Speaker 1: Also media, ah, welcome back everybody to behind the bastards
Speaker 1: in a fresh, bright new year. Twenty twenty four took
Speaker 1: me a second to remember which year it was, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's going to be a good one, as
Speaker 1: long as there's nothing like a presidential election to cause
Speaker 1: chaos and horror across the land. Anyway, I'm just going
Speaker 1: to continue not having read the news for the last
Speaker 1: seven years. And welcome to the podcast our guest, Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, Jamie, thank you.
Speaker 2: For having me back. Twenty twenty four is our year.
Speaker 3: I think I feel really optimistic. I've been enjoying everyone's
Speaker 3: in and out lists.
Speaker 2: I don't know what they're talking about most of the time.
Speaker 3: A lot of the things that people want in I
Speaker 3: feel maybe signs of permanent brain damage for.
Speaker 1: The last no care. Yeah, yeah, but it's like with
Speaker 1: the internet. This year is like that moment when you
Speaker 1: know that, like when you accept because you've hit thirty
Speaker 1: that like certain physical problems you've dealt with your whole life, like, well,
Speaker 1: that's just one's never going to get better, right, Like
Speaker 1: my back's never going to work the same way again.
Speaker 1: The Exuma's not clearing up like something like that. That's
Speaker 1: that's how we are. That's how I feel about social
Speaker 1: media and what it's done to people's brains in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four. Like, yeah, it's permanent. We're good.
Speaker 3: There's certain a whole generation of adults that will never
Speaker 3: quite be able to you know, their critical reading skills
Speaker 3: were just like kind of demolished, and that won't be
Speaker 3: a problem for anybody. I feel optimistic. I feel like
Speaker 3: it's a big it's going to be a big, awesome.
Speaker 2: Year this time next year.
Speaker 3: I'm honestly trying to savor the beginning of twenty twenty
Speaker 3: four because it's going to be so bad.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, No, I'm just like, this is.
Speaker 2: As good as it's going to get. I'm going to
Speaker 2: share is.
Speaker 1: Down hill folks. Yeah, ah, good times. Well, you know
Speaker 1: what's not a good time.
Speaker 3: Whatever we're about to talk about for three hours, I'm assuming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a sex cult, a child sex cult. Maybe probably
Speaker 1: not actually, but the story of why probably not and
Speaker 1: what they probably were is still an interesting story of
Speaker 1: some people being real pieces of shit. Huh uh huh
Speaker 1: uh huh uh huh. Yeah, exciting, Jamie, have you ever
Speaker 1: heard of the Finders.
Speaker 2: No, I haven't.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, this is a big one. This is a
Speaker 1: heavy hitter cult. So this is the cult that is
Speaker 1: one of the origins of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The
Speaker 1: thirty thousand feet version of the story before we dig
Speaker 1: into it, is that in the late nineteen eighties, during
Speaker 1: the height of the Satanic Panic, a couple of dudes
Speaker 1: and some little kids in a van got called in
Speaker 1: by a busy body neighbor in Tallahassee, Florida, because she
Speaker 1: thought the kids looked dirty and that they were probably
Speaker 1: devil worshipers. And the kids were indeed dirty, and the men,
Speaker 1: only one of whom was a father to only one
Speaker 1: of the kids, were members of a group called the
Speaker 1: Finders that is either a CIA spying operation or just
Speaker 1: a bunch of weirdos playing games in a house they rented.
Speaker 1: Impossible to say, it's a little.
Speaker 3: Beside the point, but I am just like consistently like, Wow,
Speaker 3: the nosy neighbor is never going to get it right.
Speaker 2: In terms of what the real alem.
Speaker 3: Is Like, Oh, it's actually probably uh, save this God.
Speaker 3: The Satanic's Panic sins are are bottomless.
Speaker 1: But yeah, interesting. Interesting, So I have taken that logic,
Speaker 1: Jamie in my own life, and so I will do
Speaker 1: nothing at all if I hear anything happening in my
Speaker 1: neighbor's house. You know, if there's screams and bangs in
Speaker 1: the night, I don't call the police because I don't
Speaker 1: want to be part of the problem. And sure have
Speaker 1: I woken up next to a lot of like lines
Speaker 1: of police tape and house with blood on the front
Speaker 1: door and shattered windows. Of course, of course that's gonna
Speaker 1: happen when you refuse to take an interest in your neighbors.
Speaker 1: But I will not continue the cycle of violence.
Speaker 3: I would just ask that you stop sending me selfies
Speaker 3: of these crime scenes because it's been making my life
Speaker 3: really complicated.
Speaker 1: Well, Jamie, you just never have an alibi for where
Speaker 1: you were when it happens. That's one of the fun
Speaker 1: things about you.
Speaker 2: It's because I don't leave my house. There's no witnesses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I told the FBI. There's no witnesses,
Speaker 1: none at all to where Jamie was on the night
Speaker 1: those people were killed. Those people were killed with the
Speaker 1: hammer that Jamie had purchased earlier that day.
Speaker 3: It was bedazzled and everything, it was damning.
Speaker 2: It was damning what happened to me. I was set up.
Speaker 3: I already this story is, you know, starting horrifically, and
Speaker 3: it also is feels like the beginning of a series
Speaker 3: of unfortunate events novel or a well meaning neighbor u
Speaker 3: and misses in a really horrific way.
Speaker 1: Because it's the reality of what's happening these kids. It's
Speaker 1: not great, but I wouldn't call it horrific. It's like
Speaker 1: maybe slightly above a normal level of child neglect for
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, like not massively, maybe a bit higher
Speaker 1: than average, but like if the things my gen x
Speaker 1: like relatives bragged about when they were kids are true,
Speaker 1: this was not. These kids were not much worse off
Speaker 1: than a lot of kids in that period of time,
Speaker 1: maybe a bit in terms of parental neglect, but it's
Speaker 1: not a story of child molestation. However, it is absolutely
Speaker 1: a story of child molestation because the Satanic panic is
Speaker 1: again at its height, and everyone in America immediately assumes
Speaker 1: these people are child trafficking children all over the world
Speaker 1: for a network of shadowy at wealthy individuals, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's what this becomes, this massive and it burns out
Speaker 1: because we don't have the Internet. It burns out in
Speaker 1: about a year, but people who are conspiracy kind of
Speaker 1: minded individuals never forget it. And so a lot of
Speaker 1: what is in this story has formed some of the
Speaker 1: foundational lore for Q and On. And there absolutely is
Speaker 1: some really shady shit going on here. It's just not
Speaker 1: the Q and On side of things. But we will
Speaker 1: be talking about our old friends, the CIA, So don't worry.
Speaker 3: Oh good, I am, like, I mean, just right away,
Speaker 3: it's like it sounds like, of course QAnon was sort
Speaker 3: of glom onto a story like this, because it's like
Speaker 3: taking something that there is a genuine cause for concern
Speaker 3: and blowing it out into a global conspiracy instead of
Speaker 3: like let's get these individual children some resources maybe, which yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, even that's because again this is happening in Florida,
Speaker 1: So even that's complex. Now, yeah, you ready to ready
Speaker 1: to begin?
Speaker 2: Is that not beginning?
Speaker 1: Well we have begun.
Speaker 2: We already have some dirty kids in a van. I
Speaker 2: assumed we had started.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well we're actually going to start several decks
Speaker 1: aides earlier, many decades earlier, with Marion David Petty. He's
Speaker 1: going to be the guy who starts this cult, the Finders,
Speaker 1: and he was born in Culpeper, virgin I A on
Speaker 1: December twelfth, nineteen twenty. Culpepper, at the time was a
Speaker 1: somewhat sleepy town seventy miles from the capitol. It was
Speaker 1: conservative and I would probably say dull. There was very
Speaker 1: little in Petty's family background to suggest he would become
Speaker 1: anything like what he winds up as his mother, Virginia
Speaker 1: and his father David both have long lives. They seem
Speaker 1: to have been like pretty comfortable, like middle class, maybe
Speaker 1: upper middle class. The families largely German. Most of their
Speaker 1: ancestors were carpenters, although Marian's grandpa's a grave digger. Nice,
Speaker 1: probably good for your cardio. Yeah. As a little kid,
Speaker 1: there were signs that Marian was peculiar and possessed of
Speaker 1: a strange sort of charisma that made other kids want
Speaker 1: to follow him. He organized a small gang of local
Speaker 1: children to go grave robbing and an abandoned cemetery near Arlington. Yeah, oh,
Speaker 1: they are stealing human remains very right out the bat.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, why remain? I thought they were stealing, Like, what.
Speaker 1: Else do you steal? It? A grave?
Speaker 3: And when I was a kid, I would think about
Speaker 3: stealing stuff from gravesites sometimes because they would have toys just.
Speaker 1: Dead little children. You are willing to steal a dead
Speaker 1: child's toys.
Speaker 2: I do remember.
Speaker 3: I have a vivid memory of seeing like a Cinderella
Speaker 3: doll and being like, she's not using it, which is
Speaker 3: but not now, Jamie, you can't say these sorts of things.
Speaker 3: But I'm like, just in the utilitarian sense, I should care.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, wow, okay, well no, they are not stealing dolls.
Speaker 1: They are actually stealing bones from the gravest.
Speaker 2: Keep that in. I want them.
Speaker 1: The grave robbing is one of those things if an
Speaker 1: adult is grave robbing, right, If you get an adult
Speaker 1: stealing people's bones from a graveyard, that's immediately creepy. If
Speaker 1: there's a little kid who's organizing his friends to steal bones,
Speaker 1: and to me, that's kind of dope. I think that's
Speaker 1: kind of charming.
Speaker 3: I'm kind of and honestly, if I am a dead guy,
Speaker 3: I'm like, let them cook, Like what are they up
Speaker 3: to from the great beyond?
Speaker 2: I'm kind of like approving of this. I like it.
Speaker 3: I think it's interesting and already it's like, I don't know.
Speaker 2: This is the first time I'm hearing of this man ever.
Speaker 3: But it's you know, a lot of weird kids come
Speaker 3: up the lower middle class unexpectedly.
Speaker 2: It's a real danger.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, and it's also a danger that they will
Speaker 1: steal your skull after you have passed on. So the
Speaker 1: initial impetus for like all of this corpse desecration seems
Speaker 1: to have been that he's got this like club that
Speaker 1: he's formed with these kids. It's like, you know, a
Speaker 1: child gang, right, and he wants to have a human
Speaker 1: skull that he can sit in the middle of their meetings. Right.
Speaker 1: Their club is kind of it's very Calvin and Hobbes
Speaker 1: type situation, Like they've got like a little secret society
Speaker 1: for kids, and these are I think mostly you know,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of media for nerdy kids in
Speaker 1: the UH in nineteen twenties, right in the early twenties.
Speaker 2: Why he had to steal a skull.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So he and his friends are like these kind
Speaker 1: of nerdy kids and they're they're probably reading pulp magazines,
Speaker 1: they're hanging out in the night, they're doing magic rituals,
Speaker 1: and they want a skull for their magic rituals.
Speaker 3: This is again kind of like this is like the
Speaker 3: furthest limits of little stinker behavior.
Speaker 2: I think we're really pushing.
Speaker 1: The he's goonies maxing pretty hard right now, so let's
Speaker 1: going to reel them in. Yeah. So the primary difference
Speaker 1: between Marion and his friends and that skull and countless
Speaker 1: other groups of weird, nerdy kids interested in the occult
Speaker 1: is that Marian had absolute problem breaking the law.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There's a lot more kids who would have done this
Speaker 1: if they had the hutspa to rob a grave. But
Speaker 1: you know, that's that's Marian, and it says a lot
Speaker 1: that he's able to convince a lot of other little
Speaker 1: kids to go grave rubbing with him.
Speaker 3: The cadence of what you just said was very hustle culture.
Speaker 2: Like maybe if you got.
Speaker 3: Your ass up and went to the graveyard, you would
Speaker 3: be leading a cult.
Speaker 1: I do periodically when I'm like running and listening to
Speaker 1: different like workout mixes, I'll get one that's like because
Speaker 1: I just want a bunch of random songs cut together
Speaker 1: like a four or four beat or some shit. But
Speaker 1: you'll catch one that's like they're they're putting the music
Speaker 1: to like clearly I don't know who it is, but
Speaker 1: some like real estate influencer yelling at you about never
Speaker 1: giving up. It's how to achieve.
Speaker 3: I went through a dark hour of the soul this summer,
Speaker 3: and I was going to a lot of cycling classes
Speaker 3: in Maine, so just take that in. There was at
Speaker 3: one of the classes there, I forget if I told
Speaker 3: you about this, they were playing a techno remix of
Speaker 3: the Kavanaugh hearing.
Speaker 1: He told me.
Speaker 2: I was just like, here, I have to get out.
Speaker 2: I have to go home, like I don't know what I'm.
Speaker 1: Doing here now, Jamie. Editorially in this techno remix, is
Speaker 1: it does it come down more pro or anti kafan Off?
Speaker 2: It's very vague, I would say it is.
Speaker 3: It's completely ambivalent, and you're in it, like I mean,
Speaker 3: to the credit of Portland, Maine. Every person in the
Speaker 3: class was looking around like there's no way, there's no
Speaker 3: way that this is playing.
Speaker 2: And then the woman, you know, the woman in the
Speaker 2: friend is doing what all the cycling instructors do, which
Speaker 2: is like God needs you to you know, bike And
Speaker 2: it was I think about it all the time. That
Speaker 2: was a clearer. I was like, I don't I have
Speaker 2: to get out of here.
Speaker 4: With all My response was do I need to come
Speaker 4: get you.
Speaker 3: Yeah in the morning, coming hot with the cap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I you know, I dabbled it. I fucked around
Speaker 2: and I found out.
Speaker 3: It really is just like all of the bad sketch
Speaker 3: comedy about spinning.
Speaker 1: It's like showing up for a hot yoga session and
Speaker 1: right when it starts to get intense, they put on
Speaker 1: the Nixon tapes. You're just hearing all of them and
Speaker 1: butter into your fucking ears sweat.
Speaker 3: It's taking my chest tightened to even think about it,
Speaker 3: Like it was just like brutal.
Speaker 2: So I forget why that came up, but it felt
Speaker 2: good to get off my chest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody remembers. But Petty is stealing skulls, right, He's
Speaker 1: got his kids, they're doing their little occult rituals. He says.
Speaker 1: The skull is there specifically to remind his friends of
Speaker 1: their mortality, which is great. Little kids need to know
Speaker 1: that they too will die more often. I think we
Speaker 1: should always be telling children that.
Speaker 3: I really, you know, never forget the first time you
Speaker 3: heard Memento Maury and it.
Speaker 1: Really hit Yeah, it really. That is actually where this goes.
Speaker 1: Because in the interview where I found him talking about
Speaker 1: it's a book, actually where I found him talking about
Speaker 1: this skull. He follows, like is introducing this concept with
Speaker 1: everybody would be better off if they did that every day.
Speaker 1: Y'all ought to get a skull and put it up
Speaker 1: in the middle of the circle when you have a meeting. So, Sophie,
Speaker 1: I want to go expense. I know where I can
Speaker 1: get one in Paris. I have met the guy. So
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna need about thirty four hundred dollars to
Speaker 1: get a human skull.
Speaker 2: The school is that the okay, first of all, the skull.
Speaker 1: Guy, yeah, you can. You can find a lot of
Speaker 1: skulls in the catacombs. And so if you're already selling
Speaker 1: ketamine in Paris, you probably know the skulls.
Speaker 4: Realy good that you clarified, because being like, hey, I
Speaker 4: know a guy who knows where to get the skulls.
Speaker 1: He does know where to get He's shown me several
Speaker 1: He quoted the price. I didn't buy it. I don't
Speaker 1: buy human remains yet, but.
Speaker 3: I really, I really am like surprised that the price
Speaker 3: is that high.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I was a tourist in this situation.
Speaker 1: He may have just been trying to like fleece me.
Speaker 1: He may have just been sizing me up and being like,
Speaker 1: I bet I could get this. I'm sure these are
Speaker 1: flexible prices, right, That's the way I always didn't talk.
Speaker 2: He could have talked him down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I probably could have if I'd wanted to buy
Speaker 1: human remains that day.
Speaker 3: He wanted that on record that you were haggling over
Speaker 3: the skull you were buying.
Speaker 1: Shall we if information comes out later that I own
Speaker 1: human remains for recreational purposes, You're not allowed to judge
Speaker 1: me because I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. I'm
Speaker 1: saying I didn't like to have in your house to
Speaker 1: look at.
Speaker 2: Oh well, I own Taxiderby in my house.
Speaker 1: So yeah, but that's a people. Because that's cool.
Speaker 3: Let's just say I have taxiderby of my house, so
Speaker 3: oh boy, it's a bird.
Speaker 4: Anyway, he took a class, get over it. It was
Speaker 4: very academic.
Speaker 2: I'm a searcher, I'm a hobbyist.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, you're a finder. Well maybe not okay, So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's his first His first fun anecdote is he convinces
Speaker 1: some kids to desecrate human remains. And this is going
Speaker 1: to be like a trend for him, right where the
Speaker 1: first version you hear of what's happened, like as a
Speaker 1: young boy, he stole human remains. It's like, well, that
Speaker 1: could be pretty fucking wild, and he's like, yeah, it
Speaker 1: was basically we were playing magic and it thought it
Speaker 1: would make the room look cooler. And it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: I understand that, like the child logic, there is not
Speaker 1: sinister you know, it's not something that's accessible to most
Speaker 1: children today.
Speaker 3: But it's like as like, yeah, if you're a kid
Speaker 3: interested in the occult and there's skulls around all over, fortunately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I see it.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's necessarily a sign of evil quite yet.
Speaker 1: No, No, it is a sign though that he's very
Speaker 1: good at talking other people into things. Yes, So, like
Speaker 1: a lot of little kids in the nineteen forties the
Speaker 1: Great Depression, Petty dropped out of school well before graduating.
Speaker 1: He only makes it to the ninth grade, which is
Speaker 1: not uncommon for young men, and my grandpa only made
Speaker 1: it to like the eighth grade just because, like the
Speaker 1: economy is so dire, you have to go work or
Speaker 1: your family will starve. But in Petty's case, at least
Speaker 1: he would claim and nearly all of our sources on
Speaker 1: his childhood. Basically one hundred percent of it is him.
Speaker 1: So take all of this, even the skull story, with
Speaker 1: a grain of salt. But he would insists that I
Speaker 1: didn't He didn't drop out because of hardship, but because
Speaker 1: he made a choice to not go to school anymore. Quote,
Speaker 1: I consider my whole life in education, and that all
Speaker 1: I do is work on my education. I dropped out
Speaker 1: of school because it was interfering with my education. So
Speaker 1: that's his claim. Decades later, it's unclear. He says he
Speaker 1: joined the army at thirteen right after this, and some
Speaker 1: of the interviews he's given, the timeline he gives makes
Speaker 1: it look more like he in the earliest he would
Speaker 1: have joined as like sixteen, which is not uncommon. And
Speaker 1: we're talking World War Two. A lot of sixteen year
Speaker 1: old Americans while.
Speaker 2: In the army, they're taking whomever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are not discriminating hardier. Yeah. It is hard
Speaker 1: to prove exactly. And this is by the way, Petty
Speaker 1: is actually before because this would be like thirty three,
Speaker 1: so he's World War two has not started for him yet.
Speaker 1: It is hard to prove what he did. Uh, he
Speaker 1: definitely served in the Armed forces, and it's not weird
Speaker 1: that in this it's not it is weird. It's not
Speaker 1: impossible to have served as a thirteen year old in
Speaker 1: the US Army at this period of time. The youngest
Speaker 1: World War Two era serviceman is believed to have been
Speaker 1: Calvin Graham, who enlisted from Houston after Pearl Harbor at
Speaker 1: the age of twelve. So somebody he is not claiming
Speaker 1: to be the youngest person who joined the US Army
Speaker 1: in this roughly this period.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a toss up because it like, I have
Speaker 3: no reason to not believe that the US would accept
Speaker 3: soldiers that young, and I also it also feels very
Speaker 3: cult leader origin story he's made.
Speaker 1: And again I hear there are like two distinct versions
Speaker 1: of his timeline you get, and one of them pushes
Speaker 1: everything forward like three or four years, which would mean like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he joined in the late thirties when he was like
Speaker 1: sixteen or seventeen, which is not at all uncommon in
Speaker 1: this area. That said, he claims thirteen. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's interesting because both because as you said, this could
Speaker 1: be kind of a cult leader story. But the thing
Speaker 1: that I think might say the most about him, whether
Speaker 1: or not it's true. Is how he claims he convinced
Speaker 1: his parents to let him join the army right at
Speaker 1: the age of thirteen, which is that he leaves a
Speaker 1: newspaper clipping on the dining room table so that they
Speaker 1: like find it when they come in for breakfast. And
Speaker 1: it's a story about a little kid who like got
Speaker 1: angry at his parents for not giving him something, and
Speaker 1: so he murdered his father. And he was basically like,
Speaker 1: because I was such a good kid. When they saw this,
Speaker 1: they realized like how strongly I felt, and let me leave.
Speaker 1: But that's that's a pretty manipulative at the very manipulative
Speaker 1: or you want us to believe you were manipulative. Either way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like there, I can see the five D chess.
Speaker 2: But it also why would you say that? Why would
Speaker 2: you say that? Thoughts?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's he has he has a real a lot invested.
Speaker 1: He's one of these guys. He's the most like want
Speaker 1: to be chess master type dude of any cult leader
Speaker 1: I've seen, Like he wants to be the three D
Speaker 1: chess guy very badly. Yeah, and I think that's why
Speaker 1: he tells this story. Whether or not it's true, it
Speaker 1: also could be true because like he really likes to
Speaker 1: make elaborate, weird threats to compel people's behavior, and this
Speaker 1: is a lifelong thing that he does, so you know, maybe.
Speaker 3: Maybe okay, yeah, there mean, I'm hearing a lot of
Speaker 3: unhinged stories that are that are a hard maybe yeah
Speaker 3: does a.
Speaker 1: Lot of these stories come from a book called The
Speaker 1: Game Caller, which you'll understand that term later. It's about
Speaker 1: Petty and it's written by a former cult member who
Speaker 1: like left and had a big lawsuit with him. But
Speaker 1: also they kind of were frenemies because he would whenever
Speaker 1: journalist would talk to me, like I actually like him
Speaker 1: a lot. He's just fucking me on this, so I
Speaker 1: got to assume him. He writes a book after the
Speaker 1: guy dies. I don't know whether or not we should
Speaker 1: trust this either, but it's simply the only source we have.
Speaker 2: God.
Speaker 3: Cult leaders are such motherfuckers, Jamie.
Speaker 2: It's just like a whole myth making game.
Speaker 3: And it's yeah, there's like so many sources that are
Speaker 3: like okay, so you know, of course, say what you
Speaker 3: will about his methods.
Speaker 2: There's like an air of that to everyone to like, oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of people, and with Petty it is
Speaker 1: more credible than a lot of like el Ron Hubbery.
Speaker 1: His official version of his life is that, at age
Speaker 1: like six, he was made a blood brother of the
Speaker 1: Blackfoot tribe for his many contributions to their people, which
Speaker 1: simply didn't in part because the Black tribe do not
Speaker 1: have blood brothers. That's like not a thing there. It's
Speaker 1: like a thing he picked up from books later in
Speaker 1: his life and differently petty. Everything he says, whether or
Speaker 1: not it's true, is totally possible. Graves were a lot
Speaker 1: easier to break into back then. People did join the
Speaker 1: US Army that young around that time, and children have
Speaker 1: threatened to murder their fathers, So it could all be true,
Speaker 1: is what.
Speaker 2: That's the thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I feel like if he is playing a
Speaker 3: myth making game here, he is like hedging his beds
Speaker 3: smarter than your average cult later.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, and I think he was actually so. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he decides he joins the army very young. I think
Speaker 1: in either case, he definitely joins quite young and decides
Speaker 1: to make a career out of it. He's going to
Speaker 1: stay in for more than twenty years, and he is,
Speaker 1: you know, for his weird guys, He's going to be later.
Speaker 1: He's extremely successful and serious in the army. He's a
Speaker 1: non commissioned officer. And for those of you who don't
Speaker 1: know army stuff, the whole shebang is split, like the
Speaker 1: army is split between You've got your NCOs, which is
Speaker 1: like everything up to like all the sergeants, corporal sergeants,
Speaker 1: all that good shit, right, and then you've got officers, lieutenants, captains, colonels, majors, generals.
Speaker 1: That was not in perfect order, and so like that's
Speaker 1: the way the Army works. I don't know how the
Speaker 1: Navy the Air Force works, and I don't care. Marian
Speaker 1: would eventually rise to the rank of master sergeant, which
Speaker 1: is pretty high up in the non commissioned officer ladder, right,
Speaker 1: relative of pretty a pretty small number of people who
Speaker 1: are in the military, who are enlisted become master sergeants.
Speaker 1: It's not the kind of thing you kind of like,
Speaker 1: you have to really want to make a career out
Speaker 1: of the army to hit there.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if he's like an or seven or
Speaker 1: an or eight, but likes he does very well. He's
Speaker 1: a proficient soldier. He worked well within the army, and
Speaker 1: one of the things that suggests is like he was
Speaker 1: reasonably good at like kind of internal politics, right that
Speaker 1: you just getting along with people, doing favors for folks,
Speaker 1: understanding what people want out of you. We know he
Speaker 1: gets a tattoo, probably very early on in his military service.
Speaker 1: He just says, while he's a teenager, so I don't
Speaker 1: know there's like a five year period there. Well, yes,
Speaker 1: it's the same tattoo Ben Affleck has. It's a giant,
Speaker 1: full back phoenix piece. Yes, indeed, yes, indeed, that's why
Speaker 1: we know it. He got the same tattoo Ben Affleck. Dip.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: I can't believe that Ben Affleck didn't get called out
Speaker 3: for copying the Leader of the Finder's back tattoo.
Speaker 1: This is the next plagiarism case that's going to shake
Speaker 1: this country, Jamie. Now that that Harvard shit's done, we're
Speaker 1: going after Ben for his phoenix tattoo.
Speaker 3: That guy is uh yeah, that guy is shameless. He
Speaker 3: gets away with everything.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, not anymore, Jamie. So one of my favorite things,
Speaker 1: one of the early sources where I eventually found out
Speaker 1: about this book by this cult leader was this like
Speaker 1: weird dude substack that.
Speaker 2: Like it's a great place to start, I don't want.
Speaker 1: To be mean to him because I think he's a harmless,
Speaker 1: weird dude. But in this substack, which definitely he buys
Speaker 1: into some conspiracy elements of it, he describes this as
Speaker 1: an occult tattoo, and like, I don't know that it's
Speaker 1: an ocult tattoo. It might just be a phoenix. I
Speaker 1: don't know that that dude with a substack that was
Speaker 1: one an occult tattoo.
Speaker 3: Is I don't know why this is important to me?
Speaker 3: Is it a bad tattoo? Is a tattoo on his own?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jamie, of course, I actually think it's a chest
Speaker 1: tattoo either.
Speaker 2: Way either, So I man.
Speaker 3: I also, I mean, honestly, down the line, if someone
Speaker 3: were to justify my worst tattoos by saying that I
Speaker 3: was that they were connected to be.
Speaker 2: Occult, I would be relieved.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, because the.
Speaker 2: Truth is it was just a bad week.
Speaker 6: I was.
Speaker 1: It was a bad week and you decided to sit
Speaker 1: down for seventeen hours while somebody dissed.
Speaker 3: Well because three foot I, I too have been liberated
Speaker 3: from the constraints of my own sanity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, sure, yeah, I uh, I have a I
Speaker 1: don't know I'll figure out what kind of tattoo to
Speaker 1: pretend I have when we come back from this ad break.
Speaker 1: We're back.
Speaker 2: I've got a bear with a gun.
Speaker 1: Oh, bear with a gun would be a good tattoo.
Speaker 2: I've got to wait. Let me show you.
Speaker 1: Oh you've got a bear with a gun.
Speaker 2: I've got a little militia bear.
Speaker 1: Friend of the pod Rory Blank, who's the great cartoonist
Speaker 1: Bone Jail. Yeah, you find them on Twitter. Did a
Speaker 1: stick and poke for me of a little pigeon with
Speaker 1: a switchblade.
Speaker 2: Wow, they're cousins.
Speaker 3: This is from a book called The Bear's Famous Invasion
Speaker 3: of Sicily.
Speaker 1: Oh nice.
Speaker 2: They take over Sicily by force.
Speaker 1: They could not do a worse job in Sicily than
Speaker 1: the Italian government. So I think that seems like a
Speaker 1: real for Sicily. Yeah yeah, so yeah, Petty you know,
Speaker 1: joins the army, he gets his phoenix back tattoo, he
Speaker 1: does his he's pre aflecking, and the same year he joins,
Speaker 1: he claims possibly the same At the same time when
Speaker 1: he gets his tattoo, he claims that he loses his
Speaker 1: virginity in a whorehouse he just like walks in as
Speaker 1: a thirteen year old he decides, like time for me
Speaker 1: to start having sex, and he walks into a whorehouse.
Speaker 1: Now again, could be a lie. Also, not hard to
Speaker 1: see this hat working out in the thirties Like that
Speaker 1: does not seem impossible.
Speaker 3: Depressing no matter which way ends up being true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, bumpo, yeah.
Speaker 1: Okay, there's no way for this not to be gross.
Speaker 1: But this is him talking about himself as a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old. He describes himself as having a vigorous libido,
Speaker 1: and would decades later claim to have had since the
Speaker 1: age of thirteen sex at least twice a week whenever possible,
Speaker 1: which actually for a cult leader is not high libido.
Speaker 3: But I do I say, twice a week is pretty
Speaker 3: conservative if you're like, I'm the king of fucking well,
Speaker 3: not to be critical.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't have to whatever. This is what just
Speaker 1: what he says.
Speaker 2: It's a gross story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a gross story. He goes to Panama. I
Speaker 1: guess like thirteen or fourteen. He works as an army lifeguard.
Speaker 1: He made voracious use of the library on base. This
Speaker 1: is he's a big reader, always always. He loves reading
Speaker 1: encyclopedias too. He's just like hoovering up trivia.
Speaker 4: So maybe that sounds so gross the way you said
Speaker 4: it sounded.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, yeah, it's sounded like a sex thing.
Speaker 1: It did.
Speaker 3: But veraciously read encyclopedia.
Speaker 1: Hey, okay, wow.
Speaker 2: Fucking the encyclopedia.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we both had the same thought, which.
Speaker 1: Is cancel culture.
Speaker 2: Okay, this guy's keeping me on my toes.
Speaker 1: I will say, I'm gonna do yeah, all right. Whatever.
Speaker 1: So sometimes when later talking about his time in the military,
Speaker 1: he would focus on what a great place it was
Speaker 1: for him to learn about human nature. Other times he
Speaker 1: was more flippant, telling one follower, I drank and gambled
Speaker 1: and traveled around and again, not not fun to think about,
Speaker 1: like a little teenage getting like wasted Panama in the army,
Speaker 1: Like that is kind of funny.
Speaker 3: Yeah, generationally it's all feasible.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, yes, this could very well be accurate. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: realizes in the late thirties world War two is probably
Speaker 1: going to happen, and being a fairly smart guy is like,
Speaker 1: what I don't want to do is be anywhere near
Speaker 1: where people are getting shot at. That doesn't seem very fun.
Speaker 1: So he kind of social engineers his way into being
Speaker 1: a driver for a general in the Army, a guy
Speaker 1: named hap Arnold.
Speaker 2: Now very thirties, name.
Speaker 1: Very This dude couldn't be more thirties and forties, and
Speaker 1: he is also like a very important person. There's no
Speaker 1: air Force at the time, right the late thirties early forties.
Speaker 1: We don't have like an air force. The air stuff
Speaker 1: that our military does is handled by the Army Air Corps,
Speaker 1: and the Army Air Corps eventually gets kind of carved
Speaker 1: out of the Army and becomes the Air Force. Right.
Speaker 1: Happ is the guy. He's an Army general, but he's
Speaker 1: going to end his career as an Air Force general.
Speaker 1: He basically is the guy who like makes the Air
Speaker 1: Force's one of the guys who creates the Air Force, right,
Speaker 1: and he's actually like one of our earliest He's one
Speaker 1: of the first three rated pilots in the history of
Speaker 1: the Air Force. So he is he's like an old
Speaker 1: school pilot. Guy Petty would later claim that during the
Speaker 1: war he becomes this guy's driver, and so his job
Speaker 1: is he's chauffeuring not just Hap but like all of
Speaker 1: these different people, politicians and generals and whatnot, meet with
Speaker 1: him and he chauffers them. Around two so you know,
Speaker 1: during this when he's kind of in his off hours,
Speaker 1: not working, he meets a Chinese man named Joe Chang
Speaker 1: who had immigrated to the United States as a fourteen
Speaker 1: year old. Petty claims in a lengthy interview to have
Speaker 1: learned martial arts from the man, and when asked, well,
Speaker 1: what style of martial arts did he teach you, this
Speaker 1: is the answer Petty gave. It didn't have a name,
Speaker 1: but if you had to call it something, it would
Speaker 1: be jiu jitsu. Now, the basic idea is that you
Speaker 1: don't know what's going to be thrown at you, so
Speaker 1: you want to be ready to respond appropriately to anything
Speaker 1: without thinking about it. Chang was a natural. There weren't
Speaker 1: many martial arts teachers back then. And here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Number one, I don't believe that that's nay, like, that's
Speaker 1: very big enough. No, definitely, I'm not saying.
Speaker 3: It's impossible that a kid from China would know jiu jitsu.
Speaker 2: But is it not a Brazilian It's not.
Speaker 1: It's not Brazilian. It is a Japanese. There is a
Speaker 1: Brazilian jiu jitsu is a thing, but jiu jitsu is
Speaker 1: a Japanese martial art.
Speaker 3: Your head is Brazilian bow either way, I don't believe,
Speaker 3: especially especially the having to walk back like, well, it
Speaker 3: doesn't really have a name.
Speaker 2: You're like, yeah, that's that's not a thing.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, I am sure. One thing I know
Speaker 1: about martial arts guys, be they Brazilian, Chinese, or Japanese,
Speaker 1: is that they love giving names to the things that
Speaker 1: they're doing. They're huge fans of that.
Speaker 3: I've never yeah, I've never heard someone into martial arts
Speaker 3: be like, there's no name for this.
Speaker 1: I don't know what this is. I'm just throwing people.
Speaker 3: There's no technique, there's no philosophy connected to it.
Speaker 2: I'm just doing whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, if that were the case, no one would
Speaker 1: know the name of Terrence Judo. Anyway.
Speaker 2: That's we'll let it slide. We'll let it slide.
Speaker 1: So I don't believe this entirely. It is true. There
Speaker 1: are some Chinese martial arts that have similarities with jiu jitsu,
Speaker 1: at least according to a random guy on Quorra I read.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's not accurate. I'm not a martial arts guy, not.
Speaker 6: The Kora source for the first half hour of the
Speaker 6: episode to have.
Speaker 1: Learned Japanese martial arts from this Chinese guy that he
Speaker 1: meets in DC while he's driving around famous people. And
Speaker 1: this is worth mentioning because Joe Chang was a real
Speaker 1: who was a kind of interesting background.
Speaker 4: He was.
Speaker 1: You know, he immigrates into the United States as a
Speaker 1: kid as a fourteen year old. He's enrolled in a
Speaker 1: Jesuit academy where he studies journalism, and then he becomes
Speaker 1: a correspondent for a Chinese government owned news service until now,
Speaker 1: well one of the Chinese governments, because this is during
Speaker 1: their civil war, and then you know, he is not
Speaker 1: aligned with the side that wins, right with the communists.
Speaker 1: One of the substacker I found describes him as a
Speaker 1: supposed Chinese agent operating under journalistic cover. Found any real
Speaker 1: evidence that that's precisely the case that seems to be
Speaker 1: stating it. I mean it is like a government so
Speaker 1: yet to that extent, yeah, that makes it sound more
Speaker 1: like school duggery and spying as opposed to like, well,
Speaker 1: this guy's an immigrant. Sounds like he was offered a
Speaker 1: job by one of the sides in that war, like
Speaker 1: putting out information in the US, and then that side
Speaker 1: lost and he continued his life until it ended. I
Speaker 1: haven't found any evidence that this is as interesting as
Speaker 1: people think it is. But it's through Marion's studying with
Speaker 1: Chang that he would meet his wife, Isabelle. She was
Speaker 1: a regular attendee at the same YMCA where he took
Speaker 1: classes during the war. She volunteered to be a hostess
Speaker 1: at the library that he was at. One day.
Speaker 2: What does that mean, like, like your librarian. I think, oh,
Speaker 2: that's fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, it sounds nice. And she sees
Speaker 1: him reading a book about Korea, and you know, this
Speaker 1: is the forties, and so she comes over and strikes
Speaker 1: up a conversation, and he claims she immediately is like,
Speaker 1: do you want to go fuck? I want someone to
Speaker 1: take my virginity. Let's go back to your place, which
Speaker 1: could be true. Like they're definitely married. I don't know
Speaker 1: how it happened, you.
Speaker 2: Know, Okay. I just feel people.
Speaker 1: Were horny in the forties too, I know.
Speaker 2: But I just don't. I don't know. I feel like
Speaker 2: people who are really.
Speaker 3: Genuinely having sex like that do not talk about it.
Speaker 2: That's my theory, like if you really you're not I
Speaker 2: don't know. Also, maybe that's just my naive world.
Speaker 4: The quote started with he claims, and then I was yeah,
Speaker 4: he claims.
Speaker 1: He claims they are they are for sure married. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It is like maybe in the nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: if you're like, hey, I know how to read and
Speaker 1: I know what Korea is, that does put you in
Speaker 1: like the top half a percentile in terms of education.
Speaker 3: It sucks, like yeah, where you have to keep like
Speaker 3: going back and being like, well in context, because my
Speaker 3: grand my grandparents met when my grandfather was cat calling
Speaker 3: her from the street. She was like pushing her baby
Speaker 3: sister around as a teenager in like a little carriage,
Speaker 3: and my grandfather pulled over and said.
Speaker 2: Hey, is that your baby? My god, and she said.
Speaker 3: No, and he's like, let's go out tonight. And then
Speaker 3: they were married for five thousand years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is that the And it's like, so yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe she maybe she'd proposed to like three other guys
Speaker 1: and they'd all screamed when they saw the condom because
Speaker 1: they thought it was some sort of devil. And so
Speaker 1: she sees a man who can read, and it's like,
Speaker 1: this is the one for me.
Speaker 2: He'll what a condom is?
Speaker 1: Yeah, he at least won't. He knows what that rubber
Speaker 1: is a substance. He won't immediately screech that I'm the.
Speaker 2: Devil slim pickens ah.
Speaker 1: Really shitting on our forties ancestors.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm not claiming it's that much better.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no no no. I do actually believe
Speaker 1: that rubber is created by witches. But I just think
Speaker 1: that's why, you know, the Witchcraft industrial complex is such
Speaker 1: a centerpiece of American prosperity. Anyway, moving on, one claim
Speaker 1: that is consistent across many years of interviews with Mary
Speaker 1: and Petty, and is also something that other people have
Speaker 1: brought up, is that during and right after the war
Speaker 1: years he kind of has he gets lucky, right, he
Speaker 1: has a great wartime experience, great early Cold War experience.
Speaker 1: He's just driving famous people around DC. He is also
Speaker 1: kind of an early swinger. He maintains two apartments in DC,
Speaker 1: and he's basically like anyone he meets that he thinks
Speaker 1: sounds interesting. He's like, hey, you can stay in my
Speaker 1: apartment for free, and so a lot of them kind
Speaker 1: of do. Now. He says this was like a con
Speaker 1: kind of because they would always offer money and there
Speaker 1: were so many people staying in his flophouse that it
Speaker 1: worked out to be more than the cost of print. God,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's a weird situation.
Speaker 3: I mean, I feel like these kinds of like I
Speaker 3: don't know, these kind of guys are who are just
Speaker 3: around like they exist. They get the best stories. They
Speaker 3: do tend to live in houses with too many people
Speaker 3: in them.
Speaker 1: That's for sure. Now he is having sex with some
Speaker 1: of these people, but not all of them. In later interviews,
Speaker 1: he would describe this as an exper mental living situation.
Speaker 1: He was basically, he said, I was creating a college
Speaker 1: for myself. Quote. The idea in my head was that
Speaker 1: they were going to teach me something about power, money,
Speaker 1: or sex, which those aren't the only three things people
Speaker 1: can teach you about. Marion. Kind of weird to frame
Speaker 1: it that way.
Speaker 3: Well, we've all lived in a punk house at some point.
Speaker 2: This isn't sounding too He said, he's going to teach
Speaker 2: me the drums.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah again he is. He is kind
Speaker 1: of the prototype for a sort of guy we all
Speaker 1: lived with for at least six months back in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and many of them do end up believing in
Speaker 3: conspiracy theories on a long enough timeline.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they are all people you don't want to like
Speaker 1: check in on on Facebook right now. In conversations with
Speaker 1: a follower later related in the book Game Caller, one
Speaker 1: gets the idea that this was though primarily about sex.
Speaker 1: Quote and this is Marion. Three girls lived on the
Speaker 1: floor above, and I also had the run of their place.
Speaker 1: There was plenty of sex in those days. During the war.
Speaker 1: Everybody was sort of in a state of suspension. Nobody
Speaker 1: knew what it was going to be like the next day,
Speaker 1: so things were a lot freer, including sex. And I
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 2: Things things really for your including sex.
Speaker 3: I just would like, you know, I went just like
Speaker 3: a pull quote from the women upstairs, and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was the.
Speaker 2: No, one never asked them anything.
Speaker 3: But we really can't be like, it's even from a
Speaker 3: modern perspective. You can't just be interviewing the guy who
Speaker 3: runs the.
Speaker 1: House, who is your friend and also who you sued
Speaker 1: for stealing a bunch of your money. This is the
Speaker 1: one source for your book.
Speaker 3: We have to like, really, yeah, that's okay, Yeah, no,
Speaker 3: but sure the sex was awesome and everyone wanted it
Speaker 3: from him.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Yes, that that is certainly his version of his life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also would claim later that during this period he
Speaker 1: as regular contact with like very powerful men through his
Speaker 1: job as a chauffeur, which is maybe to some extent true.
Speaker 1: He's also definitely lying, and this is how it's related
Speaker 1: by one of his former cult members, a guy named
Speaker 1: Toby Terrell. I didn't just drive half Arnold. I was
Speaker 1: assigned to be Arnold's driver, but when he didn't need me,
Speaker 1: I was available to drive other big wigs from the
Speaker 1: Pentagon and the White House and Capitol Hill. When the
Speaker 1: generals wanted to go somewhere or to have somebody picked up,
Speaker 1: they would send me or one of the other drivers.
Speaker 1: During the war, they had even more power than they
Speaker 1: do now. I lived and worked down near Constitution Avenue
Speaker 1: until they finished the Pentagon in about nineteen forty three.
Speaker 1: I drove all of the famous and the powerful. Did
Speaker 1: you ever drive the President, that's Terrell I ask, not
Speaker 1: while he was the president. He says, they've got their
Speaker 1: own drivers. But I drove Truman before he was the president,
Speaker 1: and Eisenhower before he was the president, and Lyndon Johnson.
Speaker 1: Although he didn't like me, plenty of others too. Marshall,
Speaker 1: Patton All of the other generals j Edgar Hoover, just
Speaker 1: about everybody in those days. Why do you think Johnson
Speaker 1: didn't like you? I ask, We weren't in the same
Speaker 1: sort of consciousness like them either. It's almost impossible to
Speaker 1: arrive at any kind of equality with a politician. They
Speaker 1: always have some hidden agenda going on that they think
Speaker 1: will give them more power. It was a great job.
Speaker 1: You overhear a lot of stuff that you can learn from.
Speaker 1: Did they confide in you, I ask, not much, he says.
Speaker 1: Arnold's wife did, but not the men. I would hear stuff.
Speaker 1: If I was driving more than one person, I could
Speaker 1: listen in on what they were talking about. Then I
Speaker 1: would read about it the papers later and get some perspective.
Speaker 1: I heard what they were saying, and I understood the context.
Speaker 1: Then i'd see the way the press wrote about it.
Speaker 1: Quite often it was different. Didn't they try to keep
Speaker 1: you from hearing it? I ask, no, never, he says.
Speaker 1: They never hid anything. They knew that it was safe
Speaker 1: to say whatever they wanted to in front of me.
Speaker 1: Do you remember any of the stuff that you heard?
Speaker 1: I ask. It was mainly psychology, he says, figuring out
Speaker 1: how the human mind works that we're all trying to
Speaker 1: get some power to hold on to it. I had
Speaker 1: opted out of that game. Plenty of times. They offered
Speaker 1: to make me an officer, but I always turned it down.
Speaker 1: I wanted to keep my head clear for learning. If
Speaker 1: you've got some big hidden agenda, like getting a promotion
Speaker 1: or being appointed to some big government job, you think
Speaker 1: different and talk different. You filter everything through your hidden agenda,
Speaker 1: so what comes out is designed to make you look
Speaker 1: like a hero. Okay, that was a long quote, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, okay, where to begin there?
Speaker 3: The thing is again, on its face, do I believe that,
Speaker 3: you know, people speak freely in front of service employees
Speaker 3: because they're fucking assholes and don't view service employees with
Speaker 3: the humanity they should.
Speaker 2: Sure do I believe that people. But that's not what
Speaker 2: he's saying. He's like, they.
Speaker 1: Taught me lessons about life and told my secrets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they just could sense that I'm kind of that bitch,
Speaker 3: and so they like it's really.
Speaker 2: The like, maybe I'm just too tiny, harding piled.
Speaker 3: He sounds so much like Jeff Gluy's friend, who was like.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, the CIA hired me blah blah blah, Like
Speaker 6: he's just like a weird, cowardly guy who ended up
Speaker 6: adjacent to something important once made it out to be
Speaker 6: this huge thing.
Speaker 2: It's so like, oh, it's embarrassing.
Speaker 1: Well, and there's he never gives you any details about
Speaker 1: like mostly learned, like what's really this is as close
Speaker 1: as we get, right, And actually, you know, I go
Speaker 1: back and forth on some of this because like some
Speaker 1: of it does seem more credible, right, Like here's him talking.
Speaker 1: He says that, Yeah, here's him talking about half Arnold.
Speaker 1: Arnold was a man's man. He was awkward around women
Speaker 1: and just did what she told him. His wife. All
Speaker 1: of the men liked him and followed his orders. He
Speaker 1: knew how to run a big game. But he was
Speaker 1: afraid of women. I never met any of the generals
Speaker 1: who weren't afraid of women. I drove all their wives
Speaker 1: at one time or another. They all knew me and
Speaker 1: liked me. They could sense that I was on their side.
Speaker 1: And like, I believe part of that, which is that,
Speaker 1: like all of these guys are scared of their wives.
Speaker 1: Maybe I get.
Speaker 2: I'm like he's choosing his like if he is.
Speaker 3: Lying, which I feel he is like he's choosing, he's
Speaker 3: being pretty like plausible. I mean, the fact offered to
Speaker 3: be a general like and then even just the vagueness
Speaker 3: of like you know when you get into an uber
Speaker 3: after a couple of drinks and you start talking about
Speaker 3: the psychology of power and how to get more like
Speaker 3: it's all.
Speaker 1: Very It's all I talk about to my uber drivers.
Speaker 2: How do you think?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And then and then you offer them the chance
Speaker 3: to be a general in the in the water Wars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like we all have that potential, Jamie, right now.
Speaker 2: True, it's true, It's true.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know who else has the potential to be
Speaker 1: a power broker in the coming water Wars?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 3: Whatever, Brutal Stanley cup ad we're about to play?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, ideally, got god willing an ad for Blue Apron,
Speaker 1: you know, blue like the water that is nowhere around
Speaker 1: anymore because we have hired mercenaries to give it all
Speaker 1: Tonesley so that they can make poison anyway.
Speaker 3: You know, Island is a little different these days. It's
Speaker 3: no longer surprise, it's no longer Ji water.
Speaker 1: We can't do that. We can't do that, the Island
Speaker 1: thing anymore. People believe it there's no more water. This
Speaker 1: is why I was gonna start this episode. It's weird
Speaker 1: that we arrived organically at joking about serial killing, because
Speaker 1: I was going to start it by like really elaborately
Speaker 1: denying that you were involved in like a series of
Speaker 1: murders in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But then I was like, no,
Speaker 1: people might people might think that Jamie is involved in
Speaker 1: a series of murders outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, and you're not.
Speaker 3: People are at just like high rates of media literacy,
Speaker 3: off the charts. Everyone's doing great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So don't google Jamie loftis Grand Rapids, Michigan murders,
Speaker 1: common Hammer.
Speaker 2: Don't do it because nothing will come up.
Speaker 1: I swear nothing will come up, although it would be
Speaker 1: pretty funny if a lot of people did that, and
Speaker 1: then that became like the first thing would people type
Speaker 1: your name Jamie loftis raw talk, Jamie loftus murders, Grand Rapids.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's a career maker right there.
Speaker 2: Fuck with the Wikipedia page. See if I care, here's ads.
Speaker 1: And we're back. So when I think about this guy
Speaker 1: and his stories of all the secrets these generals for
Speaker 1: sure told him, I think about Bill Cooper. Bill Cooper
Speaker 1: was like a right wing conspiracy radio host in the nineties.
Speaker 1: He dies in kind of a shootout with the police.
Speaker 1: He is the proto Alex Jones, and he during his
Speaker 1: time in the Army around this time, he works briefly
Speaker 1: in the Pentagon, right, and he spent the rest of
Speaker 1: his life being like I saw this document that claims
Speaker 1: this insane thing or that insane thing when I was
Speaker 1: working in the Pentagon. Petty kind of does the same thing, right,
Speaker 1: And he will talk later about like I met all
Speaker 1: of the guys that were in the OSS before they
Speaker 1: became the CIA, Like I knew all those guys. Some
Speaker 1: of that's probably true because his wife is works for
Speaker 1: the CIA, Isabelle. She winds up being in the CIA,
Speaker 1: and he's definitely driving officers. Some of those guys would
Speaker 1: have wound up in the CIA, So he does have
Speaker 1: some degree of very real CIA connections.
Speaker 3: First of all, I'm mad at you for reminding me
Speaker 3: about Bill Cooper.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 1: Uncle Bill.
Speaker 3: But but so what is his what is his wife
Speaker 3: doing in the CIA?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's probably like desk work, clerical work.
Speaker 1: I don't like, I don't think there were a lot
Speaker 1: of ladies who were agents.
Speaker 2: You don't think she could ruin the world.
Speaker 1: I think she couldn't know, Jamie, I believe I believe
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of Latin American women and children and
Speaker 1: men and old people. I believe she could kill cities
Speaker 1: worth of them if she put her mind to it.
Speaker 1: I'm just not certain because I've never actually heard anything
Speaker 1: about what specifically she did for the agency. It is
Speaker 1: the CIA, right, so, but.
Speaker 3: She but she's working there and he is still doing
Speaker 3: his This is like a very bizarre power couple situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's he's in the military, like you know, for
Speaker 1: most of the fifties, the first two thirds of it,
Speaker 1: and she's in the CIA from like fifty two to
Speaker 1: sixty one, right Oka, And yeah, that's that's kind of
Speaker 1: their period of overlaps, like four years where he's in
Speaker 1: the military. She's in the CIA because he joined so early.
Speaker 1: He finishes his career at some point in the fifties.
Speaker 1: His son, who knows his dad is kind of full
Speaker 1: of shit, will say that he retired from the Air
Speaker 1: Force in nineteen fifty six, which if that's the case,
Speaker 1: then he would have joined at like the Army at
Speaker 1: like sixteen, because his chunk of the armor becomes the
Speaker 1: Air Force. That's why he leaves a different service than
Speaker 1: he started in anyway, whatever, I think his son is
Speaker 1: probably accurate, and he was pushing things again, that's the
Speaker 1: kind of the kernel of truth. He joins the army
Speaker 1: really young. The lie he joined at thirteen, right right.
Speaker 3: You're just like, what what is this adding for your
Speaker 3: cult recruits?
Speaker 1: That you were just set it up a little bit, Jamie.
Speaker 1: He's just put a little bit spin on it, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: sank on it.
Speaker 2: He's just putting some Legassi bam on it.
Speaker 1: I miss him, Oh yeah, I do miss Emerald. I
Speaker 1: assume he was swallowed by the earth like everyone else
Speaker 1: I remember from that period of time.
Speaker 3: It's true, he actually may have never existed. It's a
Speaker 3: it's a complicated conversation.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. There is now a parody of him on Futurama,
Speaker 1: and like two thirds of the people who have seen
Speaker 1: it have no idea what he's based on. Good stuff.
Speaker 1: So I found an article in the Washington Post that
Speaker 1: interviews his son, George, and this is kind of blissfully
Speaker 1: and George doesn't talk about most of his dad's life,
Speaker 1: but whenever George comes in, I'm like, well, this is
Speaker 1: probably pretty close to truth. George seems like he's got
Speaker 1: his head and screwed on straight, and he knows that
Speaker 1: his dad was full of crap. And he told the
Speaker 1: miss quote. In the nineteen six he was a student
Speaker 1: of the world who would spend the whole day in
Speaker 1: the library near the family farm. Then around nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: he gathered his followers in the W Street House. This
Speaker 1: was the beginning of a new life for him. They
Speaker 1: found in their communal lifestyle, a more adventurous life. Right,
Speaker 1: So he he spends several years reading and then he's like,
Speaker 1: he's doing the same. He's got a family farm. It's
Speaker 1: like ninety acres at this point, he's living there. His
Speaker 1: wife is sometimes there, but she has a separate house.
Speaker 1: It's whatever, do what works for you in a relation?
Speaker 3: Yeah sure, I'm like, you know, if had either resources,
Speaker 3: why not, couldn't hurt Yeah?
Speaker 1: Why? Yeah exactly? Why not? But yeah, there, So he
Speaker 1: just starts inviting people to his farm kind of over
Speaker 1: the sixties, and then in nineteen seventy one he gets
Speaker 1: a bunch of followers together at like a rented house
Speaker 1: and he's like, hey, guys, we're going to be a
Speaker 1: cult now. We're all got to live together. We're all
Speaker 1: going to pool our bank accounts. I've got a great plan.
Speaker 1: It's going to be cool and a lot what.
Speaker 3: A bummer house meetings, Like No, I knew.
Speaker 2: I knew it was too good to be true.
Speaker 1: Like it says a lot about the early seventies that
Speaker 1: it seems like most of the people who are like
Speaker 1: around him are like, yeah, right, well, I.
Speaker 2: Mean, honestly for that, I've not done worse.
Speaker 3: But like, you know, for a good living situation, you'll
Speaker 3: really can see quite a bit. Had I had a
Speaker 3: place in like a beautiful like I had my own bedroom.
Speaker 2: It was like a three person.
Speaker 3: Apartment in Boston, and it costs four hundred dollars a month.
Speaker 3: And the landlord was like, the only caveat is that
Speaker 3: if the police come to the apartment, you have to
Speaker 3: say that you're my daughter.
Speaker 6: And I was.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, all right, you know, and they never showed
Speaker 3: and it was and I lived in Bliss for no
Speaker 3: money for two years.
Speaker 2: It was awesome. Who knows what he did, I'll never know.
Speaker 3: We all just had There were three women who lived
Speaker 3: in that apartment, and we all had to agree that
Speaker 3: we would say we were his daughter.
Speaker 1: I think I think he murdered his daughter, is what.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 2: He just needed three Caucasian women in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to three women who all looked close enough like
Speaker 1: his daughter around.
Speaker 2: So we did, showed up, we did all.
Speaker 3: You know, we were all kind of tall brunettes. We
Speaker 3: just didn't talk about it.
Speaker 2: Like anyway, Sure, he'll agree to a lot. We're done. Look, look, if.
Speaker 1: You're listening in right now, you do the same thing
Speaker 1: next to Mit.
Speaker 2: Are you joking?
Speaker 3: It was like me and two MIT students that were like,
Speaker 3: well he certainly did something, yeah, but hard to say anyways.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So he says, hey, guys, we're going to do
Speaker 1: a cult in nineteen seventy one. And you know, because
Speaker 1: all the reading he's done, he's developed this real, this
Speaker 1: fascination with futurism, right, and he's also he's equally interested
Speaker 1: in like kind of pop a cult shit, the stuff
Speaker 1: that's going to become new age. Right, this is kind
Speaker 1: of right at the birth of New Age, and so
Speaker 1: he is particularly obsessed with the writings of Carlos Castaneda.
Speaker 1: Now a lot of people are probably familiar with carl
Speaker 1: the Don Juan books, Right, So Carlos cassned these are
Speaker 1: like nineteen sixties. They come out, chronicles of mystic self
Speaker 1: exploration that are kind of one of the inciting incidents
Speaker 1: of the New Age movement. Yeah, Castaneda was He's this
Speaker 1: Peruvian writer who comes to the United States and gets
Speaker 1: a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, and
Speaker 1: he writes three books, starting with the Teachings of Don Juan,
Speaker 1: which he claims are a faithful representation of his apprenticeship
Speaker 1: of a traditional shaman of the Yaqui people in northern Mexico. Right,
Speaker 1: that he goes and lives with this Yaqui shaman sorcerer
Speaker 1: fell at Don Juan, who teaches him a bunch of
Speaker 1: mystical stuff, right, and then, as you know, he does
Speaker 1: get a doctorate in anthropology. He's like writing about this
Speaker 1: experience he had as an anthropologist. He actually writes these
Speaker 1: as part of his doctoral program at the University of California.
Speaker 2: I hate that I knew where he went to school. Yeah,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, do U c l A.
Speaker 1: Yeah he sure did, baby, he absolutely did. Now you
Speaker 1: would think if you're a real anthropology program at a
Speaker 1: real college, which we can all agree u c l
Speaker 1: A is not. You would check the work of a
Speaker 1: doctoral student, one presumes, right. I feel like that's part
Speaker 1: of the point.
Speaker 2: You would think, you know u c l A. Will
Speaker 2: UCLA ever answer for its crimes? Answer? No, half the
Speaker 2: camp like their baseball stadium is on, like veteran owned
Speaker 2: land whatever, They're.
Speaker 3: Okay, So so there there. Wizards are real at.
Speaker 2: U c l A.
Speaker 1: Wizards real, yes, more or less Jamie. And again, I'm
Speaker 1: not speaking anything about actual yet key beliefs, because Castaneda
Speaker 1: is not either. This is just a book that he writes.
Speaker 1: It becomes immediately successful. Uh, and it is. It is beloved,
Speaker 1: it's you get some interesting Depending on what year you're reading,
Speaker 1: people talking about these books very different responses. There are
Speaker 1: some respected academic figures who love Castaneda's work, but these
Speaker 1: are also all drug guys, right. Their expertise is not
Speaker 1: anthropology or the yaki, It is mushrooms. In the case
Speaker 1: of Gordon Wasson, right, he's like a guy who really
Speaker 1: likes his fucking mushrooms.
Speaker 3: And he is there and is there a more seventies
Speaker 3: thing to do than to make a best selling book
Speaker 3: based off of an actual belief system that you've heard of, Like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's fun. So yeah, these
Speaker 1: are you know, kind of like our buddy Petty. His
Speaker 1: his lies. Castaneda lies are not like super lazy, like
Speaker 1: there's usually degrees of real knowledge in them, are like
Speaker 1: little pieces of it, and then he just spins it
Speaker 1: to make kind of the Hollywood version. But he's also
Speaker 1: a playerist. He plagiarizes large chunks of this. There's a
Speaker 1: bunch of inconsistencies in it. All of this gets found out,
Speaker 1: but it does take a while. It's harder to like
Speaker 1: spot this stuff back then there is.
Speaker 2: No Huy to drop a nuclear.
Speaker 1: Bomb, Carlos. It's also worth noting that anthropologists who have
Speaker 1: spent time with Yaki people uh will note that the
Speaker 1: books contain absolutely no there's no use of Yaki vocabulary
Speaker 1: anywhere in there, Like yeah, he just does not use
Speaker 1: any of the words that they use, which is suspicious
Speaker 1: for a book of anthropology. Nothing, yeah, for.
Speaker 3: Your doctoral thesis, what do you Okay?
Speaker 1: Okay, I always love talking about Castaneta, but like my
Speaker 1: point is that these books that inspire Petty are full
Speaker 1: of shit, but he loves them and they inspire him
Speaker 1: to create all of these arcane rules and vaguely occult
Speaker 1: rituals for his hanger on. And he's basically the way
Speaker 1: he frames this is like this is a learning community.
Speaker 1: You're all coming here to like learn more about yourselves.
Speaker 1: And I'm here. I'm not really even the leader. I'm
Speaker 1: the student. I'm going to learn from all of you.
Speaker 1: You know, We're all going to like teach each other, right,
Speaker 1: And he does a lot of kind of classic cult things.
Speaker 1: He's at his farm. It's like known as a place
Speaker 1: in the area. You can get a free organic meal
Speaker 1: anytime you go there. So like a lot of drifters
Speaker 1: pass through, and like if he finds them interesting or
Speaker 1: if they'll do what he says, they kind of become
Speaker 1: part of the group. Although while those people that is
Speaker 1: a factor, a weird number of his followers are like
Speaker 1: successful and educated. There's like PhDs there, there's Harvard graduates.
Speaker 1: There's like businessmen who have like run successful oil companies
Speaker 1: who are all going to fall in with him, as
Speaker 1: he's kind of I'll explain what they're doing in a
Speaker 1: second here, but like it's it's yeah, it's I can
Speaker 1: see why there was an appeal to it.
Speaker 7: He's basically said that net to get folks in from Yeah,
Speaker 7: it is, and it's we're just going to start talking
Speaker 7: about like what exactly these people are doing because it's
Speaker 7: a little different.
Speaker 3: Ye, Like, how does he get guys who are in
Speaker 3: oil to move into his punk house?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Basically, this whole organization, the Finders, which he starts
Speaker 1: calling in nineteen seventy one, is organized around what he
Speaker 1: calls a game, and everyone is playing the game who
Speaker 1: is in the cult? And he Mariann is the game caller. Right,
Speaker 1: He's basically a DM for their lives. And so if
Speaker 1: you're a member at various points, sometimes you'll all live
Speaker 1: communally and like do like commune stuff, grow food. But
Speaker 1: periodically he'll pick a number of people and he'll say
Speaker 1: you need to go to Japan for six months. Here's
Speaker 1: the name of a company. I want you to spy
Speaker 1: on their operations and find out everything you can about them.
Speaker 1: Or here is a political candidate. I want you to
Speaker 1: go like research him, or I want you to go
Speaker 1: do this job for two I want you to start
Speaker 1: a company her startup capital, build this company with these
Speaker 1: two other people. This is the game that you're playing
Speaker 1: right now, and I'll tell you when it's done, and
Speaker 1: then you'll you'll come back and you'll talk to us
Speaker 1: about what you learned doing it. Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, because if anything bad happens, it's nothing bad happens.
Speaker 2: It's just a game. It's just an arg that you're
Speaker 2: living in.
Speaker 3: You can't be you can't be you know, taken to
Speaker 3: court for things you were doing just for a fun game.
Speaker 1: It's also it's such a it's such an oddly specific thing.
Speaker 1: But I think the appeal to a lot of people
Speaker 1: is that, like even a lot of educated successful people,
Speaker 1: is like, well, you don't have to make decisions about
Speaker 1: what you're going to do with your life. This man
Speaker 1: will tell you what your next thing is. And he
Speaker 1: seems pretty smart, so maybe he knows that this is
Speaker 1: what I need to be doing with my time. For
Speaker 1: his wife's part, you don't get great context on her,
Speaker 1: but she definitely starts living away from him during this
Speaker 1: period of time, and her view of according to their son,
Speaker 1: her view of his followers is like these are a
Speaker 1: bunch of weirdos, Like you're hanging out with a bunch
Speaker 1: of weirdos, What is wrong with you?
Speaker 2: I wish I wish more uh more.
Speaker 3: People felt empowered to be like, no, too weird, I'm
Speaker 3: out of here.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I'm out.
Speaker 7: I'm out.
Speaker 1: The CIA wasn't too weird for me, but you are, Mary, Yeah, you're.
Speaker 3: Like, no that I'm gonna I'm going to return to
Speaker 3: the safe embrace of the CIA where everyone's normal.
Speaker 1: Marion adopts a nickname at this point for himself, the stroller,
Speaker 1: because he takes he's every day. He'll spend like four
Speaker 1: or five hours walking and like taking notes on the
Speaker 1: neighborhood that he's in and like everything that happens around it.
Speaker 1: But he just walks all the time, which is Keith
Speaker 1: Ranieri was the same thing, where like that was his
Speaker 1: his number one character trait other than being his sex criminal,
Speaker 1: was that he would walk around all the time and
Speaker 1: just you bullshit out of his mouth to whoever was
Speaker 1: forced to follow him. Yeah. Interesting was the Carnaria was.
Speaker 2: Huge on like wandering and like sleep deprivation.
Speaker 1: Right, yes, yeah yeah. And the chief difference between them
Speaker 1: is that we have no evidence that Mary and Petty
Speaker 1: was a sex criminal, although I'm certainly not ruling it
Speaker 1: out Jamie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, based on Okay, yeah, I think we would be
Speaker 3: unwise to rule out so his wife.
Speaker 2: His wife leaves him.
Speaker 1: Now not really leaves him, but is not living with
Speaker 1: him and seems to be kind of frustrated with him.
Speaker 1: She dies not all that long after this. She doesn't
Speaker 1: live a super long life. But yeah, so the game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all playing this game. And he starts calling his
Speaker 1: group the Finders, and the name was actually based on
Speaker 1: an old medieval like concept.
Speaker 2: They're literally playing D and D.
Speaker 1: This is so oh god, they are. They are definitely
Speaker 1: playing DNB Like eighty percent of this cold and eighty
Speaker 1: percent of Petty's life given his childhood activities, is like O.
Speaker 1: If this kid had D and D right.
Speaker 3: Like, we really gotta we got him on the straight
Speaker 3: and narrow early, he would have just been a prolific DM.
Speaker 1: He would have been going to three and a half
Speaker 1: million dollars from a D and D podcast.
Speaker 3: Fine, breaking it in on Patreon, and it would have
Speaker 3: saved everybody a lot of trouble.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, you can go.
Speaker 2: To the military when you were thirteen in D and D.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you can't make against it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's always nice to introduce a liar to D
Speaker 3: and D because you're just like.
Speaker 2: Here, go nuts over here.
Speaker 1: Enjoy yourself, have fun with this. This is what you
Speaker 1: need to control yourself. This is your riddle. Yeah, someone's
Speaker 1: getting it angry about that.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't claim that statement, Robert. I just think
Speaker 3: that D and D is.
Speaker 2: A fun place for liars. That's what I'm going to say.
Speaker 1: So I want to to talk more about how this
Speaker 1: game works. I'm going to quote from an article in
Speaker 1: the City Paper by John Cohen. Rt G I A
Speaker 1: D Ready to go win any direction. It's the salutation
Speaker 1: or closing found on almost every finder's report, and it's
Speaker 1: the essence of the group. If you aren't RTGI a D,
Speaker 1: you can't play the game calls and with the finders,
Speaker 1: everything is a game call. Dress, diet, work, play, travel, marriage, divorce, pregnancy,
Speaker 1: child rearing, pranks, investigations, even calling games can be a
Speaker 1: game call. And what that means is that like he's
Speaker 1: not as this evolves, he's not just saying, Hey, I
Speaker 1: want you to go to this country and spy on
Speaker 1: this thing for me, or I want you to start
Speaker 1: a business. He's saying, like, you're only gonna wear skirts
Speaker 1: you know, from now on until I say, or you're
Speaker 1: only eating vegetables from now on until I say you
Speaker 1: can't cook any of your food for six weeks. You
Speaker 1: have to marry this person. You two should split out.
Speaker 4: So it's like Simon says, but yeah, Simon says.
Speaker 1: Simon says, have a child with this other cult member
Speaker 1: and raise them this way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Simon says, but for your bodily autonomy and a
Speaker 3: lot of the.
Speaker 1: And there are people who leave, but like there's generally
Speaker 1: a few dozen adults who are like, yeah, why not,
Speaker 1: let's try.
Speaker 3: What is the timeline on this escalation from like, hey, move.
Speaker 2: Into my punk house to okay?
Speaker 3: But like, how quickly do we get from move into
Speaker 3: my punk house to like Simon says, that your body
Speaker 3: is Mine?
Speaker 1: Kind of starts in the late sixties, the hey, everyone
Speaker 1: come crash with me, and then by seventy one they're like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're the Finders, and like by the mid seventies, it's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you should have a child now.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, So it is like a slow ish escalation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's more as I understand it. Yeah. A
Speaker 1: former member, Robert Terrell, who wrote the book that I've
Speaker 1: been quoting from a bit provided more detail. In a
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one interview, Petty used the term pressure cooker.
Speaker 1: The idea was to explore your own person and discover
Speaker 1: your own true nature. You can't do that just by
Speaker 1: sitting at a desk or on a couch in a
Speaker 1: routine way. You have to have some experiences. So Petty
Speaker 1: was good at structuring experiences from which you could learn.
Speaker 1: He called himself the game caller, and what that meant
Speaker 1: is he'd call a game for you to do something
Speaker 1: where you'd gain experience. Examples of past games include making
Speaker 1: followers work a temporary accounting job at a law firm,
Speaker 1: or flying to other countries to spy on companies. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I is so mad.
Speaker 3: If I was a cult member, that was like, you're
Speaker 3: going to work an accounting desk job, and like that
Speaker 3: guy got to go to fucking Japan for six months.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you have to do people's taxes. But it does
Speaker 1: split up like that. It's interesting because so there are
Speaker 1: a couple of things going on. Some of this is
Speaker 1: like very much mid century, you know, sixties inspired, Like
Speaker 1: we're somewhat politically radical and we're willing to, you know,
Speaker 1: look at you know, very radical cultural ideas like completely
Speaker 1: changing child rearing or relationship free love kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: They're exploring that. That's a part of this, but it's
Speaker 1: also like, hey, a lot of us are spending a
Speaker 1: lot of our time LARPing as spies. We are spying
Speaker 1: on political movements in the area. You know, we're going
Speaker 1: to meetings, we're joining political organizations, we're writing reports on it,
Speaker 1: We're writing reports on companies around the world. We're doing
Speaker 1: and one version of the story is we are LARPing
Speaker 1: as spies, right, this is a thing people want to
Speaker 1: feel important. They want Petty doesn't even tell us why.
Speaker 1: He just needs the info and the other version of
Speaker 1: this story so they're doing.
Speaker 3: It with no That was the other question I have
Speaker 3: was like, are they being led to believe that there
Speaker 3: is some sort of perceived endgame or are they just.
Speaker 1: Doing that Not as far as former members say, they
Speaker 1: were just interested in growing as people and like learning
Speaker 1: and continuing to play the game.
Speaker 2: He was fine, Free Teddy, Good trips to Japan.
Speaker 1: Free trips to Japan. You know, Petty is like, this
Speaker 1: was all part of my learning process as a lifelong
Speaker 1: student of the world. Now, as we'll talk about in
Speaker 1: part two, they're allegations some of what. You're pretty credible
Speaker 1: that like some of a lot of some of the spying,
Speaker 1: some degree of spying absolutely wound up on the CIA's desk.
Speaker 1: Now did the CIA wanted on their desk? That is
Speaker 1: a question that we're going to we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1: But there are connections there, Like his wife is a
Speaker 1: CIA agent and he is running an amateur spy ring.
Speaker 1: So I think you can see the direction things are
Speaker 1: going to go in in part two to at least
Speaker 1: an extent. But Jamie, that's part one. We're done.
Speaker 2: Wow, that actually like didn't get as bad as I
Speaker 2: thought it would get.
Speaker 1: It gets it gets a lot worse in part two.
Speaker 2: Oh few good, I was helping something.
Speaker 1: Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. This is just set up, baby,
Speaker 1: And now it's.
Speaker 4: Time for Robert to set you up to plug your
Speaker 4: plugg ables.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jamie, in addition to not even being in Grand Rapids,
Speaker 1: when whatever happened to those people happened to them, you
Speaker 1: can see just in Michigan. You are also the author
Speaker 1: of the best selling book Raw Dog you are a
Speaker 1: co host of the Bechdel Cast and you are the
Speaker 1: future host. And I actually found this out in a
Speaker 1: tarot reading I did last night of a podcast that Sophie.
Speaker 1: Can we still not describe the podcast she's going to
Speaker 1: be doing for it?
Speaker 2: I couldn't we conscribe it? Can you do it?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 1: You can. It's in a magazine, now, Jamie, you want
Speaker 1: to talk about it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's called fifteen Minutes. It's on cool Zone, it's
Speaker 2: on Cools.
Speaker 3: I never heard of it, And it's a podcast that
Speaker 3: is going to be about the main characters of the Internet,
Speaker 3: what happened and what happened to them. And I will
Speaker 3: directly be telling you exactly how to feel about all
Speaker 3: of it, each and every week starting in March.
Speaker 1: Now, Jamie, correct me if I'm wrong here, But isn't
Speaker 1: it true that listening to your new podcast on cool
Speaker 1: Zone is the only way to receive the light of
Speaker 1: heaven after your death and be ushered into paradise.
Speaker 2: That's how That's what Sophie told me. And I have
Speaker 2: to believe what Sophie tells me.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, this is a Sophie says situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is well, and also on my on my call,
Speaker 1: I have calls with the Pope every couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: He really he really hit that. He says he's the Pope.
Speaker 1: He really emphasized that to me as well.
Speaker 2: Guy named Francis that is that is.
Speaker 1: I did my verification as a journalist. A guy said
Speaker 1: he was the Pope, and I made sure his ID
Speaker 1: sent Francis. I'm not responsible for anything beyond that.
Speaker 2: Everything else is from Quora.
Speaker 3: Also, I also want to plug We The Unhoused, the
Speaker 3: show that I'm lucky to be producing. But it's created
Speaker 3: and hosted by Theo Henderson, who is a formerly unhoused Angelino,
Speaker 3: and every other Tuesday, he's covering issues from an unhoused perspective.
Speaker 3: It's sort of hyper local, but I think if you're
Speaker 3: unfamiliar with a lot of the issues affecting the unhoused,
Speaker 3: he's doing a lot of incredible episodes, including coming up
Speaker 3: like a whole roundtable discussion about philanthropy versus direct action.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, check that out. It's on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: If you can believe, well, wow, I can believe, and
Speaker 1: I am excited to listen, and listeners you should be
Speaker 1: excited to listen to, and you should also, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: turn the wheel. Turn the wheel. The car's coming right
Speaker 1: at you. That was a mean way to end the episode.
Speaker 5: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 5: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
Speaker 5: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 5: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.