True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 384: Epoch End Times
Aired: 2024-06-06
Duration: 01:07:37


=== Good Night VRC Situation (03:11) ===

[00:00:00]  Ladies and gentlemen, my dear friend Liz Francak would like to read a poem that she's written for the occasion.
[00:00:08]  Liz, if you would.
[00:00:09]  According to the PRC's unwritten protocol, to be Chinese these days, it seems you can't be Falun Gong.
[00:00:19]  Your race or where you're born no longer matter much at all.
[00:00:23]  You have to be an atheist in order to belong.
[00:00:28]  Good citizen or not, unless you bow to Xi Jinping, you'll find yourself condemned as one of China's enemies, no longer viewed as human by the party, but a thing, whose life and body parts the government is free to seize.
[00:00:45]  To have faith in God, or something greater than the state, will mark you as a traitor or could lead to your arrest with prison or labor camp, your destiny and fate, as many who have suffered through such trials will attest.
[00:01:01]  How strange that only communists can call themselves Chinese.
[00:01:06]  That's right.
[00:01:09]  Uyghurs, excuse me, while Uyghurs, Jews, and Christians are held worthy to condemn, but Chinese en Formosa who declare they're Taiwanese are part of what the PRC declares belongs to them.
[00:01:26]  I don't know about the verse here.
[00:01:28]  I'm just going to say right off the bat.
[00:01:29]  I just, it's a little awkward.
[00:01:30]  That's a little tough.
[00:01:32]  How sad that people are condemned for being who they are.
[00:01:37]  So true.
[00:01:38]  Unless they publicly abandon all that they believe or bow and scrape before some petty party commissar.
[00:01:47]  If I were in their place, I'd pack my things and try to leave.
[00:01:55]  I think that's actually pretty good.
[00:02:09]  I'm imagining it in one of those like, like cardboard, you know, children's books where, you know, they kind of like fold out and they've got the, you know, a little good night moon.
[00:02:34]  but this is like good night VRC kind of situation.
[00:02:37]  I have always said, so I, as you know, I hold to very obscure racial theories that I myself spend most of my free time crafting.
[00:02:46]  Sure.
[00:02:46]  And it's crazy to actually see something.
[00:02:48]  It's like almost like a bit of a synchronicity to see one of Rachel Jake's theories in the wild because Long said that if you adhere to like strongly left-wing political beliefs, you are Chinese.
[00:03:02]  And to see that in a poem like this, read by a woman like you, another Chinese person just like me, it is, it is, what is that?

=== Invisible Gong Smack (04:35) ===

[00:03:12]  It's validating.
[00:03:15]  How strange that only communists can call themselves Chinese.
[00:03:18]  I like that line.
[00:03:19]  I think there's a good rhythm to it.
[00:03:21]  It's nice.
[00:03:21]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:23]  Hello.
[00:03:23]  My name is, and we don't have the gong because I'm recording from a prison cell, Brace Belden.
[00:03:30]  My name is Liz, and we're recording from a prison cell because I, oops, gave away all of Brace's organs.
[00:03:37]  Whoops.
[00:03:38]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky, and this is no gong truan.
[00:03:45]  Hello.
[00:03:46]  So Liz is joking about donating my organs because I have no.
[00:03:49]  That's right, because I made money off of it.
[00:03:51]  Yes, yes, she sold my organs.
[00:03:53]  But the fact of the matter is, is that I am in prison and you're allowed to podcast from here now.
[00:03:58]  And so is Liz, because obviously many of you know that we are independent media company.
[00:04:06]  That we are independent media company.
[00:04:08]  But did you know that that's illegal now, Liz?
[00:04:12]  It is.
[00:04:13]  You know why?
[00:04:14]  Why?
[00:04:15]  Brandon's DOJ keeps going after the freedom-speaking, freedom-loving, freedom not fearing.
[00:04:26]  I'm still trying to keep going.
[00:04:28]  Fellow CFOs of independent media companies.
[00:04:33]  Now, Liz, I have often winced visibly when you refer to Biden's Department of Justice, the DOJ, as Biden's Department of Jewish Lawyers, the DOG, JL, as you call it.
[00:04:46]  But you know what?
[00:04:48]  It's true.
[00:04:48]  It's true.
[00:04:49]  She won't tell it either.
[00:04:51]  But you should say here the stuff that she says privately that she knows I'll forgive her for.
[00:04:58]  The Epoch Times is under attack, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:05:02]  Which here's what they need to do a ruling on, by the way.
[00:05:05]  Is it epic times or epoch times?
[00:05:07]  That's what we need someone to come down with.
[00:05:11]  Let us know.
[00:05:12]  What conclusion did we come to during the Fall and Gong series?
[00:05:15]  The thing is, I think it's epoch times because that's how epoch is spelled.
[00:05:22]  But through doing that series and you constantly saying epic times, I've just now, now I just say epic times.
[00:05:30]  And now when I read the word epoch, I read it epic and it's like fucking me up.
[00:05:35]  I think they say epic times sometimes.
[00:05:37]  I don't think people know what.
[00:05:39]  They also commit crazy fraud.
[00:05:41]  Alleged to commit crazy fraud by Biden's Department of, as Liz calls it, Jews, lawyers.
[00:05:47]  That's not.
[00:05:48]  It's just, it's not.
[00:05:49]  I call it the Department of Justice.
[00:05:50]  Liz has her own little nickname for it.
[00:05:53]  Ladies and gentlemen, you might remember our three-part series, 3.5-part series on the Fallon Gong.
[00:06:01]  Oh my God, I wish we weren't fucking recording remote.
[00:06:04]  Do you know how tempting it is for me right now to just hold an invisible mallet in my hand and smack an invisible gong?
[00:06:12]  But you would look at me like that.
[00:06:13]  Do it, but Young Chomsky can just put in a gong sound, but let's make it a gong sound that's very different from our gong sound.
[00:06:20]  Yeah.
[00:06:21]  Because I do want to say that I saw some people saying that they were like, oh, I always assumed the gong was like not real.
[00:06:26]  The gong.
[00:06:27]  It was just a sound.
[00:06:28]  And I'm like, bitch, seriously?
[00:06:30]  You think we didn't buy a fucking gong?
[00:06:33]  The gong is next to my feet.
[00:06:36]  My bare feet, which stinking or sweaty.
[00:06:39]  Ew, I don't want that in there.
[00:06:41]  But keep it.
[00:06:43]  The gong is the gong stands next to my bare feet every time we record.
[00:06:47]  So right now, young Chomsky, will you do an artificial gong?
[00:06:56]  We did a 3.5 episode series on the Fallon gong.
[00:07:01]  I say 3.5 because three episodes are about the Fallon Gong.
[00:07:04]  And the 0.5, which is actually a full episode, despite what the 0.5 might tell you, is an interview with a former Epoch Times Epoch Times journalist who had some, let's say, illuminating things to say about his time at the company.
[00:07:21]  Which, by the way, if you haven't listened to that series, go listen to it.
[00:07:26]  It's crazy if you haven't.
[00:07:27]  We're putting the links in this in the description so you can just click on over real easy.
[00:07:31]  It's quite a guess.
[00:07:34]  Bryce and Young Chomsky famously got interviewed by Shen Yun promoters after we went and watched it at Lincoln Center.
[00:07:45]  So Tang Dynasty television.

=== Guan's Online Empire (15:31) ===

[00:07:47]  Well, same thing.
[00:07:48]  It's all one thing, which you'll find out about when you listen to our series.
[00:07:53]  Okay.
[00:07:54]  The CFO of Epic Times was indicted this week in the good old southern district of New York for allegedly laundering $67 million of, quote, illegally obtained unemployment benefits to fund the media company.
[00:08:13]  It's a lot more exciting than it sounds, I promise.
[00:08:17]  They were targeted by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which is what?
[00:08:25]  A bunch of different Leo agencies.
[00:08:28]  Like, what's going on there?
[00:08:30]  Yeah, it's like it just, it's like a bunch of different, it's like FBI, I think DEA, all these guys.
[00:08:34]  It's like a fucking task force.
[00:08:35]  So they got a guy from everything in there.
[00:08:37]  They were actually, they were targeted by a bunch of different government agencies, including, of course, the Department of Labor, because, well, they were stealing unemployment benefits and the Department of I believe it's DSS Diplomatic Security Services, which has to do with like, I think that was more like coordinating foreign law enforcement agencies, like helping out with actually like nailing maybe where this was coming from.
[00:09:03]  Legit.
[00:09:04]  I thought you were going to say the DSA.
[00:09:05]  That's the DSA.
[00:09:07]  Yeah.
[00:09:07]  Well, no, it's not.
[00:09:08]  Cooperation is good.
[00:09:09]  Everyone is all kind of working together on this one.
[00:09:12]  The CFO, which of course stands for Cash Fun Organizing, Wai Dong Guan, aka Bill Guan, he got hit with two counts of bank fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
[00:09:30]  He's the CFO.
[00:09:30]  That's the chief financial officer.
[00:09:32]  He's the guy that seems to be sort of the one that's been in charge of basically making all of its money over the past few years.
[00:09:40]  And something we talked about in our series when we, you know, towards the end, when we kind of were discussing the epoch Epic Times, was how crazy their money operation seemed to be post-2020, that they were just kind of raking in all of this money and no one was really clear where it was coming from.
[00:09:59]  Yeah.
[00:10:00]  I mean, if people will remember, if you live in like a city that has a city hall, which not most of the country, if you look like near San Francisco City Hall, for example, in 2015, 2016, you would see a couple of Epic Times like newsstands or whatever.
[00:10:14]  They were handing out the paper.
[00:10:15]  Maybe you could buy it.
[00:10:16]  I don't know, but it was a pretty small operation.
[00:10:19]  And then it seemed like during the Trump years, especially like maybe 2017, 2018, then really 2019, 2020, it was everywhere.
[00:10:29]  I mean, it became such a big ad fucking money ad spender on Facebook that they actually banned it from advertising because it was basically like unofficial Trump ads that they were running.
[00:10:42]  But they became one of the most prominent conservative news outlets in the country.
[00:10:46]  I mean, they have like a dozen YouTube channels, very few of which actually disclose affiliation with Epic Times, let alone Falon Gong, just in English alone.
[00:10:55]  But they are worldwide.
[00:10:57]  They have different, like, you know, they have like YouTube channels in countries with languages that you could never even believe, like Vietnamese.
[00:11:06]  But they are everywhere.
[00:11:08]  And they became one of the biggest like kind of QAnon, Michael Flynn, kind of crazy out there, right-wing media outlets in the country.
[00:11:15]  I think what surprised a lot of people is how big they were able to, they were able to come that quickly.
[00:11:20]  I mean, they just, what?
[00:11:24]  I don't fucking know.
[00:11:30]  How big they were able to get and how quickly they were able to do so.
[00:11:35]  Yes, yes.
[00:11:35]  But I like the way you said it too.
[00:11:37]  Sorry, I'm really hot in this room right now.
[00:11:40]  My God.
[00:11:41]  I'm glad that I finally got to drop a pause.
[00:11:43]  That made sense.
[00:11:44]  Young Chomsky, why don't you have the air conditioning on?
[00:11:46]  You don't have to, the mic's not picking up.
[00:11:48]  You don't have to say anything.
[00:11:49]  But why doesn't, you should have the AC on.
[00:11:51]  Liz and I can't.
[00:11:53]  I do.
[00:11:53]  I do.
[00:11:54]  Oh, I'm roasted in here.
[00:11:55]  My AC is off.
[00:11:56]  I saw you here.
[00:11:58]  Oh, certainly I do not.
[00:12:01]  So.
[00:12:02]  Guan is not the most searchable guy in the world.
[00:12:04]  His real name, Waidong Guan, basically has no hits on the internet.
[00:12:10]  But Bill Guan, which I assume is his, like a lot of Chinese people pick like an English language name and it's usually something like Bill.
[00:12:17]  The first hit comes up on him from newspapers.com in a 2001 article from the Ottawa citizen, Ottawa, Ottawa citizen, about a Bill Guan from Montreal participating in a vigil outside the Chinese embassy to protest the banning of the Falon Gong.
[00:12:34]  So 2001 is just a couple of years after China officially prescribed the group and a lot of them moved to the U.S. and became very quickly sort of dissidents du jour.
[00:12:44]  So how exactly were they laundering this money?
[00:12:47]  Well, here's a very fun quote to start us off from Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser, who was hired by the Epoch Times to make inroads with Republican politicians.
[00:13:00]  So here's a quote from Brendan Steinhauser, who's a Republican strategist who was hired by the Epoch Times to make inroads with Republican politicians.
[00:13:09]  And it's from a 2023 article on, I believe, NBC by that chick, Brandy Zardzani, who's, I don't really know her deal.
[00:13:16]  I just remember seeing that last name whenever I read one of these fucking articles.
[00:13:21]  They take advantage of every opportunity, Steinhauser, who is not currently working for the Epoch Times, continued.
[00:13:28]  They studied digital marketing.
[00:13:30]  Okay.
[00:13:31]  They learned how to work the system and they did it.
[00:13:34]  They're smarter than people give them credit for and they've got the money to back it up.
[00:13:38]  Okay, that's a really funny.
[00:13:40]  I feel like I remember us talking about this in the episode we did because I remember us referring to that piece by Brandy Zardzoni because I also remember that name.
[00:13:50]  I mean, how could you forget it?
[00:13:51]  Sounds like a polar city.
[00:13:54]  But it's really, really funny, the kind of positioning of them as, first of all, studying digital marketing.
[00:14:03]  Like, okay, who are you?
[00:14:04]  Alex Earl?
[00:14:05]  Like, what are you fucking talking about?
[00:14:06]  Who's not studying digital marketing?
[00:14:08]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:14:09]  Yes.
[00:14:10]  Also, it's really funny in light of what they were actually doing, which was using crypto to buy up stolen identities that were used to like fake unemployment benefits on prepaid cash cards during like the big COVID rush of sending out unemployment checks to everybody.
[00:14:30]  Yeah, it's really funny because I think one of the things that really stands out in a lot of articles that you read prior to a couple of days ago, but the Epoch Times is so many journalists wondering how the fuck they have so much money.
[00:14:42]  So the way that Epoch Times has always claimed it made money is just by small donations from people who were appreciative of their coverage of Anthony Fauci and the Chinese Communist Party.
[00:14:54]  I mean, the Epoch Times is a, I guess, newspaper, but it's almost just like a multimedia company where they have all these various, you know, YouTube channels and like little mini documentaries about Fauci or whatever.
[00:15:07]  And if you really want to like see the exclusive stuff on their website, you got to pay like a premium price.
[00:15:13]  The thing is, the amount of money they were spending just did not match up at all with apparently how much they were actually making.
[00:15:22]  And I think this made banks a little suspicious because it turns out they had gone up by, I think, a 410% in just a few years.
[00:15:35]  Which is crazy for a digital media company?
[00:15:38]  That's not happening.
[00:15:39]  No, I mean, it's, it's, it's 2020 was really the big year for them.
[00:15:43]  So this is from the indictment.
[00:15:44]  That year, the media company, and that's who they're, they're referring it to Epic Times as the media company.
[00:15:49]  That year, the media company's internal financial accounting reflected an increased annual revenue over the previous year of approximately 410% from approximately 15 million to approximately 62 million.
[00:16:03]  A significant portion of this increase was attributable to the media company's foreign office, including the MMO team, which was managed by Waidong Guan, aka Bill Guan, the defendant.
[00:16:21]  Now, Brace, MMO team.
[00:16:25]  If you're just coming to this, you're like, oh, that must be the name of like a typical kind of like, oh, that's just shorthand for like some digital marketing term that I don't know about because I didn't go to University of Miami or whatever, Arizona.
[00:16:39]  I see you.
[00:16:41]  What does MMO stand for at the Epic Times?
[00:16:45]  Making money online.
[00:16:49]  Now, I got to tell you, every time I read about a company, I always hear some, especially like a media company, there's always some like DEI, HR, one of these fucking, these little things.
[00:16:59]  I'm like, I don't really understand what this is.
[00:17:02]  Making money online, that I do get.
[00:17:05]  And the way they were making it is just like Liz said, buying up stolen identities, stolen unemployment checks, and then cashing them out at 80 cents to the dollar on crypto exchanges and then laundering that money back through their own bank accounts that they opened up, but they were not actually their own bank accounts.
[00:17:22]  They were other bank accounts that they had opened up with other stolen identities and then laundering that as donations to the Epic Times.
[00:17:30]  So, to be, I mean, to be fair, though, like that is a way to make money online.
[00:17:36]  Yes, yeah, yeah, it really is.
[00:17:38]  Well, I think a lot of people are also confused as to like why the Epic Times would be getting rolled up right now because the Epoch Times are obviously controlled by the Falon Gong.
[00:17:47]  And I think a lot of people, quite rightly so, like, associate the Falun Gong with some of the seedier parts of the U.S. government, right?
[00:17:55]  CIA, FBI, State Department, whatever.
[00:17:59]  And I think that actually we probably can get kind of some insight onto why that happened from some things that actually have to do with another part of the Falun Gong's internet operation.
[00:18:12]  All of the laser eye branding memes.
[00:18:15]  Yes, yeah, exactly.
[00:18:16]  They're the ones that are behind it.
[00:18:18]  So the Falun Gong has always had a really heavily online component to it.
[00:18:22]  I mean, really, since the early 2000s.
[00:18:24]  One of their earliest projects was something called Dynamic Internet Technologies, which is a CIA-sounding company, if I've ever heard one.
[00:18:31]  This was a nebulous, quote, tech company that seems to be, aside from the organ harvesting propaganda, the most useful thing that they could provide to the U.S. government.
[00:18:42]  So it was started by an Ohio-based practitioner of Falun Gong named Bill Gia.
[00:18:46]  Started in 2002, just a few years after Falun Gong moved to the U.S.
[00:18:50]  And it offers just three main products on its website, which is still around, although it doesn't seem to have been updated in 17, wait, 19 years.
[00:19:00]  That's cool.
[00:19:02]  I know, but for some reason, it's still completely all those sorts of websites, by the way, gone.
[00:19:07]  Just gone.
[00:19:08]  No way to find them.
[00:19:09]  Dust in the wind.
[00:19:10]  They're still paying for this.
[00:19:11]  I mean, maybe some part of it has been updated, but definitely a lot of it has not.
[00:19:17]  Dynob.
[00:19:17]  It's inside the little guest book that I'm sure they have.
[00:19:20]  Oh, fuck.
[00:19:20]  I forgot about those.
[00:19:22]  Never forget about those.
[00:19:23]  So they had DynaWeb, Freegate, and something called Mass Mailing, which after looking into it, I believe is literally just mass mailing.
[00:19:32]  It's not like a specific product.
[00:19:34]  Well, similarly to Make Money Online.
[00:19:36]  They list four clients on their website, and you'll never guess who they are: Voice of America.
[00:19:43]  Okay.
[00:19:43]  Radio Free Asia.
[00:19:45]  All right.
[00:19:46]  Human Rights in China, which is a Falun Gong front group.
[00:19:50]  And the Epic Times.
[00:19:52]  Okay.
[00:19:53]  So I was looking at their like product.
[00:19:55]  I mean, I know about DynaWeb and FreeGate.
[00:19:57]  I think we actually covered those in the Falun Gong episodes.
[00:20:00]  But I was like, what is mass mailing?
[00:20:02]  And they seem to be advertising that they just know a lot of Chinese people's email addresses.
[00:20:07]  We can get 2.3 million emails in China sent out in no time.
[00:20:12]  But like, to be fair, 2.3 million emails in China is like 100 people in the United States.
[00:20:18]  I was going to say, that's like nothing.
[00:20:20]  There's like a billion Chinese people.
[00:20:22]  2.3 million?
[00:20:24]  But also back in 2002?
[00:20:27]  No, it was still about that.
[00:20:29]  Still, yeah, still not very good.
[00:20:31]  DynaWeb and Freegate are products that sort of resemble VPNs.
[00:20:34]  They're basically like ways.
[00:20:36]  Remember how we always used to hear about the great firewall of China, Liz?
[00:20:40]  Now we're building our own great firewall.
[00:20:45]  Yeah, we are.
[00:20:45]  We're keeping the Chinese out.
[00:20:47]  When they used to keep us out.
[00:20:49]  How the table has turned.
[00:20:51]  Internet freedom products to get you around the Chinese firewall.
[00:20:56]  Falun Gong practitioners also started a similar product in Silicon Valley called UltraSurf, which is the same exact kind of thing.
[00:21:04]  Like it's a way that is supposed to allow Chinese people to get around the Chinese firewall so they can look at Falun Gong teachings.
[00:21:12]  So obviously DynaWeb got these contracts from the U.S. government.
[00:21:17]  They were sending out Voice of America and Radio Free Asia in the mass mailing section, for instance.
[00:21:21]  They talk about how one of their services that they did was this mass mailing, and they would send out VOA and RFA articles to people in China's mailboxes.
[00:21:33]  Now, this is where the Open Technology Fund comes in.
[00:21:36]  And this is sort of where I believe Falun Gong's usefulness to, I would say, the main deep state kind of comes to not an end, but maybe it tapers off a little bit.
[00:21:48]  I mean, if you're going to say Dynamic Internet Technologies is the CIAS sounding name, I'm going to go ahead and say Open Technology Fund might beat that.
[00:21:57]  Well, you'd be right on that.
[00:21:59]  So it was a project under the Obama Clinton State Department, specifically under Radio Free Asia.
[00:22:05]  So for those who don't know, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe.
[00:22:11]  Sponsors of this podcast, obviously.
[00:22:13]  Obviously.
[00:22:14]  But they're basically like our propaganda websites.
[00:22:20]  Like they are.
[00:22:21]  They're U.S. government run websites that usually always put the U.S. government line on things out there.
[00:22:30]  But they're basically like propaganda aimed at people in other countries.
[00:22:35]  Right.
[00:22:35]  Like specifically in 42, I think is when VOA started.
[00:22:38]  It was to counter Nazi propaganda, but then it was very useful during the Cold War.
[00:22:42]  Radio Free Europe also, I think they're probably less useful now for the U.S.
[00:22:46]  I mean, they all still exist.
[00:22:48]  It's funny because they all literally did start as like radio stations, but now they're all just kind of websites and news outlets in their own right.
[00:22:54]  And they take on, you know, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college grads from the U.S. to do reporting for them.
[00:23:00]  But I can't imagine that there's like some guy in China who's like, oh, hey, Xi Jinping, better see what Radio Free Asia is saying because there's so many other just websites you could look at that probably agree with you and also probably have some better articles on that.
[00:23:14]  But also so many people source stories from those places.

=== Npr Expose On U.S. Radio Stations (10:47) ===

[00:23:19]  So, I mean, everything is kind of a pyramid scheme online.
[00:23:22]  So when you get in at the bottom, your chances of being, you know, relayed up to the top and other stories kind of maybe go up a bit.
[00:23:30]  I will say also, this is a whole series.
[00:23:32]  This is a whole episode of us plugging our old episodes because we talked extensively about Radio Free Europe, I mean, so many of these outlets with Yasha Levine many, many moons ago, which we recorded four years ago.
[00:23:50]  Young Chomsky's apartment.
[00:23:52]  Do you remember?
[00:23:53]  I do.
[00:23:54]  We saw that.
[00:23:54]  It was one of our early episodes.
[00:23:56]  Yeah, it was a really early episode.
[00:23:58]  And I'll say it, old-timey fan favorite because Yasha is so fun to talk to and very easy and cool.
[00:24:04]  And you can check it out.
[00:24:06]  We're going to link to it in the episode notes too.
[00:24:08]  But basically, Open Technology Fund, for those who aren't going to listen to the episode, which should be zero of you, is a project started under Radio Free Asia that was essentially aimed at internet freedom.
[00:24:21]  Right.
[00:24:21]  And so it was like U.S. government funding these ways for people under, quote, authoritarian regimes.
[00:24:28]  I'm not quoting anybody, but I'm sure I am, to get around internet censorship so they could look at Radio Free Asia.
[00:24:36]  I mean, it was really prominent during like the Arab Spring and all this kind of thing.
[00:24:41]  You know, it was like one of those spooky parts of the U.S. government's technology arms.
[00:24:48]  You know, they're the people who funded, provided funding for Tor, for Signal, et cetera, like all that kind of shit.
[00:24:53]  So it's under the purview of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which publishes Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, as well as Voice of America.
[00:25:02]  And now Open Technology Fund has moved from being part of Radio Free Asia to being just under the purview of the USAGM.
[00:25:10]  I think now it's technically a nonprofit, but I wouldn't trust that as far as I could throw it.
[00:25:15]  This is prime feeding ground for the Fallon Gong.
[00:25:19]  The problem is, is after the lib tarted State Department, USAGM, all these motherfuckers of the Hillary Clinton years, Trump comes in there and he's like, listen, Bannon, remember Steve Bannon?
[00:25:32]  How could I forget?
[00:25:34]  My motherfucking guy, you made Breitbart so cool.
[00:25:39]  Amilo Giannopoulos, Israel, you are so fucking cool.
[00:25:44]  Miles Kuo, like, I think you're going to, I think you're our man for the job.
[00:25:48]  You figured out how to restructure this.
[00:25:50]  You put your guy in there and you're going to make the fucking sickest propaganda we could ever make.
[00:25:56]  And Steve Bannon, for some reason, hates Chinese people, probably due to his weight.
[00:26:04]  Because, well, I'm just not going to continue on that line of thought.
[00:26:08]  But Steve Bannon does not like Chinese people, although he looks like he's eaten a couple of them.
[00:26:12]  He puts in a Claremont Institute guy, which are other sponsors for the show.
[00:26:19]  Voice of America and Claremont, the two, Claremont has had some of the biggest freaks I've ever seen.
[00:26:27]  I mean, physical freaks that they put out there.
[00:26:29]  Have you ever seen that guy, Dave Ria Boy?
[00:26:32]  Yeah, he's quite large.
[00:26:34]  No.
[00:26:34]  And I don't mean, no, I mean, like, his, his, his thing, like his face and his shoulders, I feel like, don't they take up a lot of camera width?
[00:26:44]  Young Chomsky, I want you to, do you know what this guy looks like?
[00:26:47]  I want you to Google Dave Rhea Boy right now.
[00:26:50]  And I want you to tell me natty.
[00:26:51]  Dave Rhea Boy is a hard name to tell you.
[00:26:55]  That's when you take your wife's last name.
[00:26:57]  But this guy is, if this guy is natty, I will fucking, yeah, he is.
[00:27:00]  Yeah, no, obviously not.
[00:27:01]  No, because he's clearly when you look at the proportions.
[00:27:05]  The traps, the delts.
[00:27:07]  Yeah, he's no, but the proportions you can tell, much more of a small man.
[00:27:11]  He has, oh my God, his, this is like the worst version of Young Chomsky.
[00:27:17]  It says in his interest in his Twitter bio, jazz hi-fi bodybuilding.
[00:27:23]  Wow, that's you.
[00:27:24]  But he's like 4'10.
[00:27:25]  Thumbs down.
[00:27:26]  I'm not even joking.
[00:27:27]  This guy is legit like 4'10, which is a legal dwarf.
[00:27:31]  He's 4'10.
[00:27:33]  I think he's one of the non-anti-Semitic Claremont Institute guys.
[00:27:37]  I think he loves, loves Israel.
[00:27:38]  And obviously, you know what I mean by that.
[00:27:42]  But I think he might be one of the philo-Semitic ones, rather.
[00:27:46]  But he is a fucking freak.
[00:27:48]  That is not the guy that they put in charge of Voice of America.
[00:27:51]  Instead, they put this guy, Michael Pack, in charge.
[00:27:55]  Bryce, I have a really quick question that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
[00:27:59]  This is literally a tangent.
[00:28:00]  I'm sorry, listeners, but I'm just going to pretend like you're not here when I ask this.
[00:28:03]  I was just looking up the Ria Boy Twitter guy.
[00:28:08]  So then I and I hit back and so it went to Twitter home, even though I'm, you know, whatever, I got mixed up.
[00:28:13]  And there's a thing that says, NYPD preparing to revoke Donald Trump's license to carry a gun after felony convictions.
[00:28:19]  He gets to carry a gun?
[00:28:20]  That's what I wanted to ask you about.
[00:28:22]  So how does that work that he got a license to carry in New York?
[00:28:27]  So from what I understand, I've been trying to figure out how I can legally have a gun here for a while.
[00:28:33]  And I just, I know it's such a headache that I haven't even started to look.
[00:28:37]  I think if you have a business, you're going to be enough allowed to, I know, but I think it has to maybe be like a brick and mortar one.
[00:28:46]  I'm not sure if Trump Towers qualifies as that or whatever his motherfucking business is here.
[00:28:51]  But if you're like, there's like, obviously also you can pay off at NYPD.
[00:28:56]  Like all the, what's the Hasidic Police Department got in trouble for doing that.
[00:29:01]  But to carry a gun is even harder than actually like being able to legally have a gun here.
[00:29:08]  So I have no idea.
[00:29:10]  I mean, he literally probably just paid somebody.
[00:29:13]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:29:14]  And it was like maybe grandfathered in from a really long time ago.
[00:29:17]  Yeah, it could be that too.
[00:29:18]  Yeah.
[00:29:18]  Which I wonder if Trump has one because I feel like we would have seen him shoot it at some point.
[00:29:26]  I feel like he has guns at Mar-a-Lago, but he's not a gun guy.
[00:29:30]  He's definitely not.
[00:29:31]  No.
[00:29:32]  Isn't Don Jr. is though, right?
[00:29:33]  Yeah, but he's like, it's like fake.
[00:29:36]  Yeah.
[00:29:36]  He's like, he's like gun guy in the sense that he also has like flannel guy for the photo.
[00:29:41]  Well, he also, I think he big game hunts too.
[00:29:44]  I was just going to say that.
[00:29:45]  Oh my God.
[00:29:46]  Rich, big game hunter of like physically deformed, rich malcontent is like such a type.
[00:29:54]  It's so British.
[00:29:56]  Well, like the most dangerous game is obviously man, right?
[00:30:00]  And so it's like, okay, you're hunting like a rhinoceros or whatever.
[00:30:04]  Hunt somebody.
[00:30:04]  Hunt a person.
[00:30:06]  I mean, Dick Cheney kind of did.
[00:30:08]  I guess he did.
[00:30:09]  Well, yeah, but he didn't finish the job.
[00:30:11]  He was like a, he just smoked him a little.
[00:30:14]  He didn't even smoke him.
[00:30:14]  He just fucking imagine Donald Trump strapped up walking around New York City.
[00:30:19]  You think he's got like a desert eagle?
[00:30:21]  That would be so fucking funny.
[00:30:23]  Like people would say, I mean, that's like terrible, but like also people would like fucking.
[00:30:27]  Let me have a gun here.
[00:30:29]  It's crazy.
[00:30:31]  People have crazy thoughts about me.
[00:30:33]  They should like to do that.
[00:30:34]  I don't think Donald Trump knows anything about guns, which I think is a good thing.
[00:30:37]  I know, but once you're, if you're enough of a baller, you have like your like Praetorian guard around you.
[00:30:41]  Yeah.
[00:30:42]  You don't need a gun.
[00:30:43]  That's like actually like beneath you.
[00:30:44]  But that's why the license to carry is so funny.
[00:30:47]  You want the license, but you don't want to actually carry.
[00:30:49]  Because also, but he's so big.
[00:30:51]  Maybe it's all guns under there.
[00:30:55]  That's why he walks all weird.
[00:30:57]  It's like weighted down at his hips.
[00:31:00]  He's got him at his hips, like Yosemite Sam.
[00:31:02]  The roughest, toughest, eman, stiffest ombre has ever crossed the Rio Grande.
[00:31:06]  Yeah, I just imagine that he's basically covered in a complete gun rack of like bolt action rifles.
[00:31:13]  And that's why his body type is so strange.
[00:31:16]  Okay, sorry, guys.
[00:31:17]  Michael Pack is brought in by Bannon to run the entire U.S. Agency for Global Media.
[00:31:22]  That's again, covering like Voice of America, Raider for Europe, Raider for Asia, and the Open Technology Fund.
[00:31:30]  So NPR kind of did like a big expose of this, which is also kind of a new arm of U.S.
[00:31:36]  I don't know what they're an arm of, but they are definitely aligned with this kind of shit.
[00:31:41]  PAC came in there and was just like, like Donald Trump pulling out a motherfucking, what's the shittiest rifle?
[00:31:48]  What's that?
[00:31:49]  MNP, pulling that out in the courtroom and just going, he mows down the leadership of all these different organizations.
[00:31:59]  He's like, Libtard there.
[00:32:01]  Libtard here.
[00:32:03]  Libtard there.
[00:32:05]  Takes everyone out.
[00:32:06]  All the heads of all these.
[00:32:07]  Cleans house.
[00:32:08]  He fucking cleans house and spends millions on a law firm that basically investigates people he was going to fire anyways.
[00:32:16]  So this was part of, again, Bannon was trying to remake all this shit into like a conservative, like a Breitbart kind of Epic Times media network.
[00:32:24]  But it was already pretty conservative, like to begin with.
[00:32:26]  That's what's so crazy.
[00:32:28]  I mean, I got to be real.
[00:32:29]  I'm not really reading voice.
[00:32:31]  Maybe it's just like, oh, we're bringing gender to Afghanistan or whatever.
[00:32:34]  I have no fucking idea.
[00:32:36]  I think that's kind of like what it was.
[00:32:38]  And well, the thing is, Bannon hates China.
[00:32:41]  And so he wanted to be like more vocally anti-China.
[00:32:45]  Yeah.
[00:32:46]  As opposed to just like subtly anti-China, which was like the Obama way.
[00:32:51]  Yeah, yeah, precisely.
[00:32:52]  Yeah.
[00:32:53]  So part of this effort was trying to get the Open Technology Fund to give a bunch of money to UltraSurf.
[00:33:01]  Now, again, the Open Technology Fund already funds all these fucking VPNs, tours, signals, all this kind of shit.
[00:33:10]  But he was like, we need to give some money to my Falun Gong buddies little project they're doing to make a VPN.
[00:33:17]  There is a State Department audit that was revealed by a whistleblower from this time that shows UltraSurf was actually using outdated technology by almost a decade.
[00:33:26]  So it was like they hadn't updated their shit in about as long as DynaWebb hadn't updated their website.
[00:33:32]  Whistleblower complaints show that PAC was pushing for more, quote, religious groups being funded by the OTF, which is clearly aimed at Falun Gong.
[00:33:42]  Yeah, that's what they're trying to get.
[00:33:43]  Okay.
[00:33:44]  And then he puts an Epic Times writer on the board of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
[00:33:50]  So we can see where this is going.
[00:33:52]  And this is a quote from Robin Destro, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor under Trump.
[00:34:01]  I don't know what the empirical value of the software is, Destro tells NPR.

=== American Thought Leaders Mystery (02:37) ===

[00:34:06]  Was I supportive of the Falon Gong?
[00:34:09]  Was I supportive of UltraSurf?
[00:34:12]  Yeah, but that wasn't my job.
[00:34:14]  My job was to oversee internet freedom.
[00:34:17]  And if they fit into them, that's great.
[00:34:21]  One of the last things that Michael Pack did before leaving office was an interview with a YouTube channel called American Thought Leaders.
[00:34:30]  Now, American Thought Leaders basically just interviews like, I think like Pompeo, like Republican guys like that.
[00:34:37]  Other Instagram girls, et cetera.
[00:34:39]  Alex Earl.
[00:34:40]  We should know another one.
[00:34:41]  Who's another one?
[00:34:42]  There's so many.
[00:34:43]  Oh my God.
[00:34:44]  I know, but what's another one?
[00:34:45]  She's kind of lost a little shrine.
[00:34:47]  I feel like she kind of has.
[00:34:48]  Do you think that she's lost?
[00:34:51]  Did you see the Sports Illustrated?
[00:34:54]  No, I didn't.
[00:34:55]  Is it bad?
[00:34:56]  Is it bad?
[00:34:57]  I mean, I'm going to like, well, I'm going to hold off because I don't feel, I'm not going to bad mouth another.
[00:35:03]  Think that her shine has worn off enough for her to maybe look at starting a new chapter of her life with perhaps a co-author like myself, with.
[00:35:17]  Do you think that she would enter in a kind of lesbian relationship with you?
[00:35:21]  No, you know Liz, with like a she's she tall?
[00:35:25]  In my head she's six feet tall, which actually is pretty short.
[00:35:29]  No, I don't think she is six feet tall.
[00:35:32]  I wouldn't like that.
[00:35:33]  So American Thought Leaders is actually an EPIC Times YouTube channel, one of many that they have that I'm not sure if American Thought Leaders visibly has an affiliation, but they all kind of have the same sort of like weird blank-faced white guy who brings up the Falon GONG in whatever context that he can.
[00:35:53]  Liz, I'm sure you remember when we went and saw Shenyun, do you remember the funky white boy who was introducing the whole thing?
[00:36:01]  Yes, the weird like Colin Jost guy.
[00:36:05]  Yes, Colin Jost did.
[00:36:07]  He was like Aryan Colin Jost, which is saying a lot considering Colin Joast.
[00:36:11]  Interesting you say that, the Aryan part, because while he was blonde and square jawed, I believe, unless it's somebody different, which it could be, but I believe he is an Ohio-born Israeli American.
[00:36:23]  Interesting.
[00:36:24]  Exactly.
[00:36:25]  He had a very weird affected voice, which you'll hear all about if you listen to the episode where we review Shenyun.
[00:36:33]  Let's be real.
[00:36:33]  He did a full Chinese accent, but he did a Chinese accent of somebody who moved here from China at like the age of six and then grows up mostly speaking in American.
[00:36:41]  Or maybe it's maybe 12.
[00:36:43]  It was strange.

=== Body Snatcher Propaganda (05:15) ===

[00:36:44]  It was like very robotic.
[00:36:46]  Yeah, but he was an ESL.
[00:36:48]  No, it was very weird.
[00:36:52]  It was like a total like body snatcher.
[00:36:54]  He was a body snatcher.
[00:36:55]  It was very unsettling.
[00:36:58]  So the OTF ended up awarding UltraSurf close to $2 million.
[00:37:03]  But I believe, and I was actually talking to Robert Scavarla about this because we were sort of banning about what some of the stuff might mean.
[00:37:13]  Probably due to backstabbing from disgruntled State Department types and like deep state bureaucrats, they actually only got paid a quarter of a million dollars.
[00:37:22]  So they were kind of like they were promised $2 million and then they didn't actually pay him the whole amount of money.
[00:37:28]  That could actually just be a Bannon thing too, because he seems to be pretty contented with that shit.
[00:37:34]  So of course, Bannon is actually really close to the Falun Gong.
[00:37:37]  He put out a movie called Claws of the Red Dragon on New Tang Dynasty television, which I myself and Young Chomsky have been on.
[00:37:45]  And the problem is with this whole remaking of, you know, USAGM, VOA, all this kind of stuff, is that the fact is, Bannon is a fucking psycho.
[00:37:57]  Michael Pack and all the Claremont people are fucking psychos.
[00:38:01]  Like if you do want to get your anti-China shit done, which the U.S. government very much does, it's like there's such a thing as overdoing a bit.
[00:38:10]  And they're just frankly not very good at running their own businesses.
[00:38:14]  And so he basically blew the entire operation.
[00:38:16]  I think at the end of his tenure there, PAC was facing a criminal investigation for shit he had done.
[00:38:22]  But the problem is the Epic Times over the years has grown further and further right and further and further against the U.S. liberal regime, which we now have under Joe Biden.
[00:38:33]  And so my thinking on this is, is that like the parts of the Falun Gong that were useful to the CIA, useful to the State Department, are less and less useful now, right?
[00:38:46]  Because nobody gives a fuck about the fucking Falun Gong persecution in China anymore.
[00:38:50]  It's just like nobody gives a fuck about the Tibetans anymore.
[00:38:52]  It's all about the Uyghurs.
[00:38:55]  Even the Uyghurs have fallen off.
[00:38:56]  Come on, no one's hella fell off.
[00:38:59]  Uyghurs totally fell off.
[00:39:01]  None of this shit works when like half of one of the largest like economic power centers of the U.S., aka Silicon Valley, half of those guys go to work in China four months out of the year.
[00:39:15]  Like none of this shit works.
[00:39:16]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:39:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:39:19]  I mean, I think really it's just like the Falun Gong are just too insane criminal and right wing, which has rarely in the past been a problem for the U.S. government.
[00:39:29]  But I just think that that now outweighs the usefulness, right?
[00:39:33]  The organ harvesting thing is another example.
[00:39:35]  That is still being trotted out.
[00:39:36]  Persecution of the Falun Gong is still being talked about occasionally by State Department, but it really is just like it pales in comparison to a lot of the other stuff.
[00:39:44]  And I think the massive money laundering operation that they were running probably outweighed the usefulness that they would have.
[00:39:54]  Although, again, I'm sure the State Department CIA is keeping some of this stuff in the back pocket, but it looks like now they kind of burn their own guys here.
[00:40:02]  I mean, I think you're right.
[00:40:03]  I mean, just you see, also just thinking about the organ harvesting thing, it's like, it's not 1998.
[00:40:09]  It's not 2002.
[00:40:10]  It's not even 2007, as much as some people might dress like it is.
[00:40:16]  It is, you know, like, it's not as if even people that are not worldly and cultured are now because of the internet and social media.
[00:40:27]  Hello, welcome to the future.
[00:40:28]  And the idea that like the Chinese backward man harvesting the organs of the poor, the poor, like quasi-weird, maybe Christians, we're not sure.
[00:40:38]  Like that doesn't really fly anymore.
[00:40:40]  It's not as believable when there's so much, when you can see like how modern, how Western, how, you know, I don't know, normal, the same like Chinese cities are and Chinese people.
[00:40:55]  Like that veil is totally gone.
[00:40:58]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:40:59]  And even with the government, I don't think, I don't know.
[00:41:02]  I mean, I think that there's a lot of standard CCP like propaganda that definitely works.
[00:41:07]  And clearly, we see it all the time here.
[00:41:10]  But this other, this like kind of crazier shit just seems almost too, it's like too extra now.
[00:41:17]  It's like, chill out, you know?
[00:41:18]  Yeah, yeah, I agree.
[00:41:20]  I think that like the propaganda that these guys put out is really, I mean, we saw it in Shenyun.
[00:41:25]  You know, if you, if you went into Shenyun like having a neutral opinion of China, I don't think you can come out of that thing being like, you know, that it's just like a nation of human vivisectionists over there.
[00:41:35]  That all they do is just beat on these poor religious people who just want you to stop texting so much.
[00:41:41]  Which is also why like the richest men in the world are always doing business with them.
[00:41:45]  I mean, it's exactly so.

=== Matt Levine's Reddit Account (15:28) ===

[00:41:59]  There's like another callback portion of this show, which this is like.
[00:42:06]  I hate that so much.
[00:42:08]  We're talking money, baby.
[00:42:10]  Do it again.
[00:42:12]  It also sort of sounds vaguely racial, which I like.
[00:42:15]  Whoa.
[00:42:16]  Yeah, I'm just saying.
[00:42:17]  I don't know if we should put that next to the fellow and gong segment.
[00:42:20]  It's the sound of a money.
[00:42:22]  Oh, because you think of Jewish people.
[00:42:24]  Oh, my God.
[00:42:25]  Here we go.
[00:42:26]  None of this I'm excited to talk about.
[00:42:30]  I really don't like that this is happening, but it is happening.
[00:42:34]  And so I'm going to talk about it, which is that another man of 2020 fame kind of returned to the scene this week.
[00:42:44]  This seems to be like an ongoing theme.
[00:42:46]  Dr. Anthony Fauci is back with a new virus that you people are going to love.
[00:42:55]  You know, he is there.
[00:42:56]  He was doing, did you look at any of the testimony?
[00:42:59]  Oh, he was talking.
[00:43:00]  He should just go.
[00:43:02]  He should kill himself.
[00:43:05]  Don't put that in.
[00:43:07]  Put that in.
[00:43:09]  I'm not saying I don't think he should, but he should.
[00:43:12]  What does that mean?
[00:43:13]  I just, I'm saying that's the difference in those statements because I would never say to somebody, you should do this, despite the times that I've said that you should do this on this show.
[00:43:24]  But if I was him, I would do that.
[00:43:28]  Do you feel me?
[00:43:30]  All right.
[00:43:32]  No, we're not talking Fauci.
[00:43:35]  We're talking, oh, God, I hate this.
[00:43:39]  Deep fucking value.
[00:43:40]  Reddit user deep fucking value, aka Roaring Kitty.
[00:43:45]  Another thing I don't like saying, aka Keith Gill, who is the GameStop guy, famous to 2020.
[00:43:56]  Also, they made a movie about him, which I saw.
[00:44:00]  I didn't see the movie, but I saw it.
[00:44:02]  Did you save the movie?
[00:44:02]  No, I saw a clip for it on the plane, and I was like, definitely not watching that.
[00:44:08]  That's crazy.
[00:44:09]  They made a movie about it.
[00:44:10]  And also crazy, they made a movie about it because the story is not over.
[00:44:14]  He's back.
[00:44:15]  Okay, back in early May, he basically returned.
[00:44:19]  And I'm going to say he in quotes, and I'll explain why in a little bit.
[00:44:24]  He returned after a long hiatus to Twitter, posting a bunch of memes, specifically, you know, the one with the guy leaning forward in the chair.
[00:44:34]  That's sort of like, no, I'm, now I'm looking, you know, leaning forward.
[00:44:39]  He's playing video games.
[00:44:40]  It's like video games.
[00:44:41]  And then he leans forward.
[00:44:43]  You know that meme.
[00:44:45]  Is it a black guy?
[00:44:48]  No, it's just like an outline of a guy.
[00:44:51]  Oh, like the guy who's like, they will never do this.
[00:44:53]  And he spits out a cereal?
[00:44:55]  No, it's just the guy leaning forward in the chair.
[00:44:59]  Yeah, not coming to mind here.
[00:45:02]  Is it, are you talking about, is it the guy with the straining vein in his head?
[00:45:05]  No, it's when you're playing a game and you get to like the hard part and you got to lean forward.
[00:45:09]  He's got a controller in his hands.
[00:45:12]  It's a cartoon guy.
[00:45:13]  He's describing it very well.
[00:45:15]  Yeah.
[00:45:16]  Yeah.
[00:45:17]  It's right here.
[00:45:18]  I'm putting it in the group chat.
[00:45:19]  It's that guy.
[00:45:21]  Okay.
[00:45:21]  I've never seen that before in my motherfucking life.
[00:45:23]  Okay.
[00:45:24]  Well, that's the meme.
[00:45:25]  And it's the guy leaning forward in the chair meme.
[00:45:28]  And he posted it.
[00:45:31]  And then immediately GameStop pumped like 230%, bringing up all the other meme stocks at the same time, which is just like, I'm so sick of this shit.
[00:45:46]  It is.
[00:45:46]  Anyway, since then, it has been kind of a wild ride.
[00:45:49]  Okay.
[00:45:50]  Now, a couple days ago, he finally did more than post weird memes.
[00:45:56]  He went to Reddit.
[00:45:58]  And again, I'm going to put a he in quotes here.
[00:46:01]  He posted to Reddit.
[00:46:02]  It's a GME YOLO update because that used to be kind of what he, that's what he would always post when he was posting his positions in GameStop for the years that he was buying all this stock and these options back in the day during the original 2020 GameStop crazy Wall Street vets time.
[00:46:21]  Which, by the way, I'll say we've got a couple episodes about it.
[00:46:25]  We'll link to it in the show notes if you haven't heard.
[00:46:30]  The only thing we're doing here is updates from our previous episodes.
[00:46:33]  Look at that.
[00:46:34]  I made some money on that.
[00:46:37]  Good for you, Bryce.
[00:46:38]  That makes me happy.
[00:46:40]  But also makes me wag my finger because you got to be careful with that stuff.
[00:46:44]  Well, I just think you should be immediately all into Bitcoin.
[00:46:48]  Yeah, there you go.
[00:46:49]  Okay, so a couple of days ago, literally like three days ago, he posted to Reddit GME YOLO update a screenshot with his stake in GameStop.
[00:46:58]  What it showed will blow your mind.
[00:47:00]  It said that he had $5 million worth of shares in GameStop with an average cost that he bought them at about $21.27.
[00:47:10]  Now, why I say this will blow your mind?
[00:47:12]  That's a really, really large position.
[00:47:14]  It would basically make Keith one of the company's biggest investors.
[00:47:18]  And the big thing is, it's about six times more than the amount that he held the last time he posted his position in 2021.
[00:47:27]  Okay.
[00:47:28]  Which means he's been buying up this huge, large position in GameStop.
[00:47:33]  Okay.
[00:47:33]  I promise this is going somewhere.
[00:47:34]  It's been pretty low.
[00:47:36]  Like it fucking went way back down too.
[00:47:39]  So he's been.
[00:47:40]  Yeah.
[00:47:40]  I mean, there's been like various attempts at kind of like pumping the thing, everyone going like, oh, we're doing it again.
[00:47:47]  And then it like goes back down.
[00:47:48]  And then we'll be like, oh, we're doing it again.
[00:47:50]  You know, kind of like with the with the AMC Apes.
[00:47:53]  For the past couple years, they've all been trying to do it again and trying to like kind of make shit happen through Reddit and Twitter, X, the everything app, and Discord, obviously, all the crazy haunts of all of these people.
[00:48:08]  And it's just fucking annoying.
[00:48:09]  I'm sick of it.
[00:48:10]  I'm sorry.
[00:48:10]  I'm like, so sick of it.
[00:48:13]  In addition to that $5 million equity position, he showed that he had bought 120,000 call options, all like basically in total worth about $65 million, all set to expire June 21st.
[00:48:27]  Now, those contracts had a strike price of $20 a share.
[00:48:32]  If he were to exercise those options, it would cost him $240 million to do so, which is a significant amount of money.
[00:48:44]  And it's just like much more than like all of this in total is much, much more than anything he showed having from the GameStop rush in 2020.
[00:48:56]  Does that make sense?
[00:48:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:59]  So he posts that shit on Reddit and Twitter, right?
[00:49:03]  And immediately, like GameStop went all the way up to $40.50 a share, which pushed his calls up towards $21.
[00:49:12]  He had bought them for about like on average, maybe like $5.
[00:49:18]  So it would give him like an unrealized game of about $281 million.
[00:49:25]  Okay.
[00:49:25]  So let me just sum it up what happened.
[00:49:27]  He loaded up on all of these weekly options before causing the underlying price to triple through his posting.
[00:49:37]  Does that make sense?
[00:49:38]  Gotcha.
[00:49:39]  Yeah.
[00:49:39]  So basically like he pumped, he just like his own posting pumped the stock like trip, triple what it was.
[00:49:46]  Yeah, you can make that argument.
[00:49:47]  I mean, it's like really similar to a lot of the shit that we used to talk about with Elon, right?
[00:49:53]  Yeah.
[00:49:53]  And the way he would run stuff or the way that a lot of like people that run pump and dump kind of stuff all over Discord, but with smaller things.
[00:50:01]  But this is like a massive amount of money, right?
[00:50:05]  Yeah.
[00:50:05]  Yeah.
[00:50:06]  Significant, significant amount of money.
[00:50:07]  He posted like the most recent post.
[00:50:10]  I mean, I don't know if he's posted again actually since, but he posted a reverse Uno card, which I just am pointing out because I think it's like so fucking annoying.
[00:50:19]  There are like all of these people devoted to deciphering all of his different memes and like breaking it down.
[00:50:28]  And it's like, oh, we're building this lord.
[00:50:30]  And these are the secret messages he's sending about what these prices are going to be and how the stock is going to move.
[00:50:35]  And I find this like so fucking annoying.
[00:50:38]  I want it all to stop.
[00:50:39]  I hate it.
[00:50:41]  I really fucking hate it.
[00:50:42]  I hate it.
[00:50:43]  This should not be happening.
[00:50:44]  This shouldn't be happening.
[00:50:46]  You're jealous.
[00:50:46]  I'm not fucking jealous.
[00:50:48]  This is stupid.
[00:50:49]  Some fucking Reddit guy posting a reverse Uno card and it makes the stock market like jump a billion dollars.
[00:50:54]  No, stop.
[00:50:55]  Just stop.
[00:50:56]  All the other stuff that makes the stock market jump are like rumors about computer chips and stuff like that, right?
[00:51:02]  Well, I'm going to talk about this.
[00:51:03]  The thing that I want to point out, and this is Matt Levine pointed this out, and this is important, and this is why I'm using the quotation marks here, is that Roaring Kitty, which is his name on YouTube.
[00:51:14]  I know.
[00:51:15]  That's tough.
[00:51:16]  I know.
[00:51:17]  I know.
[00:51:18]  I really don't like it either.
[00:51:19]  It's just too similar to what people call me, which is screaming pussy.
[00:51:24]  I hate that.
[00:51:28]  So he has not returned to YouTube.
[00:51:31]  Okay.
[00:51:32]  He's posted an image of what might be.
[00:51:36]  I mean, it would, he's posted an image of a position of an E-Trade account.
[00:51:40]  He, or his account has posted, his account has posted memes, movie clips, guy leaning forward, Uno card, whatever on Twitter, X, the everything app.
[00:51:51]  But he has not returned to YouTube.
[00:51:53]  As far as I know, no proof of life yet.
[00:51:56]  Okay.
[00:51:58]  Now, Matt Levine speculates that perchance someone else is running the account because he would need so much fucking money to back all of that up that like there's no way someone has to be funding all of this purchasing, right?
[00:52:14]  Well, didn't it?
[00:52:15]  He probably got a bunch of money from that movie, right?
[00:52:18]  I mean, I don't think, not, not that I'm aware of.
[00:52:22]  But like, you would need like millions and millions and millions for this.
[00:52:25]  Yeah.
[00:52:27]  You'd need like $150 million.
[00:52:30]  Okay.
[00:52:30]  So he definitely didn't get that much in the movie.
[00:52:32]  This is what.
[00:52:34]  This is what Matt Levine said.
[00:52:36]  Do you want to read this?
[00:52:37]  It's in his quotes right here.
[00:52:38]  And I think he plays it really well.
[00:52:40]  I'll do it in my Matt Levine voice.
[00:52:44]  If you had a lot of money and a taste for danger, how would Keith get how much would Keith Gill's ex account be worth to you?
[00:52:51]  How much would his Reddit account be worth to you?
[00:52:53]  How much would his YouTube account be worth to you?
[00:52:56]  Do you look and sound like him?
[00:52:58]  If you had the ex and Reddit accounts, would these constitute a magic lamp in your hands?
[00:53:03]  Would you most how would you most efficiently monetize it?
[00:53:07]  If you were Gil, how would you most efficiently monetize your accounts?
[00:53:11]  Is the answer sell them?
[00:53:13]  Wait, sorry, I'm from Lesotho.
[00:53:16]  Sell them to a while.
[00:53:19]  I love how many, first of all, I love that Matt Levine is both Scottish, Australian, British.
[00:53:25]  What else?
[00:53:26]  Matt Levine, in my mind here, Matt Levine is from the deep interior of Australia.
[00:53:33]  Okay.
[00:53:34]  And he moved to South Africa in order to get in on the post-apartheid economy, but was run out for reasons that other reporters are trying to uncover.
[00:53:49]  I love that.
[00:53:50]  You know, he's now a podcaster, which makes him our colleague.
[00:53:53]  Is who is Matt Levine the guy that everyone hates?
[00:53:57]  No.
[00:53:59]  Who does Matt Levine work for?
[00:54:00]  Bloomberg.
[00:54:02]  Okay, I'm thinking of a different guy.
[00:54:03]  Who's the guy that everyone's always mad at on the internet?
[00:54:06]  He's like, talking about stocks on TV.
[00:54:08]  You know what I'm talking about?
[00:54:10]  Oh, Kramer?
[00:54:11]  Kramer.
[00:54:12]  Oh, yeah.
[00:54:12]  No, this is not Kramer.
[00:54:13]  If Kramer said this, I'd be like, okay, we believe whatever the opposite is.
[00:54:17]  Gotcha.
[00:54:17]  Yeah.
[00:54:19]  Do whatever the opposite of what Jim Kramer says and you'll make money, which is not financial advice.
[00:54:25]  Okay, so the thing that Levine is talking about there with the magic lamp, I just want to tease out for a second.
[00:54:29]  He's basically talking about if you had the power to move the price of a stock a really large amount, what would you do with it?
[00:54:34]  And this is like what we talked about with Elon.
[00:54:36]  You move it upwards.
[00:54:37]  Well, unless you were shorting it and then you couldn't move downwards.
[00:54:40]  Anyway, move it downwards.
[00:54:41]  Yeah.
[00:54:42]  Yeah.
[00:54:43]  But remember the funding secured tweet?
[00:54:46]  Yes.
[00:54:46]  Remember all that?
[00:54:47]  So that ended up being a little too much.
[00:54:49]  That got him in trouble with the SEC, but then he actually didn't get in trouble, but then he kind of got in trouble, but like definitely not enough.
[00:54:55]  I will say that it seemed like there was going to be a crackdown on all this kind of social media behavior from the SEC, right?
[00:55:04]  Remember those guys we talked about?
[00:55:07]  I know we did an episode about this and I will find it and we will put it in the show notes.
[00:55:14]  But it was about those Atlas trading guys.
[00:55:16]  Do you remember?
[00:55:17]  They call them foods.
[00:55:19]  I don't remember that.
[00:55:20]  Foo's?
[00:55:21]  Yeah, foo Rus.
[00:55:22]  What's that mean?
[00:55:23]  It's like financial guru.
[00:55:26]  Oh, isn't that just a guru?
[00:55:29]  Yeah, but they go by foo's.
[00:55:31]  But I think it's kind of like a derisive.
[00:55:33]  Oh, gotcha.
[00:55:34]  I like that.
[00:55:36]  Yeah.
[00:55:36]  So, but that was like the Mr. Zach Morris guy and whatever.
[00:55:40]  And they were the ones running all those pump and dump schemes during COVID.
[00:55:44]  And they would post like photos of their Lambo and they were just like doing penny stock bullshit.
[00:55:49]  Like, do you remember that?
[00:55:52]  There was the SEC filed charges against them.
[00:55:55]  And then the charges got dropped.
[00:56:01]  All those guys walked away free.
[00:56:04]  And the reason for that is a little quirk in securities fraud law, which I'm sorry, I'm going to break down.
[00:56:14]  Oh, God.
[00:56:16]  Did you see the photo of their lawyer, by the way, that I included here?
[00:56:19]  I did.
[00:56:22]  There's nothing wrong with that.
[00:56:24]  Oh, because he's not Jewish.
[00:56:26]  That's why you don't like him.
[00:56:27]  No, can you describe him?
[00:56:28]  Sephardic.
[00:56:30]  In a does he look like he has a podcast?
[00:56:34]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:56:35]  I'm trying to figure out, and I mean, no disrespect by anybody.
[00:56:38]  You didn't put his name here.
[00:56:39]  I'm trying to figure out what race this brother perhaps is, but maybe not.
[00:56:44]  Maybe Hermano, but maybe another so far unknown one, perhaps a member of some uncontacted tribe.
[00:56:53]  He is wearing a vest, obviously.
[00:56:59]  He is wearing a very starched, stiff collar and a tie that is, I gotta tell you, that is a tie that nobody is complaining about the girth of, which is actually come up a lot for me lately.
[00:57:14]  And he's got a, I'm just gonna call that a haircut, and he's he's looking pissed off at the fucking camera.
[00:57:21]  Yeah, he looks pissed off at the law.
[00:57:23]  But he looks young as fuck.
[00:57:25]  He looks like he's like 31 years old, maybe.

=== Market Manipulation Debate (10:09) ===

[00:57:28]  Yeah, he's got a little like Doogie Hauser vibe to him.
[00:57:30]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:57:31]  But and in the sense that he also looks like he's like wearing a like much older adult suit, but it shrunk in the wash.
[00:57:40]  So it's too tight for him too.
[00:57:42]  It's both an older person and too small.
[00:57:45]  Okay.
[00:57:46]  The reason that these guys got off, and I promise we're going to bring this back to GameStop, because I think this is the reason why Keith is back to pumping GameStop is because securities law is very weird.
[00:57:59]  What is and isn't securities fraud is basically built off of a, let's say, a lovely stew of case law, judgments, precedents, common sense, common law, all kind of like built off of like one single provision in the Security Exchange Act from 1934.
[00:58:22]  So it's basically just all built off of case law and interpretation.
[00:58:26]  There's no single like, this is what fraud is, and this you can't do.
[00:58:31]  Okay.
[00:58:32]  So what feels like what should be simple really isn't.
[00:58:36]  And it's basically because of the magic of markets.
[00:58:39]  Now, like, Brace, you've seen Wolf of Wall Street, right?
[00:58:43]  We've talked about this.
[00:58:46]  That's the classic.
[00:58:47]  I feel bad.
[00:58:47]  This is the second week I'm talking about pump and dumps.
[00:58:49]  I'm sorry.
[00:58:50]  And I also don't like really saying that.
[00:58:52]  I don't.
[00:58:52]  Yeah, you say it so often, Liz.
[00:58:54]  I really don't think it's like.
[00:58:56]  Then it's like every time I say pump and dump.
[00:58:58]  No, no, no, because first of all, I do not say it like that.
[00:59:02]  You fucking giggle.
[00:59:04]  You say, okay, okay.
[00:59:06]  I don't say it like that, but then it's true that every time I say it, I'm like, ugh, I hate saying this.
[00:59:11]  Okay.
[00:59:11]  Yeah.
[00:59:12]  Jordan Belfort, you know, famous, he sold penny stocks on the phone directly to customers.
[00:59:17]  He was the broker, right?
[00:59:18]  You remember?
[00:59:19]  He worked for that firm, which was basically what you call a boiler room.
[00:59:23]  Also, there was a movie called Boiler Room that was also about this, where, you know, the firm buys up the shares and then they get the brokers to go sell them and run the pump and dump schemes, right?
[00:59:33]  The guys.
[00:59:33]  Okay.
[00:59:34]  So the thing that was fraught, I mean, there was a ton of stuff that was fraud with Belfort that doesn't have to do with this.
[00:59:39]  So ignore that for a second.
[00:59:41]  But what was fraud in this instance was that he was running the trades, right?
[00:59:44]  If a client wanted to buy, he had to go find the buyer, which was him.
[00:59:49]  So that was easy.
[00:59:51]  And if they wanted to sell, he would have to find a seller, but there were none.
[00:59:55]  So whoops, that's how you lost all your money.
[00:59:59]  And so, you know, he did all the other stuff this far, but I'm just talking about this one thing.
[01:00:02]  Now, in the modern world, we don't really buy and sell stocks that way, right?
[01:00:07]  Anymore.
[01:00:08]  I mean, you can, but, you know, most retail doesn't.
[01:00:11]  You just get on the app, right?
[01:00:14]  And someone E-Trade or whatever, one of those platforms.
[01:00:18]  Yeah.
[01:00:18]  Someone buys the stock on an app because, you know, something you saw, some guy tweet on Xy Everything app, but then the stock went down and it turns out like maybe that guy lied, but he's the one who made money on it.
[01:00:30]  Like that should be clearly securities fraud, right?
[01:00:37]  Well, a big part of legal opinion on this comes from an 80s SCOTUS case.
[01:00:42]  Basically, this had to do with you had to prove whether or not like you as an individual relied on information that one specific individual gave in order to make a decision about whether or not to buy or sell something.
[01:00:56]  Right.
[01:00:57]  And in this SCODIS case, it was a class action suit.
[01:01:00]  And they said, okay, there's way too many people involved.
[01:01:03]  Right.
[01:01:04]  You can't prove, it's too much of a burden to prove each individual had to rely on another individual for information.
[01:01:12]  So we're just going to say that everyone should assume the market itself is a source of information when giving about any given security and what it's worth.
[01:01:24]  Right.
[01:01:25]  Okay.
[01:01:25]  Yeah.
[01:01:26]  Right.
[01:01:26]  And I'm just going to quote because we can break this down.
[01:01:28]  It says the market is acting as the unpaid agent of the investor, informing him that given all the information available to it, the value of the stock is worth the market price, right?
[01:01:38]  What does that mean?
[01:01:39]  It means that if people believe you when you lie about what something is worth and then you make money off of that and they lose, it's fraud because the price reflects all available information, which includes potentially your lies, right?
[01:01:56]  But what I don't understand, Liz, is it's illegal to lie to somebody if you make money off of it.
[01:02:04]  And yeah.
[01:02:05]  But isn't that my first amendment to do that?
[01:02:08]  Not when it comes to buying and not when it comes to buying and selling stocks.
[01:02:12]  I don't put a gun to their head and make them do that.
[01:02:14]  Well, you might find a friend in a very strange judge in Texas because that's basically what they ruled when we're talking about the Atlas trading foo crew from Discord.
[01:02:33]  I swear we talked about this.
[01:02:34]  I think it was in a winners and losers episode.
[01:02:37]  And we were like, these guys are such losers.
[01:02:39]  Look at them.
[01:02:40]  Well, add it to the list of true and on wrongs because they were total winners.
[01:02:46]  No, well, you know what?
[01:02:49]  It's it's my thing is this.
[01:02:52]  If you get away with it, are you really guilty?
[01:02:55]  So these guys that I'm talking about, this is Mr. Zach Morris, Mystic Mac, the stock sniper, and the podcast that they all hosted called Pennies Going in Raw.
[01:03:08]  It was a Discord group, Atlas Trading, and a group of guys that basically ran the same kind of Wolf of Wall Street pumps from 2020 to 2022.
[01:03:18]  They scammed or not, according to this judge, close to $115 million, but I guess they didn't because the case got dismissed.
[01:03:28]  Now, that Texas judge, he basically dismissed the case by saying that it wasn't actually securities fraud because they didn't sell the securities to all the people who got defrauded directly, which is the thing that you're saying about the gun, right?
[01:03:43]  Yeah.
[01:03:43]  That basically goes against like any like prior precedent or any understanding of what any kind of like fraud could be in an all-encompassing market where retail can just like enter and buy and sell, and you don't know where the stock is going, right, at any given time.
[01:04:02]  And basically what this, what this judge is saying is that fraud requires a direct connection.
[01:04:07]  But then if that opinion holds, it would make basically any pumping and dumping like totally perfectly legal and in the Trumpian way.
[01:04:17]  And particularly on social media, which is pretty crazy.
[01:04:22]  So like Wolf of Wall Street would be fraud.
[01:04:26]  Okay, that's fraud.
[01:04:27]  But proxy Wolf of Wall Street 2, pennies going in raw, Mr. Zach Morris, Atlas Vooru time wouldn't be.
[01:04:36]  So basically all the people that are like roaring kitty is going to go to prison or pay some fine to the SEC are it's kind of sour grapes because it looks like it's legal to do that as of now.
[01:04:51]  Well, it's confusing.
[01:04:52]  I mean, I don't think this legal opinion, I don't know.
[01:04:54]  I'm not a lawyer.
[01:04:55]  I don't know.
[01:04:55]  I don't fucking know anything, but I would be so surprised if this opinion like held any kind of weight or they think it would be really hard to use this defense.
[01:05:04]  I saw Gary Gensler like just came, was just on CNBC today, I think, being like, what Roaring Kitty, what Keith Gill is doing feels like market manipulation.
[01:05:15]  And it's like, I don't know.
[01:05:17]  It feels like textbook market manipulation.
[01:05:19]  Here's a fucking screenshot of my of my position and here's a meme and like everyone floods in.
[01:05:27]  I don't know, dude.
[01:05:28]  Like that seems fucking crazy.
[01:05:31]  You know, and you, you, you kind of believe maybe the Matt May Levain sort of take that possibly there's somebody backing Roaring Kitty in this.
[01:05:41]  I mean, I don't know, but it seems like it's a lot of fucking money to get.
[01:05:45]  And what's weirder is that he hasn't like, as of now, he hasn't sold those options.
[01:05:51]  So even when the price, he, even when he was up like on paper, like 260, even when he was up 160 million on paper, which I think he is right now on those options contracts, like he's still holding and he only has to the 21st to sell.
[01:06:07]  So I don't really know or like exercise, but why would you do that?
[01:06:12]  I don't know.
[01:06:12]  You need a lot of money.
[01:06:13]  The thing that would be that's crazy is that if he does exercise the options, he's going to be a majority stakeholder of GameStop.
[01:06:20]  Which also can tell them what's going on.
[01:06:21]  That's fucking crazy.
[01:06:22]  I mean, I don't, I don't know what is GameStop anymore.
[01:06:26]  It's just a meme stock.
[01:06:27]  It's not even a company.
[01:06:28]  Liz, should we do a SPAC?
[01:06:31]  No.
[01:06:33]  Okay.
[01:06:34]  Why not?
[01:06:35]  Because we do those anymore.
[01:06:39]  That was what it was just like a year that they did those?
[01:06:42]  Yeah.
[01:06:42]  They were like the ICO of the company.
[01:06:47]  Should we do?
[01:06:49]  Should we, can we, is there any, what's the easiest way we could pump and dump this small independent media company that we have?
[01:06:57]  Wait, I don't want to dump it.
[01:06:59]  No, well, we pump and dump its value, not the actual company.
[01:07:02]  We still work here.
[01:07:04]  Wait, but then if we, wait, if we still work here, we don't want to dump the value.
[01:07:08]  But we'll be rich from pumping and dumping.
[01:07:11]  But then we'll still be stuck with the company because we'll still be here.
[01:07:14]  Well, then we sell the company to Epoch Times or something.
[01:07:19]  I don't want to do that.
[01:07:21]  Fine.
[01:07:21]  I'm going to have to figure this out without you.
[01:07:24]  And with that being said, my name is Brace.
[01:07:29]  I'm Liz.
[01:07:30]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:07:32]  And this has been Druid.
[01:07:36]  See you next time.