Online commerce giant eBay gets in deep, hot water for stalking and harassing a pair of trade journalists -- and some actual eBay employees got in trouble. Dr. Fauci has a tense hang session with Congress. The great data center debate continues. Stunning revelations find 'AI' companies have been secretly buying up non-digitized books to feed their models -- and destroying the books afterward. New Jersey becomes the first state to ban grocery stores from jacking up prices based on your personal info. Join Ben, Matt, and Noel for all this and more in this week's strange news segment.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noman.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
We're joined as always with our super producer Max the
Free Train Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
You are here.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
And folks, this is an exciting, strange news program for us.
This evening. We are officially in August or what a
lot of us on the show called birthday month.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
So welcome to Dougust third Leo.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
We did it, We did it. I just give some
bad news out of the way.
Speaker 5 (01:00):
Oh no.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
This morning it was reported by the BBC that Glenn hanswered, well,
one of our I don't know my favorite musicians passed
away in a motorbike accident.
Speaker 5 (01:12):
I did just like that Irish folk musician known for
the movie Once. I think a lot of people knew
him for that did some oscar business. That's the wrong
way of putting it, really really powerful film. I didn't
know his work at all and I saw that and
sort of like a found footage like handheld thing about
a musician in Ireland. And it's got some credible songs
(01:34):
that he wrote through his band, The Swell Season. And
then there's actually a play version of it that I
saw put on here in Atlanta. It is very different
from the movie but has a lot of the same
songs and really powerful stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
And I'm sad to hear that as well.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
But don't sleep on the Frames, which is the band
that he formed like right before he kind of got
on screen, I guess for the first time, and he
was just a busker and a really interesting person and
an activist and just really sad see that guy. Go
just want to put that out there. If you don't
know Glenn Hansard, look up his work.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
And the film once is he plays a busker and
it kind of makes good or whatever, and it's it's
very well done as far as that kind of racks
to riches story and another sad story that folks might
know maybe a little less than that guy's a dude
named Kavinski who is a French electronic musician, a DJ
and musician, probably most known for the opening titles from
(02:28):
the film Drive, which got a pretty big boost in
the Paris Olympics when it was performed during the opening
ceremonies or as part of that whole giant production, and
I believe it became the most shazamed song in the
history of Shazam. And yeah, it's a really, really haunting,
incredible piece of work. And he was real tight with
(02:51):
the guys from Phoenix and Daft Punk and Justice and
all those guys. Not sure yet what happened. He was
only in his early fifties and was found He was
found to have passed away in his home in Paris
yesterday twenty eighth, as we record this as well. So yeah,
I saw both of those stories morning, very very sad.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
And we're recording on Wednesday, July twenty ninth, so we're
actually pre August here through the magic of editing, guys,
I'd like to at the top here add something I'm
going to put a positive frame on. This is about
a guy who is in some complex deep water but
is not deceased. It comes to us from our own Atlanta, Georgia.
(03:29):
Sam Tunic back in January was stopped at Hartsfield Airport
here in Atlanta because it was vacationing in the dr
and he did not know that because of his activism
was stop Coop City that he had been put on
a terrorism watch list. This guy was taken into the
back room. You never won a secondary location at passport control.
(03:53):
He was not mirandized. He was not allowed to contact
a lawyer, even though he repeatedly asked to do so.
They said that he was not technically on US soil
because he had not passed border control, which meant they
didn't see him as having the rights of a US
citizen to search and seizure. Luckily, this is going to
(04:15):
be a big issue in the next few months, I think. Luckily,
he had something called graphe os on his phone, and
graphing os lets you enter what's called a duress password.
So these folks, these border agents, were going to take
his phone. They accused him of having CSAM child sexual
abuse material, which he very much didn't, but he thought
(04:38):
they were trying to jam him up because of his
earlier activism. So we used this thing called graphene os
to enter a pass code that wasn't as usual passcode
dope in his phone. It was a passcode that bricks
his phone. It encrypts everything. Now there is a case
(05:00):
against him. He just got charged as we're recording. This
came to us from the Guardian on July twenty third.
He got charged by the FEDS with wilful destruction of evidence.
But the question is if he's under dress, right, and
he doesn't have access to a lawyer, then how could
they say he knew what he was doing was illegal.
Speaker 5 (05:23):
Well, they can't compel you to unlock your phone, can they.
I thought that was a whole deal where like even
Apple like wouldn't after the fact give access to a
phone even involved in like, you know, assassination attempts or
in some sort of terrorist act. There was precedent that
Apple would not do that, and that you know, these
devices are encrypted and you have to have the individual
(05:44):
consent to unlocking the phone. So I'm a little confused
as to how the law plays into that.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
I think border control is also confused on how the
law should play into that.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Folks.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
This is this is a story that we all should
be keeping an eye on because similar things are happening
in other countries, like in France and Spain, where authorities
have been trying to gain access to the phones of journalists,
of lawyers, of political rivals. It's going to get weirder
before it gets better. So if you want to learn more,
(06:16):
check out Timothy Pratt's article at The Guardian. US government
targets Cop City protester over phone operating system. This feels
like it could be an episode.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
In a million percent, and I mean it might be.
It's been a little business.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
This was in the public eye as much, but people
might have already forgotten. The Cop City thing was a
very Atlanta centric story about a massive plot of land
that I believe was originally designated as like park type
land that was going to be bulldozed and turned into
a massive training facility for police forces across the United States.
(06:50):
And there were protesters who had went so far as
to I believe, you know, barricade the construction attempts like
that where they hand the cuff themselves together, et cetera.
And in that situation there was a there were some casualties.
There's at least one casualty I mean by whose nickname
was Tortuga and I forget his government name, but he
(07:12):
was one of these conservationists who was I think more
supporting the you know protecting nature.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Side of it on the site, correct.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
Correct, And so I just wanted to maybe remind folks
that this is still on people's minds and that the
the folks in power don't forget when you cross them, right.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
I'm really I'm really interested in the the legal side
of this, because we know if there's an active crime
scene or investigation, it's highly illegal to destroy evidence. Right,
So if they're if they're claiming it's some sort of
you know, active investigation or something bigger than just pulling
(07:54):
somebody over, as you said, been at border patrol, if
they claim that and using that code with graphinos is
probably might be I don't know, legally equivalent to destroying evidence.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
It's irreversible. Ben Uh, Yeah, it is irreversible.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Look unless no such agency has some spoopy doup toys
that we're unaware of, which is possible.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
But doesn't that I mean that kind of sucks because
then even if you're doing it to protect your privacy
and you believe that it's a fishing expedition, then taking
that action to potentially prevent these authorities who are overstepping
from accessing your stuff and violating your privacy, you are
potentially committing a crime.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Well, and my whole point about like, isn't it illegal
for them that they can't really compel you to open
your phone?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I mean everyone, we all.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
Know that there are situations where you have face ID
on it, where someone, if you are being held and
being interrogated and perhaps abused, they could just hold the
phone up to your face with your hands tied behind
your back, right, So, I mean that's not legal, but
the need to protect himself against that potentially happening, right right.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Lower court rulings will generally protect passwords under the Fifth Amendment.
But what you're talking about there, Noel, is your biometric data.
We still don't have legislation that fully solves some of
these questions the three of us have been bringing up.
But I do want to add a newer going along here.
Tunic did later find out when he was finally allowed
(09:25):
to speak to his lawyer, that a tracker had been
placed on his car earlier. His cell phone records had
already been subpoena. Gmail notified him that his Gmail account
had been subpoena or alphabet excuse me. And it's something
that hasn't been legally settled yet. So a lot of
Tunic's supporters, including his legal team, are saying that the
(09:49):
FEDS are trying to get ahead of the curve here.
They're trying to set a precedent so do something sketchy
and then later get someone to agree that it was
in fact legal. It lived interesting times.
Speaker 5 (10:03):
I can't remember the exact nature of how this conversation
came up last time. I think it was a story
that you are, Matt brought. But a lot of the
rhetoric around political opposition and protest being sort of recategorized
as domestic terrorism. This feels like a step in that direction,
and some of the things that we've all been scared
about is to retroactively say.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Oh, you did that thing back then.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
That means now, based on our new standard, you are
this thing, and we can do whatever we want to
you retroactively.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
Yes, keep your eyes on it, folks. As always, if
you'd like more specific sources on any of the stuff
we've discussed here, especially graphios, just hit us up conspiracy
atiheartradio dot com and we can send those links your
way in the meantime, guys, before we get black bag
or while we're downloading graphios. Kidding, kidding, why don't we
(10:53):
take a break for a word from our sponsors in
return with more strange news.
Speaker 5 (11:06):
And we've returned, and I've got two stories that are
both sort of could be categorized as blasts from the past.
eBay is still very much a thing, but it's not
maybe exactly what it used to be, and I don't
know that people are using it quite as much as
they once did in the face of other ways of
conducting e commerce and you know, Facebook, Marketplace and all
(11:27):
of that. I would not say it's irrelevant, but it
maybe it doesn't seem to quite have the same shine
as it once had back in the day. The other
one is definitely a blast from the past, and that
is MySpace. We will get to that shortly. So eBay Incorporated,
as they are known, agreed to pay fifty million bucks
to a couple from Massachusetts who believe we're journalists if
(11:48):
I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
They said that former employees.
Speaker 5 (11:51):
Of eBay had targeted them with threats and harassment, sending
like the kind of stuff that Jared Leto joked about
sending his co stars of the suicide Squad in.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
The Male It was in hot water again by the
boyle boy as he ever.
Speaker 5 (12:05):
I mean it's like, you know, you see the comments
on those those posts, and it's like sort of like yeah,
and water is wet. A lot of these these things
have been floating around about that man, and of course,
you know, innocent until proving guilty, but I mean, those
allegations about that man have been floating around for sometime.
And I mean he was doing his press tour for
his role as you know, one of the most lesser
(12:25):
Jokers in the Portrayal of Jokers. He claimed to have
sent his co stars things like insects and use condoms
and weird meat and stuff in the mail. It appears
that these folks, these former Ubie employees, might have taken
a page out of the book of Joker, sending this
couple things like live insects, a funeral wreath, and a
(12:47):
bloody pig mask that was like, I guess one of
those real gnarly gory kind of Halloween masks that you
might see at like a you know, the Spirit Halloween.
It would appear that this couple, Ina and David Steiner
had been writing critically about eBay and some of their
policies in their online newsletter, which was called e Commerce Bites,
(13:11):
which is I guess you could call kind of a
trade publication, sort of like Variety or in the podcast industry,
Ben you point out off Mike, I think it's called
hot pod or there's various ones that are kind of
very niche in terms of like a particular industry. So
we might not be avid readers of e commerce Bites,
but apparently they have enough footprint in the space in
(13:33):
the industry that they their critical writing about eBay turned
some heads. So it would appear that these were actually
former executives, so not just not just like run of
the mill, you know, eBay employees.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Yeah, it looks I'm looking into the story from a
couple of other sources here, and it looks like a
question I had off airinal whether these folks were actual
employees at the time or whether they had already left eBay.
They were employed by the company. There were seven eBay employees,
and of those employees who pled to criminal conspiracy and
(14:09):
some other charges, like you said, two of them were
senior members of eBay's corporate security team. Two there were
two members of the c suite, their executive leadership team
that got implicated. But it looks like they never actually
got charged, so I guess they fired everybody when the
s hit.
Speaker 5 (14:29):
The f It would seem that's the case, Ben. And
one thing that is interesting about this case, I think
that is allowing us to be able to speak to
some of these details is typically when they're settlements like this,
there are usually conditions, many of which revolve around anonymity
or kind of gag orders, you know NDA's things like that.
(14:50):
But that is not the case in this particular arrangement.
So we have the couple David and Ena speaking out
on details of their abuse. So they here's a quote
from them that was printed in WBU or Boston. David
and I were on the same page as this settlement
should and must be made public. As victims who want
to prevent something like this from ever happening to anyone else,
(15:10):
and as reporters who believe in transparency, we hope that
this case will serve as a deterrent. This is the
culmination of more than six years of criminal and civil proceedings,
which is I think is important to remember in terms
of like how, when or how these employees were let go.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
At what stage grind of the legal process?
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Correct?
Speaker 5 (15:33):
Correct, Ben stemming from the proceedings the harassment campaign as
how they're categorizing it. The initial lawsuit filed in Boston
Federal Court was filed in twenty twenty one. At that point,
the Steiners claimed that the company was engaging in a
conspiracy to quote, intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk,
(15:55):
and silence them in order to quote from them stifle
they're reporting on eBay. They referred to and categorized characterized
this action. These actions as cyber stalking involving death threats
as well as kind of I don't know, man, a
lot of the same tactics you would see the Church
of Scientology employ against detractors in person surveillance by former
(16:21):
eBay employees, involving escalation and kind of you know, ratcheting
up this pressure and tension and threatening behavior in.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Their car, putting a format mags and David Steiner's name
and sending them to neighbors.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Yeah, well, you know, taken as an individual accent of
these things could be just seen as like on the
level of like gnarly nasty, very mean spirited pranks, But
as a whole, this is, I would agree, a campaign
of terror and harassment.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Matt, imagine all that stuff's happening to you and you
have no idea who's doing it or why Seven former
eBay employees were charged with a coordinated harassment campaign. But again,
like it's crazy just to imagine that happening, and cockroach
is showing up in the mail, your neighbor getting newdy
magazines with your name on it.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
And you're, yeah, well, what maybe a smear campaign. They're
trying to ruin their reputation, not only as you know, journalists,
but as members of the community, you know, like trying
to create untenable circumstances for them in their own day
to day lives.
Speaker 4 (17:29):
There's also a psyop too, which I think to have
no idea about the so called white Night strategy.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, that one I don't know as much about. Ben.
Can you talk to can you talk to us a
little bit about the White Night strategy?
Speaker 4 (17:41):
Yes, So as the as this campaign and I do
agree that's the right word. As this campaign escalates eBay again,
we established that these seven we were working employees, they
practice something that has been referred to as a white
Knight strategy. They this did a guy named Brian Gilbert
(18:02):
to say Hey, I'm an official employee of eBay and
I'm here to help you. And the whole thing was
a grift. He was supposed to win goodwill from the
Steiners and his ultimate motive was to get their help
in unmasking somebody who had an account called Fido Master
(18:25):
or unsuck eBay. I'm getting this from a place called
Value Added EBAs.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
That's awesome, Ben, I mean awful.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
But I did not have that in any of the
sources that I was looking at initially, so that's new information.
So you're saying they were, I mean, there are You
could argue this terror campaign is a siop onto itself,
especially since they didn't know where it was coming from,
so just designed to create terror and paranoia and you
know all of the above. But you're saying that they
went so far as to send like basically like a
(18:56):
good Samaritan, someone masquerading from within this campaign as a
good Samaritan with the intent of earning their trust and
then extracting information from them about some of their sources.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
Just so it looks like that was Senior Manager of
Special Operations Brian Gilbert again, who is one of the
folks who pled guilty to the accusations.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
So guys, then the question becomes, I mean, obviously eBay
is you know, you know, Mia culplaying you know till
the cows come home and saying what the Steiners were
subjected to by former eBay employees, making sure they're leaning
on that in twenty nineteen was wrong, reprehensible and should
never have happened. Can we also point out that this
is right on the cusp of like covid too and
everyone like sending the stuff in the mail while everyone's
(19:41):
already mega freaked out and paranoid. Probably you could argue
this is an added layer of mental you know.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
Duress dystopic like our pal Mango would say. Also, I've
got to ask you, guys and everybody to ninia And
if you knew you were going to get almost fifty
million dollars at the end of being on the receiving
side of this campaign, Like if you knew in advance
you would get almost fifty million dollars, would you put
(20:11):
up with it? If they said, Hey, we're gonna mail
your neighbors some newdi mags, We're going to try to
track your car, We'll vandalize your house, will send you
weird stuff in the mail, but at the end of it,
you'll be a multimillionaire.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
That's a monkey's paw kind of devil's bargain, right, Yeah,
you know what I mean, because you never know what
sure you might think you could. You know, this also
reminds me of It's like that maccamee manner, stuff that
some people like subject themselves do on purpose. Oh it's awful.
But that guy, if anyone's' familiar, is like a weird
dude who runs this super hardcore quote unquote haunted house
that people sign up to be kidnapped and tortured and
(20:45):
have bugs port on their faces and all this stuff.
They are, you know, complicit or at least consenting and
doing this, but apparently it goes way too far, and
then there's talk to the guys like doing cams of
all this stuff. The I was getting to the end
of the statement from the the current leadership at eBay.
The company did acknowledge that there was some let's call
(21:07):
it company culture problems here at play. They cited it
as the unprofessional tone in internal communications by former CEO
Devin Wennig, former chief Communications Officer Steve Weimer, and former
senior vice president Wendy Jones, and they say, of course,
now it is not representative of eBay's culture since it's
(21:29):
changed leadership. And of course they would say that. And
maybe this is a kind of learning experience, but what
a rotten c suite. That is wild stuff. And it
seems to be the kind of mean spirited just you know,
winning all odds that we do start to feel like
is part of corporate America, like in its very essence.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Guys, I'd do it if I knew for certain there'd
be fifty million dollars at the end, But only that's hypothetical.
If you for sure would you do it?
Speaker 5 (22:03):
And I got ahead of myself, Ben, I was saying,
it's one of those things where monkey's pop bark. You
might think you could handle it, but it might break
you before you could enjoy the.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Fifty mil you know what I mean. I think you
could do it then.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yeah, Ben, I have faith in your ability to withstand it.
But it does remind me of the Watcher letters. You
remember that story out of New Jersey where there was
like a brand new home that was purchased.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
And documentary about that I believe, right.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, it was a real thing that happened, and then
I think a Netflix show or something that came out.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Okay, but it's like a whatever dramatized version.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, just somebody that's letting you know they have eyes on,
they're watching you, they know what you're doing at all times.
They you know that all of that stuff. That kind
of thing can break you or potentially make you insanely
strong mentally, right, because then you've been through it all,
You're like, ah, I can handle anything now, and I
hear you.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
What you're saying too. There on the point about overestimating
one's resilience. No, it reminds me of that the quietest
room on the planet where people talk about how you
know they would be able to just go in their
own head and surviving. I think the record for the
(23:16):
longest time a human is spent in there is just
a matter.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Of minutes a couple. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:21):
Yeah, Because apparently you can hear your blood flowing and
you can hear your heart. I mean obvious, we can
all if you stop your ears up, you hear your
heart a little bit. But apparently it is an uncanny.
It's almost like it reminds me of Odysseus tying himself
to the mast and stopping up his his you know,
Cohort's ears with wax, but he's the only one that
can hear. I thought the way they played that in
(23:41):
the film was really neat, because it's like one of
those things where you can't imagine what that would sound like.
So better to not try to create it, better to
have it exist in your head. Not to get too
off topic here, the names that I mentioned, those C
suite folks, it seems to me, Ben, I think you're
you're seeing this as well.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Those are the folks that.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
Were named and that are even I believe responsible for
a portion of the payouts. We are talking two million
from former CEO, winning, five hundred thousand from former executive Jones,
and only fifty thousand from former executive Whimer. So it
does that's a civil case, right, that's the other criminal case. Well,
(24:25):
there's there's Like I said, it's a handful. It's like
a culmination. We're talking about the payout that would be
the result of the civil case, right, because we're talking
Under the settlement, the Steiners will receive forty eight point
seven million in compensation, including forty six point one to
five million from eBay two million from winning fifty five
hundred thous from executive Jones. So now this is all
part of the main case. There could I imagine there
(24:47):
could be a separate civil case yet this point.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
That's what I'm seeing here in uh.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
No, there's a combination of criminal and civil proceedings. So
this is sort of the culmination of all of that.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
Yeah, okay, that gets so that gets bottom line number
from both the criminal case and the civil case.
Speaker 5 (25:04):
Yeah, so this should be all she wrote as far
as you know what the company is liable for. Gotta
wonder is this a bridge too far? Is this going
to cause serious damage to eBay's reputation.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
I mean eBay's reputation.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
That's exactly what I was getting out earlier. It's not
like they're exactly top of the heap anymore.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Some people swear by it, you know, and it did.
It did create a market that a lot of other
competitors swept into, so naturally there's competition, right. But you guys,
what one thing that I think is a very big
positive here is that this is a case where individual
members of the C suite of the company had to
(25:46):
personally pay damages, which doesn't always happen, you know, like
a bank gets in trouble, and unless they're or an
investment crew gets in trouble, and unless they've really offended
very powerful people, the employees of the company themselves, the
top dogs usually don't get you know, fined personally or
(26:07):
they don't ever see jail time. So this is this
feels unusual that these uh, these management folks would have
to pay personally out of pocket, and I think that
as unusual.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
And also the the openness of the settlement, like in
terms of the lack of you know, gag orders and
all of that, so the information is out there. And
just to I was kind of getting a spidy sense
of how where eBay stands in terms of it's once
glory days, you know. And and it is true that
it is still a viable platform, but mainly for collectors,
(26:41):
and I believe it's got kind of a pretty reasonable
amount of business that it does for like auto parts.
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Yes, we've had full disclosure, we've done ads for eBay
auto parts. Sure have used eBay for auto components in
the past.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
But to your point, Ben, and it's glory days, it
was about finding deals. It is like the the you know,
swap shop of the internet. But once people started realizing
how much things were worth, it's very rare that you're
ever going to find a quote unquote deal on like
a used item, because there's too many things to compare
it to. Everybody knows what everything's worth, and if you're
(27:15):
ever gonna it's kind of ironic. Actually now it's back
to the old days. If you're ever going to find
a deal, it's gonna be at like a thrift store
or like you know, a goodwill, or maybe they have
something they don't know what it is, and that's very rare.
So it's definitely one percent the state sales things like that,
or folks maybe aren't going through everything with a fine
tooth comb. But the people that are posting stuff on
(27:36):
eBay are professionals for the most part. They're like flippers,
you know, of of e theemera of their job.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
There just sites and forms, so eBay is like one
arrow in their quiver, which.
Speaker 5 (27:50):
If you're a record sales person for example, I mean
like LPs, you might do a lot of eBay business,
but you are probably also going to be on discogs.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
There are other that are more.
Speaker 5 (27:59):
Niche things for watches, for example, there's like a Chrono
sneakerhead stuff, but they don't.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Own the market share like they used to. So I
know that.
Speaker 5 (28:11):
One a little longer than I was expecting. I guess
I should have expected it. So I will just be
brief and just say nothing much to it other than
to say, millennials rejoice. MySpace maybe making a comeback. It
was purchased recently by some investors from news Corp.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
I didn't know my Space was owned by news Corp.
Speaker 5 (28:34):
All I do know is that all of the stuff
I used to have on MySpace, like for bands that
I was in and stuff, there was a period I
believe it was around COVID where a lot of that
stuff got unceremoniously wiped. So like a lot of music
and stuff that I had on there that I actually
don't have anywhere else is gone. And that's true for
anybody that was, you know, a MySpace user.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
But it would yep, exactly. It's a bummer.
Speaker 5 (28:59):
So but it would appear that they are attempting to
stage a comeback. And one thing that they're trying to
differentiate themselves with is they're saying it's going to have
no algorithm, no endless scroll and no feed built to
keep you hooked. So they're trying to market it as
a kinder, gentler, less addictive solution to the social media
(29:23):
kind of quandary, and I would argue, in agreeing with
my buddy Jonesy, who I heard the story about on
his weird af news, that those are only things you
can promise when you don't have an audience yet and
you're not yet selling ads. It seems to me unless
they have a much wider business plan to keep that
(29:43):
top of mind, that inevitably there's going to be that
intification that we always see as advertisers creep in and
those promises get diluted, and then of course the algorithm
then creeps in, because what's the algorithm if not to
just direct people's attention towards advertising and to target ads.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
So what do you guys think about that?
Speaker 5 (30:01):
Is it possible to have an algorithm free social media platform?
And is MySpace the answer to that? Or is this
just kind of pie in the sky marketing talk.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I don't know, Ben, I just want to see if
you if this would jog a memory. In two thousand
and seven, my Space was valued crazy high.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
I think like twelve billion.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Do you remember any other companies that were valued pretty
dang high around two thousand and seven, two thousand.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
And eight, I have a spider sense.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, And then was this one was recently sold for
thirty five million, as another one was sold for forty
five million.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Everything's great HowStuffWorks?
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Dot com?
Speaker 4 (30:42):
Yeah, and I guess this statue has this early Internet passed.
I know we're running so long in this part, but
just a quick war story. I won't name too many names.
We had a we had a new employee start who
was kind of like under me for first day, and
I told this person, Hey, you know what, we're pretty
(31:06):
lucy goosey. Here at any meeting I can go to,
you go to as well if you want, you'll have to.
So here's our first big meeting. And we went to
a big meeting where we learned that we learned about
bankruptcy firsthand. The poor guys first day.
Speaker 5 (31:24):
Oh dude, I mean yeah, I mean we were all
part of multiple acquisitions, buying, selling under different corporate overlords.
It was definitely a way to learn about that stuff firsthand.
As I imagine the employees of MySpace may have as well.
These folks out to Tom vander Hooks. That's right, Tom,
is even real. I remember the top friends and the background,
(31:46):
the animated wallpapers.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
It really is a blast from the past. Tom. Congrats
on your photography.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
By the way, I guess that would be considered Internet
two point zero kind of right, because it wasn't the
way geo cities and the programming HTML by hand. It
was sort of like the next step from that.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
But then if you were.
Speaker 5 (32:03):
Crafty, you could inject a little code into it yourself,
do a little bit of tweaken, and it wasn't all
kind of ready made.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
But yeah, these are these brothers.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
The vander Hooks purchased this back in twenty eleven, and
they said in a recent documentary called MySpace that they
are hatching a algorithmless relaunch, so we'll keep an eye
on that.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
They still own MySpace.
Speaker 5 (32:27):
We're stewards of the MySpace brand at this point, and
we are going to relaunch MySpace. So sorry that run
on the long, guys, but really great points all around.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Let's take a quick break here we're from our sponsor.
Speaker 5 (32:38):
Then'll be back with more strange news.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And we've returned. Quick note here, everybody, something happened today
July twenty ninth as we record this morning. In fact,
it is currently eleven forty am. But before this, Anthony Fauci,
Doctor Anthony Fauci went to a US Senate hearing where
(33:08):
he was going to be grilled for a long time
about the origins of the COVID nineteen virus, the novel
coronavirus and COVID nineteen associated things with that, and it's
interesting the guy pleaded the fifth for much of the hearing,
many questions coming from Senator Rand Paul. Here's why we're
(33:30):
talking about it. Two things. The first one, it is possible,
highly possible, that this is a giant political theater, an
instance of political theater, putting this person up there on
the stand to get them to say something that might
incriminate themselves. Because guys, do we remember something that happened
(33:52):
just a couple of years ago, right as the former
president left and the new president came in.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
It's been a bit of a blur mat you're in
January six.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah, yes, that is a big deal, right, Yes, that
didn't happen. But with regards to this story, doctor Anthony
Fauci was given a preemptive pardon, which was kind of
strange to everybody looking on, but also it was justified
in the news and by the Biden administration. We're giving
this guy a preemptive pardon in case somebody on the
(34:27):
other side attempts to, you know, do him wrong or
get him in trouble for something he did during the
pandemic times. So it's already politicized right before any of
that stuff. Now we're going through this political theater. Doctor
Anthony Fauci pleaded the fifth for many of the questions
and didn't really answer anything. Much of the questions were
coming about his personal journals, which were recently put online
(34:51):
for everybody to read by Senator Ran Paul. At least
he made a big, big fuss about it, and in
those journals you see somebody who is weighing the two
primary reasonings behind how COVID nineteen came to be. Right,
We've talked about it many a time on this show.
Just look in our backlog. We've talked about the labolique
(35:14):
theory and the jump from animal to human theory. Out
of one of the potentially wet markets or surrounding cave
areas they're in near Wuhan. It gets all really even
more complicated in that. In twenty twenty four, on was
this December sixth, we put out an episode with Jenner First,
(35:38):
the creator of a documentary called Thank You, Doctor Fauci,
wherein he does a pretty deep dive into some of
those same documents and the same conference calls that happened
early on during the COVID pandemic, and even some talk
between scientists which included doctor Anthony Fauci before everybody even
(35:58):
knew what COVID nineteen was. It was fishy. I think, guys,
maybe if you're recalling that documentary, stuff that's presented to
us felt pretty fishy and strange.
Speaker 5 (36:09):
The argument being that it was some sort of biological
weapon gain of function research that got out of hand,
or was there even a further step that maybe it
was released intentionally.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
I don't know about the intentional thing what I recall,
and I may be recalling it incorrectly. So I apologized
there preemptively. Hey, hey, preemptive apologies putting it out there.
Just that the question was whether or not this group
of scientists was trying to cover up the possibility that
a virus that was created through gain of function research
(36:42):
escaped the laboratory and caused a global pandemic. And that's
the thought there, at least that is presented in the documentary,
is that those scientists have a high value money investment
in keeping gain of function research going, and this would
be a really bad look for that re search. That's
the argument within the documentary. We would say, check it out.
(37:06):
I guess as we did in that episode. I think
it's available on something called the Angel Network or just
called Angel. I don't know much about this, guys, but
it appears to be a streaming service of some sort.
It's out there. Look into this. Don't let yourself get
pulled into whatever political angle is being presented. Just try
and look at everything. That would be our only request
(37:28):
if you choose to see any anything else on that, guys,
any ideas or thoughts.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
Well, I did see that he was very uncooperative, and
then I believe he was actively hostile towards Rampaul at
certain points, calling him unhinged and things like that.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
This is why it's political, though, because it's depending on
kind of which side you're being presented in which way
you're getting into the story. Either of those guys they're
just having a spat that they've been having for a
long time, or it is absolutely a political move to
appease you know, somebody in the executive branch, or it
is to prevent yourself from being perjured, right, And.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
It's just.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Who knows who knows. It's weird. There was a pandemic
and we still don't have absolute certainty about how it happened.
And you can ask anybody that the CIA thinks it
came out of a lab. There's stories on that on
the BBC you can read right now.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
And the pandemics not over, folks. The news moved on,
but COVID didn't suddenly disappear.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Oh no, And the next one is on the way.
Speaker 5 (38:31):
I mean, yeah, but then are there further stories been
about new mutations that could potentially I mean, I feel
like we get the whiff of a story of like
a new, more resistant version of it, and then it
doesn't really kind of hit the way you might think
a story like that would. I know, there's a lot
of talk of long COVID, of people having you know,
(38:53):
long term knock on consequences that don't get discussed or
in some ways they're even sort of gas lit by
the medical community as to not being real yeah, let
me curious.
Speaker 4 (39:03):
Cicada variant also known as BAT three dot two. So
there are still mutations and variants out there. And I
think to your point Matt with saying the next one
is on the way, we're referring to our recent episode
on on pandemics, right, the next pandemics on the horizon.
(39:26):
There's some scary stuff out there, and unless there are
serious health and policy changes, it's statistically just a matter
of time.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Oh yeah, there's stuff we know about it. And as
I believe Dick Cheney would say, there are known knowns,
known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and the unknown unknowns are
the real scary ones because they're just lurking out there
in the dark, microscopic in waiting to find you.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Hahaa.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Not really, don't be scared, It's fine. Well you should
be a little worried about are these things called data centers?
Moving on to our next story, Here's something for the
hill written by Rachel Frozen, July twenty seventh, twenty twenty six.
EPA exempts data center power plants from pollution limits seeking
to prevent acid rain. Here we go a bit of
(40:12):
a long walk. Here, we'll get through. Ready, the current
executive administration announced on Monday, July twenty seventh that it
is exempting power plants that only serve data centers and
do not connect to the broader grid from pollution limits
that seek to prevent acid rain. The administration announced new
guidance on Monday clarifying that these quote islanded unquote power
(40:35):
plants do not have to be a part of the
Clean Air AXE acid Rain program. This program, by the way,
requires power plants to reduce emissions of acid rain precursors
sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Why is acid rain a problem?
We heard about that as kids. Right we're in our forties, guys,
we heard about acid rain. It's a huge problem. Acid rain,
(40:57):
I remember, had something to do with wildlife and damaging ecosystems,
plant life, fish, anything that lives in water, especially fresh water. Oh,
and humans. It also damages humans. Exposure to sulfur dioxide
and nitrogen oxides can worsen respiratory issues in humans. You
(41:18):
can see all kinds of things like asthma, which the
man speaking to you right now suffered from as a child.
It's really really awful. Many of us out here suffer
from asthma and breathing issues. This would not be good
if we're just you know, making a lot of power
plants attached to these data centers and they're just spewing
(41:41):
out whatever because they don't have to adhere to any
of these guidelines.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
Ooh, and real quick, a dark version of pseudo good news, folks,
is that if you are in Georgia and you would
have been directly affected by acid raying because you lived
right next to it data center, that's probably not going
to happen to you because imminent domain is back baby.
(42:06):
Across one thousand miles of grid expansion in Georgia related
to data centers, people's homes are being targeted and their
personal properties for imminent domain, which means the government can
make you a deal you can't refuse and you have
to move. So shout out to Joshua hong Over at
Fortune who wrote about that on July twenty sixth.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yeah, there's some horrifying video you can see on some
local news where it's families talking about how you know,
it's a young woman speaking about how her daughter was
supposed to inherit this large piece of land that the
family has owned for generations and they were trying to
create generational wealth in a family that has never had
much money, and now the state can just roll through
(42:52):
and say no ours now, and they got to roll
with it. It's pretty harrowing stuff. It's horrifying. But hey,
guess what, guys, We've got something in this country called
the Environmental Protection Agency for things like these data centers
and their acid rain spewers. So they're stepping in. They said,
we are taking the action to try and help data
(43:16):
centers flourish while also mitigating their impacts on consumer electric
bills by incentivizing data centers to bring their own power
plants instead of relying on the electricity that's already on
the grid. So they're they're gonna help us with our
power bills, but not with the pollution and acid rain.
Speaker 5 (43:39):
Matt, we talked about this off air. A listener wrote
in about some companies that are using AI technologies to
create better distribution of power from from the gun, like
smart systems, etc. That are like and that those were
being sold as benefits of AI almost in a way. Look,
(44:00):
here's here's a here's a version of AI that's good
for you the consumer, and felt, you know, very much like, Okay,
maybe that's true, but it does feel like a way
of kind of sanitizing and sugar sugaring the pill a
little bit.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Well, I'm wondering if you feel like these things are related.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
This It is somewhat, but this move from the e
p A is saying, no, we're actually encouraging the companies
that are building data centers to also build attached power
plants that are not connected to the grid. So that
system you're talking about, that use of AI wouldn't even
apply because this this power plant only serves this this
(44:37):
giant million square foot facility or whatever.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Are we talking nuclear matt We're.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Talking all sorts of different forms of power, but often
not nuclear.
Speaker 5 (44:47):
There's there's how difficult it is to push those types
of sea I'm assuming we're talking renewable.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Perhaps that would be cool.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Well, dev that would be great, but that they wouldn't
require this whole you know, exemption from the clean air
acid rain program thing if they were clean producing power plants.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Right.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Here's a quote from the EPA Assistant Administrator for Air
and Radiation. This is what he says, and just really
listening to the language here, Everybody that can hear this
that has human ears ready. Ensuring that the United States
maintains our artificial intelligence dominance is essential to national security
and economic prosperity. At the same time, it is equally
(45:30):
important that we safeguard our communities. We safeguard our communities
from utility price hikes. This guidance will provide an avenue
to do both. Again, we see that it's all about
money and power, right, artificial intelligence dominance. That's power, economic prosperity,
(45:51):
that's money. They're going to safeguard us from having to
pay more for electricity. They are not at all worried
about the acid rain and pollution that these things are
going to generate. We keep seeing these local hearings in
townships and cities where people humans like you and us,
(46:11):
stand up and say, hey, this is a bad idea,
this is terrible. What are we doing, Why are you
doing this? Who is paying you to do this? And
they either get kicked out of the meetings or nothing happens,
and then the stuff goes through a couple of times,
we've seen good stuff occur right where a moratorium occurs
like in New York, or things get shut down like
in social circle here in Georgia. But it does seem
(46:33):
as though an entire administration and executive branch, and a
legislative branch, and an entirety of a US government are
all about pushing this stuff forward, no matter what the
consequences to the humans. But at least our electric bills
will go down. So, for the seventeenth time on this show,
congratulations open AI, alphabet anthropic, the rest and the most
(46:57):
humblest of apologies to ecosystem fish, humanity's ability to breathe
without a metabranded mobile air purification system. I'm being a
little hyperbolic and silly.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
Sorry now I don't know, man, not too hyperbolic.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Last thing before we get out of here. You can
learn more about the acid rain program over at the
EPA dot gov website. It's like slash acid rain slash
acid rain dash program. If you just type it into
a search bar, you'll find it acid Rain Program. You
can learn all about these substances and why it's important
to not let them out en mass into the environment.
(47:33):
No bueno. Final thing you can look up on your own,
because there is silver lining here. The Guardian reported on
July twenty second ex Southern Water boss to face trial
over allegedly manipulating sewage testing. This is from the UK.
This is a former chief executive of the UK's private
utility company, Southern Water, who is currently being prosecuted for
(47:56):
listening to this guy's conspiracy to defraud along with three
other employees over allegations they manipulated sewage wastewater testing results
to avoid tens of millions of pounds in fines. So
they're actually going after the former chief executive. And just
in that previous story you were talking about Ben with
(48:18):
eBay that Noel brought to us, it is highly generally
unlikely that the executive parts of a large corporation or
in this case of private utility company are going to
come under fire from a prosecutor because of things that
company did. Right, company is not person running company. Company
is company independent entity. You know, often we don't see
(48:43):
that happening. It is happening. You can read all about it.
It's this other thing that we've mentioned before you as
maybe we could do a whole episode on this. This
concept of in the UK they call it operator self monitoring,
which you can you hear that that sounds an ice right,
operator self monitoring?
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Cool?
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Wait, what does that.
Speaker 5 (49:04):
Mean anytime we hear self monitoring was always a little
bit suspicious.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
Yeah, it's like self selection in his study. Basically, folks,
the cynical view of that is saying, who would better
to run the fire department than the local arsonist. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:20):
Yeah, anytime there's like self self policing by these companies
or things that are not in any way like you know,
taking people to task and having oversight from a third party,
it always just feels very very toruthless, if not just
designed to allow them to do whatever the hell they want.
Speaker 4 (49:35):
Now, folks, am I here to say that firebug Francis
is a perfect man? Absolutely not. Look around, look to
your left, look to your right, Ask who knows as
much about fire as Francis.
Speaker 5 (49:50):
We're gonna have to figure out who did this. We've
got to figure out who do this?
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Says the guy in the hot dog costume. I'm just
gonna read from the article here to reiterate what you
just said, Ben Operator. Self monitoring allows water companies to
monitor and test discharges from their wastewater treatment works, rather
than the testing being carried out by an independent regulator
or third party, which we know in industries across this
(50:17):
great planet of ours. That's an encouraged thing. Deregulate, right, deregulate.
Allow the companies to do what they must to give
us the awesome things like water supplies and electricity and
AI chat prompts. Let them do their own testing because
(50:37):
commerce and freedom, and they just kind of they kind
of mess with the results a lot, as these guys
apparently did. Anyway, it's a judgment that just came out
of the High Court there in the UK, and the
argument from you know, the chief executive, their former chief executive,
(50:59):
was saying that the environmental agency there lacked the power
to prosecute him for conspiracy to defraud. But this brand
new ruling from the High Court said, oh no, no, no,
yes they do. Yes, we can proceed with a criminal trial.
So that gives us that silver lining. Perhaps more people
(51:20):
who make these decisions that are going to end up
harming way more humans and animals and plants than they
are helping. Whatever the AI thing is that they are
all attempting to establish dominance over, maybe they can actually
get in trouble and that'll be cool. All right, that's
(51:41):
it for this segment. We'll be right back with more
strange news.
Speaker 4 (51:52):
And we have returned, folks. There are a lot of
things want to get to might not get to all
of it here, but will we'll at least score some mentions. First,
this is something you know harp On maybe a little
bit too often, but we always talk about it. You
have to be very, very careful in the age of unstoppable, continual,
(52:13):
ubiquitous media too. You have to be very careful to
remember that just because a story has disappeared from the news,
just because something is no longer viral, it doesn't mean
the story has ended. It means mass media is looking
for a different way to get clicks. With that in mind,
we'd like to shout out an episode we did back
(52:35):
in twenty twenty two on Russia's shadow army, the Wagner Group.
Remember that one, guys, Yes.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Ben, I got to tell you.
Speaker 5 (52:43):
When I saw your bullet in the document for Strange News,
I thought you were talking about the composer Recard Wagner's,
like you know, Living Airs were responsible for this, But no,
the Wagner Group. That's a big, like almost like a
paramilitary kind of situation.
Speaker 4 (52:58):
Yeah, run by Prigozen who got too big for his bridges,
led a march to the seat of power in Russia
ultimately expired Wagner a really interesting story. You'll have to
tune into that episode to learn more about it, folks.
(53:18):
But essentially they were a paramilitary. There were a proxy
army such that the government of Russia could officially say,
these guys are part of our military right. Therefore, they're
not beholden to certain things that we agree should be
rules of law and rules of conduct of warfare. So
(53:40):
Wagner as a group, it fell. But you may be
surprised to learn, folks, it did not entirely disappear. This
is something that came out earlier this month courtesy of
The Wall Street Journal. You can read that in full.
If you're a little shaky about paywalls and subscription services,
you can see a great right up on euro Maiden
(54:02):
Press by the journalist Uri Zuria. Here's the headline. Wagner's
remnants didn't just survive. They run an opioid empire in
the Central African Republic. We're talking about, yeah, we're talking
about at least five hundred mercenaries are who are under
the command of Pregusian's son. They control what's called the tramadol.
Speaker 5 (54:26):
Trade an anti psychotic. I believe right, Trammidol is it's
a sedative.
Speaker 4 (54:35):
Tramadol is a synthetic opioid, and the trade in tramidol
in parts of the African continent has made a massive
public health and security crisis, largely driven by illegal imports
from Asia and mercenary groups and militant groups like the
(54:55):
remnants of Wagner. They've built an empire that the Wall
Street Journal is saying is now beyond the reach of
local law enforcement, international law enforcement, and the reach of
Moscow itself. That son's name, by the way, is Pavel Pregoshan.
They use this opioid trade kind of the way gangs
(55:16):
will use a drug trade here in the States or
in Europe. They make the money off the synthetic opioids,
and then they use that to fund weapons, to fund
their own proxy militias, and to increase their octopus like
grasp on the country in which they operate, mainly the.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Ar using drugs to gain more power.
Speaker 4 (55:39):
Weird, right, And the name for it, the local street
name for it is the poor Man's Cocaine ooh, which
just makes it even sleazier.
Speaker 3 (55:51):
Right.
Speaker 4 (55:52):
This story is still it's still being developed. But I'm
just putting that in here briefly for us, guys, because
I think it's important for all of us friends and
neighbors follow conspiracy realists to realize the stories don't end
when the when the headlines stop, right, So do look
into the Wagner group. Let us know other similar operations
(56:15):
that you're aware of. There there is another thing that
will swing to that gives us kind of a narrative spine.
In tonight's Strange News program, we've been talking about AI
and there's something happening that should make everybody absolutely livid.
It's not necessarily the stuff that you hear mostly right
(56:39):
in terms of like plummeting cognition rates in users of AI,
which is true, or you know, the vast ecological damage
on the horizon, which is true. It starts with a book. Now,
our Strange News program is audio, so folks, you'll have
to take our word for it. And holding up a
(57:00):
book that I don't remember the providence of. It's called
I Dare You. This book is from like the fifties
or sixties, which means it doesn't have an ISBN. And
because it doesn't have an ISBN, that little barcode usually
on the back of most modern books you would buy
because it doesn't have an ISBN. It's not in that
(57:22):
huge system that we have for you know, understanding a
book exists, and the more recent books that have ISBNs
often exist in a digital form, which means AI companies
scrape them and they're not paying you as the author
or even as maybe they're paying you as the publisher,
(57:44):
but the author is getting bupkus Ai companies, as we know,
or the LLM models that they create, are roboristic to
churchify a word, they're eating their own stuff, right, and
they're scraping from each other sort of like in a
troublingly thematically similar way, sort of like how the top
(58:07):
AI companies have been accused of just handing money back
and forth and calling it growth. So AI creators appear
to have realized that there was a diminishing return and
how often they could misquote, hallucinate, or butcher the work
of other people, and so they have launched another thing.
(58:31):
They realized quote the world's best AI training data is
setting on a shelf. It's the antique stuff, the old
books that never made it, you know, the PDF format
couldn't get onto the cloud and therefore were immune or
(58:51):
at least inoculated against the great AI data scrape. So
if we go to futurism is a great starting source
for this. Shout out to the journal list Frank Landymore,
we see that AI companies are buying antique books and
then they're ingesting their contents to train models. And then
here's the worst part. Then they are destroying those books.
(59:13):
This is the new version of book burning.
Speaker 5 (59:15):
You guys say, man, Well, that's the part that throws me.
Why are they doing it to cut down on competition?
Are they trying to make it where no one else
can use it to train it?
Speaker 2 (59:25):
Like?
Speaker 5 (59:25):
It just seems really really twisted.
Speaker 4 (59:29):
It's like errant the banality of evil stuff here, Noel,
the reason that they're destroying these books.
Speaker 3 (59:38):
Is so stupid. It's small.
Speaker 4 (59:41):
It's an operational, practical reason, not ideological or market driven.
This is according to a settled lawsuit concerning Anthropic They
were forced to pay a one point five billion settlement
to authors. Still not enough for all the authors they
ripped off. But here's why the books get destroyed. When
they are scanning these things in they don't have somebody
(01:00:04):
like opening it up and putting it on a printer
and then turning the page and doing the same thing
at nauseum. They use hydraulic powered cutting machines to remove
the pages from the book, right, destroying the spine of
the book, get rid of the cover. After we get
a photo of that, and then that means the book
is obviously no longer usable. It's just a stack of pages.
Speaker 5 (01:00:28):
Are they going to pay to rebind them and refile them?
Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
Right there?
Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
This is This is an explanation and that we hear
from a bookseller called ISBNDB, which is quoted by four
oh four Media. Another great source isbn dB has quote
the world's largest book database, and they say they're the
ones who say the world's best DAI training data is
(01:00:57):
setting on a shelf because it is uncorrupted by the
shoddy back and forth Keaton level multiplicity problem of.
Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
Cloning a clone.
Speaker 4 (01:01:07):
Right, this AI writing doesn't necessarily improve with each iteration
and becomes increasingly self referential. So what they're saying, and
companies like this are saying books from the pre llm
era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination.
That alone is a significant advantage. Physical books published before
(01:01:32):
this date pre twenty twenty two, but also anything earlier
are clean of what they call modern poisoning tools. So
this company isbn dB. We're just quoting them because they're
one of the most quoted in this reporting. Their business
model is to help these AI companies, these anthropics go
(01:01:54):
to bulk buy anywhere from one thousand to one million
physical books per order. That's their business model. They used
to just help libraries and bookshops find and sell rare books,
but now they're destroying the very thing they were created
to preserve.
Speaker 5 (01:02:14):
Ben I was on the road on a little bit
of an adventure over the weekend and I saw a
truck from a company called shred It shred It Trademark,
and their tagline is we protect what matters. It's this
idea of destroying the thing in order to preserve it.
Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Oh, you guys, I just started watching a show on
Apple TV that you may have already seen a bet
a lot of people have. I think it's on his
third season now called The Silo People.
Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
I love in that I have not, but I want to.
Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
I'm gonna recommend it to you guys, in particular for
this very theme that runs through out the show, this
concept of destroying the information that came before to kind
of hide it. I'd have to say, Ben, the.
Speaker 5 (01:03:06):
Argument is to protect the people in a way, right,
or to protect civilization like this is this stuff would
be bad for us, like the forbidden knowledge.
Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Of well attitude.
Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
In that instance, it's the rebels destroyed it so that
we couldn't know our history in our past. But the
subtext is that somebody else destroyed it, so we don't
know what actually happened in the past, right, Ben, I
don't think we're in that era yet or that situation
(01:03:38):
with this type of destruction of books as you were
talking about. I don't think it's that. But do you
see anything darker potentially here?
Speaker 4 (01:03:47):
Yeah, we definitely can see that kind of stuff on
the horizon. Can also see lessons and precedent set in
the past. You know, authoritarian governments burned books because they
wanted to control history. It's very common in a lot
of science fiction. I mean, shout out or well, shout
out Neil Stevenson in the awesome book Anatham, which is
(01:04:10):
also very long. Now one's a commitment. I think there's
still physical copies of that around. But Orwell was right
when he said he who controls the past control the future,
and everybody involved in this they don't see it as
a rature. They would be saying that they're using this
(01:04:34):
to They would probably argue they're very sketchy about this process.
But they would probably argue that when they scan the
book in they keep an uncorrupted copy, right, so you
can go get it on a kindle maybe, So that's
all well and good until they pull the rug from
you there, because we're in the end of ownership as
well as the end of history. Their main complaint within
(01:04:58):
the industry here and very much as an industry now,
is that they don't want to get caught with their
hands in the cookie jar. The anthropics and the metas
of the world want this under wraps, and that's why
these companies that are selling out the reading public selling
them down the river. These companies like isbn dB, they
(01:05:21):
teut one of their biggest features is that they will
keep your purchases secret. They acknowledge this practice is pretty shady.
If you go to their website, you see a note
that says the optics problem is real. AI company destroys
two million books is not a headline that generates sympathy.
(01:05:42):
Wamp womp, indeed understatement of the year.
Speaker 5 (01:05:45):
Well, I mean it also occurs to me that in
the current administration, and they're focused on helping the AI
corporations continue pushing that stuff out, making it kind of inescapable.
I just picture a world where what if all of
a sudden, they're hoovering up all the physical books and
like the Library of Congress, you know, and destroying them
in the process.
Speaker 3 (01:06:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:06:06):
Absolutely, I mean, there's definitely precedent about this. There's so
much more to get into, but we also want to
extend empathy for booksellers. There are a lot of mom
and pop booksellers or rare book experts who have been
struggling for quite some time, especially you know, if you're
largely a brick and mortar enterprise. People increasingly depend on
(01:06:29):
online sales like eBay or abe books or something of
that nature, and the booksellers have repeated stories about going
from selling maybe twenty books a week online and in
person to selling hundreds at one go and not being
(01:06:50):
able to figure out who is actually buying the books
because the real identity of you know, the AI smile
the dragon sitting on a pile of ripped up books.
That identity is very carefully hidden, and they don't know
how to fight against it. Because economically, for a very
short time, this is going to be a godsend. There's
(01:07:12):
a watershed moment for them, and we would love to
we'd love to hear your opinions on this, folks, because
whether or not you consider yourself a bookworm, or whether
or not you recreationally read, we can all agree that
keeping this stuff around in a uncorrupted form is probably
(01:07:35):
going to be important in the future. Again, not to
sound too hyperbolic, as you were saying, Matt, but when
you erase the books, even the crappy ones, even the
books we don't like, if you erase those books, then
you're losing something that cannot be replaced, unless it's like
a scientific textbook that will inevitably be written again based
(01:07:57):
on the observation of the universe. Ough, the coffee's kicking in, guys,
Sorry where you went a little long at this one.
We're going to be off to octivigate here. We'll tell
you how to get in touch with us. Thanks as
always for tuning in, and stay tuned. For the very
very end, because we are going to have one last
(01:08:19):
little piece snippet of very good news.
Speaker 5 (01:08:22):
If you'd like to find us on the Internet, you
can do so by reaching out to the handle conspiracy
stuff or conspiracy Stuff Show, or we exist on all
the social media platforms out there. Just you know, look
for those and then you'll find us.
Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
We have a phone number. It is one eight to
three three std WYTK. Turn the letters into numbers, give
it a call. It's a voicemail system. You got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know within
the message if we can use your name and message
on one of our listener mail episodes that show up
in the audio feeds. If you want to send us
an email, we are This is.
Speaker 4 (01:08:54):
One of the best ways to contact us. Folks. We
are the entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive.
Be well aware, yet I'm afraid sometimes the void rights back, back,
back back, So ask us for links. We'll send them.
Send us some links, take us to the edge of
the rabbit hole. We will do the rest for everybody
who listen to the very end.
Speaker 3 (01:09:13):
Here's the good news.
Speaker 4 (01:09:14):
If you like us, we're mad about the idea of
dynamic pricing in all sorts of businesses. New Jersey has
become the first state to ban grocery stores from using
your personal data to set prices.
Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
So go New Jersey.
Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
Shout out to journalist Curtis Bradner at The Jersey Vindicator.
Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
We can't wait to hear from you.
Speaker 4 (01:09:35):
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noman.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben.
Speaker 4 (00:32):
We're joined as always with our super producer Max the
Free Train Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
You are here.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
And folks, this is an exciting, strange news program for us.
This evening. We are officially in August or what a
lot of us on the show called birthday month.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
So welcome to Dougust third Leo.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
We did it, We did it. I just give some
bad news out of the way.
Speaker 5 (01:00):
Oh no.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
This morning it was reported by the BBC that Glenn hanswered, well,
one of our I don't know my favorite musicians passed
away in a motorbike accident.
Speaker 5 (01:12):
I did just like that Irish folk musician known for
the movie Once. I think a lot of people knew
him for that did some oscar business. That's the wrong
way of putting it, really really powerful film. I didn't
know his work at all and I saw that and
sort of like a found footage like handheld thing about
a musician in Ireland. And it's got some credible songs
(01:34):
that he wrote through his band, The Swell Season. And
then there's actually a play version of it that I
saw put on here in Atlanta. It is very different
from the movie but has a lot of the same
songs and really powerful stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
And I'm sad to hear that as well.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
But don't sleep on the Frames, which is the band
that he formed like right before he kind of got
on screen, I guess for the first time, and he
was just a busker and a really interesting person and
an activist and just really sad see that guy. Go
just want to put that out there. If you don't
know Glenn Hansard, look up his work.
Speaker 5 (02:05):
And the film once is he plays a busker and
it kind of makes good or whatever, and it's it's
very well done as far as that kind of racks
to riches story and another sad story that folks might
know maybe a little less than that guy's a dude
named Kavinski who is a French electronic musician, a DJ
and musician, probably most known for the opening titles from
(02:28):
the film Drive, which got a pretty big boost in
the Paris Olympics when it was performed during the opening
ceremonies or as part of that whole giant production, and
I believe it became the most shazamed song in the
history of Shazam. And yeah, it's a really, really haunting,
incredible piece of work. And he was real tight with
(02:51):
the guys from Phoenix and Daft Punk and Justice and
all those guys. Not sure yet what happened. He was
only in his early fifties and was found He was
found to have passed away in his home in Paris
yesterday twenty eighth, as we record this as well. So yeah,
I saw both of those stories morning, very very sad.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
And we're recording on Wednesday, July twenty ninth, so we're
actually pre August here through the magic of editing, guys,
I'd like to at the top here add something I'm
going to put a positive frame on. This is about
a guy who is in some complex deep water but
is not deceased. It comes to us from our own Atlanta, Georgia.
(03:29):
Sam Tunic back in January was stopped at Hartsfield Airport
here in Atlanta because it was vacationing in the dr
and he did not know that because of his activism
was stop Coop City that he had been put on
a terrorism watch list. This guy was taken into the
back room. You never won a secondary location at passport control.
(03:53):
He was not mirandized. He was not allowed to contact
a lawyer, even though he repeatedly asked to do so.
They said that he was not technically on US soil
because he had not passed border control, which meant they
didn't see him as having the rights of a US
citizen to search and seizure. Luckily, this is going to
(04:15):
be a big issue in the next few months, I think. Luckily,
he had something called graphe os on his phone, and
graphing os lets you enter what's called a duress password.
So these folks, these border agents, were going to take
his phone. They accused him of having CSAM child sexual
abuse material, which he very much didn't, but he thought
(04:38):
they were trying to jam him up because of his
earlier activism. So we used this thing called graphene os
to enter a pass code that wasn't as usual passcode
dope in his phone. It was a passcode that bricks
his phone. It encrypts everything. Now there is a case
(05:00):
against him. He just got charged as we're recording. This
came to us from the Guardian on July twenty third.
He got charged by the FEDS with wilful destruction of evidence.
But the question is if he's under dress, right, and
he doesn't have access to a lawyer, then how could
they say he knew what he was doing was illegal.
Speaker 5 (05:23):
Well, they can't compel you to unlock your phone, can they.
I thought that was a whole deal where like even
Apple like wouldn't after the fact give access to a
phone even involved in like, you know, assassination attempts or
in some sort of terrorist act. There was precedent that
Apple would not do that, and that you know, these
devices are encrypted and you have to have the individual
(05:44):
consent to unlocking the phone. So I'm a little confused
as to how the law plays into that.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
I think border control is also confused on how the
law should play into that.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Folks.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
This is this is a story that we all should
be keeping an eye on because similar things are happening
in other countries, like in France and Spain, where authorities
have been trying to gain access to the phones of journalists,
of lawyers, of political rivals. It's going to get weirder
before it gets better. So if you want to learn more,
(06:16):
check out Timothy Pratt's article at The Guardian. US government
targets Cop City protester over phone operating system. This feels
like it could be an episode.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
In a million percent, and I mean it might be.
It's been a little business.
Speaker 5 (06:29):
This was in the public eye as much, but people
might have already forgotten. The Cop City thing was a
very Atlanta centric story about a massive plot of land
that I believe was originally designated as like park type
land that was going to be bulldozed and turned into
a massive training facility for police forces across the United States.
(06:50):
And there were protesters who had went so far as
to I believe, you know, barricade the construction attempts like
that where they hand the cuff themselves together, et cetera.
And in that situation there was a there were some casualties.
There's at least one casualty I mean by whose nickname
was Tortuga and I forget his government name, but he
(07:12):
was one of these conservationists who was I think more
supporting the you know protecting nature.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
Side of it on the site, correct.
Speaker 5 (07:22):
Correct, And so I just wanted to maybe remind folks
that this is still on people's minds and that the
the folks in power don't forget when you cross them, right.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
I'm really I'm really interested in the the legal side
of this, because we know if there's an active crime
scene or investigation, it's highly illegal to destroy evidence. Right,
So if they're if they're claiming it's some sort of
you know, active investigation or something bigger than just pulling
(07:54):
somebody over, as you said, been at border patrol, if
they claim that and using that code with graphinos is
probably might be I don't know, legally equivalent to destroying evidence.
Speaker 3 (08:08):
It's irreversible. Ben Uh, Yeah, it is irreversible.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
Look unless no such agency has some spoopy doup toys
that we're unaware of, which is possible.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
But doesn't that I mean that kind of sucks because
then even if you're doing it to protect your privacy
and you believe that it's a fishing expedition, then taking
that action to potentially prevent these authorities who are overstepping
from accessing your stuff and violating your privacy, you are
potentially committing a crime.
Speaker 5 (08:39):
Well, and my whole point about like, isn't it illegal
for them that they can't really compel you to open
your phone?
Speaker 3 (08:43):
I mean everyone, we all.
Speaker 5 (08:44):
Know that there are situations where you have face ID
on it, where someone, if you are being held and
being interrogated and perhaps abused, they could just hold the
phone up to your face with your hands tied behind
your back, right, So, I mean that's not legal, but
the need to protect himself against that potentially happening, right right.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
Lower court rulings will generally protect passwords under the Fifth Amendment.
But what you're talking about there, Noel, is your biometric data.
We still don't have legislation that fully solves some of
these questions the three of us have been bringing up.
But I do want to add a newer going along here.
Tunic did later find out when he was finally allowed
(09:25):
to speak to his lawyer, that a tracker had been
placed on his car earlier. His cell phone records had
already been subpoena. Gmail notified him that his Gmail account
had been subpoena or alphabet excuse me. And it's something
that hasn't been legally settled yet. So a lot of
Tunic's supporters, including his legal team, are saying that the
(09:49):
FEDS are trying to get ahead of the curve here.
They're trying to set a precedent so do something sketchy
and then later get someone to agree that it was
in fact legal. It lived interesting times.
Speaker 5 (10:03):
I can't remember the exact nature of how this conversation
came up last time. I think it was a story
that you are, Matt brought. But a lot of the
rhetoric around political opposition and protest being sort of recategorized
as domestic terrorism. This feels like a step in that direction,
and some of the things that we've all been scared
about is to retroactively say.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Oh, you did that thing back then.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
That means now, based on our new standard, you are
this thing, and we can do whatever we want to
you retroactively.
Speaker 4 (10:32):
Yes, keep your eyes on it, folks. As always, if
you'd like more specific sources on any of the stuff
we've discussed here, especially graphios, just hit us up conspiracy
atiheartradio dot com and we can send those links your
way in the meantime, guys, before we get black bag
or while we're downloading graphios. Kidding, kidding, why don't we
(10:53):
take a break for a word from our sponsors in
return with more strange news.
Speaker 5 (11:06):
And we've returned, and I've got two stories that are
both sort of could be categorized as blasts from the past.
eBay is still very much a thing, but it's not
maybe exactly what it used to be, and I don't
know that people are using it quite as much as
they once did in the face of other ways of
conducting e commerce and you know, Facebook, Marketplace and all
(11:27):
of that. I would not say it's irrelevant, but it
maybe it doesn't seem to quite have the same shine
as it once had back in the day. The other
one is definitely a blast from the past, and that
is MySpace. We will get to that shortly. So eBay Incorporated,
as they are known, agreed to pay fifty million bucks
to a couple from Massachusetts who believe we're journalists if
(11:48):
I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
They said that former employees.
Speaker 5 (11:51):
Of eBay had targeted them with threats and harassment, sending
like the kind of stuff that Jared Leto joked about
sending his co stars of the suicide Squad in.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
The Male It was in hot water again by the
boyle boy as he ever.
Speaker 5 (12:05):
I mean it's like, you know, you see the comments
on those those posts, and it's like sort of like yeah,
and water is wet. A lot of these these things
have been floating around about that man, and of course,
you know, innocent until proving guilty, but I mean, those
allegations about that man have been floating around for sometime.
And I mean he was doing his press tour for
his role as you know, one of the most lesser
(12:25):
Jokers in the Portrayal of Jokers. He claimed to have
sent his co stars things like insects and use condoms
and weird meat and stuff in the mail. It appears
that these folks, these former Ubie employees, might have taken
a page out of the book of Joker, sending this
couple things like live insects, a funeral wreath, and a
(12:47):
bloody pig mask that was like, I guess one of
those real gnarly gory kind of Halloween masks that you
might see at like a you know, the Spirit Halloween.
It would appear that this couple, Ina and David Steiner
had been writing critically about eBay and some of their
policies in their online newsletter, which was called e Commerce Bites,
(13:11):
which is I guess you could call kind of a
trade publication, sort of like Variety or in the podcast industry,
Ben you point out off Mike, I think it's called
hot pod or there's various ones that are kind of
very niche in terms of like a particular industry. So
we might not be avid readers of e commerce Bites,
but apparently they have enough footprint in the space in
(13:33):
the industry that they their critical writing about eBay turned
some heads. So it would appear that these were actually
former executives, so not just not just like run of
the mill, you know, eBay employees.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
Yeah, it looks I'm looking into the story from a
couple of other sources here, and it looks like a
question I had off airinal whether these folks were actual
employees at the time or whether they had already left eBay.
They were employed by the company. There were seven eBay employees,
and of those employees who pled to criminal conspiracy and
(14:09):
some other charges, like you said, two of them were
senior members of eBay's corporate security team. Two there were
two members of the c suite, their executive leadership team
that got implicated. But it looks like they never actually
got charged, so I guess they fired everybody when the
s hit.
Speaker 5 (14:29):
The f It would seem that's the case, Ben. And
one thing that is interesting about this case, I think
that is allowing us to be able to speak to
some of these details is typically when they're settlements like this,
there are usually conditions, many of which revolve around anonymity
or kind of gag orders, you know NDA's things like that.
(14:50):
But that is not the case in this particular arrangement.
So we have the couple David and Ena speaking out
on details of their abuse. So they here's a quote
from them that was printed in WBU or Boston. David
and I were on the same page as this settlement
should and must be made public. As victims who want
to prevent something like this from ever happening to anyone else,
(15:10):
and as reporters who believe in transparency, we hope that
this case will serve as a deterrent. This is the
culmination of more than six years of criminal and civil proceedings,
which is I think is important to remember in terms
of like how, when or how these employees were let go.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
At what stage grind of the legal process?
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Correct?
Speaker 5 (15:33):
Correct, Ben stemming from the proceedings the harassment campaign as
how they're categorizing it. The initial lawsuit filed in Boston
Federal Court was filed in twenty twenty one. At that point,
the Steiners claimed that the company was engaging in a
conspiracy to quote, intimidate, threaten to kill, torture, terrorize, stalk,
(15:55):
and silence them in order to quote from them stifle
they're reporting on eBay. They referred to and categorized characterized
this action. These actions as cyber stalking involving death threats
as well as kind of I don't know, man, a
lot of the same tactics you would see the Church
of Scientology employ against detractors in person surveillance by former
(16:21):
eBay employees, involving escalation and kind of you know, ratcheting
up this pressure and tension and threatening behavior in.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Their car, putting a format mags and David Steiner's name
and sending them to neighbors.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
Yeah, well, you know, taken as an individual accent of
these things could be just seen as like on the
level of like gnarly nasty, very mean spirited pranks, But
as a whole, this is, I would agree, a campaign
of terror and harassment.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Matt, imagine all that stuff's happening to you and you
have no idea who's doing it or why Seven former
eBay employees were charged with a coordinated harassment campaign. But again,
like it's crazy just to imagine that happening, and cockroach
is showing up in the mail, your neighbor getting newdy
magazines with your name on it.
Speaker 5 (17:12):
And you're, yeah, well, what maybe a smear campaign. They're
trying to ruin their reputation, not only as you know, journalists,
but as members of the community, you know, like trying
to create untenable circumstances for them in their own day
to day lives.
Speaker 4 (17:29):
There's also a psyop too, which I think to have
no idea about the so called white Night strategy.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
Yeah, that one I don't know as much about. Ben.
Can you talk to can you talk to us a
little bit about the White Night strategy?
Speaker 4 (17:41):
Yes, So as the as this campaign and I do
agree that's the right word. As this campaign escalates eBay again,
we established that these seven we were working employees, they
practice something that has been referred to as a white
Knight strategy. They this did a guy named Brian Gilbert
(18:02):
to say Hey, I'm an official employee of eBay and
I'm here to help you. And the whole thing was
a grift. He was supposed to win goodwill from the
Steiners and his ultimate motive was to get their help
in unmasking somebody who had an account called Fido Master
(18:25):
or unsuck eBay. I'm getting this from a place called
Value Added EBAs.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
That's awesome, Ben, I mean awful.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
But I did not have that in any of the
sources that I was looking at initially, so that's new information.
So you're saying they were, I mean, there are You
could argue this terror campaign is a siop onto itself,
especially since they didn't know where it was coming from,
so just designed to create terror and paranoia and you
know all of the above. But you're saying that they
went so far as to send like basically like a
(18:56):
good Samaritan, someone masquerading from within this campaign as a
good Samaritan with the intent of earning their trust and
then extracting information from them about some of their sources.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
Just so it looks like that was Senior Manager of
Special Operations Brian Gilbert again, who is one of the
folks who pled guilty to the accusations.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
So guys, then the question becomes, I mean, obviously eBay
is you know, you know, Mia culplaying you know till
the cows come home and saying what the Steiners were
subjected to by former eBay employees, making sure they're leaning
on that in twenty nineteen was wrong, reprehensible and should
never have happened. Can we also point out that this
is right on the cusp of like covid too and
everyone like sending the stuff in the mail while everyone's
(19:41):
already mega freaked out and paranoid. Probably you could argue
this is an added layer of mental you know.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
Duress dystopic like our pal Mango would say. Also, I've
got to ask you, guys and everybody to ninia And
if you knew you were going to get almost fifty
million dollars at the end of being on the receiving
side of this campaign, Like if you knew in advance
you would get almost fifty million dollars, would you put
(20:11):
up with it? If they said, Hey, we're gonna mail
your neighbors some newdi mags, We're going to try to
track your car, We'll vandalize your house, will send you
weird stuff in the mail, but at the end of it,
you'll be a multimillionaire.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
That's a monkey's paw kind of devil's bargain, right, Yeah,
you know what I mean, because you never know what
sure you might think you could. You know, this also
reminds me of It's like that maccamee manner, stuff that
some people like subject themselves do on purpose. Oh it's awful.
But that guy, if anyone's' familiar, is like a weird
dude who runs this super hardcore quote unquote haunted house
that people sign up to be kidnapped and tortured and
(20:45):
have bugs port on their faces and all this stuff.
They are, you know, complicit or at least consenting and
doing this, but apparently it goes way too far, and
then there's talk to the guys like doing cams of
all this stuff. The I was getting to the end
of the statement from the the current leadership at eBay.
The company did acknowledge that there was some let's call
(21:07):
it company culture problems here at play. They cited it
as the unprofessional tone in internal communications by former CEO
Devin Wennig, former chief Communications Officer Steve Weimer, and former
senior vice president Wendy Jones, and they say, of course,
now it is not representative of eBay's culture since it's
(21:29):
changed leadership. And of course they would say that. And
maybe this is a kind of learning experience, but what
a rotten c suite. That is wild stuff. And it
seems to be the kind of mean spirited just you know,
winning all odds that we do start to feel like
is part of corporate America, like in its very essence.
Speaker 4 (21:54):
Guys, I'd do it if I knew for certain there'd
be fifty million dollars at the end, But only that's hypothetical.
If you for sure would you do it?
Speaker 5 (22:03):
And I got ahead of myself, Ben, I was saying,
it's one of those things where monkey's pop bark. You
might think you could handle it, but it might break
you before you could enjoy the.
Speaker 3 (22:11):
Fifty mil you know what I mean. I think you
could do it then.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yeah, Ben, I have faith in your ability to withstand it.
But it does remind me of the Watcher letters. You
remember that story out of New Jersey where there was
like a brand new home that was purchased.
Speaker 3 (22:25):
And documentary about that I believe, right.
Speaker 2 (22:28):
Yeah, it was a real thing that happened, and then
I think a Netflix show or something that came out.
Speaker 3 (22:33):
Okay, but it's like a whatever dramatized version.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, just somebody that's letting you know they have eyes on,
they're watching you, they know what you're doing at all times.
They you know that all of that stuff. That kind
of thing can break you or potentially make you insanely
strong mentally, right, because then you've been through it all,
You're like, ah, I can handle anything now, and I
hear you.
Speaker 4 (22:56):
What you're saying too. There on the point about overestimating
one's resilience. No, it reminds me of that the quietest
room on the planet where people talk about how you
know they would be able to just go in their
own head and surviving. I think the record for the
(23:16):
longest time a human is spent in there is just
a matter.
Speaker 3 (23:19):
Of minutes a couple. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:21):
Yeah, Because apparently you can hear your blood flowing and
you can hear your heart. I mean obvious, we can
all if you stop your ears up, you hear your
heart a little bit. But apparently it is an uncanny.
It's almost like it reminds me of Odysseus tying himself
to the mast and stopping up his his you know,
Cohort's ears with wax, but he's the only one that
can hear. I thought the way they played that in
(23:41):
the film was really neat, because it's like one of
those things where you can't imagine what that would sound like.
So better to not try to create it, better to
have it exist in your head. Not to get too
off topic here, the names that I mentioned, those C
suite folks, it seems to me, Ben, I think you're
you're seeing this as well.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
Those are the folks that.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
Were named and that are even I believe responsible for
a portion of the payouts. We are talking two million
from former CEO, winning, five hundred thousand from former executive Jones,
and only fifty thousand from former executive Whimer. So it
does that's a civil case, right, that's the other criminal case. Well,
(24:25):
there's there's Like I said, it's a handful. It's like
a culmination. We're talking about the payout that would be
the result of the civil case, right, because we're talking
Under the settlement, the Steiners will receive forty eight point
seven million in compensation, including forty six point one to
five million from eBay two million from winning fifty five
hundred thous from executive Jones. So now this is all
part of the main case. There could I imagine there
(24:47):
could be a separate civil case yet this point.
Speaker 4 (24:50):
That's what I'm seeing here in uh.
Speaker 5 (24:52):
No, there's a combination of criminal and civil proceedings. So
this is sort of the culmination of all of that.
Speaker 4 (24:57):
Yeah, okay, that gets so that gets bottom line number
from both the criminal case and the civil case.
Speaker 5 (25:04):
Yeah, so this should be all she wrote as far
as you know what the company is liable for. Gotta
wonder is this a bridge too far? Is this going
to cause serious damage to eBay's reputation.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
I mean eBay's reputation.
Speaker 5 (25:18):
That's exactly what I was getting out earlier. It's not
like they're exactly top of the heap anymore.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Some people swear by it, you know, and it did.
It did create a market that a lot of other
competitors swept into, so naturally there's competition, right. But you guys,
what one thing that I think is a very big
positive here is that this is a case where individual
members of the C suite of the company had to
(25:46):
personally pay damages, which doesn't always happen, you know, like
a bank gets in trouble, and unless they're or an
investment crew gets in trouble, and unless they've really offended
very powerful people, the employees of the company themselves, the
top dogs usually don't get you know, fined personally or
(26:07):
they don't ever see jail time. So this is this
feels unusual that these uh, these management folks would have
to pay personally out of pocket, and I think that
as unusual.
Speaker 5 (26:19):
And also the the openness of the settlement, like in
terms of the lack of you know, gag orders and
all of that, so the information is out there. And
just to I was kind of getting a spidy sense
of how where eBay stands in terms of it's once
glory days, you know. And and it is true that
it is still a viable platform, but mainly for collectors,
(26:41):
and I believe it's got kind of a pretty reasonable
amount of business that it does for like auto parts.
Speaker 4 (26:47):
Yes, we've had full disclosure, we've done ads for eBay
auto parts. Sure have used eBay for auto components in
the past.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
But to your point, Ben, and it's glory days, it
was about finding deals. It is like the the you know,
swap shop of the internet. But once people started realizing
how much things were worth, it's very rare that you're
ever going to find a quote unquote deal on like
a used item, because there's too many things to compare
it to. Everybody knows what everything's worth, and if you're
(27:15):
ever gonna it's kind of ironic. Actually now it's back
to the old days. If you're ever going to find
a deal, it's gonna be at like a thrift store
or like you know, a goodwill, or maybe they have
something they don't know what it is, and that's very rare.
So it's definitely one percent the state sales things like that,
or folks maybe aren't going through everything with a fine
tooth comb. But the people that are posting stuff on
(27:36):
eBay are professionals for the most part. They're like flippers,
you know, of of e theemera of their job.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
There just sites and forms, so eBay is like one
arrow in their quiver, which.
Speaker 5 (27:50):
If you're a record sales person for example, I mean
like LPs, you might do a lot of eBay business,
but you are probably also going to be on discogs.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
There are other that are more.
Speaker 5 (27:59):
Niche things for watches, for example, there's like a Chrono
sneakerhead stuff, but they don't.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Own the market share like they used to. So I
know that.
Speaker 5 (28:11):
One a little longer than I was expecting. I guess
I should have expected it. So I will just be
brief and just say nothing much to it other than
to say, millennials rejoice. MySpace maybe making a comeback. It
was purchased recently by some investors from news Corp.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
I didn't know my Space was owned by news Corp.
Speaker 5 (28:34):
All I do know is that all of the stuff
I used to have on MySpace, like for bands that
I was in and stuff, there was a period I
believe it was around COVID where a lot of that
stuff got unceremoniously wiped. So like a lot of music
and stuff that I had on there that I actually
don't have anywhere else is gone. And that's true for
anybody that was, you know, a MySpace user.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
But it would yep, exactly. It's a bummer.
Speaker 5 (28:59):
So but it would appear that they are attempting to
stage a comeback. And one thing that they're trying to
differentiate themselves with is they're saying it's going to have
no algorithm, no endless scroll and no feed built to
keep you hooked. So they're trying to market it as
a kinder, gentler, less addictive solution to the social media
(29:23):
kind of quandary, and I would argue, in agreeing with
my buddy Jonesy, who I heard the story about on
his weird af news, that those are only things you
can promise when you don't have an audience yet and
you're not yet selling ads. It seems to me unless
they have a much wider business plan to keep that
(29:43):
top of mind, that inevitably there's going to be that
intification that we always see as advertisers creep in and
those promises get diluted, and then of course the algorithm
then creeps in, because what's the algorithm if not to
just direct people's attention towards advertising and to target ads.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
So what do you guys think about that?
Speaker 5 (30:01):
Is it possible to have an algorithm free social media platform?
And is MySpace the answer to that? Or is this
just kind of pie in the sky marketing talk.
Speaker 2 (30:10):
I don't know, Ben, I just want to see if
you if this would jog a memory. In two thousand
and seven, my Space was valued crazy high.
Speaker 3 (30:19):
I think like twelve billion.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Do you remember any other companies that were valued pretty
dang high around two thousand and seven, two thousand.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
And eight, I have a spider sense.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah, And then was this one was recently sold for
thirty five million, as another one was sold for forty
five million.
Speaker 4 (30:37):
Everything's great HowStuffWorks?
Speaker 3 (30:41):
Dot com?
Speaker 4 (30:42):
Yeah, and I guess this statue has this early Internet passed.
I know we're running so long in this part, but
just a quick war story. I won't name too many names.
We had a we had a new employee start who
was kind of like under me for first day, and
I told this person, Hey, you know what, we're pretty
(31:06):
lucy goosey. Here at any meeting I can go to,
you go to as well if you want, you'll have to.
So here's our first big meeting. And we went to
a big meeting where we learned that we learned about
bankruptcy firsthand. The poor guys first day.
Speaker 5 (31:24):
Oh dude, I mean yeah, I mean we were all
part of multiple acquisitions, buying, selling under different corporate overlords.
It was definitely a way to learn about that stuff firsthand.
As I imagine the employees of MySpace may have as well.
These folks out to Tom vander Hooks. That's right, Tom,
is even real. I remember the top friends and the background,
(31:46):
the animated wallpapers.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
It really is a blast from the past. Tom. Congrats
on your photography.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
By the way, I guess that would be considered Internet
two point zero kind of right, because it wasn't the
way geo cities and the programming HTML by hand. It
was sort of like the next step from that.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
But then if you were.
Speaker 5 (32:03):
Crafty, you could inject a little code into it yourself,
do a little bit of tweaken, and it wasn't all
kind of ready made.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
But yeah, these are these brothers.
Speaker 5 (32:12):
The vander Hooks purchased this back in twenty eleven, and
they said in a recent documentary called MySpace that they
are hatching a algorithmless relaunch, so we'll keep an eye
on that.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
They still own MySpace.
Speaker 5 (32:27):
We're stewards of the MySpace brand at this point, and
we are going to relaunch MySpace. So sorry that run
on the long, guys, but really great points all around.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Let's take a quick break here we're from our sponsor.
Speaker 5 (32:38):
Then'll be back with more strange news.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And we've returned. Quick note here, everybody, something happened today
July twenty ninth as we record this morning. In fact,
it is currently eleven forty am. But before this, Anthony Fauci,
Doctor Anthony Fauci went to a US Senate hearing where
(33:08):
he was going to be grilled for a long time
about the origins of the COVID nineteen virus, the novel
coronavirus and COVID nineteen associated things with that, and it's
interesting the guy pleaded the fifth for much of the hearing,
many questions coming from Senator Rand Paul. Here's why we're
(33:30):
talking about it. Two things. The first one, it is possible,
highly possible, that this is a giant political theater, an
instance of political theater, putting this person up there on
the stand to get them to say something that might
incriminate themselves. Because guys, do we remember something that happened
(33:52):
just a couple of years ago, right as the former
president left and the new president came in.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
It's been a bit of a blur mat you're in
January six.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah, yes, that is a big deal, right, Yes, that
didn't happen. But with regards to this story, doctor Anthony
Fauci was given a preemptive pardon, which was kind of
strange to everybody looking on, but also it was justified
in the news and by the Biden administration. We're giving
this guy a preemptive pardon in case somebody on the
(34:27):
other side attempts to, you know, do him wrong or
get him in trouble for something he did during the
pandemic times. So it's already politicized right before any of
that stuff. Now we're going through this political theater. Doctor
Anthony Fauci pleaded the fifth for many of the questions
and didn't really answer anything. Much of the questions were
coming about his personal journals, which were recently put online
(34:51):
for everybody to read by Senator Ran Paul. At least
he made a big, big fuss about it, and in
those journals you see somebody who is weighing the two
primary reasonings behind how COVID nineteen came to be. Right,
We've talked about it many a time on this show.
Just look in our backlog. We've talked about the labolique
(35:14):
theory and the jump from animal to human theory. Out
of one of the potentially wet markets or surrounding cave
areas they're in near Wuhan. It gets all really even
more complicated in that. In twenty twenty four, on was
this December sixth, we put out an episode with Jenner First,
(35:38):
the creator of a documentary called Thank You, Doctor Fauci,
wherein he does a pretty deep dive into some of
those same documents and the same conference calls that happened
early on during the COVID pandemic, and even some talk
between scientists which included doctor Anthony Fauci before everybody even
(35:58):
knew what COVID nineteen was. It was fishy. I think, guys,
maybe if you're recalling that documentary, stuff that's presented to
us felt pretty fishy and strange.
Speaker 5 (36:09):
The argument being that it was some sort of biological
weapon gain of function research that got out of hand,
or was there even a further step that maybe it
was released intentionally.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
I don't know about the intentional thing what I recall,
and I may be recalling it incorrectly. So I apologized
there preemptively. Hey, hey, preemptive apologies putting it out there.
Just that the question was whether or not this group
of scientists was trying to cover up the possibility that
a virus that was created through gain of function research
(36:42):
escaped the laboratory and caused a global pandemic. And that's
the thought there, at least that is presented in the documentary,
is that those scientists have a high value money investment
in keeping gain of function research going, and this would
be a really bad look for that re search. That's
the argument within the documentary. We would say, check it out.
(37:06):
I guess as we did in that episode. I think
it's available on something called the Angel Network or just
called Angel. I don't know much about this, guys, but
it appears to be a streaming service of some sort.
It's out there. Look into this. Don't let yourself get
pulled into whatever political angle is being presented. Just try
and look at everything. That would be our only request
(37:28):
if you choose to see any anything else on that, guys,
any ideas or thoughts.
Speaker 5 (37:33):
Well, I did see that he was very uncooperative, and
then I believe he was actively hostile towards Rampaul at
certain points, calling him unhinged and things like that.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
This is why it's political, though, because it's depending on
kind of which side you're being presented in which way
you're getting into the story. Either of those guys they're
just having a spat that they've been having for a
long time, or it is absolutely a political move to
appease you know, somebody in the executive branch, or it
is to prevent yourself from being perjured, right, And.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
It's just.
Speaker 2 (38:08):
Who knows who knows. It's weird. There was a pandemic
and we still don't have absolute certainty about how it happened.
And you can ask anybody that the CIA thinks it
came out of a lab. There's stories on that on
the BBC you can read right now.
Speaker 4 (38:22):
And the pandemics not over, folks. The news moved on,
but COVID didn't suddenly disappear.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Oh no, And the next one is on the way.
Speaker 5 (38:31):
I mean, yeah, but then are there further stories been
about new mutations that could potentially I mean, I feel
like we get the whiff of a story of like
a new, more resistant version of it, and then it
doesn't really kind of hit the way you might think
a story like that would. I know, there's a lot
of talk of long COVID, of people having you know,
(38:53):
long term knock on consequences that don't get discussed or
in some ways they're even sort of gas lit by
the medical community as to not being real yeah, let
me curious.
Speaker 4 (39:03):
Cicada variant also known as BAT three dot two. So
there are still mutations and variants out there. And I
think to your point Matt with saying the next one
is on the way, we're referring to our recent episode
on on pandemics, right, the next pandemics on the horizon.
(39:26):
There's some scary stuff out there, and unless there are
serious health and policy changes, it's statistically just a matter
of time.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Oh yeah, there's stuff we know about it. And as
I believe Dick Cheney would say, there are known knowns,
known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and the unknown unknowns are
the real scary ones because they're just lurking out there
in the dark, microscopic in waiting to find you.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
Hahaa.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
Not really, don't be scared, It's fine. Well you should
be a little worried about are these things called data centers?
Moving on to our next story, Here's something for the
hill written by Rachel Frozen, July twenty seventh, twenty twenty six.
EPA exempts data center power plants from pollution limits seeking
to prevent acid rain. Here we go a bit of
(40:12):
a long walk. Here, we'll get through. Ready, the current
executive administration announced on Monday, July twenty seventh that it
is exempting power plants that only serve data centers and
do not connect to the broader grid from pollution limits
that seek to prevent acid rain. The administration announced new
guidance on Monday clarifying that these quote islanded unquote power
(40:35):
plants do not have to be a part of the
Clean Air AXE acid Rain program. This program, by the way,
requires power plants to reduce emissions of acid rain precursors
sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. Why is acid rain a problem?
We heard about that as kids. Right we're in our forties, guys,
we heard about acid rain. It's a huge problem. Acid rain,
(40:57):
I remember, had something to do with wildlife and damaging ecosystems,
plant life, fish, anything that lives in water, especially fresh water. Oh,
and humans. It also damages humans. Exposure to sulfur dioxide
and nitrogen oxides can worsen respiratory issues in humans. You
(41:18):
can see all kinds of things like asthma, which the
man speaking to you right now suffered from as a child.
It's really really awful. Many of us out here suffer
from asthma and breathing issues. This would not be good
if we're just you know, making a lot of power
plants attached to these data centers and they're just spewing
(41:41):
out whatever because they don't have to adhere to any
of these guidelines.
Speaker 4 (41:45):
Ooh, and real quick, a dark version of pseudo good news, folks,
is that if you are in Georgia and you would
have been directly affected by acid raying because you lived
right next to it data center, that's probably not going
to happen to you because imminent domain is back baby.
(42:06):
Across one thousand miles of grid expansion in Georgia related
to data centers, people's homes are being targeted and their
personal properties for imminent domain, which means the government can
make you a deal you can't refuse and you have
to move. So shout out to Joshua hong Over at
Fortune who wrote about that on July twenty sixth.
Speaker 2 (42:29):
Yeah, there's some horrifying video you can see on some
local news where it's families talking about how you know,
it's a young woman speaking about how her daughter was
supposed to inherit this large piece of land that the
family has owned for generations and they were trying to
create generational wealth in a family that has never had
much money, and now the state can just roll through
(42:52):
and say no ours now, and they got to roll
with it. It's pretty harrowing stuff. It's horrifying. But hey,
guess what, guys, We've got something in this country called
the Environmental Protection Agency for things like these data centers
and their acid rain spewers. So they're stepping in. They said,
we are taking the action to try and help data
(43:16):
centers flourish while also mitigating their impacts on consumer electric
bills by incentivizing data centers to bring their own power
plants instead of relying on the electricity that's already on
the grid. So they're they're gonna help us with our
power bills, but not with the pollution and acid rain.
Speaker 5 (43:39):
Matt, we talked about this off air. A listener wrote
in about some companies that are using AI technologies to
create better distribution of power from from the gun, like
smart systems, etc. That are like and that those were
being sold as benefits of AI almost in a way. Look,
(44:00):
here's here's a here's a version of AI that's good
for you the consumer, and felt, you know, very much like, Okay,
maybe that's true, but it does feel like a way
of kind of sanitizing and sugar sugaring the pill a
little bit.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
Well, I'm wondering if you feel like these things are related.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
This It is somewhat, but this move from the e
p A is saying, no, we're actually encouraging the companies
that are building data centers to also build attached power
plants that are not connected to the grid. So that
system you're talking about, that use of AI wouldn't even
apply because this this power plant only serves this this
(44:37):
giant million square foot facility or whatever.
Speaker 3 (44:39):
Are we talking nuclear matt We're.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Talking all sorts of different forms of power, but often
not nuclear.
Speaker 5 (44:47):
There's there's how difficult it is to push those types
of sea I'm assuming we're talking renewable.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Perhaps that would be cool.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Well, dev that would be great, but that they wouldn't
require this whole you know, exemption from the clean air
acid rain program thing if they were clean producing power plants.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
Right.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Here's a quote from the EPA Assistant Administrator for Air
and Radiation. This is what he says, and just really
listening to the language here, Everybody that can hear this
that has human ears ready. Ensuring that the United States
maintains our artificial intelligence dominance is essential to national security
and economic prosperity. At the same time, it is equally
(45:30):
important that we safeguard our communities. We safeguard our communities
from utility price hikes. This guidance will provide an avenue
to do both. Again, we see that it's all about
money and power, right, artificial intelligence dominance. That's power, economic prosperity,
(45:51):
that's money. They're going to safeguard us from having to
pay more for electricity. They are not at all worried
about the acid rain and pollution that these things are
going to generate. We keep seeing these local hearings in
townships and cities where people humans like you and us,
(46:11):
stand up and say, hey, this is a bad idea,
this is terrible. What are we doing, Why are you
doing this? Who is paying you to do this? And
they either get kicked out of the meetings or nothing happens,
and then the stuff goes through a couple of times,
we've seen good stuff occur right where a moratorium occurs
like in New York, or things get shut down like
in social circle here in Georgia. But it does seem
(46:33):
as though an entire administration and executive branch, and a
legislative branch, and an entirety of a US government are
all about pushing this stuff forward, no matter what the
consequences to the humans. But at least our electric bills
will go down. So, for the seventeenth time on this show,
congratulations open AI, alphabet anthropic, the rest and the most
(46:57):
humblest of apologies to ecosystem fish, humanity's ability to breathe
without a metabranded mobile air purification system. I'm being a
little hyperbolic and silly.
Speaker 3 (47:08):
Sorry now I don't know, man, not too hyperbolic.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Last thing before we get out of here. You can
learn more about the acid rain program over at the
EPA dot gov website. It's like slash acid rain slash
acid rain dash program. If you just type it into
a search bar, you'll find it acid Rain Program. You
can learn all about these substances and why it's important
to not let them out en mass into the environment.
(47:33):
No bueno. Final thing you can look up on your own,
because there is silver lining here. The Guardian reported on
July twenty second ex Southern Water boss to face trial
over allegedly manipulating sewage testing. This is from the UK.
This is a former chief executive of the UK's private
utility company, Southern Water, who is currently being prosecuted for
(47:56):
listening to this guy's conspiracy to defraud along with three
other employees over allegations they manipulated sewage wastewater testing results
to avoid tens of millions of pounds in fines. So
they're actually going after the former chief executive. And just
in that previous story you were talking about Ben with
(48:18):
eBay that Noel brought to us, it is highly generally
unlikely that the executive parts of a large corporation or
in this case of private utility company are going to
come under fire from a prosecutor because of things that
company did. Right, company is not person running company. Company
is company independent entity. You know, often we don't see
(48:43):
that happening. It is happening. You can read all about it.
It's this other thing that we've mentioned before you as
maybe we could do a whole episode on this. This
concept of in the UK they call it operator self monitoring,
which you can you hear that that sounds an ice right,
operator self monitoring?
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Cool?
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Wait, what does that.
Speaker 5 (49:04):
Mean anytime we hear self monitoring was always a little
bit suspicious.
Speaker 4 (49:09):
Yeah, it's like self selection in his study. Basically, folks,
the cynical view of that is saying, who would better
to run the fire department than the local arsonist. Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:20):
Yeah, anytime there's like self self policing by these companies
or things that are not in any way like you know,
taking people to task and having oversight from a third party,
it always just feels very very toruthless, if not just
designed to allow them to do whatever the hell they want.
Speaker 4 (49:35):
Now, folks, am I here to say that firebug Francis
is a perfect man? Absolutely not. Look around, look to
your left, look to your right, Ask who knows as
much about fire as Francis.
Speaker 5 (49:50):
We're gonna have to figure out who did this. We've
got to figure out who do this?
Speaker 2 (49:54):
Says the guy in the hot dog costume. I'm just
gonna read from the article here to reiterate what you
just said, Ben Operator. Self monitoring allows water companies to
monitor and test discharges from their wastewater treatment works, rather
than the testing being carried out by an independent regulator
or third party, which we know in industries across this
(50:17):
great planet of ours. That's an encouraged thing. Deregulate, right, deregulate.
Allow the companies to do what they must to give
us the awesome things like water supplies and electricity and
AI chat prompts. Let them do their own testing because
(50:37):
commerce and freedom, and they just kind of they kind
of mess with the results a lot, as these guys
apparently did. Anyway, it's a judgment that just came out
of the High Court there in the UK, and the
argument from you know, the chief executive, their former chief executive,
(50:59):
was saying that the environmental agency there lacked the power
to prosecute him for conspiracy to defraud. But this brand
new ruling from the High Court said, oh no, no, no,
yes they do. Yes, we can proceed with a criminal trial.
So that gives us that silver lining. Perhaps more people
(51:20):
who make these decisions that are going to end up
harming way more humans and animals and plants than they
are helping. Whatever the AI thing is that they are
all attempting to establish dominance over, maybe they can actually
get in trouble and that'll be cool. All right, that's
(51:41):
it for this segment. We'll be right back with more
strange news.
Speaker 4 (51:52):
And we have returned, folks. There are a lot of
things want to get to might not get to all
of it here, but will we'll at least score some mentions. First,
this is something you know harp On maybe a little
bit too often, but we always talk about it. You
have to be very, very careful in the age of unstoppable, continual,
(52:13):
ubiquitous media too. You have to be very careful to
remember that just because a story has disappeared from the news,
just because something is no longer viral, it doesn't mean
the story has ended. It means mass media is looking
for a different way to get clicks. With that in mind,
we'd like to shout out an episode we did back
(52:35):
in twenty twenty two on Russia's shadow army, the Wagner Group.
Remember that one, guys, Yes.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Ben, I got to tell you.
Speaker 5 (52:43):
When I saw your bullet in the document for Strange News,
I thought you were talking about the composer Recard Wagner's,
like you know, Living Airs were responsible for this, But no,
the Wagner Group. That's a big, like almost like a
paramilitary kind of situation.
Speaker 4 (52:58):
Yeah, run by Prigozen who got too big for his bridges,
led a march to the seat of power in Russia
ultimately expired Wagner a really interesting story. You'll have to
tune into that episode to learn more about it, folks.
(53:18):
But essentially they were a paramilitary. There were a proxy
army such that the government of Russia could officially say,
these guys are part of our military right. Therefore, they're
not beholden to certain things that we agree should be
rules of law and rules of conduct of warfare. So
(53:40):
Wagner as a group, it fell. But you may be
surprised to learn, folks, it did not entirely disappear. This
is something that came out earlier this month courtesy of
The Wall Street Journal. You can read that in full.
If you're a little shaky about paywalls and subscription services,
you can see a great right up on euro Maiden
(54:02):
Press by the journalist Uri Zuria. Here's the headline. Wagner's
remnants didn't just survive. They run an opioid empire in
the Central African Republic. We're talking about, yeah, we're talking
about at least five hundred mercenaries are who are under
the command of Pregusian's son. They control what's called the tramadol.
Speaker 5 (54:26):
Trade an anti psychotic. I believe right, Trammidol is it's
a sedative.
Speaker 4 (54:35):
Tramadol is a synthetic opioid, and the trade in tramidol
in parts of the African continent has made a massive
public health and security crisis, largely driven by illegal imports
from Asia and mercenary groups and militant groups like the
(54:55):
remnants of Wagner. They've built an empire that the Wall
Street Journal is saying is now beyond the reach of
local law enforcement, international law enforcement, and the reach of
Moscow itself. That son's name, by the way, is Pavel Pregoshan.
They use this opioid trade kind of the way gangs
(55:16):
will use a drug trade here in the States or
in Europe. They make the money off the synthetic opioids,
and then they use that to fund weapons, to fund
their own proxy militias, and to increase their octopus like
grasp on the country in which they operate, mainly the.
Speaker 2 (55:35):
Ar using drugs to gain more power.
Speaker 4 (55:39):
Weird, right, And the name for it, the local street
name for it is the poor Man's Cocaine ooh, which
just makes it even sleazier.
Speaker 3 (55:51):
Right.
Speaker 4 (55:52):
This story is still it's still being developed. But I'm
just putting that in here briefly for us, guys, because
I think it's important for all of us friends and
neighbors follow conspiracy realists to realize the stories don't end
when the when the headlines stop, right, So do look
into the Wagner group. Let us know other similar operations
(56:15):
that you're aware of. There there is another thing that
will swing to that gives us kind of a narrative spine.
In tonight's Strange News program, we've been talking about AI
and there's something happening that should make everybody absolutely livid.
It's not necessarily the stuff that you hear mostly right
(56:39):
in terms of like plummeting cognition rates in users of AI,
which is true, or you know, the vast ecological damage
on the horizon, which is true. It starts with a book. Now,
our Strange News program is audio, so folks, you'll have
to take our word for it. And holding up a
(57:00):
book that I don't remember the providence of. It's called
I Dare You. This book is from like the fifties
or sixties, which means it doesn't have an ISBN. And
because it doesn't have an ISBN, that little barcode usually
on the back of most modern books you would buy
because it doesn't have an ISBN. It's not in that
(57:22):
huge system that we have for you know, understanding a
book exists, and the more recent books that have ISBNs
often exist in a digital form, which means AI companies
scrape them and they're not paying you as the author
or even as maybe they're paying you as the publisher,
(57:44):
but the author is getting bupkus Ai companies, as we know,
or the LLM models that they create, are roboristic to
churchify a word, they're eating their own stuff, right, and
they're scraping from each other sort of like in a
troublingly thematically similar way, sort of like how the top
(58:07):
AI companies have been accused of just handing money back
and forth and calling it growth. So AI creators appear
to have realized that there was a diminishing return and
how often they could misquote, hallucinate, or butcher the work
of other people, and so they have launched another thing.
(58:31):
They realized quote the world's best AI training data is
setting on a shelf. It's the antique stuff, the old
books that never made it, you know, the PDF format
couldn't get onto the cloud and therefore were immune or
(58:51):
at least inoculated against the great AI data scrape. So
if we go to futurism is a great starting source
for this. Shout out to the journal list Frank Landymore,
we see that AI companies are buying antique books and
then they're ingesting their contents to train models. And then
here's the worst part. Then they are destroying those books.
(59:13):
This is the new version of book burning.
Speaker 5 (59:15):
You guys say, man, Well, that's the part that throws me.
Why are they doing it to cut down on competition?
Are they trying to make it where no one else
can use it to train it?
Speaker 2 (59:25):
Like?
Speaker 5 (59:25):
It just seems really really twisted.
Speaker 4 (59:29):
It's like errant the banality of evil stuff here, Noel,
the reason that they're destroying these books.
Speaker 3 (59:38):
Is so stupid. It's small.
Speaker 4 (59:41):
It's an operational, practical reason, not ideological or market driven.
This is according to a settled lawsuit concerning Anthropic They
were forced to pay a one point five billion settlement
to authors. Still not enough for all the authors they
ripped off. But here's why the books get destroyed. When
they are scanning these things in they don't have somebody
(01:00:04):
like opening it up and putting it on a printer
and then turning the page and doing the same thing
at nauseum. They use hydraulic powered cutting machines to remove
the pages from the book, right, destroying the spine of
the book, get rid of the cover. After we get
a photo of that, and then that means the book
is obviously no longer usable. It's just a stack of pages.
Speaker 5 (01:00:28):
Are they going to pay to rebind them and refile them?
Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
Right there?
Speaker 4 (01:00:35):
This is This is an explanation and that we hear
from a bookseller called ISBNDB, which is quoted by four
oh four Media. Another great source isbn dB has quote
the world's largest book database, and they say they're the
ones who say the world's best DAI training data is
(01:00:57):
setting on a shelf because it is uncorrupted by the
shoddy back and forth Keaton level multiplicity problem of.
Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
Cloning a clone.
Speaker 4 (01:01:07):
Right, this AI writing doesn't necessarily improve with each iteration
and becomes increasingly self referential. So what they're saying, and
companies like this are saying books from the pre llm
era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination.
That alone is a significant advantage. Physical books published before
(01:01:32):
this date pre twenty twenty two, but also anything earlier
are clean of what they call modern poisoning tools. So
this company isbn dB. We're just quoting them because they're
one of the most quoted in this reporting. Their business
model is to help these AI companies, these anthropics go
(01:01:54):
to bulk buy anywhere from one thousand to one million
physical books per order. That's their business model. They used
to just help libraries and bookshops find and sell rare books,
but now they're destroying the very thing they were created
to preserve.
Speaker 5 (01:02:14):
Ben I was on the road on a little bit
of an adventure over the weekend and I saw a
truck from a company called shred It shred It Trademark,
and their tagline is we protect what matters. It's this
idea of destroying the thing in order to preserve it.
Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Oh, you guys, I just started watching a show on
Apple TV that you may have already seen a bet
a lot of people have. I think it's on his
third season now called The Silo People.
Speaker 3 (01:02:47):
I love in that I have not, but I want to.
Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
I'm gonna recommend it to you guys, in particular for
this very theme that runs through out the show, this
concept of destroying the information that came before to kind
of hide it. I'd have to say, Ben, the.
Speaker 5 (01:03:06):
Argument is to protect the people in a way, right,
or to protect civilization like this is this stuff would
be bad for us, like the forbidden knowledge.
Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Of well attitude.
Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
In that instance, it's the rebels destroyed it so that
we couldn't know our history in our past. But the
subtext is that somebody else destroyed it, so we don't
know what actually happened in the past, right, Ben, I
don't think we're in that era yet or that situation
(01:03:38):
with this type of destruction of books as you were
talking about. I don't think it's that. But do you
see anything darker potentially here?
Speaker 4 (01:03:47):
Yeah, we definitely can see that kind of stuff on
the horizon. Can also see lessons and precedent set in
the past. You know, authoritarian governments burned books because they
wanted to control history. It's very common in a lot
of science fiction. I mean, shout out or well, shout
out Neil Stevenson in the awesome book Anatham, which is
(01:04:10):
also very long. Now one's a commitment. I think there's
still physical copies of that around. But Orwell was right
when he said he who controls the past control the future,
and everybody involved in this they don't see it as
a rature. They would be saying that they're using this
(01:04:34):
to They would probably argue they're very sketchy about this process.
But they would probably argue that when they scan the
book in they keep an uncorrupted copy, right, so you
can go get it on a kindle maybe, So that's
all well and good until they pull the rug from
you there, because we're in the end of ownership as
well as the end of history. Their main complaint within
(01:04:58):
the industry here and very much as an industry now,
is that they don't want to get caught with their
hands in the cookie jar. The anthropics and the metas
of the world want this under wraps, and that's why
these companies that are selling out the reading public selling
them down the river. These companies like isbn dB, they
(01:05:21):
teut one of their biggest features is that they will
keep your purchases secret. They acknowledge this practice is pretty shady.
If you go to their website, you see a note
that says the optics problem is real. AI company destroys
two million books is not a headline that generates sympathy.
(01:05:42):
Wamp womp, indeed understatement of the year.
Speaker 5 (01:05:45):
Well, I mean it also occurs to me that in
the current administration, and they're focused on helping the AI
corporations continue pushing that stuff out, making it kind of inescapable.
I just picture a world where what if all of
a sudden, they're hoovering up all the physical books and
like the Library of Congress, you know, and destroying them
in the process.
Speaker 3 (01:06:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:06:06):
Absolutely, I mean, there's definitely precedent about this. There's so
much more to get into, but we also want to
extend empathy for booksellers. There are a lot of mom
and pop booksellers or rare book experts who have been
struggling for quite some time, especially you know, if you're
largely a brick and mortar enterprise. People increasingly depend on
(01:06:29):
online sales like eBay or abe books or something of
that nature, and the booksellers have repeated stories about going
from selling maybe twenty books a week online and in
person to selling hundreds at one go and not being
(01:06:50):
able to figure out who is actually buying the books
because the real identity of you know, the AI smile
the dragon sitting on a pile of ripped up books.
That identity is very carefully hidden, and they don't know
how to fight against it. Because economically, for a very
short time, this is going to be a godsend. There's
(01:07:12):
a watershed moment for them, and we would love to
we'd love to hear your opinions on this, folks, because
whether or not you consider yourself a bookworm, or whether
or not you recreationally read, we can all agree that
keeping this stuff around in a uncorrupted form is probably
(01:07:35):
going to be important in the future. Again, not to
sound too hyperbolic, as you were saying, Matt, but when
you erase the books, even the crappy ones, even the
books we don't like, if you erase those books, then
you're losing something that cannot be replaced, unless it's like
a scientific textbook that will inevitably be written again based
(01:07:57):
on the observation of the universe. Ough, the coffee's kicking in, guys,
Sorry where you went a little long at this one.
We're going to be off to octivigate here. We'll tell
you how to get in touch with us. Thanks as
always for tuning in, and stay tuned. For the very
very end, because we are going to have one last
(01:08:19):
little piece snippet of very good news.
Speaker 5 (01:08:22):
If you'd like to find us on the Internet, you
can do so by reaching out to the handle conspiracy
stuff or conspiracy Stuff Show, or we exist on all
the social media platforms out there. Just you know, look
for those and then you'll find us.
Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
We have a phone number. It is one eight to
three three std WYTK. Turn the letters into numbers, give
it a call. It's a voicemail system. You got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know within
the message if we can use your name and message
on one of our listener mail episodes that show up
in the audio feeds. If you want to send us
an email, we are This is.
Speaker 4 (01:08:54):
One of the best ways to contact us. Folks. We
are the entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive.
Be well aware, yet I'm afraid sometimes the void rights back, back,
back back, So ask us for links. We'll send them.
Send us some links, take us to the edge of
the rabbit hole. We will do the rest for everybody
who listen to the very end.
Speaker 3 (01:09:13):
Here's the good news.
Speaker 4 (01:09:14):
If you like us, we're mad about the idea of
dynamic pricing in all sorts of businesses. New Jersey has
become the first state to ban grocery stores from using
your personal data to set prices.
Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
So go New Jersey.
Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
Shout out to journalist Curtis Bradner at The Jersey Vindicator.
Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
We can't wait to hear from you.
Speaker 4 (01:09:35):
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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