This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
That first interview with Dennis’s company was ten days after that voice in my head answered my desperate prayer. While 1983 to 1985 were my life’s unhappiest years, 1986 was my happiest. As Dennis later said, I was shaking in my interview with him, and he hired me to start the next day. But that evening, Dennis spoke at the Seattle Center in front of about a thousand people, and several camera crews recorded it. I lived on Queen Anne Hill with my grandparents then, and I actually walked to Dennis’s speech. Dennis was announcing Project Whoopie, which was a pun on Whoops, which I eventually learned was Dennis’s inimitable style. Dennis announced his intention to produce electricity and compete with the electric companies. I unwittingly sat behind the BPA Hit Man’s attorney, who heckled Dennis with what I later learned were lies. I remember walking back to my grandparents’ home that evening, trying to take in what I had just gotten involved with. It was exciting, but my learning curve was just beginning.
The morning before beginning to write this post, I lied in bed in the wee hours, thinking about this post, and I was thinking about those early days with Dennis in ways that I never had before. From the very beginning, probably half of my motivation was the rehabilitation of my mentor, whom I call Mr. Mentor in my writings. All of his inventions, and some revolutionized industries, were stolen, suppressed, or both. I saw inventors in heroic terms in those days.
That voice in my head knew what it was doing, sending me to Dennis when it did. I was reverberating from that lightning bolt and had no idea how Dennis’s heat pump worked, and I would not truly appreciate it until I studied thermodynamics several years later. Only then did its superior properties become clear to me. I did not begin to understand Dennis’s heat pump until I chased him to Boston later that year. Dennis hired me to construct his company’s books and financial statements. It took me two months to do that, the old-fashioned way, with a pencil, adding machine, and ledger paper. I had the bank statements, canceled checks, invoices, customer contracts, and constructed the books from scratch. I never heard why, but my guess is that it was important for Dennis’s attempts to save the company, get financing, and the like.
But I only got one paycheck before the company stopped making payroll. I was really hired as the company was dying. After the end of 1985, the company never sold or installed any more systems. But what impressed me in those days was Dennis. His personality was infectiously cheerful, I could tell that he was highly intelligent, and I had some idea of the strain that he was operating under. After I had been there about two months, the company sold off its remaining inventory to the family of one of Dennis’s salesmen. They lived in Boston and were going to try to make the heat pump business work there. I got some back pay from that sale, as did the other employees, and that was the last money that I saw from the Seattle company.
But I was on fire, thinking that I had found my life’s work (and I was right). Also, that year was my lifetime’s best hiking year. The youngest son of my uncle who introduced me to hiking became my hiking buddy. He took a year off from school to earn money as a janitor, and we hiked every weekend that year, from when I got to Seattle to when I left for Boston eight months later. Quite a few pictures on this page were from 1986. The physical feats that I was still capable of at age 27 and 28 boggles my mind, looking back on it. Those hikes were part of why 1986 was my lifetime’s happiest year.
I had my yuppie war chest from my LA days, and moved out from my grandparents’ house after a month and roomed with an aspiring comedy writer whom I am still friends with. The next several months saw me burn through my war chest, and when I decided to chase Dennis to Boston, I moved back in with my grandparents and got a temporary job, making $6 an hour, to save gas money to chase Dennis.
But I need to go back to the beginning of my days with Dennis and what I saw and learned, as it was the beginning of an awakening process that lasted the next four years, but the next three years would be the steepest learning curve of my life, as I began to learn how our world really works.
To begin with, watching Dennis in action was inspiring, and even though the company was not making payroll, there were still dozens of people who worked in the office. We were working for free, as it turned out, and I thought that I was surrounded with people who believed in the cause. I would later be disabused of my naïveté, but it was a feeling that I never had before.
When I had been there only about a week, one camera crew at Dennis’s Whoopie speech aired a news clip. It was a news station in Canada, and to this day, it is the only positive TV coverage that I ever saw of Dennis. About a week after that, a Seattle news show aired its clip on Dennis, which I later learned was a series of Big Lies by a “consumer advocate” reporter. When I wrote this post several years ago, I looked up that reporter, and she had a long career as a “consumer advocate” reporter and became a news anchor. She was really a liar who faithfully served her criminal masters, and it was my earliest inkling that protecting the public is the world’s biggest protection racket and that the media was a propaganda machine. I won’t name her here, but I will link to an article about her after she retired in 2020 to a heroine’s farewell. In that lying news clip, they also interviewed Betsy, the hatchet lady from the Attorney General’s office. Betsy’s conscience finally awoke when her nose was rubbed in her crimes. Betsy was the best of that sorry bunch, but she still got her hand caught in the cookie jar many years later and was disbarred. After Betsy stepped down, another woman took her place at the Attorney General’s office. I have read her lies for many years and she is a noted “philanthropist” today. But they were just following orders from their criminal boss, as they protected Washington’s energy oligarchy.
I slowly became aware of what Dennis faced in Seattle, but I kept my head down and constructed those financial statements. I had no idea that I was reconstructing the records of something so historic. That was the greatest attempt ever made to bring alternative energy to the American marketplace, but it was many years before I appreciated the magnitude of what Dennis accomplished. His heating system has been completely wiped out in North America, and only one company on Earth makes that style of heat pump today, to my knowledge. To completely wipe out any companies that made the world’s best heating system was quite a feat, and makes the suppression of free energy a lot easier to understand. That is one of my greatest lessons of Dennis’s journey.
In May, 1986, when I had been there two months, Dennis called a meeting in the second floor’s meeting room to show the remaining employees a clip about Joe Newman, whose operation Dennis had just returned from visiting. It was the first time that I had heard of free energy.
Also in May, as I worked late in the office most days, Dennis asked me to give him a ride home. He lived in a nice home in Bellevue (only a few miles from where I live today), which he got from John Spickard, AKA Mr. Financier, when he got involved. On the way to his home, Dennis told me about his employee who died, which obviously had a big impact on Dennis. It was really the first time that we had talked at any length since he hired me, and I mostly just listened.
Until June, 1986, even without pay, I was happily working in the office and hiking on the weekend. By then, there were only a relative handful of us working in the office. Dennis promised me stock in the company to continue working, and I was happy get a tiny fraction of the ownership, of far less than 1%.
My boss, the controller, told me to put on my auditor’s hat as I constructed the company’s records, and when I got to the balance sheet‘s equity section, which accounted for the company’s ownership, my boss said that he would take care of that, and did he ever. A year previously, when John Spickard’s finance company came aboard and he wanted ownership in Dennis’s company, John put Dennis in contact with one of his employees who knew of a corporate shell for sale, so that Dennis could quickly take his company public. I earlier wrote that John got 20% of the company, but that was incorrect. Dennis gave up 20% of his equity to go public, but John only got half of it, for 10% of Dennis’s company, and John’s stake was worth several million dollars before the boom was lowered on Dennis’s company.
As I worked at Dennis’s company, I soon learned that many of the employees were Mormons. I thought it a little odd, but did not think much about it. Mormonism is prevalent in the Western USA, and in some areas, people have to be Mormon if they want to engage in business. Basically, some of the early employees were Mormons, and they helped ensure that their Mormon pals were hired. It turned out that the owners of that shell company were also Mormons. My boss, named Clark, was hired by Dennis to ensure that the shell deal was properly executed. What Clark did instead was conspire with the shell’s owners to steal Dennis’s company. To be hired to consummate a deal, but then use one’s own negligence to steal the company, is criminal behavior on multiple levels.
One Friday morning in early June, as I worked in the office, Dennis and Alison were nowhere to be seen, and I saw people in the office whom I had never seen before. When one approached me to introduce himself, Clark intervened and told me to go home for the day. I had no idea what was happening, but I was witnessing an attempt to steal Dennis’s company, which was the first of many that happened during my days with Dennis.
Dennis called me that evening and said that Clark’s effort had not succeeded. Clark had used some documents to change the locks on the building, but Dennis had them changed back. The next day, I helped transfer most of an inventor’s equipment in the company’s facility to Mr. Engineer’s barn in Ellensburg. Mr. Engineer died in 1990, and I will name him for the first time: Stan. The inventor I have called Mr. Inventor, and his name was Bob. Bob also died long ago, I know that four years later, Bob’s equipment was still in Stan’s barn, and Bob might have never retrieved it.
The man who put John in touch with the shell company also led the effort to steal John’s company, as a way to steal Dennis‘s. John’s company was named Selectors, and I was able to find one of its folksy ads that played to the Spokane crowd. The people who stole John’s company were Mormon swindlers, led by a man named Dick Southwick. When John built Selectors, he gave shares to friends and family, to share the wealth, and they betrayed John. Swindlers such as Southwick need people on the inside to abet their crimes. About the only mention that I was able to subsequently find about Selectors was this article, and I am virtually certain that the thieves looted Selectors and drove it into bankruptcy, which is not much different from what many private equity firms do.
When Dennis got access to the facilities back that Friday, Clark and the general counsel, who helped engineer the company’s theft (I sketched its mechanics here), had left many incriminating documents in their offices. On Monday morning I was back at my desk and witnessed the spectacle of Clark and the general counsel as they came into our offices and tried to retrieve their documents from their offices. Dennis literally stood in front of Clark’s office door and blocked him. It nearly became violent. It was shocking to see that. The shareholder’s meeting in which the theft was completed was the next day, I believe, and I literally slept in the offices to make sure that Clark and friends did not burglarize the building. As I look back at it, that was kind of risky.
The day of the shareholders’ meeting was the only time that I ever saw John. His company, which he had spent a lifetime building, had already been stolen, and his stolen company was being used to steal Dennis’s. John walked past my desk with a stricken look. As I recall, I performed some clerical function at the shareholder’s meeting, which was held in the second-story conference room, and hundreds of people attended, most of whom likely attended Dennis’s Whoopie speech and gave him a standing ovation. After a couple of hours, when the theft’s success became evident (and a state securities official even attended), Dick took the microphone and said that they did not need Dennis any longer, and a cheer erupted in the room. The theft of Dennis’s company was blatantly criminal, but I’ll admit that most in the audience did not understand the theft’s technical aspects, but when they cheered as Dennis’s company was stolen, it was my first big awakening moment during my journey with Dennis. Those people would cheer whoever promised to pay them.
Dennis left the state in days, and Alison and their children were close behind him. Dennis theoretically owned his home, but the thieves would likely prevail on that, too, so they abandoned their home. Dennis went from a $50 million net worth in June 1985 to escaping Washington with nothing more than the clothes on his back a year later. The beat-up station wagon that Dennis drove his family in over the Cascades into Seattle in late 1984 was also stored in Stan’s barn, with their meager possessions.
In the wake of the company’s theft and Dennis and Alison’s departure, there were about ten of us “loyalists” left, and we met weekly. It consisted of me, Bob, Stan, Brian the engineer, Blake the head installer, and several people in marketing and sales. I was busy hiking on the weekends and going to those weekly meetings, in which we really did nothing more than wait for Dennis to make something happen. Dennis originally fled to Chicago and lived with one of his dealers, and a few weeks later, his family moved in with that family in Boston who was trying to make a go of it in the heat pump business.
Over the next several weeks, one-by-one, the loyalists dropped out. Blake actually went to work for the thieves, fixing systems that were installed poorly to meet the December 31, 1985 expiration date on Carter’s tax credit. I struck up friendships with several of the loyalists, and one evening, Bob told me about his days with General Motors (“GM”) and inventors’ groups. He unwittingly worked for several years for GM to help them steal patents from inventors and competitors. He knew of a pickup truck that GM accidently sold in the late 1940s that got 70 miles per gallon. Bob also said that inventors’ groups never really worked, because every inventor tried to commandeer the organization to support his invention. It was the first time that I had heard of inventors that were described that way, and it gave me a preview of what I would learn the hard way in coming years.
I was owed two months of wages by the stolen company and went to a creditor’s presentation at the company’s offices. Clark tried to get me to work for the stolen company. It was a difficult situation for me. Clark had been my boss for three months, but I knew what they did. I was sold on Dennis. Clark asked me if I would sign an affidavit to the financial statements that I had prepared. I agreed to, and signed it at their attorney’s office. They seemed to really be trying to make a go of it with that heat pump, as if what happened to the company, with all of the establishment attacks had never happened. I don’t know what they were thinking, but that approach did not have a prayer.
One of the first problems that they had was the phony bankruptcy suit that Bill the BPA Hit Man had filed, which the federal court allowed to strangle the company. Bill duped several of Dennis’s employees into filing that phony lawsuit, and Clark and the thieves had to get the case dismissed if they were going to make whatever play they were trying for. I attended the trial one day. It was a farce. The lawsuit should have never been accepted in the first place, as none of the petitioners were genuine creditors of the company. I was a more genuine creditor than any of them were. The judge had obviously acted on behalf of the energy oligarchy in even letting the case proceed. Once Dennis was taken out of the picture, Bill’s job was over and he left the scene, leaving his dupes holding the bag. In the courtroom was the spectacle of a corrupt judge, the thieves of the company, Bill’s dupes, and some scavengers who hoped to profit somehow. I attended with one of the loyalists, and as we left, I said that it was like watching the sharks versus the piranhas in there. His reply was that it was more like the sharks versus the piranhas versus the barracudas versus the crocodiles. That was my second big awakening moment during my journey with Dennis.
By the end of July, I was the only loyalist left. Everybody else had dropped out. In the end, only two of the loyalists bowed out honorably. The thieves’ play did not last long, and they abandoned the facility in late July. Bob had me accompany him with the police to the building, to see what was left of what we could not take to Stan’s barn. Bob had a similar stricken look that John had worn. It was a look that I would become all too familiar with in the coming years, and I wore that look myself at times.
At the end of July, I was still reverberating from the lightning bolt in March. I called Dennis, who lived in Boston by then, and told Dennis that I still wanted to be part of what he was doing. Dennis tried to talk me out of it. He told me to get a real job and that I would hear from him again when the time was right. So I did, but after two weeks of looking for work, I called Dennis again and said that I would sleep on his floor to help rebuild his effort, and I won him over. It was my fourth attempt to live in Seattle, and there I was, going to move away only eight months after the latest attempt. Was I crazy?
So, I got a temp job, making something like $6 an hour, to save up gas money to chase Dennis to Boston. My yuppie war chest was gone and I had to move back in with my grandparents. I worked and planned to drive to Boston at the end of October. I can also tell that my “friends” were not making it easy on me, as I also had to leave behind a new girlfriend, which was another bizarre set of circumstances that I could tell that my otherworldly “friends” had orchestrated, as if to test my resolve one more time before I embarked on my greatest adventure. With tears in my eyes for what I was leaving behind, I drove from Seattle in my Pinto wagon, pulling a trailer that contained my most valuable possessions (mostly my music collection) and Dennis’s and Alison’s few possessions. Little did I know what lied ahead, and if I had been told any of what was coming, I would have not have believed any of it.
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