Thinking Sideways: Polybius

all of the legwork on this thing. They'll also notice if you had listened to what we're calling the last twenty six episodes before and you're re listening now, the music and sound effects are gone. Yes, we've we've gone back to straight audio, so be warned. We sound a little different today than we do in what you're about to listen to. Yeah, bye bye, Thinking Sideways. I don't under say you never know the story is of things we simply don't know the answer too. Well. Hey there,

and thanks for joining us again. And this is Thinking Sideways the podcast, and I am Steve, as always joined by and this week we're going to take on yet another thing that I don't quite understand. Yeah, well this one I don't quite understand. Because ladies and gentlemen we haven't quite gone in this territory before, but we're gonna do it anyway. Is what a lot of people believe

to be an urban myth? Yeah, and it's hot. Well this one when you when and we'll get into the details of it in the name of but when you get into a lot of things on the net, it seems like you find a pretty solid opinion one way or the other. It's you know, oh, let's real or oh no, total urban myth. Even Snopes on this one is said, oh no, this is a total urban myth.

Except my problem is as I read it, I thought that, and then I came across some details it started making me think that maybe there's and gems of truth in it. So what the heck we're going to run down that road. I'm really this is like opening up new territory for us. This is like nothing like we've done yet where show has gone before, but this show has gone before. I listened to that, so no show ever, So no show has ever done this before. Awesome. Yeah, all right, Well

tonight we're going to talk about Polebius. If you wait, like the Greek philosopher. No, no, no, no, not that guy. Polebus which is supposedly a arcade game that came out in We're going to step into a little time machine here because not everybody understands this, and we're going to go back to one. And when you played a video game, you had to go to an arcade because they were the stand up machines. It was pinball and stand up arcade games. There's almost no home video games. Hardly anybody

out a home computer. Well in Atari had been I don't even know that the Atari gaming system had come out. If it had, it was still in its infancy. They were really expensive. They were very exc and to hook it up to your TV to have a TV that was compatible with something like that also crazy expensive because on tube TVs did not have a bazilion ports on the back well, and they also were they weren't digital, so you had to get a demodulator and or modulator

or whatever to you could actually interface those things. But you had to buy this box to do it with. Some had It was kind of fuzzy and crappy looking too. Yeah, so it wasn't easy to do. Playing video games meant you had a roller cords in your pocket and you went down to the arcade that's just how it happened. I remember many a time begging money off of my parents could have a couple of books so I can go play video games. Yeah, yeah, go go. I mean that's just the way to So we're gonna talk about

Polebous and let's go ahead the story. Because it's considered an urban legend or an urban myth, there are all lot of variants and versions of it out there, and I'm gonna do my best to try and wade through those. But let's just get the basic story to start with, and then we'll build from there. All right. So, according to this story, an unnamed arcade here in Portland, Oregon, in one got a new game one or was it several? I heard it was several, you you just right off

the bat. I've heard both ways. I've heard it was one arcade. I've heard it was multiple arcades in this city. I've heard that they were all in the suburbs. And I've heard that there was a couple that showed up in other towns on the other side of the country. Yeah, and we should, you know, make a point of saying this. It was like an unknown game, but that was really rare. Then I mean, you know, if you were going to get a new Arcade game, you were telling everybody about it.

You're saying, oh, yeah, we're finally going to get this. You know that you kind of you wanted to build hype around it. Yeah. But I also got the impression that this might have been a beta test situation. If they only build a certain number of game cabinets, then that would explain, you know, well, we've just got to try it out and see how it does, and then we'll take it back to the shop and and make

our changes and then do our big marketing dump. Probably not a bad idea to just sticks them out there and see how people like him or not. I guess I just feel like, I mean, even at that in beta testing, you as an Arcade kind of say we're getting this beta. You know, the amount of people that would come out for this thing. You say, this is one of four units in existence. Come play this game before anybody else, you know, So to have it just kind of appear mysteriously is is like the first little

question mark exactly exactly. Uh so let's keep going here. It turns out this game was super popular and from

many accounts, almost addictive. People were lining up, playing it like mad NonStop, and at least one arcade, according to these accounts of it being released, the owner of that arcade said that he noticed, and I'm using air quotes, men in black hanging around, watching the players, watching their reactions, going to the machines, not collecting money, but doing something on the inch side of the machine, and then walking away,

which is weird. Well, you know, and I gotta say, I really have a hard time believing that, because I mean, are you really going to send some guys like, you know, with porked by hats and black suits and skinny times to an arcade full of teenagers and people? I mean, come on. And of course this is a government, so maybe.

But still throughout history you get these reports. A lot of conspiracy theories or urban legends have these like mysterious men in black characters, and I think that it's often used as a term, not as like an actual description, so as possible, yeah, that these guys were actually casually dressed, Yeah, and it could be that they just they weren't in jeans and Randy T shirts and yeah, thirty five year

old FBI agents, you know, in sweatshirts. Yeah, I picture the like Steve Bushemy as a teenager in that episode where Steve Bushey plays a um personal investigator private eye, and he says something about, you know, he was doing an undercover thing in high school, and its just like it just like you know, shows him in a high school like literally just Steve Bushemy, but like wearing kids clothes with skateboard like hey dudes, and dude debts like

what are we doing tonight? So I feel like that's like also totally feasible men in black, right, It's just like dudes who are like, oh no, we're thirteen, clearly in their thirties. Yeah no, no, no, I chaved my hair this high up on my fore Yeah no, I diet gray man. It's cool, but it could have been. It's not necessarily been men in black, but just men from the corporation that built these things. Yeah, I just want to see what it could be, some kind of

businessmen of some kind. Again, this is as with this, it's rife with possibilities for plausible reasons or yeah, if you've built these machines, you've got them out there for testing purposes to see how people like them. It makes sense to go by the arcade and just see what what people are doing. You absolutely, so this is where things go a little sideways. No pun intended for this

particular show. Uh So. Evidently, according to the allegations in the multiple versions that you come across, the machines were having psychoactive effects on players. So they were they were having amnesia, insomnia, night terrors, suicidal tendencies like all this

easy behavior. I feel like it should also be mentioned that in every account that happens, right, that's consistent throughout almost every account it is, except here's here's why I don't put a lot of credence in It's in every account because the order of those things written is always is always identical. It's abc D. You think there's a little cutting and paste going on there, Yeah, a lot

of that on the internet. But again, and this is this is one of the things that makes me scratch my head is how did they find out that these people suffered from, say, amnesia. That's a very good question, dude, I don't I don't know where I am. Where am I? Well, I'm missing ten dollars in quarters where I don't know. You know, you know, the crowd, the crowd pulls the kid away, right, because they're like, they all want to

play the game too. It's finally he's died like a million times in a row and he like wakes up from a trance and it can't remember doing it. That's I mean, quantifiable reportable asia. Right, Yeah, that's absolutely possible. Insomnia ssomnia. Again, it's a it's a kind of kind of a tricky one. Unless they did interviews with these with these kids, I assume that these are all just like accounts, right, like kids being like I couldn't sleep last night. That game is messing me up or whatever.

Absolutely correct. So here's where things really go bad is, according to the story, it was the game was pulled out of the arcades within weeks of having been installed because one player of it's supposedly a boy, had an epileptic seizure from playing the game, which might not even be related to the game. I mean, maybe he was just you know, just passed out. Yeah, it's possible, and we'll get into some descriptions of what happens on screen

as to why it could have caused a seizure. But it's you know, it's believed that basically he had a seizure and whoever made the game just in a panic pulled it and disappeared, and it's going there's there's never been a cabinet, you know, physically inspected, and people like, look right here, this is plevious. We've got it. There's some photos on the net. Again, we're gonna get into some of that stuff, but the story itself is really

the main basis we've got to operate from. Yeah, but yeah, no, that's that's one of the reasons I'm kind of doubting this story, just because the people that made this thing. I mean, you know what what somebody would have held onto it a souvenir or whatever, um you know, or maybe all of it. Some one of those machines should have showed up on eBay by now if there were like seven, right, I mean you assume if if you have decided as a game manufacturer, no, we're pulling this

for good. Right, they made their cabinets, but the cabinets all kind of looked the same, and if they are making other games, they either repurpose it or are motherboard in it. And the way you go, because I think that saves a lot of money on yeah, I mean it would, but you know, and I'm assuming if these were prototypes, they were probably in generic boxes. But the thing is, somebody would have saved all the guts and they would have shown up somewhere. Like one time, for example,

I bought it. I bought an Asteroids machine years ago, and it was this guy who had everything but the box. He had like the power supply and the motherboard and the control ward and the monitor and everything except the box the cabinet, and I bought it from this guy, and I played Asteroids for years on this thing. I built a crude box to put it in. So somebody, you know, somebody still has those guts somewhere if the

game ever existed. Maybe, I guess. I just think that, like if if you have a game that causes seizures and maybe a bunch of other stuff, you maybe just destroy it. I mean, again, you want to recoup your cost. You repurpose it, like you said. So it's it's hard to say, but again you real story says that this happened in the story itself didn't surface until August, so that's what Seventeen years later, suddenly the story just pops

up on the Internet. The story comes up on a forum which is coin op dot org, which evidently is a big gaming forum. I looked around a little bit on it, but I'm not a forum guy, so I didn't really know what I was doing it. It's a forum, not a repository of any kind. Again, I'm not positive it might be. I think that in the reading like coin op got bought by somebody else, and so I think that, like the old archives are held, I wasn't

clear and I couldn't get a direct line aside. Well, and to be fair, you know, the Internet is way different than the Internet now, and you know, I think it's likely right it may have been a forum, but they're just like really basic forums. But I guess the impress and I kind of have, is that it's just like a repository of Rom's Basically, you know, you download the game you want to play, and you just play

it on your computer. That's well, though, I got the impression that coin op was originally basically a BBS old school BBS. Again, I don't know, but here's here's what happens is this original story comes out. There's almost no information about the history of the game. They just say that it's a space shooters slash abstract puzzle game. It's named after a Greek historian Um and I mean, honestly, it doesn't lend itself to a whole lot of credibility

right off the bat. From that, and everybody on the Internet from day one has ripped this thing to shreds, and that's continued to happen. I mean, if you do, ladies and gentlemen, if you go out and you search for information on this game and you type it into Google, you're gonna come up with a gazillion hits on it. And you're gonna find people who say it's fake. You're gonna find people who say it's real. You're gonna find some guy who says it's he's got it in his

mom's basement. I mean, it's everywhere. Okay, well, the forums aside. Let's and let's just walk through some of the details that have been put out out there. And again I'm putting air quotes around the word details. But the things that I have found that people say about the game, and we'll start with how does the game work? Is the game? It's the game. That's kind of the first

thing is there's some conflicting data on that too. Oh yeah, there's data all over the map on every point that I'm gonna bring up in here, and that's that's the hard part. And bear with us, folks, because there are some things that we are hanging on till the end

that maybe tie some of this together. But okay, So, according to the information that I've come across, the game was either a an action puzzle game that had a rotating three D puzzle that had it had logic puzzles in it, and it had a maze built in it, kind of like do you remember pac Man, the original pac Man, how you had to run through the maze.

That's what they mean by a maze. Um not you know in these new games where your your first person shooter going through these crazy mazes where you can only see ahead. Yeah, we're still probably look at graphics and very simple. It's absolutely simple graphics. The second b is that you're flying through a tunnel and you have to dodge things that are in your path, and as you get farther through the game, things start going faster and lights on the screen began to flash, almost in a

strobing effect. So not like that. One that reminds me a lot of um Space age and Dragon Quest or whatever, right, that like stuff and Dragon Slayer. Yeah, Dragon Slayer that where you like just go through and dodge stuff. We're talking something like that. Are we talking, No, we're talking. We're talking generations before that that came out much later.

We're talking about more of you know, it's you've got a T junction head and you've got to hold the joystick to the left until you get to that junction and then it's upper down right. I think that this, like the graphics on the screen maybe are rotating that this is this is my gas. This is kind of almost three D graphics. It's in some of the some of the stuff that I came across most video games

of the time. If you think of everybody's seeing Super Mario Brothers and the original arcade of Super Mario Brothers or Donkey Kong, and they were in raster graphics, which is just little pixels that turn on to paint an image, right, little bit images. Well, there is discussion that Polybius was a vector graphics game, which is more along the lines

of if you remember, like you said, Joe Asteroids. Uh, there was a game and we're going to talk about later on, but battle Zone battle Zone is what I was thinking of, because that was also Antari game, which came out not too long after Asteroids, and that was actually a three D game. Yeah, and if if you haven't heard of any of these games, take a minute and just do a Google image search and you'll see what we mean by simplistic line graphic work and vector graphics.

And this is kind of a computer thing in terms of how things work. But vector graphics are smaller and easier to render than rester would be. So if your game can do these in vector, then it's faster, especially with the processor in one which is compared to today's standards a snail, it's going to be able to go faster, which is going to be revolutionary for anybody. They've never seen this happen before, so I've heard discussions that it was some experiment to use the vector graphic form. If

that's right or not, I don't know. So we're not talking like just an animated sequence, because that's all that like Space Age was was really. I mean, in terms of programming, it wasn't much more complex than pac Man or anything like that. It was just that they had done these like full animated scenes. So we're talking like like really basic, extremely basic. Again, Pong was kind of still, you know, the grandfather of all of these games at

that time. I'm still waiting for the movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another game that was kind of vector based, and this comes up in the research saying that maybe this was based upon it is Atari put out a game called Tempest, and I know that we watched the video of how Tempest works, which is, you know, it's vector graphics and you're kind of sliding around the edges of a maze,

avoiding things and shooting stuff. People say that it could have been based on that, or a beta version of that, because Tempest, according to everything, came out about four to six months after this supposedly hit Portless. So now the image that I have in my brain is you know in Star Wars when he like has his like like a little guiding thing come down or he's like gonna do and it's like that there, Yeah, when he's in the trench. That's now in my brain, and that's that's

that's basically what the graphics. Yeah, that it's that level of sophistication and it's moving quote unquote right past you and I guess if that were going fast enough and you're trying to dodge things and there were lights flashing at you. Okay, I'm getting a good picture here. Yeah, sounds like a fun game. And none of these games that we've talked about so far are anything that would give someone a seizure. But I did watch and I know again I put this up, and I know you

guys have watched it. There's a current game out there was that Super Hexagon. It's a game that basically flash is and your everything's rotating and spinning. If it was in line with that, And again, ladies and gentlemen, you might want to google this. You might want to kind especially pause this, go watch it for a minute and a half and then come back to us. Actually, for anybody, if if you do have epilepsy, you probably don't want to go to watch that one because that would be

a bad thing. Yeah, everybody else go look, so welcome back. Yep. That was crazy to watch. I know now you kind of get how somebody could have a seizure because it's not easy to watch that stuff flashing around. Yeah, and then imagine playing it like you're just passively watching it. Imagine like trying to be in charge of that thing. Oh, I would imagine that you'd be like seasick after a while. Yeah, I can't. I can't imagine that going on. It's not

just watching it makes me dizzy. Yeah, So let's let's move forward into the actual person. Polibius the Greek historian. Yes, because the name of game is based upon a real person, and Polybius lived the actual guy. He was a Greek historian, lived in two sixty four to one forty six b c. He was a historian. He had some views on how

things should be recorded, which is fine. But really, what I like about this guy, and I didn't really know about it until I started doing the research, is he was one of the first He came up with an early cryptographic system to use for communications over long distance. So it's called the Polebia square. And what it is is you take a grid of five across and five down and you start in the upper left hand square and you put A B, C, D, and E, and then you go down in the next line and there's

twenty six letters in the alphabet. So he combined I and Jane in the same one. Yeah, if you're communicating

over a long distance. You can use flashes of some kind, and you know that the first number is going to be the top of the grid and the sex second number is going to be on the vertical access of that grid, and then you put them together and you know it's B and then E and so want to and you can build sentences so that great distances, which again, I mean, it would have taken me a week to write over there, but it took me an hour to transmit the message using Flare, much simpler, So I thought

that was cool. I don't know why he's referenced. Maybe it's because of the fact that this is supposed to be some kind of puzzle game. But I couldn't really make the tie together myself. Didn't They say on one account of it that it was like a rotating square. That was like, yeah, yeah, so maybe it was a

reference to that. But the other reference that I was thinking about was that he was also besides being a cryptographer, he was an historian, and one of his things was he felt that any historian should never put anything into the historical record without actually interviewing somebody and finding out if it was true or not. You know, what do you think about it? It might be, you know, like

like this whole thing, this whole story exactly exactly. Oh man, So okay, already even in the name, right, we're like we've got two different directions, right. I have found a way that this reference is what the game is, and it totally makes sense. And Joe has found a way totally discount the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, somebody was somebody was playing a joke, and and and the name of the game is itself part of the joke. It's a broad hand as to you know what this story is

all about. Really well, and that's that's a great segue into the next bit of data that I want to go into, which would be who made the game. We never know. We we don't know who made it. A Tari and Sega. We're kind of the big boys on the block when it came to video games at this time. They were the superpowers. They also would have been the ones that would have had the resources to say, here's seven boxes, let's call beta testamon or and to develop.

I mean, they had the R and D money they were creating all of these games, so they totally had the money to just as opposed to a small indie label that's just going to do the one thing that they know work. And plus they had the money to sand x marines and sweatshirts around to watch the Yeah, that's exactly right. So there's a lot of conjecture that

one of these two major labels made it. There is a image going around on the Internet of the title screen of the game, and actually, I'll be honest, I've seen three different images of the game. I've seen the title screen, I've seen a black and white of the cabinet itself, and I have supposedly seen images of the City of Portland's what is it the licensing stickers for it to be put into an arcade and play. I

feel like I want to see these pictures. Also, I want to talk to the person who licensed, did you. I wasn't even aware that you have to have a license like a licensed stick so people don't have eplectic fit. I have seen stickers on games. I'm assuming it's licensing. Again, here's the problem. I don't know if it's from this game. I don't even know if it belongs to a video game, and I don't even know if they're real. I've just

seen these. But I've got to go to an arcade and arcade now and check out the machines, because I'm not finding what. Yeah, there's I know, I know the city, like, you know, they licensed things like cigarette machines. I know they do that kind of stuff, But I'm not sure about arcade games. I mean, actually, I wouldn't put it past them. You know what, I've seen stickers on games. It looks like they're they're officially issued. So I'm presuming that at least in this city that happens. But I

don't know exactly what they're for. But what I'm saying is that I cannot say these real because they're the same three ones over and over people have tried to check for photo shopping and all this stuff. The title screen of Polibius, it is eight bit graphics, so it is from that era. It looks like it's from that era. On the title screen there is a name from a company, and Joe, You're gonna have to help me out with this.

How do you how do you say this German? And in German that means deletion or a rature of senses, as in your senses of the world. So actually I think sorry, okay, okay, So there's there's that, but there's no record of this company. We don't know who this company is. Nobody can find them. They don't seem to exist currently, and there's no records of them, you know, putting out other games or anything like that. So I'm going to find my German dictionary. But I can, I can.

I'm guessing right now that this word means men in black or give him a conspiracy. I'm not sure one of the other. There is another direction that we can take for who created it, which is there supposedly is a guy named Cybernogi. Cybernogy, I'm not exactly positive again on the annunciation of the Cybernogi is according to use

net members, which using net remember you using that? Yeah? Well, according to us net, Cybernogi created and Cybernogi is a German programmer, and people believe that he created he or she I should say, created the game as in April Fools joke. Evidently Cybernoggi has been known to put out April Fool's jokes. Two people on the net, So cyber he created the game or he created the legend of the game, created the whole thing, as in made the

whole thing for April fools. But here's the problem is that Okay, well people say, okay, well I think he did it, and then here's the stories. But I haven't seen any research and I couldn't find anything that would link the two together. So it's kind of, oh, that jerk does that stuff all the time. I'll about that jerk did this. Does usually take credit for his April fool, Frank, I don't believe. So that's the thing is that people will eventually come back and say, we're out in you

is the one who did that whatever? Maybe yeah, yeah, size, which it's not exactly an arrestable offense. Okay, Okay, So so next week this will be a two part episode. We are going to fly to Germany personally and subjects I Gnocgie to some intensive interrogation. Yeah, we can do that, or we can just keep going. Okay, we should probably just keep going. Okay, I want to go to Chairmany. I know you do. I really want to let you

keep somebody no no battery. Okay. We're gonna move forward into the places that it could have been released, where the game cabinet actually go. I've come across a couple of bits of information that say there was an arcade here in Portland called Backwater Alleys, which evidently is closed down long ago. They're reported as one of the places that supposedly got the game cabinet. Another one is Blue Diamond,

which is still around. But Blue Diamond is actually a bar. Now, I mean it's possible, but I mean that place is a bar restaurant. It's got a full kitchen and a full bar and everything. And I suppose at some point some he might have Supposedly the building was renovated in the nineties and that's when it became a bar. So

we got Blue Diamond. I've seen reports that say that it was in Gresham, Oregon, which is just outside of the city of Portland, because again the story says it was released in suburbs, so Gresham could be a plausible candidate. But then again, I've also heard that it was released in Kansas, which is not a suburb of Portland. Shockingly, Yeah, they're so close together. Yeah, so I don't know where it's at. Well, I thought about Blue Diamond. No, I'm

saying that I don't know where it was released at. Yeah, you don't know exactly where this thing was at. Yeah, they didn't say suburbs, and I don't know why. I don't know why they picked the suburbs. Don't either. It's it's kind of an odd place to say. Well, think about it is, if you put it in various suburban places and your your men in black are going to have to drive farther distances to go out there and monitor the teenagers playing it, I would think you'd want

to keep them close. In suburbs makes sense because that's where the kids are at. That's where the kids are, that's where the board kids are. But it's also you know, if you do want to keep it under wraps, right, it's not like the most central hub. You know, there's not as many kids around. So if you decide to pull it after a couple of weeks, you can just pull it and it won't be like this massive outcry.

Not that Portland was giant in the eighties, but it'd be less of an outcry late, right, And I want to jump to a point that we've talked about before, which I know we were talking about the pictures of the cabinet and the title screen and all that, because that's how we got the name of the company. One of the things that I couldn't ever come to grips with when it came to this title screenshot is how did somebody get it? Yeah? Absolutely, Here's the thing. Remember

these cabinets. It's a glass face with a video monitor underneath the case. And it's a CRT monitor. It's old school monitor. So even using thirty five millimeter film, the screen roles, you're not going to get a good clear image. And these images that are put up of this title screen they look like screenshot. They look like screenshots. How did somebody get the screenshot if the machine was only

out there for a very short time? Although I guess to like counter that, you know, like just in terms of things that are coming up in my brain right now, why choose Portland for your hoax place? Like? What a weird place to pick as a hoax place? Really? You know, like okay, some like tiny town in the middle of Kansas, Okay, sure, right, or some like really big metropolitan hub, but like Portland, Oregon in the eighties is like the weirdest, like literally

the weirdest spot that you could pick. I feel like it still is even even I guess more now you know there's more people here, but it was it was a bit more of a backwater back in but it wasn't like totally backwar. So it's just to me, it's such a weird, it's unusual place. It's not where you would normally want to go to market something. So that, but it's also not the kind of place that you would pick as like a hoax, right, if you were going to like pick a place to start a hoax.

That that is an interesting point, is that, like you would think that people generally, when they're making up stories about America, the story is said in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles or some tiny place nobody, or maybe Miami or yeah, or some some some strange, some squirky little town called Silent Hill or something like that from a creepy little place. Yeah. OK, so that that's that's kind of interesting. Another question mark on this

whole Yeah, this whole thing so far. And I don't know if YouTube have gotten this impression, but there's just question marks all over the place written read ink for Yeah. I totally agree with that, and I think, you know, it's like as for as much evidence that I feel like disproves it, there's also like it's almost the exact same amount of almost enough to yeah, see it actually happens. Yeah,

and we're like halfway through, right, got halfway through? Yeah yeah, yeah, we've got and we've got ways to go, and we're gonna move on to Joe's favorite subject, which is the supposed Men in Black. So here's the thing is that it was. It is not unheard of for the government to get involved with games, to use them as a way to find people with abilities to try to recruit them.

Battle Zone that we talked about there, which anybody who doesn't know what battle zone is, it's this old cabinet game where you put your your face into a periscope and you drove a tank around and you were blasting enemy tanks and driving around. Yeas would also swoop in and you have to blast them to So do you know what that thing was before it became a video game. I heard it was a Bradley Bradley troop carriers. It

was a training module for Bradley carrier tanks. So this is what soldiers did for before they went out in the field, as they learned to drive the tank in a VR situation. Well, I mean airplane pilots do it to this day, they use flight simulators that are open to the public. You know, people do use them in like a less sophisticated sense. But this has been a

thing forever. Is that that's how you train Rainbow six When that first came out, Evidently the scores and stuff like that, we're being fed back to the army or the military heard. And again I can't validatee game. No it was it wasn't gosh, what was that on It was a PlayStation game or something like that. It came out a good number of years ago. But supposedly you could register scores. So I don't know, and I just hear these things. Yeah, it's a weird thing. And there's

there's all kinds of creepy stories. If oh, I played the sniper game. When I got to the end, the phone number came up, and I called the phone number and it was a secret Nervously they offered me a job. Yeah, yeah, I tend, I tend to, you know, I mean, I'm I'm totally on board with the sinister government theory. At the same time, I'm totally on board with the incompetent government theory. And I don't I don't think they had the brains to come up with ideas like this. Well,

but here's the thing. Okay, let's just say that somebody was collecting data out of the machine. What could you get out of a nine video game processor besides the high score? Well okay, and not that sophistic record video. They can't record audio. So I mean, is it just they're doing duration and score? I mean, yeah, you could get that. The data, the data you could get out of it would be like, you know, maybe how often it was played and how much it was played. You

can get that kind of stuff. But of course, if you're sending men in black around and just like skulking skulk in the shadows and watch the kids play, and they're noticing the kids lining up around the block to play this game, they don't really need to download the data about how frequently the game was played. Yeah. Actually, you know, to me, the idea of them school I just like hanging around makes way more sense than the idea of them like, you know, coming to collect data.

I guess maybe if they saw someone that was like playing it a lot, they would want to know what your high score was or something like that. But I think, you know, this seems much more like a situation where they would want to know how it was affecting people more than they would want to know about high scores or how long it's played or anything like that. The

machine itself wouldn't give you that information. Now it's plawed. Okay, let's go with the sins for government again, and let's say, okay, it's plausible that they had some kind of video recorder, and it would have been a video recorder would have been on tape in the box, filming everybody who was playing. And so we're going and changing the tape, literally changing the tape I could have been to They might have been like the handles that we used for playing the game.

You know, maybe they had galvanic response mechanisms built into them, so they could actually probably download what is that they could like actually from the from what's going on in the electric currents in your skin, they can tell what's going on with your nervous system, and so in the eighties they can Yeah, I'm not so sure about that, but again, these are men in black, so they probably had some sophisticated tools that the rest of us didn't have back in there. I guess, you know, I think

what it really was. Should I save my my my

summation of what I think it really was until the end? Okay, I think I think it makes sense to me that if you're going to send some agents to like stand and watch behavior, if they say, oh, yeah, we're text for this thing, and we're going to have to go in like once a day just to make sure it's working, that's a great cover story for why they're hanging out all day instead of like we're just here watching the kids, right, I mean, so, yeah, we have to open it up

once a day, you know, for no good reason except to like have a good cover story. I don't know her government, there's all this, yes, I mean all right, so the machine disappeared. Yeah, it was taken away. It was taken away and probably executed and probably had a blindfold cigarette. Yeah you suck. Well, now everybody is saying, well, where's the ram of it, which, if you don't know rams, where you only memory. It's a game you can download and play on your computer, and they do remakes of

all these old games. Dude, this is my favorite thing in the entire world. MS. Yeah, I spend a lot of time playing my all time favorite game, which is a sn S game that you can only play on your computer. Now, I mean unless you have an S n S. So which one Earthbound one? Oh it's so good you should. We'll have this discussion, like I need to get the wrong for Asteroids. Yeah all right, Well anyway, so a ROM is a recreation of the game, and there have been just like everything else, a bunch but

oh I've got a wrong of the game. Okay, let's see it. I lost it, it got deleted or the most famous one out there is everybody would get this wrong and it would load the title screen that was on the internet. It would make this weird noise and then it would crash. I okay, So I have a big problem with this again saying you know, I love rams. There aren't a lot of ROMs for things that have been only arcade games because it's really hard to translate.

So you know, I guess this is made up statistic, but the majority of the ROMs out there are games that have been on console translated by the company that of any kind, um, so, games that exist solely in arcade box format. I know this because that I have an arcade game that I'm obsessed with and like literally can play for hours. And I wanted to find the RAM of it one time, and I do this a bunch of research, and it you know, comes out that unless it's been released on a console, your likelihood of

finding a ROM of it is like none. Yeah, it's just not going to happen because it's so hard to translates. I'm sure somebody's just like totally reprogrammed. I'm sure, I'm sure somebody, because I mean it's so freaking classic. I mean, how could it not well, and it's easy. Yeah, it's pretty simple of the game. Yeah. So but with something like this, you know, my belief of a ROM existing in any capacity is very low. Ladies and gentlemen. I

would to apologize quite obviously we're geeking out on video. Yeah, yeah, we are. Sorry. I've been holding back not to just run down that road. Here's the thing. If this is a wrong, it should work, and there is, and we're going to go back to the big bad government conspiracy theory. People have said, well, it's a direct translation, but of course the hardware in a PC doesn't work like the hardware in the actual machine does, so it can't do

the mind control voodoo. That's the thing I've ever heard that anyone. It doesn't it. It does not hold water for me. But it is funny that I see this now. I also will say that there are a bunch of people who say they have ROMs that aren't actual wrongs, because what they've done is they've taken the descriptions of the game and then they've recreated it the way they think it would have been. Yeah, which is really interesting

to me. Actually, it is interesting, and I've watched them, and I gotta be honest, it looks like a lame game based on the way people built it. And also again I can see why you get a seizure because nothing but flashing lights and more. Yeah, And you know, and that's that's the other thing too, is that perhaps this game actually existed, perhaps they did put some beta versions in in our cades, and perhaps it was just so lame that told what he played it and that's

why it disappeared forever. Yeah, And that the whole urban myth of like people lying it's just kind of been the built up version of it. Yeah, could have been just a really lame game, or it seems lame to us, because like you know, our games now are super right, but like you know, and again we were talking about like this whole introduction of vector graphics and maybe you know, it was super flashing lights and everything, and you just

kind of like got carried away with it. And the reason it was addictive was because you were so busy like paying attention to flashing lights that like you sucked at the game. Right, It's just like these graphics are so cool, what's going on here? And then you die a million times. It's so far. We have a lot of information that basically is uncorroborated, and at this point in my research, I would have dumped this story, except there's one character that we haven't talked about, not Santa.

It's a guy by the name of Steven Roach, Stephen Roach. He is based out of the Czech Republic. In March two thousand and six, he went on a bunch of forums and he made a post and it's the same post he he literally cut and paste. He wrote this

thing up and cut pasted it every time. He claims that he was involved in the creation of Polybius and has a bunch of details about the game and its history in terms of how it was made, why it was made, where all of this stuff which we're gonna go into, I will say right know that there is a lot of doubt cast upon the validity of this guy's story. People have picked it apart. He's done some interviews and people have turned around and said, well, you know,

it's pretty funny. His answers almost exactly match what was on the Wikipedia page about this. Okay, Well, you know the problem is Wikipedia is constantly changing, and he could have updated or somebody could have read his details put them on the wiki page, and then everybody asking, well, that's weird, they Matt almost word for words. He could he could have actually he could actually have edited the wiki page of himself and stuff. Yeah, he could have been an updator on it. I guess my My big

question is like, why wait till two thousand six. Well, we'll get into that, okay, So let's let's just start at the beginning. So Joe helped me again. What is the name? How do you pronounce this? Actually, that's spelling it differently now since slosa and actually this is the spelling is different. Well that's fine, that's fine because this

is how he pronounces it versus the internet. Um, but he said This was a company that he and a couple other amateur programmers had put together in eight and they were approached in nineteen eighty by a South American company that he wouldn't give the name of for legal reasons. I guess they paid him. He probably signed an NDA and non disclosure agreement, so he's you know, he's keeping

his mouth shut on that, which is understandable. Uh. They came and said that they wanted an arcade game made that was going to use puzzle elements, but as we talked about before, they wanted to use vector graph Okay, well, this all makes sense so far. So they make this, uh, this puzzle game and it's it's got all this different and stuff going on, things that haven't been seen in video games, and they're all agog, they're really excited. And then the game gets released by this company. One of

the places, he says that there were seven cabinets made. Okay, one of the places here in Portland, Oregon that he says it was released was the Lloyd District. Okay, wait, I'm just gonna go back to my previous statement about like Portland being a weird place to pick right, and then like furthermore the Lloyd District, especially in the eighties was kind of a dump. Trying to find like a good word for that. And I feel like I can

say that. I mean, I was born in seven in the Lloyd District, so I you know, in the nineties it was a dump. In the eighties it was a dump, you know. And and it's not even like a very well publicized area of Portland. So for somebody to be creating a hoax by saying, oh, it's Portland, and then to like further it by saying, oh, and it was in the Lloyd district, Like that's such an obscure place

to say something like that. I just feel like, you know, I think, for whatever reason, I feel like it leads credence to the story. Interestingly, to the Blue Diamond, which is now a bar, is kind of on a southern periphery of the Lloyd District. Okay, So again again weird things stitched together in the story. So I don't know. So he goes on to say that about a week or not even a week after the game was put out, evidently, you know, the kids were lining up, they were all

enjoying it. And then a thirteen year old boy has an epileptic seizure while playing the game. So all the executives are freaking out because they think that, oh god, we've we've made the worst thing in the world. We're going to give people seizures before they pull it. Of course, now word gets out, according to Roach, that word gets out, and now it's now this is a fun game to play.

It's teenage boys daring their buddies to go play it, or their buddies going I'm tough, I'll played it will be which does not help the image of the sure so this this is all bad And he said he didn't. He say that they had play tested it for like a really long time as adults. All the adult developers really enjoyed it but didn't have any of this reaction. But they may not have had you know, they may

not have been epileptic. Well they probably weren't, but you know, I think that that's what the question, right, is that like, if an epileptic person plays something that's got flashing lights, they are probably going to have a seizure. And it's probably not the fault of the game, not that, but years ago probably well these things were not as well. Monitors is the wrong word, but well understood. The tech

oology wasn't good enough. I know personally, I've been in work environments that were kind of high security would be a way to say it. And so that you know, your monitor was watched and screen captures were remotely taken of your monitor. And we had employees who said, listen, I have epilepsy. You can't take screen crabs of my screen because when the screen capture would cause the monitor to do a little flash, and that would be enough to set this person off. And so the company couldn't

do it. So it was you know, I mean, I can see if you're not used to it. This rule had been made until this one guy came along and said, uh, hi, can't do that to me, And so everybody's testing it. It's fine, and then oh, we didn't think about that. But it's still is a little strange because Okay, what

happens is the game is very popular. One kid has an epileptic seizure, which may or may not even be the fault of the game, and they're all like in panic mode, and they pull all the machines just like really,

I guess I just I think it makes sense to me. Honestly, you know, the I mean even the scaremongering that happens with like current video games where people say like, oh, if you play this game that has guns in it, you're going to become a murderer, you know, And that I think is kind of kind of the same situation where you have this game that's out for a week and it's technology that people don't really understand, and some kid, whether he has epilepsy or not, you know, has a

seizure or has an adverse reaction to it. The technology is so new, people are just gonna say that thing did it, that thing's fault. There is always that possibility, although at the same time, I know when I was a kid, there were always kids that we knew were just spazzes. So so it's like out but like everything else,

it's peppered with doubt. Well of one of the things I'm interested in finding out, and I didn't occur to me to that to actually check this out, is that have there ever been any video game manufacturers based in South America? Oh, I'm sure I don't know that. They weren't the manufacturer as far as I can tell, it sounded like they were. What was it. How did Roach put it? Let me grab this. Yeah, well, it sounds like was was basically him and some friends who were programmers.

So it sounds like they developed some software. But it doesn't sound it does not sound like they had the capability to actually produce hardware. No, but again, if it's a South American company, it could have been some group that just said an investment group of some kinds. So they went to some other country and said I need you to make me this hardware. They went another country and said I need you to build this. You know, it could have been just piecemealed out so that when

it got time to do it. No, two people that were involved in opposite sides knew the other, and that's that's how cells work. Absolutely, so it's quite possible. So Roach goes on to talk about though, he says, Okay, well, this whole thing about men in black, I can tell you who that was. That was all the exacts at all the investors who were panicking and came flocking to the area to deal with this this event, you know, this this seizure that this boy had and to try

to mitigate the impact of it. So now they're all hanging around the arcade and they're all nervously staring at the machine and talking. Of course, everybody's like, what's that? A bunch of dudes do it, So it could be as simple as a misinterpretation. They're staring going, oh god, don't play it, don't play it. Don't play it. Kids, Like why is that guy staring at me while I'm playing the game? I mean, if a kid had a Caesar in an arcade, there's nothing that anybody could do

to keep that out of the new pature. And and let's face it, this is kind of a slow, slow move in towns at that time. Well, but they also you know, they were saying that like there was this massive fearmongering that happened, right, there was this massive scared but I I want to I want to pull back on that because it may have been fearmongering amongst the company and the investors panicking rather than the public. That's possible. Well, and and here's the other problem is that we can't

find any record of this boy. But a settlement out of court was made evidently family, So there's gonna be no lawsuit on record because they just did it under the table, listening and I'm sure that they signed, do not you probably so they've never been able to talk about it. Says that they were trying to, you know, basically, after that, he and his buddies they disbanded the company they made because they just wanted to distance themselves from

this whole thing fell apart. It was terrible and like, no, we don't want to keep making stuff and be haunted by this ghost forever. But you know, the thing that I found less credible about this is he published his little his little thing in two thousand and six. So the cultural difference between American two thousand and six in N is number one. In ninteen eighty one, we weren't such a litigious society. And you know, in in nineteen eight one, and I was alive back in those days.

I know that if you know, for example, I was playing a video game and I had an epileptic seizure, my parents probably wouldn't think about suing the company that made it. They would just assume I had an epileptic fit. There.

You probably wouldn't find a lawyer to take the case, because I mean, the lawyer just say, the jury is gonna laugh at your kid has epilepsy, well know, and so I mean, I mean, and so to the lens of two thousand six Litigious America, this sort of panicking on the part of the company of the company makes sense,

but in n it doesn't make sense, I guess. So the counter to that is that, like, so, for instance, my brother, who does not have epilepsy, has had two seizures in his life, and you know, both of them were by outside sources, and that happens to people. So I think that, you know, we've been saying it's an apple to fit, it's an maybe he just had a seizure. Maybe he you know, because some people just that just

happens every once in a while. You don't have epilepsy, but if this game has if something has given something, you know. So I think that even in the eighties, if your kid isn't sick and then suddenly they have something horrible happen to them, maybe they're not gonna, like, you know, go through like we're gonna see you for a million dollars. But probably the company is going to be like, listen, let's just deal with this right now. But I don't know, you know, it's hard to tell.

Again again, the kid is also the kid is in an arcade which has got dozens of other arcade machines in it, which has obviously been playing one of those. And it could have been that, it could have been that he just had recently consumed, like just minutes before thirty six pop Sickles or something like that. I mean, it could have been all kinds of things that cost us. See, yeah, sure,

and that's definitely possible. But I think you know, if it's the startup like whatever, you know, nobody really knows what they're doing. They're experimenting with new visuals that people haven't really seen before. I think that the tendency for a company to panic is greater when they're kind of experimenting in this sort of situation. But you know, again, this is we're having exactly the debate that everybody's happen online.

Well again, and I think I think again, actually, when it's not a startup one they're a really big company, then then they're typically seen as a deep pocket by attorneys. But when they're just a startup with not a lot of capital or anything like that, you know, they're not they're not really a worthy target because they don't have any money to take from. Well, let's let's move farther into to the information that we get from Steven Roche.

So according to a Roach and his explanation is difficult, and I'm actually going to try and read this verbatim to describe this to everyone. But this is how he says the game was played. And again, personally, this game sounds lame. But the game is centered around a moon base large which he says is largely played darized from Star Wars, which displayed a number that doesn't what's what's that mean exactly? I'm guessing there was a number in the middle of the moon base. Okay, let's get farther in.

I think this will help clarify a little bit more so. There's six sets of different aliens. The firch, which varied through six levels, appears as random waves sent out from the moon base and need to be destroyed. The others were numbered between one and ten, which had to be repelled back to the base to lower the total. The figure you had to match exactly to clear the level, otherwise you lose two lives or just one if you have one remaining. So, if I understand the way he's

saying this, correctly. The moon base, let's say, comes up with number fifty five and a shift comes at you and it says five, and you bounce it back into the base. It sounded to me like you were trying to get the moon base to drop back down to zero by pushing numbers back into it, like a like a mix between a shooter game and a math game. Yes, yeah, ok, yeah, so that's how he says. And he goes on to to give out some more stuff, which makes the description

even more convoluted and difficult to follow it. I don't I just don't want to read it because it doesn't logically make sense to me. But what he does say is that the longer a specific level goes on, faster the game gets, which we've all seen in every video game. That what as you go longer the screen, the lights begin to flash, and if you beat the game, the screen rapidly flashes. Puts up the word polebius and eventually

says polybius. And I'm guessing it probably isn't that prototypical, you know, that deep throated weird voice that they always had an old video games, which if this kid beat the game and it's rapid flashing could be what caused the seizure. Well yeah, I mean you know that makes sense to me that they would have rapid flashing. Right, you blew up the moon. It's the representation of the explosion of said moon. Too sophisticated, So you know, it

says Plebi. You know, based on that description, I can see how somebody could have a caesar from it. But I can also you know, it does kind of sound like a lame game, but I can also. You know, when I was a kid playing like math Rabbit or whatever, like get addicted to those things because you know, you just in your mind, you just are competitive and you think, well if I just played again, maybe this time I'll do better, you know, And it's just it just feeds

on it. I played the crap out of Asteroids. I played the Holy Heck out of the Star Wars game. It's a total vector base to this game. If I to this day, if I see that game, I'll play it. Oh yeah, I can't help myself. I gotta drop fifty cents in and play. Yeah, listen, there are games. This

is how. There's that bar downtown called ground Control, which is like an adult arcade, and like there are games there that like nobody ever wants to play, but I'm sitting there playing them like drunk, Like I've got a couple of beers in me. I'm just like playing it, just shoving quarters in and there's no reason for it except for that I can't pass them up because you Yeah, by the way, do they have asteroids there? Yeah? Probably

there's got a long time. I mean, you know, so it's it's one of those games that you think you think, like empirically, you're like, wow, it sounds boring, but then you like get into it and you're like, oh man, so fun and so hard. But if you do this, it's really good. Yeah, I mean it's completely plausible. Yeah.

And you know the thing that I always say about like, again, i'm a little bit nerding out here, but like video games of the past versus video games of now, right, video games of the past you had to you had to hate before you could love them. And I think that's a great thing to say about a game like this, where like you would hate this game, you would hate it, but you wouldn't want it to beat you, so you'd

go back and play and play and play it. And I can see how people would just get or you'd watch that one guy who was really good somehow figured it out and then you couldn't help but watch him play. Yeah. Absolutely, so you know I can see just based on that description. Actually, that description is far more interesting to me than any of the other things we've Yeah, I mean really like, okay, cool,

it's like shooting some asteroids or whatever. Fine, but like you have to keep track of the number, and like you have to hit the right numbers back and then also dodge the ships then also shoot the like waves, and also the graphics are really cool and new. Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me again because like you're supposed to knock back the ships. That the ships come out with numbers, and not all of them.

Some come out without and you gotta kill some come out with a number, and you got to knock them back in there so and you know, and and the never has to match exactly, which means that if I say, say you're at like the number the random number generated was thirty three, and you've knocked back and knocked back like five ships to total dirty, so that means the number is at three right now, and the ship comes out and it's got the number four on it, so

you dodge it. So you dodge it, But then it gets past you, and that doesn't start shooting at you know, surely it just continues, right, Those I don't think are probably maybe you can destroy them. I don't know. Maybe ye, maybe maybe you used to destroy. We don't know. We know nothing. We could sit here for another hour and talk about that's a good point. We don't know. And the worst part is that's the end of the information

we have. Yeah, we've got the Internet legend, We've got some details that people seem to repeat, but I can't validate. We've got a story by Roach which sounds plausible, and I can see credence in bits and pieces, but I can't none of it stitches together. And this is probably the loosest bit of This is the loosest story we've done yet, because it's all over the map. Yeah, And first, personally, I find no reason whatsoever to believe Stephen Roach. And

also I think we've gone on long enough. It's time to solve the mystery. Oh, Joe knows the answer, apparently, What is the answer, Joe, Well, it's pretty freaking obvious. Okay, this is a the best department experiment to it a video game, and the idea was to create a video game that would cause people to completely spas, go insane,

kill themselves. The idea was that once they perfected this and tested it, then they would air drop like millions of these in the hostile countries like Iran, North Korea or whatever and and totally decimate their populations. So they put so they put out a beta version in Portland, and and the other thing to get is one one Katie Spas is out and has an epileptic fit, you know,

and so a major disappointment. So they pulled it and they put him in a huge warehouse somewhere like the one you see at the end of Ridges of the Lost Art where they still are. And uh, and that said, that was the end of the experiment. They decided it was like, you know, they just couldn't create a video game that would cause people to spas out and kill themselves.

I I personally, my personal opinion is that I think that it may have been real, but I don't think it was real in terms of the actual incarnation that we hear about you all of the stories. I think that it probably is this is an amalgamation of several stories of several games that have been merged together through the mishmash of the Internet. There's enough concrete or solid believable information here that I'm willing to run with it.

I just don't think that Polebius was real. I think that it was beta versions of tempests or battles under any of these other games that are out there, or games that we don't even know of because they just faded from the memory of the social group. Is that I think that it was. It's just a bunch of

them stitched together. I think that you know, actually, if you to look for a credible version of the whole thing, it's like if you can imagine some nerve that hung out in game arcades back in those days, and this game shows up and it's it's put out in a few places, not just his but and it turns outack, no, but what I mean, it's like, so, okay, so this guy, this guy is like like witnessing that the arrival of this game from nowhere, and it's really popular with him

and his dorky friends, and it's like they really like it a lot. But it turns out it's not it's totally a dead letter and every other arcade they put it in. So a couple of weeks go by, you know, and maybe randomly some kid has an epileptic seizure while he's in the arcade. Then the game gets pulled because it's obviously a failure because besides, aside from this guy is nerdy friends, nobody else likes it or plays it. So they pull it and that's the end of that.

And then this guy like sort of like, you know, years later he's like, you know, tax it onto the end of the Southern legend. Yeah, it's like this guy years later says, you know, I can't believe this. You know, this this arcade game shows up and and everybody was nuts about it, meeting him and his friends, you know, and then somebody has some much somebody like has an epileptic fit, and then they pulled the game and and and that was it. The whole thing just went down

the memory hole. But now maybe it was just purely a game that sucked and nobody wanted to play it, and so they pulled it out. What do you think that I honestly, I don't know what I think, you know, I do I think that there's Yeah, I really am actually, you know, I think that there's a lot of stuff that's great in the story, and I think there's a

lot of stuff that pure crap in this story. I you guys know, when you probably listeners, you now know based on my like little rants, I'm really passionate about video games. I really like them. And you know the fact that there are so many things that I almost like want to be true. I just I just can't decide either way whether it existed or not, you know. And I do think that since we do have the you know, pleasure of living in Portland, maybe we can

find a little more about it, but probably not. You know, I think that if that stuff was to be found, it would be on the internet already, would be part of the story, because I think this is the thing about internet. People speculate and and they cut and paste and make stuff up. If anybody, any of these people are out there that are actually busily obsessing over this this topic, they would have done a couple of things. They would have looked for a South American software company

that was specialized in video games. They would have gone through the Oregonians archives. They would have looked in German records, because there's got to be at least one nerd out there in Germany who's following this intensely, who could actually look in public records to see if a company was ever incorporated called Zinnish Lawson. No, and nobody's done this. Yeah, I mean it's hard to say. Yeah, well, ladies and gentlemen,

we're gonna leave this one unsolved. That would be permanently unsolved. Maybe permanently, but uh, that having been said, if you'd like to go ahead and check out some of the links for some of the research that we did for the show, you can go ahead and check that out on our website. The website is, of course, thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You can listen to the show right

there on that website. You can also go ahead and listen to the show on iTunes if you want to go in and download, and probably most of you the download do it through iTunes. Got a couple of minutes, go ahead and leave us that comment as well, because

that's what helps other people find us. Uh. If you're on the go and you realize that you know a new show has come out and you forgot to download it, well, of course, you can find us on Stitcher, which is available on just about every internet capable device, and you can stream it right there. You can always go ahead

and send us an email. So if you've got thoughts on this particular episode, or stories that we've got on the site, or stories you'd like to hear any of the above, or anything else, go ahead and you can send us an email. Our email address is Thinking Sideways Podcast at gmail dot com. And as a matter of fact, yeah, we have some listener comments. Well it's it's good. Um. I mean basically what it is is, there's this little

website called Reddit. It's a little tiny um, but we actually got a message there from a user anyways, he uh really likes our show. He looped us in with like a bunch of other really awesome podcasts um and also suggested podcast topic for us. Yeah, which we're definitely gonna get to. Um. But I just thought we'd give him a little shout out, because you know, I like hearing great things about our show. I don't know about you, guys, I don't care. It's a story to look into it. Yeah.

The mom Talk Project, which is I think going to be a lot of research. Okay, Yeah, I've not heard of that. Yeah, it's a conspiracy, so Joe might have to head So eighteens. Thanks or do that, whatever whichever you are, we appreciate it. Yeah. I guess I just assumed you were a dude, but you could be a check totally okay. Al right, well that having been said, once again, thanks for for slogging through this one with us,

ladies and gentlemen. I know this. We didn't. We didn't think this was gonna be turned into as big of an episode as it obviously has. But I hope you enjoyed it, and we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up and U we'll come back at you next week with something completely unrelated to today's show and completely interesting Jo, then we'll talk you later. It was aliens. Yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to