Was Robert Anton Wilson in the CIA? w/ Gabriel Kennedy | Paranoid American Podcast 103

Paranoid American, a unique comic publisher, has been exploring the world’s mysteries through their podcast since 2012. They delve into topics like secret societies, forbidden technology, and occult symbols in pop culture. In a recent episode, they interviewed Gabriel Kennedy, author of a book about Robert Anton Wilson, a figure known for his conspiracy theories and optimism. Kennedy, who self-published his book, discussed his journey studying Wilson’s work and his own experiences as a writer and artist.
Wilson, as a child, suffered from polio, a painful virus that left him contemplating the harshness of the universe. This early experience of suffering influenced his later interest in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, which explore themes of indifference and pain caused by powerful beings. Despite his physical challenges, Wilson managed to overcome his condition through the Sister Kenny method and positive thinking, which shaped his optimistic outlook and belief in the power of change. His experiences also influenced his views on conspiracy theories, encouraging critical thinking and the questioning of grand narratives.
The text discusses the writing style and philosophy of an artist named Wilson, who simplifies complex topics like quantum physics and general semantics. Wilson uses clear, concise imagery to keep his writing moving and engaging. He also explores the concept of causality and the potential of psychic abilities, using quantum entanglement as a possible explanation. The author of the text aims to emulate Wilson’s approach in his own book, providing a simple narrative while also critiquing Wilson’s ideas.
The text discusses the importance of learning from others’ experiences to understand humanity and create a better society. It emphasizes the need for critical thinking skills to differentiate between assertions and arguments, using the theory of falsifiability as an example. The text also explores the influence of media on our perceptions and the importance of maintaining a balanced perspective. Lastly, it encourages individuals to engage with diverse groups and ideas, while maintaining self-awareness and discernment.
This text discusses the power of perception and the importance of critical thinking. It highlights the work of Robert Anton Wilson, particularly his book “Prometheus Rising”, which encourages readers to question their beliefs and consider different perspectives. The text also touches on various theories and beliefs, from quantum entanglement to the existence of dragons and celebrity clones, emphasizing the need for open-mindedness and skepticism.
The speaker discusses various topics, including the practice of Gematria, the concept of AI as a vehicle for intelligence, and the belief in magic. They also touch on the moon landing and whether the footage was real or fabricated. The speaker promotes their book, “Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson,” available on Amazon and Lulu Press, and encourages readers to check it out for new information about Wilson. They conclude by expressing their interest in discussing the intersection of John C. Lilly’s research and Robert Anton Wilson’s work in the future.
This text talks about a 40-page comic that suggests Stanley Kubrick directed the Apollo space missions. The comic, available on NASA comic.com, is a great read for fans of Kubrick, comics, or conspiracy theories. The text also includes a rap verse with themes of struggle, success, and defiance against haters.
In the late 70s, Wilson and Leary, two free-thinking rebels, became friends. Leary, a former Harvard professor, was imprisoned for a marijuana charge but managed to escape from a low-security prison using a personality test he had created. He was later arrested in Afghanistan by the CIA and accused of being a snitch. Wilson, who was often seen with Leary, was accused of being his CIA babysitter, but they were simply friends and intellectual collaborators.
The text discusses the complex relationships and perceptions surrounding figures like Bob Wilson and Timothy Leary, who were part of the counterculture movement in the 60s and 70s. It explores the idea that they might have been involved with intelligence agencies like the CIA, either knowingly or unknowingly, and their influence on public perception of groups like the Bavarian Illuminati. The text also delves into the paranoia and skepticism that was prevalent during their time, and how these figures might have been seen as agents of chaos. Lastly, it touches on the possibility of intelligence agencies infiltrating journalism and other fields.
This text discusses the possibility of certain influential figures, like Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary, being unknowingly used by intelligence agencies due to their significant influence. It also explores the idea of artists and intellectuals being targeted by these agencies for their potential usefulness. The author shares his experience of requesting information about Wilson from the CIA and FBI, and receiving a vague response. The text also mentions Wilson’s “Red Squad” file, a record kept by the Chicago Police Department on potential subversives.
The text discusses the history of anti-communist paranoia in America, starting from the 1917 Russian Revolution, through the McCarthy era, and into the Vietnam War protests. It highlights the role of the Red Squad, a department within the Chicago Police Department, in surveilling activists and dissenters, including the story of Bob and Arlen, who were targeted for their anti-war and feminist activities. The text also touches on the overreactions of American institutions to perceived threats, comparing it to killing a fly with a sledgehammer. It ends with a story about Bob being falsely accused of running guns for the Black Panthers, illustrating the extent of the paranoia and surveillance during this period.
From 1966 to 1971, Wilson, Bob, and Arlen were in Chicago, with Arlen’s name appearing frequently, while Wilson’s only appeared once. They attended many protests and even returned from Mexico to sign a book deal. There are speculations about Playboy being used for blackmail, similar to Epstein’s case, but no concrete evidence has been found. The text also discusses the potential involvement of George Bush Senior in deep state manipulations and the lack of allegations against Hugh Hefner and Timothy Leary.
The text discusses Wilson’s career as a writer and editor for various magazines, including Playboy and its knockoffs. He was known for adding intellectual discussions to his work, challenging readers to think beyond the surface. Despite facing challenges and criticisms, Wilson remained committed to his unique approach, believing in the importance of exploring both the light and dark sides of humanity. His work serves as a guide for others navigating their own paths, emphasizing the importance of individuality and self-actualization.
The text discusses the work of artist Robert Anton Wilson, emphasizing his ability to help people understand and navigate paranoid states of mind. Wilson’s work, particularly his book “Prometheus Rising,” is seen as a beacon of hope, offering a positive and optimistic view of life. The text also explores the concept of “reality tunnels,” the idea that two people can perceive the same situation differently. Wilson’s work is seen as a tool for understanding and transcending these differing perceptions, leading to a more unified and harmonious society.
The speaker discusses a complex situation where he was unsure of his residential status due to conflicting information from different authorities. He compares this to a quantum state, where something can be in two places at once, depending on the observer. He also talks about the work of Robert Anton Wilson, who was able to explain complex quantum theories in a way that was understandable to the average person. The speaker appreciates Wilson’s ability to communicate complex ideas to a wide audience, and sees this as a sign of true understanding.

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 MK Ultra 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 and 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 steal 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. Today we’re going to talk about a conspiracy theory legend. And maybe there’s an asterisk after that because it deviates a little bit from what a conventional conspiracy theorist might be defined as. But today’s guest is Gabriel Kennedy, who wrote an entire book on Robert Anton Wilson’s called Chapel Perilous the Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. And this is going to be a great way to just get more acquainted with Robert Anton Wilson’s particular line of thinking and just we’ll get into a whole bunch of different tangents and rabbit holes.

So first of all, Gabriel, thanks so much for coming onto the show. I like to do all of the. The sort of plugs up front so let people know where they can find you, where they can get your book, everything. Sure, yeah. Thomas, thank you for having me on the show, man. It’s great to be here today. And yes, my name is Gabriel Kennedy, AKA Propanon. That’s short for propaganda. Anonymous. I’ve been a musician and a visual artist, a street artist for many years. Chapel Perilous, the Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson is my first book.

I’ve written for other outlets like Boing Boing Reality Sandwich, Mondo 2000 and my own websites, prop-anand.com and also ChapelParalous US and ChapelParalys US. Constantly uploading, you know, things concerning the book. And I am, you know, I guess, curating a substack page, which is GabrielPatrick Kennedy, I think, dot substack or no.com, one of those things, substack.com and, you know, you can see some of my writings on there and whatnot. So, yeah, this is my first book and I’ve, you know, Wilson was like one of my main teachers. I discovered his work in high school. Years later, I interviewed him in 2003, the day after the premiere of a documentary that was made on his life.

So I interviewed him on July 24, 2003. A year later, I joined what was called the maybe Logic Academy, which was Wilson’s cutting edge, asynchronous remote learning website, that there were a number of teachers, you know, writers who, you know, had courses to teach. Wilson was one of them. Others were involved in that were Douglas Rushkoff. Are you serious? Starhawk Peter Carroll and Turo Ali. Those are just a few off the top of my head. It was such a great experience and during that time I just got deeper and deeper in studying Wilson’s work and I just never stopped.

And I started this book a number of years ago and completed it just recently. Put it out in late October and it’s been selling really well. I self published the book, so I guess I’m, you know, the publisher in cahoots with Amazon and Lulu Press, which is pretty amazing, this new era of self publishing that’s allowed to writers. So I did that just kind of as an experiment to see how it’ll go. And it’s going really well so far. So. Yeah. And just doing these podcasts right now and I’m really, like I said, I’m. I’m really excited to be here.

Yeah, congrats on cutting out the middleman too. It’s a, a great time to be alive for a publisher in, in some regards. Right. And you actually, you reached out to me, but it was so like there was so much synchronicity in this because I had just re. Like like the week that I heard from you. I had just watched maybe Logic for the first time, paying attention. I think it had, like, been on in the background a couple times. But this is the documentary on Robert Anton Wilson’s life, and it gave me a completely different perspective because I think that for the first 10 or 20 years that I became familiar with him, it was through the Illuminatus trilogy, and then it was through Prometheus Rising.

And I kind of just made all the assumptions on who he was as a person based on that and his discordianism, sort of. I kind of saw him almost as like a. Like a prankster or a troll. Or maybe he was just being fun. And after watching maybe Logic, I walked away with a completely different interpretation of this, one of the main ones. I guess I’ll just lead with this question. But one of the things that took me the most by surprise was the sheer amount of optimism that Robert Anton Wilson sort of embodied. And like, he was a professor of optimism.

Like, he would basically try and convince everyone to be this, the same kind of optimist that he was. And my brain almost did a divide by zero error moment, because conspiracy theory and optimism don’t usually play in, like, the same sandbox in a way. They almost feel like they are mutually exclusive. So I’m curious how. How do you sort of rectify these two seemingly, like oil and water, different ingredients here between conspiracy theory and optimism in the context of Robert Anton Wilson. That’s a great point, Thomas. Yeah. You know, squaring the radical optimism that Wilson had with his capacity to ingest, like a ton of conspiracy theories and.

And even look at the world through that lens every once in a while. I think that adds to what makes him unique and what makes him such a great writer, you know, late in his life. I think it’s in that documentary that maybe Logic documentary, where Wilson said that two things fuel his art, and that’s anger and optimism. And so I find that interesting as well. You know, how could this person. I mean, that’s the sign of intelligence, is the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts, you know, within yourself without kind of going crazy. And so.

And that Wilson, this is what makes him so valuable as a writer, beyond just being a funny troll, if you will, because unlike, I don’t know, I can’t name any trolls offhand, but if Wilson is a troll, he walked the talk. At least he wasn’t just, you know, keyboard warring, you know, being a keyboard warrior, beefing with people online or whatever. You know, he embodied what he wrote about and to be able to be such a radical optimist while I guess entertaining so many conspiracy theories, I, I think that just goes back to his, his. His kind of like his youth in a way.

He was diagnosed with polio at the age of two. And it’s weird, I think he got like two separate bouts of polio, uh, around that age. And um, he. That was in around 19, that was 1934, when he was 2 years old. And the polio. So this was years before Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine. So Wilson is of that generation. There are a number of, you know, people that we, you know, probably know. I mean, if, you know, Alan Alda, he was in mash, he’s a great actor. He also had polio when he was a kid, as did so many people from that, as I said generation.

And Alda like Wilson, there was no vaccine, but they received a relative cure from this system, I guess, called the Sister Kenny method, which was, we would see it now as just an alternative kind of body therapy invented by an Australian kind of nurse’s aide named Sister Kenny. And that flew in the face of normal medical, you know, suggestion at the time. So it prescribed for young kids who got polio activation of the muscle as opposed to the medical experts were saying complete, you know, non movement, like a child should just stop moving and lay in bed.

Which is the worst thing that a child could really do, really for them. Right. And so Wilson, when he first got hit with the polio, he writes about this in his work. Being such a young mind, but suffering from the pains of the spasms that polio brings. It’s an extremely painful virus. It starts out as. It’s the polio virus that turns into a disease, right? And if one isn’t killed within the first three weeks of getting polio, they, they’re. They’re suffering greatly. And Wilson got his real first taste of existential suffering at such a young age that he would sit in bed at night and just contemplate just how terrible the universe could be.

You know, how could a God exist that would cause such suffering on. On. On me or, you know, people that I love. And for, for him, it was, you know, him in his small, small body and mind at that time. So I think that left an imprint in Bob like that. And this is why maybe like later, the work of H.P. lovecraft appeals to him because there’s a similar theme, you know, it he found in Lovecraft’s work, like these dark, ancient, incomprehensible beings. That ex are so much bigger than puny humans and. And what we. What we care about.

And they’re not benevolent, they’re not necessarily malevolent. They’re not necessarily, like, not on our side. They just don’t really care about us, and they’ll cause us pain in a heartbeat. That’s what Wilson got from H.P. lovecraft years later. This was sort of imprinted in him at a young age. So, as I said, he received a relative cure of the Sister Kenny method, which involved activation of the muscles, movement, stretching, and what. Eventually, for Wilson, he also took on positive thinking. So he was confronted with very existential dangers. Right. There was nothing to be paranoid about at that.

At that age, like, he was. He was in. In physical threat and by, excuse me, by really surmounting a mountain, really, with the help of his mom, he, as I said, received relative, you know, cure from that horrible virus slash disease. Was able to live most of his life still suffering spasms here and there, but it wasn’t debilitating. But my point is that the fact that he was in touch with this real visceral pain at such a young age, I think put him in touch with that wavelength of what could be perhaps, you know, a frustrating motivation behind thinking conspiratorially at times, which is that there’s something wrong.

I don’t know what it is, but I think maybe it’s got something to do with that or those people or this group of people or whatever. Right. Wilson was in touch with the notion of there’s something wrong. I’m not quite sure what it is, but it’s inside me. Right. So that’s such a deep lesson. And then, as I said, being able to sort of overcome this through, you know, and he received a real lesson in this notion of activation and have to keep it moving, you know, don’t you, you know, common phrase in, I guess, certain literature is a move, a muscle, change of thought.

Wilson became very aware of that as well. You know, he was confronted with an extreme challenge at a very young age, and he was able to overcome that for the most part. And I think that was. Was also an imprint for his optimism and his ability to stay motivated, to constantly stay present and find an opportunity to make things better. And, you know, I think as well, like, the more, you know, Wilson was able to study psychology of his own mind and then the kind of sociology, he was able to see that, you know, we’re all the same for the most part.

Humans respond to things very similarly and that. So when you’re faced with such hardship, it’s easier to think conspiratorially. It’s easier to think. It’s easier just to be frustrated and to project that out to the world in some ways. And then when you’re able to sort of achieve a goal, like, it’s easier to start believing in the ability to change things yourself, Which I think ultimately that’s at the heart of optimism is this idea that, like, I, or we can change something to make this better. And conspiracy theory at the heart of that is like, the alarm is going off of like, whoa, we need to change something.

But, you know, things. People are grasping at straws to find out what that is. So I think those that experience sort of just imprinted Wilson to be the voice of someone who could express both of these things and leave that unique perspective for people to. To read in his books and then to. Then they themselves be able to hold these two conflicting notions at the same time. And I think that adds to what becomes his ironic style, as Jesse Walker calls it. Wilson’s whole view towards conspiracy theories itself is not just swallow the pill and believe everything.

They’re litmus tests for your critical thinking skills. Don’t just swallow everything everyone says to you. You can’t do that about anything. Why would you do that about the biggest grand narrative, like stories of all time? You have to apply critical thinking. So, yeah, there’s just a whole there. I think Wilson was able to turn a corner and hold those two perspectives constantly in his work and. And then also let the reader work things out for themselves too, which is also pretty. Pretty gifted. That’s. That’s actually a really interesting take. And it makes a lot of sense that his optimism was shaped by this alternative approach to polio because the vaccine wasn’t available.

It makes me wonder, if he had just gotten the polio vaccine, would that have maybe, like, killed his. His perspective on optimism and of thinking that you can, like, overcome things through positive thinking and just moving around and like, like you said, change a muscle, change of thought that might not have ever even come into contact with Robert Anton Wilson. We might have gotten a completely different person out of that if it weren’t for that early suffering and being forced to figure out a way around it or a way to sort of cope with it. Yeah, that’s a great point, Thomas.

Yeah. And also to the key of being able to. He received the help as well, you know, from his mom, of course. He was a child. But I think that’s a part of the component too, is that Overcoming maybe if there’s a. Look, some conspiracy theories are meant. They later turn out to be true. So they’re not, you know, but some are grand narrative, like just wild theories that seem to be helping someone emotionally more than anything else and trying to say the truth of the matter, you know, and that if we just. Which they might be more paranoid.

So when you’re stuck in a paranoia, it’s isolating and then. But to receive help from another person, I think is a big. That you’re. It breaks the isolation, you know. And that’s a big part of Wilson’s life too. He wrote about all these crazy conspiracy theories, but this, this guy was able to be part of networks of support for people. And then he himself received networks of support from the vicissitudes of life, like how hard life could be for just a regular person living. And he, he endured many hardships. And a major part of that getting through it wasn’t just himself bootstrapping by himself.

I’m a tough stoic. It was. He had an open heart and, and he was able to receive help from people. That’s a major part of this too, you know, he was able to be part of a mutual network of support and be a recipient of such support as well. On the conspiracy theory topic too, I’ve. I’ve talked to a bunch of people and I’ve. I’ve read some articles where there’s almost an ambiguousness about Robert Anton Wilson’s role in, say, popularizing the Illuminati or popularizing certain versions of conspiracy through discordianism and through like, you know, and all of.

And I guess one of the things that comes up with his sort of being directly involved with Timothy Leary and even writing certain passages with him, there’s a question as like, was he an insider? Was he in on some of this conspiracy? Like just, just like Timothy Leary sometimes get accused that he was just an agent of the CIA. He was just one of the. The tendrils that made its way into this counterculture. And Robert Anton Wilson very much was also a voice of counterculture. He was editor, I believe, of like, High Times or Playboy magazine for a while.

So he was in the epicenter of this counterculture. What do you think that he was like, what were his thoughts on being accused of being part of the conspiracy that like, he was in the Illuminati? Thomas, great question. I. I think there’s kind of two parts to that question. I’d love to get into both. I’ll answer the second part first, which is his thoughts, which he wrote about, of being accused of maybe being Timothy Leary’s CIA babysitter. Right. One of the accusations. Right. And that came about in the late 70s, like when Wilson was. Most of his work was now finally being published in the late 70s, and it coincided to when Leary was released from prison in May 1976.

And, you know, the reality is. Well, I don’t want to. The situation is Wilson and Leary were acquaintances since 1964 when Wilson interviewed Leary for the first time for the Realist magazine in a great article called Leary Psychological H Bomb, which is a fantastic read. I talk about it in my book Chapel Perilous the Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. It’s a great scene in the book. So, you know, and also they become friends. They’re kindred spirits, you know, they’re these two wild Irish American free thinking, you know, rebels, you know. And Bob likes this guy.

He’s a wild dude, you know, and Leary was a very interesting character, man. He broke out of prison at the age of 50. Okay. He was. He was a Harvard professor turned, you know, prison escapee. That’s. I don’t know any. Do you know, has Slavaj I ever broken out of prison? I don’t think so. You know, I don’t know any professor that has ever broken out of prison. And like Leary did, you know, and that wasn’t with the help of the CIA. That was with the help of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, you know.

And so in terms of Bob’s responses to, I guess, accusations at times that he was Leary’s CIA babysitter. Well, you know, no. Was his response like quite simply, like, how. How would he be? You know, and. But to maybe perhaps speak on why there was such paranoia it was surrounding Leary. And I mean, I looked at. So, you know, Leary, as I said, escaped from prison. He was put in prison for a marijuana charge that gave him 37 years in prison. It was the harshest, like marijuana charged, prison sentence. Like, I don’t know. Must have been some pretty strong marijuana.

Yeah, that’s great. Very strong strain. And the judge called Leary the most dangerous man in America and locked him away. Leary wasn’t having any of that and escaped from. From prison in 1971. Part of the reason why he was able to escape was because when he worked as a psychologist, he created this thing called the Leary Circumplex, which was a personality test that was hugely popular in institutions like prisons. And so Leary happened to receive. When they were figuring out where to what prison? To put him in high security or low security. They gave him his own test that he and his, his team invented.

Right. So Leary knew how to answer the questions to that, to this, to the test to be put into a very low security prison from which he escaped. Right. And CIA person might do. Yeah, I mean, right. Well, sure. I mean that, that story. Did Leary really, what’s the word? It’s really awesome. Like when you move, when you shimmy past on a wire, you know, he, he, this is his story. He climbed the pole, he got to the roof and he shimmied pat over a wire, you know, to then like a tightrope walk. Yeah, like, you know, but shimmying.

Yes. So I forget the term for it. It’s. You see it in all the awesome like army movies. Like. So this is a good point. I mean, could Leary have just been, you know, let right out and said, right this way, sir. Well, where would the CIA be in that? It would be, you know, in the people helping him escape. Was he himself in the CIA and he just had a easy way to get out? Well, I mean, it was the CIA that arrested him. You know, according to Wilson and others, like, Leary was eventually arrested in Afghanistan when he was, he moved from, he was hanging out with Eldridge Cleaver and his crew in Africa and then he left and then was bouncing around and ended up in Afghanistan on a connecting flight.

And then that’s when the CIA arrested him. And according to Wilson, quite illegally, they pretty much kidnapped Leary. They had no jurisdiction to do this. And what was the reason to like kidnap to arrest just a prison escapee. Like, you know, Leary was probably more like. Well, according to my research, which was a lot, Larry seems more like a Julian Assange character who was, you know, and this is not discounting whether the history of LSD is one that’s first generation is all CIA. Leary is part of the second generation of kind of LSD researchers who are actually psychologists and not these crazy CIA agents just dosing each other just to see what happens, you know, like.

And so Leary became a, A, you know, a real scapegoat for, you know, the kind of collapse of the, the hippie movement. And even Richard Nixon, he was high on Richard Nixon shit list. This is why Leary was again according to Wilson, kidnapped by the CIA all the way in Afghanistan. They spent all this money to do this to Leary. And then, so when they put Leary back in prison, like a whisper campaign began. So immediately when he was put in prison, like literally like immediately before he was even like, briefed by the cops much. The New York Times.

And you could, you could Google this, you could read these New York Times articles. I don’t think they’re paywalled right now. There’s a series of articles from 73, 74, basically saying that Leary was arrested. He’s gonna snitch on everybody in the left, everybody in the underground. He’s gonna snitch. So. So, you know, it wasn’t uncommon at all. This was a tactic from, you know, agencies like the FBI, CIA, but mostly the FBI because it was domestic. It’s called the bad jacket. Right. They did it all the time in cointelpro. It’s to cause confusion and dissent within the leftist underground.

And it worked very well. When they did it to the Black Panthers and other organizations, when they would send fake letters to the leaders of these organizations to get them to fight and want to kill each other. The FBI was doing that. It’s very common knowledge now, you know, cointelpro. And so part of those campaigns to separate people’s, you know, care for these, these, these, these people who are brave enough to take stances in a repressive society like Leary was, is to disinvest them from. From their supporters. So that was immediate, was they were. When Leary was put in jail, the second time was to floated all through the underground that or that Leary was a snitch.

And then it became, I don’t know where, where it became that Leary was a part of the CIA. I never really heard it like that. As I said. I heard it like he had a CIA babysitter. And people accused, like at times, Wilson of being such babysitter. But there was another individual named George Koopman who was accused of being Leary’s sort of intelligence babysitter. And he was with. He worked at one time with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Now those are the fellas to maybe watch. Maybe also Naval intelligence in these realms. Right. Maybe these are the areas to watch.

Right. It’s not just CIA here, right. So, you know, so it would be interesting, like if Leary entertaining that thought for a second, like, and this. Who knows, man? I mean, Bob gets this in his work. Like when you have double, triple, quadruple quintuple agents, they don’t always know that so and so is undercover and so and so is working for who? So you can have one undercover with one agency who has a cover story spying on another undercover and another agency who also has a cover story. And they’re both like watching each other’s cover Stories, each other’s legends, but they’re both undercover, working for other agencies.

Like, this is what makes Wilson so brilliant as a writer. Like, this is what he’s able to get into. An Illuminatus trilogy is showing how fast moving, you know, a deep state world really is. Right. And so I think where it hit the accusation of Wilson in a way of being Leary, CIA babysitter, I think that might have come about because perhaps Leary was so famous and we got out of jail, it’s like, who’s. Who’s this guy next to him? And it was Bob. They did a number of tours together. They, you know, Wilson was very pivotal in resurrecting Leary’s intellectual career.

I have in my book the scene when Leary gets out of prison. Him and his then wife Joanne are staying in the Picos wilderness in New Mexico. They’re, you know, placed there before getting put into whatever it was still probation or something. Right. This was around May 1976. Joanne talks about how Leary was on the phone constantly with Wilson. And what they were doing was Wilson was making moves to get him and Leary’s book that they, you know, collaborated on the periodic table of Energy, which later basically becomes like the. The blueprint for things in Prometheus Rising.

You know, in that book they Discuss basically the 8th Circuit model of intelligence. And, you know, really they would just became kindred spirits and friends according to how Wilson wrote it. Right. Like, and. But I think there were a number of people who weren’t aware of who Bob was. And some of them, I guess the whisper campaign then in the hippie underground at the time then was Leary’s name was Sullied. You know, it was already. It was already dragged through the dirt before he was released from prison. So he already had, as I say, perhaps this bad jacket on him.

You know, there was. And that’s not for out of nowhere, right. He did get into some sort of beef, if you will, with one of his lawyers. Leary did during his trials. And this was a man named Michael Kennedy, who was like a huge kick ass count, you know, civil rights lawyer. But he also, I guess, was. Leary accused him of being kind of like the spokesman for the Weather Underground, which the Weather Underground at the time I think might have been considered a domestic terrorist group. There were a bunch of college students that turned into an underground revolutionary movement who did some wild things in America, one of which was helping Leary break out of prison and sending him to Africa.

And that came about because Leary had five wives or something during his life. So when he was in prison, he had another wife, this woman named Rosemary, and she was the one that it said who had the connections with all these underground people in, you know, all these scenes. So, so that’s the first part. Wilson’s response was to have a hearty laugh because, you know, Bob was, according to him, not in the CIA. And he thought it was funny that this, this, there was these, these, these waves of paranoia that shifted through the scene. I mean the first generation of really dealing with heavy paranoia was, you know, that 60s, 70s kind of hippie generation like.

And Bob was one of those people who was seeking to make sense of what, why are so many people paranoid at times? You know, And I mean, when it came to the first part of your question, which was, you know, could, was it, could Bob have been in the CIA or something like that? Right. Well, and to qualify that a little bit based on everything you just mentioned, sometimes the way that I understand this particular skepticism of Robert Anton Wilson and conflated with Timothy Leary, that connection between the two, but it’s that the counterculture movement had been co opted by intelligence.

And I guess CIA is easy to throw a blanket term in my mind that kind of includes Naval Intelligence and includes oss, includes CIA, includes all of like the William Donovan, it includes all of these different things, Camp X and all these other like LSD adjacent sort of pioneers. But that Robert Anton Wilson to a lot of people also represented a degeneracy in that he worked with Playboy magazine, that he was open to talking with all these horrible druggies and drug addicts and like, you know, counterculture people. And that, that like, who else better if you want to infiltrate counterculture than to get Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary into the fold.

And I guess to an extra qualifier here that being an asset doesn’t necessarily mean being an agent. It just means that you are somehow useful, maybe even unwittingly to you in the same way that you mentioned the CIA was this original sort of way, this first wave of LSD of, of let’s just throw some stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And let’s just see what happens that you can extrapolate that same mentality to now people and the counterculture movement, like, let’s see what happens if we get Robert Anton Wilson in the fold and Timothy Leary, let’s see what happens if we arrest them and let him break out and then arrest them again, just to elevate his status as almost a folk hero, but one that we have, if not control over, but that We’ve got eyes on him.

Like we know what he’s up to, what he’s writing, all the things that he’s doing, so we can sort of trace all the effects of what this Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson experiment are doing. And I get. And to Takhan the other thing too, that, that I’ve seen come up is that we might not even know about the Bavarian Illuminati in the same capacity if it weren’t for this Illuminatus trilogy, bringing it back into the public sphere in a way. And I, and you, you’re probably way more of an expert on Robert Anton Wilson’s take on this, but I remember reading at some point his own words where it was like he thought it would just be funny to blame this, this antiquated 200 year old organization as perhaps the source of all sorts of modern day, you know, like, issues that were going on.

Again, maybe not troll might be a loaded word, but as like an instigator or just as, you know, this like satirical writer. Wouldn’t it be funny if we got people to focus their paranoia on this two century old group of, you know, Bavarians and that this, this combination of factors being adjacent to counterculture, being working at what, you know, a lot of fundamentalists would consider like the, the generation degeneration of culture through Playboy magazine and just his acceptance of, you know, psychedelics, that all those combined marks him as like an agent of chaos. Like a useful agent of chaos.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah. This is great. Sure. I mean, it is. It’s interesting that, you know, of course, when you are writing a biography about a writer who, I mean, went there, he opened the doors of paranoia. I mean, when you enter the realm of paranoia, it’s, it’s. You’re entering chapel perilous, you know, everything is waiting for you with slobbering jaws and chapel perilous, writes Wilson and he, you know, I mean, when you write about these things, eventually it’s not that unusual to think that you then will start getting accused of being an agent in this and, or, you know, a miss or disinformation agent, et cetera, et cetera.

And yeah, I hear what you’re saying. Right. Like, so CIA is just sort of like, you know, a metaphor for intelligence agency, if you will. Right. Different intelligence agencies. And there is, Right, yeah, there’s, there’s some precedent to, to these sort of things where, I mean, let’s just take the C, for example. Right. There’s a book called the Cultural Cold War, I believe, and this book also this writer named Carl Bernstein, who was Woodward and Bernstein, the guys that exposed the Watergate conspiracy from Richard Nixon and his boys. And Carl Bernstein once put out, I think it was a Rolling Stone article in the 70s or 80s that talked about how infiltrated mainstream journalists and journalism was with CIA agents.

Right? So I mean it doesn’t, you know, that’s not a far leap. The CIA was started, it’s like an Ivy League club, you know, out of Yale and stuff like that. So these are hoity toities, right? Like intellectual, you know, English majors like James Jesus Angleton, love modernist poetry and you know, wrote letters to Ezra Pound and EE Cummings things and stuff. So you know, these are, these are, you know, well read people, I suppose. So it’s not a far leap to think that maybe like, oh wow, you know, the Anderson Cooper is a major news person trained at the CIA before he got his break at cnn.

That’s interesting. What’s that about, you know, Anderson Cooper from the, the famous Vanderbilt empire, you know. And so Carl Bernstein in this article many years earlier basically talks about this. You know, how many CIA agents were, you know, how deep CIA might be in American journalism. So perhaps then are there writers that were assets, you know, or on the spectrum, were there writers that were CIA agents? I think, I think William F. Buckley might have been a CIA agent. I know there’s a couple William Buckley’s, but if that’s the one I’m thinking of the one who was a big conservative who actually was part of the, I think, you know, the group that said we don’t let them monetize the eschaton.

You know, this, this Catholic conservatism works very well with the CIA. Actually the CIA was full of Catholic conservatives. You know, James Jesus Angleton was another one one. And William F. Buckley was literally like a writer making money as a writer, but also was a CIA agent. Didn’t let anyone really know it, but he was that. But it did come out, right? So now does the CIA invest in far out sci fi writers slash philosophers who choose to leave their job at Playboy after creating of what he thinks, well, what is a masterpiece and then spends the next five or six years in utter poverty and destitution? I mean, who knows that that could be a deep agent.

That’s a, that’s deep cover, man. That’s, you know what I mean? Like, I mean there are some there then this is not. There are some there are. They’re usually like the Soldiers of Fortune guys that, you know, they are used Literally, as CIA adjacent contractors who go into third World villages and rape, pillage and kill those fellas. Like some of them may be used in trying to kill Fidel Castro and whatnot. Those guys, couple of them might have lived kind of close to the bone, working menial jobs. And maybe that was part of their cover, you know, but maybe they had a, you know, an account here and there to get them through the hard times.

I don’t know. Timothy Leary once said when he was accused of being in the CIA or being used as a CIA was like, I mean, they didn’t pay me enough then, right? And this again, also, that doesn’t discount much either. I mean, paranoia can find. You could find a needle in a haystack from anyone. You could find any reason for anyone to maybe be part of this preconceived idea that one may have. Right? And again, I’m not. I thought of this a lot. Like, what could Wilson have been an agent of some kind? And, and yes, let’s, let’s discount the CIA.

Let’s get into Naval Intelligence, right? And I, I even interject an unwitting asset. Like, it doesn’t necessarily mean that someone was like, hey, do you want to join the CA sign up here that says you agree. It could almost just be that you happen to be in circles that have already been infiltrated and now you’re on the radar and it’s like, hey, hey, let’s just tail this Robert Anton Wilson guy. Let’s tail this Timothy Leary guy. Because wherever he goes, he carries a great amount of influence. And if we could just steer it or if we could just analyze what they’re doing and then bring that back to Langley or wherever the hell they bring the information back to.

I’ve heard the same sort of claims, leveraged against, say, like, William S. Burroughs, that he had such deep insight into what would have been classified sort of research about, you know, insulin shock therapy that was kind of outside of the purview that he normally would have had of just like a writer or a poet, but yet these, like, deep connections and references to very real operations kind of show up in his quote, unquote, fictional works. And I think that it’s. It’s almost in the same bucket. Like, was he getting a paycheck from the CIA? Maybe not, but he might have had a friend or some sort of influences that were.

Were feeding him information. And to him it’s just like, wow, what a great idea for a character in a book that I’m writing. A Naked Lunch or Something. Meanwhile, that guy could have been an agent or that guy could have been an ad. It’s. It’s hard to tell because it’s not like they kept the records that they intentionally then released 50 years later. Right. Yeah. I mean, but it is very interesting with this information that we have now, even just Wikipedia and the Internet, to do a kind of revisionist take on the past because now we have more information than before.

And I mean, it is interesting that. I mean, San Miguel Allende, which is a place in Mexico that became a big place for artist colonies, expatriate American artist colonies, which Wilson went to with his family after leaving Playboy. Arlen’s sister was living there. So they didn’t just go to. They stayed organically with Arlen’s sister. But, I mean, and a ton of artists have, like, been to San Miguel Allende. They live there, whatever, whatnot. It’s a really cool kind of like, history place. However, they’re. One of the persons involved in kind of creating San Miguel Allende as an artist colony for expatriates was someone who was in the OSS during World War II.

So, I mean, this idea of earmarking intellectuals and artists and either working with them as, like, William F. Buckley, like, you know, you go through the program again, Anderson Cooper went to the CIA program. You could Google that, you know, and then he just decided to become a journalist and become, you know, know, have a clear path to the top. Now, likewise, Tucker Carlson mentioned that he tried to get in but then wasn’t accepted or ended up, like, not joining the same program that Anderson Cooper was in. Yeah, Tucker had, you know. You know. Yeah, he.

They were. Both were the. I mean, again, it’s journalists, right? Like, they. Of course, you. You want. These are. They could be used as one could be a true investigative journalist or one could be a propaganda puppy. It. Right. And viewers or readers can’t really know at first. They have to analyze your work and whatnot and really look and see and study. I mean, I spent, you know, eight years really, like, zeroing in on Wilson’s life and asking. I mean, this was definitely an interesting path. I mean, I sent, you know, to cut to the chase there about Wilson and the CIA.

I mean, I wasn’t able to reach out to other intelligence agencies. I mean, I sent two letters, you know, information requests, one to the FBI and one to the CIA and the. Now, now, this is a funny thing, right? I mean, I. I was living at that time in. In Hawaii in, like, the. On Aahu. The one tiny section that you wouldn’t ever think was the hood, but it was kind of the hood because that’s where artists get placed, right? And I went to the post office one day, right, Surrounded by a bunch of sort of, you know, local Hawaiians who, you know, there is a bit of a skeptical look at, you know, mainlanders, and then maybe, you know, a lighter shade of mainlander.

Yeah, Howly, you know, you could be quickly seen as like a howly, you know, which is sort of just kind of like part of the settler invaders, right? The people who basically took their land from them. And so you’re seen with suspicion. You’re already placed as a type of other. Right? And so, you know, I went in to the post office this one day after, you know, requesting this information about Timothy Leary. Excuse me, about Robert Anton Wilson. And I have, right there, this person handing me the letters, looking at me because. From the CIA, you know, to me, right? And so they could think, is this guy in the CIA? You know, which is kind of funny.

And. And so, I mean, Wilson, obviously, this was not lost on him. You know, he said that, you know, this. This just happens, right? Like. And in that letter, I received what’s called the glomar response. G L O R M A R response. And this is kind of like a standard response that these intelligence agencies now give. And it’s actually they were sued to stop giving this response because it’s not enough information. And actually they leave it as sort of ambiguous, which, you know, again, keeps the flame burning for one’s own, if you want. Right? And, you know, they thought they were funny to the CIA when they first.

The glomar response. I don’t quite remember it offhand, but it’s something like, you know, we may or may not have information on the person that you’re looking for. This person may or may not have been involved in our shift it or. Or not, but we can’t tell you. You know, we can neither confirm nor deny sort of response. That’s it. Thank you. Yes. We can neither confirm nor deny. So, you know, the CIA’s first tweet on Twitter before Musk took over was like, we can neither confirm nor deny that this is a tweet from the CIA.

Like, bro, very funny. And like, so, I mean, there were people, like I said, said James Jesus Angleton, who was. Were friends with, like, there were people who are, like, publishers and whatnot, who would be, like, maybe adjacent or agents or used by the CIA here and there. Wilson as a useful idiot, which is, you Know that term of being used by an agency without knowing it. I mean, he. It’s funny, he commented on that in one of his last interviews in 2001 in an interview series called Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, Parentheses or oh, Bob exposes his ignorance.

And that was that. You know, perhaps maybe he was used as a useful. Ignorant. As a useful idiot at one time or other. He didn’t specify in what way. I think it’s because he was writing about these things. And also, I mean, he was aware, I mean, Wilson was aware that there were agents about. I mean, in 19, when he was working at Playboy. Well, I’ll get into that maybe later. Like, he, he was very aware of agents and whatnot. He, he had a. Also another thing, this was the real jewel that’s in my book is Wilson had this thing called a Red Squad file.

And this was a file on him by the branch of the Chicago Police Department in the late 1960s. New York City had a branch as well, and maybe other cities as well. Maybe it’s called the Red Squad. This was called the Red Squad in Chicago. And the Red Squad file, the Red Squad was set up to basically search out communists, subversives, anarchists, feminists, anyone that, that had the gall to actually be against the Vietnam War and who protested in the street against the. The pointless killing of Vietnamese women and children and American soldiers dying for what reason? You know, Americans were told one reason why they were fighting, but some of them saw through that.

This is about something else. This isn’t about fighting communism per se. This is some other shit that’s going on. And they protest like an extension of McCarthyism in a way. It was extremely. It was. Yeah, and it was, it was pre McCarthyite, you know, like the Red Squad. If I, if I’m correct, there was kind of two generations of it. Like the first sort of generation was. It came up as a response to the first red. Red scare that happened in america after the 1917 Russian Revolution when, you know, America got scared and I mean, maybe they should have that These, these crazy Bolsheviks wanted, you know, worldwide communist revolution, right? And the work, you know, workers unite.

Workers of the world unite. While American industrialists weren’t having that. That in 1917, they had a whole other way of running their economy. So there was paranoia like they didn’t want agents of Russia coming in and, and destroying the, the. The moral fiber of America. This is where this is. That’s, you know, in 1917, 1920s, this is where the first Red Squad was. Was organized in Russia. Not Russia in Chicago. And like. And so one of their targets was feminists at that time. Like there guy who invented like the Red Squad. He says some you could.

All this is verifiable online, right? From, from newspapers. This guy who created the first Red Squad, like had a lot of really like harsh opinions of women in general. It’s kind of shocking, you know. And Then so post McCarthy, right? Like, you know, the Cold War is all about America fighting communism. I mean the Korean War that occurs in the early 1950s is the first war of the Cold War. It’s fighting the commun. Right. Korea gets split between the Northern Korean commies and then the South Korean free people, you know, because America’s there introducing baseball and whatnot, you know.

And so fast forward to the 60s, like the, the, you know, J. Edgar Hoover is at the helm of the FBI. This guy is a paranoid cross dressing like maniac. This guy is a strange dude. And as Nixon said about J. Edgar Hoover with, with envy. You know, Hoover had a file on everyone. You know, Hoover was this guy, he was, he was this ultimate paranoid dude, just like James Jesus Angleton at the CIA. These guys are putting recording devices and everything, you know, trying to record, get, get dirt on everyone. Meanwhile, Hoover likes. No, nothing against it at all, man.

Just why are your policies against it? Hoover was a cross dresser. Hoover love putting on makeup and high heels and a nice fancy dress. You know, he was going undercover. He was under. He was definitely. He was going way undercover with, with Roy Cohn, who is the mentor to President Trump. You know, Roy Cohn also was going undercover a lot too. He was part of that lace mafia or whatever. Yeah, the famous quote was that Roy Cohn isn’t gay, he just likes to have sex with men. Yeah, they’re gay, right? Remember Al Pacino playing Roy Cohn in a movie or something? And, and him saying he’s like, I’m not gay, they’re gay.

But he. So you know, kind of digressing here, but to show the kind of fertile ground that already existed in America in terms of like an institutional paranoia, right? Like perhaps there are other ways that the American establishment could have responded and reacted to this notion of. I mean, I’m sure there were agents of Bolshevik agents that wanted to, to agitate working people to overthrow their capitalist masters and form a union of workers and whatnot, you know, and there are also probably, you know, it’s not like maybe, well, Stalin comes after Lenin and then Stalin is an absolute madman.

So, you know, it’s a complicated thing, right? Like, but America’s kind of institutional response was like, like overkill. You know, kill. Killing a fly with a sledgehammer. This is not uncommon. And this historically happens by the powers that be. Instead of choosing the logical way to fix shit, they, they, they just seek to kill a fly with a sledgehammer. The NSA did it many, many years later when they instituted their mass spying program on all Americans during the Bush administration. They could have done a simpler, easier program that was available, yet they chose to do a more expensive, massive spying program that spied on every single American.

Almost like that’s documented. This writer named, former NSA guy named Thomas Drake talks about that. But so just saying, like, this is. This is the world that exists there and perhaps still exists, right? Like, and where this response is to just create departments that are. Are they legal? Are they questionably legal? So this was. The Red Squad was a department within the Chicago Police Department that they were, you know, in constant contact with the FBI and their main focus. So there was sort of like perhaps a national conversation because the FBI is very organized nationally. That’s the whole point, right.

So they could communicate perhaps from agents in Chicago to New York. And this is what they did. This is the. To the home office. Hoover takes a look, whatever. And so fast forwarding to Wilson and, and Arlen, Bob and his wife Arlen being spied on by the Chicago Red Squad in the late 60s. All the kind of like, activist activity that they were doing, which was kind of traditionally leftist anarchist stuff. At the time. Arlen was involved in, you know, Women Against Vietnam War and whatnot. And again, because she was a feminist who was against the war, that got a major target on her back.

I like, it’s. Yeah. That it’s not hard to see, like, the institutions, you know, they, they don’t like women speaking up. Right. And so Bob’s involvement with groups that he was involved in got him attention. But what was interesting, like speaking to Playboy, he, he, he never really wrote about this. Wilson. I learned about this story that I’m about to tell because he told this at a talk. Right. Right before he talked. Even right before the talk. Right. Right before someone pressed record on the talk. This was in a talk in San Francisco. I think it was like December 4, 2001.

I saw him speak and he said, right before the talk, he says, you guys want to know how I became a paranoid? And everyone’s like, yeah, what the. And I had just eaten like a weed cookie, so I was getting really high, you know. And then here’s Bob Talking about paranoia. And I’m like, oh. And he tells a story, and I put it in my book, Chapel Perilous, about how one day he’s working at Playboy. A mysterious Playboy executive comes into his office. An executive who has an office on the floor with all the writers and not with the other executives.

An executive who Bob never sees going to meetings, but he sees this guy taking celebrities out to the Playboy Club. He’s a schmoozer type of executive. He comes into the office and sits on. Sits down and immediately tells Bob. He says, you’re in the Red Squad files. You’re being surveilled by the Red Squad. And this was a very sort of, like, scary thing to think about. And Bob was like, what do you mean, why am I on the Red Squad files? And the guy said to him, you’re running guns for the Black Panthers. And Bob was like, what? I’m not running guns for the Black Panthers.

What are you talking about? And the executive says to him, well, I have a guy who is a confidential informant for the cops, but he is also an informant to me. So he heard another informant through the wire. It even could have been him tell the. The cops this, that you’re running guns for the Black Panthers. And Wilson was. He still. He’s like, no, no, no, no. He’s like, I help with their free breakfast program. I help with their lunch program. And at the time, yeah, Wilson was they, you know, hanging out with some Black Panthers.

And. And the executive was like, okay, I believe you. I believe you. He’s like, don’t get any ideas. Don’t, Don’t. Don’t do that stuff. But I’ll tell you, I’ll make sure that your name does not come up in these files while you’re working here. And while you’re working here. Yep. And sure enough. And then this was. Because, again, this guy. I mean, who was this mysterious guy? He. He even had his own little spy in the. The. On the. The criminal world. His own little spy that was a confidential informant. Right. As well. So this guy was informing to the police, but then also giving information to this executive.

Right. And so, sure enough, when I accessed the files, you know, many, many years later, and as far as I know, Wilson never even knew about these files, never even was able to access them. From the time that Wilson, Bob, and Arlen were In Chicago from 1966 to 1971, Arlen’s name pops up every single year. Right. Wilson’s name pops up once at the very beginning, and then never again. Even though he was going to a lot of protests and his name pops up only one more time. But this was after he’d already left Playboy when Arlen and he went back to Chicago from Mexico to sign some, to sign a contract for some book deals.

And they were at a protest, a Mayday protest for the, the, the hay market, the Haymarket affair, remembrance on May 1, 1972. And I have a long file on that. You know, Wilson was definitely watched at that. And Wilson was no longer at Playboy, which is very interesting. Is Playboy a part of the degeneration of, of the Western society? Boobies? I think bombs are more destructive than boobs, you know, I think, let me tack on to this particular claim because I guess, yeah, boobies versus bombs, but also some of the, the idea, the unsubstantiated maybe, but ideas that Hugh Hefner and the origins of Playboy was really just another sort of blackmail operation that they would get celebrities or high ranking anyone into these parties and put them in compromising situations and just like, like a J.

Edgar Hoover where everything is microphone, everything is being recorded in the secret passages underneath the Playboy Mansion out to, you know, everyone else’s houses. That, that it wasn’t just about, you know, boobies, but it was about blackmail more so than anything else. Like an OG Epstein or an OG Diddy or something. Sure. I mean, I guess I would, where I would go next with that is, I mean, where, where, where are the claims? Right. Where are the stories? I mean, it’s been many, many years since, since then, many opportunities for people to write exposes about Hugh Hefner.

He’s been dead for years now. I mean, we’re, we’re, I mean, Epstein, that story came out before he even died. Did he? The story, Epstein being a great example. Where, where are the arrests and the names in the Black Book? And it’s, I guess the conspiratorial explanation of this is that, that the black, the Black book just changed hands. And whoever owns that black Book, whoever can destroy American dynasties just by saying, hey, look, here’s the proof that that’s where the power’s at. So revealing that to the public gets rid of all the power that it’s concentrated in this little spot.

So if Hugh Hefner did have some sort of record, again, we’re, this is conspiracy speculation. Yeah, I love it. You did have the receipt receipts. Having the receipts is far more powerful than showing them to everyone. The second you show them to everyone, there goes all of your power. You don’t have any Bargaining chips left. Oh, yeah. And then that’s when you enter the realm of poker, you know, because you’re not showing your hand to people then. So what are you doing? You could be bluffing as well. I mean, we get into this realm now, we’re way beyond the realm of if we bring a either or mindset, as Wilson would call an Aristotelian.

In either or. The maybe logic. Right? Yeah, one. One needs maybe logic to. To. To not go crazy in this realm. And, I mean, there are plenty of crazy. Let’s just stay on the topic CIA agents. I mean, there was even that interesting TV show Homeland, that, uh, Claire Danes’s character, she’s schizophrenic and she’s a CIA agent, which kind of makes a lot of sense. Sense, because there’s been a lot of stuff put out, you know, especially by a. A writer today and whose name escapes me. I think he wrote this book. I don’t know, the Devil’s Played Chessboard or something like that, which he.

He writes about James Jesus Angleton. And this was already known. I write about it in my book. Wilson wrote about it as well. James Jesus Angleton was like. Like a Philip K. Dick character. His paranoia was off the Richter scale. This guy was so paranoid, you know, that he thought that the Russian mole, because, you know, his high time was during the Cold War, was deep in the CIA. So he was constantly seeking to look for these Russian moles in the CIA. At one point, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t want to mix metaphors, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he even started wondering if he himself was the molecule without even knowing it, too.

Scanner Darkly. But, like, you know. But I have to. You know, this is just the way my mind would work, too, if such a speculative thought came up. Right. It’s like. Well, on the topic of Epstein’s black book, I do believe that this writer, Nick Bryant, who. Who has a. Who talks a lot about this. Many. It’s one of his books. Books. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a very disturbing and very interesting read. And he. Many, many years ago. Before Epstein even died. No, it was right after Epstein died, but before it became a huge story. I believe he.

He published the black book. He had the black book published in. I don’t know if it was Vanity Fair or something like that. He told me this. I had a conversation with him about this, and then I found it. He said. I. He. He’s like, I saw the Black book. Book, right. And he said he Saw George Bush’s. The. The. George Bush, the President, the first president’s name all up in. That is. Who’s. Isn’t it funny how his name hasn’t really come up right. In any of these Epstein things? And who was George Bush the senior.

Oh, he just happened to be the head of the CIA, who then became the President of the United States, who after, you know, Reagan was, you know, almost assassinated by Hinckley, who. The Hinckley family was friends with the Bush family. Right. So it is interesting, this guy, Russ Baker wrote a book about really going in on. What’s it called, the Bush family Dynasty or something like that. That might not be the name, but it goes in on the Bush family and really explores how. The unauthorized biography of Bush or something. Do I have the book around here? Oh, here it is.

Yeah. Family of Secrets. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Russ Baker. I mean, this guy, his. His. His whole target is George Bush senior in this. And he builds a very, you know, our strong argument for the fact that, you know, George Bush senior is a deep, deep state agent for many, many years, even possibly present at Dealey Plaza that day that JFK was killed. What. What. Why was George Bush senior there? You know, this guy was the head of the CIA who then became president. I mean, that. That was in 1988. Right? So we’re going deep here in.

In deep state manipulations of the public mind, if you will. And, you know, circling back then, too, as well, because this is a nice thing to keep returning to. Well, then also, too, though, with. With the allegations then, or claims and allegations against Hugh Hefner having these sex parties where, you know, things were being recorded and whatnot. I mean, I would. Again, I counter, yo, where are the receipts, man? Show me those receipts. Because they’re, you know, there are at least stories, right? There were never even any stories that have come out about Hugh Hefner doing this stuff.

Really. I mean, just as if at. And things can always change. But there’s been really never any stories. Timothy Leary never got me toed retrospectively, right? Like, and this guy married, like, five women. Like, I mean, was he a serial polygamist, right? Or was he an honest guy who was able to communicate with women and somewhere in between or whatever, there’s a biography about Tim Leary that’s very unkind to him. I guess that was kind of a conspiracy theory against Leary, but. Or was it telling the truth? I mean, you have to read the book and think about it for yourself.

And Wilson himself, again, like, say, linking up with, well, I’ll say it like this. I put in the book. He was headhunted to join Playboy in 1966, meaning the editor who was Hugh Hefner’s right hand man, this guy named A.C. spektorski, who is a writer and an editor of Gray Great Heft at the time, well respected in the industry. He sought Wilson out to, to write for Playboy. They want to get some fresh blood in there. And it’s a nice sort of ambiguous story. As to 8, there’s two origin stories as to why Spektorski reached out to Wilson.

Paul Krasner tells one and Wilson tells another. According to Paul Krasner, Spectorsky saw an article Wilson wrote for Krasner’s pioneering magazine, the Realist. And it was called like, Hugh Hefner is a Virgin. And, and this is Bob going in on Hugh Hefner, basically equating him to like Elon Musk level of pretentious stupidity. Right? Someone who should have very little say or weight or opinion in anything political anywhere. Right? Like Bob was saying this about Hugh Hefner. He was like, just keep putting out pictures of boobies, bro. Don’t, don’t get involved in talking about political economy and culture and everything like that.

And I mean, it’s interesting because in that article. Yeah, yeah, Bob’s, Bob’s even taking the position that, you know, this is slightly maybe. What are you doing here at Playboy? Are you, you, are you pro sexual revolution or are you continuing the exploitation of women and men? Right? Which is, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s so interesting. It’s a fiery, you know, takedown, Right? That’s another good either or maybe logic sort of situation, right? Both. Yeah, because both in the sense that Wilson later writes another article that he said was the reason why he got hired because Paul Krasner said Spectorski read this article, or Hugh Hefner read it and was like, let’s get this guy, right, Writing for us.

He roasted us or something. Which is interesting. Like maybe the way into these big places is to kick these people in the nuts, you know, like just insult them. Like D. Reynolds outside the nightclub. And always sunny when Dennis tells her to insult the, the doorman. That’s how they get in the club. It’s like the, the negging technique, right? Yes. Just punch up, guys. Don’t punch down. Punch up. So the article that Wilson said that got him the job is a really great article. And I think it’s called Confessions of a Schlockmeister. And that was also published in the Realist a few years after the Hugh Hefner is a virgin article.

And that’s Wilson telling the story so well as he does about his time working for Playboy knockoffs, right. Run by this, you know, publisher of ill repute, if you will, but a legend of pulp. This guy named Myron Foss, who had a, you know, he put out a ton of magazines, pulp magazines of different genres. So detective magazines, you know, these. All these nudie magazines which were all rip offs of Playboy. You know, that’s what Myron Foss did. There was nothing original. It was just rip off the formula, let’s put it out. And it was schlock, right? That was old school schlock.

And Wilson and Arlen might have worked there too, writing like romance schlock. But Wilson found it kind of liberating for his imagination in a way. Like he wrote for one of the magazines that are gone to the paranormal and UFOs. He had like a UFO column in that, one of these Myron Foss schlock magazines. I’ll set it up in the sense that Wilson was hired by myron Foss around 1965 when he and his family were living back in the East Coast. And he worked for Myron Foss for a number of months, not sure if it was a full year or not.

And he got the job because he answered an ad in the back of maybe the Village Voice or some other newspaper. And he knew that there was something of up when he was at the office or something. And I forget what it was, but I have it in the book, I have it in my book about it. He’s like, you know, you’re going to be working five different magazines or something. And then that’s when he figured, like, oh, this is like a schlock factory. Okay, now I know what we’re doing here. And. But he talks about, you know, he wrote for art magazines like Jaguar, where he was able to, you know, know, bring in some intellectual discussion.

So he interviewed like William s. Burroughs in 1965 for Jaguar. And you know, he would seek to, as he said, he at one time provided the captions to these pictures, right? So today there’s, you know, webcams where the people engaging in the sex work are speaking and talking or whatever, right? But at the time, the magazines, you know, they had obviously these captions. So, you know, he would have these, you know, bimbos or whatever, you know, talking about like beatniks and, you know, writers and stuff like that. So this was Wilson’s way of like throwing a cog in the, in the machine, in a way, adding some intellectual discussion to, you know, the arousal of your lower chakras.

You know, Wilson already is doing something very interesting. He’s, he’s, he’s, he’s, he’s asking you to, to. Don’t just spooge it out, bro. Pull it up. Think, use your brain. You know what I mean? Like, this is, this is. Wilson is the label of a trickster because basically he does what great artists are supposed to do, right? And it’s the whole. The old axiom of never judge a book by its cover. Like, you think you may know, like, what this person is saying or doing just on an initial interaction with it. But as we all know, that’s never enough.

An initial interaction is never enough to fully know what’s going on with something. And so many great artists are. They do that. You know, they’re like, they’re like, oh, you think it’s like this. But then when you really start reading or looking, wow, it’s really like this. So Wilson, you think he’s just a kooky conspiracy theorist guy, but really when you start reading, he’s like a phenomenologist of high intellectual abilities, but he’s also a stoner intellectual. And he does not predict himself in his books sometimes as well, but sort of getting off track here, but bringing it back in to Wilson gets hired anyway, you know, by Spectorsky, this article he ends up writing, Confessions of a Schlockmeister, I think think is.

Is so funny. It’s so great. And all these articles that the Realists are available online at the Realist Archive. It’s a really great website. You could read all this stuff there. And he ends up, I guess Myron Foss asks him to edit, you know, this magazine. It’s supposed to be a big break. And the guy says to him, he’s like, look, don’t make it too egghead and don’t make it too likes, like, like lascivious or something like that. So he, he tries to do that, but he gets fired because it’s too egghead or whatever, you know, And Wilson knows he’s getting fired and, and he does it.

And then he writes this great article about it. And possibly A.C. spectorski reads this article and is like, wow, this guy is a brilliant writer. And he also has experience in editorial in this sort of line of work. So, you know, and Bob was also an editor as well in previous magazines, like, and Journals. So Playboy was a, was A a natural career step. It was also one of the most successful magazines at the time. That’s not to say, I mean I also have it in my book as well. You know, this, the. I put this a lot in the book.

Like, you know, there. One thing I’m trying to square, I guess is like there are great writers, artists, things, institutions, they’ve done great things for humanity. And then that same writer, artist, person, institution could be a, like have a real dark, horrible side to them. And this current age is because of all this information and communication technology. I think we’re able to see the darkness, shadow of people quicker than ever before. And so we’re faced with this confrontation of how do you square this? You know, the whole totality of like the human psyche, the darkness and the light.

And Wilson was never afraid to go to the dark places, but his mind was like illuminating and he shined a light and that’s what he did. He’s a beacon of Chapel Perilous. You know, Chapel Perilous is a way station that you may find yourself in along your path to whatever you may call it, the metaphor you choose, but self actualization of the highest regard, really feeling why you’re alive and what the whole point of this is for you individually, that’s your path to the Holy Grail. And you could get taken on off and get trapped in the Chapel Perilous and spend your whole life there.

And if we’re getting really dynamic and cosmological with it, spend many lives stuck there. And so Wilson is one of those like brave, hanging with the metaphor here, brave knights who stand still in the temple, you know, shining a light that and presenting a map that could help you escape. Because the way I see it right now, the collectively the world is in Chapel Perilous. I see more individuals stuck in their own type of Chapel Perilous than ever before. People are stuck in this like crazy state of mind and it’s a wild time that we’re living in.

And I think the way that Wilson walked through his own Chapel Perilous and was able to take careful notes and maps. This is why people who are not just Wilson fans should read this book because you’ll see very clearly like a map that this person utilized who chose to live a life by the accord of their own, you know, true will, you know, this guy chose to be an artist. That’s not an easy path to be in America at all. You know what I mean? And so an artist is supposed to reflect mankind, womankind unto themselves.

This is the Role of a true artist is to show a mirror and reflection. So Wilson did that throughout his whole career. He’s an extremely important artist in that regard. And, and him being a beacon of shining light in the chapel, Perilous. I mean, his work is valuable, I think, in helping people who might be trapped in paranoid states of mind at least learn about Metanoia. It’s a spectrum, right? There’s paranoia, which is this idea that everything is connected, but it’s all in a conspiracy to just take you down now. Wow, wow. What secrets are we holding where we’re being that targeted and all that money is being spent specifically on us to have a whole cadre of gang stalkers following us around all day, you know, like bumping into us at the supermarket or, you know, parking in front of a parking spot too long.

These gang stalkers are really bad, you know what I mean? Like, if we all go around walking, think that we’re all being gang stalked, like, that’ll lead to a very weird and interesting society. And I think we’ll. Wilson saw that, as did Philip K. Dick, you know, But Wilson’s whole take on it was, we’re not there yet, we don’t have to go there. And there’s a much better way to live and there’s so much potential. And I really made it a point to put it in my book that like, Wilson is a voice of like nuclear fusion.

If I’m to choose a metaphor. Right, Wilson, nuclear fusion is, is this. We just achieved it in December 2002. Humanity just achieved something that could bring more energy empowered. It could, it would, it would be a whole new stage of human evolution. Once humanity is able to fully implement nuclear fusion and if we’re able to transcend these, these stupid states of mind, these bigoted states of mind that say, well, you’re Chinese. Oh, you’re Russian, you’re. You’re Ukrainian, you’re Palestinian, you’re Israeli. Fuck you. You’re over there, I’m over here. You know, like, I think this is like a last minute bug out that people are going through.

It’s like an acid trip. It’s like a heavy ayahuasca trip. Like you’re confronted with the paranoia first, you’re confronted with everything crazy first. And if you’re able to maintain and breathe through it and get through it, you don’t even need to do acid and ayahuasca for this. Just, just study the hero’s journey, if you will, the heroine’s journey. If you could get through it and not Lose your shit and not destroy everyone and have someone destroy you. Like, there’s. You get to the other side, and the other side is joy. And that’s something that Wilson had a lot of and he was able to access.

Well. And I would. I would almost suggest, too, that Prometheus Rising is an example of that, of, like, completely switching your mindset and opening it up to new kind of perspectives. And I. To lead that into a question, I’m curious. What do you think? Think for someone unfamiliar with Robert Anton Wilson, what is the definitive Robert Anton Wilson book or article? Or if, like, you know, you’re. You’re on. You’re on Death’s Door, you only got time to read one more book before you die, and you’re like, I just want to know what Robert Anton Wilson was about.

What would you be able to pinpoint one particular. Sure, Thomas. Yeah, I think maybe you might. You might have said it right there. I mean, maybe it’s Prometheus Rising, Ask Me Tomorrow, and maybe it’s Illuminatus Trilogy, you know, maybe it’s Cosmic Trigger. But I think for the purposes of, like, wanting to get a real understanding of what his mission was, if you will. Right. His intellectual desires and Prometheus Rise. And like you said, it ends quite joyfully, the book, you know, like. And that’s his intention. Like, Wilson was a huge fan of Beethoven. He loved classical music.

He understood, like, you know, the structures of. From the hero’s journey to the hero’s journey of a Beethoven song. You know, crescendo, decrescendo, the Rising, you know, explosive, joyous moments. I mean, he’s even. He’s tapped in, man. He. There’s something that he understands, and it’s. And it’s communicated in that book. Book, you know, that in that book, he’s. He’s Talking about the 8th Circuit model of intelligence, which pretty much is him and Leary. He gets very much associated with this. Makes sense that that’s him. Him and Leary’s sort of scientific metaphor for individual and collective human evolution and development, which is a quite optimistic model.

We could get into, you know, how true every little circuit metaphor is, but overall, it’s positive and optimistic metaphor for viewing life, you know. And so within Prometheus Rising, Wilson goes through these eight circuit model of intelligences, which is the way that what he contrasts his and Leary’s work with are very contemporary intellectual thinkers. Like, Wilson is not referencing, you know, the. I don’t know, just Alice Bailey and Michel Zek, you know, or. Or, you know, Whatever. Rom, Rom. You know, Wilson’s not channeling. His books are not full of channeled, you know, just kind of screeds.

He’s, he’s doing what now a ton of academics are doing who study the Western esoteric tradition in universities across the world. Leary. Excuse me. Wilson was an intellectual, right? So when you read Prometheus Rising, you’re getting this synthesis. Another one of his great gifts of like work from Gurdjieff to Carl Jung to. But then Sigmund Freud to even post Freudians like Erich Fromm perhaps or Wilhelm Reich. Then he’s introducing James Joyce into the mix. I mean, and then quantum entanglement, it’s pretty much all there, like within that book Prometheus Rising. And then he offers those exercises to do after every chapter.

That’s what stands out the most to me in the Prometheus Rising is that he’ll get into very like high order magic, esoteric kind of thing, things that you might have come across before. But then he tells you, now go out into the real world and here’s how you, you know, determine for yourself. Like one of the, maybe the low hanging fruit examples of this is there’s one chapter inside Prometheus Rising where the whole premise is to find money, that, that everywhere you look now you’re going to stare at the ground and you’re going to imagine yourself, himself just finding a quarter on the ground.

And at first you’re just doing it mentally, you’re just like imagining that you’re finding quarters. And then he sort of has this, this premise that at a certain point you will find an actual quarter. And now the question is left up to you as the reader and the practitioner. Did you manifest that quarter or did you just make it so that you were hyper aware of the quarter being there? And I guess in that maybe logic space, it’s like, is there a difference between those two things? Oh man, great example, Thomas. Yeah, and so fun to think about when doing that exercise and, and thinking back later that day to ask that question, right? Like, because I feel like, you know, finding change on the street, you don’t think much about it.

You’re like, oh, a quarter. Nice, cool. But then when Wilson asks you to think about it like this, I think that it’s a great exercise. And this is one of his skills too, because of putting attention to our own power of perception. And this is where it infuses his love of, and insights gained from Buddhist meditation and general semantics. General semantics is a school of thought that was invented by this guy named Alfred Korzebski, after he published this huge book called Science Insanity, which essentially comes down to what we would call now, today, like a process philosophy.

Things are always moving. You can’t say anything is essentially this or that. Doing so gets you caught in kind of mental traps. And in a world that doesn’t really exist, Wilson is constantly seeking, and this is why he’s a great phenomenologist, to draw people’s awareness to right here, right now. You know, we could get lost in the sauce, we could mistake. And he gets this from general semantics. The map for the territory, meaning we have an amazing capacity as human beings and ability. This is what perhaps makes us stand out from other animals, is that we can create imaginary realms in our head and then project that out into the world and literally see.

See what’s going on in our head. Is this what he called a reality tunnel? Is that pretty much what that would be, or is there a better interpretation of that? No, I mean, that. That’s a great way to put it. That’s a part of this construction of a reality tunnel, which. That was Timothy Leary’s term. And. Yeah. So a reality tunnel, that would be a component of what constructs say, a reality tunnel. Why, you know, how are there reality tunnels really? Which that means is how is it that we can literally. Two people can be in the same room and see two different rooms.

Right. He had a really good example of this. One stood out to me. And he was trying to describe this concept of a reality tunnel and two different people seeing different things. And it was. I think he was also conflating a little bit with, like, quantum mechanics. And it was like a mundane example, which I think made it the perfect one. But he. And I’m going to butcher this a little bit. I’ll paraphrase it, but it was. Was in a talk where he mentioned that he was trying to figure out something to do with where he lived or he wanted to get, like, a permit.

And he writes in. And he. And he finds out that technically where he was living wasn’t really in the county that he thought he lived in. And they directed him to some municipality. So then he writes the municipality. And municipality is like, well, technically, you’re not within our municipality either. You’re in this, like, other district that wasn’t fully, like, sort of acquired by either of these different government regulatory, you know, like, sort of abstract boundaries. And he makes this point like, this is me in quantum state. Like, I am both in the county and not in the county.

I’M both in the municipality and not in the music. Like, it depends on which sort of rule book that you’re following at that time as to whether or not you’re in this quantum state or not. And he. He makes a really compelling point that even this idea of quantum state and quantum mechanics, it’s only within the realm of our own definition of it. Like, you couldn’t be in this quantum state unless someone had written what a quantum state is. And then you decide, like, which check marks you fill in. And that the. The way that I interpret it is he was kind of saying that it’s not a literal or specific thing.

You can’t actually be in or out of this quantum state. All you can be is in or out of. Of our definition of what the quantum state would be. So you’re kind of always living within your own definitions of what things are. It’s. It’s. It gets really hard. But when he described it in the very mundane way, because I think everyone’s been in a similar situation where you thought you were in group A and someone tells you you’re in group B, and then you go over to group B and they’re like, well, technically, you’re in group C and you’re just like, I guess I’m all of these things.

Oh, yeah, I love it. Which is like the heart of all great comedy. Right? The surprise. And like the. These maps that we have suddenly are not working. And the surprise of that. A lot a laugh will come from that, if you will. Right. Like, what? I’m not an A, I’m in B. What the. You know, or at least the way that Wilson is able to translate all of that. I think it’s full of laughs. Yeah, that. I love that scene. That’s. That’s from a talk. I believe that’s a scene from maybe Logic, the documentary lies and ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, that.

I believe that was Bob in Germany with the help of a friend of his translating. And of course, Bob speaking with this heavy Brooklyn accent. And that translator was great, too. That lady, she was really funny because she’s communicating both with a heavy German accent to the questioner and. And then just breaks it down very New York like to Bob, which I thought she was really funny. And yeah, I think her name is Nancy Durrell. She still lives in Germany. I think I spoke with her. And. Yeah, I love that. I love that part. And that’s.

Yeah. Bob illustrating so in such a, you know, erudite and funny way, this. The idea of quantum uncertainty. Right. The position of where the electron is, you know, depends on when we look at it, when we measure it. So within that quantum realm, if we follow these wild theories, like from, was it John Wheeler, the uncertainty principle, you know, that we can’t predict where the electron is going to be, which contradicts classical physics, which allows us to do things like fly airplanes, like we can predict the position of an atom, an electron, an object moving through space and time based on the classical laws of Newtonian physics.

Now that we can’t do that in quantum physics, this presents a problem because an airplane, we know, oh, we’ll take seven or eight hours to get from this place to that we can understand where it’s going to go. That’s logical, that’s rational. But when an electron suddenly appears here and there, it’s, it seems magical and shocking. And all that we can say is that it exists in potential, in potentia, you know, and that it’s, it’s sort of this relationship to the observer or the instrument making the observation of where it’s going to appear, which is so mind boggling.

And for, you know, I mean these discoveries in quantum physics were made in the 1930s. So for the next decades, you know, all these great thinkers were contemplating the ontological effect of, of such discoveries. And Wilson was all up in that mix. He was, he hung out with a whole generation of physicists that were questioning the what, what are the implications of the reality of these discoveries that these people like John Wheeler and Erwin Schrodinger and Albert Einstein and all these great minds were coming up with in the early part of the 20th century. Along came these wild hippies in berkeley in the mid-70s who were finally getting to the meat of the matter and looking at again the ontological implications of quantum mechanics.

When like, as you said, something could just like appear out of nowhere. So to just kind of tie it in real quick to Prometheus Rising. Again, like Wilson, like he introduced me to this, this discussion and conversation of quantum mechanics and quantum entanglement moment in Prometheus Rising he uses the term non local theorem and Bell’s theorem. But Saul Paul Sirag, Wilson’s friend from the 70s, and like an extremely intelligent like particle physicist who was like, told me so many things about quantum physics, you know, mentioned to me how it became quantum entanglement became the term which is essentially the same thing as non local Bell’s theorem, which means that, you know, two, two particles are entangled, you know, through space and time.

It comes from a 1935 paper from Erwin Schrodinger. And so, you know, Wilson is, is, I mean, here you go. I mean here’s, here’s a, here’s a writer who’s writing about the Illuminati, which you could find that discussion in many, you know, bookstores, you know, but then. And he’s talking very adroitly, very intelligently about cutting edge discoveries being made in quantum mechanics. As Saul Paul Sirag told me, Wilson is the first popular non fiction writer to actually present the experiments from John Clauser and Elaine Aspect. Elon Aspect. To do it correctly in a book. That’s before any physicist did it.

That’s before Fritjoff Capra or anyone really talked about these specific experiments. Right. Wilson is the first one. And he did it correctly because some physicists talked about it in a previous book, but they did it incorrectly. Bob, a non physicist, a zany stoner, intellectual, countercultural, weed smoking, acid taking, magic making, funny guy is the one that gets it right. Right. But scientists did not give him props, much props for doing that at the time, as I put in my book. Yeah, he didn’t get much props for getting this right. And more importantly, he was able to do it in a way that like a layman could understand these very complex theories that even, even the mathematicians and the physicists that were coming up with this like theoretical sort of quantum mechanics, they didn’t know how to describe it to a layman.

They could give you a bunch of formulas and a bunch of numbers. But for, for Robert Anton Wilson to be able to not only understand that but then convey it to a completely different audience some in, in my mind that’s almost the hallmark of true understanding, of being able to take a complex concept and then redescribe it into a completely different genre and a completely different demographic and have the information transfer with very little data loss. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. And I mean in that regard, you know, Wilson was a huge fan of Frederick Nietzsche. Not so much Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman or anything like that, or Ubermensch or none of that.

It was more Nietzsche as a linguistic philosopher. Nietzsche is someone who, because Wilson was super, you know, interested in linguistic philosophy. It was a major part of his whole career. And you know, Nietzsche made it, you know, clear to him. I remember reading this kind of Nietzsche, Nietzsche, this Nietzsche quote somewhere and I’m going to paraphrase, but basically Nietzsche is saying it’s like what worth is all your knowledge if you can’t explain a topic to like the, the simplest of minds, if you will, of Course, Nietzsche speaks like that. Right, Like. But meaning, communicate to all.

Try to be as communicative to as many different people and, you know, levels of semantic intelligence as possible. You mean this Wilson is an egalitarian philosopher in the sense that. I mean, he writes in an erudite, clear, concise, one could say very American type of way. Influenced by, you know, Ernest Hemingway and the pragmatists, you know, in that. Get the point across, man. Don’t cut to the chase. You know, subject, predicate, noun, verb. I wouldn’t say subject, predicate, but, you know, unfold the imagery, make the connection. Let’s keep it moving, you know. And as a writer, I mean, I learned a lot from Bob as a writer, as an artist, as a constructor of words in that regard.

Because Wilson is part of a tradition, though, right? He’s, as William Burroughs said, like, cut out the flowery language. And Ezra Pound, another influence in terms of his writing. Ezra Pound created this imagistic movement which is basically, don’t get lost on like. Like abstract words, right? Create clear, concise images so the viewer, reader can see it and make the connection and keep it moving. And that’s Wilson. Always keep it moving. Get to the point. So you could throw another point in there and also a joke or two. And Wilson is dancing, man. He’s dancing a J Big, you know, he is.

He’s, you know, like. Like James Joyce was a singer, right? And. And you hear it in his words. How lyrical. And. And. And, you know, you know, sing song. He is, right? You can hear James Joyce read his own work, Finnegan’s Wake. And there’s all the same. All that sort of thing, right? Oh, you know, right. But Bob, he’s not much of a singer, but he’s dancing, you know, and if you. If you view him like that, he’s break dancing. This guy’s hitting all. Hitting all the switches, six steps, all that. He’s. He does something very interesting as a writer and exciting in that he’s.

He forms. He’s constantly practicing the dialectic. He’s constantly creating synthesis. He’s taking a thesis, presenting an antithesis and creating a synthesis, which, you know, Marx did not create the dialectic. The dialectic was created by Hegel. It’s a very powerful philosophical tool, and it’s an aid and. In thought and thinking. And, you know, Wilson to kind of touch back on what was just briefly said about the idea of where he was living, right? Like Capitola, Santa Cruz, like in that talk. Talk in Germany and whatnot. As to illustrate quantum physics. He said that he lives in Capitola, but as he, you know, he lives in Santa Cruz.

But then when he called the police, he was told that he lives in the municipality of Capitola and only they can help them, etc. Etc. It’s also a comment on like bureaucracy, right? Like of how you just need some simple help. What it was, was his car got broken into and he needed to just file a report and figure out who to call. Right, right. And of course he, he takes it to that, I think a hilarious level of finding a connection with quantum physics. Because ultimately where goes with Schrodinger’s, you know, the idea of Schrodinger’s Schrodinger cat, Schroder’s cat metaphor, scientific theory, which is a comment on uncertainty.

You put a cat in the box and you put a poison pellet in and at some point the cat’s going to die. Die, right. At which point is the cat dead? Right, when you open the box or did the cat die sometime before that? Pretty cruel to cats if you ask me. But this is where those guys went at that time, right? And I mean, it was a thought experiment. Who knows if anyone ever tried it. But the point being to Schrodinger is that the cat is only dead when the viewer views it. That’s the only instrument.

Now we have cameras, of course, we could do. But that’s an instrument, right? And it all comes down to the. We can only speak through, we can only describe something through the measuring instrument. And the quantum uncertainty exists in every measurement. So we’ll, we can now put a camera in the box and see when the cat dies. But the cat doesn’t die until we view it. We don’t register it as dead. So it’s called Schrodinger’s catastrophe theorem or theory that the, the, it ultimately comes down to the consciousness of the individual who reads the measurement that, that can finally see where the electron is or make a definitive statement.

But then when we. It’s. It’s a catastrophe because it’s an interior collapse. The more you look at your interior consciousness, the further and further these things go. Where does causality exist? And this is a major part of Wilson’s work, I guess as a philosopher, he’s going into the whole notion of causality. What causes what? In an old Newtonian physics universe, A causes B causes C causes D. We have a linear progression. And you could say history is progressing to some great omega point, right? But then when you look at things through a quantum physics realm and he does this very brilliantly in his book Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy, where and he forms, you know, a star because A could cause B, B could cause C, C could cause D.

But another loop could be, you know, D could cause C, C cause B, B cause A. And we’re in a whole new realm because of, you know, superposition and the potentiality of where the electron is. And if our consciousness acts the same way, I mean, things get very weird, right? And Wilson, eventually he purports a theory to support his viewpoint, which is that ESP, telekinesis, these two things, remote viewing, these things are not B.S. these things are possible. And everyone can potentiate these things and activate these. An ESP within yourself. I don’t know about telekinesis, but definitely remote viewing and whatnot.

We have a psychic capacity within all of ourselves. He was exploring this heavy in the 1970s. And this is what the second four circuits of the 8th Circuit model of intelligence were, were about. Like you one of them, you kind of gain access to sort of like a psychic sort of ability. And this is, you know, like further exploration of. Of consciousness for Wilson, where he goes and he finds a, A, The. The. The quantum explanation for this, why something like ESP can exist. Well, this is because quantum entanglement could possibly make this possible. Because when unit A changes, unit B changes simultaneously violates the.

The. The speed of light, which is everything is based on. Einstein proved like movement in this universe can only move according to the fastest is the speed of light, right? 104, 40,000 miles an hour or whatever, right? Like, so this quantum entanglement, this Bell’s theorem A and B change at the same time. There’s a simultaneous faster than light change, right? And so that’s what all these people have been. All these smart minds, great minds have been questioning ever since then. I mean, Einstein did it as well. Like, this violates all the known laws of nature. This is.

This God doesn’t play dice with the universe. This is spooky action at a distance, said Einstein. This is impossible otherwise. Or it completely contradicts all rational and known things that we know about the world. All our sciences are based on this sort of logical A causes B causality sort of thing. But now we enter this new realm where causality seems to be in the state of potentia. Things become a lot more possibly confusing. And so it’s great to have a writer like Wilson who was really able to take all these heavily jargonized studies like quantum physics, general semantics, areas of Buddhism, mathematics, and communicate them in a very simple.

He stayed in touch with this Brooklyn laconic draw, a very simple way to just break things down to people at their level. And I think that’s a great trait and ability of his work. I sought to do that as well in my book. Like, I really made it a point. I want to make this book accessible to readers who are, who don’t never even heard of Robert Anton Wilson, like. And I feel pretty confident that I accomplished that, that I told the story quite simply of a man who chose to live a life as an artist in America.

I mean, that’s what he was. He produced novels and books. He’s an artist. He’s also a philosopher and also a psychedelic philosopher and thinking about conspiracy theories. But he dedicated his life to creating artifacts that are known as books. He’s an artist. Right? What does that entail? What, what you know. And that’s why his life was a chapel perilous, a walkthrough chapel perilous. Because to live as an artist in America is not easy. And it’s become even more difficult since the 1980s, at least when the Congress started stripping funds to the National Endowment of the Arts and other areas of art.

And Wilson is a great map maker for all of this stuff. You can find it in his work. But most importantly, you can find all this in my book. I made a huge effort to take all of his work and just streamline it into a clear, consistent narrative. And while staying true to his ideas, also criticizing them and showing through time with new information that we have different things that are contradictory. Like, Wilson didn’t want a hagiography. He didn’t want, you know, he wanted warts and all. And like all great artists deserve all great people. Everyone deserves a biography with warts and all.

He’s a, you know, a humanist in the sense that the only way you could really learn about humanity is learning how other humans live. You don’t get it in some holy book. God communicating to whoever. So and so in some cave comes down from the mountain. I channeled this from God. No, no, you, you, you, you learn from how other people lived. And this is how we will hopefully achieve what he called a non zero sum society. A world where people could, you know, live truly freely and also in kind communication and community with each other.

It seems to be a very different world than what we see on the TV and the news all the time. However, Wilson was great at drawing your attention to your immediate environment. Just because that’s happening on the news, that doesn’t mean that you’re powerless and you can’t make your own personal space and vicinity a beautiful place. And, you know, really curate. Nietzsche said something about that too. You know, he’s like, curate your friends. You know, understand your environment like you want nutrition. You want to. You know. But Wilson is also not. He also realizes that one can also be a cosmic schmuck.

So you might think that you’re curating your friends, but you could just be an elitist asshole or, you know, with CIA assets and then surround yourself with CIA assets. Yeah, I’m open to dig into that more too, because that’s also a very interesting thing to throw one extra. I don’t want to open that back up. It’s a wild rabbit hole. But also, it was interesting when you mentioned the link to, what was it? The Red Squad in Chicago because. And the. The Weather Underground breaking Timothy Leary out because also, one of the famous members of Weather Underground was Bill Avery.

Right. Or. Or no, Ro Brought Roy Bill. Bill Ayers, who was also linked to like. Like, that was one of the names that came up when Obama was running his campaign. And later after the campaign, that was like, well, maybe this is another link between CIA, like Obama’s CIA, and. And Ayers is CIA. And weather undercrowded. It. It becomes really hard to untie. There’s almost like a Schrodinger’s box sort of analogy on that, right? Like. Like if you put Will. If you put Ayers and Obama in a box, you know, are they both CIA? You open it or what? Right.

I love that. That’s a great point. I mean, that’s a great question. But then when you have these questions, right, like, you have to activate a repertoire of critical thinking skills. Wilson. This was a big part of his work too, which he sought for his readers to gain the ability to know the difference between an assertion and an argument. He was very much influenced by Karl Popper, the scientific philosopher who. Who created this thing called the theory of falsifiability. Right. There are hypothesis as statements and claims that can be made that can be tested. Right. You could say it’s raining outside.

And then, you know, where I. We were living in the same space. It’s raining outside. Okay, I’ll go check. It’s not raining outside. Oh, okay. Well, we found out more information. Or you’re right, I confirm you’re finding it’s raining outside side. That claim can be tested. Right. Some claims can’t really be tested in the scientific sense. The God exists. You can’t Test that. You can’t put that in a laboratory. No matter how we intuitively feel, you just can’t test that. So there are certain, like. So then to argue about whether God exists and then your interpretation of God being superior to someone else’s interpretation of God.

God just brings you back to caveman era, where you’re bashing rocks on each other’s heads. Or even if you just say it’s nice outside, that could be just as hard to prove either way. Right. Because now you’re talking about some sort of a subjective experience that you. Now you got to spend like an entire hour defining what your, like, quantitative and qualitative version of nice is. Right? Well, I mean, I think generally, though, I mean, this is where I mean, what. Yeah, exactly. Some people, maybe they like it when it’s raining, you know, or some people, it’s nice out when it’s sunny.

I think this is where we. Then we fit into a sociological sort of range of how most people think it’s what. It’s nice out. Or you could also be speaking to, like, a person with borderline personality who just likes to argue with people all the time. So it could subjectively be and objectively be nice out. But they’re talking to you. It’s not nice out, you know? Right. If you’re a contrarian, then I guess it’s. It would be hard to pin them down because they just. They just want the conflict. Right, Exactly. And then. But this is all where.

I think Bob’s work is extremely valuable because you, Bob, encourages individuals. Get out there, man. Engage with life. Interact with these crazy, kooky, wild, like, groups and people, you know, but have your knowledge of self in order, your center and be centered and have your critical thinking skills on point, point to realize and when to know to move on. And. And one does not even need to be like, oh, this is total. I can’t believe I was taken in by this. It could just be simply a vibe like, I’m not feeling this anymore. I’m gonna follow this my own inner into, like, movement here and just keep it moving.

Take care, guys. Bob did that a number of times in his life, you know, and you gain wisdom from that, you know, know. But to. To speak on, like, let’s just take the claim right now of, like, Bob was surrounded by CIA assets. Prove it. Who, Who. Who is the CIA assets? Because now we live. We also live in this. This age too, where a suggestion. It’s all part of the bad jacket social media brings apart. Like, it’s like micro bad jacketing that goes on all the time now where. And the, the. The movement of this, this.

The onslaught of imagery which could be information or mis or disinformation. People are losing their ballast with that. And it’s harder and harder to tell. You know, this is why you really need to learn the difference or people or. Bob, encourage readers to know the difference between an assertion and an argument. And this is the difference between Wilson and QAnon, quite simply, right there. I’m glad you be. You almost beat me to that. That was my last big question for you. What would be. Like, what. What do you think Robert Anton Wilson would think about the QAnon movement? I think that, I mean, I mean, I think that he would would have definitely studied it because of the similarity in format or, you know, stylistic structure in the sense that how QAnon, whoever Q was gave out, it’s sort of information was all in the form of questions.

Right. And so, you know, as you know, I think Zach de la Rocha said it. Do you know the power of the question? The question works very well in this, in this new media age that we live in. You know, like invoking Marshall McClellen, which Wilson was very well versed on this. You know, amazing champion and understander of media ecospheres, Marshall McClelland. And McClellan knew the difference between hot and cool. Like, when we live in a hot media space, it’s better to keep a cool face. When you live in like a cool media space, sometimes it’s better to be hot.

And the only difference between hot and cool is the. This is a hot media that we’re in because you see people’s faces, you hear the voices. So, so it’s. People will practice. Film actors know this. Robert De Niro said, when in doubt, do nothing. You know, that’s why you see a lot of film actors, they have no expressions now because they’re not doing absolutely anything. But stage actors will be loud because you have to perform to the back row. And generally stage actors may not read well on camera because they’re too hot. You know, Tupac was hot.

Tupac was, you know, making all sorts of. I’m using old references here, but like. But what happened? Timothy Leary was hot. You know, he was hot in a hot media space. But he Learned from Marshall McClelland to put on a happy face because this put out a wild image. So that’s why you always see Leary smiling, especially that famous image of him being arrested. He has a huge smile on his face because this was A strategy, a publicity strategy. Kind of never let them see you sweat in a way. But point being, in hot and cool media spheres years, the importance of basically keeping a cool mind, in some ways, this is my own.

This may not be, according to McClellan, this is my take. But Wilson adds to this idea of just keeping a cool mind in the sense of it’s very simply, just before you start retweeting or reposting this, this, this wild story which you haven’t even read, I do this too, but it’s just that headline. Oh, yeah, yeah. But it’s like, wait a minute, take a breath, read this and understand what it’s about, what’s it really saying, and just have a deeper understanding of not just your own perceptual grid, but also how these media spheres, everyone has a point of view, right? And some people want you to have their point of view too.

And some people will ask you to have their point of view. And some people will try to coerce and manipulate you to have their point of view too. Wilson’s work, Prometheus Rising being another great example, is just a great reminder of your own power of perception and your ability to make sense of all this information coming at you. He would often say, like, the most important power that we have is the ability to say no, right? So that’s a big deal. You’re claiming agency then by saying no. And if you’re able to say no in a moment, moment later on, you don’t think, oh, my God, I was totally manipulated.

How did that happen to me? And then you have to prove to all these people that you were manipulated and all this. And people are like, ah, you’re full of. You’re just trying to do this, you know, like, if you have the wherewithal in the moment. And this is why he’s like an intellectual sensei, you know, like those eight circuits model of intelligences. That again, is found in Prometheus Rising. To stay on that, that’s like the eight belts of a dojo, you know, white, blue, yellow. Was it white, yellow, blue, red, green, what you know, and then you get to the black belt and you’re understanding how quantum entanglement, like, throws everything up in the air.

But staying on that book, like, he invokes also the work of Ilya Prigozhin, who studied dissipative structures. Prigozhin was a chemist, I think. And the idea of dissipative structures is before something changes a state, state, you know, there’s a high level of sort of Chaos. There’s a high level of movement. And. And Terence McKenna would touch on this too. Like, there’s a high level of novelty, right? So things are becoming more complex. This doesn’t necessarily. And it becomes that either a question, is this a breakthrough or a breakdown? Are we achieving something better or something worse? This is the eternal question that every generation of humans, while we’re alive, must ask.

When we’re dead, we don’t have to ask that question anymore. But this is like an obsession that every humans constantly have. You know, even during the time of Plato, there were people grumbling about the youth and how lazy and stupid the youth were. So this is a trope in humanity. Like, and the books were corrupting their mind. I can’t believe they’re all just reading these horrible books and getting these horrible thoughts, you know, and. Yeah, so. And then that brings in an interesting conversation, conversation about communication technologies and the idea of technology in general. I mean, there’s certain mind states.

There were like, Christian fundamentalists who thought that lightning rods were the work of Satan, Right? So, I mean, there. There are, you know, religious sects that don’t take medicine and they think Christian scientists, they’ll just pray around you. You know, Larry David and the great Richard Lewis have a, you know, funny comment on that. On a curb your enthusiasm episode where Larry David’s going out with a woman who’s a Christian scientist, but she won’ medicine, et cetera, et cetera. And, but, and, you know, Wilson is such an interesting mind who is constantly bringing in the paradox.

He called himself an agnostic. Gnostic. He’ll, like Nietzsche, he’ll give an argument for one part of the polarity, one area, and then he’ll bring it back and sort of, you know, maybe suggest or argue another polarity. So he’s a rationalist. He’s asking you to develop your critical thinking skills. Skills. But then at the same time, he’s talking about remote viewing and then having these wild experiences and whatnot. But by the end of Prometheus Rising, he seeks to bring a final synthesis with all this wild stuff through his discussion of quantum entanglement that faster than light communication.

It hasn’t been proven though, but theoretically in his mind was quite possible. And this makes it possible for esperance, remote viewing, telekinesis, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean, he’s just. He does the job of a very good writer in that he’s constantly producing thought through utilizing contrast, conflict, you know, and other saying, novels, literary tropes. But in his non fiction. He knows how to, you know, write a book, man. He knows how to create the desire to keep reading and you know, and by the end of Prometheus Rising, I mean, I’ve had friends comment about this, I’ve interviewed people about this.

He really does the job, man. He elevates your mind. By the end of the book, like, you know, I haven’t met many people who like threw that book down and discussed at the end of it there. They put the book down, they took a deep breath, looked outside and we’re like, wow, shit life. It’s challenging. It’s an incredibly challenging book. Not, not that it’s hard to read, but it’s, it’s difficult to get through because it forces you to take different positions and think about things in ways that maybe feel uncomfortable. Right. And make you go out in the world and actually do I really, really love.

I think that would probably be my number one suggestion for someone unfamiliar with Robert Anton Wilson will probably be Prometheus Rising. Yeah. Agree right now. Definitely. I. Sorry, go ahead, finish your thought. No, I just, I, I totally agree. I think I love that book. I, I clearly remember, you know, where, where I was when I read it, where I was when I finished it and how, you know, Wilson was. Made you feel good. I remember the, the day that I finished reading that book, I went outside and I found a twenty dollar bill. I’m not even kidding.

And it was like in a high traffic area where there were lots and lots of like, like transients that would walk up and down this high traffic road and there was just a freaking $20 bill just right there and it blew my mind. And I, and I won’t ever be able to shake that feeling of like, did that book manifest this $20 bill that I like? Who put this here? I almost felt like Robert Anton Wilson himself like knew that I just finished the book and he like ran out and he planted a 20 just for me to find.

That’s so great. I love that, man. People share somewhat similar stories and these weird synchronicities that occur after reading one of his books. Yeah, it is a synchronicity magnet for sure. I’m, I’m going to wind this down a little bit here. I want to be mindful of your time. I’ve got a little segment, let me just play a little 10 second clip and then I’m going to explain what’s going to, what’s going to happen. You good? Sure. Hey conspiracy buffs. I double dare you to take some pcp. The paranormal conspiracy probe. On your marks, get set and go.

Okay, these rules are pretty easy. I just want to get you to give me a 1 to 10 rating on some very definitive topics. And this is, might be anti raw in a, in a way. Right? Because I’m going to ask you to actually get off the fence and just pick a specific answer. So there’s not a lot of maybe logic in here. You can inject it if you want. But for example, if I said how much do you believe in a literal Bigfoot on a scale from 1 to 10, where would you put that? 5.

So okay, so you could be swayed either way, plus or minus. How about the concept of flat or earth? 0. How about little gray Roswell aliens to be specific? 2. How about a biblical Satan? 1. How about angels and demons? Would that fall on the same line? This is an interesting, this is a true or false sort of thing. Angels and demons, same line. I mean, yeah, also one in this, thinking in this regard of. Yeah, I’ll go. One. How about dinosaurs? And, and to qualify dinosaur, like you go to the Museum of Natural History and someone points out that you know, Tyrannosaurus rex or something and they’re like that was a real thing that existed.

Where are you at on that? 9. How about dragons and I mean like fire breathing flying dragons having existed at any point in, in history? 1. How about the concept of fall of hollow earth? 2. Well, how about a literal Atlantis, like, like a Platonic Atlantis, like the Atlantis that Plato talked about. Correct. Not just like a land mass that people would say, yeah, not just laying map but like, like a, like a, some sort of a superior, you know, community that had some kind of technology that just stank and was lost to time. 2. Well, remote viewing being a real practice this.

3. 4. 4. 4. How about manifesting quarters on the ground? 4. How about celebrity clones? And I don’t mean like having a spare kidney. I mean, you know, Jamie Foxx is acting up on stage, so go ahead and wheel out Jamie B or whatever. 0. How about 9? 11 was an inside job. 4. How about Gematria? I don’t, I don’t even know. I mean that’s the practice of like reading numbers or something. Like seeing sacred significance. It would be basically deriving numerical values out of words and letters and then those numerical values themselves being some other deeper meaning behind everything.

See like some of these questions, right? Like, like even angels and demons and the idea of like Satan, like these are mimetic entities as Phil Farber calls them. Right? But I’M playing the game, man. So they could be real to you, right? But maybe not real out there. But how real are they to you, though? To Gabriel? Yeah, man. I mean, dude, a lot of these. Maybe I should have just said five. I’m pretty, pretty, pretty open, but I’ve never experienced some of these things. But. So gamatria, right? Like, I mean, that’s. That’s a. I mean, that.

That’s a real practice. That’s. People do that. I don’t know what meaning they find, but that’s a 10. I mean, people do that. It’s fair answer. How about the concept that AI is a vehicle for some other intelligence, Meaning that you’re not just talking or potentially in 10, 20 years, whatever, that you’re not just talking to, like, a numerical formula that gives you the most, you know, anticipated answer, but that it’s like a Ouija board of some kind. So you mean like its own intelligence or it’s kind of being like the transducer for some other intelligence using it? I would say more.

More the latter. Like the. The Just to the question be more of the latter. That it’s being a vehicle for some other actual intelligence and not just like a really fancy mechanical turk. That’s great. I never really considered that before. That’s very interesting. I don’t know right now. 1. Well, magic and I guess, Matt, you can interpret it out however you want, but I mean magic in a way that not just you’re giving yourself positive reinforcement so you’re in a better mood, but like some sort of an objective magic, like, manifestation and stuff like that by just making, like, a spell and not doing anything physical to attain it.

Right. Just thinking, like, oh, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know how to qualify that. Right. Because some magic revolves revolves around ritual and having, I don’t know, magic potions and tinctures and stuff. But I mean that. That you can objectively change the physical world in some way that could be observable by someone that doesn’t believe in magic. Right? Like the. The conscious change to one’s environment through the power of will and whatnot. I mean, I believe in magic, like, but my definition of it involves, you know, it’s not how people would think of it, but this is really, I think, how magic is real.

This is magic. You have to do everything in your physical capacity first to achieve something. And then. And there’s. You can’t. You can’t lust after any results just because you have a desire and you do this Thing, there’s no indication that it’ even going to happen. So you can make a sigil for something and there’s just no telling that it might manifest. But Lon, Milo Duquette said that like, you know, who is, you know, magical writer, you know, magic is like just basically utilizing like your imagination and your will to create something, you know, creative something which.

So then that’s brings it into the realm of art. So in that realm, I definitely believe in magic. Magic, right. It’s a 10. But in the realm of ceremonial magic and then people, you know, doing all that stuff. See, I’ve had actual experience though with things. So I’ve, you know. Yeah, it’s all, it’s all above five. That’s right now. That’s right now. Because. Yeah, it’s a fair answer. It’s fair answer. Yeah. Here, here’s a lot. This one’s kind of a two parter. So pay attention to the, the qualifications on the first one. But that a human being has stepped foot on the moon in the last 100 years.

Yeah, true. So 10 true or, or six true. Right, right, of course. Eight and a half. Okay, now, now the follow up is that the footage that we saw or we, I mean like our parents and grandparents of the Apollo 11 mission in 98. 69. On a scale of 1 to 10, how valid do you think that footage was? Well, I mean this is a realm that I realized. This is an area that, I mean whole books are written about this. Right. Dark mission. Right. Richard Hogan. Right. Like the, the false moon landing footage. I’ve never really, really delve too much into that.

I always leave it open that things could be fabricated. But was that filmed in a Hollywood basement or whatever. How true is that? 2. I think they remember that it was baked or 2 that it was real. 2 that it was faked. Okay, so an 8 roughly. That it was real. Real. Wait. Yeah, the moon landing footage. Right, right, the moon landing footage that got broadcast to the world, essentially. I also just want to say that like these, you, you asked me these questions tomorrow and these could be different numbers too. That’s fair. That’s fair. I want to give you another chance to plug all of your stuff, tell people the name of your book where that they can buy it and you know, any promises that you want to make about like everlasting glory or riches from, from reading your book.

Oh man. Thank you. Yes, for sure. You. Everyone could find the book Chapel Perilous the Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. Make sure this is a big Deal like if you can see you put in the ampersand on the title. There was some confusion about the title. In other words, you can find it on Amazon and also Lulu Press. Also on my website, chapelpaylor Us. I update a lot of stuff that I wrote about in the book and then things that I did not get to include in the book I will put on that website.

And my sub stack again, that’s. I’m constantly updating that. That’s Gabriel Patrick Kennedy. I believe it’s dot substack. I’m not. I’m kind of new on that website, but if you put, you know, if you Google substack. Gabriel Patrick Kennedy. I should come up and yeah, the, the book right now is available in hardcover and I think all, all the paperback and Kindle. It’s getting some really nice reviews from people. As I said, you know, it’s. It’s there for people who are really into Robert Anton Wilson because I’ve uncovered like a really a lot of new information about him.

Even put his yearbook photo at the age of 18. That’s the earliest photo of Wilson in there. A lot of new information. Like I said, the Red Squad files just connecting a lot of dots in Wilson’s life. I think that people who love and enjoy a nice great story, a great biography, I think the. The book will appeal to them too. So it’s really got something for everyone. And yeah, man, I just appreciate the time given to me today. It was really fun speaking with you about some of these things. And you know, I encourage readers to check the book out and there’s also forwards by Douglas Rushkoff and Grant Morrison, the comic book writer, the writer of the great book the Invisible and I’m just very happy to finally get the book out and to share it with the world, man.

Chapel Perilous the life and ideas of Robert Anton Wilson. I think everyone should get it and promise of riches and great glory. I can promise you riches. A great. I can promise you great glory, but not riches. Well, and I’ll promise you the richest part, but you have to be pure of heart. So if you don’t find him, it’s kind of on you. It’s not on either of of us. Like that’s your problem not being cure of heart. Thank. This was a phenomenal interview. We got to talk about so many cool talk. There’s a few that I had to like leave on the cutting room floor just maybe for a part two.

But I would love to a preview. I would love to talk about maybe the intersection of John C. Lily sort of research and Robert Anton Wilson. Especially like the, the. The Quantum Psychology vs. John John C. Lilly’s version of all this. Anyway, anyways, I don’t want to open up a whole new can of worms. That would be a really fun conversation to have with you. I’d love to have you back. Talk more about this book or any other future projects. Thanks again for your time. And of course I’ll put all the links to the substack and the books and Lulu Press and everything in the comments.

Thank you for having me. Yeah, it was great to be here. Ready for a cosmic conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick, moon landings and the CIA? Go visit NASA consciousness comic.com CIA Stanley Kubrick put us on this while we’re singing this song I’m not CIA’s biggest con Stanley Kubrick put us on that’s why we’re singing this song about nessa comic.com go visit me nas go visit nas never a straight answer is a 40 page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions. Yeah go. This is the perfect read for comic Kubrick or conspiracy fans of all ages.

For more details visit NASA comic.com paranoid yeah I scribbled my life away driven the right page willing to light your brain give you the slight my plane face but the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage it your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hate maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution to flame you out Nuclear bomb just distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see max them out that I like my trees blow it off in the face you’re despising me for what though calculated and rather cutthroat paranoid American must be all the blood spoke for real Lord give me your day your way vacate they wait around to hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits so thank us your wealth I’m the niggas for real you’re welcome they never had a deal you’re welcome man they lacking appeal you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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