AP Strange: 00:22

Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back my friends to the AP strange show and hail heiress.

AP Strange: 01:11

This week's show is brought to you by these handy dandy Fanord Revealer Goggles. They look perfectly natural. They're inconspicuous. They're just kind of large goggles that have the three d movie glass kind of look to them or two different colored glasses. People won't even realize you're wearing them.

AP Strange: 01:34

But when you're out and about with these heavy duty goggles on, as long as you have them filled regularly with the little uranium tube that goes into them, you should be able to spot all the fanords out in the wild. So if you wanna make sure that you're kept abreast of all the fanords that you would otherwise not notice out in the environment. Get these handy dandy Finord Revealer Goggles and and and use use coupon code AP Strange Show the Nord. Okay. So with that out of the way, we have a really fun show today.

AP Strange: 02:14

It's great for me because we have several episodes where we kinda geeked out about comic books and we talked about comic books. And I actually have a comic book creator, an artist, he's a writer, he's a teacher, he's the owner of MLJC LLC and runs weird comics websites online and is active in the process of developing one of the greatest weird stories of our time, the Illuminatus trilogy into comic book form. Welcome to the show, Bobby Campbell.

Bobby Campbell: 02:52

Hey. Great to be here. I'm it's like to dive into the the strangeness of it all. Yeah. I'm I am I will say I'm a little bit worried that with current events proceeding the way they are, that so I'm working on issue two of the Illumina Illuminatus comic now, and I fear that by the time it comes out, it's gonna be a quaint story about a simpler time.

Bobby Campbell: 03:16

Like, I feel like reality is outpacing my weirdness a little bit.

AP Strange: 03:20

Yeah, I think you intuited what one of my questions was going to be because because, you know, for for listeners context, if any of my listeners aren't familiar, the Illuminatus trilogy was written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in the early seventies. They worked on it for a long time before it came out. Yeah, so we're talking like the story is set kind of in that sixties, seventies mindset, and it it seems a little dated, but maybe more relevant than ever. And as you say, it's like today's reality is so absurd. It's almost it it almost makes this look kinda cute by comparison.

Bobby Campbell: 04:02

It does a little bit. A little bit. Some of it is is more, like, conventionally weird as opposed to the high weirdness that we're experiencing right now. Though it is I mean, it's all so, like, entangled with each other, because it seems to be it seems like it's the novel is dealing with the, like, stages of what came to be. Like, it it's identifying the trends early on, and so there's a lot of resonance between the what's happening in the book ostensibly in this that sixties, seventies time period and what we're seeing today.

Bobby Campbell: 04:47

So, yeah, it it does seem like they they they caught the that wave early and kind of dealt with it in an interesting way that is useful for our purposes today, I think.

AP Strange: 05:00

Well, and contributed to it because it's kind of this interesting feedback loop right there where Operation Mind Fuck was all about messing with the Garrison investigation into the assassination of JFK. So I mean, this is in the first issue the Illuminati's comic where the two detectives arrive at the scene of an explosion and get on the trail of the Illuminati. And I really love the way you did it as a mixed media thing where you're including the clippings from the magazines that are in the file that they're looking at. But I mean those were real columns. I mean Robert Wilson and Bob Shea and other discordians of the time were writing into publications the editorial sections or publications they worked for in the case of Shea and Wilson, which was Playboy Magazine.

AP Strange: 06:01

Yeah,

Bobby Campbell: 06:02

no, as near as I can tell, they flooded the underground media with these stories to try to create this verisimilitude of the Illuminati conspiracy. But but it was it was it was meant to as as you allude to, it was meant to highlight the absurdity. It was it wasn't meant to be believable. It was meant to be, like because what happened was, one of the cocreators of Discordianism, Kerry Thornely, had gotten himself wrapped up in the Garrison investigation into the assassination of JFK because he had known Lee Harvey Oswald back when they were in the marines together. And so he had kind of I think he had inserted himself into that investigation maybe in, like, a, like, Frankster ish kind of, like, self promoting way, and it kinda got out of hand, and they actually started to believe that he was involved in planning the assassination.

Bobby Campbell: 07:09

So he had gotten charged with perjury for saying that he had not met up with Lee Harvey Oswald even though they were both living in New Orleans, in close proximity to each other. So so Thorne Lee is actually starting to face, like, these legal consequences of having been involved with Lee Harvey Oswald, And he discovers that one of the guys on Garrison's commission believes in the Illuminati. And so what he wanted to do was basically just to to fuck with them a little bit and be like, see how see how loosey goosey your investigators are? They are so unrigorous that they believe in this ridiculous conspiracy theory. And so they just started flooding the underground with these stories, and it was meant to just kinda be poking fun at their investigation and its lack of rigor.

Bobby Campbell: 08:03

And then it just slowly, like, crept into reality and, to the point that Carrie Thorneley himself lost track of what was a joke and what was real and came to eventually believe that he was involved in planning the assassination of JFK. So yeah. So it it it's this thing that started as a joke and then became a little bit real and then persisted as a joke and persisted in reality and now it's this kind of Gordian knot where it's hard to tell where the joke stops and where reality begins.

AP Strange: 08:41

Yeah yeah and and like I said your presentation of it really drives that home because you're using in that part of the book anyway there's there's kind of like the direct scans of that column from playboy with part the partial cover behind it looks like everything's just laid out on the table. So I like that artistic approach because I mean you have your you have your art you know panels and everything but then you also have kind of like the actual media on top of it in some cases, and it kinda shows you, it's a good way of illustrating how the reality and the fictions overlapped with this whole tale.

Bobby Campbell: 09:22

Yeah, for sure. Well, and one thing I've learned as I was trying to adapt Illuminatus, because it's a really long book with a lot of prequels and sequels and expository literature and other books that goes along with it. It's just it's more than you can really fit in your head at one time. So when you're trying to adapt something that you can't it's like the blind men and the elephant. Elephant.

Bobby Campbell: 09:47

You know? Like, I'm I'm I'm feeling it feels like a trunk here. I don't know what this is here. So a little bit, what I wanted to do is to invite the reader into the mystery as a co investigator, that that we're investigating this elephant together because I don't know either. And so so a little bit, sometimes what you wanna do is just here here's the information.

Bobby Campbell: 10:12

Here's the the resources, and let's see what everyone thinks, not just from one source from up on high. It's an invitation to the mystery more than it is an explanation of a mystery.

AP Strange: 10:30

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I've always been all about all that stuff and my first reading of the Illuminatus trilogy was like a dream come true to me. It was like the book I had always wanted to write or I always wished existed, know, and I'm like, oh, here it is. This is the book. It's got everything in it, you know.

AP Strange: 10:52

So I was curious for you, what was your introduction to the Illuminatus trilogy? You were reading other Wilson first and then came to it or?

Bobby Campbell: 11:02

No, so I When I was younger I had kind of like an anomalous experience that kind of made me interested in altered states of consciousness, and so I was not looking for this stuff, like any of the esoteric or the occult. I had the experience first and then started finding the literature after the fact and became kind of ravenous for it because I was like, oh, wow. There are other people that have had these kind of experiences. There's this whole, like, tradition going back hundreds of years and different interpretations of it. And so I had spent years and years just reading everything I could get my hands on in terms of, like, any sort of altered states of consciousness.

Bobby Campbell: 11:57

And it was kind of perfect because I got to Wilson last. So I I had read Crowley, I'd read Leary, I'd read Red Watts and McKenna and Lilly, and, like, all, like, Advaita Vedanta, and Buddhism, and Austin Ostman Spare, and just all this, like, wild, weird stuff. And then my roommate had just left a copy of the Illuminatus trilogy on my bed one day, and I just got home and this book was sitting there, and it had everything that I had spent the last two or three years reading all mixed up in a blender in this perfect crystallization of everything that I was going through and all the weird synchronicities and wild possibilities. And it just like it was like a pipe bomb of a book that I had just been perfectly set up to enjoy, because, like, all like, yeah. It it just took everything I was obsessed with and wove it into this pastiche that just opened up my world.

Bobby Campbell: 13:12

I I read it I started on a Friday and finished it on a Sunday, and I was just glued through it the the the whole weekend. And then after that, luckily, I was going to the University of Delaware at the time, and they just had all of Wilson's books in the library. So I just went after another after another after another. And, yeah, I just poured through the whole thing, and it was it was perfect because, like, it was a little bit like the Goldilocks and the Three Bears because all those other people I'd been reading were not quite right in one way or another. Like, I knew like, reading Crowley, I was like, Crowley definitely, like, had similar experiences that I had that put me on the path, and that made me appreciate him because that was that was half the thing was, like, when you have those kind of experiences, and I'm sure a lot of people within listening distance have, if you have that experience in isolation, it's it's incredibly alienating.

Bobby Campbell: 14:16

And so so to have so I was just I was like, has anyone else seen this? And so Crowley had, but Crowley has all that weird aggressive stuff built into his shtick that is partially just a shtick, but it's hard to kinda tell when someone's pretending to be mean and when they're actually mean. Leary also was was just, like, a little bit too bombastic for me. And just, like, not anything wrong with them in particular, but Wilson's kind of down to earth, like, working class, like he's he's, like, explaining ontology to you like a plumber. And there was just something about that that hit home in a way that didn't set off any of my, like, defense mechanisms and really, like, allowed me to get deeper into stuff.

Bobby Campbell: 15:05

Because also the thing with Will Wilson is he is a collector of underappreciated thinkers. So with Wilson, you're getting Buckminster Fuller. You're getting James Joyce. You're getting Ezra Pound. You're you you know, like, you're getting Klubitsky.

Bobby Campbell: 15:25

You're getting all these people condensed down into his style. So really, when you get into Wilson, it's really more like you're getting into a whole genre filtered through his interpretation. And yeah. So and then it was wild. So, like, a lot of people have that thing where once you read Illuminatus, it just, like, sparks your world and the weird coincidences, and it just, like, opens up a world.

Bobby Campbell: 15:56

So I I went from reading Illuminatus. Right? Two years later, I'm sitting in his in Robert Hinton Wilson's living room, and we're smoking a joint together. That's how immersive Illuminatus was, was I ended up sitting in the guy's living room. And yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 16:13

So it it just, like, was both literally and figuratively this immersive, life changing literary experience.

AP Strange: 16:23

Yeah. So well, how did you come to meet Wilson?

Bobby Campbell: 16:27

So in his later years when his he had a polio when he was young and had been cured of it, but in old age, his post polio symptoms had gotten pretty severe. So he was kind of wheelchair bound at one point towards the end of his life, so he couldn't go on speaking tours anymore. So instead of doing that, he opened up a an online workshop space called the Maybelogic Academy. And so they had this thing where if you were one of the first ten people that signed up, you could get weekly email contact with Robert Anton Wilson. And so I scraped together the money and took a bunch of classes at the Maybe Logic Academy, but also had this direct line to him.

Bobby Campbell: 17:20

And so just spent, you know, couple of years bouncing ideas back and forth. And he had this weekly movie night he would do with his friends where they everyone would just come over and watch a movie. And I was like, can I come over and watch the movie with you guys? And he was like, yeah. Sure.

Bobby Campbell: 17:36

He sent me his address, and then I I showed up on his doorstep. It it was it was wild that, like, how nice he was is, like, no exaggeration. You hear nothing but, like, these glowing stories about how generous and nice he was, and that was by far my experience.

AP Strange: 17:55

Yeah. I mean, seems like from stories I've heard, seems like if if you were out where the smokers were, you might run into him like at one of his cats because he was always looking to sneak a cigarette or a joint.

Bobby Campbell: 18:08

Yeah. For sure.

AP Strange: 18:11

But yeah, he was that kind of guy, approachable from what I understand. I mean, I never I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I kinda came to Wilson late. I feel like, much like you, I had read all the other stuff. Was just consuming tons of stuff, so by the time I read Illuminatus, none of the references were really going over my head. It's just like, oh, he touched that too?

AP Strange: 18:39

So it's pretty great. But as you say, the synchronicities do happen as a result of Discordianism in general, but the Illuminatus trilogy in particular, and Cosmic Trigger, because that's kind of at the heart of Cosmic Trigger. I think anybody that's into the weird and especially has any experience with synchronicities can benefit from reading that book.

Bobby Campbell: 19:07

Yo, yeah, for sure. That book is interesting too, because I feel like every time I read it, it's somehow a different book. Like, it's never the same book twice. There's stuff I know, however many times I've read it, and, you know, I'll go through again. And now what I do is because there's an audiobook version, and so when I'm drawing, I'll listen to the audiobook version, and I'll get to this thing.

Bobby Campbell: 19:30

I'm like, I've been through this book five, six, seven times. I don't remember this part, and it's just because, like, it's just, like, whatever whatever you're going through at that time, whatever your interests are at the time, that's just what you focus on, and then I guess, like, as you get older or as you have different experiences, you just pick up on these other threads, but it is so info rich that it it feels almost inexhaustible in in terms of what you can get out of it. Yeah. And Cosmic Trigger is very interesting too because there's this there's this thing that that mister Wilson talks about, which is the danger of opening the crown chakra before you open the heart chakra, which is basically like you can have these kind of, like, intellectual satoris. But if they're not paired with the emotional satori, you're you're gonna you're gonna end up kind of callous.

Bobby Campbell: 20:28

And Cosmic Trigger is, I I think, really good at opening up the, like, emotional intelligence of the reader. Whereas I would say something like Prometheus Rising is more about opening up the intellectual like, that's more of an intellectual awakening, but cosmic trigger. They they pair together well, and I think that that I I I feel like it it maybe that's something the world needs a little bit more right now is that emotional awakening. I feel like we've

AP Strange: 20:59

Oh, yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 21:00

We've we've got we we've done pretty well, I think, with the intellectual awakenings and and all that kind of stuff, but I I don't think it's it's been paired well with the emotional awakening. And I think I I think that that would probably help. So, yeah, I would love to see I wish the I wish that more people and I wish I could have seen the cosmic trigger play that Daisy Ari Scampbell put on. I read the script and that is amazing but I think that would be a good story for the time.

AP Strange: 21:35

Yeah, think that is absolutely something that's missing. Mean, nowadays we are actually hearing nonsense like the sin of empathy.

Bobby Campbell: 21:46

Yeah. That that's exactly what I mean. Yeah.

AP Strange: 21:48

Self described self described genius Elon Musk talking about how empathy is weakness. You know? It's like

Bobby Campbell: 21:54

Right. Right.

AP Strange: 21:55

Yeah. Actually, the heart, and and actually caring about your fellow human being is, like, the reason we're all here. Like Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 22:04

Yeah. And and, like, you can you can engineer all the wonders in the world, but if it's in opposition to all the other beings that you're in in a relationship with, it's doomed to fail because there is no real separation between the individual and the environment. You can't just cut off huge sections of it and expect to benefit personally. But It's good. Because it is there is this aspect of, like, kind of like the Silicon Valley guys have cleaved onto the smile formula, which the space migration intelligence increase and life extension.

Bobby Campbell: 22:52

And I think that's that's there's a part of that that's cool. But I think that's that's the that's the intellectual awakening, and I don't think that it can work without the emotional as well. Because if you're like like, there's that guy that's, like, trying to extend his life by, like, raiding his son's blood. You know that guy?

AP Strange: 23:13

I think I've heard of him. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 23:16

I forget his name. But he's, like, making his son do blood transfusions, and, like, it's real, like, vampire type stuff. And I don't think that that's what Leary and Wilson were envisioning with this smile formula, that you would, you know, literally take your son's blood to make yourself look younger. And I it's funny too because the guy's like he he I wish I could remember his name so I could properly address this. But he's like, and I I look so young.

Bobby Campbell: 23:45

I look so young. Dude, he's like he looks exactly how old he is. There's nothing older than trying to look young, man. Like, man, like, it ain't working. It ain't working.

Bobby Campbell: 23:57

So yeah. So I I I think that I think we've really kind of maxed out a little bit that that engineering aspect of this revolution. And yeah, think we have to work on the emotional intelligence part of it.

AP Strange: 24:16

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a product in part of what Wilson would call believing too strongly in your own BS, the belief system or the reality tunnel that you've chosen and being single-minded in your focus doing that, you know. You have to have an openness to all kinds of ideas.

Bobby Campbell: 24:38

Right, yeah, yeah.

AP Strange: 24:43

Because I mean, we're living in a world with like people thinking that artificial intelligence is gonna solve all our problems, you know?

Bobby Campbell: 24:51

Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 24:55

Just really strange.

Bobby Campbell: 24:57

And it's kinda funny too. That's a very maybe you've had a similar experience, but I when I was younger, man, I was the weirdest guy around. I I I had the weirdest ideas, weirdest experiences, put out the weirdest art around. And I do feel like in some ways, the world has outpaced me its weirdness. The world has gotten weirder than I have, and I find myself almost feeling like a grounding, like, mitigating type force to be like, no.

Bobby Campbell: 25:26

They they said unidentified flying object. They didn't say alien spacecraft, you know, like that kind of stuff. Yeah. But I I but I do think that there is there is a kind of weirdness that I think the is being avoided with a lot of these more, like, showy, like, oh, simulation theory, AI with AI immortality in the stars, like, all that kind of stuff. And I think the weirdness that is a little bit being avoided is impermanence.

Bobby Campbell: 26:04

And and I think that a lot of the a lot of the the what would appear as weirdness is actually just conventional thinking in new clothes. And I think it's it's just still grasping for the permanence and, like, durability of the self and the ego just in a different form. Now now it's, you know, artificial intelligence persisting in the future that you have uploaded your consciousness to. But it's it's it's just the heaven metaphor in a different dress. And I think that in some ways, we're we're avoiding the true weirdness, which is the the dissolution of boundaries.

Bobby Campbell: 26:52

And I think that that was that's what's being avoided. And so, like, you know, like, you see how much trouble everyone's having with just one binary being poked at a little bit? And that's the easy one. The gender binary? Are you kidding me?

Bobby Campbell: 27:09

Didn't people grow up with David Bowie? Like, that's the easy one. Haven't you met are you like you've met them. You've met people that are like, oh, la la la la Like, they're like, you've met people that clearly display those characteristics. The gender binary is the easy one to break down.

Bobby Campbell: 27:27

That's kindergarten stuff. And so, like, the idea of then breaking down self and other continuity and discontinuity, that's the, like, that's the true weirdness that I think is being ducked with, you know, some of the more, like, aggressive I don't know. Techno utopianism. I I I think the the the true weirdness is being hidden from. And I don't think it can be hidden from.

Bobby Campbell: 27:57

I think it's a it's a losing battle. I think that those those binaries will dissolve whether you want them to or not, which I which is maybe why that that first domino is being fought against so hard because it is scary. It is scary to have Right. Self and other seen as intertwined. That's it's not the easiest thing in the world.

Bobby Campbell: 28:19

I don't blame people for being hesitant or afraid of it, but I would advise against it for sure.

AP Strange: 28:29

Right. I mean, because then you have people acting like they're really doing some kind of intellectual thought experiment by talking about something like simulation theory. Right. You're like this has been around this is a new skin on a very very old idea. Like Right.

AP Strange: 28:46

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In India, they were talking about this.

Bobby Campbell: 28:48

Right. Yeah. In Greece, they

AP Strange: 28:50

were talking

Bobby Campbell: 28:51

For sure. Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 28:52

Instead of instead of turning around in Plato's cave to see who's making the shadows, you're just, you know, making your own shadow animals on the wall.

Bobby Campbell: 29:01

Yeah. No. That's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 29:05

The Upanishads have way weirder stuff than simulation theory. Way weirder stuff. And, like, way better, like, detailed, and the world building is exquisite. Yeah. For for whatever reason, that one that one gets my goat a little bit, and and and only because, like you said, because it's it is just it it's a new skin on an old idea, and because and, also, the thing that bothers me about that one is there's no and then Right.

Bobby Campbell: 29:33

With it. There's it's you know, what if the the simulate the world is a simulation, and then it stops there and there's no and then therefore we can do this, that, or the other or that means Well, unfortunately, the

AP Strange: 29:48

conclusion people draw is that everybody else in the world is just an NPC and they're not real people. And that's kind

Bobby Campbell: 29:54

of the way Right. Right. Right.

AP Strange: 29:55

Elon Musk's look at things. You know? They're not people that matter. You know? Right.

Bobby Campbell: 30:00

And you know what? You know what that is too? That's a defense against the dissolution of the self and other dichotomy. That's because then the other doesn't matter, and it can just be the self. That's that kinda makes sense in that context, but the fear of admitting your interrelationship with everyone else.

Bobby Campbell: 30:28

It's almost like Thomas Jefferson's thing where he was like, all men are created equal, but my livelihood depends on having slaves. Therefore, they're not people. And so it's that thing where you dehumanize the other once you realize your interdependence with them so that you can justify persisting in a self directed way? Maybe, I don't know.

AP Strange: 30:53

Yeah. Well, is scary stuff because there are a lot of weird ideas that are really only harmful if I guess like that heart chakra thing isn't activated. If you don't have that part of it and you're just spinning your wheels in kind of this narcissistic or sociopathic worldview, that's where it becomes really dangerous. But there's a lot of us, like you said, I was definitely one of them thinking weird thoughts, thinking about how time isn't actually a linear thing, it's just that's how we perceive it.

Bobby Campbell: 31:33

And looking

AP Strange: 31:34

at UFOs and having my own experiences with premonitions and ghosts and things like that. And it's just like, I I feel like we in the last decade or two, we've really moved into what I was calling the the great weirdening. You know, everything is getting a lot weirder, and it's kinda like what Hunter S Thompson said. When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. And we're kind of the ones that like, we've been down these paths.

AP Strange: 32:03

We can Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 32:05

Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 32:05

Gonna help people. It's like those of

Bobby Campbell: 32:07

us that Yeah. No. For sure.

AP Strange: 32:09

Yeah. All all of us old school tinfoil hat wearing nuts are kind of a lot more reasonable by comparison because I mean, in today's day and age you have, well, I don't think QAnon's even so much a thing anymore but that kind

Bobby Campbell: 32:23

of problem That doesn't seem like it. Yeah.

AP Strange: 32:25

That kind of alternative, right? Basic ideology behind it is a whole lot of people that are much dumber than your classic conspiracy theorist and also don't have people's best interests at heart looking into it. So I'm talking about just your average YouTube watching, YouTube scholar, I think my friend Timbin all calls them, like where they take in this information but they have no means of processing it. There's no critical faculty there to do something productive with that and nor do they really care. I feel like conspiracy theories are like a mental exercise that allow you to see the connections between things and back when, well, I mean, back when I was growing up with it, a lot of people that had these theories out there were because they legitimately cared about finding out what's behind all the ills of the world and maybe doing something about it.

AP Strange: 33:31

And nowadays, it's just kind of the people that believe that strongly are very easily misled, I guess, is the way to put it.

Bobby Campbell: 33:42

Yeah, it does seem that way. And I think a part of it too is, there was this, in the early internet days, as everyone kind of figured out with phrases like eyeball hours and that kind of the idea that feedback is a kind of currency, that in any way you can get someone to interact and respond to the things you were creating, that that was a form of success. Because whether it it led to higher visibility or, like, a feedback loop where you're you're getting idea of how to improve what you're doing or just in in any way you could get someone to interact with what you were doing, especially in a in a art form, was seen as good. And then I remember do you remember this was a long time ago now. There was that song Friday by that girl, Rebecca Black.

Bobby Campbell: 34:36

And it was basically like a terrible, terrible song. It was one of those things where I'm sure, like, her parents went to a producer and the producer was like, we'll turn her into a star. And so they released this song, and it's so bad that she becomes famous because of how bad it is and makes a bunch of money from people buying it to mock it. And what I realized was negative feedback is way easier to generate than positive feedback, but still has the monetary association with it. And so it's way easier to be antagonistic and to generate that response.

Bobby Campbell: 35:20

And I think that's what you've seen over the past decade or so. Is that just turning into a full, like, not, like, business paradigm of just targeted cruelty and manipulation, and it works because it creates this negative burst of feedback that then brings attention to it, and then people that kind of in an oppositionally defiant way go, actually, no. I like it. I like it when you're mean to those people. And then it just kind of, like, becomes a means to make money.

Bobby Campbell: 35:59

And once something is a means to make money, it attaches, attracts, imitators. And and now there's just that's what the ecosystem is. The ecosystem like, if you if you go and look at what the most popular podcasts are, it's gonna be things that are being aggressive and generating negative feedback to begin with and then reinforced after the fact. And I think that's it's just laziness is kind of what's pulling us in is because it's much harder to build something of value that provides a quality experience. It's hard.

Bobby Campbell: 36:40

It's hard to do. And it's hard to make money off of it. So that's not the way the cookie crumbles, because the cookie crumbles along the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance, at least for the time being, is in negativity. But I don't I think I don't think that paradigms last forever, and I think that those kind of neuro pathways eventually callous over and we don't fall for the same trick over and over and over again. But it's taking way longer than I would have hoped, to be honest.

Bobby Campbell: 37:16

Yeah. Well, it's

AP Strange: 37:17

a pendulum swing, you know, it's often gonna swing one way and then swing the other. But I take I take your meaning there I understand what you're saying and I think the reason this is becoming so dragged out is because this this kind of environment is almost literally brain rotting. You know, it's a

Bobby Campbell: 37:42

Yeah, yeah.

AP Strange: 37:44

There are studies to show that people have actually become dumber the attention spans are shorter and there's a lot less ability and motivation to intellectually pick things apart. So people want answers. They want that binary yes or no, true or false, and reality just don't work that way.

Bobby Campbell: 38:07

Right, yeah, yeah. That's why I do think that, so Robert Anton Wilson, his kind of the message he kind of went out on was so he built the Maybe Logic Academy. His documentary was called Maybe Logic. So he he kind of landed on that as the best encapsulation of his ideas. And I do think that the word maybe is in some ways a solution here because nobody wants to turn around on a dime.

Bobby Campbell: 38:46

Nobody you know what I mean? Nobody wants to be like, I'm I'm super in favor of this, and you're not gonna talk them into being in favor of its opposite right away. Right. Like, that's not gonna happen. And the but it wouldn't work on me.

Bobby Campbell: 39:01

It wouldn't work on them. It's it doesn't work on anyone. No one wants to turn around on a dime. But meeting in the maybe space is, I think, maybe a more viable path, because I'm very willing to admit most maybes. Maybe I'm wrong?

Bobby Campbell: 39:20

Hell yeah. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. I like, I am wrong very, very frequently, so there's no reason to suggest that I'm not being wrong now. You know what I mean? Right.

Bobby Campbell: 39:30

So, like, I'm so if you're offering me a maybe, I think that that is something that I'm willing to take, and I think that's probably true for a lot of people, and I think that might be a fertile ground worth building on is is in the maybe space, in that excluded middle, which is also a dissolution of a binary, because that's the problem. It's the yes and the no. And so maybe is that resolution of the yes and the no, and so it's a more gentle dissolution of those boundaries that everyone, not everyone, that a lot of people have trouble dealing with. And so it's kind of, it's a, like, again, it's an invitation to a mystery as opposed to a forced expulsion from a belief system that you may or may not be deeply entrenched in. And I think that that might be a more useful path forward into true strangeness as opposed to just surface strangeness, which is being sold as something more substantial than it actually is.

AP Strange: 40:49

Yeah and I mean this is something I try to tell people all the time just become acquainted with words like maybe perhaps allegedly. Possibly you know it's like there's a lot of little adverbs that you can throw into your language to. I mean, it covers your own ass in some ways so that you're not saying

Bobby Campbell: 41:07

For sure.

AP Strange: 41:08

But also it's more intellectually honest because we really can't know anything. Don't know anything that's happening outside of this room right now, really.

Bobby Campbell: 41:18

Yep. No. Absolutely. Yeah. That's why, yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 41:22

So as much as I because you don't wanna not have values, you don't wanna not have a backbone, but you also don't want to sacrifice like, the truth for something that you can't actually believe. And so yeah. So I think flexibility is probably the best way forward. With like, when people would argue about the anti vaxx thing, yeah, like, you would get to the point where, like, you would see people arguing for or against the vaccines, right, but then you would almost see people lured into defending the pharmaceutical corporations as a business practice, and it's like, well, I don't know that we wanna go that far. I don't know that I'm on their you know what I mean?

Bobby Campbell: 42:18

Like, I I think it's probably okay to get vaccines against contagious diseases, but I don't think that that means that their business practices are entirely above board. So you don't wanna be lured into an offside position just by defending some tribal flag somewhere. It's it's kind of hard to make those distinctions sometimes.

AP Strange: 42:40

It becomes really troublesome because of absolutist statements. Like, just being completely absolute about, this is the hard line in the sand right now.

Bobby Campbell: 42:51

Right, yeah, And

AP Strange: 42:56

we're at a disadvantage if you're trying to think fluidly and be flexible because unfortunately, people that are evil or people that have hate in their hearts or don't care, the apathetic ones, or just people that are not bright enough to realize they don't know Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have no problem with definitive statement making, they just do it. They'll just keep repeating it. It's like, you know, the press can interview Trump all they want and say that, you know, actually we didn't give $350,000,000,000 to Ukraine. That number doesn't wait, I don't know where you got that number, but it's not true.

AP Strange: 43:38

Neil just keeps saying it because it doesn't Right,

Bobby Campbell: 43:41

right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AP Strange: 43:43

It's like I had a boss like that once. I've seen that kind of weird cognitive disconnect where I worked for a guy once where if you told them something costs the company something, he would do this weird calculation in his head where he would multiply it by two and then add 10% and he would do it without thinking. And so whatever number, whatever loss he was thinking in his head was now greatly expanded from what it actually was. But he could not sway him from that. It'd be like, that cost $12.

AP Strange: 44:14

He's like, so you're telling me we're losing $38 every time one of these goes out? And I'm

Bobby Campbell: 44:18

like, no.

AP Strange: 44:21

12 is not 38. I don't know how to explain that to But but it's like, it's amazing to me because and this has been a problem of human nature, I guess, for ages. It's like, I think Voltaire said uncertainty is an uncomfortable position but absolute certainty is an absurd one But the trouble is that like

Bobby Campbell: 44:44

Right. Yeah. Yeah. That

AP Strange: 44:46

kind of certainty is just comforting to people. They wanna hear an answer. So if you have the answer, they're like, well, these other guys. They're kinda saying well, hemming and hawing and kinda weighing one end. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 44:57

So Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So so maybe logic does have an Achilles heel, or at least it's not applicable to every situation, because if you vote yes and I vote maybe, guess what?

Bobby Campbell: 45:10

The yes wins. So there is a little bit. That's why you also have

AP Strange: 45:15

to

Bobby Campbell: 45:15

have values and a backbone in addition to that openness to sincerely deliberate the other person's point of view. And the trouble is that it's hard to know if someone is actually deliberating in a honest way, if it's an actual honest exchange, Because everything's kinda turned into, like, professional wrestling promos, and that's kind of just whoever has the best promo wins. And I don't know how you back away from that. I don't know I don't know if the point is to get better at cutting promos or to un undo that game so that you're not playing it anymore. And I think that's that's kind of the position we're stuck in, which is can we change the game somehow, or do we have to get better at playing it?

Bobby Campbell: 46:10

But if the game itself is terrible, I don't know. I don't know the answer. I don't know if if you get better at playing the game or if you try to change it entirely. And I think that's kind of the the spinning wheels that are leading to a backslide to a certain degree. But I also think that and and I think this is the good news with all this, is I think that Elon Musk is wrong about empathy.

Bobby Campbell: 46:40

And, not only is he wrong about it, it's making him blind to the fact that fascism doesn't not work because people are too weak to implement it with full vigor, which I think is what he thinks. I think he thinks, no. Fascism would work if like like Stalin says, you must hit the people over the head. You must hit them over the head so they behave. And so I think Elon Musk thinks that in the past, they were too weak to stop hitting the people over the head.

Bobby Campbell: 47:13

And I think he's wrong. Fascism doesn't work not because people don't have the stomach for it. Fascism doesn't work because it doesn't fucking work. Because it doesn't provide a consistent, reliable structure. It is a inherently self consuming monster that leads to degradation, and you end up strung up in the street upside down.

Bobby Campbell: 47:38

That's what fascism is. And so the good news is that I think this current iteration of it will suffer the same fate because and and it's not even because people have to open up their hearts necessarily. It'd be great if they did, but it also is just a system that that is unsustainable and burns itself out really, really quickly. And the the main thing, I think, might be mitigating the damage along the way and then being prepared to build anew, which is trickier than it seems because all of the art movements I've ever seen or been interested in have all been deconstructive in nature, but it's all deconstructed. It's all down.

Bobby Campbell: 48:23

All it's time to be constructive, which I don't know that we have, like, role models for because it it's it's really all been deconstructive in nature, and we're gonna kinda have to be creative in a new way, I think, to rebuild. Yeah. Which is an interesting position to be in. It it's it's there is actual new ground to be broken, and it's all just waiting there to be built. But it it but it's hard to get out of that deconstructive mindset, because you wanna be like, here's here's what they're doing.

Bobby Campbell: 49:03

Here's how it works. Here's why it's bad and all that stuff, which is necessary to do, but there also has to be that other wing that's like, and therefore, we have to build these collectives of like minded groups that are self supporting and building new alliances and stuff like that, and so which is harder to do because it's just like I said, we we don't really have a existing model to follow that I know of. Maybe there is. But it is so and I think really what we've arrived at, and McLuhan said it years ago, McLuhan was fifty years ahead of everyone anyway, but he was they asked him about anarchy once, and McClune was like, oh, we achieved anarchy long, long ago. And and this this falls in with Discordianism as well, because Discordianism states that the fundamental nature of the universe is chaos and that order is just a temporary structure imposed over top of the chaos.

Bobby Campbell: 50:13

And same with anarchy. I I wouldn't describe myself as an anarchist because I think that's the way things should be or that we need to do anything to bring it about. I think that's just the way things are, that you have anarchy exists, and then we impose structures over top of anarchy. And so, like, clearly, the law doesn't is is not limiting anyone in power right now, but it will be used to limit us should should we do something they don't like. So I I think that now you just have to start imposing other structures from the ground up.

Bobby Campbell: 50:56

I think there has to be, like, a grassroots cooperative that starts imposing a new structure because there is no inherent law that's gonna save us. Nothing that we don't build is gonna be there. And it's similar and with the ontology of Discordianism, There is only chaos, and if we want there to be something besides chaos, we gotta build it.

AP Strange: 51:23

Yeah. And working with the chaos instead of against it might be there.

Bobby Campbell: 51:28

Yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 51:30

You don't wanna deny what's true, which is that's the that's that's the been the gimmick. That's why these things fail, because they deny that the fundamental ground is chaos or anarchy. But you're right. If you build with it instead of against it, like Bucky Fuller says, don't fight forces, use them.

AP Strange: 51:50

Right, right, because everything is true, even false things.

Bobby Campbell: 51:54

Yeah, for sure. And you can't fight against it, it just is, it's just the way it goes.

AP Strange: 52:01

Yep. I love the metaphor that you're kinda using there where you're talking about the deconstruction because you almost picture like a building being stripped to the studs and it's like, well, what do we do? Take down the studs too? And then we can move them around but yeah building it back up is building some form up because I mean we see people stuck in the old thought modalities and trying to get back to a thing that never really people were already disillusioned with. You look at like the Democratic National Convention now, it's like they want an old status quo that it's almost impossible to get back to now.

AP Strange: 52:41

Yeah, exactly.

Bobby Campbell: 52:42

I agree. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.

AP Strange: 52:44

The reason we've deviated so far is because people are starting to really see through it. Yes. Yeah. So I mean, we kinda do need a new model and endlessly deconstructing how we got to where we are is really just taking a walk in circles in the past only going further backwards in time as opposed to doing something in the now and building a future.

Bobby Campbell: 53:13

Yeah, absolutely. I think we're, oddly enough, we do have the tools to do it too. I mean, then in a lot of ways, it's the older tools of the Internet. It's that weird thing where sometimes the more rudimentary technology is more sophisticated than the current iteration of it. So, like, one thing that I I think everyone should learn, just enough HTML to get by to build their own platforms.

Bobby Campbell: 53:46

And I think RSS feeds, I think, would be far superior to the algorithm based social networks where things are mitigated towards profit centers as opposed towards your actual genuine interests. And I like, so many of the tools of building that that can be used to build the future are are there. They're they're they're waiting to be picked up. And so I think there's, like, there's all the reason in the world to be optimistic about the future. I I I do not fall into doom and gloom because the the potential is as there as it's ever been, and in some ways, more there than it's ever been because

AP Strange: 54:37

Right.

Bobby Campbell: 54:38

There's no choice but to build a a a new future because the old one has been stripped down and sold for parts. There's it's not there anymore. And so what else were we gonna do but build something? And why build something worse? You know?

Bobby Campbell: 54:55

I I I think that, yeah. I I I think that it it's all still there. And, like, resources exist when the human brain sees how to use something, which is what Mr. Wilson said. So we money is just an abstract accounting notion that keeps track of who owns what or who owes who.

Bobby Campbell: 55:22

But when we work together, we can build genuine resources. There's a difference between resources and money. You can't eat money, but you can grow food and trade it for this or trade it for that. Not that I wanna go back to some sort of subsistence farming thing, but just the general thing in principle is we create value. It's not something that's handed down from up on high.

Bobby Campbell: 55:45

And the more capable we get, the more enthusiastic we get, the more value we can create for ourselves and each other. And that's I mean, this the project with doing the Tales of Illuminatus comic, it's been this thing where just, like, getting people together and building a magazine, essentially. And it and and it's been so fun. It like, we so you know my co creator in the book, Todd Purse. Right?

AP Strange: 56:20

Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 56:21

Yep. So Todd I've known Todd since he was in the fifth grade. Was so I'm a I'm a high school teacher by by trade, and so I was working at an after school program. And Todd was one of the kids in the after school program, and all I would do for my job was me and Todd would play chess. That's all I did.

Bobby Campbell: 56:44

My first job ever was playing chess with Todd. And years later, I didn't see him for years and years and years, and then saw him at we when I was in college, we would throw these big house shows with bands and kegs and all sorts of stuff. So I saw him many years later and reconnected, and we had been making comics together ever since for geez, it's gotta be almost twenty years now we've been making comics. But we hadn't seen each other for a while, and it was a great excuse just to get together and build something. And then my friend Dan, who's a songwriter, he's doing a we're doing a storyline.

Bobby Campbell: 57:25

In Illuminatus, there's these kind of competing music industry factions. So there's the Illuminati controlled bands, and then there's the John Dillinger controlled bands. And so I got Dan Dan Robinson of The Hetties and Danny and the Darlings. He's writing a a mini punk rock opera that's gonna feature in the comic. And then, Steve Fly, who was another, Robert Anton Wilson, influenced, writer, DJ, musician.

Bobby Campbell: 57:58

He was, close friends with, John Sinclair, who was the manager of the MC five back in the day. You know that you know that you know that John Lennon song, John Sinclair, It Ain't Fair, that whole thing? That so he's writing so he so he's doing all the Illuminati controlled music. Dan's doing the John Dillinger controlled music. And so it's it's just an excuse to get together and create art with my friends, and I highly, highly recommend people doing things like that.

Bobby Campbell: 58:31

And so if any, the thing to get out of reading Tales of Illuminatus isn't to read Tales of Illuminatus, it's to make something. I highly I highly recommend in in these times building something. I think that it is a a multifaceted reaction to the conditions that we're going through and very much influenced by so I I do this every year, I put on this maybe day event, which celebrates Robert Anton Wilson either being contacted by extraterrestrials from Sirius or going a little bit crazy and thinking that he was contacting Yeah. Extraterrestrials from Sirius. So I do an art festival every day or every day.

Bobby Campbell: 59:20

Every year on July 23 called maybe day. And then I also do a maybe night festival celebrating James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. And a very interesting thing happened after the first maybe night was a Ukrainian Finnegan's Wake reading group reached out to me and said that they had just started their reading group just as I had started the maybe night thing, and we started corresponding, and I have joined their reading group a couple of times. And take it from people that know about having to perform resistance, that building something and continuing your appreciation of the things you like amidst actual bombs dropping down is a very powerful form of resistance. Do not let your joy be taken away, whether by people intentionally inflicting tough times or just circumstances.

Bobby Campbell: 01:00:24

I think that it is a very productive reaction is to build things.

AP Strange: 01:00:32

Yeah, no, I think so too. And I was kind of thinking that earlier with what we were saying before about deconstruction is just that people when they're tearing things down, there's always been subversive ways to kind of flip things on their head and make people think differently about things. And it's a lot tougher nowadays because it's really hard to do satire now. Everything's so absurd now, it's

Bobby Campbell: 01:01:02

hard to do satire. It's

AP Strange: 01:01:04

hard to be shocking. Like sometimes people would do subversive acts that were just meant to shock people out of, but nothing shocks people anymore. I mean, our reality is so shocking anyway. So the subversion may be now just being productive, positive, empathetic, inspiring love in the world, like, because that's something that's gonna You

Bobby Campbell: 01:01:26

know? You know what the most you know what the most aversive thing may be right now? It's sincerity. Sincerity may be the ultimate form of a lot of shock because it's in such short supply in some ways. And and

AP Strange: 01:01:42

Actual human connection. Actual human connection is

Bobby Campbell: 01:01:46

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and I and one one caveat I wanna throw out to the the idea of making something is just not to get dragged so much into the business part of it, because there's a little bit of like, not to say that you you can't make money off the thing that you're doing, but there it it is a little bit of a of a trap where like, I did this I did this Comic Con once, and I had, you know, I I got a bunch of books printed up, I got the banners printed up, I bought the table, and I noticed that the the company that was sponsoring the Comic Con was a crowdfunding platform. And then I noticed that, like, there were maybe six to one more people selling comics than buying comics.

Bobby Campbell: 01:02:43

And I realized what I had done was I was buying a product called Aspiring Artist. Yeah. I thought I was selling a product, but I was actually consuming a higher level project being sold by someone else, and there's I mean, it's not entirely not worth doing, but it is a little bit of a trap to fall into. Like, if you find yourself spending a lot of money pursuing the thing that you're building, you you you might wanna change your approach a little bit so that you're not falling into that thing where you're just consuming a higher level invisible product. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:03:30

That is just in in terms of don't don't let your don't let your hobby be something that then becomes a source of stress. So as as much as yeah. Yeah. Just I mean, of course, people can figure that out for themselves. It's just the thing

AP Strange: 01:03:43

Doing things that you love is important because I mean, I think I heard you talk elsewhere about the idea of doing Tales of Illuminatus as a comic book wasn't necessarily something, and I think you even kinda said it here too, where it's not necessarily something where it was a big money making endeavor. It was something you're doing because it's creative and it's fun and you love the source material. Like it's a genuine Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:04:06

Yeah. And and it's the thing that's neat about it too is that you then you get to meet the people that like that thing too. Todd and I did the Small Press Expo and just spent two days, like, getting to hear everyone's, like, weird synchronicity stories with having read Illuminatus or Cosmic Trigger and how it changed their lives and all the the weird dreams that then came true and the premonitions and the the weird coincidences that opened up their lives. And it was that was that was the thing that was worth doing it for. It was that that connection with other people sharing their experiences.

Bobby Campbell: 01:04:52

That was the gold at the end of the rainbow, it turned out. So there's I what I find with art is that the first thing is you have the only payment you can ever really expect to receive is the enjoyment you get from actually doing the work. And anything you get after that is a cherry on top. And sometimes the cherry on top is just a conversation with a stranger that allows you to connect to a larger world, and it ends up being, you know, worth it. And it so but it it it is that weird thing where you you don't wanna just, like, be like, oh, if you make art, it'll all work out.

Bobby Campbell: 01:05:43

You know how you know how there's that survivor

AP Strange: 01:05:45

bias Yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:05:46

Yeah. Thing that people do where they're like, just go for it, and it'll all work out. And it's like, well, it worked out for you, but, like, there's a ton of people that it didn't work out for. So I just wanna make the distinction that I'm not saying that exactly. It's a slight caveat.

Bobby Campbell: 01:06:01

It's not there's not material success that is necessarily gonna come from it, but there is an emotional success that is available with the right circumstances.

AP Strange: 01:06:14

Yeah. Yeah. No. And I I believe that to be true. And I mean, I ran into this when I was making music.

AP Strange: 01:06:20

I mean, used to I used to write my own songs and I was in a couple bands and then, you know, would would record and then I'd be at a show and I'd have these CDs that I had printed up that cost me money, you know, and and the guy that recorded them for me was invested in it too. So I had to sell this CD for $10 and that was just too much for a lot of people at a show for some whatever reason, you know. Yeah. And then CDs were becoming, starting to become like less common anyway. People weren't buying CDs or, you know, but but and the same thing when I did poetry, I'd have books printed up.

AP Strange: 01:06:57

And I always found that there were people that would buy it to to quote support you. And you know that that got tossed on the driver's seat of their car and then maybe made its way into the house eventually and never into a CD player. Or you have people that are like, oh man, I'm flat broke, but I loved what you were playing. You're just like, I would rather give my stuff for free to the person that it's gonna really mean something to you then get $10 from somebody that just wants to like support me. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:07:29

I I agree completely. I agree completely. Yep. So everything most everything I do these days is free because I just don't find ways At the moment for the things that I currently do I just don't find ways that I could monetize it but I feel comfortable with personally which is no comment on anybody else doing whatever but

Bobby Campbell: 01:07:47

no yeah for sure no everybody has the same boat Yeah. Yep. So And I I think the thing that maybe we overlook sometimes is that digital technology is a form of communication, first and foremost. And I think that efforts to turn it into a broadcast system, are fighting against its actual nature, and that the the thing that that wants to happen is that communication with the person that is into your music. You you know what I mean?

Bobby Campbell: 01:08:25

Like, it's it's it's that it it's not to turn yourself into a brand. To communicate the thing that you have to communicate.

AP Strange: 01:08:34

That's exactly what I wanna avoid is like branding, you know?

Bobby Campbell: 01:08:37

Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:08:38

Yeah. It's terrible. You know? I think it's a scourge in our society these days that people have to give of themselves completely in a way that hollows out beneficial function of the content. Fact that it's called content, mean, I feel like people might get upset with me or not understand where I'm coming from, but I don't consider myself a content creator.

AP Strange: 01:09:04

I consider myself a writer.

Bobby Campbell: 01:09:07

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And

AP Strange: 01:09:09

I do podcasts. Like to tend to read people. I'm a writer and an interviewer. I guess I'm personality. There's a lot of labels I could stick on that, but the idea of creating content to me, because content almost just sounds like a commodity, you know?

AP Strange: 01:09:25

No, for sure,

Bobby Campbell: 01:09:26

for sure.

AP Strange: 01:09:26

It's a bushel full of something that you're gonna sell at the market.

Bobby Campbell: 01:09:31

Yeah. It it's another square on Netflix that you're gonna scroll past and ignore because it doesn't mean anything. It's it's just a a a item on a shelf as opposed to a sincere attempt to communicate with the world.

AP Strange: 01:09:44

Right, and I think, yeah, but I think you make really good points. My circuitous way of getting to this is that like the original promise of the internet was of connection with people all over the world, right? And like a free experience that should be available to everybody, instant communication, access to information, and the landscape of the internet has become completely monopolized, but quite literally.

Bobby Campbell: 01:10:13

Yeah, yeah, yep, yeah. By mega

AP Strange: 01:10:16

corporations, so.

Bobby Campbell: 01:10:18

Never forgave social media, Myspace specifically. We used to have a group blog, me and my friends. And, you know, everybody had posting abilities on it, you'd go and post. And we would do, you know, several hundred views a day. And then as soon as Myspace popped up, it just sank like a stone because it was lower hanging fruit to just go and post somewhere where you could force everyone to see your stuff as opposed to invite them to a place, and then everyone stopped going to each other's gardens and instead just went into the the Walmart version of it.

Bobby Campbell: 01:11:03

And I do think I mean, it does seem to be breaking down somewhat. I think people kinda are seeing that I I don't even post on half of the things I have anymore, because I know it because all I wanna do when I post places is bring people to my garden, I know that kinds of posts get they sink like a stone, because that's not what they want. They want they wanna keep people in their garden. They don't want me to invite people to my garden. So what's the point?

Bobby Campbell: 01:11:35

What's the point of even Unless you pay them.

AP Strange: 01:11:39

Unless you pay them for the privilege.

Bobby Campbell: 01:11:40

Yeah. I've even tried that. It does that doesn't all you get is you get you get bots. It's all bots Right. That that that respond to the the promoted posts anyway.

Bobby Campbell: 01:11:51

So yeah. So it it it it's almost like it's a game not worth playing, and the more people stop playing it and start playing their own games, I think we might get that kind of that weird interesting Internet back. And it doesn't even need to be something that everyone does. You know what I mean? Like, doesn't we don't need that many people to do it, to create Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:12:13

And I think you're starting to see a lot of people wanna return to that, but I think it has to be people of a certain age that remember the internet pre social media, which is

Bobby Campbell: 01:12:23

Right. Not that many. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:12:26

I mean, there's plenty of them, but I mean, it has to be those people that wanna return to that on some level, you know, but it seems like that's you you do have a web ring going with weird comics. Right?

Bobby Campbell: 01:12:39

That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:12:40

Yep. Kinda similar to what you're talking about where it's a it's a community garden, but everybody has their own little section.

Bobby Campbell: 01:12:46

Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of I try a lot of little experiments, and some stuff works better than others, but you never know what's gonna be the thing, and it's interesting to see what it brings in because it's never nothing.

Bobby Campbell: 01:13:08

You always get something out of all the little attempts, and it it's kind of it's neat to see the possibilities that are still there despite how likely or unlikely they are. The possibilities are still fully exist that were you know, that technology is still there. Anyone in the world can still make their own site that has whatever they want on there. It's not even that hard. And so it it's it's just good to remember that those possibilities exist.

Bobby Campbell: 01:13:46

And I I mean, to be honest, the the quality of art out in the world has only and always improved over time. I see better and better writing, better and better art, better and better music. It's like, it really is. Like, we're going through this weird, like, hidden renaissance, but just everything is so fragmented that you might not know about it. You might not know that there's all this great stuff going on because everything's so splintered.

Bobby Campbell: 01:14:20

And to add there's this phrase of Terrence McKinnon's that I like to repeat a lot just because I think it it it encapsulates the moment so well, which is the the balkanization of epistemology. And so you have this this fractured commons, and with since the commons is fractured, you can't even really argue with the people you disagree with because they're watching a completely different movie than you are. And you can't they don't they don't get your frame of reference, and you don't get theirs, and you're just talking across each other. And similar with with with art scenes and stuff like that. Like, who's who's what's the best band in the world right now?

Bobby Campbell: 01:15:06

Everyone would has a different frame of reference for that. There's no, you know, there's no real functioning top 40 in the world right now.

AP Strange: 01:15:13

Right. I mean, you have some that are monumental. You get like, people know, everyone knows who Taylor Swift is, but I wouldn't be able to pick out a song, but I know who she is. But I know what you mean. It's like, we used to have TV tell us, basically tell us what the big show was, and everybody watched that show every week, you know?

Bobby Campbell: 01:15:33

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:15:34

We have very few moments like that anymore. We don't have that collective understanding, but one wonders how necessary it is as

Bobby Campbell: 01:15:44

you say, Yeah. Because in some ways, it's a shame, right? In some ways, was kinda neat, but in another way, if done right, this is the prime condition for DIY culture. This would be the situation where DIY culture should, in theory, shine and be more capable and more agile than these big like, the big bands can't even make money going on tour anymore. Like, it's not a it's not a functioning business model.

Bobby Campbell: 01:16:17

But, like, a band playing around the Tri State area, they might be able to get a little something going. They might get a residency somewhere. They might be able to, make something happen. Or even if it's, like, I think probably most likely what you're gonna see is the, like, the mini renaissance of the spare time artist. Like, all my favorite songwriters are, like, work at restaurants and are bartenders and, you know, like, they're not full time musicians.

Bobby Campbell: 01:16:53

All the like, the people I consider the best songwriters in the world, none of them are famous. None of them are making a full time living off of this. I think maybe that's yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:17:06

So, I mean, it's it's it's like a well, Franz Kafka, he he worked all day and came home and wrote at night. He was not he he he wasn't a a literary superstar. He was he was just a guy with a hobby. And I think this might be a good time for the people with hobbies to create something that actually resonates, because everyone else is asleep at the wheel. The the the the the the the all the the gatekeepers are have it so locked down that it's not even worth playing that game anymore.

Bobby Campbell: 01:17:44

Because you can't, like, you can't fight against the algorithm in any realistic way, but you can go out there in the real world and kind of make something happen it's not impossible.

AP Strange: 01:17:57

Yeah yeah I mean I think what one of the other parts to. What we were just discussing is like the nature of celebrity and what we call influencers now we let straight out call people influencers.

Bobby Campbell: 01:18:15

True.

AP Strange: 01:18:18

But old time celebrities always were and that was always people manipulated that in a way it was all very consciously manipulated where celebrities should or shouldn't do certain things in public because they have an influence beyond.

Bobby Campbell: 01:18:37

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:18:39

So you had fixers and you had people like kind of cultivating that. But what you also have as a result is that well for one thing it's manufactured but when you see this in especially our politics or people that we think of as cultural luminaries I guess people that people look up to is that a lot of disconnection from the average person's life. When you're talking about somebody writing after work that's a very like Kafka had a very different understanding and he saw the absurdity of it all firsthand because he had to come home

Bobby Campbell: 01:19:19

because he was living it, yeah.

AP Strange: 01:19:22

As opposed to somebody like RFK Jr, not that he's like a writer but like he doesn't have to be anything. Right right yeah yeah

Bobby Campbell: 01:19:39

For sure. Right, yeah, yeah. Is a good point. In a lot of ways, people who come across as intentionally manipulative are actually probably being sincere just from an absurd standpoint. Right.

Bobby Campbell: 01:19:57

You know what mean? Like, you couldn't tell the difference between someone being insincere or someone being sincere. They just have a completely unrelatable life. Yeah. Like Exactly.

Bobby Campbell: 01:20:09

He probably he probably believes all of his shtick that looks like bullshit to me, but it probably in his in his world, like, you know, whatever he says goes. He's got enough, you know, clout and pull that no one's really gonna argue with him that much, and he can kind of force through, in his world whatever crazy idea he comes up with. So why wouldn't he believe it? Of course it's true. Everyone around him says it's true.

AP Strange: 01:20:36

Right. And I think it's important that getting into the maybe logic of it for everybody to just kind of extrapolate from that examining your own life, you know, because I think people fall prey to a lot of dangerous crazy ideas because they're very comfortable. And I think now that we're seeing people become very uncomfortable with Yeah, them doing that because of they're waking up to that a bit and they're, you know, being able to see like, wait, this isn't normal. Actually, old way of doing things wasn't that great either.

Bobby Campbell: 01:21:07

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

AP Strange: 01:21:12

But that is the time where artists kind of need to step in, creatives of all kinds can make a really good impact.

Bobby Campbell: 01:21:22

Yeah, for sure, especially if you can, like if you can create something that is alluring during tough times, I think that it will root in deeper than anything else because it's like because I think what people will have trouble with if they're not already is envisioning better times. And so I think that if you can spark people's imaginations so that not not necessarily that they're believing in what you're selling, but that they can envision something themselves, I think that that will go a long way and and kind of get everyone out of these defensive postures that are kind of suffocating our cooperative networks. Like, everyone is is is very close to the vest right now, it feels like, because they're envisioning tough times ahead. But if we can envision brighter times ahead, then I think it's more likely that we can make them happen, because it you know, there's this idea that I think is true, which is culture is upstream of politics, which is part of the reason why I wanna do an Illuminatus story, because for me, Illuminatus is about seeing through the maelstrom into something bright and hopeful, and that's kind of what I want to build, is build that light at the end of the tunnel, even if it's not a clear light and it's not exactly certain what it is.

Bobby Campbell: 01:23:21

But I mean, like, what's it's it's wild too because, like, the the thing that Illuminatis deals with, like, the the bad guy is resurgent Nazism. That's the bad guy in Illuminatus is they're bringing back the Nazis. And in the end, the Nazis are stamped out by a giant goddess of chaos, which I think would be pretty cathartic these days. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:23:48

Oh, yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:23:50

But yeah. But I so I I I feel very lucky that, like because there's this impulse to, like, I wanna do something. I don't I don't I don't I don't like what's happening. I don't wanna just sit around and do nothing. And so I'm glad that the thing I was already doing was an anarchist, anti authoritarian text that stamps out resurgent Nazism.

Bobby Campbell: 01:24:15

Think that was a fortunate coincidence that I was already working on that as things kind of slid that way. A little bit, just to throw an idea out there, don't quite know how to express this, but so from a Jungian perspective, right, if you looked at our collective conscious for the past half century or so, I guess longer, you would see like you'd be like, man, these people really wanna fight Nazis. Like, all the pop culture, all the video games, all the comic books, everything is a analog. Man, these guys really wanna fight some Nazis. And then all of a sudden you have this thing where there's a movement that is doing this, like, crypto fascism thing.

Bobby Campbell: 01:25:10

It's almost like we wanted it. We wanted these enemies to pop up because it's the thing we're familiar with. It's the thing we're comfortable with. It's it's the narrative of the twentieth century repeating. It's this thing rises and then we knock it down.

Bobby Campbell: 01:25:25

Now, there's no mechanism that I would think of that actually exists that could make that happen, but narratively speaking, if I was looking at at this as a story instead of as reality, I would say that, like, there was there was a desire. Everybody wants to be Indiana Jones. Everybody wants to you know what I mean? That there there's this thing America. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:25:51

There's this desire to be and maybe it's because we're stuck in that, like, hero's journey thing, where, like, just wanting to triumph over evil almost then invoked the evil that we wanna triumph over in a weird way. I don't know. It's an emerging thought that I don't know where it connects, but I just figured I'd throw that out there because why not?

AP Strange: 01:26:16

It's the ouroboros and then Right. Yeah. It's a snake eating its own tail and it's also just another binary trap, good versus evil.

Bobby Campbell: 01:26:28

Right. Yeah, yeah. So Yeah, for sure.

AP Strange: 01:26:33

Yeah. So I think we need need new narratives for the future.

Bobby Campbell: 01:26:39

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

AP Strange: 01:26:42

Because I find Joseph Campbell to be problematic on some levels, but I mean the hero's journey is something that he's illustrated and it's a well told story, it's a story we see over and over again, we see a lot of the same archetypes, a lot of the stuff that Jung was pointing out too. But I agree that you

Bobby Campbell: 01:27:00

would wanna then resolve it. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:27:04

You don't wanna Or

AP Strange: 01:27:05

other options.

Bobby Campbell: 01:27:06

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You don't wanna just repeat that same story over and over again and that, yeah, I agree that it would then be time for a new story to emerge narratively from that old one.

Bobby Campbell: 01:27:19

You would you would want basically, you would want to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion to the hero's journey that then yields a new paradigm, I think, would probably be the best way to do it. Right. Now how to do that is tricky.

AP Strange: 01:27:36

Yeah. An actual paradise or utopia would be pretty boring if they like, conflict matter. Like, what kind of story is that?

Bobby Campbell: 01:27:43

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But

AP Strange: 01:27:47

yeah. I mean, that's something that's always bothered me when I was confronted, as a kid with the idea of heaven and hell. I'm like, well, you don't wanna suffer for eternity, but then what's heaven? What actually happens in heaven? You just Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:28:01

Is this constantly your favorite thing when I get boring? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:28:08

Conceptually it just kind of doesn't work. Just doesn't,

AP Strange: 01:28:15

yeah, we're always gonna have some manner of conflict, but like we do need new storylines because I feel like people fall into the roles too easily. Yeah. Yeah, so, like I don't think we have a choice anymore because there's nothing more upsetting to me than having somebody say that, like, you know, what what was the word I'm looking for? When I was talking before about being subversive, counterculture.

Bobby Campbell: 01:28:49

Yes.

AP Strange: 01:28:49

Do I've people use the word counterculture to describe Trump and, like, his lackeys and stuff. They're like, that is not okay. Yeah. It is counter to, but that's not the same thing, man. Like, he's just he's just a a maniac.

AP Strange: 01:29:04

Like, he's he's Ubu Roy from the Alfred Cherry play, you know?

Bobby Campbell: 01:29:09

Right. Yeah. That it is it's so it's it's a thing that, I guess, like, you have to develop a sense of, which is when are you just being contrary, and when are you actually standing up for something you believe in? Like like like Roger Daltrey from The Who is now, like, super conservative and is, like, railing against immigrants at but he thinks he's still rebellion. You know what I mean?

Bobby Campbell: 01:29:43

But that's not rebellion. Like, that's but but it's that same ad, like, basically, like, it's that thing where, like, all the old hippies become conservative without really changing that much about themselves because it's just them saying no to someone. But, like, you can't just say no to authority uncritically. You know what I mean? It's it's like that Chomsky anarchy thing is authority has to be investigated, and if it's found to be warranted, then then you work with that authority.

Bobby Campbell: 01:30:20

If it's found to be baseless, then you rebel against it. But just blindly rebelling against all authority everywhere you find it is not punk rock.

AP Strange: 01:30:29

You know what mean? Like, that's Yeah. Exactly. That's always just the punk rock thing, though. I mean, it's like sure.

AP Strange: 01:30:36

I think of it in terms of being a disruptor to a system. Like, absolutely, Trump is a disruptor. He's disrupted things, but he's also the apotheosis of all the worst parts of it. That variety. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:30:49

Yeah. And he's the logical conclusion. Yeah. Right.

Bobby Campbell: 01:30:52

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:30:55

Because it's it's yeah, it's rebellion that results in authoritarianism. And so that's the yeah. You're not arriving at a place where rebellion has won. You're just arriving at a place where someone wins and then assumes the it's the old boss becoming or the new boss becoming the old boss.

AP Strange: 01:31:20

It's yeah. Just like Roger Daltrey's saying.

Bobby Campbell: 01:31:23

Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:31:26

Won't get fooled again. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:31:28

Well, that that makes sense.

AP Strange: 01:31:30

Yeah. Well, I mean, I I love, like, there's a meme that goes around. It's like in a world of performative cruelty, like, being kind is punk punk as fuck, like, be punk as fuck. It's like yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:31:43

Yeah. Yeah. Love It's that thing, like like, how punk was inherently anti racist, but then as those values became embedded in culture, then you're still it's still punk to be anti racist. You don't then, just because you win that part of the cultural war, then turn against it because it's supported by culture. Right.

Bobby Campbell: 01:32:12

Yeah. It has to be you actually have to discern the merits of things and not just thrash around when you know, because a lot of this is people just sucking their thumbs and saying they're not gonna clean their rooms. Like, that's really what's going on in a a a lot of cases. And It really

AP Strange: 01:32:29

is not infantile, I think.

Bobby Campbell: 01:32:31

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and and, you know, some of them have gotten into positions where they don't have to clean their rooms and have never had to clean their rooms, and that that sphere of tantrum throwing is expanding and expanding. But, eventually, you know, you eventually, when things start to collapse, as they're starting to collapse with these tantrums, I think that it becomes something more than ideology.

Bobby Campbell: 01:33:02

I think it becomes yeah. Once once ideology leads to experiential consequences, I think that maybe that's when it's ripe for takedown and for a replacement with something hopefully more functional.

AP Strange: 01:33:21

Yeah. Well, I have to believe so, and I certainly hope so.

Bobby Campbell: 01:33:26

Yeah. You need to

AP Strange: 01:33:27

be able to do something about it. Yeah. I mean, it's not a tenable position to be in. Like you can't, like you said, you can't do that forever. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:33:41

What we're seeing is just the very obvious consequences of having a whole bunch of people that have never had to see any consequences for their actions.

Bobby Campbell: 01:33:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

AP Strange: 01:33:52

Continuing to do what they always did, and they're only ever just gonna increase it, you know, so

Bobby Campbell: 01:34:00

There was a thing Grant Morrison said the other day, which was basically like, yeah, don't don't worry. Their dreams will crash and burn too. Everyone's dreams crash and burn. So Right. Don't worry.

Bobby Campbell: 01:34:13

They're they're not exempt from that law of the universe. Just hopefully, other people aren't caught up in the collateral damage.

AP Strange: 01:34:26

Yeah. Well, they almost certainly will be. I mean, I Well, yeah. Yeah. Things are gonna get much worse before they get better.

Bobby Campbell: 01:34:32

Yeah. I think that's probably true.

AP Strange: 01:34:33

Certainly. I certainly feel for everybody that I mean, I'm in a very privileged position and I understand that and I my heart goes out to everybody that's worried about being deported or jailed or put into some kind of camp, and it's just like, I don't know.

Bobby Campbell: 01:34:52

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It it it's yeah. It it's there's only so much you can shrug your shoulders.

Bobby Campbell: 01:35:00

It's tough. Teach at a school that is very, very, very affected. There's a lot of stuff we can't do anymore in terms of student functions and stuff because it puts a target on them. And Right. Yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:35:17

It is it's it's bad. And it it will only get better, I think, like you said, once it gets worse enough that it starts to affect the people that didn't care about everyone else. And then I think that boundary between self and other will become a little bit more porous one once the those once the authoritarian structure is not just punishing the other and it starts punishing also the self, I think that there will be some maybe some crossover insights there. And we'll we'll see, you know, we'll see what happens from there. I I do I do still think that people are inherently cooperative, and it's just that they have misaligned perspectives.

Bobby Campbell: 01:36:15

And Mhmm. I I don't think misaligned perspectives persist forever, and that if enough of us are constructive enough in our communication, that maybe they can be caught as they fall, and Yeah. Something better can happen. I don't know. Yeah, it's a weird time to sell optimism because in some cases anger and negativity is warranted, but I will still nudge everything along towards constructive anger, constructive negativity, and building towards something better, because it is not only possible, I think it remains likely.

AP Strange: 01:37:09

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, Illuminatus, like as we're winding down is just an encapsulation of all of these things. Like you said, it's about actually bringing the Nazis back and stuff like that. And eminentizing the eschaton, which is just it certainly feels like what's happening right now.

AP Strange: 01:37:34

But volume one is out. This is the second printing of volume one, right?

Bobby Campbell: 01:37:38

That's Oh, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. We out the first printing, and then we went back to press with Todd's new cover. And then so in May, our campaign opens up for issue number two, and I would say either mid June, early July issue two will be out.

Bobby Campbell: 01:37:57

And I think we're we're gonna roll real quick into issue three. So issues two and three should be coming out. Like, so issue two this summer and then probably issue three in the fall. And it's it's going well. It's it's again, it's I've I've cast myself in the role of Saul Goodman investigating the novel.

Bobby Campbell: 01:38:20

I don't I don't know everything about the mysteries that we're pursuing, which makes it so much more fun as I'm going through. I have all these guidebooks, and there's all these wikis with Illuminata stuff. And so I I I'm I'm like the the meme of the guy from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the corkboard and everything. And it's just it's so fun. It's like, the the material that has been left for us to play with is so rich and just, like, the rabbit holes go on forever until they intersect into these, like, tangled webs.

Bobby Campbell: 01:39:00

And I'm just I'm very excited for these paths to be more widely available. I'm I just like the thing that I would like to see is more interpretations of this material other than just ours, because I think that's where it really comes alive. And yeah. So the the more we put it out there in the world and the more people are able to interact with it, I think that that the magic that the book accomplished individual to individual can also happen across networks, and I think that'll be interesting to see. Because, you know, when Illuminatus came out, every everyone that was reading it for the most part were kinda disconnected from each other.

Bobby Campbell: 01:39:51

There wasn't really a culture that was I mean, there was, like, mail order things and stuff like that, but I think it'll be interesting to see, like, even when when the play came out, the the Ken Campbell play, the the kind of, like, sparks of wild coincidence that happened from the play, similar to the book. And so it's kind of an it really is a kind of magic experiment in group dynamics to revisit this material now because of what the material does for people. To see, can we do it again? Can we reignite those enthusiasms and those weird synchronicities into something bigger than just a story? And the answer is probably no, but you never know.

AP Strange: 01:40:54

Well, it's certainly worth a shot, and I would expect anybody to go grab issue one so that you're prepared for when issue two comes out. And you're gonna do, like, a crowdfunding kind of thing for issue two, said, in May?

Bobby Campbell: 01:41:08

Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna be we're only gonna yeah. Basically just preorders. The book will come out irregardless of the campaign.

Bobby Campbell: 01:41:16

But yeah, so we'll do preorders, and then yeah, so I think the preorders will open from May until the June, and then the book will come out shortly after it closes. The only difference with the preorder, you get the book for a couple of dollars cheaper, But if you miss the the preorder, we'll we'll still have some copies left to sell.

AP Strange: 01:41:40

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. And then speaking of Ken Campbell, there there was something in there with him as Doctor Who. Is that gonna be like a separate thing or is that? I couldn't tell them you were just joking.

Bobby Campbell: 01:41:52

So yeah. Right. Right. Right. So what happened was the okay.

Bobby Campbell: 01:41:55

Good. I'm I'm glad you mentioned this. So there's a bunch of people from Ken Campbell's old theater troupe. Right?

AP Strange: 01:42:02

Oh, good.

Bobby Campbell: 01:42:02

And so what they did was there was there was a time in the mid eighties when Ken Campbell came, like, that close away from getting cast as doctor who in the TV show. I think there was just, like, a scheduling mishap or something happened where he ended up not getting the role. So this group of actors put on a full season radio play series of what if Ken Campbell had been Doctor Who? So it's all this Discordian influenced yeah. Basically, they made their own Doctor Who called The Lost Doctor, and it's Ken Campbell as Doctor Who encountering Discordian and other esoteric enemies and adventures.

Bobby Campbell: 01:42:52

So I think they might even they might be up to episode 23. So if you go to thelostdoctor.net, there's 23 episodes of this show. And so they put out an annual, a thing that they do in England for Doctor Who. I guess every year they put a magazine, a book, so they did one that was imitating that, so that's what I did for that was a comic about their version of Doctor Who. And in mine, since Ken Campbell put on the play of Illuminatus, I had him as Doctor Who exhuming the Leaf Erickson, the yellow submarine from that had was sunken in what they call the Pool Of Life, the the waters outside of Liverpool.

Bobby Campbell: 01:43:44

So that was kind of a one off just done for that book, but it may it may come back. I I've I've got a I I did a bunch of art for that book and created a bunch of characters for that world. So it it may recur, or it may just be a one off. That was that was a little bit of a a kind of, like, a a magical tipping of the cap to the person who had interpreted Illuminatus before me. So Right.

Bobby Campbell: 01:44:13

You know? Which is funny. I've I've for for years, people would tell me that I had the perfect name to adapt Illuminatus because my name is Bob Campbell. And it's like, well, that's those are all the names involved in adapting Illuminatus. So yeah.

Bobby Campbell: 01:44:28

So that would that was me kinda paying my respects to Ken Campbell who had adapted Illuminatus to maybe its greatest success. I think the play was maybe a bigger success than the books were even. I wasn't around for it, but, judging from, like, the press I've read, it was a big hit in England. It was it was a big deal.

AP Strange: 01:44:49

And these things these productions were wild too because they'd go on for, like, a day and a half or something.

Bobby Campbell: 01:44:55

Yeah. Like, nine hours. And then my favorite story, and and I don't know if it's rude to say, but, so what we were talking about the cosmic trigger play, and Daisy Arise Campbell is Ken Campbell's daughter, and she's the one that did the cosmic trigger play. She was conceived backstage at the Illuminatus play, at one of the Oh, wow. The productions of the Illuminatus play.

Bobby Campbell: 01:45:18

So she literally was birthed from the Illuminatus play into the Yeah. I I I highly recommend her the the like I said before, the the script for her cosmic trigger play. It is so it it's the the story of Robert Anton Wilson's life is one that is very, very affecting. And Oh, I should also anybody who hasn't read Gabriel Kennedy's Chapel Perilous, it's the first biography of Robert Anton Wilson, and it is awesome. It is a great read and really puts you in that world and how it relates to our current world very very well.

Bobby Campbell: 01:46:03

I recommend both of those books to get a deeper sense of Mr. Wilson and his world.

AP Strange: 01:46:09

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Alright. Well, if people listening wanna find Tales of Illuminatus or your other work online, what's the best way to go find that stuff?

Bobby Campbell: 01:46:20

So talesofilluminatus.com is probably the best place to check and I even I have it set up with it has all the latest postings from the the raw Blue Sky page, and it has all the latest posts from the Substack page. You can also there's we have a Substack that you can subscribe to, But, again, you can just check talesofilluminatus.com, and it'll have all the the latest and greatest goings on. And we'll we'll probably once we launch the Kickstarter in May, we'll switch to weekly updates and we'll have all I got all kinds of stuff I'm gonna start rolling out along with the campaign. It should be pretty fun. I've I've been working on it for a while, so we've got a lot of neat stuff in store.

Bobby Campbell: 01:47:07

I'm very, very excited.

AP Strange: 01:47:09

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Well, people definitely do check this out. Like I said, the first issue has has some work by Todd Peirce in it as well as as Bob.

AP Strange: 01:47:20

So definitely and, of course, it's a classic story. Whether or not you've read Illuminatus, like, might be the the doorway into it. You know? If you're intimidated by this very large book, like, pick up the comic book because it it's very faithful to it. You know?

Bobby Campbell: 01:47:36

Yeah. And it'll ease you into it. And a little bit that that's why I feel like like, because we're kinda going at a leisurely pace because, you know, we both have jobs and stuff like that. So if you if you get impatient for what happens next, the book is there, the book will will take you right through. I highly recommend I

AP Strange: 01:47:55

think I found on I don't know if it's still up, but on YouTube at one point there was like basically an audiobook version of it that Ken Campbell was reading. I found

Bobby Campbell: 01:48:04

a video of Yeah. Yeah. No, the audiobook versions are great. I think Ken Campbell does the first two books and then someone else does the third. But the full unabridged text is available as an audiobook.

Bobby Campbell: 01:48:19

And I've been listening to that while I draw. He does a great job of performing it. There's even there's audio that exists of the original theater production as well. That no one filmed it, there's audio of it. And that's pretty interesting as well.

Bobby Campbell: 01:48:37

I don't know if that's available anywhere. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Alright.

Bobby Campbell: 01:48:43

Well, it was it was

AP Strange: 01:48:45

really great to talk to you. We kinda went all

Bobby Campbell: 01:48:46

over Yeah. I'm I'm sorry. I was I was just scatter shooting. That's how I tend to do these things.

AP Strange: 01:48:55

Yeah. Well, it makes for a good conversation. I think I think our listeners definitely will have enjoyed it at this point. I thank you very much

Bobby Campbell: 01:49:05

for coming Yeah. I I I appreciate it. It's it's great to to be in a space where it's like I feel comfortable just shooting my mouth off about whatever I happen to actually be thinking, and I'm not in that, like, like, press engagement kinda mindset and just actually able to converse. So I appreciate you having this kind of platform and this kind of conversation. It was awesome.

AP Strange: 01:49:32

Alright. Well, yeah. Thanks, man. The this I think this has been great, and people people will really like it. So Right on.

Bobby Campbell: 01:49:40

I and I'll I'll have to I'll I'll have to listen to your conversation with Todd. I'll I'll have to dig that up. I I didn't even I must have missed it.

AP Strange: 01:49:49

Yeah. Well, it was quite a while ago. It was on his show. So

Bobby Campbell: 01:49:52

Okay. Yeah.

AP Strange: 01:49:53

One of the creative weirdos ones.

Bobby Campbell: 01:49:55

So Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll have to look that up.

AP Strange: 01:49:58

Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Well, for now, all hail Discordia, and I'll talk to you soon.

Bobby Campbell: 01:50:06

Alright. Thank you so much. Have a good one.