➡ The text is a conversation from the Paranoid American Podcast. The host discusses a strange incident in his bedroom, introduces the podcast’s mission to uncover hidden truths, and shares his concerns about AI-generated memes. The conversation then shifts to a guest named Alan Marcus, who talks about his unique name, his experiences with social media, and his time at a private Christian college where he ran for student government and advocated for extended visiting hours.
➡ A student joined a private Christian college hoping to fit in with the community. He used MySpace to connect with other students before the semester started, sharing his interests and looking for a roommate. However, his posts raised eyebrows due to his mention of being interested in gay Republicans, leading to the college administration questioning his lifestyle choices. This incident highlighted the tension between religious rights and freedom of speech, with the college eventually hosting a debate on the issue.
➡ The text is about a person’s high school experience, where he faced bullying and a smear campaign against him. Despite this, he remained non-judgmental and respectful towards everyone. He was socially connected, being the yearbook editor, but often felt misunderstood. His interest in technology, film, and broadcasting led him to explore online platforms like Google Video and YouTube, where he discovered content related to conspiracy theories and occult symbolism. He also made short films with his roommates, often satirizing belief systems. He observed the merging of Christian and secular cultures in the mainstream, particularly in music.
➡ In the late 60s and 70s, Christian youth found a unique way to express their faith through hardcore music, creating a counterculture that upheld traditional values in a time when societal norms were changing. This movement provided a positive and uplifting escape for young people, especially those from broken homes. The popularity of Christian music grew, even reaching mainstream platforms like MTV. The internet further fueled this movement, allowing young people to explore and understand their faith and the world around them, despite the challenges and fears of the time.
➡ The text talks about a person’s experiences growing up, being involved in gifted programs, and being exposed to various conspiracy theories. They discuss their fascination with TV shows, their early reading and writing skills, and their involvement in a Masonic program. They also mention their suspicions about the intentions behind these programs and their fear of being part of a database of gifted children. The text ends with the person preparing to answer a series of rapid-fire questions about their experiences.
➡ The speaker discusses their beliefs on various conspiracy theories and supernatural phenomena, rating their belief in each on a scale of one to ten. Topics include Bigfoot, flat earth, Atlantis, Tartaria, mud floods, world’s fairs, dinosaurs, dragons, alchemy, biblical demons, and the possibility of summoning demons. The speaker’s belief varies for each topic, with some scoring high and others low. They also discuss the potential for a non-believer to summon a demon and the consequences of such actions.
➡ The speaker discusses various conspiracy theories and their personal beliefs about them. They question the official narrative of events like 9/11 and the moon landing, suggesting they might be part of a larger scheme. They also explore the idea of celebrity clones and the potential for artificial intelligence and psychedelics to connect with other entities. Despite their skepticism, they remain open to all possibilities and encourage further research and discussion.
➡ The speaker shares his deep experiences with both Christianity and the occult, including direct communication with Lucifer and Jesus. He talks about his spiritual journey, from being a fourth grader at a Bible camp to his adult life, where he felt a calling to broadcast his experiences to a wider audience. He also mentions his struggle with sleep paralysis, which he believes was caused by spiritual visits. Towards the end, he hints at a new debate format he’s working on, which aims to distinguish between creative exploration and absolute truths.
➡ The text is a conversation about personal experiences with spirituality, the desire for more open discussions about these experiences, and the importance of understanding and sharing information. The speaker also mentions their skepticism towards authority and traditional paths, preferring to forge their own way. They encourage listeners to share their own stories and experiences, and promote a comic about Stanley Kubrick and the Apollo space missions.
➡ Paranoid American offers unique sticker sheets featuring various themes like cryptids, secret societies, and more. These stickers are popular and sell out quickly. They provide a fun and exciting way to express your interests and personality. Get yours now at paranoidamerican.com.
➡ The text is a personal account of a person who grew up attending a Christian kids camp and later went to a private Christian college. The college had a large radio station and state-of-the-art broadcasting facilities, which attracted the person due to their interest in creativity and radio. The person also discusses their deep involvement in Christian culture, including music and movies, and their experiences at Bible camp. They reflect on how these experiences shaped their understanding of their faith and their personal growth.
➡ The text talks about the author’s journey with Christianity and his curiosity about the occult, sparked by a Christian music video. The author was deeply involved in Christian culture, participating in Bible quizzes and youth groups. However, he started questioning and exploring other beliefs after watching a music video that depicted a spiritual battle between good and evil. This exploration led him to learn about witches and the occult, challenging his previously held beliefs.
➡ The speaker shares their experiences with strange occurrences in their home, suspecting their troubled neighbors or possibly supernatural activity. They discuss the idea of capturing these events on camera, questioning if the technology would be manipulated or affected. The speaker also explores the concept of spirits understanding and interacting with our technology. They reflect on their childhood, mentioning the influence of religious videos and societal pressures, and share an unusual experience of dreaming about a “Where’s Waldo?” book before seeing it in real life.
➡ The text is about a person who had precognitive dreams, which they used to find Waldo in a book. They also discuss their Christian upbringing and how it influenced their understanding of these dreams and other unusual experiences. They mention their interest in gothic culture during puberty and how it didn’t seem dangerous or scary to them. The text also touches on their experiences with Christian music and bookstores, and their observations about the overlap between Christian hard rock, punk, and straight edge culture.
➡ The text discusses the author’s journey through understanding Christian culture, including the concept of ‘straight edge’ lifestyle and the symbolism in Christian music. The author also explores the idea of spiritual warfare and the belief in a greater conspiracy against Christianity. They delve into the world of Christian comics and their impact, expressing a sense of boredom with the repetitive gospel message. The author concludes by expressing a lack of interest in the portrayal of drug addicts in these comics.
➡ The speaker shares their journey of interest in literature, graphic design, and publishing, which led them to become a yearbook editor in high school. They were inspired by small Christian ministries who managed to reach a national audience through publishing and speaking events. The speaker also discusses their early experiences with the internet and email, including writing a fan letter to a musician named Carmen. They also volunteered at a Carmen concert, collecting donations. The speaker then delves into their understanding of different Christian denominations and their experiences with missionaries from various groups.
➡ The text discusses the speaker’s experiences growing up in a Christian community, where they were exposed to Christian versions of popular culture and taught to view the secular world as corrupt. The speaker also discusses the Christian community’s efforts to provide a safe haven from the perceived dangers of the secular world, including violence, drug abuse, and broken homes. The speaker also touches on the challenges of navigating relationships and social dynamics within this context, and the pressure to evangelize and spread the Christian message. The text ends with the speaker questioning the validity of different Christian denominations.
➡ The text discusses the author’s experiences with religious differences, particularly between Catholicism and Protestantism, and how these differences played out in his personal life and education. It also explores the impact of these religious differences on his relationships, particularly with a former girlfriend who reacted negatively to their breakup. The author also discusses the influence of popular culture, such as music and fashion, on his religious beliefs and experiences. Lastly, he talks about the backlash he faced from his peers due to his religious beliefs and how it ultimately backfired.

650 in my bedroom, grabbing my bible, grabbing. Maybe I don’t think I had cds at that point, but maybe a cool movie or something to share, a sticker or something. I don’t remember what I forgot, but I was in my room, went to the van, needed to grab something. Maybe I borrowed a CD or a tape or something from someone else. I’m like, oh, I got to bring it back then, so 605 651520, gotta go run up. And then I returned to my bedroom. Something wasn’t right in the bedroom. The shelves had fallen, the bed spread had been thrown across the room.

Everything was tipped over and all the bedroom upstairs, I was just upstairs. I was the last one out. Are you hearing what I’m saying here? I mean, it sounds like poltergeist. Good evening, listeners, brave navigators of the enigmatic and the concealed. Have you ever felt the pull of the unanswered, the allure of the mysteries that shroud our existence? For more than a decade, a unique comic publisher has dared to dive into these mysteries, unafraid of the secrets they might uncover. This audacious entity is paranoid American. Welcome to the mystifying universe of the paranoid american podcast. Launched in the year 2012, Paranoid American has been on a mission to decipher the encrypted secrets of our world.

From the unnerving enigma of mkultra mind control, to the clandestine assemblies of secret societies, from the awe inspiring frontiers of forbidden technology, to the arcane patterns of occult symbols in our very own pop culture, they have committed to unveiling the concealed realities that lie just beneath the surface. Join us as we navigate these intricate landscapes, decoding the hidden scripts of our society, challenging the accepted perceptions of reality. Folks, I’ve got a big problem on my hands. There’s a company called Paranoid American making all these funny memes and comics. Now, I’m a fair guy. I believe in free speech, as long as it doesn’t cross the line.

And if these AI generated memes dare to make fun of me. They’re crossing the line. This is your expedition into the realm of the extraordinary, the secret, the shrouded. Come with us as we sift through the world’s grand mysteries, question the standardized narratives, and brave the cryptic labyrinth of the concealed truth. So strap yourselves in, broaden your horizons, and steel yourselves for a voyage into the enigmatic heart of the paranoid american podcast, where each story, every image, every revelation brings us one step closer to the elusive truth. Paranoid American Podcast this is going to be a nice little chill session.

We might get into some wild tangents. And I just want to get right off the bat and say, normally I tell everyone not to trust somebody that has two first names. It’s weird and it just seems unsettling. Although they were going to make a huge exception for Alan Marcuse, who’s one of the coolest people that I know, that has two first names. That is the exception to this rule. So for this one time only, we’re going to be okay with two first names. So welcome aboard, Alan Marcus. Thank you for having me. Do we have to talk about the name first? Have you ever encountered such a bias or am I original in this, like a Marianne or an Ann Marie? I think it was a lot of female names.

Or like you want me to say Pollyanna, Pollyanna, Pollyanna or something? Are you off the hook? I guess. Or bloody Mary, bloody Mary, bloody Mary. It was more like Marcus Allen is a football player and a guy in a Wheaties box. So when I was born, my dad was like, great. We got a son, we got an athlete, we got a Marcus Allen. And here I am today, loving. So how long was your NFL career exactly? You can just round it to the year. You don’t have to go through the months. Well, the problem is with the Google searches.

So if you like Google search marcusallen.com or Marcus Allen, it’s gonna be a football player. So I started a YouTube channel years and years ago because I was into publishing short films and videos and things, and then I decided that, well, gotta have a name. If people are searching for Marcus Allen, they’re gonna get a football player. So if I flip it in reverse and go, Allen, Marcus. No one had that name. So I established that was going to be the name that was better than Marcus 86, which, like an AOL username, had some other usernames, early Internet message boards and things.

So I thought that Alan Marcus would be easier for the majority of people to pronounce correctly and remember. And it’s unique enough to have the.com four. And then finally getting a.com after years and years of just playing around with homepages and websites and things was like a big accomplishment, I suppose. But by that time, everyone had kind of passed on personal web pages and were more into MySpace accounts. And then Facebook came along and ruined everything for everyone. Well, I wouldn’t say ruined. Everyone’s resistant to a little change, but I’d say a vast overall improvement in society and technology in general, wouldn’t you? Well, I joined Facebook as soon as it was made available to my college with a college email address going back to.

Was that 2005? Maybe 2006, like early, early January of 2006 when it was for college networking. And when I went to this private christian college in Minnesota here, I was really into networking. And I did that when I decided to run for student government. Really want to, but I thought it would be funny to do interesting and sort of an easy way to have everybody figure out who I am and what I’m about. And then I could sort of decide who I wanted to get to know better. And in that case, I ran for student government.

It was like a student centered position, and they had let in a lot more students that year. They were really expanding in 2005. College was a really popular thing, and everyone was going to college in 2005. So the freshman class that year, Washington larger than other classes, and they were going to have three positions open instead of two because there was more students to represent as freshmen. So then I had to campaign, get some signatures, and then I could have a couple minutes on stage during chapel. It was private christian college. We all went to chapel around 1030 in the morning as a community together.

So all the freshmen get together in chapel. We’re all sitting on stage. There’s about twelve of us. We had to give a speech in front of like 700, 800 people, student staff. And I get up there, I don’t know what number I was. I wasn’t the first, wasn’t the last, but I was, I think, the first candidate to make anybody laugh. I had said that in talking with all of you, being the freshman class and discovering what visiting hours were, because it was a private christian college and the dorm rooms were off limits to the opposite sex during certain hours.

During visiting hours, that’s when guys could walk down the girls hall. Girls could walk down the guys hall, that type of thing. A lot of the girls would make cookies and invite people in and they’d play house and whatever. Christian college. There’s lots of fun stuff happening at Christian College. That was awesome. Yeah. So being night owls, people wanted to extend the evening visiting hours. So I was like, that’s kind of the most pressing issue people had. They wanted to negotiate the visiting hours. There were certain nights where there was no visiting hours. So I said, well, in talking with the administration and negotiating the visiting hours and recognizing that there’s a declaration of christian community, and we’ve all signed lifestyle agreements to say we won’t engage in certain behaviors, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, having sex, running dice games in the laundry room or whatever it was, we’ve agreed to be on our best behavior, that’s understood.

But recognizing that when a man and a woman are alone together, certain questions are going to be asked. So I said, we all have a standard Bible. It’s our textbook. And if we open that Bible that’s about, you know, this wide. So if we agree that in contact with the opposite sex during visited hours, we’d open that Bible and we’d have it like thigh to thigh, and we’d agree to be with one Bible length apart at all times, then I think that the. We’d all be in agreement that we could extend some visiting hours and we’d have more time with the opposite sex.

And then people were, like, laughing, and I was like, great. And then they voted me in, and then I had to do the work. So with, like, the visiting hours aside, how much were people doing alcohol and drugs and shooting dice in the laundry room? Well, being a christian college and realizing that parents pay for college, quickly discovering that not every student was there out of their own volition and choosing, a lot of parents said, I will pay for a semester or two of college, one at a time. We’ll see how the grades are, and we want you to go to a private christian institution for your behavior to be exemplified by other good Christianity students at this point sounds like a recipe for success.

I just imagine that everyone there is probably like a beacon of the community, and everyone leaves on the path to greater things. Well, certainly getting to know a lot of the students and having access to Facebook and very social people at this time, this was MySpace. MySpace had a message board for the college. So the summer of. Before the fall semester, there was a select group of people posting to the MySpace board for the college saying, well, who’s your roommate? What classes are you taking? Getting to know each other and wanting to get to know other people to maybe have a selection for the roommate so they know their roommate before going into it, because the last thing you want to do is get set up with a blind date for a semester with guys you never met before before that type of thing.

In that scenario, people were maybe not understanding what the conditions were. So at this .1 of the posters was this guy who was saying his interests were like, Chevrolet trucks and worship music and gay republicans and his grandmother and some other things. Okay, flip one in. There wasn’t me. This other guy, very friendly, though, very social, including, of all people. And I had an extra concert ticket to one of the christian concert clubs in Minneapolis at the time. So I had bought two tickets. My friend had also bought two tickets or something. So we had an extra ticket amongst the group of us.

So I said, you know, to the forum. I said, hey, we’re all going to this college. We all like christian music, right? Message me if you want a ticket. This. This guy messaged me. He’s like, you got the ticket? I said, sure. I’m like, have you ever been to this location? He’s like, no. Have you ever been in a christian concert before? No. Have you ever been in a concert before? No. Do you know what’s going on? No. Well, if you can get to the location, meet us before the concert. I’ll give you the ticket. This type of thing, strange behavior.

So having met this guy, he had showed up to concert very socially awkward, and then kind of left early, but forgot where he parked. And then I didn’t hear from him for a while, and he was choosing his roommates. And then finally I was reading his blog on MySpace, and he said he got called in front of the administration or the dean of students or the admissions council or something, and they had printed out all of his MySpace pages. What year is this? 2005. They’re ahead of the curve on this. All right. Right. Because this was when in MySpace, I’d added the forums so other students had seen it, and other staff members were, like, made aware that, hey, people are talking about our college.

We should monitor the situation. So they printed it out, and I think that highlighted some questionable lines. And in the statement of, you know, when we, part of the application process and the acceptance process is signing a statement saying, you agree to these lifestyles that we are upholding here. And was there a checkbox that was like, no gay stuff? We can get into that a little bit more as the story unfolds here. That was a concern they had. Now, this is also the time when there’s a group called, like, exodus international and other groups were campaigning to say that religious rights versus other rights, freedom of speech and things, and to say that it’s discrimination to not allow students of different persuasions and interests and things to attend.

So that’s where it became a real issue. And there’s a number of private christian colleges in the Twin Cities area that had a visit from this bus called soul force. So these were equality riders, and they went to private christian colleges at the time to nonviolent protests. Basically, they’d sit in front of the doors to buildings, and they’d say, we’re here, we’re queer. We’re never going to disappear, or whatever it was. And some of the schools were more public. One of them was right downtown and was in neighborhoods, so they didn’t own all the properties. There’s more leeway there.

Our college was near Lake, and it was more private, so you’d have to go through a security checkpoint. They eventually, the college eventually agreed to host them in a debate format if they were agreeing to stay within the room that they were allowed to be in, not wander around, not cause trouble, not interrupt classes, that sort of thing. So they sort of forced the issue going back to this other guy from MySpace who was questioning his interest in gay Republicans and politics and that sort of thing. It turned out that they had. They had asked him about that, and then he had kind of.

He had gone to them, and I think he just kind of broke down. And he’s like, you know, I’m a sinner. I got all these issues my life. And so that’s okay. Maybe you’re not ready for a freshman year here. We’ll have. We can delay your enrollment for another semester. You can kind of work out your personal issues and figure out what your stances are, and then we can talk again and then later on. It’s a very small world. So the editor of the newspaper, of the college newspaper, actually knew this guy and had gone to high school with him.

So everybody knew everybody else, and that was not including MySpace in Facebook and social networking. So the networking was very real at that point. So when they told him to reevaluate lifestyle, is that saying, like, go be un gay and come back when you’re not gay? Or was it more like he wasn’t mentally prepared to just act, not a fool? Well, let’s be clear. I guess the reason I bring up a story, and I wasn’t quite clear what the purpose of the story at the beginning of the story. It’s the shaky dog tale of, why am I talking about this? What does it mean to me? Well, because I was posting stuff on MySpace at that time and vampire freaks and fetlife and all of the social media platforms that existed.

I was like, let’s hang out here. Let’s see what these people are about. Let’s interact, let’s see what the differences are. So had I been fully inspected on my social media presence, they might call that doxing today or stalking. They would have found questionable things, printed them out, and I would say, I’m an artist. I don’t know. I can’t explain the art that I’m putting out. I’m like a character. And this is before Alex Jones and those types of people would say, well, you know, it’s for entertaining. What does Alex Jones say his deal is? He’s an entertainer, or what was the phrase he uses? Well, I mean, I come to understand him as almost like a WWE fighter in a way.

So that’s the best analogy that I’ve got for Alex Jones. So my understanding, without having phrased it in a specific way, was that online culture, posting online, there’s always going to be a mask that you wear or a character that you play. You’re going to choose a username, you’re going to post your interest, you’re going to appeal to certain niche audiences, and that’s how you’re going to kind of market yourself. And I just understood that I don’t think the older administrators at private christian colleges had really caught up to that idea yet. And then I would say, well, some of my favorite christian bands, they wore eyeliner, they wore makeup, they wore stage costumes.

And I was into theater and drama, as you can see. Very, very suspicious behavior, very suspicious interests. So what are you, my interests attending a private christian college? Am I there to subvert it, or what’s my deal? And I was never quite clear about it, except I would suggest to these people to say, well, instead of judging person on their outward appearance and how they present themselves, look at their behavior and what are their actions over a long period of time, and what are they doing, not how are they looking or who are they talking to? Because in my understanding, wasn’t that what the Christ figure, you know, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth was doing? He was talking with all the people, getting to know them, and sharing his message.

What was your actual reason for being there? Did you get sent there to correct behavior? Were you there to subvert it? Were you there because you were christian and you wanted to go to a christian college? All of the above, yes. My father being a youth pastor when I was young and growing up in a pentecostal church, the assemblies of God church, that’s where I was familiar with. Now not realizing that so much of my life was spent at the thumbnails of God Pentecostal Bible camp every summer with my family and then with youth groups and as a kid.

So there was kids camp for a week. That was starting at fourth grade. I was the first 4th grader to go with my pastor to kids camp. And then each year after that, I continued to go and then with two weeks for family. So I was there, you know, half a month out of the year, every year. So that was sort of a second home kind of a vacation thing to look forward to. And the people that would go there were with all. They were all within an assembly of God, pentecostal mindset, and they listened to maybe tooth and nail bands and the christian bands, and they knew the christian movies and they knew all the christian culture that was even a more specific niche within a niche within a niche.

And then going to a more non denominational, private christian college and seeing that not all of these people here even knew christian bands or had gone to christian music festivals, so there’s a much wider variety, I understood that that was okay. My reasoning for going there was primarily they had the number one largest radio station on their campus. So it was college and radio. On the radio, it was always known as from this college and radio. They had built a new facility for the radio station. The radio station was on the second floor. The first floor had classrooms, and the student radio station and the basement had built a new state of the art broadcasting facility for television and video.

And they were starting to push into film at that point. And they had editing bays and state of the art equipment. That’s really what the appeal was to say. I could go to a place where I could be creative. They’re starting a new program. There’s some enthusiasm here. And they would go to the national religious broadcasters conventions, and there was christian awards programs. So it was the subculture that was very encouraging. Felt like a safe place. And then knowing that people weren’t going to be burning out and hung over Saturday and Sunday morning in lawns everywhere, that seemed like an appealing choice.

So it seemed like it was more academic, focused, and people were on, well, be good behavior. And it was a private christian college, which seemed like such a stretch for such a simple, low income, family type person like myself. So it was such a reach to attend and maybe a miracle or something, you know, that type of thing. It was a dream come true at that point. And for a lot of other people who were raised maybe in smaller towns all over, their families worked in saved. They’re like, we’re going to send you to college, so we want to make sure you get the most out of it.

But 2005, college stream was still alive before the housing crisis hit and the college bubble started bursting. I think that’s an important backstory for where we’re going in this autobiographical monologue that I’m sharing, that you probably had no information above about prior, and it sounds like the college that you’re describing, the riff raff, kind of took itself off or weeded itself out in literally, maybe if they were smoking and they had to. Well, and it’s actually somewhat atypical, because a lot of the christian schools that I know a lot of other people went to, it was like a very secondary kind of thing.

So it’s actually interesting to hear one where everyone’s there and, like, getting their work done and, like, the way that you described, it’s perfect. Like, everyone’s not hungover on Saturday and Sundays and, you know, is actually working on projects, I guess, and not getting too crazy. When you said that you were raised pentecostal, how pentecostal? Snakes talking, speaking in tongues or other? No, not southern. I’m northern Minnesota. So we weren’t doing snake handling by speaking in tongues and dwelling in the Holy Spirit. That was a primary goal. Absolutely. Glossolalia, right? Yeah, glossolalia. So, with the Bible camp, I said fourth grade, first year people could go to Bible camp.

Now, you can imagine a sanctuary, a worship sanctuary filled with five 604th graders, all very intuit, very emotional, very taken by the music, the message, the idea of forgiveness and living in a broken world and having broken homes at home. So everyone’s very much bonding over this. If you’ve seen the movie Jesus camp that came out a few years ago, that cut out of George Bush. Right. That’s the famous scene. Well, or they’re putting hands on him. They’re not worshiping him. They’re putting hands on him. That movie was so interesting, and it wasn’t quite my experience at the Bible camp I had gone to.

So that movie kind of made me laugh, and then it kind of made me frustrated. What president cut out did you get then? There wasn’t a political conversation happening with the fourth graders. It was not about choosing what president you want to go home and tell your parents to vote for. It wasn’t like that, essentially, but the excess and the extreme. How. How far can we take this church, christian bible believing current, and then put it into a Jesus camp thing? I think that film was more of a warning to other leaders who were facilitating bible camps around America.

I think that was a warning to them, say, hey, put you on notice. If you go this far, there’s gonna be backlash. I think that’s probably how that functioned for a lot of people. So to see that the intention of these camps for a lot of kids was having single parent homes, not enough food, poverty, these types of issues for them to have five days, four nights having fun with friends who want to do well and don’t want to dwell on drama and emotion and sadness. It was a very emotionally uplifting time, a lot of fun for a lot of people, and they returned year after year.

So I grew up in one town. I went to one church. I went to one school system. But then I’d go to this bible camp, and I’d meet people who maybe lived 20 minutes away from me, but I had never seen them because a different town was a completely different world. But then I’d go to camp, and I’d see them every year, and then year after year after year, seeing them get to know some friends that way. So that was a cool way to interact face to face. But I recognize that for most of the people, I was much more advanced in my Sunday school studies and in my understanding of the fundamental statement of beliefs of the assemblies of God and what they were and what that meant.

Most people just wanted to go swim in the lake and then jump on the blob that they saw in the movie. Heavyweights for, you know, fat camp, essentially, compared to where you were at in the mid two thousands, which is, I guess, where we’re talking about right now compared to then and now. Have you changed your spiritual outlook? Has you. Have you just, like, been building upon it, or has it, like, completely morphed from something than it was 20 years ago? Right. So as I alluded to in my bible, my Sunday school Bible study got to the point where I was sitting in with the adult Bible study as a precocious fourth grader.

So I was sitting with adults studying the Bible, talking about the book of revelation and the tribulation timeline, and then books like left behind were being published, and I was like, that’s not really right. But the popular culture was accepting it. And then Nicolas Cage starts in the movie, and, you know, the Kirk Cameron movies were just pushed aside at that point. So having studied all this stuff, I was out of material, essentially. So I started reading more stuff, and I laughed because I was really into music videos. And I have a memory of a sales guy coming, sitting in our living room and selling us cable packages.

I was, I don’t know, maybe second grade, third grade. And the guy’s sitting in the kitchen selling my parents cable packages, and they’re like, no, HBO. Can we block certain channels, this type of thing? And I’m just like, make sure you get MTV. I want to see music videos. And they’re like, yeah, by the way, Block VH one, block MTV. You know, block the state. You know, we don’t want to see these. So then the music videos I did get to see were on Trinity Broadcasting network, TBN, and there was maybe another christian station. And there’s this guy named Car man.

C A R M a n. He’s not an automobile salesman. He’s a italian entertainer guy. Who, do you know him, Carmen? I don’t know him, but I know that TBS or that Trinity broadcast thing you’re talking about had a huge station here in Orlando that almost recently got ripped out. They had a whole, like, big coliseum and everything. Sure, sure. So christian music videos sold on vhs tapes in Bible bookstores. That’s one way to get them. I would see them on television, and I would record every music video program that they had to VHS so I could play them back and watch them.

And then eventually, I think we bought some Carmen tape so we could watch them. There was a very specific, very intriguing music video he had called a witch’s invitation. Carmen being a man of biblical stature, holding his Bible, holding firm to his beliefs and wanting to cast out demons and devils and help people in their struggles and free them, that sort of spiritual battle stuff. Good and evil and God sides winds. He wrote a song called the Champion, where Jesus is a boxer and he’s going against the devil in a boxing ring. And it parallels the story of Easter and Jesus dying and then rising again and defeating Satan at the end.

So this sort of story carries on through all of his music videos. And he himself, Carmen, being the hero, mimics Michael Jackson. He mimics all of the secular music that I wasn’t familiar with. I didn’t know what he was inspired by at that time. But this video for a witch’s invitation included tarot cards, crystal balls, other occult accoutrements. Later on, I find out that Carmen had a pastor who was in California and had met a guy named Isaac Bonowitz who got a degree in magic studies. Later on, I find all this stuff out. But this seed is planted where? Okay, so I have understood what the Bible is saying.

I get that. I know the books of the Bible by heart. I was a junior bible quizzer. Bible trivia stuff. I’d go and compete, win trophies, memorize bible verses. Got all that stuff. Great. Carmen over here going against this male witch who’s in Adams family style horror haunted house. What’s going on over here? Very, very interesting. So I begin to look into that stuff to figure out, well, what are they actually doing here? And what do these male witches think about what they’re doing? They don’t see themselves as being evil. They don’t see themselves as wanting to destroy christian culture, do they? They’re not really challenging pastors and casting hexes and spells, are they? Well, some of them are.

Many of them probably aren’t, but that sort of planted a seed to say, well, huh. I watched these things over and over again. They became mimetic memories. These were the songs that I’d memorized because I’d heard them over and over again and they were very, very catchy and uplifting. And then they’d be played in the churches over and over. So it was this insular christian culture that not everyone in the church had appreciated, but it was what I had, and I made the most of it, really got into it. This is actually really fascinating. So I just want to understand this.

Your first introduction to the occult in any capacity was through a christian music video. And they were talking about witches and they had tarot cards. And that was the first time that you were like, ooh, what’s that? And you looked into it and you hadn’t heard about this from any other source. Well, at the same time, concurrently, the memories are sort of all together. Establishing a timeline is difficult, but being so plugged into the spirit, living a holy spirit, directed life, at some point, we might call this almost synchronistic, shamanic sort of journeying. When you’re looking into good and evil, angels, demons, naturally the supernatural is going to appear everywhere.

So having gone to church on Sundays and also youth group meetings on Wednesday nights, and having made it very clear to people because there was like, I think, fourth grade, I came back from bible camp and went to school and I had, like, my wrist filled with, but with Jesus do bracelets, like 1234 of every color. This was when they were kind of cool and popular. This is when DC talk at Jesus freak and people knew who DC talk was. And then eventually we get to pod and everyone’s singing youth of the nation and really enjoying the music.

So seeing a moment when Christianity and christian culture and christian art were being recognized by mainstream outlets, I think some of these videos were finally played on MTV and VH one. It was all very interesting. And this is where I was at the forefront. That’s a christian record label, by the way. Forefront. I knew all this stuff because I was very familiar with it to a level of knowledge that so many people didn’t know. But I thought, this is what Christianity is. So it took going to a private christian college to realize that other christians didn’t have all of the same interests or knew the references that sort of expanded the worldview a little bit.

This is sort of answering the question of, well, when did I expand further and further and further? Slow baby steps, certainly. But having gone through all the available material and being more curious and wanting to know other people’s point of view, because I realized mine was so focus stuck in a reality tunnel. It was safe. It was comfortable. Well, pause there. Was it safe? It wasn’t safe. When I was going to youth group summers, I was probably 6th, 7th grade at this point. Summer youth groups. 07:00 p.m. is when the start time was. We didn’t live too far from the church, so it gets to be about 06:50 p.m.

family five. We all got to be in the minivan and get ready to go. It was a little bit slower putting on clean clothes. There’s going to be girls there. We’re going to listen to christian music. We’re going to do christian side hugs. You’re going to keep a Bible length away though, correct? Correct. Our christian sisters are going to respect them. But knowing that other, it was the summertime, we didn’t have school. We’d stay there later and teenagers from other towns would drive to visit other churches, other youth groups to make new friends and pen pals.

Catch the drift. It’s like you don’t want to date the people at your church. You want to go to other churches, meet new people. This type of thing, keeping arms, like distance, that type of thing. So what I’m saying is puberty’s happening. 650 in my bedroom, grabbing my bible, grabbing. Maybe I don’t think I’d see these at that point, but maybe a cool movie or something to share a sticker or something. I don’t remember what I forgot, but I was in my room, went to the van, needed to grab something. Maybe I borrowed a cd or a tape or something from someone else.

I’m like, oh, I gotta bring it back to them. So 605 651520. Gotta go run up. And then I returned to my bedroom. Something wasn’t right in the bedroom. The shelves had fallen, the bed spread had been thrown across the room. Everything was tipped over and all the bedroom upstairs. I was just upstairs. I was the last one out. Are you hearing what I’m saying here? I mean, it sounds like poltergeist. If I’m just gonna do like the most, you know, obvious version of this. That’s the word that came to mind because there was the movie by that title.

And I remember seeing that movie. And there’s a scene in the kitchen where the camera on the chairs, and then it pans over the side, and then you pan back, and all the chairs are stacked. It’s like it was one continuous shot. Well, that’s kind of what it was like for me. I had walked up the stairs, went to my room, grabbed the thing. Everything was fine. Went back downstairs, went to the van. Oh, forgot something. Went back upstairs. Things are not right. Don’t say anything. Go back down. Go to the van, go to church. We come home from church, and then, you know, my sister’s people are writing lipstick on the mirror.

All right? So then we clean everything up. We put on our karma music. We pray, anoint with oil. What are we doing? We don’t know. This happened three or four times that entire summer, same story. It got to the point where we’d come home from church, we’d call our pastor, and he was dreading the call Wednesday evening to say, I don’t want to go back over. I don’t know. I don’t know what to tell these. I don’t know what to do. Like, two years ago, I went back to Bible camp and saw him there. And we were talking, and he shared with me privately.

He was like. I was like, what do you remember about visiting our house? What do you remember about phone calls asking him, not telling him what I wanted him to say? Remember the haunted house family? Right. Well, just saying, well, what do you remember? And he was like, well, his wife would hear the phone ring, and she would know, and she would say, don’t answer the phone. Don’t answer that. He’d answer the phone, and he’d understand our concern, and then he’d hang up the phone, and he’d tell his wife, and she says, you don’t have to go.

You don’t have to go. You don’t have to go. Are you hearing what I’m saying here? Well, that everyone basically was also under the impression that this was poltergeist. Was there anyone at all that was looking around for troublemakers or thinking that it might have been you or maybe, like, one of your siblings? Yeah. Looking for a rational explanation or copycat behavior. There was concern that our neighbors, who somehow were our cousins, and they were not attending church, they were much more emotionally disturbed. They had their biological father they weren’t in good terms with, and they were more troubled and had behavioral issues.

So there was concern that maybe they had a key, or they would know when we would leave, and they’d go into our house and then watch our cable for an hour and then know when we were coming back and then go back out, that type of thing. But I had the firsthand experience of being in the room, walking out of the room, returning to the room, seeing what had happened, and then living with that and trying to figure that out. And the word, you know, poltergeist is brought up. I think my mother went to the library to look up the word in the book.

And it was like, we’re not even keeping that book in the house. Just keep that in the, you know, garage. Keep it as far away from the situation as possible. So. So I was in it. It was happening around me. Other people weren’t really caught up to the ideas that, you know, haunting, supernatural activity, that stuff. Actually, they thought it was only in the movies. This is a complete hypothetical, but I’m just curious what you think. If you had set up a camera, paranormal activity style, do you think that would have double slit experiment, changed it so that nothing happened? Or do you think that there’s a chance you could have captured objects basically moving by themselves and things getting flipped over? Right.

So it became annoying. As you can imagine, no one wants to clean the entire upstairs every Wednesday night when you want to go to sleep and go to the next day. So I started thinking, well, we didn’t have cameras at that point. We didn’t have security systems. Would it change it? Are we talking film cameras or digital cameras? Does it matter? I’m always curious about that, too. Does it even matter? That is what also pushed my interest in television broadcasting, documentary, getting stuff on video, that sort of thing. So that sort of pushed my interest in saying, well, what cameras could we use? Would we get a camcorder? Here’s.

Here’s a quick answer. As far as that period of time. Our VCR, we loved it, had a tape, a christian tape that we wanted to play that night. And when we put. We had a whole cabinet of tapes, christian tapes. We grabbed one of them, and the first tape we played had been almost scrambled or recorded over. The first tape that we chose at random from a cabinet that we put in had been recorded over. So the magnetic tape had been scrambled so it couldn’t play the program. The tape was destroyed. So I think at that point, if we would have had a, you know, a digital camcorder or VHS or something in a corner recording plugged into the wall, would the tape just be recording noise and not the actual picture? I think that would be a possibility.

The more hypotheticals here, but does that mean, or do you think that would imply that ghosts would. I’m going to say ghost as a placeholder for a much more complicated topic? Possibly. But would that imply that a ghost would actually have to understand the technology it was sort of manipulating? For example, if it could make an analog tape scramble, or if it could cause digital compression errors or some sort of other glitch, does that mean that ghosts or spirits are keeping up to date with our technology? Important question. I’ve had a few years to think about it.

I don’t know if the popular culture ghostbusters sort of education into the supernatural, like the most mundane popular culture, introduction to these topics are suitable for explaining what’s going on. There’s a lot of nuances and a lot of possibilities all happening simultaneously at the same time. Interacting, processing, reacting in real time to what’s going on. It’s far more intricate. And the component that I later became much more aware of in terms of if we’re using the word poltergeist, having to do with puberty and hormones and emotional energy and orgone, and these types of ideas, which was not really considered at that moment, in the heat of that moment, of the thick of it, having encountered it and been annoyed by it, but then wondering, is this.

Is this the result of being highly charged, spiritual, and meeting the opposite polarity to find a balance? Is that to say in watching Carmen videos and being familiar with the idea of casting out unclean spirits? I don’t know if they’re good or evil. Maybe there’s unclean. Maybe they had a stomach ache. Maybe they’re a little bit emotionally damaged. Who’s to say if they’re good or evil? If it’s a person who died in the vicinity? Was it a Native American? Barry, all of these types of questions could be all those things at the same time. And then interacting together, create sort of the boiling point where things just go and the lid flies off, and there has to be an escape of this energy, almost like an amalgamation of a bunch of different things.

Do you think there’s coordination in that? Or are we just talking boiling point in that perfect storm? Like, just so many things are happening that it has to express itself in another dimension, essentially. I think the important factor here is the element of belief. Belief that this is the way things work. So in a magical worldview, having the belief that there are spirits, egregores, disembodied voices, intelligence, these types of things. Being open to this, being shown this through a Carmen music video, as, you know, a second 3rd grader. I mean, this is the most horrific horror movie I had seen.

At that point, I was allowed to see it because it was playing on a christian television station who was saying, don’t watch horror films that are emotionally disturbing. And now a witch’s invitation from Carmen. Let’s watch it. Satanic panic, worried about back masking and secular music. But here we go. Here’s a guy dressed up as a gunslinger, wearing a cowboy hat, walking into saloon and shooting demons. This is entertainment. Carmen. Cool guy. This reminds me just the tiniest little bit of, like, the dare program when I was in, I think, fourth or fifth grade. Yeah. Where up until that point, to me, anyone that had done drugs was probably out killing people at night.

Like, murderers and burglars and drug users were just, like, the same thing. It was. No, you know, the Venn diagram was a circle kind of thing, right? And as soon as the sheriff starts showing us, like, all these examples of people that are, like, down on their luck, and then, long story short, it was like, oh, the education changed my entire thought about, like, if they had just let me just keep going, I just would have assumed that all drug users were murderers, and everyone my friend’s parents are painkillers. Those painkillers are drugs. Now, I’m in a moral quagmire of emotions and right actions, and I love my friend, and I don’t want to see them go through protective child services.

But, man, drugs are really bad, and the moral fiber of the neighborhood is at stake here. And I’m in fourth grade, and I’ve got poltergeists in my house, and I’m watching karma music videos. And God needs to return to America. We need to make prayer in public school a priority again. And, man, we’ve. We’ve really lost our way. And, boy, this is a lot of weight on my shoulders right now. What am I gonna do? Because it’s all on me. It’s all on me because I know I’ve seen things. I know things. Now, what am I gonna do with this information? I had strange conversations, people prior to this.

I mean, I remember in second grade, I got a visual aid here. Like, here’s a where’s Waldo book. Now, imagine I’d never seen this where’s Waldo book before. And we’d have a reading time in first and second grade, maybe after lunch, after research or something. It’d be like a quiet time in the afternoon. You get a half an hour, and you choose a book, and you sit and read it. My friend and I, we’d grab this where’s Waldo book one that we hadn’t agreed upon, and we try to find the thing faster than the other person.

So it was honor system, saying, okay, let’s not cheat. Let’s not look ahead. We just got in a new where’s Waldo? Book on the shelf. None of us have seen it. So then we’d open the page. We’d learned what the coordinates were in north, south, east, west, maybe like a battleship coordinate system. So we try to narrow it down this way. But it was simply, you just put your finger on Wurzwaldo. Previous evenings, I had had dreams in which I was at the school reading the where’s Waldo? Book. So I was given the answers in dreams beforehand.

This is cheating. It was knowledge that was given to me. I didn’t ask for it. I couldn’t forget it, this type of thing. So I had a seen the images, not knowing what book it was from, and there’s like a fog of war on it, but I could clearly see, and I had familiarity with the terroring. So we got the book, and I didn’t think of the dreams, but as soon as I saw the art theme, maybe it was a beach or whatever, whereas Waldo had. There was a theme, a location, and all these little people and things that you’d find in the book, he’d open the book, and I was like, I know where it is.

I put my finger right down on the page. Like, I take my finger up. Yep, Waldo was under my finger. Okay, I got a point. Okay, take a breather. This is a competition. Turn the page. Put my finger right down on Waldo. I’m like, I’m not cheating. Third time, I went even slower. My friend couldn’t find Waldo. I was like, he’s right there. He’s right there. Put your finger on it. My friend couldn’t find Waldo. Time was passing. Clock was ticking. Finally, he’s right there. My friend was like, are you sure you’re not cheating? I said, no, it’s stranger than that.

I’d seen this in a dream last night. He’s like, dude, you’re psychic. I’m like, we all are. You are too. And we were just joking, and he laughed it off. And then he was like, you’re probably cheating. And I’m like, no, no. And then I’d give them other instances of what we’d called, like, deja vu. Second graders don’t know French, but learning later, maybe that’s deja vu. Or presentience or prophetic dreams, this type of thing, which seemed very normal to a second grader who hadn’t quite been told that maybe it’s evil. Yet were you ever told that any of this was evil explicitly? There was maybe the idea that it was gifts of the spirit.

So we had the idea of that being in a biblical worldview, living a christian lifestyle, being, having the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit living inside you, inviting Jesus Christ into your heart, accepting salvation, seeking redemption and believing in grace, all of these great qualities and ways to live by. There was the possibility within a pentecostal christian worldview that that would lead to. They didn’t use the word synchronicity. They might say miracles or rather just being on the right path. So these would be signs of being on the right path where things would be made easy, the needs that you had would be made available to you, this type of thing.

So it was seen as a very positive way to live a life where you’d find out you were on the right, right path by signs and affirmations and things going more smoothly. But then they’d say, well, at some point, though, things are going to get too easy and your face will be challenged. And as a way to level up, as soon as you meet these challenges, you’re going to have to lift heavier weights. Your growth is going to plateau, so you’re going to have to lift heavier weights. Greater challenges will come to you. So my understanding was, well, you know, I got a real early start on this stuff, very precocious, and knew all of this stuff already.

So I’m just ahead of a lot of people at this point, which meant I had to kind of just keep quiet about it. But I hung around a lot more adults and listened to their conversations and understood what they were talking about but didn’t join in the conversation. Did you ever level up from a poltergeist? Like, what’s the next level after that? As far as if you were discussing almost like going to the gym, right. You’d have to plateau. So you’d have to start lifting heavier weights in order to, like, break through to that next sort of level.

Well, if we were to look at Poltergeist as being, you know, on the treadmill, like, you leave, you come back, things are kind of shifted around to just kind of mess with you mentally. Sure. I’m assuming if that’s the treadmill, like, what’s, you know, what’s lifting weights, what’s doing, like, squats, what’s powerlifting in this case? Well, to be honest with you, experiencing that level of disturbance is annoying. It’s not fun. And sometimes a kid just wants to be a kid. So it’s put the weight down, put the stuff down, relax a little bit. Stop engaging with it, stop inviting it in.

Just try and take a breather. Distance yourself away from it. Things are getting too high. Going cooldown for a little while. That was the first point. It’s a fair point. And what age is this like, precisely, again? Oh, this is puberty. This is. This is middle school. This is becoming interested and noticing that other people are interested in me. I don’t have a good judge of what makes me different from other people, but other people noticing that somehow I was a little bit different, more interesting, more moody, more mysterious. Dressing in black wearing island and having the goth phase before emo took it over and ruined it.

So there was this idea that there was a compatibility with gothic romances and Christianity because Jesus died on the cross, he had nails driven through him, and at that time, there was guys on television hanging from fishhooks and this sort of thing. So that was sort of curiosity of what is the counterculture? So if I’ve experienced the christian culture, what is counter to that christian culture now? Those things became more interesting because I don’t know anything about them and they don’t seem dangerous anymore. I think that’s the point. They didn’t seem dangerous. They didn’t seem harmful.

They didn’t seem scary or frightening. It became curiosity. So what are they doing? And how are they expressing themselves in their arts? And are they stirring up energies that are having repercussions? Or is it just a performative thing where they go and do a magic ritual, do a tarot reading, and then they throw them in a sock drawer, and then they go drink a beer and watch a football game? And it’s not sort of an all encompassing aspect of a lifestyle or a personality trait. I mean, if we’re talking mid two thousands, I don’t know what town this was specifically, but Barnes and noble was kind of reigning supreme at this time.

This was like peak Barnes and. No. Did you have a Barnes and noble or other, like commercial bookshops? Right. I. So bookstores that I went to were Bible bookstores. They were gift stores. They sold Christian CDs. There’s a heavenly metal section where I could get harder sounding music, this type of thing. This was the era of posters that said, if you like nirvana, try skillet. If you like this genre of music and this sound, then buy this CD for your grandkid. If your grandkids listening to Green Day, you know, take it away. From them and replace it with these Mxpx CDs.

Was Mxpx Christian? I didn’t actually know that. Mxpx on tooths and nail. Tooths and nail were clever in their marketing to be interesting enough to teenagers. But because they were a christian record label out of Seattle, Brandon Ebel found the label. They had a variety of sounds from different bands who all in some way profess to be christian, maybe in their personal lives, which somehow reflected into their art and into their cds. And because the CDs were not going to contain profanities or occult themes or suicidal ideations or any of the other dangers that you might experience on a record that has the parental advisory sticker on it.

So it’s sort of the opposite of that. This is maybe a dove award or maybe there’s a christian stamp of approval. So there’s a. There’s. There are companies like dove Nest, other. Other sort of christian companies that would recognize that because Tipper Gore states that we could have a parental advisory sticker. This is good marketing for us. It’s like the kosher k on the pickle jar. Other ways to identify a symbol so that christian mothers would know other christian moms had listened to this. And this is probably okay. So we can sell it at a christian bible bookstore, and if we can buy it from a christian bookstore, then we can bring it home to our children and not have to read the lyrics and be concerned.

Was there overlap with straight edge culture and this like christian hard rock punk? What was that overlap? Because I kind of saw this from the outside but never looked into it. But I just kind of noticed that they’re like all of the hard rock and the punk concerts would be at churches and then, you know, a lot of that would just dovetail directly into straight edge and straight edge. It was almost like they were recruiting, like they were looking for the up and comers and they wanted them on board. What, like, what was all that about? You know? So once I got to my space and discovered that people were posting pictures from.

From concerts and there were friends I knew who had started christian bands, I’d gone to Bible camp with them and now they’re a successful band touring. So I knew these kids, now they’re successful and they’re touring churches and then playing vfws, becoming more aware of what the scene was and what the culture was. Discovering that if you put x’s on your hands, that means you’re straight edge. That means I. You’re not drinking alcohol, you’re not being served alcohol. If you’re attending a bar you’re choosing to abstain from, maybe sex, maybe drugs, maybe alcohol, maybe just for that evening to attend the concert.

I don’t know the extent of what the straight edge lifestyle was. It could be celibate for a period of time, but she’s kind of cute. So now we’re deciding what’s more important here. If that ex rubbed off, then the x rubbed off. You could add a third x and make a movie, and it would be a different scenario. Christian biography. So I just want to do, like, a recap to make sure, like, I’m completely up to speed because, yeah, you. You started off, and it sounds like you immediately were just absorbing the. The Bible, like, right into revelations, and you’re even calling out left behind.

And, like, that’s not how revelations goes, which is kind of implying. And that, like, this advancement and your understanding of the spirit might have attracted or you’ve got, like, an antenna that’s. That’s more finely tuned, or that might, like, the fact that you’re reading in makes you a target. But whatever the case is that you somehow attracted this version of a poltergeist to simplify the term. Right. And at that moment, you kind of realize, like, oh, there’s something out there. Not only is there something out there, but I’m on the front lines of this because look at how young I am, and no one else is really running into this.

And it dovetails with an idea that I’ve, I guess I’ve been dancing around for. It might not even be that unique. I think that it might even be obvious, but it almost seems that real, like true christians, whatever that would mean. But, like, someone of the way that you’re describing yourself, at least there’s a propensity to be into conspiracy theories, because this is the ultimate conspiracy, is they’re trying to get prayer out of schools. And who’s they? And why are they doing that? Well, essentially, it’s Satan. Satan is trying to get prayer out of schools or this concept of an antithesis to whatever you see as God.

But that this is almost the ultimate conspiracy, and almost every other conspiracy, political or otherwise, pales in comparison to that. So is that an accurate way of looking at this? Yeah. And I’ll, I’ll add to that just being exposed to. There were videos that I’d see where they would be talking about Amy Grant, and I’m like, oh, Amy Grant. She’s great. She has a tape. She wears that sort of cheetah vest thing or whatever. She’s cool. She’s pretty. She’s not cover. She’s. She’s barefoot, and she’s walking. And then I watched the video, and there’s getting into esoteric symbolism.

They’re saying, you see how she’s wearing these red gloves? And on these gloves, five pointed star, which is a pentagram. And then I get into, like, tex Mars tapes, you know, the monuments to the beast type stuff. Oh, yeah. Codex magicka, correct. Yep. All of that stuff ravaged by the new age. If you sneeze on camera and someone takes a picture of, like, every motion you make until you actually make the sneeze, you would have praised Satan, like, seven or eight times in a text Mars sort of analysis way. So I was taking in all the available material that was made available to me, not contextualizing it, not understanding what was going on, and not having a critical eye to see other arguments for or against it, or maybe better arguments to say, well, your argument’s weak at this point.

You know, Amy Grant is a great singer, but she’s in a satanic Babylon Hollywood music system. So at some point, there was, like, a takeover or slowly, over time, contracts are signed. It’s like you want a little bit more success? You want a little bit more playtime. You want to be on the mainstream. Well, yeah. Amy Grant wants to spread her positive, uplifting, gospel adjacent message to target store shoppers. Of course she does. But in doing so, recognizing the good versus evil and the ultimate conspiracy that you’re talking about, saying that if Lucifer is the prince of powers of the air, the principalities of powers of the air.

I’m already interested in broadcasting, so I’m already interested in luciferic ideas. So broadcasting christian radio, power of the air. Air waves, broadcasting. Wait a second. There’s more here. Let’s do a little bit more homework. Let’s figure this out and wait. Lucifer is different from the opposer, the oppressor, the citan figure, okay? Lucifer, the light bringer, but Christ is also the light bringer. Okay. There’s some esoteric elements here, and the word mystic came to mind. You said true christian, I would say. Well, there’s the level of christian mysticism that is probably not spoken about often, but for christians who are in the thick of it, having mystical experiences, missing time, memories, strange phenomenon, deja vu, all of these things having been shown a worldview from day one that allows these concepts and these things to happen, this is a long winded way of saying, I was never a strictly atheist materialist.

It was always, there are. There’s a spirituality. There’s more to life than this. The brain functions, but it’s not the chemicals and the neurons firing in the brain that creates consciousness. We weren’t really talking about consciousness in terms of mind, body problem, philosophy. It was more just like, there’s more to the world. But we’re not going to talk about that from the pulpit or from Sunday school. And because there are authors like Tex Mars who may have been sold in Bible bookstores in a small corner, tucked away behind a curtain for those who ask for more, you could get that material.

Did you get chick tracks at this age? I was aware of them, yeah. Were, though? Because I always imagine those would be like, if your kid likes Spider man, then here, grab this chick track, because this is the non secular, non non secular version of that. Did you ever see these crusader comics? Oh, yeah, I’ve got. I’ve got. And in fact, the broken cross. That’s the one. The first one that was co written by John Todd or based on John Todd’s. Had you heard of John Todd at that age? I didn’t really know what the stuff was.

I had cousins who had comic books. Did you have that, that comic as a kid? That specific one I picked up as an adult later on? I do have memories, though, of receiving a box filled with, like, Disney comics and all sorts of comics in a box from an aunt and uncle who had cousins that were a little bit older than we were. And they had, you know, gone off to college and military and whatever else. We were a little bit younger. So we got some of their old toys, got a box of comic, and because they were in the culture, they had some christian comments through in there, some Jack chick.

And this, this crusader comic is a large format, same size as, like, a Spider man comic book. And then you open it up on the first page. It does mention chick publications, 1974. And then maybe I’d made the connection to those little tracks, because I knew what religious tract T R a C T tracks were. I had been given them on Halloween, you know, goddess, greater parties, gospel harvest parties, these types of things. We didn’t have Halloween, trick or treating, costume contests. We were always provided a religious, specifically christian, specifically bible based alternative. So having that bible based christian alternative with a gospel message like these crusader comics, I was exposed to them.

But this was kind of boring to me. I already knew the gospel message. I already knew the talking points. I already knew the apologetics, the doctrinal statements of belief, and then the arguments for and against it. And it was boring to me. So it’s not something that I was like, wow, this is cool. Oh, wait, these guys are christians. It wasn’t like I was saying, oh, this is me. This is so me. This is the type of comic book I wanted to read more of. I was kind of like, well, there’s a lot of comics, and I see there’s history comics and world war two comics, and anything could be illustrated wasn’t something that really stood out to me.

I kind of understood at that point that it was kind of a silly thing, the silly thing in the comic medium. Or do you mean the way that they were talking about? Because in the broken cross of a tinkler, right. The art is very, very good. That was sort of interesting for the art, but I’m like, like, these guys are drug addicts. I don’t care about drugs. I’m not a drug user. I am already saved, so I don’t need to read a story leading to a salvation. So it wasn’t very interesting. The chick comics were kind of interesting because I’d read everything.

I would collect a lot of literature, go to county fairs or business expos, and I’d have a bag and any free literature that was on offer. I’d say, give me everything I got. And Philip begs the literature later discovered it was probably because I was interested in fonts and graphic designs and layouts and colors and print materials. That was probably what I was interested in more than the information on it. Wanting to see, well, what is published, what is a business card look like, what is advertising, what is marketing? And could this possibly be a career because these adults are getting into it.

This is the question of, well, what are you going to do with your life? How are you going to make money? I have an interest in desktop design and publishing, eventually becoming a yearbook editor for my senior year of high school. Having all these interests with computers and Internet and the democratization of publishing and video editing and filmmaking and podcasting and putting media out there was very much inspired by seeing small christian ministries who were struggling but asking for support and then stating that for them, that was their full time gig. They’d be able to reach a national audience out of a second bedroom by publishing a newsletter or touring the country as a speaker for certain events, maybe not necessarily a missionary.

There was this guy who was fairly well known, ended up making a movie. He was in I don’t remember which war. Maybe Vietnam, caught a grenade, had half his face blown off, was gonna die, miraculously saved, healed up, still looked grotesque, and then would share his testimony. I’m forgetting the guy’s name right now. Maybe you’ve encountered his VHS tape in a thrift store. He had a book he toured around. I’d remember this if I had seen it. No. Now I kind of want to see that. This. It’ll come back. There’s so much stuff in here, so much useless knowledge, and I just have to file it away and say, for another day.

I might even still have this tape in a VHS cabinet somewhere. Well, there’s so many ways we can go with this, but I’m really curious in this, because you brought up seeing a text Mars book. You mentioned Crusader comics and the japanese tracks, and I think through Tex Mars also. But this is also the reason that I was asking you about Barnes and noble or bookstores is because I remember in damn near every commercial bookstore, Walden books and, you know, books a million and all the different ones. They always had, like, one rack, maybe two. They would say occult studies or, like, world religion or something.

And I just, like, when was the first time that you walked by one of those racks, not the one behind the curtain in the christian bookstore, but, like, out in the secular world? Like, did you ever walk by and see Anton Lavey’s satanic bible without looking for it? Like, did it give you the heebie jeebie? Like, did you ever encounter something like that out in the wild? I wasn’t looking for that material and didn’t really go shopping often, not having a lot of money. I’m not going to go to Barnes unless I got a gift card or something.

So didn’t really go to Barnes and Noble until after Amazon was kind of available and getting Internet. So I want to say 1999, after many, many years, go back to, like, 19, 93, 94. Public school libraries got computers, and then they had those eye in the triangle, AOL webcams on top of them, the triangle ones. I got letters in the mail addressed to me for prodigy Internet and AOL online. They were addressed to me. I’m a third grader, fourth grader, little floppy disk, the hard floppy, that disk, and it had my name on it and free hours.

And I could get an email address. And I asked my parents, I said, can I get an email address? Can you pay for this service? And I can log in at school and go to public library. I can get an email address and I can go online. And finally they were like, I was the oldest. Not yet. I mean, that’s an expense and you probably never use it. I took the floppy disk to the library at school and asked librarian I said, can I put this in a computer? Can I see what’s on this desk? There’s something called an Internet.

I want an email address. I want to be online. I want a homepage. I want a website. They’re like, that’s great. I have an email address. I can help you write a fan letter to Carmen. So we wrote a fan. I like, I think I hand wrote it, and then she typed it up, and she said, this was, like, what was on your mind? Right? I’m like, well, I don’t know what websites there are, but I had Carmen stuff, and he had his website. And then all of his fan letters, I think, were responded to by his grandmother for a period of time.

So his grandmother emails me back and say, oh, I love, love, love that you appreciate the music and love that you’re wanting to go to concerts and. And there’s like, a world record thing in that. I was really impressed. And Carmen kept saying that he had the largest single attendance for a concert because he packed out a stadium somewhere. So he was making this claim that he was the number one artist of all time in all of the world to have the largest single one time audience at some point in time. And that was sort of a claim that he was making.

I was like, oh, that’s really cool. That’s really awesome. You’re so huge. And not everybody knows even who you are, but you have this huge audience. Christian or period, like, biggest. That’s what he was saying. He was saying he would have concerts in stadiums similar to what, like, Billy Graham would do, where he’d have, like, a crusade thing. So it turns out that the admission was no free. It was a free concert. They’d bus people in. They had church groups bringing people in from miles and miles away to fill up stadiums, sports stadiums, to see a concert.

And then they would do a free will love gift offering where volunteers. I actually became a volunteer at a christian college Christian at a Carmen concert, I think, in the target center where the basketball teams played in Minnesota. They had a concert tour, finally attended, emailed him beforehand, said, I want to volunteer. I want to volunteer. So my family got in early. We took the course on how to hold a bucket, pass it down an aisle, collect the money, and then bring the money from the free will love offering back to the supervisor in this corner so that they can collect all the funds.

This type of thing from the Tex Mars and crusader kind of era. That was the first time that I encountered the talk about, like, Catholics and Jesuits in comparison to other denominators did you have an opinion on Catholics or Jesuits? At this point, I was becoming aware that there were other denominations. I think there were baptist church. I became aware of Baptist Church and evangelical churches and learning what a denomination was, because the assemblies of God being a denomination based out of Springfield, Missouri, having christian colleges, that they were the denomination of where they would ordain pastors.

Ministers and missionaries. Understanding. Okay, so this is kind of like a franchise. So there are Wendy’s and Arby’s and pizza huts and McDonald’s. Okay, there’s an idea of a franchise. So I’m attending a church which in some way behaves like a franchise. They have a license, some sort of ability to use the letterhead and the official status of being an assemblies of God church. So then I started realizing there’s something called an evangelical free. There’s a Methodist church, there’s a Southern Baptist convention. And then, of course, there were, and still are, Jehovah’s Witnesses. Latter day Saints.

Latter day Saints. What are they? Mormons. Mormons have missionaries. Well, I understood the assemblies of God had missionaries. I understood in general, there was christian ministers, ministries, and missionaries and these sort of missions and outreaches. And then to find out that, oh, there’s also Jesuits, and there’s all these other groups who have different doctrine and different agendas, perhaps. And missionary work might also be tied in with Bible smuggling, which might be subversive, but those people might be accused of spying. I would hear stories of assemblies of God missionaries in communist countries who would tell us that they could not be known as Christians or as missionaries.

They would have to have a degree in medicine or English as a second language or engineering or something to that effect, to then get work visas, to then sort of cross the border, to then find hidden splinter cells of christian activity. Crypto Christians. Correct. So that became sort of an interest. And then, you know, back to Carmen. He had this video called mission 316, where he’s playing a Christian James Bond agent using the gadgets to sneak into godless, communist, authoritarian, fascist, anti political. You got the christian flag behind you, right? What’s the christian flag? Well, okay, so there’s the flag of America, the american flag.

Red, white, and blue, stars and stripes, old glory. Then alongside that, you’ll fly the christian flag, which is more of a blue purple color with a cross in the corner. Corner. So there was a pledge of allegiance to the american flag, and then we would say the pledge of allegiance to the christian flag. This is actually new to me. I grew up Roman Catholic, so I was more in the jesuit opus dei corner. Sure, sure. So the extra information you’ll need to get caught up on to understand why are we making a pledge to the american flag and a pledge of the christian flag? Because boy scouts are not a christian organization.

Say what you want about the Boy scouts. They’re not Bible first, camp out second, there was a men’s group called Royal Rangers under assemblies of God curriculum programs for children, teens and adults so fathers could be royal Ranger leaders. And then on a Wednesday night or whatever night they’d agreed upon, they would meet as Royal Rangers. So, like third graders, instead of going to a webullows or a Boy Scouts meeting, the option was Royal Rangers. And in Royal Rangers, we, you know, this is where it’s like, is this christian nationalism? Is this propaganda? Is this programming? Is this good for America? Everything you’re describing is pure isolationism every single step of the way.

Oh, you like this music from the outside world? Here’s music from inside the bubble. Oh, you like this aspect? It seems like there’s always a version that you can get in house. Have you watched the news? Have you seen the OJ Simpson trial, the Rodney King race riots? What’s going on in the world? Violence, murder, theft, all of this stuff is frustrating and terrible. What is the safe haven? What is the alternative? What is the best way to live? How do you prevent yourself from getting caught up in the ways of the world? The secular world is corrupt.

It’s failing, it’s fallen, it’s lost. We see that every time we watch the news. This involves politics and governance and policies and change and wanting to see how removing prayer from public schools, separating church and state, meaning that the positive elements of the moral teaching based off of biblical values, being pulled out of public school, we see the result of that, which is to say more broken homes, more drug abuse, more broken relationships, violence, domestic violence, these types of things. So the christian community and the fellowship in a christian worldview becomes a safer place to hang out, to be yourself, to have potluck dinners, to meet other families, to meet other friends, and already sort of have this stamp of approval, already having this sort of verification that these people are trying to live a godly life, which is to say, not allowing themselves to get caught up in godlessness or heathenism or paganism or new age beliefs, or these sort of things that are slippery, slippery slopes to despair, depression, these types of things.

When you say new age beliefs, but it sounds like you had that peaked a little bit, like your interest was piqued by maybe starting with Carmen as the thing that pushed you and you seeing the Carmen music video with the tarot cards and everything else that was after your sort of supernatural experience earlier on. Before, after and during, it’s all happening concurrently. I’m being exposed to this stuff, not giving it a second glance, not questioning it, not understanding. It was just background entertainment. It was okay. Music, entertainment. I love Lucy 09:00 go to bed, start the next day.

It’s just these things, past time, christian entertainment, that sort of thing. And then realizing that a lot of people take this stuff really, really seriously. There are authors who research these topics and they put out position papers and then the satanic panic stuff. My parents, being youth pastors late eighties, have clippings of all the satanic panic articles in filing cabinets. They have focus on the family magazines and books and materials and curriculum. So they’re studying how do we teach teenagers positive relationships with other people, positive relationships with romantic interests, with their parents, with drugs and alcohol, with weight loss and eating disorders and all of these sort of teenage issues that you might see on 7th heaven on WB a few years later, which that show is bonkers.

We watch that, I think, every Tuesday night because there’s a christian family on television on the WB. I don’t know what Dawson’s Creek is. I don’t know really what 9020 is. I don’t know any of these other teen drama shows. But wasn’t Dawson’s Creek on the same network though? Correct. But we turned the tv off after seven heaven so we’d see commercials and previews for Dawson’s Creek and Dawson’s crying, crying, crying. And why is there so much emotion and teen drama and like, well, they’re simple. They’re not living a christian lifestyle. They’re not raised in a christian home.

They’re suffering for it. They have emotional imbalances and disturbances. And the only way that those issues are ever going to be solved is when they get their heart right with God and they align themselves with the Holy Spirit and they actively seek forgiveness and grace and gifts of the spirit. So the problems of these social dynamics and relationships between people are broken because they’re lacking the Holy Spirit and having salvation and Jesus in their heart. And all these examples are pretty convincing to say those are miserable lifestyles. All these dramas are ending in misery and heartache and heartbreak and the worst possible scenarios.

So having been sold the fire insurance, I don’t have to go to hell. I don’t have to live through hell on earth. I can live in this mystical christian, holy Spirit led, synchronistic, synchro, mystic world. Privately, in my own mind, through what I see, that’s going to have to be kept to myself for most of the time because christians are freaked out by it. People who are needing salvation, they’re going to be freaked out by it. So how do you sell Christianity in evangelical way? That’s the gospel. That’s the great commission that’s going to all the world and spread the gospel.

That’s the evangelical ethos. The denomination of evangelical churches, pentecostal churches, are evangelical in that mission to say, living in a fallen world, these people are suffering. Not all of them will be saved, but it’s my responsibility to let them know what the gospel message is, let them know that they need to make the decision. This is probably why things are not going well for them. So to present them with the gospel message, that’s just the entire worldview, you know, getting through high school, high school is just the worst time in everyone’s life. I had told you earlier that I was posting stuff on the Internet, taking pictures, selfies, having homepages, having profiles, and having interests from the opposite sex who are very interested.

But I’m like, I’m not going to marry you. What are we going to do? I don’t understand what this is about. It doesn’t serve a practical purpose now, but that sort of high aloofness and disinterest maybe creates a mystery and a magnetism. So I’m getting all this attention, not considering falling into temptation, which then creates challenges for people. Long story short, this girl had a best friend, and they were both, like, pointing at me. This first girl says, dibs. The second girl says, okay, I got you. You get the first chance. Tick tock, tick tock. She asks me out.

I say, okay, I don’t know what this is about. Let’s learn. She’s very emotionally disturbed, has a catholic mother who absolutely adores me. Go to her house. Her catholic mother adores me, thinks it’s a great idea that I bring her daughter to, you know, christian youth group and get her involved, other Christians and friends. And this type of thing polarizes her so much that it’s like she’s very upset that her mother thinks I’m a great match, and now she has to live better and stop being a brat. Well, and the stipulation was she had to go to my church if we were to hang out or do anything thing.

Well, this, this brings me back because I wanted to push on the Jesuit Catholic thing again, because from the outside looking in. I had come up with the impression at that point when I started learning about Baptist and especially pentecostal, I guess Pentecostal in particular, that. That, like, Catholicism was almost seen as like a bad version of Christianity. And I had never. That had never even crossed my mind that there could be bad versions or that Mormonism was like a fake version. They don’t worship Jesus enough. And like, all these. Did you ever come into those sorts of opinions on other denominations? And, like.

And the reason that I asked this, I guess I’ll just get the whole thing out because I feel like you can follow along and respond to the whole thing. Sure. But it always blew my mind that all these other denominations that seem to imply Catholicism is like, idol worship and, you know, like, bad version, like it’s the devil tricked him and thinking, this God, whatever the explanation is, but they also seem to be exclusively the only denomination that does say exorcisms or that recognizes poltergeist or supernatural activity. No other denomination that I’m really aware of acknowledges it or faces it head on.

That hits the nail right onto Jesus palm for the stigmata to happen. That’s right there. That’s the image of Christ on the cross. I got the accoutrement, of course, Christ on the cross, that being hung up in the Catholic Church and the iconography and the reverence and worship for the Mother Mary, those things were in conflict with protestant christian belief. So there was a clear separation when Martin Luther nails his 95 thesis against the Catholic Church in Germany, clear separation from the Holy Roman Empire, the Holy See. And then you get into like the orthodox, russian, Eastern Orthodox, that sort of thing.

And then in America, well, it’s just Protestants and Catholics. But I didn’t really know what Protestantism was apart from Thanksgiving story of Mayflower and pilgrims. So seeking religious freedom from England, and maybe England has a more catholic church or something. So the idea that American was America was founded by this need for a religious liberty, for christian meaning, more protestant christian ideals, well, that just made sense. That was the history that was reaffirmed in all of my education time and time again. We love pilgrims. We love thanksgiving. We love giving thanks, thanks and praise and worship.

That’s a christian thing. We sing worship music. We sing praise and adoration to God and to Jesus. But we don’t sing those songs about Mary. We don’t sing praise songs to Maryland. And maybe there was concern that Amy Grant was maybe worshiping Mary secretly and less interested in Jesus. So maybe she’s less of a Christian and maybe that’s in her lyrics and in her art. If you look at her liner notes and read between the lines, you’ll see that she’s more of a witch worshiping Mary. And maybe Mary is a different goddess. And maybe there’s this sort of idea that, well, it appears christian, but there’s pagans in the pews.

So we need to be really concerned about the symbology, the symbols and the things of images used in our christian arts because it could be opening the door for other spirits which recognize the symbols and influence the subconscious, but they’re not christian. So we have to take a firm position in our faith and in our doctrine. Otherwise, heresies, you know, heresies are going to come in if we’re compared with that context of her, Amy Grant’s music maybe being like a trojan horse, right? She’s sneaking in paganism at worst or like a Mary Magdalene worship or Virgin Mary.

Where. What about compared to Marilyn Manson? Is Marilyn Manson so overt that it’s not as much of a threat as the sleeper agent of Amy Grant? So I learned about Marilyn Manson because there was a group of friends that my ex girlfriend was associating with secular people. They didn’t attend church. They had the Marilyn Manson beanies, the old spooky kid stuff, m m stuff dripping, whatever. They’d wear those beanies and they’re black and maybe they were dressing more. You saw an eyeliner and you were like, ah, compatriots. Well, the girls were. The boys weren’t wearing makeup, but the girls were.

And we had something called, like, release time. So during the public school day, certain, maybe every other week, we’d get on buses and we’d be able to go to churches in the community. They called it a release time. So for me to bring back candy and toys and awards and things from release time and be like, here’s the incentive. Hey, guys, you can get out of class. You bring this form home, your parent signs it granting you permission to ride a bus to a church to receive a religious exploration, topical sort of thing. That’s sort of the excuse they had.

You would get a religious education through the public school system. They call it release time. Now, naturally, kids numbers, butts and seats. Let’s get all the kids to get on buses to come to our church through release time. Then maybe they’ll come on Sunday morning and Wednesday night. So I was partially responsible for letting them know, hey, I’m leaving right now. We can get out of class. We can ride a bus. We can be unsupervised for a little bit. We can sit, you know, in a church and then get camped and snacks and have unsupervised bus time back.

They’re wearing Marilyn Manson stuff. They’re intentionally wearing their Antichrist superstar merchandise to attend release time to sit in the back. What are you gonna do about us? What are you gonna do about us in your release time? We love Marilyn Manson. So they were there. They weren’t actively trying to get kicked out or misbehaving. They were playing along. But they were clearly wearing Marilyn Manson merchandise. Maybe a tulle shirt, maybe a Metallica shirt, but they were clearly wearing green day shirts and Simpson stuff and all of this stuff that might be somehow not the type of clothing you would wear, respectfully, to a church.

So this leads back to the shaggy dog story. Well, what happens with this girlfriend scenario between 8th grade and 9th grade, starting high school and having websites? Well, naturally, things didn’t work out, and I was like, you see this? This isn’t working out. So it’s like, I’m not breaking up with you. I’m not saying you’re a bad person. I’m just saying this isn’t compatible. You see it, I see it. Our parents see it. Let’s try something else. She’s like, oh, you can’t break up. You can’t break up. You can’t break up with me. She found all of my websites, all of my message boards accounts, all this information, downloaded it, saved it, and then made.

Made a smear website, a libelous website where I was misquoted. I had all my edgy goth photos that my mom took of me, essentially saved and reposted. And then this group of people, the Marilyn Manson, Beanie wearing, slacker crowd, the freak crowd, not the Jesus freak crowd, the real freak, drug using, burnout crowd had come together against me. They had a message board that they were posting to. They wanted to basically humiliate popular kids in school, and they had a website to do that. And then they made a webpage specifically reposting my stuff as sort of a smear campaign.

And then, because there was maybe six to eight of them, they called themselves a gang. Sure, they were into backyard wrestling, so they wanted to post their backyard wrestling stuff on their website. They had interest in media and starting production companies. All of this stuff, too. I had the same interest. They had the same interest. They made the website, they set the homepage on all the computers in the library every morning to this website that had my goofy, goth looking face on it and all the computers in the school. And then word started getting around because other students were recognizing, hey, he looks a little bit different.

That they found out who I was. I was in choir one day, and someone finally had to ask me, what’s this deal with this website thing? And I was like, I wasn’t really paying attention to it. They had seen it, but finally they had to ask me about it. Like, did you make that? Who made that? I’m like, I don’t really know. I was like, oh, wait, it’s that soup gang group, the backyard wrestler people they had linked to it. It. So they were putting backlinks to their stuff. So it became clear, oh, it’s that group.

And I was like, okay, the webmaster of this libelous hate website was this girl whose catholic mother loved me but created this repulsion, this polarized effect. She wasn’t over it. She didn’t move on. I became number target, number one that she wanted to humiliate. I was trying to just, like, deescalate, de escalate, de escalate, move on. You know, we’re 9th grade, 10th grade now. Let’s meet other people. Let’s hang out. But she wouldn’t let this thing go. And that was sort of, like, the pushback to say, okay, if my lifestyle and not pushing evangelicalism, but wearing christian t shirts and inviting people to use just basic stuff, not going overboard with it, but people I knew and letting them know that there are events happening and they were invited to it, just being social, that they were providing a pushback against that.

It almost sounds like this would reinforce that whole feeling of isolationism, of, like, this wouldn’t happen if I hadn’t dabbled in the secular world. Well, maybe it’s the Barbra Streisand effect, where other young women seeing this website, interesting vampire, like, modeling photos, who is this mysterious figure? They’re the ones asking me about it getting more attention. So for her to destroy me completely backfired. And she had, the other girl who was competing for my attention had an older brother who would slam me up against lockers, that sort of, like, people would see that. Like, what is this guy? Is he dangerous? What is this threat? He’s got upperclassmen, you know, slamming him against lockers, and he shakes off like, it’s no big deal, who is this punk kid? What is going on over there? So it created sort of an interest and fascination, and I was not really able to handle that.

I didn’t have any motivation or desired outcome or goal. I just wanted to get out of high school and find a group of adults, mentor people to learn technology, learn broadcasting, television, film, and then do the thing, make a show, make a product, do something together, instead of a destructive, hate filled, libelous website, which is still on, like, archive.org dot. Might be fun to look at that later. I don’t know if. I think I maybe archived it on archive.org years and years ago when I saw that was still on because they didn’t buy a domain and the hosting was gone.

But I’m like, let’s get this thing archived. I think I saved a couple pages. Was this like a geocities type of thing? Yeah, yeah. It was on a free host. And I used a Tk domain redirector thing. And they were getting into web design and hosting and stuff, like 2003, four and five period of time. So lots of animated gifs of, like, the little males flying into the post boxes and stuff. Correct. And that was their sense of humor. It was like that postal video game and anything offensive. They were really into Steven Seagal movies. They had, like, a Steven Seagal movie club.

The most satanic thing I’ve heard so far. Right? I mean, these people were interesting. They were not christian, but they were artists. And they were the other people that I probably would have gotten along well with, except for this one girl, thought it would be hilarious if they all tried to destroy my reputation and run a smear campaign against me. And she, I think, kind of just went off the rails and maybe separated from that group of people who were not really hateful toward me. They didn’t have any beef with me, but because they were a gang, they were trying to support each other in that way.

Didn’t quite work out. I don’t think, overall for them. But that was sort of my experience with a group of people who was actively against a single christian guy who’s just live and let live. Maybe I was more libertarian, more open. I wasn’t condescending, I wasn’t sending people to damnation. I wasn’t judgmental. I was actually the least judgmental person of all, because I would hear everyone equally, and I would treat them with love and respect and dignity, and people would open up to me and talk to me, and they would see me as someone who wasn’t quick to judge them.

So I would sit at different lunch tables in high school, and people knew who I was, and I would talk to them. Was yearbook editor senior year, so I knew everybody’s names, and I was responsible for putting their pictures in the paper. So I was socially connected to all these people. People knew who I was, but for many reasons, I didn’t relate to them, but I didn’t tell them that. So it was more like listening to them, let them speak. Not saying much about myself because I didn’t know what power level they were at. It’s like, always hide your power level.

So I had to sort of play dumb, play social games in that way. And at some point, the conspiracy lore and culture comes up a little bit more prevalent. Like, for example, before we started recording, you kind of show me you had, like, a Robert Anton Wilson book, like, at hands reach. Yeah. So at what point does this fade start? Like, when is the first time you hear the word illuminati? Illuminatus, high in the triangle, you know, occult, bloodlines, Fritz Springmeyer, that sort of stuff is all adjacent to the Tex Mars stuff. And when I was in college in 2005, six, seven time period, having made student films and trying to put them online was very difficult at that point, we had Google video, and on Google Video I find Freeman flies free zone.

Freeman tv material. And part of that was with the Super bowl event. I shared this story many times. The significance of Janet Jackson’s nipple in my life cannot be understated. I feel like that needs some expansion. It certainly does. That Super bowl event. Justin Timberlake wardrobe malfunction. What is this esoteric occult symbolism? Is that did she had a piercing? I couldn’t see. I couldn’t pause it. I did have a web tv unit. I could pause tv. I could take a screenshot of it. I was very much interested in that technology. Sunday night, Monday morning in the school library, Discover.

There’s the soup gang guys. They’re also looking for the same thing. You know, it’s sort of this fight over the computer lab to have Internet access. So they’re in there searching for it. I’m in there not having to search for it because they’re searching for it. So looking over their shoulder, and they’re trying to find a screen grab of Janet Jackson’s nipple on a public school computer before classes start in the morning. Morning. And then later on, find out that, you know, Freeman fly. Freeman TV had covered that event, and that was discussed on Google video.

So a few years later, in college, finding the Google video site to see, well, what other material, what other sort of content is shared to Google Video. Looking for a video host for student films I was working, working on. So that’s how I encountered that again. And then, of course, Tex Mars stuff was also uploaded a lot of vhs rips were uploaded to Google Video and then discovering that that was the start of YouTube. Because the. The founders of YouTube also had this fascination with Janet Jackson’s nipple, they created a video sharing site on their own to post to Janet Jackson Nipple, calling the website YouTube and then seeing how.

How YouTube was much more of a social network for vloggers and homepage creators to create video diary entries. That was already within my understanding of a new medium and having the skills and the desire to want to keep up with that stuff, I was thoroughly aware of and having the information of the new media, Wired magazine, what are the technology trends? That was such an interest that I had that I was front center for that event where YouTube became a video hosting platform. So I was posting stuff there and, you know, the goth phase never ended.

So in college, my roommates and I convinced them to make a dumb short films with me. And the topic was, well, let’s pretend we are our Antichrist superstars and freaks and summoning demons and make it into a spoof, a goof and a spoof type of a thing, because that’s what we knew. So we were making fun of it. So I played a goth metal head character, you know, white face paint, crow makeup, that type of thing, and they were going along with it. I’m like, great, this is fun. They’re fulfilling my dream vision and they were wearing masks and playing demons and they thought it was hilarious too.

And we a character that we were making fun of because he was a Christian. So it was our opportunity as christians to play the other side. This type of thing, which I thought was absolutely hilarious, sort of a satire of this sort of belief system and structure. And to say it’s all very ridiculous, but the Christians are keeping up this sort of lie that there’s a satanic panic and there’s back masking. The secular world is so terrible, while at the same time the christian culture and the secular culture are dovetailing to such an extent where DC talk, Jesus freak, pod, jars of clay, there’s that kiss me song that’s on the WB, dramas from that sixpence and the richer.

So all these christian artists are having their mainstream time where they’re accepted in the mainstream. To Christianity in the mainstream were one in the same at some point in history where there really wasn’t a distinction. Well, it almost seems too, that there was more in like the. The nineties to two thousands. You’re kind of talking about like MXPX kind of coming out and like, DT talk, like at the coolest kids at Bible camp, they’d ride in with some old beat up station wagon and covered with tour stickers because they get in the minivan. Or they’d have minivans.

They’d have, you know, the old Studebakers that have whatever vehicle they had covered in tooth and nail stickers. They were the tooth and nail kids. They were straight edge or punk. They were cool. And they’d go to all these concerts and they knew all the bands and they themselves were in the bands. So they drive up to the refreshment stand, the oasis, where we’re getting hamburgers and deep fried onion rings and stuff. And they’re showing up at, like, after church service that evening. It’s like 930 10:00 they’re like the, like the vampires in that movie with Corey Feldman in it.

Lost Boys. Lost Boys. So they’re showing up in leather jackets looking like the vampires and Lost Boys, but they’re playing christian hardcore music. Wow. Wow, that’s cool. And I guess the point, too is that this is almost the first time that it’s cool to be intentionally christian. Because before that you had a lot of decency laws and, like, purity tests that movies and music and all these things would have to abide by. And then sometime in the late sixties, kind of seventies, like, all bets were off. And now you got the Simpsons on tv and married with children, and it’s almost like the floodgates were opened.

So there was this moment in time when it was like a counterculture thing to not do that right, to go back to having purity tests and back to almost pretending as if decency laws still existed and upholding that without it being, like, mandated on you. And that’s almost like the cool version that we’re talking about a little bit. Yes. So it might have been parents who had come from divorced homes and the children of these broken homes would go to christian youth groups and then get invited to christian music festivals and discover that there’s a positive, uplifting, relieving energy from these dramas at home.

This was a much better lifestyle. There were friends to be made. There was emotions to be worked through. And there was a positive outcome at the end of the night for these people. So there was a desire for. There still is. You can go to TikTok and see Christian Tiktokers. This is a continuous thing. We’re talking about a time in culture where MTV plays project 86 hardcore christian music, and now we’re represented. TRL, the total request live. Call in and vote for Pod and Pod is number one because christian kids are paying attention and wanting christian music to be the top represented music on the colon total request line on MTV.

So that was a cultural victory for all of us in the trenches watching Carmen music videos in our pajamas before bed in the early nineties. You mentioned Fritz Springmeyer by name, being tangential to like ex Mars stuff. Did you actually come across Fritz Springmeyer’s books and read them or did you just see them referenced? Another works. Got the Internet, get a gateway computer sitting in front of it, Carmen, which is invitation. They’re talking about Isaac Bonowitz. They’re talking about the real world inspiration for the, the sorcerer, the male witch, the warlock in this music video. And they’re sharing this story saying, yeah, that was based on a real guy in like, I think Berkeley, California who would walk around looking real strange like a warlock would dress, getting a lot of attention, talking to students.

One of the pastors, the campus pastor got an invitation to a debate at Isaac Bonewitz’s house. And then this guy talks to Carmen about it and they’re like, that’s great. That’s a visual thing. We can make that music video that’ll be like the Michael Jackson thriller moment for us. It’ll be awesome. And it was huge for the people who saw it. Now what are these other influences? What are these other references? Who is, you know, who’s text Mars? What’s this new age movement? What are crystals? What are tarot cards? What is channeling? What are channel documents? So that opens up supernatural, spiritual hauntings, ghost stories, that sort of stuff.

X files. And then we get something like the 6th sense, you know, M. Night Shyamalama lama lama ding dong, his doors ringing. It’s a twist ending. Spooky, spooky. Dead the entire time, this stuff. So Internet research, message boards, threads, taking in all this information. It’s so fascinating because the mystery was created in me and I was living this mystery. I was initiated into these mysteries not of, I guess, my own sort of taking an oath into it, but through a more mystical, shamanic sort of like I had the craziest vivid as dreams playing out prophetic stuff, horror stuff.

You know, all this stuff was happening and not many adults couldn’t handle this. I couldn’t go talk to an adult therapist because I’d frightened the adult therapist. I couldn’t have adult conversations with adults about serious things because they, they weren’t handling that stuff. They didn’t want to hear that stuff. They didn’t know what to do about it. So they didn’t address it, they didn’t pretend it existed. It wasn’t something they needed to deal with. So when I got Internet access and access to research, now I’m on my own anonymously communicating, researching, finding documents and books and then videos and things.

I mean, Fritz Springmeyer is pretty hardcore. That’s about as far down one of the rabbit holes, I would say. He’s kind of like towards the end tunnel. Some of like specifically like the project Monarch and Mkultra and how the, the government connects directly in the satanic panic angle. Like what’s the end goal? And Fritz spring Myers kind of lays it out. Well, the end goal is to brainwash and mind program and use all this for these old, like, did you get deep into that? What was your thoughts when you came across that sort of material the first time? So my parents having ministry credentials for youth, teenagers, essentially, they, we had those articles from the late eighties and early nineties about satanic ritual abuse and looking for signs of it and being aware of it.

Now they kept that stuff away from me as best they could, but I’m going to find out about it, be curious about it, file it away in my ex files, cabinet of stuff to look at later when I’m able to do that. The sexual ritual abuse stuff that becomes the number one topic of conspiracy for a period of time where that was the issue that needed to be figured out. And then, well, that’s politicians. There was a case of a kid who was about my age who looked similar to me, actually looked more like my cousin, Jacob Wetterling, who was kidnapped.

And that was a huge thing in Minnesota, this Jacob Wetterling place. Where did this boy go? And the whispers are, well, it was probably a satanic ritual abuse thing. Like what year is this? I want to say maybe 88 to 92 or something. Jacob Wetterling, you could probably look that name up. W e t t R. Wetterling. His mother testified between in front of state legislatures for figuring out what do we do? And this is the same time where this was a huge concern of like child kidnapping. Kidnappings and abductions lead to alien abductions. So is it a human that’s abducting the kid? Is it an alien? Is that alien a demon that’s taking this kid? There was such a mystery around this kid who was essentially a stand in for me.

And the real world terror was I would walk home from school because I lived within the vicinity of the school so I could walk. And then some days I’d take longer, I’d visit friends houses. So I wouldn’t arrive home. They’d put me in front of a computer and I’d be, you know, gone for hours. Like, this is awesome. Forget to call home, parents freaking out. Well, I’m just at a friend’s house. I didn’t call. Their concern was child abduction case. First thing they think about. And I’m like, no, I’m protected. You know, I got God on my side.

I’m not fearful of, you know, strangers with candy and strange vans. I’m not. I can defend myself. I got legs. I can run. I’m not worried about this stuff. But the parental concern for the well being of their firstborn child is like, don’t sacrifice a firstborn child. Sort of Isaac binding of Isaac story here. There’s probably a lot into it, certainly, but that was a concern. And then I’d be like, I’m home. And like, thank God. Hugs and emotional outpouring of support from the community. I was at my friend’s house. We were listening to tLc. No scrubs.

I know you’re mad about that, but come on, they’re just a girl group. They sing a silly song. It’s not so bad. I’m gonna bring them a Carmen tape tomorrow. There’s something I think, unique about growing up in eighties, nineties, in that particular time period. It’s, I guess, a little bit weird for me to hear I, that you were, in a way, shielded from some of that satanic panic with your parents keeping articles and stuff and, like, not really bringing it up because my experience, I remember, like, police officers coming to the school and even on tv talking about telling parents, hey, there might be these satanic kidnapper vans that are scouring and not a lot of people.

This is my version, I guess, of the walking to school uphill in 2 miles of snow. But it was like not a lot of people these days know what it was like to be surrounded in this ubiquitous fear of satanic, like, you know, underground conspiracy kidnappers that were possibly hiding behind every corner. It could be the mailman. It could be. And that, that, that was so much more powerful to raising me to be susceptible to conspiracy theories, theories, files ever was or nowhere man or any of the tv shows or movies. Like, I got television and I channel surf and I watched everything.

I took it all in, everything, every format, every possible storyline. I was just a sponge taking it all in. And now today we get something like stranger things. And that’s like retro nostalgia. I’m like, well, yeah, I live. They just need Jesus. I live that. And because I was probably so close to eleven with the gate, the gifted and talented program and the creative programs and the stuff that I was involved in with my upbringing. Like, I was reading and writing very early on in preschool level. So they’re like, do we have a gifted and talented kid here also? He has deja vu and telekinesis and psychic phenomena and stuff surrounding it.

It’s like I’m like, shut up about about that. I don’t want to be taken out and put in a gift and talent program. And they have that audio test, you know, that blue box with the headphones? And you go. And you’d be like, left, right, hear it, hear it, hear it. Left, right. They’re, like, doing audio tests. Well, that became conspiratorial. Like, were they testing the phenomenon to say, were they putting, like, tones that only psychic kids could hear into that? And I was always passing these tests. And these adults, well, they’re Masons coming into our school paying for audio tests and vision tests.

And then they had the masonic chipping program where we’d go and we’d put our thumbprints on papers, and they’d. They. I think the first time. Well, the first time I took home a vhs tape with me on it as a youngster was when I went to the police department to talk about my interests and who I am and kind of spin around and show them what I look like. To have a video record of my existence in case I needed to play it on the news because I was abducted. And that was sponsored by a masonic program.

There’s a lodge in town. What is that mystery? Are they against the christian church? Are they the temple and synagogue of satan? Are we concerned about this at all? Well, maybe I was because I was a precocious kid. Before or after Tex Mars that you’re noticing of masonic temples? Well, this is all happening at the same time. So the exposure of the material is available to me. And then in my own timeline, connect the dots, finding what pieces fit together and where money flows and where influence comes from and who’s really running this town here? Who’s really running the government and the city council and the governor and, oh, there’s families.

Oh, this specific family has more say in input into, like, local parking lot snowplow policies and contracts, tracks, this type of stuff. Small town politics. And you were personally in the masonic chip program? There was a program each year, each summer that was a little bit different. But being the oldest child and going with my younger brother and sister to the county fair where we’d meet with a sheriff and we’d get a sheriff badge sticker we’d wear, and we’d meet the crime dog. And they had all these events in the community to get to know your neighbors.

All of these programs kind of blend together at some point. But then to realize at some point when I take home a vhs tape that’s paid for by the masonic lodge in town in cooperation with the local police department. Now I have an artifact that I bring home that puts a seed in my mind to say, well, this is evidence. This is physical evidence to a conspiracy of what’s really going on. And then other people would say, adults would talk and I would walk by and hear them, and other adults would say, you know, I’m not bringing my kids to that because they’re creating a database of kids, which is like a catalog.

I’m like, what? Okay, so now they have a catalog of children with addresses. Well, what does that mean? So now they know where the gifted and talented and beautiful, beautiful little boys are. See where the thinking leads. I’m in a database. I’m doing well. I get good grades. I can hear the beeps that no one else can hear. I can find Waldo before anybody else. Do I have something to be afraid of here? They’re maybe making a database of Indigo children through the new age teachings or Indigo children, psychic children, sure. And then like Project Montauk and all these.

The whole idea that the children of the future. But they’re using military ESP testing and, like, zenner cards. What are Zenner cards? So my friend and I think at some point toyed with the idea of Zenner cards and psychic training. And then he got more involved with, like, transformers and beast wars and other stuff. So we never really got farther into our little private psychic training and testing club in second grade. When you talk about those are the cards that usually have, like, a wave or a triangle or like, very discernible symbols that are supposed to be unique enough that five elements.

Maybe that’s an occult thing. Water. Definitely an occult thing. It’s Captain Planet. If Earth, wind, fire, water, air. Combine the powers, get Captain Planet. Gaia. Oh, no. That’s the most new age cartoon I ever saw in my life. But I can watch it. I’m getting annoyed with it. There’s some interesting stuff here. Ted Turner, were you familiar with James Randy then or now? I was familiar with James Randy because of Michael Shermer being a complete jerk off, always trying to say that Christianity is not a skeptical adjacent thing because he had gone to a very similar private christian college.

He rode a bike. I think he had a wife who had some health scare. And then he turned his back away from God and became a skeptic and was always on television. And he was telling me that the Bible code in Gematria was a pattern recognition thing that didn’t quite exist, and he was debunking it. And then I got into Penn and Teller and their bullshit series and the whole new age atheist enlightenment. They had a word for it in Wired magazine where they were trying to say that this new thought movement that was atheistic and skeptical would be called, like, bright or something.

I’m like, well, that’s light. That’s luciferic. There are luciferic agenda behind this new atheist movement. That’s kind of dumb. Later realizing that Wired magazine itself was very much propaganda. And then that’s another thing about me, is I subscribe to every single magazine. So I would, I would get magazine trials. And I recognized that if I put in the name field on a computer, current as the first name, resident as a last name, it would be delivered to current resident at my house, at my mailbox. So I would get tons and tons of magazines to current resident that was delivered successfully.

And then I’d just pour through those magazines that could. Resident. Does this include stuff in Maxim or were you. Yes, absolutely. Those were the easiest magazines to get unending free subscriptions to. I would get like doubles or triples of some of those magazines. Yeah. I don’t know if this is still a hack that works now, but even, I guess back then, the hack that I came to learn afterwards. But those magazines, they don’t care about for the most part your subscription. They care about the advertising. Advertisements. Yes. They go to the advertisers and they say, look it, we’ve got x number of subscribers.

So if you ever like, fraudulently or signed up for free and let it lapse or anything, they usually keep you on the mailing list because you on the mailing list are worth more money the advertiser than the subscribers. So, yeah, that was like, you could, you could have a subscription a damn near any magazine you wanted. Trade journals. So every, every magazine, you know, every mail day was an excitement of possibility, of just a stack of material that I could just flip through and be exposed to all sorts of trade magazine stuff, all sorts of like club magazines.

And I was getting into like DJ culture and sound equipment and video equipment and getting like a BH catalog that was like the size of a phone book, flipping through it, looking at all these cool cameras and lights and sound equipment and stuff. A lot of fun. I’ve got a little segment that I like to play where I’m just going to rapid fire a bunch of questions at you now that I’ve got a little bit of background, so some of it will feel arbitrary, but I swear it’ll be a little bit custom tailored just to get some fodder for the next time we talk.

Right. I’m going to play quick little 10 seconds. I’ll explain the rules afterwards. Hey, conspiracy buffs, I double dare you to take some PCP, the paranormal conspiracy probe. On your marks, get set and go. Rules are pretty simple. I just want you to rate things one to ten. So if I started out and I said, how much do you believe in Bigfoot? On a scale from one to ten, where would you put yourself? Bigfoot? Ten. How about flat earth? I am between two worlds with that. Attending flat Earth fest, doing that again this year, end of September.

I’m right in the middle. I’m at the five point where I see arguments from both sides, the best arguments from both sides. I could be convinced and swayed either way. I think there’s a conspiratory element with the UN flag. Looks like a flat earth map, but maybe it’s target and target Earth. So there’s all sorts of fun ideas there. I’m not convinced one way or the other, so I’m always on the fence at a five. What about Atlantis? Atlantis, the colony, the islands, the idea of Atlantis? Yeah. I think there’s a civilization that had some sort of idea under the idea of atlantean culture and high technology and stuff.

So I’m closer to eight or nine on that. About Tartaria. This is a controversial subject in my. My circle of influence and friend groups and stuff, and they. And they go back and forth. I select the antico tech, the old world stuff, the mud floods. Is that all under the Tartaria banner for you? Well, yeah, let’s. Because I’ll get more granular, but let’s say Tartaria is kind of mud flood. And generally the premise that I’ve understood is that any history before, I don’t know, 1960, I don’t even know where the cutoff is, but. So there was a country, a banner flag under the idea of a tartarean unified empire.

Yeah. Like a global empire almost atlantean in some respects. I’m accepting of that possibility of an idea. Yeah. What about mud floods, specifically? Yeah. Seeing certain buildings in like San Francisco, where the first few floors are underground. Was it a mud flood? Was it a fire? There’s Noah’s flood. God promised he’d never destroy the earth with a flood again, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t take coastal areas and put them underwater. Atlantis. We’re already accepting of mud flood’s a possibility. Say, an eight on mud flood. What about the idea of world’s fairs being a yemenite cover? Destroy previous buildings from, like, an older group of, you know, advanced civilizations open to that possibility.

All the world’s stage and the world fair being a staging for cultural progress. Saying that this is where we want to take our culture, sort of a trade show idea, makes a lot of sense to me. That’s like a nine. What about a conventional concept of dinosaurs as you would go into a national museum of history and see a T. Rex skeleton? The Bible talks about the behemoth, a large animal, and the Leviathan. That gets into fun old cult lessons of what is Leviathan? And that sort of thing. So the possibility that there were large animals at some point.

Fossil record. Yeah. Researching that far, they’re saying that in museums, those fossil structures are recreations of things. Kind of suspicious. But in terms of extinct large animals, maybe dragons. Are we calling dinosaurs dragons? Not yet. Not yet. Okay, so for this specific question. Yeah, about a seven. So more specifically, fire breathing fire or fire breathing, lying dragons having existed at any point in history, I had thought that maybe the fire with the magma might have been like Gila monster type reptile things. On tropical islands where there happened to be tar pits or natural gas opens up and the ground comes on fire.

There’s a. There are lizards in the area. There seems to be reasons why there are stories associating fire and breathing and dragon in the same breath. So probably seven. Six or seven. How about a. Like a middle aged alchemical successful transmutation of a base metal into gold, a base metal into actual gold or gold plate actual gold. I’m not talking about philosopher’s stone consciousness. I mean, like, yeah, at a five there, you know, with. With more knowledge and more ideas about how things could be changed in their, you know, chemical composition and periodic table of elements.

I don’t have a huge understanding of the sciences. I was more into art and literature and language. Language as kind of skipped out on chemistry. I don’t have that knowledge, but I do believe that there’s some possibility in it. So I’m more of six. What about biblical demons? See, that’s going to be something where I could probably talk for hours and hours about the possibilities, arguments for and against connections to aliens and little grey men and Alistair CROWLEY and all the stuff I know now, the stuff that I was thinking about then just the question. Demons, biblical demons, what are angels? Are they different from demons? Much more open to that conversation if it’s a personal belief in them.

You know, you’d think I’d be at like a nine or a ten, but I’m more between like a four and a six, depending on the day and the person I’m talking to. Okay, so this one kind of dovetails with that. What do you think the chances that, say, an atheist, Bart Simpson watching Marilyn Manson, but, like, a true atheist could order a series of books on the Internet, how to summon demons for dummies and successfully invite some sort of a dark entity into their life that causes a tangible change? What do you think the chances of that from one, let’s say it’s a 14 year old, you know, atheist is just dabbling 14 year old atheist who has a belief that reading some grimoire, doing some magic rituals, lightning camp, whatever it is, to invite a conversation or a possession or invocation or evocation, just a teenage boy book demon summoning, that sort of thing.

Very powerful. Yeah. And I’m almost saying it from, and I’m being specific about an atheist or agnostic point of view and that it’s a science experiment. It’s like, well, if I recite these things and I mix these, you know, and I arrange these herbs in a certain way and I do it under the moon, like this book tells me, this wicked handbook tells me, you know, will there be a tangible proof that there’s a spiritual world out there? What do you think the chances of something like that? Actually, if that teenager is functioning in a material, atheistic reductionists were just brain chemicals firing.

The possibility of them hallucinating a demon or having some sort of experiences that are maybe a causal. There’s a possibility of that happening. I’m open to the idea that it could occur. If the more specific question is if the person does not believe that that is a possibility at all, period. And of story, everybody else is hallucinating, gaslighting, and crazy paranoia stuff. Could it happen? I think it still could happen. I think because they are entertaining the idea and they’re being playful with the idea that that idea plays back with them and whether or not they are capable of interpreting data as being a demonic response or just their own physical explanation for logical Occam’s razor type thing, I mean, that’s a huge conversation.

You’re asking rapid fire and I’m taking too long to answer the question. So I’m fluctuating between that four and six area where depending on the day and how I’m feeling and what I want to argue in favor of, it’s fair. It’s very sliding scale. It’s the same sliding scale as whether or not a demon even exists is whether or not an agnostic could in turn someone, or whether or not they believe themselves to be a demon. A little rebel, a little rabble rouser. If they wear like Hellfire club t shirt and they like the stranger things movie and they say, well, I’m gonna be an outsider, I’m gonna wear another jacket, I’m gonna go raise hell somewhere.

I’m gonna go and get an Anton Lavey album and just play it, you know, on a loop just to seem dangerous and make my parents and teachers concerned that I’m always wondering, is there someone out there that does that? I just want to be a little edge, Lord. I just want to show everyone how. And then it’s, oops, I invited a demon. Well, there is power in that. So if it’s demonic energy or just the fact that they’re, they’re dressing in such a way, they’re behaving in such a way, they’re professing that they are practicing Satanists, whether or not they’re atheistic and they’re just saying that or it’s a performative thing.

Atheism, satanism. If they’re playing around with this power dynamic, there are real world consequences and follow from putting that forth and portraying yourself to a public in that way. Whether or not that’s a supernatural sort of demonic church of Satan, hidden masters, black Lodge influence or nothing, I’m open to the possibility of that being what could or does happen. Certainly. How about a one to ten on 911 being an inside job? An inside job meaning the defense department. The government was aware that there was. So let’s define the four and then I guess you can tell me which of the four.

So there’s the government didn’t know anything and it was all, you know, basically official story. There is the government got wind of and knew it was happening, but let it happen. The government facilitated its happening. And then there’s the government planned it from start to end. I was in choir class in the morning in 9th grade where we had to stop what we were doing, turn on the tv and see the news reports that there was a terrorist attack happening in New York, you know, as a 9th grader taking a social studies class where we watched news every day and we took news news notes and wrote down what CNN was reporting.

There was shoe bombers and anthrax and snipers at the same time, there’s a lot going on. So in my memory, that’s all tied together. Terrorists on american soil seemed like a real possibility at that point. I was like, well, is the government in on it? I wasn’t aware of Pearl harbor, false flag type stuff at that point. Currently now, inside job, magical ritual. I’m open to all those possibilities. I don’t have those answers. I’ve seen the research. I don’t reject the research. Truth is for 911, loose change, zeitgeist, all that stuff I’m aware of. I don’t have a particular stance on it.

It’s not close to my concern. But to say it’s an inside job, I’m like a nine on accepting that statement and not being deeply offended or wanting to fight you on it when you say it’s not of your concern. I’m just curious. Why would the premise of one of the most, I guess, pivotal collective traumas that our country’s gone through together, I mean, prior to 2019, at least, but the largest collective of trauma, that seems like one of the most important things that we’ve ever gone through, like you and I, at least, I guess this year might be a little different.

We had, like, a close call with a presidential assassination. That could have been another JFK thing. But those are the big ones, right? Presidential assassinations and major events for everybody else. And being in a community where I’m hosting live streams and talking about these topics and having to make editorial decisions, I say, well, that’s none of my concern because everybody else is covering it. My personal gut take is these media events. Having studied news writing and reading AP news wires and terminals to get the latest news to determine how news is created and manufactured consent, all this stuff, knowing this information now, the whole 911 thing being a huge event to me seems like the largest honey trap for everyone to fall into to.

So when I say it’s none of my concern, I feel like it’s such a blatant, obvious target of research and sort of government and gaslighting to say whether it was an inside job or not or whether there’s terrorists or dancing Israelis or whatever it is, it seems to me that is the conspiratorial funnel which everyone is forced into endlessly arguing that it’s, you know, how many years since, you know, JFK was assassinated and people are still arguing about it. It seems like how many years since Jesus was assassinated and how many people are still talking about it, man, you know, if you want to do an actual timeline of.

Was it actually 2000 years, literal 365 days, was the timeline messed with? Were there missing years put in? I mean, that’s. That’s a question I’ll put in and I’ll volunteer on nine on possibility of fake years added to a history timeline. So I don’t think that even the whole origin of Christianity in the Catholic Church goes back 2000 years. I’m not convinced of that. What about, again, we’ll do a couple more of these, one to tens, one to ten, that a human being is stepped foot on the moon at some point in the last hundred years.

That’s a hard one because I want to believe that. I want to believe that we can land on the moon. And I’m much more of the opinion that we probably can’t get there. The simplest reason why is if we haven’t returned to it and we don’t have hd footage of it and we haven’t started mining helium three and stuff from it. If there’s vested business interests in going to the moon and bringing back resources, but we haven’t done that yet, that’s very suspicious to me. So I’m like, I don’t think. I don’t think that. I don’t think Lance Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, any of the bicycle riding Freemason people sneaking to the moon and doing rituals.

Not my biggest concern, not my hobby of research. Low concern. Low. Low belief in landing on the moon. All of the conspiratory research of is the moon fake or real? Can we travel to outer space? What is SpaceX and NASA doing interested in the space travel technology? But I don’t know that we can go to Mars. I don’t think we can land on the moon. What about celebrity clones like Jamie Foxx and fill in the blank? Elvis is born a twin, and he’s got a twin to twin Elvis, but they’re using one Elvis so that he can do a concert and then he rests and then the second Elvis comes in.

I guess. I mean, yeah, that. That would also include. There’s also like a more of, like a lab grown, you know, like maybe they don’t need. Realize they need an Alan Marcus clone until you’re 40. And now they’re like, crap, now we need one. And. And just to be clear, I’m not talking about a look alike where they find someone that looks like you. But. But that there is an actual, like, someone bred to play the part, whether from birth or from test tube, later on in life. How accurate do you think that that is on more than just like a presidential scale? Like, I look at Stephen Hawking and think that there’s three to maybe four versions of Stephen Hawking.

I don’t know if that was a clone or a lookalike or just any sort of guy in a wheelchair dripping through a feeding tube resembles a Stephen Hawking. That guy should have died at a much earlier age. So the fact that Stephen Hawking was put on television so many years past his expiration date leads me to believe that that is the primary example of an actor playing a role, serving a purpose. So that’s where I say, yeah, that’s. That was my opening to that possibility of being an actual functioning thing. I don’t know the mechanisms or the societies or the groups or the business interests behind it, but to see Stephen Hawking and people taking that seriously and respecting it and then being upset that I would criticize their acceptance of the Stephen Hawking narrative, that seems like an easy conspiracy theory.

That’s fun to talk about at parties. People get really upset about that. How dare I criticize a disabled man for playing a role in some grand conspiracy that doesn’t actually exist? And then this one, I could almost ask the same thing two different times. So if you want to delineate between the two, that’s totally fine. What about the idea that psychedelics could put you in communion with demons and what I guess could be the same thing? What about AI being able to put you in the communion with demons? Do you have different perspectives on each of those? Technology, cyber punk culture leading to AI’s.

That seems a lot like Ouija boards and channeling and spirituality. So absolutely open to that topic of AI and intelligences and computers and disembodied voices and sort of that? Yeah, absolutely. The other question was psychedelics and theogens, God molecules, DMT, that sort of stuff. Right. Any. Anything where people tend to say that they either have a religious or spiritual existence or claim to have some communion with entities or a consciousness of some kind. Well, when I read Robert Anton Wilson, and he was explaining the humor of Alastair Crowley. And Alastair Crowley is a diary of a drug fiend, and he was talking about the rituals and the substances use and then gonzo journalism with fear and loathing in Las Vegas.

Your Hunter S. Thompson. Yeah, yeah. Open to that possibility? Possibility. I think that’s how you open to the possibilities by taking the drug that you don’t know what it is and being straight edge. Asked me another time about my non straight edge experiences and how extra mystical and weird that was for everybody around me thinking that I was just pranking them and pulling their leg and faking it. Because how could someone take such a small amount of something that’s like a placebo and have very little effect on them? And then me rolling around in the earth and trying to communicate to them through miming and choreography and having this experience and not saying anything, not screaming or making a big scene, but they were just like laughing at first and they’re like, no, no, this is demonically possessed.

I would, I would love that as a part two to all this. I think I got a pretty good understanding landing. And I think we also kind of have like a nice little cutoff point from where you started to just get really deeper into, I guess, like more esoteric and occult concepts. So you were aware of them. But we haven’t yet. And we will get into Al Marcus, like, deep dive into the occult. And what. Can you just give us a preview? Like, what was your, I don’t want to, for lack of a better word, but like, what was your, like, rock bottom or like deepest dive into the occult? Like, at what point did you say, okay, that’s enough for today.

I’ll start walking back where I came from. I’ve shared the story a few times without including all of the details in the recipe. To follow. To follow a ritual to contact Lucifer, but then picking up that phone, getting a number of answers, interactive answers in real time in a completely sober and awake state. That’s the cliffhanger there. Yeah. So next time we’ll talk about direct communion with Lucifer, something a little forward to. And then, you know, a lifetime of fellowship with the Trinity. God the father, God the son, God the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit. And then talking and interacting and walking with Jesus and then having that sort of ongoing communication and then having experiences where I would have what you’d call, like sleep paralysis, but not from demons.

It was because, because Jesus was visiting me. A bright shining cloth, like a bright sort of monk’s robe, sort of saint Germain bright light figure. And then here’s a weird aspect to the story to ask me later is I ended up getting a robe that looked just like that, standing in a position where that dream memory thing happened and light coming in from behind me. I was illuminated, standing in position. So it was like, was it a trans temporal time thing where I was having a precognition of how I would be doing what Jesus was doing.

Remember I wore the what would jesus do bracelets. I was walking like Jesus. I was behaving like Jesus. And then at some point, resembling what that figure looks like in paintings, and then wondering what was it myself or was it the Christ figure? Or was it myself and the Christ figure at the same time communicating with you? But then why was I asleep, paralyzed? It was a paralysis because my spirit body, soul thing was pulled out of time. And then it was like the point of consciousness was from a future point visiting me in the present, but it was in the past, because this sort of thing, that sort of christian mysticism of becoming the Christ and recognizing that, well, what was the actual timeline of events? Here, I would love nothing more than to get into more like theological talk, especially Trinity.

I’ve got some go to questions that I usually ask people that are scholars of the Bible, or at least have read it enough times to know some of the more intricate details. So I’ll leave that one for next time and tell people where they can find you if they want to hear more about this. I’ve done a really poor job of archiving all this stuff, and I feel like I’ve talked about it enough times on public streams, but because I haven’t clipped it and shared it to social media and TikTok and applied all of the archived and indexed and Dewey decimal system to make it easily found, a lot of people have.

Haven’t heard the full expanded autobiography of these events, and I’ve been wondering if I should even, like, write that down in autobiography biographical form and then narrate it as a book myself or what. What do I even do with this stuff? And then having to talk to you to pull out the things that other people would be interested in, even hearing about has been a great help. So I have some of that stuff on alanmarcus.com. i have some of it poorly organized on alanmarcus.com, but plans to expand that probably are slowly happening, very, very slowly, teasing it out further to say, is there even a demand for this.

This storytime stuff? Well, I think there could be. I would plant a seed, maybe. If you’re familiar with the chick track format. I mean, that would be the perfect vehicle to take. I’ve trigger. I’ve, like, do I write my version of my cosmic trigger experience? I could do that. I’m familiar, I think. I mean, if you’re. If you’re asking if it’s not returning, I’d say all of the above. Because the way that you would express your thoughts through a chick track or through a cosmic trigger or through a music video or through a painting, they would all be this.

It would be like a holographic thing. Like every time you tell that story in a different medium, you’re able to show one extra little nook and cranny of that, and you might not feel like you’ve ever told the whole story until you do it through all these different mediums. Let’s go back to, like, fourth grade Bible camp. So I’m the only kid from my church to ride up with my pastor to a kids camp. Hadn’t been away from home in a while. I show up early the night before. Sunday night, everyone shows up. Monday morning, I show up early.

They put me in a cabin with some other pastor’s kids, and these pastor kids are jerks to me. They don’t. They don’t care about my well being, and they’re kind of hazing me a little bit because they’re all friends. Turns out their father happened to be the counselor for the group, so I was with their father. He is a pastor at a small church. And then at our altar time, you know, seven night at a christian bible camp, they’re praying, and I’m participating. I’m fully complicit in participating with this stuff. And they’re doing this sort of prophecy night, like, what are you going to do in the future? Sort of like, not really a career fair, but what role do you have in this church franchise? Are you going to be an assembly of God minister? Are you going to be a missionary? What are you going to do? And I don’t even remember if I had obsessively let out, spilled.

Spilled my information about my interest in broadcasting, intelligent film and that sort of stuff. I don’t even remember talking that much about it. In fact, I think I pretty much just kept quiet most of the time because I’m just a fourth grade kid trying to read everybody else’s language. Long story short, the guy is getting all these other pastors to really pray for me, and all the energy is surrounding me. I’m in the spotlight, and I’m absolutely dreading it because I’m getting too much attention. But then they start saying that we see a vision of a future where you are a broadcaster and you’re reaching millions of people and they’re hearing your stories.

So this seed was already planted in me. I’m like, that’s annoying. Why did you have to say those words? Why did you have to plant that blessing on me? Which seems to be a curse because now I just want to be behind the scenes, producing shows, making content, letting the cattle actors in front of the camera look pretty and do hair and makeup and stuff. Yeah, well, sorry. You don’t get to pick your mission all the time, right? Not when I comply. And I’m complicit in. What’s that word? Consent. I consented to going to Bible camp.

I consented to the altar call. I consented to the call. I asked Jesus into my heart. I wanted to be filled with the Holy Spirit. What else could I have expected to happen then? More. More. More responsibility, more prophecy, more, uh, more upgrades. I would say, like, uh, the army of the Lord, the army of God. Onward, christian soldier. It’s like, I can’t just be in the. Trevor, it sounds like Jesuits, not Jesuits, right? I have to climb the chain of command and. And be a leader in this. And I’m like, dude, come on, I’m in fourth grade.

Wait till I’m in, like, 11th grade, and then we can talk about college choices. But as a fourth grader. But body language and reading people and having that sort of word of wisdom and prophecy and stuff, it’s like, what are you gonna do? I was broadcasting it. People picked up on it. Well, we got a good look into, I guess, what all coins like the christian side of this story, and it sounds like the other half might be, like, a luciferian, at least in a cliffhanger way. It’ll be the luciferian side of the story. I like cliffhangers.

I also want to plug a new debate format. I have been involved with sort of a creative web weaving of stories and ideas and seeing the connections between everything in a yes and yes and yes and accepting an exploration of things. Things. That’s been fun. That’s very creative and fun. Now, in the world we’re living with and needing to change the format a little bit to sort of define a barrier between what is exploration and creativity and what is having to say. Well, there are absolute truths that we need to argue for or against. So making a debate format, I had a show deliberating dog faced dudes.

I don’t know if he caught it. The topic was, should women be allowed to vote and run for office? I think that’s a very one of your more recent ones. Yeah. Yes, yes. So I was wondering if you caught that and wanted to talk more about my misogynistic views of christian nationalism. Well, I don’t know what kind of monster takes pleasure in watching women just suffrage left and right. Right. I. Yep. So look for that on Alan Marcus. That’s awesome. Should women be allowed to vote? How dare. How dare I even ask that question? End suffraging.

It’s 2020, people. It’s not working out, guys. We need God in America again. We need to fly the christian flag next to the american flag. Prayer back in schools. Get Amy Grant out of there. Well, you know, we can talk about Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith and the history of christian music. You know, what I’ve discovered as an adult about those topics in the music business out of Nashville and what’s really going on. Honestly, it sounds like you might have, like, a modern day John Todd sort of story to tell, because that was his approach, too, was that he had seen the inside of the christian music industry and was there to expose all of it while also operating occult bookstores on the side.

So. All right, well, we’re going to save that one for next time. Alan Marcus, thank you for spending some time with me and giving me the backstory and helping tee up what I think will be an even better part, too. I always want to get to the juicier, deeper, like 303 level courses, but without playing that foundation of, well, what is my experience? Why am I talking about these things? What are my credentials? That sort of thing. This is incredibly helpful, especially to understand how deep rooted the, what I’ll kind of perceive is like the belief in supernatural at a level where it’s undeniable, not where you have to trick yourself into thinking that.

I see that out of the corner of my eye, but the way that you described it, it leaves zero chance for hijinks or optical phenomenon. Sounds like what you experienced was something that you couldn’t deny, and therefore, you’ve never even been in the situation where dabbling in atheism was even an option, which is fairly unique to me because a lot of the people that I know, especially with religious backgrounds, they tend to have, like, this pendulum swinging, reactionary opposition to religion, where they dabble in atheism and have to come back to where they dabble in agnosticism and come back to it.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but it almost seems like you skipped that part because you had such a personal experience that there was really no reason for you to leave and come back. Many various personal experiences ongoing to this day. Yeah. So I find that incredibly unique, and I’d love to talk more about it. Yeah, it’s not something that I really even wanted to talk about. It’s not something I want to share. It’s not something that I’m, you know, proud of. Like, I did this thing. I had these experiences. I just want to open up the conversation to meet other people who have had similar experiences.

So as adults with video calling technology, where are those people? Let’s talk it out and figure it out because there’s such a deep mystery here that is so much more interesting than political conspiracy. I agree. I agree wholeheartedly on that. Like, political conspiracy is so flash in the pan. This is kind of hugging at an ultimate truth. Yes. And I guess I’ll encourage anyone that’s listening or watching the video or anything to send in some comments. If you’ve got a contact email on my website, I think it’s contact@alanmarcus.com. so let’s maybe get some emails in. I didn’t want to do that for the longest time because when I was like, hey, man, I’m on YouTube, let’s be friends.

Send me emails. You know, you get emails from people who are like, oh, I’m looking for a friend. This guy wants to be my friend. Now I’m being more focused to say, this is kind of my story. You’ve heard my story. Maybe you have similar aspects to your story, and we can figure out mysteries together. So purposeful contact and thankful at Alan Marcus is the other one because I want to hear success stories from people who have watched my appearances on things and have found success in their own research and findings and curiosities. The benefit benefits from having more information far outweigh having less information.

That’s sort of my kind of mission statement at this point, I think, is, let’s have more information, better information, and then based off of that information, we can have much more informed conversations than, well, was 911 an inside job? And what is an inside job? And what is a false flag? And false flags themselves are false. So we’re not even getting into the actual subject matter here. That’s such a frustrating thing to engage in surface level conversations with people. And it takes minimum of 3 hours before we can begin the conversation. So this is like the prelude.

Agree. Do you ever do like a closeout prayer or anything like this? Not out loud. Okay, so you have a personal close out prayer. I, you know, I. I have sort of a childlike way with magic and chaos, magic and spirituality and ritual, intuition and things. You know, it’s very difficult for me to follow authority and prescribe recipes and medications and paths because none of those have led me anywhere I wanted to go anywhere, you know, anyone. They’ve always been cul de sacs and dead ends and limited hangouts and fake and gay and, you know, all that stuff.

So it’s like, I didn’t want to be a pilgrim or pioneer, but, you know, that’s. That’s what I was in Royal Rangers. I had the badges. I think those were the degrees of that Royal Ranger Boy Scout knockoff. Initiation where you’re like, you know, pioneer and that’s a of thing. Yeah. That’s one of the best analogies that I’ve usually heard before, too, is that collecting badges in the Cub Scouts or anywhere Royal Rangers is essentially getting degrees in masonry. It’s basically that same premise. Right? So, you know, if all initiation, self initiation, according to what I’ve read through Robert Anton Wilson’s cosmic trigger stuff and chapel perilous, which I want to get into more, but before we can even get to the.

The gates of Chapel perilous of the chapel perilous property, before we can even arrive and find it on a map somewhere, territory map, menu, meal, semantics stuff. You know, all these things. Unless there’s an understanding of just basic biographical history and experience and, you know, soberness, truth, you know, connect me to a truth, you know, if people want to hear my personal anecdotes and dismiss them, I’m not. I’m not arguing for or against. I’ve gotten to the point where I try to tell my stories in the most neutral third person observer, out of body. Because I’ve had those dreams so many times.

Out of body, in the corner of a room, viewing myself, playing out perspectives. I don’t know if other people are capable of that. I said hide the power level type of thing, but I think I’ve spoken too much and shared too many secrets, and there’s no putting that cat back in the schrodinger’s box. I guess I’ll recommend anyone that’s going to tune in for part two of this one. Get caught up on your raw. Get caught up on your cosmic trigger. There might be some allusions to that. Absolutely. You’re gonna have to mute my mic and cut me off and send me back.

And we got another 3 hours to go tonight, so. Yeah. So come back, read up on raw, and get ready to match our freak. That’s a challenge. Spread the word with propaganda packs, all for just $40 shipped@paranoidamerican.com. dot we got facts on these sticker slaps, so grab yourself a stack and go attack with these paranoid propaganda packs these huge all weather slaps will last in public for years to come. Remind citizens that birds are not real. Self immolation is an option and might make you magnetic. Do your part and get a propaganda pack today from paranoid american.

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