Hey, all right, so thank you for coming on the Mindflex podcast. That little montage was of Mondo, 2000 covers and content from the 90s, very early 90s, and it's because today our guest is, are you serious? Say hi. Are you? Hello, everybody. And just to give people a little more background about you, because what's exciting to me is I feel like I'm kind of reintroducing you to a new generation of people that are already excited. I have people come up to me, younger people coming up to me that are like, what's up with mono 2000 and it's like, oh, I actually, you know, and they can go on the Internet Archive and see it, because a lot of it is on archive.org and so it's really exciting to have you on the show to tell us about it. Co founder and former editor in chief of mono 2000 and you co founded that with Allison and Bailey. You have done so many books. I didn't actually count them, but it's more than 15 or 20. I know that many books on many things, psychedelic, psychedelic history, psychedelic literature. You've co authored books with Timothy Leary. You've did the original cyberpunk handbook, or the original fake book, depending on how you how you look at it. And I just found out I was reading an old well interview with you from 2004 with John, John Lebowski, and I was just telling a friend of mine last week about the yippies, because people forget about the yippies. You know that it was the yippies before the hippies and
RU Sirius:the yippies actually, the yippies took the hippies and acknowledged that there were a political gang of hippies, and they called that the yippies, the Youth International party 19. Yes.
Lisa Rein:Yes. And you formed, and you formed the Bingham, New York, Chapter
RU Sirius:of the yippies in 19 from 1970
Lisa Rein:to 1973 and so that was really right, when all this stuff was going on. I mean, Abby Hoffman, the whole, you know, the Chicago 1968 at the D you know, at the DNC had happened. And you were really in the heart of that. And then you were in a punk rock band, which I didn't know what was the name of the punk rock band,
RU Sirius:party dogs in New York. We used to play a club called squirties. It might still be there. It was the only punk New Wave club in Rochester at the time. We were just before hardcore hit Rochester, New York. So we were kind of the punkiest band at the time, but we were really more punk inflected rock and roll when you come down to it. But, yeah, we were great. You can find the stuff on my band camp. Are you serious? Band Camp?
Lisa Rein:Nice, okay, great, and I'll add a link to that, party dog. Is that
RU Sirius:what you said? Party dog? I called the album. It's actually, like about 30 minutes of music. I call it, it's a groove, so Okay. Oh, and I think it's on some commercial places as well. You might be able to find it on YouTube,
Lisa Rein:all right. Well, I'll find it and put and pop a link in there so we can, people can hear that. I didn't had a chance to hear that yet. So, so what I'd like to do for the show everybody is, you're free to ask questions anytime, but I'm going to try to start kind of at the beginning and let Are you talk about how the magazine was formed and stuff like that, and then look at some of the early issues and get his first hand feedback on them. So what I'd like to do now, I'm going to share my screen. Very exciting. Here we go, dun. Dun. All right. Are you seeing issue number one? I
RU Sirius:am seeing it. There we are at the very beginning. All
Lisa Rein:right, so first of all, I mean, wow, this issue. I mean, Todd Rundgren, Tim Larry, William Gibson. How did it come about? It's also like there's. The whole thing about how it's number seven of reality hackers, even though it's number one Mondo, like, what's what's it all mean, yeah,
RU Sirius:we were confused lot, for sure, yeah, I'll go into this, yes. So, I mean, we were actually designing issue number seven of reality hackers to be the cyberpunk edition, when I decided that we needed to upgrade the name, and I was watching TV, and there was a show called something 2000 and there were advertisements trying to sell stuff by identifying with the year 2000 so I went to clean Moo. I said, Yeah, we should change.
Lisa Rein:We could do that
RU Sirius:actually coming up, she liked it because she thought the logo would look great. He felt the design of the logo the great which it does.
Lisa Rein:Yeah, yes. One of the defining things
RU Sirius:is imitating that imitated by on The Simpsons is Mondo Franco, and also a juice company put out put out Mondo juice that used something very similar to our design, and I tried to milk them for some money, but got nowhere with that. So anyway, yeah, I can talk more about this.
Lisa Rein:Yeah. So just wanted to show everybody that you can find this issue at the Internet Archive, because a lot of these issues are up there and and on. Very early on, we have this page where you explain, that's you, and there's Allison Queen Moo and there's a closer picture that people can see you guys, because it's just, it's such a, I don't know it's such a perfect the expressions on your faces is so perfect for the time period, in terms of the optimism, it's just these optimistic looks to me. And here's where you give your shirt a little manifesto of what about. And I have,
RU Sirius:either way on Mondo, two thousand.com I have a version of this where I go through and add new comments and make fun of it.
Lisa Rein:Oh, good. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Give me this to be the new the new version of of the Mondo explanation. Would you read the part that have them highlighted there for
RU Sirius:us? I'm not sure you read it. I'm not sure if I can see it. Oh, okay.
Lisa Rein:Oh, okay. Well, I'm gonna read then, okay, okay. It says the cybernet is in place. If fusion is real, we'll find out about it fast. The old information elites are crumbling. The kids are at the controls. This magazine is about what to do until the Millennium comes. We're talking about total possibilities, radical assaults on the limits of biology, gravity and time, the end of artificial scarcity, the dawn of a new humanism, hijacking technology for personal empowerment, fun and games, flexing those synapses, stoking those neuropeptides, making bliss states our normal waking consciousness, becoming the bionic Angel. They get weirder before they get better, the rupture before the rapture, social and economic dislocation that will make the cracked 80s look like summer camp. So in the words of the immortal Rudy Rucker, hang 10 on the edge because the 90s are going to be quite a ride. Queen. What does that sound like?
RU Sirius:Wow. That's pretty inspirational.
Lisa Rein:It sounds like
RU Sirius:I'm glad we got into the decline part of it. Yeah, it sounds very, sounds very trans unity, really, yeah, becoming the bionic Angel. Yeah? David Pierce, see your art out. Man, yes. So what does it all mean? Now, I look to other people to tell me generally, no, no, not. What
Lisa Rein:does it mean now, sorry to be clear,
RU Sirius:what does it mean now, it's a tremendous challenge,
Lisa Rein:right, right? But what I meant is it sounds like the same kinds of things that people are saying now about AI and AGI and yeah, what it's gonna
RU Sirius:do, what's interesting to me, though, is that what we did. Mondo. And I was just reading this article by Nick Herbert from Issue number two or three about the pleasure dome project. What's interesting is that this moment in the early 90s appealed to pretty much the entire counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area. And it would be a culture that I would say would be about two thirds of them would probably be hostile towards these sort of utopian project projections about the future and new technology and so forth. So the narrative, at least, and perhaps the actuality, has turned from an optimism and utopian IDF technology to a lot of recognition, or feelings about it being very dystopian now. And the thing with with Mondo at that time, we could make it all up. The future was it was being made. It was ahead of us. And the feeling with new technology and the internet that hardly were relative to the population. Hardly anybody was on it yet, and everybody was talking about virtual reality, as if that was about to become widely distributed, and all that stuff, and the idea that nanotechnology might happen soon, all that stuff in the early 90s, that that was a culture that it was still making itself up, so that people, people who would be inclined to be interested in that, could all hang out together, whether you were the owners of the company or the lowest lump in proletariat, person living in a squat, I like to say that the people who threw rocks at the Google Bus and the owners of zuzzel would have been hanging out together at the Mondo 2000 house in the early 90s. So, I mean, it's such a different culture then, and it was such an unmade culture. And you know, we were going to parties about virtual reality that didn't really even have any virtual reality at it, maybe get erithson or Darren Lanier to drag one of their systems to a party,
Lisa Rein:right? Because they were big. They were big systems I was just trying to get to find those pictures. Have they were amazing, darn it. We'll hit it up soon. But that's, maybe, that's what's so exciting, I guess, is that the stuff is finally happening. All the stuff that was just, you know, bullshit, science fiction, you know, is actually happening now. Yeah, and, and, so that's what, but it's, but the utopianism. Yeah, it can turn people off, but it didn't turn us off then. So much it was because we hadn't heard it before. See, now it's like, now it's 30 years later, and I've heard it so many times, right? So it's, it's different, but it was so wasn't like that, though, this is about the internet, and, you know, it was
RU Sirius:so new and so unique. The voice that model put out. I mean, I'm looking at an old issue, and I'm seeing how that there are errors, and, you know, it's a little messy and so forth. Oh, I know you've the early issue, the early issues, really early issues. We kind of, we kind of hit our stride around number four and held that to about number seven or eight. Those were, those were really slick, well, well organized, but it was okay, directed, but yeah, it was okay, because it was new. It was novel, because
Lisa Rein:it was cool. We were just looking at the picture, you know, it was sort of like, and then what somebody would read part of it, and then it would be like, what? And then everyone would read like that part. So we could argue about it, right?
RU Sirius:Glad to hear
Lisa Rein:it. And it was just there. It would be there. There was a copy of Mondo. And like all the party houses, you know, everywhere you went, you know, when you're getting ready to go, wherever, you know, there'd be the Mondo, and it would be, oh, it was almost like a waiting room. It was, it was the required, you know, waiting room, um, magazine. And. Everybody was just wait when the new one came out. Everyone was, you know, just talking about it and talking about it. This, right here, you said was one of your favorite covers. Tell us about it. This is the JFK. This is the Mary Pinochet Meyer that who may have dosed JFK, which may have what turned him into such a peacenik is the theory,
RU Sirius:yeah, right, yeah, the headline is America's psychedelic president. But I love the picture sort of isolated from the actual article or the content of the article, because what you're seeing, in some sense, is the wild, psychedelic 1960s coming out of the bullet hole in JFK brain. I think it's the signature moment of the 20th century, and I think it's incredibly well expressed by this picture, which I think, I think it was actually painted by Eric White, who has gone on to become a fairly famous painter. Yeah, so, yeah, I mean that references
Lisa Rein:other. That's a good keep going. Yeah. It's just flipping through it. It's a combination of of all the stuff you know going on at the time, and then also the incredible graphics, of course. Yeah, so who's doing these graphics at this time? It was
RU Sirius:an art Nagel. Is the art director. Heidi Foley, who later became the art director, is the Assistant art director, and they're both very involved. And then, you know, they're, they're hiring different artists to to do it, John Barrus, a name that comes to mind, Eric White, who, I guess mentioned Bart is doing some of them himself. You know, I don't remember all the names, but a lot of really marvelous artists. And I mean, it's all credit to clean move for wanting to have to feature design and to spare no expense, which was complicated financially, but so marvelous, so marvelous to see and look at. In fact, let me do a little merch here.
Lisa Rein:Oh, should we do you want to be showing something on the screen? Yeah, okay, cut to here we go. We'll stop sharing for a second.
RU Sirius:I don't know if people can see this, but this is a book called Mondo vision. They're just 1000 copies of it with various visuals inside, how they happen to be opening to the same thing. It's published by culpa press, and there's only 1000 copies of it. So you can try to get one of them. Yeah,
Lisa Rein:great. So I actually forgot to ask you something that I'm going to go back to the stuff I have prepared here, because I didn't get the story now. How did you get Todd run good on the cover? Cover? How'd that help?
RU Sirius:Yeah, we jazz Morgan, our music editor and Morgan Russell, who was one of our CO publishers at the beginning, they went out to see Todd. He was living in Sausalito. Todd had become a digital enthusiast. I suppose he was always a technical enthusiast. There in Woodstock, was a recording studio and so forth. But he had moved to Sausalito and become part of the culture there. And so they went out and they interviewed him and took a picture, and it was going to be for reality hackers. So he's holding a copy of reality hackers with sun raw on the cover, which was our issue number six of reality hackers music issue, an excellent issue, by the way. And so yeah, we got we got the picture and decided to use that now I gotta say that Todd is sort of the only male ever to appear on except for JFK with his head the only male, except there was somebody in drag in. And on one in one of the issues, I wish I could remember the name, their name, but yeah, yeah, but yeah, he was the only guy ever to grace a Mondo cover. Allison decided on putting the women on the cover, as, I think, after reading what it turns magazines, actually,
Lisa Rein:yeah, and I gotta tell you, it did a thing about, and I remembered now where I have the where I have the, sorry, here on a second, okay, where I found the virtual reality thing. Here's the virtual reality thing about that. That's what virtual reality was when this was happening. And I used to pay $15 for 15 minutes on this thing at the in San Francisco, and it was worth every penny, and the carvers of it, which I never used, but that's that's what that is. And then, speaking of hot covers, I mean the hot Mondo cover, whether it was an elegant hot Mondo cover or Reese Witherspoon hot monocover, even when she's just being silly, she's hot, right? I mean, there it is, yeah, and then that, I mean, that's just, I don't know what, planet's definitely hot, right? Like, oh,
RU Sirius:that's Central. Wilson, the great writer, Cinta Wilson, yeah,
Lisa Rein:oh, okay, great. And she and I have another this layout later that I took a picture of that center, Wilson, I believe, right,
RU Sirius:I can't see it that clearly. Oh, okay, that's that's from
Lisa Rein:that. That's from that issue. Hot covers. Hot covers were really a part of it, but they were still tasteful. Hot covers, yeah? And they, they were authentic. Here's some other stuff that we showed in the opening. Um, there, there's Iggy ate you had a great and an Iggy is also one of these people are always sort of, I don't know, cutting edge, bleeding edge, yeah,
RU Sirius:actually, on the Well, I had people complaining that Iggy Pop was, was was old, was we started right around 1974 or 1994 1995 when the Gen X thing really exploded, there was some identity conflicts going on within Mondo and within Mondo fandom not wanting to crush the old people on there. People complain about Timothy Leary being a frequent presence the Mondo staff rejecting an interview with Ken Kesey very much trying to get away from the hippie thing and become pure cyberpunk and post punk and all that. But a few people even complained about Iggy, and I said, Iggy is a perennial, which is just what you were basically saying just now. And
Lisa Rein:the idea that he's, I mean, Iggy, literally, I just saw Iggy Pop last year live.
RU Sirius:He's still great. Yes, this
Lisa Rein:is, like, one of the best concert I'd ever seen in my life. I mean, he had a super band, you know, he's got all these great people playing with him, but he always does. And the idea he gave me hope. You know, as so as a rock and roller, you know, an aging rock and roller, or whatever, like, wow, 80 years old, he's doing great, you know, he's, he's certainly, but the idea that he'd be washed up in the 70s, that's why I was laughing. He was still hot. Iggy was hot when I was in high school. We still thought pop was hot. That was the 80s, you know. So that that's just funny to me, but anyway, he's there. We got this was amazing, Rage Against the Machine you have in there. Okay, yeah, and Einstein didn't knew button.
RU Sirius:Oh, yeah, yeah. Everybody went out to see them perform, yeah, yeah,
Lisa Rein:yeah. That was exciting, of course. What William Gibson? And there's you being now. That is that snow vanilla
RU Sirius:picture? No, that's a picture taken. That's a picture taken by my sweetheart, Eve Bernie, who recently passed, actually that well after Mondo 2000
Lisa Rein:and there's Eve, because I had a picture of her ready in case he came.
RU Sirius:Oh yeah, there we go.
Lisa Rein:Let's go back to this. So we're in the. Eight. We're talking about the deal with JFK. Oh, yeah. So again, this thing with JFK I will miss. I just told it like last I was looking, wait a minute, what's that? You know? And I wasn't sure if it was, now, I see that it's coming out or bullet coming in, but I was like, Oh, wait, that's actually the key to everything. And I and I just noticed it. But this is a key. This is a really important Kennedy for all of his, you know, interesting. I don't want to get into a discussion about Kennedy but interesting policies. Uh, did a clear about face at the something happened. It changed his mind about war. And it's the kind of thing that people do do, and they've been tripping. We will never know for sure there's different evidence around it. What gave you the idea for this, What? What? What evidence were you acting on?
RU Sirius:It was actually the article by Nam C druid was lifted straight out of issue number three of high frontiers, which came out in 1987 so, okay, yeah, so, so we just re rerun the same thing. But, I mean, it came from Timothy Leary and flashbacks going into his relation ship with his friendship with Mary Pinchot Meyer. How she she says she came to her for psychedelics and to learn about running psychedelic trips because she was going to turn on powerful men in Washington, and it being Tim, I thought, oh, Tim made up a great story. But, but, I mean, it's been confirmed. I can't remember the name of the author, but their book about Mary pincher Meyer confirms that she knew Timothy Leary. She had a friendship with Timothy Leary, and she had an affair with the JFK, and they smoked marijuana in the White House. She couldn't confirm that they took acid in in the White House. But that even part of this, that even part of this story, lines up with reality, is is pretty stunning.
Lisa Rein:Yeah, yeah. And I love that they couldn't confirm it with which just means the right people kept their mouth shut, which I also love. Yeah, it's almost the best part of the story is and they're never going to be able to confirm it, and who cares? Maybe he never actually took it, but it got him thinking, and he did some reading, and the reading turned him, I mean, whatever. It was
RU Sirius:a great story. Yeah. I just love the idea of 1963 being this turning point in which the wild psychedelic movement leaks out of the brain of Yeah, and in our and it and in our hysteria and our apocalyptic feelings, it led towards the whole dropout, revolutionary, Wild wanderings of the late 1960s and into the 1970s so yeah, I mean, I love it. It's a signature moment that's captured in that image. And a friend of mine at the memorial for Eve brought me a framed copy of that cover, signed by Timothy Leary and Oliver Stone.
Lisa Rein:Nice, nice. Yeah, and I don't think he put that in the movie. I don't, I don't think that was in the movie, but, but, uh, yeah, it's just, it's a wonderful image. It's really beautiful. And in that issue is an interview with David Byrne and Timothy Leary, yeah, and Tim would get starstruck The one time I actually hung out with my house after I edited his last book, surfing the conscious nets, this comic book that He did the the one day I was there, he had just come back from George DiCaprio, his wedding, and he had met Leonardo, and he was just walking on air and running around with Leonardo's phone number in his hand. And he wanted to be friends. He wants to be friends so they. Knew they met briefly, like years earlier, but Leonardo was too you know that, and Tim was too shy, and then learn, then Titanic came out, and Leonardo was a big star. So now Tim was shy, and then they at the wedding, they bonded and talked about also it was that he was, and so it's the same kind of thing he's asking he's a fan, and, you know, date of and the whole thing just, you know, so there's the and there's a close and, and so you can see other, yeah,
RU Sirius:That's nice.
Lisa Rein:Thing else you want about this piece,
RU Sirius:there's an accompanying piece in which Tim does sort of, not exactly a review, but an article of praise for a book that David Byrne had put out about new ways of looking at art in the internet age, and it was sort of along the lines of the William Burroughs loot, the louver idea that everything was going to be free or cheap and easy and would not be valued by its exclusivity, but it would be, you know, copied and passed around very kind of sort of very sophisticated culture theory, thing that younger people would not have expected from Timothy Leary. I really like that. I quoted from it recently in an article on the monda 2000 website, actually,
Lisa Rein:yeah, we talked that. With creative commons, that the idea he talked about sharing, remixing and things like that, he didn't call it remixing, it collages, yeah, you know, again is 1990 he told me I was a librarian, and I had no idea what he was even talking about. You know, I had no idea what the librarian was. Never heard that word before in my life. And so he really did see a lot of the stuff, you know, that that happened. Hey, while we're here, I saw this Neil Young piece. How did you get Neil Young? I mean, again, these are big names very early on in the magazines.
RU Sirius:Well, these are great stories. I don't know. I don't know if you, if you ask that question to lead into a bragging point, if you, if you know this, but we had these people actually contact we had these people actually contact us to want to be in the magazine, which is, you know, I think a very rare and wow, usual, particularly for a magazine at the time our our circulation was maybe 70 80,000 you know, nothing compared to Rolling Stone or any of the major publications. But, yeah, we heard from Neil Young wanting to be in the magazine. Right around the same time, we heard from David Bowie wanting to be in the magazine. David Bowie, to me, is God, but
Lisa Rein:that Yeah, and
RU Sirius:we, we, and of course, as legend would have it. We heard from you too to name the edge. So, I mean, that's a there's a whole story behind, behind that. But
Lisa Rein:is it number 10? Yeah, David. Is it number 10? The David Bowie,
RU Sirius:the Bowie interview? Okay, well, Tim Leary ties into this, and it's not a happy story. We did eventually have an interview with David Bowie in monda 2000 in a later issue, but we heard from his people that he wanted to do an interview and that he was going to be in Los Angeles. And we were like, Okay, our man in Los Angeles is Timothy Leary, and he canceled the interview, so
Lisa Rein:didn't want to get interviewed. He
RU Sirius:was a little paranoid about Leary. We were envisioning a repeat of the. Rolling Stone issue, where he and burrows post together and all that. But, yeah, well, it's hard. It's part of the story, you know.
Lisa Rein:Yeah,
RU Sirius:not happy about it.
Lisa Rein:No, I imagine not. I imagine not. I imagine he was excited. I'm sure, like I said he was probably because anybody would be. Yeah,
RU Sirius:we talked about whether we thought, we talked about whether Ashes to ashes was about him or not.
Lisa Rein:Oh, but that had come out way before Ash to ashes had come out. Way before you were scheduling that interview. What am I missing? Oh,
RU Sirius:yeah, yeah,
Lisa Rein:yeah. So it couldn't have been about, Oh, you think he lived in
RU Sirius:the 70s. Everybody, right, right. He commented on Leary and rock magazine, I think, in the early 70s, when he was talking about a song, I can't remember the name of it, something from space, I leave the Signet committee. Yeah, at the time, it wasn't negative or positive, but he followed, he clearly followed some of Tim's themes across his career, which is what part of why it was disappointing. But I guess he thought we wanted we he thought of drugs and we're thinking cyber culture, which they're both into.
Lisa Rein:Yeah, he said he was thinking drugs. You think it's
RU Sirius:gonna be about drugs, yeah, and he was, again, he was being against drugs, which was partly bullshit, but nevertheless,
Lisa Rein:yeah, I didn't know. I didn't know he'd ever actually said anything against them. I can understand him not wanting to be in Los Angeles, in a house to where they were more likely going to be there, you know, like, that's a hard
RU Sirius:he also, I mean, we shouldn't necessarily continue this discussion too much longer, but okay, he had a paranoia connected with Los Angeles and people who like Ellis Rowley, So he had those two things in his head that he had paranoia about. He may have connected Tim with that. Well, I
Lisa Rein:think that it's starting to sound to me like it didn't have anything to do with Tim and it had more to do with Los Angeles. That's what it sounds Yeah. Yeah, he
RU Sirius:did. He did have a lot of anxiety about Los Angeles. So, yeah,
Lisa Rein:in all fairness, because that's the LAPD are terrifying, and that they like to set people up, you know, and stuff like that. So it's actually, you know, it's, it's a perfectly fine that just went to a an important point that's always good to make. And you should be careful with Los Angeles paranoid. But
RU Sirius:David Kushner who ultimately interviewed him for Mondo. And Kushner is a pretty well known writer. Yeah, it was a good interview. I think he was doing tin machine.
Lisa Rein:Where was that I tried? He did. He was in it because I tried to find it's in a later issue
RU Sirius:and a much later issue, maybe 13 or 14, something like that.
Lisa Rein:It should be there, right? And archive.org because, again, it says things at issue 10. Issue 10 came, it's like 40 or something, yeah,
RU Sirius:or it could be, it could be 10. I don't really, you know, I wasn't, I wasn't the editor in chief at that time.
Lisa Rein:Yeah, all right, well, I'm
RU Sirius:gonna give up. I'm gonna go. I knew I was happening and I was happy about it, but I wasn't. Yeah, scrambled in my mind. Well, this
Lisa Rein:issue that I'm showing right now is Deborah Harry, and again, did Deborah Harry really being on the cover? Oh
RU Sirius:no, no, a friend of mine. I can't think of his name right now, but he knew everybody in music, practically, because he had, like, the biggest record collection in the world, or something like that. And he was an old friend of Allison's. So there was a show called Escape from New York featuring Blondie, two members of the talking head to Chris and Tina. Tina, Chris and Tina tomtown club. Yeah, they were calling themselves as severed heads at the time, and the Ramones. So do I want to go to that? Yeah, of course I want to go to that. Yeah, I was actually, I was actually there in New York to see some of those people at the at the beginning of it all. So I. Anyway, yeah, we got to go backstage. And I don't think it was pre arranged. I think we just asked for an interview on the spot from Debbie and from Kristin Tina. And we got both of those things, and Debbie was great too. It's very enthusiastic about Mondo, and I guess I can say this, she asked if I had any of those new psychedelics, which I didn't. I didn't have any on me at the time. But yeah, I
Lisa Rein:was asking, quietly. Heard about it. Anybody paying anybody paying attention? You know, was asking.
RU Sirius:So she was great, and got to add to the interview over the phone. And she actually called me at the Mondo house one time, which made me a big celebrity in the office for a day. Yeah,
Lisa Rein:you always had Cisco house. The only time I got to go to the Mondo house was when I was with a celebrity. I was hanging out with mercury Mullin. Oh yeah, Allison invited her, and I got to hang out. We were sitting on the bed 17th century or something, or maybe it was 14 something. It was somebody's bed, that
RU Sirius:famous bed, yeah, in the master bedroom,
Lisa Rein:right? But how old it was like from? It was very old, right? It was like from the 1700s
RU Sirius:I don't know. I've lost track of those details.
Lisa Rein:Oh, okay. Well, though we were,
RU Sirius:mom had a her mom was part of the same family as Mary Todd, who married Abraham Lincoln and Queen Moo always says she had the Mad Mary Todd jeans.
Lisa Rein:Very cool. So, yeah, so here's, I found the Deborah Harry interview. I didn't realize there was an actual I couldn't, I couldn't find it when I was looking
RU Sirius:before. Yeah, it's a very short interview, but, yeah,
Lisa Rein:but it's short, but exciting, and in that same issue again, kind of ahead of its time, you have this ad for an article, I mean, grow your own growth hormone, you know, which I thought was really interesting. Tell us about
RU Sirius:it. Okay. Well, I believe that Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw the the vitamin and nutrient hustlers, you know, I don't know if people, people should know about Dirk and Sandy if they're in the longevity world, you know, they were doing it. They were doing a raw, you know, without a lot of advanced technology going on. Merv Griffin in late 1970s dressed like heavy metal stars talking about longevity and different vitamins and nutrients. You can you can try and st, Jude st, Jude Milham, who became our senior editor, developed a great rapport with them, because she was very not knowledgeable about obscure medical stuff. She had been a registered nurse. Actually,
Lisa Rein:that was St Jude on the in the on the cover of the cyberpunk handbook, is that St Jude? No, that's no, okay, I
RU Sirius:won't try to find it. Tiffany. Tiffany brown actually on the cover,
Lisa Rein:no picture of her. Yeah, I'm just gonna show, Oh, it's right, I forgot. I gotta put the millhorn or it's gonna give me Jesus. Here we are. Yeah,
RU Sirius:a little intervention from Jesus.
Lisa Rein:Hey, never heard anybody. Here's the picture. Here's your mug shot. Is a good one.
RU Sirius:Oh yeah, yeah, that's arrested that civil rights demonstration. I'm one of the big ones down in the south in the early 60s. Jude, yeah, dude. Jude was went through it all. She was working in analog with computers, and she helped to design the automatic automatons that would spit that you could put money in and it would put it would shoot food that out at a place called horn and hard art, she helped to design those. She was the only woman in Stephen Levy's hackers about the history, the early history. Of hackers, and she was part of the group that started the community memory, which was also the group that with Lee Felsen Stein and Ephraim Lipkin that started the Homebrew Computer group out of which grew the personal computer Jobs and Wozniak were among the people who were going to those gatherings down, I think they're in the South Bay, but also in some of them were in Berkeley. I think Elise Felsenstein just hasn't wrote a book, no publisher yet, but such an interesting early, early, early history of computers. By the way, we talked about yippies earlier, I mentioned in a number of places that might claim that the yippies started the digital revolution because they were at the center of phone freaks. They put out the, I can't remember the name of it, but they put out the newsletter, Bell, something Bell. They were absolutely you know, Draper used to hang out at the yippies Dippy headquarters in New York, at every level that the phone, freaking pH, b, h, R, E, A, K and yippies were intertwined absolutely so I mean, that was sort of the beginning of the hacker movement.
Lisa Rein:And the cyberpunk the hacker movement, were kind of
RU Sirius:yeah, a lot of
Lisa Rein:us, and I'm sharing a picture of the cyberpunk handbook now it seems like a good time to talk about it, since we're talking about these. You wrote this with St Jude, right? Yeah, and, oh yeah, Bart and eagles and Bart. Bart
RU Sirius:did the design, dude and I wrote it, more dude than myself. Yeah, cool. And
Lisa Rein:it, and it has a it's pretty much, it's our it's like a parody. It's like a parody, parody all at the same time, you know, yeah, when it, when it came out, we were learning from it, because I wasn't really hanging out with actual hackers yet. I was still just kind of in the with the rain. So it was, it was, it was really interesting. So tell us about led up to you guys deciding we're gonna, we're gonna put out a book.
RU Sirius:Yeah, we were working on a book, another book called How to mutate and take over the world for a Ballantine book, which is a subsidiary of Random House. And in the middle of that, somebody got in touch with us, and originally, Penn jollett was going to write cyberpunk handbook. It was his pitch, and he decided he didn't have time to do it. So basically we were, it was, we were just for hire. Basically, they came to us and said, Do you want to do this? And,
Lisa Rein:oh, that's funny. So they went and they went and looked for people that would write the book that they want to put out. It was that kind
RU Sirius:of, yeah. They came to us and they were offering a pretty decent amount of money. And yeah, we said, Yes. And there was a little like flurry of people wanting to get rid of the use of the cyber word at the time. And I was thinking, yeah. So I was thinking, you know, my usual attitude towards the publishers, I'll get the money, and then after I have the money, I'll change the title. But dude went ahead and started writing this brilliant and funny stuff about cyberpunk. So the title remained, but
Lisa Rein:it didn't have the real cyberpunk fake book. You guys added that, right?
RU Sirius:Yeah, yeah. We
Lisa Rein:added that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We
RU Sirius:turned it into, I mean, I think it was since, it was since it was Penn Jillette. It probably would have been comedy, even originally, but we definitely, yeah,
Lisa Rein:yeah, that's but
RU Sirius:also with real, with real material in there, real, real instructions.
Lisa Rein:Well, yeah, and this guy, this guy, Eric, I actually brunch with him. Was at the at the Thai temple in Berkeley. Eric, I can't think of his last name, darn it. But yeah, I can't
RU Sirius:think of it either. Eric White's name is getting in my way. Eric, I can't remember, right? One of the people who started the cipher punks,
Lisa Rein:right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so this is really, like you said, it was funny as hell, but it was also, you know, parts of it were real. I love this. It's just a pager. Yeah, really neat, really neat stuff. So during around that was, and then then this happened. You wanted to make sure we covered this? What does this this poster? So everybody had these, and we're, we're passing them around, giving them to people, writing, you'd have it would be on the wall. And people would sometimes add their own stuff to the poster. You know? They would put in their own stuff with the arrow, making fun.
RU Sirius:That's Chris. Chris Hudak, looking good in weather, a handsome fellow. You know, there were two people involved in Mondo who actually called themselves Cyberpunks, and one of them was Chris, and the other ones was Michael synergy, who disappeared from, from view, from anybody knowing who he where, where he went to, but that anyway, yeah, and, I mean, this was just, it was filler, actually, within the magazine, within, within the context of, I wasn't there at the time, but I was aware of what was going on. And there was an advertisement that didn't arrive, and the issue had to be shipped, so they had to fill a page within a couple of days. And actually, Marcia Robert, who was mostly known to us as the person who was working in the office and answering the phones and stuff, came up with this concept, which turned out to be the, you know, the hit of monda, 2000 on the internet during the 21st century, most people under 40, if they've seen anything from Monday, 2000 all they've seen is this thing. And half, more than half of them probably don't know we're taking the piss out of ourselves. I mean, it was, you know,
Lisa Rein:like it was a real thing, yeah, like, like it was something you wanted, you wanted to be, but again, in many ways you did,
RU Sirius:yeah, many ways it wasn't stuff we should have at that time,
Lisa Rein:yeah, or you wanted to find out about it, or whatever, you know. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, neat. So let's see. Okay, I'm gonna go back here. Okay, but John Perry Barlow, John Perry Barlow, and here's a picture of him and you Yeah, and yeah, I just wanted to show this thing across it. John Perry wrote a lot for you guys, and what, what was that like? Was he did he just sort of send you his latest thing and you would put it in or more? Did you ask him?
RU Sirius:I mean, he came along pretty early, when we were Mondo. Actually, we're still really reality hackers. When he got interested, I have a whole interview with him about it, meeting me at a hackers gathering at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. And then Morgan ru invited him, inviting him up to the Mondo house, and it being a kind of a revelation for him. He was starting his new life. He had taken off from being a farmer in Wyoming, and had come to the Bay Area to be a participant in digital digital culture. They cyber culture, as we called it at the time, and, of course, a Grateful Dead lyricist, but not somebody was hanging out really with Grateful Dead so in a way, it was, this was kind of new to him. And it came to the Mondo house, which was a beautiful, sort of described in the media during the 90s as a techno Gothic Citadel high in the Berkeley hills. Yeah, go
Lisa Rein:ahead. Yeah,
RU Sirius:go ahead. No.
Lisa Rein:Well, when he talks about his relationship with the Grateful Dead and writing lyrics, basically he was Bobby's smart friend. That's how they thought of him. And and Bobby had to write lyrics. Bobby needed some songs to like show that he could write good songs. And so the way that Perry tells it, he would give, I would give him a perfectly good song that was already worked out or whatever. And Bob. Me would completely transform it. He'd give it some weird time signature and change it into one of his weird Bobby songs, but, but they had this thing, but, but, yeah, he wasn't really. He hung out with them when they were playing, because he'd go backstage, you know, for the shows, but, but he wasn't really into that, the dead scene like that. It was really interesting talk about it,
RU Sirius:yeah, yeah. But anyway, yeah. And he was living as a farmer in Wyoming, and then he came out to the Bay Area and really got, really got into it. And we're excited among the first people that he kind of started hanging out with. The first thing we got from him for the virtual reality issue, being in nothingness. Part of it had already been published in a nice little free paper that was available in the Bay Area called microtones. And then we took it and tuned it up a little bit and ran it along with interview with Sharon Lanier that he had done turned what was the
Lisa Rein:title? What was the title of that? Again, I'm going to look it up right
RU Sirius:now, being and nothingness was the Barlow article and life and the data cloud, I believe, with the title of the conversation between Barlow and Jaron Lanier,
Lisa Rein:was it? Was it an early one, like Issue number two? Or what
RU Sirius:issue two the virtual reality issue? I'm pretty sure that's Issue number two.
Lisa Rein:All right, perfect. So
RU Sirius:we'll just two or three. I think it's two.
Lisa Rein:See if we can get lucky and find just keep talking, and I'm just going to try to find out while
RU Sirius:you're all right, yeah, I was just reading that issue, actually. That's pretty fun issue. There's Dirk and Sandy, the infamous Dirk, there it is, being a nothingness. That's the name of it. You were there,
Lisa Rein:yeah. Ba bam, all
RU Sirius:right. And nothingness, that's it, yeah.
Lisa Rein:So tell us about this. This is, this is 19, one of
RU Sirius:the first, yeah, one of the first articles about one of the first, really at length articles about virtual reality by John Perry Barlow, covers a lot of territory about what Darren Lanier was up to, about what Eric Gullickson was up to, about Timothy Leary's and enthusiasm, you know, how he was hopping on the next train to Nirvana. And we can say Barlow was was really good writer. I mean, we're so fortunate to have him writing for us. Yeah, remember, we had a lot of really good writers, and Barlow. Barlow was among them, yeah,
Lisa Rein:yeah. No idea who was or who you know, but it was just captivating to read about it, even though it didn't exist
RU Sirius:yet. Yeah, and interestingly, although he ended up interviewing Darren Lanier for us, we knew Darren Lanier all the way back to the going all the way back to the days of high frontiers in the mid 80s, because at what came to be called the Mondo house, at the house where we lived, another woman lived there, Deborah Harlow and Jaron Lanier was courting Deborah Harlow, and they eventually got married, and then he had to face one high powered lawyer. But anyway, we'll do it. We'll do a gossip. Exactly,
Lisa Rein:gossip, yeah, here
RU Sirius:I have some great gossip.
Lisa Rein:Karen's article in this issue too. There
RU Sirius:it is. This is where it starts. This is where it's the start of Barlow and Darren and conversation, substantial, long, very interesting article about diverse reality right there in issue number 219, 90. Nice.
Lisa Rein:All right, so we'll have that. I'll put that in. I've actually put links to all the stuff we're talking about in the description. I'm gonna put that here. So I so I linked to that. So
RU Sirius:we heard about, anyway, we heard about virtual reality in the mid 80s from from Darren. He had the company, then VPL, that was putting, supposed to be putting together the first virtual stuff. And right around the same time, Timothy, Leary and Eric alexan collaborated on Oracle that was tired artificial realities, so they actually weren't even using the term virtual yet. But that's, uh, what it was,
Lisa Rein:neat. Neat. So, um. Um, let's see. So I wanted to, Oh, yeah. So again, you were talking about music. You had a lot of incredible music, everything, I mean, the musicians themselves, and then the designers. You'd have fashion shoots and stuff like that. Now this issue, especially this number four. Now, who is that on the cover?
RU Sirius:Some model, um,
Lisa Rein:some model, because you don't give her credit,
RU Sirius:no, yeah, she so we're
Lisa Rein:losing our minds to this day, are you? We don't know who this woman is. We were losing our minds.
RU Sirius:Not mentioned on the on
Lisa Rein:the No, nope, she is not. And so I thought we were going to solve the great mystery today, and apparently, not. Yes, we still don't know who she is, but it was a cool cover, and it didn't matter she was. So I
RU Sirius:remember coming up to the house. She was very cool. But yeah, someday
Lisa Rein:somebody out there, let me know who she is. So in the same issue, in this one issue, you've got skinny puppy, yeah, you've got Brian Eno, yep, you've got the cuckoo. The
RU Sirius:cuckoo, what a great that they were a product of San Francisco cyber culture, and they were the star. They were like the local stars of the San Francisco cyber culture for women, doing stuff with digital stuff and live music. And they ended up making an album produced by Brian Eno, but I don't think it. I don't think I went anywhere, but they were, they were like the stars of our local culture,
Lisa Rein:yeah, they had their moment. I can't remember what the song was. They had different moments, but there is a widespread respect for what they
RU Sirius:were doing, yeah. Oh, they were fantastic, even though they didn't get big, and
Lisa Rein:we found this unpublished cover. Oh,
RU Sirius:yeah, that's one of the members.
Lisa Rein:So because you ended up using the model, the model without a name, but it could
RU Sirius:be, or could be from a different Yeah, probably from that issue, right? Yeah, we had,
Lisa Rein:it's the same picture, almost. See it's from that same shoe. Yeah,
RU Sirius:we moshed up a bunch of covers and printed them and made some decisions on those.
Lisa Rein:And then here's an article we're still in this issue of John Perry Barlow interviewing Ted Nelson, yeah. Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, who actually hangs out at the Internet Archive all the time. He's got a he's Yeah, that's there for like, 20 years.
RU Sirius:That's a Mount Rushmore of cyberculture stuff, right there.
Lisa Rein:Barlow Nelson, especially, especially when he says things like, like, wizzy wig is practically the bottom lobotomization of our ability to see, yeah, that's just the kind of overdramatic shit that Ted would say. Oh yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. We
RU Sirius:love, we love people who produce pull quotes, that's for sure. Yes,
Lisa Rein:yes. And then here same issue William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
RU Sirius:That's actually a review of, oh,
Lisa Rein:it's a review of their book by Rudy.
RU Sirius:Is it probably by Rudy? Yeah,
Lisa Rein:so you've got Rudy. So Rudy Rucker is doing book reviews. Yeah, for you. Okay, make that point. It's kind of amazing. It's just
RU Sirius:running for us. Gibson ever ended up running for us? He might have, but Bruce Sterling ended up writing for us a lot. Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, we connected with way back when we were Mondo 2000 and John Shirley was actually the first person to agree to be in our initial article from the cyberpunk world. He had just moved to the Bay Area. Yeah. And Josh early wrote for us a lot as well.
Lisa Rein:Neat, okay, and then we have is this, Sarah Drew, and I what's going on?
RU Sirius:Let's not not to be named, but I guess it's too late. No,
Lisa Rein:okay, yeah,
RU Sirius:but yeah, it's a great it's a great pose being a cyber siren, siren and a cyborg. And yes, man. Many years, many years of my life. But that's the for the gossip show. That's
Lisa Rein:another we're definitely going to have to have the gossip show now. We keep dropping tidbits for it, and we are going to have you back in September, by the way, so that you and Ben, you know, can talk about, you know, future stuff too, by the way. So this is another cover that never was. You can tell it's not a final cover, because you guys would never, you guys would never have anything boxy like that, but, but I still thought it was interesting. And that's what you do, is you, you mock up several covers and pick the best one, you know. And for you guys, I'm just lots of amazing covers that never, that never, yeah,
RU Sirius:not too many of them were saved, but some of them
Lisa Rein:were, yeah, I was able to find Yeah, neat. And it's so nice. It's so great that you put them up there. You know that that the Internet Archive, that they're there for people. Hey, let's talk about Mondo. Vanilli. Oh, yeah. So I was amazed. I remembered the song. I found that love is the product song. That's the music that was playing in the opening montage. Yeah, and
RU Sirius:that's an hour that's an hour long song. Story in and of itself, how we met Trent Reznor and I, and he said we should record for him, spent $90,000 of nothing, records money, and then they didn't release it. Yeah, that's a whole he was, he was in his downward spiral at the time, wild, wild times. And he was, of course, living in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered, and we met him at a housewarming party with Timothy Leary and the members of Mondo Vanilli and Gibby Haynes and, my God, I can't remember the name of the guy anyway. Bunch of rock stars, yeah,
Lisa Rein:what do you think happened? Why do you think they didn't release it? I mean, what reason would
RU Sirius:everybody went over budget, including us? And I think we are following Trent's example, assuming we could do the same thing that he could do, but nothing. It was a boutique record company given to Trent in which, as is often the case with record companies, telling him he can do whatever he wants with it, and then not actually following through on that offer. So nothing was a subsidiary of Interscope, which I believe was a subsidiary of Warner Brothers. So it was the contracts were supposed to be friendly, but were actually really hostile, because they went up the chain of command, and yeah, it was all, it was all pretty bizarre, and then we couldn't use it. Eventually, we just put it out on the internet. Enough time had passed, but they wanted to be paid back for their studio for their $90,000 of studio time before we could use what we did, and we couldn't really. Reznor dropped out of sight after a while. Couldn't really communicate with him. He was on a downward spiral. He was downward spiral, and then he was on an upward spiral, and became this huge, well respected man about town. So anyway, yeah, it's a start there. If people look it up, they can find me telling the full, full story on various
Lisa Rein:and, and, yeah, it sounds like it was out of turn, out of Trent's hands, anywhere. In all fairness, the other thing
RU Sirius:or not. Yeah, there was the Tipper Gore crisis, and what Congress Believe me
Lisa Rein:when I try to tell him that story, they think I make it up,
RU Sirius:yeah, and which Congress was attacking music, and they specifically went after Nine Inch Nails, and that was right, or that was at the same time too, and the parent company, inter scope, was also being attacked for carrying Dr Dre so that anxiety hit just at this just at the same time we turned. Than our own IOU bed. So all that was mixed up, and you haven't had a Mac. We haven't had a we even had a manager who quit the entire Rock and Roll industry in the middle of it all,
Lisa Rein:even though, in the end, it ended up selling our records in the end, right? It turned out you wanted the sticker as time went on.
RU Sirius:Oh yeah, you want to say things on purpose to get the sticker everything. Oh yeah, we didn't. We didn't have to put that on there. It's on there because we wanted to, yeah,
Lisa Rein:right, right. But, I mean, but I mean, in general, when, when you was an artist, there was a panic, and then it happened, and then it turned out, they sold more records with the sticker, and it just sort of neutered the whole thing, you know, what
RU Sirius:the results of the of the meaning of the hearings were going to be turned out being a sticker, then, okay, well, that's, that's weak. It
Lisa Rein:just made people, made teenagers want to go buy more records to piss everybody off, you know, worked out and, of course, real quick a moment of silence for Millie Vanilli, Oh, yeah. So how did you decide to make the name mondoville Vanilla?
RU Sirius:Yeah. Well, I was just reading the newspaper one day, sitting out having my coffee. I was in the middle of the obsession with virtual reality, and I read about these guys being in trouble for lip syncing, and to my virtual reality so brain, I was like, What's the difference? Why not? Well, there
Lisa Rein:isn't yet and again. They got a bad rap. We are. Most people are kind of in agreement now that they got a bad rap in the sense that there's a lot of of other singers that are used in everything, and you can't go down that, go down that trail. But
RU Sirius:I was definitely up playing the simulacrum and and Millie Vanilli. What Millie Vanilli done? I mean, there's their song. Shouldn't have never, ever gotten a Grammy, but that's exactly the song, I mean. But yeah, so I just tossed it out as as as a joke, and the
Lisa Rein:rest is history. And then, of course, IOU babe is a takeoff on I Got You Babe, which
RU Sirius:is Yeah, yeah, which became even more relevant when we gave the album The title. And then we ended up owing nothing records $90,000 and then we we made a new song called The Ballad of Brent buzzkill, and we put it in our post nothing records version of the album that's on Bandcamp now in different places,
Lisa Rein:was that, is that the record executive or something?
RU Sirius:No, Brent bus killed. Is a play on,
Lisa Rein:yeah, oh, oh, okay, yeah. Again, again. It sounds like he to me. It sounded like it wasn't anything personal. It sounded like No, no, they give him a record label, and you don't really have the power to do it at what you will like. What
RU Sirius:happened was he actually had six different artists that he had signed, other than Nine Inch Nails, and the only one who got albums released was Marilyn Manson, which was certainly a business wise is a good decision. You know, we see where that wow,
Lisa Rein:it's, it's hard to talk about Marilyn Manson since I've seen the documentary, you know, now about, about all that, but, but in that, but way back then, he was actually a progressive he had a stage show.
RU Sirius:Yeah, there were no albums
Lisa Rein:but progressive and stuff. And that just makes it all the more sad, you know, put, throw him on the list of music I can't really listen to anymore. He can hang out with Michael Jackson and all the other sad music, but swiftly moving on. So this I
RU Sirius:listen to anything. But anyway, yeah, yeah, I still listen to Cat Scratch Fever because it's a good
Lisa Rein:Oh no. He's the worst. No no. Not Ted. Not Ted. Nugent. So
RU Sirius:I have a song. I have a song actually called, I can't remember the opening title, but it's subtitles. I Ted Nugent with his own gun, so people can look that up.
Lisa Rein:Is that one of your songs? Yeah. Oh, well, that's okay. Anyway, yeah, um, yeah, he's just, you know, just a mean meanie. I don't like meanies. Um, yeah, hey, I found this piece. Now I'm showing now here's Genesis, um, who's finally got a movie out about them. I saw. Ah, I haven't seen it yet, but it looks really exciting and and here's a quote from him. Video is the nearest you'll get to an electric maltov. Go out and throw one, cause the cat cathode ray tubes to resonate and implode. You are your own screen. Yeah, we worshiped this guy, this guy, um, are they um, at the at the time he that's why I made that mistake.
RU Sirius:But I don't know. What is I don't
Lisa Rein:I don't know. Okay, well, there was already Genesis. Was already around by the time, because he was doing psychic TV. Oh, yeah, right,
RU Sirius:and performance arts going back to the 70s or maybe even the 60s. Yeah. I remember. I remember, I remember seeing him, his name in Dallas magazine called file, which during the punk era became vile.
Lisa Rein:That's late 70s, early 80s. Probably, yeah, okay, so this is 85 and I'm thinking about when you're more when your your magazine was coming out, maybe around 90, maybe around 1990 and we would just collect televisions, old television sets, and make these walls of television sets, yeah, and then, and then fuck with the signal to get it to, to display different, bizarre, different things, right? Than just all the same thing or something flashing. Or, if you somebody finally did it to where it could be one big picture, you know, from all the TV
RU Sirius:snacks back to Nam June Pike, actually the first video artists from going back to 1960 if nobody else wanted to have Anything to do with video art. And there's great NAMA, June Pike, n, a, m, J, U, n, e,
Lisa Rein:i Korean. A Korean artist,
RU Sirius:yeah, Korean. Moved to America and yeah, all right, I have a personal story Eve. Eve and I had our first sort of formal date when our friend Larry took us to San Jose to a non June hype exhibition, video exhibition,
Lisa Rein:uh huh,
RU Sirius:yeah, so yeah, did
Lisa Rein:you? Did you meet him? Or,
RU Sirius:oh no, no,
Lisa Rein:okay,
RU Sirius:he wasn't later. We went to something at MoMA in New York that was a exhibition. But it was, it was, it was after the opening. So, no, I never got to meet him. Needs, actually, Binghamton. Binghamton, New York had a strong experimental TV center, so I was very aware of experimental TV as Neil.
Lisa Rein:I'd never heard of him before, so this is neat. It's always need to get some get some more.
RU Sirius:People should find that show. It's such a marvelous show. He says so many brilliant things about technology on that show. What's the name of the show? And find it by a PBS, something about Moon something or the first TV, something like that. Alright, I'll,
Lisa Rein:I'll find it, but I'll find it and drop it in the drop it in the description. What's the story behind this cover? I don't know.
RU Sirius:That's Brenda. Brenda Laurel, one of the early people experimenting with virtual reality, still quite well, okay, within VR and tech circles. So, yeah, that's, that's who that is. Neither was she in college or teaching in college. I can't remember exactly, Laurel, absolutely
Lisa Rein:neat. And then we have Reese Witherspoon, Reese's
RU Sirius:first cover,
Lisa Rein:haha. It says freeways. Reese Witherspoon, what the heck is freeway? Is that a movie? Freeway?
RU Sirius:Yeah, there's this weird movie that Queen movie came obsessed with. So we interviewed the director, and then we, of course, put Reese on the on the cover.
Lisa Rein:And you think it was her first cover?
RU Sirius:I'm pretty sure that's her first cover. It was pretty career. That was crazy. It was a very punky, nasty movie. It was very different from what you'd likely to see her and anymore, although I think she does make good choices,
Lisa Rein:she does big little eyes. Was the last thing I saw. Her end. And I was actually rather impressed, interesting. This is great. Go ahead, usually, what would you say?
RU Sirius:Yeah, usually, if I see she's in the movie, I'll at least try to find out what it is,
Lisa Rein:yeah. So that's amazing. And this is night. So this is, yeah, the same time period, sort of 9495 Okay, six. Maybe
RU Sirius:that's actually I that's the one issue I was editor in chief on in the later period I came back to guest edit an issue, and that's the one with Reese withers.
Lisa Rein:That one neat. Okay, and then this is just an ad, yeah, no, Sentra. There's Sentra. We, we talked about her. Now this, I wanted to ask you about this is an ad. Is this an ad that Logitech gave you, like this? Or did you guys, were you guys creating these ads? It
RU Sirius:could be from Logitech. It was after my time. But Logitech always gave us interesting ads. They gave us one. They gave us one of a naked baby, a naked male baby, one with the baby not peeing, and one with the baby peeing. I can't remember. I can't remember what it said. So clearly one of one of our CO publishers, who I'll let remain unnamed, thought it really hurt our potential for selling ads to other advertisers, because there was a little pee pee in there, a little baby and his pee pee a little
Lisa Rein:baby. It said it was just a little baby with a little baby, pee pee, peeing. But scare away advertisers? Well,
RU Sirius:yeah, I don't know if it did scare away advertiser or not. I don't think so. Did
Lisa Rein:you run? Did you run the version with the PP, yeah, yeah. Ran all the issues somewhere. Oh, so they gave you two verses, but you chose to do the one that show no, it was
RU Sirius:the one version that they gave us. Oh, baby side by side, the baby not peeing and the baby peeing.
Lisa Rein:Oh, I see what you're saying. They were both. Oh, okay, so, but you would, you did go ahead and run it? Yeah,
RU Sirius:we run it without without knowledge, and my forethought, didn't really think about it one or the other. But
Lisa Rein:did it affect
RU Sirius:anything? No, I don't think so. One of the one of the one of the people had some money in the magazine thought it was harmful, but I don't think you saw it until after, after the fact.
Lisa Rein:Yeah, well, that's interesting.
RU Sirius:Something for the something for the rumor version
Lisa Rein:of our Yes, exactly. Another thing, another story for the rumor
RU Sirius:mill, inside Mondo, 2000
Lisa Rein:the inside scoop. Let's see here. Okay, this is interesting, and I don't even know what this is. This is, is that BART Nagel that did that?
RU Sirius:This is, oh, yeah, it's an inside sleeve. Yeah, that's probably Bart organizing it. But the image is probably from something also inside the magazine. Oh, which could be by anybody, could be by any of the artists that we used to work with. Okay, well, could be by Barker. Could be by somebody else, okay,
Lisa Rein:all right. Well, it's cool.
RU Sirius:Yay. Cocktail twins. We love the talk Cocteau Twins. You know, of course, this mortal, this mortal coil, recorded Allison's theme song tarantula. So she had to find out if they were into tarantula venom, because she wrote several articles about the use of tarantula Venom as an intoxicant. That's
Lisa Rein:right, because she's actually a scientist and an anthropologist.
RU Sirius:She is color A Gonzo anthropologist. She didn't graduate or anything, but she lays claim to discovering the property of DMT in toads before anybody else. And she did it by reading iconography, Tomic iconography, rather than through any other source. Uh, interesting. Yeah, you can, you can. Yeah, too. I tried to tell that guy who has a show about psychedelics on TV about it, because he wrote a he had a whole episode about who discovered DMT and toads and. And made no mention of Queen Lu but he pooh poohed it.
Lisa Rein:Well, she wrote a paper. She's written papers and stuff. That
RU Sirius:old paper definitely,
Lisa Rein:oh, there isn't well. She's written papers just,
RU Sirius:it's just not quite explicit enough to get over the top, but it's there, yeah, yeah,
Lisa Rein:yeah. I found some papers that were enough to make me be like, okay, she knows what she's talking about.
RU Sirius:Oh yeah, oh yeah. She's done some great stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Rein:And then in here, let's see we've got, okay, that was the John Perry. So these again. Now these were just kind of in there they were. I wasn't sure what stories they even corresponded to, but this is just the kind of thing that you'd stick in there now that's sent in the middle, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. And this whole fashion thing was really cool and really, really prevalent at the time. See that again,
RU Sirius:yeah, a lot of the hardcore nerds thought the inclusion of that kind of stuff was ridiculous. But we had fun,
Lisa Rein:neat. All right, well, are you that has been really great having you on the show. It's amazing being able to talk to you firsthand about all this stuff. Here we go. And yeah, I just want to really thank thank you for coming on the show, and we're going to have you back in September with Ben and Desdemona robot will also be here. Desmond robot had all sorts of things she was going to ask you about, but I told her that she she could wait. And it was kind of good anyway, because I really loved having you all to myself, and being able to just go through some of the Mondo, 2000 history and have that there for anybody that wants to come, you know. And and now, as you write, oh, and you write, I forgot to mention that you write excellent, uh, columns for mindplex, too. It's been
RU Sirius:a while, but I hope to get back to it soon. Yeah,
Lisa Rein:yeah.
RU Sirius:I do go into the yippies starting the digital revolution. I believe in an article called still the singularity, so people can try to look that up. Yes, and
Lisa Rein:they're all really interesting. The articles are really amazing, and learn a lot. Learn a lot when I read them, and even some of your more controversial the tesserel, the article you did with Emile Torres,
RU Sirius:oh yeah.
Lisa Rein:And, you know, it got a lot of criticism. I found it fascinating, and it all checked out when I researched it. It all,
RU Sirius:I think, I mean, I'm somewhere in between the guy who complained about it and the guy interviewed Emilio. You know, more towards Emilio, but you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, scary monsters and super creeps, exactly,
Lisa Rein:exactly. It just you gave both sides of it. You weren't really being for or against it. You were just talking about what it was, and it was, you know, really well done. So we love having you on the team, and we look forward to having you back. And I think that's it, unless there's anything else. Oh, I know one thing I wanted to ask you any advice for today's generation of artists and creators and writers and you know, think about like you in the 90s, if you are you now, you know what any advice that you would give writers,
RU Sirius:writers
Lisa Rein:or creators or artists or whatever, but just about the Scene now,
RU Sirius:not going to make any money. Yeah. My The one thing I have an attitude about is that I may agree with some of the criticisms about using AI, but if you're a genuine artist, and you have some originality in your in your mind and your soul, then you could, you should exploit the medium anyway. Use it.
Lisa Rein:Use it. Yeah, and you could do and you can do creative things with it. It's not that you're handing everything.
RU Sirius:In fact, I, I have a. Song called I used to dance between the raindrops, and the person I collaborated with pretty much made it all using artificial intelligence, and probably got one of the best responses of anything without saying, you know, who made it or whatever, got one of the best responses of anything I tossed out there.
Lisa Rein:Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, Ben. And Ben uses AI. Well, that's the one thing that we found out with these generative tools, is they are always leaning towards these commercial sounds because they're just trying to make people happy, right? And a lot of the people using these tools can't do it with the regular musician, you know, they don't, can't, like, play an instrument and record it or whatever, normally, that's why they're using a tool. And so they're just happy it came out so good, right? Even if it's just, you know, repurposing training data or whatever, that that's sort of like the dark side, but, but, yeah, that's really great. I'll link to that in the in the description, and thanks again for coming on. I want to remind everybody to to subscribe and and we'll see you later. Thank you RU.
RU Sirius:Thanks Lisa. Take Care.
Lisa Rein:sweet dreams, everybody, bye, bye, bye.