February 5, 2021 • 61 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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer,
all mission control decads. Most importantly, you are you. 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
(00:47):
you belong to a family, to a an organization, to
a religion of some sort. Uh. 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 too many people if the thing
that you are a member of is exclusive, if not,
(01:10):
everybody can be as special whereas enlightened as you. It's
actually it's 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 as you'll see when we uh
when explore today's topic, folks, obviously the game film with
(01:35):
Michael Douglas, and of course the fantastic for Co'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.
(01:55):
We're talking about something called the Latitude Society. Here are
the facts, here's 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. Well, yeah,
I think the first thing you have to do is
(02:16):
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 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 care
of our families. We you know, eat, we blah blah
(02:37):
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
(02:57):
things that it is there's there's almost no way to
say no. 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
(03:19):
at a fancy hotel or maybe even not a fancy
hotel for your key card. They're slid into those little
paper sleeves or the WiFi 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
and uh and you know, bespoke looking. So it's already
like reeks of entry. When you pull out the actual
(03:40):
card and it looks like a blank credit card, there's
a website. There's an 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 gonna hear
repeatedly in this story. It's almost a monstra absolute discretion.
(04:00):
Once you go to the website, you into your code,
you get a selection of different appointment times, and you
lock yours in. Then you show up to an address
in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. At this point
you will have an experience that feels very through the
looking glass, very Alice in Wonderland. And if you have
(04:23):
not had this spoiled for you, warning spoilers ahead. What
happens when you open the door. The website for this
organization has a has a kind of decadent description of this,
saying through the door and behind a thick curtain was
the flux chamber and automated hallway with only one way
(04:46):
through down a wooden slide at the base of in
ornate Victorian fireplace mantle, awaiting the visitor. At the bottom
of the slide was a lobby area with one red
neonce side reading s and then three doors. So you
have you know, you already have this really this really cool,
(05:06):
almost David Lynchy and vibe. Whatever door you choose, you'll
go through an increasingly narrow passage surrounded by all the
walls are padded with black carpet, and this is called
the dark Maze. You hear music, you hear us suscerous
whispering voices, whispering voices, and that's what guides you through
(05:27):
this completely dark labyrinth. Your monitored by cameras the whole time,
which is important later. Uh. And then finally you go
through this crawl space and find yourself in what they
call the library chamber. Uh. This is surrounded. This is
really cool if you see it. It's surrounded by all
(05:47):
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. It doesn't. 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. Um.
And you know, you just curiosity is going to lead
(06:09):
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. 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,
(06:32):
and that's on 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 within this book. Yeah,
I mean, it really is sort of an interactive theater experience.
If anyone is familiar with the company Punch Drunk who
did the will continues to do I think probably during COVID.
(06:53):
It's on hiatus, but hopefully we've back soon. Uh. Incredibly
beautifully curated kind of theatrical experience in New York, and
I think there's other versions, but it's called Sleep No More.
And it's essentially like an interactive theatrical experience whereas you're
progressing through this actual physical space, you can choose your
path and things happen based on which path you choose, etcetera. Uh.
(07:15):
This this really reminds me of that. But the using
whatever theatrical projection technology uh that they use, essentially 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. Uh.
(07:36):
And you can actually witness this for yourself, um, in
a couple of places. There's a really good article on
Vice about it called My Year in San Francisco's two
million dollar Startup, and also the documentary Bright Axiom, where
you can actually see it visually. It's it's very much
worth a watch. Yeah. In Bright Axiom is uh the
name documentary. You may also be interested in the institute
(07:59):
uh be worn. They are they they're somewhere between documentary
and long form infomercial. But this fable is important to
the Latitude Society. It's when the first pieces of literature
that people experience when they interact with this society. It's
(08:20):
often recited before new adventures or new society meetings, which
they call practice. 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
(08:40):
through your 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, real time,
you just experiencing it. And then after you have experienced
this fable, you are sent off on something similar to
a scavenger hunt. You're you're on a should in the mission, uh,
(09:02):
you go, 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 game which leads you onto
another to another experience. It's all very just. So this
entire thing is an introduction to the Latitude Society. Was
(09:24):
the Latitude Society, Well, it is self described secret order
dedicating itself to expanding human consciousness, and it's uh 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
(09:47):
to moonlight. So what happens once you pass this first
adventure You are inducted as a full 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
(10:07):
the various mysteries of practices and philosophy. Uh. They also
have Like you said that the emphasis here is on
in person experience. So they also had town hall events.
You can you can see various video of this. Uh.
They also had dedicated talks and meetings. This was throughout
the San Francisco area and active members of the community
(10:31):
could mingle and they could openly talk about the future
of society with one another. Because the thing is there's
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 absolutely discretion, meaning you're not supposed to
talk about latitude in front of people who are not
(10:53):
evolved with latitude unless you want to invite them, in
which case you 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 a all about surprise, And as Noll said that
that phrase absolute discretion was embossed on the slip that
you would get that the card was inserted into. So
(11:14):
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 the creators of
the Latitude Society took great pains to make sure that
the member, the user understood that that phrase has two
(11:38):
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 you decided to
give out. The other one is essentially just implying secrecy.
So it's both of those things, right, That's that's what
Ben is talking about. You get to choose is as
(12:00):
a member. Who else becomes a member? And they had
and like, like we're saying, there are several other tenants
that were very important to Latitude Society. Yeah, value, we
value experiences over things is that's the second tenant. And
I think that's something a lot of people can agree with,
especially you'll find uh this belief common in people who
(12:24):
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 so than the gadgets
they accrue. So I get that one third tenant we
give in order to become part of a story greater
than ourselves. Think about it. What is giving me there?
We'll get to it, uh. And the fourth is freedom
from dogma. So the person who invites you is thereafter
(12:49):
referred to as your ascendant and you are their descendant.
It's it's a bit like a less sinister version of
an upline or down line, a multi level marketing scheme.
And I want to be very clear, the Latitude Society
is not multi marketing, and it's also not nexium. And
it's also not nexium. Anybody who is a member of
(13:10):
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 known of this adventure.
So after you've finished this first mission they call it
book one, then you are given a code word that
gets you further access on the website, and then you
(13:32):
get the opportunity to invite other people, theoretically as many
as you would like. So, just like for COO'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 not hurt that the group responsible for creating the
(13:55):
Latitude Society named Nonchalance was staffed by very talented creatives.
They made it compelling, you know what I mean. It
didn't seem it seemed real. It felt real, and in
a way it was. 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, uh,
(14:17):
you know, facility, I guess we call it. There is
a part when you go to that window where it
says the neon, there's like kind of like a shrouded
figure behind sort of um, I guess, frosted glass. You're
not quite sure if it's even a real person or not. Um.
And like a drawer pops out and you're instructed to
place all of your personal possessions in that drawer. So
(14:38):
it's got this like inherent kind of decoupling from like
you know, the hum drum day to day of of
of existence and identity, not to mention things like you know,
your phone and all of that, and it's actually taking
you out, especially like a place like San Francisco Silicon
Valley that's the epicenter of this type of like decoupling
(14:58):
you know, from real real life uh and and thrusting
you into this place where you have to separate yourself
from all of that those trappings and literally, you know,
go down a rabbit hole of actual physical experience as
opposed to virtual. 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
(15:21):
say it's immersive theater. It's there are a lot of
things like this. It's similar to projects from places like
Sembi Playhouse in the Atlanta area, multiple haunted houses in
the US around the world, various theater projects in New York.
It's also a networking opportunity. Liked mentioned this on an
earlier listener male segment. People tend to want to be Promethean,
(15:45):
whether or not they have like earned that feeling. We
want to be the bringers of knowledge often rather than
the receivers. So this became a way of looking very
cool too. Friends where colleagues met somebody at a business lunch,
I think they're dope. You want them to feel the
same way about you. Slide in one of those little
(16:06):
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 the point? What
was actually going on here behind the scenes of this
behind the scenes underground endeavor. Yeah, it's not like this
(16:26):
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, it's a production. This
(16:47):
is expensive stuff. Why would you spend all that money
to do this in multiple locations too? We mentioned going
to an ark that's another physical location with all of
these kind of like bespoke sort of psychedelic looking arcade
machines um, one of which when you put that coin in,
like you're mentioning Ben, a deity appears to you, which
(17:08):
is a is a theme that we're gonna see throughout
the story. Sort of looks almost like the creepy rabbit
from Donnie Darko, only it's more of like a half
man's face with these weird eye stocks that don't have eyes. Uh,
And and and he in sort of like again like
serial killer voice disguise or voice gives you instructions on
where to go next, and you know, starts feeding you
(17:29):
these kind of philosophical lines about the practice and all
of that good stuff. So what was the point at
expensive production, multiple rented locations in the city with the
highest cost of living in the country. It's not a
it's not a it's not a small amount of overhead here.
What else was the Latitude Society and what were the
(17:53):
motivations for creating it? Will explore this afterword from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. To understand the Latitude Society,
we have to understand the organization I mentioned earlier, Nonchalance,
(18:14):
along with two people, Jeff Holl and Cat Miller. Jeff
Hall is the company's founder. He started Nonchalance in the
early two thousand's. Cat Miller as one was one of
the primary employees, and there were other people there were
it takes a village right to make a conspiracy. There
were artists, community engagement experts, various engineers. The money for
(18:40):
this came from Jeff Hall directly. He gave He gave
two million dollars. We came to find out or that's
that's what's believed that he gave two million dollars to
get this thing started. How does one end up with
two billion dollars such that you say, I want to
weird conspiracy. A good way to make two million dollars
(19:03):
is to, you know, have money given to you through
your family. We 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 in your family. So, um, there's something that
(19:25):
happened with Jeff Hall his father. Uh, he created an
incredible company that was valued just under five hundred million
dollars and it was sold to Goldman Sacks five hundred
and thirty one million dollars. And maybe that's how he
got that two million dollars. But at least according to
Jeff in response to that Vice article that we mentioned before,
(19:48):
he states that he actually made his wealth or it
began his wealth working for his father's company before it
was sold to Golden Sacks, and that he became a
partner when the firm was acquired by Golden Sacks. So mainly,
and he wrote to the st Fist and you know,
he wrote the same message device as you said where
(20:08):
where he was taking issue primarily with the implication that
he was a trust fund kid. And he said he
found it but littally, which is understandable. It's not it's
not a phrase. Uh. I don't think it's a phrase
a lot of people use to self identify, you know what.
It's also inherently dismissive and unfair people that are fortunate
(20:30):
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
as an example of taking that privilege and converting it
into something interesting, which I think is uh, you know,
should be applauded. Mm hm. Well, the Latitude Society is
(20:53):
not the first generation 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 city of San Francisco
(21:14):
on kind of a scavenger hunt immersive adventure game. But
here's the 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
(21:34):
was a business and in theory was a very smart one.
The whole 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? I think
it absolutely is. Um And Also, this like this push
pull between artistic pure artistic expression and creativity and making
(21:56):
money is like tail as old as time, right, and
so many are brilliant artists are very bad business people.
Um And and it's interesting when you see that kind
of like that I guess, I don't know, conflict. There's
another interesting kind of group that reminds me of this
called Mia Wolf and there's a fabulous documentary about them.
And it started off as this collective of just like
(22:18):
minded weirdos in Santa Fe, which has kind of a
stuffy art scene that's like very you know, like uh
exclusive in the everything is very expensive, you know, and
kind of boring and like these kind of like seen
kids like who were into like d I y punk
type shows and weird music. Started this group to kind
(22:39):
of be a counterbalance to that. But it became so
successful they started getting investments from folks like George rr
Martin uh and essentially turned it into this giant business.
Some people were less enthused about that direction than others,
and I think that's what we're seeing here. Yeah. The
weird thing is there's this intense dichotomy between what was
(23:02):
presented internally at nonchalance what was presented to people who
are participating in this in this artistic endeavor. Uh. The
idea is that they would one day be able to
like like uh, it was startup thinking right like, let's
get it going, Let's prime the pump as much as
we can, Let's go hard on the paint, and eventually
(23:22):
we will monetize this. We will make it self sustaining.
Hold said. The vision was to create an immersive narrative
experience that rivaled at theme park ride and production value,
but was embedded into the urban landscape of San Francisco.
And they had a deck or a power point and
when the when it was presented internally. It was a
(23:43):
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,
a hugely expensive endeavor. We're talking about even even not
(24:04):
talking about renting multiple properties in a very expensive urban area.
We're talking about technical design, hours of work I d
aighting 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. It's crazy. And when
(24:24):
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 to mill um. And
(24:46):
here's why a lot of people got 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 soul as in corporate
about it. Once you've got to invited, once you were in,
and you know you did the you did the book
law in the first mission, First Adventure. Then we said
(25:07):
you 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 your Paul Mission Controled decade.
You want to invite some friends, you want to invite
your pals Matt Nolan Ben to to this to this adventure.
(25:29):
Then you pay twenty five dollars a card, but later
that was raised to thirty two dollars 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. Absolutely,
And that's why I think it's interesting that people didn't
kind of the people like got some about of shape,
because this was like, this is the deal from the beginning.
You know, you you it's a closed website where you
(25:52):
can't even log into it until you get that card
with that unique code. And then once you go through,
like you said, Ben, that book experience, that's when you
get access to what's called the marketplace um 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 in like
(26:14):
it's fun, the idea of buying a T shirt that
says absolute discretion, Um, and yeah, that's right. You buy
these cards, Uh, you can distribute them to whomever you wish,
and then it 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.
(26:35):
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. Yeah, because you're not.
You're not making money from the cards that are sold
after you. And like you know, like I was saying earlier,
even though they have some some language that's reminiscent of
m l M S, there's not a baked in quota. No,
(26:58):
you you don't get in trouble. You don't get twenty
people per month or something like that. So it's not
it's not ponzi is. It's not MLM. But they do
want to make it profitable. Uh. The thing is, when
you're talking two million dollars, uh, and you're you're trying
to recoup that based on the sale of T shirts,
(27:21):
impendance and invitation cards. You're looking at a very large,
a nearly Sissiffian hill to climb. It would be very
difficult to cover that initial investment in a reasonable amount
of time. Some journalists estimated the math and they said, okay,
we think over the part over the span of the
(27:43):
Latitude Society during its heyday, maybe two thousand people were
giving cards and participated in some part of the initiation.
They went to the website, they never showed up to
the place, and 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
(28:04):
then they said, okay, that's it. It was a great weekend,
but I'm done. If two thousand people did this, they
participate in some way, then that means the most revenue
from that part of the part of the business that
Latitude could make was about sixty tho dollars, which is cool,
but it's not two million. And so later they did
(28:26):
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 an annual membership fee is
over three d bucks. Uh, it's still less than a
burning Man ticket, people are quick to point out. Uh.
But people were like, what is the mission of this
(28:48):
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 original plan. 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
(29:09):
the film is interesting, but it almost has an agenda
a little bit like it it really like you said
at the top end and almost feels like a weird
kind of commercial for the thing, and it feels like
it has a little bit of a 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 absolutely
(29:30):
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 doing kind of little you know, gatherings,
uh 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
(29:53):
and around the whole experience of this thing, you know, again,
because it's almost like a religion at that point, or
it starts to at least have the sense of community
that a religion can have it 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
(30:14):
where they start not digging that because they feel like
it's taking something that's very special and personal to them,
uh and you know, bastardizing it in some way. But again,
to the creators, this is what they had planned all along.
So is it really them doing anything but what they
already kind of set out to do. Yeah. And the
writer for Vice, Lydia Lawrenson, she she had quotes from
(30:38):
several members, Um, I don't want to spoil the 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
to them like a gift that they had been given,
like someone handed them a free card. Then they got
(30:59):
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 like a gift became a burden essentially. But
I'm sorry what had to pay in order to continue
doing what going to these things like they were doing
real world events, so they those were official events that
(31:22):
there were official events, but then also just little little
gatherings of of members privately right right, similar to a
less citister version of squirreling in scienceologies, which we can
talk about a little bit later, but squirreling is UH
scientology term for when someone takes what they describe as
(31:46):
l Ron Hubbard's technology or tech and they use it
in an unsanctioned way. It's it's similar to maybe the
way that the UH Catholic Church in days of old
looked at Protestants, you know what 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.
(32:07):
You're doing it the way like the film industry looks
at pirrating movies, you know what I mean, maybe, yeah,
I mean it's like you're stealing. You're basically saying you're
taking our stuff and you're using it, you know, and
and and you're not like giving us our due or
like yeah, mad, I don't know, like the paying part
certainly is at the heart of it. But yeah, you're
exactly right now. I think squirreling is a perfect comparison.
(32:29):
Let's think too about social media in the Internet. One
thing that the Internet has made abundantly clear in every
every culture, in every iteration, is that if people have
something for free, there's something deeply offensive to people if
that changes to a paid service. You know what New
York Times, right, I say that as a guy with
(32:52):
a subscription uh 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 podcast siloing podcast 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 like free content,
(33:15):
you know, add supported free content, and if all of
a sudden that change, I think people would like lose
their minds m. 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,
(33:37):
I can only have a Facebook page if I go
to this school, or then if later if I go
to a school. Um. We we see this time and
time again. 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
this fight club, then the problems grow as well. It's
(33:58):
a symptom of al if I wanted to be all
ted talky and pop say about it symptoms. Yeah, because
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.
(34:21):
And it's very very helpful to keep it low low
number and 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 to get
(34:43):
the exact right kind of you know, punch to make
people feel that way, and imagine how cool it is,
just objectively, how cool it is if you're say a
a at a at a bar somewhere it's called the Sycamore,
and you're rocking, you're absolute discretion t and then you
(35:03):
you know, you're just hanging out and you see somebody
come in like furtively and have a weird whispered conversation
with the bartender and they get this coin and they
turn around and they see you and their jaw drops
and you're like, 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,
(35:26):
right you, a city in a society speaks to itself
in an ecosystem, 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, signal by
(35:47):
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. People had people have problems with this,
Like a guy named Thomas Loads who was speaking with
Lydia Lawrence and over Advice, objected because he felt the
(36:07):
monetization was a blow to the things about the society
that were important to him and his colleagues. It gave
them meaning. It 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.
(36:34):
And a lot of these people were in, you know,
very stressful day jobs. They're they're very go go go,
you know, with high stakes and stuff. So the 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 that's a beautiful feeling, uh. And
(36:56):
that seemed very meaningful to people, and they liked being
in a secret Society. There was a story. We're part
of the story where the audience and we're the author.
That's amazing. But you'll notice the student listeners, we've been
talking about the Latitude Society and past tense. Why I'll
(37:18):
tell you after a word from our sponsor. So latitude problems.
We're pretty I 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
(37:41):
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 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
(38:02):
issues began. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Uh. And
there's a there's a quote here again from that Vice
article from Matt Weinberger. He's a person who you know,
took part in in the Latitude Society, and here's this quote.
Some people treated it as a game. That makes sense, right,
Some people as a social club and a networking opportunity,
(38:24):
and some treated 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,
uh 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
(38:44):
the things that were not supposed to be spoken to
non members. And this person, Matt 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. And here's the other Latitude wasn't just
a business. It was a genre of business that we
(39:05):
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 a lot of startups, Nonchalance did not seem to
have a very clear focus, in the opinion of observers um,
(39:28):
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 daily cost of the Latitude Society just keeping the
lights on, keeping the rent paid, keeping the weird coins
(39:49):
in circulation that was three grand a day. Uh. And
apparently they didn't even have a very let's say developed
business plan or well not business plan, but they weren't
keeping books particularly well. They didn't have, um, some of
(40:09):
the most basic kind of book keeping sheets that you
would have to have, especially with an operation that's expensive
in a city as expensive as San Francisco. Um. You know,
any business startup or otherwise keeps something called a profit
and loss uh ledger um, 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
(40:31):
outweigh your profits, that's not a good look. Um. And
this could well be 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, um,
not being super meticulous about the bigger picture of the
(40:52):
of the finances. Yeah. Yeah, there's something a little bit
aristocratic about it. I could see critic 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 RESOLTI and I believe it's
(41:14):
RESULTI the owner is this old 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
(41:35):
have to ask ourselves to your point, noal is is
the perspective then for this person? Are 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.
(41:56):
But at nine dollars a month, Uh, this these conversations
have to happen. Um. So there were a couple of
ideas and how to how to stem the financial hemorrhaging,
and one of those was, let's stop emphasizing physicality. Let's
(42:19):
move entirely to virtual reality. And that's that's a bummer.
That also makes me love your New York Times example, Matt,
because we've seen so many print publications say okay, we're
gonna 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,
(42:40):
they feel like they feel like they're getting robbed because
they don't have the thing. And this is more extreme example,
I would argue, because 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 are going to push back
(43:02):
against this. And there's another article by a former member
UH called The author's name is Caveat Magister, and Caveat
compares 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
(43:26):
the there was a really i 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
(43:48):
think there's anything wrong with that. It's kind of like,
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 a box you buy and just build
your own stuff. They're still Legos and you're still having
a heck of a time. UM. I just say, I
don't see anything wrong with what these folks are doing.
(44:10):
And by this point, of course, yes, they're paying three
hundred something UM a year for a membership, and of
course that the push to then have a membership whittled
away at the membership very quickly immediately, UM. And you
know that that's that's obviously a problem if you're trying
to build a user base essentially like a startup does
(44:32):
want to do. Now, we've got some other criticisms from
people here about the Latitude Society and what was 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
(44:53):
experience essentially going through it. Um. And it started on
that book. One experience where you know, she looked at
the book and everything, because she was contacted almost immediately
after that by the person that invited her to the society,
and he stated something a little strange, Uh, something we
didn't know it before. This is that in many of
(45:16):
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
know you're being watched, or that the cameras on at
least or recording. And he mentioned her that, oh, I
was watching you when you when you went through the fable,
when you know, you sat down and you got that
(45:37):
book read to you. Um, 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 surveilling her and observing her. So that was the
first little thing that happened. But then she felt it
got weirder from there. Yeah, she saw an imbalance in
(45:59):
the agreement, some kind of information as symmetry would be
a dry phrase for it. Uh, you do have to
sign this terms of service thing, right, But as Rebecca
Power found out, uh, there wasn't a formal procedure for
releasing yourself from it, and she said, I know the
(46:19):
employees are monitoring us, but who is monitoring them? And
there's another good point, and you I totally forgot about this.
That's before you even set up your appointment, right when
you sign that, so you know you have no idea
what you're signing up for, and you're just gonna put
all your info in there exactly exactly. And there's that
(46:40):
that detail you mentioned about being observed is so creepy
because she found out this Facebook message that the person
who invited her I've been watching it the whole time.
So she got spooped and she asked that the group
deactivate her membership. So this is where we get like
(47:01):
to the Coe pendulum, 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 me and played stupid about their
(47:22):
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 messages from your friends who are like,
(47:45):
better not talk about disney World. Keep keep The first
rule of Disney World is you don't talk about Disney World. Yeah.
I don't think that those parks would function that way
if that was. I love it, though, it's like the
uh think in my head, it calls you late at night.
(48:10):
Come on. Although, isn't there that secret members only club
at Disney World. Yeah, that's my secret, you know. But yeah,
it's supposed to be nice. The menu seems cool. 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,
(48:30):
one of these things they called practice or a practis praxi,
and someone there essentially Dockster, not really but just you know,
mentioned they knew what she did and knew who she was,
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.
(48:54):
She started a thing that had a different name at
the time. It's changed names, but now it is called
Hoax h O a X. It is in it's in
San Francisco, and it's the same kind of thing. It's
a company that creates experiences. They're they're an interactive design
studio and they like to create quote novel situations and
(49:15):
powerful experiences. So the same kind of thing. She continued
on to do that stuff, just outside of this other
group Nonchalance. That's a very good point, man. Uh So,
now we're reaching the end, and we talked in past tense.
You see some of the problems. Some people are worried
about their own privacy. Uh some people have what they
(49:36):
feel are ethical objections to the business model. And then
also you can understand this from the perspective of the
employees of Nonchalance and the people responsible for making these experiences.
They might feel kind of underappreciated, like, hey, man, I
gave you a thing. I'm just trying to I'm trying
(49:58):
to keep it going, you know, And I mean you
can't be like you can't go to the sandwich shop,
get a get a free sandwich every day and expect
those sandwiches to just appear. Um, we have to. It's
a terrible comparison, but you get it. So after the
membership fee roll out, there's internal division within nonchalance. Employees resign,
(50:25):
and then Jeff Holl sanctions and article about the society
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. In less than a
(50:49):
week after that article publishes, Jeff shuts down the website.
He leaves a note that the San Francisco House of
Latitude is closed and the Society closes down on Monday, September. Uh.
This was news reportedly to several of the employees involved.
(51:10):
Has happened, you know, recently in the days of the pandemic.
Some people just showed up to a job that no
longer existed, which is a massive bummer, It really is.
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
(51:31):
of ethics or conduct, you know. I mean, even their
whole idea of of discretion uh is ironic in a
lot of ways because like it's a secret, but it's
also tell your friends. So it's it's very loose, all
of this stuff, and and and to the point where
it's clearly meant to be a bit of an ironic
(51:51):
performance art thing, almost commenting on the types of the
way social media works, uh. And and the kind of
you know what you're what you're saying then about how
exclusivity in and of itself makes things more attractive. And
now we've got things like this new social media platform,
uh Clubhouse that's once again based entirely on exclusivity, and
(52:15):
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. UM. So I think there's
there's a lot of that that's sort of some of
the folks that really started taking this seriously seemed to
have maybe maybe have been lost on them a little bit,
which is interesting to me because again, it's the definition
(52:41):
of what this is changes based on the perspective of
the people and their degree of involvement. So after Jeff
Hole closes down Latitude Society egoes on Facebook and you
post an update. Uh. Some people copied and pasted it,
(53:03):
and then the reactions were mixed. Some folks were like,
you know, I get it, um, and I sympathized with you.
Some people were angry, don't you're ruining the game or
you're ruining the community that I've come to love. Uh.
The whole rights the following He says, I've been rolling
a boulder up a hill for four years and it
(53:24):
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. Let go,
Oh man, where do you think that boulder went? I
(53:45):
wonder what's on the other side? You know, to the
third game? Right, that's right. You go throughout the cities
of the United States that you're you're searching for. It's
what a twenty foot tall boulder that's just rolling downhill somewhere. Yeah,
randomized locations, the pieces are there, will workshop it. Yeah.
(54:09):
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
way back machine at archive dot org you can find it.
It's https called slash slash, the Latitude dot Com slash
book Slash one. And if you but then in you
(54:32):
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 how the
whole thing ended and why, And you know, he said,
it'll be an enduring, an escapable mystery. How a game
(54:53):
built to offer shared whimsy inspiration play can result in
trauma for the people most closely involved would feels like
an acknowledgement of the of the conflicts that the employees had.
On the night the society closed, about a hundred people
went to to a local bar that's important during that
(55:15):
first mission, the Sycamore, which I mentioned earlier, uh, and
they got together they commiserated. Um I believe many of
the former members or people who have met one another
through this remain friends today, which is awesome. Uh, It's
sad it was an abrupt end to such a bold endeavor,
but again, people still remember their times. Their experiences in
(55:39):
the group left an impression. And you know, like your
to your point about Rebecca Power, this is likely not
going to be the last thing of its sort, because
I don't. This is just my opinion here. 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 what you
(56:00):
guys glean from this? Would you participate in something like this?
If you got a mysterious on the loop or no,
it needs to be better than an envelope? What would
it be? Dude? If I get like that, I'm I'm going,
I mean, I'm there, Please break me out of the
thing a little bit. Uh. In on non chalance dot
(56:22):
com n O n C H A L A n
c E dot com slash about, you can read the
mission mission statement essentially of Nonchalance and this is the
way it starts. Picture in your mind a cartoon character
sleep walking. Now it goes on to talk about this
thing that they call divine nonchalance. This is this concept
(56:43):
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 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,
(57:04):
and the 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 j June Institute.
I think the thing they created, which is a whole
could be a whole other episode or just you know,
something for you to check out on your own that
we won't spoil here. Um, it's worth your time. It's
fascinating because we definitely spoiled the latitude society. Yeah, heavily
(57:29):
spoiled that part. But this the efforts put in too
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
(57:54):
you can you can create great change in an individual
in a group of people that way. Uh, And it
could be highly positive, but it could also but it
could also be really dangerous because it feels like the
same thing that Nexium did, but with the nefarious goals
at the center of it, right, and with any cult
(58:14):
that started, it's the same kind of thing. 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 too, then just constantly fund money, which they kind
of did at the end there, right, like a startup. Um,
(58:36):
it wasn't it wasn't that crazy, right, I don't know that.
To me, this feels positive. 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 in your perspective.
What's what's not to love? But it is so fascinating
(58:59):
because these things are possible and they're 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, Uh,
if you were creating something like this, what sort of
experience would you give people? And maybe the maybe the
(59:22):
other question, 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. Where on Facebook?
Or on Twitter? Where on Instagram? Uh, we'd like to
recommend here's where it gets crazy on Facebook if you
are a Facebook user. We also have a phone number.
(59:45):
If you do not sip the social meeds, you can
dial lists directly. That's right. We are one eight three
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the time you shall have to leave your message. Please
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not call you or if you want to be completely anonymous,
we are absolutely cool with that. That's right. Call us
(01:00:08):
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, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. I have elaborate plans for that, and one
day it's gonna happen. So if you're a Jeff Hole
like individual and you've just got two million, eight million
(01:00:30):
dollars lying around, hit us up. If you don't want
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(01:00:52):
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(01:01:14):
dot com. Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is
(01:01:35):
a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from
my Heart Radio visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer,
all mission control decads. Most importantly, you are you. 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
(00:47):
you belong to a family, to a an organization, to
a religion of some sort. Uh. 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 too many people if the thing
that you are a member of is exclusive, if not,
(01:10):
everybody can be as special whereas enlightened as you. It's
actually it's 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 as you'll see when we uh
when explore today's topic, folks, obviously the game film with
(01:35):
Michael Douglas, and of course the fantastic for Co'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.
(01:55):
We're talking about something called the Latitude Society. Here are
the facts, here's 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. Well, yeah,
I think the first thing you have to do is
(02:16):
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 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 care
of our families. We you know, eat, we blah blah
(02:37):
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
(02:57):
things that it is there's there's almost no way to
say no. 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
(03:19):
at a fancy hotel or maybe even not a fancy
hotel for your key card. They're slid into those little
paper sleeves or the WiFi 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
and uh and you know, bespoke looking. So it's already
like reeks of entry. When you pull out the actual
(03:40):
card and it looks like a blank credit card, there's
a website. There's an 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 gonna hear
repeatedly in this story. It's almost a monstra absolute discretion.
(04:00):
Once you go to the website, you into your code,
you get a selection of different appointment times, and you
lock yours in. Then you show up to an address
in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. At this point
you will have an experience that feels very through the
looking glass, very Alice in Wonderland. And if you have
(04:23):
not had this spoiled for you, warning spoilers ahead. What
happens when you open the door. The website for this
organization has a has a kind of decadent description of this,
saying through the door and behind a thick curtain was
the flux chamber and automated hallway with only one way
(04:46):
through down a wooden slide at the base of in
ornate Victorian fireplace mantle, awaiting the visitor. At the bottom
of the slide was a lobby area with one red
neonce side reading s and then three doors. So you
have you know, you already have this really this really cool,
(05:06):
almost David Lynchy and vibe. Whatever door you choose, you'll
go through an increasingly narrow passage surrounded by all the
walls are padded with black carpet, and this is called
the dark Maze. You hear music, you hear us suscerous
whispering voices, whispering voices, and that's what guides you through
(05:27):
this completely dark labyrinth. Your monitored by cameras the whole time,
which is important later. Uh. And then finally you go
through this crawl space and find yourself in what they
call the library chamber. Uh. This is surrounded. This is
really cool if you see it. It's surrounded by all
(05:47):
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. It doesn't. 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. Um.
And you know, you just curiosity is going to lead
(06:09):
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. 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,
(06:32):
and that's on 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 within this book. Yeah,
I mean, it really is sort of an interactive theater experience.
If anyone is familiar with the company Punch Drunk who
did the will continues to do I think probably during COVID.
(06:53):
It's on hiatus, but hopefully we've back soon. Uh. Incredibly
beautifully curated kind of theatrical experience in New York, and
I think there's other versions, but it's called Sleep No More.
And it's essentially like an interactive theatrical experience whereas you're
progressing through this actual physical space, you can choose your
path and things happen based on which path you choose, etcetera. Uh.
(07:15):
This this really reminds me of that. But the using
whatever theatrical projection technology uh that they use, essentially 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. Uh.
(07:36):
And you can actually witness this for yourself, um, in
a couple of places. There's a really good article on
Vice about it called My Year in San Francisco's two
million dollar Startup, and also the documentary Bright Axiom, where
you can actually see it visually. It's it's very much
worth a watch. Yeah. In Bright Axiom is uh the
name documentary. You may also be interested in the institute
(07:59):
uh be worn. They are they they're somewhere between documentary
and long form infomercial. But this fable is important to
the Latitude Society. It's when the first pieces of literature
that people experience when they interact with this society. It's
(08:20):
often recited before new adventures or new society meetings, which
they call practice. 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
(08:40):
through your 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, real time,
you just experiencing it. And then after you have experienced
this fable, you are sent off on something similar to
a scavenger hunt. You're you're on a should in the mission, uh,
(09:02):
you go, 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 game which leads you onto
another to another experience. It's all very just. So this
entire thing is an introduction to the Latitude Society. Was
(09:24):
the Latitude Society, Well, it is self described secret order
dedicating itself to expanding human consciousness, and it's uh 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
(09:47):
to moonlight. So what happens once you pass this first
adventure You are inducted as a full 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
(10:07):
the various mysteries of practices and philosophy. Uh. They also
have Like you said that the emphasis here is on
in person experience. So they also had town hall events.
You can you can see various video of this. Uh.
They also had dedicated talks and meetings. This was throughout
the San Francisco area and active members of the community
(10:31):
could mingle and they could openly talk about the future
of society with one another. Because the thing is there's
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 absolutely discretion, meaning you're not supposed to
talk about latitude in front of people who are not
(10:53):
evolved with latitude unless you want to invite them, in
which case you 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 a all about surprise, And as Noll said that
that phrase absolute discretion was embossed on the slip that
you would get that the card was inserted into. So
(11:14):
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 the creators of
the Latitude Society took great pains to make sure that
the member, the user understood that that phrase has two
(11:38):
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 you decided to
give out. The other one is essentially just implying secrecy.
So it's both of those things, right, That's that's what
Ben is talking about. You get to choose is as
(12:00):
a member. Who else becomes a member? And they had
and like, like we're saying, there are several other tenants
that were very important to Latitude Society. Yeah, value, we
value experiences over things is that's the second tenant. And
I think that's something a lot of people can agree with,
especially you'll find uh this belief common in people who
(12:24):
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 so than the gadgets
they accrue. So I get that one third tenant we
give in order to become part of a story greater
than ourselves. Think about it. What is giving me there?
We'll get to it, uh. And the fourth is freedom
from dogma. So the person who invites you is thereafter
(12:49):
referred to as your ascendant and you are their descendant.
It's it's a bit like a less sinister version of
an upline or down line, a multi level marketing scheme.
And I want to be very clear, the Latitude Society
is not multi marketing, and it's also not nexium. And
it's also not nexium. Anybody who is a member of
(13:10):
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 known of this adventure.
So after you've finished this first mission they call it
book one, then you are given a code word that
gets you further access on the website, and then you
(13:32):
get the opportunity to invite other people, theoretically as many
as you would like. So, just like for COO'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 not hurt that the group responsible for creating the
(13:55):
Latitude Society named Nonchalance was staffed by very talented creatives.
They made it compelling, you know what I mean. It
didn't seem it seemed real. It felt real, and in
a way it was. 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, uh,
(14:17):
you know, facility, I guess we call it. There is
a part when you go to that window where it
says the neon, there's like kind of like a shrouded
figure behind sort of um, I guess, frosted glass. You're
not quite sure if it's even a real person or not. Um.
And like a drawer pops out and you're instructed to
place all of your personal possessions in that drawer. So
(14:38):
it's got this like inherent kind of decoupling from like
you know, the hum drum day to day of of
of existence and identity, not to mention things like you know,
your phone and all of that, and it's actually taking
you out, especially like a place like San Francisco Silicon
Valley that's the epicenter of this type of like decoupling
(14:58):
you know, from real real life uh and and thrusting
you into this place where you have to separate yourself
from all of that those trappings and literally, you know,
go down a rabbit hole of actual physical experience as
opposed to virtual. 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
(15:21):
say it's immersive theater. It's there are a lot of
things like this. It's similar to projects from places like
Sembi Playhouse in the Atlanta area, multiple haunted houses in
the US around the world, various theater projects in New York.
It's also a networking opportunity. Liked mentioned this on an
earlier listener male segment. People tend to want to be Promethean,
(15:45):
whether or not they have like earned that feeling. We
want to be the bringers of knowledge often rather than
the receivers. So this became a way of looking very
cool too. Friends where colleagues met somebody at a business lunch,
I think they're dope. You want them to feel the
same way about you. Slide in one of those little
(16:06):
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 the point? What
was actually going on here behind the scenes of this
behind the scenes underground endeavor. Yeah, it's not like this
(16:26):
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, it's a production. This
(16:47):
is expensive stuff. Why would you spend all that money
to do this in multiple locations too? We mentioned going
to an ark that's another physical location with all of
these kind of like bespoke sort of psychedelic looking arcade
machines um, one of which when you put that coin in,
like you're mentioning Ben, a deity appears to you, which
(17:08):
is a is a theme that we're gonna see throughout
the story. Sort of looks almost like the creepy rabbit
from Donnie Darko, only it's more of like a half
man's face with these weird eye stocks that don't have eyes. Uh,
And and and he in sort of like again like
serial killer voice disguise or voice gives you instructions on
where to go next, and you know, starts feeding you
(17:29):
these kind of philosophical lines about the practice and all
of that good stuff. So what was the point at
expensive production, multiple rented locations in the city with the
highest cost of living in the country. It's not a
it's not a it's not a small amount of overhead here.
What else was the Latitude Society and what were the
(17:53):
motivations for creating it? Will explore this afterword from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. To understand the Latitude Society,
we have to understand the organization I mentioned earlier, Nonchalance,
(18:14):
along with two people, Jeff Holl and Cat Miller. Jeff
Hall is the company's founder. He started Nonchalance in the
early two thousand's. Cat Miller as one was one of
the primary employees, and there were other people there were
it takes a village right to make a conspiracy. There
were artists, community engagement experts, various engineers. The money for
(18:40):
this came from Jeff Hall directly. He gave He gave
two million dollars. We came to find out or that's
that's what's believed that he gave two million dollars to
get this thing started. How does one end up with
two billion dollars such that you say, I want to
weird conspiracy. A good way to make two million dollars
(19:03):
is to, you know, have money given to you through
your family. We 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 in your family. So, um, there's something that
(19:25):
happened with Jeff Hall his father. Uh, he created an
incredible company that was valued just under five hundred million
dollars and it was sold to Goldman Sacks five hundred
and thirty one million dollars. And maybe that's how he
got that two million dollars. But at least according to
Jeff in response to that Vice article that we mentioned before,
(19:48):
he states that he actually made his wealth or it
began his wealth working for his father's company before it
was sold to Golden Sacks, and that he became a
partner when the firm was acquired by Golden Sacks. So mainly,
and he wrote to the st Fist and you know,
he wrote the same message device as you said where
(20:08):
where he was taking issue primarily with the implication that
he was a trust fund kid. And he said he
found it but littally, which is understandable. It's not it's
not a phrase. Uh. I don't think it's a phrase
a lot of people use to self identify, you know what.
It's also inherently dismissive and unfair people that are fortunate
(20:30):
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
as an example of taking that privilege and converting it
into something interesting, which I think is uh, you know,
should be applauded. Mm hm. Well, the Latitude Society is
(20:53):
not the first generation 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 city of San Francisco
(21:14):
on kind of a scavenger hunt immersive adventure game. But
here's the 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
(21:34):
was a business and in theory was a very smart one.
The whole 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? I think
it absolutely is. Um And Also, this like this push
pull between artistic pure artistic expression and creativity and making
(21:56):
money is like tail as old as time, right, and
so many are brilliant artists are very bad business people.
Um And and it's interesting when you see that kind
of like that I guess, I don't know, conflict. There's
another interesting kind of group that reminds me of this
called Mia Wolf and there's a fabulous documentary about them.
And it started off as this collective of just like
(22:18):
minded weirdos in Santa Fe, which has kind of a
stuffy art scene that's like very you know, like uh
exclusive in the everything is very expensive, you know, and
kind of boring and like these kind of like seen
kids like who were into like d I y punk
type shows and weird music. Started this group to kind
(22:39):
of be a counterbalance to that. But it became so
successful they started getting investments from folks like George rr
Martin uh and essentially turned it into this giant business.
Some people were less enthused about that direction than others,
and I think that's what we're seeing here. Yeah. The
weird thing is there's this intense dichotomy between what was
(23:02):
presented internally at nonchalance what was presented to people who
are participating in this in this artistic endeavor. Uh. The
idea is that they would one day be able to
like like uh, it was startup thinking right like, let's
get it going, Let's prime the pump as much as
we can, Let's go hard on the paint, and eventually
(23:22):
we will monetize this. We will make it self sustaining.
Hold said. The vision was to create an immersive narrative
experience that rivaled at theme park ride and production value,
but was embedded into the urban landscape of San Francisco.
And they had a deck or a power point and
when the when it was presented internally. It was a
(23:43):
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,
a hugely expensive endeavor. We're talking about even even not
(24:04):
talking about renting multiple properties in a very expensive urban area.
We're talking about technical design, hours of work I d
aighting 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. It's crazy. And when
(24:24):
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 to mill um. And
(24:46):
here's why a lot of people got 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 soul as in corporate
about it. Once you've got to invited, once you were in,
and you know you did the you did the book
law in the first mission, First Adventure. Then we said
(25:07):
you 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 your Paul Mission Controled decade.
You want to invite some friends, you want to invite
your pals Matt Nolan Ben to to this to this adventure.
(25:29):
Then you pay twenty five dollars a card, but later
that was raised to thirty two dollars 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. Absolutely,
And that's why I think it's interesting that people didn't
kind of the people like got some about of shape,
because this was like, this is the deal from the beginning.
You know, you you it's a closed website where you
(25:52):
can't even log into it until you get that card
with that unique code. And then once you go through,
like you said, Ben, that book experience, that's when you
get access to what's called the marketplace um 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 in like
(26:14):
it's fun, the idea of buying a T shirt that
says absolute discretion, Um, and yeah, that's right. You buy
these cards, Uh, you can distribute them to whomever you wish,
and then it 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.
(26:35):
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. Yeah, because you're not.
You're not making money from the cards that are sold
after you. And like you know, like I was saying earlier,
even though they have some some language that's reminiscent of
m l M S, there's not a baked in quota. No,
(26:58):
you you don't get in trouble. You don't get twenty
people per month or something like that. So it's not
it's not ponzi is. It's not MLM. But they do
want to make it profitable. Uh. The thing is, when
you're talking two million dollars, uh, and you're you're trying
to recoup that based on the sale of T shirts,
(27:21):
impendance and invitation cards. You're looking at a very large,
a nearly Sissiffian hill to climb. It would be very
difficult to cover that initial investment in a reasonable amount
of time. Some journalists estimated the math and they said, okay,
we think over the part over the span of the
(27:43):
Latitude Society during its heyday, maybe two thousand people were
giving cards and participated in some part of the initiation.
They went to the website, they never showed up to
the place, and 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
(28:04):
then they said, okay, that's it. It was a great weekend,
but I'm done. If two thousand people did this, they
participate in some way, then that means the most revenue
from that part of the part of the business that
Latitude could make was about sixty tho dollars, which is cool,
but it's not two million. And so later they did
(28:26):
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 an annual membership fee is
over three d bucks. Uh, it's still less than a
burning Man ticket, people are quick to point out. Uh.
But people were like, what is the mission of this
(28:48):
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 original plan. 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
(29:09):
the film is interesting, but it almost has an agenda
a little bit like it it really like you said
at the top end and almost feels like a weird
kind of commercial for the thing, and it feels like
it has a little bit of a 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 absolutely
(29:30):
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 doing kind of little you know, gatherings,
uh 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
(29:53):
and around the whole experience of this thing, you know, again,
because it's almost like a religion at that point, or
it starts to at least have the sense of community
that a religion can have it 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
(30:14):
where they start not digging that because they feel like
it's taking something that's very special and personal to them,
uh and you know, bastardizing it in some way. But again,
to the creators, this is what they had planned all along.
So is it really them doing anything but what they
already kind of set out to do. Yeah. And the
writer for Vice, Lydia Lawrenson, she she had quotes from
(30:38):
several members, Um, I don't want to spoil the 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
to them like a gift that they had been given,
like someone handed them a free card. Then they got
(30:59):
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 like a gift became a burden essentially. But
I'm sorry what had to pay in order to continue
doing what going to these things like they were doing
real world events, so they those were official events that
(31:22):
there were official events, but then also just little little
gatherings of of members privately right right, similar to a
less citister version of squirreling in scienceologies, which we can
talk about a little bit later, but squirreling is UH
scientology term for when someone takes what they describe as
(31:46):
l Ron Hubbard's technology or tech and they use it
in an unsanctioned way. It's it's similar to maybe the
way that the UH Catholic Church in days of old
looked at Protestants, you know what 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.
(32:07):
You're doing it the way like the film industry looks
at pirrating movies, you know what I mean, maybe, yeah,
I mean it's like you're stealing. You're basically saying you're
taking our stuff and you're using it, you know, and
and and you're not like giving us our due or
like yeah, mad, I don't know, like the paying part
certainly is at the heart of it. But yeah, you're
exactly right now. I think squirreling is a perfect comparison.
(32:29):
Let's think too about social media in the Internet. One
thing that the Internet has made abundantly clear in every
every culture, in every iteration, is that if people have
something for free, there's something deeply offensive to people if
that changes to a paid service. You know what New
York Times, right, I say that as a guy with
(32:52):
a subscription uh 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 podcast siloing podcast 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 like free content,
(33:15):
you know, add supported free content, and if all of
a sudden that change, I think people would like lose
their minds m. 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,
(33:37):
I can only have a Facebook page if I go
to this school, or then if later if I go
to a school. Um. We we see this time and
time again. 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
this fight club, then the problems grow as well. It's
(33:58):
a symptom of al if I wanted to be all
ted talky and pop say about it symptoms. Yeah, because
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.
(34:21):
And it's very very helpful to keep it low low
number and 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 to get
(34:43):
the exact right kind of you know, punch to make
people feel that way, and imagine how cool it is,
just objectively, how cool it is if you're say a
a at a at a bar somewhere it's called the Sycamore,
and you're rocking, you're absolute discretion t and then you
(35:03):
you know, you're just hanging out and you see somebody
come in like furtively and have a weird whispered conversation
with the bartender and they get this coin and they
turn around and they see you and their jaw drops
and you're like, 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,
(35:26):
right you, a city in a society speaks to itself
in an ecosystem, 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, signal by
(35:47):
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. People had people have problems with this,
Like a guy named Thomas Loads who was speaking with
Lydia Lawrence and over Advice, objected because he felt the
(36:07):
monetization was a blow to the things about the society
that were important to him and his colleagues. It gave
them meaning. It 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.
(36:34):
And a lot of these people were in, you know,
very stressful day jobs. They're they're very go go go,
you know, with high stakes and stuff. So the 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 that's a beautiful feeling, uh. And
(36:56):
that seemed very meaningful to people, and they liked being
in a secret Society. There was a story. We're part
of the story where the audience and we're the author.
That's amazing. But you'll notice the student listeners, we've been
talking about the Latitude Society and past tense. Why I'll
(37:18):
tell you after a word from our sponsor. So latitude problems.
We're pretty I 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
(37:41):
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 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
(38:02):
issues began. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Uh. And
there's a there's a quote here again from that Vice
article from Matt Weinberger. He's a person who you know,
took part in in the Latitude Society, and here's this quote.
Some people treated it as a game. That makes sense, right,
Some people as a social club and a networking opportunity,
(38:24):
and some treated 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,
uh 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
(38:44):
the things that were not supposed to be spoken to
non members. And this person, Matt 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. And here's the other Latitude wasn't just
a business. It was a genre of business that we
(39:05):
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 a lot of startups, Nonchalance did not seem to
have a very clear focus, in the opinion of observers um,
(39:28):
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 daily cost of the Latitude Society just keeping the
lights on, keeping the rent paid, keeping the weird coins
(39:49):
in circulation that was three grand a day. Uh. And
apparently they didn't even have a very let's say developed
business plan or well not business plan, but they weren't
keeping books particularly well. They didn't have, um, some of
(40:09):
the most basic kind of book keeping sheets that you
would have to have, especially with an operation that's expensive
in a city as expensive as San Francisco. Um. You know,
any business startup or otherwise keeps something called a profit
and loss uh ledger um, 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
(40:31):
outweigh your profits, that's not a good look. Um. And
this could well be 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, um,
not being super meticulous about the bigger picture of the
(40:52):
of the finances. Yeah. Yeah, there's something a little bit
aristocratic about it. I could see critic 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 RESOLTI and I believe it's
(41:14):
RESULTI the owner is this old 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
(41:35):
have to ask ourselves to your point, noal is is
the perspective then for this person? Are 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.
(41:56):
But at nine dollars a month, Uh, this these conversations
have to happen. Um. So there were a couple of
ideas and how to how to stem the financial hemorrhaging,
and one of those was, let's stop emphasizing physicality. Let's
(42:19):
move entirely to virtual reality. And that's that's a bummer.
That also makes me love your New York Times example, Matt,
because we've seen so many print publications say okay, we're
gonna 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,
(42:40):
they feel like they feel like they're getting robbed because
they don't have the thing. And this is more extreme example,
I would argue, because 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 are going to push back
(43:02):
against this. And there's another article by a former member
UH called The author's name is Caveat Magister, and Caveat
compares 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
(43:26):
the there was a really i 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
(43:48):
think there's anything wrong with that. It's kind of like,
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 a box you buy and just build
your own stuff. They're still Legos and you're still having
a heck of a time. UM. I just say, I
don't see anything wrong with what these folks are doing.
(44:10):
And by this point, of course, yes, they're paying three
hundred something UM a year for a membership, and of
course that the push to then have a membership whittled
away at the membership very quickly immediately, UM. And you
know that that's that's obviously a problem if you're trying
to build a user base essentially like a startup does
(44:32):
want to do. Now, we've got some other criticisms from
people here about the Latitude Society and what was 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
(44:53):
experience essentially going through it. Um. And it started on
that book. One experience where you know, she looked at
the book and everything, because she was contacted almost immediately
after that by the person that invited her to the society,
and he stated something a little strange, Uh, something we
didn't know it before. This is that in many of
(45:16):
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
know you're being watched, or that the cameras on at
least or recording. And he mentioned her that, oh, I
was watching you when you when you went through the fable,
when you know, you sat down and you got that
(45:37):
book read to you. Um, 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 surveilling her and observing her. So that was the
first little thing that happened. But then she felt it
got weirder from there. Yeah, she saw an imbalance in
(45:59):
the agreement, some kind of information as symmetry would be
a dry phrase for it. Uh, you do have to
sign this terms of service thing, right, But as Rebecca
Power found out, uh, there wasn't a formal procedure for
releasing yourself from it, and she said, I know the
(46:19):
employees are monitoring us, but who is monitoring them? And
there's another good point, and you I totally forgot about this.
That's before you even set up your appointment, right when
you sign that, so you know you have no idea
what you're signing up for, and you're just gonna put
all your info in there exactly exactly. And there's that
(46:40):
that detail you mentioned about being observed is so creepy
because she found out this Facebook message that the person
who invited her I've been watching it the whole time.
So she got spooped and she asked that the group
deactivate her membership. So this is where we get like
(47:01):
to the Coe pendulum, 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 me and played stupid about their
(47:22):
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 messages from your friends who are like,
(47:45):
better not talk about disney World. Keep keep The first
rule of Disney World is you don't talk about Disney World. Yeah.
I don't think that those parks would function that way
if that was. I love it, though, it's like the
uh think in my head, it calls you late at night.
(48:10):
Come on. Although, isn't there that secret members only club
at Disney World. Yeah, that's my secret, you know. But yeah,
it's supposed to be nice. The menu seems cool. 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,
(48:30):
one of these things they called practice or a practis praxi,
and someone there essentially Dockster, not really but just you know,
mentioned they knew what she did and knew who she was,
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.
(48:54):
She started a thing that had a different name at
the time. It's changed names, but now it is called
Hoax h O a X. It is in it's in
San Francisco, and it's the same kind of thing. It's
a company that creates experiences. They're they're an interactive design
studio and they like to create quote novel situations and
(49:15):
powerful experiences. So the same kind of thing. She continued
on to do that stuff, just outside of this other
group Nonchalance. That's a very good point, man. Uh So,
now we're reaching the end, and we talked in past tense.
You see some of the problems. Some people are worried
about their own privacy. Uh some people have what they
(49:36):
feel are ethical objections to the business model. And then
also you can understand this from the perspective of the
employees of Nonchalance and the people responsible for making these experiences.
They might feel kind of underappreciated, like, hey, man, I
gave you a thing. I'm just trying to I'm trying
(49:58):
to keep it going, you know, And I mean you
can't be like you can't go to the sandwich shop,
get a get a free sandwich every day and expect
those sandwiches to just appear. Um, we have to. It's
a terrible comparison, but you get it. So after the
membership fee roll out, there's internal division within nonchalance. Employees resign,
(50:25):
and then Jeff Holl sanctions and article about the society
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. In less than a
(50:49):
week after that article publishes, Jeff shuts down the website.
He leaves a note that the San Francisco House of
Latitude is closed and the Society closes down on Monday, September. Uh.
This was news reportedly to several of the employees involved.
(51:10):
Has happened, you know, recently in the days of the pandemic.
Some people just showed up to a job that no
longer existed, which is a massive bummer, It really is.
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
(51:31):
of ethics or conduct, you know. I mean, even their
whole idea of of discretion uh is ironic in a
lot of ways because like it's a secret, but it's
also tell your friends. So it's it's very loose, all
of this stuff, and and and to the point where
it's clearly meant to be a bit of an ironic
(51:51):
performance art thing, almost commenting on the types of the
way social media works, uh. And and the kind of
you know what you're what you're saying then about how
exclusivity in and of itself makes things more attractive. And
now we've got things like this new social media platform,
uh Clubhouse that's once again based entirely on exclusivity, and
(52:15):
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. UM. So I think there's
there's a lot of that that's sort of some of
the folks that really started taking this seriously seemed to
have maybe maybe have been lost on them a little bit,
which is interesting to me because again, it's the definition
(52:41):
of what this is changes based on the perspective of
the people and their degree of involvement. So after Jeff
Hole closes down Latitude Society egoes on Facebook and you
post an update. Uh. Some people copied and pasted it,
(53:03):
and then the reactions were mixed. Some folks were like,
you know, I get it, um, and I sympathized with you.
Some people were angry, don't you're ruining the game or
you're ruining the community that I've come to love. Uh.
The whole rights the following He says, I've been rolling
a boulder up a hill for four years and it
(53:24):
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. Let go,
Oh man, where do you think that boulder went? I
(53:45):
wonder what's on the other side? You know, to the
third game? Right, that's right. You go throughout the cities
of the United States that you're you're searching for. It's
what a twenty foot tall boulder that's just rolling downhill somewhere. Yeah,
randomized locations, the pieces are there, will workshop it. Yeah.
(54:09):
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
way back machine at archive dot org you can find it.
It's https called slash slash, the Latitude dot Com slash
book Slash one. And if you but then in you
(54:32):
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 how the
whole thing ended and why, And you know, he said,
it'll be an enduring, an escapable mystery. How a game
(54:53):
built to offer shared whimsy inspiration play can result in
trauma for the people most closely involved would feels like
an acknowledgement of the of the conflicts that the employees had.
On the night the society closed, about a hundred people
went to to a local bar that's important during that
(55:15):
first mission, the Sycamore, which I mentioned earlier, uh, and
they got together they commiserated. Um I believe many of
the former members or people who have met one another
through this remain friends today, which is awesome. Uh, It's
sad it was an abrupt end to such a bold endeavor,
but again, people still remember their times. Their experiences in
(55:39):
the group left an impression. And you know, like your
to your point about Rebecca Power, this is likely not
going to be the last thing of its sort, because
I don't. This is just my opinion here. 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 what you
(56:00):
guys glean from this? Would you participate in something like this?
If you got a mysterious on the loop or no,
it needs to be better than an envelope? What would
it be? Dude? If I get like that, I'm I'm going,
I mean, I'm there, Please break me out of the
thing a little bit. Uh. In on non chalance dot
(56:22):
com n O n C H A L A n
c E dot com slash about, you can read the
mission mission statement essentially of Nonchalance and this is the
way it starts. Picture in your mind a cartoon character
sleep walking. Now it goes on to talk about this
thing that they call divine nonchalance. This is this concept
(56:43):
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 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,
(57:04):
and the 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 j June Institute.
I think the thing they created, which is a whole
could be a whole other episode or just you know,
something for you to check out on your own that
we won't spoil here. Um, it's worth your time. It's
fascinating because we definitely spoiled the latitude society. Yeah, heavily
(57:29):
spoiled that part. But this the efforts put in too
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
(57:54):
you can you can create great change in an individual
in a group of people that way. Uh, And it
could be highly positive, but it could also but it
could also be really dangerous because it feels like the
same thing that Nexium did, but with the nefarious goals
at the center of it, right, and with any cult
(58:14):
that started, it's the same kind of thing. 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 too, then just constantly fund money, which they kind
of did at the end there, right, like a startup. Um,
(58:36):
it wasn't it wasn't that crazy, right, I don't know that.
To me, this feels positive. 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 in your perspective.
What's what's not to love? But it is so fascinating
(58:59):
because these things are possible and they're 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, Uh,
if you were creating something like this, what sort of
experience would you give people? And maybe the maybe the
(59:22):
other question, 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. Where on Facebook?
Or on Twitter? Where on Instagram? Uh, we'd like to
recommend here's where it gets crazy on Facebook if you
are a Facebook user. We also have a phone number.
(59:45):
If you do not sip the social meeds, you can
dial lists directly. That's right. We are one eight three
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we are absolutely cool with that. That's right. Call us
(01:00:08):
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, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. I have elaborate plans for that, and one
day it's gonna happen. So if you're a Jeff Hole
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