THE BEGINNING... AND WHAT FOLLOWED
I first became aware of Alex Chiu in the fall of 1997. I had nearly completed my first semester at UC Berkeley, and had decided that I should dedicate the remainder of my short life to the quest for immortality. In retrospect, this was an odd decision, considering that I was more depressed than I had ever been in my life, and thought regularly about deliberately falling out of my sixth-story dormitory window onto a poorly maintained row of hedges by the cracked California pavement. At some point during those hazy months, I had come across the website of an inventor named Alex Chiu, whose seizure-inducing online advertising was becoming ubiquitous on the then-relatively obscure World Wide Web. NEW INVENTION ALLOWS HUMANS TO LIVE FOREVER, screamed the flashing banner, over an image of a nerdy, pockmarked Asian man with coke-bottle glasses and a black suit. He looked focused, yet strangely vacant, perhaps the way people might later describe a psychotic killer right before he walked into a crowded shopping center with a loaded handgun. A click on the ad led me to a cheaply designed website that reflected an extremely poor understanding of graphic compression methods. The words, which were printed in a font too big to be taken seriously, stated with brazen confidence that the man in the photo, like so many initially misunderstood scientists before him, was a genius. Photos of people like Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla sat beside the photo, as if to silently nod their agreement.

I don’t recall what drew me to spend more than 2 minutes on the site—or indeed to return hundreds of times over the course of the next decade. Maybe it was the primitive layout, maybe it was the weird, vaguely militaristic/secret society insignia at the top of every page (a logo, I discovered later, that was derived from a Nazi insignia). Or maybe it was the fact that he was selling immortality in the form of two oversized, adjustable plastic pinkie rings. Whatever the case, the more I filtered through the site, the more I became intrigued by what Alex Chiu, the mysterious proprietor of the site was offering. And it wasn’t the prospect of living forever that intrigued me so much. It was the creepy, unsettling feeling I got realizing that everything I had accepted as reality might be completely wrong. Alex Chiu’s site was a tunnel into that little-considered world; a small piece of crackpot America, a fractured landscape populated with Chemtrail conspiracies, Roswell cover-ups, and 300mpg automobile engines suppressed by the government. Alex, you could say, was on the medical end of this spectrum, but it seemed that he felt no need to confine himself to it.

His site was, and continues to be, extensive, and features an endless array of pages dedicated to seemingly lunatic inventions, laughable plans for a "World Corporation" that could easily cure the planet's political and social ills by funneling money and power through a nexus of apparently unregulated administrative channels, amateurish comics involving unnamed but recognizable world leaders, and the trademark of any person who has all the answers— long diatribes about Biblical revelations, complete with descriptions of hidden mathematical codes buried in the text.

His writing style at times bears a passing resemblance to that of Dr. Bronner, the avuncular loon behind a lucrative line of heavily didactic soaps that you may have seen in hippie//hipster/yippie/yipster/yuppie/bobo-type stores:

When it comes to medical technology, my technology is 2nd to none. 2nd to none! Alex Chiu's Immortality Rings are the most superior medical technology in the world because they amplify your body's Chi flow while you lie down for healing. The small finger acts as the smallest gear that turns a larger gear. And that larger gear is your entire body. You see, the small finger and your entire body are connected. If the small finger has 1% of energy flow, the body should have 100% of energy flow. If the small finger has 10% of energy flow, THE ENTIRE BODY WILL HAVE 1000% OF ENERGY FLOW! Now do you understand your body's gear box?

Leafing through the material on a casual basis, I think the average user might go through a series of reactions that resembles this timeline:

t = 1 minute – This guy is a nut case.
t = 3 minutes – $25 magical magnetic rings will give you immortality! HA!
t = 5 minutes – Laughably drawn comics about how we can save the world by enforcing a 3rd grade level-of-understanding corporate structure? Kshshhhh... [muffled guffaw]!!
t = 8 minutes – All. right, this is just silly. This has got to be a hoax.
t = 10 minutes – Okay, this is definitely a hoax.
t = 12 minutes – I don't think this is a hoax.
t = 15 minutes – This guy is a nut case.

RATIONALISM, SKEPTICISM, AND TRYING TO MAINTAIN AN OPEN MIND IN THE FACE OF THE ABSURD
Make no mistake, Alex has some pretty out there ideas. Well— out there if you're a believer in modern scientific theory and such. Now, I am a well-educated person, but perhaps my biggest failing as a consumer is that I am intellectually generous— some would say foolishly overextending— towards people making the sort of wild claims purveyed by Alex Chiu. My general attitude towards unproven medical claims, indeed unproven conspiracy theories, inventions, spiritual declarations, etc., is that they are they are not to be believed—or disbelieved—without adequate evidence. Contrast this charitable attitude with the stance of most scientists and rationalists, who are willing to call bullshit on anything sans proof, provided that it goes against the grain of their previously engendered worldviews. Stuff that can be labeled “new agey” or “miraculous” in any way, which of course includes every page of Alex’s site, receive particularly savage beatings from the scientific community.

While I agree that we must do this to some degree in our daily lives to avoid falling continuously victim to ridiculous nonsense being peddled by unscrupulous hucksters, it also discounts the possibility of there existing genuine unacknowledged phenomena that fall outside the boundaries of current human knowledge—like Alex Chiu’s immortality rings, for example.

A WORD ABOUT THE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS
Before you write me off, let me just have a word about scientific discovery. It’s probably not anything you haven’t considered before, but it’s worth repeating, if only because our society has become highly skeptical and thin on patience. Let’s go back just a hundred and fifty years ago. In the mid 1850s, the concept of disease-causing microscopic organisms was not a generally accepted theory. Before it had been accepted by the scientific community, it must have sounded quite mad. Yet, as William Poundstone, author of Labyrinths of Reason, points out, there had really been nothing stopping us from accepting it earlier:

The germ theory of disease could have been advanced and confirmed centuries before it was, if someone had made the right connections. It follows that there must be yet undiscovered generalizations that are "overdue" right now. Quite possibly, we have all the necessary facts needed to deduce how to prevent cancer or the location of a tenth planet, but no one is putting them together in the right order. More than that: Maybe we're missing all sorts of logical conclusions about the world. They could be implicit in everything we see and hear, but might be just a little too complex to grasp.

This thought, I find troubling— and relevant. There are things out there— the cure for AIDS, the existence of antimatter, the secret of immortality— that as I type these words, do not yet have substance in the eyes of the scientific community, but whose answers might suddenly materialize one fine morning. You can almost be certain that if you listen very carefully at that time, you’ll hear either a collective “duh” echoing from every scientific corner of the earth— or more likely, an eerie, windswept silence followed by a Nelson Muntz-like “ha-ha!” Alex Chiu has decided that that as the discoverer of immortality, he is condemned to the latter.

While this may be by and large true, it’s not quite an accurate reflection of reality. It’s true that plenty of people who have heard of him think Alex Chiu is a gone case, and many of those have started online campaigns to destroy him, endlessly mocking him on message boards and in flash video games. But he also has a relatively vocal (but not necessarily intelligent) contingent of advocates that worship him, and celebrate the fact that his magnetic immortality rings, which when worn during their sleeping hours, cured their erectile dysfunction and gave them their faces back.

But I stand— alone, it often seems— on the sidelines, part of the small, annoying, wishy-washy contingent that won't easily commit to decisions about Alex. My particular stance is one that rubs everyone the wrong way. Spiritualists and non-rationalists are irritated that I’m a Doubting Thomas that wants proof before adopting a belief system, complaining that I’m gripping too tightly to intellectual terra-firma to be able to experience the wonders of the great metaphysical beyond. Rationalists view me with the same cocky disdain that right-wingers might view a ‘pinko’ who suggests that rehabilitation might be viable way of dealing with criminals. Frankly, I’m not quite sure if I’m better off for distancing myself from these large factions, as I get the sense that I’m instead condemned to be viewed as an indecisive fence-straddler, who doesn’t deserve the moral or intellectual superiority of either.

Yet, if I’m forced to give a gut-level assessment of Alex Chiu, I find myself compelled to believe him, despite his nutty persona. Why? I have a theory that when individuals are able to project their confidence in large enough quantities, most people—myself included— will instinctively trust these individuals, and abandon their sense of critical judgment in the face of a subtle, but nagging self-doubt. There are notable historical examples of this— like Hitler’s massacre of the Jews in World War II, or Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, both incidents that should have set off pyrotechnic WTFs across each’s respective constituencies—but for some reason didn’t.

I think Alex, perhaps not consciously, is also able to capitalize on this concept, at least with the non-rationalist crowd. His peculiar emphases, his neurotic—yet somewhat veiled— need for validation that bubbles to the surface in every paragraph, and his totally hare-brained approaches to problems whose solutions have evaded even the most cerebral biologists, physiologists, economists, and social scientists for time immemorial render it difficult for me to evaluate him objectively. He is nothing if sincere, and seems bravely committed to the idea of being an unsung hero even as he is trying to convince you that as the inventor of immortality he doesn’t deserve that sorry fate.

Maybe for these reasons, it is somewhat easy to arrive at the idea that both the concept and persona of Alex Chiu is a wicked, over-the-top— yet paradoxically subtle— hoax executed by a wiseguy who thought it would be funny to lampoon the archetypal snake oil salesmen. The problem is that this Alex Chiu character just puts in too much effort. It seems too much like a full time job to be a hoax. For years, Alex endlessly (and shamelessly) trolled internet message boards, selling us on what for all intents and purposes appear to be half-baked junk science devices, apparently never holding a job from the day his site went live. He has built hundreds on hundreds of self-serving web pages championing his products. He mans his phones 24 hours a day, talking to anyone who gives him the time. And perhaps most tellingly, he is more than happy to take your money.

Perhaps this last fact seems overly obvious and unremarkable. However, it is a crucial element of identifying who Alex Chiu is, and in determining his agenda and intentions. The act of taking money differentiates the hoaxer from the businessman. Belief in the product differentiates the businessman from the conman. But inability to understand what it means for a particular product to work differentiates the conman from the deluded nut job. Which one is Alex? It's either very hard or very easy to say, depending on where you stand on the concept of assessing "fact." For most, it's easy; no discussion or critical evaluation is necessary. He's either a nut or a conman, it doesn’t matter which because his claims defy what we know about modern medicine, and the products don’t work, case closed.

For someone like me, though, it's not so easy. I need something more tangible to make a decision about whether he’s a fraud or not. I need to wear the immortality rings and feel my cells re-aligning. I need to see my scars disappearing. I need to physically sense my body beckoning me into eternity. Even then, I couldn’t be sure that I wasn’t imagining it. Maybe you could color me convinced when reached the ripe old age of 450 years.

THE SAGA CONTINUES
So anyway, in the fall of 1997, what I wanted was to have a unnatural smile plastered across my face for the rest of my life, and according to Alex Chiu, I was one $25 check away from being in the best physical and mental shape I'd ever been in, which led me to believe that I'd somehow get what I wanted if I had the rings. They were calling me. Yet, despite their tantalizing allure, I found the prospect of frittering away a whole number percentage of my bank account balance on some quasi-Eastern I-Ching New Age bullshit found on the lonely back pages of the internet rather unappealing. And despite my open-minded outlook, Alex Chiu’s “satisfaction guaranteed” refund policy, and the promise of eternal life, I was not quite prepared to make that sort of sacrifice. Of course, $25 was not a bad price for living to the age of Biblical icons, but I wanted my immortality free, or as close to free as possible.

Luckily, there were several ways to get the immortality rings. At the time, Alex had some sort of a multi-level marketing scheme going, one where if you put his banner ad on your website and got 50 or 100 people to click it, he'd send you free immortality rings, and possibly some cut of profits from sold rings. I tried setting up a system and using a number of IP spoofing tools and ICQ requests to friends to bump up my numbers, but Alex had somehow found a way to subvert people like me, and that plan never worked. Curiously—and interestingly for those who consider him a fraud— Alex also offered a convoluted diagram explaining how to make the rings at home, although he warned that if you fucked it up, you could easily die wearing them. For me, it was worth death to save $25.

My first attempt at constructing the rings took place in December 1999. The easy part was buying the magnets at a hardware store and figuring out the polarity of their sides.¹ The hard part was trying to find a suitable substitute for the metal ring component. It needed to be sturdy, yet moldable, and non-magnetic. For some reason, the only thing that came to mind at the time was paper. I folded up some paper and embedded the magnets according to the instructions and formed makeshift rings out of it. The design was shoddy, and they tore before I had a chance to really evaluate them. After that, I mothballed Alex’s project for several years.

I regained interest in Alex Chiu's magnetic therapy in April 2005 after a long period of indifference², and was suddenly on the market for some new magnets. But before shelling out my hard-earned $5 for a set at the hardware store, I wanted to check around for non-lunatic opinions on whether Alex’s so-called immortality rings worked. I’d generously given the world some 5 years since my last ring-building effort to determine the usefulness of the rings and to post relevant information on the internet for my perusal. The world, predictably, failed me. It was easy to find testimonials from overzealous 19 year olds whose sentences were littered with misspellings and unnecessary “lols,” who swore up and down that the rings made their dicks longer and took away their egregious acne problems— but unbiased information from rational people with at least 10th grade educations was hard to come by. Of course, this meant that I would have to perform the experiment myself and personally determine whether there was anything to Alex’s claims.³

Chiu had suggested that I use neodymium as the magnetic force, as the pull was much stronger than that of the ceramic refrigerator magnets I had used previously.⁴ I was eager to try it out, but once again, I ran up against the same problem in fabricating the ring structure. I finally formed a makeshift square out of a strip of a pizza box and hot-glued the magnets in place. I wore them to sleep for a week, but unfortunately, I made one of the rings a bit small, which bothered me considerably at night. This niggling detail began to discourage me from using the rings on a regular basis, as it cut off blood circulation to my finger. After a couple of weeks, I put the experiment away again, not expecting to try it again.

A PARADIGM SHIFT
By this time, I had counted a number of tipoffs that suggested that the rings were bunk. Of course, they were circumstantial pieces of evidence, but for me, there was a tide of information that by my assessment could allow me to comfortably—but informally— convict Alex Chiu of fraud. First of all, if you happened to track his website over time, you’d notice a curious tendency for Alex to create new inventions that required others to work, making the enterprise of living into eternity a rather costly proposal. Take, for example, the recent introduction of his latest gimmick, GorgeousPil, which carries this bothersome disclaimer:

I don't want people to use the rings or the foot braces without Gorgeouspil anymore since this stuff is so incredible. It would be unwise to use the rings without Gorgeouspil… Gorgeouspil cannot function without the rings. So if you want to take Gorgeouspil, you need the rings.

Forget the fact that he’d been getting people to wear the rings without GorgeousPil for almost 10 years, and was only now calling it “unwise.” The fact is, he’d already done the same thing with some overpriced capsule he was calling “American Ginseng,” which also needed to be used in concert with the rings (so both could work at optimum efficiency), some other chemical concoction he was selling called “Super Chi Flush,” as well as a bizarre Tesla-coiled headgear unit that he had been priming as the next generation of Immortality Ring, which cost 100 times as much as the rings, and supposedly cured all kind of very serious medical conditions that the rings just couldn’t.⁵ Of course, you’d have to use this last device in tandem with the rings for it to work at all.

But let’s get back to the GorgeousPil, which Alex introduced in early 2006. First, an introduction, courtesy of the website:

This pill was named 'Gorgeous Pill' [sic] because it turns a user prettier every time the pill was taken. The user will gradually look PERFECT, even more gorgeous than super models. You will one day reach PHYSICAL PERFECTION!! I don't want to convince you anymore. The bottom line is this: This pill has been invented by Alex Chiu himself. And you know one thing about Alex Chiu: When something came out of Alex Chiu's laboratory, it must be HELL OF AMAZING!!!!

The result of this pill being released, compounded with Alex’s ridiculous commentary gave off the distinct impression that he had been a huckster all along, one whose skills in marketing were at least up to debate before he starting claiming that a pre-packaged pill could restructure bones in your face and shrink the size of your nose. True, the product probably didn’t have the effect of eliminating his customer base, and if anything it has probably created another cash cow in the Alex Chiu catalog, but it certainly gave his detractors more ammunition to discredit him. Hell, even the sycophants on the Immortality Forum, a message board populated with Alex Chiu fanboys, started to get second thoughts about the whole thing. For years, this odd amalgamation of recovering cancer patients, New Agers, conspiracy theorists, racists, and subscribers to every major lunatic fringe group in the history of the planet had gathered there to discuss Alex, the apocalypse, and everything in between. But if there were three notable qualities to this board, it was 1) a uniform inability by members to conform to English spelling and grammar standards, 2) a shocking level of earnestness in the comments of the users (one board member, for example, speaks in complete seriousness about how he is planning to build a planet and launch it into space), and 3) a total and absolute devotion to Alex Chiu. Well, sort of. It seemed there was an unqualified devotion to Alex Chiu, the corporate entity, the manufacturer of such fine products as the Immortality Ring—at least until the GorgeousPil came upon the scene. Alex the person was viewed with a certain level of ambivalence, and a surprisingly level of dismissiveness. People would openly deconstruct his personality quirks, often rolling their eyes in response to his unpredictable behavior the same way someone might respond to the antics of a well-liked, but crazy uncle. There was also considerable negative sentiment caused by the fact that many of the board’s users had never received the free rings promised by Alex for their parts in his multi-level marketing schemes. For this reason, there were, and continue to be a fair number of messages titled “HEY ALEX WHERE’S MY SHIT,” ⁶ or similar. Alex frequents the board, but he rarely responds to those messages (when he does, his messages typically say, verbatim: “yeah whatever, get the hell outa [sic] here”). He’s more into starting messages about stuff like how white people are genetically superior to Asians (yes, he believes that whites are the master race), and how if he could have one chick, it would be Hilary Duff.⁷ Many of his threads on the board seem like sudden epiphanies that he just had to share with the world, the kind that stoners get a lot, only to find out the next day that they make little to no sense.

So now, with this GorgeousPil, one could draw a clear line. Before, Alex Chiu was like a mad scientist hawking a lot of curious gizmos that, regardless of whether they worked, at least sounded mysterious and cool. Now he has become more of a low-rent, McDonald’s version of, well, Alex Chiu, selling embarrassing panaceas containing "secret ingredients"⁸ that are supposed to rid you of all your deficiencies, right up to the flaws in your physical appearance—even those whose qualities are subjectively based. One might wonder if the pill would have a different effect in the earlier part of the 20th century, where fleshiness was considered attractive. Thankfully, Alex has anticipated this question and has posted a thoughtful response in the GorgeousPil FAQ:

Q: I like chubby women, and he likes skinny women. Everybody views beauty differently. How can Gorgeouspil guarantee a progressive beauty?

A: By eliminating ugliness. That's how. It's hard to define beauty. But it's very easy to define ugliness. Here are a few: Disfigurement is ugliness. Retarded looking face is ugliness. Too dark or too pale is ugliness. Too fat or too skinny is ugliness. Nose too wide or too thin is ugliness. Anything that shows a sign of poor health or out-of-balance Chi flow is ugliness. Gorgeouspil will stimulate all cells in your body forcing them to regroup and reheal [sic]. The result is better balanced and better traffic of Chi flow. Gorgeouspil will eliminate all those ugliness [sic] for you. The lesser the ugliness you have on you, the prettier you become. Agree?

Also in the FAQ is this useful, medically reassuring tidbit:

Q: Chi Flush is working but is not working fast enough. How can I make it work faster?

A: Take more teaspoons I guess.

After reading over the GorgousPil material, it’s hard not to get the impression that Alex wound up at a GNC one day and realized that the real money is not in wacky gizmos, but in bullshit elixirs; the advantage being that the production costs are significantly lower, the markup significantly higher, and a customer base that is quite possibly even more naïve than those buying his rings. Also quite fortuitously for him, Alex happens to live at a time when cures and preventative treatments are thought not to come from living healthier lifestyles, but by popping pills full of unfamiliar chemicals. In this case, however, Alex didn’t even need to synthesize chemicals. The list of ingredients, which during a radio interview Alex claimed was a trade secret and wouldn’t reveal, is clearly listed on the bottle and on his website, and includes common herbs such as ginseng, nettle, and pepper. Also included is Dong Quai, a Chinese herb readily available in the herbalist shops that litter San Francisco’s Chinatown district, a city by no coincidence in which Alex makes his home. On top of all this, GorgeousPil offers a major marginal advantage to Alex, given that his customers have to come back every month or so to stock up on a fresh supply of GorgeousPil, something that never would have happened with the Immortality Rings.

THE BIZARRE, FRIGHTENING WORLD OF ALEX CHIU
In 2006, when I took up a job at San Francisco Magazine, I realized that I was in a position to possibly finagle a free set of “review” rings from Alex, provided of course that I could tantalize him with the prospect of a positive write-up. I called him and explained the situation: my boss was breathing down my back for a story, and we needed another alternative healer to feature in the August issue, after the success of last month’s story about a Qi-Gong master who solved rich yuppies’ intestinal problems at a new-agey health spa.

I really was planning on pitching some kind of story about Alex to the magazine, as he was a prominent resident of the city, and he had just released a new product, the stupidly named, and perhaps most easily-proved-fraudulent “GorgeousPil,” a capsule that supposedly fixed all your personal appearance woes by changing your skeletal structure, among other things. I thought it would be a funny, if bizarre story that would be a bit offbeat and interesting. But it turned out that my editors thought it too weird for our audience, and not relevant enough to our journalistic focus, and axed the idea.

The rings came in the next week, curiously shipped in from Maryland despite Alex’s residence in San Francisco (I later learned that he leaves much of the administrative work to his East Coast partner, a guy named Christian Kim). For one week I wore the rings, to no noticeable effect—except the discomfort caused by the ring’s perplexingly jagged corners (Alex told me on the phone later that I should sandpaper them down).

I was somewhat saddened by the magazine’s rejection of my idea, as I was hoping to have some kind of excuse to meet up with Alex in person. Then one night in July, as some friends and I were wandering about the Mission District, we spontanteously came up with an idea: invite Alex Chiu out with us for a night on the town.

We nervously called him up and invited him to come to a bar with us. At first he declined this invitation because firstly, he (understandably) suspected that we were prank calling him, and secondly, he said that a friend had "gone berserk" earlier in the afternoon, and had been running around naked outside a McDonald's restaurant. Alex said he was at home waiting for a phone call from the hospital and couldn't come out. We were disappointed (and somewhat amused) by this excuse, but said that we'd try another time.

Later on in the evening, on a whim, I decided to call back and see if maybe things had sorted themselves out and he might be interested in coming out after all. He said that nothing had changed with his friend and he was still waiting for a call. It didn’t really sound like a lame excuse to me; it seemed as if he was being serious and genuine about this friend. I took the opportunity to subtly mock him. "Can't you give your friend Super Chi Flush and make him normal again?" He responded that the friend didn't believe in Alex’s powers and wouldn't take his magical elixirs. "What kind of friend is this guy?" I asked, in an annoyed voice. Alex did the equivalent of a verbal shrug, saying that he wouldn't judge his friend negatively just because the guy wouldn't imbibe his questionable chemical concoctions. Moving onto the purpose of my call, I then told Alex that he should meet up with us at an acquaintance’s backyard barbecue we’d just found out about, instead of over drinks like we had said earlier. He said, somewhat half-heartedly, that he'd try to come. I knew he wasn't going to come, but I gave him the address anyway and was about to say goodbye, when I realized that I needed to assure him that this wasn't a prank. To gain credibility, I reluctantly told him I was the journalist that had called him a few weeks ago. Suddenly, his voice sounded more enthusiastic, and he said that he'd try to make it. I still doubted he'd come because he lived some distance away. San Francisco is a dense city, mass transit is bad, parking is problematic, and we were in a crowded area. I couldn't imagine that he would bother with this invitation to a barbecue from a stranger, and so late at night.

An hour later, while we were at the barbecue, having a few beers over some Doritos, a funny looking Asian man with bad hair walked in the door. We were stunned. It was Alex Chiu. THE Alex Chiu. The famous, heavily-ridiculed internet phenomenon who had 'invented' the ‘immortality rings,’ and had made a guest appearance on the Daily Show with Mo Rocca. Color me star struck, but I had a hard time reconciling the fact that this person, who as far as I was concerned was an internet entity, was now physically standing in front of me, taking the form of a diminutive, not-so-attractive man with a rather unbecoming bowl haircut and the early stages of an ugly, grassy mustache.

Despite his incessant online ballyhoo— which could be adequately condensed to the narcissistic lines “GODDAMN, I LOOK MORE LIKE A SUPERMODEL EVERY DAY, THANKS TO GORGEOUSPIL”— to these eyes, he looked exactly like the old photo of his on the main screen of his homepage— and not an iota more attractive (or younger for that matter).

I shook his hand, and thanked him for coming out, still somewhat shocked by this turn of events. The first thing he said was, "I hope you don't mind, I invited my friend over and we're going to a STRIP CLUB later." He spoke rather loudly, and I felt a bit embarrassed because this guy who seemed to the other people at this party to be my friend just barged in and was suddenly talking loudly about his crass masculine habits. It really added an unnecessary and unwanted layer of seediness to the event. Sensing trouble, I immediately felt the need to contain him as I wasn't sure what I'd just gotten myself into. Did we just open a huge can of worms by inviting this suspected madman into the house? It wasn’t even my house! I cornered him in part of the kitchen, while my friend and I pummeled him with questions about his products and beliefs. Surprisingly, his speech patterns were like those of a normal person (that is to say, he didn’t sound “crazy,” if you exclude all the bizarre things he was saying), and he seemed surprisingly fluent in English, which is not really the impression you get when you read his writing.

For the next two hours, Alex offered his fringe-papal insights into all sorts of things: Teleportation, strip clubs, immortality, GorgeousPil, Super Chi Flush, strip clubs, how Japanese people are the stupidest people on earth and need to be herded around like cattle, magnets, strip clubs, how he's going to buy a German castle, strip clubs, how his long-term plans involve stealing bodies and resurrecting them with magnetic flux, strip clubs, how he doesn't give a shit if no one believes him, how Kevin Trudeau made him a millionaire, strip clubs, how he owns several houses in the Bay Area (!), strip clubs, how women don't like him because he's a "mad scientist," strip clubs, and Nazism. Oh yeah, did I mention that he talked a lot about strip clubs?

I asked him repeatedly if he had any hobbies, but his only apparent concerns outside of conducting internet fraud involved strip clubs. I sensed that his continual attendance of these sleazy businesses reflected almost the entire social component of his life, and paying women at men's clubs to talk to him was about the only way he could manage anything approaching a meaningful relationship. Perhaps it was this desperation that led him to come out to this barbecue despite not knowing anyone, even me.

Despite my expectation for this to be a wildly funny and surreal encounter, it was actually rather uncomfortable, unnerving, and sometimes pathetic. The main damper on the ironic ha-has was my continual fear that this guy was going to get out of control. Sometimes he would suddenly get a jolt of energy and start speaking louder than he was already speaking— which was already verging on shouting at times— and his arms would swing madly as he gestured. At other times, his speech would take on militaristic tones, and he’d purse his lips, and clench his jaw, as if he was envisioning strangling someone.

Aside from all that, I found listening to him truly exhausting. He clearly had no rationale for almost anything he was saying. He was, as one might put it, talking out of his ass for hours on end, railing about the inferiority of certain racial groups, his belief in his products, and how everyone was going to feel stupid once they realized his genius. When he started talking about digging up dead bodies and performing weird experiments on them, he noticed that my girlfriend was standing nearby, and complained that "this is why girls don't want to have anything to do with me." But underneath all his crazy talk was actually a dull person who just happened to have a lot of bizarre beliefs. He was not a very compelling character, once divorced from his internet persona, and I felt like his conversation was so insular and uninviting that it was virtually impossible to communicate to him as one would with another person; interacting with him could be more likened to staring at an insect in a glass jar. And, disappointingly enough, he conveyed mystery and otherworldly kookiness much better online than he did in person.

By the end of the night, my friends and I had decided to leave the party because we needed to catch the subway back home, and the closest BART station was closing soon. Yet, despite my hinting and urging, Alex didn't want to leave the party with us. I had serious reservations about walking out, because it would mean unleashing this weirdo on these poor partygoers. I had no idea what might happen in my absence. Sure, I knew about him and how to deal with him, but no one there had any inkling about Alex (except, as I found out, one individual who actually lived at the house who seemed very alarmed about this lunatic being in his place of residence).

But I had no choice, I had to catch my train. Anyway, I told myself, Alex had mentioned earlier that he had to be at the strip club at a certain time, and he seemed rather religious about his strip club habits... so I very uncomfortably walked away.

Once I was away, I felt very glad to be free from Alex Chiu. Yet his creepy and unsettling vibe continued to haunt me. On reflection, I was somewhat intrigued by the fact that Alex would come meet and hang out with total strangers without having any misgivings or weird feelings about it, but conflicted by the fact that everything else about him seemed to clash with this apparent friendliness. My general sense of him was not positive; he had a dark, troubling presence, and he emanated an ominous stench that completely betrayed the feeling you get from staring at the gorgeous arrays of shimmering water and sailboats that surround the city in which he dwells. He also lacked any immediate qualities whatsoever of a saint or natural healer; he openly harbored a very aggressive and antagonistic attitude towards the world, and seemed bent on taking an adversarial tone with everything.

Honestly, I kind of wished that I hadn't met him, and had left him to be a distant and mysterious online figure rather than a crazy person standing in front of me. With this encounter, suddenly this guy who I had never thought of as a real person was reduced to a socially inept weirdo with very bad hair and Nike basketball shoes who was yelling about strip clubs at a crowded party. Very anticlimactic. Very weird.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER
Seeing him proved to me that GorgeousPil and the immortality rings don't work, or at least they don’t improve your physical appearance. And I think the experience was solid enough evidence to me that he's not a conman at all, but rather, a horribly misguided and possibly mentally ill person who honestly believes everything he says, no matter how much evidence to the contrary. I am no psychiatrist, but if I were to speculate on his condition, my bet would be on what the DSM-IV refers to as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a disease whose name is a bit misleading to the layman. This disorder is defined by nine qualities, of which one needs five to be diagnosed. Alex has five strong hits that I can detect, not to mention a couple of weaker ones:

1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

[Strong hit: Claims to have invented a tool for immortality; Continually exaggerates potency of his products, often announcing that the newer versions of his Chi Flush and GorgeousPil are “thousands of times” stronger than previous versions.]

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

[Strong hit: GorgeousPil supposedly provides him with unlimited beauty, while the Immortality Rings offer a user eternal life]

(3) believes that he or she is "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

[Strong hit: Self admittedly a “Jewish Nazi.” Nazis were committed to the idea of creating a master race of genetically superior people. Alex even purchased the web domain superiorrace.com. Jews are described in the Torah as “God’s Chosen People.” Alex also frames himself next to upper-echelon scientists like Einstein and Tesla on his website. The following quote appears on his website: “Whoever takes this pill and uses Alex Chiu's Immortality Devices is considered a HUMAN TYPE II. (the more superior type of human)”]

(4) requires excessive admiration

[Strong hit: Demands complete loyalty from users, expecting them to admit his unqualified genius. He also sells himself as a wrongly overlooked scientist who slavishly and selflessly seeks to perfect the human race, and who history will eventually vindicate.]

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

[Moderate hit: Expresses strong hostility to those who doubt his claims, despite the rather unbelievable nature of his claims]

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

(7) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

(8) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

[Strong hit: From his website: “The bottom line is this: This pill has been invented by Alex Chiu himself. And you know one thing about Alex Chiu: When something came out of Alex Chiu's laboratory, it must be HELL OF AMAZING!!!!”]

(9) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

[Weak hit: Reportedly denies users refunds despite the 30 day money back guarantee, claiming that the users don’t know what they’re talking about, and therefore don’t deserve a refund.]

At the risk of trivializing mental illness, I’d say this is good enough evidence to suggest that Alex is a nut.

Disappointed? I know I am. Somehow I find it very hard to believe that someone who speaks with so much conviction, who has apparently spent so much time building and testing these devices, and who receives so much notoriety is actually just crazy. It’s so anticlimactic that I sort of feel that I’d rather live with the belief that his products work, and that his reputation is being tarnished by people who don’t know any better. I have to admit that over time, I’ve been charmed by his rudimentary web design skills, his rudimentary cartooning abilities, and his rudimentary grasp of written English grammar. Despite his bizarre conversation at times, he displays a shockingly functional sense of humor, an ability to be self-deprecating, and a surprising level of self-awareness. He’s also been very forthright about information that most people would consider embarrassing, including information about his lack of a scientific background, his non-existent love life, his (ugh) sexual history, his mediocre physical appearance, and his lackluster social life.⁹

But here’s something interesting. I don’t think he’s a conman, a charlatan, or a liar. He’s definitely a shady businessman in terms of his sales practices ^{See Citation 6}, but lying is about deliberately misleading, and Alex isn’t about that, as his retraction of the magnetic headgear product I mentioned earlier reveals.^{See Citation 5} He’s just incapable of assessing reality. He has a serious mental disorder, exacerbated by his own ambitions in curing diseases and living forever, which could possibly be triggered by a neurotic fear of death.¹⁰ But perhaps more centrally, he is incurably attracted to the idea of being someone important. He is so consumed by this that he’s deluded himself into believing his own bullshit, which come to think of it, probably never struck him as bullshit in the first place. Like a mad scientist analog of the horribly misguided Professor William Newbold who was unshakably convinced that he had cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, even as his code cipher required the adoption of an increasingly complex system of mental gymnastics in order to make any sense of it whatsoever, Alex clings tightly to the belief that he has achieved his Olympian goal, and in the process, has done the world a profound favor. More importantly to him, he believes that he will someday be held alongside Einstein and Edison as one of the true innovators of our time.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

FOOTNOTES

1. Actually, I had difficult at first in figuring out how to determine polarity; my dad suggested that I tape a piece of dental floss to either side of the magnet and dangle it, observing which direction the magnet turned.
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