True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 358: American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders: Director's Cut: Part 2
Aired: 2024-02-29
Duration: 01:13:50


=== The Ass Conspiracy (07:23) ===

[00:00:00]  If you had a conspiracy, what animal would you name it after?
[00:00:04]  I gotta say zebra is good, but there's a zebra murders.
[00:00:10]  Catfish?
[00:00:10]  I feel like a good name for like some bullshit like thing would be like the catfish conspiracy.
[00:00:18]  Also, I'd probably be pretty rocking at catfishing in general, like the act of it.
[00:00:22]  Okay.
[00:00:23]  Oh, wait, the act of it.
[00:00:24]  Okay, I got it.
[00:00:25]  Yes.
[00:00:25]  Or like the what's the ass conspiracy, like the mule conspiracy.
[00:00:32]  The ass conspiracy?
[00:00:34]  The ass conspiracy.
[00:00:35]  I feel like that would be the ass that that would be a good one is because it would confuse people right off the bat.
[00:00:41]  The ass conspiracy.
[00:00:43]  And people would be like, what is it about?
[00:00:45]  It's like, no, it has to do with just like these mountainous roads.
[00:00:49]  But yeah, what about you?
[00:00:52]  I don't know.
[00:00:53]  Good question.
[00:00:54]  I love that I threw that out there and I didn't.
[00:00:56]  Yeah, no answer.
[00:00:57]  That's the class.
[00:00:57]  There's no answer.
[00:00:59]  I'm going to do the Caipera.
[00:01:02]  That is what you would do?
[00:01:04]  The Capyberra conspiracy?
[00:01:05]  What about you?
[00:01:06]  They're so cute.
[00:01:07]  Probably go with Sloth.
[00:01:08]  Sloth conspiracy?
[00:01:09]  That's a deadly sin.
[00:01:10]  Sort of a slow burn, that one.
[00:01:14]  Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode one of the Ass Conspiracy.
[00:01:40]  Just playing.
[00:01:42]  Welcome to episode who knows of true enough.
[00:01:46]  Of whatever.
[00:01:47]  Of whatever.
[00:01:48]  You're welcome to who knows?
[00:01:49]  Episode Who Knows of Whatever.
[00:01:51]  My name is.
[00:01:52]  Who Gives a Shit?
[00:01:53]  Yeah, I'm shut the fuck up.
[00:01:55]  And we're, of course, joined by producer.
[00:01:57]  Tell me next time.
[00:01:58]  What is on second?
[00:01:59]  I'm not asking you who's on second.
[00:02:01]  Who's unfurled?
[00:02:02]  I don't know.
[00:02:02]  Third me!
[00:02:03]  Just kidding.
[00:02:04]  It's TrueNON.
[00:02:04]  I'm Liz.
[00:02:05]  That's Brace.
[00:02:05]  Young Chomsky.
[00:02:06]  You know the drill.
[00:02:07]  You know the motherfucking drill.
[00:02:08]  It's part two of our interview about, I almost just made a joke, about the octopus and the now out on streaming available wherever streaming is sold, but exclusively in this case, to Netflix.
[00:02:25]  To Netflix, yeah, I think it's slightly misleading.
[00:02:27]  American Conspiracy, colon, the octopus murders, about the suicide of Danny Castellero, his investigation into the possible stealing of the promise software and all of the crazy cast of characters that he encounters in investigating that whole story.
[00:02:51]  I don't even know what else to say.
[00:02:53]  I mean, there's just so fucking much.
[00:02:54]  I will say this, because we should have said this on the opening for the last one, which we are recording back to back.
[00:03:02]  This is not just is this like tough to kind of like to untangle, like as just a person reading and thinking about it and looking into it, but also we didn't do any of that on these in these episodes.
[00:03:17]  We didn't really try to untangle too much of it because I think so much of our conversation is really just geared on these guys' experience and in them trying to untangle it.
[00:03:28]  Well, I mean, the thing is, they made the fucking documentary.
[00:03:30]  I'm saying if you want to learn the ins and outs of this thing, one, watch the movie.
[00:03:36]  It's not my job to educate you.
[00:03:39]  I don't know.
[00:03:40]  It's my job to entertain you.
[00:03:41]  That's okay, fair enough.
[00:03:43]  But it's like editing.
[00:03:45]  It's yeah, infotainment.
[00:03:48]  No, but there's so much stuff out there about this, and it's a real crazy ride, as you can see.
[00:03:54]  But I just want to, you know, if you guys are really looking for more, like, you know, I apologize if we didn't get into too much specifics, but there's just so much to talk about.
[00:04:02]  So we could have gone for like 10 more episodes.
[00:04:05]  Yeah.
[00:04:07]  Yeah.
[00:04:08]  I think this makes a really good companion piece to the documentary.
[00:04:10]  Absolutely.
[00:04:11]  You get into a lot of stuff they couldn't, they didn't have time or whatever for legal reasons can't cover in there.
[00:04:15]  Which means go back through your emails, find your ex-boyfriend's Netflix password, and fucking get on that.
[00:04:21]  Get on that.
[00:04:23]  It's your last name plus 77 as a tribute to punk rock.
[00:04:28]  Also, Ghost Stories for the End of the World, a friend of the show, has a great 10-part series on the octopus as well.
[00:04:36]  And yeah, let's just fucking, let's play the interview.
[00:04:42]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to True and On.
[00:05:00]  We have with us here, and I'm so excited, part two of our interview with the two guys who made that documentary about the dude who fucked the octopus, from what I can understand.
[00:05:10]  From the one sheet we were handed by a mute vizier type of figure that approached us from Netflix wearing a conical hat, very clearly displaying the fact that he had been gelded, much like a horse or certain dogs, although I guess they don't cut the penises off of dogs.
[00:05:30]  Just fucking playing.
[00:05:32]  We have with us here Zachary Treitz, Treitz, Treitz, hailing straight from Sudetenland, and Christian Hansen, one of the unfortunately not musically inclined Hansen brothers, who are here to talk about their now-out documentary, American Conspiracy, The Octopus Movies.
[00:05:55]  Thank you and forgive me for that introduction.
[00:05:57]  The octopus murders.
[00:05:59]  The octopus, what did I say?
[00:06:01]  The octopus movies?
[00:06:03]  American Conspiracy.
[00:06:04]  The new versions.
[00:06:06]  Four new versions of the movie about the guy who fucked the octopus.
[00:06:10]  Yeah, it's our Laws Run Shreer five obstructions.
[00:06:13]  Yes.
[00:06:14]  What if this time we approached it like an MM octopus threesome?
[00:06:19]  Anyways, we last left off in Cabazon, and now we are kind of going up to San Francisco to talk about the murder of Michael Rocanosciuto's business partner.
[00:06:30]  But before that, I want to back up a little bit and talk about Michael Rocanosciutto himself because he is one of the most key players of both the octopus story in terms of like the alleged story of everything that happened and in like the octopus, I guess you would call it like just narrative in general.
[00:06:55]  I was thrilled to find that you guys actually pick up Rakana Sciutto from prison, which I was shocked about because I'm going to be honest, if I'm in prison for 26 years, the last thing I want to find is upon my release is two guys and my cousin waiting for me.
[00:07:11]  Right.
[00:07:13]  What was that?
[00:07:13]  We also offered to take him out to dinner wherever he wanted to go.
[00:07:17]  Wherever he wanted to go.
[00:07:18]  Where did he go?
[00:07:18]  We were going to Santa Barbara.
[00:07:20]  We pulled up in front of this taco place that had great reviews.

=== Denny's Detour (04:22) ===

[00:07:23]  And he was like, he took one look at it and was like, this place is gentrified.
[00:07:28]  He said gentrified?
[00:07:29]  Yeah, and he's been in prison for 26 years.
[00:07:32]  Wow.
[00:07:33]  And so then we went to.
[00:07:34]  This is James.
[00:07:34]  He's like, can't we just go to a Denny's?
[00:07:36]  Can we just, can we not just go to a Denny's?
[00:07:39]  He's on his Austin Powers shit.
[00:07:40]  And it's like, really, you've been in prison for 26 years and you want to go to Denny's, right?
[00:07:44]  Because it's like, nah, they microwave the eggs.
[00:07:46]  It's like prison.
[00:07:47]  But that's, well, that's Emily's theory.
[00:07:50]  I don't know if we're even allowed to go into that, but, you know.
[00:07:52]  What?
[00:07:54]  Denny's is like, there's a lot of stories that involve Denny's.
[00:08:00]  It's a through line through a lot of strange stories.
[00:08:02]  Like a lot of important meetings have happened at Denny's house.
[00:08:06]  Not just an art thing.
[00:08:07]  And like lots of like things.
[00:08:09]  And Tom O'Neill.
[00:08:10]  I think Tom O'Neill had a lot of Denny's meetings, probably.
[00:08:13]  Well, it's open 24 hours.
[00:08:14]  It's one of the few places that is in a lot of suburban towns.
[00:08:17]  Well, so we picked him up after 26 years of, you know, 26 years earlier, he had gone to prison and Danny Castellero had met him that first weekend that he got arrested.
[00:08:29]  Yeah.
[00:08:29]  And he got arrested for a drug charge for manufacturing.
[00:08:35]  He is an amateur chemist.
[00:08:37]  Well, professional chemist, actually, because he sold it for money, allegedly from the government.
[00:08:41]  Well, I guess.
[00:08:42]  It depends on who you ask, right?
[00:08:43]  He would say, or the government would say, this guy is a major manufacturer of methamphetamine and other drugs.
[00:08:49]  They would say pro.
[00:08:50]  He would say, yeah.
[00:08:52]  And he would say, I was wrongly accused and arrested for because I had come out with the truth about what happened to the promise software and all the people that I was dealing with out of Cabazon and all the various machinations of Wackenhaw.
[00:09:08]  As to the questions of, well, what about all those esoteric chemicals that you had on your property?
[00:09:13]  Well, he was taking detritus from abandoned copper mines, a material called slag.
[00:09:24]  And he had come up with a chemical process of extracting precious metals from mining slag.
[00:09:33]  And I think he was, what was, it was.
[00:09:38]  What, the Greenwood pile?
[00:09:40]  Yeah, there were various metals that he was doing.
[00:09:42]  Oh, he was extremely extracting platinum.
[00:09:45]  I think one of the sort of encapsulation is like he came up with a cost-effective way to extract precious minerals like platinum and gold and various things from previously, you know, slag is previously processed ores, right?
[00:10:01]  Or previously processed minerals.
[00:10:03]  And so it's like a cold, you know, a cold chemical method that you get more out of it than what you put in.
[00:10:10]  Interesting.
[00:10:10]  And he hasn't met in various places.
[00:10:15]  Maybe some of the same, his explanation is some of the same chemicals he used to make meth.
[00:10:19]  To extract are what you extract platinum with processes.
[00:10:23]  But also when he was, so that was in 1991 when he was arrested for that.
[00:10:29]  But in 1972 or so, he was arrested for manufacturing PCP in a lab that you actually had to enter with scuba gear.
[00:10:44]  You know, it was like in a boat.
[00:10:47]  And the interest was below.
[00:10:49]  Interesting.
[00:10:49]  Because he had a lot of surveillance happening.
[00:10:53]  I talked to the DEA dude who ran that investigation against him in the 70s.
[00:10:58]  And they were watching him from the bridges, on the tops of the buildings.
[00:11:02]  He was watching this dude scuba.
[00:11:04]  And then the pickup, the drops were also in these sealed containers in the, you might know the Pacific Northwest better than me.
[00:11:13]  The Duamish River.
[00:11:15]  The Duwamish River that goes through Tacoma.
[00:11:17]  Thankfully, dude.
[00:11:19]  And yeah, and so they would pick up the materials.
[00:11:23]  And so they had a tough time busting him.
[00:11:27]  Then when He was on trial.
[00:11:31]  Obviously, he's doing scientific testing on the water.
[00:11:35]  That's his story.
[00:11:36]  That's what he says.
[00:11:36]  He's doing his own volition.
[00:11:39]  He's just doing scientific Tetsi on the water.
[00:11:41]  Right.
[00:11:42]  The thing is that he was a child science prodigy, right?

=== Phenyl Acetic Secrets (15:28) ===

[00:11:45]  Like, that sort of objectively seems to be the case here when he was nine or so.
[00:11:52]  He won a big science fair.
[00:11:57]  We found articles in the paper of him having rewired his neighborhood with its own competing system to the Bell telephone system.
[00:12:09]  It was free.
[00:12:09]  Rewired.
[00:12:11]  And by the time he was 16, he's in the Stanford lab, physics lab of Arthur Shalla, Dr. Arthur Shalla, who essentially invented the laser, the maser, it was called at the time, but the laser.
[00:12:24]  And he's doing laser research there at 16.
[00:12:28]  By the age of 22, yeah, he's getting involved with the drug thing.
[00:12:34]  Since you guys are San Francisco, he attended high school at an all-boys school called the Woodside Priory in Palo Alto?
[00:12:43]  It's in the upscale valley where the guys that did the Chow Chilla kidnapping lived.
[00:12:53]  Starts with a P. Portola Valley.
[00:12:55]  Portola Valley.
[00:12:56]  Portola.
[00:12:57]  It's like a very exclusive.
[00:12:58]  This is something we don't dive into in the show at all, but it's worth mentioning, I feel like, right?
[00:13:04]  That Doug Vaughan's analysis of somebody we interviewed, a journalist.
[00:13:10]  He did research into Michael and talked about how that school allegedly, well, it was a Hungarian, it was Hungarian priests or monks, I guess, who had been anti-communist in Hungary and allegedly had worked with the CIA and State Department over there in their anti-communist efforts.
[00:13:35]  And then after they, when they left Hungary, they came to the Portola Valley, founded this school, and dug this.
[00:13:44]  And it was a school for troubled boys.
[00:13:47]  I never heard of it.
[00:13:49]  But it's a good school now.
[00:13:51]  I wouldn't want to cast too many aspersions.
[00:13:53]  But when I went and visited, I was.
[00:13:54]  But that it had been, importantly, in his telling, a recruitment ground for the CIA.
[00:14:03]  And it's like, is that true?
[00:14:04]  Like, how could you even prove that ever?
[00:14:06]  But it's an interesting thing.
[00:14:07]  You've got these monks who worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, and they're dealing with all these kids.
[00:14:13]  And like, well, you're spotting talent.
[00:14:15]  I would do it.
[00:14:16]  Yeah.
[00:14:17]  If I were you guys.
[00:14:18]  And so then, you know, that's San Francisco.
[00:14:21]  And then Michael turns up at this avant-garde theater on Haight and Ashbury or the Haight area called the Straight Theater, where he at one point, and this is a story I learned from the founders of the theater, not from Michael.
[00:14:39]  He never even told me this story.
[00:14:40]  The night that Ken Kesey did a 30-minute rap along to the Warlocks, the predecessors of the Grateful Dead.
[00:14:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:49]  Or not Ken Kesey.
[00:14:51]  Not Ken Kesey, Neil Cassidy.
[00:14:52]  Sorry.
[00:14:54]  The night that Neil Cassidy did this rap, Michael Rocanosciutto had brought a laser from Stanford and was projecting it around his stomach and stuff.
[00:15:07]  He's kind of talking about it, I think, as a piece of the lighting.
[00:15:12]  And look at this cool new camera.
[00:15:13]  Well, that was a big thing back then in San Francisco in the 60s.
[00:15:16]  There's like light shows by people.
[00:15:18]  And so there's a way you could see Michael as this guy who comes out of the counterculture movement and kind of moves into the, you know, as it goes from acid, if you want to think of it that way.
[00:15:30]  I think that's a good way to think of it as a single thing.
[00:15:33]  Into the speed years later on in the 70s and 80s.
[00:15:36]  He's also adamant with us in that car ride when we picked him up, was adamant that he was part of COINTELPRO New Left.
[00:15:44]  He was part of, he was.
[00:15:45]  He was like, I worked for COINTELPER.
[00:15:48]  He was like, there was a communist threat.
[00:15:50]  The communists had been in, the hippie movement had been infiltrated by communists, and I was helping keep tabs on what was going on as an informant.
[00:16:00]  Interesting.
[00:16:01]  So his whole thing is he's like, I was like both informant and target, which actually wasn't.
[00:16:06]  But also loves the music of San Francisco.
[00:16:09]  And he's turned me on to some amazing bands from Joy Cole Cooking.
[00:16:13]  Oh, Joy.
[00:16:14]  Joy Cooking.
[00:16:16]  That's interesting, but also you didn't really need Cohen Telpro to infiltrate the hippie movement as it pretty much did the work of Cohen Telpro by its very nature of like depoliticizing people and getting people to tune in, just drop out or whatever.
[00:16:29]  Right.
[00:16:30]  But he's such a fascinating character that you guys get involved with, that Danny himself had been involved with.
[00:16:36]  And it's, you know, there's a part in this where you actually reenact Danny Castellero going looking for this cassette that Michael Rakanasciuto told him was like out in the like this wilderness.
[00:16:52]  A very strange story.
[00:16:55]  And I feel like that's so emblematic of like Rakanosciuto's kind of MO because like he kind of is like sending this tantalizing information like all the answers are here.
[00:17:05]  But all it does is just like obfuscate more and like add more confusion and really waste Danny Castellero's time.
[00:17:12]  Yeah.
[00:17:13]  Someone said, Michael Rakanoshio's favorite words are, I've got the document, I've got the photo, I've got it on film, you know, but you'll never see it, you know.
[00:17:23]  Yeah.
[00:17:24]  Which we found to be, you know, dealing with Michael, I found him to be a very, when I first learned about him from Christian and met him, I was a huge skeptic of his.
[00:17:35]  I'm still a skeptic of pretty much anybody in this story, but as you check out more, he speaks very quickly, drops a lot of names.
[00:17:44]  There's a lot of stuff in there.
[00:17:45]  Some of it's true, some of it's not.
[00:17:47]  Fundamental stories that I thought were total bullshit turned out to be true in a way that I it's just kind of amazing to me now some of the stories about I mean like like, what happened to with Paul Marosca and the things that happened in San Francisco and the people he was dealing with, people like Philip Arthur Thompson, which we can get into, you know, it's like, or just like, if you met him at um, you were wandering around San Bernardino and you met him at uh uh,
[00:18:18]  you know a car parts store or something, and you struck up a conversation and you didn't know anything about this and he said yeah, you know, back in the 80s I used to work on this Native American reservation.
[00:18:29]  I was a director of research for the Wackad Corporation, which was and we were made.
[00:18:33]  And you'd be like yeah whatever, and he's the way he's presenting it and talking so fast.
[00:18:37]  It's like there's basic things, basic parts of his story that are true, that are absurdly fictional sounding.
[00:18:45]  Yeah yeah, I know yeah, I know what you mean.
[00:18:48]  Getting even to his the, the Marasca murder right, I mean, it is a real, verifiable fact that his actual, real-life business partner was murdered in a pretty spectacular fashion.
[00:19:01]  Yeah um, and the way that you guys get into that in in this is is is fascinating, because it seems like Philip Arthur Thompson uh is kind of who you like point the finger at.
[00:19:12]  It's like this guy probably did it yeah, and he was both an FBI informant yes, and he was also which is proven, you got, you show the documents but he was also legitimately part of uh Rakanosciuto's like circle.
[00:19:29]  You know, like he had shown up and just like started hanging out with them one day his dad was paying him to to be like his whatever friend.
[00:19:37]  How the fuck did his dad get in contact with that?
[00:19:39]  That was the question.
[00:19:40]  I had his dad, you know, got into contact with Philip Arthur Thompson through John Nichols.
[00:19:46]  Essentially, I mean, it's, it's hard, it's there's, there is a, a lot of people, everybody that involved in this triangle, has a different uh explanation as to how Philip Arthur Thompson enters into their lives.
[00:20:00]  And then, and then Philip Arthur Thompson's explanation, you know, a fourth take is that he first met Michael back in the early 60s in San Francisco.
[00:20:10]  But The way that basically the account from Michael is that the FBI was, we mentioned that Michael had a business partner who was murdered, Paul Moraskin.
[00:20:26]  The business that they were in was drug.
[00:20:31]  It was drug business, drug wholesale operation.
[00:20:34]  Illegal drugs.
[00:20:35]  Illegal drugs, yeah.
[00:20:37]  He had, Paul was moving cocaine.
[00:20:41]  They also had like a huge supply of precursor chemicals to make methamphetamine.
[00:20:49]  When we talk about huge supply, though, I think it's important to mention scale load.
[00:20:55]  We're talking about phenyl acetic acid.
[00:20:57]  We're talking about, you basically need two major, two important ingredients, right?
[00:21:04]  So Michael had access to, I think Paul had said like, hey, can you get me some like phenyl acetic acid?
[00:21:14]  And Michael was like, well, I can't get you like a little, but I can get you an entire train card load of it.
[00:21:21]  Like two, was it two tons or something like that?
[00:21:24]  It was something massive, right?
[00:21:26]  And when you're dealing with that kind of volume, you got to think about like people we've talked to about it who just had, who know that business, you know, it's like, you don't really get access to that without having some kind of government connection.
[00:21:42]  And that, that, um, and the massive amount of it.
[00:21:46]  The way they got the phenyl acetic acid is also fascinating.
[00:21:49]  There's a guy who, the guy that actually coined the term zero waste.
[00:21:53]  He's a kind of an amazing, brilliant guy.
[00:21:56]  And bless his heart, you know, he has dedicated his life to tracking down unwanted vats of chemical product and finding somebody who wants them.
[00:22:11]  Someone who wants them.
[00:22:12]  And rather than it getting tossed because like I bought this old factory and there's a vat of whatever on it.
[00:22:19]  Throw it in the river.
[00:22:20]  Throw it in the river.
[00:22:20]  No, it's like here you could – and so he – Here you can make math.
[00:22:24]  Yeah.
[00:22:25]  Right.
[00:22:26]  He's a recycling visionary.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:30]  But he also knew Michael and he had connections to the DEA.
[00:22:36]  Like they knew kind of what he was up to.
[00:22:39]  I mean, there's a published account and then there's his account and he, I don't know.
[00:22:44]  Basically, he hooked them up with the phenylacidic acid or he told them where they should get it.
[00:22:49]  Yeah, it was phenylacidic acid and there was...
[00:22:50]  And then there was monomethylamine, which Michael...
[00:22:52]  Sorry, Michael got the monomethylamine.
[00:22:54]  Michael got the monomethyl.
[00:22:56]  I'm sorry, yeah.
[00:22:56]  Those are the two important ingredients.
[00:22:58]  But also it's important to highlight.
[00:22:59]  They're not like moving drugs on a fucking corner.
[00:23:05]  And something we don't really get into, I wish we had in the story is just the background of Michael's father owned the town of Hercules, which is outside of San Francisco.
[00:23:16]  Hercules was a dynamite manufacturing facility.
[00:23:18]  I did know that, yeah.
[00:23:19]  And so it was a dynamite town, essentially, because it was such a big factory.
[00:23:24]  And he bought that plant and essentially bought the town.
[00:23:27]  And Michael had a lab.
[00:23:28]  Michael had a loud shit.
[00:23:30]  They pull up the train into the dynamite facility.
[00:23:33]  You can pull up a whole train car, you know?
[00:23:36]  And there are other interesting people working from like the Lawrence Livermore lab out of there.
[00:23:40]  They had a kitty litter mine somewhere else down the coast doing kitty litter is mine?
[00:23:47]  Kitty litter.
[00:23:48]  It's diatomaceous urchins.
[00:23:50]  You know, in the like desert-y Central Valley, like I think probably close to Trona-ish.
[00:23:56]  Lost my husband, the kitty litter mine.
[00:23:59]  Wow.
[00:24:00]  So Michael has toxic type of guy backlung.
[00:24:04]  Do I have a hairball?
[00:24:05]  Michael's dad, Marshall, is a super interesting character that does his own whole freaking podcast or whatever.
[00:24:11]  He was a guy who, his name's mentioned, Christian found his name several times in the Warren Report.
[00:24:16]  Marshall.
[00:24:16]  Marshall Ricano Shipper.
[00:24:18]  He was business part of the world.
[00:24:20]  He was in a business part of Ricardo.
[00:24:22]  One of the three hobos from Kennedy.
[00:24:24]  Yeah.
[00:24:24]  This guy named Fred Christman.
[00:24:25]  And Fred Christman interviewed by Garrison.
[00:24:29]  Jim Garrison.
[00:24:30]  Jim Garrison.
[00:24:31]  Yeah, there's an interview with Christman by Jim Garrison on the internet too.
[00:24:35]  Yeah.
[00:24:36]  Right.
[00:24:36]  And so he's also in business with this guy, Patrick Moriarty, who had a fireworks empire.
[00:24:43]  They had a fireworks empire called Red Devil.
[00:24:46]  Red Devil Fireworks.
[00:24:47]  And Moriarty, we called his nephew or something like that.
[00:24:50]  He was like, you know, my dad was the first non-government official to go into China during the detente.
[00:24:58]  And it's like, ah, like, you're a fireworks guy.
[00:25:01]  You're going over to China.
[00:25:02]  But also California politics Republican, Nick.
[00:25:05]  Republican.
[00:25:05]  There's this whole kind of Republican, intelligence-related, politically connected group.
[00:25:11]  And Marshall is a part of that milieu.
[00:25:13]  Also, the Disneyland fireworks every night that go off over the— That's Red Devil?
[00:25:18]  That's— That was Red Devil.
[00:25:20]  That was Michael's father's company.
[00:25:21]  That's a hell of a little connection to have there.
[00:25:24]  Yeah.
[00:25:26]  Interesting.
[00:25:26]  And so, yeah, I mean, his.
[00:25:28]  None of that made it into the movie, unfortunately.
[00:25:30]  It was just too much.
[00:25:31]  But that's the kind of world that Michael's coming from.
[00:25:34]  He's a brilliant kid, science prodigy, has a knack for doing chemistry.
[00:25:39]  Sometimes that knack seems to get him into trouble.
[00:25:41]  And he's got this partner, Paul Morosca, who wants a shit ton of chemicals to make, or doesn't even want that many, but lands with this shit ton of chemicals, very extremely valuable chemicals.
[00:25:55]  He also has a, you know, kind of a contract, if you will, a certain amount of a huge shipment of Coke every month comes from New York that he offloads.
[00:26:07]  You know, he's got, he's, you know, a pretty heavy businessman.
[00:26:10]  And so they were moving these drugs through Cabazon?
[00:26:13]  No.
[00:26:14]  Well, money that they were using for Cabazon, for the night vision stuff, Paul was an investor in some of that stuff.
[00:26:21]  And John Nichols had mentored Michael and mentored Paul through Michael into starting a company that they were all working on together, developed a night vision, kind of a laundry.
[00:26:32]  Part of it's kind of laundering some of his drug money into the intelligence.
[00:26:35]  The theme of like doing scientific research but also doing drugs.
[00:26:39]  The company was called Recovery Technology Inc., which is very reminiscent of in 1991 when he's trying to recover.
[00:26:51]  And so they have this massive amount of Paul, his partner, has a massive amount of precursors, right?
[00:27:00]  So that seems like where value comes from.
[00:27:04]  And it's hidden.
[00:27:05]  It's hidden.
[00:27:07]  It's a pretty complicated story, but they're basically waiting for one dude to get out of hiding.
[00:27:11]  And so they're going to cook it all before they sell it.

=== Confusing Scientific Research (15:49) ===

[00:27:14]  So the precursors are hidden in an abandoned mine in Nevada.
[00:27:18]  And they're basically waiting for the time to be right.
[00:27:22]  And then they're going to cook it.
[00:27:23]  And so tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs.
[00:27:27]  So much money.
[00:27:30]  And John Philip Nichols knows all this stuff.
[00:27:33]  And he's having his own money problems himself with the casino.
[00:27:37]  He's in the arms business and all this stuff.
[00:27:38]  But the casino actually was having so many legal problems because they were fighting the government and doing all this stuff.
[00:27:43]  And perhaps who knows where the money ultimately was going at the time as well.
[00:27:47]  And the casino went, you know, this is kind of Christian's own point in the movie and research that he did.
[00:27:52]  It's like the casino went bankrupt in December of 81.
[00:27:58]  Yeah.
[00:27:58]  And a month later, Michael's partner, this drug mover, Paul, is hog tied, is found in his apartment, hogtied, strangled to death.
[00:28:09]  Yeah, clearly tortured.
[00:28:11]  Clearly tortured.
[00:28:12]  He seems to have been alive for a while.
[00:28:13]  And he lived on, what did he live on?
[00:28:15]  He lived on Kearney and like right on.
[00:28:19]  Telegraph Hill.
[00:28:20]  Yeah, right where that walkway shows.
[00:28:22]  People take the selfies.
[00:28:23]  What's the broader towards Coi Tower, right?
[00:28:28]  Right on the hills.
[00:28:29]  You can step out and see Coy from there.
[00:28:31]  and so it's what he's like he's Michael is the one who finds the body Michael Michael goes over to his house.
[00:28:42]  We haven't introduced Philip Arthur Thompson.
[00:28:45]  We haven't explained it.
[00:28:46]  But Michael goes to – I just think it's important to mention.
[00:28:50]  Like Michael is the one who went over to his partner's house and finds the body, does not call the cops, does not do anything.
[00:28:59]  He calls a guy named John Philip Nichols, who we know, Dr. John Nichols, 700 miles away at Cabazon.
[00:29:06]  And John Nichols says, get down here.
[00:29:09]  And so Michael drives overnight there.
[00:29:12]  And eventually they alert the police that there's a body sitting there in Telegraph Hill.
[00:29:19]  And the police, one of the detectives we interviewed, is thrust into this world that we kind of like already know about.
[00:29:26]  By the time, he's called in the movie.
[00:29:30]  Basically, a lawyer in LA that he's still alive.
[00:29:33]  I won't mention him.
[00:29:34]  Fascinating guy.
[00:29:37]  He calls the San Francisco Police Department.
[00:29:41]  It's like, if you go, you'll find a body at this house.
[00:29:46]  And, you know, so then, all right, the police go, find the body.
[00:29:51]  It's tied very strangely.
[00:29:53]  They call this lawyer back.
[00:29:54]  They're like, okay, what's going on here?
[00:29:58]  And he's like, well, I had an introduction to the guy that told me about it.
[00:30:01]  He's currently in the Palm Springs area, but it's my understanding that he's on his way to LA and he would love to speak to you.
[00:30:09]  Interesting.
[00:30:10]  And so that's when they meet Michael.
[00:30:12]  And, you know, Michael tells the detectives, you know, basically he seems distraught.
[00:30:19]  We have this, you know, on tape, this call, and he seems very concerned and distraught.
[00:30:27]  And it doesn't, you don't get the impression that Michael killed Paul.
[00:30:32]  But then he asks, like, well, was it sexual?
[00:30:36]  What do you think?
[00:30:36]  He asks the police.
[00:30:37]  And you're also like, so what is, why would he ask that?
[00:30:40]  Like, you saw it.
[00:30:41]  Like, he saw the, it's not like.
[00:30:46]  It's not a sexual.
[00:30:47]  And Michael sounds, he also seems very innocent on those calls.
[00:30:52]  He says at one point, he's like, he died pretty hard, didn't he?
[00:30:55]  And it's like, oh, fuck.
[00:30:57]  I mean, strangled.
[00:30:58]  The body had been sitting there too.
[00:30:59]  I'm sure there was bloat.
[00:31:00]  He says there's an incredible smell.
[00:31:02]  You know, I mean, you're sitting there and this guy that you know in his apartment, and he's, you know, he's dead.
[00:31:09]  And Michael, I think over the course of time, he comes to believe that the reason that he's dead is because of John Philip Nichols and an opportunity that presented itself where John Nichols essentially hooked him up with an FBI informant/slash serial killer named Philip Arthur Thompson.
[00:31:30]  And to put a fine point on this, Philip Arthur Thompson was being paid by Michael Rocano Sciutto's dad.
[00:31:37]  In the months leading up to this.
[00:31:38]  In the months leading up to this, Michael Rashan Connasciutto's father was paying John Nichols a salary already to do mental health help on Michael.
[00:31:48]  And then John Nichols is like, well, there's another guy that you should use because I can't, you know, I can't.
[00:31:53]  He says, and oh my God, it's the most amazing, I think it's the most amazing part of our entire show.
[00:31:58]  The most amazing line.
[00:31:59]  He explains, John Nichols explains the reasoning behind why he's telling Marshall that he should hire Philip Arthur Thompson to look over my head.
[00:32:08]  He says, sometimes a sociopath can help a psychopath.
[00:32:12]  Yes.
[00:32:12]  Very matter of fact.
[00:32:13]  He's like, Granted.
[00:32:14]  He's like, a sociopath can help a psychopath.
[00:32:17]  And it's like, you sit there and you think, I listened to it.
[00:32:19]  I was just like, what can help?
[00:32:22]  It's like saying the Kentucky Derby is the first Saturday in May every single year.
[00:32:26]  Yeah.
[00:32:26]  Yeah.
[00:32:26]  A sociopath can help a psychopath.
[00:32:28]  And you hear Eddie in these conversations.
[00:32:32]  He's just like, okay.
[00:32:34]  You know, you just, it's beyond normal understanding of what this guy is doing.
[00:32:39]  And John Nichols, he's there, you know, talking to Eddie, the detective, like he's just, I want to help you in any way I can.
[00:32:47]  Yeah.
[00:32:47]  You know, and it's like, he just lures you right in.
[00:32:50]  There's another line where he's like, Eddie's father was the former coach of the Raiders.
[00:32:56]  Yeah.
[00:32:57]  And he was like, he's like, your father was an amazing coach.
[00:33:00]  That must make you pretty young, huh?
[00:33:02]  And he's like, oh, I guess it does.
[00:33:04]  He's like, you can just almost hear him kind of lining Eddie up and being like, young detective.
[00:33:09]  This shouldn't be that hard.
[00:33:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:12]  Wow.
[00:33:12]  I mean, it's just, I mean, I think that's a really extraordinary aspect because there's pretty clear evidence that Philip Arthur Thompson is a serial killer in a way that is actually beyond the remit of this story and like killed possibly multiple people while definitely working as an informant for the FBI,
[00:33:32]  which ties into like a whole other realm of like 60s, 70s, 80s stuff around serial killers and government contact that is sort of extraordinary.
[00:33:43]  And it looks like he eventually does get busted for murder too, which as do like thanks to the family of one of the victims, they like really put the squeeze on.
[00:33:54]  But I mean, I talked to a district attorney, a retired DA who was just convinced that he was a CIA.
[00:34:05]  Like he did jobs overseas.
[00:34:07]  He wasn't just like a.
[00:34:09]  Yeah.
[00:34:10]  He didn't just rape and kill women in the U.S. for his own pleasure.
[00:34:12]  He also had foreign assignments.
[00:34:15]  And there's a lot of evidence that he was running guns to El Salvador.
[00:34:20]  Wow.
[00:34:21]  It certainly turns up a lot in this.
[00:34:23]  And there was multiple stories about him.
[00:34:26]  It's very likely that we do.
[00:34:28]  Yeah, we don't explore this further, but he was going in and out of jail and prison constantly.
[00:34:33]  Yes.
[00:34:34]  Okay.
[00:34:34]  But getting out and sometimes going on, you know, just on leave from prison in certain ways.
[00:34:41]  Federal agents would check him out.
[00:34:43]  Check him out.
[00:34:45]  Like it was a library book.
[00:34:46]  What was it?
[00:34:46]  DA told to Christian, I remember him saying something like, it was like, you know, he had a, you know, some people have a, have a, have a MasterCard, you know, in life.
[00:34:54]  They have a visa.
[00:34:55]  This guy had a platinum card, okay?
[00:34:58]  He was able to access things that, you know, that was his metaphor for it.
[00:35:01]  I was like, I guess that kind of works.
[00:35:03]  It's just, it's very reminiscent of like the, like, you know, the Dave McGowan stuff and chaos.
[00:35:08]  And like, it's just, it's such a similar era and cast of characters.
[00:35:15]  And we talked to Tom O'Neill, and he was kind of a big inspiration hero for us.
[00:35:21]  We share characters, you know.
[00:35:22]  And if you haven't read the book, it's Chaos by Tom O'Neill.
[00:35:25]  Yeah, incredible.
[00:35:26]  And Michael, in his San Francisco days, used to go to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and says that he knows Jolly West.
[00:35:35]  Interesting.
[00:35:36]  He would say that.
[00:35:36]  He would, yeah.
[00:35:38]  But he also kind of acts like he's like he might have been a part of the program.
[00:35:44]  Like, does he, Michael Ricanashuto himself sort of hints that he might have been an MK Ultra subject or practitioner?
[00:35:51]  Said it.
[00:35:52]  Yeah.
[00:35:52]  He said that Jolly West, at one time he said, he was like, oh, he's one of the good guys.
[00:35:56]  It's like, but his brain.
[00:35:58]  If you think that, if you know him, your brain is potentially very strange.
[00:36:02]  I would say that killing the elephant, even if you are like the biggest anti-communist, like mind control crusader in the world, the elephant thing, probably unnecessary.
[00:36:11]  Elephant's a bridge too far.
[00:36:21]  Yeah, I mean, reconnaissance is such an interesting figure in this.
[00:36:24]  And what was it like dealing with all these people, Robert Booth Nichols being one of them as well, that have this like this strange aura of complete bullshit?
[00:36:36]  I mean, at one point, Christian, you look in the camera and you're like, all of these people are insane.
[00:36:42]  And the viewer feels a lot of sympathy for you in that moment because certainly the footage that had just been shown helps illustrate that.
[00:36:51]  And I feel very self-conscious about that scene.
[00:36:54]  I think it's a powerful scene, but I don't think that the Castellero family is insane.
[00:37:01]  I understand that you probably feel like all these people.
[00:37:04]  I definitely don't mean that.
[00:37:05]  It's very obvious to the clinical.
[00:37:07]  You're not talking about Tony Castellero, who's extremely measured and very clearly not insane.
[00:37:14]  I mean, what is it like sort of like coming up against this?
[00:37:17]  Because it seems like Casalero, that is like one of the theories about Danny Castellero's, like if he committed suicide, right?
[00:37:23]  Is that he was taken in by this group of hucksters who like are bad people who genuinely did crazy shit, but were lying and sort of stringing him along with this story.
[00:37:34]  You guys essentially take up from where he ended there and like kind of are subject to the same forces of just like smoke and mirrors and just like dazzle and bullshit, but then also these like this like line of truth beneath all the way.
[00:37:50]  We were able to document so much of the supposedly bullshit stuff that these crank crackpots were telling Danny.
[00:38:01]  But they also are like you know, every other, you know, they do lie and they are very confusing people to deal with.
[00:38:08]  They're also, it's fun, you know, but it is interesting when you get to a point when like you, it's pretty exciting when you first get to know these guys.
[00:38:16]  Yeah.
[00:38:17]  But then when, you know, you realize you've been in, been in it too long, when you roll your eyes, you're like, oh, God, he's calling.
[00:38:24]  Yeah.
[00:38:24]  You know, you don't even want to deal with it anymore.
[00:38:26]  But, you know, whenever you talk to like Michael, for instance, it's always, since we met him in 2017, he's always been on the brink of being hunted down and killed.
[00:38:38]  And he's always just like, I am fighting for my life.
[00:38:44]  And it's one of the things he said.
[00:38:46]  And at a certain point, you know, it's like, I feel bad if Michael hears this, but, you know, what you seem like okay.
[00:38:53]  Like the worst thing that happened is your heart from all the stress you're putting on yourself.
[00:38:58]  Like, who's chasing you?
[00:39:02]  You've been good for five years.
[00:39:04]  And then you have, but you have the history of it's like people die around Michael.
[00:39:08]  You know, there's a lot of people.
[00:39:10]  I mean, he walked in.
[00:39:11]  Let me tell you.
[00:39:12]  I walk in and I'm not going to use you as an example.
[00:39:16]  And young Chomsky has been trussed and slaughtered in an apartment.
[00:39:22]  I might be paranoid for the rest of my life, you know?
[00:39:26]  And that energy lives with him.
[00:39:28]  And that's the problem.
[00:39:29]  It's like you just never know exactly where anybody's coming from.
[00:39:33]  And there's, in my mind, I came to believe that there's a point to that.
[00:39:37]  And I don't know it's an overall point, an overarching point, that the octopus is like this, is this ultimate conspiracy or whatever, but that it's a play.
[00:39:48]  It's a dance.
[00:39:49]  It's like a piece of jazz that's being improvised.
[00:39:52]  But there's people who are better at it and people who are worse at it.
[00:39:54]  And they're all playing this kind of game.
[00:39:57]  And it's how Michael plays it is, you know, he has information that he knows is true, I think, and information he knows is false.
[00:40:06]  And he uses that and seeds it out into the world.
[00:40:09]  And it gives him ability to kind of move around and see what's going on and see who's talking to who, because you can see what information passes to whom.
[00:40:18]  And it's fascinating.
[00:40:20]  And it also, I think that smokescreen allows for a lot of the people in this story to get away with the things that we talk about people getting away with.
[00:40:28]  People get away with murders.
[00:40:30]  People get away with enormous drug deals and enormous amounts of money and arms and intelligence operations all around the world because it's all just too damn confusing for anybody to really parse it.
[00:40:43]  It's designed confusing.
[00:40:45]  Well, I think there's like almost like two different projects that sometimes seem like the same thing, but maybe aren't, where there's like, and I'm curious if you guys felt like this because my understanding of like Danny's project is that he kind of ran into this issue,
[00:41:00]  which is that there's sort of like this idea of trying to find the quote-unquote truth, which this idea that there is this sort of like determined, like determinist like reality that can be like, you know, you can strip away everything and you can understand like what happened, when, why, where, all of those answers, and like it makes sense and it's clear.
[00:41:20]  And then there's a story.
[00:41:22]  And like sometimes those things are maybe like different projects.
[00:41:27]  And there's something about like, I mean, at least, you know, from what I've read and what I understand, like Danny couldn't figure out what the story was that he wanted to tell, maybe because he got too obsessed with this idea that he could figure out the truth.
[00:41:42]  And like, at least in my, my, I mean, I'll just say like speaking for myself, like, I think that that project of like figuring out this like exact thing is one like pretty much impossible and just never ending, but also maybe not, like there's something to like figuring out the story and like, you know, an interpretation, I guess I would say.
[00:42:08]  Like there is, I think, sorry, I don't mean to like monologue here, but I think like we have this idea in our kind of like understanding of like interpretation that that's like different than like there's like there's truth and there's like interpretation.
[00:42:20]  Like those are two different things that are at odds.
[00:42:23]  But to me, like, and in other languages too, interpretation means like your version of like laying out the story.
[00:42:29]  Like this is how I interpret the world.
[00:42:31]  This is how I lay things out.
[00:42:33]  I think that's like even like the German word for interpretation is like to lay things out.
[00:42:38]  And in some ways that can be like more, almost like more insightful than the idea of getting to this like determined thing because the idea of an interpretation is that it's supposed to kind of like wake you up, to like shock you and to show you things that you weren't, you couldn't see before, to like illuminate things and to kind of present something that can kind of make sense.

=== Getting Bogged Down (04:48) ===

[00:43:03]  And so it's almost like in getting into the details and the truth of all these things, you kind of get bogged down and you're unable to kind of actually lay out something that can help us understand something a bit more.
[00:43:18]  Does that make sense?
[00:43:18]  Yeah.
[00:43:20]  One little thing I'll throw to Christian, but I think that's why last time we were talking in the last episode, we were talking about I was so insistent on sort of seeing the perspective of where things came from, the sort of like source of the information.
[00:43:32]  And that's why ultimately, you know, Danny's in the movie, we see his perspective on things and we see him as a character and how his thinking evolves and devolves kind of at the same time over the course of it.
[00:43:42]  And then it was important for us to just be extremely subjective and put ultimately ourselves and meet my view of Christian's interpretation of Danny.
[00:43:51]  You kind of can't understand it without, you know, it's like a physics experiment or something, like without being a part of it, without affecting it.
[00:43:59]  You know what I mean?
[00:44:00]  And you can't really understand this bigger picture without understanding what it's doing to you and how you're interpreting it because the subjectivity is how you have to see it.
[00:44:10]  And it's also, like you're saying, I mean, it's, there kind of is no, maybe there's an objective reality, but it's, it's not one that anybody can grasp, really.
[00:44:17]  Like, ultimately, it's as complicated as life itself.
[00:44:22]  You know, like there's unending connections between all of these people and in an intelligence world that we go into, that's just really useful, like I was saying.
[00:44:32]  Well, and at a certain point, you have to decide what you think.
[00:44:34]  You have to say, like, okay, I believe that he's telling the truth or not.
[00:44:38]  Or it doesn't matter if I think, you know, it doesn't matter if he is or not.
[00:44:42]  I'm going to still go with this lead.
[00:44:44]  I'm going to still go with this hunch.
[00:44:45]  And so you inevitably are going to end up crafting something whether you mean to or not.
[00:44:50]  I mean, I think if Danny had funding and a research assistant and like and a Netflix deal.
[00:44:57]  I'm just kidding.
[00:44:58]  Yeah.
[00:45:01]  I think what the book likely would have been was a character study of different people within the stratosphere or the stratification of the intelligence world.
[00:45:11]  Because we look at the different people that he wants to feature in the story.
[00:45:15]  It's like John Philip Nichols and this guy George Pinder who are like totally obscure kind of small fry freelancers and you go all up and up to the you know George H.W. Bush.
[00:45:29]  And if you do said if you were to tell like a through the eyes of these tangible characters that you can really flesh out with color and events and stories, you'd get a pretty good sense of the this secret world of intelligence and fake history and stuff.
[00:45:52]  And the other point that I wanted to make, this book, The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot, have either of you read that?
[00:45:58]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:58]  I mean, that is like, if Danny had that, I mean, that really, like, that's the octopus, you know, that Alan Dulles.
[00:46:06]  I mean, this guy is like manipulating.
[00:46:09]  If that book is true, which it's pretty well researched, this one person is drastically changing the course of history from the Holocaust to the Kennedy assassination.
[00:46:22]  Yeah.
[00:46:25]  In a very like, and that book is very sober take on that.
[00:46:30]  And so then, and, you know, Danny doesn't mention Alan Dulles, but, you know, it's just an interesting, like, there are.
[00:46:39]  He mentions all those guys, those OSS.
[00:46:41]  I mean, that's what he was really, really became ultimately interested in was the OSS Good Old Boy Network of the intelligence community, people like Alan Dulles.
[00:46:51]  And I also, yeah, I guess I just, I feel like Danny, it's important to note, like, also, we just don't have everything, right?
[00:46:58]  It's like Danny died.
[00:46:59]  He didn't finish his book.
[00:47:00]  And our project is an extremely subjective way of Christian talking about how he's trying to finish his book, you know?
[00:47:06]  And so like, I don't know.
[00:47:08]  I don't want, I'm not sitting here like defending Danny or something.
[00:47:10]  I have no real dog in that fight or something, but I just think it's like this idea that he was just like totally out on a limb and had no idea what he was doing.
[00:47:19]  It's like he did so much in a year, found so much stuff and put it together.
[00:47:24]  And like, yeah, other journalists had written about part of this stuff.
[00:47:26]  That's research.
[00:47:27]  You research part of that.
[00:47:28]  He was kind of putting this, you know, what was kind of like a theory of everything, which is a very difficult thing to do, but it's a powerful project because you're linking all these different scandals that he'd looked over the last 10, 20, 30 years.
[00:47:40]  And you're finding, yeah, actually, all these guys who were Iran Contra were over there, you know, involved in like the bombing of Laos or like maybe the Phoenix project, the Phoenix program.
[00:47:50]  It's like they're all, they are all connected.

=== Linking Scandals Together (04:35) ===

[00:47:52]  They all know each other.
[00:47:53]  And it's not that far off to say that they enrich themselves and the people around them by doing things that are seemingly semi-legal or illegal, depending on where you're sitting in the world.
[00:48:07]  And they're able to do that because they're intelligence connections.
[00:48:09]  And they all basically involve like the same kinds of things, right?
[00:48:13]  Like assassinations, coups, drugs, and oftentimes weapons smuggling.
[00:48:20]  I mean, it's like this is just like an MO.
[00:48:22]  An election cartel.
[00:48:23]  Election bullshit.
[00:48:24]  An election bullshit, too.
[00:48:25]  Danny called it parochial political intrigue.
[00:48:29]  Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a very like, there's a stylistic choice or narrative choice within the documentary where you start, and I think it doesn't happen in the first episode, but where I can't remember the woman's name, but.
[00:48:43]  Ann Clink?
[00:48:44]  Yeah.
[00:48:45]  Danny's friend.
[00:48:46]  Yeah, Danny's friend mentions that you, Christian, look like Danny Getzel, and you kind of do.
[00:48:51]  Yeah.
[00:48:53]  Well, that came up because, I mean, when that first came out, everybody that I've met, Bill Hamilton was just like, I remember sitting on his driveway and him being like, almost uncomfortable just being like, you really look like Danny.
[00:49:06]  You know, it was always this like ghostly thing going on.
[00:49:08]  And it's like, and said the same.
[00:49:10]  Tony said the same.
[00:49:11]  First thing, first time that his brother, Tony Castellero, said the same thing.
[00:49:15]  The first time that ever happened to Christian was early on, before any of this documentary or anything was happening, Christian showed up at Danny's mom's house, Tony and Danny's mom.
[00:49:27]  It showed up at Tony's house, and Danny's mother lived in an adjacent apartment.
[00:49:32]  And Tony wasn't home, so I went over and introduced myself to Danny's mother.
[00:49:38]  And I was wearing jeans, brown boots, a blue shirt.
[00:49:45]  I have blood hair, blue eyes.
[00:49:46]  I often wear blue.
[00:49:47]  Yeah.
[00:49:48]  And a camel hair sports jacket, which is just like kind of what I would wear if I was trying to dress semi-nice, wandering around D.C., introducing myself to people.
[00:49:59]  But, and I guess that's exactly how Danny used to dress.
[00:50:05]  And his mother thought that I was like part of a prank show or something.
[00:50:11]  And I had a notebook in my hand, and I was like, hi, I'm here to talk about your late son.
[00:50:15]  And she was like, get out of here.
[00:50:17]  This is nutty.
[00:50:18]  Like, you are putting me on.
[00:50:19]  Like, she's like looking around for like where the cameras are or something.
[00:50:23]  Like, she was like, this is too weird.
[00:50:25]  No, I was at a certain point.
[00:50:27]  I calmed it down.
[00:50:27]  I was like, this is how writers dress.
[00:50:29]  Yeah, fair enough.
[00:50:31]  Wait, but so did that like trip you?
[00:50:32]  Like, did you realize at some point when you were like, okay, I look like him.
[00:50:36]  Now I'm like kind of taking on his project.
[00:50:39]  Like, was there a bit of a I think it, I think it must have like subconsciously like helped me empathize with him.
[00:50:48]  You know, we have part of your experience in the world is based on like how you look, kind of, because people treat you a certain way based on how you look.
[00:50:58]  And then, you know, I come from a big loving family.
[00:51:03]  He comes from a big loving family.
[00:51:05]  He's from Virginia.
[00:51:06]  I'm from Kentucky.
[00:51:08]  You know, just like, I don't know.
[00:51:10]  We're very similar in certain ways.
[00:51:14]  Kind of unconventional thinkers.
[00:51:18]  Both have a background in journalism.
[00:51:19]  And we both have a background in journalism.
[00:51:21]  We both have a fear of blood.
[00:51:24]  Because when I found that he had a fear of blood and he died the way he did, that was another initial thing that was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, what?
[00:51:32]  Yeah.
[00:51:32]  And yeah, and I did.
[00:51:34]  For the first many years, I'd only seen like a grainy JPEG, like black and white photo of him.
[00:51:42]  And I was 25, you know, and he died when he was 44.
[00:51:46]  So maybe I looked vaguely like him.
[00:51:48]  I've looked, as I've aged, I think I've looked more and more like him.
[00:51:53]  As we took our time with the documentary, Christian aged into the part.
[00:51:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:57]  Well, you also have a butt chin, too.
[00:52:00]  Oh, yeah.
[00:52:01]  Or excuse me, a cleft chin.
[00:52:04]  And Castellera also had a, didn't he have a clef?
[00:52:06]  He had a butt chin too?
[00:52:07]  I mean, I don't know if the butt chin is like the most Danny part of Christian.
[00:52:12]  I want to be clear here.
[00:52:12]  It does approach.
[00:52:14]  Somebody does not have a butt chin.
[00:52:17]  But, you know, when kind of casting Christian in the role of Danny, you know, it wasn't this just convenience thing or something like that.

=== Bob's Concerns About Danny (13:02) ===

[00:52:27]  It was kind of this uncanny vertigo, like, or the tenant, or there's this sort of like doubling, like hitchcucking, doubling thing going on that we wanted to play.
[00:52:36]  You know, there's, for me, this story is kind of like a cautionary ghost story almost.
[00:52:40]  Like, promise is almost like the, is like Jaws or something.
[00:52:43]  It's like this, or Promise is like the ghost that's like, who knows how powerful this thing is?
[00:52:49]  And who knows what happens here?
[00:52:51]  And, and, and Danny and Christian kind of, there's a, there's like a melding that was like really powerful.
[00:52:57]  And just knowing, you know, it wasn't just us being like, yeah, this is easy.
[00:53:00]  Like, throw Christian in the role.
[00:53:01]  Like, you know, save a couple dollars.
[00:53:03]  Don't have to be sad.
[00:53:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:53:05]  It was just like, we almost like didn't want to do it as everybody.
[00:53:08]  It felt almost opportunistic and weird, but it was just like, well, we have to.
[00:53:13]  It just makes too much sense.
[00:53:14]  And it's getting too things just are starting to get too weird in general.
[00:53:17]  Let's just make, let's just crank it up a notch.
[00:53:20]  And I look forward to the opportunity as from a research standpoint where, you know, I could use this.
[00:53:29]  You know, we recreated his office to a T based on forensic photographs from the Martinsburg Police.
[00:53:36]  News stuff.
[00:53:37]  And yeah, news footage.
[00:53:40]  The exteriors, we don't even mention this in the show.
[00:53:43]  The exteriors of Danny's house in the show, that's Danny's actual house where he actually lived.
[00:53:48]  That house has since been bulldozed and turned into a McMansion.
[00:53:51]  But I mean, all sorts of coincidences aligned where we were able to film in that house right before it was bulldozed.
[00:53:59]  And then, you know, so I'm in his office.
[00:54:02]  I'm typing on the exact same typewriter that he had, or the same model.
[00:54:06]  It's not the same one.
[00:54:08]  And I'm writing his words.
[00:54:10]  I'm in his office.
[00:54:12]  I'm driving in his car.
[00:54:14]  And then at this point where I had this meeting with Robert Booth Nichols, it was this really revelatory experience.
[00:54:21]  You'll see it in episode three.
[00:54:22]  Me and Bob Nichols are at this hotel restaurant.
[00:54:26]  Danny and Bob Nichols.
[00:54:27]  Right.
[00:54:28]  Danny and Cranny.
[00:54:28]  Christian and Danny.
[00:54:31]  That's a funny slip.
[00:54:35]  Well, you know, this is the experience I had.
[00:54:39]  Danny and Bob had this meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in DC.
[00:54:43]  And I recreated that, or I played Danny in a recreation of that.
[00:54:47]  And, you know, the actor that played Bob was like super into the role.
[00:54:51]  And he's sitting there talking, like, just riffing about arms deals and whacking hot BCCI.
[00:54:58]  And he's just going just in character and just talking.
[00:55:02]  I'm sitting there taking notes.
[00:55:04]  And I'm thinking About that real night, that real evening in 1991.
[00:55:11]  But why is this international man of mystery?
[00:55:16]  Like, why is he messing around with this like unfunded novelist/slash researcher who's been poking into this guy's life in major ways and trying to do this character study of a guy who at that point in time is an unknown underworld figure?
[00:55:35]  And then, why are they meeting together?
[00:55:37]  Why are they, you know, what's going?
[00:55:39]  Like, why is Bob Nichols giving this guy any time?
[00:55:43]  Yeah.
[00:55:43]  And it was.
[00:55:44]  Why do you think?
[00:55:46]  I think he was getting something out of it.
[00:55:49]  And what that is, for me, I mean, do you want to?
[00:55:54]  I mean, for me, it's like, it's an information exchange, right?
[00:55:57]  Yeah.
[00:55:57]  And it's like you got journalists, you've got a journalist, especially one who doesn't have like the New York Times or somebody backing him up.
[00:56:05]  And he's like a go-between between you and your like ex-business partner, Michael Ricanosciuto, who you hate allegedly, and you want to find out what Michael's saying about you.
[00:56:15]  And you're using Danny, you're throwing a little information out there.
[00:56:20]  Danny's telling Michael, Bob said this about you.
[00:56:23]  It's like a depth charge.
[00:56:24]  But then Danny's at this time also talking to FBI agents who were investigating Robert Booth Nichols and prosecutors who were investigating Robert Booth Nichols.
[00:56:32]  So it's a way to see what someone knows, how far along on the trail they are.
[00:56:35]  Yeah, how far along is the trail.
[00:56:37]  And there is every possibility, I think, for our minds that Bob, who's just an amazing other character.
[00:56:45]  May or may not be dead, actually.
[00:56:47]  May or may not be dead.
[00:56:48]  But is sitting there and, you know, Bob's just a guy, very, from all accounts, very intelligent, somewhat maybe sociopathic, if you want to throw some words around.
[00:57:01]  Person who does, who's a criminal.
[00:57:05]  And I mean, like, I use that word like it means something, but you know, he's a money launderer and an arms dealer and possibly other stuff.
[00:57:13]  And also seems to work with people, definitely worked with people in the intelligence world.
[00:57:19]  Bob Mayhew.
[00:57:20]  There's a whole other sort of web of connections around Bob that's almost separate from Michael.
[00:57:25]  And like he's, he's, maybe he slipped up, you know, he would drink and make, maybe he just said something to Danny or Danny found out something that he just really shouldn't have mentioned, you know?
[00:57:37]  Shouldn't have said.
[00:57:38]  And I think that's, there's a lot of danger in there for Danny to meet with a guy like that.
[00:57:42]  And that meeting, like, was pretty late in Danny's life, kind of.
[00:57:46]  Just a few weeks before Danny died.
[00:57:48]  Yeah.
[00:57:48]  And it's, it's, you know, I think Danny, if anybody says anything that's true about him, it's kind of negative.
[00:57:56]  It's like he was very naive.
[00:57:58]  At the meeting, Danny, according to Tony, after that weekend that he spent with Robert Booth Nichols, Robert had told Danny that weekend, you know too much.
[00:58:09]  Now you're going to have to die.
[00:58:12]  Interesting.
[00:58:14]  Which Danny told Tony, he's like, I don't know what he means.
[00:58:17]  I don't know if he's reporting or whatever.
[00:58:20]  He wasn't reporting this in a melodramatic way.
[00:58:22]  He told his brother, this guy said this weird thing to me.
[00:58:24]  Yeah.
[00:58:25]  Interesting.
[00:58:26]  Or he was like, but maybe it was a joke.
[00:58:29]  Maybe he was, you know, he might have been like, or maybe he's warning me about somebody else.
[00:58:33]  You know, there's all these threats coming in.
[00:58:34]  And it's kind of, you kind of get to the point looking at Danny's notes, like how Christian interpreted them.
[00:58:39]  And it is like, it's almost like the question is like from the police is like, ah, he was dealing with all these weirdos who didn't know anything, who were just like leading him on and stuff.
[00:58:49]  And when we look at it and we look into the actual people he's dealing with, Michael and Robert Nichols and Quayar and John Nichols, all these people were alive at the time, Philip Brother Thompson.
[00:58:58]  ECCI was also collapsing at the time.
[00:59:00]  ECCI.
[00:59:01]  They had this whole black network of assassins.
[00:59:03]  And yeah, it's like, it's a wonder that Danny didn't die.
[00:59:07]  It's not very far-fetched to think that somebody who's looking into this stuff could die.
[00:59:11]  He's also looking into the Cali Cartel's top lawyer.
[00:59:13]  Yeah, it's just like, there's so many people.
[00:59:15]  It's almost like CCI also being reported on.
[00:59:19]  Like there's a huge blockbuster story and it was like what, Time magazine?
[00:59:23]  John Betty.
[00:59:24]  Yeah.
[00:59:24]  And so it was like also.
[00:59:25]  John DeMetty went into hiding.
[00:59:27]  Yeah, reporters were all over this stuff.
[00:59:29]  Other people, we talked to other reporters who went into hiding after Danny died because they were looking into similar things and they were like, they were getting threats, right?
[00:59:37]  That dude who was talking to Earl Bryan suddenly started getting threats and he was like, he was like, yeah, I stopped my investigation right there.
[00:59:44]  He was like, I drove to the country.
[00:59:47]  I didn't talk to anybody for three months after Danny died.
[00:59:49]  It's like, you know, it's just like the sort of official position is like, well, Danny was just going to get a kook.
[00:59:55]  You know, it's like, well, what?
[00:59:56]  I don't know, man.
[00:59:57]  These guys were looking into it and they were scared.
[00:59:59]  I'm not saying that, you know, that doesn't like cloud my mind about like, you know, people commit suicide.
[01:00:04]  Absolutely.
[01:00:05]  But for all kinds of reasons.
[01:00:06]  That is true.
[01:00:07]  But there are also, and this is a point that gets left out and I think is important to make.
[01:00:12]  And I'm not an expert on it, but there are leave no trace hitmen that can go in and kill somebody and get out without leaving any DNA.
[01:00:22]  And it makes it look like a suicide.
[01:00:23]  I mean, that's just a job.
[01:00:24]  People, I'm pretty good at my job.
[01:00:26]  You guys are good at your jobs.
[01:00:27]  And there's people that kill people that are good at their job.
[01:00:30]  Well, they don't get caught.
[01:00:31]  It's just also, I mean, you guys go into this.
[01:00:33]  I was really kind of gratified to see that you guys go into like the actual talking about the suicide, Danny Castellero's death, and like going to the police department and getting the file and stuff like that.
[01:00:46]  And it was one of those things that has always kind of floated around is this death tape, which I talked to you about.
[01:00:54]  We talked about it yesterday.
[01:00:58]  It's just like, there is like there's that letter that you guys uncover in the composite sketch, which I think is, I mean, frankly, if watch the documentary, they get to it.
[01:01:08]  It would do it more justice than us talking about it right now.
[01:01:12]  But yeah, I don't think it's far-fetched.
[01:01:15]  And that is one of those things.
[01:01:16]  It's like, you really can never, and like, it sounds like such a cop-out.
[01:01:20]  You can never rule out a suicide or whatever.
[01:01:23]  People do kill themselves.
[01:01:26]  But it's also like, I think in this instance, like, there's also a lot of extenuating factors, right?
[01:01:32]  Where like you wouldn't maybe necessarily label something a suicide as quickly as you would if this was just a guy who just gotten fired from his job at like, you know, whatever the plant and, you know, was deep in debt and had been fighting with his wife.
[01:01:43]  I mean, there's extenuating factors at play here.
[01:01:46]  I think there's also the idea of like, there's such thing in my mind, and who knows if I'm right about this, but like of driving somebody to the brink of something who, you know, of feeling so low and feeling so insane about this stuff and doing it on purpose because this person is onto something.
[01:02:04]  I mean, that's a little more abstract.
[01:02:05]  Yeah.
[01:02:05]  Maybe that's like a little unfounded.
[01:02:07]  Gaslighting.
[01:02:09]  But I guess the point that I would like to make is like, just because if he did commit suicide, it doesn't mean like, oh, well, I didn't like, he didn't find anything.
[01:02:19]  You know, it's whatever.
[01:02:20]  It's like, you can be at a really low place when you're trying to look through all this stuff and you're like broke and whatever.
[01:02:26]  Like you can get to a really low place and have stumbled onto some stuff that you can't even, maybe it's too hard to put together or something, but it doesn't make it unrealistic.
[01:02:34]  It doesn't realize it's going to delegitimize the work.
[01:02:38]  But also the suicide is pretty crazy.
[01:02:44]  We'll see.
[01:02:45]  Yeah.
[01:02:46]  I mean, it's also like there's, I would say there's some definite questions about his suicide or whatever.
[01:02:52]  I mean, even FBI agents said they didn't.
[01:02:54]  They said some FBI agents had questions.
[01:02:58]  Yeah, there were some.
[01:02:59]  There was not full, you know, not full consensus despite what they wanted, what they put out in the report.
[01:03:05]  Yeah.
[01:03:05]  There's a whole Webb Hubble story that we had to leave out.
[01:03:07]  Do you want to tell that, Zach?
[01:03:08]  Oh, yeah.
[01:03:09]  Do you know what Webster?
[01:03:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:03:11]  Yeah, it's sort of like just like a name of the Vince Foster.
[01:03:15]  There's a Vince Foster little.
[01:03:17]  Oh, my God.
[01:03:17]  Yeah.
[01:03:18]  So Tony told us this story that didn't make it in.
[01:03:20]  It's like when Tony met with Janet, so what, two years after Danny's death, all these people are like, oh, DOJ should investigate Danny's death.
[01:03:30]  DOJ finally, it's a new regime, right?
[01:03:33]  Bush is out.
[01:03:34]  Clinton's in.
[01:03:34]  Janet Reno is now the attorney general.
[01:03:37]  And the goddess.
[01:03:38]  And so Tony's brought into the attorney, in the meeting room with the Attorney General Janet Reno.
[01:03:44]  And in there is a lawyer named Webster Hubble.
[01:03:49]  And Tony's sitting there.
[01:03:52]  He's inside.
[01:03:53]  I play this clip for people of Tony telling the story.
[01:03:56]  It's so amazing.
[01:03:58]  He's going to be in charge of doing the Danny Castelera investigation.
[01:04:02]  And he says to Tony, I know what it's like to lose somebody and have it be a question about whether he committed suicide or not.
[01:04:12]  Wow.
[01:04:13]  Because, what, months, weeks, days earlier, Vince Foster had just been found dead.
[01:04:18]  Yeah.
[01:04:18]  And Webster Hubble sits there and just melts down into tears in this conference room and starts crying.
[01:04:24]  And no one knows what to do.
[01:04:24]  It's all the way.
[01:04:25]  Nobody knows what to do.
[01:04:26]  And Tony, sweetest guy I've ever met, really.
[01:04:28]  Yeah.
[01:04:30]  So he gets up and he goes over to Webster Hubble and he puts his arm around him and he says, it's okay.
[01:04:37]  Like, it's okay.
[01:04:37]  And it's almost like, you know, you think about like weird sort of psychological stuff going on.
[01:04:43]  Just like, just, you know, I'm not like a Vince Foster was murdered guy.
[01:04:49]  I have zero opinions.
[01:04:50]  You haven't gotten beyond the Wikipedia page.
[01:04:52]  Yeah, I haven't gotten beyond the Wikipedia page.
[01:04:54]  But just that scene, right?
[01:04:56]  And then, and then Webster Hubble, midway through their investigation, is removed.
[01:05:02]  Yeah, because of Whitewater.
[01:05:03]  Because of like his connections with, you know, some criminal stuff with his law firm, his old law firm or stuff like that.
[01:05:10]  And it's like, it's just such a DC thing.
[01:05:12]  It's like, well, now he's in a scandal and he has to go.
[01:05:15]  And then they get another group in there to do it.
[01:05:17]  You know, it's just like such a nightmare for Tony to go through.
[01:05:21]  And then, you know, the end of the report is just like, and we got the report.
[01:05:24]  We got their notes.
[01:05:25]  We got all this stuff.
[01:05:26]  And it's just, it's not as clear-cut as these guys want to make it seem.

=== Whispered Connections (03:30) ===

[01:05:30]  It's just not.
[01:05:31]  I think it was a rush job to get through it and just be like, yeah, what the Martinsburg police said is pretty much right.
[01:05:37]  Like these guys were all kooks and Danny committed suicide.
[01:05:41]  I'm just like.
[01:05:42]  Well, if they were going to go the other way, it would take him 10 years.
[01:05:44]  That would, yeah, Christian, you know.
[01:05:46]  It's not long.
[01:05:48]  Not only that, but the implications would not be good for the government that they work for, you know?
[01:05:53]  The DOJ, you know?
[01:05:55]  Even if Danny did kill himself, the stuff that he found out that relates to the DOJ's investigation, you know, something like Philip Arthur Thompson doesn't look great when you have an FBI guy who's an informant who's going around murdering, raping, selling arms, doing all kinds of stuff with the imprimature and the help or whatever it is of the FBI and his handlers.
[01:06:19]  It's just not a great look for the Bureau.
[01:06:22]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:06:23]  I mean, it's something they battle with for, you know, pretty much yearly.
[01:06:26]  Well, it's mass shooters now, but yeah, yeah.
[01:06:40]  You know, I wanted to, because we've got to wrap up, but I wanted to ask, did you guys find yourself going nuts doing this?
[01:06:48]  I had one recently, one of the pillows from my bed disappeared.
[01:06:52]  It disappeared.
[01:06:55]  Like, I looked everywhere.
[01:06:56]  I mean, you asked me any place that it might have been.
[01:06:58]  I looked there.
[01:07:00]  Let me ask you this.
[01:07:01]  Did you have a dream you were eating a marshmallow?
[01:07:03]  No, no.
[01:07:03]  I don't like marshmallows.
[01:07:05]  Well, you can still turn it up.
[01:07:06]  Well, you feel like you were literally gaslit.
[01:07:08]  I don't know.
[01:07:09]  I mean, the only thing that I can think of, well, I don't have a history of sleepwalking.
[01:07:15]  I've never sleepwalked.
[01:07:16]  Oh, I can't say the same.
[01:07:19]  I would have had to lift heavy windows and thrown it into my street, which I won't say which one it is, but there's often trash on the street.
[01:07:32]  And I don't see why the pillow of all things would get, you know, if I threw it out the window, would get taken up.
[01:07:39]  All the other crap that's on the street.
[01:07:41]  It still sits there until it gets, you know.
[01:07:43]  So then, yeah, I don't know.
[01:07:46]  It was like, it was really freaky.
[01:07:47]  It was super.
[01:07:48]  I mean, it's a soft, literally soft intimidation, but I don't know what it was.
[01:07:55]  But my pillow disappeared.
[01:07:57]  And I just think, like, I thought instantly about this story I heard a different related investigation related to Philip Arthur Thompson.
[01:08:08]  Some people surreptitiously recorded the FBI agents that were handling him.
[01:08:15]  And they got home from San Francisco and they took the tape and they put it in this crawl space under the stairs inside a suitcase, inside a bag, inside his suitcase.
[01:08:28]  Then when they went out of town the next time and came back, they found the tape in their tape layer.
[01:08:34]  Wow.
[01:08:35]  And so the pillow disappearing was kind of like, I don't know, maybe someone's like, your show's about to come out.
[01:08:40]  Like, I can take your pillow.
[01:08:42]  I can take your life.
[01:08:43]  Just like be good or something.
[01:08:45]  I don't know.
[01:08:46]  Or maybe I'm insane.
[01:08:47]  I don't know what happened to the pillow.
[01:08:48]  It could have been anything, but not that many things, actually, because I live alone and I, all I do is you have to go to Bushwick, who's like taking it for making you do the dish, for making them do the dishes.

=== King Baby's Mystery (03:30) ===

[01:09:01]  That is.
[01:09:01]  I don't have a remote.
[01:09:02]  But like, did you go, did you, like, did you guys like, I mean, obviously, also doing a documentary is a ton of work and like working 10 years on something and you've been involved for what, seven years?
[01:09:12]  Five or six.
[01:09:13]  Yeah.
[01:09:13]  I mean, since knowing Christian, I've been involved the whole time in some way, just hearing about it.
[01:09:18]  Yeah, we would always talk about it.
[01:09:19]  But you guys have known each other for a long time.
[01:09:21]  Since we were kids together in Kentucky, people from Kentucky are crazy.
[01:09:25]  They are crazy.
[01:09:26]  What does that suppose mean?
[01:09:27]  We have a lot of experience with people.
[01:09:29]  Liz and I have a ton of experience with people from Kentucky.
[01:09:32]  I hope it's good.
[01:09:34]  It's a smack bag.
[01:09:34]  It's mixed bag.
[01:09:36]  But I would say all of it has made an impression upon me.
[01:09:39]  Okay.
[01:09:40]  I'll take it.
[01:09:41]  But the insane, you know, it's just like, Brace, what are you getting at?
[01:09:46]  Trying to like set up a sort of like context in which like somebody can say in the future, like listen to that True Nine, like those guys went insane.
[01:09:55]  No, that's not what I'm saying.
[01:09:56]  Obviously, when they fell out of the window, first of all, if no disrespect, but if I'm gonna kill two guys in their 30s who live in New York, I'm gonna be like, oh, they did cocaine laced with fentanyl.
[01:10:06]  Not saying you guys do cocaine, or they get hit by a car on their bike, or they get hit by a car on their bike, or there was a gas leak, or it was a, you know, there's a variety of things you can do.
[01:10:17]  I think that there's like a fun and a fear.
[01:10:22]  It's like a weird combination of sort of exhilaration that you get from looking into this story that's that's very drug-like, that's very freaky.
[01:10:30]  For somebody like me who's like just a wimp, you know, like, yeah, I get freaked out by telling this story.
[01:10:36]  I get freaked out by talking about it.
[01:10:38]  I like want to knock on wood when I think about the start conversation we're having right now.
[01:10:42]  I just think it's like really grim and kind of fucked up, you know, but you kind of have to talk about it.
[01:10:47]  And yeah, like who knows what these people like, you know, it's an old story, but who knows what people are up to and like what little thing you accidentally uncover that like you didn't think was a big deal.
[01:10:59]  But to somebody out there who's in the world we're talking about, it's like it's almost like we can look at almost like a fictional world.
[01:11:05]  You know, we have characters, we have Raw Rude Nichols.
[01:11:08]  There's something very abstract, but like they're real, you know, and some of them are still alive and they have friends and they're, you know, a lot of them got arrested for murder.
[01:11:16]  And a lot of them got arrested for murder and other things, you know?
[01:11:18]  And so it's a scary situation that's that's like, you know, I come home, I like to turn on the lights, look around a little bit, and just make sure nobody's in there with me.
[01:11:44]  People are so upset when we didn't do the cold open.
[01:11:47]  I know.
[01:11:47]  You know, I'm sorry.
[01:11:48]  I'm trying to figure out a way.
[01:11:50]  Look, it's just A-B testing.
[01:11:51]  Sometimes you sometimes, here's the thing: listeners, at this point, listeners, this is like three episodes ago, so you probably don't even remember.
[01:12:00]  But sometimes you're just trying different stuff out, okay?
[01:12:05]  You're just trying different stuff out.
[01:12:07]  We're growing up in public here at True.
[01:12:09]  Yeah.
[01:12:09]  Hey, give us the space to experiment.
[01:12:12]  I'm the world's youngest 34-year-old teenager.
[01:12:15]  No, preteen.
[01:12:17]  What?
[01:12:17]  I'm a 34-year-old preteen.
[01:12:19]  I'm just a little baby.
[01:12:20]  Oh, God.
[01:12:21]  I'm just a little baby.
[01:12:22]  Oh, no.
[01:12:22]  Nope.
[01:12:23]  Nope.
[01:12:23]  Reeling that one back in.
[01:12:26]  I am just a little, I'm the world's oldest baby.

=== Growing Up in Public (01:19) ===

[01:12:31]  And my name, I would say, watch the damn documentary.
[01:12:34]  I took all these thoughts I had that I hated King Baby.
[01:12:37]  King Baby.
[01:12:40]  He was King Baby.
[01:12:43]  I was gratified to hear a shout out to Hercules California.
[01:12:46]  Yeah, that was cool.
[01:12:47]  We love Hercules.
[01:12:48]  I got to look up that weird Hungarian school.
[01:12:50]  Yeah, never heard of that before.
[01:12:53]  But it's also like such a common thing with post-war or especially like post-50s and post-50s, really.
[01:13:03]  Like all of these Eastern European religious groups being used as kind of conduits for intelligence.
[01:13:10]  I mean, there's so much of that stuff.
[01:13:13]  And yeah, that's maybe something to look into for another time.
[01:13:17]  With that being said, I am so hungry.
[01:13:19]  I got to eat a little piece of food.
[01:13:20]  My name.
[01:13:21]  But just a little bit.
[01:13:23]  I'm trying to lose weight.
[01:13:24]  I'm trying to get into spring shape because I am planning to do, and I didn't want to announce this right now, but I feel like I have to.
[01:13:31]  I'm planning to do this job completely naked from now on.
[01:13:34]  Okay.
[01:13:35]  With a little sarong on, but so that's not completely naked.
[01:13:40]  But I'm planning on doing this job in a sarong.
[01:13:42]  My name is Bryce.
[01:13:43]  I'm Liz.
[01:13:44]  We are, of course, joined by producer Yank Chomsky.
[01:13:46]  And this has been Trunan.
[01:13:48]  We'll see you next time.
[01:13:50]  Bye-bye.