder of High Times.
[00:07:00]  Sean is a, well, you were a journalist, but now you're just an author.
[00:07:03]  I feel like you've been a little bit more for a long time.
[00:07:06]  Just a guy.
[00:07:06]  An author.
[00:07:08]  And also author of Marvel the Untold Story.
[00:07:11]  And unless I got that title wrong.
[00:07:13]  Marvel Comics, the Untold Story?
[00:07:15]  Marvel Comics Untold Story.
[00:07:16]  I know.
[00:07:16]  I said it and I panicked.
[00:07:17]  I was like, fuck, I should just look at myself.
[00:07:18]  Everyone knew what you were talking about.
[00:07:20]  You know what I'm talking about.
[00:07:21]  Sean, you know, welcome to the show.
[00:07:24]  Thank you for showing up.
[00:07:26]  And let me ask the first question.
[00:07:27]  Do you smoke weed?
[00:07:31]  I sometimes do.
[00:07:33]  It's too strong now, right?
[00:07:35]  You know, we did a reading and they were offering 10 milligram mocktails, which I thought was kind of crazy.
[00:07:43]  What does that mean?
[00:07:44]  Neither of us smoke weed, so you have to explain this.
[00:07:46]  Like I'm five years old.
[00:07:48]  Yeah, for me, like three milligrams is like, you know, I'm not going to freak out.
[00:07:52]  Okay.
[00:07:53]  And so I don't know how many people got home afterward.
[00:07:57]  It would have kicked in after they were at the reading, which is kind of a funny.
[00:08:03]  So like afterwards, they would have been driving home and then just completely swerved off the BQE.
[00:08:08]  Right.
[00:08:09]  Yeah, I actually, so last night it was, I did go up there.
[00:08:11]  I went to this reading to Sean's reading and there was an open bar or there was a bar at this bookstore.
[00:08:17]  And I said, oh, well, how funky.
[00:08:19]  Maybe I'll order myself a funky little mock tail.
[00:08:22]  And I go up there and they do indeed have a sign that says mock tails.
[00:08:25]  I don't drink because unlike many people in your book, I conquered my substance abuse issue.
[00:08:30]  So I go up there and I'm like, hey, let me get a mock pina colada.
[00:08:34]  The lady says no problem.
[00:08:36]  And then I look at the sign a little closer and I was like, sorry, does this have weed in it?
[00:08:40]  And she's like, yeah, it's all weed.
[00:08:42]  You can't call it a mocktail, but have weed in it.
[00:08:44]  It makes a mockery of cocktails is what it does.
[00:08:48]  And I said, can you do it, Sans Weed?
[00:08:50]  And she said yes and gave me basically what I'm adding to a female.
[00:08:53]  So you hadn't pounded it.
[00:08:54]  I hadn't had it.
[00:08:55]  But weed, even beyond everything else, weed is the most weed drives me crazy.
[00:09:00]  So if I had accidentally drank weed at your thing last night, it would have been an incident.
[00:09:08]  Weed is crazy.
[00:09:09]  I don't like this feature.
[00:09:10]  I don't like it.
[00:09:11]  We have a long, long-standing bugbear about the crazy, crazy weed now because we had like, we were on tour, we kept having all these faintings in the audience and we were convinced it's because the weed is too strong.
[00:09:26]  Because we investigate in many toques prior to these faintings.
[00:09:29]  It was the mocktails.
[00:09:30]  It was the mocktails.
[00:09:32]  It was the infusions.
[00:09:34]  So your book, the reason we're not bringing up weed because you look stoned.
[00:09:37]  You look totally normal.
[00:09:39]  But we are bringing up weed because the subject of your book, Thomas King Forsad, if that is your real name, was the founder of High Times Magazine, which I assume everybody listening knows is the weed magazine.
[00:09:53]  But let me ask you this, just to establish who the fuck we're talking about here, who is Thomas Forsad, which is a crazy name to begin with.

=== Blazing a Trail for High Times (06:16) ===

[00:10:02]  What's this guy story?
[00:10:02]  Why'd you write a book about him?
[00:10:04]  Yeah, so I don't even really know at this point who he was.
[00:10:12]  I got a lot closer to solving that mystery.
[00:10:16]  His real name was Gary Goodson, although people didn't know that at the time when he kind of appeared on the scene in 1969 and insinuated himself into the echelons of the counterculture and radical politics and immediately aroused everyone's suspicion.
[00:10:36]  Everyone thought he was a cop.
[00:10:39]  But somehow he continued to gain power and influence within that world.
[00:10:46]  And throughout the early 70s, he was kind of overseeing the underground newspaper network in America.
[00:10:52]  And after a long crazy hijinks in the summer of 1972, which ended with him being indicted on a firebombing offense from the Republican National Convention, he went underground, re-emerged with High Times magazine in 74.
[00:11:12]  And, you know, the magazine we all know and love.
[00:11:18]  And then he died.
[00:11:20]  And then he died.
[00:11:20]  In 78, right?
[00:11:21]  He died in 78 at the age of 33.
[00:11:26]  As someone said at one of the readings, very sort of suspiciously, that's a lot of Christian symbology.
[00:11:33]  Well, he was.
[00:11:34]  He was.
[00:11:35]  I was actually sort of surprised to find a, at least in the beginning of his sojourn into the radical media and sort of the radical milieu, a self-identified Christian for a point, to a point.
[00:11:48]  Yeah, I think that was mostly as a way to kind of keep police off of his trail.
[00:11:55]  He did a lot of traveling in a big school bus and had kind of an underground printing press in the back of this.
[00:12:04]  So he would go from town to town and give out his newspaper and sell drugs on the road.
[00:12:13]  And if they got pulled over, he would don like a priest's outfit and he would lead all the other people in the van singing hymns.
[00:12:23]  And so they would get off with a warning usually.
[00:12:26]  Yeah, you can sort of pretend to be Jesus people.
[00:12:28]  Right.
[00:12:29]  What brought you to writing about him?
[00:12:31]  Or like, how did you, like, what was it about him that felt like such, because I was reading the book and it seemed, you know, that whole era is very chaotic, this time between kind of 68 to, you know, when he died in 78, that kind of, let's say that's the decade of the 70s in a way.
[00:12:48]  I know other people have said that before, right?
[00:12:51]  But he seems to kind of embody a lot of this very like transitional chaotic energy.
[00:12:56]  And I'm wondering, like, what was it so much about him that kind of you keyed in on?
[00:13:02]  Yeah, I think it was kind of the fact that he was kind of weaving in and out of all these different subcultures.
[00:13:08]  And he seemed to just, you know, insinuate himself everywhere.
[00:13:13]  And so he, you know, he pops up in, you know, the world of magazine journalism, obviously, but also, you know, leftist radical politics, the punk rock movement.
[00:13:25]  And he just seemed like, how have I never heard of this guy who has had kind of an outsized influence, you know, in several categories.
[00:13:35]  You know, for one thing, he was a First Amendment warrior.
[00:13:41]  He battled for press credentials that were later used in the CNN versus Trump case when Jim Acosta was kicked out of press access for the White House.
[00:13:56]  And he kind of blazed a trail for underground reporters being welcomed into the mainstream.
[00:14:10]  Yeah, I mean, because he starts out, I mean, one thing that your book makes pretty clear, and I mean, you can't kind of escape noticing, is this guy really does kind of come out of nowhere with an assumed name and is able to, within like a year of his sort of appearance on the scene, he's running something called the Underground Press Syndicate, pretty much single-handedly.
[00:14:30]  And that was an organization that existed prior to his arrival, but he kind of seemed like kind of nobody wanted to do it anymore.
[00:14:38]  And he kind of just took the reins.
[00:14:39]  And I used to go to the shop in the Tenderloin in San Francisco called the Magazine.
[00:14:46]  And it was mostly, it was run by five pretty much identical guys that all kind of had, were bald with beards and kind of the same height.
[00:14:57]  It was sort of like a gnome situation.
[00:15:00]  And it was mostly like male erotica, like old photographs and stuff like that.
[00:15:06]  And then some like magazines.
[00:15:07]  But in the back, there was a massive collection of like underground papers from the 1960s.
[00:15:12]  And so I used to go buy like old copies of the Berkeley Barb.
[00:15:17]  I think I had copy of Slash magazine, so that's much later in the 70s.
[00:15:21]  But really, it was cool.
[00:15:22]  And I would, you know, kind of look through these underground papers.
[00:15:24]  They were pretty cheap.
[00:15:25]  I'd buy them.
[00:15:26]  And I think something that sort of people might know about some of the big ones, like the Berkeley Barb.
[00:15:32]  I think that's kind of probably the most famous one.
[00:15:34]  Yeah.
[00:15:34]  And those were kind of the precursor to like the alt weeklies that we, well, now have mostly disappeared, but you know, that you, if you are of a certain age, meaning probably above 22, you remember from whatever town you're from.
[00:15:47]  And, you know, it was a, they had a massive presence back then.
[00:15:51]  I mean, I know in the book, I think Tom is quoted as saying that there's like six million readers across America of these things.
[00:15:59]  And I mean, it's notable that like the thing that he heads for immediately, and this is whether he's a cop or not a cop.
[00:16:07]  It's just notable that the thing he heads for immediately is like, I want to be in charge of essentially like the wire service for the underground newspapers.

=== Forsade's Wire Service Ambition (14:49) ===

[00:16:18]  Yeah.
[00:16:19]  Yeah.
[00:16:19]  I mean, one of the things that I found out pretty early in my research that I think really led me down a rabbit hole was he kind of came out of nowhere.
[00:16:29]  And on August 15th, 1967, he contacted the East Village Other, which was the East Village underground newspaper.
[00:16:38]  And he said, look, I want to help in any way I can.
[00:16:42]  You know, he previously had been a business major in college and had worked for the Air Guard in Arizona.
[00:16:50]  He'd had a small military service.
[00:16:55]  And then suddenly he attaches himself to this counterculture movement.
[00:17:01]  It turns out that August 15th, 1967 is also the same day that the CIA's chaos program started.
[00:17:09]  And so I thought, oh my God, it's too perfect.
[00:17:14]  Yeah.
[00:17:14]  For our listeners who don't know, can you explain real quick what just a kind of head general idea of what the chaos program is?
[00:17:20]  M-H-CHOS.
[00:17:22]  Chaos.
[00:17:22]  Chaos is pretty much the CIA equivalent of COINTELPR.
[00:17:27]  So, you know, infiltrating the left, the civil rights movement, you know, various non-down-the-middle mainstream parts of America that need to be cleaned up or wiped out.
[00:17:44]  And, you know, Forsad made all of the people who were kind of in his orbit read a book called Agents of Chaos, a science fiction novel, kind of a pulpy science fiction novel about the establishment and then the counter-establishment and then this third force that comes in and shakes everything up.
[00:18:10]  So I thought, this guy was obviously an agent of the chaos program.
[00:18:18]  Could it be any more clear?
[00:18:21]  It's not maybe the smoking gun that I hoped it would be or thought it might be.
[00:18:28]  But it's one of many sort of circumstantial things that make your eyes in the book.
[00:18:39]  There are several quotes kind of throughout his basically decade-long career from people that were friends with him that are either them reporting to him that like, oh, you know, in letters like, hey, like, we're chill, but like a lot of my friends think you're in the CIA.
[00:18:57]  Or like other people giving you quotes later, but basically being like, the guy was a fucking agent.
[00:19:02]  And that seems to be something that like is throughout the book kind of like hangs over.
[00:19:08]  I mean, the book, the name, you know, not, I'm sure not to insinuate anything, but I was like, that's a very interesting title for your book on an agents of chaos, because like, you know, that obviously is, you know, any sort of student of the 60s would remember that that was a pretty big part of it, you know, the MH Chaos.
[00:19:27]  Right.
[00:19:28]  And it would seem sort of to somebody who was just to go over this guy's life, it's like, well, there's a lot of really, like, he was really getting away with a lot of stuff, right?
[00:19:38]  Like, there's a lot of instances throughout the book where he's sort of in these radical scenes and a lot of other people are getting busted.
[00:19:44]  Not that he doesn't get busted himself ever.
[00:19:45]  You know, he does.
[00:19:47]  But a lot of guys are getting busted.
[00:19:48]  And Tom's kind of just like getting away scot-free.
[00:19:52]  And, you know, there's multiple readings of that stuff within the book as well.
[00:19:56]  Like, there's people who are like, well, it's just like, that's the way it happened this time.
[00:19:59]  Or some people being like, I don't know why he got away, you know?
[00:20:03]  And did you wrestle with that?
[00:20:05]  Like while writing the book, you're like, did you come in with like a preconceived notion?
[00:20:08]  You kind of hinted at that right then.
[00:20:09]  Like, this guy's probably like something's up with this guy.
[00:20:12]  And then how did that change as you were writing the book?
[00:20:15]  Yeah.
[00:20:16]  Well, it kind of ebbed and flowed a little bit.
[00:20:19]  You know, I would kind of go back and forth thinking, like, oh my God, like this person that I just interviewed, like, they probably have a tap on my phone.
[00:20:28]  You know, I got like four years into it.
[00:20:30]  I think I was starting to like get the paranoia of what I was researching was starting to rub off on me.
[00:20:35]  You know, I mean, not to mention, you know, you're talking to a lot of people who are paranoid themselves.
[00:20:41]  You know, it's only natural that you start to get a little nutty.
[00:20:45]  But yeah, his arrest record is pretty clean considering what he was up to.
[00:20:55]  And I, you know, I had access to a lot of FBI files, which were really helpful.
[00:21:01]  But the FBI files would reference, for instance, a plot that the Secret Service was investigating about Forsad's alleged plot to assassinate Nixon.
[00:21:15]  And there were no Secret Service files that were responsive to searches.
[00:21:21]  There were no drug files on Forsad.
[00:21:24]  There were no DEA or the predecessor BNDD files on Forsad.
[00:21:30]  And for someone who was selling a lot of drugs and was just pretty openly advocating drug use, I thought that was strange.
[00:21:42]  But you can't, that doesn't really prove anything either.
[00:21:46]  It's a hard thing to prove that someone is not a spook or that they are a spook.
[00:21:53]  And so that can be maddening when you're trying to figure out someone's motivations.
[00:22:00]  Someone who's who also, I should say, Forsad really enjoyed kind of playing the heavy and he liked making people wonder who he was.
[00:22:09]  He didn't like having his face photographed and he would say provocative things to people and he would claim to be parts of groups that he wasn't a part of and he would use assumed names for things that he wrote and his name was never in high times while he was alive.
[00:22:26]  So there was all this mystery that he was cultivating and meanwhile there are people saying this guy's pretty mysterious and he wasn't doing much to kind of assure people he was cool.
[00:22:41]  It's funny you say that you kind of went through the looking glass a little bit in it when you were writing the book.
[00:22:45]  Like you kind of assumed some of the like or started feeling some of that kind of paranoia that the people in the book clearly felt because I think reading the book, I felt that.
[00:22:56]  Like the the there's so much going on and kind of weaving through different milieus and everyone throughout the years that the book document just seems crazy fucking paranoid about everything.
[00:23:08]  And it's not just from the smoke and the weed and all of the, like, but and all of the, you know, obviously there's a lot of cops around, but it's like everyone is constantly accusing everyone else of being in bed with the government or having mysterious motivations or I mean, it just, it really comes across as like this really fucking insane time, like really chaotic.
[00:23:30]  Yeah.
[00:23:31]  I love the cover of the book, but sometimes I, it's Bill Sinkovich, a comics artist that I've loved since I was like 10 years old.
[00:23:40]  But sometimes I think like maybe that two Spider-Mans pointing at each other meme would be like also the perfect cover for this book.
[00:23:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:23:49]  Because yeah, there's, there's so much, there are so many accusations going around and, you know, it's hard to know like what to trust.
[00:24:00]  And I think that's something that, you know, felt as I was working on it very relevant to a lot of the political situation today.
[00:24:09]  You know, there's so many factions of people across the political spectrum that put the snitch jacket on one another.
[00:24:20]  And so I just guess I really wanted to show also how the various government programs that surveilled activists, you know, that that was not just, it's not so much that that resulted in people going to jail.
[00:24:40]  It's that it injected all of this paranoia into the movement, which, you know, was not very helpful to the movement's goals.
[00:24:50]  No, no, I mean, I think that, like, it's funny how fitting like a name chaos, I guess, was to the CIA operation.
[00:24:56]  But like, I think that's one of the things that like, I think a lot of people think of like Cohen Tel Pro, obviously the two big aspects of it, right, were like political assassinations and infiltration and infiltration, obviously, to get people busted or whatever, to spy on people.
[00:25:10]  But what that infiltration and what those assassinations engendered, is that the word engendered?
[00:25:16]  Engendered?
[00:25:18]  In activist groups was this just broad sense of paranoia to where like it was this sort of self-perpetuating thing.
[00:25:24]  We actually, I mean, they did have agents in most of these groups, but even if there wasn't an agent present, you had this suspicion of everybody around you being a police agent.
[00:25:33]  And that drove a lot, I mean, Panthers, it drove a lot of those guys insane.
[00:25:37]  And the groups that Forsad was most closely linked to were groups that we haven't really talked about much on this show, which were the Yippies and their sort of counterpart, the zippies.
[00:25:50]  The American Bolshevik Menshevik.
[00:25:52]  Yes.
[00:25:54]  And listeners might know one of the more famous Yippies, Abby Hoffman.
[00:26:00]  He wrote, Steal This Book.
[00:26:02]  I remember I read that when I was like 13 and was, I got to be honest with you, not really germane to my life at that point.
[00:26:08]  I just remember the one part they were like, steal a giant wire spool if you need a coffee table in your house.
[00:26:13]  I was like, well, my parents have a Bruce, once on the podcast, called him the famously annoying Abby Hoffman, and it's been stuck in my brain.
[00:26:20]  He's famous for being annoying.
[00:26:22]  It's been stuck in my brain like a Trump, like kind of Trumpist, like Trumpian kind of quote, you know, where his like manner gets stuck.
[00:26:28]  It's stuck in my craw.
[00:26:29]  And now I can only, whenever I see Abby Hoffman or read Abby Hoffman's name, I just read it as the famously annoying Abby Hoffman.
[00:26:36]  Talk to us about that scene, right?
[00:26:37]  Because Forsad went from like the kind of underground newspaper scene, which was a lot of like, you know, all across the country.
[00:26:43]  He was kind of running this press syndicate.
[00:26:45]  And then he sort of makes this move.
[00:26:47]  He starts hanging out with some more to the New York crowd, which is like Abby Hoffman, you know, Jerry Rubin, and these guys.
[00:26:53]  What is up with that?
[00:26:54]  What were the fucking yippies?
[00:26:56]  What were all these kind of like New York psycho groups?
[00:26:59]  Yeah.
[00:26:59]  So the Yippies were basically, I think their main objective was to kind of merge the counterculture and the political left, which for a while were, you know, were pretty separate.
[00:27:14]  You know, there were, you know, the like Students for a Democratic Society crowd was often just like kind of clean cut, sometimes, you know, going along with kind of these Marxist ideals.
[00:27:29]  There was the, you know, the Clean for Gene, Eugene McCarthy fans.
[00:27:34]  And then there were the dirty hippies who were into rock music and doing drugs.
[00:27:38]  And that's kind of like how those were the stereotypes.
[00:27:41]  And the yippies basically wanted to embrace the counterculture stuff and use that as kind of a vehicle to sell the political stuff.
[00:27:50]  And they did that through a lot of kind of high-profile pranks.
[00:27:56]  You know, they threw money out on the stock exchange floor and watched people fight for it, things like that.
[00:28:04]  And they became like household names, especially after the Chicago 7 trial, which, you know, there's a terrible Aaron Sorkin.
[00:28:16]  Oh, yes.
[00:28:16]  Aaron Sorkin made a movie about that.
[00:28:18]  He did?
[00:28:18]  And for Netflix, I think.
[00:28:20]  I think it came out.
[00:28:21]  My brain was a bad thing.
[00:28:23]  I might be doing a Hassan Minaj emotional truth right now, but I think it came out during October 2020, or not October, excuse me, like summer of 2020, like during the BLM stuff.
[00:28:34]  But my brain might just be making that backed up.
[00:28:37]  I try not to talk trash about things, but it was pretty terrible.
[00:28:41]  I think Sorkin's not listening.
[00:28:42]  You're good.
[00:28:43]  Yeah, you're good.
[00:28:45]  It was Sasha Baron Cohen as Abby Hoffman and that succession method actor guy as he was Jerry Rubin.
[00:28:56]  Yeah.
[00:28:56]  That's funny.
[00:28:57]  Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:28:58]  I can see that.
[00:28:59]  I can see that.
[00:28:59]  I hate Jerry Rubin.
[00:29:01]  I will talk shit.
[00:29:01]  I know maybe you don't, you know, you know some of these people.
[00:29:05]  Jerry Rubin has been, I haven't liked Jerry Rubin since I found out who he was a long time ago.
[00:29:10]  But so these guys were like, these guys were, they weren't the merry pranksters, although they were new some of them, but they were pranksters, you know, like they were, they were sort of like theater.
[00:29:20]  Theater kids.
[00:29:22]  Yeah.
[00:29:22]  I mean.
[00:29:23]  Surrealist theater kids.
[00:29:24]  Surrealist theater kids.
[00:29:25]  Yeah.
[00:29:25]  Inspired at least.
[00:29:28]  And that seems to be a theme throughout the book too, is that like, you know, in a lot of the, like if you read like Revolution's End or like any of these sort of like histories of like the radical left in the 1960s, it really like a lot of the countercultural movement stuff is kind of left out of it because like they're like, we're not like the hippies.
[00:29:46]  Like we're not just like, that was sort of, we're more Marxist.
[00:29:48]  That was more like anarchic.
[00:29:51]  And there is that, that a lot of this in your book is like actually these people who sort of see themselves as political actors, like you said, trying to sort of merge both of these two scenes that were kind of existing side by side.
[00:30:05]  Yeah.
[00:30:06]  But and both have broadly involved in the anti-war movement, but weren't really united.
[00:30:10]  And I think a big, a big part of, you know, you talk a lot about festivals, about music festivals in the book.
[00:30:16]  And Woodstock Nation.
[00:30:19]  And I for, I, you know, that sort of seems to be, Woodstock is a big link because you talk about how some of the underground press, like Woodstock was advertised to the underground press and the underground press were basically able to secure like a contract to print brochures or whatever.
[00:30:32]  That didn't seem to fully work out.
[00:30:35]  But I think a lot of the guys, a lot of sort of the political actors you're talking about, Abby Hoffman, Jerubin, et al., sort of viewed Woodstock like, oh my God, we had all these young people together.
[00:30:44]  Like we got to spread this across, this is like a political movement.
[00:30:47]  And they spend the next several years kind of trying to replicate the magic of that.
[00:30:51]  Right.
[00:30:52]  Yeah.
[00:30:52]  Forsade had a good name for the, I don't know if it was his original name, but he called the politicos and the pot smokers the fists in the heads.
[00:31:04]  That's kind of cool.
[00:31:05]  Heads, I know, but fists is pretty.

=== Woodstock's Political Legacy (03:16) ===

[00:31:07]  Yeah.
[00:31:08]  Yeah.
[00:31:08]  And so and so getting those getting those two groups on the same page was like this big objective.
[00:31:14]  And using like, you know, rock and roll, man, that was like how they were going to do it.
[00:31:21]  And they saw, I think, you know, the cultural moment of Woodstock as this way that they could tap into activism.
[00:31:32]  And of course, like, you know, Abby Hoffman famously got up and tried to give a political speech at Woodstock and Pete Townsend smashed him with his guitar.
[00:31:41]  Yep.
[00:31:42]  You know, it didn't go so well.
[00:31:44]  It's so annoying.
[00:31:45]  Maybe it would have ended up differently.
[00:31:47]  Yeah.
[00:31:49]  So, yeah, and so the thing is that Forsad was actually involved in the editing of that book, Steal This Book.
[00:31:55]  He contributed some writing to it, and he had this falling out with Abbie Hoffman.
[00:32:01]  And that's kind of what kicked off the zippies.
[00:32:04]  So Forsad decides that Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin are sellouts and that they are not pure enough.
[00:32:12]  Hip capitalists.
[00:32:13]  Hip capitalists.
[00:32:14]  Well, that seems to be something that Jerry Rubin called Forsad, but I'm sure that that wasn't.
[00:32:20]  Not all hip capitalists.
[00:32:21]  Right.
[00:32:22]  Well, hip, I don't know, but definitely.
[00:32:24]  At the time.
[00:32:25]  Everyone's an operator.
[00:32:27]  Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Ed Sanders got like $33,000 to write a book about the 72 election, presidential election campaign, and they called it Vote.
[00:32:38]  And Forsad really seized on this as like, you know, just evidence of how dirty they were and that they were, you know, they were sitting up in their nice hotel room at the conventions and they weren't down in the streets with the people.
[00:32:53]  And so the zippies were born to kind of hold the feet of the yippies to the fire.
[00:33:00]  And this became kind of a big clash in the summer of 72 that got a lot of media attention that, you know, has sort of, you know, faded into the background.
[00:33:13]  But if you go back to the newspapers, there was like a lot of coverage of the zippies.
[00:33:19]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:33:20]  Both names like those.
[00:33:21]  Hardware.
[00:33:22]  Well, of course.
[00:33:23]  I will say this.
[00:33:24]  I mean, Chunan, I would say our sort of unofficial fourth member would be the classic Zippy the Pinhead.
[00:33:31]  And of course, his faithful friend, the doggy Dinerhead.
[00:33:34]  Sure.
[00:33:34]  Who's a massive influence on me throughout my life?
[00:33:37]  You know, you mentioned the 72.
[00:33:39]  This is the Miami.
[00:33:41]  Was that the DNC that took place?
[00:33:43]  It was in Miami.
[00:33:44]  It was happening in both because the DNC and the RNC were held in Miami that year.
[00:33:49]  Yeah.
[00:33:50]  So sick.
[00:33:51]  They don't do that anymore.
[00:33:52]  I can't remember.
[00:33:53]  I don't have them in the same city anymore.
[00:33:55]  There's one passage from the book, which is just astounding.
[00:34:00]  There's a lot of these kind of things in the book, but this was, I think, stood out to me more than the other ones.
[00:34:05]  And I think it's emblematic of a lot of the sort of the themes in the book is at one point you're kind of covering a, or you're mentioning this Vietnam Veteran Against the War meeting in Miami.
[00:34:16]  And that Forsad looks like he was likely at, or at least a representative from the Zippy is at.

=== Forsad's Dual Loyalties (15:25) ===

[00:34:23]  And at this meeting, a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War kind of gets up and says, we're going to start, we're going to have this militant organization.
[00:34:31]  We're going to have these, we're going to make these makeshift weapons to get the cops off of the horses and like kind of riles everyone up into this violent mood.
[00:34:38]  And he's like, we're going to do all these violent things.
[00:34:40]  And then afterwards, immediately confesses to other members of the organization that he works for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
[00:34:46]  He's an FBI agent.
[00:34:48]  And then those guys are like, all good.
[00:34:51]  We'll just use him against the FBI.
[00:34:55]  They go down to meet with this Cuban guy to kind of make peace so that the Cubans exiles don't come and beat the shit out of them.
[00:35:02]  And then the Cuban guy ends up being like, all good.
[00:35:05]  I can't guarantee anything about the Cubans.
[00:35:07]  I can sell you guys some guns, though.
[00:35:09]  And they're like, absolutely.
[00:35:10]  Cuban guy also working for the FBI.
[00:35:13]  And these guys get entrapped in this big thing.
[00:35:16]  And that to me, I mean, that is these sort of like semi-naive guys who want to be these sort of like political actors, but aren't really like, they think that they can use the system against itself.
[00:35:29]  And that happens so many times within the book.
[00:35:32]  I mean, not only with sort of the hip capitalists who are like using, or not the hip capitalists, the yippies and the zippies, although maybe the shoe fits, think they can use this media attention against the media or the, you know, the, I think it's the medicine ball caravan.
[00:35:46]  Yeah.
[00:35:47]  Sort of the traveling woodstock that Forsad kind of comes into as like a as a loyal opposition member.
[00:35:57]  And like just throughout, and even with high times, in a sense, like all of these guys are just like, they think that they can use, they see that they're being used by an outside force.
[00:36:07]  And they're like, maybe I can use this outside force against itself.
[00:36:11]  Right.
[00:36:11]  And it's the tools of the master.
[00:36:13]  Exactly.
[00:36:14]  And it seems to be a legacy of failure.
[00:36:17]  Yeah.
[00:36:19]  Yeah.
[00:36:19]  And it's, I think, you know, capitalism is one of the big forces that they think that, you know, they can employ to achieve their ends.
[00:36:28]  And, you know, it turns out that like capitalism is pretty hard to beat at its own game.
[00:36:34]  And I think one of the things that really became a conflict in Forsad's life was when high times became this big success.
[00:36:44]  You know, he seems to wrestle with, you know, have I, have I sold out, essentially?
[00:36:52]  And he tried to like shut down the magazine a few times.
[00:36:55]  He fired the whole staff and then he would hire them back.
[00:36:58]  Yeah.
[00:36:59]  But it was it was this constant this dichotomy between making a lot of money and then putting that money into the movement or just like staying true and staying pure.
[00:37:15]  And many people have never figured this out.
[00:37:19]  I don't know if anyone has.
[00:37:20]  It's a tough one.
[00:37:21]  Yeah.
[00:37:21]  He was it's the effect of altruism, Gambit.
[00:37:26]  Yeah, I mean, let's talk about high times because that's, that's a, that's a, another little theme that runs through the book is fucking weed.
[00:37:34]  And these guys were dopers.
[00:37:37]  These guys were smoking marijuana and getting very high.
[00:37:41]  And that seems to be like, that's a funny thing also, sort of the split between the counterculture and like the politicos or whatever, the fists and the heads.
[00:37:49]  Yeah.
[00:37:50]  Is that the fists were like, maybe you shouldn't really be smoking pot so much.
[00:37:53]  Like, you know, we got to like talk to working class people or whatever and like, you know, try to maybe get jobs in factories and stuff like that.
[00:38:00]  Whereas a lot of the heads were like, we got to smoke as much fucking weed as possible.
[00:38:03]  Everybody smokes weed.
[00:38:04]  And their whole thing was, and this is, I knew this, but it's spelled out several times in the book with the rec quotes from people like, listen, if everybody smokes weed, they will be more like down, their minds will be more open to like alternative ways of living.
[00:38:17]  Right.
[00:38:18]  Which I will say now, with full hindsight, 2023 history did not turn out to be the case.
[00:38:24]  I think more people smoke weed than ever in history, and things are dog shit.
[00:38:28]  But that, the theme of like marijuana legalization also runs through as well.
[00:38:35]  A lot of people getting busted for pot.
[00:38:38]  And that is sort of like the one, I guess, like kind of semi-victory that kind of comes out, not directly from these guys, but from that arc is that like, I guess weed's legal in New York kind of now.
[00:38:48]  Right, right.
[00:38:49]  I mean, I do think that there's something to be said for, you know, marijuana making people question systems, you know, whether or not that follows through that they do anything about it.
[00:39:02]  And I also think that smoking weed does not necessarily help with your paranoia.
[00:39:08]  It also does not help give you a sense of like what's real and what's the truth.
[00:39:13]  Interesting.
[00:39:14]  And it might even lead to a lot of conspiracy theories that don't help out a lot.
[00:39:22]  But I think I understand where that impulse comes from, that you start questioning things.
[00:39:29]  And that's good to an extent.
[00:39:33]  But if you're always questioning everything, then you're in trouble.
[00:39:38]  But it's funny, you know, to keep bringing up the Spider-Man meme thing.
[00:39:42]  I mean, to see the kind of like leveling this criticism, I mean, I think rightly, at the yippies for trying to kind of button up and subsume the movement into something, something else, they're sort of doing the same thing where they're like, well, what if we just made like smoking weed political?
[00:40:00]  You know what I mean?
[00:40:01]  Or like, what if all the political stuff was actually just about smoking weed?
[00:40:06]  Like kind of doing it both ways.
[00:40:07]  And it didn't really end up going anywhere.
[00:40:09]  But it does seem like Forsad, like we said, kind of had a bunch of problems with that too.
[00:40:14]  Yeah.
[00:40:14]  He wasn't totally comfortable with all of it.
[00:40:16]  Yeah.
[00:40:17]  I mean, the thing is that there's always going to be somebody to like rise up and say like you are not radical enough.
[00:40:25]  Yeah.
[00:40:25]  I mean, that's me.
[00:40:26]  And that, that, you know, that and that purer than thou thing is a tricky thing to navigate.
[00:40:32]  Yeah.
[00:40:34]  Um, well, weed not only looms large in terms of politics, but also in terms of Forsad's money making, because you drop a little bit into the book.
[00:40:45]  I mean, you wait a little bit to drop this fact, but he was moving some what you might call weight and was actually a pretty big weed dealer in New York, but also a weed trafficker, like getting it from South America and like getting it flown up in classico Cessna style, which listeners will know how we feel about planes of that size.
[00:41:09]  But he falls in with this guy.
[00:41:14]  And I have to, I have to look at my notes right now because I'm going to mispronounce the guy's name.
[00:41:18]  Bernstein.
[00:41:20]  Yeah.
[00:41:20]  In Florida.
[00:41:22]  You know, I was thinking Bernstein, but I actually have no idea.
[00:41:25]  It's kind of a Bernstein-Bernstein situation.
[00:41:28]  Yeah.
[00:41:30]  Jeremy Corbin Bernstein.
[00:41:31]  Bernstein.
[00:41:32]  He follows in with this guy, Bernstein, in Florida, who is a like a realtor or something.
[00:41:41]  I feel like it's a very Floridian profession, which is Fort Lauderdale Real Estate.
[00:41:45]  Classic.
[00:41:45]  That's our number one listener demographic.
[00:41:49]  He follows in with this guy who also he tries to connect as an investor in various underground papers, a Florida underground paper.
[00:41:57]  And this guy is a weird cat.
[00:41:59]  I mean, this is, I think, your closest link to me of like, well, there's something going on here because this guy is like in with the DEA and in with the government, but also getting like busted by them.
[00:42:11]  Yeah.
[00:42:12]  Yeah.
[00:42:12]  That's that the whole Ken Bernstein epic was something that was really kind of always threatening to kind of pull me right out of the Forsade narrative.
[00:42:22]  Yeah, I get that.
[00:42:24]  Because he was involved in a lot of there was there was kind of like this circular firing squad with a bunch of like ex-Bay of Pigs guys and arms dealers and the classic Florida.
[00:42:40]  Can you say the name of one particular arms dealer who was associated with perhaps the manufacturing and sale of MAC 10 suppressors?
[00:42:49]  Is that Mitchell Wurbell III?
[00:42:53]  Who has come up, I would say, more than any other name in Junan history in various episodes.
[00:42:59]  In fact, literally the last author, no, author before last that we interviewed, Worbell makes a appearance in his book as well.
[00:43:08]  I mean, that guy, another character, to put it mildly.
[00:43:14]  Mitch Wurbell, most famous for the MAC 10 silencer or suppressor.
[00:43:20]  People who are into guns really don't like when you call things.
[00:43:23]  No, it's fine.
[00:43:24]  People can call him whatever they want.
[00:43:27]  They don't suppress or silence, so it doesn't matter.
[00:43:29]  But like Bernstein was bringing in this weed from South America.
[00:43:34]  Worbell was also a weed dealer, which is a less focused on part of his lifestyle.
[00:43:40]  He kind of dealt everything.
[00:43:41]  He did deal everything.
[00:43:43]  And there's an interesting part of the book where you're talking about how he and Worbelle, Bernstein and Worbel, and Bernstein's in business with Forsade.
[00:43:50]  Yep.
[00:43:50]  Bernstein, Tom Forsad's partner in weed trafficking is also in business with Worbelle, but they're both kind of ratting each other to the government who are both investigating them for different things, but are also maybe employing both of them.
[00:44:05]  I mean, definitely employing Worbell, maybe employing Bernstein.
[00:44:08]  Yeah.
[00:44:08]  And then they've got like Watergate figures who are like testifying at their trials, like Bud Crowe, I think, took the stand.
[00:44:19]  And people who are like tied up in like the JFK assassination conspiracy world.
[00:44:24]  Yeah, that was a very impressive, close reading of what was going on there because it's so, I had to diagram this stuff.
[00:44:33]  I was going to say, did you end up with the red string on the wall, like trying to piece all this shit together?
[00:44:38]  More than just red string, yeah.
[00:44:40]  I mean, and just like trying to keep the alliances that were always shifting.
[00:44:49]  And, you know, it got to the point where, you know, you have different federal agencies like accusing the other federal agencies of lying.
[00:44:57]  Spider-Man.
[00:44:58]  Spider-Man beam again.
[00:45:00]  Oh, my God.
[00:45:02]  But yeah, the Ken Bernstein thing, the only way I knew about it was I found a letter from Bernstein to Forsade in Forsad's papers.
[00:45:13]  And I mentioned it to this guy, Jerry Powers, who was a former underground newspaper editor, who then became like a big Miami Beach kind of art world big money guy.
[00:45:27]  And he was like, oh, that's what they were doing together.
[00:45:30]  And then he told me these stories about like running into Bernstein and Forsad acting suspicious.
[00:45:38]  Yeah, I mean, I think it just speaks to the sort of compartmentalization that Forsade had in his life, right?
[00:45:43]  Because, and you do a good way of, this is sort of how it ends up being in the book, is like you sort of reveal these other aspects of him that he's been doing this whole time throughout like as the book goes on.
[00:45:54]  But you're like, actually, he's been selling weed for like this many years or like, oh, this is his real name and et cetera.
[00:45:59]  Right.
[00:45:59]  Which I want to get to in a second.
[00:46:01]  But yeah, I mean, he was making some serious fucking, because one of the things that whenever I read about the 60s, I'm like, sorry, does anyone go to work in this world?
[00:46:09]  Like, everyone's like, oh, I'm flying to the radical, the White Panthers convention, and I'm flying to this convention.
[00:46:15]  It's like, bro.
[00:46:16]  Why should you wait till the 80s to get real jobs?
[00:46:19]  And then they all made fucking thing.
[00:46:21]  Yes.
[00:46:21]  Yeah.
[00:46:21]  Well, it's Jerry Rubin.
[00:46:24]  But yeah, so, I mean, that seems to be like the real way that Forsad was making some serious cash was selling weed in New York.
[00:46:31]  Yep.
[00:46:32]  Yep.
[00:46:32]  He was selling weed.
[00:46:33]  And the other thing that he was making money off of was selling the microfilming rights to the underground papers, which of course kicked up, you know, that made a bunch of other people suspicious that he was working.
[00:46:47]  You're talking about.
[00:46:48]  Yeah.
[00:46:48]  Why were they doing that?
[00:46:49]  Who did he sell the rights to?
[00:46:50]  Bell and Howell.
[00:46:52]  So it was going, so they were, you know, microfiche that were going out to libraries, but also various government agencies were subscribing. to get all these underground papers on microfilm.
[00:47:04]  And so some of the people who actually did the microfilming said to me, like, you know, what could he be, but a cop?
[00:47:12]  I know.
[00:47:13]  There's a funny quote in the book where this woman's like, yeah, I did the microfilming.
[00:47:17]  It must have been for the CIA or something.
[00:47:18]  Like, yeah, it's the CIA.
[00:47:20]  Who else wants microfilms of this stuff?
[00:47:23]  But I didn't mean to get you off of the weed.
[00:47:26]  Oh, no, no, no.
[00:47:27]  I mean, so, but I mean, that it's obviously that leads into high times, right?
[00:47:31]  Like, cause this guy, this whole thing, like all this stuff converges.
[00:47:33]  Like, he's making all this money off of weed.
[00:47:35]  He knows all these weed people.
[00:47:36]  Yeah.
[00:47:37]  You know, normal N-O-R-M-L is like, which I got to say, great name for an organization.
[00:47:42]  Yeah.
[00:47:43]  Normal.
[00:47:43]  I mean, that's.
[00:47:44]  It's still around.
[00:47:45]  It is.
[00:47:45]  It is.
[00:47:46]  But that's got to be one of the all-time greats for normal?
[00:47:50]  No one else thought of that.
[00:47:51]  Can't argue with it.
[00:47:52]  Can't argue with it.
[00:47:53]  Like, all right, fair enough.
[00:47:54]  So it's what it is right in the name.
[00:47:55]  That's what it is.
[00:47:57]  But all those kind of come together.
[00:47:59]  He starts high times.
[00:47:59]  And high times becomes, it's funny because I always kind of put high time that slot it in with Playboy of that era, right?
[00:48:05]  Yeah.
[00:48:06]  Where it's as you should.
[00:48:07]  Because I think these kind of quote-unquote revolutions, whether in drugs or in sex or whatever, it's all happening at the same time.
[00:48:13]  And both of these guys are kind of figuring out how to literally put it into print and kind of make money off of it, right?
[00:48:21]  Yeah.
[00:48:21]  Kind of, you know, take over and direct the culture of those cutting revolutions.
[00:48:28]  Right.
[00:48:28]  These, yeah, these great taboo breaking magazines, you know, that, you know, hopefully can also make a lot of money for them on the side, in addition to changing the cultural norms.
[00:48:41]  But one of the challenges that High Times faced in the beginning was that they couldn't get any distributors to pick it up.
[00:48:48]  And so their way around that was they would give a lot of issues of the magazine to different drug dealers who would then distribute it along with like their bales of weed.
[00:48:59]  So if you, you know, you bought like a few bricks from somebody, they would pass along like some issues of high times, like give this to your customers.
[00:49:08]  So old school marketing tactics.
[00:49:10]  Old school marketing.
[00:49:11]  Yeah.
[00:49:12]  Yeah.
[00:49:12]  I mean, one of the crazy things.
[00:49:14]  Door flyering.
[00:49:15]  When I was reading this book, I was like, because I, you know, obviously I know about high time.
[00:49:18]  I actually have a lot of old, like, I guess like early 80s, late 70s issue.
[00:49:23]  No, like early mid-80s issues of high times, because there's a lot of like Coke free basing ads for free basing equipment in them.
[00:49:32]  But I didn't know that High Times also had like a trade publication for weed dealers.
[00:49:37]  And then they had all these sort of like other publications too under the High Times umbrella.
[00:49:41]  They were like really trying to basically become not like a general interest weed magazine, but then also these various trade magazines for the industry as well.

=== Fading Alternative Press (02:06) ===

[00:49:49]  Right, right.
[00:49:50]  Dealer magazine is amazing.
[00:49:54]  And putting their like, you know, their skills with glossy photographs of various illegal substances to good use.
[00:50:03]  Well, they're like the you piece of weed in a weird way.
[00:50:06]  I mean, it's like, you know, they were like, I don't know, like kind of getting their claws in because they thought that legalization was coming.
[00:50:15]  We're going to set up and be the kind of like, we're going to run the new market and kind of like set up shop.
[00:50:23]  At least that's what it always seemed like to me, you know, and kind of get in all over the place where they could.
[00:50:29]  Another thing that they were trying to do with High Times was to make some money that they could then pour back into the struggling alternative newspapers, which, you know, they had actually changed the name from underground press indicate to alternative press indicate by that point.
[00:50:48]  And that's a metaphor, by the way, for the change in the direction of the movement.
[00:50:53]  Right, right.
[00:50:54]  And it was a very like considered, like, we don't want to be seen as like underground anymore.
[00:50:58]  And so like, we're going to do like a lot of like, you know, where can you like show up, you know, for a wine tasting on like a Tuesday night listings.
[00:51:05]  All weekly.
[00:51:06]  Yeah.
[00:51:07]  Yeah.
[00:51:07]  And so that was, that was as, you know, the draft was ending and the, you know, Paris Peace talks were going on and the economy was starting to stagnate a little bit.
[00:51:23]  There was there was this real kind of bleak fade out of the anti-war movement and the surrounding political movements.
[00:51:37]  And the underground newspapers were kind of fading along with that.
[00:51:42]  And I think High Times was this almost like last ditch attempt to get people back involved.

=== Last Ditch High Times (11:06) ===

[00:51:55]  Yeah, I mean, that's what it seems like.
[00:51:57]  It's like 74, it's over.
[00:52:02]  You know what I mean?
[00:52:02]  It's so over for everybody.
[00:52:04]  Like you're dead, you're in jail, you're a speed freak, you know, you're paranoid or you're in college going straight.
[00:52:11]  Like you went back to college and you're going straight now and you're about to invest in an apple and be like the craziest landlord ever in the Bay Area in like 10 years.
[00:52:20]  But yeah, I mean, that's, it seems to be like a lot of, I mean, there's sort of that, that like thing about like the 60s casualties, you know what I mean?
[00:52:29]  And like there was a lot of those that littered through the 1970s.
[00:52:34]  But one thing Forsad, I mean, he became a 60s, 70s, and 70s casualty, I guess in 78.
[00:52:39]  But one thing that is interesting about Forsad is he does have this sort of through line through this stuff.
[00:52:44]  Like he was really tapped in to a lot of, I mean, he wasn't at Woodstock, but he was at, you know, all these other sort of like big events, the pop festival, the, you know, the medicine ball caravan or whatever.
[00:52:58]  But then also he's like, gets into punk.
[00:53:02]  And like, that seems to be like that.
[00:53:04]  I mean, David Peele is a sort of similar character, right?
[00:53:07]  You know, David Peale, musician who was kind of glommed on to John Lennon, but like, you know, he started Electro Records, I think.
[00:53:15]  Am I wrong?
[00:53:15]  He started on Electro Records.
[00:53:17]  He started on Electro Records, yeah.
[00:53:18]  But, you know, he had David Peel and the Laurie's side were kind of this like fugs like bands.
[00:53:22]  And then like, they also, I think their only really good song is actually a punk song from the, from the 70s, I think called like King of Punk or something.
[00:53:32]  But, you know, Forsad sort of also like makes this journey from like this hippie, groovy stuff into like, he tours with the Sex Pistols at some point.
[00:53:40]  And you mentioned at the reading last night that John Lennon, or excuse me not John Lennon, Johnny Rotten, who is, boy, if you want to fright, Google Johnny Rotten modern day picture right now, and you will yelp at your goddamn phone like you just saw a ghost.
[00:53:56]  Johnny Rotten thought he was a CIA agent.
[00:53:58]  Yeah, wrote about it in his memoir.
[00:54:00]  Yeah.
[00:54:00]  Yeah.
[00:54:02]  I think Forsad saw what the MC5 were to John Sinclair and the White Panthers as kind of like the, you know, the house organ, not quite the mascot band, but you know, delivering the message, you know, getting it out to the people.
[00:54:20]  And I think Forsad saw David Peel maybe as being someone who could do that for him.
[00:54:28]  And so he dragged David Peale out on the medicine ball caravan and they sort of like, you know, heckled people with their music.
[00:54:39]  And I think the appeal of the Sex Pistols was similar.
[00:54:42]  I think Forsad saw the Sex Pistols as this great contrarian force.
[00:54:49]  You know, maybe even more than any interest he had in the music, it just, it upset people.
[00:54:55]  And I think, you know, I often think of Forsad and that Marx Brothers song, you know, like whatever it is, I'm against it.
[00:55:06]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:07]  And I think Forsad just loved anything that would kind of like rattle people's cages a little bit.
[00:55:16]  And so he became obsessed with the Sex Pistols and followed them around on their U.S. tour and hired a filmmaker to document it.
[00:55:26]  And they were constantly getting thrown out of venues by Warner Brothers.
[00:55:32]  And yeah, there were some stories about kind of mixing it up with the Sex Pistols themselves.
[00:55:41]  But they weren't going to become Forsad's MC5.
[00:55:46]  Yeah, I mean, I think at one point, even Warner Brothers Security are like, you're a CIA agent to Forsad.
[00:55:53]  Which is, if you're getting called CIA by the security guard, it's time to leave the phone.
[00:55:58]  That is my advice to you out there.
[00:56:00]  But it's funny because it seems like throughout his life, he, you know, I know that we were talking before we started recording of just that like Zillig and like or Gumpian, Forrest Gumpian, like he is just popping up everywhere.
[00:56:15]  But it seems like it was because he was always kind of chasing the next thing he thought that could like be the thing to wake people up.
[00:56:22]  Right.
[00:56:22]  Or like be, what's the thing that is going to be, you know, this will be the next thing that makes people think differently.
[00:56:29]  It's going to be weed.
[00:56:30]  No, it's going to be punk.
[00:56:31]  No, it's going to be, you know, it's always just kind of like chasing that.
[00:56:34]  I'm not going to say chasing that high, but chasing.
[00:56:37]  No, say it.
[00:56:38]  But no, if that's what he wasn't, I don't even think it was that so much as just like a kind of like, he embodies that sort of desperation a little bit that I think a lot of people felt at the end of the 60s of just like trying to figure out, wait, what just happened and how do we like get it back together really quickly?
[00:56:55]  Because it's all sort of dissembling into something else throughout the 70s, you know?
[00:57:00]  Right.
[00:57:01]  Right.
[00:57:01]  And I think for some reason, what you were saying made me think of like social media and people trying to get things to catch on desperately.
[00:57:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:57:11]  And I wonder how Forsad would fare in these days.
[00:57:16]  Oh, he'd be totally fucking insane.
[00:57:18]  The internet would have made him schizophrenic.
[00:57:19]  Absolutely.
[00:57:20]  I mean, in a sense, the internet is kind of like an extension of the Underground Press Syndicate because it's this centralized but diffuse communication system.
[00:57:35]  Lots of naked girls and half-baked political opinions.
[00:57:38]  That's right.
[00:57:39]  The true legacy.
[00:57:40]  Yeah.
[00:57:40]  And early IRC stuff is very like UPS coded.
[00:57:43]  Yes.
[00:57:44]  Yeah.
[00:57:44]  I would say too, like early internet stuff.
[00:57:46]  Absolutely.
[00:57:47]  I think, you know, Forsad also, he had a business school background and he idolized J.P. Morgan and Howard Hughes when he was growing up.
[00:57:56]  Also, that's going to be a red flag for anyone who's like, let's align ourselves politically.
[00:58:01]  Right.
[00:58:02]  Right.
[00:58:03]  You've seen the thousand guys changing their hinge profile.
[00:58:08]  He was a big Ayn Rand disciple.
[00:58:10]  Another one.
[00:58:10]  That's the class.
[00:58:11]  Yeah.
[00:58:12]  Who are your heroes?
[00:58:13]  Ayn Rand and J.P. Morgan.
[00:58:15]  John Waters has that quote.
[00:58:17]  If someone doesn't have books at their house, don't fuck them or whatever, which bullshit.
[00:58:21]  Yeah, also, which books?
[00:58:22]  Which books?
[00:58:22]  And it's like, I'm sorry, I'm already here.
[00:58:25]  But people go to my house and like, oh, he has books.
[00:58:27]  I can have sex with him.
[00:58:28]  And yeah, we're talking fountainhead.
[00:58:32]  We're talking Atlas shrugged.
[00:58:34]  We're talking the God that failed.
[00:58:35]  And yeah, I have every copy of them.
[00:58:37]  It's just mountains and mountains of them.
[00:58:39]  Not to believe those.
[00:58:40]  Sorry, I got us off track.
[00:58:42]  No, no.
[00:58:43]  I was just going to say, I think in terms of him trying to always chase the next big thing, I think that was his business school instincts and his marketing background.
[00:58:53]  And I think that he, you know, I tend to think that he probably really did have these ideals that have been questioned.
[00:59:02]  But I think he really did believe in a lot of the stuff that he was preaching.
[00:59:06]  But I think his way of trying to make those things manifest was through business tools.
[00:59:21]  I think that's what makes people really uncomfortable trying to wrestle with this stuff is that they want him.
[00:59:27]  And I don't know if you felt this way going into the book, but it's like they want him or people like him to be cynical operators because then it's a lot easier to deal with the kind of contradiction there of like someone who does have these sort of aspirational politics but also has these instincts to sort of try to chase them or distribute them or rile people up through these sort of like business practices or marketing.
[00:59:53]  We see all this all the time, these kind of like, we all seem to be children of, I don't know, like the marketing revolution that happened in like the 80s and 90s.
[01:00:03]  And now even you see kids younger than us, what they're steeped in makes me kind of want to blow my brains out Forsad style.
[01:00:12]  But like, I mean, spoiler alert, but I think it makes people, it's almost easier to think someone like Forsad was, and maybe he was, I don't know, was a double agent trying to, you know, an agent of chaos,
[01:00:26]  trying to sow mistrust and paranoia among the movement and make things, you know, difficult for everyone, rather than maybe some of those instincts coming from the same place that a lot of the politics are coming from as well.
[01:00:43]  And kind of trying to wrestle with that contradiction, I think that's one of the legacies of trying to deal with the new left or what was the new left is people not wanting to have that fucking conversation.
[01:00:53]  Yeah.
[01:00:54]  Yeah.
[01:00:55]  I mean, he was a complicated personality, not just his persona, but his, you know, he was bipolar and there was a lot that was not consistent about his behavior and possibly also his motivations and his, certainly his politics shifted at times.
[01:01:16]  you know another like kind of rorschach blot that you can say is that because he you know he he didn't mean any of it or or did he did he actually change a lot yeah um and i i think um i think he was cynical at times but i but i don't think that um he was you know kind of like the angel of death that that some people see him as yeah i mean that's Well,
[01:01:43]  I mean, that's, you know, you mentioned Rorschach there, and it does seem like the book features quotes from people who just have these wildly different opinions.
[01:01:52]  Some of you were like, he changed my life, you know, sort of was like, he taught me to believe in myself, essentially, and like, great guy.
[01:01:58]  And then other people were like, it's fucking, you know, hip capitalist, CIA, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[01:02:04]  And these two opinions are held by people who might have been in very similar situations with the same guy.
[01:02:09]  And, you know, he does move from like different sort of political, I mean, not that the political scene itself changed very much during his time in it.
[01:02:17]  I mean, it was, it's really, one cannot stress enough however the period of like 67 to 72, 74, especially, like things just like the landscape changed radically.
[01:02:29]  But I think that the thing that the book sort of reveals, I don't want to say halfway through, but like a third of the way through maybe, is that, I mean, his essentially his actual background, you know, you mentioned the business school, but you know, where he actually comes.
[01:02:45]  I mean, there's a very entertaining part sort of about his like, you know, ancestry and some troublemakers in his lineage or his family tree.
[01:02:55]  But then also you include his psychological report from the Air Guard.

=== Shocking Goodson ID Mystery (04:05) ===

[01:03:01]  Right.
[01:03:02]  And I think they diagnose him as paranoid schizophrenic.
[01:03:05]  Yeah.
[01:03:06]  Which at the time I was like, well, is that just him trying to like do a like, I'm crazy, don't somebody Vietnam kind of thing?
[01:03:11]  Because my ass would be doing that.
[01:03:13]  Right.
[01:03:13]  Classic tactic.
[01:03:14]  Classic tactic, that, or get a boner during induction like Iggy Pop.
[01:03:19]  But is like, what did you make of that when you saw the psychological report?
[01:03:24]  Yeah, my interpretation of that changed like over the over the time I was working on it.
[01:03:30]  Definitely, I was like, oh, clearly he faked this to get out of the military.
[01:03:36]  But then also the more I knew about his real life struggles that were not going to get him, that were not going to achieve anything for him, his kind of crippling depressions and his really crazy outbursts, that profile started to really kind of fit in with that.
[01:04:04]  Yeah.
[01:04:05]  There's another part of that section, too, that is a big bombshell.
[01:04:11]  I don't know, bombshell is the right word, but a sort of shocking passage.
[01:04:15]  You know, his real name is Gary Goodson.
[01:04:18]  Right.
[01:04:18]  Goodson.
[01:04:19]  What a curse to be saddled with a name Goodson.
[01:04:24]  But he, a hitchhiker, excuse me, rather, a dog was found with a severed arm in its mouth.
[01:04:33]  And that was sort of traced back to the body of a hitchhiker that was found with his ID in the pocket, which is first.
[01:04:44]  With Gary Goodson's ID.
[01:04:46]  Youth Gary Goodson's ID, aka Thomas Forsad's ID.
[01:04:53]  What the fuck do you make of that?
[01:04:55]  Did he smoke this dude?
[01:04:58]  I don't think so.
[01:05:01]  There was an old interview transcript with his mother, and she related this story about the police showing up and that someone, a body had been found with Tom Forsad's identification.
[01:05:14]  And this is prior to him being a known figure.
[01:05:18]  Right.
[01:05:19]  This is in 69.
[01:05:20]  This is right before he moves from Phoenix to New York.
[01:05:23]  So he's got a little bit of a name, but not.
[01:05:26]  Right, right.
[01:05:28]  And, you know, it's an interesting story, but like, I'm not sure if it is a tall tale.
[01:05:34]  And then I found the newspaper clipping about that just that just lined up exactly about the dog finding this like, you know, arm with someone's identification.
[01:05:49]  They don't say what the identification is in the story.
[01:05:52]  And I tried really hard to, you know, try to dig up.
[01:05:56]  You know, there were no follow-up articles in the newspaper, and I couldn't track down any police records about this.
[01:06:06]  So, you know, maybe that's maybe we can, do you guys have like a team of like sleuth listeners like the two of them?
[01:06:15]  We do have some very paranoid listeners with quite a lot of time on their hands.
[01:06:18]  And they're all placed in the police department.
[01:06:21]  Yeah, that's true.
[01:06:21]  Most of our listeners do, it does mostly police officers, but on their off hours.
[01:06:27]  But I would love, that's one thing I would love to get to the bottom of that I just couldn't.
[01:06:32]  And so it just kind of just kind of hangs there.
[01:06:34]  Adds to the mystery of this guy.
[01:06:50]  So the book, which by the way, me and Liz have both read it.
[01:06:54]  Fantastic book.
[01:06:55]  I'm a big fan of history books in general, and especially history books about subjects that many of which are represented in this.
[01:07:03]  I think a lot of our listeners will be fans of this book as well.

=== Hip Capitalism vs. Paranoia (06:24) ===

[01:07:06]  What would you say, though, are like the themes running through it, right?
[01:07:10]  Like we sort of touched on like the hip capitalism stuff and the paranoia stuff.
[01:07:13]  Like what would you see like while you were writing this book and after you finished it, like what do you think of as like the through lines through this book from the beginning?
[01:07:19]  And we actually didn't really spend any time on this, but Tom Forsaud did commit suicide in 1978.
[01:07:25]  I know that there's some theories that he was killed, but it looks pretty clearly like suicide.
[01:07:32]  What do you think are the themes that start sort of from the beginning, not even of his career, but from his life, that sort of arc to the end?
[01:07:40]  What do you see there represented?
[01:07:43]  Yeah, I really think in some ways it's kind of a cautionary tale about maybe mistakes that the left makes over and over again.
[01:07:57]  I don't want to discount him as having had a good impact in his life.
[01:08:08]  But I think that some of the political provocations maybe just didn't really go anywhere.
[01:08:22]  I think I wanted to get down kind of like the story of what happened to the 60s, what connected the 60s to the 80s, which is usually a story that's told as, you know, Altamont and then Watergate and then gas lines and hostages in Iran.
[01:08:44]  And I thought— And then everyone just skips into Reagan.
[01:08:48]  Yeah.
[01:08:48]  Yeah.
[01:08:49]  It's like there's a little bit of the story missing.
[01:08:51]  And without sounding too much like delusions of grandeur, I kind of felt like the story of how things got there for a certain section of the baby boomer generation is never really told.
[01:09:11]  I mean, of course, there's a lot about commodification and capitalism and its impact on the yippee to yuppie pipeline.
[01:09:21]  It does get talked about, but I don't think it ever, I don't think, I think it's often just kind of like it's just like a bumper sticker saying.
[01:09:31]  I think that there are reasons that that shift happened Yeah, yeah, that I that I think are kind of important to get at.
[01:09:38]  Forsade's such a good character.
[01:09:39]  I mean, I hate saying that about a person who was a real person, but a great figure, I'll say, to kind of trace that and complicate that bumper sticker, like you're saying, you know, because he ultimately couldn't make it into the 80s and into the kind of like, you know, that transition into yuppy-dumb for as complicated as, you know, however he felt his own, you know,
[01:10:05]  business practices or political practices or whatever, however, he thought of himself, you know, he couldn't do that.
[01:10:11]  And so his sort of like, you know, tracing or attempting to trace this like really wily figure.
[01:10:19]  I mean, he's just a really, I hate just repeating the title of the book, but he's like so fucking chaotic, this dude.
[01:10:26]  That's a book author's dream.
[01:10:29]  Just keep repeating the title.
[01:10:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:10:32]  We're all AdWords now.
[01:10:33]  No, but it's true.
[01:10:34]  Like, he really is just like a crazy chaotic figure who is all over the place and really emblematic, like you're saying, of this.
[01:10:43]  Yeah, I, again, not to repeat myself, but this like dissembling of the 60s into whatever it became into the 80s, you know, and all of these people trying to figure out like, well, now what the fuck do we do?
[01:10:55]  You know?
[01:10:56]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:10:57]  And I think, you know, your hatred of Jerry Rubin noted.
[01:11:04]  But I think, I think, you know, people, I think, can be really kind of hard on the baby boomers.
[01:11:14]  Am I actually saying this?
[01:11:15]  Can be really hard on the baby boomers for like the arc of like baby boomer colleges.
[01:11:22]  You know, like Jan Wenner's empire.
[01:11:25]  Yeah.
[01:11:26]  But I think, you know, there was, there was not really a roadmap, you know, and after things really got weird in like, you know, the early to mid-70s, people struggled to figure out where to go.
[01:11:42]  Yeah.
[01:11:42]  Yeah.
[01:11:43]  I mean, the dissolution of the draft alone, I think, was suddenly like, well, what do we, how do we, everything had kind of been piled into that, you know?
[01:11:51]  And then suddenly it was like, oh, that's over now.
[01:11:53]  Okay.
[01:11:54]  Well, to speak of bugbears, one that has not been brought up on this show in a while, but used to be brought up regularly, is that my number one political position, bring back the motherfucking draft.
[01:12:07]  Everything falls into place after that.
[01:12:09]  Bring the draft back.
[01:12:09]  All these groups are like, well, how come there's not a big anti-war movement?
[01:12:12]  How come there's nothing?
[01:12:13]  It's because no one cares if there's not a draft.
[01:12:16]  No one's going to give a fuck if there's not a draft.
[01:12:19]  There just needs to be a draft.
[01:12:20]  We got to put it back in.
[01:12:21]  See what happens.
[01:12:22]  I'm too old.
[01:12:23]  But I think also people were not prepared.
[01:12:25]  I mean, now we're going to go into my weird apology, apology tour for the baby boomers.
[01:12:29]  I'm with you.
[01:12:30]  But I think it's not apology, it's much as like a sensitivity, I guess, is that I just, I don't think anyone was prepared for the way the state cracked down and how they did.
[01:12:39]  And I think like it's funny, we were talking about them being like these kind of like activists being sort of theater kids a little bit.
[01:12:46]  Like I was thinking about that earlier when I was thinking about the SLA and like kind of, you know, what we know now about the SLA, right?
[01:12:53]  And, you know, everyone at home watching that raid live on TV when they went to LA, you know, and they didn't find Patty Hearst, but it was like huge fucking shootout, two hours live TV or whatever.
[01:13:05]  And like that being its own kind of theater performance by the state, right?
[01:13:11]  Because they're sort of like acting on both sides to kind of show in a kind of like, I don't know, like mousetrap for my Hamlet heads out there like way of like, this is what we'll do, this is what we can do.
[01:13:24]  Like, and that, that kind of really pushing that paranoia into everyone as well.

=== September 11th Revisited (10:46) ===

[01:13:31]  Yeah.
[01:13:31]  Right.
[01:13:32]  And that being its own kind of performance on live TV of, you know, this is, this is what we can do and this is what we will do.
[01:13:39]  And it just fucking breaking people's brains.
[01:13:42]  Yeah.
[01:13:43]  Yeah.
[01:13:43]  And I think I think there's, there's not a lot that's written about sort of, you know, there are the people who stayed political and they generally kind of, you know, organized on local levels and joined city councils and school or the Sierra Club.
[01:14:01]  But there was just really nothing national going on that replaced the anti-war movement.
[01:14:09]  Yeah, none of those groups.
[01:14:10]  I mean, not a single, I mean, Progressive Labor Party put out a couple LPs in the 70s.
[01:14:17]  They did.
[01:14:19]  Yeah.
[01:14:19]  P-L-P-L-P.
[01:14:22]  I actually want to end on this.
[01:14:25]  What were some threads from this that are like the most that you weren't able to tie up or like that you'll like, one of some of those things that are just like, you'll never, no one will ever know the answer.
[01:14:34]  But like, what were some of the things that you either came across while writing the book, maybe didn't even include in the book or did include in the book that you're just like, what the fuck was that?
[01:14:42]  Like basically unsolved mysteries of the Tom Forsad saga or even just that general scene.
[01:14:48]  Yeah.
[01:14:48]  I think I could have, I could have really kept going on that Ken Bernstein tangent for a while longer.
[01:14:59]  I think you can sort of tell you wanted to in the book.
[01:15:03]  I mean, the smuggling stuff is also just like, that's another thing that has not been really documented that well.
[01:15:12]  And so there's like a whole, yeah, that could be like a whole world, a whole rabbit hole that, you know, I'm not sure I want to go into, but that's, yeah, that's where the other big mysteries.
[01:15:28]  I have this book called Smugglers from the, I think from the mid-70s that's like written by a purported smuggler.
[01:15:36]  It feels a little like high timesy, like maybe someone who kind of knows what they're talking about, gussing up their knowledge with some emotional truths.
[01:15:44]  But it's like one of the big things I remember.
[01:15:47]  There's a big section about smuggling watches.
[01:15:50]  But one of the things that they talk about is like this really complicated method of like unscrewing a part of the bathroom in the airplane and hiding stuff in there and then having someone get that exact plane somewhere else, like to evade customs.
[01:16:05]  Like an international flight.
[01:16:05]  You unscrew part of it and then find out if that international flight is now going on a domestic run and then have someone get the next flight that's going to be on, but I'm like that's so risky for some.
[01:16:15]  You know what I mean.
[01:16:16]  Like that's just anyways.
[01:16:17]  Yeah, smuggling is my ass would just be like, oh, I have some weed on me.
[01:16:23]  I know a guy who used to fly from you might be listening to this actually used to fly from New York to San Francisco with like 200 fucking stamp bags of China white in his underwear and I'm like how, I don't know.
[01:16:37]  I was just at the airport and there's like they have dogs everywhere.
[01:16:41]  This was like 2010, but there were still dogs.
[01:16:45]  But I don't know.
[01:16:46]  People tell me they're not looking for drugs, but I never believed they're like it's just bombs.
[01:16:51]  I couldn't tell it was September 11th so um, but I'm like dude, if you're gonna do September 11th, you're gonna do the same day you flew, on September 11th.
[01:16:57]  But you're not gonna do like another September 11th on September 11th.
[01:17:00]  That's the best day to fly.
[01:17:01]  You're gonna like, you want your own day.
[01:17:03]  You want your own.
[01:17:04]  You want it like another one.
[01:17:05]  Yeah, it could be like the second September 11th.
[01:17:08]  There's like eight September we've covered this in the show.
[01:17:09]  There's like 10 September 11th.
[01:17:11]  But I'm saying, if you're gonna do this same thing yeah, you're right, you can't.
[01:17:14]  That can't just be like the do-over cat.
[01:17:17]  Yeah, we don't like that.
[01:17:19]  Happy anyway, this is what I was thinking about.
[01:17:21]  Thank you so much for joining us.
[01:17:22]  I gotta tell you once again, true, and on listeners, you will like this book.
[01:17:26]  It is a is a fan.
[01:17:27]  Yeah, it's a fantastic book crazy, researched.
[01:17:30]  See it to you.
[01:17:31]  Eight years to do.
[01:17:32]  Oh yeah, we're gonna tell people that yeah well, I think that's a good thing.
[01:17:37]  Right, it is a good thing.
[01:17:38]  Can you imagine if you're like yeah, it only took me six months?
[01:17:41]  You're like well maybe yeah, it's like.
[01:17:43]  Well, it's like all those old, I bled for this.
[01:17:46]  One crazy thing.
[01:17:47]  So talk about Zelig.
[01:17:48]  Yeah, one crazy thing.
[01:17:50]  When I was reading the book, this motherfucker Forsad and somebody else I can't remember who we went with.
[01:17:55]  He snuck onto a cruise to watch the lift off of the Apollo mission.
[01:17:59]  Rex Wiener Rex Weiner, that's a name you've got to get a wife as soon as possible and change your last name to hers but also the creator of the Ford Fairlane character, Rex oh interesting.
[01:18:12]  Are the Fabi's furry freak brothers involved in any of this?
[01:18:15]  They were published in high times.
[01:18:16]  There we go.
[01:18:17]  I used to.
[01:18:18]  I found a stack of this comic books in my my apartment building laundry room when I was 18 and I read every single one but the.
[01:18:27]  He sneaks onto this cruise to watch the Apollo liftoff, and he's like sitting there with Robert Heinlein, of course, the famous polyamorous fascist, but of course, I've read every single one of his books.
[01:18:38]  And author.
[01:18:39]  And author.
[01:18:40]  And I will say this, in his later career, incest advocate, but also former supporter of Upton Sinclair, his California gubernatorial run.
[01:18:50]  But he's like, I'm like, that's a zealot moment to be like sitting there smoking weed with, and I don't know if Robert Heinlein was taking it, but sitting next to Robert Heinlein watching the Apollo liftoff.
[01:19:02]  I mean, that is fucking crazy.
[01:19:04]  Right, right.
[01:19:05]  And I think a bunch of these old science fiction writers were like talking about like their old buddy L. Ron Hubbard and some kind of cocktail conversation about how Scientology might have been started.
[01:19:21]  And Norman Mailer and Hugh Downs were also like passing the joint around, which I always entertain.
[01:19:27]  It's a funny thing.
[01:19:28]  Not so surprising that Norman Mailer was, but Hugh Downs, CBS News.
[01:19:33]  There's a funny Norman Mailer being like, all right, chill to Tom Forsadi in that book, too.
[01:19:37]  Anyways, the book is full of great scenes, weird scenes.
[01:19:41]  And thank you so much for joining us.
[01:19:42]  Thank you guys so much.
[01:19:52]  I think a lot of people listening would actually really dig that book.
[01:19:56]  I do too.
[01:19:57]  Which we already said during the interview, but I want to repeat it.
[01:19:59]  If you enjoyed Tom O'Neill's infamous Chaos, you'd really dig this book.
[01:20:05]  Yeah.
[01:20:06]  Fantastic.
[01:20:06]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:07]  Nice little continuation of some of the also a cool, you know what? Something I want to talk about, something that you want to talk about real quick, which I know we got to get out of here, but book covers.
[01:20:17]  Oh, yeah.
[01:20:18]  We got to talk about book covers real quick because I like the cover of Agents of Chaos.
[01:20:23]  It's kind of a cool looking book cover.
[01:20:25]  Looks like a book.
[01:20:26]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:26]  It's Little Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
[01:20:29]  Very much so.
[01:20:29]  Yeah.
[01:20:30]  You got the kind of old school film guy look.
[01:20:35]  You know?
[01:20:35]  Very different than a lot of books you see on the shelves these days.
[01:20:37]  It's not green and blue, which is one thing.
[01:20:42]  And it's not just like kind of abstract squiggle art.
[01:20:46]  We don't love that.
[01:20:47]  They all look the same.
[01:20:48]  Or like.
[01:20:49]  Or just two colors.
[01:20:50]  Like a book that's yellow.
[01:20:52]  I can't see that Emma Klein book anymore.
[01:20:54]  Who's Emma Klein?
[01:20:55]  My girl knows here.
[01:20:57]  Ruby, you know.
[01:20:58]  She's nodding.
[01:20:58]  She knows.
[01:20:59]  My girl knows.
[01:21:00]  These females, you know, too?
[01:21:02]  It was like the book of the summer, according to people who.
[01:21:06]  Book of the summer.
[01:21:07]  But for like a month.
[01:21:09]  And then everyone was like, just like every other fucking commodity cycle in this godforsaken country, everyone was like, oh my God, I love this book.
[01:21:16]  And then immediately, oh my God, I hate this book.
[01:21:18]  I hate this book?
[01:21:19]  You read the whole book and you hate it?
[01:21:21]  First of all, you can read it in an afternoon.
[01:21:24]  So real quick.
[01:21:25]  On the beach.
[01:21:25]  I read her first.
[01:21:26]  I liked her the other book better, Daddy.
[01:21:30]  Did she do the girls?
[01:21:31]  She did the girls about the Manson girls, right?
[01:21:33]  I think Daddy was the, was it short stories?
[01:21:36]  You like Daddy, though.
[01:21:38]  But that was also a book, one color book, yellow.
[01:21:43]  Here's the thing.
[01:21:44]  What you want, I want two things in a book.
[01:21:47]  Front cover, your guy, I'm going to say, I want to see what you're working with.
[01:21:53]  I want to see what you're rocking with on there because that just the tenor of the book changes.
[01:21:58]  You know what I mean?
[01:21:59]  I feel, I just want to see what you're rocking with.
[01:22:01]  On the inside, I want the first 15 pages to be like, what's like, how are you feeling?
[01:22:06]  You know, like, what's what was going through your mind when you're writing this?
[01:22:10]  And what, what, what people you use from your real life as basis for the characters in this, right?
[01:22:17]  And I want you to tell me about them and I want you to tell you the stories there.
[01:22:20]  If you didn't use any, I think you're lying.
[01:22:24]  What the fuck are you talking about?
[01:22:25]  I have no idea.
[01:22:26]  I am the author of the cat person screenplay soon to be made into a major motion picture.
[01:22:33]  And I got to say it.
[01:22:35]  I was the cat person guy.
[01:22:36]  I'm going to say this real quick.
[01:22:39]  Here's a take.
[01:22:39]  What?
[01:22:40]  If I was Nicholas Braun, which I'm not, thank God, I would not have done that movie.
[01:22:44]  He's too busy texting.
[01:22:45]  Everyone already sort of turned on him.
[01:22:49]  I would say season four, succession.
[01:22:51]  You hit mass.
[01:22:53]  You know, it was, again, another commodity cycle, right?
[01:22:56]  Another little taste cycle.
[01:22:57]  That it's like now you want to be, everyone already knows that you're out there texting the girls.
[01:23:01]  You're a bartending at the places.
[01:23:03]  You're in the mix.
[01:23:04]  You don't want to be texting girls.
[01:23:06]  I will say this.
[01:23:07]  A lot of women know other women who have texted with him.
[01:23:12]  But I'll say this.
[01:23:13]  I don't think I would take on a role where then I'm the cat person?
[01:23:18]  The cat person.
[01:23:19]  I'm sorry.
[01:23:20]  You want to be cast against type?
[01:23:22]  Method acting?
[01:23:24]  He was method acting for years, and it's bad when he does it.
[01:23:27]  But it's good Jericho.
[01:23:30]  Yeah, he was going into it.
[01:23:31]  He just noted that some guys get a method acting.
[01:23:33]  When other guys do, it's just they're too good at it.
[01:23:35]  But it was like the Aaron Rodgers lodge that he goes into.
[01:23:39]  It's like the cat person.
[01:23:41]  It's like, you don't know what I'm talking about, do you?
[01:23:43]  I'm only dimly aware of who Aaron Rodgers is.
[01:23:45]  Football player?
[01:23:47]  Yes.
[01:23:47]  Okay, then I just told you.
[01:23:50]  He just got hurt because of Taylor Swift?
[01:23:53]  No.
[01:23:54]  No, he tours Achilles on the first play because of the Curse of the Jets.
[01:23:58]  The Jets.
[01:23:59]  Yeah.
[01:24:00]  Great magazine.
[01:24:01]  More of a sharks guy.
[01:24:03]  Oh, my God.
[01:24:04]  Come on.
[01:24:04]  Well, I don't believe in curses.
[01:24:06]  Actually, that's not true.
[01:24:07]  I fully believe that.
[01:24:07]  You fully do.
[01:24:08]  You are one of the most superstitious.
[01:24:09]  I was a multiple times.
[01:24:10]  Yeah.
[01:24:11]  I got a lot to say about this.
[01:24:12]  I walk under ladders.
[01:24:13]  I don't care.
[01:24:13]  What do you do?
[01:24:14]  Follow me?
[01:24:15]  Well, that doesn't mean you're not superstitious about other things.

=== Belief in Curses (01:19) ===

[01:24:17]  You just don't go classico.
[01:24:19]  I don't, yeah.
[01:24:19]  I'm not afraid of ladders.
[01:24:20]  Actually, I'm afraid of ladders.
[01:24:21]  What about heights?
[01:24:23]  Yeah.
[01:24:23]  Anyone's not afraid of heights.
[01:24:25]  God wants you to die.
[01:24:26]  You know, my aunt's not afraid of heights.
[01:24:28]  Okay.
[01:24:28]  That's a lie.
[01:24:29]  Like, she will just get up there.
[01:24:31]  How tall?
[01:24:32]  As tall as she wants.
[01:24:33]  We have to talk her down.
[01:24:35]  What?
[01:24:35]  Oh, my God.
[01:24:39]  All right.
[01:24:39]  I have to pee really badly.
[01:24:40]  We got to wrap this up.
[01:24:41]  My name is Liz.
[01:24:42]  My name, of course, is the cat person himself, Brace Belden.
[01:24:47]  We are joined for this outro by Ruby McAllister and also known as Duby McGangester.
[01:24:53]  Duby McGangester, who, of course, is the lead actress in the new cat person movie.
[01:24:59]  And then, of course, we have the titular cat from the story itself, the feline upon which all of those little words were tip-tapped out into that MacBook, Young Chomsky, who is also Moonlights as the producer of this podcast, which is called.
[01:25:15]  True and on.
[01:25:15]  We'll see you next time.
[01:25:17]  Bye.
[01:25:37]  Come out.