 Before we get into the video today, I just want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors, Gnostic TV. Gnostic TV is ancient wisdom reimagined. This is a Netflix for those who are spiritually curious and want a place to go where there is no censorship. I personally am doing a whole series on Gnostic TV called The Esoteric Explorer where I am providing exclusive content to Gnostic. Gnostic TV is a host to all sorts of different content creators, many of whom are your old favorites. If you would like to check out Gnostic TV, there is a link down in the description box below. Hello everybody and welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. Boy, do I have quite a rabbit hole that I wanted to talk to you guys about today. This is kind of like the video I did where I reacted to somebody else's video. Although this is more or less me reacting to this trending story that's happening over on TikTok. And not only is it a fascinating story, but I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of this story because it takes place in Atlanta, Georgia. In fact, I think I know the apartment complex that this man lives in. I'm not going to say obviously which complex it is, but if I'm right, it's only like a mile away from where I live. Now this story has picked up lots of controversy online. Some people believe that this is all just a hoax. And some people think that this is literally like a glitch in the matrix or something that is going on. Probably in more cities, not just Atlanta, that we're now starting to like figure out that there's something actually going on. I don't know. I go back and forth. But being from Atlanta, there is some evidence of this guy has shown that makes me go, I think he's actually right because I am from Atlanta. Like I live a mile if I'm right and where he lives, I'm like a mile away from him. So like him, I do know the culture of the city. I do know what it's like living in Atlanta, Georgia. And so therefore some of the naysayers that I've seen that are trying to debunk this whole menu gate story, some of their logic just doesn't make sense because it doesn't apply to the city of Atlanta. For example, for example, my friends, Atlanta, Georgia is a city of six million people. Now it's a major metropolis. It is Empire State South. It is the New York City of the South. We do, we do have a subway system. It is called MARTA, but our underground subway system is not great. Wait, what's the new gate again? The guy in Atlanta who realized he was only living in his apartment building because of all the menus. It's like gone viral. Uh-huh. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's people are going to start talking about it because when I saw that abandoned car being posted on Reddit, I was like, Oh, people are going to catch it onto this. Yeah. So you'll be on the forefront of it. Well, that's what I was just saying about the cars because some people on the disbunkers are like, it's, you know, it's city people. I'm like, no, no, no, people always drive in Atlanta. Like we don't, it's not a, we're a driving city. So all right, you guys, my boyfriend like walked in while I was talking to you guys because this, this, um, this up, this conspiracy, this rabbit hole is literally just taken Atlanta by storm and we were just talking about one of the things he, he refers to as I was saying with, with the MARTA system, we drive in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta, Georgia is not a city where you are just going to move. It's not New York, right? It's not Chicago. It's not London. Our, I, listen, listen, I have, I am voted for us to expand MARTA. I would love to have a subway system here in Atlanta where I didn't have to drive everywhere, but Atlanta 100% like Los Angeles is a driving city. So a lot of people on the internet are trying to debunk this whole menu gate story because of all the abandoned cars in the parking lot being like, oh, it's a city. People are probably just taking public transportation. I don't know anyone in Atlanta, Georgia who takes public transportation. You know, it's, it just, that's just not, that's just not this city. So let's go ahead and get into it for those of you who don't know what menu gate is. I am going to read really quickly from this article from the LED Bible. Horrified man finds out he's the only person living in his building after menu gate. A man has gone viral for never seeing anyone at the apartment complex. So this was published back in October, 2023. Now you guys, I'm going to just vouch for this guy because like I said, he lives about a mile away from me. We live in a very, we live in Midtown and that's not doxing myself. Again, this is a city of 6 million people. Midtown is a really fancy place to live. Right. This is not, this is very fine living. Like my apartment is tiny in Midtown and I pay a lot of money for the location basically. Right. Like I'm right off of Piedmont Park, which is our central park here in Atlanta. So the fact that they have these swanky luxury apartment buildings, like these apartment buildings, where he lives, if I'm accurate, where he lives is not an apartment complex. Whereas some 20-something-year-old kid fresh out of college or university is going to move to. No, this is an apartment complex where it's going to be filled with a bunch of working professionals. And I do believe that this guy, Cody, I think I read that he is actually an attorney. I could be wrong about that, but that, that checks out to me like this is a, this is a luxury living. All right. So millions of viewers have been drawn into a bizarre multi-part menu saga, which sees a horrified resident claiming to be the only tenant in an empty apartment complex. So MenuGate has been trending on TikTok after a lawyer. Yes, he's a lawyer named Cody from Atlanta, Georgia. Notices that takeaway menus which were left on the residence door frame have been untouched for days. They say the building is full, but I never see anyone here. He said in a viral video posted in October, 2021. Are you really telling me people live here, but no one on my floor has come in and out of their building in three days? I don't get it. He said in a follow-up video. Let me stop right there. So basically, I know a lot of cities do this. So basically, like sometimes like restaurants or, you know, marketing will commonly put flyers in your car. They'll put like menus in your door. And the way that they put the menus in the door, the minute you open the door, the menu is going to fall. So the fact that the menus are still in all of his neighbor's doors means that nobody has come in and out of that door. He claims that these menus were put up like on a Friday and he's filming this video, the first video on like a Sunday or a Monday. Like you mean to tell me that all of my neighbors, all of them, not one of them left their apartment not even once this weekend because the minute you would open that door, that menu would fall. All right. I live in a nice part of town in a demanding market. Yes. My building is a good building, especially for the price. So how are they vacant? And remember, they marketed that their full capacity. And I believe he said the full capacity would be somewhere around 800 people. After taking advice from someone in the comments section, Cody went to check out the car park. I live on the first floor. So the only people who are supposed to park here are people who live on my floor, he said. There are more cars here than our apartments. Some of these cars don't look like they've been moved for a while. So if you go to his Tik Tok, he starts to actually examine all the cars, which again in Atlanta, in Atlanta, Georgia, most buildings are going to have a park. I have a parking lot because Atlanta is a driving city. It is an absolute driving city. You are not if you don't have a car in Atlanta, Georgia, you are going to have to live literally right by your place of work because we don't have the access to public transportation like other cities do. So if you're moving into a luxury apartment building, every single unit is going to be granted at least one or two parking spots for the unit. They're also going to have like guest parking too. Like we have a guest parking lot for my building as well. So he goes out and he looks at all of these cars for his floor and I get it. Like I know my neighbor's cars, but I don't study my neighbor's cars. Like I know they're there, but if you're not paying attention, you might not notice that some of the registration tags are like a few years expired or that the car is literally covered inches deep in pollen, which you know, we do get a lot of pollen in the city, but you typically if your car is super covered in pollen, you're going to at least wipe it down or do the windshield wipers over your front windshield so you can see to drive. He finds that a lot of the cars have been wrecked that they have massive like dents in them. Something super strange he finds in a lot of the tech talks is that some of the cars windshields have been rolled down. Listen, you make that mistake one time in Atlanta, Georgia. You do not leave your car window rolled down in Atlanta, Georgia. Your car will get robbed. You roll that sucker up. He looks in these windows and he'll see like old CD players and things of value. You don't do that in Atlanta. You do that one time. You make that mistake one time in Atlanta, Georgia. You make sure there is nothing of value in your car because it will get robbed. So it's evident that the cars that are parked in this building are not being driven and therefore are either being held in this building for a particular reason or are simply just there as like prop cars to give the illusion of being packed. All right, the TikToker then shows us a dusty black car that doesn't look like it's been used in years. He has since posted over 25 videos of his an alleged empty apartment complex which he claims only contain staff and viewers are torn between it being a glimpse in the matrix or there being a genuine reason for it. Plot twist, it's an abandoned apartment complex but he's a ghost and doesn't know it, one person suggests. While another person thought you're unwittingly become someone's test subject in some kind of experiment. Percentage lease and percentage occupied are two very different things a third says. They're investor owned units that are held but empty in order to artificially inflate demands and reduce supply of fourth time debt. I actually in a practical world, this is the one that I actually think is legit. That they're making it look like it's packed to increase the demand. So they can up the rent, you know, so they can up the competition for people trying to get a unit. That's the one that I kind of lean more towards. I'm living with my parents at 38, someone else said. The idea of rentals just sitting there completely empty makes me want to absolutely break down sobbing and screaming. Kobe added, does anybody just go on vacation for weeks or does everybody just go on vacation for weeks? I need answers. The idea of Will Smith's, I am legend, happened in a random apartment complex in Atlanta is pretty creepy. So that's men you get you guys. And again, the one of the videos that really sold me was that he went into a lot of the buildings. I'm sure this is, you know, this is kind of what they did in LA too when I lived in LA. You know, you walk in the middle of that, you see the apartment buildings kind of in the middle. There's like a pool or something. So at one point at night, he walks outside to film the exterior of the apartment from the center, like where the pool is to see how many people have their lights on. It is so dark. There is like maybe one other unit with the lights on. So you mean to tell me at like eight o'clock at night, 800 people decided to all go to bed at the same time and turn their lights off? No. No. He has one building where he video where he talks about trash day where they say, I need we need you to they send you like a notice. I need you to take your trash out. And so he literally puts his trash out and then he goes in films and he shows where like there's all these trash cans that have been placed, but like there's no trash in them. It's wild, you guys. It's wild. And honestly, I do think that it's probably something like them just trying to increase the value of the apartment complex by making it appear like it's full when it's actually not. I have noticed to the more I go out and walk with my dog. There are a lot of for sale signs in Atlanta, Georgia right now. I frankly think that because inflation is so bad and we're in such a bad recession that people just can't afford to live in the city. I know it's been stressful for me too, because it's way more expensive here in Atlanta than it is elsewhere. I pay more for rent than I think most of my friends do for their mortgages. It's ridiculously expensive living in any city. So I do think we're seeing a bit of an exodus from the city and maybe that is why because of that, maybe that's why these big apartment complexes that are owned by corporations do these tactics like or lease out buildings as somebody said just because the room is leased or apartment is leased doesn't mean that somebody's occupying it. I have a funny story. When I lived in LA, there was an apartment complex or an apartment unit like across the hall from mine. And we knew that it was being rented, but we knew that nobody was living there. They're basically using it as a storage unit. And the owner of that unit ended up passing away, which we I never knew who this owner was like they were never there. So somebody came to the unit to clean out what was being stored in that built in that apartment complex. And it was a bunch of adult videos, VHSs basically. So, you know, I do know that people will lease apartment complexes and not necessarily use them for living purposes or it could be another corporation might lease a few apartment apartments in the city, furnish them for like employees that are coming in like traveling in and out like you might have a high ranking employee of some, you know, Coca-Cola or something that's Coca-Cola is based in Atlanta that might be working for Coca-Cola headquarters in Paris or something and they might come in for a month to do work in Atlanta. And they the Coca-Cola company might have a few apartments leased around the city just to give them a place to stay on the company's dime while they're here in Atlanta. If that makes sense, I know I know corporations do that a lot, but you would think if that's what some of the corporations in Atlanta have done done with this luxury building that he would see people periodically coming and going from these different units, but he literally isn't like there's one hysterical video where he's walking down his hot hallway without his shirt on. And I don't know if he's fully naked or not, but he's like, you know, the only person that lives here. So I come over and make it, you know, it's it's some it's quite quite interesting. There's one episode where he actually pulls a fire alarm, which don't do that. It don't do that guys like that's illegal, but he pulls it out of desperation to see how many people run out of the building and it's only like two other people that leave the building. So it's all very, very, very strange. And again, a lot of people try to debunk it by the car thing because it's a city, but I can say that you obviously don't know Atlanta, Georgia, anybody living in that unit, especially a luxury unit would absolutely have a car. Again, the lights being turned out across being completely pitch black dark in the building at 8 p.m. That's weird. That's weird. Other people have pitched in. There's one guy that crossed referenced on TikTok, this guy's videos and he said, I don't actually think I have roommates. He was saying that he signed an agreement to live with people that he didn't know like a house share and he's been living at this house for a few months and he's never seen his roommates ever. And so he's wondering if these roommates actually exist or if this was again some scheme to get the place rented out at a lower price without the person realizing that they were the only ones living there. There's all these talks now, people who got invested in the story as my boyfriend was just reminding me are now going all over Atlanta and finding these abandoned cars everywhere. And there's all these theories as to what's going on. So it's just very, very fascinating. And again, it has taken the internet, the TikTok by storm. Thank God, you know, the guy even said in one video that he's not complaining being the only person living there. He's just wondering why the lies, why the manipulation, but he's like, I'm cool being the only person that lives here. I just want to know why they lied to me. I think I would freak out like I'm really glad like yesterday was the eclipse and so I was out first in the parking lot and then my neighbors all came out. So I know my neighbors, they all have dogs. So I know that I know which units in my building are vacant right now. I absolutely know which, you know, it's very transparent here, but my landlord is a person. My landlord is not a corporation. So there's a difference there as well, right? You're dealing with a corporation versus an actual just private person. I prefer renting from a private person than a corporation anyway. So I want to hear y'all's thoughts on this again. I think I believe that one person who said I do believe this apartment building is empty, but I think they're doing it to try to increase the demand, especially if it's corporation because they obviously have other units, other luxury units in Atlanta in other cities as well. And I think it's to increase the demand for their units is just a really crappy marketing scheme. So and I think and I applaud Cody for actually exposing it and maybe we'll pay a little bit more attention. That's the thing about a city too. Like I always say like, you know, even though there's 6 million people here in Atlanta, Georgia, I feel very private. Like in a city, no one's paying attention to you, right? No one in a small town. Everyone's paying attention to you. So I think this does give us pause for those of us who do live in cities to take a moment just to kind of like observe our surroundings. And so I do applaud Cody for initially feeling like something was weird like he never saw his neighbors and passing. But then when he noticed that the menus were still in the doors being like, okay, okay, am I the only person that lives here? So I applaud him for pointing that out. It's a gripping story guys. Go and follow it on Tiktok. Just go to Tiktok and type in menu gate and let me know down in the comment section what you think about this story.