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Tuesday
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We Analyzed a Mysterious Web Page—Here’s What We Found
As UX professionals, we meticulously study the user journey from click to conversion. But what can we learn from a journey that leads to a dead end? We’ve all had the experience: you click a high-intent headline, intrigued by its promise, only to land on a page that is confusing, unfinished, or nearly empty. This creates cognitive dissonance for the user, a frustrating disconnect between expectation and reality.
Recently, we encountered a perfect example of this phenomenon on Patreon. The page is titled "Crabtree Falls in the Forest and No One Hears -Does He Make a Sound." The headline immediately brings to mind the classic philosophical riddle, priming the reader for a thoughtful discussion on perception or existence.
What we found, however, was something else entirely—something surprisingly revealing in its emptiness. This peculiar digital artifact is more than just an empty post; it’s a case study in the structure of web content and the promises we make to our users.
High-Concept, No Content: A Failure of Information Scent
The most prominent piece of content on the page is its title, which creates a powerful information scent. By alluding to a classic philosophical thought experiment, it signals a high-value intellectual payoff. A user follows this scent anticipating an article, a story, or a reflection on the theme.
That expectation is never met. An examination of the page's actual content reveals that it is composed entirely of its UI framework, or "page chrome." The page is a perfectly formed digital container, but one that holds nothing of substance. The only elements present are structural:
- Navigation and Branding: Standard user interface components are visible, including "Skip navigation," the "Patreon logo," and "Log in" links.
- Author Information: The author is identified as "Sum of Your Beeswax," who has "7 posts." A "Collections" section is also noted.
- Placeholder Text: The only significant block of text on the page is explicitly filler.
- Copyright: A standard copyright notice, "© 2025 Patreon," appears at the bottom.
The page isn't just empty; it's a perfectly formed vessel for a message that was never sent. This structure highlights the void more profoundly than a simple '404 Not Found' error ever could.
The Ghost in the Digital Machine
This Patreon post is a digital paradox: a high-concept title on a fully rendered page that offers nothing more than the shell of an idea. It is an artifact of creation, frozen in a state between concept and completion.
This artifact serves as a stark reminder that in digital spaces, structure without substance is just noise. The user experience begins with a promise, and when that promise is broken—even by an empty page—trust is eroded. In the end, the page inadvertently answers its own philosophical question in a digital context. It is the sound of a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear—a signal sent with no message attached. This leaves us with a modern version of the classic riddle: If a web page is published on the internet but contains no content, does it truly exist?
Five Novels that Prove The Internet is a Psyop
Five Novels that Prove The Internet is a Psyop - YouTube
Transcripts:
These five novels prove that the internet is a scop because decades from now, individuals are going to look back at us and say, "Oh my god, how could they not see that they were in the greatest mind control experiment of all time?" Because in the present reality, we like to look back at MK Ultra and how intelligence agencies infiltrated the radio and television and fractured our soul and broke up the family and all of this stuff.
But we don't want to acknowledge that we are 25 years or more into the worldwide web project and we have nothing to show for it. We are more unconscious and have less freedom than ever. And one of the greatest mediums to show this fracturing of our our soul, excuse me, these mind control methodologies is the novel.
No TV show, movie or album can come anywhere close to the level level of depth of the novels that we are going to be talking about today. Also, almost no non-fiction books by whether that's Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman or whoever can come close to what these novels can show because mind control is a lived experience.
It's something that we collectively undergo as a society. It is a spiritual war and a non-fiction book pointing all this stuff out and what happened or what is happening is great but it doesn't speak to to what we are undergoing as individuals and when you can tap into that when you can show someone that experience it can change their life because I could go talk to any random Joe Schmo on the street right now and say the internet has made society worse all this technology is really disconnecting us and they'll say yeah and then they'll leave go home and
you place a couple sports back bets, excuse me, whack a couple off, talk to their AI girlfriend, be disconnected at dinner with their family, and go to bed while listening to a podcast. But how do we actually activate individuals? How do we change the world? And the answer is through art. It is through story.
And that's what I do here on Write Conscious. I talk about the best books and authors of all time. And I only talk about transformative novels. Novels that are not only entertaining, but that can change your life. novels that can transform you beyond that first level stuff that Harry Potter or a random TV show can do and create real individuation in your soul. And so the five novels that we're going to be talking about today are transformative.
And so if you guys are interested in this journey that I am leading to create a literary renaissance, to create an educational awakening in society, make sure to subscribe. Make sure to support modern authors and people trying to make it happen. And let's hop into it.
And so, first up is Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pinchon, who is probably the greatest living author right now and one of the greatest authors of all time. And this is such a fun book. I recently read this for my book club back over the summer. And I sat down and finished this in one sitting. I read for like five plus hours straight.
I just was snacking a little bit and going to the bathroom, but I just sat down and just read it straight through because Pinchon as usual balances our relationship with technology in such a humane way because I don't want to be some boomer saying, "Oh, video games are bad or all this technology has ruined us." We are beyond that now.
We can't become these aggregates who totally remove from society and act like that's going to work. We can become personal lites and disconnect and let the world go to hell. But in actuality, if we want to create a literary renaissance, it's not about eliminating technology completely. It's not about having some dune level but jihad or or whatever, at least for right now.
But rather, it's about trying to be able trying to get people to be able to cultivate at least a conscious relationship with technology. If you look at this channel I've created, it's an educational channel on books, on writing, on all these different things. These are these algorithms are just mediums that could be used appropriately and respond to our own wants and our own needs.
And if you have the character strength to be able to overcome a lot of the crap, then these the internet can be one of the most powerful tool to tools in the world. I know so many bros out there that are addicted to sports betting, who are addicted to porn, and so they can't log on to Instagram or whatever without seeing some busty chick because they've seen too much. They've liked too much.
They've spent time looking at these chicks for way too long over the past. So the algorithms going to keep delivering it and they don't have the strength to reset and create a different algorithm. And so it's really easy to be a doomer. It's really easy to become this anarcho primitivist who says, "Oh, screw the internet. Screw AI.
" like all this stuff, but it's it's in motion. It is happening. And Pinchon in Bleeding Edge captures this perfectly because Pinchon wrote this in his mid70s. But listen to this line. Quote, "Only the framing material, obvious influences, Neotokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Gear Gear Solid by Hideio Kojima. Sorry if I'm saying that wrong.
" Or as he's known in my crib, God. Imagine your 70-year-old grandpa back in the mid 2000s writing like this, thinking like this. I remember my grandparents who were in their 70s in the mid 2000s, couldn't even use a mobile phone and still can't. Uh Cormatt McCarthy, who's only a couple years older than Thomas Pinchon, never had a laptop, never had a cell phone.
And we got Thomas Pinchon mentioning Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid, Akira. And so Pinchon for Bleeding Edge actually researched technology. He researched video games. You know, one of the cool things about Pinchon raising a son, I think, in New York City at an old age, you know, marrying a younger woman in this thing, in this type of thing, was that he got exposed to the modern world because if you're going to raise a kid, that's what kind of has to happen. You're going to have video games in the house.
And if you're Thomas Pinchon, obviously you're going to be interested if you're interested in storytelling. But Pinchon goes beyond this. In bleeding edge, he talks about programming languages at a very very competent level and so many other things. But what bleeding edge is about is about and now speaking about the SCOP.
It's about government interference in the internet and in the creation of the internet in the early 2000s. And so Bleeding Edge follows kind of the fallout of the.com bus because after the.com bust, which was kind of this big tech fallout in the late '9s, a lot of people in Silicon Valley fled and went to other parts of the country and many went back to New York City.
And so this novel follows a private investigator, and there's going to be really no big spoilers in this. I'm just going to be kind of walking you guys through the main plot. this private detective named or investigator named Maxine who's hired to investigate this billionaire, this tech guy who was one of these big names but has come to New York and is one of the few who's kind of risen up again.
But this is all taking place in New York City during 2001 and it leads up to the September 11th attacks. It talks about the attacks and it talks about the aftermath of it. But simultaneously as she's investigating this guy and his ties to the tech world, she's realizing that and Pinchon's basically writing about 9/11 being a conspiracy, but he takes it to the next level and here we go and ties it to this idea of something called Bleeding Edge. And so in the book, there's this video game called Bleeding Edge. And it's hard to
describe, but it's basically a openw world open-source game that is somewhat hallucinatory and is expanding. You can keep creating levels. It's almost like a Roblox or a Minecraft where you can be like creating worlds, but anyone can come in into this open world and continue creating, but it's almost got a magical effect to it where it's not locked down because it's open source, but has this spiritual life of its own. But the intelligence agencies have infiltrated it. They're already in it.
They're doing stuff within this world and they're trying to take over the psychic space. And when you look at like speaking of mind control and technology, if we go back to the 1960s and 1970s, they were trying to and I think still are trying to figure out what is this psychic space? What does it mean to map out the spiritual world? And that may sound a little bit woo, but what was what was what really blew my mind with this was that probably probably like on my 30th acid trip, I remember sitting there and knowing about MK Ultra and all this stuff and about how the hippie
movement was basically created so that Woodstock could continue as this kind of false passivity movement. I was sitting in there looking I was in Las Vegas. I was looking out to the west at Mount Charleston. I was like, damn, this isn't my perception.
I'm not the first person to see this because when you take psychedelics, one of the first things that happens to you is you feel like you are different, that you are unique because you have kind of unveiled, you know, this first level of reality that you are different. And this is why there's like the acid bros and like guys are all, have you read Infinite Jess? Have you read Blood Meridian? And it's like none of these girls understand me.
You know, I went through all that, but eventually I realized I was like, wait, I'm I'm seeing something that's not unique. I'm seeing a forced reality. And who dominates that reality? Who creates the impressions in that world? What does it all circle back to? Why do 99% of the people who I know who took psychedelics and went deep? Why have none of them ever activated? Why aren't why have none of them tried to work at scale online to wake people up or even in their own community? Why are are all of them the little dark anointed prince in their
little group but are doing nothing with this knowledge? And I was like, wait, because this is a controlled landscape. And when you look at a lot of the kind of early scop stuff in the 60s and 70s, it wasn't just about controlling reality, but believing that the spiritual world had a map to it.
And when you look at shamanism, this is also true. You know, they believed in this in shamanic culture, that's what the training of a shaman is. So there's this lineage lineage of shamans. And it's not just about taking psychedelics, but through um herbalism and all this stuff, you learn about this interior world.
You learn about this world that's beyond our sight, but that's actually been mapped out about our relationships, relationship, excuse me, with plants and all of this stuff that is intuitive, that's thousands of years old that has that was accessed by people uh from disperate and disconnected cultures and and who and almost everyone was coming to these same conclusions.
What is that? Well, it's really that there is this zone of we could call it this union arypal zone or whatever. This map that's not perfect, but that does exist out there in the spiritual world that can not only be mapped, but that can also be used to exploit us in the conscious realm by unconsciously triggering our wants, our desires, our fears, all of this stuff.
And so what's interesting is that Pinchon puts forth that the intelligence agencies have realized that what's greater than the spiritual world. What's better than that? Because you control the spirit. You know, if your plan is to give everyone acid or like take people down into this meditative spiritual world, but be the master of it.
It's somewhat risky because there's going to be a lot of dropouts. There's going to be a lot of these kind of bodhic sautic and I'm sure you're kind of like this figures who were able to kind of see beyond it and be like okay I'm going to use this all to my advantage but when we look at the map of the internet when we look at the spiritual nature of the internet and what's underlying it all that can be controlled and the dropouts in that world are less able to become these enlightened activated beings because it's a maze it's a trap and pinchon published this in 2013 but was writing
about the early 2000s and speaks pretty candidly that they were that the government, that these intelligence agencies, that these corporations, that these billionaires, that these think tanks, whatever we want to call them, the dark occultists, the elites were decades ahead of us, at least a decade ahead of us in terms of mapping out, mining out, not just the infrastructure of the surface level internet, but the spiritual level of the internet.
And so Instagram, Facebook, and now with like Tik Tok and other crazy apps, those didn't appear out of a vacuum. But I I absolutely love this novel because Pinchon shows the freedom of it, shows the expansiveness of it. One of the most tragic things that happened to the internet was that people stopped making blogs. You know, we I run the right conscious book club where we read Thomas Pinchon.
We read Thomas Pinchon's bleeding edge back in June over on substack.com. And Substack is the home of the literary renaissance. It's where the best writers and readers in the world are. If you want to get your fiction, your poetry, your non-fiction in front of people, it is the website to do it. It is social media for readers and writers.
But the problem is is that it's very uniform that you can't create these crazy variations that you were able to with WordPress websites. You know, my right conscious website and previous blogs that I did were all created by me. I sat there and did all the WordPress plugins and you know learned how to do HTML, HTML and other things to create this unique website where I would share my writing, where I would share my videos, where I would do all these different things. But that era is basically dead.
But we had total freedom even before censorship and all this stuff was around before AI you know farmed out all the SEO and all the top pages. The internet internet was a beautiful and expansive thing was a positive thing. Now when you look at the internet and like all the rabbit holes like people will say why don't you have a right conscious discord because discord is the home of the logic bros literally discord as a medium is a dark entity I've spent over a decade on discord just in groups and obviously with friends and with other things I'm not haven't been on it in years but it
doesn't promote as a medium very much positivity because everyone can just push their fractured soul their doom state with no friction and there is no way to go and verify or look at who these people are. For instance, on Substack, you can see, well, this guy left a comment and the same same is true kind of on YouTube, but on Substack, you could look and be, has this guy actually written anything? What does this guy actually believe? Because the problem with YouTube is that a lot of people don't want to make videos and it's like kind of an odd thing. But on Substack, there are countless people who all see a
crazy comment and I'll go look. I'm like, okay, this is a real person and there's some like accountability there. And so we're living in a world where the internet is basically locked down. That because these algorithms at these websites have taken over. The only battle left for us to fight other than becoming aggregates and saying we're not going to do this anymore and we're going to do physical, you know, just drop out completely or do like physical media and like physical products like lit literary magazines or open mic events or
whatever. And that's totally fine and necessary. But the only other thing that you can do be is play the game of the algorithm because the only way even if you created a personal website if you created you know your own author website or you post your own writing and it's not Substack the only way you're going to get people to go there is not through SEO or people searching on Google that's a pipe dream but through websites like YouTube or X or whatever that will get a ton of people to be able to come to that website and so that's why I'm on Substack that's why I host the right
conscious book club which is the most active book club in the world on Substack. In 2026, we are going to read, speaking of Thomas Pinchon, his three biggest novels, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason and Dixon, and Against the Day. I'll be releasing my 2026 book club schedule soon. But also on Substack, you can read my writing.
You can get access to over a 100 hours of content just like this. I have literature courses, I have writing courses, I do free live streams multiple times a week over there. It's a really crazy platform. I'm relaunching my free writing school. And so if you guys want to support me in a monetary way, that's where you guys can do it and get access to a ton of cool stuff.
But if you guys want to support me in a free way, but also be on the best social media site by far where you can post your writing, post your thoughts, and get in actually deep discussions with people who are real individuals. Substack is the place. And I would recommend you go sign up even if you don't subscribe to me.
And so my link to my Substack is down in the description below if you guys are interested. each membership like literally keeps me going now that I'm trying to do this full-time and we're getting closer and closer to me finally not having to dip into my savings and so thank you for that.
So our our this level of expansiveness, this level of freedom is beautifully explored by Pinchon in this novel. And that's why I really love this and am talking about it first because it's not a doomer novel. It's a curious novel. It's a novel that really grapples with the complexities of the internet, but keeps a story intact and explores some wild stuff.
I mean, if you're into conspiracies, this is you get to see Thomas Pinchan talk about his his city, New York City, and he isn't koi about what he feels happened. And so, I won't I won't spoil that. He takes a interesting approach around it. And so, let's now move on to our next novel of the day. So, next up, we have the man, the myth, the legend himself, Mr.
Dondo, who I got riding ab above my head over here. And as you guys know, I love Dondilo. And I actually have a a playlist for Dondilo and Thomas Pincha. And actually, most of the authors we're going to be talking about and so you just have to type in right conscious Dondilo and you will find at least 15 or 20 more videos on Dondilo if you love him.
But if you don't know, Dondilo is one of the greatest American authors of all time. He is also one of the greatest living authors right now. I haven't liked or thought that he's maybe kept up his greatness with his last few novels, but they haven't been terrible. But one of his best novels is White Noise, and it's actually one of his more I I hate to say it like this, accessible novels.
It's not the easiest read, but it's only a couple hundred pages. We're actually going to be reading it in the right conscious book club this summer, if whenever you're watching that, summer of 2026. But compared to, you know, some of his longer books like Libra, which is about Lee Harvey Oswald, or Underworld, as you guys see right here, which is 850 pages, this is a really great read.
And it's kind of right on the nose of analyzing technology. And so, one of the reasons why I love Dondo is that he, you know, and that's what novelists are. And that's what he would say, you know, back in the 1990s, he predicted 9/11, he predicted our relationship with the Middle East and said that terrorists are going to replace novelists. I have a really great video on that if you guys want to check that out.
And White Noise isn't about the internet. It's a pre- internet novel. And some of the other novels we're talking about are also, even though we are going to be talking about a novel that came out this year about the internet. But one of the problems with this literary dark age we're in right now is that no one is writing these ambitious and epic books about our current moment in time. What we are experiencing.
We don't have these authors in their 30s and 40s really pushing the limits in literary fiction about the internet, about our relationship with it. And I know there are a couple people out there who are doing it. I understand. But we don't have these heavyweights. We don't have this push.
And we have like old these older authors maybe in their 50s, their 60s, their 70s or 80s writing about the internet. But we haven't had this new wave. And that's as I've talked about many times before, partially because of MFA programs, the university system, diversity quotas, genre, you know, the push for slop entertainment genre fiction, the shift of publishing houses to just kind of profit only models.
There's like a million different reasons why, but we don't have enough quantity of writers trying to write these ambitious novels about the internet. And it's actually kind of really a really hard thing because it's you're writing about the most complex thing, right? like the little Olo in this is writing about the television and technology and how it induces passivity and we're going to talk about that but the internet is a whole other ballgame.
So you're asking people to, you know, stand on the shoulders of a Don Dilo, of a core Matt McCarthy, of a Thomas Pinchon or whatever, which is already a really big ask, especially in this world with so many different distractions and ways to kind of not focus and not be great. And you're asking us to simultaneously write about something that is harder to much much harder to write about than the television or something like that and its role because it's so fluid.
so expansive and it's it's really hard not to sound like a boomer shouting at a cloud. And so the main thing that we can take away from white noise without me kind of spoiling the novel that's really important and that has been maximized by this kind of internet scop experiment is that the action in our life what you and I do like these big moments are not these grand gestures out you know in the world like you scored the goal you you got the girl you and your family had a great camping trip or something like that. They're informational. They're theseformational triumphs. Whether that's at your work and you do something
on the computer screen, you do something or I I make a viral video. Oh my god, look what I did. It's these in this world of information. And so this novel is about a culture, our culture, where images and information no longer describe reality. And the sociologist, French, you know, French sociologist Jean Bullliard talks about this at length in many of his books, even outside of uh Similac and Simulation. And I I'm a huge fan of him.
But what he talks about is that obviously a similacra is a copy of a copy. But at some point we become very very detached and no and can no longer find the origin of any similacra in our reality because right now I can look at this desk and I don't exactly know where it came from or how it was processed.
But if you go out in nature there is no similacra out there. It is the original image, right? It's the original form or maybe like one or two down if it's dead. But anyway, you guys kind of get that. But what is art? What is this video? Well, it started off with this inspiration or conception in my head. Now, I'm filming it in the present moment, but you're watching a similacra of that.
You're watching a copy of something I had in my head of a copy. And now, as you're processing it and interpreting it, it's a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. And if you do anything with this information I'm talking about here today, then let's say you tell your wife, "I'm quitting my phone or I'm deleting Instagram." She doesn't know it's because you watched Reichcon.
He doesn't know the origin of the chain or any of this. And all I'm doing right now is talking about information. I'm talking about practices and actions. I'm talking about words in a book that's a pixelated image on a screen that's ink on a page. But I'm replacing reality.
We're talking about sh, you know, getting away from something that isn't real in the first place. Technology, these things, these screens, these fake images. And so we live in a world of similacra. And when you combine a world of sim similacro where we can find no origin and then you multiply that or combine that with the insane amount of information especially now with AI that's being flooded into this online space every single day or even into the the real world then we enter into what Bleard calls hyper reality where we basically are existing in a world that has no basis in anything. And what's interesting is that this novel really focuses us on this idea of the rejection
of of death. One of the characters in this novel is taking a pill that erases her fear of death. The novel is very observatory and focuses on people, you know, consuming technology, going through their life in amaze. And it's even worse now with everyone on phone, having headphones on, um, doing whatever.
And it's really a way to reject death. And it's partially because we are so afraid of death because we have not lived any form of a life that even if I'm successful, hey, I'm Mr. Right Conscious. Let's say I get five million subscribers. Well, if I don't actually do something in person, it means that most of my life was built in thisformational bubble that doesn't exist. Most of my memories, my accomplish accomplishments, all of that.
And when you live like that, it's actually a very easy way to avert death if you focus on technology. And now with all the crazy technology and ways that we can manipulate, you know, our body through plastic surgery or ompic or whatever, because of technology, we're really denying death, as Ernest Becker would say, or my boy Otto Ron at the highest level.
And so, one of the kind of big metaphors moments in this novel that really has always stuck with me is that two of the main characters go to this barn and it's called like the most photographed barn in the world or something like that. and they get there and everyone shows up and everyone's taking a photograph, but there's signs everywhere around the barn as you're taking a photo that says the most photographed barn in the world.
And it's this ironic idea that we all live out today with these, you know, places for tourism that no one actually sees the actual barn anymore because they've seen it already. We go into these experiences of life with no sense of anticipation or curiosity. We have no sense of animistic uh anticipation anymore at all. It's so funny.
Like people will be like, "Well, I got to before I go to jiu-jitsu, I'm going to watch a bunch of guides on jiu-jitsu. Before I go skiing, I got to watch videos on how to ski. I got to do all these guides. Before I do this, before I start a YouTube channel, before I get on Substack, just get on the just do it. Go and do something. You don't need a precursor. You don't need an apology. You don't need a summary of anything before you go and do it.
You don't need to go read white noise. You don't need to listen to me sit and try and convince you to do it. But that's all that we care about." And it's crazy because we want these primed pre-formatted lines before everything. That's kind of one of the negative aspects of advertising culture, of review culture, of restaurant culture, of like, you know, I'll look at a restaurant and be like, "Damn, that's a 3.0. I'm not [ __ ] going there.
" Like, why would I do this? Like, you know, there's a 4.8 over there. But maybe the 3.0 is good. Maybe Jack is a little bit angry and a little maybe it's a little bit dirty in the corner, but they make a really good, you know, red curry or something. That happened to me the other day. The town I live in right now isn't that big and so there's not very many culinary options.
And so I was looking at this um this Thai place and there's only one in town. I'm looking I'm like says bad reviews. I'm looking at it. I'm looking at I've driven by like this doesn't look good. But I was just craving a red curry the other day. I was like I'm going to go. I have to do it. It's a waste of $15. It's a waste of 15. I go in there.
It was just as good as what I had at the best, you know, maybe not but it was it could pass in Las Vegas in Chinatown. Lady's from Thailand. She knows what she's doing. Yeah, she's a little bit rude. Maybe it's not the Maybe it smells a little bit like bleach in there, but in the in the in the in the we we watch videos, we take photos, we go to these tourist attractions not to discover anything new, not to have an experience because that's what it's about.
You were supposed to go to Old Faithful in Yellowstone or, you know, Olympic National Park up on the Olympic Peninsula and you know, maybe you saw some black and white photos, maybe you saw some stuff, but you were supposed to go, it's supposed to be this anticipation, supposed to be this spiritual moment. Now you go to Yusede and it's a [ __ ] zoo, bro.
Go to the Grand Teton National Park, you go to Yellowstone, it's a joke. Some of the most beautiful stuff in the world that's supposed to be transforming you is maybe, you know, giving you like, "Wow, that's really nice." like thank god I'm not at my office job in Kansas but it's not you're not we're not really anticipating anymore and so this is you know speaking of scops this is SCOP 101 so I I was I've built up to this so as I talked about earlier you make the map you prime everybody priming is a real thing my example that I've talked about on this show before with priming that
relates to stories is that this this one blew my mind when I read about this these researchers would walk to up to someone at a coffee shop and say hey if you listen to this one minute story, I'll give you $20." And so then they tell them this one minute story that has a lot of contrast in it that's just like a simple fairy tale, you know, fable or something like that, but there's a lot of contrast.
And so then they someone new walks up to them 10 or 20 minutes later while they're at the coffee shop and says, "Hey, can you hold my coffee?" And they either give them a cold or a hot coffee, like you know, in the cup. And then as they're holding it, they say, "Hey, that guy just gave me $20, too.
What story did he tell you? What was it about?" And there was a very high correlation to if they were holding a cold coffee, they would mention the darker elements of the story. But if they were holding a hot coffee, they would talk about more of the brighter positive elements of the story. Something as simple as what you're holding in your hand and its temperature can reformat what you how you perceive things.
And like this is all if anyone is into personal development or character building or like trying to become a better person and get things done, you know that this is really true. But when you look at our entire society and priming, what kind of we wonder why we live in a depressed world where people are unhealthy, unhappy, and disconnected from everything.
What kind of world do we live in? I could go out in my city right now and have nothing but negative associations. I live in a very beautiful place, but if I especi like when I lived in Las Vegas, I could go out for 10 hours and have nothing but neutral to negative interactions. I could just see bums on the street. I could smell pee. I could see advertising tell me I need more.
I could see, you know, people um you know, homeless people. I could see um I could go drive up to Summerland, see all the places that like I can't afford to live. It's nothing but lack. And everyone I talk to, no one is going to be positive to me. No. How are you doing? Good. How are you doing? Good. No one's actually communicating, opening up.
And then I could go talk to my friend group, you know, if I just have this basic friend group and they're all going to be negative. They're going to be complaining about their wives, their family, that they're fat now, they have no money, or they're just going to be playing videos. They're not. It's all negative priming. And then we wonder why we're so negative. Then I go online. I go to, you know, CNN. I go to Fox News.
I go to whatever website on whatever side. It's [ __ ] chaos. Oh, look what's happening. Look, Trump's a fascist. They're trying to turn my daughter into a boy. You know, it's everything is crazy. But everything is a pre-selected dialectic that we've been thrown into. We get installed a narrative in our head whether that's a political narrative whether that's an aesthetic narrative and then we send or you know and then we send people down to go experience it but they form format and stay within the realm of the dialect and that's what Twitter and Tik Tok and social media at large have become vehicles of and it was crazy you know
exist teach being a high school English teacher that I would you know see this in real time every day with students I'd be like oh my god I'd see them at mass at a collective all believing the same thing, all existing within these chosen dialectics. And that's always happened throughout time.
That's just cultural pressure and, you know, culture in general, but it's amplified to an even more extreme now. And what Dilo does in White Noise is he really has some beautiful metaphors about the supermarket that one of the characters is obsessed with shopping. Not because he needs food, but because it's this religious experience that he is obviously having the security of having um a bunch of food, but the bright colored packaging, the endless choice you can choose.
There's 18 different types of pasta that you can have, all that are enriched with folic acid, which if you have an MTHFR mutation actually is bad for you, which most of us do. It's like all this stuff. It's like Jesus Christ. But like our supermarket, our our our media models, what they're doing are telling us that we can that look, we're in abundance, right? Right.
There's always going to be food. Everything's under control. The daddy and mommy state got you. But that's what's happening to us on the internet now. As you scroll, as you watch videos, you're plugged in. You're there. You're in the world. You know what's happening in in Portland with Antifa and the National Guard. You know what's happening in China right now.
You know what's happening in the literary world with me. like you know all of it. You're plugged in and you can get it all done in 20 minutes. When you're bored in line, when you're having a hard time, when you're get in a fight in your relationship, you will be fed. You can connect. The point though isn't to teach you or to help you grow. The point is to keep you on the repetitive carousel.
And what's crazy is that all speaking of a dialect, okay, let's hop into the dialect, right? You want to force me into these dialects. You want to force me into this game. Well, on one side is beautiful, right? Like, hey, I'm a full-time creator on YouTube. like, "Wow, that's awesome because of your guys' support. Let's go.
" And we look at this culture we've created. Like, there's beautiful technological things and movies and like art and like how sound has improved in music and like all the, you know, all these innovations. It's like, wow. But on the other side, we look at what's happened to the kids, what's happened to kids killing themselves, how disconnected they are.
I I was there. I watched it. I watched the I watched kids get TikTok and short form content and what it did to them. And I'm not some boomer. I was in my 20s. I'm only in my early early 30s now. I watched it happen. I watched how they changed.
I taught and was a part of a generation and was very conscious that had no short form content other than photos on Instagram, which really isn't short form. And seeing what that dopamine insanity did to everyone's brain, it was it's a dramatic shift. And now with the iPad kids and all this, me teaching the co kids who did nothing for a year or two, total change.
And we're we're not there's no restoration. And so we have all the deaths now because of technology. We have these insane data centers. We have the cancer from the sedentary sedentariness that you know sitting down and looking and not doing anything all day causes. We have the random violence.
People say that violent video video games don't cause people to be violent. That social media doesn't cause people to go crazy. For a lot of people, it is a form of passivity. You know, playing violent video games, being on the phone. But for other people, it's a form of repression.
It's for people it's it's something that they they're living in and they're using it as a tool that's you know a weird form of priming that eventually they let out. And so that's what's happening to us in this dialectic. We are obsessed. We are living within death. We are staring at a a a screen and being wrecked by both sides of the dialectic being played out at once which is the ultimate tactic.
I mean that's what abuse is, right? Like the best abusers aren't just someone that's slapping you around, right? I mean, if you look at cult leaders, you know, it's someone that you feel like loves you and they're just doing this, you know, it's just a part of it, right? Like this is a part if you want to be with this person or this group, then you undergo this. And that's what this all is.
We I to exist online, man, is it's crazy. Like I'm really helping my wife out right now. Like we're we're really getting off techno. We don't have a television in our house. Like this room with these screens is the only room with screens in the house right now. And the goal eventually, you know, years from now as, you know, I continue hopefully to be successful in these things is to have an outhouse or something or studio where it's like we have no technology in the house and if we need technology, we can go use it in this room, but it's
like a detached portal. But sometimes I'll I'll she'll just be crying. I'm like, why are you crying? Like what happened? Is someone dead? Like are you having a [ __ ] existential crisis? And she'll show me some terrible video. She was like, "Dude, I was just, you know, we have a kid now.
Like, and we're very active with uh with our daughter, like constant reading, constant attention, like like they're taking a nap right now." Anyway, like I that's usually when I'm working at early in the morning or late into the night or when they're napping. Um but within 5 minutes, she can watch four minutes of really positive things, but then see some like like the other day on on um she logged into Facebook to make some like Facebook Marketplace deal and got sucked into reels for a couple minutes, was watching positive things. I looked at the entire reel. Then she watch there's a video of
some girl lady being smacked out uh smacked in the side of the head dragged behind a building to get raped and then you see her running away like naked. Why is Facebook showing this? It's a stoke fear but it's this it's this happy happy just total pain. And so this novel is called White Noise because it turns the the hum of the television, the radio, the the songs in the supermarkets, the beeps, the sirens, the airplanes overhead, the emergency amber alerts, all this stuff as this noise as is what thing that fatigues us. And with the internet now, it's gotten even worse
because here I am. It's it's all about activation, everybody. It's all about, you know, us doing something to wake people up about create. That's how you create an educational waking. It just doesn't happen. Yes, there are going to be these mavens. Yes, there's going to be people like me out here who are going to reach millions of people and do all this, but we need people on the ground being the infrastructure of it.
That's how technology got into play. We were we once didn't have any of this, right? And there were the early people who got into this and eventually proidalized it to other people who said and now my grandma, my you know, all these people are glued on to Facebook.
Eventually, the web of social influence and pressure and this stuff, you know, tipped people over the edge. People who said that they had nothing, they had no need for technology, no need for any of this stuff got roped into this. But that's what we have to do in an inverted way with education at large. We have to become leaders. That's how you make people do this.
You know, I had a friend yesterday. He called me and he said, you know, he's trying to eat healthy. You know, he's trying to he's like 280 lbs or something and he's not jacked. He's like, you know, he's fat, you know. um he's like 5'7 or something and he's trying to get into shape and you know I work out a lot and like really into fitness and stuff and he's doing a good job, right? Like he's lost some weight and like you know he's staying consistent and we're staying he's staying on this mentality. Focus on performance and daily wins. Don't focus
on the scale or like you know don't obsess over that. He's like dude I I have to you know I don't have time to cook healthy right now or you know it's it's really hard cuz I have to cook two meals. I have to cook my meal then I have to cook my kids meal and like my wife a meal.
I'm like, "What the [ __ ] are you talking about, bro?" It's like, "Yeah, you know, I made my, you know, my salmon and my asparagus and some rice last night and I made them fried chicken." I was like, "Are you kidding me?" They're like, "Yeah, they don't like salmon and asparagus and rice." I was like, "Yeah, of course they don't. I would rather eat [ __ ] Oreos and milkshakes all day. Let's go get 10 Big Macs, right?" Like, you're the leader.
And I'm just saying this in a cliche like the man's the leader of the house, but like you're they literally look up. I know you, bro. Your kids play baseball in softball because you played baseball. Your wife sits down and knows who the Seattle Seahawks drafted this year because you got her into football and made her like the Seahawks and she's so G that she knows that Sam Darnold doesn't have that dog in him, but she would never tell you.
So yes, it's going to be hard and they're going to complain, but they're going to eat it and they're not are they going to starve or are they going to eat? And that's how we have to activate everyone. That's we have to lead. We have to be this example for people. We have to be doing something. We can't just be this constant little chatterbot saying, "Yes, technology sucks. Look what's happened. Oh, Mark Zuckerberg.
" You know, you have to do something about it. Even though you guys see me online, I'm very free of the online world. That's why it's such a big theme of my channel. It's such why it's such a big theme of what we read in my book club. That's why my child is not going to be on a screen for a very, very long time.
And when they watch a movie, they're going to watch a movie on a TV from the 1990s or early 2000s with a VCR tape for some fun on the weekend or something after a fun week of learning and camping and doing all this stuff. It's not hard. Lead from the front. Get off your phone. Do something. Wake people up. The SCOP right now, the internet scop is invisible.
The internet is in your pocket when you have a slab. Carry around a notebook. I just, you know, I'm using leaving this here for a little set piece. I'm writing all my thoughts down in here, you guys. I'm poetry. What's happening? I'm doing morning pages. I I have like a hundred of these things constantly. I have this in my pocket instead of a I don't have a phone anymore.
I got a flip phone for a year because I was working uh while my wife was in the third trimester then um after she had the baby. But as soon as I quit my job, I threw away the phone. MP3 player for life, everybody. Let's go. But as the Lilo talks about, the white noise is connected to our body.
Like if we want to be if you've made it this far, you've heard me go all spiritual and woo, but your your messages are popping up right now. There are notifications popping up right now on your screen. The white noise is everywhere. I now I'm sounding like now we're going full it's everywhere. And if we want real connection, it can't happen as much. You know, the reason why real connection is so important and being a leader is because like I met a guy recently in my town and you know, he liked one of my shirts. And so speaking of which, I just dropped my Rightconscious merch merch shop. So if you guys want literary street wear, no
Gilden shirts, no crappy shirts. I have over 50 designs, all about the greatest books in the world. Really sick stuff. Go check it out. Link down in the description below. But I had this, you know, I had a Blood Meridian shirt on and a guy said, "Oh my god, you know, I love Blood Meridian." We started talking.
He said, you know, since having a kid, you know, I haven't been reading very much and blah blah blah. Gave him my email. Yes, my email. and we've been talking and I got him to read one of the books we're doing in my book club and him and I are going to meet up before we do my online book club and we're going to talk about it and him and I are going to connect on something that is real because we both tangibly read it from point A to point Z. But the problem now is that in these algorithms I don't know.
So if I sit down and look at my phone for 20 minutes and you look at your phone for 20 minutes, we can't connect because you saw a totally different group of things than I did. Even if we send each other a couple different, you know, reels or whatever, it still doesn't work like that. And so, we need to return to consuming long- form media together, albums, movies, you know, these types of things, reading books together, you know, having animistic experiences together, not at a tourist trap, something that we go and find for ourselves, uh, you know, meet me at our spot. And that's why there's a
disconnection now between the kids and and and adults. That's so great because adults can't comprehend this new world that they're in and it's an impossible task. Even if they try to be hip and into this stuff, you can't do it. And so why I don't believe in playing games that are unwinable, especially when it comes to my kids or my relationships or or even in our world.
And so this novel, White Noise, does this really well because the the parents are gone, you know, and so what's your job as a parent? What's your job as a friend? You know, let's let's talk about it. You know, you're a reader. You know, I have I have a friend, right? He knows everything about cars. Like I have a 2000 4Runner third generation. Let's go everybody. And I could do honestly a decent amount of stuff with it.
I've replaced a lot of random things with it with a lot of friends over the years. Like I can, you know, do the starter, it goes out, you know, just, you know, a little bit beyond basic stuff. But I'm not an expert by any means. And I'm not really comfortable like if something major happens to go in and make it happen. I have a friend though.
He's not even a mechanic, but he's been working with cars his entire life. He can do anything and we can sit down and do it. Well, he's a leader for me, you know, so I could watch maybe a video and try to get some instructions and kind of come in with this plan. This is what we need to replace. I got the part. This is what I think we need to do.
But he can be my interpreter, right? He can show me. He can guide me. He can say, "No, don't don't do that. Holy cow." I mentioned the starter because I did that the I went through a start I tried to replace the starter on my own and I did do it but then I my friend came over and he was like he's like dude you took it out the wrong way. I was like, "Dude, it took me hours.
" And he's like, "Dude, it should have taken you five minutes." But he's my interpreter. Like, and even about other things like household projects. He's a very handy guy, right? Awesome. Shout out to him. Likewise, I'm like that for many philosophical things. He'll say, "Hey, Ian, what do you think of this author?" Right? I heard of this guy or this idea.
What do you know about it? And he cuz, you know, he knows that I know more than he does and like about this type of stuff and I'm kind of inshed in this world. And so, we interpret for each other, right? And that's what parents were. But now our interpretation has been replaced by the feed. There are no longer any experts or any connections.
And that's one of the sadder parts of the novel that the parents no longer what role do the parents serve. The parents job is to raise a verb the child or the children. And when that isn't possible or excuse me when you stop doing that, when you stop being a leader, something else has to raise your kids. And we've given that up to the government with outcomebased education systems.
And sending your kids to school, you know, is okay if you actually work with them. But having taught for 8 years, I mean, less than 1% of parents are actually educating their children outside of school, like in a very matterof fact and deliberate and systematic way and filling in gaps. You're supposed to be the feed, but now the feed has been replaced.
And so these roles, these identities, these systems that have been in and created forever, the system of having a parent be your interpreter. We talk about the fall of Western civilization. Let's talk about the fall of civilization and life itself. It goes back to that.
Am I right? The first thing we ever learned if you wanted to survive was listen to your parents. They they've done this all before. Blah blah blah. Build the house like this, you know, put the the lean tube like this, hunt like this, don't eat that, don't eat this. And that's what's happened right now. This system technology feels more authoritative than mom and dad. Makes me want to cry, man. It's so sad.
And that's why, you know, I you know, my my my family, we're making a big push. Like, you know, I'm having I'm setting goals, you know, like this what it takes, dude. That's how hard it is to disconnect from this stuff. I'm talking about we're taking I'm making goals here. I'm doing timelines. Doing smart goals over here everybody to disconnect from everything. Not like everything, but like say like we're not going to use chat GBT anymore.
We're going to try to solve problems or do these things or figure out this in a different way because it's simple, right? Like oh my god, there's a crisis or something happened or like there's a very complicated question that you basically aren't going to be able to figure out. Well, just ask chat to BT. But you're modeling that for your family.
And when you think about most problems, there's actually someone that you know or could get to know today that could know the answer to your problem. Or you could just tinker and figure it out. How did everyone else exist? All throughout time, even before Google, what did we do? We lived in house like this house I'm in, this apartment I'm in right now, this was built in the '90s. Hasn't been updated either. Jesus Christ.
Um, but they they somehow figured this out. And so I I mean, you guys could tell I could go on all day about white noise. Like there is political stuff in this. like the the professor there's a professor in the novel that specializes in Hitler studies and there's all this stuff like related to fascism that like relates to today and the conversation around fascism and all this and like the manipulation of wars like it's honestly a really great novel to be reading right now and so I would highly recommend White Noise and so boom I'm I'm going to stop myself I could now now I could go on for hours
about this book and just talk about the main ideas but I'm sure we'll get to it in the other novels boom about to connect everyone so next up we have Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson and this book is in my transformative cannon. So, I have a free guide which I'm calling the transformative cannon. So, you hear me talk about transformative work.
What do I mean by that? Well, I have a list of over 500 novels that you can get for free down in the link below that talks about or excuse me, that just gives you straight up, no fluff, 500 different books, novels I should say, that are transformative in my estimation. I know there's more than that, but I just sat down for a couple days and spent like 10 or 15 hours just thinking like, okay, what what are the books that matter that really can be transformative at a high level for maybe not everyone, but for a higher percentage of people for deeper levels of individuation than Harry Potter or you know, some random airplane
novel. And so that's what I came up with. So I really like Neil Stephenson. You know, people think I hate genre fiction, but I we're reading the book of a new son and fool in the right conscious book club in 2026. We're reading Hyperion and we're going to be doing some other uh science science fiction and fantasy works al also.
And so I still Neil Stephenson's also speaking of being a leader, he's one of these authors that doesn't use technology. He doesn't have an Instagram page. If you go to his website, he has this statement um about why he won't email you back or why he he'll never read your work or why he won't communicate with you. And he says that, you know, he just doesn't care. He just wants to write. He just wants to live his life. He wants to live like he's in the old world.
And so this novel is somewhat famous because it coined the term metaverse in basically the same way that it got utilized by Mark Zuckerberg which is just kind of odd. So, one of my favorite SCOP aspects of this novel, and I'm not going to try to repeat like ideas we've been already exploring, and so these novels start might move a little bit faster now, is that there's this CIC.
And so, this is kind of a dystopian novel where corporations basically are controlling our life and the government at a very extreme level. And after the government collapses, the CIA and the Library of Congress combine into this entity called the CIC, which is just once again this really interesting idea that intelligence agencies and knowledge, internet archives, all these things are all inherently linked.
And so that idea is really cool that 99% of this information that's entering our hyper reality, as I was talking about earlier, are never consumed, never touched. But we live in this surveillance society now where everything's being recorded, logged, all this stuff. There's all this information online.
Our personal data, everything we've ever done online is all being tracked. But in this world, if you want to tap into this infinite body of knowledge, which is accessible, you have to pay. You have to be a corporation. You have to be one of these big wig entities to be able to access this type of information.
And at some level with AI getting to the level that it is and us getting kind of these watered down models and I'm sure when we're looking at intelligence agencies and what they have that we don't have access to in terms of information and all of this stuff, they're the ones that can uh infiltrate and uh speak with the database.
And this is what happened actually with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta and their use of AI. And so he Mark Zuckerberg gave a direct order for to catch uh for their AI to catch up. Okay, let me reframe this. Meta's AI wasn't as strong as ChacheBT or other AIs that other corporations had. And Zuckerberg realized this and said, "We need a strong one if we're going to be a player in the game.
" And so he said, "How do we train this AI faster?" And so he instructed his software engineers or whoever, and you can look all this up. This is a big court case going on right now to tap into Library Genesis and download 20 million books for the model to train itself on. Well, you and I could never build our own super strong AI with a whole team of people, some of the smartest computer programmers in the world to work on it.
We also don't probably have the technological infrastructure to then download 20 million books and then feed them to this system for us to go take control over more people or we don't have the time or ability to personally tap in and read all 20 million of those books. And funny enough, these all these AIs are primed in different ways.
What they are are mechanisms of priming. They aren't this autonomous being. They have parameters and obviously you can manipulate them but they've been primed and the only people who can afford to tap into this knowledge at scale as talked about in this are the people who own the metaverse. And what I like about this book and this is a really good idea.
I mean we're talking about SCOPS. This this book novel I should say dives into this idea that the internet makes us all snitches and actors, right? I mean, you could see it now that every you could people literally fight online and people are getting hurt and everyone's recording it like this is a performance.
Someone's getting their heads smashed in and someone should be stepping in to break this up there. We there have been countless videos of this and people don't care. People are snitching, you know, through their phone and also performing. And that's like kind of one of these problems I also saw with my students that if you were going to be online or doing anything, you know, you're performing like a lot of my female students, you know, do the duck face, do these little Tik Toks and they do their dances, but they're literally
performing online for other people. And you know, the the weird part is is that they're not just performing for their friends, but all like the weird people online that want to watch teenage girls, but there's also a whole crew of people waiting and have phones and are ready to snitch anyone out for anything.
I remember the first time that this happened to me. I was 18 and I was in Utah and I'm smoking a doobie at the park during Thanksgiving week, the week of Thanksgiving, which is funny. And I was very hidden. I was like hidden away. And I hear two people walking around and I hear them say, "Do you smell that? Is that weed?" And they start investigating.
And they come around the corner and find me and it's two momos. It's the They're like 21 years old. homeboy just got off of a mission procilizing to brown people in Guatemala about the white savior Joseph Smith and the girl whispers something to the guy and he takes out his 2011 phone and starts recording me as she's calling the police and I say really what the [ __ ] you guys what is wrong with you and I take take the weed got to take the weed and I start sprinting luckily that was cross country Ian 16-minute 5k Ian so I was gone and crazy enough the guy chased
me the guy started chasing me was recording me I dipped out. And even better, shout out to my grandma. I was at my grandma's house. She lived in where I was going to university. And so I just ran straight back to her house cuz I had walked there and like, you know, hit in. But then I saw the police cars going by. I was like, "This is crazy.
" But we live in that culture now where we're performers and we're snitches. And the only thing you need to ever snitch on anyone for is being violent. If someone's being violent, you should try to break it up. And if you feel like you can't, you should try to break it up. And then you should report it if if it's some egregious act. If it's mutual combat, whatever.
But, you know, if some guy's beating up his wife or hitting his kids or like some, you know, someone's really hurting someone else, yeah, you can record it. You can call someone. Like, that's really what the police should be for. Like, if we're going to offset our own personal liberty to a group, it should be for our own personal protection.
And we could maybe take that to property too if it's like a small business or something like that. But in general, we record everything now. We have become the lap dogs of the government and all its crazy laws and all these things and just are we're under constant surveillance. It's insane. And that ruins our trust in each other. That ruins our society because we're once again feeding the algorithm.
We're in service not of in the moment and observing something whether that's egregious or whatever and trying to deescalate the situation or leave but we're rather trying to record it for some algorithm so that we could get famous or some of these things. It was so sad as a teacher when I would want to do something like crazy, you know? Hey, like you can't do a back flip, gal, get on this desk right now and do a back flip off of it.
I couldn't do it because everyone would be recording. Anytime there was a fun moment or something was going on, someone would always have the phone out like it was and it would get me in trouble sometimes as a teacher. You couldn't let anything organic happen or anything fun. You can't you have to watch what you say at all times, you know? Sometimes you just need to be a little bit off thek, you know, just say things. And so that's a total problem in our society.
Now the other thing is snow crash the so this novel is about a virus virus excuse me and what it's basically saying is that you know this virus isn't just like it's a linguistic virus it's built from Samrian language but what it's talking about is almost this form of sigil magic that as I was talking about earlier there is a earlier precursor level to what we are experiencing online right now.
it's even um a priority or or before a different level than like the actual code that makes all of this possible. So we talk about algorithms radicalizing people or people watching the news too much or doing stuff like that. But this novel kind of links into this idea that visual information itself if it's done in a certain way can hijack your cognitive capabilities that if we want to go like into full conspiracy land that there's like we're we're all being slowly programmed to be activated to do something and not activated to like people when people talk about like and this is like we're getting we're getting now down into the iceberg here everyone.
So here we go. So, like a lot of people who are really deep in the conspiracy world, what they think is that we're being programmed through these sigils and through like language and kind of unseen stuff in technology and through like these our experience with it and like prove it. Okay.
But what they're what they think is that it's meant to throw us into a dialect so that we can later be activated that we're slowly being primed. This this probably makes more objective sense. We're slowly being primed with information and ideas all across the algorithm so that we can be primed to react in a certain way.
Because when people talk about programming and activation, people feel like someone presses a button and we all go, "Huh? Oh yes, let's go do this. Let's all tear up the world." But rather something happens. We're being out, you know, we're being primed for something and then an event happens that's maybe planned or something like that or it's just something that happens in general and it's amplified by the media and we all are we all react within our dialect in whatever way that is.
And then that could be used to manipulate us to, you know, obviously go further into unconsciousness or for profit or any of this stuff. And that's what this novel is dealing with at a very high level sci-fi type of way. That's kind of what this virus is. And like I think it could be translated really to what we're h like what we're seeing now because I really do believe that's what's happening.
Even if you look at basic political things that are happening on both sides of the aisle, the linguistic programming that we're hearing with fascism and Nazis or on the other side, these crazy neo-Marxist, postmodernists and all this stuff and and the and the priming, these these heathens, these elites, these whatever. I mean, you you guys have heard it all before, transhumanists, like whatever it is.
Um, or these crazy religious people, these religious nuts. Eventually, all that is utilized later on. And all this priming is utilized later on in certain moments to rile people up when the time comes. That's what they're doing it for. It's not just for the moment for us. We we don't do anything with that information, but later on when an incident an incident happens and it gets amplified and usually it's just some minor thing that is egregious, you know, but can be activated. Then we all go crazy over it.
And so snow crash is really detailing that. And I think that's an unagnowledged thing that like is happening to us that we're just being linguistically primed to be enraged or sad or happy or whatever later on down the line. So what this novel is about is about the privatization of the internet of what really happens in this like almost anarchco dystopian world.
If that happened, like if things went totally wrong and corporations took over all that and gained more power, how would they be priming us? You know, what does that actually look like? Because people think it's like we're all wearing VR headsets and weird stuff like that. We're all lost in some world. But it's I don't think it's really going to look like that.
I think the conditions, living conditions, life is going to continuously get worse, but the technology is going to get better and we're just not going to notice. We're just going to remain almost in the same place. But the people looking around like us, like I'm looking around like, dude, I don't know if this is getting better.
I the world isn't looking better because our growth rate is declining and an actual population decline could be possible in the future. And so, but even with that, it feels like everything is still going to be eaten up and nothing is going to be sacred anymore. And maybe that's just me getting older and I've learned everything and nothing is new on the horizon. But it felt like that even when I was younger, too, because of my inundation with technology.
And so, I absolutely recommend Snow Crash. If you haven't read Neil Stephenson, I would say this is a really good one to start with. It's it's a fast read. I mean, I tore this book up from when I read it. So, when I do that, it must be good cuz I'm usually carrying it everywhere. like like I can read 2 minutes before I get into the shower. Like weird stuff like that. That's how I that's how I read a lot too.
Like I just constantly doing it. And so moving on to our fourth novel, we have Infinite Jest. And Infinite Jest does not have the internet within it. Wallace only wrote about the internet in a in an essay that I've talked about on the channel before. Just type in right conscious um David Foster Wallace internet or something like that and you'll find it.
But he talks about something that is very related to intelligence agencies and entertainment. So an infinite jest is about a lot. It's a 12,200 page novel, but one of the main plot lines in it is that there's this tape named Infinite Jess, and when you watch it, you basically go brain dead. You're so entertained that you just lose all cognitive capabilities.
And this tape is eventually trying to be found by everyone. But the who the novel focuses on are these intelligence agencies, this terroristic group of handicap kebaban revolutionaries that are trying to, you know, use this tape as a political terrorist device to be able to break free from a North American superstate that exists in infinite jest. But other groups are also trying to find it too.
And it's the the novel makes a ton of commentary on how as Americans if we realized, you know, cuz the the the tape isn't out there yet. That if everyone realized that this existed, we would consciously take it. That if people said like, "Hey, there's a video online. If you watch it, you're just going to go into this pure state of pleasure for the rest of your life, more people than we could imagine would just want to do that. Would just want to go pure into bliss, man. Because that's how we've been trained. We don't have a core.
We don't have a soul. And Infinite Jest is all it's all about our weaknesses. It's about our weakness when it comes to entertainment, when it comes to drugs, and when it comes to kind of this competitive mindset. And it all centers around this denial of death, these addictions. And David Foster Wallace was an addict of television.
He he talks about, you know, spending a ton, you know, 16, 18 hours a day watching television for huge, you know, swasts of time. But at a much bigger level, this novel talks about entertainment, whether that's through film or the radio, books being used as a form of mind control. Even more importantly, it talks about how overthinkers are the ones that are going to become paralyzed by this new world of information, are going to be exploited because of it. And it's true.
All you guys out there, you know, so many of the smartest, most intelligent people I know know all this stuff and they're doing nothing with it. Basically, everyone, you've read hundreds of books, probably. What are you doing with that information other than having just become a, you know, you're a good person. You've reached baseline. Thank you. We need more of that. We need the whole world to do that for a literary renaissance.
But has that information actually stifled you? And why aren't why why wouldn't that information be activating you even more? Why is there a whole culture in academia of people who study and who read who aren't these action-taking individuals? Shouldn't that be? Isn't that what it's about? The harmony of pen and sword. That's what right conscious is about.
But this novel explores how the type of person who would get get into something like reading or deep into entertainment is the type of overthinker who could get thrown into paralysis. And there's like larger metaphors happening within the novel. And some of them are explained like explicitly by Wallace for dozens of pages. And truly, it's really transformative stuff.
I mean, Wallace was really blowing the whistle on us really kicking back against pushing back against a lot of this and entering actual reality, trying to do a better job. And that's why Wallace ended up dying. You know, people say, "Oh, why would I take advice from someone who's like this?" Well, he gone on an anti-depressant when he was 18 years old and stayed on it.
And by the end of his life, he had kicked drugs. He had kicked being he was a drug addict. He beat that. He beat being an alcoholic. He beat being a a tobacco smoker, which isn't easy. Most hardcore addicts like Wallace continue smoking tobacco or doing other things. He beat all of that. He was exercising. He was happy. He had a wife. He was in a much better spot.
And he said, "I want to finally get off this anti-depressant." and he got off of it and he spiraled and he tried to get back on it and it didn't work and he ended up killing himself.
I think to the neglect of his family who didn't put him in a care center till he got, you know, over this kind of really bad cycle he was in. But we need soldiers in the game, everybody. We need the if the overthinkers just partially activated, the whole world would change. But that's the greatest sigh up of all. Throw us into this world of entertainment and information and almost everybody will fall.
Whether that's us on the information side with all this information and doing nothing with it or the people that are just, you know, dopamine addicts and are just always entertained, that's where we're at. This novel explores all of this at length. 1,200 pages of trying to prove this idea.
And it shows how intelligence agencies are exploiting this, how we're being exploited to not to not to use the cliche, to be our best self, to really go out there and do something with this knowledge. And I mean, Wallace does it. I mean, he he talks about us being sent back into an infantile state. And that's really what what is this, you know, these forms that we take as we're on technology. We're literally curling back up. We're not expressive.
We're not open. We're not in different planes of motion. And so, you have to mention I have to mention Infinite Jest Man. I mean, it's an actual manual on how to escape all of this. You know, a lot of these books point out the problem. You know, White Noise and Snow Crash point out a lot of the problems.
Bleeding Edge does a decent job of kind of talking about solutions and feelings, but Infinite Jess is a manual in my opinion, and that's why I think it's one of the most transformative novels of all time. It's a manual on how to wake up. I've known when I I'm not I'm not even saying this as an exaggeration. I've known hundreds of people who have changed their relationship with technology because of Infinite Jest.
That's just people I know personally. And so, I think it's a very very strong book. And the way that it shows you that is through these intelligence agencies. It shows you through this manipulation and what's happening behind the scenes that entertainment that the internet it's a power and once again this trend it's the if we want to know we can't see what's happening in the moment very clearly but we can go back 20 years and see what happened back then and how it was all set up and that so that's why a lot of the v uh the books we're talking about other than that there haven't been very many great authors or great books are
kind of focusing on that early period and so speaking of a book that doesn't take place in the present but in the past but takes place now. This is Major Arcana by John Pastelli. This came out last May, May of 2025. People ask me, Ian, what are modern books that people should be reading? This is not trash.
This is not some big five publisher novel that is from some random MFA. John Pastelli, who wrote this, couldn't get a publishing deal. He first serialized this novel on Substack for, you know, people who are paid, aka best readers and writers in the world, are on Substack.com, and got a publishing deal from that. And so anyone who thinks that you can't do that on Substack is wrong.
And so he couldn't get a publishing deal and knew that the things he was talking about in this weren't going to be touched by the big five. This novel is an exploration of what happens when the what happened to the two people who consume the internet at all levels. And so this novel is a lot of different things, but what it really showed me and showed me how it really is a scop the internet in general. And what really made me think is that it features these two young protagonists.
And so I'm going to spoil the first page of the novel. It's actually on the back. It begins with a gunshot, a student's public suicide on a university campus filmed by his girlfriend. This novel follows the threads that lead to this event that there is this boy who shoots himself in the head and his girlfriend's filming it.
And they're both the students of this famous writer and we get into this web. But what really struck me about this novel is that both of the characters um the girlfriend and the kid that kills himself were raised without technology. They had parents that were hippies or didn't care about that stuff and they were raised in this world, but then they got into technology because of family stuff and all this stuff and they got thrown into this world of technology and weren't ready for it.
And so this is how it's really sensitive for me because earlier you guys were hearing me talk about how I'm going to keep my kids away from technology, but you can't forever. And you have to teach them how to be literate in it. And there are these rabbit holes because if they don't, then they might be more susceptible to more extreme ideology once they get on there.
if they haven't gotten used to what's happening. We've basically been forced into this position where you can't raise kids without showing them or at least teaching teaching them about some of this stuff, especially without being like a totalitarian parent.
You know, I've seen a lot of like Mormon parents rip their kids away from this stuff and like put them in this religion, you know, and send them off on a mission. But those aren't free thinkers. Those are basically philosophical slaves that were battered and basically forced to follow, you know, this ideology that you want them to. and having, you know, knowing knowing a lot of people in Utah, there's a lot of blowback on that later in life and a lot of swinging out of it all.
But this novel really touched my soul because it shows and through detail how the internet can ruin people, how it can ruin innocent kids, be kids with beautiful souls, kids that matter, kids that read. It's not just dummies. You know what's even worse is kids that are smart.
You know, if you have a kid and you teach them all this stuff, they're smart enough to then decipher and go into the depths of the internet. That's what's happened to us. you know, we can now go deeper and it gets darker and darker as you go down that rabbit hole. And this novel talks about the internet fluidly. It shows these kids experience and like their radicalization almost in real time because that's what it is.
You know, as you're watching, as you're doing these reels, as you're doing it all, it's a lived it's a form of individuation. It it feels we've all done it before. It feels like this transformation. It feels like this growth. It doesn't feel disconnected from reality at all. And like really blew my mind when I read it. really made me rethink a lot of my things in my own life and it really showed me it's like dude we are we've been basically pushed into this position where we can't escape this anymore and it sucks like I said unless we want to be aggregates and like run a very totalitarian religious programming on our kid or something like kids or something like that which is if
you want to do that then whatever but for us trying to like reach a balance and like you know send our kids off into the world or send you know just the the same about me man like I I started as a I watch ski videos I don't know I I'm into freestyle skiing. I used to go to this website website newchoolers.com and watch all this freestyle skiing stuff.
But then when I was like 10, 11, 12, 13, then I got sucked down into this dark world. Suddenly I'm learning about I'm watching people get killed. I'm watching crazy porn. I'm like I'm watching all this crazy stuff. I'm like what what the hell did that do to me? I'm still dealing with those ramifications. I'm still trying to get out of that priming. I didn't consent to that.
My parents didn't consent to that when they just they didn't know in 2006 2007 what I was going to get into. And I got led down that road. Who led me down that road? Who let that be possible? And like I said, now we know what happened. And now, and that's why I like this novel by Pelli.
He showed what happens to people in real time. He showed people are going to look back in 10 years. We're going to look back at everything that happened and be like, really, we let the kids do this? We let teenagers mutilate themselves? We let them take hormones for no reason? We let them become like little polarized nailboy MAGA talking heads with no actual critical thinking ability.
We stopped pushing men and women to continue evolving and said, "Yeah, just go back to these traditional roles that don't even exist, that never existed in the first place, that did exist in a different time." Like, is that what we really did? Those are all SCOPS. We're creating clones that I don't know are going to be able to recover because my generation, the mill, you know, some of these younger millennials, I don't know if we've recovered from this internet scop that we went through. I mean, a lot of us haven't. A lot of us haven't moved back to where we should have been.
You know, a lot of generations in your youth, you go crazy. You're a radical. You do these ideas. Then there's this shift back. Our shift back has been very weird, very controlled in my opinion. And it's really sad to watch. And so, I can't imagine what the next group is going to look like.
And from what I'm seeing, I think that journey back to this normal, individuated, conscious existence that you maybe hit as you become an adult or whatever that you try to work through, I think that's going to become more rare. And this novel captures it perfectly, man. This novel captures a lot perfectly, man. If you're Anyway, I would recommend this one. This is one of my favorite books of 2025.
One of my favorite books of this decade so far. I'm reading another one. It's a non-fiction book that just came out a month ago. It's called Against the Machine by Paul Kingsworth who's a really good kind of um he's really great writer. Um it's a spiritual manual for dissident in a technological age. And he basically just walks through he it's really good for literature lovers.
He has a ton of poetry. Um he's basically in the lineage of Robert Bllee and Wendel Barry if you guys know about them. They're some of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. And he's actually a poet and a fiction author too. He has some good stuff. Um and so Paul Kingsforce is really good. I mean let me talk about some other books that aren't going to make the list.
um because I didn't feel like I had 10 really strong novels that I could talk about. I had like six or seven. So, another one I really really like is Willian Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Everyone, if you're into the actual techniques of like mind control and like corporations trying to prime people, that's what this novel is basically about, about someone involved in the priming and programming angle.
And so, shout out to William Gibson and pattern recognition. And so, boom, bot to connect. What did I miss everyone? What am I ignorant of or just totally forgot to talk about? Because that happens sometimes, too. Put it down in the comments below. And so, once again, if you guys want to support me and the literary renaissance, join Substack, post your writing there, support other writers there, support me there, buy a t-shirt if you guys want some literary streetear, or get my guide to the 500 best transformative novels ever written. All the links to all of it are down in the description below. And I will see
you guys very very soon in the next
Monday
Gays and Oz: Why There's No Place Like Homo
Gays and Oz: Why There's No Place Like Homo - YouTube
Transcripts:
Surrender, Dorothy. In the 1980s, the United States military went on a witch hunt. Are you a good witch or a bad witch? The Navy was hunting for Dorothy and her network of friends. You know, I'm a friend of Dorothy's. Long before Friend of Dorothy meant sketchy supplements, it was a code for gay men. Of course, people do go both ways.
And years before don't ask, don't tell, it was military policy to root them out. I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too. But why were these seaman gaga for Gail? We just love the Wizard of Oz, don't you? And why did a children's movie from before World War II become so closely associated with gay culture? It's a cult movie to me. I'm a member of the cult. To the point that a century later, queer people are still holding space for it.
I didn't know that that was happening. The Wizard of Oz certainly spoke to me. As a kid, I couldn't wait for the annual broadcast of the film, even though one year it nearly killed me. And as an adult, when I moved to West Hollywood, I discovered a gay bar where the Monday night tradition was selecting one person to be the wicked witch from the musical Wicked and lifting them up while everyone around them sang Defying Gravity.
The night I was chosen to be Alphaba, I felt like I'd found my home, and there was no place like it. So, how did we get from a fairy tale written over a hundred years ago to a triumphant anthem in a gay bar? 1936, Irving Thalberg was dead. Thalberg had run production at MGM since he co-founded the studio at the age of 24.
MGM and all of Hollywood had come to depend on Irving Thberg as a tastemaker. When movies were new, his pictures had helped define the genres that we have today. Comedies like A Night at the Opera, dramas like Mutiny on the Bounty, historical epics like Ben Hur, action films like Tarzan. And now that he was dead, studios shut their doors in morning.
Well-wishers sent flowers by the truckload. The actor Wallace Beer got in a plane and tossed bouquets over Thberg's funeral, nearly hitting his wife with a bunch of roses. Roses? Yeah, the roses. Why would you send me roses? Thberg's death was seen as a disaster for the film industry. It was also a disaster for the gays. This is the end. The absolute end.
Irving was straight, but he was a close friend to many queer actors, artists, drag performers. At a time when gay men often had to be closeted for the sake of their careers. That wasn't the case for Irving Thalberg. He hired gay actors for his films like Raone Navaro and Billy Haynes. I thought you were pansy.
Well, I'm the wildest pansy you ever picked. He hired screenwriters like Edmund Golding, who was notorious for wild bisexual orgies that were so energetic they occasionally landed participants in the hospital. They tore my legs off and they threw them over there. Then they took my chest out and they threw it over there. Well, that's you all over.
Thberg also gave big breaks to gay producers like David Lewis, the boyfriend of Frankenstein director James Whale. He encouraged filmmakers to watch queer films from Europe for inspiration and include queer content in the movies they produced. You cannot die an old man. I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor.
That had earned him some enemies. Sensors hated Thalberg. Considered his movies and actors indecent, pushed for tougher censorship rules. But Thalberg pushed back. He delayed implementation of what would become the production code for as long as he could. But by 1936, he was gone.
The production code was coming into effect and it looked like it was going to be a lot harder for queer people to make a living in Hollywood or for movies to share a knowing wink with queer audiences. Oh, go right ahead, boys. Don't mind me. But for the time being, the people that Irving had hired were still working at MGM, and their films would go on to have an enormous impact on American culture and specifically on gay culture to this day. And the biggest impact of all would come from an unexpected source.
It started with a film made across town at Disney. Now, don't tell me who you are. Let me guess. A lot of people thought nobody would go to a featurelength cartoon. But the first one, Snow White, was a hit. Who now is the fairest one of all? And that got the other studios scrambling for fairy tales of their own.
Over at MGM, an executive named Mvin Loy had been hired to replace Irving Thalberg. And Mvin remembered a novel that he'd loved as a kid, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It had been published about 35 years earlier in 1900, written by a window dresser turned author named Elrank Bow. No relation. You probably know the story.
A young girl from Kansas travels to Oz. She finds a pair of silver slippers. She meets a shape-shifting wizard who appears as a beautiful woman and a biblically accurate rhinoceros with five eyes. And after the girl aids in the killing of a giant spider, she returns home with some help from her new friends, the Flying Monkeys.
The book had been a huge success. There were over a dozen sequels and a massive stage version. Here's an ad posting of a cast of over a 100 people, mostly girls. And in the 19s, Elrank Bam created a studio to bring Oz to the screen. Not like that with silent films. While the books are lush and imaginative, the films, well, they look a little cheap.
They also mash a bunch of different Oz books together, and the titles don't do a great job of explaining what's going on unless you really know the books. So, they're a roller coaster of sometimes inexplicable visions. They're magic beheadings, soup cannibals, a flirty Minecraft cat. This place has everything.
His silent films were big flops that lost a ton of money. So given the reputation of past Oz films, MGM executives knew if they wanted to bring these books to life successfully, they were going to need an unprecedented creative vision, a gathering of artistic talent across countless disciplines, and boundless opulent fantasy.
In other words, they needed gays. Yes, queen. Most of the production on Wizard of Oz was overseen by Arthur Freed. He was a former song and dance man whose prior claim to fame was writing Singing in the Rain. I'm sing. No, the other singing in the raining. He'd moved into a producer role a few years earlier and he started assembling the top creative talent at MGM and the film industry in general for a musical adaptation of the LFrank Bound books.
And although Arthur Freed was straight, the crew that he assembled was overwhelmingly queer. For example, there's Cedric Gibbons aka Gibby. Not just an art director, Gibby was the art director of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. The Oscar statue that's handed out today was designed by Cedric Gibbons. So, we have him to thank for everyone in Hollywood lusting after these little naked, muscular men. God, I hope I get it. I hope I get it.
God, I hope you all can get it. Then there's Edwin Willis, the set decorator. He had an exacting standard. He was known for antique hunting throughout Europe to acquire authentic props. If you ever see any opulent settings in MGM musicals, there's a good chance Edwin Willis was the one who found it.
And then there's the costume designer, Adrien Greenberg. He worked on hundreds of movies. Whenever you see Gowns by Adrien, that's him. His outfits were so popular, American fashion followed his lead. His dress for John Crawford and Mildred Pierce sparked the shoulder pad craze of the 1940s. I forgot my shoulder pads.
Who gives a And of all the queer contributions to the film, one of the biggest is from somebody who isn't even credited. Roger Edens. He served as a producer and a music director. And when The Wizard of Oz was still early in the casting stages, executives were trying to figure out who should play Dorothy.
In the books, she's around 10, so somebody like Shirley Temple would make sense. After all, there's no place like home. But it was Roger Edens who said, "Hey, how about Judy Garland?" Now, that must have come as a surprise to some folks at MGM. Judy had been signed a couple years earlier. She was a child performer who'd worked her way up through vaudeville, appearing alongside some memorable acts.
Uh, we worked with a man who just threw up for his living. And when she arrived at MGM, executives didn't really think of her as a star. Louis B. Mayor was especially awful to her. He called Judy my little hunchback and a fat little pig with pigtails. And at first, she often got cast in supporting roles. She played the awkward girl next door.
Or the unsophisticated farmer's daughter. They all stopped for melons. Are they nice and ripe? They ain't nothing else but. But when Eden sat down with Judy for vocal lessons, he said it was like discovering gold. My heart beats like a hammer and I stutter and I stammer.
Eden's had a knack for collaborating with gay icons across his career from Audrey Hepburn. As a matter of fact, I rather feel like expressing myself now and I could certainly use a relief. To Barbara, look at the old girl now, fellas. To Angela, how you like to spoon with me? I liked if there is a 20th century film diva that you love, chances are good at some point she worked with Roger.
And it was Roger who convinced MGM to cast Judy Garland as Dorothy. And he coached her to find the emotion in the music. Years later, Judy's daughter, Laura Lu, said it was Roger who gave Mama the courage to let the softness, the vulnerability that was part of her into her singing. Without Roger, we might never have had Over the Rainbow. At least not the way we all remember it.
And then there's one more queer figure that I want you to know about. One of the three credited screenwriters, Edgar Allan Wolf, or as he was known around MGM, a wild redheaded homosexual. Wolf and his writing partner, Florence Ryerson, were brought into work on a draft of the script.
The producers wanted them to focus on Dorothy's longing for a home, a place where she could be with people who love her, who she loves in return, and to focus on the threat that the witch poses, separating her from the place that she belongs. It's easy to see how those themes of longing and isolation would make sense to a gay man, but not all of Wolf's work was about melancholy longing. Some of it was also extremely horny.
In researching this video, I found a song that Edgar Allen Wolf wrote years before he worked on The Wizard of Oz. It's for a musical comedy called Toot based on the book Excuse Me. Excuse me, Princess. It is shockingly horny, but unfortunately I couldn't find any recordings of it. So I guess we'll never get to hear it unless you're so cute.
I asked a friend to bring this 100-year-old salute to soldiers in tight uniforms to life. There's a link below to the full recording. And big thanks to actor and singer Aaron Scoggins and composer and music producer Caleb Martin. There's links to their work below as well. So to sum up, as filming on the Wizard of Oz came together in late 1938, at every stage, from the writing to the costumes to the sets to the songs, the Wizard of Oz was being assembled by some of the most talented queer artists in the country.
Arthur Freed's group would stick around at MGM for years. They were celebrated for making some of the best musicals of the 20th century. And around the industry, it was such common knowledge how gay this group was that they all came to be known by a nickname, Freed's Fairies. Now, of course, it wasn't their intent to make a gay film.
And even if it was, at that point, the production code would never have allowed it. And yet, there is a lot of queer subtext just under the surface. And we're going to look at how that manifests on screen in just a little bit. For the time being, though, everybody was focused on getting through a legendarily difficult production. It was not fun. Like hell, it was fun.
It was a lot of hard work. It was not fun at all. There's nothing funny about it. First, there were the fights over how Judy should play the character. Initially, the idea was she should play Dorothy, like in the book, a child with a blonde wig and baby doll makeup.
But George Cucor, another gay man brought in to help with the production, threw that all out. He only worked on the film a couple days before moving on to Gone with the Wind. But before he left, he told Judy, "When the cameras roll, just be yourself." And then there was the challenge of directing all those actors. In some shots of Munchkin Land, there are about a hundred people on screen.
And sometimes Judy would get lost in the crowd. And so the director, Victor Fleming, who was darling man, he was always up on a boom, would say, "Hold it, you three dirty hands. Let that little girl in there." Now, to be fair, here's how her daughter Liza described that story. Our mother had an amazing sense of humor.
So anything that she talked about would become an epic joke almost. People believe a lot of the things that she has told which in fact we know are not true. But there's no doubt this was a very tricky production for everybody. Bertlar's lion costume made of real lion fur weighed nearly 100 pounds and he sweat so heavily they needed a special industrial dryer so it wouldn't get water logged.
For the Tin Man, they originally cast Buddy Epson, Jed Clampet from Beverly Hillbillies, and used aluminum powder for makeup, but that got into his lungs and suffocated him, sending him to the hospital for weeks. So, they switched to aluminum paste and just recast the part, though they never bothered to tell the new actor what had happened to Buddy. But the worst experience was probably The Wicked Witches.
During a skywriting sequence, a smoke pipe hidden in the broom exploded and sent the stunt woman, Betty Denko, to the hospital. And there was an even worse injury to Margaret Hamilton. In one take of this scene, the fireball went off too soon and burned her hand and face. She refused to work around fire effects ever again after that. The onset injuries were terrible.
But top MGM executives were even more worried about how much the producer Mvin Loy was spending. They didn't want to do that, believe me, to spend that much money because that was a lot of money in those days. 2 million six, a lot of money. They they almost fired me for spending so much money. In the end, the film cost a little under three million. That's close to $70 million today.
And for comparison, it's about four times the budget of Judy Garland's other film that year, Babes in Arms, which had the advantage of not suffocating, burning, or blowing up any of the cast. The Wizard of Oz was slated for a 1939 release, and they'd soon find out if all that pain and the expense had been worth it. The release came with a huge promotional blitz.
There were appearances by Judy, tyin merch, a promo booklet for theater owners entitled exploitation. The Wizard of Oz was everywhere. And if you jump ahead through the decades that followed, the film would become especially ubiquitous in gay culture. There were references to the characters. You see, we call ourselves the friends of Dorothy because we just love the Wizard of Oz, don't you? To the dialogue. Addy, look. It's a twister.
That's a twister to the setting. It even became part of gay slang. Disco dancing, Oscar Wild reading, strand, ticket holding friend of Dorothy. You know what I'm saying? Something about this movie and also the books just spoke to gay people. I talked about this phenomenon with D.
Michelle, author of the book Friends of Dorothy, why gay boys and gay men love the Wizard of Oz. Rosian was also really surprised how many how often people said they were really young when they first became fans. So we're talking three, four, five, six years old. So it seems natural that the gay fandom would date back to the film's release in 1939, right? Well, I think there's this myth that from the moment the MJ movie came out in 1939, it became a gay favorite. I don't have any evidence of that.
And the same with Friends of Darthy as as an expression. There's no evidence for that being before Stonewall. Now, that doesn't mean The Wizard of Oz wasn't on gay men's radar at all. Records from the time are pretty limited, but the film is enthusiastically recommended in this 1939 newsletter that was supposedly about trading stamps, but was actually a clandestine way for gay men to exchange letters.
And in his memoir, the pioneering gay journalist Jim Keepner mentions that all of his friends raved about this film when it came out, though he didn't see it until 1975. So why did it take so long to catch on with the gays? Well, part of it is that 1939 was an especially competitive year for movies. The Wizard of Oz was up against Gone with the Wind, Stage Coach, Gungadin, Nachka of Men, The Women.
I've had two years to grow claws. Mother Jungle Ray and in a lot of markets, it was simply overshadowed. Ticket sales were mixed. It didn't recoup its costs. In fact, like those LFrankbound silent versions, the Wizard of Oz initially lost money and audiences just moved on. Now, there were occasional re-releases like in 1949 with this bananas ad campaign, "Are your husbands grouchy? Are your wives irritable? Solve your problems by taking them to see the Wizard of Oz.
" But this presentation definitely wasn't going to speak to a gay fandom, even though the husband is oddly caked up. So, why did the Wizard of Oz go from relative obscurity to a foundational gay text? To come into its full power, first the Wizard of Oz simply needed to get back in front of audiences. That might never have happened if the film industry wasn't blindsided by an existential threat.
Now, the principal advantage television has over radio is that the performer can be seen as well as heard. In the 1950s, TV started siphoning audiences away from theaters, just like streaming is today. At first, studios tried to lure people back to theaters with gimmicks like 3D. And when that didn't work, they realized they were going to have to adjust to this new medium.
And they started running classic films on TV. So in 1956, audiences got to see The Wizard of Oz for the first time on television. For most viewers in black and white, so they never got the thrill of the technicolor reveal. And there were a few other differences from the theatrical version.
Well, we're going to leave Darothy and her friends for a moment so we can follow a boy and a girl on another trip and another adventure. We're off to see the Ford, the wonderful new. We're here in the land of the new Ford. Theatrically, The Wizard of Oz had only ever done so. So, how did you on TV? And the ratings, they went through the roof. They were astronomical. It was like something like 45 million people.
Part of that success was very good timing. They showed it on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, a celebration of home, a celebration of Americana. And from there, it turned into a yearly tradition. The arrival every year of the Wizard of Oz on TV was a part of my lurggical calendar. We had Christmas, we had Easter, we had the Wizard of Oz.
It was like the three main events of a child's annual life. birthday, the December holidays, and the night the Wizard of Oz was on. Even in the 1980s, when I was a kid, I remember what a thrill it was. When I was 5 years old, there was a showing during a hurricane, and just as Dorothy got to the Emerald City, I swallowed an arcade token that I had found, and the token got lodged in my throat.
My parents had to rush me to the hospital to get it out. I was fine. But of everything that I remember from that experience, what stuck with me most was how furious I was that I'd missed the whole second half of the movie. The point is, with those rebroadcasts, the movie got a second life.
It was a chance for audiences to take another look and realize just how good it was and to make it part of an annual tradition. But although it was popular with families and kids, it still wasn't a cornerstone of gay culture. But what was was Judy. Call me on the phone and sing a couple of notes to me and I'll give you hatred like you've never gotten. Judy Garland developed a massive gay following in the 50s and 60s.
The phenomenon was documented by, of all people, William Goldman, the author of The Princess Bride. He spent a lot of time researching gay audiences at Judy concerts. In one article, he describes a 21-year-old fan who's watching Judy sing and clutching his hands so tight they've started to bleed.
Story that I find a little inconceivable. One of Goldman's explanations for this phenomenon is that if homosexuals have an enemy, it is age and Garland is youth perennially over the rainbow. What he's probably talking about there is the widespread belief of the time that homosexuality was a sort of arrested development, refusing to grow up like Peter Pan.
But I think there's some much simpler reasons gay men loved Judy, like the fact that she loved them back. She was often seen at gay bars. She defended them in interviews. There's even a persistent story that Judy's funeral in June of 1969 is what caused the Stonewall riots. Although there's one or two Stonewall veterans say that that's true, but many more don't.
There was hardly any mention of her in the press about the Stonewall riots. In any case, Judy's connection to queer culture is a huge topic that I'm working on a whole separate video about. Hit subscribe so you get a notification when it comes out. The gay fandom for Judy Garland was about more than just her music. It was also a piece of shared culture.
If you share jokes or you know how to cake games or kids things and adult stuff too, it binds you together with other people who share that information. And one reason fandoms like that could spread in the 60s and 70s. I think it spread and may have started when there was an outgay press and people communicated that way.
Sure enough, the more openly gay media and gay events there are, the more you see references to the Wizard of Oz. For example, this newsletter where organizer Harry Haye contrasts gay activism with the wizard's magic feats. And this newsletter about trans issues from the 1960s discussing how the original books approached gender fluidity. The Wizard of Oz appears in ads for books targeted to queer people.
Here's an ad for an Oz journal published in a gay newsletter. So, there were four big forces driving the gay Wizard of Oz fandom. One, the movie is easily accessible. Two, there's already a gay fandom for the star. Three, there's finally a way to share that fandom. And four, this movie made by some of the country's top queer artists makes it very easy to spot gay themes.
So, as gay people were watching this film through fresh eyes in the 60s and 70s, it almost seemed like it was made for them. So, let's take a look at how that shows up on screen. It starts with Dorothy's longing for escape. When we first meet her, she doesn't know where she belongs, but she's sure it's not Kansas.
Adults there don't listen to her. Dorothy, we're busy. Or they dismiss her. Think you didn't have any brains at all. Her only friend is a dog who gets targeted just for doing what comes naturally. This goat hit total right over the back with a rake just because she says he gets in her garden and chases her nasty old cat every day.
That feeling of not belonging is something a lot of queer people can identify with. I spoke to the artist and writer Terry Bloss, an Oz super fan who's been writing Oz story since he was a kid, and we talked about how he connected with characters like Dorothy. I grew up in a pretty religious household, and I think that there were certain expectations placed upon me.
You know, all the other boys in my um school and in my church were super into, you know, basketball and football and there were expectations placed on me to be a missionary and to do certain things. So I think I was trying to escape some of those things that I knew I was either expected to do or that were coming that were coming up in my life.
Wizard of Oz songwriter Yip Harber explained how he saw Dorothy starting place. An arid colorless place almost no flowers there because it's so dry. The only thing in her life that was colorful at that point was I thought the rainbow was the only thing of color that she had ever seen. So I said I must have a song with rainbow in it. He gave her a song where she expresses her dream to get out of there.
Do you suppose there is such a place to go to find a place with no troubles behind the moon beyond the rain? And when MGM executives heard Judy singhere, they said, "It stinks." They went to Louis B. Mayor and they said, "You can't have our movie star singing in a barnyard. Where's the glamour?" And at that, the producers, Mvin Loy, and Arthur Freed panicked.
They said, "No, the movie needs that song. The audience has to understand Dorothy's longing." It was almost exactly the same fight that the creative team had at Disney 50 years later when Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to cut Part of Your World. A song written by a gay man about longing for a place where you belong.
For more about that Little Mermaid story, check out my video about the songwriter Howard Ashman. This story is is true and deeply humiliating, but we'll tell it. Fortunately, in both cases, the gays prevailed and the song stayed. I also talked to Terry Bloss about how those heroic I want songs gave him something to look forward to.
I don't think there's anything wrong with like um being born in a town, you grow up there, you you know, you spend your life there. That's fine. But for some reason in my brain and it probably had a lot to do with Oz and with The Little Mermaid after high school, I was like I but I'm I'm gone. I'm leaving.
Like I'm that and obviously Romy and Michelle like we're out of here. And I think one thing about this song that works really well is that we don't just see Dorothy's sadness, we see hope, her belief that there is a place for her somewhere. And I think this line is crucial. That you dare to dream that dreams can be brave and they can come true.
That is a beautiful idea today. And imagine how it must have felt to queer people 50, 60, 70 years ago, living somewhere totally isolated and being told, "Be brave. Dream of the place you belong." And part of what makes Oz an answer to Dorothy's dream are its colors, its music, the fabulous visions. At last, it's the escape that she dreamed of and that a lot of viewers dreamed of, too.
So, I grew up between Boisee, Idaho, and several different cities in Mexico. And for me, I mean, no shade to Boyisey, but it was somewhat brown and gray. And then we would go to Mexico, which was this intense, colorful, beautiful place where I felt like I was seeing this sort of similar relationship that Dorothy would have to like here's home, here's this other place I get to go.
Um, and so I think I was one of those kids whose imagination was sort of ignited by Oz. It's It's probably my earliest and strongest um I think inspiration as a kid. But there's more to Oz than just the beauty. There's also her new friends. It starts with the scarecrow, or as drag icon Ginger Ming called him, this mindless twink that just dances his way mindlessly through life, depending on his best friend to get him where he needs to go. Then there's the Tin Man who gets so emotional he can't move, which is why he has to carry his own
lube. and the lion. You don't even have to insinuate about him being gay. I'm afraid there's no denying I'm just a dandelion. Dandy was a wellestablished slang word for homosexual by that point. Here's a review of a play from one year earlier calling Oscar Wild a witty, hedonistic homosexual dandy.
Put that in your Grinder profile. What these characters all have in common is that they're men who appear unmanly by the standards of the time. There's an expectation that men should be smart, stoic, brave. For the most part, these three characters behave the opposite of those ideals.
Plus, they're following a woman, letting her be in charge. By the standards that audiences would have at that time, the characters are totally unmasculine. And I got a permanent just for the occasion. And yet, they're also loyal. They're lovable. We root for them the whole time. They are our heroes.
I spoke to another Oz superfan, the writer Josh Trillo, about how important those characters were to him. I think everyone wishes that they had three great friends like the scarecrow, the tin man, and the cowardly lion. And I think a lot of queer people feel isolated, but to know that there is a place, whether it be real uh or imagined, like going over the rainbow, that you're always welcome to and where nothing bad will ever hurt you, I think is the most powerful story you could possibly tell. They meant so much to Josh as a kid.
He started collecting Wizard of Oz memorabilia. Every time we went to the mall, it was me going to the Hallmark store and basically throwing a tantrum until we walked out of there with Ray Bulgers like this on a porcelain plate. Here's artist and writer Terry Bloss again. You know, in those books, she calls her friends queer, not in a bad way.
It was always like, these are my queer friends and and um that she found strength in that. In the book, The Road to Oz, a character named Polychrome says to Dorothy, "You have some queer friends." and Dorothy replies, "The queerness doesn't matter as long as they're friends.
" So, the movie shows someone longing for a place they belong, finding it with fellow outcasts, and then there's just the sheer camp of it all, especially when it comes to the witches. They've got huge outfits, flamboyant gestures, flashy entrances, and exits. They're over-the-top, exaggerated, and they are essentially drag queens. I'll get you, my pretty.
So, of course, they've been inspiring drag performances for decades. I'll be seeing you, sweetie. And in multiple languages. These over-the-top displays of feminine power have had such a huge impact on pop culture. From this, I'm Glenda, the good witch of the north, to this, I'm to even David Lynch. Don't turn away from love, Sailor. And obviously to Wicked, and don't worry, we're going to get there. You stay out of this, Glenda.
There is one more angle to the 39 film that I think invites queer people in. Our heroes started their journey thinking they were inadequate, that they needed fixing to get him a heart and him a brain. I'm sure he could give you some courage. But when they're tested by overwhelming odds, the scarecrow is clever. I've got a plan how to get in there. The Tin Man's loving.
Oh, I hate to think of her in there. The lion's brave. All right, I'll go in there for Dorothy. Their reward for their journey is discovering together they were never broken in the first place. They're fine the way they are. Not just fine, but powerful together. I felt like I had it within me to kind of go out there and take on the world and be who I wanted to be, but I was always too scared to do it until I found a group of people around me that encouraged me to really find my voice and find my roar and not be scared
of other people. The qualities that made them outsiders are the qualities that brought them together. And going out into the world with each other is how they discovered their true selves because they knew they could count on each other.
And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others. So, those are just a few of the elements that make the Wizard of Oz special, cuz there's nothing that has all the themes that appeal to gay men and is as widely disseminated. And sure enough, we see an explosion of fandom for that film in the 1970s.
There's screenings at the new gay community centers, Wizard of Oz merch at the new gay bookstores, advice columns in the new gay magazines written in the voice of Glenda, and then there were the conventions. When I went to my first Oz convention, the thing that was most powerful to me was there were other people who were Oz geeks.
You know, I would make Oz illusions and metaphors and they would all get it. And then the second thing was seeing how many other gay men were there. This was not always a safe world, if not now even to be openly queer, but at a Wizard of Oz convention, you're you can be whoever you want. And it served an under the radar kind of things.
It wasn't like they had a sign like some gay cruises say, you know, friends of Darthothy meet Saturday at 2 p.m. by the pool. Uh people just sort of knew each other, winked at each other, and then chatted each other up. The Wizard of Oz became such a natural part of gay culture that by the late 1970s, the term friend of Dorothy had become slang for gay men.
Hello all you friends of Dorothy out now. That even led to a misunderstanding in 1980 when the Navy was trying to expose gay soldiers. Investigators heard gays referring to each other as friends of Dorothy and assumed there was a real woman named Dorothy who is some kind of homosexual ring leader.
So when one soldier confessed to being gay, they told him they knew all about Dorothy and insisted he take them to her. but he had no idea what they were talking about. You're Dorothy and I'm Toto. Ironically, some of the earliest appearance of the term friend of Dorothy call it dated slang from decades earlier. But the earliest documented uses are from around 1980.
It's just that the film and the references and the slang are all such a good fit for gays, it seems they ought to have been using it the whole time. The Wizard of Oz is the I think still one of the most successful movies of all time. So, a cult movie in some way. It's a cult movie to me. I'm a member of the cult, but so's everybody. So, it's a very wide cult. It's the most mainstream cult of all.
Now, there were other Wizard of Oz projects. Some very successful like The Whiz. But most ran into some resistance. It would be suicide to make The Wizard of Oz today. The movies you should remake are the bad ones, not the good ones. There's the nightmare visions of Return to Oz. What do you think? An Oz anime set in space.
We have heard the great Wizard of Oz can grant any wish that he chooses. You're correct. My powers are wondrous. There's a Turkish version where the witch really makes a meal for death scene. And one of the oddest takes on Oz. The gun is good. The god is the god of the penis is evil. Now, we don't have time to talk about all of the weird Wizard of Oz adaptations right now, but I'm posting a bonus video about them over on Patreon, plus videos about the openly queer actors working at MGM during the 1939 Wizard of Oz, and about the rumor about
one producer there eating spaghetti with his hands. It was a sight to see. Everybody came to the commissary to see it, and he likes spaghetti a lot. You can watch all that and much more at patreon.com/mattbound. These are all fun, but none of them hit quite the same way.
For decades, it seemed like the 39th film was the definitive take on Oz. And our cultural attitude toward the story and its characters had been set for good. And yet, in the mid '90s, a children's author named Gregory Magcguire started to look at Oz in a very different way. Gregory was a lifelong fan of fantasy stories. I talked to him a couple years ago on my podcast.
The stories that have always interested me in childhood and still do in adult life are those that approximate the beginning of every fairy tale you ever read. Once upon a time, there was a child who was so wonderful that her mother died. Took one look at her and died.
And then the child has to make his or her way through a dark world. Gregory never knew his own mother. She died giving birth to him. And he spent some of his childhood in an orphanage and in relatives homes before his father and his stepmother were ready to raise him. During that instability, fairy tales were an escape for him. And he especially loved the Wizard of Oz.
And I remember that in the lower middle class neighborhood in which I grew up, the advertising on TV for the upcoming rebroadcast of The Wizard of Oz set the schoolyard into a lather of hysterical anticipation. As an adult, he got a degree in children's fantasy literature, ran a literacy nonprofit, wrote novels for kids. It was rewarding work, but a tough way to earn a living.
by the early 90s. So, I was kind of living uh off my boyfriend in a way that didn't make me feel good about myself. I've been writing professionally for 16 years and I've never really broken out. I have to do something sooner or go into the selling of insurance. He was living in England then when two huge events took place.
The first was the start of Desert Storm trying to suppress Saddam Hussein who was called in the newspapers in England the next Hitler. The second was a shocking crime. A little boy murdered by two other children. How could that happen? Where does the evil in that behavior come from? Everybody in England was talking about it. And I saw the evil of international war and the evil of school kids killing a weak child with binocular vision.
And I decided if I did not write about the nature of evil somehow, I would probably have to take myself off to the Looney Bin at last because I just couldn't process all that. To tell that story, he thought back to the good and evil characters that he'd loved as a boy and one character in particular. And I thought, well, there's an idea.
After all, she's called Wicked. And I knew, having been a good child scholar, that Elrank Bomb never said anything about how she got to be bad. So he started to write. It it was as if my my curly hair was on fire. Uh I wrote the book in five months. I was writing so fast I couldn't even stop to take notes about what I wanted to have happen next.
The novel that poured out of him was called Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. It's about a family in Munchkinland who give birth to a baby named Alphaba. She's green with fearsome sharp teeth, and she grows up an outcast knowing that people are afraid of her. As a student at a magic school, she learns that the beloved wizard who rules Oz is really a fraud.
That he's distracting the population by whipping up fear of talking animals, distracting people so he can consolidate his power. Alphaba joins a resistance movement. The wizard turns the people of Oz against her, convinces them that she's a villain, and throughout it all, Alphaba is determined to stand up for herself to stop the wizard and defend the oppressed animals of Oz.
Instead of telling the story through Dorothy, Wicked is told from the witch's point of view. She's trying to help, to do good, to fight against a cruel tyrant oppressing his people. Now, Gregory knew that might not be what people expected or even wanted from an Oz story, but he told himself, "This is what I want to do. This is what art is. You have to be brave. Don't think about what people are going to say.
Just do the best you can, and if it doesn't work, it won't be because you didn't try." Sure enough, when Wicked was published, there were some tough reviews. The New York Times said it sounds like a joke. Complained about his insistence on politicizing Oz and they were annoyed about how the book spends pages and pages debating things like the nature of good and evil.
I don't know what they expected from a book called Wicked. But at any rate, it seemed like maybe that was the end of the line for the book. Like with the 39 film, sales were okay. Nothing special. Gregory was paid a modest amount for the first printing. And I thought, well, this is the most buddy I'm ever going to earn.
But it's nice to earn a chunk of money at least once in my life instead of just pennies and hamburger money. But there were some favorable reviews. And through word of mouth, interest picked up, the opposite of how it often goes for a book. And a few months later, his publisher sent him a royalty check, a milestone that many books never sell enough copies to reach.
I called my agent and I said, "Bill, I got this check. I really like the look of it, but I'm afraid there's been a mistake. I think there's an extra zero on it." and he said, "Yeah, I thought so, too." But I called the publisher, "No, it's accurate." And at that point, we both kind of gulped and thought, "Oh my gosh, this is actually hidden.
" And then he got the news that Universal wanted to option the book for a film. Debbie Moore wanted it. Whoopy Goldberg wanted it. Lorie Metaf wanted it. Claire Baines wanted it. The book caught on especially well with gay fans. Gay magazines wrote glowing profiles of Gregory Magcguire. Gay book clubs invited him to come speak.
And although the novel isn't explicitly gay, Gregory brought a gay perspective to the story. All her life, Alphaba is told that she is evil, a message Gregory grew up hearing about gay men. For years, he denied to himself that he was gay because he was frightened of what it meant.
I wonder if I am a homosexual, as if, does that mean I have to kill myself and throw myself in the Hudson River? Maybe the path through the Dark Woods was going to be even harder and more tortured than I had imagined. In Wicked, a big chunk of Alphaba's life is spent in mourning, caring for loved ones and seeing them die too young. Gregory said, "That was an intentional reference to HIV." He said, "I had been living with a man for 15 years or so.
I knew that somebody would have to care for dying people, even in a magic land where troubles melt like lemon drops. Somebody has to wash the corpses and say the prayers." And over time, he saw that as painful as being on the outside could be, there were also advantages.
I think a great many of the riches of my life have come to me by virtue of the fact that I was assigned a position on the margins. And as he came to embrace being gay, managing that path, surviving it, uh, has given me something to write about and a sympathy, I hope, for other people who are on tortured paths without very much in the way of singing and dancing animals and uh, little spritly spirits floating around in the moonlight to help them on their way. We are all pretty much alone.
His hope was that in some way Alphaba's determination could inspire people like him. And there's a reason that Alphaba came out of me. I often think she's stronger than I am. People say, you know, who do you look for for for inspiration? If if we can identify that we have managed a couple of times in our lives not to flinch or to flinch and keep going, then something's gone right.
that his message got through to readers was a thrill and getting optioned for a film seemed unbelievable. But when he saw some of the early scripts from Universal, unbelievable didn't begin to cover it. The studio wanted to make it a runchy, scatalogical comedy full of Prattf falls. Gregory was mortified, but he and his partner had recently become fathers, and he said, "I had children to feed, so I was like, I'll just put a paper bag over my head." The movie adaptation lingered in development hell for years, but then he got a call from a producer
who was thinking about a different approach, a musical. Being a gay man, I was thinking like, you know, Broadway. Among the book's many fans was Steven Schwarz, the queer man who'd written Pippen, God Spell, music for Pocahontas, and Prince of Egypt. He was looking for projects to work on with the writer Winnie Holtzman.
She'd created My So-Called Life, one of the greatest teen dramas ever made. For more about that, check out my video and my podcast about the show My So-Called Life. There's links to that below. Winnie was a perfect person to adapt Wicked. My So-called life is full of many of the same themes that Gregory's book explores.
What makes somebody good or bad? Being an outsider, and that it's painful, but can give you a different perspective on the world. And she brought her own new perspective to the story. She added a focus on the fraught relationship between Glenda and Alphaba. It's about two women and their friendship, how at first that they immediately clash and ultimately become very, very important in each other's lives. Gregory told Winnie that he was fine with her adapting and changing his book.
He said he felt free to adapt Elrank Bound's story, so he wanted her to feel free to adapt his. And if you like act one of Wicked, you should check out My So-Called Life. It is full of complex characters trying to do good but making a lot of mistakes and hurting each other by accident.
And there's some situations that will feel very familiar, like the unlikely friendship between the popular good girl Sharon and the bad girl Rayanne. Or a school dance where an excruciatingly awkward moment is broken by characters deciding to dance together no matter what anyone might think of them.
And if my so-called life had had a second season, the writers had planned a story line involving a gay teacher that was going to be the center of controversy. That in a sense, Wicked is a bit like the second season of My So-Called Life that we never got. So, as Winnie and Steven chugged away on scripts and songs for years, they had some readings and some workshops with actors. To play Glenda, they brought in Kristen Chennowith.
She was known for playing Anjenu roles on Broadway. And for Alphaba, they cast the wickedly talented Adel Dazim. She was an actress with a knack for originating roles that were embraced by queer audiences. She'd already played Moren, the queer girlfriend in Rent. Sister, we're close. And she'd go on to play Elsa in Frozen.
Those early Wicked workshops were helpful, but to figure out if the story was working, they needed to see it on stage. So, the team decided to take a risk on a try out in San Francisco directed by Joe Mantel. He had recently won a Tony for Take Me Out, a play about a gay baseball player. And Joe is known for taking on risky projects.
You can't hesitate or they can smell it. So, Wicked opened on June 10th, 2003 in San Francisco. Here's the producer. My name is Mark and I want to welcome you to the world premiere of Wicked. Tonight is our first preview, which means our first audience basically. The audience was thrilled. Listen to this reaction to the opening line.
It's good to see me, isn't it? And when reviews came in, one local paper wrote that it serves up one bland ballad after another. It was rough. Variety wrote, "Ding-dong, the witch's prognosis is uncertain." And unfortunately, those reviews were right. I went to see that preview in San Francisco and I can confirm it wasn't great.
There were parts that were kind of a slog and there was one huge problem. I think the major thing that we discovered in San Francisco was that we had not really yet solved um and delivered the character of Alphaba, our main character. In the San Francisco version, it was kind of hard to root for Alphaba. Her decision to fight the wizard didn't really make sense. She just seemed bitter.
The whole point was to tell the story from the perspective of the outsider who is misunderstood. The hardest thing with Alphaba was that we want everyone to love her when she comes out so we can sort of break the stereotype of what they've grown up believing about the Wicked Witch in the West. They needed to fix the story, but there wasn't a lot of time.
Investors wanted them to open on Broadway that fall, and other Broadway producers questioned whether that was even possible. The stakes are high here. You know, you put an enormous amount of time, money, effort on the line and in one night, a handful of people pass judgment. Even the cast wasn't sure they wanted to risk it. San Francisco audiences are delightful. Let's just stay here.
Let's just not even go to New York. Adding to the risk, they would be up against some stiff competition. A lot of shows with queer content or connections were opening that same season. There was Caroline or Change by Tony Kushner. He's the legendary author of Angels in America. There was Avenue Q with puppets singing about being gay.
If you were gay, be okay. There was Taboo from Boy George and Rosie O'Donnell, which had lots of star power. Critics were skeptical that audiences would give Wicked any attention. One of the big shows coming this season is Wicked. This is a musical by Steven Schwarz. I assume you all know Pippen and God Spell. Do you like that stuff? Pippen. I mean, I saw it in San Francisco.
Um, it has a lot of problems. Wicked opened on October of 2003 with big changes from San Francisco. Steven Schwarz had replaced an entire song. And throughout the show, Winnie had layered in a ton of changes to Alphaba.
She made it clear what Alpha is reacting to, that the wizard is attacking a vulnerable animal minority to solidify his power and that Alphaba is trying to protect them and stand up for what's right. But still, the team was scared. I don't go to opening night. I'm too hysterical. But the critics did go to opening night and their response a lumbering bore I think you're calling probably that sounds familiar and I liked it. It's lumbering and boring and awful and overproduced and hard to follow.
It has a lot of problems. But Wicked had its fans from the beginning. There was strong repeat business. And like with Maguire's book, word of mouth began to spread. I'm not going to spread for no roses. Ticket sales often taper off during the harsh winter months, but with Wicked, we built the advance every single week during the winter, which is, you know, unheard of.
People seem to be embracing the show in a way that the numbers just keep climbing. Critics were baffled. It has a lot of problems muddled and messy and it's making a million dollars a week, so that shows our influence. But the creative team saw how their show was speaking to a certain group of fans who needed a show like this. This is a musical where the lead girl basically says, "I'm going to defy grav.
I'm going to do the right thing and be who I am." And the girl who is the beautiful popular girl learns from the green girl that that's what she needs to do, too. And that notion has really tapped into to young girls and I think they relate. Wicked spoke to people who felt like they just didn't belong.
Very much like the books and like the 1939 film. I realize now it's like kids come with their parents and they they get in on a whole different level. When you get tired and the the eight shows a week starts to get you down and you might have a cold and I I try to remember these these kids that are out there. Here's the music supervisor and conductor Steven Amis.
can see to my right and to my left a little bit of some of the people in the first couple of rows and I and there are young kids that come and when she starts to fly and you see them like you know like have this transcendent experience that is so magical. I spoke to YouTuber Emma McMahon about Wicked. She first saw the show when she was in 8th grade.
I didn't know I was queer at the time, so it's hard to know exactly what was hitting. But I think the the story of an underdog outsider who has to accept that mainstream conformity won't save her is like I'm glad that I was receiving stories like that in my adolescence. That feels really valuable to me. Emma just posted a video about Wicked Stage to Screen adaptation.
Check that out on her channel, Media Processing. One of the songs that spoke most powerfully to queer audiences in Wicked was the big act one finale, Define Gravity. It's where Alphaba declares she's not going to seek approval or even try to fit in anymore. She's going to defy the world. She's going to stand up for herself.
Oh, and well, actually, you you saw defying gravity on videos in gay bars. Adina Menzel and Kristen Chennith, both the original stars of the Broadway version, have talked about their gay fans. And Alphaba, especially, the idea of her being green and being an outsider is something that people identify with. It's similar to another anthem that Adena Menzel would sing a couple years later.
In its first year, Wicked won a ton of awards. It went on a big national tour. Then it went international. And in 2007, Wicked played an important role in protecting gay marriage in Massachusetts. Organizers there had won marriage equality a couple years earlier, but anti-gay groups were pushing a bill that would reverse that, take marriage away.
Both sides were lobbying lawmakers as hard as they could. But neither side could get through to some of them. One of the undecided lawmakers was a state rep named Angelo Pupelo, who was known to be a big fan of Wicked. Gregory Magcguire, who had lived in Massachusetts for years, wrote him a letter. It read in part, "You can tell from Wicked, the play, that my heart is very much with the underdog.
The green-skinned alphaba, passionate and devoted to the abused citizens of Oz, is a victim herself of snap judgments and slurs and prejudices." Gregory's letter went on to describe his family, his kids, and he explained why equality was so important to them. We don't want them to feel any more of what Alphaba has felt than they possibly have to.
And when it was time for Massachusetts lawmakers to vote in June of 2007, Pupelo voted against the bill and marriage was saved. So that gives you a sense of how powerful a show like Wicked could be. But of course, not everyone loves musical theater and as a stage show, it could still only reach so many people. They could have a much bigger impact as a big blockbuster, which is exactly what we have now. Two of them, in fact.
It took over 20 years to bring Wicked to the screen. And as a film, the story can speak to gay audiences in a way that no version of Oz could before. Like with the 39 film, the Wicked films have a ton of queer crew. Where the Wizard of Oz had Adrien designing costumes, Wicked has Paul Tazwell. Wizard of Oz had Cedric Gibbons a set decorator. Wicked has Lee Sandales.
Wizard of Oz had Roger Edens working on the music. Wicked has composer Steven Schwarz and musical director Steven Armis. It's hard to put your finger on or prove, but like you can feel when something was made by queer people. Um, a lot of the time something about the queer magic seeps into the art.
Plus, there's a super queer cast in supporting roles like Bowen Yang, Bronwin James, Marissa Bode, Coleman Domingo, and in major roles like Jonathan Bailey, Cynthia Revo. I think like Cynthia Revo, just the way that she is so deeply herself and like she's so embodied and she's so passionate and so unabashedly passionate.
I find that really meaningful to see this person not apologizing for her existence and she's like, "Yeah, no, I I know I'm amazing at singing." And now a lot of people have observed that the Wicked Films make it very easy to read the Glenda and Alphaba relationship as romantic. They start as enemies. clothing. They grow closer and closer. You're beautiful.
Until they are the most important people in each other's lives. They can see each other like no one else can. And even in part two, when their feelings toward each other get a lot more complicated, at the root, their love for each other always remains. And that's not just fans reading into it.
The actors themselves have said, you know, whether it's romantic or platonic or, you know, maybe Glenda might be a little in the closet, but if there were time, you know, you never know. Yeah, you never know. Give it a little more time. Yeah. And then there's Fiero, who's simply chaotic and bisexual. End of story. Of course, people do go both ways. Now, there are moments in Wicked when Alphaba seems similar to Dorothy.
Both of them have like this I don't belong and I want to know where I belong kind of arc. And I think that really connects with queer people as well. She sings this weird quirk I've tried to suppress or hide. She dreams of finding a place where she belongs cuz once you're with the wizard, no one thinks you're strange.
But you can also see a big difference between Alphaba and Dorothy when you look at their respective gay anthems. For Dorothy, it's over the rainbow, a song of melancholy longing, dreaming that someday, somehow things might get better. But for Alphaba, it's defying gravity. She sings, "I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game." This isn't her dreaming.
It's her declaring who she is and what she's going to do. I'm through accepting limits cuz someone says they're so. She's setting aside her need to fit in. If I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free. And she's done compromising who she is for other people. Too long I've been afraid of losing love, I guess I've lost. Well, if that's love, it comes at much too high a cost.
That line is especially powerful. It's about conditional love. Deciding to reject love if it comes from a parental figure who only offers their love on the condition that you conform to what they want you to be or do. If you compare Over the Rainbow with Defying Gravity, it makes sense that for gay men in the ' 60s '7s, a melancholy song about what might change someday would make sense.
While it doesn't feel like Judy Garland is necessarily like my top diva, like it does feel meaningful to know that like this was that for a generation and that it was a shared a shared interest that united people before it was like safe to come out and say who you are and what you were into. And it makes sense that a more defiant song would hit in the 2000s.
Not an I wish song, but an I'm going for it song. For a time when queer people have made a lot of advances that we could once only dream of. And we can see we can keep winning more. This arc of Alphaba going from I'm different and it's bad and I want it changed to I'm different and that's what makes me powerful. Alphaba is especially motivated to protect the weak and vulnerable.
In this case, the talking animals of Oz. She sees that the wizard is making them into literal scapegoats. It's a metaphor that you can see as a stand-in for any number of oppressed groups in real life. They're not allowed to teach, not allowed to speak, not allowed to use public accommodations like transportation.
We see many of them trying to flee, fearing that things will get worse, which Alphabet discovers has already begun. For something written in the '9s and brought to the stage in the early 2000s, it feels shockingly timely to today. the moment in the musical where they uh where Dr.
Dillamman turned this turns the blackboard around and it says animals should be seen not heard and it just like in in blood red text um or in red paint. That really shook me when I saw it in the theaters like 3 weeks after Trump being elected. I was like, "Oh my god." I like I don't know. I couldn't figure out a way to say this that didn't sound like trit, but it like felt like I was witnessing a hate crime.
Um, and it's like, well, this is a goat, you know, like that's not akin to a real hate crime, but I was like, this is this is an intimidation tactic from a cowardly individual who wants this person erased from public life. Wicked gives queer audiences a lot of ways to see themselves. I think anytime that there's a story as catchy and as meaningful as this like um I think little queer people everywhere are have a potential to see themselves in it.
It was really interesting having like this piece of comfort media from my childhood intersect with like a really preant, really relevant political message for the moment we lived in. There's something very special about Oz stories going all the way back to the beginning. Elrankrankbound created a world that's been able to inspire people for over a century.
I think it's endured because of people's dreams and because of the possibilities and because that there may be some place over the rainbow. It's a world that specifically welcomed queer people into it. No one in the story of the wonderful Wizard of Oz is without value. We are not told this often enough and it is one of the blessings of that story and one of the reasons we return to it.
A world where we can see ourselves and where we can tell our own stories. It's not just something that you know people like and are inspired by. It's something that has um generated more art and more stories and more more media. And so I think that's another fun part of Oz.
Not a lot of well not every you know story or um fantasy world I think does that but this one does. A place to create stories and experiences that we can share with each other. My own home. It becomes a Wizard of Oz convention every so often. Just uh the music starts playing. You know the the singing starts to come out.
It's like I'm that four-year-old little gay kid singing to my grandma all over again except now I'm singing to my dog. and by sharing it create vast connections with each other because we don't have gay culture passed down for the most part in our family the way other people do in other cultures. Thinking about being part of a gay community that has lasted since before Stonewall is very reassuring and empowering. It makes you feel part of something larger than yourself.
somebody's life maybe is slightly improved because we've been here first and we've tried to uh to clear the path in this dark woods. We've tried to plant a few lights along the way for those who will have a hard time. Leave them some hope. Leave them a conversational voice as they tuck themselves into bed and pick up a book and learn once again that they are not alone.
Now, there's lots more to say about Wicked and The Wizard of Oz. There's rumors that the actresses who played Glenda and the Wicked Witch in 1939 were queer. There's more about the very weird adaptations of the books, from anime to Nintendo games to Shan Connory in this outfit. And there's more to say about the gay subtext of films produced at MGM before the production code took effect.
I'm posting bonus videos with all that and much more at patreon.com/mattbomb. Huge thanks to everybody who chatted with me for this video. Josh Trillo, Terry Boss, DM Michelle, Emma McMahon. You can find links to all of their work below. And thanks to Gregory Magcguire for giving me permission to use excerpts from our conversation several years ago.
Also, big thanks to Emma for the edit on this video. Check out her video about Wicked Stage to Screen Adaptation. That's on her channel, Media Processing. Thanks to actor, singer Aaron Scoggins, and composer and music producer Caleb Martin for recording You're So Cute, Soldier Boy.
There's links to their work below. Now, if you'll excuse me, if I don't move quickly, I'm going to miss my balloon. Here I come. Oh, it's strange to see the magic change. A suit of khaki breeze about. The men I once passed by now seem to catch my eye. Whenever I go out, one and all they are short or tall, they seem to take my heart by storm.
And every young recruiter I would like for I love a unifor so cute. Oh, so cute in your new khakis when you're marching down the line. Then I get this counter sign. It's a soldier boy for mine. As I not toily not to the boys in the squad, how my heart is filled with joy. Oh, I love to play hookie with you looking rookie. You're so cute.
Oh, so cute. So am I.
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