True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 127: Nashville Lineman
Aired: 2021-01-07
Duration: 01:14:36


=== Practicing Mindfulness (03:13) ===

[00:00:00]  Are we going?
[00:00:00]  Is this thing on?
[00:00:03]  We're going, baby.
[00:00:05]  What are you doing?
[00:00:06]  I'm talking to you, Liz.
[00:00:10]  After a big break.
[00:00:12]  Oh, my God.
[00:00:13]  It has been a big break.
[00:00:14]  It's been a big break.
[00:00:16]  Yeah.
[00:00:17]  You learned anything during this break?
[00:00:18]  During our big break?
[00:00:20]  During our big break.
[00:00:21]  Yeah.
[00:00:22]  Did I learn anything?
[00:00:24]  I don't think so.
[00:00:25]  I kind of like turned my brain off.
[00:00:27]  Yeah.
[00:00:28]  I turned my brain off.
[00:00:29]  I turned my Twitter off.
[00:00:34]  I'd just been.
[00:00:35]  I was like in the holiday spirit.
[00:00:39]  Sounds delightful.
[00:00:40]  It was delightful.
[00:00:41]  I know it's 2021, baby.
[00:00:43]  That doesn't feel right.
[00:00:44]  It doesn't ring off roll off the tongue very well.
[00:00:48]  Oh, it rolls.
[00:00:49]  It rolls.
[00:00:50]  I've been chewing it around in my mouth.
[00:00:52]  I love it.
[00:00:53]  2021.
[00:00:54]  Why do you love it?
[00:00:56]  I'm just, it's the year.
[00:00:58]  It's the year of the, it's the year of brace.
[00:01:01]  I think you would say that about every year.
[00:01:04]  I'm doing it.
[00:01:06]  Mandalay Bay 2.
[00:01:07]  Oh my God.
[00:01:08]  Don't say that.
[00:01:09]  Okay.
[00:01:12]  No, I'm opening up.
[00:01:13]  I've been meeting with Sheldon and I'm opening up a second Mandalay Bay casino.
[00:01:19]  This one in Reno, Nevada.
[00:01:20]  Oh, lovely.
[00:01:22]  Yeah, because people know the name, but it's sort of faded why they know it.
[00:01:25]  So they see it and they're like, oh, Mandalay Bay.
[00:01:28]  I know that.
[00:01:29]  I trust it.
[00:01:30]  I'll stay there.
[00:01:32]  in the paddock suite liz i've been practicing while we've been gone
[00:02:00]  You say you've been letting your mind rest, but I've been practicing.
[00:02:04]  Practicing for what?
[00:02:05]  The male gaze.
[00:02:08]  What?
[00:02:08]  Yeah.
[00:02:09]  Is that even good?
[00:02:10]  I've gotten so good at it.
[00:02:11]  Look at this.
[00:02:14]  You fucking see that?
[00:02:17]  Uh-huh.
[00:02:18]  Yeah, it felt a little uncomfortable.
[00:02:19]  It's kind of like a care bear stare.
[00:02:22]  Well, I said I'm working on it.
[00:02:25]  Look.
[00:02:25]  Okay.
[00:02:28]  I like that.
[00:02:29]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:29]  Francie feels that skin got a little tingly.
[00:02:32]  Don't like that, do you?
[00:02:33]  Yeah.
[00:02:33]  You got to back away.
[00:02:34]  That's like, I want to take that male gaze and throw it back at you.
[00:02:38]  I've been studying the traditional art of the Italian Malagaze, and it's been, you know, I was at the monastery for a little bit.
[00:02:46]  I was training in Rome, too, at the Vatican.
[00:02:49]  And now I'm back.
[00:02:50]  I'm in America.
[00:02:51]  And I'm about to change a lot of N plus One writers' lives.
[00:02:56]  And by change, I mean end.
[00:02:59]  End plus one.
[00:03:00]  End plus.
[00:03:01]  Exactly.
[00:03:02]  Because I'm killing your partner too.
[00:03:04]  Welcome to Truanon.
[00:03:06]  Welcome back, everyone.
[00:03:07]  Hello.
[00:03:07]  Hi, Brace.
[00:03:09]  Hey, Liz.
[00:03:10]  How you doing, sweetheart?

=== Julian Assange's Guilty Plea (07:47) ===

[00:03:13]  Why did that sound like a threat?
[00:03:15]  I'm just, hey, I've had a new recurring dream I'll tell you about after this, but definitely should not.
[00:03:23]  Yeah, okay.
[00:03:24]  Let's not, we don't have to cut that, but let's move on from that.
[00:03:27]  I'm Brace.
[00:03:28]  I am Liz.
[00:03:29]  I'm a little concerned about what Brace just said.
[00:03:32]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:03:33]  So the dream is: I am sitting in the back of a car and I shoot someone in the head, and I had it four nights in a row.
[00:03:41]  Different people every time, but no one I knew.
[00:03:43]  What?
[00:03:44]  I take this medication, Trazodone, to help me sleep.
[00:03:48]  And it gives me nightmares so I can talk to my analyst about them because that's the Young Ian thing.
[00:03:53]  And I haven't met with her in a couple of weeks.
[00:03:56]  And I'm meeting with her tomorrow and really got a lot of, well, not a lot.
[00:04:00]  Do you keep a dream journal?
[00:04:02]  I write it my phone, yeah, on the notes, little notes app.
[00:04:04]  Interesting.
[00:04:05]  Yes.
[00:04:06]  Those keystrokes, by the way, are absolutely logged because I say a lot of, I don't have great dreams.
[00:04:16]  But we're back.
[00:04:18]  We are.
[00:04:19]  We are back.
[00:04:19]  We took a little break.
[00:04:21]  Now, for us, it felt like a very long time.
[00:04:24]  Yes, we were quite savvy with our recording schedule.
[00:04:27]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:29]  But for our dear listeners, it probably didn't feel as long.
[00:04:32]  Hopefully.
[00:04:33]  People don't know that we actually record every episode three months in advance.
[00:04:37]  And we do like a, it's like a season thing.
[00:04:39]  So we're actually right now, hi, you're in 2021.
[00:04:42]  We're actually still back in October of 2020.
[00:04:45]  Yeah, we just took two months off.
[00:04:47]  Mm-hmm.
[00:04:49]  And Mr. Bean will never be in the news again.
[00:04:52]  Wonder who's going to win the election.
[00:04:54]  Uh-huh.
[00:04:54]  Yeah, and I'll never drink a gallon of pea on a dare.
[00:04:57]  What?
[00:04:58]  Yeah.
[00:04:59]  I'll never do that on New Year's Eve.
[00:05:02]  Oh my God.
[00:05:03]  Okay, anyway.
[00:05:05]  Actually, a bunch of stuff happened while we were gone, which I was not expecting.
[00:05:09]  It's sort of like, you know, one of those things where I, you know, I think normally assumed that since I was on vacation, the entire world would also be on vacation.
[00:05:20]  I mean, it's like nobody's working anyways.
[00:05:23]  How come there's still stuff happening?
[00:05:24]  And it's the holidays.
[00:05:25]  Yeah.
[00:05:26]  There's a thing too where it's like the week between Christmas and New Year's just feels like a complete and total time suck.
[00:05:33]  I know.
[00:05:33]  I actually despise the holidays because of that.
[00:05:36]  Yeah, I don't like them.
[00:05:40]  But yeah, no, it feels like you're lost in time.
[00:05:42]  Like nothing can happen.
[00:05:43]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:05:44]  It's like this like liminal space where you're just kind of waiting for New Year's to happen and then suddenly it's like, okay, we're back.
[00:05:49]  Let's go.
[00:05:50]  You say liminal one more time.
[00:05:51]  I'm putting you on my fucking N plus one list.
[00:05:57]  One thing is I think we should maybe give this a little bit of space, hold some space for this, do a little acknowledgement, is that Julian Assange has his, he's not being extradited.
[00:06:09]  Yes, that was actually really surprising.
[00:06:11]  That happened.
[00:06:12]  Wait, was that this morning or yesterday morning?
[00:06:14]  That was yesterday.
[00:06:14]  They don't know when we're recording this.
[00:06:16]  Yeah, this just happened.
[00:06:19]  And we're in England.
[00:06:22]  I was actually, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:06:24]  I saw that.
[00:06:25]  I was in bed and I was like, whoa, what?
[00:06:27]  That's crazy.
[00:06:28]  And then I read actually the judge's remarks.
[00:06:34]  Pretty funny because she was like, yeah, actually, Assange, he's guilty of everything.
[00:06:40]  Yes, yes, yeah.
[00:06:42]  Didn't care very much for any of the defense's arguments, except for that she said he may be guilty, but we can't send him to the U.S. because the prison conditions are so bad.
[00:06:57]  Absolutely.
[00:06:57]  And there's actually some analogs of this in my own life because I've had a lot of girls be like, you have to stop staying at my house.
[00:07:04]  I hate you.
[00:07:05]  I despise you.
[00:07:06]  But I'm like, but you see my apartment.
[00:07:07]  Like, it sucks.
[00:07:08]  And they're like, yeah, you can stay here for another four years.
[00:07:12]  But yeah, they said that he is so psychotically depressed that there is absolutely no way that the U.S. can guarantee he won't kill himself.
[00:07:23]  So they're just going to have him kill himself in the UK prison where he's going to be held probably for the next two years awaiting the appeal.
[00:07:29]  Yeah, I think funny enough, they actually, she actually cited Jeffrey Epstein, if I'm correct, in the judgment, saying that even Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, which was the first time, of course, as our listeners know, in what, 20 years in the MCC.
[00:07:50]  So Assange, yeah, they couldn't trust the U.S. penal system and the prison system, excuse me, to take care of him.
[00:07:59]  Yeah, and it's sort of an interesting read, her ruling or whatever.
[00:08:06]  But like Liz said, she's like, this guy is definitely guilty.
[00:08:09]  And these are not like, you know, one of the big things that we talked about during our episode on it was that this was a political crime that he was being extradited for, which is in contravene, contravenes.
[00:08:20]  I don't know how to say contravention.
[00:08:22]  It goes against the fucking extradition treaty that the UK has with the U.S. She's like, these are not political crimes.
[00:08:30]  Get his ass out of here.
[00:08:32]  However, he's depressed.
[00:08:35]  So I think what I think is going to happen, and there's a new bail hearing, I think today it starts.
[00:08:41]  I don't really know.
[00:08:42]  I doubt he's going to get bail.
[00:08:45]  But I do not doubt that if he is kept in prison in the UK, he will be tortured by our cousins over there.
[00:08:53]  Across the pond.
[00:08:54]  Yeah, no, and you know, we should say, you know, obviously the U.S. immediately, you know, filed an appeal.
[00:09:03]  Yes.
[00:09:05]  I, you know, I think it's funny because, you know, you mentioned that she said, you know, oh, he's totally guilty of all these crimes and it's not political.
[00:09:12]  Like, she really focused on the hacking thing, which we covered again extensively on the Assange episode, which is to say that she, like, totally, I mean, whatever.
[00:09:22]  She was a terrible.
[00:09:23]  She's a terrible judge.
[00:09:24]  The whole thing was a fucking farce, as we, you know, talked about like from the beginning, a total farce.
[00:09:30]  And so many things, so many, like, defense witnesses weren't able to come to come and give testimony, you know, etc., etc.
[00:09:39]  But she totally, I mean, the whole thing she said is that it's non-political because this is a, you know, he hacked into it.
[00:09:46]  Yeah.
[00:09:46]  And really latching onto the kind of like bizarro technical argument.
[00:09:51]  That's like kind of a workaround to the whole thing.
[00:09:54]  So yeah, it remains to be seen.
[00:09:55]  She kind of like made a gesture towards the Brits just filing their own charges against him there to prosecute him in the UK.
[00:10:06]  So here's hoping that doesn't happen.
[00:10:08]  I don't know.
[00:10:10]  But all in all, it was a bit surprising.
[00:10:13]  And I think there was like a, someone reported on how Assange's lawyers were basically like, well, it wasn't the worst thing that could have happened.
[00:10:23]  So pretty good so far.
[00:10:25]  we'll see what happens there well I'm sure that we'll get around to that again when we do our R.I.P. Julian Assange episode in a few months when they force him to kill himself in prison in the UK
[00:10:55]  But now to talk about something near and dear to my heart.

=== Car Bomb in Nashville (03:19) ===

[00:11:00]  A car bomb.
[00:11:03]  In the country music capital of the world.
[00:11:09]  Liz, when I used to go on tour with Gene and we'd be out there with our dueling twangs of twanging guitars.
[00:11:18]  Banjo.
[00:11:19]  Banjo stuff.
[00:11:21]  Yeah.
[00:11:21]  We played it.
[00:11:22]  Recktit.
[00:11:23]  Yeah.
[00:11:24]  And of course we played a little kind of music.
[00:11:27]  It's a little down home kind of music called slur that didn't really make it up north.
[00:11:31]  What is this?
[00:11:33]  I don't really got to get into it.
[00:11:34]  It's like a white boy blues.
[00:11:36]  Yeah, it's well, it's part of, it's like the first part of that for sure.
[00:11:42]  And we say that word a lot, definitely.
[00:11:45]  But yeah, you know, and a lot of you guys know that I'm in the Country Music Hall of Fame due to shoplifting from there a lot and I was trying to get slur recognized as a genre.
[00:11:57]  And I've talked a lot about car bombs.
[00:12:01]  So I don't know.
[00:12:02]  I'm sure everyone is aware of this.
[00:12:04]  On Christmas Day, there was a big car bomb that went on.
[00:12:08]  You know, you might say everyone's aware of this, but this thing kind of, I got to say, people, this was like a big thing for like two days, but it got liminal spaced because it happened on Christmas.
[00:12:18]  Everyone's like, yeah, it's fine.
[00:12:21]  Yeah, it kind of was like, boop, came and went, just like the bomb itself, which we'll get into.
[00:12:27]  But yeah, so there was, I think it was like 5.30 a.m. local time, Nashville, Tennessee, Christmas morning, December 25th.
[00:12:35]  Also, the birthday of one, Miss Gillane Maxwell.
[00:12:41]  Just throwing that out there.
[00:12:43]  And also, you know, Jesus Christ.
[00:12:46]  Yeah, no relation.
[00:12:49]  Yeah, so 5.30 a.m. downtown Nashville, so-called arts district.
[00:12:56]  Here's my thing.
[00:12:57]  Well, hold on.
[00:12:57]  Can we pause for a second?
[00:12:59]  Oh, yeah.
[00:12:59]  Yeah, no, no.
[00:13:01]  Give it to me, sweetheart.
[00:13:02]  I know what you're about to say.
[00:13:03]  Why does every town have a, they can't just say like, this is the arts district.
[00:13:08]  It's like they just pick a block where there's a bunch of brick buildings and they go, hey, here's the arts district.
[00:13:13]  It's like, that's not an arts district.
[00:13:15]  I'll tell you what.
[00:13:15]  I went to the arts district in Atlanta, Georgia, and in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:13:21]  Same district.
[00:13:24]  It's just a bunch of brick buildings.
[00:13:26]  Here's what they do is they get, I think I've complained about this on the fucking podcast before, but what they do is they get this big ass cavernous building and then they get all these little fucking vendors.
[00:13:36]  They're like, oh, you want like a bread bowl?
[00:13:39]  I hate a vendor.
[00:13:41]  You want a bread bowl?
[00:13:42]  Oh, you want a lobster BLT or whatever?
[00:13:45]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:46]  Hey, we made a taco out of anything you want.
[00:13:49]  Yeah, hey, check out the shit.
[00:13:50]  Not everything should be in a taco.
[00:13:51]  He's Mexican.
[00:13:52]  Fucking we're married to another guy, to a Chinese guy, too.
[00:13:57]  And we make Italian food.
[00:13:59]  It's fucking insane.
[00:14:00]  Like, and the spice shop.
[00:14:03]  This is just fusion food, by the way.
[00:14:05]  It's just fusion.
[00:14:07]  It's like the 90s.
[00:14:08]  We haven't moved on.
[00:14:09]  Yeah.
[00:14:10]  And what is paprika?
[00:14:12]  No, that one's fine.
[00:14:14]  What is it, though?
[00:14:15]  It's a spice, baby.
[00:14:17]  Okay.
[00:14:17]  All right.
[00:14:18]  Well, that clears a lot of things up for me.

=== Car Bomb Experience (15:48) ===

[00:14:20]  But, but, but, yeah.
[00:14:21]  So I know a lot of people out there.
[00:14:23]  I mean, we get thousands of emails per day being like, I am thinking of driving a vehicle-born IED into the arts district in Altoona, Pennsylvania.
[00:14:32]  And I'm always like, my brother, please do not do that.
[00:14:39]  Rick to Life of the band 25 to Life lives in Altoona, I think, and that could possibly harm him because he could possibly be working at the Paprika store there.
[00:14:48]  But apparently, we did miss one email.
[00:14:51]  And so 5:30 a.m., just like Liz says, there's this recording of gunshots, right?
[00:14:59]  Yeah, so, okay, so we've got an RV parked downtown, or it's district, Nashville, Tennessee, blaring what sounds like gunshots for about an hour, by the way.
[00:15:17]  This is the CIA fireworks psyop.
[00:15:22]  It's not just fire, or it's not just gunshots, too.
[00:15:25]  It's also warnings.
[00:15:26]  There's like an automatic, like an automated computer lady voice.
[00:15:30]  Yes.
[00:15:31]  That's like, this RV will explode in five minutes.
[00:15:37]  I was going to say, it sounded like you.
[00:15:39]  10 minutes.
[00:15:40]  Look, I'll just say, I didn't take that job.
[00:15:42]  It wasn't me.
[00:15:43]  Okay, because I know that you were doing Fiverr stuff over break.
[00:15:47]  And so I was worried that could have been you.
[00:15:50]  Yeah.
[00:15:50]  So, yeah, he's got, and he's playing, so he's got these gunshots.
[00:15:53]  And apparently, the gunshots, this is sort of what the after-analysis is of it, or I guess the analysis of it is that other people are saying.
[00:16:01]  So gunshots were to draw police in.
[00:16:03]  And once, you know, they were in there, which, you know, loud gunshots or probably loud anything played at 5:30 in the morning on Christmas morning will bring.
[00:16:12]  He starts saying, oh, we got a bomb on the truck, and the cops will get people out of there.
[00:16:16]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:17]  That seems to be mostly what happened because they come and sort of search the area.
[00:16:20]  They see a white RV and they're like, holy fuck, dude.
[00:16:23]  It's like breaking bad.
[00:16:25]  And they start taking pictures next to it.
[00:16:27]  And they're like, they're like, I don't know any breaking bad guy ever had.
[00:16:31]  Have you seen it?
[00:16:32]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:33]  I never did.
[00:16:34]  None of those shows.
[00:16:35]  Sopranos, breaking bad, none.
[00:16:37]  Don't put Sopranos in that.
[00:16:38]  Sopranos is in a different tier.
[00:16:40]  I tried to watch the first episode of Sopranos because I'm like, oh, this is like stuff that people do podcasts like.
[00:16:45]  And I was like, it didn't do much for me.
[00:16:48]  That's surprising to me.
[00:16:49]  Yeah.
[00:16:49]  Just didn't get into it.
[00:16:50]  You should get into it.
[00:16:51]  No.
[00:16:52]  I think you should get into it.
[00:16:53]  I just do Caligula.
[00:16:54]  I think you would get into it because you're, you know, a man of, you know, you like the psychology.
[00:17:00]  I do love psychology.
[00:17:02]  That guy's just a little too big for me.
[00:17:04]  I'm like, what are you doing?
[00:17:05]  I could outrun you.
[00:17:06]  Yeah.
[00:17:07]  RV.
[00:17:08]  So, yeah, the messages go, there's a large bomb in this vehicle, and all buildings must be evacuated.
[00:17:14]  I don't want to do it.
[00:17:15]  I'm doing like a gruff voice.
[00:17:16]  Yeah, no, it's lady voice.
[00:17:17]  Let me do it.
[00:17:18]  Yeah, okay.
[00:17:19]  All buildings must be evacuated in five minutes.
[00:17:25]  And it starts playing parts of the song Downtown by Petula Clark.
[00:17:28]  Petula?
[00:17:29]  Why did I pronounce it like that?
[00:17:30]  Here's my thing.
[00:17:31]  I've never said the word.
[00:17:32]  No one knew her name.
[00:17:33]  Everyone knows Soprano.
[00:17:34]  Petula?
[00:17:35]  Didn't know her name.
[00:17:36]  Petulare.
[00:17:37]  Here's the thing.
[00:17:38]  I had actually read an analysis in the Washington POST sort of national security section of the paper where they said that there was a real risk that he could have played a Towns Van Zandt lefty and poncho and it would have actually driven every woman in America there but driven every man in America away from it because Towns Van Zance are girls.
[00:18:00]  Yeah, Towns is actually famously the female MK Ultra trigger Where it's just like it awakens the kind of the sleeper cell within all females.
[00:18:13]  I used to have like a few records that I had when like girls came over because you know I got lots of records and but there was like a few that you gotta play.
[00:18:21]  Yeah yeah yeah one of them is of course towns.
[00:18:24]  And they see that he got the old one too and they're like oh he didn't even get the reissue man.
[00:18:29]  He's been digging in the bins because he wants to convince me to have sex with him due to putting on a record.
[00:18:35]  Anyways, so downtown, which I will sing part of now, the song goes downtown.
[00:18:44]  No one does it.
[00:18:46]  Downtown.
[00:18:48]  What?
[00:18:49]  Where I don't know, is it that?
[00:18:52]  No, that's not it at all.
[00:18:54]  Down, downtown.
[00:18:57]  Am I doing the pitch wrong?
[00:18:59]  Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na!
[00:19:05]  Downtown!
[00:19:07]  When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry seems to help.
[00:19:11]  I know.
[00:19:13]  Downtown.
[00:19:15]  Like that.
[00:19:16]  I'm going to, you know what I'm going to do?
[00:19:18]  I'm going to do.
[00:19:19]  I'm just kidding, by the way.
[00:19:20]  This is a joke.
[00:19:21]  I want to preface this with, I will never do this.
[00:19:23]  Liz, I'm going to do a car bomb with your just splicing the recordings from this episode of you talking.
[00:19:31]  And with the automated voice.
[00:19:33]  Yes.
[00:19:33]  Look, we can make, by the way, for people out there, hopefully none of our listeners, because you guys are very cool.
[00:19:40]  All the people listening going, oh, this is like important taste.
[00:19:43]  I mean, this was a bump.
[00:19:44]  Look, no one died.
[00:19:45]  Well, except for the bummer.
[00:19:47]  The guy.
[00:19:48]  But he wanted to die.
[00:19:50]  Well, yeah, we'll get into that too.
[00:19:52]  Yeah.
[00:19:52]  Anyway, okay.
[00:19:55]  I'm just saying that, you know, we could joke.
[00:19:58]  After we're talking about, I'll be real with you.
[00:20:00]  I am probably one of the few people involved in podcasting who has seen a car bomb.
[00:20:07]  They're fucking wild, man.
[00:20:09]  They blow up.
[00:20:10]  It's like crazy.
[00:20:11]  You get hit by the sound thing a little bit.
[00:20:13]  You know, there's a guy driving them.
[00:20:14]  You're like, holy shit, why would you do just throw a bomb or something?
[00:20:18]  Why are you driving a bomb?
[00:20:20]  And that's all.
[00:20:21]  That's always what I always wondered.
[00:20:23]  And it's like, yeah, you can talk about car bomb.
[00:20:26]  I mean, you know, if someone's driving a car bomb, they want to die in the car bomb.
[00:20:30]  I'm sorry.
[00:20:30]  I respect your wishes.
[00:20:32]  I won't do that anymore.
[00:20:33]  Okay, so how does it go?
[00:20:35]  When you're alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown.
[00:20:46]  Maybe you know some little places to go where they never close downtown.
[00:20:55]  So there is a okay, back to it.
[00:20:57]  There's a video of all this happening.
[00:21:00]  Do you watch that, right, Bryce?
[00:21:02]  So you see from the like police officers who are on the scene, they arrive on the scene and you see them kind of like pooking around the corner and you see the RV and they're like walking up and you can hear the thing and then boom blamo kaboom, explosion.
[00:21:20]  Yeah explosion, that's right big exploit.
[00:21:25]  Well, I will be real, not that big of an explosion yeah, it wasn't that big.
[00:21:30]  But it explodes at about 629 a.m.
[00:21:34]  Second Avenue, Arts District obliterated, bye-bye.
[00:21:40]  Uh, it actually was pretty like devastated, I will say yeah, I mean so I again i've seen car bombs go off and as car bombs go, not that bad of a car bomb.
[00:21:53]  But here's the thing i'll say, arts districts, for an arts infrastructure and for an arts district to be car bombed, which I hope never, ever happens and we would never suggest it would happen to any of our listener like to do for that to happen, never at all.
[00:22:11]  Uh, a lot of debris, a lot of debris.
[00:22:14]  Well, that's what i'm saying, poor infrastructure, Arts District, brick building, and there was much ado about the bomb being near an, at Transmission building yes, so before we get into that and some of the theories that emerged, I do want to just go over a couple more details um, like a little bit more seriously about about the, the event.
[00:22:39]  Um yeah, so we said we mentioned that no one was killed except for the bomber.
[00:22:42]  Uh, there were about three minor injuries.
[00:22:44]  No one was seriously hurt.
[00:22:45]  I think that one of the officers like lost hearing for yeah, maybe for a little bit um, because they were so close to the bomb, but it didn't end up like it really didn't injure anybody.
[00:22:57]  And when you, I mean Some people have done some analysis on it, and it seems pretty clear that actually the entire, I don't know, the entire event attack, I don't even know how you want to, what you want to call this, was like basically painstakingly designed to minimize like total injury.
[00:23:14]  That's really the impression that you're sort of forced to have from this because I mean, an hour countdown of blaring like there is a bomb here.
[00:23:24]  I mean, it's almost like from a movie or something.
[00:23:26]  I mean, Christ.
[00:23:27]  Well, this is, yeah.
[00:23:29]  It's, it's, it's, it's not something that usually happens when people set off bombs with the intent to injure people.
[00:23:35]  It's very diehard.
[00:23:37]  Yes.
[00:23:37]  Yeah.
[00:23:38]  Yeah.
[00:23:38]  Which, you know, that's what I'm saying.
[00:23:40]  My man, he knows Christmas movie.
[00:23:42]  And it's, it's technically a Hanukkah thing because it's a Hollywood movie.
[00:23:50]  But it like counting down, getting the cops there, getting everyone to put them away.
[00:23:56]  I think in the original, like right after this happened, I think a lot of people were really horny to be like, this is an FBI plot or like, you know, there's maybe a false flag or something like that.
[00:24:06]  I am not getting any vibes like that from this.
[00:24:09]  Yeah.
[00:24:10]  I mean, I do want to mention two other things about the minimizing casualties is that, or one other thing, is that actually like you mentioned that the bomb wasn't that big.
[00:24:20]  It seems very clear that, I mean, it really wasn't that big.
[00:24:25]  If this dude wanted to damage a ton of shit, like it, he would not have done the bomb this way.
[00:24:32]  And it seems that, you know, if we want to get into like who he is and stuff about him, like it seems like he actually knew a decent amount about making bombs from like friends and kind of some like, you know, personal history and things that he's told people.
[00:24:48]  But like, it seems clear that this was like not this isn't, this wasn't like, you know, I don't think they've released like what the explosives were, but I don't think it was like C4 or something that would have like inflicted like mass damage where it, you know, like kind of radiates out.
[00:25:06]  I don't totally know how bombs work, but like, you know, creates like electrowaves that create mass more mass damage.
[00:25:13]  Like it seems like this was like propane or something.
[00:25:16]  Yeah, that's kind of the impression I get from it too, because it did not, I mean, it did, it did a lot of damage for not that crazy of a bomb, but like, it's not like he blew up, you know, leveled a city block or anything like that.
[00:25:30]  Right.
[00:25:30]  And like, you know, with like with vehicle-borne IEDs, like, you know, car bombs people are driving that I've seen, those things can level a city block, like totally demolish every building on there.
[00:25:42]  Yeah.
[00:25:43]  Not to mention what it could do to an arts district.
[00:25:45]  Exactly.
[00:25:46]  My God.
[00:25:46]  Can you imagine all the fucking crystal shops?
[00:25:49]  Oh, my God.
[00:25:49]  All of the gallery walls.
[00:25:51]  Galleries.
[00:25:52]  The paintings.
[00:25:52]  Askew.
[00:25:53]  Jesus Christ.
[00:25:55]  I don't even, let's not talk about it.
[00:25:57]  So you mentioned that all these people kind of came out and they were like, oh my God, is this a false flag?
[00:26:01]  Is this, you know, what's going on?
[00:26:03]  So people also were, I mean, everyone kind of was hoping, it seemed, that this was a bigger thing than it was.
[00:26:11]  Yes.
[00:26:12]  Which I think is a little bit like, you know, from a sociological perspective or whatever, pretty interesting.
[00:26:17]  Mark II and the N plus one kill list there.
[00:26:21]  Yeah.
[00:26:24]  But we should say that like the I mean the FBI, you know, leaked to whatever the press or the, you know, the local police, whoever was leaking it, was that he was apparently like a conspiracy guy.
[00:26:35]  He was maybe, you know, I'm not going to say that he was a true and non-listener because I don't want to say that.
[00:26:42]  He could have been.
[00:26:43]  Well, I know him.
[00:26:47]  But yeah, there's basically no indication.
[00:26:51]  I mean, it's possible that it, you know, we don't know.
[00:26:55]  You know, this could be true.
[00:26:57]  But from what the public, and including myself and Liz in that, is we don't, there's no indication that this was due to 5G or anything like that.
[00:27:07]  Yeah, that's kind of, yeah, that's like what people were saying.
[00:27:10]  Yeah.
[00:27:11]  It seems like hoping.
[00:27:12]  The police chief did come out and say that he has been hanging out with a lot of crackheads and drug addicts.
[00:27:19]  And I will say, as somebody who has spent considerable amounts of time embedded as a journalist in the crackhead and drug addict community who was doing research for newspapers and such, a lot of people in those communities believe all kinds of crazy things because they don't sleep.
[00:27:40]  Yeah.
[00:27:41]  I mean, we should say, like, someone, he mailed a couple packages that friends received like a couple days after the bombing.
[00:27:51]  They were, I think they were postmarked like two days before the bomb went off.
[00:27:55]  And, you know, they, each package, it sounds like each package contained about nine typed pages with each having two thumb drives in them that all, I mean, allegedly had videos on the drives.
[00:28:12]  It sounds like they were YouTubes as opposed to like, you know, home videos.
[00:28:18]  And apparently the letter, the letters, they have like a cover letter and it starts, hey dude, you will never believe what I found in the park.
[00:28:27]  Ominous.
[00:28:27]  My friend George once found a revolver in Dolores Park.
[00:28:32]  I found 20 bucks in a park once.
[00:28:34]  I found $5 yesterday and gave it to a lady on the street.
[00:28:36]  That's nice.
[00:28:37]  Yeah, I thought she had dropped it.
[00:28:39]  So it continues, the knowledge I have gained is immeasurable.
[00:28:42]  I now understand everything and I mean everything from who, what we really are to what the known universe really is.
[00:28:52]  And apparently he signed the cover letter Julio, which is very weird, but he has a dog named Julio.
[00:28:57]  I don't know.
[00:28:58]  It doesn't make sense to me.
[00:28:59]  I guess apparently he, like on another page, he said that the moon landing and 9-11 have so many anomalies they are hard to count, which I gotta say, absolutely correct.
[00:29:09]  Absolutely correct.
[00:29:11]  I know my impression of this guy is that he's like a lot of people that I have known throughout my life and spent considerable amounts of time with, in that he's basically like disconnected in any way from sort of the mainstream and sort of exists on the fringes and margins.
[00:29:28]  And I mean, once you get really into drugs or, you know, not even necessarily really into drugs, once you just kind of fall into like a certain segment of society, I guess like a, I guess you could call it lumping or whatever, a lot of these things become like this, this dude sounds like a lot of people I've met and I've known in my life.
[00:29:49]  And it's fucked up.
[00:29:50]  I mean, rarely do those people, I mean, people talk about, that's the other thing is like in my, you know, years in the drug business as a purchaser, I've met a lot of people who talk about doing a lot of things.
[00:30:05]  You'll hear people being like, oh, I fucking, I'll do this and this and this and this.

=== Ray Throckmorton's Strange Background (03:04) ===

[00:30:08]  People never do it.
[00:30:09]  And I've known people who like work on projects similar to what this guy has been working on.
[00:30:14]  Not bombs or anything like that, but you know, tinkering on stuff, always talking about, you know, doing shit.
[00:30:19]  And they never do it.
[00:30:20]  And I guess this is what happens when they do.
[00:30:22]  So we didn't mention his name.
[00:30:23]  His name is Anthony Quinn Warner.
[00:30:27]  And he was, it sounds like a self-employed computer consultant.
[00:30:32]  That can mean a lot of different things.
[00:30:34]  Apparently, he was once licensed to install burglar alarms.
[00:30:37]  Sounds like he had a lot of different jobs.
[00:30:40]  The media has really latched onto the conspiracy thing.
[00:30:42]  I guess he had told people that he, you know, believed that there were lizard people and that there were like switches inside of people's brains that they could turn on and off in order to like cloak their lizardness.
[00:30:58]  That's when you know you've gone too far, I gotta say.
[00:31:00]  I draw the line at lizard people and I draw a lot of crazy shit.
[00:31:03]  Me too, because it's like, why would they even have to hide it?
[00:31:07]  Yeah.
[00:31:08]  Plenty of people look like lizards.
[00:31:12]  There's some weird personal stuff in his background too.
[00:31:14]  I don't know how much we want to get into this.
[00:31:17]  I do want to mention that his girlfriend, well, it's a little more complicated than that.
[00:31:23]  His lawyer, Ray Throckmorton III, called the police about a year ago, alleging two things.
[00:31:29]  One, that his girlfriend, Anthony Quinn Warner's girlfriend, was sitting on her porch with a bunch of guns saying she was going to kill herself.
[00:31:38]  And two, that Warner was making a bomb.
[00:31:43]  And that these were somehow connected in some way.
[00:31:47]  And I do remember, I read the transcript of the call saying, the lawyer saying that there was kind of more to the bomb thing rather than the suicide thing.
[00:31:56]  Police come basically 5150, the girlfriend.
[00:32:00]  She's just sitting there on a porch with some guns next to her.
[00:32:03]  I think some of Warner's guns.
[00:32:05]  And then they go to Warner's residence and they see an RV in the back and a bunch of cameras hooked up to a security system in the front and they don't have a warrant, so they leave.
[00:32:17]  I'll be real with you.
[00:32:18]  Cops probably get calls like this all the fucking time.
[00:32:22]  Yeah, it doesn't seem all that surprising to me.
[00:32:24]  Yeah.
[00:32:25]  And so it is like, I think there was a lot of hay made about like, you know, oh, she was arrested 5150.
[00:32:32]  They knew it.
[00:32:32]  But it's like, I don't know.
[00:32:34]  You know, maybe they did, but I doubt they did.
[00:32:40]  Yeah, so that's just, I just think that's a little interesting backstory there.
[00:32:44]  I also really just wanted to say the name Roy Throckmorton III.
[00:32:49]  No, it's Ray.
[00:32:49]  Ray, excuse me.
[00:32:51]  Ray Throckmorton III.
[00:32:54]  It sounds like he married Angelina Jolie when she was 13 or something.
[00:32:58]  This sounds like a guy in a Harry Cruz book or something.
[00:33:01]  Listen, Ray, if you are listening to this, I extend you an invitation to come on the podcast and talk about really whatever you'd like.
[00:33:08]  Yeah.
[00:33:08]  Just tell us your life story.
[00:33:10]  Hey, who's Ray Throckmorton II?
[00:33:12]  Uh-huh.

=== NSA and AT&T Monitoring (15:27) ===

[00:33:13]  I'm interested in why you didn't go with the junior system.
[00:33:16]  And who's the first?
[00:33:18]  Uh-huh.
[00:33:18]  well that'd be the senior so you mentioned the 5g thing and that didn't just come out of the blue by the way
[00:33:39]  We didn't mention like a big thing, which was that it wasn't just that this was in an arts district, but that it was actually right outside an ATT building.
[00:33:50]  And this actually ended up disrupting so much ATT service.
[00:33:57]  Yes.
[00:33:57]  It was like, it was right outside one of ATT's like critical wireless hubs for the entire Southeast.
[00:34:05]  And the Southeast Wireless Network was basically shut down for a couple days.
[00:34:11]  Yeah.
[00:34:12]  And I think it's called FirstNet, which is like ATT's first responder network.
[00:34:17]  Yeah.
[00:34:17]  That apparently is just like a total boondoggle money fucking sink.
[00:34:21]  Oh, yeah.
[00:34:22]  Do you know?
[00:34:22]  I was reading about it and they have these things.
[00:34:24]  They have these blimps that they're using.
[00:34:26]  This is like some turn of the century fucking like fake Tesla as in Nikolai, not Jan.
[00:34:34]  Like crazy bullshit.
[00:34:35]  Yeah, they got flying blimps that they call cows.
[00:34:39]  What?
[00:34:39]  Yeah.
[00:34:40]  They call them things that people call fat people.
[00:34:43]  Yeah, they call them flying cows that are there to be like first responder satellites.
[00:34:49]  What?
[00:34:50]  Yeah, it's total bullshit.
[00:34:52]  It's like some real, like, you know, I don't know.
[00:34:55]  Well, that makes sense because a couple of flying cows were shot down with surface-to-air missiles outside of Memphis.
[00:35:01]  Remember in Twister when the cow like flies across the car?
[00:35:05]  I made my dad rent that movie like once a week.
[00:35:07]  And everyone was like, how did they do that?
[00:35:09]  Yeah, how did they?
[00:35:10]  Movie magic.
[00:35:12]  Anyway, okay, so the backup generators for this in the AT ⁇ T built didn't go down.
[00:35:18]  All of Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama cell service interruptions for like three days.
[00:35:25]  911 call senders can't take calls.
[00:35:27]  Phone lines are down.
[00:35:28]  Internet is down for the cops.
[00:35:30]  So God knows what they couldn't, they couldn't look at their blogs.
[00:35:33]  How to hit wife better?
[00:35:38]  Best point of contact, fist-to-face wife.
[00:35:40]  How hit wife?
[00:35:43]  Nashville Airport had to ground all flights for three hours, which is a very flat.
[00:35:48]  That's my like tinfoil hat red flag is when the airports have to down flights.
[00:35:52]  That's when I think perhaps something else is going on, but I don't know about here, I gotta say.
[00:35:58]  And like even in Atlanta, there were interruptions, which is like, I mean, Atlanta's like 250 miles away from Nashville.
[00:36:04]  I don't really understand that either.
[00:36:06]  You know, I'll tell you what, not a big wires guy.
[00:36:10]  You know, you go to these substations, there's wires going here, this guy is going there.
[00:36:14]  I'm like, why do you need this for Atlanta?
[00:36:16]  I don't get it.
[00:36:16]  It's a substation.
[00:36:18]  Well, it's like a station, but of a lesser variety.
[00:36:21]  Like, there's the station, you got the substation.
[00:36:24]  Anyway, okay, so people really latched onto this being right outside of AT ⁇ T and they were saying, ah, he was targeting ATT.
[00:36:29]  This is about 5G.
[00:36:30]  We've seen this like rash of 5G kind of infrastructure attacks over the past year.
[00:36:37]  I mean, really, like, it's been like, it's been happening for the past like three, four years, but really ramped up with the pandemic and, you know, everyone kind of freaking about COVID.
[00:36:50]  Well, I don't understand it because I use my cell phone all the time and I have COVID.
[00:36:53]  So it's like, I'm sorry, that's like a one-to-one thing.
[00:36:56]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:36:56]  You got proof is in the pudding, my friend.
[00:36:59]  And that's all I can eat because I've lost 100 IQ points since using my phone all the time.
[00:37:05]  We actually did an episode.
[00:37:06]  If you guys haven't listened, we did an episode on 5G a while ago with Jathan Sadowski.
[00:37:11]  And I would recommend you guys listen to that.
[00:37:12]  You can hear us talk about 5G.
[00:37:14]  Did you hear the way that Polish name just slipped off her tongue like that?
[00:37:18]  There was no, she didn't even, she's not even looking at any notes or nothing.
[00:37:22]  Incredible.
[00:37:24]  But I do want to say that, you know, May 2020, DHS released a report.
[00:37:29]  They said they saw an increase of 5G related attacks throughout the country and that people should kind of like expect to see more.
[00:37:38]  I think by people, they mean law enforcement, not necessarily like us.
[00:37:42]  You know, I think that they said that it was a lot because of like COVID and stuff.
[00:37:46]  My theory is that, you know, people that have issues with 5G aside from COVID trutherism, the feds are kind of like trying to tie it all together to make it seem a lot more crazier than maybe, you know, is warranted.
[00:38:01]  But they said violent extremists have drawn from misinformation campaigns online that claim wireless infrastructure is deleterious to human health and helps spread COVID-19, resulting in a global effort by like-minded individuals to share operational guidance and justification for conducting attacks against 5G infrastructure, some of which have already prompted arson and physical attacks against cell towers in several U.S. states.
[00:38:30]  Well, the weird thing about this too is that there's this apparently this source that the FBI has on Warner who says that he blamed 5G for his dad's cancer.
[00:38:44]  Which doesn't make sense because, I mean, well, first of all, I'm pretty sure this informant is full of shit because I've read a couple of stories that have talked about like people talking about a Tony Warner, some real estate agent who's like talking about a guy he knows.
[00:39:00]  One says that he wasn't into 5G conspiracy stuff at all.
[00:39:02]  He never mentioned it whatsoever.
[00:39:05]  And this other guy apparently says that he was building a bomb because of his father's cancer maybe, but he's been building a bomb for like a year.
[00:39:14]  Yeah.
[00:39:15]  Well, since December 2019, there have been at least five arson attacks targeting cell towers in just in Memphis alone, which is very strange.
[00:39:24]  Yeah, there, and also there was like additionally 14 other attacks in western Tennessee.
[00:39:30]  Tennessee is like a weird hotbed for 5G anti-5G activity, which if you live in Tennessee and you know why, let me know because I'm interested in this.
[00:39:39]  I've spent some time in Memphis before.
[00:39:43]  It's a weird place.
[00:39:44]  Yeah.
[00:39:45]  It's cool.
[00:39:45]  But I'm just wondering, you guys got anti-5G fever?
[00:39:48]  I want to know about it.
[00:39:50]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:39:51]  Let me know.
[00:39:52]  Is it like a, maybe it's like a garage rock thing?
[00:39:55]  I mean, we did talk about a little bit about this on the episode we did on the spy cops scandal in the UK, but, you know, like late 20th century, early, you know, like kind of like early 90s, anti-technology, global trade attack stuff was really big and really common.
[00:40:14]  And like pre-9-11 was like the biggest terrorist, like terrorist threat in the US.
[00:40:21]  I think it was like between 1996 and 2002.
[00:40:24]  You had like Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front.
[00:40:27]  They're targeting like research labs, multinationals, logging companies.
[00:40:33]  There's like, you know, it was like 600, 700 arsons, sabotage attacks.
[00:40:37]  I mean, this is like a huge thing.
[00:40:38]  And they would always focus on property not hurting people.
[00:40:42]  And I think that's why, you know, kind of like the remembrance, the memory of this stuff is one of the reasons why people kind of focus like, oh, maybe this is the return of this, you know?
[00:40:53]  Well, there was, there was those attacks on internet infrastructure in 2013 in Silicon Valley, which I've always been really, they've always really fascinated me because the way they're described by the press and by police officials is basically like a like crack team of like, you know, crack shots, you know, firing AR-15s at internet infrastructure solely to take it out and no one took credit.
[00:41:17]  Now, I've always been wondering, like, oh, I've always wondered rather, like, was that maybe like a, like a sort of blue team, red team thing by the government to see like, you know, like a stress test or whatever.
[00:41:28]  But if you actually did do it, then congratulations.
[00:41:32]  Because that's what I've always wondered.
[00:41:34]  Because people I know that have knowledge about technology are well aware that I've always asked, is there some place where I can turn the internet off?
[00:41:46]  And I've never gotten a super clear answer on that, except for those 2013 attacks, because they really fucked up the internet for a lot of people.
[00:41:52]  For like all Silicon Valley companies.
[00:41:55]  But yeah, we'll see if this stuff becomes more prevalent in the future.
[00:41:58]  There's the thing about AT&T, though.
[00:42:22]  Because Ante Quinn Warner, I don't think was targeting AT ⁇ T because, you know, he could have targeted the giant AT ⁇ T building several blocks from where he was.
[00:42:31]  Oh, yeah, we didn't mention that.
[00:42:32]  So it was like an AT ⁇ T call center that he was outside of, but there's like the biggest ATT HQ like three blocks away.
[00:42:39]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:40]  It's like with a sign on it.
[00:42:42]  Yes.
[00:42:42]  They call it like the Batman.
[00:42:45]  They do?
[00:42:45]  That's a Gotham or something?
[00:42:47]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:48]  Because it looks like Batman.
[00:42:50]  Oh, it's like one of those kind of buildings?
[00:42:52]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:53]  Some gargoyles.
[00:42:55]  Yeah.
[00:42:55]  I got a really good bringing it up.
[00:42:56]  No, no, it has like, it's like, it has like two points on it.
[00:42:59]  So it looks like the Batman Bat mask.
[00:43:01]  Okay, okay.
[00:43:02]  I get what you're saying.
[00:43:03]  I don't know what's going on in Nashville.
[00:43:05]  I've never been there.
[00:43:06]  Probably never going to go.
[00:43:08]  I'm just kidding.
[00:43:08]  We're having a live show there in the summer.
[00:43:12]  Anyways, here in San Francisco, there is a lot of AT ⁇ T stuff because, you know, we're always ticking and tapping away on the computer.
[00:43:19]  And there is a building downtown, down on Folsom Street, which is the home of the Folsom Street Fair.
[00:43:28]  Although this is a little further down towards the water.
[00:43:31]  There is an AT ⁇ T center with a room in it.
[00:43:35]  And that room is called 641A.
[00:43:38]  And you can't, if you work at ATT, it's very difficult to get in there.
[00:43:42]  In fact, I believe only a couple of employees, at least at the time that this came out, had access to that room.
[00:43:48]  However, some non-ATT workers had access to that room because those non-ATT workers work for a little telecoms communication company called the NSA.
[00:43:58]  So I'm going to, here's what I'm going to do.
[00:44:00]  And listeners, I want you to give me as much leeway as you can give me.
[00:44:06]  To preface this, I'm stupid.
[00:44:11]  Okay, I agree.
[00:44:12]  I'm smart.
[00:44:13]  And I'm much smarter than most people who listen to this.
[00:44:15]  But I'm, as my parents and teachers would say, a different kind of smart, Brace.
[00:44:21]  No, like, don't worry about it.
[00:44:23]  Those are just numbers.
[00:44:24]  You don't have to.
[00:44:25]  No, you get to go to the other high school.
[00:44:27]  They don't have homework and you can smoke there.
[00:44:30]  Although they took out the astrays in my last year there, but you could still smoke.
[00:44:33]  You just didn't have an astray.
[00:44:34]  I didn't really get what was up with that.
[00:44:36]  Anyways, the way the internet works is like this.
[00:44:42]  Fuck, I can't believe I have to do this.
[00:44:44]  I practiced this yesterday.
[00:44:45]  It's not going to work.
[00:44:47]  There is this thing called bandwidth.
[00:44:53]  And you know, when you're like, hey, like, Monica, do you, can you come help me with my lizard shit at home?
[00:45:00]  Because all the lizards are lose.
[00:45:02]  I can't get them back in.
[00:45:03]  And she's like, Brace, I have super low bandwidth today.
[00:45:06]  And I actually can't do that.
[00:45:08]  And she kind of upspeaks at the end, and you're like, I'm going to fucking kill you and your boyfriend.
[00:45:13]  Like, you have to come over here.
[00:45:14]  The lizards are everywhere.
[00:45:16]  Apparently, the internet's like that too.
[00:45:18]  So ATT is an internet service provider, in addition to a lot of other things.
[00:45:24]  And so when I use ATT internet, which I don't, by the way, I use the internet that Cartel's made.
[00:45:29]  I'm the only American consumer of it.
[00:45:32]  But, you know, ATT, their fucking network gets all so fucking crazy.
[00:45:36]  Everyone's like, oh my God, dude, I have to look at the internet.
[00:45:42]  And like, but everyone's looking at it at the same time.
[00:45:45]  They sort of offload some of that onto other ISPs.
[00:45:48]  And that happens in reverse too.
[00:45:50]  Like other internet service providers kind of offload their extra bandwidth through ATT.
[00:45:54]  This is called, as far as I can understand it.
[00:45:58]  And again, there is every, this could be totally incorrect, but I read about it a few times.
[00:46:04]  This is called peering.
[00:46:06]  Horrible name.
[00:46:07]  Sounds dirty.
[00:46:08]  Yes.
[00:46:09]  Well, and it's also on Pornhub.
[00:46:11]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:46:13]  I actually don't know what you're saying.
[00:46:15]  Not familiar with that website.
[00:46:16]  Just do memory.
[00:46:18]  Pure memory.
[00:46:21]  Pure memory of your web searches.
[00:46:23]  Pure memory from the last time I looked at porn and before my ISP blocked it because it is a cartel ISP.
[00:46:30]  And they're like, you're just supposed to be low.
[00:46:33]  Anyways, peering is when the things I just explained happened.
[00:46:38]  Yes.
[00:46:39]  And other foreign and domestic, saying that makes me feel like a national security official, other foreign and domestic internet service providers also peer with AT ⁇ T.
[00:46:49]  So there's a huge portion.
[00:46:51]  And people can't see what I'm doing, but I'm making sort of a flapping motion with my arms for some reason.
[00:46:56]  It's none of your fucking business what it is.
[00:46:59]  B-word.
[00:47:00]  And I almost, if I had said bitch right there, I'll drop it right now.
[00:47:06]  Baby.
[00:47:07]  Yeah.
[00:47:09]  Yeah, fucking bitch.
[00:47:11]  Let me finish talking about this.
[00:47:13]  This is really hard for me, and you're not making any easier.
[00:47:17]  I am.
[00:47:19]  I'm going to fucking do it.
[00:47:20]  So, is this loaded?
[00:47:22]  Yes.
[00:47:23]  So.
[00:47:24]  Please put it down.
[00:47:24]  Please put it down.
[00:47:26]  Okay.
[00:47:26]  Putting it at the computer, at the AT ⁇ T itself.
[00:47:29]  So anyways, a huge portion of internet of the world goes through these AT ⁇ T facilities, right?
[00:47:38]  Because we got these fiber optic cables underneath the ocean, like the fucking octopuses going around there.
[00:47:45]  All the fucking data going here, there.
[00:47:47]  What is that?
[00:47:48]  Oh my God.
[00:47:49]  I can't read this fucking email.
[00:47:50]  It's an Urdu.
[00:47:52]  Like, oh, Google Translate, Urdu.
[00:47:54]  He's saying my dick small, blah, blah, blah.
[00:47:59]  Anyways, there are only eight AT ⁇ T facilities in the U.S. that give access directly to this data route that carries a ton of internet traffic.
[00:48:10]  Again, foreign and domestic.
[00:48:13]  The NSA realizes this is a great idea.
[00:48:17]  We can fucking tap into that and with their long-term partners, start going into these facilities and building these rooms and these specialized rooms.
[00:48:26]  They have secret rooms in eight of these AT ⁇ T facilities.
[00:48:30]  This is all part of something called Operation Fairview, which we'll get into a little bit more later.
[00:48:35]  AT ⁇ T's code name within that, I really like this, lithium.

=== Monitoring Metadata: AT&T's NSA Cooperation (06:36) ===

[00:48:40]  Anyways, they apparently established this in around 2003 to monitor internet traffic.
[00:48:46]  And they say that they were able to monitor about 10% of domestic internet traffic through all of these.
[00:48:55]  I guarantee you that there is by now and probably back then a way for the NSA and AT ⁇ T to monitor closer to 100.
[00:49:04]  Yeah, I mean, it's basically like just take a photocopy of it, right?
[00:49:10]  If they wanted.
[00:49:10]  The problem, from my understanding, the problem is always just analyzing the data, not collecting it, but actually like sorting through all of it.
[00:49:18]  Well, they do that in South Korea.
[00:49:20]  It's like how TV shows like do a lot of animation there.
[00:49:23]  They just have a bunch of guys there do it.
[00:49:25]  Yeah, well, they have these different.
[00:49:27]  So, I mean, again, I'm not going to get too into this because I don't really understand a lot of it because internet stuff makes my fucking head hurt.
[00:49:33]  But they collect all this information.
[00:49:35]  They send it to NSA HQ.
[00:49:37]  They have these different programs there, a bunch of different ones.
[00:49:40]  The two I know more about are Marina and Mainway.
[00:49:44]  Marina, I guess, is where they store the, this is the code ninja program.
[00:49:48]  That's where they store the sort of raw metadata.
[00:49:51]  Mainway is a little different.
[00:49:52]  That can do like quality control and sorting.
[00:49:55]  I think in a lot of things, they basically are searching for keywords.
[00:49:58]  So like if, for instance, I'm like, I finally accept a fan request to do transcripts of our shows, which I'll never do for literally this exact reason.
[00:50:08]  No.
[00:50:09]  But like two people when we first started, but I don't know how to do it, so I'm not going to.
[00:50:14]  But one of the reasons we shouldn't do that is because if we do do that and they hear the words car bomb, arts district, then their little fucking system gets all horny.
[00:50:27]  Its fucking nipples get all fucked up looking, and it looks at me and it glares and it corners me and it pushes me and it says, Brace, you're under arrest.
[00:50:37]  I think that is how it works.
[00:50:39]  Exactly.
[00:50:40]  And like, listen, I get it.
[00:50:42]  I get that there's a more technical explanation for this.
[00:50:45]  I understand that some fucking nerd on some fucking TED Talk ass looking YouTube fucking thing or at a conference or at fucking the internet or something could tell you how this works exactly.
[00:50:56]  But it does not matter to me.
[00:50:58]  What does matter to me is that the government has secret rooms in the fucking ATT facilities where they look at every single fucking thing that you do on the internet that you're forced to use through every fucking facet of your life from fucking talking to girls to getting fucking groceries to buying fucking bullets to looking up how Anthony Quinn Warner made his fucking car bomb.
[00:51:17]  And that's the thing is I don't need to know where all the widgets and wires go, baby.
[00:51:23]  I'm just telling you.
[00:51:26]  We should say, I mean, we are focusing, you know, all the telecom companies partner with the government, but ATT really is a special case.
[00:51:34]  My God.
[00:51:35]  Now, I feel terrible because I actually do have ATT.
[00:51:38]  Well, wait, can I say something really quick?
[00:51:40]  Just one sentence?
[00:51:41]  What?
[00:51:41]  They really knock it out of the park.
[00:51:44]  That's a little thing about ATT Park.
[00:51:47]  Oh, because of baseball.
[00:51:50]  Is that a whole ball game there?
[00:51:51]  Oh, wait.
[00:51:52]  Did baseball happen?
[00:51:53]  Wait, did the World Series happen?
[00:51:55]  Yeah.
[00:51:55]  All right.
[00:51:56]  Well, don't care.
[00:51:57]  Yeah.
[00:51:58]  Oh, wait.
[00:51:58]  You didn't hear about that?
[00:51:59]  Did the Dodgers win?
[00:52:01]  No, Liz.
[00:52:03]  It was the first time a Japanese team won.
[00:52:05]  Okay, anyway.
[00:52:07]  So, no, ATT really does have like a special relationship with the NSA.
[00:52:15]  That is, I think it kind of like puts like Verizon even to shame, which is like another big dog.
[00:52:22]  They should mention that in their ads.
[00:52:25]  Well, they mentioned that in their ads in Washington.
[00:52:28]  Yes, we will say that we could get into.
[00:52:31]  But they've been working with the government, I mean, pretty much since when, I mean, I don't know, 85, although it's been really, I mean, much earlier than that.
[00:52:39]  Well, I mean, the government basically gave AT ⁇ T's parent company and Verizon, I think, parent company, Ma Bell, a fucking monopoly for like 60 fucking years before that.
[00:52:51]  So one could say they've been working with the government real close, basically since their inception.
[00:52:55]  So we should say, I mean, yeah, AT ⁇ T does have, is like a bit different than the other, the other of the big four, the Verizon, Sprint, G-Mobile, AT ⁇ T.
[00:53:07]  Those are kind of the big telecoms that we're talking about.
[00:53:09]  But AT ⁇ T has basically like the unique power to extract information from its metadata because it actually retains so much of it as opposed to the other companies.
[00:53:20]  So it owns, AT ⁇ T as a company owns about three quarters of U.S. of all U.S. land switches, landline switches.
[00:53:29]  And it's the second largest share of the nation's wireless infrastructure and cell phone towers.
[00:53:35]  And unlike other companies, it retains cell tower data going back to like 2008, which is like way longer than any other company.
[00:53:45]  It even like invented its own programming language in order to mine its own records for surveillance purposes.
[00:53:53]  CP Plus.
[00:53:54]  That's what it's called?
[00:53:55]  No, that's just a joke about the words childborn.
[00:54:00]  You think I would have gotten that?
[00:54:01]  And yet.
[00:54:02]  I didn't think you would have to do that.
[00:54:03]  You know what I would have said?
[00:54:04]  I didn't think you would have to do this.
[00:54:06]  There was, I didn't, you know, study computer programming or whatever, but there was a textbook that was called C ⁇ for U ⁇ .
[00:54:16]  Oh, look at that.
[00:54:18]  I thought that was cute.
[00:54:19]  They didn't have computers in my high school.
[00:54:21]  Just estrays.
[00:54:22]  Until they did.
[00:54:23]  Yeah, they really, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:25]  They really didn't, though.
[00:54:25]  It was, it was, it was, I didn't, I mean, not a lot of programmers came out of that thing.
[00:54:29]  Because you're 70 years old.
[00:54:31]  Yes.
[00:54:32]  Yes.
[00:54:34]  I mean, here's the thing is like AT ⁇ T basically like embeds itself, embeds the NSA in it.
[00:54:42]  And ATT does the same.
[00:54:45]  I don't even know how I phrased that the first time.
[00:54:47]  So what I'm saying here is that they're both embedded in each other.
[00:54:50]  And it's kind of hard to separate them at all because, you know, there was a lot to do about, oh, maybe the NSA is stopping and the NSA is changing.
[00:54:58]  Any shit you read about the government changing or stopping or tweaking its surveillance programs, they are usually just offloading some of that stuff onto these companies themselves.
[00:55:10]  So like, okay, maybe the NSA isn't storing all of your metadata for 10 years to look, you know, look through it.

=== Surveillance Partnerships (13:47) ===

[00:55:16]  But their company, their partners in private industry absolutely are.
[00:55:21]  I mean, ATT assisted the NSA in wiretapping the UN, Which stands for United Nations.
[00:55:31]  The thing too is that, like, you like you said that they're like kind of like it's hard to separate the two.
[00:55:37]  That's very true.
[00:55:38]  Like, this isn't just a contract.
[00:55:40]  Like, when we think of like a public-private partnership, um, like the NSA budget with ATT in 2013 was twice as large as any other partnership beneath it.
[00:55:51]  I think Verizon was the second biggest, like 118 whatever million, and ATT was like 280.
[00:56:00]  Yeah, and even like some of the in the internal documents, like a lot of that stuff is a lot of this stuff is coming from the Snowden, uh, the Snowden trove, or however you want to call it.
[00:56:11]  Um, tranche, tranche, tranche, oh, yeah, the tranche.
[00:56:14]  Uh, no, but even like the NSA even refers to it as a partnership, not like a contractual relationship.
[00:56:20]  So it's really like, um, you know, it's like they're co-producing, man.
[00:56:26]  Listen, like, I love being in a creative space with these people.
[00:56:30]  I love being a creative.
[00:56:32]  I, I'm sorry, I'm gonna get stuck on a loop here if you don't interrupt me.
[00:56:36]  I love working in a co-working space with ATT.
[00:56:39]  It's been one of the greatest things of my life.
[00:56:40]  I love living in this house with them in LA and being able to just fucking vibe when we want to.
[00:56:47]  We wear sweaters together.
[00:56:48]  Dude, those like COVID party houses are so crazy.
[00:56:52]  Just as a side note, before we keep going, yeah, man.
[00:56:55]  I, well, the one, the video I watched, I think I think I told you about this, is like all these like 17-year-old like influencers, but they're also like OnlyFans.
[00:57:05]  I didn't understand.
[00:57:05]  Did you say they only fan, but then they do all the other influencing, I think.
[00:57:10]  So they're like, but these were like male gendered.
[00:57:14]  Yeah, so is there like a big male contingent on OnlyFans?
[00:57:19]  I guess so.
[00:57:20]  I mean, because it's like, yeah, I mean, there must be.
[00:57:23]  I mean, according to this thing, it's like not only, I mean, they're, they're influencers.
[00:57:28]  So they're, yeah, Liz and I watched all these videos of like parties in LA, which, you know, I usually go to, but, you know, I haven't been due to my Chevrolet breaking down.
[00:57:39]  And like, all of these people were named like Instagram influencers/slash OnlyFans person.
[00:57:43]  Yeah.
[00:57:43]  And they had a horrible name.
[00:57:44]  Like, there was like, you know, Clayton Tershaw.
[00:57:49]  Yeah.
[00:57:49]  But, but in one of the videos, and they're all like 18.
[00:57:52]  And in one of the videos, I paused it.
[00:57:54]  And in the background is a guy named Father Damon, who was famous.
[00:57:58]  He's like a 55-year-old guy who ran a sex club in LA called Sanctum.
[00:58:03]  And I'm like, huh, okay.
[00:58:04]  He's hanging out with these 16-year-old kids, 17-year-old kids.
[00:58:07]  This is a great sign.
[00:58:08]  Sounds great.
[00:58:09]  Sounds like a case for Truanon.
[00:58:12]  I did DM him on Instagram about it.
[00:58:14]  her back but i've dm'd him a lot on instagram because i'm trying to i'm trying to uh get him arrested okay wait so back to at&t so So, like we're saying, this is like a very like, you know, fruitful partnership, collaborative environment with the government.
[00:58:44]  This, like, this is no more evident than in what was called Operation Hemisphere.
[00:58:50]  Yes.
[00:58:51]  Which started in, I guess, is like at least 2007, although it's probably much earlier than that.
[00:58:59]  But we should say that Hemisphere wasn't even really like simply just a partnership like any of its other, any of the other kind of operations that the NSA was running.
[00:59:11]  But this is like a product that ATT basically developed, marketed, sold in tandem with the DEA.
[00:59:20]  And they're actually like, like, it seems like this has been completely memory hold or like what people have retained from the sort of era of like surveillance reporting, we'll say, which was kind of like late Bush to early Obama.
[00:59:37]  Yeah.
[00:59:38]  If we're doing it that way, early to mid-Obama.
[00:59:43]  This has been kind of like memory hold what they were doing with the DEA, but it was a much larger scale than some of the stuff that was happening with the NSA.
[00:59:53]  It seems like.
[00:59:54]  Yeah, I mean, the NSA was logging 1.8 billion phone calls a day.
[00:59:59]  The DEA and ATT were logging 4 billion per day.
[01:00:04]  And so it's like a scale several times larger.
[01:00:07]  And you might think like, oh, well, it's the DEA.
[01:00:10]  Like, first of all, the DEA are the fucking biggest drug runners in the fucking world.
[01:00:14]  But like, it is, I mean, this is apparently a program that is supposed to be able to tell if somebody has like a burner phone or if somebody replaces their old phone or something like that.
[01:00:26]  But like logging 4 billion calls a day is fucking insane.
[01:00:30]  And it's not like the NSA, where the NSA can only ostensibly go back five years into call records.
[01:00:35]  These guys can go back to 19 fucking 84 with call records.
[01:00:40]  I mean, it's incredible.
[01:00:41]  I mean, they have an insane amount of stuff they can look at.
[01:00:44]  I mean, this shit was basically unknown.
[01:00:48]  There's a lot less known about this and the NSA stuff just in general.
[01:00:53]  A lot of this is from a guy named Drew Hendrix who got it from FOIA requests.
[01:00:57]  He got a bunch of slides.
[01:00:58]  And according to the slides he got, I read these slides, the DHS, they have this one called protecting the program.
[01:01:06]  And if they're ever asked to refer to any of the way that they got this information, they just have to refer to ATT subpoenas.
[01:01:13]  And this goes way beyond the scale of stuff allowed by the Patriot Act or anything like that.
[01:01:17]  And we know essentially nothing about it.
[01:01:19]  I mean, it's, they just say that they're looking at drug dealers' phones, but even in their own fucking slides, all of the victories that they claim are about like, oh, we got like some cocaine and three AK-47s in like Tucson.
[01:01:33]  And like, they're not, they're sort of busts that you would expect like local cops to get.
[01:01:38]  It's nothing really insane at all.
[01:01:40]  But it's just massive surveillance.
[01:01:42]  Yeah, it's not even just drug stuff, too.
[01:01:43]  It's like they're looking at like Medicaid fraud.
[01:01:46]  It's like very, it's like really, really crazy stuff.
[01:01:50]  That basically it sounds like they're just, they're surveilling and then using that surveillance to dictate what crimes they're looking at.
[01:01:57]  Exactly.
[01:01:58]  Exactly.
[01:01:58]  And that's the same with all this.
[01:02:00]  I mean, it's like, it's like the NSA stuff is, oh, we're looking at terrorists.
[01:02:03]  But like, no, dude, they're just looking at everything.
[01:02:06]  Yeah.
[01:02:06]  And they're never going to stop.
[01:02:08]  Like, no reform is going to stop this.
[01:02:11]  No fucking, no one has ever actually in any real way or even in any minor way tried to impede on the power that these guys have.
[01:02:19]  Well, it's also like the definition of like terrorists gets defined by whatever the surveillance shows people.
[01:02:26]  Yeah.
[01:02:26]  Like shows them.
[01:02:27]  You know what I mean?
[01:02:28]  Yeah.
[01:02:29]  I mean, ATT is just, I mean, they spend so much money like lobbying the government and like working in tandem with the government.
[01:02:41]  I mean, it pays off for them, right?
[01:02:42]  They get these huge contracts.
[01:02:44]  They get all this stuff.
[01:02:45]  They get the tax cuts that they've always wanted.
[01:02:47]  They spent like 16.8 million on lobbying federal officials just in 2017 alone, which is huge.
[01:02:55]  They just were, they were just granted that massive, you know, merger with Time Warner just a couple years ago that they were really worried about.
[01:03:04]  So much so that they, remember, there was a whole scandal of them hiring Michael Cohen.
[01:03:08]  Remember?
[01:03:09]  Classic, classic.
[01:03:10]  Putting him on retainer because they thought it would like ingratiate them to the Trump admin.
[01:03:14]  Well, I mean, you, yeah, yeah, it's that's did it?
[01:03:18]  Well, no, because that's what's interesting is that Trump DOJ was actually not going to grant the merger, but the courts, of course, were because the U.S. government doesn't give a fuck.
[01:03:29]  Classic.
[01:03:30]  Love the courts.
[01:03:31]  Yeah, you got to love them.
[01:03:32]  So you might be thinking, damn, all this shit sounds really illegal, right?
[01:03:38]  You know, like you'd be like, damn, that's crazy.
[01:03:42]  Like, they can just look at all your stuff.
[01:03:43]  Like, that's, doesn't that sound like a violation of the Fourth Amendment and like maybe even the First Amendment?
[01:03:49]  Who gives a fuck?
[01:03:50]  All these fucking companies have immunity.
[01:03:53]  Yeah, that's what's I mean, the telecoms, they got a real big gift from the U.S. government.
[01:04:00]  When was it was like 2008?
[01:04:02]  They get like crazy immunity.
[01:04:05]  And, you know, I'm just going to say it.
[01:04:06]  They got an Epstein-like deal.
[01:04:09]  Yes, they do.
[01:04:10]  Cause it's retroactive immunity.
[01:04:12]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:04:13]  So before we get into what it is, I just want to give this like little history of it because I think it's important to understand like what's what's crazy is that basically after the church committee, right?
[01:04:24]  So in the wake of the church committee, which finds that the U.S. government is, you know, spying on a bunch of political dissidents, on, you know, in like the black radical community and, you know, communists, et cetera, whatever.
[01:04:38]  Girls that thinks are hot.
[01:04:39]  Yeah, totally.
[01:04:41]  In, you know, locker rooms, et cetera.
[01:04:43]  Jane Fonda.
[01:04:47]  Basically, Congress ended up passing a bunch of laws in order to make sure that the telecoms didn't partner with the government to spy on citizens.
[01:04:56]  And so it's interesting because basically what they did was they wrote in these immunity clauses in order to say like, okay, we're not going to prosecute you if you make good faith mistakes.
[01:05:07]  Like you're partnering and you don't know that the government's doing this, right?
[01:05:11]  So because we don't want you working with the government to spy on people.
[01:05:14]  And so what's funny is that like basically post 9-11, you know, you get these, you know, before Snow, way before Snowden, you get these first reports in the New York Times, like around 2005, that come out that the Bush admin is partnering with the telecoms to collect data to spy on people.
[01:05:31]  And, you know, this was like the early stuff, right?
[01:05:33]  This isn't the Five Eyes stuff or any of the kind of PowerPoint Snowden docs, right?
[01:05:42]  So people start suing the telecom companies because they're like, what the fuck?
[01:05:47]  And, you know, obviously there's like mass targeting of Arab Americans happening after 9-11.
[01:05:53]  I mean, there's so much domestic spying.
[01:05:55]  And this was like really, I mean, this was pretty unheard of.
[01:05:59]  So the telecom companies, what they do is they say, hey, wait a second.
[01:06:02]  We have immunity.
[01:06:04]  Yeah.
[01:06:04]  You can't do it.
[01:06:05]  You can't touch us.
[01:06:06]  We got immunity.
[01:06:07]  Suck my fucking dick.
[01:06:08]  And then the courts, what the courts do is they say, this is actually kind of baller, I will say.
[01:06:14]  And everyone knows I hate the courts.
[01:06:16]  The courts come back and they say, no, you would have to be an idiot if you thought any of this was not egregious spying.
[01:06:23]  Like this is so over the top and obvious that you absolutely knew what you were doing that this, your immunity doesn't cover this.
[01:06:32]  And so the telecoms are like, fuck, what do we do?
[01:06:35]  So they freak out and they start petitioning the government and they're like, hey, Bush admin, you got to help us out.
[01:06:41]  We can't go to jail.
[01:06:42]  This is crazy.
[01:06:42]  Give me a little sugar.
[01:06:43]  Give me a little sugar.
[01:06:44]  You, hey, we worked with you.
[01:06:46]  You told us we'd be cool.
[01:06:47]  Why aren't we cool?
[01:06:48]  They basically threatened to withdraw all their partnerships with the government, which is like basically kind of like a capital strike in like a funny way.
[01:06:57]  And they throw like billions and billions of dollars at Congress lobbying.
[01:07:01]  Funny enough, Verizon, you know who they get to represent themselves?
[01:07:07]  Oh, tell it to me.
[01:07:09]  William Barr.
[01:07:10]  There we go.
[01:07:11]  Yeah.
[01:07:11]  So, Billy Barr, as we know, former attorney general for Donald Trump, also former official in the Daddy Bush's administration.
[01:07:25]  And of course, speaking of daddy, his father, of course, was the first person to hire Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:07:31]  Yes.
[01:07:32]  So, yeah, he's general counsel at Verizon, petitioning his old boss, W. Bush, to, you know, to help him out, help out the telecoms.
[01:07:43]  They put pressure on Congress.
[01:07:45]  They put pressure on the federal government.
[01:07:48]  And boom, you get this crazy, crazy.
[01:07:52]  I mean, this was really controversial at the time, right?
[01:07:55]  I mean, you get a crazy law granting all of the telecoms retroactive immunity for like.
[01:08:01]  So cool.
[01:08:02]  Yeah, and this was, you know, I should say this is right after, I mean, Congress was passing retroactive immunity clauses left and right, because remember they also passed a law that gave all CIA officers retroactive immunity if they could be found to be dealing in war crimes.
[01:08:18]  Yes.
[01:08:19]  I mean, it's like fucking, I mean, it is really, really crazy.
[01:08:23]  And this was a big deal, too, I remember because, you know, this was right before Obama was elected.
[01:08:30]  This was like July 2008.
[01:08:32]  And Obama, at the time, Senator Obama, after he'd been community organizer, Obama, of course.
[01:08:39]  Senator Obama had come out and said, like, oh, we're going to fight this.
[01:08:43]  The telecoms can't get this.
[01:08:45]  Blah, July rolls around.
[01:08:48]  Senator Obama's like, maybe it's not that we're going to deal.
[01:08:51]  I don't know.
[01:08:51]  Yeah.
[01:08:52]  No one could force the vote on him.
[01:08:54]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:08:55]  I know what you're saying.
[01:08:56]  Then fucking, of course, he gets in office and he's like, this NSA thing, as a constitutional lawyer, I'll allow it.
[01:09:03]  Yeah.

=== Obama's Telecom Battle (04:35) ===

[01:09:04]  All good, brother.
[01:09:06]  Yeah.
[01:09:06]  So the telecoms, I mean, yeah, they're good.
[01:09:10]  Yeah.
[01:09:11]  Oh, yeah.
[01:09:11]  Oh, yeah.
[01:09:12]  They're smooth operators, man.
[01:09:13]  I mean, they are slick.
[01:09:16]  And so when we talk about a guy like Anthony Quinn Warner, a guy who basically committed suicide in a spectacular fashion, I will say he is doing more against the telecom industry than any of these fucking crooks in Congress.
[01:09:47]  That is nowhere an endorsement of what he did.
[01:09:49]  In fact, we find all things that are explosive to be abhorrent.
[01:09:55]  I forgot to mention, I want to say one thing, is that I have a theory.
[01:10:00]  You ready?
[01:10:01]  Oh, always.
[01:10:03]  So you remember Serial?
[01:10:05]  The podcast?
[01:10:06]  Yes.
[01:10:06]  Yeah.
[01:10:07]  I think that was MPR propaganda for ATT surveillance.
[01:10:13]  To be like, oh, look, the fucking four things.
[01:10:17]  Yeah, they're like, oh, damn, if ATT had better fucking surveillance, we could show that Adnon should marry Sarah Koenig.
[01:10:25]  Yeah.
[01:10:26]  Do you think he ever put his hand on her knee underneath the visitor table?
[01:10:30]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:10:31]  He's like, Sarah.
[01:10:33]  know what remember the whole you know what was the other thing that happened while we were gone What?
[01:10:39]  Fucking Shakrelli.
[01:10:40]  Shakrelly.
[01:10:41]  However, how do you say his name?
[01:10:42]  Yeah, some wait.
[01:10:43]  So yeah, I was always going out with that Because I was in the throes of not sleeping.
[01:10:49]  Yeah.
[01:10:49]  Very Sarah Koenig.
[01:10:52]  By the way, you know, her stepdad?
[01:10:53]  CIA.
[01:10:54]  Oh, yeah.
[01:10:55]  Actually.
[01:10:56]  Literally.
[01:10:57]  This also bolsters my theory.
[01:10:59]  Also, CIA.
[01:11:01]  Yeah.
[01:11:02]  What's the national?
[01:11:03]  The nation of America, where the CIA is.
[01:11:05]  Absolutely.
[01:11:06]  Yeah.
[01:11:06]  So, well, the Shkrelly guy, he's just like, some journalist falls in love with him?
[01:11:11]  Yeah, he's, yeah.
[01:11:13]  She, like, she, like, leaves her husband.
[01:11:16]  Classic.
[01:11:17]  She's a journalist.
[01:11:18]  Oof.
[01:11:19]  Oof.
[01:11:20]  Rough.
[01:11:21]  Falls in love with him.
[01:11:22]  Mm-hmm.
[01:11:23]  Doesn't seem like he's calling her back.
[01:11:25]  He cuts her off.
[01:11:27]  Sounds like she's trying to get a book deal.
[01:11:29]  Sounds like he's trying to get some nookie in the pussy.
[01:11:34]  What's nookie mean?
[01:11:35]  Does that just mean vagina?
[01:11:36]  Or does that mean the act of okay?
[01:11:38]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:11:39]  Did it all for the nookie?
[01:11:41]  Yeah, but I mean, I don't know what that means.
[01:11:43]  I don't know if anyone did.
[01:11:46]  Yeah, I gotta say, if you're hanging out with that guy, I get it's like a funny meme.
[01:11:53]  You gotta go to a doctor or something.
[01:11:55]  You're mentally ill.
[01:11:56]  That being said, I would really like to talk to him.
[01:11:59]  Yeah, oh, yeah, Shkrelly, if you want to come on the show, we'll talk to you.
[01:12:02]  You know what I'm a big fan of?
[01:12:04]  His blog?
[01:12:05]  He's a great blogger.
[01:12:06]  Everyone should check out his blog.
[01:12:07]  I don't read blogs.
[01:12:09]  He's a good blogger.
[01:12:10]  It's like a return to the medium.
[01:12:12]  He understands the form of blogging.
[01:12:14]  Is he still blogging?
[01:12:14]  He walks it out of the park.
[01:12:16]  Occasionally, yeah.
[01:12:17]  How does he blog from prison?
[01:12:19]  They get internet time.
[01:12:21]  Oh.
[01:12:22]  Well, he also probably can send.
[01:12:23]  You know, he's going to be out soon.
[01:12:25]  Yeah, I know.
[01:12:26]  Get this, Martin, how do you say his name?
[01:12:30]  I always say it wrong and you make fun of me.
[01:12:32]  Shakrelly?
[01:12:32]  Shakrelly.
[01:12:33]  We'll say Shakrelly.
[01:12:34]  No, it's Shkrelly.
[01:12:35]  Shkrelly.
[01:12:36]  Martin Skrillex will be exiting the old Gray Bar Hotel for the last time.
[01:12:44]  Who's Cal?
[01:12:45]  Entering Mayor Andrew Yang's New York City.
[01:12:50]  If that happens, he's got to put, Yang's got to put Shkreli in charge of prison reform.
[01:12:58]  That man, I mean, talk about a glow-up.
[01:13:01]  Which one?
[01:13:02]  Shkrelli.
[01:13:03]  Oh, yeah.
[01:13:05]  The Yangasons of Manhattan.
[01:13:07]  Incredible.
[01:13:08]  Incredible.
[01:13:09]  And when Christi went in, Yang was barely even the blip on the radar.
[01:13:12]  Now look at him.
[01:13:13]  Yang is the most popular politician in the United States, according to polls.
[01:13:17]  I mean, he's going to turn around.
[01:13:18]  He's going to turn that island around.
[01:13:20]  It's going to be incredible what he does.
[01:13:22]  Gotham will ride.
[01:13:23]  It's going to be the Tulsi Gabbard of New York City.
[01:13:27]  Man.
[01:13:27]  It's going to be fucking City of London, baby.
[01:13:30]  Let's go.
[01:13:30]  Bring it home.
[01:13:31]  I'm excited.
[01:13:32]  Bitcoin's going up.
[01:13:33]  So are his odds.
[01:13:36]  Everyone, this has been lovely.
[01:13:38]  It has been a pleasure.

=== Gotham's Rising (00:56) ===

[01:13:40]  I'm listening to this.
[01:13:41]  I know.
[01:13:41]  It's good.
[01:13:42]  I'm feeling good.
[01:13:42]  I'm grooving.
[01:13:43]  Yeah.
[01:13:44]  Maybe a little bumpy to start, but you know what?
[01:13:47]  We got it.
[01:13:47]  We got it.
[01:13:48]  Yeah, no, we cut all that stuff out, Liz.
[01:13:50]  Oh, okay, perfect.
[01:13:51]  Yeah, no, don't worry.
[01:13:52]  They'll never know what you said there.
[01:13:54]  They'll never know who you were talking about.
[01:14:00]  You think you're shocked?
[01:14:01]  But I can't believe you said that.
[01:14:02]  Clever.
[01:14:03]  I can't believe you said that.
[01:14:05]  My name is Brace.
[01:14:09]  My name is Liz.
[01:14:12]  We should say that we are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:14:15]  And on this episode, the music is done by John Vanderslice.
[01:14:20]  And the podcast?
[01:14:22]  What's it called, baby?
[01:14:23]  Give me the name.
[01:14:24]  What's it called?
[01:14:24]  What are they listening to?
[01:14:25]  They've been listening to this for one hour and 20 minutes.
[01:14:28]  What is it called?
[01:14:29]  Tell me the name, Liz.
[01:14:31]  It's called Truanon.
[01:14:34]  And we will see you next time.