#13 Thomas Townsend Brown biographer| Paul Schatzkin

I think they're trying to build an atomic bomb. Are we ever going to get the keys to the cosmic Ferrari? You're collaborating with her on a biography of her dad and her longlost love interest shows back up. Linda needs not to know. If you've ever looked into whether we've cracked gravity, electrovitics, anti-gravity, any of those things, you're definitely going to come across Thomas Townson Brown. And if you come across Thomas Townson Brown, you're going to come across his biographer, Paul Shatskin. That's who we get to talk to today. Paul is the source of information for Thomas Townson Brown: All Things Electrovitics. And honestly, he's just such an awesome guy. The first part of the interview, we actually talk about his first book, which is The Boy Who Invented Television, which led him into Thomas Townson Brown, because he just figured he was going to be a historical biographer. So, you're going to get a deep cut on this one. and he's honestly become a friend to us and we had such a great conversation with him. Uh there's so many mysteries around Thomas Townson Brown that you're going to find that even he after spending at least a thousand hours with Linda Brown's Brown's daughter still doesn't know the full story. No one knows the full story and maybe we never will. But we still think that if we keep scratching at the edges, keep cutting away at corners, we may find some extra breakthroughs. And I think we got a few in this one. So I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to the Austin and Matt podcast. spring and summer of 1973. Okay. I was graduating from a branch of Antioch College, which was a liberal arts college based in Ohio that had branch campuses around the East Coast. I went to one of those branch campuses based in Baltimore and Colombia, Maryland. And my college career, if you can call it that, was spent with the earliest video porta, the very first personal video recorders. Wow. uh running around the neighborhoods trying to create programming for what we hoped would be cable TV. We were part of what we called the gorilla video movement. And we had a publication that all the video the gorilla video communities around the country read and contributed to called Radical Software came out of New York. And I will say that radical software is where I first read this idea that someday in the future televisions, computers, and satellites would all merge to form a state of global white noise. So it it very much predicted the time that we're living in now. Incredible. Yeah. In the spring of 73, just as I was graduating from that branch campus, Radical Software, which had been published for several years out of New York, farmed an addition out to another community and and the first one that they did was out of San Francisco. And that was I can show you right here. Oh yeah, we have evidence. This is the video city edition of Radical Software Volume 5 number three from the spring of 1973 called the Video City Edition because as I learned from inside Vid video was invented in San Francisco in 1927 and it was in this magazine in its pages that I first learned of a man named Pho T. Farnsworth, who in fact was the inventor of video. And this is the the actual magazine. This is the actual magazine. You haven't. This is the one you This is not a copy. This is This is that I hung on to that magazine for those what are we now 50 odd years. Yeah. This is it. Yeah. So that's where you met about learned about Farnsworth. Right. Okay. And um I didn't really think anything of it other than that it was a curiosity that we had so little historical knowledge of the origins of what by then was the dominant communications technology on the planet and still is. Um and when I saw some of the images that accompanied those articles, it dawned on me that we had no sense of the prehistory of television. I was seeing things I had never seen before. So that made had some kind of impact. And later that same summer, uh, after I'd moved out to Los Angeles to seek my fortune in the actual TV business, I was rumaging around in the stacks at the Santa Monica library and I found the story of television by George Ever. This is the first biography that was really ever written of Pho 1949 by a man named George Everson who had provided the initial what we now call angel capital that got Farnsworth off the ground in 1926. So I kind of knew that story, the television part of the story. But what really got me hooked was later that summer, uh, my college roommate and I, he he was from Los Angeles and I stayed with him and we teamed up. His name was Tom Klein. Tom and I made a trip up the West Coast toward San Francisco and stopped in Santa Cruz to visit somebody else from the Guerilla video community who was doing uh, the very first kind of local cable access programming for Santa Cruz. And I don't actually I I don't remember his real name, but he had the gnome diplume of Johnny videotape. So we can only call him Johnny. Wow. Were there monikers in that gorilla video movement? Were there Were there like monikers or nicknames that Oh, yeah. Yeah. People Yeah, people stay for some reason or was it just for fun? I think it was mostly just for fun. Okay. I mean, the the the whole gorilla video movement was kind of an extension of the flower power era of the 60s when everything was so colorful and playful and so there was still a lot of that ethos to what became the gorilla video movement in the early 70s. So, Johnny videotape and I'm sorry I don't remember any of the other names, but that's what I do remember. So, here's the scene as I recall it. We hung out with Johnny in Santa Cruz and then we went out to the coast and we stood on a sat on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and I actually have a photograph from that day and Johnny started telling us more of the story of Pho. Johnny knew a man named Phil Gson who had edited and published the video city edition that I just showed you. So Gonson was the editor and publisher and Gethson was a friend of a man named Pho T. Farnsworth III who was the oldest son of the inventor of television who had died a couple of years earlier. He was Pho T. Farnsworth II. His grandfather was Pho T. Farnsworth I so Phil Gson knew Pho III. And and I'm relaying a story here that is a couple of generations removed, but the story that I heard goes kind of like this. First, Johnny explains to us that in the latter years of his life, Pho was developing a very promising process to achieve nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the missing piece of the nuclear energy puzzle still to this day. I had never heard of it prior to that. But Johnny explained to me that the promise of nuclear fusion is effectively a clean, safe, and virtually unlimited source of industrial energy from the same process that drives the sun and all the stars. A star in a box. No, a star in a jar. Star in a jar. That's right. Yeah, star in a jar. Right. The star in a jar. Ju just maybe maybe I'm missing the connection. How is it that the guy that creates television would be useful in studying nuclear fusion? That's one of the great connections in this whole story. So we we'll come back to that story on the hillside because we're going to have a little conversation now about a man named Albert Einstein. I'm sure you're familiar. And this conversation begins when I ask somebody, "Do you know what Albert Einstein won his Nobel Prize for?" The photoelectric effect. Oh, somebody knows the answer. We have a winner. Somebody's done his homework. I may have cheated. I'm sorry. You're not supposed to answer that question. No, I think it's great. Oh, uh, relativity. Yeah, relativity. Well, that's the com. Oh, yeah. Thank you for Thank you for Thank you for playing. Yeah. What what Einstein is most known for is relativity and E= MC² which comes at the very end of the work that he did in 1905. In 1905, Albert Einstein published four sometimes it's considered five different papers that laid the foundations for quantum mechanics and relativity. The first paper that he published and I can't do justice to the actual title. It's got the word heristic in it somewhere, but it is an articulation and quantification of the photoelectric effect or the process by which light becomes electricity. And in that paper, he describes the photon as a discrete unit of energy or a discrete unit of light and begins laying the foundations for quantum mechanics where energy is believed to be transmitted in discrete packets called quantum. And a photon is a similarly discrete packet like a like a like a quantum. So that paper is the first paper that he publishes in 1905. That's what he is awarded the Nobel Prize officially for in 1921. But that paper leads him through a series of steps over the course of 1905 from um the the photoelectric effect to the paper that proves the existence of atoms. Then we get into special relativity and finally we wind up with E= MC² which is the the formula that we're talking about that is active in nuclear fusion. That's that's where you get all the energy because and this is what Johnny videotape was explaining to me that I had never heard before. Some of us who are familiar with nuclear energy growing up in the 50s and 60s understand atom splitting. That when you split a uranium atom, the two parts that you have left have less mass than the one part that you started out with. That difference is given off as energy according to Einstein's formula. The same happens when you combine light particles like hydrogen. So you take two hydrogen molecules and combine them into a helium molecule. The helium molecule has less mass than the two hydrogen atoms. That difference is given off as energy. And arguably the amount of energy that you're getting is much greater than you get from uranium because you're starting out with so much less mass per unit of energy released. So this is what I'm hearing on this hillside in Santa Cruz. And the connection is direct because in fact E= MC² was an extension of what Einstein first introduced with the photoelectric effect. So it's no accident that somebody who would then use what he learned from Einstein as a teenager in the late teens and early 1920s would later in his life use that same information to explore nuclear fusion. No accident at all, rather a direct connection. And I would argue that, and we'll come back again, we'll come back to this the apocryphal story that I heard on that hillside. Uh I would argue that when we get into the late 1930s, early 1940s, there isn't anybody who is well-versed who is as well-versed in the quantum realm as Pho. Farnsworth because he has taken the basic elements of quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect, and spent 10 years developing it firsthand to deliver television into the marketplace. He started with the raw idea of the image to sector tube and with that invention, this is what I learned later from the son that I I mentioned, he developed a whole portfolio of patents that made television practical. And and so when you get to the Manhattan project, there wasn't anybody in the country as knowledgeable about the quantum realm as Pho T. Farnsworth. And in fact, during, I think, the summer of 1941, when the Manhattan Project was just getting started, somebody flies to visit Farnsworth at his farm in Maine, where he's now retired to or retreated to, and invites him to work on a secret project in Chicago. And that would have been the Fermy Pile, which was part of the Manhattan Project. But Farnsworth turned to his wife and said, "I think they're trying to build an atomic bomb, and I want nothing to do with it." So, here's here's one of the most knowledgeable people of this whole quantum realm saying, "I'm not going there." While the rest of them all filed in and went to work on the bomb. So, so, so I'm just going to take a quick tangent here and you can edit this however you want, but uh we're we're following the point that I keep making when I get into this is what has been lost to history because of the way television was absorbed into the culture and the economy, which is what my book is about. Um, what we have lost is that video, all this screen technology that dominates our world now comes from the same well of cosmic knowledge as nuclear energy and atomic weapons. That's unbelievable that that Einstein's not only did he kind of coin quantum mechanics, but he it its derivatives led to television. It led to refrigeration. It led to so many things. And he was only 26 at the time. I think we all think of Einstein as like white-haired working on the Manhattan project, but in 1905 when he was publishing those papers, he was only 26 years old. And that just blows my mind to think about something. There there's a lot of practical application that came out of the work that Einstein did that transformed the world. But I would I would argue and have have gotten support for this point that when when Farnsworth produces the first electronic video signal in 1927, that was the first practical application of all the knowledge that Einstein delivered in 1905. So he was kind of like the first quantum engineer because there might have been theoreticians but he's actually creating things. He's engineering with it. When I got first got into this story, when I first got into the story about Phoearns, I thought of it in just those terms. Einstein was the brains. Farnsworth was the hands. Yeah. Wow. So, of course, they would have called him when it was time to build the bomb. Like, you're the engineer. And he batted it away. He said, "No." No. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. So, we'll go back to the hillside in in Santa Cruz. So, so Johnny videotape has explained the process of nuclear fusion and and the promise that it still holds today of a source of clean, safe and virtually unlimited energy. Unlimited because the isotopes that produce it can be drawn from seaater and there's a lot of that. Then he tells me this apocryphal story. He describes a scene for me where the younger Farnsworth is standing outside of his father's laboratory while his father is working on this fantastic device, the star in a jar. Uh I I should back up for one second and explain that the riddle that's so compelling on all this is how do you bottle a star? What kind of container can you build where either the heat of the reaction doesn't destroy the container or the cool walls of the container extinguish the reaction? How do you bottle a star? That's the riddle of nuclear fusion that big science is still trying to figure out and has not. So now we're in this laboratory and this young man watches his father, the older man, achieve the dream. He sees the star in the jar, the bottled fusion reaction, and his father watches it for a while and sees that it works. And after he's satisfied that he has solved the riddle, he dismantles the machine and takes a piece of it and puts it high on a shelf where nobody will ever find it. That's the story that I heard that summer day on the bluff in Santa Cruz in 1973. That's when the harpoon on all of this got sunk in my consciousness. You were hooked. I was hooked. Yeah. And I I can that's that's when I I I can go back and look at that moment as as the seminal moment that sucked me into all this. I didn't do anything with it immediately after that. It wasn't until a couple years later that we got drawn into it. But but I I can identify that as the moment that I the seed was planted. Yeah. Wow. So it sounds like he might have he might have cracked it and he decided maybe we're not ready for this. I believe that is the case. Yes. I I think that he had and and this is this is what comes through in the in the literature that I've written that his widow wrote when I starting when I met her two years later in 1975 there um there is the sense that he had some idea what would make it work but withheld that information and that immediately becomes controversial. What right did he have to withhold this? But I think he imagined in a very different civilization than the one that we were living in. And as is as as is the same sentiment expressed within the Towns and Brown story that I also wrote about, there's just the sense that this species is not quite ready for that knowledge. So interesting because he also invented TV and we have that everywhere as well. And so we did he did give us that and you know that has its pros and cons as well in I I've said it several times. So so like I said both video and atomic weapons come from the same well of cosmic knowledge and it's questionable which has done more damage. That's right. And around what year would like just just if you had to speculate around what year would have his son have seen him do that? That would have been probably in the early to mid 1960s. The most work that was done on the Farnsworth fuser was done between about 1960 and 1966. And and there are a lot of variables in that story because Farnsworth was no longer the master of his own destiny at that point. That's another factor in why he may have had reservations about how the technology would be used. Why is that? Well, Farnsworth had his own company, the Farnsworth Television and Radio Company in Fort Wayne, Indiana from 1938 until 1949. And the company actually did very well during World War II making products for the war effort based on vacuum tube technology, but they didn't make the transition out of the war as deafly as other companies did. And so they had taken on a lot of debt for for new factories and plants. They weren't able to service that debt. Long story short, they had to default on some of that debt. And in 1949, the Farnsworth Television and Radio Company disappeared from the New York Stock Exchange after it was acquired by an ascendant conglomerate called ITT or International Telephone Telegraph. So in 1949, Farnsworth loses his own company and that itself is is only part of the story because a lot of the destiny that he wanted to pursue had already been lost but he lost the company alto together and when people ask me why don't we know of Pho when his gift of the world is one of the most dominant things ever ever invented I'll say there's three reasons for that the first is he was not inclined to tout his own accomplishment ments. He knew what he had done, but he was always focused on what he was going to do next. Second was there are plenty of other contenders who are pretenders to the throne and and they will all take credit. So that's where you get into this television was too complicated to be in invented by any single individual. It wasn't and it was um and then third is he no longer had a company to to elevate his accomplishments. So there was no farms worth in television television or radio company and say this is where television started. So so he lost the company in 1949 was now working for ITT. Got it. Yeah. And so did this did you know that you were going to research and this that this would become your first book and when did that sort of take off? Ah well the the the hook that the the harpoon that got set with the story in 1973 didn't get dragged to the boat until 1975. I was in Hollywood. I was working for a very small video production company. And again, we're talking about this period in the mid70s when video was just coming into its own as a production medium in its own right. It had been used, it was used on on stages to to do live television shows or or or sitcoms, but it wasn't used in in replacement for film yet as it is now. And so this was the period when video was just coming into its own. The company that I worked for promoted the art of video for production and we had um very early stage video editing machines. The when it was all analog and used tape and and most of your day editing video was spent waiting for the the reels of tape to get to the piece of footage that you wanted to use. So, so we had these analog video recorders and we're trying to promote that service to other people that were using video and I came up with the bright idea of promoting the service by creating a coupon for good for a free hour of video on uh video editing on our machines and as a faximile dollar bill suggested in place of George Washington's picture we put a picture of Pho T. Farnsworth and and my employer, his name was Bob Kiger, said, "Who's father T Farnsworth?" And I proceeded to tell him the whole story that I had now learned from reading George Everson's biography, from from meeting Johnny videotape and having a sense of what that story was. I proceeded to tell him that whole story and he said, "That would make a great movie for television." And that's when we started dragging dragging the whale back to the boat. Okay. Yeah. Um, and at Bob's bidding really somehow, I don't remember how. Oh, I know. We we we had a copy of of George's book and I think we contacted his publisher and the publisher told us how to reach George and we found George who was by now in his 90s and living in Mendescino County, California. And we went up there. We flew to San Francisco and drove to Mendescino and we met George and spent an afternoon with him and and hand wrote an option for the screen rights to his book and handed him a check for $500 and we now held the rights to the story of Pho. Farnsworth. Then he introduced us to the Farnsworth family that we met later that same summer and that's when everything started to really take shape. That's amazing. Yeah. George Everson, how much was he involved with Farn Farnsworth? He he also funded he wrote the book on it, but he also funded Farnsworth. So the story there is that first of all Farnsworth got the idea that became video in the summer of 1921 and and thought about it and did what research he could on the idea and drew his first sketch of the idea for his high school science teacher, a man named Justin Tolman, sometime in the winter or spring of 1922. And you'll see that we have reproductions of that actual sketch because he drew it on a sketch. He drew it first on a chalkboard, the the schematic for the image to sector tube. And then he drew it also on a piece of sketch paper. And he handed it to Justin Tolman and said, "Hang on to this. It might prove useful one day." And long story short, about 15 years later, Tolman produces that sketch during the patent litigation. That's why we still have it today. Oh, yeah. So, he he he has the the conception and one of the things that I learned as I got to know the Farnsworth family was the much more about the the idea of how inventions enter the world to an inventor. When you get an idea for an invention and it's a viable idea, the moment of conception, that's the moment when it's invented. And when you produce it on a workbench later, that's called reducing it to practice. So you could say that television was actually invented by Pho Farnsworth on a on a potato field in Idaho in the summer of 1921. First manifestation was the sketch that he draws in 1922 and then it is another four years before he gets any funding to try and actually build something. That's the measure of how far ahead he was of any of his contemporaries. He thinks that any day now he's going to open Popular Science magazine and read that somebody has developed electronic television and it never happens. He was traveling in his own realm and the people that were trying to do television in the 1920s were doing it with electromechanical devices. They were very Newtonian for for lack of a better word. spinning wheels and discs, mechanical things, lots of moving parts, and and he's carrying this idea in his head until he takes a job in Salt Lake City in 1926 working for a man named George Ever who's developing a community chest campaign for the city of Salt Lake City. And George is a financier from the West Coast. His contacts are all out of the Bay Area. And after working late one night on the community chess campaign, George takes an interest in his young prodigy and asks him what his plans are. He's going to go back to college. And young, he calls himself Phil now. He dropped the O a couple years earlier. And young Phil says, "Well, you know, I've been trying to find some funding for this idea I have." And George encourages him and says, "Well, what's the idea?" And he says, "It's a an electronic television system." And George says, "Teelvision? What's that? It's 1926. Television? What's that?" And Phil proceeds to explain the idea. George doesn't really get it, but there's another man in the room, a colleague of George is named Les Guell. Less is a graduate of Stanford and has some technical chops. And when they get together later, Les encourages George to take another look at what he's just heard from young Farnsworth. So they get together again and Phil goes into a little more detail and George says, "Well, that's a pretty crazy idea, but I keep a little bit of mad money aside for taking a flyer on something someday." High risk. So he a high-risisk venture, Angel Capital, what we call it now. And so he dedicated the $6,000 and I don't know what the the equivalent would have been about $60,000 today. He he commits it to to bringing Farnsworth first to Los Angeles to start building circuits. And while he's in Los Angeles, George goes back up to San Francisco and confers with some of his colleagues there who are directly associated with the Crocker bank. There's there's one individual named Daddy Fagan who's considered the the the wized old keeper of the moneybags and and a capitalist and and engineer named Roy Bishop. and they listened to the idea and said, "Bring them up here." And and so Farnsworth comes up from San Fr from Los Angeles to San Francisco, presents this this idea to this room full of capitalists and engineers, and they agree to as as as uh Fagan put it. He said, "Well, it sounds like wildcatting to me and very wildcatting at that." But they decide to take a flyer on it and he gets $25,000 and a loft at 202 Green Street and he starts building the first electronic television system 6 years after he had the first idea and nobody's come up with the same idea. Do you think he was at all versed in Einstein's photoelectric effect? Was he like was he approaching from the science or was he tinkering from the engineering more? No, I think that the photoelectric effect was central to his process. And there are stories of Farnsworth holding forth in his science class and his teacher coming in and and watching this 14-year-old kid explaining relativity to the science class. So Farnsworth knew the whole story of relativity that effectively begins with the photoelectric effect. And because he was already thinking that he wanted to invent television. I mean the background there is simply he was aware of the world of invention and and that television was something that was anticipated that someday motion pictures and radio would somehow be merged and you'd have moving pictures that could fly through the air and and he wants to be an inventor. So he thinks all right television that'd be a good thing to invent to launch my career as an inventor. So he's processing all this starting with the photoelectric effect. And when when you look at that that sketch that he drew of what became the image dissector in the late 1920s and 30s, it is essentially Einstein's photoelectric effect in a bottle. Wow. And so he's he's working with bottles, empty bottles at a very early age and is the master of the vacuum tube and and electronic processes and vacuum tubes by the time he's 30. This does make a lot more sense why he would eventually end up looking at nuclear fusion. Yeah. Because he had been thinking since he's a child or basically a kid Yeah. about how how the quantum world works. Right. And one of the points that I make too is that Einstein did all this seminal work in 1905 and Pho was born in 1906. Towns and Brown who I guess we'll talk about later you know part two towns and Brown was born in 1905. And so Brown and Farnsworth were contemporaries though I don't believe they ever met. They were contemporaries and what they have in common is they have never not lived in a world without quantum mechanics and relativity. So when we talk today about digital natives who have grown up with iPhones in their hands in the same sense Farnsworth and Brown grew up with quantum mechanics. That was just part of their their world view. That was how they processed the world from a from a native base. Of course. Yeah. So, so, so the the the concepts that go into the photoelectric effect, it was sort of natural for him to to build them into the a vacuum tube for the sake of transmitting moving pictures, but that lays the foundation for the work that he does later on, which which culminates in nuclear fusion. But he used a lot of the things that he learned along the way when he got to that point in the late 1940s and early 1950s. So, how does this one Farnsworth who's the inventor of television relate to Thomas Townson Brown, this other scientist who's looking at anti-gravidics and how did you go from looking at Farnsworth and then to discover Towns and Brown? How how does that tie together? Well, I'll answer that question first by explaining how I got from Farnsworth to Towns and Brown. Yeah. So, I had been working on the Farnsworth story in one capacity or another. It wo in and out of my life at various different times from 1973 and75 up until the year 2000. Uh I had developed some material that would fit into a book but never really thought of writing a book because when I met the farmer family his widow Pam was writing her own book. So I deferred to her in the interest of using her book as the basis for the movie project that we thought that we would do in the 1970s. But I had a a business here in Nashville that I sold and then the new owners folded it in 2000 and I didn't have anything else to do but I had met a publisher during the years when I was working on that business that m music industry business and I ran the farms story by him and he said let's let's make it a biography. So in 20201, I took the material that I developed and built it into a a larger arc that actually begins with the fusion story as a prologue and then lands on it at the end. And that book book was published in 2002, the 75th anniversary of the arrival of video on the planet. And so now I think, oh, I have found my new career. I am a biographer of obscure 20th century scientists. How cool. How cool. And I'm wondering what I will do for my encore because I have no idea. And in the in the summer of 2002, as we're putting the finishing touches, it's like I literally have the galleys in my hand for the boy who invented television. I got an email out of the blue. And the email said, "Check out Thomas Townsen Brown. He's another obscure inventor whose work has been swept under the rug." The letter says that physics at the time, science at the time said what he had discovered was against physical law, but the military classified it. And the other thing it said was two other things it said were first that you can see the results of Towns and Brown's work in a blue haze floating over the desert in Nevada at night and the second was that the Sharper Image made an air purifier with his discoveries that he never got any money for. That was the letter that I got in 2002 that introduced me to Towns and Brown. So just on the cusp of finishing the biography of Pho is when I first learned of Towns and Brown. And now I'm motivated because I want to write another book. And so over a period of time, I found the Brown website. I was introduced to his daughter. She and I agreed to collaborate. And then we went down the rabbit hole together. Who sent that letter? Was it like a fan? Was it just like a anonymous or are you I don't know, Matt. Who sent that letter? I don't know. I'm asking you. Um, did I mention going down a rabbit hole? Yeah. Yeah. Um, the letter was signed Janoseek. J A N O S H E K. Janek. Janosek. I have no idea. Wow. I have no idea. Have you tried to piece together what Janosek could possibly mean? You mean have I puzzled it out into some anagram for something? No, I haven't. and and and so um to this day I don't know where that inspiration came from but it's curious that in the last few months I was looking at the reviews on Amazon and there's a review from a guy who says I was the guy who put the bug in his ear but it's not signed Janoshack it's got a different name was it an email or a physical letter that I got was an email okay got it yeah so I get this email and and I'm I'm looking for something, but um I had no knowledge of this Towns and Brown. And honestly, when I started reading about Towns and Brown and his affiliation with UFOs, I started to kind of dodge away from it because while I I believe that we're not alone in the universe and I think there's a likelihood that we are being visited by other forms of intelligence, it's it's not a place that I go. I'm I'm not a euphologist. I I don't spend time studying sightings. I enjoy the movies. I love Close Encounters with a third kind of the third kind, but it's it's not something where I I ever felt motivated to invest my time and energy. Um, but I was motivated and and I found elements in the story that I thought I could find parallels with the work that I'd done around Pho. I sort of thought it would be some kind of sequel, but it wasn't until we got a few feet down the rabbit hole we realized that this was an entirely different journey. Yeah. Had you ever dealt with had was the Farnsworth story did it have any elements of like military secrecy in it? Was that a new aspect of Townsen Brown? Yeah, the the military industrial complex aspect of the Towns and Brown story was not present in in the Farnsworth story. Now he did do some work particularly during World War II developing vacuum tubes, radar tubes and so forth for the military but there was there was never the sense of cloak and dagger around the farms story that there was as soon as I got into the Brown story. Now, when he was developing the fusion technology in the 1960s, there was a lot of secrecy around it, but none of that secrecy was vested in the tentacles of the national security and intelligence establishment as it seems the Brown story was. Yeah. Did that make you nervous at all or did that make it just more exciting? Oddly not. Um there there are there are stories like the Karen Silkwood story of people who have feared for their life because they're revealing secrets. And for whatever reason I I never felt any kind of apprehension or anxiety around what I was trying to do, the stories I was trying to tell. In part because I didn't really know what the stories were. It was so hard with this where the where the farms were story was kind of straightforward and lent itself to a conventional narrative. This towns and brown story was a different kind of beast alto together. Okay. So you get the email. Yeah. What do you what do you do next? Uh I I I Googled I googled Tons and Brown. What did anybody you know this was 2002. What did you do? You went on the internet and you Googled things. Um, and now you would go to chatgpt and most of what you'd get from chat gpt would be stuff that I did. That's right. So, um, I Googled it and I found a website. It was called Sotaria and I don't remember what that was a Latin word meaning light, I think. and and the site was dedicated to Towns and Brown. That's where I read about the the the consistency with Albert Einstein and the affiliation with UFOs because what he discovered was believed to perhaps be what propelled UFOs and you know I'm kind of holding at arms length but I contacted because I needed something to do right. Yeah. Uh, I I contacted the the master of the website. His name was Andrew Baland and um asked for a little bit of information and then over the course of several weeks I got involved in a correspondence by email with Andrew and Andrew had known the Brown family since the 1980s. So he'd known them for 15 20 years by now and had been interested in what we're calling electrogravidics which is the name given to Brown's work that's associated with anti-gravity and had he got to know his w his his widow who died in 1985 and his daughter who who lived with her mother in the somewhere in the desert in California. They had moved there from Catalina after Towns and died. And he eventually, Andrew eventually introduced me by conventional snail mail to Linda Brown, the daughter who had worked with Townsen in his laboratories on the East and West Coasts during her late adolescent early adult years in the 1960s. Linda turned 20 would have turned 20 in 1965. So she worked with her father in his laboratories as a late teenager and and early adult and she and I struck up a conventional snail mail correspondence over the course of I'll say about 6 months. Um we started corresponding I think in October 2002 and we finally agreed to meet in the spring of 2003. we entered a collaboration agreement where we would work together and and she would share in in the proceeds and then we met in Las Vegas in I think April of 2003 and that's when we went to work on it and spent the next five six years trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle for which we had no cover no picture on the the box cover. What was it like working with Linda? She's the daughter of T Towns and Brown. Was she kind of tired of this story? Was she What was her countenance around? Was she reticent to share? Was she thankful someone finally came around and wanted to talk? H what did what was that like? Working with Linda Brown uh on the biography of her father was an experience that covered the full spectrum of human experience from enthusiasm or or or starting with reticence and then becoming enthusiasm and then becoming a quagmire. Okay. Because because it became so hard to find any actual material about her father. And and then then we were availed to a kind of a secret source, the the the individual that in the book I cenamed Morgan, who was somebody that Linda had been very close to, intimate with during her adolescence, and they reformed their relationship, and that cast another uh crust around the material. She was she was privy to things that I was not privy to. And that lent a level of difficulty to the experience to the to the point where it finally got to the point in at the end of 2008 beginning of 2009 where uh the relationship with her became very difficult and I walked away from the project. Okay. Because there she had information that she wasn't willing to share because it was confidential or for whatever reason she was holding back. There was a kind of a buffer there between what Linda was learning and what she was able to share with me. And I don't know really where the limits of the buffer are, what more she may know than what she shared with me. And and and there were there were things that she did kind of convey to me in a very veiled sense that gave me the sense that she was exposed to very different highlevel things that perhaps in the interest of protecting my personal security I was not privy to. So there were layers of difficulty to this whole process. Like I said earlier, the the Phosworth story was a the Philo Farnsworth story was a fairly straightforward experience of compiling a conventional biography. The the Towns and Brown experience turned into falling down a deep dark rabbit hole in which we were never sure there was a rabbit. Do you think she ever gave you disinformation knowingly? I was asked once, did I think I had been played during this whole process of compiling the man who mastered gravity? And the answer to I I I gave to that was, well, if you can tell me who was playing me and to what end, then I will consider the possibility that I was in fact played. Well, how do you feel about it? What's your gut tell you throughout it all? throughout it all. I think that I was given the information that this what we've been calling a multi-generational project needed at this time to reach the next phase of its disclosure. It's a phasic sort of unrolling. There's there's there's we're we're we're getting we're we're we're jumping from the kind of the periphery of the storytelling to what's at the heart of it. That's right. And and my contention after having been through all this over the course of the last 50 years, if you just talk about the Farnsworth story and 25 years, if we're just talking about the Towns and Brown story, is that um information is being metered out to us as fast as we can earn it. And I find that embodied a quotation from Pho T. Farnsworth from later in his life when he said, "I know that God exists. I know that I have never invented anything. I have been a medium by which these things were given to the culture as fast as the culture could earn them. I give all the credit to God." Now, I don't necessarily go along with the anthropomorphification of the spiritual elements of the universe, but I think that he's he's describing a process here by which humanity is being shown the secrets of the universe as fast as we can show that we've earned them. And and there's there's an element of that in the the Towns and Brown story as well. Let me let me read you one quotation here. one that tends to the idea of the muse. The muse has been talked about for forever or even just inspiration. Where does inspiration come from? Those kinds of ideas in in this in a story like this. What I the way I try to make sense of it is that we're actually talking about some kind of higher intelligence in the universe that is meeting these secrets out to this species on Earth that is learning to use them and demonstrating its worthiness as time proceeds. Prompt theory Morgan. that my my my clandestine my covert source for the um for the Brown story said something that speaks in a similar manner. He said in subsequent messages Morgan alluded to the conversations he had at Ashon when Dr. Brown said that time travel is possible in your lifetime. In March 2005, Morgan confided the technology is a time machine. a way of reaching forward and back of traveling between dimensions that are available to us. Now you can see that it is also beyond our capabilities spiritually. How do you change that? Well, you get people to sit around a campfire and tell stories of wondrous things and brave individuals and eventually they come to accept that vision as a possibility. They come to see that possibility in themselves and take ownership of it. And then I wrote, "Or they make a movie with a Mobius loop-like title, Back to the Future." And in the final scene, show a mad scientist named Doc Emmett TT Brown coming back from the future pouring beer and banana peels into his Mr. Fusion. Yeah. Home reactor. Pull his goggles over his eyes and say, "Where we're going, we don't need roads. Man, TT Brown in Back to the Future is is unmistakable. EMTT Brown, TT at the end, Doc Brown having a time machine, Flux Capacitor, the writers must have known. I mean, yeah, that's too that's too much. I I think for the viewers of this podcast, we have to set the stage of there's a few characters that really take the limelight here. There's Linda Brown, the daughter, who you who you meet, who you already described meeting, right? But then some people start showing up, right? And you give them code names because first, you know, probably for safety reasons and things. Well, so Linda and I struggled with this for a little over a year. When we met, she brought me two Rubbermaid tubs that were all that was left of the family archives. There wasn't much there. There were some some schematics and patents from the 1920s and 30s and there was some interesting stuff there, but that nothing that gave us a handle that we could use to make things add up into some kind of narrative. Remember, I'm coming off having written a fairly conventional biography that had a beginning, a middle, and an arc to it. Um, I'm trying to do the same thing here, but finding it very difficult. So when we started collaborating, Linda started to share with me her journal entries. She kept an extensive journal during this period that we're talking about in the mid1 1960s and she still had all the journals. And much of what is documented in those journals is the relationship that she formed with an individual that I subsequently cenamed Morgan. I know the man's real name, but I'm we're we're gonna call him Morgan. And I don't know where Morgan came from, but that's the name that stuck. And why can't you share his name? Just out of curiosity. Is it national security? Is it out of respect? It's it's out it's out it's out of out of respect and for personal security. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Um, you know, Linda is still living. And so, frankly, the the less I say about Linda, who maintains her existence in an undisclosed location, I I I feel the better I'm I'm honoring her desire to maintain her privacy at this point. Got it. Um, and that's more for um security for her. Personal security. She does. She doesn't want to bunch people. Not that she feels like she's in any physical danger, but there is a there is a lot of new curiosity around this that has surfaced in just the last two years. Linda is known to be a source of of information and and doesn't not want to be at the center of that quest. That's so interesting. Like some people with a personality would love this. Sure. You know, it's like, hey, finally I can tell the whole world what I've been holding on to for forever. And some just want to stay uh un un out of out of the limelight and she just has that personality. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And and and it was it was a process of earning her trust over those several months from late O2 to early 03. Um that that got her to the point where she was now not only willing but excited at the prospect of sharing what she had. But most of what she had was the journals that she had kept during that time which detailed her relationship with this individual that I cenamed Morgan who had his own relationship with Towns and Brown. And so when when Morgan shows up in the story, he's he's interested in Linda as a classmate in in his in his high school class and in in a potential romantic sense, but he also meets her father and is as interested in what her father is doing as he is in Linda. And so there are parallel stories through this whole narrative where Morgan has his own relationship with Towns and Brown and over the course of a couple of years is exposed to and then drawn into what appears to be some tentacle of the nation's military and national security establishment. Um, this is a bit of an aside, but do you do you think there will be a moment in the future when it will be appropriate to release the names of Morgan and O'Reilly? There could be. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Something to look forward to for those following the story. Well, I I I think I think, you know, more to look forward to is Yeah. Are are you know are we ever going to get the keys to the cosmic Ferrari? That's right. Yeah. So, you know, who who cares who Morgan Yeah. Right. O'Reilly where, you know, when do we get to fly to Mario? Yeah. Right. If we can press a button and shift into a different dimension and be in a whole other reality or another place in time. Yeah. So, so this young man, Morgan, is interested in Linda. She's she's a interesting young woman. Her father is doing crazy things at the house, it seems like. So, he keeps coming around. Yeah. And so when you're you're you're probably slowly she it probably took her a while to release her personal journals to you to to show you some of her diary entries. I would imagine in point of fact when Linda and I really got into our collaboration, we went we went after we met in um or shortly before we met in Las Vegas in April of 03, we also began email corresponding with each other and and almost right after either right after we signed the collaboration agreement or right after we met in Las Vegas, she started hand typing long entries from the journal. and and giving me the material that's in the book basically uh which details her romantic relationship with with Morgan. But for that whole year, we really only had her side of the story and and we still were were were moving these jigsaw puzzle pieces around on the table just trying to find the edge pieces that would fit together so we could get some framework in which to put the thing. Um but really coming up with bupkus in terms in terms of substantial concrete biographical material. So she wasn't how so did it sounds like she lived a lot of her life in the dark as far as what her dad did and maybe never got clarity even towards his his dying days. He never sort of disclosed from what we know. What I can say of the unfolding of Linda's knowledge base on all this is that while her father was alive, she had very little essentially no knowledge of the the the the inner scene aspects, the clandestine aspects of his work. He was working on things on the surface that demonstrated the capabilities of things that were less visible and and so she knew the things that were on the surface. But after we had been struggling with this for about a year is when we start to get mysterious more mysterious communications from the void. And as is detailed in the book, the individual that we have cenamed Morgan returns to Linda's life. They have been he has been believed dead frankly as as is described in the book. Um Morgan was thought to have died sometime not long after Towns and Brown died in the 80s. In the 80s, right? Yeah. This is mid 2000s and now we're in the early 2000s. And Linda thinks he's dead. Linda thinks he's dead. Thought he's dead for thinks he's dead. Right. You're collaborating with her on a biography of her dad and her longlost love interest shows back up. Yes. That's exactly what happened. And and there's this whole proc this is this whole like fun process where when he first begins to surface uh he uses the the the the pseudonym of Norman Paperman and Norman Paperman is a character in a Herman Woke novel called Don't Stop the Carnival. And and Jimmy Buffett later makes a musical based on the Herman Woke novel. And Morgan inferred over the course of our correspondence that he and Buffett were friends. Uh and and he made lots of Buffett illusions over the course of our correspondence, quoted Buffett songs and and we had some commonality here because I'd been a Jimmy Buffett fan during those years when I was living in Hawaii and living the Jimmy Buffett life essentially, you know, absent for hundreds of millions of dollars and yachts and planes. Did you This is This is one of those stories that kind of feels like you just became a part of the story. That was what becoming part of the story was what I resisted for as long as I could again because I was just doing writing another biography. I wanted to write a conventional third person biography. But I kept pretty careful notes of everything that was going on. And and once I started actually writing, which I started sometime I think in 2005, I I did avail myself to the the device of stepping out of the narrative to write what I called notes from the rabbit hole where I conveyed what my actual experience was. So yeah, I I could it got to the point where the only way I could find my way through the material. The only way I could make sense of it was the ma the way it made any sense to me because there were always going to be pieces missing that would just not lend themselves to the natural there would always be pieces missing that would not lend themselves to the natural trajectory of a conventional biography. Well, yeah, these characters are now starting to uh share information with you. You have a relationship with Morgan and you have a relationship with Linda, right? And it's not just them conveying biographical information. They're starting you're you're in it. You're a part of it. They're and they're choosing what to disclose to you and what not to disclose to you. It's hard. You can't separate yourself out of that. I couldn't. Yeah. So, so um we have just finished or are or close to finishing the audio book version of The Man Who Mastered Gravity and we've adopted the convention of three different voices. So, I have a male voice reading the conventional biography. I have a female voice reading those portions that are attributed to Linda's journals. And I am reading the parts that are the notes from the rabbit hole. So the listener will be able to easily tell where we are in this strange unfolding. Um what do you think was the personality of TT Brown? How did Linda convey that? Because and I'll put it in a sort of a framework. Um I have like a we've been in the software industry as a background and there are some guys who are tinkerers and they just like inventing things and they sort of get lost in that. There are others who kind of see the broader picture of things. There are others that are cold and warm and whatever. Like I I was trying to understand what TT Brown was actually like cuz as a father who doesn't disclose everything to all of your kids. He had a tenuous relationship with his son. Um what was he a nice guy? Was he an introvert? Was he like what's your sense of who TT Brown actually was as a as a personality? My sense that he was is that my sense of towns and Brown's personality is that he was a fairly conventional man of his times that he had he had a a a warmth to him which was compromised by the way that he had to live his life. National security. the national security aspect of it. And when we speak of national security, we're not really sure if we're talking about governmental stuff or something beyond or within governmental stuff. It's complicated. Some generic blanket of national. My my sense is that under different circumstances, he would have been the devoted family man and he had his way of showing that when the opportunities presented itself. Uh, I think that the relationship that he had with Josephine, his wife, was um was very warm and intimate. She was his confidant. But there was also a period there that we did not know that Linda didn't know when they had to be divorced from each other. They divorced and remarried at one point and that was for her protection. What about his relationship with his son? because it seemed there you didn't say much about it in the book and I don't know how much Linda shared but you know at his at his funeral his son didn't even show up and yeah you know what what is that what is that how how did that happen like how do you have such a great relationship with your daughter and then well that's that's kind of the flip side of of what I was saying earlier where where where his relationship with his daughter was fairly warm and close his relationship with his son who was 12 years older than Linda was estranged And and I think that that's I I I would say that that's because a son expects something different from his father than a daughter does. And those things that a son might expect were not present in the relationship between Townsen and his son Joseph. There was there was an aspect for Joseph of some kind of ridicule because of the reputation that Towns and Brown took on when Joseph came of age and when they moved back for example they moved back to Zanesville and he was kind of teased by his classmates about his father's uh preoccupation with flying saucers and anti-gravity and maybe he squandered the family fortune on these ridiculous pursuits. So there was a strangement there and as you say I don't think Joseph showed up for the funeral. Uh and and I never Joseph died I believe in 1992. I think he was from colon cancer. Okay. And so he died at a relatively young age. Um and I so I never had any contact with him nor with his own sons or or their family. There there was just there was a severe estrangement there. Yeah. I was wondering who chose that. Like is the son embarrassed of his dad and it's that kind of relationship? Is the dad kind of like you're out of here because of certain reasons or mutual? You know, I don't know how that relationship would who who, you know, I'm trying to understand because I really am trying to get in the mind of TT Brown. And sure, to have a son that's a strange I could see that, right? You have you have to do all these dark, you know, all you have all these all this um all this research and all these things you're doing that you can't tell your son about. And that would be really hard. And if that made your son sort of hate you and be embarrassed of you and run away, like would you mourn that? Would you mourn that loss of that relationship with your son or were they kind of two of the same heads and they buted heads and they fought all the time and it was kind of like all right, we're just not going to get along together, you know, like that. I'm trying to understand what would that relationship. My sense of the relationship between towns and and Joseph is that Joseph was the one who withdrew. Uh he joined the air force. He was stationed in Europe in the Air Force. There is that one picture in the book of the two of them together that doesn't look very warm between them, but that's like the only evidence that we have. There's no correspondence between them. Uh and and and so the conclusion that we're kind of drawn toward is that the resentment was more on Joseph's part. Okay. and and that given his brothers, Townsen might have wanted to have a deeper relationship there, but that Joseph was the factor that prevented that from happening. Okay? And I will add, we talk in the book about the period in the 1950s that we call the wounded prairie chicken routine. There was an event in 1950 where some of the work that Townsen was doing under wraps was compromised as part of this uh the the the Philby Burgess Mlan intelligence network which is this whole other story that we probably shouldn't get into but the work was compromised to some extent we don't know what extent and in order to to in order to correct that compromise, he went into a period where he used aspects of the technology to discredit the technology. And so he went into this period where he was basically trying to discredit himself. That's what we call the wounded prairie chicken routine. And that's when that's when Joseph is coming of age. Yeah. And so under the guise of this this wounded prairie chicken routine with his uh uh tail under his under his legs, he he returns to Zanesville, Ohio, appearing to uh be of very diminished means and having run out of money and living with relatives. And this is when Joseph is just finishing high school or starting college and and so he's living under the mantle of what seems to be his father's disgrace. And his father can't even tell him because did did Linda know that? I mean Linda maybe knew that in hindsight but she didn't know when it so even to his family he can't say hey guys this is all an act you know this kind of thing. He has to watch it happen. Yeah. If you talk to people whose fathers have worked in the intelligence services and there's a there's a book that I came out recently on this they have no idea the family just is is they are not allowed to know. Okay. And there there's actually there's an exchange in in the story when Morgan be is introduced to the man we believe was William S. Stevenson or the intelligence expert that Churchill cenamed Intrepid who organized the allies intelligence services during World War II. Um, when Morgan goes sailing on Biscane Bay with Towns and Brown and this this stately gentleman with the British accent that we call Mr. X in the book who was identified to me as William Stevenson. And when they come back from this, Morgan is told very precisely that everything that they have talked about on this day sale that they go on Biscane Bay that Linda needs not to know. It's not don't tell Linda or don't say anything to Linda. It's Linda needs not to know. And so that expresses the attitude that people like Towns and Brown in this kind of an intelligence role have to have toward their family. Their family needs not to know. So that's that's that's the mantle that we're operating under here. It's just all clandest clandestine. I it'd be so rough growing up as a child where your one of your parents is totally clandestine and no questions get answered for decades. That sounds so hard. And the other dimension of this story that we're trying to cope with is that on the one hand we're talking about things that are classified or beyond classified or top secret or above top secret. And then apparently we're dealing with stuff that's really secret that that doesn't fit anywhere into any of those classification strata. Everything breaks down at that point. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it takes on a different dimension. Exactly. And then we're back to that mysterious core at the center of the story about what are we learning? Are we learning anything here about the grand arc of the the trajectory of human civilization? Yeah, I get the sensation that maybe Townson Brown had still had that longing to have a son type relationship and Morgan almost fit it a little bit. There was a little bit in Morgan where Townson Brown kind of took him under his wing and he he gives him a choice of going two paths. That's right. And it's kind but he almost has like a fatherly feel to him where it's it's like you can go this path but know that if you go this path you you don't come back. And and in fact by the time you arrived at the story Morgan's already died quote unquote and he comes back from the dead when you get in in contact with Linda. Yeah. The relationship between Morgan and Linda as an adolescent couple and Townsen and Josephine was very parental. And uh in fact when when Josephine is on her deathbed and Morgan is believed dead, he comes to visit her in the hospital and she she says, "I knew that you would come to see me, son." So they did in fact treat Morgan like a son. And I think it is fair to say that Morgan could have been the son that he couldn't have in Joseph because of the generational differences and the way Joseph the way that Morgan had apparently been drawn into the the network of secrets that were the factor that precluded Townsen from having a closer relationship with his son. Joseph like Linda after the sail on Biscane Bay, Joseph needed not to know and to some extent Josephine needed not to know and they had to be divorced for a while and and the the difference there is I think that when Morgan enters the picture he's single and pretty much has to remain single but I think that in in the case of of Townsen though he went through the motions of being single, whoever his superiors are, his handlers or whatever, they had to accept that he was going to be married and he went back to Josephine. But Linda and Morgan never hooked up in in in the way that I mean they never had the the marital domestic relationship that Townsen had with Josephine. Well, maybe we should dive into Morgan's journey a little bit. So, what what would have been publicly known about Townson Brown's works before Morgan arrives to the scene? Because there were some patents and there were there was some information available that was that was public prior to that, was there not? There was. There are kind of layers dimensions to how much was known about Towns and Brown. When I get drawn into this in 2002 2003, the most that was probably known about Towns and Brown was his affiliation with something called the Philadelphia Project. And you will notice that the Philadelphia Project does not come up anywhere in my narrative. There's an illusion to it somewhere in the footnotes because from my perspective that was all part of the cover story to which Townsend contributed and most of what was known about Towns and Brown other than stuff that surfaced in the 1950s which I'll come back to in a moment but most of what was known about Towns and Brown was a chapter in William Moore's book the Philadelphia experiment which is called the fourth fields of towns and brown and that associates Brown and gives some substance to his work uh in the context of this fantastic thing where uh a battleship escort called the SS Eldridge was supposedly radiated with dense magnetic waves and caused to disappear from visible sight. And in one version of the story, the ship reappears at its birth in Norfick, Virginia from from its base in Delaware in the Delaware River near Philadelphia. So this thing is being trans this battleship escort is being transported through dimensions. Um there are movie versions which show the crew of the ship embedded in the hull when it rematerializes. And it's it's this fantastic story which I believe was created to provide additional cover to the Towns and Brown story. And you can see that intent at work in Nick Cook's book, The Hunt for Zero Point, because he gets hold of that book. And there are a couple of times in Nick's book, Nick is doing the best research that has ever been done into whether or not there was anti-gravity research being done in the world. in 1955 56 in that era and interestingly he got drawn into it kind of the same way I did by an anonymous source. So all all credit due to Nick for the the the the deep investigative work that he did. But he admits that because of the way the Brown story comes over the transom wrapped in this mythos of this thing called the Philadelphia experiment, he would get close to to thinking he wanted to know more about Brown and then keep it at arms length. So it worked. It really did work. So So that is kind of what Brown was most known for when we're coming into this period in the early 21st century. But he had some visibility as well in the 1950s. There's a couple of newspaper articles like the one that I put in the book from the Los Angeles Times from I think 195354 that says flying saucers are being demonstrated in a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. That was all part of the wounded prairie chicken routine because those saucers were actually using conventional physics to allow people to come view it, right? Where he's claiming this is a flying saucer and physicists can say we know how that works. You haven't discovered anything. And he wants them to think that, right? So when we talk about the the the demonstrations in Los Angeles, we are right at the cusp between conventional physics and what might be new here. And that's that's where it starts going down the rabbit hole honestly because we have instances when it is reported that we are observing something new but that's not what was being demonstrated at the time in places like Los Angeles. So here's where you get to the whole lifter culture and the ionic wind business because that is conventional physics and the conventional physics is in fact manifest in uh devices that you can build around what's called the bifeld brown effect which is Brown's basic electro excuse me which is Brown's basic electrogravetic principle but it manifests differently depending on what materials you're using and that's that's where we get to the question of have we discovered something new here was it as Janoseek said to me um did it did it defy conventional physics but was classified anyway was it then developed somewhere in some black realm that we because of its very nature don't get to know anything about etc etc why Would people like Janice Sheek think that maybe it was classified? Where is the crossover where Brown was doing something in a warehouse in Los Angeles and then the military is actually like we can confirm that the military is involved? The assumption that things have been subject to some kind of classification is part a kind of a a cultural expectation. If we think something might be secret, we will use words like classified to describe it. So if if we think Towns and Brown has discovered something and and and we want to attribute it to government sponsored development, then we would say it has been classified. But there is evidence and it's it's very prefuncter cursory evidence that something that Towns and Brown was doing was classified. So here's here's the story. It took us a long time to get Towns and Brown's military records. He went into the Navy in 1930, resigned from the Navy in 1942. Most of that time he was a low low-level officer. He was a lieutenant in the United States Navy. and any relative, any heir uh immediate family of any service officer is entitled to their family members service records. So, Linda, this is in I think 2004, we started to send applications to the National Archives, which houses all these military records. And um the first response we got was somebody named Towns and Brown, but it was an entirely different guy. And then we we actually Linda got into some telephone conversations with people at the National Archives who cannot find her father's records. And they're saying things like, "This is very unusual. these records should be very accessible. They should be right here, but we can't find them. That's like the first couple of calls. And then the the last call I think she had, I don't remember the woman's name now, but the last woman says very clearly, "We're going to send you the records, but if there's anything classified in the records, we not only can't send you the classified part of the records, but we can't send you anything in the records that refers to anything classified in the records. It gets very meta." So the the records that we finally got were very clean and and there is no reference to anything classified because that was excised or redacted from what they could send us to. So that's the evidence that we have that there was in fact something classified but because of the nature of something that's classified you can't really get to it beyond that. Man, where do you go from there? Like what? Well, I have a question around finances. Uh, you mentioned a few times in the book that he would every once in a while pull out an MX black card. Yeah. And if that, you know, if it's a real MX black card, it's for, you know, super wealthy people, very uh limited in who can get it. You can't just call AMX and say, "Give me a black card." So, it sort of alludes to the fact that either he had some access to a lot of wealth or he was being funded by the Caroline Group or or somebody. Uh but then also at the same time they're not living a lavish lifestyle, you know, and so like I guess I'm trying to understand how that what was your perspective on sort of how he got financed, but when he he seemed to have a lot of money sometimes and not a lot of money others and it kind of went up and down and maybe was depending on what it was. Can you explain that a little bit as far as your perception on from hearing from Linda? I don't feel that I can any explain it any better than you did in the question that you asked. Okay. It's just enigmatic. It is. It is that that's a good word for it. He doesn't have money and then he pays with something with a black card, right? Or or or or or the family is living in a rather sumptuous home in Ashon uh on the um on in the prestigious neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Yeah. It's like we don't have any money. Oh, we'll just buy this house. I mean, there's these stories that are it doesn't make any sense as far as where he's getting financed relative to his work and whatever. In 1933, Towns and Brown goes on the voyage of the Caroline to explore the depths of the Caribbean. It's a mission sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute. And the the gentleman who provides his yacht for the experience is a man named Eldridge Reeves Johnson. And it's curious to me that both of the stories that I've written about brush up against the Radio Corporation of America. Uh in the Farssworth story, he's fighting the radio corporation of America because they want his patents and he wants his independence. That's the the nutshell of that story. Eldidge Reeves Johnson was the founder of the Victor Talking Machines Company. He helped a man named Emil Berliner perfect the gramophone and and built an empire on that technology, the gramophone technology in the early 1920s and formed the Victor Victor talking machines company which was one of the early international communications companies and and so that's the realm that he travels in. And in 1927, I think the Victor Talking Machines Company was merged with RCA and for the Victor Talking Machines Company was merged with RCA and for decades after that was known as RCA Victor. So curious that both of these stories have an element of RCA. But selling his company to RCA in 1927 made Eldred Reeves Johnson one of the richest men in the country if not the world. And because his company was international, he had all kinds of ties around the world. Among them, we believe the man we talked about earlier, William S. Stevenson, the man that Churchill called the Intrepid. So that would give us the idea that there is a a well of considerable wealth and access to considerable wealth that somebody in that orbit like Towns and Brown who is working at times on behalf of these vast international interests has access to that he can draw on as he needs it or not as he doesn't. And I think that's what you've described. That's what we're talking about here. There are times on his life when he had to make it look like he had reached the end of his financial rope. And after that time passed, as we get into the 1960s, he can take on a more affluent appearance because he's he's diverted the attention. But then towards the end, uh, there was a story you told in the book where he goes in and sort of demonstrates the tech and maybe it was Northrup Grumman, I can't remember who. And they they basically were like, "Thank you. See you later." And he comes home and he's like, "We're just shutting it all down." And that I'd love more explanation on that because in the book it it sort of cuts off and just it it didn't make sense. like is it sort of I guess the perception I had was that he showed them and it's essentially they kind of took what he had had over the few years and then they all just started developing it internally without him and so maybe he felt left behind or he felt like you guys because there's no one that says that he has to be come along for the whole ride and that's kind of why I've been trying to understand his personality because maybe maybe people didn't like working with him and maybe so they liked what he invented but then they're kind of like hey let's keep developing this without this guy because he's difficult to work with or for whatever reason I I'm really trying to understand why was he cut out and and then he comes home and he's just like let's shut it all down. This is this is over and it just and it is over and it doesn't make sense yet. So I'm I'm trying to piece it together from a personality standpoint. So this is the period in the mid to late 1960s. We're getting up to about 1968 here. And what you have to remember when you when we talk about the work that he was doing then was that he's in league with people like Floyd Odlam who was a wealthy west coast finance here who started the Atlas company that built some of the first rockets that that put US satellites in the sky. And he was I I I get confused. There have been so many permutations of the companies like uh uh Northrup and Grumman and Lockheed and they're all just one big company now but I I believe um that Odlam was one of the principles in Northrup what became Northrup Grumman I forget which half exactly and and and um Curtis Lameé is in the picture and there's the demo for for Edward Teller and so he's on one level demonstrating a principle Mhm. But I think that on another level there's something else that is beneath that and that that's kind of what's really at work here. So what what you've been referring to is a demonstration for the Rand Corporation which was kind of the milit the West Coast equivalent of um why am I blanking? Um it it was a research and develop Rand was research and development for the military uh on the west coast and all of these people uh Odlin Curtis Lame uh uh Bill Leer the inventor the developer of the Learjet is all part of this they're all circling in and out of this little laboratory and office where where Brown was working at the time and finally they take what they've been working on which is what he's known as the fan precipitator which is the device that kind of dem demonstrates the ionic wind, takes it to the Rand Corporation. Linda this all this time thinks that they are developing this commercial product to be like an air purifier or a loudspeaker uh that that's what they're going to bring to the marketplace. But given the nature of what they're doing and the fact that they're demonstrating it for the Rand Corporation would infer that that's not necessarily the case. So that's why there's layers to all this and moving parts that don't always fit together. So he does in fact do a demonstration for for the rant corporation in in 1968 and u they go back to the lab and Linda goes home and when Linda comes when when Brown comes back to their apartment in Santa Monica, he tells Linda very much to her surprise that what they've been working on for all these months is now over. And and Linda doesn't understand what's gone on here. When you when you were asking me much earlier about um what did she know when I met her as opposed to what she learned after Morgan re-entered the picture at this time we're we're dealing with the Linda who still needs not to know. M so so whatever happened there um Linda needed not to know and so was completely surprised when her father tells her that the project that they've been working on for however many months if not years has suddenly been curtailed and he just doesn't return to doing it right I mean it it's over yeah um and and and and I I I really I don't I the work that I did kind of tails off at that point um because it becomes kind of this repeating pattern of showing up somewhere doing something that we don't know what it is and then ending it and then going on to something else. So I felt like once the pattern had been established um we we that's what we needed to work from um there there are stories when you were with Linda when you were talking with Linda you mean that that no I'm talking about in the the structure of the book. Oh okay. You know the fact that as you say this the story begins to fade out after that demonstration from Northrup and or or for for the rand corporation. Now the the story is uh or or the the legend is that what in fact Brown had dis disclosed is the technology that some believe became part of the B2 stealth bomber. So this also shows up in Nick Nick Cook's work. this idea that um variations of Brown's surface technology not what is beneath it which is the electrogravidic work which we don't really know enough about um that actually has found its way into military airframes and that the B1 the B2 bomber surfs its own electrostatic wave based entirely on the bifel Brown effect using something called the uh flamejet generator to step up the volume the the the voltage of the exhaust cloud behind the plane so that it's very highly negatively charged and then uh inducing a positive charge to the leading edge of the wings that produces the bifel brown effect and now you have this kind of electrostatic cloud that the B2 bomber surfs on at high altitude that's that has been alleged that has been reported uh it has been described in several volumes like Paul Lavlet's um electrogravidics book but it has never been proven or verified or confirmed by the military. Okay. So they they were paying attention. I mean they were paying attention. They were paying attention, right? I mean, you've you you've you've got you've got what looks like a a commercial uh um household product being developed when in fact it is taken and demonstrated to the military and then everything is curtailed. It just seems like he was chewed up and spit out a little bit by the end. And that I think is how they want you to see it. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Then I'm reading what they're saying. Right. Exactly. Well, um, and again, I'm always afraid of of seeming critical of Nick Cook, but, um, I I think you can see something coming from some unknowable higher what Linda called the deeper draft vessel at work in the disinformation campaign at work when even as skilled a journalist as Nick as Nick Cook holds back from going deeper into the Brown story. I don't have those credentials. So, I just Oh, okay. Let's go. Leave me in. Tell me. You know, you don't have to. Yeah. Right. That's fair. Uh I want to This is a This is total curveball. What about the dream that Linda had where the aliens come down and leave a box? Can Can you Can you rehash that story and just tell us like what what was it like when she when she was telling you that? So, this is a story from 1954 or 55. The family is living uh at a farm called Mont Tresor uh on the outskirts of Leville, Virginia. Part of the story up to this point is that one of the things that was demonstrated for for the Navy at Pearl Harbor in 1950, the demonstration that had been compromised that leads us to the wounded prairie chicken routine was a communications device that Morgan would only vaguely allude to as the set. And because it's very undisclosed, uh, I I surmise that the set is something that used Brown's theories to communicate in a way that does not use the electromagnetic spectrum. And that set was demonstrated. And when the when the tech the demonstration was compromised by the presence of this mole that was working for Kim Philby and his Soviet related spy network that that technology was taken locktock and barrel off the table and what Morgan said was that the set was returned to him sometime in the mid-50s. And in the book, there is a story that Linda tells of what she thinks of as a dream where she wakes up and and sees out her window three discshaped craft coming into the field beyond their house on this farm called Montreer. and and the the these three discshaped craft settle in the grass and and and humanoid forms come out of them and they they come into the house and and and they they bring something to Dr. Brown that looks like a box. And the pertinent piece of dialogue around that is that it is capable of communicating over vast distances instantly. Later on in the book when I talk about the structure of space, I explain how that might have worked. But that's the dream that you're referring to where Linda has where three flying flying saucers come to Montreer and they bring this specialized communications technology back to towns in Brown after kind of the the it has it's cooled off around what had had been revealed. And all I can tell you is that when I discussed this event with Morgan in our email exchange, he just assured me that what Linda was describing was not a dream. So they have And you wonder why it doesn't add up. Yeah, it just has to be there has to be some Men in Black erase your memory technology something to just do that. Oh, I want I want to get back to Morgan. Hold on. But that's the point that Morgan was making when he talked about how you you're sitting around a campfire and and trying to um reach the spiritual capability of technologies that are beyond our reckoning. And and I think what he has also inferred elsewhere when he speaks of the Caroline group communicating through the arts that there are things that are being shown to us in in in a cultural manner that are are in fact possible and they're just trying to get our wits to get sharper so that we can have access to it. Let's keep getting sharper. Yeah. The un the universe is full of mysteries waiting for wisdom. The the the quotation that begins the man who mastered gravity was actually something that I heard on a documentary on PBS by Mishi Kau renowned physicist. The documentary was called um Isaac Newton in me and it begins with this quotation. The universe is filled with magical things waiting for our wits to grow sharper. Now that I found out was actually a quotation from an early science fiction writer named Eden Philpots. Somehow I tracked it down to Philpots. But that's that's the theme of this whole exercise that has pretty much dominated my adult life from that afternoon on the hillside in 1973. The universe is filled with magical things. Get your together. Yeah, it's incred. Um, are you still in touch with Linda? I haven't had any contact with Linda uh for about a year now, but uh twice a year I'm obligated to share with her the proceeds from our enterprise and the checks have been cashed. Okay. So, Okay. Got it. Um I I don't remember Sarbacher's first name even though Robert Robert Sarbacher. Okay. So there there's another story. I think this is in Ashelon outside of Virginia, right? No, that was Ashon was outside of Philadelphia. You're talking about Montreer. Montreer. Okay. So they're living in Montreer and Linda has records of Thomas Townson Brown being driven home by a man named Roger Robert Sarbacher. Robert Sarbacher. Yeah. Yeah. So, Robert Sarbacher is another one of these moving parts that sometimes fits in and fits the other gears and sometimes doesn't. And Sarbacher has his own reputation of sorts from UFO disclosure business. Um there I don't remember the exact there was uh a letter that Sarbacher wrote I think to somebody named Wilmer Smith that said that the the knowledge of unidentified flying objects is at a level of classification or secrecy beyond the Hbomb. So that's a Sarbacher letter that's in the lore somewhere. And Sarbacher first shows up in our story in uh the closing days of World War II when Brown is in Germany. He's on a mission there first to to investigate the Foo Fighters, which is described in the book. And he's also part of a mission that is trying to track down German cryptologology technology and Sarbacher shows up as part of that. So Sarbacher, they're they're they're in Germany. I think this is I don't it's either in the last weeks of the war or the weeks right after the war, but in the spring of 1945, Brown is over there on this mission with the other uh mystery character I I cenamed O'Reilly. Uh and and at some point Sarb Sar this guy called Robert Sarbacher shows up and takes over the mission that Brown is working on. And that's wild. They're on like a secret mission on behalf of the Caroline group. This is where where creating or allowing for the possibility that private intelligence efforts work within the confines of the sanctioned intelligence efforts. uh and and and so while there is something like the OSS or an operation called TCOM, the targeted information committee that is trying to get its hands on the the most advanced uh code equipment that the Nazis were using during World War II. Um there is the inference that there were also private interests working within those confines, within those networks. And that's what we call the Caroline group. So again, moving parts that sometimes come together and sometimes fly apart and and things that we know that are true that run up against things that we can't really verify. You opened my eyes to the idea that at the closing chapter of World War II when Germany, everybody kind of knows that it's crumbling. Even the Germans know that it's crumbling. There were deals being made by rich groups around the world, not all of which were officially sanctioned. In fact, some of these people preferred that they not be sanctioned for them to drop in over enemy lines into the war zone and start collecting scientists and technology. Oh yeah. Um the most famous operation along those lines was the one called Alos. Um and oh uh did you see Oenheimer? No, I haven't seen Okay. Well, okay. So, um, Boris Pash was his name and and Boris Pash is a character in Oppenheimer and and he's he becomes one of Oenheimer's nemesises during that whole story. But Boris Pash was one of the commanders of a mission called Alos, which was going into Germany in the in the closing months of World War II to try to figure out how far the Germans were getting with an atomic bomb effort. So yes, there were uh many efforts to to get to infiltrate Germany. Alos then morphs into project paperclip. They're running kind of parallel with each other. Paperclip was the operation to find a lot of these German scientists like Heisenberg and the guy who developed the Cyclon B gas and Verner von Braun and bring them all to America. Um, so yeah, there was a there was a lot there was a kind of a power vacuum opening up in Germany in the closing days of the war and even here in the United States after Roosevelt dies and and Truman ascends to the presidency and apparently knows very little or nothing that we have a Manhattan project going and there's going to be an atomic bomb. So yeah, there are there were a lot of vacuums opening up in those last years, last months of World War II and we and Philip J. Corso also talks about some of those vacuums. He he he was in Italy, I believe, and he was helping find some of those sciences and bring them over. So, yeah, there are a lot of names that that that come up that percolate around the efforts to recover and and exfiltrate all kinds of technology and science. Okay. And so, Sarbacher is associated with that. And then later he's driving Townson Brown to his home. Yeah. in Mont when Townsen. So one of the one of the interesting nodes in the story is 1956 when he goes to Paris and and runs tests on capacitor based devices in a vacuum. And um remember we're we're we're talking about this cusp between known known science and unknown science and and that the whole Towns and Brown story somewhere rides that cusp and and when we talk about like the demonstrations in Los Angeles the warehouse in Los Angeles that's the known technology the ionic breeze stuff and that we're looking for evidence of does the thing that Brown discovered as a teenager in the 1920s, does it open the door on some other aspect of lesserk known science? And I think there are at least three occasions when we can answer that in the affirmative when somebody has attested to seeing something that is not explained by conventional science. One of those instances is when Brown goes to Paris in 1956 and this company called Sudest builds him this big vacuum chamber and they are seeing anomalous results in this vacuum chamber. And I spoke to the man who directed those operations. He was a man named Jacqu Cornion. I met him when he was 98 years old and in in in his final days. And he said to me that they witnessed something anomalous and I have that on tape. tape. Jesse used that tape in his Towns and Brown documentary. So that's one instances. There's a couple of other instances. But this is pertinent because when Brown comes back from he flies, I guess he No, he takes a ship. He he takes a cruise ship home from Southampton uh from Europe and and lands in the United States and is picked up wherever he disembarks by Robert Sarbacher. And Linda tells the story about how this black Cadillac drives onto the grounds at Montreer and Robert Sarbacher is behind the wheel and she sees her father for the first time and he stays for a few hours and then drives away again with Sarbacher behind the wheel. And some of the times when Townson Brown leaves home, he doesn't come back for a while. Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. Linda wrote her own book. It's out of circulation now, but her book was called The Goodbye Man because he left the family for a long period. They lived on the island of Kawaii for a while. This is prior to between like 1947 and the demonstration in Pearl Harbor in 1950. And the family was living in this little grass little grass shack uh on the Nepali coast of Kawaii. And they saw very little of her father the whole time they were there. We we have the wounded prairie chicken routine was was between what years? That was 1950 and 1956 57. And it's it's it's a little odd that the University of North Carolina then hosts one one of the biggest events in in anti-gravity lore in 1957, wasn't it? Yeah. And Thomas Townson Brown was there. I'm not sure that he was. I think that he was there in name. Oh, and and there's um I' I've not read there is there is a book that you can get which is the output from that, but it's like Towns and Brown's name percolates and circulates in that in that context, but there's no evidence that he was actually there. But Jesse talks a lot about when um uh who Lewis the physicist Whitten Lewis Whitten, thank you. He he talks about hearing at that conference about a man named Townsend. So it it's it's a a reference to Towns and Brown, but not his actual presence there. And and it's interesting that you mentioned that because this is where you get to that per that place uh on the cusp between what we know and what we don't know. And as you say, that was a a notable event in the annals of gravity research. And I hesitate often to use the word anti-gravity, but that was a big gravity symposium. We're trying to understand gravity. And I haven't even done my speech about the missing fourths, which we need to get to, and maybe we'll do that right after this. Yeah, let's get into that because because that's what they're investigating there. Um but that's during the period when it when there is reporting on all kinds of study of gravity and maybe gravity control and then it just vanishes. And as Hal Puto famously says in that clip with Jesse, he says, "Well, either there was nothing there or it all went black." And it's just it's not our purview to know what are the missing fourths. Okay. So this is this is the the story kind of at that core of all these individual stories that circle all this and it's effectively what makes the towns and brown story and the pho farms story resonate with each other. Um it's what I call my grand theory my grand nebulous theory of the missing forests. It starts with the four fundamental forces of nature and what we've been able to do, what humans have been able to do to master them. Those fundamental forces are electromagnetism. Hello, we've we've got a real good handle on electromagnetism. Then there's the weak nuclear force, which is essentially nuclear radiation. We use that in medical technologies. Then there's the strong nuclear force. That's your E= MC². and we've learned how to do something with that. And then the fourth one is gravity. And we have not learned how to do anything with gravity beyond fall down and drop things. So it seems maybe in this story about towns and brown that we have gotten to the threshold of being able to do something with that, but we've been pushed back. So that's the first missing forth. mankind's ability to do anything constructive with the fourth fundamental force or interaction of nature, gravity. The the second one is within the third one. So when we're talking about the strong nuclear force, there are four ways to release E= MC². Two of them are explosive and two of them are controlled. Two of them are fision and two of them are fusion. So the first thing we mastered was controlled nuclear fision. That's the atomic pile which gave us the physics to build the first atomic bombs. That's the explosive form of fision. Then we went straight from that to the hydrogen bomb which is explosive nuclear fusion. And what's still missing is controlled nuclear fusion. We have controlled nuclear fision. We don't have controlled nuclear fusion. And just as an aside here, when he was developing his technology for nuclear fusion in 1948, Pho had a phone call with Albert Einstein. And the Einstein that he is talking to on the phone in 1945 is is dejected to see how his science has been employed at the end of World War II. And he was a pacifist all of his life. But this really broke his heart. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But he tells Farnsworth, "This controlled fusion that you're working on, this is the good part of my theories. You got to continue this work." And I I see Farnsworth coming out of the room where he'd been on the phone with Einstein like Charlton H coming down from Mount Si in Cesile Deill's The Ten Commandments, you know, glowing and his hair flowing because he's spoken to the oracle. And the oracle has told him this this is the good part of my theories. You must continue this work. And here we are how many decades later and we still have not figured out controlled nuclear fusion. And so that brings me to the conclusion that I draw from this idea of these missing fourths that we have gotten to the threshold of some very advanced technologies and for whatever reason and by whatever means mankind has been pushed back from those advanced technologies because as Pho said we have yet to earn them. That's great. That's we need it. Let's do it. And and and and my follow on thought from that is that if there are advanced civilizations gallivanting around the universe in some kind of unidentifiable aerial phenomena that actually have material form and show up here from time to time, then they have two technologies at their disposal that make that work. And that's fusion energy and gravity control. Totally. Yeah, that's right. That's what we're missing. Yeah, that's what those those are the missing forths. And um we're not there yet. We We're just, you know, we don't get the keys to the co to the cosmic Ferrari. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, that is great. Is that a good place to wrap? That might cool. Oh, can I see the Morgan's uh thumb stick actually show this is proof. Yeah. There there's a book called a fist full of kings which is an autobiography and memoir by a man named John Brotherton who was a casino executive and he tells a story about going to Bise to investigate uh real estate possibilities for casinos in Central America and he describes meeting a pilot who's flying this beat to death Sesna and he's he's walking with a cane And we believe this to be that cane. Whoa. And that Morgan was that pilot. Whoa. Yeah. And and Lind and And Linda brought this to me on one of her visits here in um 2006, I think. Yeah. So, and and Mor Morgan in in our correspondence, he described this as his thumb stick. And it's it's pretty heavy and it has this sharp animals horn uh for a handle here. And if it it if it was swung at you and made contact, it would do some damage. You don't want to get you don't want to get in the way of that. Yeah. No. Well, Paul, this has been so amazing. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for thanks for your interest for your genuine sincere and informed interest. Yeah, we want to get to the bottom of of what's happening and you know if if we if we have cracked the missing fourths and it's being hidden then you know I I I can it's hard to describe what I would do if I discovered that right because you can definitely see the infinite damage it could do in the wrong hands and the infinite good it can do if it's deployed. And so I I'm not here to judge if we've what what somebody's done if they have discovered it. But if they have discovered it and we are at a point in humanity where where we won't destroy ourselves with it, I think we should start figuring out how what to do with it because it can help a lot of people. It'll save a lot of lives. It'll change everything. Well, Farnsworth was certain that the implementation of fusion energy would transform civilization in undoubtedly. Yeah. Yeah. And and and his his attitude was how much fun it was going to be. Mhm. But he also recognized and he spoke with with Pam about what the potential downsides were. He he described the potential of a laser, a fusion powered laser burning a hole through the moon. So there's there's normal there's enormous potential there that could be used for good or ill. Hard to give that to everybody. Hard to say every eight billion people should have that. That's what's interesting about the fusion technology that Farnsworth developed. And I mentioned to you earlier, I have been maintaining for 25 years now a website at fuser.net. That's fus o rfuser.net. We'll link to it. We'll we'll put a link to it also. and and that's that's a community of people around the world who who continue to develop Phoe's technology for fusion and they are learning the skill sets that somebody would need to have if they were to operate a device like Phoed and Farnsworth envisioned a very decentralized system of fusing technology where where you would have at at at most or at least decentralized fusion plants in every vicinity. Sure. Rather than one giant power plant somewhere. Totally. Um and and at most everybody might have one in their own basement or garage, but you'd have to know how to operate the thing. And star in a jar. We have people learning the skill set that would entail. But the the money that's being spent on fusion, they are spending billions and billions of dollars on these enormous machines that use giant magnets to try to force the particles together with external forces where what Farnsworth envisioned was a way that uses the internal properties of the particles themselves to pull themselves together. It's a very different process and and if it could be proven to work would be much more economically feasible, but it has never been it has never been tested again since Farnsworth walked away from it in 1966. These projects that that are being developed in basements and garages are on a very small scale, but they prove the principle. Man, it's exciting. Yeah. Glad we got people working on it. I am. Yeah. That's great. Uh c can I ask you like your your I hate to use the word religious but like what's your view of of like angels, demons, helping hands, guiding forces? Is there I I guess it's maybe unsettled but where do you lean? Um I I am I am the founder of a new church called um the church of the quantum continuum. Uh I I I believe the energy that has that has been identified and and anthropomorphized as God exists somewhere in the quantum realm. Okay. And manifests in many ways like you've just described and um and they look at the ways that we interpret that energy in in in in books and they just they're just laughing their heads off. Have you ever had any sort of like experial spiritual experiences? Um, the only thing I have ever described as a religious experience is when I was caught in the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles in January 1994. Um, yeah, I can. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I was I was living in Los Angeles at the time, going to some music schools and this this earthquake struck and I remember being awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of 2x4s trying to tear their nails out and thinking, "Well, you you you hadn't lived in Los Angeles for years, but you managed to be back for the big one." And and then as I'm lying there after the shaking stops, I I think I hear this still voice that just says, "Just stay there. You'll be fine. And I I was and that's the closest I think I've ever come to having anything to what people would describe as a religious experience. So I just stayed there until the shaking stopped and then I got up and I found my way out of the apartment and three weeks later I moved to Nashville. All right. Yeah. And I've been fine ever since. Stay here. Yeah. That's great. Well, Paul, thanks for taking time with us today. Oh, thank you guys for coming. Thanks for making the effort. really appreciate it. I've enjoyed talking with you guys. You're a wealthy book. I hope whoever's listening to this enjoys hearing it. Yeah, that was really fun. And buy a book. That's right. The The Man Who Mastered Gravity. So, we got two books here. The Towns and Brown biography is called The Man Who Mastered Gravity. And the Phoiography is The Boy Who Invented Television. They're great books. And this one is already available on audio book. And this one uh will be soon. All right, coming on out. Can't wait, man. It was a real pleasure. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay. See you everybody.