Get ready for it. And it is the twenty ninth day, is that right? Twenty ninth Yeah, twenty ninth day of August twenty twenty four, allegedly, according to that thing we call a calendar, Sore's Day and all that good stuff. Welcome to it. It's the O'Kelly effect. And if you're hearing us live, that's what day it is. But most of you listen to the podcast, So whatever day it is, greetings,
whatever night it is, Hello. Anyway, here we are on a Thursday, and before we get to the call in show on Friday, which I'm sure is going to be an adventurer this week, we'll see has anything happened in the news. I don't know, you know what. Everything is a muddled mess as of late. But I had a cancelation and was able to grab up somebody who I haven't had on a while, but strangely enough had a project that they're doing, a piece of writing they're doing.
And I saw what it was, and I said to myself, gee, you know, I put about ten years of my life into something associated to a project this person was. Okay, I used to make a living. I've said it many times on this show. I worked for Exxon Mobile. I tell you guys that all the time, right, But what was I doing for Exxon Mobile? I talk about personnel management and all that kind of thing, and how I could not dig dealing with the edicts coming from Houston, Texas,
which is where the corporate headquarters of Exon was. I think it still is. But anyway, you know, it was one of those things. But what was I doing Convenience stores, gas stations. I worked for Exon and their Tiger Marts later on on the run stores because when they merged with Mobile and they had to cross brand and rebrand and everything else. And even when you guys hear me talk about, well, yeah, I worked in a sandwich place. I did this, I did that. I've had some people
say you had a lot of jobs. No, it was really one job that turned into a bunch of things. I had to do fuel management, fast food, cash earing in New Jersey. You have gas attendance, which you know you might see them in some places where you have full service gas. Somebody comes out and pumps your gas for you. By law. You have that New Jersey. Anyways, back to it, convenience store world. That also included being a lottery agent and stuff like this. A lot of
things you got to do. And that's what I did in the nineties going into the two thousands when I talk about, you know, on nine to eleven, and I end up sending water to the guys over you know, digging people out because I tried to get over there onto the island to help. I'm sending water from my job. Why, because I was ordering cases of water for convenience stores.
I also happened to be ordering things like gloves, so I sent over work gloves, I sent over some of those masks, things like that, in order to give supplies to people to help out. Because again I had been in the New York, New Jersey area my whole life, and there was a very personal aspect to what happened to the people and the towers falling and all that. But today's show is not about nine to eleven or
any of that. Today's show, well, you know what, I'm gonna let the author explain it now that I've given you this weird, weird setup, and you know what appropriate weird setup. Why Joseph L. Flatley is with us and everything he writes is kind of weird and quirky, and I love it for that reason. I mean, at one point it was like taking a look at a psychotic man's art project. For a cover of one of his zines.
We talked about that, you know, evoking the imagery of the old trope of a candy a van looking for you know, having candy looking for children, almost when he releases a picture of something. And what was this the searchers and all that weirdness? What was it? Satan goes to the mind control convention, you know, I mean, look, all of these things sound pretty odd. And I said to myself, this guy needs to get to know Adam go rightly. And that's weird enough in and of itself.
And I was right about that. Plus we used to do a thing on here where he did the strangest of interviews. What did we call that?
I think that was the Was that the Bad Ideas Department?
Yeah, that was a bad Ideas Department. And it was just these really strange interviews that him and I would listen to his interview back and discuss what happened during a very weird interview, and you came up with some very unique subjects.
Yeah, yeah, you know, just following my my weird radar, I guess, but yeah, it's it's crazy and we haven't spoken.
I think.
I think according to Skype July twenty twenty two, is the last time. Oh yeah, it's been a while.
Yeah, I And back then we would have been talking about the failed state update, which you know, are you're not doing that anymore? Are you?
No? So I had to let that drop. You might remember a constant seam in our conversations. If not, you know, if not for broadcast and our personal conversations, it's you know, when you're an independent journalist who're always broke, which led me to take a full time job repairing lottery machines for the state of Pennsylvania.
I was like, two years ago, I hit the wall.
I'm like, I can't do this freelance indie journalism thing anymore. And spent two years repairing lottery machines and hey out in convenience stores and talk about the bailed statement.
Wait, wait a minute, how the hell do you get that job? First of all, before we get into the weird, uh, you know part of invisible America, because this is what this is, folks. There are parts of America that people don't do news stories on that, people don't do documentaries on that. People try to ignore because it's either embarrassing uh completely incomprehensible to most of the normies in the
world for one reason or another. And it's not because it's about conspiracy theories or you know, stuff like that. It's just an uncomfortable, in some cases illegal or gray zone area of life in general that happens all around you. In almost any place where there's a population, there is
you know, the criminal underbelly. There is the weird sort of part of society again that is either ignored on purpose or accidentally one way or the other, falling between the cracks, and that ranges between homeless people again and the embarrassing characters that might be part of the local scenery one way or another, that might be endemic to a community but are never really truly acknowledged until something crazy goes wrong or whatever. Then you might see them somewhere.
But otherwise, these are constants all around you in America, and they're there whether you know we're thriving as an economy or not. They're there whether the politics are going you know, business as usual and on autopilot, or if we're at a time of great conflict and upheaval. As
we are currently, these things continue to go on. You know, it's like there's always going to be a drug dealer somewhere nearby, unless you're in a state where it's legal, and even in places where it is legal, there's always pop dealers nearby. There's always somebody to buy weed from, although you know, maybe not everybody knows who they are.
And again they might be ignored on purpose or accidentally by everybody in a community and all that good stuff, and they're sort of the rejected and supposed to be quietly unseen parts of society, the ignored, the cast out, the cast aside, whatever. And you will find all of this converging with the normal people in life and people who just need gas, or people who just need a pack of smokes or whatever, or people who just you know, need something to you know, a tobacco product in order
to utilize tobacco. But really we know they're smoking weed when they come to buy a pipe or whatever, and they'll go to that little convenience store that always has a happy, strange corporate name as opposed to the thing that's up on the sign. One way or another. Some of them are chain stores, and some of them are Jimmy's Groceries, you know, or something like that it's called. And meanwhile, you know they're not there to sell groceries anyways. Yeah, so this is part of it. But how do you
get a job going and fixing lottery machines? Again, totally acknowledged in one way. They happily give you commercials on the new scratch offs out there, right, get in on this. It's going to support education in your state. You know, the usual theme, blah blah blah, blah blah. And you have scratch off tickets everywhere in that crap that comes off of that latex stuff everywhere and under some people's fingernails,
almost permanently. And there are people running around who devote their lives to scratch off tickets, who have a gambling addiction that's acceptable by society standard. You know, nobody's looking to break their legs over what they owe to the lottery tickets. But it gets strange anyways, that's an aspect of those convenience stores too. But I lived in the convenience store world and that's a weird place to be.
How do you end up with that job though, as a guy fixing lottery machines, because I imagine you get hired as sort of a contract guy, like nowadays, if you have a cable company or an internet provider, somebody shows up with, you know, a magnet on the side of their truck. It's their truck. They were hired, you know, off the shelf from somewhere usually and they're not you know, yeah, I'm working for Comcast or Cox or whatever communication company.
But really that's just one of the many jobs they could be doing in the new gig economy, whereas you know, the old in the old days, lottery people might have been assigned, they might have had permanent maintenance people. But how do you get that job for a while fixing lottery machines in Pennsylvania, which again is only next door to New Jersey, so minus the gas attendants. It's the same kind of convenience store underbelly that I used to live in. Anyhow, get into it. How do you get that job?
Well, I knew somebody it was, you know, it was a you you know you you uh, you nailed it. So you know, I was a contractor working for the lottery company who was contracted the State of Pennsylvania, so it was like twice removed from any like state benefits or you know state you know, like you know, when you work for the states, you get the good benefits. When you work for a company that works for a company that works for the state, you don't get great benefits, right, but yeah, you know.
So, so you have this regulatory thing in your state and it's the Lottery Commission and it's probably got you know, between five and eight people on it, and that serves as the core who makes the decisions for they contract whoever it is that has to build the lottery machines to that's another thing. They usually put out a contract thing and somebody bids for it. And in New Jersey, g Tech is the company that ended up doing all
that technology. And that technology was like, you know, four years out of date the moment they introduced it in New Jersey, clunky crap that you know, somebody who's on the convenience level has to keep running as best they can, and that's a trip in and of itself. But you contact the Lottery Commission people. They've contracted everything out from the people who answer the phones to the repair people
to god. I mean they even had had weird ways of delivering the rolls of paper and the supplies you need, you know, those blank sheets that you get to fill out for the lottery. Somebody has to deliver that stuff, and you know, and they created different ways and went through different ways of doing that. But everything is a
subcontracted issue. So the person who shows up and they deliver signage to you, you know, the cute little signs you end up with in the window, the giant lottery ticket that they give you so that you have a display, blah blah blah. All that stuff is all subcontracted out. So there's really like hundreds and thousands maybe people that end up doing the work of the lottery in a state. But you're one of these subcontractors that they pick up. And yeah, they don't have to give you benefits, they
don't have to pay attention to you. You just have you know, we're going to pay this account. You get paid and that's the end of it. And you don't really work for New Jersey or excuse me, Pennsylvania in your case, you don't really work for the lottery. You work for yourself. But you're there to do their work. So yeah, so you happen to know somebody and you got in on this. So anyway, enough of my interruptions.
I wanted to lay this out for people because I swear to you most people don't give it a second thought when they see the lottery, and most normal people don't even think about the lottery until the power ball or the what's the other one or the Mega millions is up over one hundred million dollars or close to a billion. Now, sometimes you know, they don't even think about it anymore, and unless it's that big, and then everybody rushes to buy a ticket, and that's all they do.
Nobody considers there's paper, there's the machines, there's all this other crap that the guy trying to sell you chips and cigarettes or whatever is also having to manage. So now they needed to repair. Guy, was there a problem in Pennsylvania or did you just kind of randomly stumble into the normal flow of repairs that were required in Yeah.
You know, they there's a fleet.
They have a fleet of guys in white vans that are just constantly prowling around a rural Pennsylvania looking for a lottery problems. And the reason I wrote about it is because, you know, the convenience store, especially when you get into rural PA or when you get into like inner city Pittsburgh, and especially some of these independent operations, it's really like its own subculture. You meet so many crazy characters.
You know.
William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, he wrote a one of his novels was called Virtual Light. It took place in two thousand and six, which was you know, the future at the time that the book came out, and he wanted to highlight like class disparity. So he so a lot of his novel takes place in convenience stores, and it's kind of like I was like, wow, I'm living a.
William Gibson novel.
It was between the bitcoin machines and the weird like weapons that they're selling behind the counter, and the like designer drugs, and just the fact that broke people go there to buy food because they live in food deserts. You know, it's all very I mean, it really is a part of the you know, a part of the failed state project.
Right, and these things thrive based on their surroundings. Convenience stores in reality, you know, the business of it thrives on their surroundings. What do I mean by this? You ever notice that there's a ton of them in poor areas because, like you said, there's food deserts to start with, right, So, all of a sudden, a convenience store tries to be everything to an area because a lot of their customers
are going to walk there on foot. They don't have cars, even in places where it's almost impossible to live without a car, so they're not going to the grocery store that could be you know, twenty thirty forty fifty, one hundred miles away, even you know, a decent grocery store, So they try to be a grocery store. But on top of it, they'll also have toys, and around Christmas time they'll have more toys, and they try to do everything for the holidays, and all of this stuff kind
of comes together. In areas where again they're trying to be a grocery store, they are a gambling outlet now because the people that live there are not going to travel, you know, many many miles to go to a casino which might be nearby regionally, depending on if they have a Native American tribe nearby or you know, maybe Vegas,
or if they're in Jersey, Atlantic City. The people that can afford to go to Atlantic City but still have the gambling bug might be sitting at a convenience store in a car somewhere scratching off tickets for six seven hours a day.
Okay, oh yeah.
We have the skill games in Pennsylvania, which are like they're basically like slot machines, video slots, except there's some weird so you know, gambling is regulated, but game playing is not regulated, So they like have these like basically video slot machines with this like Byzantine rules where there's a way that you can win it that's not by random chance, so it's technically not gambling. So it's obviously like nobody's playing it as a skill game. They're they're
they're gambling. But it's gone to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court so many times, and the Supreme Court doesn't even want to deal with this for whatever reason. I don't know who's getting paid off. So now there's like basically video slots in like all the gas stations and inconvenience stores and even like my supermarket down the street. There used to be a pharmacy there's no pharmacy there anymore, but you can go in and play play these skill games.
And now you can go in there and blow your whole paycheck on a Friday night right now.
In the Northeast, this is kind of odd because it's highly regulated there, even more so than in a place where I sit. Now. See if I go down to the local Circle k Okay, which is just as abundant here as say a seven eleven would be in the Northeast, maybe on the level of a wah wah almost in
New Jersey but not quite. And in Pennsylvania, it's fascinating because you have a store that's just like a wah wah and it's a dear God, they make ice cream and stuff some farm, oh man, what is the name to that store, But it's just like a wah wah. And these are big, fancy convenience stores, and some of them don't carry lottery at all or games of chance
at all. But like down here a Circle k or many other types of convenience stores, there's literally like a video poker sitting there, right But you can't technically just go there and cash out and play cash for cash like you can at a video poker machine, saying Atlantic City. There's all these little workarounds in order so that they
have to get around the regulations. But it's less regulated in the South, So, believe it or not, video poker and video slots and things like that are more available in the South, in the southeastern region than they are in the northeastern region of the country. So it's kind of odd that Pennsylvania even has this. But anyway, that's fascinating. And on Friday nights, if you guys want to talk to people about the video games in the South, talk to be Pete, my co host, because he plays that
po poker religiously in North Carolina. But I see it down here all the time. You're in Georgia, but I don't play, And that's another subculture of people.
Anyway, people still and it's like I think, on a state level, it all depends on who's getting paid off or whose buddy is in office. Like, for instance, we have the super liberal, you know, skill game situation. But at the same time, for years, you couldn't buy a bottle of wine or a beer in a convenience store. You had to go to like a state owned liquor store, right for a bottle of wine. And then for a while they had I sear of got they had these
like robots. They were like these huge display cases full of wine. And you would go in and you would, you know, order your wine, and then a screen would come up and somebody in Harrisburg, the state capitol, would look at your driver's license through like a web cam and then you and so and then you have to like breathe into a breathalyzer and then and then if you're all clear, then it'll like the robot arm will
give you a bottle of wine. And it's like like somebody, somebody got paid for that machine.
Because guaranteed and you know. Again, the funny thing is your neighbor to the east, New Jersey, there is no alcohol sales. Like in most parts of the country. You can buy a beer at a convenience store in New Jersey, you can't. In some parts of New York you can,
and some you can't in New York. But the weird thing is that they so overregulated it regulated at one point in certain areas of New York, the near Ithaca uh near Cornell University, right, the guy ended up opening something he called the inconvenience store which only sold beer, because you couldn't sell the beer at the convenience store. And this and that, Like if you want beer or wine in New Jersey, you can't get it at a
grocery store. You can't get it at your you know, Sam's Club or your big box stores, none of that. You have to go to a liquor store to get beer in New Jersey, okay, or what they call a package store. But it's odd. See, the regulations are different in every place, and they've again had to come up with a workaround. See. The interesting thing about those games of chance again though, is just to go backwards in time. This problem of gambling machines and regulation and corruption and
all the weirdness that goes on. You know, that's been with us in this country a long time. A lot of people who don't know the whole history of Jim Garrison, you know, the prosecutor you know, ended up taking the clay Shaw trial. Right, you're aware of Jim Garrison. So one of his big controversies before the JFK case is
he took on people playing the pinball machines. There was a gambling pinball machine racket that went on in New Orleans where these machines were technically illegal if they were for money, but you could set them up and play without them being for money, so you could whatever. And there was this whole thing going on, and it went so far as the Mob was involved with this and skimming money off of the top of it, of course.
And Garrison took on the pinball machine people for a little bit, and that was some of his you know, history as a prosecutor before JFK, which is weird. So you're talking about a problem in the mid sixties with the machines that had already been corrupted and co opted by the mob, and then there was government corruption involved in it and all kinds of crap. He actually takes a judge to trial over it who was getting paid off to make sure the mob could keep operating with
pinball machines back then. So, you know, it's a weird thing that's been with us a long time. Anyway, I'm sorry I sidetracked there, but I thought you would find that interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it's such an amusing image of like, you know, going after to big pinball.
Right pinball ball. Yeah, something that you definitely would not see in the headlines today. But anyway, let's get back to your story, because there's a reason why this story's big to you, because you spent a couple of years now working in this underbelly. Again, a lot of gray area stuff, maybe even possibly black market stuff comes together in your local convenience stores. No matter where you are,
some variation of this exists. I guarantee anywhere in America where you sort of have civilization, you have a town, you have a city, especially if you have poor people around, I guarantee it even in rural America where you have a collection of people and there's sort of a centralized town and the corner store of the convenience store exists. This is an aspect of life going on around you, whether you know it or not. So anyway back to it.
You're in Pennsylvania and there's a weird thing going on with the games of chance, which, by the way, why the hell was the state lottery involved that? Or are they of what with the.
Games of chance or games of still yeah, well it's just a different thing.
You know.
The lottery you know, is the state monopoly, right, and they got their their thing going. It's I mean, it's all legal gray area, and I mean everything in the
convenience store world is legal gray area. I mean the I did learn, you know, just the vast majority of entrepreneurs in this country, small business owners in this country are immigrants, and which I find absolutely fascinating, you know, because I don't know, I don't know if people I don't know if it's like a different culture you move here from India or Pakistan or you know, I've met people from from Iraq and Iran, and well.
I was going to ask you if it was Middle Eastern immigrants, because again in certain areas of the country, but in the northeast, it is a lot of Middle Eastern slash Asian immigration. That that is, it's people from other countries, you know that you know, came here and they've got their cousins here, they've got their brothers here, They've got you know, a lot of that chain migration people were talking about years ago, a lot of that.
And these people come here and they'll buy a convenience store after working at one for a couple of years, you know, seven days a week, never stopping. They save up their money and maybe a couple of brothers get together or a couple of cousins get together and they buy their own stores and they start running these places. And what do they do. They carry on any kind of business they can that they can possibly do in public. Okay, yeah, you know, and it's weird. Yeah, but okay, so it's
Middle Eastern again. So it's like New Jersey because that's what it's.
Really cool, because it's like it's a network, you know of like you know, some guys will buy a business and then they have now a base of operation is when they have relatives or not even relatives. Just people want to move to the United States, they'll help them get a job and find a place to live. I've heard some amazing conversations where you know, this guy's fresh to the country and he's like talking to a shop owner, and the shop owners.
Like, do you have a place to live?
He's like, I can put you up in one of my apartments. You're going to need a car, you know, I have a car you can use.
Yeah. They either own or control apartments for people to live in. And they might have five guys and you know when you see like ten guys living in an apartment. No joke. This isn't me being racist or anything you see like ten guys living in an apartment. Sometimes it's because they all work for the same store, or they all work for the same chain of stores where you know there's a couple of again brothers or cousins who
might own them, and who do they work with. Well, it just so happens they know somebody else that came from India or wherever they came from, who has the tobacco distributorship. So they do all their business with them, and they get the.
Workers, you know, and it's like, I want to be clear, this isn't like and I know you're the same way.
This isn't like immigrant bashing.
This is like, this is what it takes to to move.
Up in the world like Americans.
Yeah, right, go ahead, I mean because even in the case.
Where crack of that, because I mean, this is what our relatives did when they moved here from Italy or Ireland, like however many years ago, well they.
Came here, they grabbed a hold of whatever kind of thing. Honestly, the run of the mill American wasn't doing. Because even when I would go to these big meetings where they would bring together, you know, representatives from all of the you know, Central Jersey gas stations together, or we would bring all the representatives together of just the exxons in Central Jersey. I mean, I was like weird being there. It was almost like guys were looking at me strange,
like what's the white guy doing here? Because nobody else was basically born in America or sounded like or they all had accents, they all spoke other languages, you know, like Hindi or you know, stuff like this, or they might have spoken Arabic to each other. And I'm like the white guy and they're like, who do you work for? You know, and I'm like, eh, well, I'm actually a boss.
I run stores that really you're a manager. They're surprised, or they used to be surprised that I was even like supposed to be there, because this is again one of those things that you know, your average run of the mill American is not out there trying to buy a gas station or a convenience store that is all relegated to and people complain about it or make jokes
about it. You know, they talk about, well, of course it's owned by an Indian guy and blah blah blah whatever, and they used to make jokes about the seven eleven's, but everything from your chain store to like I said, something that might be called Jimmy's Groceries in your neighborhood. Guess what it's not. You know Joe Smith, whose family's been here forever, that buys those business, runs those businesses,
or works in those businesses. So what do you expect it's And again, I'm not trying to make over I'm not trying to make a big grand stereotypes up here. This is just the reality of the situation. But anyway, I'll shut up and let you go on with this story. Finally, but all this context needs to be laid out. Joe, don't you think? Sure?
Yeah, I mean it's yeah, it's quite fascinating. I yeah, you know, I think it's funny because like the further into the city, into the like you know, urban neighborhoods,
you get like the crazier these stores get. Like they go from being like just looking like a seven eleven to like being oddly shaped and everything's beat together with plywood, and then like then they like start selling like saw I swear to god, I saw this guy, Like this guy was selling it was like a plastic club and like on one end was pepper spray and the other.
End was like a taser. You know, it was just like it was like, you know, it's like you invented that.
And uh, you know clothing like stuff for magical like occult practices like candles and incense and like oh weird, weird, uh, like perfumes and you know with name that say like Michelle Obama or get a Man or it's just like oh yeah.
And there's like and there's traveling what I used to call the junk salesman guys who literally have like an area and they just sort of show up and they have like just car loads or truckloads, depending on who they are, of all kinds of odds and ends. Like you know, they might have big lighters. Now you can order that from your grocery distributor, but your junk guy might have them cheaper or or what we call the cheap lighters, right, you know, those really crappy sea through
plastic ones. And he might have anything from lighters to the latest over the counter sexual enhancement pill, you know, the horny goat weed. And then and then he'll have stuff like you're talking about, like this club, right, and then he has stuff for different seasons too. He might come in and swap out his seasonal stuff with you. Right, Oh, we got this for Valentine's Day. Oh, Mother's Day's coming up, we got this. Oh, you know, Halloween's coming up. We
got Halloween stuff for you. All of those weird little odds and ends and little gadgets that you just see to just seem to pop up at your convenience store. There's usually a guy running around just selling this stuff. And you know, I used to know how they got a hold of it all. But nowadays, you know, with the Internet and everything, I'm assuming a lot of those guys went out of business because now people could order
stuff online. You can just order the stuff from China instead of buying it from a guy you know anyway, But yeah, continue on this club with the pepper spray and the taser, which I totally believe, and the only reason why it's legal to sell it in that store is because nobody's figured out how to regulate it yet, right right, you know, And of course there's always the classic like.
Glass pipe with the paper rows in it for smoking crack.
Oh yeah, technically it's a decorative rose, but everybody knows that what it is is a crack pipe. Yeah, of course.
That's like the one thing where I'm like, you know what this is for? Why are you selling this like anything else? I'm like, you know, if you want to do bath salts, if you want to, like.
It's got another purpose. Like you look at it and you go, well, look, somebody could actually be using the bath salts as I don't know bath salts, you know, But but this thing is clearly I mean, yeah, it's got the little rose in the glass pipe. But you
know who's you know. I used to laugh, by the way, older lady used to come into one of the places that I worked, which was surrounded mostly by retirement villages, and she lived in one of those retirement villages and was like sixty years old, which is kind of amazing. But the sixty year old lady would come in and get handfuls of these and look at me and go,
I like to decorate with these. Like she would always make it a point to tell me that she was doing craps with these crack pipes, you know, And I'm going, okay, man, whatever you say, no problem, I'm guessing. Just coincidentally, you also need five lighters you know, Oh yeah, I do. In fact, you know, I'm always losing my lighters. And I'm like, year sixty five or whatever, sixty eight years.
I guarantee you she's dead by now. But I mean, but back in like nineteen ninety nine, she's going, yeah, I lose my lighters a lot, so I need to buy, like you do you have six or seven of these cheap lighters. I only need the cheap lighters, you know. I'm like, uh huh. And then she got really excited when I actually got the cigar lighters, you know, the torches right right, which again technically it's a cigar lighter,
but you're buying a glass tube and a torch. And oh, by the way, do you happen to have a box of baking soda? You know, because oh, you're really doing some home crafts. I got you. Yeah, yeah, I love that. By the way, But in some places they've tried to ban those by the way, those little roses. But they're having a hard time because technically speaking, what is it. It's not something that says it's even a pipe or anything else. It's just happens to be a glass tube
that you get a little crappy. You know, rose in and technically speaking it's a rose and glass. It's a nice little present, you know.
Yeah, I mean you can't. There's only so many things that you can ban, you know, before it just gets you know, people are gonna find it some way to do drugs no matter what.
Yeah. Plus they're busy trying to figure out how bad the stimulant level is in these different you know, supplements you sell. You know, I have vitamins to sell, So every one of these stores has a vitamin rack.
Yeah.
Well, in Pennsylvania we have medical marijuana, so you gotta so if you want to do that, you have to like get a two hundred dollars card. So everybody does the the.
Delta nine like.
THC, which is like THC extracted from hemp, but that's somehow legal. But you know, they come to from like weird factories in China, so nobody really knows what you're getting.
You know.
It's just it's it's closed, apocalyptic, and you know it's crazy to be in one of these places and see somebody come in at like eight am with like a pile of cash and go straight to the skill game. You know, it's like plugging money in. Or one time, the lottery machine was broken in a gas station and I get there and this guy's like pacing around and he's like, are you here to fix the machine. I'm like yeah.
He's like, thank god.
Yeah.
So so he.
Fixed in the machine and he's like, oh yeah. He's like, I won seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars from one of these machines. And I'm like, why the heck are you at a gas station on a Sunday morning, Jones and for your lottery ticket if you have three quarters of a million dollars.
Because he's spent that already back on the machine. See. That's the funny thing too, is because all over the place again, in these convenience stores, most of them that have a steady lottery clientele, we used to be able to you could just barely sign back onto your machine at like six am. In New Jersey you were allowed to sign back on from midnight to six am. They would shut your machines off. Everybody's machines are off, so you couldn't cash lottery tickets or print new ones or whatever,
uh for six hours. And every single day of the week, I would have people waiting, uh, you know, for six oh one, okay, outside of my store, pacing around, some of them smoking, some of them holding you know, big stacks of lottery tickets that they, you know, had been scratching off the night before, but because after midnight they
couldn't cash anything, they still have them. And it'd be like, you know, a pile of thirty things, all of them with two dollars winners right right that they're waiting for me to cash, even though I'm trying to get people off to work and out of my gas station as fast as possible at six am, because some people are commuting in Jersey, you know, to go somewhere else. This guy's gotta hand me a pile of tickets. I need
to stumpcash now. And God help me. If I tried to sign back on and like I'm sorry, the lottery's down, boy, people would get bent out of shape. Uh, And they would. And they knew where all the other lottery agents were
in the area. And I'm gonna go down to this place and I'm gonna go over to hear and you know what, maybe over at the shop right dating their machines up, maybe it'll work there, And like You should see the panic that would happen when I would tell them, no, I'm being told that our entire area is down for some reason. Uh so you're not going to find like a working machine in the county until around seven or
eight o'clock. They would freak out. But anyway, so yeah, this guy's thank god you're here to fix the machine. Go ahead, what happens next?
Oh, that's a good one.
Or like, uh, I was in inside the machine, so the machine was resetting, and it's a piece of hardware way in the back of the bottom because of course it is, so I had to turn the machine off, pull a bunch of shit out, stuff out, excuse me to to.
Get to it.
So like, picture me on the floor of a gas station with my hands inside this machine with components all over me. Nothing's lit up, nothing's on. The woman comes over to me and goes, is the machine working? And it's like, yeah, it's constant, like like they.
Like, it's working, just mine. I mean, don't you normally know that I've got eight components hanging out and there's a guy hanging out of the hood of this thing, which, by the way, they put no lights inside of or anything. I mean, you know, under a car hood an occasion when you lift up the hood there's a light underneath so you can see. But hell no, not in a lottery machine. And yeah, I pulled out the printer itself and it's sitting on the counter outside of the machine.
That's normal. Of course it's working. Are you I mean, like, really you're asking me, is it working?
Uh? Okay, woman, I'm thinking about I just started laughing because it was the most absurd thing, and she looked like so hurt like that I was making fun of her, and I was like, it's like, come on, man, you.
Know, but it's I think you.
I think when people it's like when people are in stores or people are behind the wheel, they're hiptized and it's like you throw just a little like wrench into their thing and they don't know what, like what to do, you know.
So it's like, well, you didn't.
Understand her whole life revolves around what comes out of that machine. Joe.
I mean probably every day for the last three years, she's gotten out of the car without thinking, walked into the store, walked right to the machine and started pressing buttons.
Right.
So, the fact that you're on the floor and nothing's lit up isn't going to stop her from doing that, And it's you know, it's like a real I mean, that's just kind of like the hypnotism of the American populace. It's like, ye until I like started laughing, it like didn't break that hypnotic spell she was in.
Right, I mean even weirder is see there she can press her own buttons. And in some places, by the way, they have these, uh, dispenser machines, like a it's like a soda machine, but instead of SODA's being up on the you know, pictures on the front cover or whatever. You have a lottery ticket and you punch your tickets. You can put your own cash in the machine and get your own lottery tickets out and all that kind of stuff for scratch offs, right, and scratch offs is
one part of it. But then there's also people that have to play their pick threes and pick fours. I used to stand behind that lottery machine sometimes and people would run in and start barking numbers at me because they're trying to remember some number that they've seen all day that now is going to come out because if
they don't play it and a whole thing. But before they get to telling me that story, they go, I need eight seven, three straight in box and give me all the pairs and and they're like eight numbers in barking them at me to punch them into the machine. And I say to them, look, the machine's not working right now. They didn't hear that. They keep going, I got to say it three four times before it even registers because they're on automatic pilot, coming at me to
come and play their lottery. So yeah, but this is the wildest thing. I don't know if they're hypnotized or what to call that, but they are so they're so wrapped up in they have to get their number, they have to play the machine. Uh it's it's that same thing that you can see in a casino, except one thing. You can't live like right next to the casino usually, and if you do, you're in trouble because areas right next to the casino not pleasant neighborhoods to live in.
But you know, and that would be a weird thing to watch, is to see if lottery goes well like in that neighborhood just adjacent to Atlantic City, Like I wonder what those lottery players are like, I never had to deal with them.
Yeah, it's well we have.
You know, we had a machines in the casino here in Pittsburgh and it was like I was surprised, but I would think that, you know, you got real gambling, why would you want to play lottery? But yeah, yes, people, you know, it was always busy.
So right, oh man.
Man, anyway, I keep interrupting your stories. I'm sorry. You know what it is, though, is that there are a million of these stories that you could tell. So you're immersed in this and you get to start going around though, and you started telling us that you're you're in rural areas, and like I said, I bet a lot of people, you know, think, oh, well, there's all kinds of white,
trashy weird things that go on there. But really, the convenience store it varies a little bit, but it's not that big of a variation in a wide spectrum of communities. You know, as long as there is a significantly poor population nearby, the convenience store will thrive because again it becomes a store that like it covers everything, Like you can go in there and yeah, you're buying your novelty goods. You need to buy your lighters and things like that.
Whether you're smoking crack or you're smoking Marlboros, doesn't matter. They got you covered. Sometimes they have you know, weird other things going on. Plus if it's a gas station, they also have stuff for your car, things that go into your car. I mean, it is a crazy wide variety of items that end up in this place and therefore end up attracting a wide variety of people. But to some people, your whole store, even with all that
work and all that craziness that you put in. You know, whether you're an immigrant or you're whoever, it doesn't matter. You built up this store to serve all these different people. To some people, you're nothing more than another lottery outlet, and like you're their lottery outlet because one time they came in in one one thousand dollars. Oh yeah, And therefore you now have a customer for at least a few months who's going to come in there consistently trying
to recapture that win and expand on it. Right. So yeah, and meanwhile you get thrown into this world. You know, tell me about what your your first day was like, how about that, like what was your first adventure where you he got totally immersed in this world? Like what went on?
Well, you know it was it was funny because they they trained the training, they didn't really train me, Like they just had me like hang out with a different you know, with another guy and go watch him work for like a month and then they and then at that point you're just like, I am so bored watching this guy work.
Just throw me into it. I don't care if I.
Mess up, I don't care how hard it is.
Just follow this guy around. He'll show you how to replace the printers or get him working, or what the reset codes are. He's going to show you everything. Just follow him around while he does his job and you'll figure it out. Okay.
And kind of the thing was they when they threw me into it, it was like right at the end of this transition where they're like transitioning out the old like mechanical like pot machine style lottery machines where you like hit a plastic switch for like they're switching.
Them out for these big windows computers.
Oh god.
Yeah, And it was like.
The mechanical machines, the old machines, you would go if you had like a light bulb about in one of those. You would go and look at the service sheet. Nobody had even opened it for like three years, because they're like tanks, they just work, you know, right, there hadn't been a service call.
But then these windows machines break down.
Every three or four days and then and it's just I mean, imagine troubleshooting a Windows machine in the middle of like a gas station in the middle of the winter.
Yeah, And because somebody got the lowest bidding contrary. See, this is what happens. They put out a bid for these lottery things when they're going to change stuff over, and it's like the lowest you know, bidder who can reliably give us a system. This This is why I bring up g Tech And I don't know if I mentioned them yet in this discussion, but Geech is one of the ones that came up with those clunky ass big button machines that look like they're from the seventies.
Oh yeah, theah G Tech ITVM I believe that's called.
Yeah, And they have a variation on that in different states because they won contracts all over the place because they were the lowest bidder that said we can do this. We can build you a whole system that will work together. And some of those things, even to this day are still working on phone lines. Of all things, landlines. Believe it or not, you used to have to have a dedicated landline for your lottery machine. Okay, I think some of them today might be on satellite dishes or whatever.
But it's so backwards ass technology that even when I was running it in the nineties, we were looking at it going this stuff is like nineteen seventies cutting edge.
I know. It was like when you see like Doctor Strangelove and they have these like big telephone exchanges with like huge like switches and light bulbs and players and stuff.
It's like it's so funny.
But I mean, but I absolutely loved it because the people that work in these places are so nutty, and it's like, you know, there's it's it's either like people from other countries who are just trying to like, you know, work hard and provide for their family, or it's these screwball Americans who just want to talk about Trump and the transgender agenda and groomers and you.
Know, all these things, and you're talking about the people that work there, right.
Yeah, oh yeah.
The people who work there, I've got I've had heard some crazy chewing on stuff.
Well, you know, you know why it attracts those people though, because again, you know, a whole lot of immigrants shore and who are they going to hire again, they're immigrant friends and people who know they're immigrant friends, that's for sure. But when you see Americans end up in these convenience stores, again, not the big chains like a seven to eleven or something like that, but you know, the independent ones, these are guys that are already on the fringe of society
to begin with. I mean, I can't tell you how many times, like you know, I was faced with how many felons do I have here? That you know, they're not allowed to operate a lottery machine in the state of New Jersey if they got a felony conviction that you know, blah blah blah. But but again, you know, they got criminal records, they got problems of all sorts where they can't get jobs in you know, any place normal, and they want to come over and beg to have
a job because they can't work anywhere else. And they'll come over and do a twelve hour shift or a sixteen hour shift at a convenience store because they can't get work anywhere else.
So, you know, remember when Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin Vladimir Putin. I was in a store like Winkles pit Stop or something in the middle of you know, Greensburg, Washington County, and this woman who was behind the counter had to get cat to lock up and get home because she was sure that the deep State was going to like shut off all the power and shut off the internet so that we couldn't watch the Tucker Carlson interview. So
she wanted to get the store secured. Like, oh my gosh, are you kidding me?
She's like, what's gonna happen?
They don't want blow to more Putin tell them the truth, Like, yeah, somebody's telling the.
Oh you should have seen what happened in the subculture of the day nine to eleven went down because that was bizarre. I mean I had to stop you know, Jersey style rednecks from like wanting to attack my Pakistani gas pumper.
Oh yeah, I bet.
I mean literally I had to physically get in the middle of altercations because they wanted you know, blood on that day because it was like those people attacked, those those Arabs, and I'm like, they're not even Arabs, they're Pakistani's. They're dude, they're they're Indians. I mean they're not you know, calm down, this is not al Qaeda pumping your gas.
You know, Americans don't know the difference.
No, you know, it was wild, man, it was I'm serious, it was wild. I mean even the local call in station in New Jersey is one on one point five. You might have heard of it. It's like all over the state. It's the most popular call in and talk New Jersey issues. For like eighteen hours a day. That's all they do is take phone calls. I literally heard on that station people talking about the Arabs working at my gas station. You know what about them? We should
be suspicious. I mean it was wild. But again, the fringe, you know, white people that you end up with, or you know, or black people whatever, the the homeborn Americans that end up working at these places. First of all, they're not you know, the cream of the crop out there in the job market to begin with. But in addition to that, working in a place like this will make you more crazy, I gotta tell you, because of
the characters you deal with. But okay, so Vladimir Putin is going to get shut down by the deep state, so I got to shut down the store and get home. H That's probably not even close to the weirdest thing that you heard there, but yeah, go ahead, oh.
Yeah, no, that was a really good one.
And you know, fights people trying to start fights with me.
Because the lottery.
Took or like you know, because you know, because the lottery machine's not working or something.
It's story yony, don't you know how to do your job? How come it's not fixed? Is it only take five minutes to fix this? It's just a computer, you know.
But the weirdest thing was, like the most remarkable thing for me about the job was I was I was in my van driving around probably six hours a day. So it was like I wasn't even doing that much lottery. It was more just like a view, like an up close view of like rural Pennsylvania at the you know,
in the end times. And it was you know, passing all the like churches with crazy signs with like you know about how Joe Biden's the anti Christ and stuff, and you know, and you know, of course I like I took my little break from journalism, but you know, I never stopped being a journalist. So I talked to everybody I could and took pictures and took notes.
And that's what this book is all about.
Really. It's like, not about the lottery business, because I don't know how interesting I can make it.
But it's just about living.
In this particular time in the United States history, which, right, it's kind of scary, but I I you know, I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I can't think of anything more interesting than watching the decline of civilization.
Well, again, you got exposed to a very gray area, and I want you to tell people about you know, how this project is going to be viewable by people and want to go and subscribe and all that, because you're not going to just put out a standard book. How is this being put out and how are you going to tell the story before we get back into uh huh, this fringe of society, please tell us about that.
Well it is.
The book is called Convenience Stories, and I'm releasing it on substats, so three times, three times a month, you'll get a chapter in your email, so roughly once a week, and you know, if you sign up Lenny Flatley dot substack dot com, you'll get you know, free updates with all my work. I'm working on a couple books and
doing some journalism now. But you'll also, you know, for seven dollars a month, you can read my novel and if you kick in seventy five dollars or more, you'll receive a print copy when it comes out next year. So that's my that's the model, and the reason I'm doing it like that is just because I love going straight to the people. I love self publishing. I have, you know, I have my cult book, which Ferrell House
put out. I have a book I have, like a biography of Timothy Leary coming out next year on Inner Traditions. And I have another kind of like investigative project on a cult that a major publisher is putting out that I can't really talk about right now because it's investigative. But but so I've doing a lot of weird stuff, a lot of a lot of a lot of the stuff that we used to talk about on the show
all the time when I was a guest. And if you go to Lenny Flatley dot substack dot com you can see it all.
Right, that link will be in the show notes and right now, if you go there right and you just you know, land on the page, you'll see introducing convenience Stories, and you know, and and some of your passwork too, is right there as soon as it pops right up. The deadly subculture of Internet video vigilantes. Another article that's there. Alex Jones has and quote actual cult end quote. You know,
and I love this. There's a lot of a lot of wild things that you've written about, a lot of the very out of the way sort of things, the quirky stuff that is in the gray areas and the the much ignored and invisible parts of America. You know, Failed State Update is one of those things. I think was a perfect phrase, and I think it was a great thing that series you were doing, and you were
doing that with JG. Michael for a while. I don't know what happened there with that partnership or whatever, but anyway, you're back to well what it was that you really did in the first place, which is again this odd journalism, except now you have a collection that's going to go into convenience stories, and again it's based on a whole lot of the stuff that you and I have just bounced back and forth. None of this has planned out
as per usual, no script. But I mean, I'm just banging back and forth with you here because, believe it or not, I hardly have anybody in the world that I could even talk to about this anymore.
Because we're veterans. Yeah, we've been through the wars. Well it's convenience wars.
Yeah. And again it is a series of subcultures and something that goes on again in invisible America because, like I said, from homeless people onto these you know, weird little groups that get together and like little clubs that are out there and uh and so on and so forth where people do converge, convene and associate with one another, uh for one reason or another. There's the criminal world.
There's the gray area, there's the black market, various gray markets. Uh. You know, like I've talked about on here, the the subculture of like say, the flea market is yet another one of these subcultures that is going on all around you. You the listener, that's going on all around you all over the country that again is never focused on, is never meant to be really examined by anybody outside of it.
It's just sort of there and humming under the surface, and most people go, well, I stop into my local gas station. One of my chatters commented, Oh, I love a truck stop. Did you have any truck stops along the way with the because truck stops have lottery a lot of times?
Oh yeah, I mean yeah, any place with lottery.
I yeah. My favorite though, was my absolute favorite, was going to this one rest stop on the on the Parkway, so the highway heading east towards you out of Pittsburgh, because you know, you get to like you get on the highway, then you get off and you know you got you fix the lottery machine.
You know, it's real quick. Then there's a star.
Box, Anti Ms, Pretzels, you can talk to some truck drivers. That's another business. That's a lot of Indian truck drivers in the in the East Coast and the northeast. Now really yeah, yeah, you go to you'll go to uh rest stops. I didn't see any last time I was in New Jersey, but like up towards like like Connecticut and uh, Rhode Island, and you'll see like really good Indian restaurants like in these truck stops because of all the Indian people, you know, and.
Let's yeah, let's let's differentiate though a little bit, because there's a difference between a rest stop and a truck stop, right right, yeah, but do you mean it's at a truck stop or a rest stop because the okay, because that's the place with the anti ms, yeah and all that.
Then and then the truck stop, you know, the pilot station where you could take a shower, right.
Right, that's a different thing. And there's a huge area somewhere where a lot of trucks are just parked because people are resting, you know, yeah, stuff like that's a truck stop. But rest stops your regular run of the mill rest stop. We have a parkway in New Jersey too, but it runs excuse me, you know, north to south. Excuse me, like that again, it runs north to south in Jersey. And we also have the Turnpike, which is
Jersey's part of I ninety five. But there's also a Pennsylvania Turnpike too, right.
Oh yeah, don't get me started on the New Jersey Turnpike because I was just there in the easy past. Didn't work, Oh god, I got so going in and going out. I got fifty dollars fines, So thank you New Jersey Turnpike.
Yeah, well they will find you and send you a picture of Oh yeah their bs fine too.
Yeah that was.
Oh I can't wait to tell you that story I was in. I went to like a cult, a meeting of a cult, like a recruitment meeting where they like tried to hypnotize me for three days straight in New Jersey. Yeah, it was. It was like it was like in a It was in a like a hotel on the at the the Newark airport on like a service road, and there was like nowhere to go to eat.
Oh wow, you know, okay, like.
If you wanted to eat, you had to like sneak out and like you know, drive into Newark to like find a white castle or a wah wah you know.
And like I was going to get I was going to guess Cherry Hill area, but no, you you were you were up by Newark. Okay, that's okay. So you had to go all the way across the state, which doesn't take long because Jersey's a skinny state to go to Newark and uh wow, and so you're at this this cult gathering for three days while they're trying to like, you know, mind control you.
Uh, well, what's crazy is they're mind controlling everybody. But since I know what's going on, I'm just sitting there like, are you guys serious?
It was like one of these like.
Self improvement cults, so everybody goes there with problems.
Oh I wish I can't wait to tell you the story. It's so good.
But like these people are like they have all these problems and they're there for like the guy, the guy that's running the thing, to solve the problems.
Right, And this time discount Tony Robin shows up and.
Yeah, oh dude, dude, you nailed it. And and I'm like, so, first of all, I'm like, I have there's no way even if I had like a big problem, I'm going to them for it. So I had to like think of a like a fake problem, you know, and lying in that sort of situation is not easy, and like are lying doesn't come naturally to me? But with this, it was like I had to like it would be like acting, but I couldn't skip my story straight. And then eventually I was like, you know what, guys, I'm cured.
It's like you did it.
I'm cured.
You can stop asking me because you know what, I'm fine. My relationship with my parents is fine, my relationship with my kids is fine.
I'm doing good at work. Just don't waste your time.
Just just in the past ten minutes, I see a deposit my bank account. My my financial woes are over. I gotta go. Yeah, And they they didn't want to keep you and say, oh, look, you need to stay here and give testimonials to tell people how we helped you. They didn't do that to you.
Well, it was funny because they knew, they knew right away that I was a troublemaker, so so they let me hang out, but they you know, purposefully did not call on me.
Okay, you know it was it.
Was weird, like and but what was crazy about it was it was such an intense experience being around these other people going through these emotional problems and that like I found like the other two people who were like cynical and didn't believe in that this worked right, and they were like and they but they paid money to go to this thing, so they stuck it out. So it was like we had this like terrific bond of like being like the three weirdos who you know, weren't
being sucked in by the fault, but it was. That was an interesting story. So I'm that's kind of that's what happened with convenience or with a felt state. That's what happened with JG. There was no like falling out with JG. It was literally like when I realized I couldn't I wasn't making enough money to hack it as a journalist, and like all my sources started drying up, and like I had a couple like movie projects that I was working on, and it just that kind of
like fizzled out. And it was just like I was so I guess I was depressed in hindsight, like I'm not like a naturally depressed person, but like I was just so deflated that I was like, I'm gonna I didn't tell anybody. I just stopped updating my website, stopped doing podcasts, stop calling JG. And you know he never called me. Stop calling you you guys would like my podcast buddies. I just kind of, you know, every once in a while JP so till he would email me and be like how you doing.
It's like, oh, that's nice, No J.
You know what JP is exactly that guy who does actually care about you. You know, in the real world, you could have brought this up, but the mind control fixed my problems. Seminar.
I know, but they yeah, I could have.
I'm depressed, I'm a podcaster. I wasn't quite making it with what I was doing, and things fizzled out. Helped me. You should have brought that up. It would have been real.
It's funny because that's what I tried to do. I was like, really, I was like, I don't have I was like, I don't have any problems, but I can like put myself in the headspace of like two years ago, and I could be that guy. But it was so much work, like just trying to like fool them.
You know.
It was the same with the Gabriel of your Rancha cult.
I would let your mind control me, but it's too much work.
Yeah, I was like, oh it just hurts. I mean I've been mind controlled. I had past life for regression last week. Oh boy, it was it was like it was funny because I don't believe in that stuff obviously, but because you know, I'm like the arch skeptic. But the process still works. It's still like a hypnotic process. So whether or not you believe that you're experiencing a past life or or it's just a fantasy, you're still having that experience.
Yeah, you're having.
An experience that's a projection of something from deep inside of you. Because you're obviously inventing this for a reason, even if you're just inventing it, which, by the way, one of my chatters says me, you know you're not having this problem right now. You've actually gone back to work and you're doing your thing again. But you know, there was a time where you were deflated. But they basically said, you need a show again. You should do it on here with with me, like I should pardon
the wienie dogs. You should do it on here with me because it would make some of my lefty friends happy to have you on the network. I think is the inference here, Uh yeah, because because you know you're you're one of my my leftist friends. Obviously you're you're one of those communists I happen to associate with, which is a weird divide that's gone on. You know, everybody's a communist if they're not a trumper. So you know it is what it is, but no offense.
Dude.
By the way, I'm giving the guy your comment so he thinks you should do a show. I would produce a show for you, by the way, if you wanted, I mean, we could do a radio show, even briefly, if you wanted to do like a regular weekly or something. I'd be more than happy to produce the Joseph L. Flatley Show. And I'd keep the wienie dogs out of it, you know.
So you know, I've been thinking about it, but I don't know if I really enjoy like I love talking to you or talking to whomever in an interview type scenario. But I don't know if I like the idea of doing a podcast, or if I doing a radio show, or if I just or if I genuinely would enjoy it. Like it's like, you know, it's like I toy with the idea of starting a band just because it sounds like fun, but I don't think I would actually like to do it. I think I would be like, it's just too much work.
I want to go home, and.
I mean writing books, like I kind of came to the conclusion that all I want to do is write books like everything else exists like in order to.
Make books happen. I actually believe it or not.
That's what I was thinking about this when he brought it up. I said to myself, you know, if you did like an hour, like a singular one hour per week show, you know, you could make a big part of it being Hey, here's the update on my stuff in a podcast form. You know you can go and here's the latest convenience story. Oh, by the way, why don't you go back and download you know, some of my old and hey, I got other books available that
I've written before. Plus here's what I'm working on. You could literally do that once a week along with the other material that you just feel like venting on if you felt like you don't necessarily have to do it with me either, but but I'd be happy to just have you plug into Skype, show up, and I'll take care of the rest, you know, as far as production. But you know, if that's what you wanted to do, that would be great. But otherwise, you know, hey, no need.
But I'm just thinking it could be something that would be a vehicle exactly for that to be a mechanism to help, you know, promote and push and keep you kind of making new contacts or whatever. I mean, you could take phone calls if you wanted to, you know, up to you. Just something I'm throwing at you.
Yeah. I've been thinking about that specifically because like the one thing that kept me sane driving the lottery of van around was I discovered like these people that would like upload old episodes of the Stern Show, like on the YouTube, and he was such a such a master
like of like broadcasting in the nineties or whatever. But like, and the reason I like those shows is because the callers and like the weird community around it, Like I would love to you know, I was thinking about doing something like that, like like imagine like the leftist conspiracy Stern, you know.
Try and build a whack pack around that. Yeah.
Yeah, oh man, because it's like there's something oddly even though like you know, Stern is the one of the tenth richest people in the world and hobknobs with really boring celebrities. Now he still has that like weird community of like Marianne from Brooklyn or whatever, right, people who have been calling him for twenty years. And that's what I love, is like that sort of interaction. But that sounds like another job to me. And I don't think. I don't think I'm.
I have it in me.
I start a buddy of mine and I started a business.
That's the other project.
This is why I was able to leave the lottery biz is. A friend of mine started a media company here in Pittsburgh and it's called Amphibian and we're producing. Uh, we're like like pitching stories and producing podcasts for podcast networks and writing books.
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Well, no, no, I'm.
All shot the tar rots the lot at the drut show.
I'm bringing all shot lock and tear rot the lot at the drafts shows. So for the second and final segment of this Thursday Night O Shelley Effect, I'm sitting here with Joseph L. Flatley as a brand new series on substack that he'd love it if you would subscribe to. And I am gonna find interesting all the way because of my own past life experience, but you might find interesting because it'll give you a glimpse into a part
of invisible America. That invisible American story might be told by a guy going around and fixing lottery machines at your local convenience store, or at a convenience store in a community that maybe you think is a million miles away, But I got to tell you, I guarantee you it's only just a few blocks from wherever you are. If you're near civilization, the convenience store world and the characters that are attracted to the lottery machines that Joe had
to go fix, et cetera, et cetera. And again, even though it was in Pennsylvania, I assure you there are stories just like it near you. Yeah, so that's at Let's see, let's make sure I have the web address correct. What is that address again? I know I put it in the chat room already. Oh here it is Lenny Flatley. Okay, Lenny spelled l e n n y Flatley f l A t l e y Lenny Flatley all one word dot substack dot com. And yes, indeed you can also
see failed state update stuff there previous articles. But beginning now convenience stories, and this will be a novel that you'll be able to get a chapter of three times a month, he said, And you know, approximately once a week. I guess it won't be exactly on a particular day or anything like that, but around three times a month you get an installment if you subscribe for what is it, seven dollars a month?
You said, yeah, seven dollars a month, which you know substack, meaning I only see five of that.
But yeah, but and don't get me started, and.
Then you can get a physical book when it's completed if you put in seventy five bucks. Now does that mean that if I put in seventy five bucks over the course of a year, I'll get it. Or does that mean I got to make a seventy five dollars payment to get the book?
Well that's the big Yeah.
If you do the big payment all at once, it's kind of like a a you know, a thank you to giving me a big chunk of change, so they'll be at options. It's actually seven dollars a month or seventy five dollars a year. And then there's another item. It's called a founding member, which is any amount over seventy five, So you can put seventy six dollars in I'll give you like that comes with the gift of the free book. So substack makes it a little confusing, but hopefully that makes sense.
Okay, So let's get this straight. Seven dollars a month you can subscribe to it. If you want to put in seventy five bucks for the year, you'll save some money because twelve months at seven dollars. Let's do the math. Eighty four bucks so you can save yourself nine bucks, or if you put in anything over seventy five bucks and become a founding member, like you said, seventy six dollars. Done. Deal, you get the added gift of getting a physical book
when they're printed. Any idea. Is there a target on when that's going to be printed?
Well, it looks like that with the publishing schedule I have, it'll be you know, January February of twenty twenty five.
But oh, you know, yeah, so not to not too you know, not too far off.
But you know me, I've always been really good to your listeners. If anybody wants a book there, if they want to, or if they want to get the thing but they don't have money, email me. And you know I'm not gonna I'm not going to keep somebody from reading my book just because they're broke.
Well, yeah, it works something out, but I mean, obviously you also got to eat too. So the thing is, if you chip in though, you end up with this book and I want a physical copy of this, I'll tell you because physical copies are way better than you know, than the digital, because digital can disappear on you. You lose your computer, you lose your account, you forget your password, and all of a sudden you don't have a book.
So I love the physical book. So I would advise people, if you can afford it, yeah, go there and just chip in even a dollar more. Or hey, if if you're generous and you have it, kick in what you can to Lenny Flatley and fund what he's doing.
Uh.
But either way, if you want to go for seven bucks a month, all these options are there, So seven seventy five for the year, or go over seventy five and you'll end up with a physical book as like an extra thank you. Okay, So all of that at Lenny Flatley dot substack dot com. The link will be in the show notes with the podcast, and it's also
in the live chatroom at Ochelli dot com. And I'll share it with friends and stuff too, So hopefully you'll get some sign ups out of this, and I hope that you guys listening to this will also support Joseph L. Flatley's work. I've always urged you to do so, and I've enjoyed it. It is the quirkiest stuff that there is from an intelligent guy who tells you stories that are unique. You're not going to get, you know, convenience stories all over the place. There's not one hundred of those. Okay,
it's not like a clone of somebody else's work. It's all original, all unique and very quirky and well written, because again it's written by Joseph L. Flatley. So with all that having been said, maybe you could give us, I don't know, just kind of a pearl to go away with here, anecdote from your time doing you know, doing this trek of two years.
You said it was yeah, two years, yeah, two years almost almost two years.
Two years among the subculture of the lottery people inconvenience storeland that you're telling inconvenience stories. Maybe you could just, I don't know, give us a good teaser or a roundabout or maybe something you left out of the book, just one little anecdote, and then I'll let you go for the night because I'm sure you got other things to do, So go ahead, tell.
Us something so funny, because I'm like paging through the manuscript because it's done, you know, I'm releasing it one chapter at a time. But I wrote it. I think I wrapped it up in February, and it's like, you know, it's not like a ton of anecdotes or you know, it's like it's really just like ruminations on like that Unseen America, a lot of like thinking back to my childhood and like, you know, kind of coming to grips of growing up in the old Rust Belt during the
Cold War. But I mean, probably my my favorite adventure in this whole thing was when like met some ghost hunters, ghosts people that go around to like you know, haunted locations and try to like film them with their THEO camera.
Okay, so not not not the guys with the TV show ghost Hunters, but like amateur ghost hunters like what well, like filming their adventures when year olds Okay, we're in.
Like a polygamous relationship or like.
A poly polyamorous okay, polyamorous Goths people of a young age or are they older?
Yeah? I think the oldest one was like thirty and the other ones were like twenty four.
Okay, so that generation of people goths sort of Now are they running around with retrocamquarders or are they using cell phones to take their.
They're using cell phones?
Okay, okay, so they're not fully dead catered to the retro gospel.
No, no, but it was. It was great because like so there was I might have told you this story like right when I like before before it took the lottery gig. I applied for like a newspaper job at this weird newspaper in this like abandoned oil ex oil town called Sistersville, West Virginia, and this like crazy guy owned like a hotel and he realized that there was no newspaper in the hotel or in the town, so he like launched a newspaper and he needed a reporter to move to West Virginia to work at.
The hotel part time and to write for this.
Time.
Sure, so.
So all right, so I applied.
Guy was a lunatic. It didn't work out, as you can imagine. And here I am a year and a half later, depressed because I'm working at a for the in the lottery game, and I hear these goths talking about this hotel and how they want to check it out because they're, you know, because they heard it was haunted.
Okay, there's a legend of spiritual activity going on at some hotel. Uh. And meanwhile, you're in the Pittsburgh area, and where did you say this hotel was West Virginia or yeah, this is West Virginia.
So it's like we're in western Pennsylvania. This is the part of Western Virginia that's like between like if you look at West Virginia, part of it sticks up and it's like in between Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Right, So it's like so.
It's pretty close, but there's no direct roads, so it's like an hour and a half drive anyways, Okay, and I heard them talk and I'm like, well, you know, I was just at that hotel.
So they're like, oh man, you got to.
Come with us, You got to come with us. Okay, So they're like showing showing all there, like like ghost catching equipment, and like like the big one was like something called like cat balls. They're like toys, they're like round toys. They're just little balls, but they have like an led light in it, and if the cat hits it, it like lights up.
And so they put it in a room where nobody is and there's no cats, and if it lights up, then obviously the ghost got it.
Yeah, the ghost got it.
Okay. That's almost as weird as did you ever see the thing that they were using something from one of the video game consoles that was like a motion capture and you put the motion capture thing in a room where nobody is and then the motion capture suddenly picks up, you know, figures of people and things in places where there are no people. And they were saying for a while, that's a ghost on the ghost on the emotion capture. You ever see that? No, but I do know it's a real thing.
Well, I believe, do you know if I'm talking to ghost hunters that.
They love like cheap like electronics and like cheap stuff because they think it works better when when you think about it, what's gonna malfunction something that you got from Temu for two dollars or something that you bought from like Apple. You know, it's like, you know, so it's kind of like a self reinforcing glitchy technology.
But but yeah, so so we went to Sistersville and.
You went with these guys.
Okay, and is.
This story laid out inconvenience stories about the Yeah.
Yeah, that's so people will read all about it, kind of.
Like the the off road trip of the of the trip during convenience stories as a trip through your your time as a repair man.
Well, yeah, I mean, this was a weird time in my life.
Just I mean, I'm not sure if much chuck, but I am sure that I'm supposed to be writing and when I'm not writing, I am so depressed and angry. And so what happened is I would work this utterly exhausting job where I was driving around these country roads like six hours a day plus working you know, you know these are like nine hour days, and then I would come home and write for five hours because I can't live with myself if I'm not writing.
So I don't think I slept for two years.
And then I got a book contract for a like basically a biography of Timothy Leary and nice that goes into everything from like his his history to how the cult influenced him and whether or not he was an FBI snitch.
Yeah, I was gonna ask whether or not he's an agent and all that. And oh, by the way, is the whole Acid thing actually just a part of MK ultra and all that?
Right?
Well, I didn't go much into the mk Ultra thing, but I might. I mean, so I just finished the first draft, so like, like that's on my list of like of editions. But so I got that contract. So what's the first thing I did was I wrote a book about working for the lottery. So I should have been working on the Leary book. But this Lottery book came out of me. And it's really just an expression of my frustration and you know, my love for just regular weird people and kind of you know, some of
my reflection on my childhood. It's probably parts of it are probably the closest to like a memoir or a autobiographical book I'll ever get because you know.
So I think people are really going to dig it.
And you know, it occurs to me that you're writing in essence should be like a Netflix series, like just like it should be like Joseph L. Flatley's you know, Strange People or something like that. That's what it should be,
like Joseph L. Flatley's whatever. You know, Like like make it like a PT Barnum kind of template thing where it's like I'm going to show you the odd people all around you, you know, and I'm going to show you the odd things that go on in the underbelly of this that and the other thing, the world of cults, the world of you know, the underground, the underbelly of this and that the lottery just you know, Joseph L. Flatley's underbelly call it maybe you know what I mean,
And it would just be a series about here's weird people from this segment of society. Here's the people from the different cults you know here, let me focus on this cult. Let me go and tell you about the guys who are like supporting legalizing weed and somehow are Nazis. Let me tell you about the Satanists who are over here, but they're loving Satanists, you know, I mean all that stuff like one step further with Joseph L. Flatley or something, you know what I mean.
Oh yeah, And I mean and it's funny because you know, you're like, you know, you describe it, or when I describe it, I'm like the weird people, and it's like there's no there's no other word you can use. But it's like I say it, and I think you say it with love.
It's like I.
Hate to break the news to you, Chuck, but you're one of the weird people.
Oh I know, And I'm one of the weird people.
So right, I mean, you're definitely a weird person. I have no problem with being out of the ordinary or strange. I've always been that way and I'm aware of it. And yeah, some people take offense set I'm not weird at all. This is very normal, and they'll tell you about how normal whatever it is they're doing is. But it's because if you're immersed in that world, you don't
realize that you're abnormal. Usually, you know, most people aren't, you know, they think way no on what That's no different than me being, you know, anything, a Republican you know, like well nowadays it isn't, but uh, it used to be. Uh, you couldn't be, you know, part of the normies. And also this but but anyway, you know, there is the unusual aspect here. This is not the majority, you know what I'm saying. So I got no problem with being one of the you know, one of the items on
the island of misfit toys. I know that It's fine. Matter of fact, I've got my own little clutch there where the rest of the misfit toys they come a misfit. I'm fine with that, you know, uh, and I think you are too, So yeah, of course this is with love. This is almost like not only do I say it's it's loving and uh and and all that and and I'm not saying anybody's normal there. But what I am saying is I don't hold it against anybody. For sure. I can't because I'm one of you in a way.
You know, I realize and recognize I am one of the strange people. So you know, strange person. That means you're you're actually part of my world as opposed to everybody else's, as far as I'm concerned.
That's right, man, it's we're weird and uh, we wouldn't want to be any other way.
Yeah, we're weird. We're here and we're not going to rhyme it. You know, pretty simple. So anyways, with all that having been said, yeah, definitely, I suggest people go over to Joseph Flatley. Uh let me just make sure I got that straight. No excuse me, Lenny Flatley dot substack. I always mix that up. Lenny Flatley dot substack dot com, which is what the L stands for, by the way, anyways,
Lenny Flatley dot substack dot com. And you can get convenience stories and follow your work and there's lots of ways that people can support that plus when you come out with the Timothy Leary book, you got to come back on and talk about that at least.
Heck, yeah, that's a weird one too, so and I don't throw that word around lightly.
That's gonna be a lot of fun.
Yeah, definitely.
So I'm looking forward to that.
And you know, I love it when you're when your listeners reach out to me, so they can they can email me from the same you know, when they get my newsletter, it'll come from my email address, so they can reply to that because your readers always, your listeners always have interesting stuff to say. So so let's be friends.
Yeah, do that, contact him. He loves it, especially if you're one of the weird people yourself. You never know you might end up in one of his blogs or books or et cetera, et cetera. Right, Yeah, so there you go. So josephel Flatley, thanks for doing this with me. And again Lenny Flatley dot substack dot com. Go there, sign up for Convenience Stories. I'm finding the idea of and entertaining and I've read the first part and you guys can go there right now and do that yourselves,
get into it. It's it's a lot of fun in my mind, and again another glimpse into part of what is invisible America. So with that being said, I'm merely o'celly. All of you are indeed the effect. Have a good night.