AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER E. SISCO IV

Conducted by Claude Webber, Independent Journalist

Interlachen, Florida — March 2026

Peter E. Sisco IV answers questions the way rivers move. He starts in one direction, finds a current, follows it somewhere unexpected, and arrives — without fail — exactly where he needed to be. We met on a Tuesday afternoon. He was unhurried. He had coffee. He corrected me twice before we finished the first question. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity while preserving the natural rhythm of a man who thinks out loud and means every word of it.

Claude Webber: Peter, I want to start at the beginning. Not West Milford, New Jersey — the paperwork beginning — but the real beginning. Sullivan County. Who were you as a kid up there?

Peter E. Sisco IV: First of all, I was born in West Milford but I grew up in Sullivan County, New York. Liberty. Monticello. Up in between the Catskills and the Hudson Valley. That's home. That will always be home even though I'm in Florida now.

I was a Gen X kid. Which means I was basically raised in a very specific kind of beautiful chaos. My mom and dad both worked. It wasn't unusual for me to be the one watching my two younger brothers at ten, eleven years old. That's just Gen X. That's our signature. They handed us some tools and released us into the wild and said go figure out what they mean. And we did. For better or worse, we absolutely did.

CW:(nodding) Did that early responsibility shape who you became?

PE: I can't say it did anything different to me than it did to any other Gen X kid, because you have to remember — we were all on our own. It was kind of our signature. That's why I called us latchkey kids. But I guess you could say it did give me the leadership skills I later used in the corporate world. It led to me being able to at least operate as a professional in those settings.

It's hard to describe yourself as a professional because your setting is how people look at you. And I spent the last twenty-five years or so away from family for the most part. That made a profound change that my family isn't really familiar with. When I was last home I was the village idiot. Today I was talking about something and my brother just looked at me — it was so out of character for what he expects from me that he didn't know how to react.

He laughs at this. Not bitterly. Just genuinely amused by the gap between who Sullivan County thinks he is and who walked back through the door.

CW: Village idiot is a strong phrase. Was that the label that followed you?

PE: It was. And I want to be clear — it wasn't because I was one. The shadow was partly in the geography and partly in my own head. Because it was in my head it had power over me that it never deserved to have. As soon as I broke free of those chains — as soon as I left — I went out and built something real. I've had a successful trucking career. I spent time as a corporate manager. I was highly respected by professionals across multiple industries in cities like New York, San Diego, and Chicago. Chicago is my personal adopted second home, ironically, since I hate cities.

CW:(raising an eyebrow) You said you hate cities but adopted Chicago.

PE: Chi-raq, to those in the know. I don't know how it happened. Sometimes a city just claims you whether you want it to or not.

He grins. It is clear this contradiction delights him.

CW: Let's talk about the trucking career because I think people underestimate what that actually means professionally.

PE: Eighteen years. Multi-million mile driver. I want people to understand what that designation means because most people don't. That is not a number you reach by accident. That is eighteen years of showing up exactly as promised every single time. Millions of miles. A perfect professional record. Companies don't hand that to anyone. You earn it mile by mile, year by year, decision by careful decision.

I saw all forty-eight continental states. England. Ireland. I worked fifty-one weeks a year with one week off. That was my life for eighteen years. And I built the first version of Petey Gone Mad Arts from the sleeper cab of my truck at highway rest stops. Same laptop I'm using right now, ironically.

CW:(stopping) The same laptop.

PE: The same laptop. I know.

There is a pause. He lets that land. So do I.

CW: Tell me about Ohio.

His expression doesn't change dramatically. But something in him goes still.

PE: I was driving. Fifty-one weeks a year. The letter came — or more precisely didn't come, which is the whole problem, which is why there is now a lawyer involved and why no one can give me a straight answer about why a multi-million mile driver's commercial license gets revoked without charges, without arrests, without anything resembling an adequate explanation.

I found out somewhere on an Ohio highway.

Professional police officers. Thank God for that. Otherwise it would have gone south very fast and turned into something much worse than the complete catastrophe and mental breakdown that it did become.

CW: You said mental breakdown. You're not softening that.

PE: I want to correct something people might assume. I did not hold it together. I held it together in that specific moment on the highway. After that? No. I almost lost my mind. I'm saying that plainly because it's true.

I came home. My brother's spare bedroom. I'm not going to dress that up. The man who had been highly respected by professionals in New York and San Diego and Chicago was sleeping in his little brother's spare room. The little brother I used to watch over at ten years old. That's embarrassing. I laugh about it now. But the laugh has weight in it.

He laughs now. Right on cue. And the weight is exactly where he said it would be.

CW: How long were you in that spare bedroom?

PE: Long enough. Two years ( though first 12 months or so I just was not the me everyone outside my family knew ….they would recognize that I am different though).. I spent that time running on autopilot — just being the version of myself that the county remembered. The clumsy fool. Nobody knew about the war happening inside me because you don't bring that war home. You don't lay your private catastrophe on the people who are holding you up. My brother was holding me up. Without him I don't know where I'd be right now.

CW:(quietly) What did those two years do to you permanently?

PE: Something died. Not everything — I want to be precise about that. The child in me that says YEAH and AMAZING and YOU'RE DONE when the art is right — that didn't die. Can't die. You cannot make art without it. Even very sophisticated art still comes from the imagination. When that voice in the artist's head says YEAH or COOL or AMAZING — that's the child talking. Even storytelling starts with the child.

But a piece of the innocent blindness that used to absorb the world's cruelty without cataloguing it — that's gone. What moved in instead I call the monster. The cold eye. The one that looks out with indifference. The one that sees the ego behind the performance, the machinery behind every smile, the transaction hiding inside the generosity.

It is like being a little boy who loses a tooth. And then someone tells you not only is the tooth fairy not real — but Santa Claus is just a marketing gimmick, and we ate the Easter Bunny for dinner last night.

CW:(sitting back) That's a devastating image.

PE: That's what two years of almost losing your mind does to the part of you that wanted to believe the world was fundamentally kind. Most adults become self-righteous without knowing it because this is what happens when the child dies completely and only the cold eye remains. They forget what it felt like to not know. And forgetting that makes them cruel in small ways they never notice.

My child didn't die completely. The monster and the child coexist. Which is uncomfortable. Which produces tension. Which — if you're the kind of person who makes things — produces art.

CW: You're the kind of person who makes things.

PE:(without hesitation) I am.

CW: Let's talk about what you're building. Petey Gone Mad Arts. Mad World. The whole universe. What is the philosophy underneath all of it?

PE: People are not dollar signs. That's the whole thing right there.

I watched the corporate machine from the inside. I saw how the laws get written by the people the laws are supposed to regulate. I saw how consolidation works. I saw what happens when one corporation fails versus what happens when one small business fails. One small business fails — sad, someone starts over, life continues. One corporation fails — governments scramble, pension funds collapse, thousands unemployed overnight, taxpayer money used to save the entity that helped write the laws that made it too big to fail.

The backbone of a stable economy is millions of small businesses. Not thousands of corporations. That is arithmetic, not ideology. A million points of resilience versus a thousand points of catastrophic failure. The economy was stable for thousands of years before corporations dominated it. It is simple economics at its most fundamental core.

CW:(carefully) That's a strong structural critique. You've used the word crony capitalism before. Do you think what we have in America today goes beyond that?

He sets his coffee down. Considers the question with the patience of someone who has thought about this for a long time and is particular about being understood correctly.

PE: I'm going to be honest because I'm too honest for my own good sometimes. What we have in America right now is not pure capitalism. It's not even just crony capitalism — which is bad enough on its own. What we actually have, when you look at the relationship between the government and the corporations — specifically the fact that corporations write almost every law our lawmakers then pass without reading — is something closer to a quasi-fascist market structure.

And I want to be precise about that word because people throw it around without understanding what it actually means economically. Classical fascist economics is not the government being bribed by corporations. It is the government running the corporations directly — the state and industry merged into one apparatus. What we have is arguably more dangerous because the accountability is completely invisible. The corporation says we just followed the law. The lawmaker says we just passed what the experts recommended. And the experts were paid by the corporation. Perfect circle. Nobody responsible. Everybody culpable.

CW:(leaning forward) That's a diagnosis most people would consider controversial. Do you worry about saying it publicly?

PE: I told you — I'm too honest for my own good. But I also want to be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying America is a fascist country. I'm saying our economic structure has drifted into a zone that shares characteristics with fascist economics in the specific technical sense. The partnership between state power and corporate interest producing rules designed to entrench the powerful and exhaust everyone else.

And the only way that system keeps working is if it teaches you to think the way it needs you to think. It needs you to believe that you are just an employee. That your time is a resource to be purchased. That the collapse of a major corporation is everyone's emergency — which means you should be afraid, which means you shouldn't rock the boat. That is not an accident. That is a feature.

CW: And Petey Gone Mad Arts is your answer to that system.

PE:(nodding slowly) It's my exit door. I saw the exit door from inside. And I left it open behind me.

Give something genuinely useful away for free. Build trust without obligation. The person who uses Fanny for six months remembers who gave it to them. And one day they find the book. And they already know who is handing it to them and what kind of person they are.

No newsletter. No email harvesting. If someone emails me it's because they want to communicate — the way you communicate when you call someone and ask if you can have ten tacos in fifteen minutes. That's the only reason I want anything to do with someone's email. It's just communication.

I don't even want people's real names on the Story Board. They can use whatever name they want as long as it's something their mama could read. You can say anything you want in your story — that's expression. But we maintain some decorum. You're a guest here. Not a product.

CW:(smiling) The tier loyalty system is also different from what everyone else does.

PE: Completely different. Most tier models want you to pay for privileges. I don't want that. My tiers are built on purchase history. You spend money with me, you move up automatically. Your discount grows. When you reach the top you have a permanent discount on everything going forward — not because I need a gimmick, but because you helped build this and that deserves a real thank you. You've been on this journey with me. Let me repay that.

CW: I want to ask you about your father. You wrote Rise of the Warrior Queen in his memory.

Something shifts in the room. Not dramatically. Just a degree or two warmer and more careful.

PE: He was a Conan fan. I was the Excalibur kid. He was also Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek. I'm Trek but Star Wars for me — no apologies.

I just wanted to write a cool story in his memory. I set it in his universe. Twins born to Conan — Purvian, a boy, and Lorianah, a girl. Purvian is killed by Cheron — a villain so comprehensively evil that even Akivasha, the vampire, allies with Conan because even the undead understand that some things cannot be allowed to win. The war that follows is started by grief not politics. A sword destroyed and reforged into the greatest legend ever told. Sasquatch and werewolves too. I went all out.

CW:(laughing softly) Sasquatch and werewolves.

PE: I went all out. No apologies.

CW: Twins — one boy, one girl. There's something mythological about that pairing.

PE: It felt right. Purvian and Lorianah. Conan's son and daughter. The loss of one sets the other on a path that changes everything. That's the heart of it. The war isn't about kingdoms or power. It's about what happens when something irreplaceable is taken from you.

CW: You say you just wanted to write a cool story. But there's more to it than that.

He is quiet for a moment. Not evasive. Just honest.

PE: Our relationship was complicated. Plenty of love — but complicated. I think that's the most honest way to put it. You can only have a truly complicated relationship with someone who matters enough to make it complicated.

I caught him reading my writing once. In secret. Neither of us said anything. He just kept reading. I just kept writing. I think that was the whole conversation we never managed to have out loud.

CW:(very quietly) He was telling you everything without saying a word.

PE: Yeah.

Long pause. He looks somewhere past me for a moment.

PE: Yeah. I know what he was saying.

CW: Did he get to read the book?

PE: No .

I don't push. Some things belong to the person who lived them.

CW: Let's go somewhere else entirely. The universe. You have a theory.

He straightens slightly. This is clearly territory he enjoys.

PE: It started with a conversation with my friend Jose Correra. We were just talking. And I said — hey, did you ever notice how the solar system and the atom look kind of the same? Not identical. But something there. A pattern repeating at completely different scales.

And from there it just kept expanding.

CW: Walk me through it.

PE: The universe is structured like a DNA strand. Not infinite the way people lazily imagine it — endless same space going on forever. Infinite the way DNA is infinite. A strand that copies itself, continues, mutates slightly with each iteration. The individual strand can end. The pattern — the information encoded in the structure — continues in the next one.

Which means our universe can be finite. Can have rules. Can have a beginning and an end. And still exist inside something that has no beginning and no end. The particular strand ends. The copying continues.

CW: And the Big Bang in that model?

PE: Not a creation from nothing. A rupture from something. Before what we call the beginning there was what I call Dynamic Equilibrium. Not nothing — something. A pre-temporal state of pure pressureless existence. No time as we understand it. No expansion. No thermodynamic arrow pointing anywhere. Just being. Eternal in the only way eternity can exist without anyone to measure it.

And then — under the accumulated pressure of infinite existence straining against itself — something finally gave way.

Not an explosion from nothing. A rupture from everything. Our time. Our physics. Our ability to stand here and wonder what happened.

CW:(slowly) And dark matter fits into this how?

PE: Dark matter is old. Different old. Pre-time old. We can't find it because we're trying to measure something ancient with instruments built inside a younger physics. It doesn't interact with our light and our forces and our particles not because it's exotic — but because it's prior. It's a remnant of the state that existed before the rupture. It belongs to a physics we don't have the tools to read.

CW: Time travel?

PE: Possible. But not the way the movies imagine it. You can't go back. You can't return. The door opens one way. What time travel actually does — if it ever becomes possible — is move you sideways. Into an adjacent strand. A universe close enough to feel familiar, different enough that your presence doesn't destroy its fabric. You will not come home. The branch you left continues without you.

CW:(sitting back, looking at him carefully) And God? Where does God fit in a universe made of chance and DNA strands?

He pauses here longer than anywhere else in the conversation. Not because he doesn't know what he thinks. Because he is choosing exactly how much of it to say.

PE: I believe in God. I won't say more than that publicly. I defend every religious tradition. This is America — a country of multiple faiths sharing common black letter law. The moment you let one faith run the government you get zealots. The moment you ban faith entirely you get a different kind of zealotry. Neither is freedom.

But I'll say this. What if we're inside it? What if God is not observing the strand from outside — but is the strand itself? The whole infinite structure. Every universe a blip. Every ending and beginning held simultaneously from a perspective so vast that the distance between our greatest joy and our worst catastrophe is smaller than the space between two atoms.

Pure chance holding it all together. Just like DNA.

CW:(after a long moment) That's both the most humbling and the most beautiful version of God I've heard described.

PE: Some questions are more honest as questions.

He says it simply. Final. Like a door closing gently rather than being slammed.

CW: Last question. You're in your mid-fifties. Tiny house. Same laptop. Everything back online. What does winning look like from here?

PE: I want to make money — I'll be honest about that. I'm approaching my mid-fifties and I've spent my life making other people money. I want to go out and do something where I'm making myself money doing something that is my passion. Not someone else's passion.

But here's the thing. I almost lost my mind. I went from being a highly respected professional to a doorstop. I spent two years as the village idiot again. And I'm past it now. We're past it. And having Petey Gone Mad Arts back up and running — having something I've been building actually back on track — for the first time in two years I feel like myself again.

The child is still in there. Still saying YEAH when something clicks. The monster keeps me honest. Both of them are necessary. Both of them are building this.

I have twelve creative disciplines, one universe, one philosophy, and the same laptop I started with.

That's enough to work with.

CW:(closing the notebook) I think it's more than enough. Thank you Peter.

PE:(standing, extending a hand) Thank you for following the drift.

I shake his hand. Outside the window Interlachen is going about its Tuesday. Inside this room a man who was once the village idiot of Sullivan County has just described the structure of the universe, the nature of God, the economics of human dignity, and a father who read his son's words in secret and never said a word about it.

Some stories don't need a conclusion.

They just need someone to finally sit down and listen.

Peter E. Sisco IV is the creator of Petey Gone Mad Arts, the author of Rise of the Warrior Queen, and the builder of Fanny and Stephan — free tools for authors available atpeteygonemadarts.com. He lives in Interlachen, Florida.

"More than just ART, this is LIFE."