June 25, 2026 • 62 mins
For many, the story began with the receipt of a mysterious card, which led them to a nondescript address in San Francisco. From there, new members of the Latitude Society found themselves living through a complex, enigmatic adventure in a secret society somewhere between a philosophical group, a city-wide theme park and a real-life conspiracy. But what exactly is The Latitude Society? What are its real origins, and where are the members today?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. We're returning with a classic episode that
I think still mystifies all of us. Guys, Is San
Francisco just too cool for us? Are we cool enough
for Sam Fran?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Well you call it San Fran you're definite right, Yeah, Yeah,
they don't like that. It's a fun place. I haven't
been in a long time, and they say it's not
like it used to be. But boy, oh boy did
they used to get up to some fun, artsy hijinks
and they probably still do. But today we're talking about one.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Oh yes, the Latitude Society. Guys, this is the Jeff
Hole Project. Yes it is. Do you do you remember? Yes,
we did, and we got invited out to go to
the Cortege, something that we didn't We didn't have the
opportunity to go and do it, but it sounded really interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
So let's roll the tape on our previous episode, what
is the Latitude Society? UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know.
(01:11):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
My name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our superproducer,
all mission control decand most importantly, you are here, and
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Here's a question. Who doesn't want to belong to something
bigger than themselves, Whether it's feeling like you belong to
(01:47):
a family, to an organization, to a religion of some sort.
For most people, this is a fundamental, primal drive, and
there's a bonus. It's cool to be a member of
something bigger than yourself, but it's even cooler to many
people if the thing that you are a member of
(02:08):
is exclusive, if not everybody can be as special or
as enlightened as you. It's actually that drive is a
huge problem with the world today. The intrigue of it.
It makes you feel alive. It's the basis of so
many works of fiction, including things like Obviously, as you'll
see when we explore today's topic, Folks, Obviously, the Game,
(02:32):
the nineteen ninety seventh film with Michael Douglass, and of
course the fantastic for COO's Pendulum by Umberto Echo. Today's
story is a story of curated conspiracy, part performance art,
and part Silicon Valley startup, part push for genuine adventure,
and part push for cold hard cash. We're talking about
(02:56):
something called the Latitude Society. Are the facts. Here's what
happens when you join this. Just put as we explore this,
put yourself in the mind of a person experiencing this,
and you'll get a sense of how cool it is
at the beginning.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Well, yeah, I think the first thing you have to
do is imagine that you are yourself doing whatever mundane
things it is that you do every day, no matter
how much you even enjoy, Like we enjoy our jobs,
we like doing this, but we have to. We have
a regimented schedule where we do this over and over
and over again. This is what we do. We take
(03:33):
care of our families, We you know, eat, we blah
blah blah blah blah, all the things you do. Imagine that,
and now imagine that you get an invitation to this
thing called the Latitude Society. And the way you get
the invitation is very important, and it generates so much
intrigue in someone like you, like me doing their everyday
(03:56):
things that it is there's almost no way to say no.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, I mean, you know it because it comes in
the form of a friend who is essentially inviting you
into this kind of shared experience with an invitation, a
actual physical invitation that takes the form of a blank
credit card in a sleeve like you might get at
a fancy hotel or maybe even not a fancy hotel
for your key card. They're slid into those little paper
(04:23):
sleeves or the Wi Fi code has written on only
this sleeve has a strange kind of geometric symbol on
it that's embossed and kind of a little shiny and
you know, bespoke looking, so it's already like reeks of entrigue.
And you pull out the actual card and it looks
like a blank credit card. There's a website. There's an
(04:43):
invitation code where you flip. When you flip it over
to the part where there would normally be like the signature,
it says absolute discretion, which is sort of a buzz
phrase that we're going to hear repeatedly in this story.
It's almost a mantra absolute discretion. Once you go to
the website, you enter your code, you get a selection
of different appointment times, and you lock yours in. Then
(05:07):
you show up to an address in the Mission neighborhood
of San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
At this point you will have an experience that feels
very through the looking class very alice in wonderland. And
if you have not had this spoiled for you, warning
spoilers ahead. What happens when you open the door. The
(05:32):
website for this organization has a kind of decadent description
of this, saying through the door and behind a thick
curtain was the Flux Chamber, an automated hallway with only
one way through down a wooden slide at the base
of an ornate Victorian fireplace mantle, awaiting the visitor. At
(05:53):
the bottom of the slide was a lobby area with
one red neon sign reading sh and then three doors.
So you have you know, you already have this really
cool almost David Lynchy and vibe. Whatever door you choose,
you'll go through an increasingly narrow passage surrounded by all
(06:15):
The walls are padded with black carpet, and this is
called the dark Maze. You hear music, you hear a sasceris,
whi spring voices, whispering voices, and that's what guides you
through this completely dark labyrinth. You're monitored by cameras the
whole time, which is important later. And then finally you
go through this crawl space and find yourself in what
(06:39):
they call the library chamber. This is surrounded. This is
really cool if you see it. It's surrounded by all
these bookshelves. And then there's one book on a pedestal
and it's called the Book of the Latitude. First, this
book appears to be blank.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
It does, and it's important to note that all of
the books in the room are the same book. It's
the same book that is open with blank pages, sitting
there in front of you, and you know, you just
curiosity is going to lead you to, like Ben said,
open it up, and you find that the pages are blank.
But then almost out of nowhere, you'll hear a voice,
(07:18):
and then these pages, or at least the pages that
are that the book is open to begin filling up
with the words that are being spoken to you. So
it's almost as if the book is being written in
your presence in that moment, and that's on the left
hand side, you'll get the words being written out, and
then on the right hand side you'll actually see an
illustration start to form a video of sorts playing somehow
(07:41):
within this book.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, I mean, it really is sort of an interactive
theater experience. If anyone's familiar with the company Punch Drunk,
who did the will continues to do I think probably
during COVID. It's on hiatus, but hopefully back soon. An
incredibly beautifully curated kind of theatrical experience in New York,
and I think there's other versions, but it's called Sleep
(08:03):
No More, and it's essentially like an interactive theatrical experience
where as you're progressing through this actual physical space, you
can choose your path and things happen based on which
path you choose, et cetera. This really reminds me of that,
but using whatever theatrical projection technology that they use, essentially
(08:24):
what's formed before your very eyes is this like mythos,
this sort of like base kind of fable that is
at the center of the Latitude Society's kind of lore.
And you can actually witness this for yourself in a
couple of places. There's a really good article on Vice
about it called My Year in San Francisco's two million
(08:44):
dollars startup, and also the documentary Bright Axiom, where you
can actually see it visually. It's very much worth a watch.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeap in bright Axiom is the name of the documentary.
You may also be interested in the institute. Be warned.
They are they they's somewhere between documentary and long form infomercial.
But this fable is important to the Latitude Society. It's
(09:13):
one of the first pieces of literature that people experience
when they interact with the society. It's often recited before
new adventures or new Society meetings, which they call praxis.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I want to point this out just before we go
any further, and I just want to make sure everyone
understands everything we're describing to you here. These are physical experiences.
This is not some virtual reality thing. This is not
some web based experience that you're going through. You are
physically going through those doors, down the slide, looking at
this book filling up with pages, hearing this fable for
the first time. It's all real time, you just experiencing it.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And then after you have experienced this fable, you are
sent off on something similar to a scavenger hunt. Here,
you're on a mission. In the mission, you do things
like go to a bar and have a coded conversation
with a bartender, and you get this special coin and
you end up using it to participate in an arcade
(10:13):
game which leads you on to another experience. It's all
very just. So this entire thing is an introduction to
the Latitude Society. Is the Latitude Society, Well, it is
a self described secret order dedicating itself to expanding human consciousness,
(10:33):
and it's vaguely locked in a conflict with forces of
darkness who are trying to stop the Society from growing
and expanding and sending their message out. Pretty exciting, right,
pretty exciting way to moonlight. So what happens once you
pass this first adventure, You are inducted as a full
(10:54):
time member and you get access to something called the
Night Book. The night Book is like a social network platform,
and this is where people get together and they tried
to decipher the various mysteries of practice and philosophy. They
also have, Like you said, Matt, the emphasis here is
(11:14):
on in person experience. So they also had town hall events.
You can see various video of this. They also had
dedicated talks and meetings. This was throughout the San Francisco
area and active members of the community could mingle and
they could openly talk about the future of society with
(11:35):
one another, because the thing is there's a fight club
vibe here that helps with the exclusivity. The society has
four kind of guiding principles. Number one, by far is
absolute discretion, meaning you're not supposed to talk about latitude
in front of people who are not evolved with latitude
unless you want to invite them, in which case you
(11:56):
give them one of those little cards. And really, you know,
it feels like it's very secretive, but it also it
makes sense logically to avoid spoilers, right, is all about surprise.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
And as Noel said, that that phrase absolute discretion was
embossed on the slip that you would get that the
card was inserted into. So that's your first your first
interaction with the Latitude Society after someone you know quietly says, hey,
can you keep a secret? Is the phrase absolute discretion.
And here's the thing about that phrase. The people or
(12:28):
the creators of the Latitude Society took great pains to
make sure that the member, the user understood that that
phrase has two different meanings, and one of them was
was essentially saying that you will be able to have
good judgment in what you decide to share what information
(12:49):
you decided to give out. The other one is essentially
just implying secrecy. So it's both of those things, right,
That's what Ben's talking about. You get to choose as
a member who else becomes a member and they had
And like we were saying, there are several other tenants
that were very important to Latitude society.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah, value it. We value experiences over things. Is that's
the second tenet, and I think that's something a lot
of people can agree with, especially you'll find this belief
common in people who have lived a long time. People
are at the end of their lives, tend to enjoy
the experiences they had or the memories of those, more
(13:30):
so than the gadgets they accrue. So I get that
one third tenet we give in order to become part
of a story greater than ourselves. Think about it. What
does giving mean there? We'll get to it. And the
fourth is freedom from dogma. So the person who invites
you is thereafter referred to as your ascendant, and you
(13:51):
are their descendants. It's a bit like a less sinister
version of an upline or downline in a multi level
marketing scheme, and they want to be very clear, the
Latitude Society is not multi marketing.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
No, and it's also not nexium.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
And it's also not nexium. Anybody who is a member
of this they don't, for instance, have a quota of
other people they had to invite or anything like that.
But you want people to be in one of this adventure.
So after you finished this first mission they call it
book one, then you are given a code word that
(14:28):
gets you further access on the website, and then you
get the opportunity to invite other people, theoretically as many
as you would like. So just like Fouco's Pendulum, the
majority of people involved knew this was a game, but
felt it was more fun and more immersive if you
took it seriously. So many people did, and it did
(14:51):
not hurt that the group responsible for creating the Latitude
Society named Nonchalance, was staffed by very talent to creatives.
They made it compelling, you know what I mean. It
didn't seem it seemed real, It felt real in a
way it was.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
I also wanted to point out one tiny detail from
the experiential part, the first kind of down the rabbit hole.
Visit to that mission. You know facility I call it.
There is a part when you go to that window
where it says in the neon there's like kind of
like a shrouded figure behind sort of I guess frosted glass.
You're not quite sure if it's even a real person
(15:29):
or not. And like a drawer pops out and you're
instructed to place all of your personal possessions in that drawer.
So it's got this like inherent kind of decoupling from like,
you know, the humdrum day to day of existence and identity,
not to mention things like, you know, your phone and
all of that, and it's actually taking you out and
(15:51):
especially like a place like San Francisco Silicon Valley that's
the epicenter of this type of like decoupling, you know,
from real life and thrusting you into this place where
you have to separate yourself from all of o those
trappings and literally, you know, go down a rabbit hole
of actual physical experience as opposed to virtual.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And then at some point, while you're experiencing this or
while you're hearing this show, you have to ask yourself,
what exactly is this thing? I would say it's immersive theaters.
There are a lot of things like this. It's similar
to projects from places like Cirrembi Playhouse in the Atlanta area,
multiple haunted houses in the US around the world, various
(16:32):
theater projects in New York. It's also a networking opportunity.
I mentioned this on an earlier Listener mail segment. People
tend to want to be prometheate, whether or not they've
like earned that feeling. We want to be the bringers
of knowledge often rather than the receivers. So this became
(16:54):
a way of looking very cool to friends or colleagues.
Met somebody at a business lunch, They're dope. You want
them to feel the same way about you. Slide in
one of those little black cards. I can't tell you anymore.
Absolute discretion, right, and then maybe it leads to better
things in your working life. But what what else was
(17:16):
the point? What was actually going on here behind the
scenes of this behind the scenes underground endeavor.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, it's not like this was a cheap thing to produce.
You're talking about physical elements, like you said, with people
working very hard to create a story and things, and
then going to various places throughout the city and planting
a bartender, making sure that bartender is going to give
out the information making coins that have to go. I mean,
(17:45):
it's a production, this is expensive stuff. Why would you
spend all that money to do this.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
In multiple locations too? We mentioned going to an arcade
that's another physical location with all of these kind of
like bespoke sort of psycho like looking arcade machines, one
of which, when you put that coin in, like you're
mentioning Ben, a deity appears to you, which is as
a theme that we're going to see throughout the story
sort of looks almost like the creepy rabbit from Donnie Darko,
(18:14):
only it's more of like a half man's face with
these weird eye stalks that don't have eyes, and and
he in sort of like again like serial killer voice,
disguiser voice, gives you instructions on where to go next,
and you know, he starts feeding you these kind of
philosophical lines about the praxis and all of that good stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
So what was the point an expensive production, multiple rented
locations in the city with the highest cost of living
in the country. It's a it's a it's not a
small amount overhead here. What else was the latitude society
and what were the motivations for creating it. We'll explore
(18:54):
this afterward from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy.
To understand the Latitude Society, we have to understand the
organization I mentioned earlier, Nonchalance, along with two people, Jeff
(19:15):
Hall and Kat Meller. Jeff Hull is the company's founder.
He started Nonchalance in the early two thousands. Kat Meller
is one was one of the primary employees, and there
were other people. It takes a village right to make
a conspiracy. There were artist, community engagement experts, various engineers.
(19:38):
The money for this came from Jeff Hall directly. He
gave He gave two million dollars. We came to find out,
or that's what's believed, that he gave two million dollars
to get this thing started. How does one end up
with two million dollars such that you say, I want
(19:59):
to make a weird conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
A good way to make two million dollars is to,
you know, have money given to you through your family.
We've talked about wealth in the United States and countries
throughout the world that have a long history, and how
one of the best ways to just become filthy rich
is to get it from people who came before you
(20:21):
in your family. So there's something that happened with Jeff
holl His father he created an incredible company that was
valued just under five hundred million dollars and it was
sold to Goldman Sacks in nineteen ninety nine for five
hundred and thirty one million dollars. And maybe that's how
(20:41):
he got that two million dollars. But at least according
to Jeff, in response to that Vice article that we
mentioned before, he states that he actually made his wealth
or it began his wealth working for his father's company
before it was sold to Goldman Sacks.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
And that he became a partner when the firm was
acquired by Goldman Sachs, so mainly and he wrote to
the s F FIST and then you know, he wrote
the same message device as you said, where where he
was taking issue primarily with the implication that he was
a trust fund kid, and he said he found it belittling,
(21:16):
which is understandable. It's not a phrase. I don't think
it's a phrase a lot of people use to self identify,
you know what.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
It's also inherently dismissive and unfair people that are fortunate
enough to be in that situation. It's one thing if
you just lean on that money and do nothing, or
just you know, live some opulent life of privilege where
you don't actually contribute anything. But I would argue this
is an example of taking that privilege and converting it
into something interesting, which I think is you know, should
(21:46):
be applauded.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Well, the Latitude Society is not the first iteration of
this that Nonchalance has done. They tried something earlier called
the Jed June Institute, which I think is a cool name.
That's what that other documentary in the Institute is about.
This was another a similar theme. You're crossing through the
(22:12):
city of San Francisco on kind of a scavenger hunt
immersive adventure game. But here's the secret. Here's the secret
to this secret society. And it's something that some of
the ascendants and descendants did not care for when they
learned about this. The Latitude Society was not just an
artistic statement. It was a business, and in theory was
(22:36):
a very smart one. Hull was thinking in terms of
a theme park of the mind. I would say, is
a fair description. Do you think that's a fair description, guys?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I think it absolutely is. And also this like this
push pull between artistic pure artistic expression and creativity and
making money is like tail as old as time, right,
and so many artists, brilliant artists are very bad business people,
and it's interesting when you see that kind of like
that I guess, I don't know, conflict. There's another interesting
(23:09):
kind of group that reminds me of this called meow Wolf,
and there's a fabulous documentary about them, and it started
off as this collective of just like minded weirdos in
Santa Fe, which has kind of a stuffy art scene
that's like very you know, like exclusive in that everything
is very expensive, you know, and kind of boring, and
(23:31):
like these kind of like scene kids like who were
into like DIY punk type shows and weird music started
this group to kind of be a counterbalance to that.
But it became so successful they started getting investments from
folks like George R. Martin and essentially turned it into
this giant business. Some people were less enthused about that
(23:51):
direction than others, and I think that's what we're seeing here.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah. The weird thing is there's this intense dichotomy between
what was presented internally at nonchalance. What was presented to
people who are participating in this artistic endeavor. The idea
is that they would one day be able to like
like it was startup, thinking right like, let's get it going,
(24:17):
Let's prime the pump as much as we can, let's
go hard on the paint, and eventually we will monetize this.
We will make it self sustaining. Holl said. The vision
was to create an immersive narrative experience that rivaled a
theme park ride and production value, but was embedded into
the urban landscape of San Francisco. And they had a
deck or a PowerPoint and when the when it was
(24:40):
presented internally, it was a quote growth oriented business model
with an identifiable product and service. So they were definitely
talking turkey behind the scenes. It would not be easy
to monetize this. It would be a tall milkshake because
the society was, as you said, Matt, hugely expensive endeavor.
(25:01):
We're talking about even not talking about renting multiple properties
in a very expensive urban area. We're talking about technical design,
hours of work, ID eight ing and assembling this stuff,
these elaborate, ornate spaces. It took three years to build
that first place, which really does have like this wooden slide.
(25:22):
It's crazy and when they finally opened it to members,
people weren't sure how to react. And it's pretty impressive
too that they did this for three years without spilling
the beans. But again, the price tag on that, according
to employee former employees of the organization, was a cool
two mil. And here's why a lot of people got
(25:46):
turned off. We were talking about money that was started
as investment, but how did they plan to monetize the
user experience? If we want to just keep being solas
in corporate about it. Once you got invited, you were in,
and you know you did you did the book one
or the first Mission First Adventure. Then we said you
(26:07):
could theoretically invite as many people as you wish. That's
because the invitations were sold to you on a per
card basis. So let's say you're Paul Mission Control decad
you want to invite some friends, you want to invite
your pals Matt Nolan Ben to this to this adventure.
(26:29):
Then you pay twenty five dollars a card, but later
that was raised to thirty two dollars a card. And
then you look around and you see on this website
there's all kinds of stuff you can buy very very
weirdly specific. Oh.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Absolutely. And then that's why I think it's interesting that
people didn't kind of that the people like got some
out of shape, because this is like, this is the
deal from the beginning. You know, you it's a closed
website where you can't even log into it until you
get that card with that unique code. And then once
you go through, like you said, bend that book one experience,
that's when you get access to what's called the marketplace
(27:03):
and you can buy shirts with that slogan absolute discretion,
which the author of the Vice article found very ironic,
which I think is sort of the point. It's it's like,
it's fun the idea of buying a T shirt that
says absolute discretion, and yeah, that's right. You buy these cards,
you can distribute them to whomever you wish. And then
(27:25):
doesn't that make it kind of like a I don't know,
like a pyramid thing where you kind of like you
you buy one, you get it, and then you buy
more and then give it others, and then they give
it more and it branches off. I guess not not really,
it's not. Yeah, it's it's it's it's a little different.
It's not certainly not taking advantage of folks in the
same way.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, because you're not. You're not making money from the
cards that are sold after you.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
That's right now.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Al And like you know, like I was saying earlier,
even though they have some some language that's reminiscent of MLM's,
there's not a baked in quota. No, you don't get
in trouble if you don't get to twenty people per
month or something like that. So it's not ponzias, it's
not MLM. But they do want to make it profitable.
(28:10):
The thing is, when you're talking two million dollars and
you're trying to recoup that based on the sale of
T shirts and pendants and invitation cards, you're looking at
a very large, a nearly Sissiphian hill to climb. It
(28:31):
would be very difficult to cover that initial investment in
a reasonable amount of time. Some journalists estimated the math.
They said, Okay, we think over the part over the
span of the Latitude Society during its heyday, maybe two
thousand people were giving cards and participated in some part
(28:51):
of the initiation. They went to the website. They never
showed up to the place, or they showed up to
the place and then they left and just didn't pursue
the rest of book one, or they did the whole
first book and then they said, Okay, that's it. That
was a great weekend, but I'm done. If two thousand
people did this, they participated in some way, then that
(29:12):
means the most revenue from that part of the part
of the business that Latitude could make was about sixty
thousand dollars, which is cool, but it's not two million.
And so later they did something that teed off a
lot of the members, a lot of the existing members
who were very into this adventure in society. They instituted
(29:34):
an annual membership fee. It's over three hundred bucks. It's
still less than a burning Man ticket, people are quick
to point out. But people were like, what is the
mission of this changing And to the you know, to
the participants, it felt like maybe it was, but to
the creators, no, this was just a further pursuing the
(29:55):
original plan.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
I think it's almost like the they started, you know,
the members started taking things upon themselves because they like, really,
the vice article is I think the most straightforward, Like
the film is interesting, but it almost has an agenda
a little bit like it really, like you said at
the top bend, it almost feels like a weird kind
of commercial for the thing, and it feels like it
(30:18):
has a little bit of an agenda. But the vice
article is from the perspective of someone that goes through
the whole process, and what ends up happening is, you know,
this person starts wearing that Absolute Discretion T shirt and
using it to identify other people who have done the
experience in the wild, and then those people start connecting
with each other on like forums. Then they start actually
(30:40):
doing kind of little, you know, gatherings that are sort
of I guess I'm not sanctioned or whatever they need
it to be sanctioned, but they really do start to
form a community around the lore and around the whole
experience of this thing, you know, again, because it's almost
like a religion at that point, it starts to at
(31:01):
least have the sense of community that a religion can
have at its best. And so I think those people
who really start to get a real value out of
this in their lives start to see it becoming quote
unquote becoming more commercial. Maybe that's where they start not
digging that because they feel like it's taking something that's
very special and personal to them and you know, bastardizing
(31:22):
it in some way. But again, to the creators, this
is what they've had planned all along. So is it
really them doing anything but what they already kind of
set out to do.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Yeah. And the writer for Vice, Lydia Lawrenson, she had
quotes from several members. I don't want to spoil any things.
She had several quotes from members who were talking about
this very thing, like why the money, why is this happening?
And one of the big takeaways is that this felt
(31:53):
to them like a gift that they had been given,
like someone handed them a free card. Then they got
to go through this experience, and then they got to
choose whether or not they paid for anything. Right now
they were being told that they had to pay, and
it was a gift, became a burden essentially, Well, I'm
sorry what.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Had to pay in order to continue doing what?
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Going to these things like they were doing real world events,
so those.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Were official events. There were official events, but then also
just little gatherings of members.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Privately right right, similar to a less sinister version of
squirreling and scientology, which we can talk about a little
bit later, but squirreling is scientology term for when someone
takes what they describe as l Ron Hubbard's technology or
(32:48):
tech and they use it in an unsanctioned way. It's
similar to maybe the way that the Catholic Church in
days of old looked at Protestants, you know, I mean, like, hey,
you're taking you're taking stuff that we both know is true,
but you're doing the wrong doing it the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
You're doing it the way like the film industry looks
at pirating movies, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Maybe, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Mean it's like you're stealing. You're basically saying you're taking
our stuff and you're using it, you know, and you're
not like giving us our due or like yeah, I
don't know, like the paying part certainly is at the
heart of it. But yeah, you're exactly right. I think
squirreling is a perfect comparison.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Let's think too about social media in the Internet. One
thing that the Internet has made abundantly clear in every
every culture and every iteration is that if people have
something for free, there's something deeply offensive to people. If
that changes to a paid service.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
Whatever, New York Times.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Right, I say that as a guy with a subscription.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Really really quickly, just slightly slightly off off the subject.
But it's sort of like what you know, Apple is
talking about potentially putting podcasts, siloing podcasts behind paywalls, are
making it a subscription thing, or it's a little vague
what they're talking about doing, but that would be the
exactly what you're talking about, because Apple is sort of
the arbiter of like this industry of free content, you know,
(34:14):
AD supported free content, and if all of a sudden
that change, I think people would like lose their minds.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
And the reason I mentioned social media is because we
can see clear parallels here, Right, social media, A lot
of the platforms thrive on exclusivity in the beginning, Right,
I can only have a Facebook page if I go
to this school, or then if later if I go
to a school. We see this time and time again.
(34:46):
People want to be promethea, they want to be in
the know. And then as it grows and more people
are involved, more people are aware of this fight club,
then the problems grow as well. It's a symptom of scale.
If I wanted to be all ted talkie and Popsie
about it symptoms.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Well, yeah, cause they're they're they're doing testing on those
early users. You know, they're like they're literally beta testing everything,
including that experience that we described to you at the
top of this episode, like going in and checking out
that book, down the slide, all that stuff. They're testing
to see how people react. And it's very very helpful
to keep it low number and.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
How effective like it is in like making people want
to continue on, you know what I mean, Like that
experience that first pop is what really gets you, you know,
kind of converted almost right where you're either like, wow,
this is something really special. I was given this gift.
They had to really tailor that experience to get the
exact right kind of you know, punch to make people
(35:46):
feel that way.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And imagine how cool it is, just objectively, how cool
it is if you're say at a at a at
a bar somewhere let's call it the Sycamore, and you're
rocking your absolute discretion t and then you you know,
you're just hanging out and you see somebody come in
like furtively and have a weird whispered conversation with the
(36:09):
bartender and they get this coin and they turn around
and they see you and their jaw drops and you're like, aha,
I'm one of them. Like people love that stuff. That's
why you have all these coded signals that like the
when we did our episode on secret languages, right a
city in a society speaks to itself in an ecosystem,
(36:33):
and I guarantee you that on any given day in
a city, there are people who are subtly communicating to
one another right under your nose in one method or another,
a signal by something, signaled by a piece of jewelry,
a particular piece of clothing, et cetera. I think it's
I think it's so cool, But you guys are right.
(36:54):
People had people have problems with this, Like a guy
named Thomas Loetz who was speaking with Lydia Lawrence and
over Advice objected because he felt the monetization was a
blow to the things about the society that were important
to him and his colleagues. It gave them meaning. It
(37:17):
seemed like there was a space where they were coming
together as a community in a non performative way. He
felt like there was a genuine connection and they were
taking taking dedicated time to reflect on ideas and a
lot of these people were in, you know, very stressful
day jobs. They're very go go go, you know, with
(37:40):
high stakes and stuff. So the idea that you're hanging
out with people and it's not about a work thing,
it's just hanging out with people because you like hanging
out and you like the stuff you do together. That's
a beautiful feeling and that seemed very meaningful to people,
and they liked to be in a secret society. There
(38:03):
was a story. We're part of the story where the
audience and we're the author. That's amazing. But you'll notice
as student listeners, we've been talking about the Latitude Society
and past tense. Why we'll tell you after a word
from our sponsor. So Latitude had problems. We're pretty I
(38:30):
think we're pretty clear about that. And the thing is
people agree on what they like about it, but then
they disagree on what they didn't like. As Jeff Hole
put it, his number one problem that he saw people
having is that people weren't sure how to interpret this,
how to digest it. He said, the Latitude Society may
(38:51):
have served multiple purposes, but ultimately it could not be
all things to all people. So maybe everybody just wasn't
on the same page. Maybe that's where the issues began.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And there's a
quote here again from that Vice article from Matt Weinberger.
He's a person who you know, took part in the
Latitude Society, and here's his quote. Some people treated it
as a game. That makes sense, right, some people as
a social club and a networking opportunity, and some treated
(39:25):
it as a religion. And he mentions that at some
point there was a Reddit thread created by, you know,
someone who had heard about the society and then joined.
And then this person who created this thread believed they
joined a cult, so they took it very, very seriously
and laid out a lot of the things that were
not supposed to be spoken to non members. And this person, Matt,
(39:49):
is saying that it kind of spoiled the fun of
the society itself after everybody knew what it was, or
at least a certain number of people.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
And here's the other thing. Latitude wasn't just a business.
It was a genre of business that we will call
a startup. Startups have different rules. Startups have a very
high rate of attrition. Startups can do enormously wonderful and
disruptive things. They can also fall flat. They're risky. Like
(40:19):
a lot of startups, Nonchalance did not seem to have
a very clear focus in the opinion of observers, and
they just ran out of money for the Latitude Society
before they could finish the overall arc of the story
they wanted to tell. The founder himself estimates that the
(40:41):
daily cost of the Latitude Society just keeping the lights on,
keeping the rent paid, keeping the weird coins in circulation,
that was three grand a day.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, and apparently they didn't even have a very let's
say develop up to business plan or well not business plan,
but they weren't keeping books particularly well. They didn't have
some of the most basic kind of bookkeeping sheets that
you would have to have, especially with the operation that's
(41:15):
expensive in a city as expensive as San Francisco. You know,
any business startup or otherwise keep something called a profit
and loss ledger, which allows you to keep track of
the comings and goings of money. You got to spend
money to make money, but if your losses outweigh your profits,
that's not a good look. And this could well be
(41:35):
an example of you know, one of the I guess
luxuries or privileges of being independently wealthy and sort of
doing this like as a personal project, not being super
meticulous about the bigger picture of the of the finances.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Yeah. Yeah, there's something a little bit aristocratic about it.
I could see critics taking that stance. I'm always reminded of.
There's an Italian publishing house that I really I really love.
I respect the books they put up, and they're called Resoli,
and I believe it's resolute. The owner is this old
(42:17):
or was this old school Italian aristocrat And I was
reading an interview with him where one day he just
decided to build a hedge maze, like a huge hedge
maze and invite his friends over. That's the kind of
stuff that most people can't do, you know what I mean.
And now we have to ask ourselves to your point,
nol is is the perspective then for this person? Are
(42:40):
they just thinking I am I am creating this thing
that I want to give to you, and the only
reason money becomes involved is because I want to make
it a thing that can stay around, you know, instead
of something ephemeral. But at ninety thousand dollars a month,
this these conversations have to happen. So there were a
(43:06):
couple of ideas and how to how to stem the
financial hemorrhaging, and one of those was, let's stop emphasizing physicality,
let's move entirely to virtual reality. And that's that's a bummer.
That also makes me love your New York Times example, Matt,
(43:26):
because we've seen so many print publications say Okay, we're
going to go entirely online, we're going to keep a
subscription fee, and so for people who have subscribed to
a paper and received a physical copy for years and
years and years, they feel like they feel like they're
getting robbed because they don't have the thing. And this
is an even more extreme example, I would argue because
(43:46):
the entirety of the focus of the Latitude Society was
in person adventure, a type of a very clever type
of augmented reality. That's really what's happening. So of course
folks are going to push back against this. And there's
another article by a former member called the author's name
(44:07):
is Caveat Magister, and Caveat compares this again to Burning
Man and says that the exclusivity of the Latitude Society
may have gone too far, leading to that practice that
scientology would call squirreling, and there was a really i
(44:29):
would say, inspiring organic thing to happen. Active members were like,
you know, I don't really need to do the official experience,
and I don't really need to worry about my ascendant
or whatever. I've met some people. We can just hang out,
we can do our own thing inspired by this. I
don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's kind of like,
(44:50):
you know, at some point, if you're a fan of Legos,
at some point you don't worry about what you're supposed
to build from the box. You just build your own stuff.
There's still Legos, and you're still having a heck of
a time. I just say, I don't see anything wrong
with what these folks are doing. And by this point,
(45:10):
of course, yes, they're paying three hundred something a year
for a membership.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, and of course that the push to then have
a membership whittled away at the membership very quickly immediately,
and you know, that's that's obviously a problem if you're
trying to build a user base essentially like a startup
does want to do. Now, we've got some other criticisms
from people here about the Latitude Society and what was
(45:39):
happening there. And a big criticism comes from someone named
Rebecca Power, who was known by the writer of that
Vice article that we discussed there, and she didn't have
a great experience essentially going through it, and it started
on that book. One experience where you know, she looked
at the book and everything, because she was contacted almost
(46:02):
immediately after that by the person that invited her to
the society, and he stated something a little strange, something
we didn't note before this is that in many of
the rooms there, the physical space that you enter, there
were cameras with you know, lights as cameras generally do have,
like a CCTV camera has a light that lets you
(46:25):
know you're being watched or that the camera's on at
least or recording. And he mentioned her that, oh, I
was watching you when you went through the fable, when
you know, you sat down and you got that book
read to you. And that kind of creeped her out
a lot, just the thought that someone was there actually
watching her the whole time, not interacting with her, just
(46:46):
surveilling her and observing her. So that was the first
little thing that happened, but then she felt it got
weirder from there.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, she saw an imbalance in the agreement. Some kind
of information as symmetry would be a drive phrase for it.
You do have to sign this terms of service thing, right,
but as Rebecca Power found out, there wasn't a formal
(47:15):
procedure for releasing yourself from it. And she said, I
know the employees are monitoring us, but who is monitoring them?
And there's another.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Such a good point, but I totally forgot about this.
That's before you even set up your appointment, right when
you sign that, so you have no idea what you're
signing up for, and you're just gonna put all your
info in.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
There exactly exactly. And there's that detail you mentioned about
being observed. Is so creepy because she found out this
Facebook message that the person who invited her I had
been watching her the whole time. So she got spooked
and she asked that the group deactivate her membership. So
(47:59):
this is where we get like to the copendulum, has
the performance become real? Point? She says, when I left,
I became a security risk. People I knew made vague
threats that I would regret leaving or talking about it.
A roommate of mine stopped telling me where he was
going when he left the house. Friends I trusted contacted
(48:20):
me and played stupid about their own involvement in order
to suss out what I knew. That's wild, Like imagine,
imagine you can't like imagine you go to Disney World
and you're supposed to spend a week there, and you
go for a day and you're like, all right, I'm
not gonna go and then you like, you go home early,
and the next day you get these weird calls and
(48:42):
messages from your friends who are like, better not talk
about Disney World.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
Keep keep you.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
The first rule of Disney World is you don't talk
about Disney World.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Yeah. I don't think those parks would function that way
if that was.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
I love it, though, it's like.
Speaker 4 (48:59):
The uh I got to do.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
In my head. It calls you late at night, come on.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Although, isn't there that secret members only club at Disney World.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, that's the same semi secret you know. But yeah,
it's supposed to be nice. The menu seems cool.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
I want to stay on Rebecca Power just for a moment.
So one of the other things that she really didn't
like there is that she went to an actual gathering,
one of these things they call praxis or a Praxis praxi,
and someone there essentially Dockster, not really, but just you know,
mentioned they knew what she did and knew who she was,
(49:42):
but it was said aloud. That's one of the main
reasons that she left. And the really interesting thing about
Rebecca is that she continued this kind of work afterwards.
She started a thing that had a different name at
the time. It's changed names, but now it is called
hoax h ax Is. It's in San Francisco, and it's
(50:03):
the same kind of thing. It's a company that creates experiences.
They're an interactive design studio and they like to create
quote novel situations and powerful experiences. So same kind of thing.
She continued on to do that stuff, just outside of
this other group nonchalance.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
That's a very good point, Matt. So now we're reaching
the end we talked in past tense. You see some
of the problems. Some people worried about their own privacy,
some people have what they feel are ethical objections to
the business model. And then also you can understand this
(50:44):
from the perspective of the employees of Nonchalance and the
people responsible for making these experiences, they might feel kind
of underappreciated. The Hey, man, I gave you a thing.
I'm just trying to I'm trying to keep it going,
you know what I mean. Like, you can't go to
the sandwich shop get a free sandwich every day and
(51:07):
expect those sandwiches to just appear. We have. It's a
terrible comparison, but you get it. So after the membership
fee roll out, there's internal division within Nonchalance. Employees resign
and then Jeff Hull sanctions an article about the society
(51:31):
where he says various critical things or various not you know,
super happy fun times, holding hands singing Kumbaya things about
the organization. And this itself is a violation of that
absolute discretion policy, is it not? And in less than
a week after that article publishes, Jeff shuts down the website.
(51:53):
He leaves a note that the San Francisco House of
Latitude is closed and the society he closes down on Monday,
September twenty eighth, twenty fifteen. This was news reportedly to
several of the employees involved. As happened, you know, recently,
in the days of the pandemic, some people just showed
(52:14):
up to a job that no longer existed, which is
a massive bummer.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
It really is.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
I do just want to point out too. I think
we've made it pretty clear, but a lot of these things,
this idea of these rules quote unquote, are very loose,
and it's not like there's a set like a code
of ethics or a conduct you know. I mean, even
their whole idea of discretion is ironic in a lot
of ways because like it's a secret, but it's also
(52:40):
tell your friends. So it's it's very loose, all of
this stuff, and to the point where it's clearly meant
to be a bit of an ironic performance art thing,
almost commenting on the types of the way social media
works and the kind of you know what you're saying
Ben about how exclusivity in and of itself makes things
(53:03):
more attractive. And now we've got things like this new
social media platform Clubhouse, that's once again based entirely on exclusivity,
and it's very much a Silicon Valley thing that's about
networking and being more anonymous, less tied to your persona,
and more just based on the worth of the things
that you say to other members. So I think there's
(53:26):
a lot of that that's sort of some of the
folks that really started taking this seriously seem to have
maybe have been lost on them a little bit, which
is interesting.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
To me because again it's the definition of what this
is changes based on the perspective of the people and
their degree of involvement. So after Jeff Houll closes down
Latitude Society egoes on Facebook and you post an update,
(54:00):
some people copied and pasted it, and then the reactions
were mixed. Some folks were like, you know, I get it,
and I sympathized with you. Some people were angry, like,
don't you're ruining the game or you're ruining the community
that I've come to love the whole, writes the following,
He says, I've been rolling a boulder up a hill
(54:22):
for four years and it kept getting heavier. It was
my most audacious undertaking besides parenthood, and getting to the
top meant success. Recently, as my shoulders began to give
out under the weight, I looked around, and seeing no
relief in sight, I decided to do the most healthy
thing I could possibly do.
Speaker 3 (54:40):
Let go Oh man, where do you think that boulder went?
I wonder what's on the other side? You know, Yeah,
it's bolder.
Speaker 4 (54:48):
The intro to the third game, right right, you go
throughout cities in the United States and you're searching for
twenty twenty five a tall boulder.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
That's just rolling downhill somewhere. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yeah, randomized locations. The pieces are there, we'll workshop it.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
Yeah. So he writes this thing on Facebook, and then
he also writes a large post on the website, which
is the Latitude dot Com And if you go to
the wayback machine at archive dot org you can find it.
It's https called slash slash the Latitude dot Com slash
(55:28):
book slash one. And if you put that in, you
can find this thing that he wrote called Epilogue from
the San Francisco House, and you can get a lot
of the info in there, and you can really read
at least Jeff's version of events and how the whole
thing ended and why.
Speaker 1 (55:46):
And you know, he said it'll be an enduring, inescapable mystery.
How a game built to offer shared whimsy inspiration play
can result in trauma for the people most closely evolved,
which feels like it acknowledgment of the of the conflicts
that the employees had. On the night the society closed,
(56:09):
about one hundred people went to a local bar that's
important during that first mission, the Sycamore, which I mentioned earlier,
and they got together, they commiserated. I believe many of
the former members or people who have met one another
through this remain friends today, which is awesome. It's sad
(56:29):
that it was an abrupt end to such a bold endeavor,
but again, people still remember their times, their experiences in
the group. It left an impression, and you know, like
you're to your point about Rebecca Power, this is likely
not going to be the last thing of its sort
because I don't know. It is just my opinion here.
(56:50):
I think this stuff is cool. I would I like
the idea as long as no one's getting hurt, you know,
full speed ahead. But what do you think? What can
you guys glean from this? Would you participate in something
like this if you got a mysterious envelope or no,
it need to be better than an envelope, would it be? Dude?
Speaker 3 (57:09):
If I got a record like that, I'm I'm going,
I mean, I'm there, Please break me out of this thing.
A little bit uh in on nonchalance dot com n
O n C h A l A n CE dot
com slash about you can read the missing mission statement
essentially of nonchalance. And this is the way it starts.
(57:32):
Picture in your mind a cartoon character sleepwalking. Now it
goes on to talk about this thing that they call
divine nonchalance. This is this concept that the sleepwalking character
somehow moves on through the city without ever getting hurt somehow,
because if they're just casually walking even though they're asleep,
and nothing has hurt them just by chance. Really, what
(57:55):
this is speaking to me, whether they're saying saying it
or not, is imagine that we are all just sleepwalking
in our day to day lives, and what they are
going to do is break us out of that, if
only momentarily. With these kinds of experiences that they're creating,
like the Jajhun Institute. I think the thing they created,
which is a whole could be a whole other episode
(58:17):
or just you know, something for you to check out
on your own that we won't spoil here. It's worth
your time. It's fascinating because.
Speaker 1 (58:24):
We definitely spoiled the Latitude Society. Yeah, yeah, we heavily
spoiled that part.
Speaker 3 (58:30):
But this, the efforts put into changing people's minds slightly,
to getting us to think a little differently by placing
us in what they call a genuine space and giving
us us a user and experience like this, I think
that is genuinely worthwhile. I think you can create great
(58:54):
change in an individual and a group of people that way,
and it could be highly positive, but it could also
be it could also be really dangerous because it feels
like the same thing that Nxium did, but with the
nefarious goals at the center of it, right, and with
any cult that started, it's the same kind of thing.
(59:15):
You're going to give somebody a little different experience and
you're going to try and change the way they're thinking
a little bit, remove part of that identity that's kind
of weighing them down every day, and in this case,
instead of shaping them to then just constantly fund money,
which they kind of did at the end there, right,
like a startup. It wasn't that crazy, right, I don't know.
(59:38):
To me, this feels positive.
Speaker 1 (59:40):
Yeah, I think we're all kind of on the same
page there, Like it does feel like overall and principle,
these are cool things to have in the world. Bust
out of the matrix, you know what I mean, hack
your cognition and your perspective. What's not to love? But
it is so fascinating because these things are possible and
(01:00:00):
worth doing. We'd love to hear your opinions or your
experiences with things like this, because I'm sure there are
more examples of this phenomenon out there. And also question
folks listening today, if you were creating something like this,
what sort of experience would you give people? And maybe
(01:00:21):
the other the other side of the coin here is
when do endeavors like this go too far? Let us know.
You can find us on the internet. We're on Facebook,
We're on Twitter, We're on Instagram. We'd like to recommend
heres where it gets crazy on Facebook if you are
a Facebook user. We also have a phone number. If
(01:00:45):
you do not sip the social meds, you can dial
us directly.
Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
That's right. We are one eight three three STDWITK three
minutes is the time you shall have to leave your message.
Please let us know if it is okay to use
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and let us know what to call you or not
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we are absolutely cool with that.
Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
That's right. Call us and let us know the kind
of experience you want to give people. I think I
told you guys about the interactive cannabis slash hallucinogen facility
I want to create, right, yes, yeah, yeah yeah, I
have elaborate plans for that, and one day it's going
to happen. So if you're a Jeff Whole like individual
(01:01:27):
and you've just got two million, eight million dollars lying around,
hit us up. If you don't want to do that stuff,
please check out our show on YouTube YouTube dot com
slash Conspiracy Stuff. You can watch videos of all of
these episodes that are coming out, especially our Strange News
and listener mail episodes. You'll find stuff there. Check it out,
(01:01:50):
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(01:02:10):
the good old fashioned way.
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We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
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Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. We're returning with a classic episode that
I think still mystifies all of us. Guys, Is San
Francisco just too cool for us? Are we cool enough
for Sam Fran?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Well you call it San Fran you're definite right, Yeah, Yeah,
they don't like that. It's a fun place. I haven't
been in a long time, and they say it's not
like it used to be. But boy, oh boy did
they used to get up to some fun, artsy hijinks
and they probably still do. But today we're talking about one.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Oh yes, the Latitude Society. Guys, this is the Jeff
Hole Project. Yes it is. Do you do you remember? Yes,
we did, and we got invited out to go to
the Cortege, something that we didn't We didn't have the
opportunity to go and do it, but it sounded really interesting.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
So let's roll the tape on our previous episode, what
is the Latitude Society? UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know.
(01:11):
A production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
My name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our superproducer,
all mission control decand most importantly, you are here, and
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know.
Here's a question. Who doesn't want to belong to something
bigger than themselves, Whether it's feeling like you belong to
(01:47):
a family, to an organization, to a religion of some sort.
For most people, this is a fundamental, primal drive, and
there's a bonus. It's cool to be a member of
something bigger than yourself, but it's even cooler to many
people if the thing that you are a member of
(02:08):
is exclusive, if not everybody can be as special or
as enlightened as you. It's actually that drive is a
huge problem with the world today. The intrigue of it.
It makes you feel alive. It's the basis of so
many works of fiction, including things like Obviously, as you'll
see when we explore today's topic, Folks, Obviously, the Game,
(02:32):
the nineteen ninety seventh film with Michael Douglass, and of
course the fantastic for COO's Pendulum by Umberto Echo. Today's
story is a story of curated conspiracy, part performance art,
and part Silicon Valley startup, part push for genuine adventure,
and part push for cold hard cash. We're talking about
(02:56):
something called the Latitude Society. Are the facts. Here's what
happens when you join this. Just put as we explore this,
put yourself in the mind of a person experiencing this,
and you'll get a sense of how cool it is
at the beginning.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Well, yeah, I think the first thing you have to
do is imagine that you are yourself doing whatever mundane
things it is that you do every day, no matter
how much you even enjoy, Like we enjoy our jobs,
we like doing this, but we have to. We have
a regimented schedule where we do this over and over
and over again. This is what we do. We take
(03:33):
care of our families, We you know, eat, we blah
blah blah blah blah, all the things you do. Imagine that,
and now imagine that you get an invitation to this
thing called the Latitude Society. And the way you get
the invitation is very important, and it generates so much
intrigue in someone like you, like me doing their everyday
(03:56):
things that it is there's almost no way to say no.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, I mean, you know it because it comes in
the form of a friend who is essentially inviting you
into this kind of shared experience with an invitation, a
actual physical invitation that takes the form of a blank
credit card in a sleeve like you might get at
a fancy hotel or maybe even not a fancy hotel
for your key card. They're slid into those little paper
(04:23):
sleeves or the Wi Fi code has written on only
this sleeve has a strange kind of geometric symbol on
it that's embossed and kind of a little shiny and
you know, bespoke looking, so it's already like reeks of entrigue.
And you pull out the actual card and it looks
like a blank credit card. There's a website. There's an
(04:43):
invitation code where you flip. When you flip it over
to the part where there would normally be like the signature,
it says absolute discretion, which is sort of a buzz
phrase that we're going to hear repeatedly in this story.
It's almost a mantra absolute discretion. Once you go to
the website, you enter your code, you get a selection
of different appointment times, and you lock yours in. Then
(05:07):
you show up to an address in the Mission neighborhood
of San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
At this point you will have an experience that feels
very through the looking class very alice in wonderland. And
if you have not had this spoiled for you, warning
spoilers ahead. What happens when you open the door. The
(05:32):
website for this organization has a kind of decadent description
of this, saying through the door and behind a thick
curtain was the Flux Chamber, an automated hallway with only
one way through down a wooden slide at the base
of an ornate Victorian fireplace mantle, awaiting the visitor. At
(05:53):
the bottom of the slide was a lobby area with
one red neon sign reading sh and then three doors.
So you have you know, you already have this really
cool almost David Lynchy and vibe. Whatever door you choose,
you'll go through an increasingly narrow passage surrounded by all
(06:15):
The walls are padded with black carpet, and this is
called the dark Maze. You hear music, you hear a sasceris,
whi spring voices, whispering voices, and that's what guides you
through this completely dark labyrinth. You're monitored by cameras the
whole time, which is important later. And then finally you
go through this crawl space and find yourself in what
(06:39):
they call the library chamber. This is surrounded. This is
really cool if you see it. It's surrounded by all
these bookshelves. And then there's one book on a pedestal
and it's called the Book of the Latitude. First, this
book appears to be blank.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
It does, and it's important to note that all of
the books in the room are the same book. It's
the same book that is open with blank pages, sitting
there in front of you, and you know, you just
curiosity is going to lead you to, like Ben said,
open it up, and you find that the pages are blank.
But then almost out of nowhere, you'll hear a voice,
(07:18):
and then these pages, or at least the pages that
are that the book is open to begin filling up
with the words that are being spoken to you. So
it's almost as if the book is being written in
your presence in that moment, and that's on the left
hand side, you'll get the words being written out, and
then on the right hand side you'll actually see an
illustration start to form a video of sorts playing somehow
(07:41):
within this book.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Yeah, I mean, it really is sort of an interactive
theater experience. If anyone's familiar with the company Punch Drunk,
who did the will continues to do I think probably
during COVID. It's on hiatus, but hopefully back soon. An
incredibly beautifully curated kind of theatrical experience in New York,
and I think there's other versions, but it's called Sleep
(08:03):
No More, and it's essentially like an interactive theatrical experience
where as you're progressing through this actual physical space, you
can choose your path and things happen based on which
path you choose, et cetera. This really reminds me of that,
but using whatever theatrical projection technology that they use, essentially
(08:24):
what's formed before your very eyes is this like mythos,
this sort of like base kind of fable that is
at the center of the Latitude Society's kind of lore.
And you can actually witness this for yourself in a
couple of places. There's a really good article on Vice
about it called My Year in San Francisco's two million
(08:44):
dollars startup, and also the documentary Bright Axiom, where you
can actually see it visually. It's very much worth a watch.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeap in bright Axiom is the name of the documentary.
You may also be interested in the institute. Be warned.
They are they they's somewhere between documentary and long form infomercial.
But this fable is important to the Latitude Society. It's
(09:13):
one of the first pieces of literature that people experience
when they interact with the society. It's often recited before
new adventures or new Society meetings, which they call praxis.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
I want to point this out just before we go
any further, and I just want to make sure everyone
understands everything we're describing to you here. These are physical experiences.
This is not some virtual reality thing. This is not
some web based experience that you're going through. You are
physically going through those doors, down the slide, looking at
this book filling up with pages, hearing this fable for
the first time. It's all real time, you just experiencing it.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
And then after you have experienced this fable, you are
sent off on something similar to a scavenger hunt. Here,
you're on a mission. In the mission, you do things
like go to a bar and have a coded conversation
with a bartender, and you get this special coin and
you end up using it to participate in an arcade
(10:13):
game which leads you on to another experience. It's all
very just. So this entire thing is an introduction to
the Latitude Society. Is the Latitude Society, Well, it is
a self described secret order dedicating itself to expanding human consciousness,
(10:33):
and it's vaguely locked in a conflict with forces of
darkness who are trying to stop the Society from growing
and expanding and sending their message out. Pretty exciting, right,
pretty exciting way to moonlight. So what happens once you
pass this first adventure, You are inducted as a full
(10:54):
time member and you get access to something called the
Night Book. The night Book is like a social network platform,
and this is where people get together and they tried
to decipher the various mysteries of practice and philosophy. They
also have, Like you said, Matt, the emphasis here is
(11:14):
on in person experience. So they also had town hall events.
You can see various video of this. They also had
dedicated talks and meetings. This was throughout the San Francisco
area and active members of the community could mingle and
they could openly talk about the future of society with
(11:35):
one another, because the thing is there's a fight club
vibe here that helps with the exclusivity. The society has
four kind of guiding principles. Number one, by far is
absolute discretion, meaning you're not supposed to talk about latitude
in front of people who are not evolved with latitude
unless you want to invite them, in which case you
(11:56):
give them one of those little cards. And really, you know,
it feels like it's very secretive, but it also it
makes sense logically to avoid spoilers, right, is all about surprise.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
And as Noel said, that that phrase absolute discretion was
embossed on the slip that you would get that the
card was inserted into. So that's your first your first
interaction with the Latitude Society after someone you know quietly says, hey,
can you keep a secret? Is the phrase absolute discretion.
And here's the thing about that phrase. The people or
(12:28):
the creators of the Latitude Society took great pains to
make sure that the member, the user understood that that
phrase has two different meanings, and one of them was
was essentially saying that you will be able to have
good judgment in what you decide to share what information
(12:49):
you decided to give out. The other one is essentially
just implying secrecy. So it's both of those things, right,
That's what Ben's talking about. You get to choose as
a member who else becomes a member and they had
And like we were saying, there are several other tenants
that were very important to Latitude society.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Yeah, value it. We value experiences over things. Is that's
the second tenet, and I think that's something a lot
of people can agree with, especially you'll find this belief
common in people who have lived a long time. People
are at the end of their lives, tend to enjoy
the experiences they had or the memories of those, more
(13:30):
so than the gadgets they accrue. So I get that
one third tenet we give in order to become part
of a story greater than ourselves. Think about it. What
does giving mean there? We'll get to it. And the
fourth is freedom from dogma. So the person who invites
you is thereafter referred to as your ascendant, and you
(13:51):
are their descendants. It's a bit like a less sinister
version of an upline or downline in a multi level
marketing scheme, and they want to be very clear, the
Latitude Society is not multi marketing.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
No, and it's also not nexium.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
And it's also not nexium. Anybody who is a member
of this they don't, for instance, have a quota of
other people they had to invite or anything like that.
But you want people to be in one of this adventure.
So after you finished this first mission they call it
book one, then you are given a code word that
(14:28):
gets you further access on the website, and then you
get the opportunity to invite other people, theoretically as many
as you would like. So just like Fouco's Pendulum, the
majority of people involved knew this was a game, but
felt it was more fun and more immersive if you
took it seriously. So many people did, and it did
(14:51):
not hurt that the group responsible for creating the Latitude
Society named Nonchalance, was staffed by very talent to creatives.
They made it compelling, you know what I mean. It
didn't seem it seemed real, It felt real in a
way it was.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
I also wanted to point out one tiny detail from
the experiential part, the first kind of down the rabbit hole.
Visit to that mission. You know facility I call it.
There is a part when you go to that window
where it says in the neon there's like kind of
like a shrouded figure behind sort of I guess frosted glass.
You're not quite sure if it's even a real person
(15:29):
or not. And like a drawer pops out and you're
instructed to place all of your personal possessions in that drawer.
So it's got this like inherent kind of decoupling from like,
you know, the humdrum day to day of existence and identity,
not to mention things like, you know, your phone and
all of that, and it's actually taking you out and
(15:51):
especially like a place like San Francisco Silicon Valley that's
the epicenter of this type of like decoupling, you know,
from real life and thrusting you into this place where
you have to separate yourself from all of o those
trappings and literally, you know, go down a rabbit hole
of actual physical experience as opposed to virtual.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
And then at some point, while you're experiencing this or
while you're hearing this show, you have to ask yourself,
what exactly is this thing? I would say it's immersive theaters.
There are a lot of things like this. It's similar
to projects from places like Cirrembi Playhouse in the Atlanta area,
multiple haunted houses in the US around the world, various
(16:32):
theater projects in New York. It's also a networking opportunity.
I mentioned this on an earlier Listener mail segment. People
tend to want to be prometheate, whether or not they've
like earned that feeling. We want to be the bringers
of knowledge often rather than the receivers. So this became
(16:54):
a way of looking very cool to friends or colleagues.
Met somebody at a business lunch, They're dope. You want
them to feel the same way about you. Slide in
one of those little black cards. I can't tell you anymore.
Absolute discretion, right, and then maybe it leads to better
things in your working life. But what what else was
(17:16):
the point? What was actually going on here behind the
scenes of this behind the scenes underground endeavor.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, it's not like this was a cheap thing to produce.
You're talking about physical elements, like you said, with people
working very hard to create a story and things, and
then going to various places throughout the city and planting
a bartender, making sure that bartender is going to give
out the information making coins that have to go. I mean,
(17:45):
it's a production, this is expensive stuff. Why would you
spend all that money to do this.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
In multiple locations too? We mentioned going to an arcade
that's another physical location with all of these kind of
like bespoke sort of psycho like looking arcade machines, one
of which, when you put that coin in, like you're
mentioning Ben, a deity appears to you, which is as
a theme that we're going to see throughout the story
sort of looks almost like the creepy rabbit from Donnie Darko,
(18:14):
only it's more of like a half man's face with
these weird eye stalks that don't have eyes, and and
he in sort of like again like serial killer voice,
disguiser voice, gives you instructions on where to go next,
and you know, he starts feeding you these kind of
philosophical lines about the praxis and all of that good stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
So what was the point an expensive production, multiple rented
locations in the city with the highest cost of living
in the country. It's a it's a it's not a
small amount overhead here. What else was the latitude society
and what were the motivations for creating it. We'll explore
(18:54):
this afterward from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy.
To understand the Latitude Society, we have to understand the
organization I mentioned earlier, Nonchalance, along with two people, Jeff
(19:15):
Hall and Kat Meller. Jeff Hull is the company's founder.
He started Nonchalance in the early two thousands. Kat Meller
is one was one of the primary employees, and there
were other people. It takes a village right to make
a conspiracy. There were artist, community engagement experts, various engineers.
(19:38):
The money for this came from Jeff Hall directly. He
gave He gave two million dollars. We came to find out,
or that's what's believed, that he gave two million dollars
to get this thing started. How does one end up
with two million dollars such that you say, I want
(19:59):
to make a weird conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
A good way to make two million dollars is to,
you know, have money given to you through your family.
We've talked about wealth in the United States and countries
throughout the world that have a long history, and how
one of the best ways to just become filthy rich
is to get it from people who came before you
(20:21):
in your family. So there's something that happened with Jeff
holl His father he created an incredible company that was
valued just under five hundred million dollars and it was
sold to Goldman Sacks in nineteen ninety nine for five
hundred and thirty one million dollars. And maybe that's how
(20:41):
he got that two million dollars. But at least according
to Jeff, in response to that Vice article that we
mentioned before, he states that he actually made his wealth
or it began his wealth working for his father's company
before it was sold to Goldman Sacks.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
And that he became a partner when the firm was
acquired by Goldman Sachs, so mainly and he wrote to
the s F FIST and then you know, he wrote
the same message device as you said, where where he
was taking issue primarily with the implication that he was
a trust fund kid, and he said he found it belittling,
(21:16):
which is understandable. It's not a phrase. I don't think
it's a phrase a lot of people use to self identify,
you know what.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
It's also inherently dismissive and unfair people that are fortunate
enough to be in that situation. It's one thing if
you just lean on that money and do nothing, or
just you know, live some opulent life of privilege where
you don't actually contribute anything. But I would argue this
is an example of taking that privilege and converting it
into something interesting, which I think is you know, should
(21:46):
be applauded.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Well, the Latitude Society is not the first iteration of
this that Nonchalance has done. They tried something earlier called
the Jed June Institute, which I think is a cool name.
That's what that other documentary in the Institute is about.
This was another a similar theme. You're crossing through the
(22:12):
city of San Francisco on kind of a scavenger hunt
immersive adventure game. But here's the secret. Here's the secret
to this secret society. And it's something that some of
the ascendants and descendants did not care for when they
learned about this. The Latitude Society was not just an
artistic statement. It was a business, and in theory was
(22:36):
a very smart one. Hull was thinking in terms of
a theme park of the mind. I would say, is
a fair description. Do you think that's a fair description, guys?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
I think it absolutely is. And also this like this
push pull between artistic pure artistic expression and creativity and
making money is like tail as old as time, right,
and so many artists, brilliant artists are very bad business people,
and it's interesting when you see that kind of like
that I guess, I don't know, conflict. There's another interesting
(23:09):
kind of group that reminds me of this called meow Wolf,
and there's a fabulous documentary about them, and it started
off as this collective of just like minded weirdos in
Santa Fe, which has kind of a stuffy art scene
that's like very you know, like exclusive in that everything
is very expensive, you know, and kind of boring, and
(23:31):
like these kind of like scene kids like who were
into like DIY punk type shows and weird music started
this group to kind of be a counterbalance to that.
But it became so successful they started getting investments from
folks like George R. Martin and essentially turned it into
this giant business. Some people were less enthused about that
(23:51):
direction than others, and I think that's what we're seeing here.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Yeah. The weird thing is there's this intense dichotomy between
what was presented internally at nonchalance. What was presented to
people who are participating in this artistic endeavor. The idea
is that they would one day be able to like
like it was startup, thinking right like, let's get it going,
(24:17):
Let's prime the pump as much as we can, let's
go hard on the paint, and eventually we will monetize this.
We will make it self sustaining. Holl said. The vision
was to create an immersive narrative experience that rivaled a
theme park ride and production value, but was embedded into
the urban landscape of San Francisco. And they had a
deck or a PowerPoint and when the when it was
(24:40):
presented internally, it was a quote growth oriented business model
with an identifiable product and service. So they were definitely
talking turkey behind the scenes. It would not be easy
to monetize this. It would be a tall milkshake because
the society was, as you said, Matt, hugely expensive endeavor.
(25:01):
We're talking about even not talking about renting multiple properties
in a very expensive urban area. We're talking about technical design,
hours of work, ID eight ing and assembling this stuff,
these elaborate, ornate spaces. It took three years to build
that first place, which really does have like this wooden slide.
(25:22):
It's crazy and when they finally opened it to members,
people weren't sure how to react. And it's pretty impressive
too that they did this for three years without spilling
the beans. But again, the price tag on that, according
to employee former employees of the organization, was a cool
two mil. And here's why a lot of people got
(25:46):
turned off. We were talking about money that was started
as investment, but how did they plan to monetize the
user experience? If we want to just keep being solas
in corporate about it. Once you got invited, you were in,
and you know you did you did the book one
or the first Mission First Adventure. Then we said you
(26:07):
could theoretically invite as many people as you wish. That's
because the invitations were sold to you on a per
card basis. So let's say you're Paul Mission Control decad
you want to invite some friends, you want to invite
your pals Matt Nolan Ben to this to this adventure.
(26:29):
Then you pay twenty five dollars a card, but later
that was raised to thirty two dollars a card. And
then you look around and you see on this website
there's all kinds of stuff you can buy very very
weirdly specific. Oh.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Absolutely. And then that's why I think it's interesting that
people didn't kind of that the people like got some
out of shape, because this is like, this is the
deal from the beginning. You know, you it's a closed
website where you can't even log into it until you
get that card with that unique code. And then once
you go through, like you said, bend that book one experience,
that's when you get access to what's called the marketplace
(27:03):
and you can buy shirts with that slogan absolute discretion,
which the author of the Vice article found very ironic,
which I think is sort of the point. It's it's like,
it's fun the idea of buying a T shirt that
says absolute discretion, and yeah, that's right. You buy these cards,
you can distribute them to whomever you wish. And then
(27:25):
doesn't that make it kind of like a I don't know,
like a pyramid thing where you kind of like you
you buy one, you get it, and then you buy
more and then give it others, and then they give
it more and it branches off. I guess not not really,
it's not. Yeah, it's it's it's it's a little different.
It's not certainly not taking advantage of folks in the
same way.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, because you're not. You're not making money from the
cards that are sold after you.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
That's right now.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
Al And like you know, like I was saying earlier,
even though they have some some language that's reminiscent of MLM's,
there's not a baked in quota. No, you don't get
in trouble if you don't get to twenty people per
month or something like that. So it's not ponzias, it's
not MLM. But they do want to make it profitable.
(28:10):
The thing is, when you're talking two million dollars and
you're trying to recoup that based on the sale of
T shirts and pendants and invitation cards, you're looking at
a very large, a nearly Sissiphian hill to climb. It
(28:31):
would be very difficult to cover that initial investment in
a reasonable amount of time. Some journalists estimated the math.
They said, Okay, we think over the part over the
span of the Latitude Society during its heyday, maybe two
thousand people were giving cards and participated in some part
(28:51):
of the initiation. They went to the website. They never
showed up to the place, or they showed up to
the place and then they left and just didn't pursue
the rest of book one, or they did the whole
first book and then they said, Okay, that's it. That
was a great weekend, but I'm done. If two thousand
people did this, they participated in some way, then that
(29:12):
means the most revenue from that part of the part
of the business that Latitude could make was about sixty
thousand dollars, which is cool, but it's not two million.
And so later they did something that teed off a
lot of the members, a lot of the existing members
who were very into this adventure in society. They instituted
(29:34):
an annual membership fee. It's over three hundred bucks. It's
still less than a burning Man ticket, people are quick
to point out. But people were like, what is the
mission of this changing And to the you know, to
the participants, it felt like maybe it was, but to
the creators, no, this was just a further pursuing the
(29:55):
original plan.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
I think it's almost like the they started, you know,
the members started taking things upon themselves because they like, really,
the vice article is I think the most straightforward, Like
the film is interesting, but it almost has an agenda
a little bit like it really, like you said at
the top bend, it almost feels like a weird kind
of commercial for the thing, and it feels like it
(30:18):
has a little bit of an agenda. But the vice
article is from the perspective of someone that goes through
the whole process, and what ends up happening is, you know,
this person starts wearing that Absolute Discretion T shirt and
using it to identify other people who have done the
experience in the wild, and then those people start connecting
with each other on like forums. Then they start actually
(30:40):
doing kind of little, you know, gatherings that are sort
of I guess I'm not sanctioned or whatever they need
it to be sanctioned, but they really do start to
form a community around the lore and around the whole
experience of this thing, you know, again, because it's almost
like a religion at that point, it starts to at
(31:01):
least have the sense of community that a religion can
have at its best. And so I think those people
who really start to get a real value out of
this in their lives start to see it becoming quote
unquote becoming more commercial. Maybe that's where they start not
digging that because they feel like it's taking something that's
very special and personal to them and you know, bastardizing
(31:22):
it in some way. But again, to the creators, this
is what they've had planned all along. So is it
really them doing anything but what they already kind of
set out to do.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Yeah. And the writer for Vice, Lydia Lawrenson, she had
quotes from several members. I don't want to spoil any things.
She had several quotes from members who were talking about
this very thing, like why the money, why is this happening?
And one of the big takeaways is that this felt
(31:53):
to them like a gift that they had been given,
like someone handed them a free card. Then they got
to go through this experience, and then they got to
choose whether or not they paid for anything. Right now
they were being told that they had to pay, and
it was a gift, became a burden essentially, Well, I'm
sorry what.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Had to pay in order to continue doing what?
Speaker 3 (32:16):
Going to these things like they were doing real world events,
so those.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Were official events. There were official events, but then also
just little gatherings of members.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
Privately right right, similar to a less sinister version of
squirreling and scientology, which we can talk about a little
bit later, but squirreling is scientology term for when someone
takes what they describe as l Ron Hubbard's technology or
(32:48):
tech and they use it in an unsanctioned way. It's
similar to maybe the way that the Catholic Church in
days of old looked at Protestants, you know, I mean, like, hey,
you're taking you're taking stuff that we both know is true,
but you're doing the wrong doing it the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
You're doing it the way like the film industry looks
at pirating movies, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Maybe, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Mean it's like you're stealing. You're basically saying you're taking
our stuff and you're using it, you know, and you're
not like giving us our due or like yeah, I
don't know, like the paying part certainly is at the
heart of it. But yeah, you're exactly right. I think
squirreling is a perfect comparison.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
Let's think too about social media in the Internet. One
thing that the Internet has made abundantly clear in every
every culture and every iteration is that if people have
something for free, there's something deeply offensive to people. If
that changes to a paid service.
Speaker 3 (33:47):
Whatever, New York Times.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Right, I say that as a guy with a subscription.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
Really really quickly, just slightly slightly off off the subject.
But it's sort of like what you know, Apple is
talking about potentially putting podcasts, siloing podcasts behind paywalls, are
making it a subscription thing, or it's a little vague
what they're talking about doing, but that would be the
exactly what you're talking about, because Apple is sort of
the arbiter of like this industry of free content, you know,
(34:14):
AD supported free content, and if all of a sudden
that change, I think people would like lose their minds.
Speaker 1 (34:22):
And the reason I mentioned social media is because we
can see clear parallels here, Right, social media, A lot
of the platforms thrive on exclusivity in the beginning, Right,
I can only have a Facebook page if I go
to this school, or then if later if I go
to a school. We see this time and time again.
(34:46):
People want to be promethea, they want to be in
the know. And then as it grows and more people
are involved, more people are aware of this fight club,
then the problems grow as well. It's a symptom of scale.
If I wanted to be all ted talkie and Popsie
about it symptoms.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
Well, yeah, cause they're they're they're doing testing on those
early users. You know, they're like they're literally beta testing everything,
including that experience that we described to you at the
top of this episode, like going in and checking out
that book, down the slide, all that stuff. They're testing
to see how people react. And it's very very helpful
to keep it low number and.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
How effective like it is in like making people want
to continue on, you know what I mean, Like that
experience that first pop is what really gets you, you know,
kind of converted almost right where you're either like, wow,
this is something really special. I was given this gift.
They had to really tailor that experience to get the
exact right kind of you know, punch to make people
(35:46):
feel that way.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
And imagine how cool it is, just objectively, how cool
it is if you're say at a at a at
a bar somewhere let's call it the Sycamore, and you're
rocking your absolute discretion t and then you you know,
you're just hanging out and you see somebody come in
like furtively and have a weird whispered conversation with the
(36:09):
bartender and they get this coin and they turn around
and they see you and their jaw drops and you're like, aha,
I'm one of them. Like people love that stuff. That's
why you have all these coded signals that like the
when we did our episode on secret languages, right a
city in a society speaks to itself in an ecosystem,
(36:33):
and I guarantee you that on any given day in
a city, there are people who are subtly communicating to
one another right under your nose in one method or another,
a signal by something, signaled by a piece of jewelry,
a particular piece of clothing, et cetera. I think it's
I think it's so cool, But you guys are right.
(36:54):
People had people have problems with this, Like a guy
named Thomas Loetz who was speaking with Lydia Lawrence and
over Advice objected because he felt the monetization was a
blow to the things about the society that were important
to him and his colleagues. It gave them meaning. It
(37:17):
seemed like there was a space where they were coming
together as a community in a non performative way. He
felt like there was a genuine connection and they were
taking taking dedicated time to reflect on ideas and a
lot of these people were in, you know, very stressful
day jobs. They're very go go go, you know, with
(37:40):
high stakes and stuff. So the idea that you're hanging
out with people and it's not about a work thing,
it's just hanging out with people because you like hanging
out and you like the stuff you do together. That's
a beautiful feeling and that seemed very meaningful to people,
and they liked to be in a secret society. There
(38:03):
was a story. We're part of the story where the
audience and we're the author. That's amazing. But you'll notice
as student listeners, we've been talking about the Latitude Society
and past tense. Why we'll tell you after a word
from our sponsor. So Latitude had problems. We're pretty I
(38:30):
think we're pretty clear about that. And the thing is
people agree on what they like about it, but then
they disagree on what they didn't like. As Jeff Hole
put it, his number one problem that he saw people
having is that people weren't sure how to interpret this,
how to digest it. He said, the Latitude Society may
(38:51):
have served multiple purposes, but ultimately it could not be
all things to all people. So maybe everybody just wasn't
on the same page. Maybe that's where the issues began.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And there's a
quote here again from that Vice article from Matt Weinberger.
He's a person who you know, took part in the
Latitude Society, and here's his quote. Some people treated it
as a game. That makes sense, right, some people as
a social club and a networking opportunity, and some treated
(39:25):
it as a religion. And he mentions that at some
point there was a Reddit thread created by, you know,
someone who had heard about the society and then joined.
And then this person who created this thread believed they
joined a cult, so they took it very, very seriously
and laid out a lot of the things that were
not supposed to be spoken to non members. And this person, Matt,
(39:49):
is saying that it kind of spoiled the fun of
the society itself after everybody knew what it was, or
at least a certain number of people.
Speaker 1 (39:58):
And here's the other thing. Latitude wasn't just a business.
It was a genre of business that we will call
a startup. Startups have different rules. Startups have a very
high rate of attrition. Startups can do enormously wonderful and
disruptive things. They can also fall flat. They're risky. Like
(40:19):
a lot of startups, Nonchalance did not seem to have
a very clear focus in the opinion of observers, and
they just ran out of money for the Latitude Society
before they could finish the overall arc of the story
they wanted to tell. The founder himself estimates that the
(40:41):
daily cost of the Latitude Society just keeping the lights on,
keeping the rent paid, keeping the weird coins in circulation,
that was three grand a day.
Speaker 2 (40:52):
Yeah, and apparently they didn't even have a very let's
say develop up to business plan or well not business plan,
but they weren't keeping books particularly well. They didn't have
some of the most basic kind of bookkeeping sheets that
you would have to have, especially with the operation that's
(41:15):
expensive in a city as expensive as San Francisco. You know,
any business startup or otherwise keep something called a profit
and loss ledger, which allows you to keep track of
the comings and goings of money. You got to spend
money to make money, but if your losses outweigh your profits,
that's not a good look. And this could well be
(41:35):
an example of you know, one of the I guess
luxuries or privileges of being independently wealthy and sort of
doing this like as a personal project, not being super
meticulous about the bigger picture of the of the finances.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
Yeah. Yeah, there's something a little bit aristocratic about it.
I could see critics taking that stance. I'm always reminded of.
There's an Italian publishing house that I really I really love.
I respect the books they put up, and they're called Resoli,
and I believe it's resolute. The owner is this old
(42:17):
or was this old school Italian aristocrat And I was
reading an interview with him where one day he just
decided to build a hedge maze, like a huge hedge
maze and invite his friends over. That's the kind of
stuff that most people can't do, you know what I mean.
And now we have to ask ourselves to your point,
nol is is the perspective then for this person? Are
(42:40):
they just thinking I am I am creating this thing
that I want to give to you, and the only
reason money becomes involved is because I want to make
it a thing that can stay around, you know, instead
of something ephemeral. But at ninety thousand dollars a month,
this these conversations have to happen. So there were a
(43:06):
couple of ideas and how to how to stem the
financial hemorrhaging, and one of those was, let's stop emphasizing physicality,
let's move entirely to virtual reality. And that's that's a bummer.
That also makes me love your New York Times example, Matt,
(43:26):
because we've seen so many print publications say Okay, we're
going to go entirely online, we're going to keep a
subscription fee, and so for people who have subscribed to
a paper and received a physical copy for years and
years and years, they feel like they feel like they're
getting robbed because they don't have the thing. And this
is an even more extreme example, I would argue because
(43:46):
the entirety of the focus of the Latitude Society was
in person adventure, a type of a very clever type
of augmented reality. That's really what's happening. So of course
folks are going to push back against this. And there's
another article by a former member called the author's name
(44:07):
is Caveat Magister, and Caveat compares this again to Burning
Man and says that the exclusivity of the Latitude Society
may have gone too far, leading to that practice that
scientology would call squirreling, and there was a really i
(44:29):
would say, inspiring organic thing to happen. Active members were like,
you know, I don't really need to do the official experience,
and I don't really need to worry about my ascendant
or whatever. I've met some people. We can just hang out,
we can do our own thing inspired by this. I
don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's kind of like,
(44:50):
you know, at some point, if you're a fan of Legos,
at some point you don't worry about what you're supposed
to build from the box. You just build your own stuff.
There's still Legos, and you're still having a heck of
a time. I just say, I don't see anything wrong
with what these folks are doing. And by this point,
(45:10):
of course, yes, they're paying three hundred something a year
for a membership.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, and of course that the push to then have
a membership whittled away at the membership very quickly immediately,
and you know, that's that's obviously a problem if you're
trying to build a user base essentially like a startup
does want to do. Now, we've got some other criticisms
from people here about the Latitude Society and what was
(45:39):
happening there. And a big criticism comes from someone named
Rebecca Power, who was known by the writer of that
Vice article that we discussed there, and she didn't have
a great experience essentially going through it, and it started
on that book. One experience where you know, she looked
at the book and everything, because she was contacted almost
(46:02):
immediately after that by the person that invited her to
the society, and he stated something a little strange, something
we didn't note before this is that in many of
the rooms there, the physical space that you enter, there
were cameras with you know, lights as cameras generally do have,
like a CCTV camera has a light that lets you
(46:25):
know you're being watched or that the camera's on at
least or recording. And he mentioned her that, oh, I
was watching you when you went through the fable, when
you know, you sat down and you got that book
read to you. And that kind of creeped her out
a lot, just the thought that someone was there actually
watching her the whole time, not interacting with her, just
(46:46):
surveilling her and observing her. So that was the first
little thing that happened, but then she felt it got
weirder from there.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, she saw an imbalance in the agreement. Some kind
of information as symmetry would be a drive phrase for it.
You do have to sign this terms of service thing, right,
but as Rebecca Power found out, there wasn't a formal
(47:15):
procedure for releasing yourself from it. And she said, I
know the employees are monitoring us, but who is monitoring them?
And there's another.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Such a good point, but I totally forgot about this.
That's before you even set up your appointment, right when
you sign that, so you have no idea what you're
signing up for, and you're just gonna put all your
info in.
Speaker 1 (47:36):
There exactly exactly. And there's that detail you mentioned about
being observed. Is so creepy because she found out this
Facebook message that the person who invited her I had
been watching her the whole time. So she got spooked
and she asked that the group deactivate her membership. So
(47:59):
this is where we get like to the copendulum, has
the performance become real? Point? She says, when I left,
I became a security risk. People I knew made vague
threats that I would regret leaving or talking about it.
A roommate of mine stopped telling me where he was
going when he left the house. Friends I trusted contacted
(48:20):
me and played stupid about their own involvement in order
to suss out what I knew. That's wild, Like imagine,
imagine you can't like imagine you go to Disney World
and you're supposed to spend a week there, and you
go for a day and you're like, all right, I'm
not gonna go and then you like, you go home early,
and the next day you get these weird calls and
(48:42):
messages from your friends who are like, better not talk
about Disney World.
Speaker 3 (48:47):
Keep keep you.
Speaker 2 (48:49):
The first rule of Disney World is you don't talk
about Disney World.
Speaker 3 (48:52):
Yeah. I don't think those parks would function that way
if that was.
Speaker 1 (48:57):
I love it, though, it's like.
Speaker 4 (48:59):
The uh I got to do.
Speaker 1 (49:04):
In my head. It calls you late at night, come on.
Speaker 2 (49:10):
Although, isn't there that secret members only club at Disney World.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah, that's the same semi secret you know. But yeah,
it's supposed to be nice. The menu seems cool.
Speaker 3 (49:21):
I want to stay on Rebecca Power just for a moment.
So one of the other things that she really didn't
like there is that she went to an actual gathering,
one of these things they call praxis or a Praxis praxi,
and someone there essentially Dockster, not really, but just you know,
mentioned they knew what she did and knew who she was,
(49:42):
but it was said aloud. That's one of the main
reasons that she left. And the really interesting thing about
Rebecca is that she continued this kind of work afterwards.
She started a thing that had a different name at
the time. It's changed names, but now it is called
hoax h ax Is. It's in San Francisco, and it's
(50:03):
the same kind of thing. It's a company that creates experiences.
They're an interactive design studio and they like to create
quote novel situations and powerful experiences. So same kind of thing.
She continued on to do that stuff, just outside of
this other group nonchalance.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
That's a very good point, Matt. So now we're reaching
the end we talked in past tense. You see some
of the problems. Some people worried about their own privacy,
some people have what they feel are ethical objections to
the business model. And then also you can understand this
(50:44):
from the perspective of the employees of Nonchalance and the
people responsible for making these experiences, they might feel kind
of underappreciated. The Hey, man, I gave you a thing.
I'm just trying to I'm trying to keep it going,
you know what I mean. Like, you can't go to
the sandwich shop get a free sandwich every day and
(51:07):
expect those sandwiches to just appear. We have. It's a
terrible comparison, but you get it. So after the membership
fee roll out, there's internal division within Nonchalance. Employees resign
and then Jeff Hull sanctions an article about the society
(51:31):
where he says various critical things or various not you know,
super happy fun times, holding hands singing Kumbaya things about
the organization. And this itself is a violation of that
absolute discretion policy, is it not? And in less than
a week after that article publishes, Jeff shuts down the website.
(51:53):
He leaves a note that the San Francisco House of
Latitude is closed and the society he closes down on Monday,
September twenty eighth, twenty fifteen. This was news reportedly to
several of the employees involved. As happened, you know, recently,
in the days of the pandemic, some people just showed
(52:14):
up to a job that no longer existed, which is
a massive bummer.
Speaker 3 (52:18):
It really is.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
I do just want to point out too. I think
we've made it pretty clear, but a lot of these things,
this idea of these rules quote unquote, are very loose,
and it's not like there's a set like a code
of ethics or a conduct you know. I mean, even
their whole idea of discretion is ironic in a lot
of ways because like it's a secret, but it's also
(52:40):
tell your friends. So it's it's very loose, all of
this stuff, and to the point where it's clearly meant
to be a bit of an ironic performance art thing,
almost commenting on the types of the way social media
works and the kind of you know what you're saying
Ben about how exclusivity in and of itself makes things
(53:03):
more attractive. And now we've got things like this new
social media platform Clubhouse, that's once again based entirely on exclusivity,
and it's very much a Silicon Valley thing that's about
networking and being more anonymous, less tied to your persona,
and more just based on the worth of the things
that you say to other members. So I think there's
(53:26):
a lot of that that's sort of some of the
folks that really started taking this seriously seem to have
maybe have been lost on them a little bit, which
is interesting.
Speaker 1 (53:35):
To me because again it's the definition of what this
is changes based on the perspective of the people and
their degree of involvement. So after Jeff Houll closes down
Latitude Society egoes on Facebook and you post an update,
(54:00):
some people copied and pasted it, and then the reactions
were mixed. Some folks were like, you know, I get it,
and I sympathized with you. Some people were angry, like,
don't you're ruining the game or you're ruining the community
that I've come to love the whole, writes the following,
He says, I've been rolling a boulder up a hill
(54:22):
for four years and it kept getting heavier. It was
my most audacious undertaking besides parenthood, and getting to the
top meant success. Recently, as my shoulders began to give
out under the weight, I looked around, and seeing no
relief in sight, I decided to do the most healthy
thing I could possibly do.
Speaker 3 (54:40):
Let go Oh man, where do you think that boulder went?
I wonder what's on the other side? You know, Yeah,
it's bolder.
Speaker 4 (54:48):
The intro to the third game, right right, you go
throughout cities in the United States and you're searching for
twenty twenty five a tall boulder.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
That's just rolling downhill somewhere. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yeah, randomized locations. The pieces are there, we'll workshop it.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
Yeah. So he writes this thing on Facebook, and then
he also writes a large post on the website, which
is the Latitude dot Com And if you go to
the wayback machine at archive dot org you can find it.
It's https called slash slash the Latitude dot Com slash
(55:28):
book slash one. And if you put that in, you
can find this thing that he wrote called Epilogue from
the San Francisco House, and you can get a lot
of the info in there, and you can really read
at least Jeff's version of events and how the whole
thing ended and why.
Speaker 1 (55:46):
And you know, he said it'll be an enduring, inescapable mystery.
How a game built to offer shared whimsy inspiration play
can result in trauma for the people most closely evolved,
which feels like it acknowledgment of the of the conflicts
that the employees had. On the night the society closed,
(56:09):
about one hundred people went to a local bar that's
important during that first mission, the Sycamore, which I mentioned earlier,
and they got together, they commiserated. I believe many of
the former members or people who have met one another
through this remain friends today, which is awesome. It's sad
(56:29):
that it was an abrupt end to such a bold endeavor,
but again, people still remember their times, their experiences in
the group. It left an impression, and you know, like
you're to your point about Rebecca Power, this is likely
not going to be the last thing of its sort
because I don't know. It is just my opinion here.
(56:50):
I think this stuff is cool. I would I like
the idea as long as no one's getting hurt, you know,
full speed ahead. But what do you think? What can
you guys glean from this? Would you participate in something
like this if you got a mysterious envelope or no,
it need to be better than an envelope, would it be? Dude?
Speaker 3 (57:09):
If I got a record like that, I'm I'm going,
I mean, I'm there, Please break me out of this thing.
A little bit uh in on nonchalance dot com n
O n C h A l A n CE dot
com slash about you can read the missing mission statement
essentially of nonchalance. And this is the way it starts.
(57:32):
Picture in your mind a cartoon character sleepwalking. Now it
goes on to talk about this thing that they call
divine nonchalance. This is this concept that the sleepwalking character
somehow moves on through the city without ever getting hurt somehow,
because if they're just casually walking even though they're asleep,
and nothing has hurt them just by chance. Really, what
(57:55):
this is speaking to me, whether they're saying saying it
or not, is imagine that we are all just sleepwalking
in our day to day lives, and what they are
going to do is break us out of that, if
only momentarily. With these kinds of experiences that they're creating,
like the Jajhun Institute. I think the thing they created,
which is a whole could be a whole other episode
(58:17):
or just you know, something for you to check out
on your own that we won't spoil here. It's worth
your time. It's fascinating because.
Speaker 1 (58:24):
We definitely spoiled the Latitude Society. Yeah, yeah, we heavily
spoiled that part.
Speaker 3 (58:30):
But this, the efforts put into changing people's minds slightly,
to getting us to think a little differently by placing
us in what they call a genuine space and giving
us us a user and experience like this, I think
that is genuinely worthwhile. I think you can create great
(58:54):
change in an individual and a group of people that way,
and it could be highly positive, but it could also
be it could also be really dangerous because it feels
like the same thing that Nxium did, but with the
nefarious goals at the center of it, right, and with
any cult that started, it's the same kind of thing.
(59:15):
You're going to give somebody a little different experience and
you're going to try and change the way they're thinking
a little bit, remove part of that identity that's kind
of weighing them down every day, and in this case,
instead of shaping them to then just constantly fund money,
which they kind of did at the end there, right,
like a startup. It wasn't that crazy, right, I don't know.
(59:38):
To me, this feels positive.
Speaker 1 (59:40):
Yeah, I think we're all kind of on the same
page there, Like it does feel like overall and principle,
these are cool things to have in the world. Bust
out of the matrix, you know what I mean, hack
your cognition and your perspective. What's not to love? But
it is so fascinating because these things are possible and
(01:00:00):
worth doing. We'd love to hear your opinions or your
experiences with things like this, because I'm sure there are
more examples of this phenomenon out there. And also question
folks listening today, if you were creating something like this,
what sort of experience would you give people? And maybe
(01:00:21):
the other the other side of the coin here is
when do endeavors like this go too far? Let us know.
You can find us on the internet. We're on Facebook,
We're on Twitter, We're on Instagram. We'd like to recommend
heres where it gets crazy on Facebook if you are
a Facebook user. We also have a phone number. If
(01:00:45):
you do not sip the social meds, you can dial
us directly.
Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
That's right. We are one eight three three STDWITK three
minutes is the time you shall have to leave your message.
Please let us know if it is okay to use
your message on one of our weekly listener mail episodes,
and let us know what to call you or not
call you, or if you want to be completely anonymous,
we are absolutely cool with that.
Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
That's right. Call us and let us know the kind
of experience you want to give people. I think I
told you guys about the interactive cannabis slash hallucinogen facility
I want to create, right, yes, yeah, yeah yeah, I
have elaborate plans for that, and one day it's going
to happen. So if you're a Jeff Whole like individual
(01:01:27):
and you've just got two million, eight million dollars lying around,
hit us up. If you don't want to do that stuff,
please check out our show on YouTube YouTube dot com
slash Conspiracy Stuff. You can watch videos of all of
these episodes that are coming out, especially our Strange News
and listener mail episodes. You'll find stuff there. Check it out,
(01:01:50):
like and subscribe as you do if you're down with it,
and if you don't want to do oh and also, hey,
why not leave a review on whatever podcastcher you use
to listen to this show? It would be great just
to see any and all of those. It helps the
show more than you know. If you don't want to
do any of that stuff, you can always reach us
(01:02:10):
the good old fashioned way.
Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Hey Jonas!
Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.