April 12, 2022 • 43 mins
If you've ever been to Philadelphia then you've probably walked right by a Toynbee Tile embedded in the street. But what's the meaning on these mysterious installations, and who is doing it? Listen in to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here too, which
makes this stuff you should know the podcast. Oh you
(00:22):
know what? Say small talk? While I look up? Who
gave me this idea? Why do you keep doing this
to me? I have to like entertain everybody. You once
did this to me on stage. Get this everybody. We
were on stage at the Bell House in Brooklyn and
Chuck said he had to go to the bathroom all
of a sudden, and I was left on stage, um,
having to entertain everybody while he just hung out backstage.
(00:44):
I don't think you even went to go to the bathroom.
And long story short, I ended up showing off my moonwalk. Yeah,
but I totally went to the bathroom. You think that
was all a bit. Yeah, maybe you went and took
some drugs to keep going on stage, but I'm sure
in the green room you didn't even need to go
do those in the bathroom. Uh No. I genuinely had
(01:07):
to pee such that I didn't think I could make
it through the show. I've I've felt that way before.
To San Antonio. Um I had to run off the
stage once because of that. That's right, all right, I
got you, I got it. Uh, this idea. Initially this
is on my list, but I forgot about it, but
then was reminded by Alexander or Alex Ramos and State
(01:32):
College Pennsylvania. All right, um, well thanks a lot, Alex Ramos.
This is a great idea. Tiles. Had you ever heard
of this? Sure? Had you not? Well? No, I just
said it had long been on my list. Okay, that's right.
Where did you hear of it? Uh? It just one
of those things that pops up on the internet and
(01:53):
you're like, oh, let me read about this. This looks
interesting for sure, and it is definitely interesting, but um
in it would have been I think even more interesting
ten years ago before the mystery was virtually solved. True,
but it's still interesting if you ask me. Yeah, And
I think this is one of those where we should
very clearly tell everyone what we're talking about right now. Okay,
(02:17):
So what we're talking about is a phenomenon called the
Toynbee tiles where in in the asphalt on the street,
um on street corners and crosswalks and intersections, all over
the um the northeast, seemingly concentrated in Philadelphia, but also
(02:39):
going as far west as I think Kansas City, and
then also strangely down in Chile, Argentina and Brazil. These
these tiles bearing some really bizarre messages cut out of
linoleum and again embedded into the asphalt of the street
started appearing and have appeared mysterious sleep. No one has
(03:00):
any idea or any any demonstrable proof of who is
actually doing this, but they have been doing it since
at least the mid eighties and conceivably still going on
today right uh. And they are known as the Toynbee tiles.
They're about the size of a license plate. And the
(03:21):
general main message that you see on most of these
is as follows, and it's in a very distinct script.
It is generally all caps, cut out letters made of linoleum,
cut out linoleum, and it says this Toynbee that is
t O I N B E Toynbee idea. Underneath that
(03:43):
it says in Kubrick's two thousand one, underneath that it
says resurrect dead, and underneath that it says on planet Jupiter.
And then a lot of tiles will have these little
tags underneath and much smaller script that say all kinds
of things, and we'll just read a few examples here. Uh,
(04:03):
media will be reduced to ash. Uh, you must make
plus place tiles you. I like that one because you
has three exclamation points after I'm only one man, which
turned out to be a clue, and when I caught
a fatal disease, they gloated over its death. Uh, this
is my favorite. Can I read? Sure? Now? Galileo's Cult
(04:27):
of the Hell You In is now searching for more
than one hell ideologies to get more reward, right, and
then one final one I think because it's instructive to
the story murder all journalists. I beg you. So these
are the little smaller messages underneath the main for I
guess you would call um tenants of this individual and um.
(04:51):
One thing we should point out and Ed helped us
put this together is apparently. And this is something I
didn't even realize until yesterday. When this person refers to
Hellien's apparently, he's talking about Jewish people. I don't know
if that's proven. I think specifically he's talking about like
a Jewish conspiracy of Jewish cabal, usually a Jewish media
(05:15):
conspiracy is seemingly what he's referring to. By Hellian's okay,
so there is in some of these styles an anti
Semitic bit to them. Uh. And it also points out that, um,
this person perhaps may have some sort of mental illness,
but it's also not right to even say that because
we don't even know who this person is demonstrably as
(05:39):
for proof. Like you said, so, it's also not great
to like project that when you really don't know anything. No,
And depending on where you look on the Internet, what
sites you visit, UM, some I think there's one called
toynb Idea, either dot net or dot com or something
like that. It's an authoritative site. It's by one of
the main investigators of these toynb tiles who um ended
(06:01):
up working on this documentary that basically solved the case. Um.
He refers to the the toynbetiles is like an art
project basically, So it could be the ravings of a
madman or the ongoing project of an artist, or it
(06:22):
could be somebody who legitimately wants to make a crazy
idea happen. There's a lot of different interpretations, and like
you said, because we can't say for sure who it
is that is doing this. You can't really get to
the genuine like you can't prove oh, well, this person
is is has a mental illness that there, this is
(06:44):
how they're they're communicating that mental illness like you just
you just can't say that, but it is worth putting
in the back of your mind as you kind of
hear the rest of it, you know. Yeah, and that documentary,
by the way, it's called Resurrect Dead uh um. It
is available on YouTube. But the recent I mentioned YouTube
is I didn't find that you could pay for it
(07:05):
anywhere and watch it. But that's right, you can pay
for it. I did pay for it like a chump.
I couldn't find it on YouTube. What I was trying
to do the right thing? Where did you find it?
Voo voodoo? See? I looked all over. I used my
handy app that tells you where you can stream stuff,
and it was unlisted. And then I looked on a
(07:26):
few streamers and it was unlisted. So I went to YouTube,
and it's just sitting right there, so I'll watch man.
I looked at YouTube and all I could find were
those stupid previews. Did you type in twin be titles documentary. Yes,
I typed in the name of it resurrect Dead. It's weird,
it's the first hit. I don't know what happened. Well, regardless,
(07:46):
it's about an hour and a half long and it's
worth watching. I think it's a good, good doc It's
not great, but I think for when it was made,
I think I think that they did a pretty good
job of it. Yeah. I think it's got like a
six plus maybe even a seven on AMDB, and I
would agree with that it was worth the four dollars
I paid to rent it. I I'm I'm fine with that.
(08:07):
Uh So we should talk a little bit about the message,
I think, and break down what that means, because there's
a there are a lot of components to this mystery,
um from what the message means, where it came from,
to who is doing this, how they're doing it, and
it's a pretty interesting, little multi pronged mystery, I think. Yeah,
(08:27):
And thanks to those three investigators who worked on the documentary,
who are kind of portrayed on the documentary, we basically
understand everything there is to understand about what the Toynbee
tilemaker's ideas are and what they mean. But that's fairly new.
I mean for years, basically from the advent of the
Internet to the toy Be tiles were taken up as
(08:50):
like a something to commemorate and discuss and talk about
from from the very beginning, and so there's a lot
of time for this mystery to brew, and it was
fairly recent that it kind of been settled. But what
they figured out is um from the outset. The Toynbee
that was discussed or mentioned in the tiles is Arnold J. Toynbee,
(09:11):
who was kind of a popular historian. He wrote about
civilizations and the history of civilizations and the history of
politics and how it all kind of banded together, and
how the civilizations that rose and fell over time we're
all part of the same kind of current, that they
were all related to one another, and that they rose
(09:31):
and fell in predictable ways. Usually they would rise when
a group of very smart, creative people would kind of
lead the charge and creatively addressing a problem, and civilizations
would fall when people stopped responding creatively two problems and
were overwhelmed by those problems. And he was really really
popular for a while, but then he started to really
(09:53):
kind of take an increasingly christian view worldview of history
and politics and placed a greater emphasis on the role
of religions and Christianity, I believe in particular than historians
in general were comfortable with and his his views kind
of fell out of favor. Suffice to say, he was
a genuine, um original thinker who who is definitely worth
(10:17):
you know, reading about, if not reading directly. And it's
a good thing his name was Toynbee. Yeah, it really
made it a lot easier to narrow down the first
mystery basically definitely, which is who is Toynbee? Uh, if
it was the smith tiles a lot harder, But that
is certainly the Toynbee. And it seems like the idea
(10:38):
that uh, and we'll refer to the person as the
tilemaker as it does Um toynbees book experiences seems to
be uh, the centerpiece of the crux of the idea
that the tilemaker is. Uh, let's just say fixated on um,
the concept of the soul and the possibility that you
(10:58):
could resurrect after death down to the molecular level. UM,
and that's sort of what you know, what resurrected dead
means in this case. And then as far as on
planet Jupiter that comes it seems like at least and
again they were piecing this people of pieces together because
(11:19):
they've never interviewed the tilemaker. But there it looks like
that's from Stanley Kubrick's two thousand one of Space Odyssey,
because it mentions Kubrick and in that novel they are
as you know, the star child is reborn on Jupiter. Yeah,
and that's where the astronauts are being dispatched too, is
Jupiter to figure out what's going on with some weird
signal coming from that planet. Right, that's right. So if
(11:42):
you put all those things together, then these four ideas
as the toy b idea makes sense. It does, it
does kind of make sense. And and like toynb died
the you cannot say, like the tilemaker does that Toynbee
had the idea of resurrecting the dead on Jupiter um,
and that two thousand one was about that Toynbee idea.
(12:05):
That's a that's the tilemaker's interpretation of all of that stuff.
But Toynbee was talking about scientifically resurrecting people or whether
it was possible, and the tilemaker took that idea and
ran with it and basically came to believe that the
that science was meant to carry out the project of
(12:27):
creating the afterlife that God promised, and that to resurrect
everybody um who had ever lived, you would need a
plan at the size of Jupiter, which is a huge, huge,
it's a gas giant um that you would need a
plan at the size of Jupiter to fit all those people.
So it makes sense in all sorts of different ways
(12:48):
once you understand all of it. But even still, if
you step back and think about what what they're what
they're saying, the tilemakers saying, it's a genuinely bizarre idea,
especially if you stop in realize that they legitimately we're
trying to make this idea happen. Well, and again that's
an assumption in and of itself. Like one day the
(13:10):
tilemaker could come out and say, hey, this was all
a joke, and basically banks he meets the Max Headroom incident,
and uh, I've been meets Andy Kaufman and I've been
punking you guys all these years. Of course I know
that that's not possible, but yeah, I don't know it
seems like this is something that this person believes and
that they're trying to get this message out, because another
(13:32):
way that this message was gotten out is in a
neighborhood in Philadelphia, and I guess the nineteen eighties was
when people would be watching television and all of a
sudden their signal would be interrupted by this toyn B
message coming through the TV. Uh and they figured out
that it was and I hope I'm not getting too
far ahead, but we'll keep the mystery intact. But it
(13:54):
was coming from someone driving around their car with a
high powered antenna that could cause us kind of interference.
And this was pre tile, so this would have been
the very early eighties, because they think the first tiles
that were laid down where laid down in the mid eighties,
and then even before the first tile, so basically around
the time now, I think even before the UM the
(14:17):
driving around interrupting people's TV watching, there were posters around
Philadelphia that were placed up that had very um odd
messages on them UM and then but they were all
generally like the same stuff the tiles we're talking about,
which again was the idea of resurrecting the dead on
(14:39):
Jupiter that was a toybee idea that was depicted in
two thousand one. That's generally the bulk of the message,
but also there's a weird, little kind of side tangent
that happened. Um. David Mammitt plays a role in this
because in three moment wrote a play called four Am
and he said later that it was an homage to
(14:59):
Larry King, who back in the early early eighties was
a late night radio talk show host, but long before
he had his TV show before Yeah and ma'am it
used to listen to that, uh, and he wrote a
one act play based on it. And in the one
act play, the caller who calls into this this radio
(15:20):
show talks about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter and how
people are dead molecules that you could bring back to life,
and uh, ma'am it basically said, I guess this guy
got the idea from me. But if you step back
and look at the timeline of everything, that call apparently
went in in nineteen eighty and ma'ma didn't write the
play for three years later, So David Mammitt probably wrote
(15:41):
a play based on a call he heard of the
tilemaker who called into Larry king In to explain his
views on resurrecting the dead on Jupiter right, and everywhere
I've looked, I haven't really seen that anyone is accusing
Mamot of being dishonest. I think the general all consensuses
if that were the case, that he probably didn't realize
(16:04):
that he had heard it and probably remembers it as
an original idea, and not that he just stole the
thing and lied about it. No, but it is impossible
that it's a coincidence because of the language that's used
in the one act, like resurrect dead molecules, um just
resurrect him on Jupiter two thousand one has mentioned, TOYNB
(16:26):
has mentioned, it's just not possible that it's a coincidence.
Somebody influenced somebody else. But yeah, it does seem to
be honest from what I can tell to. All Right,
good time for a break. I think I think the
mysteries mounting. I think so. I think people have their
popcorn out and they're ready for part two. Okay, well
let's give it to him. We'll be right back, all right.
(17:10):
So you mentioned at the beginning, Uh, Philadelphia is the centerpiece,
and it is I mean, I feel like we can
almost certainly say that the tilemaker lives or lived in Philadelphia,
perhaps still does and because they were not only did
the Philadelphia have the most concentration of tiles, and then
(17:31):
it sort of spread from there Boston, d C. Maryland,
New York again some sort of on a direct westward
band out to Kansas City, like through Cincinnati, but never
anything south. Um, there are in this one neighborhood where
they end up thinking they pinpointed the tilemaker. There are
they found all these little test tiles all over the place.
(17:53):
He's just a little bits of tile, little letters here
and there, but the same script and the same technique.
So uh, it was it's pretty obvious that this is
where it originated. Yes, I mean that to me is like, well,
there's there's your answer right there. So um. They they
also like the people who were were reporting having their
(18:16):
TV interrupted by somebody driving down the street with their
shortwave radio. That happened in Philadelphia, in the same neighborhood
where those test tiles were later found by the documentary investigators,
and that wasn't a mystery, right They like they were like,
we know who that is. Stopped doing it. Yes, and
that became clear once those investigators visited that neighborhood and
started talking to neighbors. UM And one of the reasons
(18:38):
they were able to think it was because the radio
broadcast that was coming through their TVs from the guy
driving down the street was talking about resurrecting the dead
on Jupiter, an idea of Arnold Toynbee's that was depicted
in two thousand one. So basically, this tilemaker got this
idea starting about nine They've pinned down and was trying
to figure out creative ways to spread this publicity um as.
(19:04):
And one of the first ways that they tried to
do it was to turn to the press, and they
called the Philadelphia Inquirer and tried to relate their um
their ideas to one of the journalists. They're a guy
named Clark day Leon and um in very much the
same way that that they called Larry King three years before.
(19:24):
Clark Day Leon took the call and then wrote up
a very unflattering piece about the idea, and UM I
think kind of set off that that disdain for the
media that the tilemaker displays in some of the additional tiles. Yes,
absolutely so, at some point there was a group formed
(19:44):
by the t m H called the Minority Association. Upon
further investigation in this documentary, it seems that it was
not a group or an association at all. It was
just this one person. Uh. And there are some little
clues that will get too later on about that. Uh,
But that was this group that was formed and there
(20:06):
were these radio broadcast where the tile maker would say,
I will send information if you want it, uh to
anyone who wants it, and someone did because they had
this stuff twenty years later, all these materials sent from
the quote unquote Minority Association that uh, the the documentary
filmmakers eventually got their hands on, which was a big,
(20:29):
big find for them. Yeah, and it was really interesting,
like to watch it in the documentary how they managed
to come across that. It was actually I was like,
this is this is some really weird filler that they're using.
And it finally like led to to finding these documents
and turning up them. You know, people who knew this
guy um back in the day. Um. But when they
(20:50):
got these documents, that's when a lot of the questions
were filled in because um, it was that that minority
associations like press materials and it explained everything, like anything
you had a question about before was basically answered in
this and there was most of the documents were signed
by somebody named James Morosco, um, which, like you were saying, uh,
(21:15):
they believe now that the minority associate was was just
one person, the tilemaker, and that the tilemaker was using
aliases to make it seem like they were more than
more people than just one and James Morosco was one
of those aliases. It just so happens there was a
James Morosco in Philadelphia who um seems to have had
nothing to do with this. It was just again an alias, right,
(21:38):
so that was a bit of a red herring. But
elsewhere in the document there was only one other name
mentioned and and you know these people, these these three
dudes basically that became um, I don't know about obsessed,
but it became like a fixation for them to solve
this mystery. And this was at the very beginnings of
the internet. Is when they started off, Like you know
(22:00):
that there was there was no information when they first
started looking on the internet about the toy Bee tiles. Yeah,
we should say their names because they really did some
good detective work Justin, Dr Steve Weinick, and Colin Smith,
the three investigators, and then John Foy made the documentary
and they all seem to have worked together for that. Yeah,
and this. These guys did not know each other previously.
(22:20):
They met online through their individual interest in the toy
Bee tiles and got together and seemingly became friends, you
know as they investigated this, which I think could have
they could have flushed out a little more in the documentary,
but that's fine human element to it. Sure. Well, yeah,
they seemed to really focus on Justin, Yeah, they did.
He seems to be the guy that sort of h
(22:41):
ran with it the most. But the only other name
in this minority association uh set of documents was Severino Verna,
a k a. Sev sev y Verna. And they tracked
sevy Verna down um to this neighborhood and phil Ladelphia,
and they said, well, sevy Verna is the guy that
(23:03):
rode around in the car broadcasting these ideas. And they
were like, well, that's got to be him then, uh,
And they were like he was. He's a recluse. He
never you don't see him much. He does his shopping
in the middle of the night. Uh, there was this
incident where because all this stuff happened, Uh, some people
broke in, like held a knife to his throat, were like,
(23:24):
you know, because he was interrupting everyone's TV and all
that stuff, And especially after that, it seemed like he
became even more of a recluse. And they said, but
he had this old car with this huge antenna and
didn't have a passenger seat and had a big hole
on the floorboard, and it was just a mess. And
they're knocking on this guy's door in the documentary and
he's just not coming to the door. And in the meantime,
(23:45):
they're they're exploring these other side roads, uh, either figuring
out the deal with Morosco or there was another candidate
name was it Railroad Jim, which had a little bit
of I mean, I could see why they went down
that road, but it became pretty clear that it wasn't
Railroad Jim. Yeah. And then same with James Morosco. He
(24:07):
lived in Philadelphia at the time, but he died in
like I think two thousand three, and some of the tilemakers,
a lot of the tilemaker's tiles continued on after that time.
That can be pointed as like, no, these are definitely
the original tilemakers tiles. Because one of the things that
clouds this mystery is there have been plenty of copycats.
Some of them are just kind of following up, like
picking up what the tilemakers laying down kind of thing.
(24:29):
Other people seem to be actually trying to actively confuse
people by making tiles that look as as much and
seem as much like the tilemaker's tiles. But these three
investigators among others, have gotten so good at examining the
tiles they can they can tell what's the tilemakers and
what's not, and have even pointed to like like change
(24:53):
like different periods. You know how artists like Picasso at
a blue period and all that, Like the tilemakers had
periods over the years, and some of them are so
different that it wasn't until years later that these investor
gets have gone back and been like, actually, that was
the tilemakers. We thought he stopped for a while and
this was a copycat. It was actually him all along.
So um, it definitely was not James Morosco. His widow says,
(25:15):
I have no idea what you guys are talking about
with Jupiter or two thousand one. My husband had nothing
to do with any tiles, please stop calling um. And
then same thing with Railroad Jim. He died and the
tiles continued on, So it couldn't have been him either.
So it definitely seems to be Severino verna Um and
that that's been He's There's just so many things that
(25:37):
that point to him. It's it's pretty much conclusive. Yeah,
And there was we also should mention beyond the regular
kind of license plate size tiles, there was one sort
of massive uh information dump, uh tile set of tiles
that just had a bunch of like I mean, you
can go online and read this one. It's really long. Uh.
(26:00):
They talked about a lot of things from there. Seems
to be an obsession with the Soviet Union, which you know,
during the Cold War, it sort of makes sense that
this might be a thing um the media. Again. The
tilemaker talks about the mafia breaking into his house to
kill him, which is probably a reference to the people
in the neighborhood who broke in to threaten him. Uh.
And it's just sort of a long rambling uh info
(26:25):
dump that is. I think when you talk to these
three investigators or anyone that's in the twin be tiles.
They're like, this is the real sort of uh magna carta,
I guess of the tilemaker, and this this has the
most clues in it. Uh. And and I think we
also forgot to mention that the reason they even found
(26:45):
Verna was I think it was one in Brazil had
an actual street address in Philadelphia that turned out to
be Verna's address. Okay, I thought the address turned out
to be a dead end, but there was definitely one
of the earliest tiles. Maybe the earliest tiles were those
with the address in Philadelphia, so it turned out to
be his huh. Yeah, but I think that the only
(27:07):
place that was was on one tile in Brazil. Okay,
I got you. But so those were those were tiles
from the mid eighties, and they think that those tiles
were put down before even one started appearing in Philadelphia. Yeah,
and that's sort of like one of the mysteries of
the of the documentary is that they eventually talked to you, Uh,
Sevy's Verna's mom because he's not answering the phone or
(27:31):
the door, and she was like, it's it's Sevy doesn't
like travel. He's got a lung condition and he wouldn't
have traveled to South America or even outside of Philadelphia
really because of this condition. Yeah, that's a puzzler because
if you look at those tiles and the fact that
it's a Philadelphia address in the same neighborhood at least
as as um Sevy Verna like it's it's definitely one
(27:56):
of Vernon's stiles. So what I guess? So for sure? Um,
And they also say, like, why South America. There's apparently
something in that book experienced by Arnold Toynbee. Um. It's
a bit of an autobiography as well, and he talks
about going to these places that these tiles appeared in
the eighties. So I guess it's possibly could have had
(28:17):
a proxy do it, right. But here's the thing, and
we'll leave you with this before our break. Uh, it
seems very much short Sevy. But no one has ever
seen this happen, these tiles that are embedded in the asphalt.
So the question for a long time remained still, how
was this happening without How are these hundreds and hundreds
(28:38):
of tiles getting embedded in the street without anyone ever
seeing this guy do it? Then we'll talk about that
right after this okay, Chuck, that was quite a cliffhanger, right, So,
(29:11):
no one's ever seen sevy Verna do this. No one's
ever seen anybody do this. Um, And it was thanks
to the Three Investigators, which, by the way, did you
ever read those Alfred Hitchcock books? The three Investigators. One
of them was like Hitchcock's nephew, and Hitchcock would make
a cameo every once in a while, but they would
remember what you're talking about. But I didn't read them,
kind of like a hardy boys type thing. They were great,
(29:34):
And every time I say three investators, I keep thinking
of that. It's very nostalgic for me. Um. There's like
a little portion of my brain that's really enjoying things
right now. Um. Not to say the rest of my
brain isn't, but it's enjoying it in a different way.
I think I did too. Um. But these three investigators,
I can't even remember what I was talking about. I
(29:56):
was talking about. We were talking about the fact that
he had never been found doing this. Oh yes, these
three investigators down how this actually happened, and then further
they pieced together how sevy Verna in particular would have
done it. Too, and it's pretty ingenious. Yeah, so the
(30:18):
way they figured out how it was happening was a
near miss, which was the and this is crazy coincidence,
but the lead investigator, guy Justin, was in Philly looking
around doing investigating and a lot of this investigation at
the time was literally walking around city streets looking down
(30:39):
for these styles. It was like, you know, kind of
the hard way before the Internet was truly like filled
up with information about this, and there's some of the
first guys that filled the Internet with the stuff. But
he happened upon a fresh tile that had just been
laid down that he said was not there when he
passed by before, and he was like, it happened within
(31:01):
minutes of when I was there, And it's in the documentary.
It's pretty thrilling that this guy, like he starts yelling
around and and saying that he's you know, I believe
then TOYNB ideas where are you come out? Come out?
And it's like, oh my god, this guy is just
like almost solved the case. But what they found was
(31:21):
these tiles were and this is really pretty ingenious actually
how it's done. Uh, they use like asphalt crack filler
like this black tari stuff. And the key though, is
the tile is wrapped in roof paper tar paper, which
is black, so it's laid down and it just looks
black on top. And then over time this thing is
(31:43):
run over by cars and walked over and gets embedded
further and further, and eventually the tar paper just wears
a way to reveal the tile. Yeah, isn't that amazing.
It's amazing. So over the course of weeks, maybe even months,
as this is being pushed down and melting into the asphalt,
apparently I'm of the tiles where he instructs people on
making more tiles to do it themselves. He says, put
(32:05):
him lay him in the in the summertime so that
the sun will bake him into the asphalt. Um. But
he never provided any other really detailed destruction instructions aside
from that, and said use asphalt crack filler and then
that's it. So these guys managed to piece this together
from that that one tile, that fresh tile they found.
But even still the mystery remained on how they were
(32:29):
appearing in some really strange places like the middle of
the street, like a busy street, um, the middle of
a highway. Uh. The entrance of the hall and tunnel.
It would be like really dangerous for a person to
be squatting down like trying to install one of these tiles.
And they pieced together by something. One of the neighbors
(32:50):
told them that you had mentioned earlier that Sevy Verna
had a car that didn't have a passenger side seat
and that had no floorboard or a huge hole in
the floorboard. But they figured out once they found this
fresh tile, is that he might pull up to a stoplight,
might stop in the middle of the road, put his
hazards on, who knows, but he could lay down one
(33:10):
of these pre made tiles with asphalt filler crack filler
on the bottom and tar paper on top, smooth it
down and then drive off and just wait for it
to be revealed, you know, over the coming weeks or months.
I this this is the part that I love more
than any other part of this whole mystery is the ingenious,
(33:31):
elegant yet simple way that this tilemaker would do this. Yeah,
I love it would just and didn't even necessarily have
to stop for too long. Like I get the impression
that this thing is tarred on the bottom such that
you can just kind of drop it there and it
will stay in place, drive over it with that back
tire and it's it's in there. Yeah, And the idea
(33:54):
that it's like slowly really it's protected until it's revealed,
like people walking on it, people having on it, not
paying any attention to it whatsoever, and then in doing
so they're actually helping UM anchor this this piece UM.
I just find that just just like Chef's kiss, you know.
And then the other part of it too is it's ephemeral,
(34:15):
like these things are made of linoleum, embedded in the
asphalt there, and they're being driven over there, being walked
over even after the tar papers gone. So they're not
meant to last very long. I saw like a lifespan
of usually about a year. And yeah, and that's him.
That's if the UM, if the like the road cruise
don't happen to be repaving that street in the meantime.
(34:37):
In some cities they actually go dig these things up
when they're reported in Chicago and New York do that,
But for the most part, they tend to just kind
of linger along until they slowly like kind of get
trashed and then are eventually repaved over. So it's an
ephemeral project as well that he's just constantly updating and
doing and has been since the mid eighties. Yeah, and
(35:00):
you get a sense of the real delight from the
people from these three guys and then just other people
in general of finding these and like it's almost like
a like a scavenger hunt, and then when they find them,
like then assessing and appreciating and reveling in its condition, like, oh,
this one's pretty new, it's still in pretty good shape.
(35:22):
Or look, they're only fragments of this one left. Um,
it's pretty neat. I mean, I'm going to New York
in two days for the first time in two years,
and uh, you can bet your bottom dollar I'm gonna
be trying to find one of these and get in
a picture. Well, you'll probably find there's a lot of
copycats these days. Some, like we said, are trying to
confuse the issue. Others are just kind of vibing on
(35:45):
the tilemaker's vibe. Um, the moment will be suckered by
any copycat. The most prolific is House of Hades. Um.
They don't seem to care at all about resurrecting the
dead on Jupiter, but they really like the idea of
like like um, reducing all media and journalists to ash um,
which is kind of a side thing. Like we said,
(36:06):
the Toynbee tilemaker is into UM, so there's you. There's
a good chance you will see some, but there's it's
not necessarily a tilemaker unless you actually go actively seek
them out. And you can find that on Toynbee idea. Yeah,
dot com or dot net whatever it is. Um, they
they have them like archives, so you could you could
(36:27):
go look for sure. Yeah, I mean that's I'm gonna cheat.
I'm not just gonna randomly walk around three days trying
to find tiles looking down the whole time. Yeah, I
got other stuff to do, but people to see. But um.
The other thing I want to mention too before we
close is just I found myself watching this documentary and
sort of exploring the idea of anonymity and how I
(36:49):
feel about that in a case like this where you
have someone who, uh, let's let's say this person is
has some sort of mental condition and this is their
outlet and uh, instead of you know, standing there with
a bullhorn on a street corner, this may be their
their messaging system. And like when I saw these guys
(37:12):
banging on the door, uh and making phone calls to
his mom. I was like, leave him alone. Yeah, yeah,
And they even talk about that, and they they're trying
to be respectful, but they do talk about the fact that,
you know, they think they saw someone upstairs clearly at home,
not answering the door. When it sort of hit them
that like, this person may be up there, really scared Uh.
(37:34):
When the documentary came out, there was a lull and
activity um from the tilemaker. So but then I thought,
you know, but then why are you going out and
putting these things all over the place and seemingly trying
to start a movement or attract attention? Although I don't
know about to start a movement because it's not like
that ever genuinely was the goal. I don't think. I
(37:59):
don't know. It didn't feel like it to me, because
it seems like if that would have been the case,
it would have been here's who I am and here's
where we'll meet. And uh, I don't know, I never
I'm not convinced that this person wanted other people involved.
What but that that's so imagine if you felt like
(38:20):
you were the only person who understood what God wanted
science to do, and you were a recluse who could
not it was not at all comfortable interacting with other people.
What would you do, well, you would when when someone
came knocking in your door saying, hey, listen, I think
you're a great, brilliant thinker, and I believe in this movement.
(38:43):
I can help you get your word out. Then you
then you take them up on it. Like, it seems
like this person did not want to be discovered and
thus did not want to start a movement to be
at the center of Yes, I don't think that he
wanted to be at the center of it. I think
he wanted this movement to start. Yeah, I don't know
if I agree with that. So one of the things
(39:04):
that that was in that um that press kit that
the the guy wrote off for in the early eighties
and still kept for like twenty or so years, it
says as the most unusual scientific movement in the USA,
the group wants the world to put all other affairs
aside in order to scientifically colonize the planet Jupiter. So
like if if if he believed that, and that's what
(39:28):
his genuine aim was, but he felt totally ill equipped
to actually publicize it himself, like making tiles and and
embedding them in a clever way and asphalt actually kind
of makes sense to me. See, I think that's the
final mystery. Is the purpose of this to begin with? Yeah, yeah,
(39:48):
if you take it on face value, then then he
was trying to make resurrection happen, knowing he couldn't do
it himself. He needed science to do it, but he
had to rouse everybody to do it on his half. Basically, yeah,
who knows, Maybe it is just the ongoing art project.
Who knows. I don't know. I think that's the mystery
will never solve. Uh. In the documentary there, it sort
(40:10):
of closes on an interesting thing where I think the
main guy tells the story of I think he was
it on a bus or something. He thinks they're on
a bus together, and it's sort of a mutual acknowledgement
and eye contact of I know who you are. You're
the guy that's been knocking on my door that did
the documentary, and I know that you're the tilemaker. Uh.
(40:33):
And there were but no words are exchanged, no, and
he's like he concludes, like I need to leave this
guy alone forever. He just like I just have to
accept it and move on that he doesn't want to
be a part of this. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. Um, well,
if you want to know more about the Toynbee tiles,
there is a lot on the internet that you can
read about it. You can watch Resurrect Dead. It was
(40:54):
pretty good documentary. Definitely worth four dollars um and uh,
since I said definitely worth were dollars this time for
a listener mail, I'm going to call this phantom kidney. Hey, guys,
you've been my go to for audio entertainment since twelve
(41:14):
when I was working to finish my forensic science graduate research.
I finally have something to email about though. Four years ago,
this may had donated a kidney to my friend's mom technically,
and my kidney went to someone else directly because we
were in the appaired exchange program, which I learned about
from you guys, and I actually experienced phantom kidney sensation.
(41:38):
I know, right. Luckily, the phantom sensation was not painful,
but almost a weird specific awareness and feeling. I mean,
because who can actually feel their kidneys? Right? But it
was on the same side of the one that I
lost and lower back who knows it could have been
placebo because they warned me that it was possible. But
it was fascinating to learn of phantom organ pain firsthand
(42:01):
and from you guys. Just figured that was unique enough
and it's sort of a fun learning experience. If you
have an opportunity to emphasize the Paired Exchange program, please
add it in again. Just by me jumping in to donate,
three transplants were able to be performed. While every donation
program was different, my experience was absolutely wonderful and I
(42:21):
would gladly do it again if I had another despair,
and if anyone were interested in more information, I would
gladly share it with them. I love what you guys do.
It's been fun going through life alongside you both. That
is Mackenzie from Maine, currently in Pennsylvania with one kidney
and uh yeah, definitely check out the Paired Kidney Exchange
(42:42):
program if that's something that you are able to do.
If you have a good, healthy kidney that you can
healthily donate, then someone would be glad to take it
off your hands. Emphasis added Also Mackenzie, I mean hats
off to you for doing that. That's an amazing thing
that you did, and you deserve to be canonized, so congratulations. Uh.
(43:04):
And if you want to be like Mackenzie and basically say, hey,
you want to hear about this cool thing I did,
you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank
it on the phantom kidney, and send it off to
Stuff Podcasts at i heart radio dot com. Stuff you
Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
(43:27):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry's here too, which
makes this stuff you should know the podcast. Oh you
(00:22):
know what? Say small talk? While I look up? Who
gave me this idea? Why do you keep doing this
to me? I have to like entertain everybody. You once
did this to me on stage. Get this everybody. We
were on stage at the Bell House in Brooklyn and
Chuck said he had to go to the bathroom all
of a sudden, and I was left on stage, um,
having to entertain everybody while he just hung out backstage.
(00:44):
I don't think you even went to go to the bathroom.
And long story short, I ended up showing off my moonwalk. Yeah,
but I totally went to the bathroom. You think that
was all a bit. Yeah, maybe you went and took
some drugs to keep going on stage, but I'm sure
in the green room you didn't even need to go
do those in the bathroom. Uh No. I genuinely had
(01:07):
to pee such that I didn't think I could make
it through the show. I've I've felt that way before.
To San Antonio. Um I had to run off the
stage once because of that. That's right, all right, I
got you, I got it. Uh, this idea. Initially this
is on my list, but I forgot about it, but
then was reminded by Alexander or Alex Ramos and State
(01:32):
College Pennsylvania. All right, um, well thanks a lot, Alex Ramos.
This is a great idea. Tiles. Had you ever heard
of this? Sure? Had you not? Well? No, I just
said it had long been on my list. Okay, that's right.
Where did you hear of it? Uh? It just one
of those things that pops up on the internet and
(01:53):
you're like, oh, let me read about this. This looks
interesting for sure, and it is definitely interesting, but um
in it would have been I think even more interesting
ten years ago before the mystery was virtually solved. True,
but it's still interesting if you ask me. Yeah, And
I think this is one of those where we should
very clearly tell everyone what we're talking about right now. Okay,
(02:17):
So what we're talking about is a phenomenon called the
Toynbee tiles where in in the asphalt on the street,
um on street corners and crosswalks and intersections, all over
the um the northeast, seemingly concentrated in Philadelphia, but also
(02:39):
going as far west as I think Kansas City, and
then also strangely down in Chile, Argentina and Brazil. These
these tiles bearing some really bizarre messages cut out of
linoleum and again embedded into the asphalt of the street
started appearing and have appeared mysterious sleep. No one has
(03:00):
any idea or any any demonstrable proof of who is
actually doing this, but they have been doing it since
at least the mid eighties and conceivably still going on
today right uh. And they are known as the Toynbee tiles.
They're about the size of a license plate. And the
(03:21):
general main message that you see on most of these
is as follows, and it's in a very distinct script.
It is generally all caps, cut out letters made of linoleum,
cut out linoleum, and it says this Toynbee that is
t O I N B E Toynbee idea. Underneath that
(03:43):
it says in Kubrick's two thousand one, underneath that it
says resurrect dead, and underneath that it says on planet Jupiter.
And then a lot of tiles will have these little
tags underneath and much smaller script that say all kinds
of things, and we'll just read a few examples here. Uh,
(04:03):
media will be reduced to ash. Uh, you must make
plus place tiles you. I like that one because you
has three exclamation points after I'm only one man, which
turned out to be a clue, and when I caught
a fatal disease, they gloated over its death. Uh, this
is my favorite. Can I read? Sure? Now? Galileo's Cult
(04:27):
of the Hell You In is now searching for more
than one hell ideologies to get more reward, right, and
then one final one I think because it's instructive to
the story murder all journalists. I beg you. So these
are the little smaller messages underneath the main for I
guess you would call um tenants of this individual and um.
(04:51):
One thing we should point out and Ed helped us
put this together is apparently. And this is something I
didn't even realize until yesterday. When this person refers to
Hellien's apparently, he's talking about Jewish people. I don't know
if that's proven. I think specifically he's talking about like
a Jewish conspiracy of Jewish cabal, usually a Jewish media
(05:15):
conspiracy is seemingly what he's referring to. By Hellian's okay,
so there is in some of these styles an anti
Semitic bit to them. Uh. And it also points out that, um,
this person perhaps may have some sort of mental illness,
but it's also not right to even say that because
we don't even know who this person is demonstrably as
(05:39):
for proof. Like you said, so, it's also not great
to like project that when you really don't know anything. No,
And depending on where you look on the Internet, what
sites you visit, UM, some I think there's one called
toynb Idea, either dot net or dot com or something
like that. It's an authoritative site. It's by one of
the main investigators of these toynb tiles who um ended
(06:01):
up working on this documentary that basically solved the case. Um.
He refers to the the toynbetiles is like an art
project basically, So it could be the ravings of a
madman or the ongoing project of an artist, or it
(06:22):
could be somebody who legitimately wants to make a crazy
idea happen. There's a lot of different interpretations, and like
you said, because we can't say for sure who it
is that is doing this. You can't really get to
the genuine like you can't prove oh, well, this person
is is has a mental illness that there, this is
(06:44):
how they're they're communicating that mental illness like you just
you just can't say that, but it is worth putting
in the back of your mind as you kind of
hear the rest of it, you know. Yeah, and that documentary,
by the way, it's called Resurrect Dead uh um. It
is available on YouTube. But the recent I mentioned YouTube
is I didn't find that you could pay for it
(07:05):
anywhere and watch it. But that's right, you can pay
for it. I did pay for it like a chump.
I couldn't find it on YouTube. What I was trying
to do the right thing? Where did you find it?
Voo voodoo? See? I looked all over. I used my
handy app that tells you where you can stream stuff,
and it was unlisted. And then I looked on a
(07:26):
few streamers and it was unlisted. So I went to YouTube,
and it's just sitting right there, so I'll watch man.
I looked at YouTube and all I could find were
those stupid previews. Did you type in twin be titles documentary. Yes,
I typed in the name of it resurrect Dead. It's weird,
it's the first hit. I don't know what happened. Well, regardless,
(07:46):
it's about an hour and a half long and it's
worth watching. I think it's a good, good doc It's
not great, but I think for when it was made,
I think I think that they did a pretty good
job of it. Yeah. I think it's got like a
six plus maybe even a seven on AMDB, and I
would agree with that it was worth the four dollars
I paid to rent it. I I'm I'm fine with that.
(08:07):
Uh So we should talk a little bit about the message,
I think, and break down what that means, because there's
a there are a lot of components to this mystery,
um from what the message means, where it came from,
to who is doing this, how they're doing it, and
it's a pretty interesting, little multi pronged mystery, I think. Yeah,
(08:27):
And thanks to those three investigators who worked on the documentary,
who are kind of portrayed on the documentary, we basically
understand everything there is to understand about what the Toynbee
tilemaker's ideas are and what they mean. But that's fairly new.
I mean for years, basically from the advent of the
Internet to the toy Be tiles were taken up as
(08:50):
like a something to commemorate and discuss and talk about
from from the very beginning, and so there's a lot
of time for this mystery to brew, and it was
fairly recent that it kind of been settled. But what
they figured out is um from the outset. The Toynbee
that was discussed or mentioned in the tiles is Arnold J. Toynbee,
(09:11):
who was kind of a popular historian. He wrote about
civilizations and the history of civilizations and the history of
politics and how it all kind of banded together, and
how the civilizations that rose and fell over time we're
all part of the same kind of current, that they
were all related to one another, and that they rose
(09:31):
and fell in predictable ways. Usually they would rise when
a group of very smart, creative people would kind of
lead the charge and creatively addressing a problem, and civilizations
would fall when people stopped responding creatively two problems and
were overwhelmed by those problems. And he was really really
popular for a while, but then he started to really
(09:53):
kind of take an increasingly christian view worldview of history
and politics and placed a greater emphasis on the role
of religions and Christianity, I believe in particular than historians
in general were comfortable with and his his views kind
of fell out of favor. Suffice to say, he was
a genuine, um original thinker who who is definitely worth
(10:17):
you know, reading about, if not reading directly. And it's
a good thing his name was Toynbee. Yeah, it really
made it a lot easier to narrow down the first
mystery basically definitely, which is who is Toynbee? Uh, if
it was the smith tiles a lot harder, But that
is certainly the Toynbee. And it seems like the idea
(10:38):
that uh, and we'll refer to the person as the
tilemaker as it does Um toynbees book experiences seems to
be uh, the centerpiece of the crux of the idea
that the tilemaker is. Uh, let's just say fixated on um,
the concept of the soul and the possibility that you
(10:58):
could resurrect after death down to the molecular level. UM,
and that's sort of what you know, what resurrected dead
means in this case. And then as far as on
planet Jupiter that comes it seems like at least and
again they were piecing this people of pieces together because
(11:19):
they've never interviewed the tilemaker. But there it looks like
that's from Stanley Kubrick's two thousand one of Space Odyssey,
because it mentions Kubrick and in that novel they are
as you know, the star child is reborn on Jupiter. Yeah,
and that's where the astronauts are being dispatched too, is
Jupiter to figure out what's going on with some weird
signal coming from that planet. Right, that's right. So if
(11:42):
you put all those things together, then these four ideas
as the toy b idea makes sense. It does, it
does kind of make sense. And and like toynb died
the you cannot say, like the tilemaker does that Toynbee
had the idea of resurrecting the dead on Jupiter um,
and that two thousand one was about that Toynbee idea.
(12:05):
That's a that's the tilemaker's interpretation of all of that stuff.
But Toynbee was talking about scientifically resurrecting people or whether
it was possible, and the tilemaker took that idea and
ran with it and basically came to believe that the
that science was meant to carry out the project of
(12:27):
creating the afterlife that God promised, and that to resurrect
everybody um who had ever lived, you would need a
plan at the size of Jupiter, which is a huge, huge,
it's a gas giant um that you would need a
plan at the size of Jupiter to fit all those people.
So it makes sense in all sorts of different ways
(12:48):
once you understand all of it. But even still, if
you step back and think about what what they're what
they're saying, the tilemakers saying, it's a genuinely bizarre idea,
especially if you stop in realize that they legitimately we're
trying to make this idea happen. Well, and again that's
an assumption in and of itself. Like one day the
(13:10):
tilemaker could come out and say, hey, this was all
a joke, and basically banks he meets the Max Headroom incident,
and uh, I've been meets Andy Kaufman and I've been
punking you guys all these years. Of course I know
that that's not possible, but yeah, I don't know it
seems like this is something that this person believes and
that they're trying to get this message out, because another
(13:32):
way that this message was gotten out is in a
neighborhood in Philadelphia, and I guess the nineteen eighties was
when people would be watching television and all of a
sudden their signal would be interrupted by this toyn B
message coming through the TV. Uh and they figured out
that it was and I hope I'm not getting too
far ahead, but we'll keep the mystery intact. But it
(13:54):
was coming from someone driving around their car with a
high powered antenna that could cause us kind of interference.
And this was pre tile, so this would have been
the very early eighties, because they think the first tiles
that were laid down where laid down in the mid eighties,
and then even before the first tile, so basically around
the time now, I think even before the UM the
(14:17):
driving around interrupting people's TV watching, there were posters around
Philadelphia that were placed up that had very um odd
messages on them UM and then but they were all
generally like the same stuff the tiles we're talking about,
which again was the idea of resurrecting the dead on
(14:39):
Jupiter that was a toybee idea that was depicted in
two thousand one. That's generally the bulk of the message,
but also there's a weird, little kind of side tangent
that happened. Um. David Mammitt plays a role in this
because in three moment wrote a play called four Am
and he said later that it was an homage to
(14:59):
Larry King, who back in the early early eighties was
a late night radio talk show host, but long before
he had his TV show before Yeah and ma'am it
used to listen to that, uh, and he wrote a
one act play based on it. And in the one
act play, the caller who calls into this this radio
(15:20):
show talks about resurrecting the dead on Jupiter and how
people are dead molecules that you could bring back to life,
and uh, ma'am it basically said, I guess this guy
got the idea from me. But if you step back
and look at the timeline of everything, that call apparently
went in in nineteen eighty and ma'ma didn't write the
play for three years later, So David Mammitt probably wrote
(15:41):
a play based on a call he heard of the
tilemaker who called into Larry king In to explain his
views on resurrecting the dead on Jupiter right, and everywhere
I've looked, I haven't really seen that anyone is accusing
Mamot of being dishonest. I think the general all consensuses
if that were the case, that he probably didn't realize
(16:04):
that he had heard it and probably remembers it as
an original idea, and not that he just stole the
thing and lied about it. No, but it is impossible
that it's a coincidence because of the language that's used
in the one act, like resurrect dead molecules, um just
resurrect him on Jupiter two thousand one has mentioned, TOYNB
(16:26):
has mentioned, it's just not possible that it's a coincidence.
Somebody influenced somebody else. But yeah, it does seem to
be honest from what I can tell to. All Right,
good time for a break. I think I think the
mysteries mounting. I think so. I think people have their
popcorn out and they're ready for part two. Okay, well
let's give it to him. We'll be right back, all right.
(17:10):
So you mentioned at the beginning, Uh, Philadelphia is the centerpiece,
and it is I mean, I feel like we can
almost certainly say that the tilemaker lives or lived in Philadelphia,
perhaps still does and because they were not only did
the Philadelphia have the most concentration of tiles, and then
(17:31):
it sort of spread from there Boston, d C. Maryland,
New York again some sort of on a direct westward
band out to Kansas City, like through Cincinnati, but never
anything south. Um, there are in this one neighborhood where
they end up thinking they pinpointed the tilemaker. There are
they found all these little test tiles all over the place.
(17:53):
He's just a little bits of tile, little letters here
and there, but the same script and the same technique.
So uh, it was it's pretty obvious that this is
where it originated. Yes, I mean that to me is like, well,
there's there's your answer right there. So um. They they
also like the people who were were reporting having their
(18:16):
TV interrupted by somebody driving down the street with their
shortwave radio. That happened in Philadelphia, in the same neighborhood
where those test tiles were later found by the documentary investigators,
and that wasn't a mystery, right They like they were like,
we know who that is. Stopped doing it. Yes, and
that became clear once those investigators visited that neighborhood and
started talking to neighbors. UM And one of the reasons
(18:38):
they were able to think it was because the radio
broadcast that was coming through their TVs from the guy
driving down the street was talking about resurrecting the dead
on Jupiter, an idea of Arnold Toynbee's that was depicted
in two thousand one. So basically, this tilemaker got this
idea starting about nine They've pinned down and was trying
to figure out creative ways to spread this publicity um as.
(19:04):
And one of the first ways that they tried to
do it was to turn to the press, and they
called the Philadelphia Inquirer and tried to relate their um
their ideas to one of the journalists. They're a guy
named Clark day Leon and um in very much the
same way that that they called Larry King three years before.
(19:24):
Clark Day Leon took the call and then wrote up
a very unflattering piece about the idea, and UM I
think kind of set off that that disdain for the
media that the tilemaker displays in some of the additional tiles. Yes,
absolutely so, at some point there was a group formed
(19:44):
by the t m H called the Minority Association. Upon
further investigation in this documentary, it seems that it was
not a group or an association at all. It was
just this one person. Uh. And there are some little
clues that will get too later on about that. Uh,
But that was this group that was formed and there
(20:06):
were these radio broadcast where the tile maker would say,
I will send information if you want it, uh to
anyone who wants it, and someone did because they had
this stuff twenty years later, all these materials sent from
the quote unquote Minority Association that uh, the the documentary
filmmakers eventually got their hands on, which was a big,
(20:29):
big find for them. Yeah, and it was really interesting,
like to watch it in the documentary how they managed
to come across that. It was actually I was like,
this is this is some really weird filler that they're using.
And it finally like led to to finding these documents
and turning up them. You know, people who knew this
guy um back in the day. Um. But when they
(20:50):
got these documents, that's when a lot of the questions
were filled in because um, it was that that minority
associations like press materials and it explained everything, like anything
you had a question about before was basically answered in
this and there was most of the documents were signed
by somebody named James Morosco, um, which, like you were saying, uh,
(21:15):
they believe now that the minority associate was was just
one person, the tilemaker, and that the tilemaker was using
aliases to make it seem like they were more than
more people than just one and James Morosco was one
of those aliases. It just so happens there was a
James Morosco in Philadelphia who um seems to have had
nothing to do with this. It was just again an alias, right,
(21:38):
so that was a bit of a red herring. But
elsewhere in the document there was only one other name
mentioned and and you know these people, these these three
dudes basically that became um, I don't know about obsessed,
but it became like a fixation for them to solve
this mystery. And this was at the very beginnings of
the internet. Is when they started off, Like you know
(22:00):
that there was there was no information when they first
started looking on the internet about the toy Bee tiles. Yeah,
we should say their names because they really did some
good detective work Justin, Dr Steve Weinick, and Colin Smith,
the three investigators, and then John Foy made the documentary
and they all seem to have worked together for that. Yeah,
and this. These guys did not know each other previously.
(22:20):
They met online through their individual interest in the toy
Bee tiles and got together and seemingly became friends, you
know as they investigated this, which I think could have
they could have flushed out a little more in the documentary,
but that's fine human element to it. Sure. Well, yeah,
they seemed to really focus on Justin, Yeah, they did.
He seems to be the guy that sort of h
(22:41):
ran with it the most. But the only other name
in this minority association uh set of documents was Severino Verna,
a k a. Sev sev y Verna. And they tracked
sevy Verna down um to this neighborhood and phil Ladelphia,
and they said, well, sevy Verna is the guy that
(23:03):
rode around in the car broadcasting these ideas. And they
were like, well, that's got to be him then, uh,
And they were like he was. He's a recluse. He
never you don't see him much. He does his shopping
in the middle of the night. Uh, there was this
incident where because all this stuff happened, Uh, some people
broke in, like held a knife to his throat, were like,
(23:24):
you know, because he was interrupting everyone's TV and all
that stuff, And especially after that, it seemed like he
became even more of a recluse. And they said, but
he had this old car with this huge antenna and
didn't have a passenger seat and had a big hole
on the floorboard, and it was just a mess. And
they're knocking on this guy's door in the documentary and
he's just not coming to the door. And in the meantime,
(23:45):
they're they're exploring these other side roads, uh, either figuring
out the deal with Morosco or there was another candidate
name was it Railroad Jim, which had a little bit
of I mean, I could see why they went down
that road, but it became pretty clear that it wasn't
Railroad Jim. Yeah. And then same with James Morosco. He
(24:07):
lived in Philadelphia at the time, but he died in
like I think two thousand three, and some of the tilemakers,
a lot of the tilemaker's tiles continued on after that time.
That can be pointed as like, no, these are definitely
the original tilemakers tiles. Because one of the things that
clouds this mystery is there have been plenty of copycats.
Some of them are just kind of following up, like
picking up what the tilemakers laying down kind of thing.
(24:29):
Other people seem to be actually trying to actively confuse
people by making tiles that look as as much and
seem as much like the tilemaker's tiles. But these three
investigators among others, have gotten so good at examining the
tiles they can they can tell what's the tilemakers and
what's not, and have even pointed to like like change
(24:53):
like different periods. You know how artists like Picasso at
a blue period and all that, Like the tilemakers had
periods over the years, and some of them are so
different that it wasn't until years later that these investor
gets have gone back and been like, actually, that was
the tilemakers. We thought he stopped for a while and
this was a copycat. It was actually him all along.
So um, it definitely was not James Morosco. His widow says,
(25:15):
I have no idea what you guys are talking about
with Jupiter or two thousand one. My husband had nothing
to do with any tiles, please stop calling um. And
then same thing with Railroad Jim. He died and the
tiles continued on, So it couldn't have been him either.
So it definitely seems to be Severino verna Um and
that that's been He's There's just so many things that
(25:37):
that point to him. It's it's pretty much conclusive. Yeah,
And there was we also should mention beyond the regular
kind of license plate size tiles, there was one sort
of massive uh information dump, uh tile set of tiles
that just had a bunch of like I mean, you
can go online and read this one. It's really long. Uh.
(26:00):
They talked about a lot of things from there. Seems
to be an obsession with the Soviet Union, which you know,
during the Cold War, it sort of makes sense that
this might be a thing um the media. Again. The
tilemaker talks about the mafia breaking into his house to
kill him, which is probably a reference to the people
in the neighborhood who broke in to threaten him. Uh.
And it's just sort of a long rambling uh info
(26:25):
dump that is. I think when you talk to these
three investigators or anyone that's in the twin be tiles.
They're like, this is the real sort of uh magna carta,
I guess of the tilemaker, and this this has the
most clues in it. Uh. And and I think we
also forgot to mention that the reason they even found
(26:45):
Verna was I think it was one in Brazil had
an actual street address in Philadelphia that turned out to
be Verna's address. Okay, I thought the address turned out
to be a dead end, but there was definitely one
of the earliest tiles. Maybe the earliest tiles were those
with the address in Philadelphia, so it turned out to
be his huh. Yeah, but I think that the only
(27:07):
place that was was on one tile in Brazil. Okay,
I got you. But so those were those were tiles
from the mid eighties, and they think that those tiles
were put down before even one started appearing in Philadelphia. Yeah,
and that's sort of like one of the mysteries of
the of the documentary is that they eventually talked to you, Uh,
Sevy's Verna's mom because he's not answering the phone or
(27:31):
the door, and she was like, it's it's Sevy doesn't
like travel. He's got a lung condition and he wouldn't
have traveled to South America or even outside of Philadelphia
really because of this condition. Yeah, that's a puzzler because
if you look at those tiles and the fact that
it's a Philadelphia address in the same neighborhood at least
as as um Sevy Verna like it's it's definitely one
(27:56):
of Vernon's stiles. So what I guess? So for sure? Um,
And they also say, like, why South America. There's apparently
something in that book experienced by Arnold Toynbee. Um. It's
a bit of an autobiography as well, and he talks
about going to these places that these tiles appeared in
the eighties. So I guess it's possibly could have had
(28:17):
a proxy do it, right. But here's the thing, and
we'll leave you with this before our break. Uh, it
seems very much short Sevy. But no one has ever
seen this happen, these tiles that are embedded in the asphalt.
So the question for a long time remained still, how
was this happening without How are these hundreds and hundreds
(28:38):
of tiles getting embedded in the street without anyone ever
seeing this guy do it? Then we'll talk about that
right after this okay, Chuck, that was quite a cliffhanger, right, So,
(29:11):
no one's ever seen sevy Verna do this. No one's
ever seen anybody do this. Um, And it was thanks
to the Three Investigators, which, by the way, did you
ever read those Alfred Hitchcock books? The three Investigators. One
of them was like Hitchcock's nephew, and Hitchcock would make
a cameo every once in a while, but they would
remember what you're talking about. But I didn't read them,
kind of like a hardy boys type thing. They were great,
(29:34):
And every time I say three investators, I keep thinking
of that. It's very nostalgic for me. Um. There's like
a little portion of my brain that's really enjoying things
right now. Um. Not to say the rest of my
brain isn't, but it's enjoying it in a different way.
I think I did too. Um. But these three investigators,
I can't even remember what I was talking about. I
(29:56):
was talking about. We were talking about the fact that
he had never been found doing this. Oh yes, these
three investigators down how this actually happened, and then further
they pieced together how sevy Verna in particular would have
done it. Too, and it's pretty ingenious. Yeah, so the
(30:18):
way they figured out how it was happening was a
near miss, which was the and this is crazy coincidence,
but the lead investigator, guy Justin, was in Philly looking
around doing investigating and a lot of this investigation at
the time was literally walking around city streets looking down
(30:39):
for these styles. It was like, you know, kind of
the hard way before the Internet was truly like filled
up with information about this, and there's some of the
first guys that filled the Internet with the stuff. But
he happened upon a fresh tile that had just been
laid down that he said was not there when he
passed by before, and he was like, it happened within
(31:01):
minutes of when I was there, And it's in the documentary.
It's pretty thrilling that this guy, like he starts yelling
around and and saying that he's you know, I believe
then TOYNB ideas where are you come out? Come out?
And it's like, oh my god, this guy is just
like almost solved the case. But what they found was
(31:21):
these tiles were and this is really pretty ingenious actually
how it's done. Uh, they use like asphalt crack filler
like this black tari stuff. And the key though, is
the tile is wrapped in roof paper tar paper, which
is black, so it's laid down and it just looks
black on top. And then over time this thing is
(31:43):
run over by cars and walked over and gets embedded
further and further, and eventually the tar paper just wears
a way to reveal the tile. Yeah, isn't that amazing.
It's amazing. So over the course of weeks, maybe even months,
as this is being pushed down and melting into the asphalt,
apparently I'm of the tiles where he instructs people on
making more tiles to do it themselves. He says, put
(32:05):
him lay him in the in the summertime so that
the sun will bake him into the asphalt. Um. But
he never provided any other really detailed destruction instructions aside
from that, and said use asphalt crack filler and then
that's it. So these guys managed to piece this together
from that that one tile, that fresh tile they found.
But even still the mystery remained on how they were
(32:29):
appearing in some really strange places like the middle of
the street, like a busy street, um, the middle of
a highway. Uh. The entrance of the hall and tunnel.
It would be like really dangerous for a person to
be squatting down like trying to install one of these tiles.
And they pieced together by something. One of the neighbors
(32:50):
told them that you had mentioned earlier that Sevy Verna
had a car that didn't have a passenger side seat
and that had no floorboard or a huge hole in
the floorboard. But they figured out once they found this
fresh tile, is that he might pull up to a stoplight,
might stop in the middle of the road, put his
hazards on, who knows, but he could lay down one
(33:10):
of these pre made tiles with asphalt filler crack filler
on the bottom and tar paper on top, smooth it
down and then drive off and just wait for it
to be revealed, you know, over the coming weeks or months.
I this this is the part that I love more
than any other part of this whole mystery is the ingenious,
(33:31):
elegant yet simple way that this tilemaker would do this. Yeah,
I love it would just and didn't even necessarily have
to stop for too long. Like I get the impression
that this thing is tarred on the bottom such that
you can just kind of drop it there and it
will stay in place, drive over it with that back
tire and it's it's in there. Yeah, And the idea
(33:54):
that it's like slowly really it's protected until it's revealed,
like people walking on it, people having on it, not
paying any attention to it whatsoever, and then in doing
so they're actually helping UM anchor this this piece UM.
I just find that just just like Chef's kiss, you know.
And then the other part of it too is it's ephemeral,
(34:15):
like these things are made of linoleum, embedded in the
asphalt there, and they're being driven over there, being walked
over even after the tar papers gone. So they're not
meant to last very long. I saw like a lifespan
of usually about a year. And yeah, and that's him.
That's if the UM, if the like the road cruise
don't happen to be repaving that street in the meantime.
(34:37):
In some cities they actually go dig these things up
when they're reported in Chicago and New York do that,
But for the most part, they tend to just kind
of linger along until they slowly like kind of get
trashed and then are eventually repaved over. So it's an
ephemeral project as well that he's just constantly updating and
doing and has been since the mid eighties. Yeah, and
(35:00):
you get a sense of the real delight from the
people from these three guys and then just other people
in general of finding these and like it's almost like
a like a scavenger hunt, and then when they find them,
like then assessing and appreciating and reveling in its condition, like, oh,
this one's pretty new, it's still in pretty good shape.
(35:22):
Or look, they're only fragments of this one left. Um,
it's pretty neat. I mean, I'm going to New York
in two days for the first time in two years,
and uh, you can bet your bottom dollar I'm gonna
be trying to find one of these and get in
a picture. Well, you'll probably find there's a lot of
copycats these days. Some, like we said, are trying to
confuse the issue. Others are just kind of vibing on
(35:45):
the tilemaker's vibe. Um, the moment will be suckered by
any copycat. The most prolific is House of Hades. Um.
They don't seem to care at all about resurrecting the
dead on Jupiter, but they really like the idea of
like like um, reducing all media and journalists to ash um,
which is kind of a side thing. Like we said,
(36:06):
the Toynbee tilemaker is into UM, so there's you. There's
a good chance you will see some, but there's it's
not necessarily a tilemaker unless you actually go actively seek
them out. And you can find that on Toynbee idea. Yeah,
dot com or dot net whatever it is. Um, they
they have them like archives, so you could you could
(36:27):
go look for sure. Yeah, I mean that's I'm gonna cheat.
I'm not just gonna randomly walk around three days trying
to find tiles looking down the whole time. Yeah, I
got other stuff to do, but people to see. But um.
The other thing I want to mention too before we
close is just I found myself watching this documentary and
sort of exploring the idea of anonymity and how I
(36:49):
feel about that in a case like this where you
have someone who, uh, let's let's say this person is
has some sort of mental condition and this is their
outlet and uh, instead of you know, standing there with
a bullhorn on a street corner, this may be their
their messaging system. And like when I saw these guys
(37:12):
banging on the door, uh and making phone calls to
his mom. I was like, leave him alone. Yeah, yeah,
And they even talk about that, and they they're trying
to be respectful, but they do talk about the fact that,
you know, they think they saw someone upstairs clearly at home,
not answering the door. When it sort of hit them
that like, this person may be up there, really scared Uh.
(37:34):
When the documentary came out, there was a lull and
activity um from the tilemaker. So but then I thought,
you know, but then why are you going out and
putting these things all over the place and seemingly trying
to start a movement or attract attention? Although I don't
know about to start a movement because it's not like
that ever genuinely was the goal. I don't think. I
(37:59):
don't know. It didn't feel like it to me, because
it seems like if that would have been the case,
it would have been here's who I am and here's
where we'll meet. And uh, I don't know, I never
I'm not convinced that this person wanted other people involved.
What but that that's so imagine if you felt like
(38:20):
you were the only person who understood what God wanted
science to do, and you were a recluse who could
not it was not at all comfortable interacting with other people.
What would you do, well, you would when when someone
came knocking in your door saying, hey, listen, I think
you're a great, brilliant thinker, and I believe in this movement.
(38:43):
I can help you get your word out. Then you
then you take them up on it. Like, it seems
like this person did not want to be discovered and
thus did not want to start a movement to be
at the center of Yes, I don't think that he
wanted to be at the center of it. I think
he wanted this movement to start. Yeah, I don't know
if I agree with that. So one of the things
(39:04):
that that was in that um that press kit that
the the guy wrote off for in the early eighties
and still kept for like twenty or so years, it
says as the most unusual scientific movement in the USA,
the group wants the world to put all other affairs
aside in order to scientifically colonize the planet Jupiter. So
like if if if he believed that, and that's what
(39:28):
his genuine aim was, but he felt totally ill equipped
to actually publicize it himself, like making tiles and and
embedding them in a clever way and asphalt actually kind
of makes sense to me. See, I think that's the
final mystery. Is the purpose of this to begin with? Yeah, yeah,
(39:48):
if you take it on face value, then then he
was trying to make resurrection happen, knowing he couldn't do
it himself. He needed science to do it, but he
had to rouse everybody to do it on his half. Basically, yeah,
who knows, Maybe it is just the ongoing art project.
Who knows. I don't know. I think that's the mystery
will never solve. Uh. In the documentary there, it sort
(40:10):
of closes on an interesting thing where I think the
main guy tells the story of I think he was
it on a bus or something. He thinks they're on
a bus together, and it's sort of a mutual acknowledgement
and eye contact of I know who you are. You're
the guy that's been knocking on my door that did
the documentary, and I know that you're the tilemaker. Uh.
(40:33):
And there were but no words are exchanged, no, and
he's like he concludes, like I need to leave this
guy alone forever. He just like I just have to
accept it and move on that he doesn't want to
be a part of this. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. Um, well,
if you want to know more about the Toynbee tiles,
there is a lot on the internet that you can
read about it. You can watch Resurrect Dead. It was
(40:54):
pretty good documentary. Definitely worth four dollars um and uh,
since I said definitely worth were dollars this time for
a listener mail, I'm going to call this phantom kidney. Hey, guys,
you've been my go to for audio entertainment since twelve
(41:14):
when I was working to finish my forensic science graduate research.
I finally have something to email about though. Four years ago,
this may had donated a kidney to my friend's mom technically,
and my kidney went to someone else directly because we
were in the appaired exchange program, which I learned about
from you guys, and I actually experienced phantom kidney sensation.
(41:38):
I know, right. Luckily, the phantom sensation was not painful,
but almost a weird specific awareness and feeling. I mean,
because who can actually feel their kidneys? Right? But it
was on the same side of the one that I
lost and lower back who knows it could have been
placebo because they warned me that it was possible. But
it was fascinating to learn of phantom organ pain firsthand
(42:01):
and from you guys. Just figured that was unique enough
and it's sort of a fun learning experience. If you
have an opportunity to emphasize the Paired Exchange program, please
add it in again. Just by me jumping in to donate,
three transplants were able to be performed. While every donation
program was different, my experience was absolutely wonderful and I
(42:21):
would gladly do it again if I had another despair,
and if anyone were interested in more information, I would
gladly share it with them. I love what you guys do.
It's been fun going through life alongside you both. That
is Mackenzie from Maine, currently in Pennsylvania with one kidney
and uh yeah, definitely check out the Paired Kidney Exchange
(42:42):
program if that's something that you are able to do.
If you have a good, healthy kidney that you can
healthily donate, then someone would be glad to take it
off your hands. Emphasis added Also Mackenzie, I mean hats
off to you for doing that. That's an amazing thing
that you did, and you deserve to be canonized, so congratulations. Uh.
(43:04):
And if you want to be like Mackenzie and basically say, hey,
you want to hear about this cool thing I did,
you can send us an email, wrap it up, spank
it on the phantom kidney, and send it off to
Stuff Podcasts at i heart radio dot com. Stuff you
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